ALL THAT'S LEFT

CHAPTER FIVE: AGENT LYN.

Diego asked me to lunch on a Friday.

Not in the way I might have feared, not with any of the particular vocabulary of a man in power pressing his proximity on a woman who works for him.

He knocked on the door of the small office I had been given, stood in the doorframe with his jacket slung over his arm, and said: "I'm going to that place on Calle Guerrero that does the fish tacos. Would you come? I always eat alone and it's a bad habit."

I said yes.

We walked the six blocks in the mild October afternoon, and he talked about London; not boastfully, but in the way people talk about a place where they have been most of themselves, a place that has shaped them in ways they are still mapping.

He talked about the rain, which he missed, and the architecture, which he did not, and a small bookshop in Islington where he had spent a disproportionate percentage of his twenties.

"You still read," I said.

He looked at me. "What?"

"When I was small. You were always reading on the steps."

He smiled, and something in it was old and uncomplicated. "Books about the sea," he said.

"Books about the sea," I confirmed.

We sat across from each other and ate fish tacos and the conversation moved the way conversations move between people who are, beneath the circumstances, genuinely curious about each other.

He asked about my life with the focused attention of someone who is actually listening, and I answered in the careful half-truths of a person with a plan, true things, but arranged to create a picture that served my purposes.

I told him about Seth. Not as a gambit; I told him because Seth was the realest thing in my life and conversation with Diego had moved into territory that required reality. I told him about the sickle cell, about the crises, about the particular mathematics of loving someone whose body is their own worst enemy.

Diego listened without filling the silences, which is rarer than it should be.

"My mother has a chronic condition," he said, when I had finished. "She's been managing it for thirty years. I know something about what that watching costs the people who love you."

"Where is your mother?"

"Guadalajara. She and my father separated, years ago. She has her own life there." He paused. "We're close.

Closer than I was to him."

I noted this. I noted everything.

Walking back, he said: "I want to offer your uncle full pay while he recovers.

Not the adjusted rate he's been receiving. Full salary, plus benefits. It should never have been reduced."

I stopped walking.

"That's too much," I said. "The terms of—"

"The terms were set by my father and they were wrong." His voice was matter-of-fact, not performative. "I'm changing a number of things. The organizational culture here has issues. I've only been here three weeks but it's apparent."

He looked at me steadily.

"I just wanted you to know before the formal notice. Because Luis is family to you, and I know what these months have cost."

I looked at him standing in the afternoon light of Calle Guerrero with his jacket still over his arm and thought: you are making this very difficult.

"Thank you," I said.

"It's nothing." He said it the way it is never nothing, with the quiet certainty of someone who means it.

* * *

I met Lyn Chen at a gas station on a Tuesday morning, which is the least romantic origin story for a conspiracy, but the accurate one.

She was leaning against a sedan that was too clean for its surroundings, and she looked at me with the particular directness of someone who has been waiting.

"Elizabeth Ramos," she said. Not a question.

I looked at her. "Who are you?"

"Special Agent Lyn Chen, FBI." She showed me identification with the smooth efficiency of someone who has shown identification many times. "I'd like to talk to you about Auto Electrica Border Logistics. Specifically, about whether you'd be willing to help us build a case."

I stood in the hard morning light with the smell of petrol around us, and something settled in me with a finality I recognized.

"Yes," I said.

Lyn's expression did not change. She was precise and compact, early thirties, with the quality of stillness that comes from years of watching without being seen.

She told me the FBI had been building a case against Auto Electrica for four years.

She told me the organization was one of the primary drug and arms trafficking networks operating out of Tamaulipas.

She told me that Armando Villanueva had been careful, meticulous, insulated that they had enough for a civil action but not for the criminal prosecution that would bring the whole structure down.

"Most of the male agents in this field office have had contact with the organization," she said, with a flatness that told me this information was significant. "Which is why I'm having this conversation, not them."

"They're compromised," I said.

"To varying degrees." She let that sit.

"What we need is access to the financial documentation. Not the public-facing logistics records, the internal accounts. The ledgers that track the actual money flows. They're kept in a physical safe in the director's office, backed up to a secure server that we know the location of but cannot access without probable cause. If we had copies —"

"The new director," I said. "Diego."

"Took over three weeks ago. We don't know yet how informed he is. He may be fully complicit. He may be a naive inheritor. Either way, if he's running the organization, he's liable."

I thought about a man in a fish taco restaurant listening to me talk about my brother.

"What do you need from me?" I asked.

She told me. It was specific and dangerous and required proximity to the director's office that I did not currently have.

"I can get it," I said.

She looked at me with the steady appraisal of someone assessing a tool.

"You understand that if this goes wrong —"

"I understand," I said. "When do we start?"