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Past her own office.
"Hi, Kathryn. Something wrong?" This from Dance's administrative assistant, Maryellen Kresbach. The short, bustling woman, mother of three, wore complex, precarious high heels on her feet and impressive coifs on her head: a mass of frosted brown curls, sprayed into totalitarian submission.
Dance smiled, just to let the world know that nobody in the immediate vicinity was in danger. Then onward. She strode to Overby's office and walked in without knocking and found him on a Skype call.
"Charles."
"Ah. Well. Kathryn."
She swallowed the planned invective and sat down.
On the screen was a swarthy, broad man in a dark suit and white shirt, striped tie, red and blue. He was looking slightly away from the webcam as he regarded his own computer screen.
Overby said, "Kathryn. You remember Commissioner Ramon Santos, with the Federal Police in Chihuahua?"
"Commissioner."
"Agent Dance, yes, hello." The man was not smiling. Overby too was sitting stiffly in his chair. Apparently the conversation had not been a felicitous one thus far. The commissioner was one of the senior people in Mexico working on Operation Pipeline. Not everyone south of the border was in favor of the effort of course; drugs and guns meant big money, even--especially--for the police down there.
"Now, I was telling Charles. It is a most unfortunate thing that has just happened. A big shipment. A load of one hundred M-Four machine guns, some fifty eighteen-caliber H & Ks. Two thousand rounds."
Overby asked, "They were delivered through the--?"
"Yes. Through the Salinas hub. They came from Oakland."
"We didn't hear," Overby said.
"No. No, you didn't. An informant down here told us. He had firsthand knowledge, obviously, to be that accurate." Santos sighed. "We found the truck but it was empty. Those weapons are on our streets now. And responsible for several deaths. This is very bad."
She recalled that the commissioner was, of course, adamant to stop the cartels from shipping their heroin and cocaine north. But what upset him more was the flood of weapons into Mexico, a country where owning a gun was illegal under most circumstances, despite having one of the highest death-by-gunshot rates in the world.
And virtually all those guns were smuggled in from the U.S.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Overby said.
"I'm not convinced we're doing all we can."
Except that the "we" was not accurate. His meaning: You aren't doing all you can.
"Commissioner," Overby said, "we have forty officers from five agencies working on Operation Pipeline. We're making progress. Slow, yes, but it still is progress."
"Slow," the man said, indeed slowly. Dance regarded the computer screen. His office
was very similar to Overby's, though without the golf and tennis trophies. The pictures on his wall were of him standing beside Mexican pols and, perhaps, celebs. The same category of poses as her boss's pix.
The commissioner asked, "Agent Dance, what is your assessment?"
"I--"
"Agent Dance is temporarily assigned to another case."
"Another case? I see."
He had not been informed about the Serrano situation.
"Commissioner," Dance pressed on, even under these circumstances not one to be shushed, "we've interdicted four shipments in the past month--"
"And eleven got through, according to our intelligence officers. Including this particularly deadly one, the one I was mentioning."
