The Execution
Page 26
President Vargas said, “Is there anything you’d like to get off your chest, Cecilia? I feel as though I am apologizing to a wall.”
“I prefer ‘Comandante,’ ” she said.
Vargas said, “Very well.”
“May I go now?”
After a moment, he said, “Yes. Certainly.”
Garza got as far as the door before pivoting hard and walking back to him.
“I will not work for you in Mexico City. I will never have dinner with you. Once we return to Mexico, I hope to never have to speak to you again.”
Vargas looked away, puzzled, trying to understand the source of this outburst. “What is it, Comandante? Speak.”
Garza tried to hold her tongue, feeling she had already said too much. “He was not here for you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I was mistaken. Chuparosa did not come to New York to try to assassinate you.”
Vargas shook his head. “Of course he did. And you stopped him. Brilliantly.”
Garza’s smile came out warped with anger. “No,” she said. “He was not here to kill the president of Mexico. He was here to kill someone measurably more influential.”
CHAPTER 76
Fisk pushed through the hospital exit doors with his good forearm, his left arm in a blue sling.
Dubin ran out just behind him. “Fisk! Stop! You’re delirious.”
Fisk stopped on the curb at the ambulance bay. “Where is it?” he said angrily.
“Where is what?”
“Your car,” said Fisk. “Where is it?”
Dubin said, “Look, Jeremy. Listen to me. Are you having a reaction to the medication?”
“I’ll get a goddamn taxi.”
“Here,” said Dubin, pointing.
Fisk went off toward the unmarked car with NYPD plates in the nearby handicapped spot. “Gimme your phone.”
“No.”
“I need a phone!” said Fisk.
An attendant came out the door after them. Dubin was torn between explaining their quick getaway and staying with Fisk.
“Here,” he said, handing Fisk his phone and getting inside the car.
“Code,” said Fisk.
“Uh . . .” Dubin had to do it in the air. “Five nine one four.”
Fisk played with it while Dubin started the engine and backed out.
“No good,” said Fisk. “I need my contact list.”
He put the phone on top of his side of the dashboard. It promptly fell to the floorboard.
“Hey!” said Dubin, fishing with his hand, finding it near Fisk’s shoe, then pulling on the man’s seat belt. “Where the hell am I supposed to be taking you?”
“Mexican consulate. Thirty-ninth and Park.”
“Mexican . . . ?” Dubin stopped, braking hard. Looking at him. “Fisk. It’s over. You stopped it, remember? You’re going to hurt yourself. They want you to stay for observation—”
Fisk said, “It’s not over. It’s not over. Drive, Barry. Go.”
“Why?”
Fisk pointed straight ahead. “So we can stop a murder.”
CHAPTER 77
The reception hall was slowly filling with diplomats and their spouses. President Vargas was greeting the arrivals. Vice President Biden was due any minute, and the street closure was already in effect outside. Then the formalities would officially begin.
Cecilia Garza wiped a bead of sweat from the damp hair at her temple. She watched the monitor until she saw the man she was looking for, making conversation on his way through the final stage of security and entering the “tent,” or secured area.
Garza choked down a swallow and walked downstairs to intercept him. Andrés León wore a black suit with silver accents on the lapels, pants with matching cuffs, and silver-toed cowboy boots. His braid was pulled back more neatly than it had been that morning.
“Comandante Garza!” he exuded when he saw her crossing the room toward him. “The woman of the hour, everyone!”
Applause from the rest of the attendees, which shocked her, making her stop when she would have thought no power in the world could have slowed her pace. She stood for a split second listening to their hollow clapping, then continued to the large expatriate, who insisted on making a scene.
“What bravery! What fortitude! And a woman! What a shining example of Mexican mettle!”
Garza reached León, trying to keep her expression calm as she gestured to the hallway. “Don Andrés, may I offer you a tour of the premises? I know you don’t get out much.”
“How can I resist any request from Comandante Garza on a great day such as this? A privilege! An honor! Lead on, Comandante!”
She did, past smiling onlookers, stepping out into the hallway leading to the portrait room.
“Will it be long, Comandante?” he asked. “I haven’t yet had a cocktail.”
“Not too long,” she said, without turning around. She opened the door and stepped aside for him to enter.
He passed her, walking inside with his hands out in a gesture of appreciation. “All the greats.”
Garza closed the door behind them. Portraits hung around the room’s only bench, lit from lamps above each frame. Emiliano Zapata. First President Guadalupe Victoria. Hernán Cortés. Diego Rivera. And the most recent addition, the writer Octavio Paz.
“Magnificent,” he said. “Oh, the lure of the homeland. So kind of you to show me this. So nice to be out of my cage.”
Garza nodded, telling herself to stay focused. “What was your name, Don Andrés? Your former name. Your real name.”
León reacted with surprise. “Strange question.”
“I tried to look you up this afternoon, using both police and Department of State resources. I could not find any so-called financier fitting the profile you described to me this morning.”
“Please, Comandante.” He spread his hands in supplication. “I don’t even like to think of it. On a night such as this? Tonight is about the future.” He waved at the portraits. “The past is history.”
