Cartel

by Chuck Hustmyre

  From what Scott did know of the man from the short time they had worked together, Mike Cassidy was a hard-working and dedicated agent. And like all good DEA street agents, he was suspicious of bosses in general and new boss-es in particular, which is why Scott and Cassidy hadn't spent a lot of time getting chummy. Having real friends on the job was something you had to give up when you went into man-agement.

  Two days after he disappeared, Cassidy's corpse was dumped on the steps of Policia Federal headquarters in Nuevo Laredo, with his head missing and his body bearing obvious signs of torture. Lying on Cassidy's chest was a fig-urine of Santa Muerte, the female patron saint of the cult of death that so many Mexican cartel members worshipped, but who was particularly venerated by the Los Zetas cartel. Also lying on Cassidy's body were two other Santa Muerte icons: an hourglass, which symbolized that life was finite; and a ti-ny set of scales, symbolizing equality and justice, but which, in the eyes of those who worshipped Santa Muerte, really meant revenge.

  As soon as Mike Cassidy's body was discovered, Scott had put every other investigation on hold and had focused his team entirely on bringing the killers to justice. The result, after three months of hard work, had been the federal grand jury indictment of Felix Ortiz.

  Phone company records of text messages between Cas-sidy and Ortiz showed that it was Ortiz who had asked for the meeting that night and Ortiz who had picked the café where they were going to meet. Scott knew Ortiz hadn't shown up for the meeting because ten minutes after the scheduled time, Cassidy had texted Ortiz, "Where R U?" Ten minutes later he called Ortiz and left a voicemail mes-sage, which the DEA agents had recovered. The message was: "It's Mike. I've been sitting on my ass here for twenty minutes, and I'm starting to feel like I have a target on my back. Where the hell are you?"

  Garza had a source at the Mexican phone company Telmex and had discovered from GPS records that Ortiz was one block away from the café where he was supposed to meet Cassidy ten minutes before the scheduled meeting and that he remained there for almost an hour. So Ortiz had not only set up Mike Cassidy, he had hung around to watch.

  Five minutes after leaving the voicemail message for Ortiz, Cassidy had walked out of the café. Four gunmen were waiting, all wearing black military clothing and black hooded skull masks, the favorite operational uniform of Los Zetas.

  Most of the abduction was caught on a bank surveil-lance camera across the street. Cassidy fought hard, but un-armed he was no match for his attackers. At one point, though, before the cartel gunmen stuffed him into the back seat of a dark SUV, Cassidy looked across the street directly at the bank security camera and pulled off the mask of one of his attackers, and for just a second the camera recorded an image of the man's face.

  Scott had sent the image to DEA and FBI headquarters, and even to the CIA and the NSA, in hopes of identifying the man using facial recognition software, but all of those agencies' computer whizzes had reported back that they had gotten no hits. The face wasn't in any of their databases. So Scott sent the image to the Policia Federal and to the coun-try's lead investigative agency, the Policia Federal Ministe-rial, known as the PFM, which had a few years ago been created to replace the notoriously corrupt AFI, the Agencia Federal de Investigacion.

  Neither the PF nor the PFM had responded to Scott's requests to help identify the gunman.

  When Scott and his team had tried to contact Ortiz, they couldn't reach him. When they went to his apartment in Nuevo Laredo, unarmed, per Mexican law, and only there to interview Ortiz, his wife said she hadn't seen him. Scott thought Ortiz was either dead or soon would be, so he pushed the U.S. attorney's office in Laredo into indicting the missing Mexican police sergeant.

  After a federal arrest warrant had been issued for Ortiz, Scott had gone through the motions with the Justice and State departments to file the warrant with Mexico and to re-quest extradition, but the Mexican government, after much foot-dragging, had declined the extradition request. So with extradition off the table, the Mexican government had no reason to arrest Ortiz.

  Then Scott had gotten the late-night, anonymous phone call from a man who said he knew where Ortiz was hiding out. Scott had jumped on the information and had arranged the hasty cross-border snatch job.

  Now he was standing at the end of his driveway in the dark, with this morning's raid and the deaths of three of his agents hanging around his neck.

