Four hundred kilos of uncut Colombian cocaine were found ferreted away in the ship’s cargo amidst coffee beans and produce. Street value was eleven million dollars, which worked out to be a hundred and sixty four thousand dollars per corpse, not counting the cost of vehicles, equipment and weapons.
The average worker in mainland Mexico earns a hundred and fifty dollars a month.
~
Don Aranas was sitting with two of his captains having breakfast. They were gathered in the smaller of his two dining rooms at a nineteenth century red cedar table in his Guadalajara retreat when the call came in. He listened intently, asked a few questions, and then issued a terse instruction before hanging up. He turned to his men, who had stopped eating once he’d begun his phone conversation.
“The Los Zetas cartel attacked one of our shipments in Tampico. We lost four hundred kilos and all our men. Apparently it was a big deal. Soldiers showed up and it turned into a war,” he recited dryly, returning to his food.
“What the fuck? Don, this can’t be tolerated. We need to hit these pricks hard and fast. They need to learn the price of taking us on,” Mauricio, the plumper and younger of the two, blurted.
“I know. I told them to move against the Zetas today. We know of several of their meth plants in Quintana Roo we can take out. I already gave the order.” Don Aranas sipped his coffee. “They lost all their men in the attack as well. So nobody benefited from this…except the newspapers.”
“These events are becoming too regular for my liking. If it isn’t the police or army, it’s one of our rivals. There was a time when this would have been unimaginable. Now it’s business as usual. We have to do something,” Hernandez, the other captain, said, spearing his eggs with his fork for emphasis.
“I think it’s safe to say that this is temporary. It’s all related. Once the military backs off, the other cartels will get the message and retreat. I’m confident that the push to eradicate our operations will end sooner than later. Call it a hunch,” Don Aranas assured them with a humorless smile. He waved to the woman at the brightly-tiled kitchen island and motioned for more orange juice. “You’re right. This can’t continue. But don’t worry. Things have a way of working out.”
Fourteen miles outside of Cancun, a dilapidated private ranch sat two miles from the desolate road connecting the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza and the highway that ran along the southern coast. A rusty chain hung across the pale dirt track that led to the compound, secured in place with a padlock. Two armed men were nestled among the trees, bored from months of guard duty where nothing happened. One of them sat on the ground, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, while the other recounted his weekend in Cancun at one of the strip clubs. It had been a raucous evening, and he was boastful of his prowess. The older man cackled as he exhaled a long plume of smoke into the air, nodding appreciatively at the younger man’s exploits.
The storyteller was surprised when a hole appeared in the older man’s forehead, mid-exhalation, and he had almost gotten his Kalashnikov AK-47 swung around when two silenced rounds found him, knocking him against one of the scrub trees, dead before he hit the ground.
A lone figure in jeans and a cowboy hat approached calmly through the brush, and when he was a few feet away, fired another round into the second man’s head for good measure. He fished a telephone out of his shirt pocket, muttered into it, and peered down the long winding white sand drive. Several vehicles pull up to the barrier a few minutes later. A man hopped out of the back of one of the vans with bolt cutters and expertly severed the lock’s shaft. The two vans pulled down the track, and the man re-attached the chain, then trotted after the vehicles to resume his position in the rear of the van. The man in the cowboy hat walked to the passenger door of the lead van and hopped in, carrying the two assault rifles he’d retrieved from the dead guards with him.
The vehicles inched down the track until they were roughly three hundred yards from the ranch, over a small rise and around a bend. They stopped and disgorged twenty men, armed with a smorgasbord of assault rifles — Kalashnikovs, M-4s and M-16s, Heckler and Koch HK416s. Nobody spoke as they moved carefully off the road and into the surrounding trees. The leader of the group removed his cowboy hat and tied a navy blue bandana around his hair to absorb any sweat, and then motioned to the men to split up in two groups. He prowled closer to the buildings, followed by his group, the second bunch barely visible fifty yards off to the right. Once they made it over the ridge, he counted eight guards loitering around outside the ranch’s large rustic barn, weapons slung over their shoulders or leaning up against the wooden ramshackle walls.
