Ghost Sniper

by Scott McEwen

“Drank himself to death.” Gil snatched his pants from the floor and stepped into them. “We need to hurry. Nahn doesn’t fuck around.”

  38

  MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

  16:40 HOURS

  There were always risks involved when Lazaro Serrano and Hector Ruvalcaba met face-to-face, but they had serious matters to discuss, and with the city devastated by the earthquake, Serrano had to abandon his normal security precautions. So the two men met in a brothel run by the Ruvalcabas on the outskirts of the Federal District, where quake damage had been minimal to none.

  “Our attack on the Toluca police station was a complete disaster,” said Ruvalcaba, a stately looking man in his early sixties, with graying hair and green eyes. He had escaped from a maximum security prison the year before via a tunnel dug from the outside to his prison cell. Serrano had arranged for and funded the tunnel’s construction, a service for which he had been handsomely reimbursed. “I still don’t know what went wrong, but I lost seventeen of my best people. Apparently the remaining Guerrero brother is not the timid young coward we’ve been led to believe.”

  Serrano sat puffing a cigar. “Is this new chief supposed to have killed all seventeen men himself?”

  Ruvalcaba made a face. “Of course not. My point is that he apparently possesses the strength of will to hold the police force together even in the face of his brother’s very public assassination. ”

  Serrano shrugged. “So the Toluca police have rallied around the memory of their martyred chief. We’ve seen it before. Juan Guerrero was a brave man—a man of the people. It’s only natural they would stick together long enough to fight a battle in his name. After all, they are Mexicans, are they not? It’s our fault for underestimating them. Now we’ll do it right. We’ll send Hancock back to Toluca with orders to kill ten or twelve policemen in the street, all in broad daylight. That will put a most definite end to their resolve, I assure you.”

  Ruvalcaba demurred. “I don’t believe it’s that simple. But it doesn’t matter because Hancock won’t go back to the same city twice. I’ve asked him before, and he has always refused. He considers it too dangerous.”

  “He works for us,” Serrano said. “He goes where he’s told.”

  Ruvalcaba cocked an eyebrow. “You tell him that.”

  Deciding to leave the issue for the moment, Serrano gestured at the large yellow envelope he’d placed on the table when he first arrived. “That is a gift for you. It will take your mind off our problem in Toluca.”

  Eying the politician, Ruvalcaba reached out and picked up the envelope. He shook out all eleven files onto the table and sat looking them over. “Are these—these are PFM agents!”

  “Straight from the hands of the CIA,” Serrano said with a twisted smile.

  “Puta madre!” Ruvalcaba pulled one of the photos free from its staple. “This man was one of mine!”

  “Luis Mendoza?” Serrano asked.

  “You knew already?”

  “The CIA told me yesterday afternoon. Mendoza and the American DSS agent are helping the PFM to build a case against us.”

  “That can’t be,” Ruvalcaba said. “I’ve been told they were dead.”

  “The PFM falsified the crime scene. Both are still very much alive. Vaught has disappeared, but we will get this pig Mendoza to tell us where he is, and Hancock will kill him for us. The gringo sniper has even more to fear from him than we do. You’d better plan on three or four simultaneous abductions. Once word gets out that Mendoza and his family have vanished, the other agents in that file will take extra precautions. And forget the Toluca police for the moment. We’ll send Hancock after Mendoza. He’ll be more than happy to help once he realizes there are witnesses who can place him behind the rifle that killed Alice Downly.”

  39

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  18:00 HOURS

  Midori Kagawa had come to work for Pope at the CIA as an analyst and computer programmer even before graduating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when Pope was still in charge of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). For the past ten years, she had been blindly loyal to him, deferring to his judgement on all matters. Recently, however, she had noticed a change in Pope. There was a coldness to the CIA director now where before there had been only the distracted genius concerned with protecting his operators in the field.

  Midori believed she knew the cause of the change. Pope had been shot twice in the chest the year before, in two separate assassination attempts. He himself had shot the second attacker to death at point-blank range, and though Pope had made a full physical recovery, he had never met once with a psychologist. There were times now when Midori could see that he was struggling with the emotional trauma of the previous year, and this convinced her that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress.

  Since the discovery of Turkish gold in the French storage unit, Pope had become obsessed with expanding the reach and power of the Anti-Terrorist Response Unit. Midori believed that he had set unattainable goals for the new special mission unit—such as reaching into the House of Saud to assassinate members of the Saudi royal family whom Pope had found to be complicit with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the same terrorist network responsible for the now-infamous attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi.