  Chapter 17

  Scott walked up his driveway toward the open garage, where his wife's Ford Explorer and his F-150 pickup were parked. On the way he picked up a bicycle with pink and white tassels hanging from the handlebars and a set of training wheels. His daughter couldn't ever seem to remember that at night her bicycle went in the garage with mommy's and daddy's cars.

  When Scott stepped into the kitchen, his wife, Victoria, was setting the dinner table for three: herself and their two children, six-year-old Samantha and nine-year-old Jake. It had been a while since Victoria had set a place for Scott. Most nights she put a plate in the microwave for him. Some nights she didn't.

  Samantha was the first to spot him. "Daddy," she shout-ed as she hopped off her booster seat and ran toward him with her chubby arms outstretched. Scott scooped her up and spun her around at arm's length. He hugged her tight and planted a kiss on each cheek.

  "Dad, did you catch any bad guys today?" Jake said from his seat at the table.

  "Yeah," Samantha said, echoing her brother. "Did you catch any bad guys today?" It was the same question they always asked him on the nights he got home before their bedtime.

  "As a matter of fact, I did catch a bad guy today," he said.

  "How bad was he?" Samantha said.

  "Really bad," Scott said. "Super bad."

  As Scott set his daughter back down on her booster seat, Samantha gave her brother a cocky look. "I told you daddy always catches bad guys."

  "Not every day he doesn't," Jake told his sister.

  Samantha looked up at Scott. "Daddy, don't you al-ways-"

  "That's enough, you two," Victoria said. "Time to eat."

  The two kids dug into their roast beef and mashed pota-toes.

  "I didn't hear your car," Victoria said.

  Scott looked at his wife. Tall, blond, green eyed, and quite beautiful at thirty-five, in a Dallas debutante WASP sort of way, with the trim well-toned legs of an avid tennis player and a self-esteem-boosting postpartum boob job. "I took a cab home."

  A crease of worry crossed Victoria's face. "A cab?"

  He nodded.

  "What's wrong?" she said.

  Scott looked at the kids. They were chomping down dinner, seemingly oblivious to everything else, but he knew that both of them kept at least half an ear cocked toward anything their parents said. And that was especially true with Samantha, who, like all women, had bionic hearing. So Scott nodded and Victoria followed him into the den.

  "What happened?" she said. "Are you in trouble again?"

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Nothing," Victoria said. But of course that wasn't true. "Tell me what happened?"

  "I lost three agents."

  Her forehead wrinkled. "What do you mean, lost?"

  "Killed."

  Victoria's hand shot to her mouth. "Oh, my God." She didn't know his agents well. She'd only met them once, when, at the end of his first week as the new resident agent in charge, Scott had hosted an all-hands barbeque at their house, but she knew their names well enough to at least put faces with them. "Who?"

  "Miller. Lundy. And Kat."

  "Kat?" Victoria said with pain in her voice. "I talked to her for over an hour about...nothing. Girl stuff. She asked me where I got..." Victoria covered her mouth again with her hand. "Oh, my God, Scott. How?"

  "Across the border."

  "Jesus Christ," Victoria said. "Were you there?"

  "Nearby," he said. "But we got separated."

  "How did they...How did it happen?"

  "I don't want to talk about it," Scott said. Then
he saw the look of hurt on his wife's face. "I really can't even if I...There's an investigation."

  She stared at him for a moment. "That's not all, though. There's something else. Something you're not...Why did you come home in a cab?"

  He hesitated. But Victoria didn't say anything. He al-ways thought she would have made a good interrogator. She knew how to use silence as a tool. Finally, he said, "I got suspended."

  Chapter 18

  Marcus parked the Suburban a block from Scott Greene's house and on the opposite side of the street. Dwayne sat next to him in the shotgun seat. Dwayne was in his late-twenties, five or six years younger than Marcus, also a lot bigger, and had spent three years in Special Forces, until getting busted out with a dishonorable discharge after a third piss test came up positive for steroids. In the six months Dwayne had been with Dynamic International, Marcus had worked out with him several times and had seen that Dwayne's back and shoulders were covered with zits, acne being a common side effect of steroid abuse. Dwayne also had a hair-trigger temper, another common side effect, what people called 'roid rage.

