Cartel

by Chuck Hustmyre

  “You found me,” Scott said.

  “You look like hell.”

  “It's been a rough day.”

  “Your office,” the SAC said. “Follow me.”

  Despite it being Scott Greene's office, Stockwell took a seat behind Scott's desk, in Scott's chair, which he had spe-cial ordered and paid for himself. For a moment, Scott just stood there, wondering what he was supposed to do, before deciding that no matter what the reason he didn't have to stand in front of his own desk like a kid being called into the principal's office. So he pulled up one of the two extra chairs he kept in his office for visitors and dropped onto the thinly cushioned seat. Then he tossed the habeas corpus onto the desk.

  “What's that?” the SAC said without touching the paper.

  “Two suits just took my prisoner.”

  “I know.”

  “Who were they?”

  “State Department.”

  “They show you any ID?”

  “They had a court order signed by a federal judge.”

  Scott nodded toward the paper. “That court order?”

  The SAC stared at the folded sheet of paper but didn't move to pick it up. So Scott picked it up, unfolded it, and handed it to him. Stockwell took it and gave it a cursory glance, then said, “What about it?”

  “You notice how the line where the judge's name is supposed to be typed is blank, and how you can't really make out his signature?”

  “Are you saying it's fake?”

  Scott looked at him for several seconds, wondering if Stockwell already knew what was going on, or maybe he didn't know and didn't want to know. Either way, this situa-tion had gone way above Scott's GS-14 pay grade and he needed help. “Yes, sir, I'm saying it's a fake."

  Stockwell dropped the order on the desk. “It looks legit-imate to me. And so did the agents who brought it.”

  “What about identification?”

  “One of them,” Stockwell said, though he sounded de-fensive. “I don't remember his name, but he had legitimate credentials from the U.S. State Department.”

  “Why did they want Ortiz?”

  “They didn't tell me,” Stockwell said. Then in a much sharper tone, he added, “I assumed it was because he was a foreign national who had just been kidnapped from his home country.”

  “Did they say where they were taking him?”

  “I didn't ask.”

  “They weren't State Department,” Scott said. “They were Agency.”

  “Why would the CIA be interested in a Mexican police sergeant?” Stockwell said dismissively. “You think that rube has some important insight into world geopolitics that the CIA doesn't?”

  Scott thought Stockwell was giving the CIA too much credit, but he kept that to himself. Instead, he said, “Ortiz was a good informant. He gave Mike Cassidy information that led to several big cases. There's no telling what he knows or why the CIA wants him, but the fact is they did want him and now they have him.”

  “I don't accept your premise that they were Agency, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is they had a court or-der and we—”

  “A bogus court order.”

  “You don't know that.”

  Scott picked up the order. “Let's call the clerk of court and find out.”

  The SAC reached over the desk and snatched the paper from Scott hands. “The prisoner has been transferred to an-other agency. End of story.”

  “How did they know he was here?”

  “I guess he used his one phone call.”

  “To call the State Department?” Scott said, not even try-ing to hide his sarcasm.

  Stockwell took a deep breath and leaned back in Scott's chair. He looked aggravated but quite comfortable. Scott knew the chair was comfortable. The reason he had paid for the chair himself was because of a compressed disc in his lower back, the result of a fast rope out of a helicopter in Afghanistan that hadn't gone as planned. The office chairs DEA bought on government contract did nothing to relieve the pain in his back. In fact, they aggravated it. So he had shelled out nearly $800 on a chair with a specially-designed ergonomic back rest and adjustable lumbar support. “Just so we're clear,” Stockwell said, “where did you apprehend Ser-geant Felix Ortiz?”

  Scott hesitated. He glanced around his desk, half-expecting to see a recorder going. Of course, just because he didn't see one didn't mean there wasn't one.

  “Do you need me to repeat the question, Agent Greene?”

  “I apprehended him in a villa approximately thirty miles south of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.”

  “You are aware, are you not, that extraordinary rendi-tions are illegal and a violation of DEA policy?”

