“Here’s everything.”
El Rey carefully inspected each item before placing it into his backpack. He checked the magazine on the Beretta nine millimeter pistol and verified that it had a full clip, and set it back on the table after chambering a round. The final box was fourteen inches by twelve. He opened it and gazed at the two cream-colored rectangles sitting in form-fitted foam before carefully closing the lid and replacing the three oversized rubber bands that secured it in place. The entire inspection took under two minutes.
Once he was loaded up, he turned to his host. “Where are the security camera feeds for the front?”
“In the back. Follow me…”
The man walked out of the dingy little office to the rear of the shop, where a piece of plywood sat on top of two milk crates. On the makeshift support were a computer and two monitors, next to a CD-Rom recording device. He pressed a button, slid the CD out and handed it to El Rey, who took it and dropped it into the backpack with the rest. As he did so, his eyes detected movement on both of the screens, one which was the alley in the back, and the other the front entrance cameras on a split screen. A group of heavily-armed Federal Police were creeping against the wall on both sides of the building.
The man’s eyes grew wide with shock.
El Rey instantly sized up the situation and whispered to him, “Is there a roof exit?”
He nodded and motioned at a steel ladder mounted to the back wall running up to a hatch in the ceiling two stories above their heads. El Rey joined him in peering up into the gloom, and then in a flash slashed the man’s throat with a stiletto he’d palmed while the man had been distracted by the vision on the two screens. He stepped back to avoid the arterial spray of blood as the man crumpled to the concrete floor, twitching as his life ran out of him.
Not pausing to wait for the impending battering of the front and rear entrances, El Rey ran to the ladder and began climbing.
Cruz watched the men deploy from one of the windows down the block, cringing when a woman stifled a scream at the sight of the heavily-armed officers moving into position. They knew the building had cameras, so the first order of business was to knock them out. They’d had no choice but to leave them working until the beginning of the operation — anything else would have alerted whoever was in the building.
The squad arrived at the doorway and stopped. It was out of his hands now. All he could do was wait.
At the shop entrance, Briones held a can of spray paint overhead and quickly hit both lenses with a blast of flat black primer, rendering them instantly dark. He listened in his earpiece as a whisper told him the same had been done at the rear emergency exit. There were no cameras on the roof, so the two men who had gone up a neighboring building’s access way to cover the machine shop were safe from observation.
Shifting against the uncomfortable Kevlar bulletproof vest, Briones gave a signal with his left hand and tossed the paint can into the street before un-holstering his service pistol.
Cruz murmured into a radio handset, giving the go-ahead for the team in the rear. He glanced at the time and saw that the assassin had been inside for four minutes. They’d captured him on film, but he knew it wouldn’t do them much good — with sunglasses and the baseball hat and all the facial hair, he could have been Cruz’s brother after a three day drunk.
Two officers sidled up to the door, slapped explosive charges to the hinge locations and pulled back to the shelter of the wall, where Briones was waiting. Three seconds later the charges detonated with a sharp crack and the assault was on. Two other men slammed through the glass with a cement-filled iron pipe, knocking it inwards, and then the team shouldered its way inside, weapons at the ready, expecting to be fired upon.
Guerrero was first to notice the movement at the rear of the building, and then sunlight streamed in. It was the other team blowing the back door. The rear team spotted the corpse on the floor at the same instant Briones ran for the ladder, not waiting for confirmation that the building was empty. He thumbed on his com earpiece and warned the men on the roof, demanding a confirmation even as he reached the ladder, but got no response. Taking a deep breath, he ascended the steel rungs, Guerrero and another officer following behind him. The wall fastenings creaked ominously under the strain.
“Stay down there until I get to the top. This fucking thing is about to tear off the wall,” he hissed through clenched teeth, when only a few rungs from the trapdoor at the top. He craned his neck skyward and caught sight of the lock.
The bolt was open. He had a sinking feeling even as he threw it wide and peered around cautiously, training his gun as best he could. There was nobody on the roof. He pulled himself up and out and saw a boot sticking out from behind a ventilation duct twenty-five feet away. Moving in a crouch, he quickly reached the body. Dead, shot in the face. Ten feet further away, another corpse lay on the hot surface in a pool of blood.
Fresh blood.
He swung around wildly, straining for a glimpse of the assassin, but didn’t see anything. Then he heard a thump from behind him, and he spun just in time to spot a figure in the distance leap across the roof to another building on the other side of the alley.
“He’s on the roof. Two officers shot dead up here. I am in pursuit. Heading northwest,” he cried into the earpiece, and then sprinted to the edge of the building. He jumped across the three foot gap between it and the neighbor, and then repeated the process at the next building. When he arrived at the alley, he skidded to a stop. It was at least ten feet to the other side, maybe more. Briones glanced across in frustration and saw a blur of movement a hundred yards away. He fired his pistol three times at the area in the hopes of a lucky shot, but knew he hadn’t hit anything worthwhile. He realized even as he did so that he’d made a critical mistake in not snatching up one of the dead men’s rifles — a mistake that would haunt him if the assassin escaped.