  "Why are we sitting on this guy?" Dwayne asked. "He's suspended. What the fuck can he even do?"

  "Why don't you call Gavin and ask him yourself?" Mar-cus said and held his cell phone out to Dwayne. Gavin also had a temper, and he was one tough old bastard. He could eat kids like Dwayne for breakfast.

  Dwayne turned his head and stared out the side win-dow.

  "Yo, Cyril, you awake back there?" Marcus said.

  "I'm here and yes I'm awake," came the muffled voice of Cyril from the back of the Suburban. "The way you drive it's impossible to sleep."

  This was no ordinary Chevrolet Suburban, and it wasn't the same one Marcus had been driving that morning with Gavin when they had almost caught up to the DEA agents on the bridge and maybe ended this whole operation. This Suburban had been tricked out at a clandestine shop in Miami run by a retired spook from the CIA's Office of Sci-ence and Technology. The upgrade had cost $105,000.

  Immediately behind the front seats stood a black fiber-glass partition that sealed off the cab from the rest of the ve-hicle. Between the seats was a sliding hatch, three feet tall and eighteen inches wide, barely big enough for a man to crawl through, that allowed access between the cab and the rear of the vehicle.

  The rear compartment had been stripped clean, leaving nothing but empty space, and in that space, the retired spook had installed a state-of-the-art surveillance package: a bank of high-definition monitors, each one showing the view from one of the six cameras mounted around the Suburban's roof; a remote computer link that could pick up everything from live DOD satellite imagery to ESPN; GPS trackers; video and audio recording equipment, including a shotgun micro-phone for eavesdropping on distant conversations; a camera that popped up from a vent in the roof, like a periscope on a submarine, and could rotate 360 degrees and had a 20X zoom capability; a audio scanner and decoder that could pick up and record radio and cell phone traffic; a self-contained cooling and heating system that worked even when the vehicle's engine was turned off and the key removed; and a comfortable swivel chair mounted in front of the space-age, mission-control type console that operated everything. All of that and a small cot for naps.

  The back of the Suburban was Cyril's domain. Cyril was a geek, but he had survived Airborne School, Ranger School, and the Special Forces Q-Course. He knew how to kill, but killing wasn't his primary task. Cyril's job was watching and listening.

  Before joining Dynamic International, Cyril had spent several years with a U.S. Army and Joint Special Operations Command unit so secret it didn't even have a permanent name. Over the years the official name had changed from Field Operations Group, to Intelligence Support Activity, to Mission Support Activity; and some of the two-word code names the unit had used were Centra Spike, Tom Victor, Cemetery Ward, Gray Fox, and Intrepid Spear.

  The unit's job was to gather actionable intelligence from a variety of sources, but its specialty was signals intelligence, meaning eavesdropping on landlines, computers, cell phones, radios, even face-to-face conversations. To keep things simple, the few people who even knew of the unit's existence called it The Activity.

  Marcus adjusted the mouthpiece of his radio headset and keyed the microphone. The communications system they were using funneled all their transmissions through a com-puter scrambler that changed code keys every ninety sec-onds. Theoretically, the code couldn't be cracked, but Mar-cus doubted NSA would let private military contractors use a communications system that the agency's computers could not tap into. Still, the system was good, and there was no way law enforcement, terror groups, or drug gangs, no mat-ter how sophisticated, could intercept their transmissions. "Cyril, this Marcus, how do you read?"

  "Lima Charlie," Cyril's voice said in Marcus's ear, using military-speak for loud and clear.

  "You got eyes on?" Marcus asked.

  "Roger that."

  "Verify, please."

  "Beige stucco and brick," Cyril said. "Brick looks to be...ochre. Two vehicles in the garage, a Ford Explorer, green, and a Ford pickup truck...standby one." A couple of seconds later, he added, "The truck is a four door crew cab, an F-150, gray in color."

  "Did you say ochre?" Marcus asked.

  "Ten-four," Cyril said. "That's my call on the color, ochre."

  "What the hell is ochre?"

