by Marc Rainer
“How is your wrist, Hugo?”
“A little sore, Jefe. It is healing, but bruised. The dog bit through some blood vessels.”
“A pity you were not able to take care of both the woman and the dog.” Moreno slapped the bolt assembly. “It is an impressive animal, however, even if not a purebred. At any rate, you may get another chance.”
“Tonight, Jefe?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know yet. I do know the FBI expects to learn of Ortega’s whereabouts very shortly. As soon as we learn where he is hiding, I want the full team moving within minutes. Understood?”
“Of course, Jefe.” The big man hesitated before leaving the room. “Jefe, you said the full team. We are short two men.”
“I know. Have our alternates briefed and ready to participate. If they are willing to share in our venture’s bounty, they must also be willing to share in the burdens.”
“Jefe.” Hugo bowed slightly as he left the ambassador’s office.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Thursday, September 14, 9:30 a.m.
Despite the pressure of the impending deadline, Trask was in a relatively good mood when he got to the squad conference room. No reason to get down today. Either we’ll make some real progress, or we won’t. Not much else that could go wrong or make things worse at this point. Lynn walked in with a cup of coffee, and he smiled at her. We’re both alive, after all, and there’s a lot to be said for that, given all we’ve been through lately.
She saw his fingers drumming on the table. “Song?”
“‘Second Chance’ by .38 Special. Best slow song of the rock era, in my opinion. Poetic lyrics, soaring lead vocal, a dialogue between the vocal and lead guitar, and a gorgeous melody line and hook.”
“I know the song. You have something to apologize for?”
Trask laughed. “No! You’re focusing on the lyrics too much. I think they’re good and heartfelt, but with the music in that song, they could be singing in Hungarian and I’d love it.”
She nodded. “It is a great song.” She sipped her coffee.
Carter and Wisniewski came into the room and sat down.
“No sunglasses today?” Trask asked. He got only sharp looks in return.
Willie Sivella was the next to enter. “Morning, Jeff, Lynn. Barry wanted me to tell you that the DEA guy is bringing someone with him. Somebody who’s been in-country in El Salvador. He went down to the entry desk to let them in. Should be here any second.”
“Good,” Trask said. “Like Lassiter used to say, ‘Info is ammo.’ I’ve been feeling a bit unarmed lately. At least I was before Lynn uncovered the true identity of our Mr. Moreno.”
“He’s likely to be the main subject of our conversation today,” Doroz said. He was standing in the door, motioning three other men into the conference room.
Trask recognized two of them: Steve McDonald from CIA, still wearing the bad sport coat, and Kevin Hall from DEA, still looking like a chemistry professor. The third man was carrying a laptop. He was shorter than McDonald or Hall, but he looked like he could have been a bouncer from a bar in a bad neighborhood. He was solidly built and dressed in a form-fitting polo shirt that accented every muscle in his arms and torso. Trask shook hands with McDonald first.
Hall was the next to extend his hand, and as he did so, he made the introduction. “Jeff Trask, this is Jason Mays, DEA’s current station chief in El Salvador. When the name of Moreno-Montillo came up in our inquiry, Jason decided to fly up for the meeting.”
“Nice to meet you,” Trask said, barely avoiding a wince as Mays almost crushed his hand.
“You, too.” Mays said. He put the laptop on the table. “How do I hook this into your display screen?”
“Puddin’!” Doroz barked. Crawford came into the room within seconds.
The three visitors glanced at each other.
“Just a nickname,” Doroz said. “He has a real one. Gentlemen, Michael Crawford.”
There were more handshakes.
“Mr. Crawford, please be so good as to work your Wi-Fi magic and connect Jason’s computer to our wall monitor.” Doroz shrugged. “Sorry guys, but too many new tricks for an old dog. I often require help in the digital age.”
McDonald nodded in agreement. “I get left behind myself.” He quickly shot a glance at Hall. “No comments required.”
Trask saw that Crawford had apparently entered the required passwords. “Let’s get on with this. What do you have for us, Jason?”
