Cargo

Texas Ranger Captain Steve Oliveras gets a late night phone call from his boss. “Earlier this evening a couple of homeboys burglarized an ISO shipping container in Galveston. They certainly weren’t expecting what they found. Out of a hundred and sixty or so people inside, forty were already dead.”
During the course of investigating the people smuggling racket, Oliveras meets, or more precisely, re-meets FBI agent Maria Esparza. They had worked in the same joint taskforce on terrorist bombing incidents along the Texas border. Now they are allied again against desperate smugglers for whom murder is just another expedient.
Even though smuggling humans is a federal crime, Oliveras is sent from Austin to Galveston, his assignment to monitor progress of the investigation, help if he can, and keep his boss and the governor up to date on the latest developments. In addition to Esparza, he finds himself working with Tom Grady, another FBI agent he knew from the border taskforce. They had not gotten along well in south Texas, but Oliveras must let bygones be bygones if he is to succeed in his task.
Pitted against the FBI is Rafael Santiago, a Costa Rican, who treats human beings as a commodity. He has co-conspirators in Costa Rica, Panama, and Texas. A Costa Rican woman also aids him in the vile scheme to provide clandestine entry to the United States for those who can pay.
Unraveling the network takes persistence and a little subterfuge on Oliveras’s part, but he soon becomes aware that he may get caught in a different kind of net. One made of silk.