Kathryn Dance was in a black skirt and white blouse of thick cotton, under a dark brown jacket, cut to obscure if not wholly hide her Glock. The only color in her ensemble was a blue band that secured the end of her dark blond French braid. Her daughter had bound it this morning on the way to school.

“That’s done.” Hovering around fifty, Charles Overby looked up from his phone, on which he might’ve been arranging a tennis date or reading an e-mail from the governor, though, given their meeting now, it was probably halfway between. The athletic if pearish man said, “Okay, all taskforced up? Let’s get this thing done.” He sat and opened a manila file folder.

His ingratiating words were greeted with the same nonnegotiable stares that had surveilled Dance a moment ago. It was pretty well known in law enforcement circles that Overby’s main skill was, and had always been, administration, while those present were hard-core line investigators. None of whom would use the verb he just had.

Mumbles and nods of greeting.

The “thing” he was referring to was an effort to address a recent trend in gang activity in the state. You could find organized crime every­where in California but the main centers for the biggest gangs were two: north and south. Oakland was the headquarters of the former, L.A. the latter. But rather than being rivals, the polar crews had decided to start working together, guns moving south from the Bay Area and drugs moving north. At any given moment, there would be dozens of illicit shipments coursing along I-5, the 101 and the dusty, slow-moving 99.

To make it harder to track and stop these shipments, the senior bangers had hit on an idea: They’d taken to using break-bulk and way stations, where the cargo was transferred from the original tractor trailers to dozens of smaller trucks and vans. Two hours south of Oakland and five north of L.A., Salinas, with its active gang population, was perfect as a hub. Hundreds of warehouses, thousands of vehicles and produce trucks. Police interdiction nearly ground to a halt and illicit business surged. This year alone the statistics cops reported that revenue in the gun/drug operation had risen nearly a half billion dollars.

Six months ago the CBI, FBI, DEA, and local law enforcement agencies had formed Operation Pipeline to try to stop the transportation network but had had paltry success. The bangers were so connected and smart and brazen that they constantly remained one step ahead of the good guys, who managed to bust only low-level dealers or mules with mere ounces taped to their crotches, hardly worth the bytes to process into the system. Worse, informants were ID’d, tortured and killed before any leads could be developed.

As part of Pipeline, Kathryn Dance was running what she’d dubbed the Guzman Connection and put together a task force that included Foster, Allerton and two other officers, presently in the field. The eponymous Guzman was a massive, borderline psychotic gangbanger who reportedly knew at least half of the transfer points in and around Salinas. As near a perfect prize as you could find in the crazy business of law enforcement.