“He got across the alley, and he’s on the next group of roofs. Can we get a helicopter here? Get the men to cordon off the northwest block, now,” he screamed.
His earpiece crackled.
“Can you make it across?” Cruz’s voice sounded tinny in his ear.
“Negative. I don’t know how he did it. He must be able to fly,” Briones said in frustration, straining futilely for a better shot at his quarry.
But El Rey was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 21
El Rey locked the door behind him and turned on the air-conditioning before placing the backpack on the coffee table. He’d worked the question of how the police had known about his meeting over and over as he’d made his way back to his apartment, and come to the conclusion that there weren’t many possibilities. Either someone in Aranas’ camp had talked, or the man he’d killed at the warehouse had sold him out. In the end, it didn’t matter. He was safe. But he was also furious. That had been far too close. And it reaffirmed every belief he had about what a bad idea dealing with unknown quantities was.
He paced the length of the living room, calculating how to proceed. The raid had been a big operation, and he’d only escaped by a miracle. But he got the sense that the miracle bank was running low, and he wouldn’t be so lucky the next time.
Fucking Cruz. The man was an annoyance and was fast becoming a real impediment. And the woman hadn’t told him anything — which had lulled him into complacency. That couldn’t stand.
He went into the kitchen and opened a drawer, retrieving a phone from its depths.
Dinah’s voice sounded guarded when she answered.
“Hello?”
“Listen very carefully. Don’t talk. Your boyfriend just launched an operation to capture me. It failed, of course, but now I’m upset. I feel like you haven’t been keeping to your side of the bargain — you didn’t warn me. That makes me want to hang him upside down and peel his skin off.”
“I…I didn’t know anything about it! You have to believe me…”
Dinah sounded like she was telling the truth. No matter.
“Shut up. I said don’t talk. Here is what you are going to do if you want him to be breathing this time tomorrow. Get me information. Figure out where the leak came from that alerted them about the meeting. Failure on your part won’t be tolerated. Get me something, or our deal is off, and I’ll make sure the last thing you ever see is his rotting corpse skewered like a pig.”
“But how am I supposed to find that out?”
“I don’t know, nor do I care. Just do it. Tear his office apart, or wherever he keeps his papers at home. Tell him you desperately want to know everything about today’s operation or he’ll never have sex again. Whatever you do, it better be good, because I’m out of patience. You have twenty-four hours.”
He hung up and tossed the phone back into the drawer. That might shake something loose. Maybe she was telling the truth, or maybe she had been feeding him inconsequential minutiae. Whatever. She needed to perform, or he’d see to it that the pair of them regretted every moment of their last breaths.
Now he had to make the call he’d been considering since he’d leapt across the buildings like a demented free-runner. He went into the bedroom, emerged with another phone, and pressed a speed dial button. Don Aranas answered.
El Rey took him through the morning’s events, omitting that he’d killed Aranas’ man at the rendezvous. That would be attributed to having happened during the police raid, and he didn’t see any reason to rock the boat. Aranas sounded worried — mostly about the viability of the plan moving forward.
“I have no concerns over our arrangement. I’m planning to close the contract in the agreed-upon time,” El Rey assured him. “I think it’s worth probing to see if you can find the source of the leak, though. I don’t have to tell you that it’s not in your best interests for your confidential information to find its way into the hands of the Federales. Even after this is concluded, you still have a problem.”
“I’ll take steps.”
“I’m also working on some avenues. I’ll keep you apprised of any progress I make,” El Rey finished, having delivered the message he wanted to send.
Aranas had to deal with his issue, or he’d be in constant jeopardy. He didn’t have a reputation for tolerating disloyalty, and El Rey had no doubt that he’d do whatever was necessary to find the traitor and silence him permanently.
“The man is really superhuman,” Briones declared in frustration towards the end of the staff meeting. “I still have no idea how he made it across that alley. I mean, it’s obviously possible to do, but I can’t imagine throwing myself into the air in the hopes I made it. Two stories is a long way down…”
“No, he’s not. He’s flesh and blood, just like you and I — like everyone in this room. He simply reacts differently than we do. And that has to stop. I made a critical error by not having more men on the roof. I underestimated El Rey. A mistake I will never make again,” Cruz spat.
“It was a one in a million chance that he’d discover the assault in time to escape. The odds of alerting him with a dozen officers tromping around on the roof was far greater. It was the correct call,” Briones reasoned.
“That is neither here nor there. At this point our only hope of capturing him has gone down the drain. That puts us back on square one. Worse, he’s now alerted that we’re hunting him. I think it’s fair to say that we lost this round. We can’t afford to lose any more,” Cruz said emphatically. “I want twice as many men on the streets. We know he’s in the city, and we have the footage of him we got when he approached the shop. It’s unlikely he’ll be able to stay incognito if his photo is plastered everywhere. I want the film and the construction photo leaked to the press so his face is on every news station and newspaper in the country. There’s no reason to play it quiet any longer.”
