* * *
At midnight, as Hawkes was getting in her Subaru at the Walmart, a few miles away, Senator Colles walked through the task force door, dressed as though he was on his way to a dinner in his honor. He shook hands with Kaiser, slapped him on the back, then gathered up Letty for a major squeeze.
“Okay, guys . . .” He put her down and looked around. “Who’s Walsh?”
Walsh lifted a finger and Colles said, “Let’s send these two off to a motel to get some sleep. We gotta lot of stuff to do tomorrow. Every network in the country wants them for the morning shows. We need them looking good . . .”
Letty said, “Aw . . .” and Kaiser said, “I need a haircut.”
“We want you just like you are,” Colles said, rubbing his hands together. “We can do a lot of good tomorrow. Good for our border policy, good for our relationship with Mexico . . .” He turned to Walsh: “Hey: did you guys catch this Jael person? Hawkes? Last I heard, you hadn’t . . .”
* * *
Colles got them out of bed the next morning at five o’clock, already seven o’clock on the East Coast; the highway patrol had delivered their suitcases from Pershing, so Letty and Kaiser looked reasonably like themselves. Welp, who’d traveled with Colles, arranged for them to use a studio at KTSM in El Paso for a series of remote interviews with the morning shows on all the major networks—seven interviews altogether, which took a bit more than an hour.
Colles sat between Kaiser and Letty, introduced them at each interview, took some credit for sending them to Texas, and let them talk. Kaiser stumbled through the first two interviews before smoothing out. Letty, who’d worked at a Twin Cities station as a teenager, knew how it all worked, and spoke succinctly and seriously, never a smile. The Telemundo interviewer spoke Spanish with Letty, while Kaiser and Colles sat like dummies. The Fox interviewer asked Colles if he was planning a run for president, and Colles said it was the wrong time to talk about such possibilities, given the horrific disaster in Pershing. He didn’t say he wasn’t thinking about the presidency.
The live interviews were cut with video of Rodriguez’s interviews with Hawkes and Low. There were after-action shots of Low’s, Duran’s, and Crain’s dead bodies. More video showed Letty and Kaiser dashing across the border bridge, of the explosions that took the bridge down. Of Letty and Kaiser, talking with Rodriguez after they had recrossed the Rio Grande, Letty’s face awash in blood, the images taken surreptitiously by Ochoa.
Letty told of crawling up and down inside the school bus, of passing children up through the jammed back door . . . of passing the dead baby’s body out of the bus.
* * *
Hawkes had checked into a Tucson highway motel at five o’clock in the morning. She got three hours of sleep, and watched the interviews, repeated in endless loops all day. She was also genuinely horrified. Her friends dead, eighteen members of the caravan now . . . dead. More hurt.
And just as bad, she saw video from the El Paso television stations of raids on the homes of El Paso militia members. She didn’t know how the police had found them so quickly—and she was stunned to hear that the police were seizing telephones for the selfies they might hold. She remembered that militia members had been taking them . . . and it had never occurred to her to stop them. It should have, because she’d seen it during the Capitol riot, and how the images had been used against the rioters in court.
* * *
Hawkes stayed in the motel all day and the following night, eating food she’d packed in her Subaru. By noon, she was a convincing redhead. She watched the president make a statement at midafternoon, and she saw the Republican Speaker of the House challenge the president’s statement, referring to the members of the Central American caravan as criminals and carriers of coronavirus variants. The usual bullshit storm ensued.
Eighteen dead, not counting the three militiamen, her friends. She muttered to herself, over and over, “Eighteen.”