by Dick Wolf
She was silent for a moment, staring at Fisk.
Finally she continued. “In a perfect world you go back and forth, there’s a certain amount of shouting and screaming on the phone . . . all to scare you. A few false alarms to squeeze the maximum figure out of you. But these guys are businessmen. They just want the money and they are rational creatures. That’s what everyone hopes, at any rate.
“So eventually there’s a handoff that’s shepherded by the crooked cops. It’s the one place where the cops are of value, you see—because their credibility in this process is predicated on their ability to reliably assure the safety of kidnap victims. If a cop gets a reputation as a man who can’t control the crazy assholes who actually do the kidnappings, then word will get around. People won’t trust him. They want this to work.
“Funny thing. I was at my father’s side the entire time. And you know what? We never argued, there was never a harsh word between us. Normally we argued constantly. But when the chips were down . . .”
For a moment her eyes welled up, and she fought back tears.
“The only time in our lives—before or since—that we got along, was while the most horrible thing was happening to us. If my father and I could have spent our lives fighting a horrible, grueling, vicious war, we might have been great friends.”
She blew out a long breath, centered herself.
“Eventually it all fell apart. As time went on we could feel the negotiations going wrong. The go-between cop was a fool, incompetent. Too stupid even to be properly corrupt. At the very end, we were supposed to make the swap. When you do these things, you hire a man to carry the money. We paid. My father paid something like six hundred thousand U.S. dollars. An incredible amount. And we never saw them or the money again.”
Fisk said, “Never?”
She shook her head. “Not alive. They were identified two years later, after their deaths. Drug addicted, infected with hepatitis, bodies covered in sores. They had been sold as sex workers and held captive in a city eighty miles south of Mexico City. They had been kept inside security houses known as a calcuilchil, or “houses of ass.” Mirrored glass for windows, so outsiders cannot see who is living inside. They were both shot in the head. Perhaps trying to escape, perhaps . . . I’ll never know.”
She was nodding slightly to mask her trembling.
Fisk said, “I don’t know what to say . . .”
“Or what to think, I know. It’s my hell. Each of us, we’ve been through something, we’ve been marked, scarred, changed. I tried to go on, maybe like you are now. I took a job at the Ministry of Justice, filing papers, doing all the things junior prosecutors do. But I was insane inside, crazy. Doing reckless things. I was not cut out for the work. I may have had an appetite for the mission. But not for the job itself.
“Then, as I said earlier, one day I arranged to go out with the PF . . . something I had been thinking about for some time . . . and everything fell into place. I was no more built to be a lawyer than I was an artist. Not for the girl who used to wreck dirt bikes in the country. So I joined the PF and you know the rest of the story, the one I told you earlier.”
Fisk was processing this. “Please tell me this doesn’t link up somehow to Chuparosa.”
She looked puzzled. “No. I know who took my mother and sister. Who sold them like drugs to men who treated them like nothing.”
“Who?”
“Ochoa. Do you know the name?”
Fisk did. It was a moment coming to him. “Vaguely.”
“German Ochoa. He ran the Guerrero Cartel. Guerrero is close to Central America, and he was tapped into Colombian cocaine. But that wasn’t enough, of course, and his crimes extended into human trafficking, among other things. But soon after the kidnapping of my mother and sister—perpetrated not by him directly, of course, but by his men, operating under his protection and control—his empire began to crumble. He was fantastically rich, of course. You realize that the goal of these cartel leaders is not to sell drugs. It is to make money and remain free to spend and enjoy it. That is why he essentially bought the former iteration of Mexican Intelligence. He was worth billions.”
Fisk got it. “He’s the plastic surgery guy.”
She nodded. “He underwent extensive surgery, including a full facial reconstruction, liposuction, everything. And died on the operating table. Heart attack, or anesthesia overdose—it’s not known. Your DEA identified the body using DNA recovered from his house. Six weeks later his doctors were discovered in barrels encased in concrete, their corpses showing evidence of torture. ‘Uncle Ochoa.’ Disgusting.”
“And the Guerrero Cartel?”
“The cartel names are fluid. One disappears, another rises immediately to take its place. So no . . . my revenge has no direct outlet. But Chuparosa, above all others, reminds me of the brutality of Ochoa, who died before I could do anything about it.”
Fisk sat there, not knowing what to say. He wanted to refill his glass, and yet he had lost his taste for the wine.
Garza said, “You will look at me differently now, you will think of me differently. But here is the thing. It could have been me. If I wasn’t away at school . . . it would have been me. That is my reality. Ochoa would have served me up just like he did my mother and my sister—who were not rag dolls, by the way. They were not fighters as I am now . . . as I have made myself to be . . . but they must have fought, as much as they could. They were brutalized. They were victimized. And here I stand on the other side. A woman of the law, who looks out for the victims now. Who acts for those who cannot.”
“And your father?”
“He suffered, too. And then he moved away from Mexico City, to California. Remarried.”
Fisk said, “You resent that.”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I envy him.” She leaned closer, speaking so that no one else could ever hear. “You faced down the man who murdered your lover. You saw your revenge.”