“No,” said Garza, shaking her head strenuously. “No, it’s not. It’s right here with you, right now. Which bank did you work for?”
León sighed, smiling and shaking his head. “So many.”
“Name just one.”
León crooked his head, looking at her with one eye nearly closed. He had noticed her growing more agitated. “I should return to the reception. I was promised a cocktail.”
“Chuparosa did not come to New York for President Vargas,” said Garza, getting the words out quickly.
“No?” He reacted with exaggerated surprise. “But how could that be?”
Garza took one step toward him, all she allowed herself. “He was here for you.”
León pursed his lips, finding this very curious.
Garza said, “You realized that when we went to see you earlier today. You figured out that he had found out about you, your true identity, somehow. Someone like him is the reason why you live behind that wall, those guards, this foreign government.”
León signed heavily. “I am sorry, Comandante Garza—”
“León. Lion.” Her next words reeked of the vomit still on her breath. “Ochoa. Wolf.”
León’s façade of innocence faltered. “Ochoa?”
“He would have succeeded in killing you here,” she said. “Because safeguarding presidents is our first priority. The Hummingbird was exploiting that certainty to allow himself a shot at a much more elusive, yet much more worthy target. Someone who leaves his gilded cage but once each year. Yes, Chuparosa would have been killed in the act. But not before he killed you.”
León looked at the nearest portraits before answering her. “And you warned me, Comandante Garza. And then you killed my assassin.” León—Ochoa, the former cartel leader—bowed slightly at the waist, obscenely.
“You scrubbed your home in Mexico, your cars, everything. And had another man live in them for a time. Then had him killed in your plac
e.” She took another step toward the man. “Your plastic surgery did not result in a fatality. For you, it was a complete success. For the man living in your house—and for the doctors after they performed the surgery—it was indeed fatal. It was his DNA the American DEA matched.”
She looked at his face, the one he had grown into in the years since it was rebuilt. So few photographs existed of Ochoa, and all of them grainy.
“Or perhaps,” she said, “the DEA made sure it matched. Why did you flip? Why did you turn your back on your former self?”
León’s contempt for her was showing. “Prison was coming. My time and my luck were both running out. The end comes for everyone. I did not want it to come for me. So I made a new beginning. I accepted it. I became a new man. A mansion in the United States instead of a shithole prison in Guadalajara. The choice was an easy one. Retirement in secret. And yes—interestingly, an opportunity to atone.”
“To settle scores with your former rivals. But I thought the past was history.”
“You are very dedicated and enterprising, Comandante. Now, if you don’t mind—”
Garza stepped back and drew her Beretta. She settled into a balanced shooter’s stance, the weapon trembling slightly in her hands.
She said, “I want to tell you a story about my mother and sister.”
CHAPTER 78
Fisk and Dubin were trying to badge their way through three rings of Secret Service security, still a block away from the consulate. Dubin was alternately trying to work his phone and stepping between Fisk and another agent, trying to talk them through another checkpoint.
“She’s going to kill him,” Fisk kept saying.
Fisk’s arm was throbbing with pain. He could not get anyone to listen to him.
She was going to ruin herself for revenge. Fisk had to stop her.
CHAPTER 79
Andrés León looked at the weapon trembling in Cecilia Garza’s hand. If he was nervous, he did not show it.
“Comandante,” he said. “Put down your weapon.”
Garza smiled painfully. “Welcome home,” she said.
León held a hand out toward her, trying to stop her from doing anything rash. “This is not Mexican soil. We are in a consulate in New York City, still subject to their laws. You can’t shoot me here and expect to claim it rightful under Mexican law—”
Garza said, “I know full well there is no extraterritoriality here. This is not sovereign territory of Mexico. However, I know also that the host country may not enter the consulate if it acts as a refuge.” Garza felt her shivering ease as she said these words. “You are surrendering to me, Mr. Ochoa. Surrendering to the daughter and sister of two women you kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery.”
León swallowed and said, “I did no such thing—”
“You did! You and your people! No one crossed you! No one did anything that displeased you! You did it!”
“Comandante, listen to reason. You are upset. Your emotions are running away with you. Please listen to me. This thing you are trying to achieve, it will never work. The United States needs me too much to let me go.”
“You are in my custody now, a Mexican citizen in the custody of a federale. They dare not intercede in this matter. Because then the people of the United States and the world will know that they took you in. Knowing who you were. What you were. And that they hosted you, that their taxpayers funded the ‘retirement’ of a former Mexican drug cartel leader and trafficker in human lives.”
“No,” said León insistently. “President Vargas himself will not stand for this.”
“He will!” said Garza. “He will have no choice. I give him no choice. Either he turns a blind eye to this . . . or else I tell everyone in the country just who was behind his rise to prominence. Who funded his miraculous political victory. And that the person he entrusted to help craft this antitrafficking treaty was a filthy trafficker himself.”
Garza backed to the only door to the room, opening it.
“Whereas if he goes along, then it is simply another example of the former administration being corrupted by association with the criminal element.”