  “Felix Ortiz helped murder one of my agents,” Scott said.

  “That doesn't change the policy.”

  “Isn't it the policy of this agency and the entire Justice Department to go after people who murder federal agents, no matter where they're hiding?”

  “It is,” Stockwell said, “but only on a case-by-case basis and only after the proper authorizations have been ob-tained.”

  “But we do them,” Scott said. “We perform extraordi-nary renditions.”

  Stockwell gave him a qualified nod. “In extraordinary circumstances, with multiple levels of review, and ultimate-ly, only after the administrator has personally approved the operation.”

  “There wasn't time. I got an anonymous call at—”

  “Of course, it was anonymous. And untraceable, right.”

  Scott felt his face flush with anger. “I got the call at eleven o'clock last night. The caller had no idea how long the target was going to be there. So I rounded up my team and at sunrise we—”

  “You invaded a sovereign nation and kidnapped one of its citizens, who also happens to be a federal police officer.”

  “A federal police officer who lured a DEA agent across the border so he could be kidnapped and killed and have his goddamned head chopped off.” Scott was spitting the words out by the time he finished.

  Stockwell stared at him for a moment; then, seemingly unperturbed, he said, “I looked at your personnel file. Seems that failure to seek proper authorization before conducting dangerous operations is becoming a habit with you.”

  “I assume you're talking about Afghanistan.”

  Stockwell nodded. “Where you got ripped with a five-day suspension.”

  “My team and I took down the biggest heroin pro-cessing plant in Southwest Asia.”

  “Again, without clearing it through channels. You were there to support the DOD's mission, not to make end runs around the Pentagon's chain of command.”

  “Our mission was to hurt the Taliban and al Qaeda by interdicting their heroin shipments.”

  “Except that particular warlord whose plant you de-stroyed was on our side,” Stockwell said. “And he was using some of that money to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda.”

  “I didn't know that at the time,” Scott said. “But even if I had, it wouldn't have made any difference to me. DEA is a single-mission agency. Our job is to arrest drug traffickers, not cooperate with them.”

  “And you did the same thing here,” Stockwell said.

  “Ortiz can give us everybody who was involved in Mike Cassidy's murder.”

  “You got three agents killed.”

  Chapter 14

  Scott let the SAC's words sink in. They were true, and they hurt. A lot. "You're right," he said. "They were killed on my watch. And it's my fault."

  The SAC leaned forward. He laid his forearms on Scott's desk and laced his fingers together. "I need to inform you, Agent Greene, that per DEA protocol, I have notified OPR and Justice Department OIG. They will be launching a joint criminal investigation...I suggest you get an attorney."

  The Office of Professional Responsibility, OPR, was DEA's internal affairs unit. Street agents called it the Rat Squad, and they called the desk jockeys assigned to it cheese eaters. Of course, every law enforcement agency needed internal investigators becaus
e there were some bad cops, and DEA, like every other agency, had its share. But most of the OPR agents Scott had met seemed to get a real kick out of screwing over their fellow agents.

  Justice Department OIG, the Office of the Inspector General, was just as bad, maybe worse. Normally the back-benchers at OIG spent their days investigating fraud, waste, and abuse within the Justice Department, doing important work like harassing employees who used too many pencils or who made single-sided copies instead of double-sided. But sometimes they got the chance to step up to a real criminal investigation, and Scott was sure that whoever got assigned to his case was going to bring his A-game because the only reason most OIG agents were OIG agents was because they didn't have what it took to make it into the big leagues of federal law enforcement, and they got a perverse thrill from taking down someone who had.

  Basically, Scott was fucked, and he knew it. But the in-vestigation would take weeks to complete, and in that time if he could find Ortiz he might still have a shot at securing indictments against everybody involved in Mike Cassidy's murder.

  "How long do I have?" Scott asked.

  "You're suspended as of right now, pending the out-come of the OPR-OIG investigation."

  "Agents aren't normally suspended until after the inter-nal investigation is finished."

  "The potential charges against you are too serious to wait," Stockwell said. "The government of Mexico is going to request extradition."