Fisk said, “I arrested him.”
“You faced him and you stopped him. You won. There was an ending. For me, there is no ending.”
Fisk sat back. She had touched something deep inside him, and he wanted to express this correctly.
He said, “All I can tell you is that it is never the victory you think it will be.” Fisk was remembering Jenssen’s words to him in that prison room, about America’s tolerant system of justice. Its weakness for the rule of law. “We have to be better than those we hunt. It is the very thing that defines us. We lose that . . . then we are lost ourselves. This cycle of murder and retribution, be it personal or international . . . it sickens us a little, just being exposed to it. Like radiation poisoning. There is no end. There is no cure.”
Garza listened, but it seemed to Fisk she was trying to understand how these words related to him—rather than giving any thought to how they related to herself.
“Aren’t you glad you asked?” she said. “About me?”
“Yes,” Fisk said, and meant it. “I want to know more about you.”
Her eyes narrowed a bit, shadowed by the candle flame. “You know the worst, and still you want to know more?”
Fisk nodded. “I think I want to know everything.”
She looked confused for a moment. Almost amazed. Then—as always—she pulled back. “Maybe we are too much alike. Maybe we have found our counterpart and simply want to ask it questions. Maybe we are a two-person support group.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Maybe it’s the Malbec.”
“Maybe. And exhaustion. And overload.” He conceded all those points. “And maybe it’s more than all that.”
She smiled as though he might be right. “Tomorrow,” she said. “I won’t be distracted. I cannot be distracted. Not until . . . after tomorrow.”
“After tomorrow,” Fisk said.
Her eyes had gone dark again, her expression hard. He could tell she was picturing the image of Chuparosa in her head, visualizing him. Wondering where he was at tha
t very moment, what he was doing, what he was thinking.
She stood, and so did Fisk.
“To be continued,” she said.
No handshake, no good-bye. He watched her walk out of the lounge and into the hotel lobby.
CHAPTER 51
Dubin called him into his office at Intel first thing in the morning.
He did not look happy. He stood immediately as Fisk entered. “You’re dropping the ball on UN Week.”
“I’m not,” said Fisk. “I’m doing my best—”
“I hear from Secret Service you’ve been running down this threat to the Mexican president, which is all well and good, but we’ve got other potential targets out there, and that’s the Secret Service’s brief. Your job is to protect the city of New York. Not one of its visiting dignitaries.”
“This is a serious threat, and it may—I say, may—involve our president. The background we have on the potential assailant is that he is a potential suicide risk. This could involve a crowded event, something public . . .”
“Who is this Comandante Garza?”
Fisk put his hands on his hips. “I think you probably know who she is.”
Dubin said, “Did you forget that there were something on the order of a dozen eyes on you last night? While you were getting gooey eyed and wine-drunk with Miss Mexico in a bar at the Sheraton?”
Fisk pulled back on his anger. Gooey eyed? If anything, it was the opposite. But he understood how their talk, her confessional, might have looked. Then his anger came out anyway. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“First there’s an imminent threat in New York. Then there’s a wine date at a hotel bar.”
Fisk boiled. “The Mexican president was tucked away safely. We went there to eat and instead . . . we had a talk. Did your tattlers tell you we went our separate ways after?”
Dubin waved that away as though it did not matter—though, if he had gone up to her room, it would certainly have mattered. “You’ve been off your desk escorting this Garza around—”
“Escorting! Jesus, Barry.”
“You’ve been AWOL chasing an alleged cartel hit man who many people think is a legend, not an actual person. A cartel fiction, a bogeyman—”
“This is total bullshit.”
“You’re getting caught up in one woman’s personal crusade instead of doing your job here. Now, I don’t know if this has anything to do with the other thing, but for appearance’s sake alone—”
“What other thing?” said Fisk.
“The other thing,” said Dubin, adopting a softer tone, stepping forward. “Gersten.”
“God,” said Fisk. “Is that the talk? Nobody has any time to do any police work around here?”
“It’s in your after-action file from Dr. Flaherty. A caution about repeating patterns, trying to replay the past. About saving this Garza from a similar fate as Gersten.”
Fisk laughed out loud. In that moment, he was embarrassed for Dubin. “I’m working a case here,” said Fisk.
“Exactly. When you are supposed to be liaising with UN security and making sure everything in this city that employs us is running smooth.”
“You know what?” said Fisk. “I’ve got an employment file with quite a few victories in there, and now suddenly this therapy report is the number one thing about me.”
“You are a pipeline between the NYPD and the United Nations. You are not to be gumshoeing around the five boroughs with the head of security for another country’s president.”
Fisk tried one more time. “This involves New York. This is New York. There is an assassin here now. He’s killed three people in the last forty-eight hours. Dumped thirteen bodies in Rockaway, none of them with heads.”
“Believe me, I know all that.” He held up the New York Post. The headline screamed, in the Post’s usual fashion, CARNAGE. Then, below that, MEX DRUG WAR HORROR COMES TO NYC.
Fisk said, “You see?”