“Luis Moreno-Montillo,” Mays began, pushing a key. A photo of Moreno flashed onto the monitor, the first in a series of PowerPoint slides. “He first came to our attention as one of the opposition activists, one of the FMLN opponents of the ARENA government. We also had street intelligence tying him to one of the smuggling operations in San Salvador, some real bad asses involved in the coke trade. I think you’ve already figured out that he went to UCLA with Lopez, the late ambassador.”
“Yes, thanks to an incredible analyst whom I personally selected for this squad,” Doroz said, nodding in Lynn’s direction.
Lynn smiled at Trask, who saw that Mays noticed.
“She’s my wife,” Trask explained.
“Interesting,” Mays said flatly. “Anyway, both Lopez and Moreno were part of the opposition for years and actually had contacts within the gangs in El Salvador, first with Barrio 18 and then later with MS-13. They certainly weren’t members themselves, but they viewed the Maras as victims and byproducts of the ARENA government policies. Again, we had files on them because Moreno kept coming up as a money man for the coke smugglers and because Lopez was very close to Moreno.”
Trask looked across the table at McDonald. “Did CIA have anything corroborating this?”
“Some,” McDonald replied. “The activism, yes. The dope stuff, no.”
“Looking the other way again?” Hall jabbed.
“Up yours, Kevin,” McDonald shot back. “We weren’t concerned with every two-bit snort merchant. We were trying to keep a friendly government in control.”
“No two-bit ops here,” Mays replied, fixing a stare on McDonald. “Tons of coke. Enough to help fund a lot of the FMLN politics, once the cash got washed a little. Our info is that Moreno was hooked into the Texis Cartel, the guys who control the smuggling routes from Colombia through Central America into Mexico. So if you’d followed the money—even though it was dope money—you’d have been interested in this, too. Moreno just kept his dope contacts after he switched sides politically.”
And checkmate, Trask thought. I think I’ll be listening primarily to my new friend Mays for a while.
“Anyway,” Mays continued, “the fiction that the Mara punks weren’t as bad as the ARENA government made them out to be hit the Moreno family before it came back on the Lopez family.”
Mays hit a key on the laptop. The photo showed the body of a teenage girl. The top half of her head was missing.
“This is a Salvadoran police photo of Carolina Moreno—Luis’ daughter—after she ate the wrong end of one of her daddy’s shotguns. She’d been getting closer and closer with some of the Mara toughs from her school, and they invited her to a party one night. Her initiation party. She was gang raped and couldn’t live with it. Her father found her body, heard what had happened to her at the hands of the MS-13, and went looking for the gangbangers who’d raped his daughter. He hunted them alone and did pretty well, all things considered. The Salvadoran cops I’ve talked to said he managed to kill five of the six who’d been involved in the rapes before the sixth one decided not to wait on his own fate and ambushed Moreno with some other Maras. They shot up his car pretty good, and the leader of the group hauled him out of his car and took out one of his eyes with a machete. They left him for dead, since he’d been shot seven or eight times. To everyone’s surprise, he lived.”
“Any idea who the banger was that slashed his eye?” Carter asked.
“Yeah. A real tough kid named Ortega. Esteban Ortega.”
“Son o
f a bitch,” Wisniewski exclaimed. “We’ve got Central America’s Ahab up here hunting his whale!”
Dead on, Tim, thought Trask. Melville, not Dumas. I should have figured it out before now. Blind rage is all that explains this. That’s why it made no sense before. No political motives, not even gang warfare. Blind hatred and revenge is the only thing that explains all the indiscriminate killing.
“Did Moreno stay affiliated with the FMLN after his daughter’s death?” Trask asked. “I’m just wondering how he ended up here in their embassy.”
“No,” Mays said. “The cops in El Salvador, who’d been closely allied with the ARENA party, had been turning their heads while Moreno hunted the Maras who’d raped his daughter. Hell, they were probably feeding him leads. They were the ones who scraped him off the road and got him to a hospital after he got ambushed. When he was back on his feet, the ARENA guys recruited him to their side. He even started running some of their black shadow death squads. Mr. Hall here told me you’d done your homework on them.”
