At a Gas Station at Night, Four Men Blocked My Way, but After My Calm Answer Their Leader Lost Color

The first man put his hand on my father’s car roof while I was still looking at the faint lights of the gas station and trying not to think about why this place seemed strangely familiar.

It was nearing one o’clock at night. On the empty road of Tamaulipas, the wind dragged dust and dry grass, while at the station only one pump was working. I had been driving for ten hours and wanted to buy a bottle of water, fill up with fuel, and reach the naval base before dawn, where I worked as an instructor.

First, a tall man got out of the black pickup. Then three others. They approached me slowly and formed a semicircle.

“Traveling alone has a bad ending, blondie,” the tall man told me.

“I don’t want to talk.”

“We do.”

His hand rested on the car roof. I slightly spread my feet to leave myself room. Twelve years in the Marines taught you that strength did not need shouting. But you always had to give a warning.

“Take your hand away and step back.”

They laughed. Only the youngest was not laughing. He watched my boots, shoulders, and the position of my hands. In my pocket I had a small wooden compass that my father had given me that same evening. Twelve thin rays were carved on the wooden cover. Since childhood, this object had connected me with my father’s past.

“Chino, let’s go,” the young man said quietly. “The boss said to take only the box.”

Chino threw him such a look that the boy could not finish his words.

“Which box?” I asked.

Chino grabbed my wrist.

His mistake lasted less than a second.

I twisted his wrist, took away his balance, and threw him to the ground. The heavy man ran toward me; I used his own speed and brought him down onto his knees beside the pump. The third rushed me from behind, but I put my shoulder into him and slammed him against the pickup door. The sound of metal rang through the empty station.

Everything was over in several seconds.

“I warned you,” I said.

The young man was already running. I did not chase him. My goal was escape, not heroism.

Chino lay breathing heavily, but he was still smiling.

“It’s already too late, Captain.”

I had not told him my rank.

I opened the car door and then saw that the glove compartment had been broken. The small wooden compass was gone.

At that moment, cold poured into my stomach.

I started the engine and drove onto the road. Five minutes later, the black pickup’s headlights appeared behind me. I did not increase my speed. At the bend I slowed down gradually, let them approach me, and when they tried to push me off the road, I suddenly moved into the reverse lane. The pickup turned too late, hit the curb, and steam rose from the hood.

The phone rang.

“Salgado, where are you?” Commander Valdes, my former superior, asked me.

“On the road.”

“The station story has already spread through local groups. Those men belong to the ‘Galgos.’”

“They were four fools.”

“Fools who have dangerous protectors. Return to the base immediately.”

“They stole my father’s thing.”

Silence fell on the other side of the line. A very long silence.

“The wooden compass?” Valdes asked.

I tightened my fingers around the steering wheel.

“How do you know?”

He did not answer me. Just then, a message from an unknown number appeared on my phone screen: “The woman is alive. Take the old man out of the house. Bring him to the warehouse by dawn.”

I was still listening to Valdes on the line.

“Camila, don’t return home,” he told me. “And don’t call your father.”

Then I understood that he knew not only about the compass. He knew where my father was.

I stopped at an abandoned checkpoint. Under the seat, among the things that had fallen during the fight, I found a cheap phone. A new message was flashing on the screen: “If they cannot open the memory, bring the old man. Only he knows the password.”

I was still looking at the words when the door of a black van opened on the other side of the road and someone raised a gun toward me…

The gun barrel caught the light, but no shot was fired. The man who got out of the vehicle only shouted at me:

“Put down the phone and get out of the car!”

I pretended to be frightened. I dropped the phone on the floor, but with my other hand I pressed a finger on a small transmitter. It belonged to Alicia Rojas, a federal prosecutor whom I had met years earlier during a rescue operation.

“Camila, I’m listening,” a quiet voice sounded.

The man from the van opened the door.

“You won’t be able to help your father if we bury you right here.”

“Where is my father?”

“At the old cotton warehouse. Bring us the compass.”

Then I understood that killing me was not his assignment. Someone needed my fear while they forced my father to reveal a secret.

The van blocked the road. I suddenly turned off the lights, turned the wheel left, and moved the car onto the sandy side. The tires spun. The men’s shouts and the engine’s sound mixed behind me.

Several minutes later Alicia called me.

“Don’t trust the police yet,” she told me. “We found a security vehicle near your father’s house. It was not military.”

“Did Valdes take him?”

“We don’t know yet. But his number leads to one of the companies belonging to Roldan.”

Roldan was the invisible boss of the ‘Galgos.’

I held the compass’s missing box in my hand and thought for the first time that my father had hidden something from me his entire life.

Then Alicia sent me a photograph. On the table taken from my father’s house, there was a bloodstain and half of one sheet of paper. It said: “The first name is Valdes…”

But the most frightening thing was that my date of birth was written on the other side of the paper…

As soon as I saw the paper, I stopped the car. Alicia was waiting for me on the phone, while I, beside the abandoned road, in the darkened cabin, listened to my father’s voice from a recording.

“If you are hearing this, Camila, the compass is already in their hands,” my father was saying. “But they do not know that the memory was not in the compass.”

My breath caught.

For several seconds, only the sound of wind could be heard in the recording. Then my father continued:

“Twelve years ago Valdes and I began investigating the disappearance of weapons from military warehouses. We found reports, routes, and names. But Valdes took money and closed the investigation. Two witnesses were killed. I kept a copy of the evidence not in the compass, but on a memory card inserted inside it. The card is in the compass’s back plate. And the password is connected only to your date of birth.”

“Father…” Alicia let out as well, because the recording was also sounding in her transmitter.

I no longer had the compass in my hand, but I remembered every ray of its wooden cover.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, as if my father were sitting beside me.

His voice broke in the recording.

“Because I thought I could protect you. Then someone began watching my house. I gave you the compass because I knew they were afraid to come to me. I was wrong.”

Alicia asked me quietly:

“Camila, where are you?”

“At the old checkpoint.”

“Don’t move. We found Valdes’s vehicle. He is going toward the cotton warehouse with your father.”

I played the recording again. The main secret was hidden in the last words.

“I already sent the memory card to three places,” my father was saying. “If you heard my voice, значит—”

I stopped. The foreign word was not in the recording; my mind had simply become confused from the tension. My father said:

“If you heard my voice, it means that the enemy already knows your name. But the greatest danger from Valdes will begin when he thinks he still controls you.”

At that moment a call came in on another line. The unknown man said only one sentence:

“Your father is with us. If you want to see him alive, go to Pier Number Four and bring the compass.”

Alicia listened to the voice and her face changed.

“That is Valdes,” she told me.

“Are you sure?”

“Not only by the voice. He used an old military code that only your former commander knew.”

Instead of the compass, I took the empty wooden box.

“Then I’ll go.”

“Not alone.”

“No. But he must think I’m going alone.”

We made our plan in several minutes. Alicia’s people would take the entrances to the pier, while I would write to Valdes as if I had escaped Roldan and had the memory card with me.

But before I started the car, my father said one more word in the recording that I had not understood before:

“Camila, if you trust Valdes, remember who gave you your first mission.”

I remembered immediately. The first secret assignment in my career had been given to me by Valdes. After that mission, two people disappeared without a trace.

The phone rang again.

“Bring the memory, Captain,” Valdes said. “This time I will not forgive a mistake.”

I looked at the dark road through the window and understood that saving my father was only the beginning. Valdes did not want to kill me. He wanted to use me so that the whole truth would again be buried underground.

And he still did not know that our conversation was already being heard in the Internal Affairs Department…