CHAPTER 80
Fisk never made it inside the consulate. In part because of his own dire warnings while trying to be let through the outer perimeter, the vice president’s interior security ring closed ranks around the detail. No one was allowed in or out until the vice president and his eleven-car motorcade were many blocks away.
Dubin returned from a conversation with a Secret Service agent he knew and pulled Fisk aside on Park Avenue. “Nobody was killed. No shots fired. The dinner went off without a hitch.”
FISK ARRIVED AT TETERBORO AIRPORT in New Jersey just in time. The presidential jet was idling on the tarmac, the big Boeing 737 having been cleared for the small airport by a rare special dispensation from the FAA. Bags were being loaded in.
Fisk’s arm was screaming at him, his fingers and thumb completely numb. He used his Intel badge to get onto the tarmac. Though well outside the radius of the Boeing 737, he was close enough to see the heavyset man in the gray braid being led aboard the plane by EMP agents—in handcuffs.
Fisk felt all the tension go out of him then. It was an incredible feeling, as though Garza’s soul had been spared. León was alive. He held his bad arm, hoping to take some of the pressure off it, and was about to turn and leave when he saw Cecilia Garza leave the contingent boarding the aircraft, starting toward him.
It must have been the blue sling that caught her eye. Her raven-black hair whipped around from the night wind and the wash from the turbines.
She looked drained, exhausted. He must have looked like hell, too.
“You watched the video,” he said.
She looked away and nodded.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I wanted to kill him,” she said. “I wanted it so badly. To put him down right there inside the consulate . . . and suffer the consequences, whatever they might be.”
She looked behind her to make sure she still had time. The last people were starting up the stairs. She only had a moment.
She turned back to Fisk. “I learned from you. I am bringing him to justice. As you did Magnus Jenssen. I am obeying the rule of law, not of vengeance. Blood vendettas are the old Mexico. This”—she pointed to the aircraft, its prisoner waiting on board—“is how we will bring about real change. By owning our past and looking to the future.” She touched the shoulder of his bad arm gently. “You set the example. I thank you.”
She kissed him again.
“I said it before,” she said. “We are too much alike.”
She gave his good arm a squeeze, then turned, black hair flying, jogging to the bottom step of the wheeled staircase and then up to the door of the plane, looking back at him one more time before entering.
CHAPTER 81
Eight days later, Fisk was lying in his bed, sleeping fitfully with his arm in a cast, when his cell phone awoke him. He looked at the display, then sat up, pushing a pillow behind his head. The phone rang twice more while he was trying to decide whether or not to answer it.
“Fisk,” he said groggily.
“You bastard.”
It was Dave Link, his friend from the CIA. “Hi, Dave.”
“You fucked me. If it gets out that I got you inside for that meeting, I will deny everything. Then I’ll fucking drone-strike your house.”
“Okay.”
Silence on the other end.
“Okay?” said Link. “What the hell is wrong with you, man? How’d you do it? On TV, they’re saying it was karma. I know better. I know it was Jeremy Fisk.”
Fisk’s mouth was painfully dry. “I gotta go, Dave.”
“Lose this number. You and I are strangers from this moment forward. Understood?”
“Understood.”
Click. Fisk lowered his phone. He felt very warm and a little shaky.
He sat there in bed for a while before turning on the television.
The CNN graphic read: A FITTING END?
Fisk turned off the television, letting the dark reclaim the room. He stared into the nothingness, his left forearm itching as though the hard cast were infested with bugs.
He thought of his meeting with Jenssen, the terrorist taunting him about the weakness of America’s overly tolerant system of justice. Fisk remembered the aftermath of the meeting, how he cleaned up the remains of the cupcake he had brought for him using the thick foil wrapper Fisk had baked it in . . . which was designed to shield the bearer from exposure to alpha radiation from the microgram of deadly polonium-210 contained therein. Polonium that Fisk had stolen from the evidence in the smoky-bomb case he had busted.
Fisk settled back into bed.
Jenssen was dead and gone.
Fisk tried to picture Krina Gersten in this moment of supposed victory, and the awful truth was . . . he could not. Not completely. Not anymore.
Gersten was fading away.
He could picture Cecilia Garza, however. Leaving him on that airplane with the criminal she had spared, thanks to his example.
Fisk rubbed his good hand over his chest. He wondered how much his exposure to radiation had shortened his life. How much his organs had been affected on a cellular level, and what health surprises lay ahead of him.
This retributive act had corrupted him—not only morally, but also physically.
Which, to him, seemed just. Time would tell.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Noelle, Olivia, Serena, Elliot, Zoe, and Rex for their patience, support, and understanding. To Chuck Hogan for his friendship and support. And to Richard Abate and David Highfill for making me look good. Thank you all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DICK WOLF, a two-time Emmy award–winning writer, producer, and creator, is the architect of one of the most successful brands in the history of television—NBC’s Law & Order, among the longest-running scripted shows. Wolf has won numerous awards, including Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series (Law & Order) and Outstanding Made-for-Television Movie (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee); a Grammy; and an Edgar. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Intercept; The Execution is the second book in his Jeremy Fisk series. He lives in Southern California.