Requiem for the Assassin - 06

by Russell Blake

  The cabby deduced that his fare wasn’t in a chatty mood, and instead of regaling him with his customary description of the resort town’s delights, concentrated on the road. He pulled onto the sumptuous grounds of a huge hotel, three glass pyramids jutting from its roof – the Melia. A valet came running from beneath the overhang, sweat beading his face, and held the car door as the assassin passed some pesos to the driver and climbed out with the mini-duffle he’d carried on the plane. A bellman swung the hotel entry door wide for him, and he entered the expansive marble lobby, peering up at the inside of the glass pyramid as he approached the reception desk.

  His room overlooked the shimmering turquoise of the Caribbean Sea, and after setting his bag on the bed, he opened the sliding glass door and went out on his patio. Six stories below, the surf crashed against the white sand, each swell dissolving with a booming roar before being sucked away from the beach to make room for another – a fitting metaphor for life, he thought, as he watched the infinite procession. Like the waves, humans arrived with sound and fury, mistaking their momentary intensity for substance, only to expire after a brief explosive climax like so many before, replaced by new arrivals equally convinced of their unique importance.

  After several minutes of watching the spectacle, he returned to the room, luxuriating in the chill of the air conditioner, and connected his laptop. Once logged onto the network, he went to his email, where there were two messages, one from Carla and one from Cruz. Carla’s was from another blind email account, sent that morning at six a.m., and he skimmed it quickly. She’d been researching the names, and had discovered that the farmer was the plaintiff in a lawsuit that had been filed half a decade ago in Baja California Sur, but beyond that and his land ownership, there was nothing more on him in any of the systems she could access. On Perry, she’d learned that his cause célèbre, the turtle charity, was also focused on Baja; but beyond that tentative link, there was nothing else. Neither the admiral nor the archbishop appeared at all concerned about turtles, so other than the four of them having a tenuous connection to Baja, a thousand-mile-long peninsula with a population of millions, there were no other commonalities.

  Cruz’s message was short: a link to an article in that morning’s Cancún newspaper and a curt instruction to read it and call him.

  El Rey navigated to the site and absorbed the news and then powered on his burner cell phone, waited for it to connect to the network, and then dialed Cruz’s number.

  “I gather you saw it,” Cruz said by way of greeting.

  “Damn. I could have saved myself a lot of flying.”

  “I hear Cancún’s lovely this time of year.”

  “Like the surface of the sun crossed with a steam bath.”

  “When are you returning?”

  “I’ll be on the next flight out. No point lingering here.”

  “You think it was a competitor that killed him?”

  “I’ll assume so. Which is alarming, considering that I’m supposed to be the only one with the contract.”

  “I’ll be here whenever you get back. Not like I have a lot of places to go.”

  “All right.”

  El Rey hung up and looked at his duffle, still packed. He typed in the address of a travel site and scanned it for flights to Mexico City. The next one was at two p.m., leaving him just enough time for a bite to eat in the hotel restaurant before returning to the airport. His job in Cancún had been done for him, though whether by fate or another contractor, he might never know. The paper had devoted a scant four lines to the farmer’s murder, a robbery gone wrong, and contained little detail other than the time and place he was found, and his name.

  Hardly anything to show for sixty-four years on the planet. His eyes drifted to the window and the waves outside as he powered his computer down and stowed the laptop back in the bag.

  They needed to connect the dots soon, because at the rate things were going, everyone on the list would soon be dead, taking their secrets with them to the grave.

  The possibility that he was being played against another party changed his already dim view of CISEN. When he’d agreed to work with them, his conditions had been clear, and this assignment clearly violated the terms he’d laid out. So even the microscopic trust he’d placed in the organization was now gone, and he would have to view them as he viewed all his prior patrons: potentially lethal for no apparent reason.

  He’d foolishly thought that having the president’s signature on his pardon would ensure that the intelligence agency honored its obligations, but given Tovar’s threats, that wasn’t a certainty. And now he needed his shot. A bad position to be in, to be sure, but one in which he had no choice.