The meeting broke up a few minutes later, and Cruz motioned to Briones for him to accompany him to his office. Once behind closed doors, he slumped into his chair and stared off into space before focusing his attention on the younger lieutenant.
“The spooks at CISEN are going to lose their minds when I tell them what happened,” Cruz complained.
“Probably. They won’t be happy, just like we aren’t happy. It’s a generally unhappy time for everyone right now. They’ll get over it,” Briones assured him.
“That’s not what worries me. No, it’s more that they might not share any more information with us after this, or they might pass it to someone else, like the president’s staff. If we get too many players on this field, it will only make finding the assassin even harder.”
Briones nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t try to jump across the alley, sir,” he said in a quiet voice.
Cruz waved it away with a curt gesture. “Don’t be ridiculous. The job is dangerous enough without demanding that you try something that would get you killed. I wouldn’t have done it, either. That’s the difference between being the cornered rat, and being the cat,” Cruz said.
They continued the discussion, moving to the practical logistics of getting maximum coverage of the images they had of El Rey, but the atmosphere remained uneasy as the afternoon wore on. Neither said anything more about Briones’ chance at getting El Rey.
Neither had to.
Both knew Cruz would have jumped.
When Cruz made it home that evening, Dinah was making pasta for dinner — chicken piccata with linguine. He went to the bedroom, changed out of his uniform, and returned a few minutes later wearing sweat pants and a white linen short-sleeved shirt. He obligingly took plates out of the cupboard and set the table, then uncorked a bottle of white wine — after Dinah forbade him a draught of the wine she’d bought to cook with.
He poured them both healthy glasses, and they ate contentedly as he inquired about how her day had gone. She seemed on edge, and Cruz wondered whether it was a return of the anxiety she’d experienced after getting out of the hospital, but it gradually receded as she ate and consumed her wine. He was relieved — even after as many months together as they’d spent, he still didn’t have a clue what was going on inside her head most of the time.
The conversation eventually turned to his day, and he gave her a rundown of the operation and its ultimate failure.
“You were that close, and he got away? He sounds like some sort of devil,” she commented.
“Tell me about it. Briones is convinced he has wings, like a bat. I went up on the roof myself and looked at the pursuit path, and he made a jump most wouldn’t have tried. It’s frustrating. I feel just like I did last year, when we were on his trail. He’s always three moves ahead of us. If I recall, that didn’t end well,” Cruz complained.
Dinah knew all about the attempt at the summit.
“I’d say that some good things came out of it. You and I wouldn’t be together if not for that.”
“Yes, but I don’t want to even think that we’re a couple because of El Rey. Although I suppose I do have him to thank for something…” Cruz acknowledged before sipping more of his wine.
“How did you know he was going to be there?” Dinah asked in a neutral tone, struggling not to show how desperate she was for the information. Her heart ached that she had to mislead him like this, but there was no other option.
Cruz hesitated, and then told her a partial truth.
“It was a tip from one of the other agencies. They’d picked up some chatter, and we got lucky,” he dissembled.
“Another agency? Who? I thought you were the El Rey experts. Is there more than one group hunting him?”
“CISEN. The intelligence agency. They got the lead and handed it over to us.”
“CISEN! What are they doing involved in this?” Dinah fought to keep her voice under control.
Cruz finished his glass of wine and strode into the kitchen to get the bottle, carrying their dishes in and placing them in the sink before he returned and refilled their glasses. He took a large mouthful, swishing it around in appreciation.
“Mmmm. This goes down easy. You may have to lock up the
cooking wine. There’s no telling what I’ll do after two glasses of this stuff,” he said, changing the subject.
Dinah smiled. “I’ll see if I can think of something,” she said suggestively. “But you never finished your story. What about CISEN? I thought they were only international operations…”
“Typically they are. But somehow they tripped onto information about the assassin and a plot to kill the president, so they brought it to me. Mostly to set me up for a big fall if he succeeds, I think. They still seem a little testy over having half their top brass fired.” He took another swallow of wine. “This way they can say they passed on everything, and if he’s successful, I am the one who failed.”
“But that’s not fair. What about the president’s guard? His security detail? Surely they would be more accountable for the president’s safety than you.”
“It’s true, but if the assassin manages to kill the president, everyone will be looking for someone to take the blame. CISEN will point the finger at me, and so will the president’s staff. All roads will lead to me — the head of the task force that failed to prevent it.” Cruz shrugged. “It may not be fair, but the world’s not fair. There’s no use complaining about it. I simply need to find this invisible man and take him out of commission, with no new information and no leads to go on. Piece of cake.” He took another pull on his wine and winked at her playfully.
“Romero, this sounds serious. What are you going to do?” Dinah said with concern.
He sighed. “What can I do? The plan is to get his photo everywhere to turn up the pressure, and hope he slips up or someone recognizes him. We’re going to offer a half million dollar reward for information leading to his capture. Hell, for that kind of money most of the city will be mounting a manhunt.” He finished his second glass of wine and regarded the empty bottle wistfully. “It hasn’t been my favorite day ever, mi Corazon. I just want to put it behind me.”
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