  "Light red. Kind of like rust."

  "Roger that," Marcus said, shaking his head. Whole company full of hardasses and he gets stuck with an egg-head. "Confirmed," he said. "You've got eyes on the target."

  "Okay," Dwayne said, "so now that we got that shit out of the way, seriously, can you tell me why we're going to spend the night sitting on this asshole?"

  Marcus said into his headset, "Boss, you want to field this one?"

  "Field what?" Gavin said over the radio.

  Marcus glanced at Dwayne, then said into his micro-phone, "Dwayne wants to know why we're surveilling this target."

  "Is he on this channel?"

  "No, but he can be," Marcus said with a slight smile.

  "Put him on," Gavin said.

  Marcus turned to Dwayne. "He wants you on comms."

  Dwayne slipped his headset on. "Go for Dwayne."

  "The short answer," Marcus heard Gavin say, "is be-cause I said so."

  "Understood," Dwayne said.

  "The long answer-which I don't feel in the least bit compelled to provide, but which I will anyway so as to pre-vent any future misunderstandings-is this: We have under-estimated Agent Greene from the get-go. We thought Ortiz was safe, yet Greene managed to not only find him, but he punched through our so-called security, kidnapped the little peckerhead, and got him across the border."

  "But Ortiz didn't tell him anything," Dwayne said.

  "Sergeant Ortiz said he didn't tell the DEA anything. We don't know that for sure."

  "But this jackleg got himself suspended, no badge, no gun, they even took his car, so what can he do?"

  "Probably nothing," Gavin said. "But I've been a soldier my whole life and I do what I'm told. The man paying the bills says watch the guy for a couple of days. If he stays home, he probably doesn't know anything of consequence. If he leaves, we'll follow him. Maybe he's going to the store for a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread. But maybe he's not. Three of his agents are dead. If I'm reading this guy right, he's not the kind who's just going to leave this alone and let nature take its course."

  Dwayne sighed. "Roger that."

  "Glad we got that straight," Gavin said over the radio. "Now shut up and do what you're told. No more stupid questions. Hooah?"

  "Hooah," Dwayne responded, giving Gavin the proper U.S. Army response to just about any question-especially the question Hooah?-which basically meant, Do you un-derstand and acknowledge? And the response meant, Yes, sir, I understand and I am ready to go! But Dwayne's re-sponse lacked the usual enthusiasm that most commanders expected from their troops when given an order. So it made Mar
cus wonder if maybe steroids weren't the only reason Dwayne had been drummed out of Special Forces and the Army. Maybe he was just a piss-poor soldier.

  Marcus himself had spent ten years in Special Forces, most of it with the 3rd SF Group out of Ft. Bragg. He did one tour in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. Even in Special Forces he had run into soldiers like Dwayne. They were high-performing fuckups. Good enough to get through all the schools but not good enough to make it with the teams.

  Dwayne was staring out the side window looking like he'd just been handed a death sentence. "Jesus," he said. "Two days of this shit. Do you know how boring this is go-ing to be?"

  "Look on the bright side," Marcus said.

  Dwayne turned to look at him. "What bright side?"

  "All the white people in this neighborhood, somebody's bound to notice a black man sitting in a parked car and call the cops on us."

  Chapter 19

  Victoria yanked open a dresser drawer. "I told you I didn't want to come here. It's dirty. The schools are bad. And no one speaks English." She closed the drawer after a few sec-onds, having taken nothing out of it. "I want to go back to Dallas. I want to go home."

  Sitting on the bed, Scott said, "I'm assigned here."

  "You're suspended here."

  "Just until the investigation is over."

  She pulled open another drawer. "How long will that take?"

  "I don't know," he said. "Hopefully not long." Trying to sound a lot more optimistic than he felt.

  Victoria left the drawer open but turned to face Scott. "Why are you even being investigated?"

  "I just...don't want to talk about it. Not yet."

  She turned away and slammed the drawer closed. "And that's exactly the problem. You never want to talk about anything." Then she opened the drawer again, dug through it, but didn't take anything out. Finally, she closed it and turned to face Scott. "Your father wanted you to go to law school."