“Yeah,” Doroz said. “Moreno has left some of their calling cards in the area.”
“So how does he wangle an appointment as the number two in an FMLN embassy?” Wisniewski asked.
“Through his buddy Lopez, after Lopez’ son gets murdered—ostensibly by the MS-13—and only then by using an alias,” Trask offered. “Lopez is facing the same grief and rage that Moreno did after losing a child, and knows that—despite the broad gulf in their current political views—Moreno has considerable expertise in Mara hunting. So Lopez imports ‘Jorge Rios’ into the embassy, and the next thing you know, we’ve got a wall full of murders. What do you think, Mr. Mays?”
Mays nodded. “Makes sense. There’s no way the new government would have approved Moreno as an embassy official if they’d known who he really was. They really weren’t prepared for the success they had in the election, no appointment systems in place since they hadn’t been through it all before. They probably took Lopez’ vouching for this ‘Rios’ guy and didn’t ask many questions.”
“Any way of finding out who he brought up with him?” Carter asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Mays said. “We were up on some coke deals involving Moreno and his people and even thought we’d be able to arrest Moreno himself, all with the blessings of the new government. In fact, I was at the airport in San Salvador with an ops team about to take him off when his goons start slapping diplomatic pouch tags on all their luggage, including the cases with the coke in it. I wasn’t willing to risk alienating the new government when I saw the stickers. I figured somebody in the new regime was either on the take or knew something I didn’t. Maybe Moreno was still on their side, a double agent or something. Anyway, I aborted our op at the airport, came away with nothing but some pics. Here they are.”
The monitor image changed to show a photo of a large, dark blue sedan parked at the airport curb. Moreno was pointing to some bags at the rear of the car and an entourage of six men appeared to be carrying out his instructions.
“Do you have files on any of Moreno’s goons?” Sivella asked Mays.
“Just a couple. The big guy there at the back is Hugo Vaca. I’ll see if I can get a close-up out of this.” Mays zoomed in to get a better view of the big man’s face.
Lynn was suddenly standing, pointing at the monitor. “That’s the asshole who tried to kill me!”
“What?” Mays asked. “Are you sure? If Hugo Vaca tries to kill you, you usually die. He’s been with La Sombra Negra for years and—”
“You bet your ass I’m sure,” Lynn said. “I was just lucky because—”
“Because they have a wolf,” Doroz tried to explain.
“She’s not a wolf, she’s…never mind,” Trask said, noting that Mays seemed to be very confused. “Can you zoom in on the other faces in that crew?”
Mays moved the cursor.
“Hold it there,” Trask said as the zoom highlighted the face of another member of Moreno’s team. Trask went to a file cabinet and pulled out a folder. He took an eight-by-ten photograph from the folder and slid it across to Mays. “A match?”
Mays looked at the photo, then the screen. “I’d say so. How’d he get the bullet in the face?”
“From me,” Lynn said, “as he was trying to decapitate Jeff with a machete. That’s actually an exit wound. I hit that one in the back of the head.”
“That one?” Mays asked.
“There should be another one in that crew who we have in the morgue with an entry wound to the front of his head,” Doroz said.
Mays moved the cursor again.
“Yep, him,” Trask said, pulling another photograph from the folder.
Carter saw that Mays looked totally off balance, unaccustomed to a world in which attorneys and analysts chopped down thugs and escaped certain death. “Lynn is a former OSI agent,” he tried to explain, “and a very good shot. She and Tim here took out a Jamaican hit man last year.”
“We are overwhelming Agent Mays, guys,” Trask said.
“Yeah, I’d say so,” Mays acknowledged. “I don’t know what I walked into here, but I’m glad that I could help. I think. Is there anything else—”
“Possibly,” Trask said. “How are your contacts in the Salvadoran diplomatic corps?”
“I know some people,” Mays replied.