  He shouldered his bag and went to the beach restaurant, where he put his misgivings aside to make room for grouper with a soy-teriyaki glaze, the high point of his day so far. Puffs of cotton-ball clouds drifted lazily offshore as he considered his options, none of which were good, and when he was finished with brunch, his ordinarily placid expression was marred by a frown, which accompanied him to the airport and, later, home to Mexico City and the nest of vipers to whom he’d pledged his life.

  Chapter 45

  Mexico City, Mexico

  El Rey approached the downtown metro station cautiously, insulated from any potential foul play by the crowd of people around him on their evening way, either late office workers or early diners. An arid breeze blew from the mountains, concentrating the perennial smog layer that blanketed the city in the western sky, making for a dazzling light show of purple, magenta, and orange as the sun sank behind the craggy peaks.

  He’d gotten in touch with Tovar with the news of the farmer’s murder and had agreed to a meeting with him in the metro that night. He’d get his vial of antidote, which, as with the last two, he’d take to a lab for testing – a preventative measure to ensure he wasn’t injected with poison instead of the correct substance, and that it was the same as his two earlier shots. He’d been warned that it would take three or four injections spaced every six months to clear his system of the neurotoxin that was dormant in his cells, a particularly ugly bit of business CISEN had obtained from the CIA.

  His senses were on hypersensitive when he arrived at the station an hour early, after having spent most of the late afternoon familiarizing himself with every inch of the warren of connecting tunnels beneath the streets.

  Cruz had offered to accompany him into the metro as backup, but he’d declined. Cruz might have been street savvy for an officer, but there was nobody more adept than El Rey, and having the cop around would be more hindrance than help if anything went wrong. He didn’t expect it to, but after the events of the last week he had no faith in CISEN’s integrity and was taking no chances.

  He was on high alert as he descended the steps into the depths of the city, an environment he’d be happy to see the last of after spending hours there. No matter how much money had been spent on modernization, the underground bunker smelled of dank earth and unwashed humanity. Millions passed through it every day, mostly manual laborers who used a bucket and rag for their infrequent concessions to hygiene.

  El Rey was dressed as an office worker, wearing a moderately priced sports coat and black dress slacks that effectively hid his SIG Sauer P250 Subcompact semiautomatic 9mm pistol – a small gun with twelve rounds that was devastatingly effective in close quarters yet fit in one of his jacket pockets with only a slight bulge.

  He paid his tariff and passed through the turnstile, noting that the pair of transit police that had been stationed near one of the ticket counters had drifted closer to the bottom of the stairs and seemed completely oblivious, their presence more for deterrent value than of any practical use he could see.

  As he made his way into the first wide passageway, the tiled tunnel walls shining in the glare of the artificial lights, his eyes roamed over the sea of faces moving toward him – a nightmare from a security standpoint, but equally so from an attacker’s. He was unrecognizable with his go
atee and modish sideburns, his disguise as a metrosexual hipster complete with a black straw fedora the likes of which were all the rage.

  The meeting would take place on the platform beneath an ornate nineteenth-century iron clock at one end of the long span. He repeated his earlier route, his muscles relaxed as he strode purposefully with the rest of the crowd toward the platform. His plan was to take a train north one station, disembark, and then return, so he could study the platform from the opposite side immediately before his meeting, ensuring it was only Tovar as his welcome committee.

  He made a left into the middle section of the passageway and slowed with the passengers in front of him, delayed by a homeless man begging from a filthy horse blanket, his castoff clothes covered with grime. El Rey eyed him with suitable upwardly mobile distaste, and for an instant their gazes locked before the vagrant looked away.

  A flutter of unease rose in the assassin’s gut as he continued forward. Something was wrong. The man hadn’t been there earlier, which in and of itself didn’t mean anything, but it was odd for a beggar to be in the tunnel – the first one he’d seen all day. The hair on the back of his neck prickled as his mind processed the remainder of the thought: the bum would have had to pay to get into that area. Not impossible, because he could have paid at one of the other stations and come that way, but in El Rey’s experience, the city’s homeless didn’t spend their change for metro tickets.