“I see it. We have people on this. I got a call from a supervisor in Rockaway saying that you authorized one of his homicide detectives working the headless thirteen to share evidence with the Mexican federales?”
“It’s how they made these guys!”
“Chain of command, Fisk. Not the first time I’ve uttered those words to you. Now listen up. You’re just back on full active duty. You want to stay that way? Distance yourself from Comandante Hottie. Okay? I don’t care how nice her ass is. Do your job. Show up at the UN briefings you are supposed to go to, and let the Secret Service do their duty.”
“Dukes, right?” said Fisk. “He call you direct, or have someone else do it for him?”
“Stay out of the way.”
CHAPTER 52
Fisk sat at his desk for a while, waiting for the usual thoughts of resigning to subside, so he could focus on the task at hand.
A couple of days ago, Dubin was singing his praises, worried Fisk might leave for another intelligence agency. Today Fisk was a liability, apparently.
He should have followed his gut. He should have quit after the Freedom Tower incident. After catching Jenssen and losing Gersten.
He should have walked away then. This was so obvious to him now.
“Hey, Nicole?”
He called to her from his desk. In a moment, she was in his doorway.
“Will you please get me the Mexican president’s full itinerary for today?”
Her mouth opened, but nothing came out. She went away, then came right back. “Don’t you want your schedule for the day?”
Fisk said, “Dubin spoke to you, too?”
She shared a pained expression with him. Fisk was not angry with her.
“President Vargas’s itinerary. I know he’s got a stop at the Mexican Cultural Institute sometime this morning, then a stop in El Barrio, then the independence parade and festival and the dinner tonight.”
Nicole nodded. “And you have a field briefing at the UN at eleven thirty this morning . . .”
“No,” said Fisk. “I won’t be going to that.”
“You won’t be . . . ?” She waited for further instructions. “So I should cancel you.”
“No, you can keep it on the books. I just won’t be there.”
“Okay,” she said, looking a little sick.
“Don’t worry, Nicole,” said Fisk. “You tell me what I’m supposed to be doing, and if I don’t do it, it falls on me, not you.”
CHAPTER 53
President Umberto Vargas’s motorcade exited from the garage beneath the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel and rolled south down Seventh Avenue. Cecilia Garza was in the first SUV with General de Aguilar and two EMP agents. President Vargas rode in the middle car with a reporter for The New Yorker who was doing a long-range article on the bold new Mexican administration. More support rode in the third SUV, and an NYPD motorcycle cop led the way.
The streets were busy that morning, faces turning toward the dark-windowed motorcade of shiny black and silver SUVs but nobody reacting with anything more than a passing curiosity. The motorcycle cop up ahead bleated his siren at traffic lights and slow crossings so that the SUVs did not get held up. At the Fortieth Street intersection, Secret Service agents had shut down traffic so the motorcade could turn left without stopping. The SUVs drove to Park Avenue, where they turned right, then right again onto Thirty-ninth.
The Mexican Cultural Institute was located at the Mexican consulate, just off Park Avenue, across the street from a row of low-rise brick buildings and brownstones. The institute had been founded in the early 1990s as part of a “Program for Mexican Communities Abroad,” in order to nurture a sense of national identity among people of Mexican origin living in the New York metro area. They ran programs to strengthen awareness of Mexico’s history and rich traditions “as a democratic, plural, and creative nation,” read the press release in her hand.
A press release. She crumpled it. Why was the consulate publicizing Señor Presidente’s visit? Were they not aware of the sec
urity threat? Or were they just so overly confident of security in and around the consulate?
Blue wooden NYPD sawhorse barricades had been set up at Park Avenue, but sidewalk traffic was allowed to pass across the street from the consulate, behind a barricade fence. The barricades had evidently been up for some time, because a small crowd had gathered across the street from the consulate, drawn by the promise of an event of some sort.
Garza reviewed on her iPad a surveillance video taken from the second floor of the consulate, panning the faces in the crowd they were about to encounter. Garza went over it once very quickly, looking for Yankees caps, then admonished herself for looking for the obvious, the expected. She went back through each face, looking for anyone who might resemble the Chuparosa from the Montreal airport and Queens traffic cameras. She spotted a cluster of photographers wearing press credentials camped behind some TV news cameras on tripods, and saw that the headlines in the morning newspapers were going to dog them all day long—exactly as President Vargas feared. The antitrafficking-treaty signing might be overshadowed by the usual narrative of Mexico’s drug cartel violence.
Garza checked her phone one last time. No contact from Fisk. She had expected to see him with the security contingent as they left the hotel, but he was nowhere to be found.
She accepted this. Upon further reflection after a night’s sleep, perhaps he realized that her past marked her as too complicated. She had to admit that, upon waking, the night before in the hotel lounge seemed to her like a dream, in which a different version of herself unburdened her personal side to a man she had only recently met.
She needed to get back to Mexico. To get out of New York. She wanted to return to the familiar confines of the PF, to go about her business and leave the concerns of presidential politics and security behind.
But first she wanted to get Chuparosa.