Revenge of the Assassin a-2

by Russell Blake

  Rodriguez took the file, stood up and paced the length of his office, reading the two pages carefully. A few minutes later, finished, he stared at one of the paintings, as if the solution lay in its inscrutable brushstrokes.

  “You have a point. But the danger to our ongoing operation is still very real. And the truth is that the likelihood of information leaking about our having this information after the fact is small.”

  Solomon took a breath, and realizing he was in delicate territory, put his most convincing disinterested expression forward. “So there’s only a small likelihood that everyone who knows about this spends the rest of their lives in prison. That would be you, and I, and two others who have already seen the report — at least two others. I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t like those odds. Bad news has a way of breaking at the worst possible time…”

  Rodriguez frowned. His subordinate was right, unfortunately.

  “Get Cruz on the line. Or better yet, have him come over here.” He looked at his watch — a newish Rolex stainless steel Submariner. “Put a rush on it. We don’t have much time.”

  Solomon stood and moved to the door. “I’ll let you know if he is available to come in today.”

  “Do that. Tell him if he delays, it’s on his head. That will get him motivated.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When Cruz returned from CISEN headquarters he practically ran from the elevator to his office. Briones spotted him as he crossed the floor, and after one look at his superior’s face, stopped what he was doing and followed him in and closed the door.

  “Call a meeting. Now,” Cruz ordered. “All the El Rey task force heads. We just got a major break — this will probably be the best lead we’ve had on him since this case started.”

  “When are you available?”

  “Five minutes.”

  Briones trotted back to his cubicle and hastily called the various members of the team who weren’t in the field. A few minutes later, they were gathered in the conference room. Cruz entered and moved straight to the head of the table. He surveyed the expectant faces and then launched into a condensed version of the information he’d gotten from CISEN.

  “Tomorrow, eleven o’clock, he’s to meet a cartel member to take delivery of some explosives and other items, at a machine shop six miles from here. Obviously, we need to take him. We can expect that he’ll be disguised, so it’s paramount that we be discreet. We can’t circle the building with Federales until he’s confirmed as being inside.”

  A hand shot up. “I know that area, sir. It’s dense, even for Mexico City, and the buildings are packed together. Maybe we can get a few apartments or offices that are proximate and set up surveillance he won’t see?”

  “Excellent suggestion, Guerrero. But it has to be low key. Get a team to canvass the area once this meeting breaks up. Softy and gently. We don’t want the neighbors freaked out, or the contact to get spooked,” Cruz warned.

  “Maybe we can bug the machine shop tonight while it’s closed?” Briones suggested.

  “Not a bad idea, but we have no intel on what counter-surveillance gear is in place, so we could give ourselves away if we try. We need this meeting to take place, gentlemen. We can’t do anything that would spook either El Rey or his contact. Let’s just assume that the shop is a front for illegal activity, and that as such, it is likely wired with security equipment,” Cruz advised.

  “How do you want us to take him, then?” Guerrero asked, willing to step into the breach, as always.

  “I want a team of twenty men in full tactical gear ready to go in on thirty seconds’ notice. If we can get a nearby building without attracting attention, perfect. If not, we’ll use one of the big transport carriers and wheel up to the shop for a shockwave deployment. But people? We can’t screw this up. It has to go off like clockwork. Ruiz? Sandborn? Pick your very best men and ensure they don’t blow it.”

  They spent the next half hour discussing the assault and agreed that they would combine visual observation of some sort with a raid by a lightning strike force. Cruz left it up to his field officers to recommend a final approach once they’d studied the lay of the land. As the men gathered their notes, there was a palpable sense of energy in the room. Finally, after weeks of no progress, there was a break, and they could get into the field and bring their quarry down.

  Dinah left the condo, walking in a seemingly aimless manner, window shopping at the upscale shops in the trendy neighborhood they’d been moved to three weeks earlier. She hated the upheaval every few months, but had come to accept it as a part of staying alive. She understood the need for constant moving, but it still created a hardship on them. At least they were being put up in high-end buildings. There seemed to be no budget limitations when it came to keeping the task force commander alive. For that she was grateful.

  She paused at the corner and glanced around to ensure that the two plainclothes officers watching the building were still there, and noted with concern that one had left his position in the car across the street and had begun following her at a discreet distance. She swallowed, her mouth dry from anxiety, and crossed to the far side.

  Continuing her walk, she picked up the pace, putting a few yards of valuable distance between herself and her bodyguard. She debated trying to give her protector the slip and then realized that it was an impossibility. His presence would just make things more nerve-racking, but wouldn’t alter the outcome of her trip, and trying to lose him could raise difficult questions with Cruz she preferred not to be asked.

  She’d gotten a call that morning on the small cell the assassin had given her at the hospital, and the man’s soft voice had calmly laid out instructions. She was to summarize any information she had gleaned and drop the notes at a pre-ordained spot at a specific time. When he hung up after only a few seconds of instruction, she’d scrambled to pull herself together, her heart pounding in her ears from the tension.