  But did it mean something, or was it a harmless anomaly? Perhaps it was worth the few pesos’ investment in a ticket for him, the rushing passengers more generous inside than out on the street?

  He continued to the platform and waited for a train, eyes roving over the area, watching for anything else that seemed out of place. A group of boisterous teens were talking loudly and listening to music on their phones, annoying bystanders. Nothing alarming there, only irritating. Tired workers leaned against the walls, waiting for the telltale whir from the tunnel, the clatter of steel wheels on rails, the rush of wind that preceded the arrival of a train. An occasional young woman busied herself with her text messaging or web crawling, face downturned, shutting out the world in favor of cyber-connection.

  There. Over by the vending machine. A pair of men in windbreakers, talking with each other, but all the while their eyes taking in the arriving travelers in much the same way El Rey’s were. He wandered to an old crone he’d seen on his earlier visit, sitting on a wooden crate selling newspapers and gum, and bought a copy of the evening news, perusing its lurid headlines as he glanced at the pair by the machine.

  A hum sounded from the tunnel, followed by the clatter of cars rolling down the track, and after a brief honk of an electric horn, the train slowed and stretched along the platform. The doors opened with a hiss, and a trickle of passengers disembarked. El Rey moved toward the nearest aperture as he folded his paper. The two men got onto the next car down, and at the last moment, El Rey dropped his paper on the ground and darted out of the car to get it, narrowly missing the train as the doors closed and it pulled away. He cursed and glanced at the time, doing an inventory of the platform as he did, looking for anyone else who hadn’t boarded – and spotted a hard-looking man with the build of a fireplug thirty yards away.

  Possibly someone waiting for his mate or child.

  Or not.

  He retraced his steps and ducked into the restroom while he waited for another train to come and go. He still had plenty of time to make the loop to the other station and then back, and if he was a few minutes late, Tovar would wait. He nodded to the newspaper vendor as he swept by her and continued to the connecting tunnel, where the crowds were thinning. The hobo was holding his battered tin cup out as El Rey moved by him again, and he felt the man’s stare linger as he brushed past.

  The restroom was clean, with an attendant who washed every surface in exchange for a peso gratuity from patrons. The assassin went into one of the stalls and read the paper, his antennae signaling to him that something was wrong.

  He allowed ten minutes to go by and finished up, tipping the attendant as he left. He was walking through the tunnel back to the platform when he realized what was off, recognizing his error too late. He dodged to the left the instant he registered a blur of motion from the vagrant, the incongruity obvious to him even as he cursed silently: the beggar was filthy, but his fingernails weren’t. The fingers clutching the cup were clean as a surgeon’s – or someone posing as a bum.

  A silenced pistol shot barked in the tunnel, and he felt a burn in his upper thigh as he twisted, freeing his gun as a second shot scored a hole through his jacket, missing his kidney by scant inches. A third shot thwacked into his hip as he threw himself to the ground and opened fire at the panhandler, ignoring the screams around him as he emptied the gun. The little SIG Sauer sounded like sticks of dynamite going off in the tunnel, and he was already ejecting the spent magazine and slapping his spare into place as the shooter collapsed in a heap, his pistol clattering onto the concrete beside him.

  El Rey didn’t wait to see who else was working the surveillance. He forced himself to his feet as screams of terror continued from the remaining travelers in the passageway, most crouched by the ground, all cringing and staring at the assassin as though he was Satan risen from the underworld. He glanced to his left where a short woman was clutching her chest, shot by one of the vagrant’s stray rounds. A man was struggling to crawl away, leaving a crimson trail from the wound in his stomach, and El Rey pushed past him as he picked up his pace. Blood streamed down his leg from the two wounds, but he’d been shot enough before to know they weren’t fatal, assuming he got pressure on them soon enough.