The leader made an abrupt gesture with his left hand as he was sighting in with his rifle in his right hand, and then opened fire. It was no contest — the guards collapsed in bloody heaps onto the dirt, dead before having a chance to shoot back. Once they were all down, the attackers stopped firing and raced to the buildings, the team on the right approaching the ranch house, wary of more sentries.
An old man appeared in the doorway brandishing a battered shotgun and took a potshot at one of the assailants, liquefying his chest with a load of double-aught buckshot. He pumped the reloading mechanism to try for another of the attackers, but a bullet caught him in the throat, ending his brief resistance. The area went silent again, then three women bolted from the back of the barn, running for their lives. All three were cut down by gunfire before they made it thirty yards.
When the bandana’d leader kicked in the door to the barn, he was greeted with a few pistol shots from within, one of which tore through his left shoulder. He tumbled to the hard dirt floor, firing even as he dropped, and caught the shooter in the abdomen, ending the failed defense. His men shouldered through the doorway after him, but all held their fire — the remaining occupants of the barn were unarmed, and mostly female, with a few young men in their twenties interspersed.
The leader stood, and after briefly checking his wound, barked a series of orders. The women shrieked in panic, and one of the young men began sobbing. The armed men rounded them up and herded them outside in the harsh sun, while the leader surveyed the methamphetamine laboratory. Large drums of liquid sat to one side, and along the other wall were two large metal reactor containers and assorted processing hardware, including a number of industrial ovens. The liquids were all marked flammable, and the leader knew from practical experience that the entire compound would go up like a natural gas explosion when detonated, leaving toxic residue throughout.
He winced from the pain of the wound and grabbed some matting material off a work table and stuck it inside his shirt, where it would staunch the flow of blood until one of his men could rig a field bandage. It was a crude improvisation, but an effective one. This was not the first time he’d taken a bullet, so he was familiar with the pain. He gauged the amount of bleeding and grunted. He’d live. This time.
Two shots echoed from the interior of the ranch house, followed by the distinctive chatter of a Kalashnikov, and then the shooting stopped. His men must have found more people inside. There was to be no quarter given, no mercy shown. Anyone found was an enemy.
He spun and exited the barn, where nine women and two men were kneeling in front of the house, most of the women crying in terrified gasps. He studied them dispassionately, many of them clearly of Indian extraction, and then nodded to his second in command, who pulled a cell phone from his shirt and made a call. The two vans rolled down the dirt road to the house and skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust. Two of the men moved to the van side doors and slid them open. When they turned from the interior, one held a machete and the other an aluminum baseball bat.
The task was finished within a few minutes, and the men loaded back into the van after carting sixty-two one kilo packages of crystal meth out of the barn and wedging them into the cargo area of the second van, cutting the space for passengers by sixty percent. It was a tight fit, but nobody complained. It was just a matter of time until the gunshots attracted the military,
even in this rural area, so everyone was anxious to get on the road.
The second in command jogged over to the barn and pulled a pin from a hand grenade. With a grunt, he tossed it through the doorway and then ran for the vans. He made it in seven seconds. The vehicles were pulling away when a huge series of explosions blew the structure apart, a massive fireball billowing into the sky as the drivers accelerated dangerously down the rustic trail in a white haze of dust.
Chapter 18
Briones stood in Cruz’s office, sorting through reports at the small circular table set up for three and four person meetings. They were expecting their counterparts from CISEN to appear at any moment, and Cruz multi-tasked as they waited, signing documents and creating piles of paper in his outbox. In the larger main room, uniformed men and women circulated between the cubicles, busy with the business of battling the cartels.
“Which do you think he’ll hit?” Cruz asked Briones.