“Good,” Trask said. “Let’s talk.”
Trask excused himself from joining the others for lunch, saying he had a loose end or two to tie up at his other office. That was only partially true, as the single loose end he could think of was there in the squad room.
Puddin’s been too smitten, and Lynn too busy with other things, to do a real review of that pole camera at the lawyer’s office. I need to have a chance to look through it myself without offending anyone.
He found the disc and loaded it into one of the computers in the bullpen. Setting the video on fast-forward, he watched the hours roll by to see if any vehicles at all stopped at the law offices of the late Victor Scarborough. He saw one sedan pull into the parking lot, turn around, and re-enter the street.
Probably lost or looking for another address. He marked the time anyway. I’ll come back and check it if nothing else turns up.
No other vehicles even entered the parking lot. After putting the video on double fast-forward for several minutes, Trask moved the cursor back to the point of the single turn-around.
He slowed the speed until he got the best angle of the driver’s window, then zoomed in. A splash of red hair showed through the window.
Murphy! The son-of-a-bitch keeps turning up in the wrong place at the right time. He was either listening to us while we were at the embassy, or someone else was and sent him to check out the office. He’s wired in to the old college clique a lot tighter than he should be, and he’s been dirty from the moment I met him in Bear’s office.
The thought hit his mind like a brick.
Bear’s office!
The door to the room was not locked. Trask began with Doroz’ desk, looking under and behind each edge. Nothing there. He stood up and looked around the room. Why would there be anything there? It wouldn’t be like Bear to leave him in here unattended, even if he was supposed to be a friendly. Where was Murphy when I first saw him in here? His eyes darted to the chair closest to the door. He sat in that same chair when he came back in to bring me that bogus file.
Trask dropped to a pushup position, not wanting to move the chair or give any indication at all that someone might be looking for it, if in fact it was there. He rolled quietly on the floor and moved so his head could see the bottom. There! On the inside edge toward the front! He started to reach for the bug, but then quickly pulled his hand back and away. He got to his feet and left the office, shutting the door.
What did we say in there? What would they have heard? Bear’s been in the conference room a lot more than he’s been in here, thank God. Lynn did come in here to mention the MS-13 moving to the car wash from the convenien
ce store. That’s how they knew to hit the place the first time, and how they knew that the Maras were still using the car wash after the first drive-by. That’s when they hit it again.
Trask heard the others returning from lunch. He motioned them into the conference room. McDonald wasn’t with them.
“We seem to have lost our CIA representative,” Trask said.
“He didn’t feel loved in present company,” Hall quipped.
“Probably doesn’t matter,” Trask said. “I think we have everyone we need for the moment. Bear, remember our little play in the ambassador’s office?”
“Sure,” Doroz said. He saw the questions on the faces around the table. “We were in the embassy after all the Maras’ defense attorneys started turning up dead. Jeff planted the seed that one of the replacements might be a guy named Scarborough. Anyone listening probably didn’t know that Scarborough was already dead. We put a pole cam on his office.”
“And then this happened.” Trask cued the video from the pole camera, again freezing it as the car turned in the parking lot and zooming in on Murphy’s face.
“Shit!” Doroz stood up and pounded his fists on the table. “You had him pegged, Jeff. I just thought he was a typical State weenie.”
“It gets better…or worse,” Trask said. “He bugged your office. I found the mic while you were at lunch. It’s under the chair he was sitting in the first day he came in. Their bug was listening to us discussing our bug. Theirs is probably a slap-on glue job.”
“That sounds familiar,” Carter remarked, shooting a glance at Sivella.
“Did you pull the damned thing?” Doroz asked.
“No,” Trask said, “and I don’t think we should. It explains how they knew to hit the car wash after the MS-13 crew moved in there—”
“You want me to leave their freakin’ bug in my freakin’ office?” Doroz asked. He caught himself. “Ohhhhh.”
“Yep,” Trask said. “They don’t know we found it, and they had to overhear me telling you earlier that we had a source for Ortega’s location.”