  Dinah had done as instructed, methodically detailing the conversations she’d had with Cruz on a single sheet of her note paper, and then set about showering and getting dressed. It was a Saturday, and school was out, so she had half a day before Cruz would return from headquarters. Still, she felt rushed, and guilty — she was selling her future husband down the river.

  She forced herself to stop the negative internal dialogue. What she was doing was protecting the one she loved, as well as herself. The assassin was right. The priority was on staying alive and together, not on sacrificing everything over a tenuous ethical belief. Every year thousands of innocent people were slaughtered in the cartel clashes in Mexico, and many of those people no doubt had laudable morals. But they were still dead, and nothing would bring them back. She took a deep breath and steeled her resolve. It was too late to second-guess herself now.

  Dinah saw the sign for the large department store and made for the entrance, taking care to move quickly into the clothing section. After a few moments of glancing around at the selections, she chose a pair of jeans and two tops and approached the changing rooms, where an attendant showed her to a cubicle.

  Five minutes later she emerged and handed the clothes to the girl at the counter with a shake of her head. She didn’t really like anything.

  Stalling for time, and so as not to be too obvious, she browsed for other items for a few minutes, straying into the underwear section. Finally, appearing to have exhausted her shopping enthusiasm, Dinah wove her way through the aisles, retrieved the little phone, and pressed redial. A few seconds later the assassin answered.

  “It’s there.”

  Shortly thereafter, a middle-aged man with a thick beard and a beret strode to the attendant carrying a pair of slacks. The woman quickly confirmed that he was carrying only the one item and then directed him to take whichever stall he liked — the area was empty, the store having only opened half an hour earlier.

  El Rey quickly located the hidden note wedged into the crack he’d created two days before in the flimsy surface of the wall and extracte
d it using the folding blade of a razor-sharp survival knife. Satisfied that he had gotten everything Dinah had left for him, he waited another minute, and then returned the pants to the attendant before unhurriedly strolling out of the store.

  Back at his apartment, he pulled the cotton out of the bottom of his cheeks, where he’d stuffed it to form the appearance of jowls, and wiped away the makeup that had completed his transformation into a debauched older man. He scratched absently at his beard as he read Dinah’s small, precise handwriting and smiled. They knew nothing of consequence. His scheme was working perfectly, and there were no loose ends. The president would be dead in due course, and he would retire again, permanently, a very wealthy fellow with abundant time on his hands.

  His arm bumped the mouse connected to his laptop, and the screen blinked to life, revealing a set of blueprints and a schematic for the construction of the device that would terminate the president’s stay on the planet. He’d already ordered the necessary item from eBay in the United States, and the shipping company was due to deliver it within seventy-two hours. Some modification would be required, but that was fine. It would give him something to occupy his idle hands with while he waited for the big day to arrive.

  Holding his arms above his head, he stretched and then tossed the cotton balls with the greasepaint on them into the trash. No time to lounge about. He had a meeting tomorrow and wanted to be prepared for anything. That was a big part of why he was successful.

  He was always prepared.

  Chapter 20

  El Rey drifted through the streets of Mexico City like a ghost, blending in with the crowds and avoiding being in any way conspicuous. The morning rush hour was finally over, in the sense that it was ever over in one of the most populated cities in the world, but the sidewalks in the area of town he was navigating were still jammed, as were the streets. Music blared from storefronts hawking women’s clothing, appliances on payment, shoes, pets — every imaginable variety of oddity, all to the beat of Shakira at a hundred-plus decibels.

  As he strolled past open-air taco stands, to the heady smell of pastor and grilled onions lingering in the air, he casually eyed his surroundings for any signs of threat. It was automatic, and he scanned each sector in his vicinity with clinical detachment, even as he appeared to be a man without a care in the world, taking in the sights.

  He disliked meeting anyone new, but couldn’t see a way to avoid it. He was running up against a deadline and, given the urgency of the situation, he had to rely on Aranas for help in securing the more difficult to acquire goods he’d need for the job. The president’s speech was rapidly approaching and he didn’t have time to source some of the harder to procure materials. It left him with precious little leeway in terms of preparation, but he wasn’t worried. He had come up with a plan that, even by his standards, was audacious.

  The neighborhood gradually degraded, and the clothing stores transitioned into automobile parts shops and muffler repair bays, interspersed with the odd internet cafe and small market. Blankets lay on the sidewalk, trinkets and obviously stolen items spread out upon them, the vendors shamelessly offering their goods for fractions of their legitimate worth. He noticed that the foot traffic had grown sparser as the district became rougher, and his nose crinkled at the pervasive odor of garbage wafting from the alleyways.

  El Rey resembled a day laborer, with a stained, red Feyco baseball hat pulled low across his brow and knockoff Oakley sunglasses he’d bought three blocks back for seven dollars. He wore baggy black cargo pants and a long-sleeved burgundy rayon dress shirt, crumpled and stained as it would be from days of wearing it while pulling wire runs or laying flooring. He’d darkened his complexion with a deep base and trimmed his beard into an elaborate goatee and set of Elvis sideburns, presenting an image of a worker who was desperately trying to proclaim some sort of hipness, but failing miserably. He knew from experience that people would focus on the most memorable attributes, and the unusual facial hair would ensure that is what they remembered — the face behind it would be almost forgotten if anyone tried to describe him.