  Scott laughed at the irony. "They wouldn't send us Ortiz, but they want the U.S. government to send them me?"

  "They're threatening to charge you with kidnapping and murder."

  "When you say murder, you're talking about the cartel gunmen who were guarding Ortiz and who tried to kill us?"

  "I need your badge and gun."

  Scott leaned over in the chair enough to pull his leather credential case from his back pocket. When he tossed it on the desk the heavy badge made a thud when it landed. "What about my agents?"

  "I'm putting them on restricted duty," Stockwell said, "until OPR decides whether or not to open separate investi-gations."

  Restricted duty was better than suspension. Scott didn't want to see his agents' careers wrecked because they did what he asked them to do. "Snatching Ortiz was my deci-sion," he said. "I didn't give my team any details until we were almost to the target."

  "You're claiming your agents didn't realize they had crossed the border into Mexico with their weapons and tacti-cal gear?"

  "I told them it was surveillance only. The weapons were strictly for self-defense."

  Stockwell shook his head. "That's the story you're going with, that your agents brought pistols, machine guns, bullet-proof vests, and cargo carriers into Mexico and yet had no idea they were there to capture a fugitive Mexican cop who participated in the murder of a DEA agent?"

  "That's exactly what happened."

  "Good luck selling that to OPR"

  "Who's doing the next-of-kin notifications?"

  "Not your problem," Stockwell said. Then in a softer tone, he added, "But since they were your people and I know you're worried about their families...I have six agents coming down from Houston to handle all three notifications simultaneously. I don't want a situation where we have one family calling another family before we've notified every-body."

  "Thank you," Scott said.

  Stockwell nodded.

  Scott stood up. "Is that all?"

  "And your gun."

  "Top drawer on the right," Scott said. "I put it there this morning before I went across the border to ID the bodies of three more dead agents, who, as it turned out, were killed by the Mexican Federal Police."

  Once again, despite all the rancor Scott had tried to put into his words, they seemed to have no effect on Stockwell. He simply opened the drawer, pulled out Scott's duty pistol, a Glock .40 caliber, and laid it on the desk.

  "My M-6 is in the trunk of my G-car," Scott said.

  "You'll have to leave it and the car here while you're on suspension." Stockwell stood up behind Scott's desk. "If you wait a minute, I'll have one of the investigative assistants type you out a property receipt."

  "Don't bother," Scott said. Then he turned around and walked out the door.

  Chapter 15

  "This is far enough," said Mr. Jones, who was sitting in the passenger seat of the Suburban. They were on a dirt road that ran off U.S. Highway 83, fifteen miles south of Laredo. All around them was nothing but sandy dirt and scrub brush.

  The driver braked to a stop and shifted into park. He didn't do or say anything. Just sat behind the wheel, eyes hidden behind his aviator sunglasses. Waiting.

  Jones gave him a sideways look. The man was going by the name Gavin, although that wasn't his real name. Nobody used real names in this line of work. He was in his mid-forties, tall and muscular, hair buzzed to a quarter of an inch, and looking uncomfortable in the dark suit. Not a man used to suits, apparently. Probably more accustomed to wearing a uniform. Jones didn't know much about him, other than he had spent time in Army Special Forces and was now a part-ner in Dynamic International, one of the Agency's go-to PMCs, private military contractors. Jones hoped he was the kind of guy who followed orders and didn't ask questions.

  Sergeant Felix Ortiz of the Policia Federal, shifted around in the back seat. "Why are we stopping?" He sound-ed nervous.

  Jones glanced over his shoulder at Ortiz. "You're walk-ing the rest of the way."

  "To Mexico?"

  Jones pointed west, straight into the setting sun. "It's two miles that way."

  The three of them stepped out of the Suburban. Gavin opened the tailgate and retrieved a dirty brown paper bag. He tossed the bag to Ortiz.

  "What's this?" Ortiz asked.

  "Clothes," Jones said.

  "What's wrong with the clothes I'm wearing?" he said, pointing to a pair of khaki pants and a sport shirt.