“I think the president’s security detail has a nightmare with having an open speech on the congress steps. I don’t know whose bright idea that was, but it stinks.”
“Fortunately, that’s not our problem. I don’t envy the poor bastards responsible for it.”
Briones nodded in accord. “It’ll require a massive outlay of manpower to lock down every possible place in the area where an attack could come from. Sniper at up to a thousand yards, bomb threat, a gas attack…it’s a lot of ground to cover. I’d recommend to them that they move it inside, like they normally would. This is a reckless risk.”
“We’ve already had that discussion, and they’re adamant that the president doesn’t want to appear to be skulking around hiding. He’s hell bent on being the brave bull in public, no matter how much difficulty it presents.”
“Then we do what we can to track down El Rey, and pray a lot,” Briones said.
The receptionist entered, followed by the two men from CISEN. Cruz motioned for them to take a seat. She closed the door behind them as she left, her offer of soda or coffee rejected by all.
Cruz greeted the pair, Dario Pareto and Solomon Quiniente, of unknown rank. Solomon seemed to be the senior of the two, but as with all the others of their ilk, they weren’t big on sharing information, including what office they held. They shook hands with Briones and Cruz, and then Dario set a yellow legal pad on the desk and uncapped his pen.
Cruz launched into a ten minute briefing of their efforts to date, describing the steps that had been taken, and finished with a glance at Briones.
Solomon was the first to speak. “You have no leads?”
“No. Nobody has heard or seen anything, and even with extra staff on the streets, we’re coming up empty. El Rey works alone, so it’s not surprising. We’ve always believed that the best chance we have is another information leak from your side. We simply don’t have any way of mounting this sort of a manhunt with any hope of success, given the lack of any new info,” Cruz admitted.
“None of the photos or the arrests over the last week have resulted in anything?”
“No. I wish they had. Then we’d have something more material to discuss. As I told you at our last meeting, we could really use any help you can offer.”
“I’m afraid nothing has surfaced on our end, either, Capitan Cruz. As always, we’ll keep you informed, but this isn’t an exact science,” Dario said with a trace of condescension.
“Why is it that whenever we get together, we do all the reporting and you tell us zip? I mean, what good is our cooperation with CISEN doing us? So far we’ve gotten nothing but the initial warning, which has done us exactly zero good,” Briones pointed out, echoing his earlier discussion with Cruz.
Solomon regarded Briones as though he had just wiped him off his shoe.
“Well, probably because we have nothing else to report. I mean, that would be the logical explanation, no?” he said.
Cruz decided to defuse the situation before it escalated. He rose from his seat, signaling that the discussion was at an end.
“Gentlemen, it’s always a pleasure. Please let us know if you hear anything at all that might be of interest, or if you have any suggestions on how we can be more effective in tracking El Rey down. You have considerably greater resources than we do, and no doubt more expertise in sensitive areas.” Cruz stood. “Thanks for coming in.”
Once the two CISEN men had left, Cruz fixed Briones with a neutral gaze. “I’d say that went well…”
“This is bullshit, sir. They’re just here to get a status report and take it back to their bosses and are giving us nothing in return. How is having them in our hair helping us? It isn’t,” Briones griped.
“All true, but it won’t do us any good to get into a fight with CISEN right now. They gave us the lead, probably to set us up to fail, so just accept it. I’ll work with the president’s staff to ensure he stays safe. If we can’t track El Rey, then the least we can do is push the president to do the right thing. Even if he is as stubborn as a burro.”
They finished up their routine reports and Briones departed, obviously unhappy with the situation, still.
Cruz studied his watch and rubbed his burning eyes. He was tired and wanted to leave. He didn’t have the patience for these pointless sessions, or for his subordinate’s emotional storms. Dinah had recovered and had been discharged from the hospital, and he’d committed to himself to spend more time with her — making them a priority. He’d been a workaholic for too long, and he knew it wouldn’t fly, especially once he was married. He had to create boundaries, and one he’d decided on was to be out of the office by six every evening, unless it was an emergency. A real emergency — not one of the routine emergencies that seemed to happen daily.