  Three blocks from his rendezvous point he paused in front of a hardware store with racks of toilet seats and shower heads proudly mounted on a board outside the windows, guarded by a surly, overweight man eating a bag of potato chips. He’d caught a glimpse of a Federal Police truck moving down one of the parallel streets, which triggered an immediate internal alarm. It might have meant nothing, but his senses moved to high alert. His eyes scrutinized everything with increased intensity from behind the shades, roving over the buildings and vehicles, looking for any signs of surveillance. He didn’t detect anything, and after a few minutes of ambling down the block without noticing anything amiss, he turned the corner and made for his destination.

  The streets were scarred with potholes and grooves from where the asphalt had worn bare, leaving filthy gravel or pools of odiferous liquid collected in the pits. A dilapidated Eighties American sedan adorned with Bondo and primer prowled slowly down the way, street gang thugs glaring from its tinted windows as it rolled past him. Traffic had thinned out, and instead of the manic bumper to bumper morass a few blocks back, only a few cars navigated the increasingly shabby roads.

  His anxiety increased again as he glanced at the windows above street level, noting that many were open, their interiors darkened to the point where making out the occupants was an impossibility. The hair on his arms prickled under the synthetic material of the shirt as he felt a sensation of being watched. This was the wrong kind of setup for a meet, at least, according to his preferences, but it would have been a dream come true for a hit.

  A cat shot out from behind a dumpster, startling him, and raced off down the street in vain pursuit of a gathering of pigeons it had spied strutting by. He watched as the emaciated feline made its play, failing to snare any of the birds as they flapped effortlessly away to safety. He could sympathize with its disappointment — he’d been there, although thankfully, only once.

  With only one block to go, he still didn’t see anything overtly alarming. Perhaps he was just over-thinking it. Still, the vague sense of unease lingered, and he’d spent too many years refining his instincts to ignore them. Outwardly, he projected nothing, and if anyone had been watching him there would have been no giveaways. His gait didn’t change, nor did he seem in any way on guard, or interested in anything but making his way to whatever drab existence awaited him.

  When he arrived at the rundown building that was his rendezvous, he continued walking past it, fishing for his cell phone in his shirt pocket, then shifting the empty black nylon backpack to his other shoulder as he held it to his ear. There were a number of other pedestrians on the block, most of them down on their luck, moving with the sickly shuffle of the perennially downtrodden. Mexico was a hard country, where, if you fell, you didn’t get up, and Mexico City was merciless in the way it devoured its weak. Much of the population was poor by any standard, earning a few hundred dollars a month. Districts like the one he was in housed those of sufficient means to avoid the endless shanty towns on its perimeter, but who were only one week’s pay from living on dirt floors.

  He pretended to make a call, using the ruse as an opportunity to lean his head back to better study the surrounding tenements above. There was nothing of note, but he still had a buzz of disquiet in his stomach. When he reached the end of the block, he rounded the corner and continued down the alley, terminating his simulated call as he did so. His gut told him to abort, but reason failed to find any reason to do so.

  As a compromise, he circled the block, noting the layout of the streets leading to and from the machine shop that was his destination. It was one large section of buildings, all two and three story, most with rebar stabbing into the sky; the rusting remnants of unfinished structural columns of future floors that had been aborted — typical for the neighborhood, with a few narrow alleys running between the shabby structures.

  When he turned onto the street again, he
felt more confident. He glanced at his watch, confirming that he was five minutes late — early by Mexican standards. In Mexico, you were on time if you arrived within half an hour of your appointment, which virtually nobody ever did.

  Except El Rey.

  He approached the opaque glass door and pushed on it, but it was locked. He spotted a buzzer by the handle and jabbed it with his thumb. Footsteps sounded on the concrete floor within the building, and forty-five seconds later, the lock rattled and the door opened. El Rey noted two security cameras angled to capture both directions on the street as he nodded at the figure inside — a gaunt, tall, fair-complexioned man, wearing jeans, cowboy boots and a western-styled shirt. The man seemed more on guard than El Rey did, which made him feel slightly better.

  “What do you want?” he demanded.

  “I’m the Don’s friend,” El Rey said, as instructed.

  The man gestured for him to come in, eyes roving over the street as he stood aside, before he locked and bolted the door behind him. El Rey saw that there were wrought iron bars on the interior of the door, as well as the front window, both of which had been painted black to defeat prying eyes. As they made their way towards an office at the back of the space, dimly lit by a few weak bulbs dangling from the ceiling above, he registered that the shop was empty, essentially vacant.

  The cartel man edged through the office door and motioned to an industrial steelwork desk, upon which sat several cardboard boxes, two hand grenades and a silenced pistol.