  "They're too new," Jones said.

  Ortiz hesitated as if unsure what to do next.

  "Open the bag," Jones ordered.

  Ortiz opened the bag and peeked inside. His face tight-ened as the stench hit him. He pushed the bag out to arm's length. "You want me to wear these?"

  "Think of it as a disguise," Jones said.

  "Why can't you just drive me back across the bridge?"

  "Because crossing the bridge, even in an official gov-ernment vehicle, leaves a record. You're a deep cover asset. We can't risk compromising your identity by being seen with us."

  "I used to ride with Cassidy sometimes."

  "That was DEA," Jones said. "We're different."

  Ortiz looked in the bag again and frowned. "Yeah, I can see that."

  "Quit whining and get dressed," Gavin barked, sound-ing a lot like a drill sergeant.

  Ortiz stared at the two Americans for almost a full mi-nute, trying to determine, Jones surmised, if they were really serious. They were serious, and eventually Ortiz realized that. So he kicked off his shoes and stripped out of his pants and shirt.

  "Underwear too," Gavin said. "And your socks."

  Ortiz folded his arms across his chest and shook his head. Gavin took a step closer to him, and the sergeant backed away. "Now," Gavin said. Ortiz stripped the rest of the way and pulled on the filthy old clothes. Then, at Jones's direction, he stuffed his own clothes into the paper bag and handed it back to Gavin, who tossed the bag into the rear of the Suburban.

  "Now what?" Ortiz asked.

  "Now you walk to Mexico," Jones said.

  "How am I supposed to get across the river?"

  Gavin gave him a hard look. "Where do you think the term wetback comes from?"

  Ortiz tried to match Gavin's dead stare. He was a veter-an federale and used to having people defer to him. Gavin didn't. And it was Ortiz who looked away. He asked Jones, "How do I get in touch with you?"

  "You don't," Jones said. "We'll call you."

  "I don't have my cell phone anymore."

  "We know where you work," Jones said. "I'll
arrange a meeting next week and give you a secure phone."

  Ortiz scanned the horizon. "I'm a little turned around."

  Pointing again into the setting sun, Jones said, "Just walk that way. You can't miss it."

  Ortiz stuck out his hand to Jones, but Jones ignored it. Eventually Ortiz dropped his hand and just nodded at Jones. "Thank you."

  Jones nodded back.

  Ortiz started walking west. He made it five steps. Gavin drew a Colt Government Model .45 caliber pistol from under his suit coat and shot Ortiz in the back. The Mexican police sergeant pitched forward onto his face in the dirty sand.

  "Make sure," Jones said.

  Gavin walked over to Ortiz and shot him in the back of the head.

  Chapter 16

  A taxi dropped Scott off in front of his house at 6:30 p.m. He paid the driver and watched the cab disappear down the quiet suburban street. Yet even after the cab was gone, Scott remained standing at the end of his driveway, thinking about the day, about the people he'd lost, about his career. What was left of his career. Before today he'd had just the one suspension on his record, the five day rip he got in Afghani-stan, and that was more of an in-school detention than a real suspension since it was too impractical for DEA to send him all the way home just for five days. Scott's boss had even told him to keep his badge and gun because the Taliban had put a bounty on the head of every DEA agent in Afghani-stan.

  This time was different. His suspension was indefinite. Pending the outcome of the OPR-OIG investigation, is how the SAC had put it. And Scott knew that indefinite could easily become permanent, as in fired, terminated, shit-canned. If the suits wanted to go after him as hard as they could, if they wanted to make an example of him, he had given them everything they needed.

  Scott had gone all-out to catch Mike Cassidy's killers. That was the unwritten rule. That was what DEA expected of him. And that was what he expected of himself. As the frontline supervisor of a slain agent, it was his responsibility to lead the charge. Though the truth was that he had barely known Cassidy. Scott had only transferred to Laredo as the new resident agent in charge three months before Cassidy was snatched off the street in Nuevo Laredo while waiting to meet his informant, Felix Ortiz.