He finished his paperwork and hurried out of the office, anxious to see her. She’d taken a few days off on her doctor’s advice and was waiting at home. Dinah had seemed different after the incident, and Cruz attributed it to shock. Part of being a decent partner was to be there for her when she needed him, not at work till all hours.
His car took him into the underground parking garage at the condo, and he deliberately made more noise than necessary when he entered, so she’d know he was home. Dinah came out of the bedroom, looking ravishing in a red silk robe. Cruz registered with mild concern that she hadn’t gotten dressed all day. That couldn’t be good.
“Hola, mi Corazon. How’s my heroic crime-fighter tonight? Did you conquer the world?” she asked playfully.
“No more than any other day. How are you doing?”
“Oh, you know. Just being lazy, taking it easy. Might as well relax on my days off.”
“Why not? Hey, do you want to go out, or eat in? Or I can call for some food…” Cruz asked.
“Let’s eat here. I can make something,” she replied. Her tone and mannerisms were the old Dinah, but something was different. She seemed preoccupied, her mind elsewhere.
Over dinner, they made small talk, about how Cruz’s day went, and the topic of what he was working on came up.
“Same as always, mi amor. Struggling to keep the world safe from the cartels,” he said.
“Anything really interesting? You had mentioned El Rey a while ago. Is there anything happening with that?”
He told her about his progress, and she seemed to finally perk up, engaged and interested. That encouraged him, and he regaled her with the minutiae of the case, taking care to leave out anything classified.
When they finally got ready for bed, he was upbeat. Dinah had bounced back during their interactions during dinner, and now seemed as vital and immediate as ever. Perhaps she was just depressed or frazzled from the attack and felt left out of his life. It had to be hard being with a man who was married to the job. He vowed to include her in more of his daily affairs and make her feel more connected to him.
As they drifted off to sleep after making tender love, a solitary tear rolled down Dinah’s cheek, unnoticed by Cruz as it absorbed into her pillow.
Chapter 19
As the morning wore on, CISEN headquarters in Mexico City was buzzing with activity. Solomon approached Rodriguez’s office, tapped discreetly on the door and waited in the harshly illuminated hallway, holding a report. After an appropriate delay, he heard his boss call for him, and he entered, taking care to close the door softly behind him.
The office was large, furnished in a Mexican contemporary style, all angles and lines, fashioned from Danish birch and glass. A collection of modern oil paintings were featured on the main wall, abstract renderings with swatches of color on a dark gray background. Rodriguez sat behind his desk, his suit jacket hung on a hook on the back of the door, shirtsleeves rolled up as he typed busily on his computer.
He glanced at the new arrival and indicated with a nod of his head that he should take a seat. Solomon complied, saying nothing.
“Yes, Solomon. What have you got for me?”
“A delicate development on the El Rey front, sir. Our asset is scheduled to deliver a package of material to the assassin tomorrow, here in Mexico City.”
Rodriguez stopped typing and pushed back from the keyboard.
“That creates a problem for us, doesn’t it?”
“I’m not sure I understand, sir.”
“If we pass the information on to Cruz, the positive is that he may be able to apprehend the assassin. The negative is that the information couldn’t have come from too many places, so it potentially jeopardizes our source — who is crucial to our ongoing operation, as you know,” Rodriguez explained.
Solomon shook his head, but chose his words with care. “I don’t see it quite that way, sir. I see it as us having information that could prevent a successful attack on the president by an assassin with a miraculous track record of spectacular hits. Which, if we didn’t pass the info on, would have us looking like traitors — especially if the execution attempt was successful.” He hesitated before continuing. “I see it as life in prison, versus doing what we have to.” He slid the report across the glass desktop.
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