  He reached the end of the tunnel and leveled his weapon at an older businessman hugging the wall and clutching his briefcase and overcoat to his chest.

  “Your coat. Take it off,” he ordered, but the man was immobilized with fear and didn’t move. El Rey took a step closer and motioned with the pistol. “I said take your coat off. Now.”

  The man did as instructed, and El Rey slid it on. “Thanks,” he said and continued around the corner, aware that he was being filmed by the overhead security cameras as he went.

  He pulled his burner cell from his breast pocket and called Cruz. When he answered, El Rey was typically terse. “Ambush. I’ve been hit. Meet me where we discussed in five.”

  He hung up just as the two cops rounded the corner and sped toward him, pushing past the others running from the gun battle. He plunged the gun into the overcoat pocket and pointed with his left hand. “Someone’s shooting. There’s blood everywhere. Do something, for God’s sake. Do something!”

  The men looked at him, seeing the blood on his pants, and for a second El Rey was afraid he’d have to shoot them. Then they broke into a reluctant trot, service revolvers drawn, the worst day of their three-hundred-dollar-a-month careers in full swing. El Rey didn’t hesitate or look back. He ran toward the turnstiles with the rest of the panicked throng, using the mayhem he’d helped create to get clear of the station before the police, or the remainder of the hit team, found him.

  Each step to the street level was agony, and he felt himself getting light-headed from the blood loss and the pain, but he ignored it and clutched the handrail for support. The rectangle of open air at the top of the stairs looked impossibly far, but he drove himself up, gritting his teeth as he struggled toward it.

  Once on the sidewalk he moved more slowly to avoid attracting attention, hoping that the trail of bloody footsteps he was leaving wouldn’t be noticed until he was safely gone. He held his hand to the hip wound, and it came away slick with blood. He wiped it on the jacket beneath the long overcoat, which covered him to the knee, and forced himself to keep walking.

  Cruz was in the Explorer in front of a McDonald’s, double-parked along with a half dozen other scofflaws whose passengers were inside buying dinner. El Rey pulled himself into the back seat and closed the door behind him and then lay flat as Cruz pulled away.

  “How bad is
it?”

  “Lot of blood. One in the leg, which went through, the other in the hip. That one’s still in there. You’ll need to dig it out and stitch me up. Hope you don’t faint easily.”

  “Can you make it till we’re back at the house? It’ll be at least fifteen minutes.”

  “Give me your belt. I can slow the bleeding from the thigh. Can’t do much for the hip other than ball up my jacket and keep pressure on it.”

  Cruz did as asked as he pulled around the corner. The assassin improvised a tourniquet and lay back for a moment, drained, then struggled out of the overcoat and jacket. Cruz hit a rough patch of pavement, a particularly ugly series of the city’s infamous potholes, and El Rey flinched and drew in a ragged intake of breath.

  “Try to avoid the worst of it, would you?” he said.

  “Will do. Just hang on. I presume you have a field kit at the house?”

  “What’s the saying? Don’t leave home without one…”

  Cruz grinned humorlessly and eyed the assassin in the mirror, taking in his ghost-white face and eyes squeezed shut against pain Cruz knew too well from his prior brushes with death. El Rey was as tough as they came, so if anyone could make it even shot to pieces, he could; but judging by the amount of blood pooling on the Explorer floor, it would be close. He increased his speed and returned his attention to the road, anxious to get the cutting over with before he lost the patient for good.

  Chapter 46

  The following day, Cruz went to meet Carla at an out-of-the-way hotel they’d agreed to use as a rendezvous. Cruz checked in, paying cash, and once in the room called her and told her the room number. She arrived fifteen minutes later, and he was taken aback when he opened the door. She looked little like she had at their last meeting – more like a student now, in sweats, her hair dyed almost black, and the disguise completed with sunglasses that covered most of her upper face, and a cap. She smiled as she entered and glanced at the bed, and then she removed the glasses and sat at the small two-seater square wooden table by the window. Cruz joined her and, after offering her water, sat back as she described her research progress.