  Midori viewed this objective as pure fantasy. Whether an ATRU assassin left evidence or not, the royal family would readily suspect CIA involvement—viewing the lack of evidence as evidence in and of itself—and with Saddam Hussein long dead, Saudi Arabia now had much less to fear in the region, and thus much less reason to tolerate the CIA’s picking off minor members of its family.

  It was true that a lesser member of the House of Saud—a naturalized American citizen—had been instrumental in aiding Chechen terrorists to purchase a pair of Russian suitcase nukes eighteen months earlier, but the Saudi royal family had accepted no responsibility for this, instantly disinheriting the man in the wake of the attempted nuclear attacks on US soil.

  While Midori remained prepared to assist Pope in his plans for expanding the ATRU to the best of her considerable abilities, she was not prepared to sit idle while he effectively turned his back on the operators who had helped him gain control of the CIA. Without the direct involvement of Gil Shannon, Daniel Crosswhite, and Mariana Mederos, the US Naval Fleet in San Diego Bay—­including two brand-new aircraft carriers—would have been destroyed in a nuclear explosion, and Robert Pope would have been run out of JSOC on a rail. As it turned out, Pope was hailed as a hero before the Senate, and his appointment as director of the CIA had been approved unanimously.

  Midori had only briefly considered discussing her concerns with Pope, realizing that to even voice an opinion on the matter would preclude any future assistance she might want to offer Gil, Crosswhite, or Mariana. The way things stood, Pope trusted her implicitly, and she needed to keep it that way in order to remain outside his suspicions. So she didn’t view helping Gil save Sabastian Blickensderfer’s life as a betrayal of Pope’s trust but rather as an act of loyalty to the man who had enabled Pope to ascend to power.

  The concern weighing most heavily on Midori’s mind at the moment was Pope’s willingness to allow Clemson Fields such a free hand in dealing with the Alice Downly assassination. This was another matter she didn’t dare offer an opinion on for fear of arousing suspicion. Fields had scheduled a flight to Mexico City via a CIA aircraft without providing any itinerary. The CIA’s deputy director, Cletus Webb, had signed off on the flight without asking a single question, fully aware that Fields was Pope’s point man in the Mexico crisis.

  At first, Midori assumed that Fields had consulted with Pope before scheduling the flight, but that assumption proved false, after she’d asked Pope in passing, “Any idea what Clemson Fields is doing in Mexico City?”

  Pope had merely shrugged. “I told him to fix the Alice Downly problem. He’s probably using the earthquake
as cover to get into the capital unnoticed. Agent Vaught made a real mess of things down there, and we’ll have to smooth Mexico’s ruffled feathers at some point, so it might as well be now. Don’t concern yourself with Fields. He’s been around a long time.”

  Something else worrying Midori was that Pope had expressed no concern for Dan Crosswhite’s well-being since the quake, nor had he directed her to attempt contact. So she decided to make contact on her own, using Dan’s private number and catching him in the middle of training the Tolucan police officers.

  She told him about Fields’s flight to Mexico City.

  “So Doctor Doom is here in Mexico.” Crosswhite did not sound overly impressed. “He gave Mariana the gestapo treatment up in Texas a couple days ago. I don’t know what he and Pope are up to, but I’ve gone off the grid for now. I’ve got some personal shit to handle down here, and the PFM has its hands full with the earthquake.”

  “What about the case against Serrano?” Midori asked. “They’re letting him go?”

  “Ya know what?” Crosswhite said. “Why don’t you ask Pope what’s going on with Serrano? He’s the one who’s been feeding intel to that fat drug-dealing bastard.”

  Midori had no knowledge of any communications between Pope and Lazaro Serrano. “Are you sure? What kind of intel?”

  “I have no idea,” Crosswhite said. “Hold on a second . . .” In the background she heard him giving lengthy instructions to a Tolucan police officer in Spanish before coming back on the phone. “Yeah, so anyway,” he continued, “Fields let that slip while he was playing ‘operation mind crime’ with Mariana. So whatever he’s cooked up with Pope, it sounds like we’ve all been left out of it. All I can tell you for sure is that I’m done steppin’ and fetchin’ for that son of a bitch. He’s playing both ends against the middle, and I won’t tolerate it.”

  “How sure are you Fields wasn’t making it up?”

  “It doesn’t matter if he was,” Crosswhite said. “Pope put the fucker on the case. He broke the faith, and I will not work for a man who uses me like a pawn.”

  Midori needed a friend to confide in, and she knew she could trust Crosswhite. “He’s sick, Dan. I think he’s messed up in the head from being shot last year. He’s not the same man.”

  “I’ll bet he is fucked up,” Crosswhite said. “Hell, he’s probably got PTSD, but that’s not my problem. He’s playing games with my life and the lives of my family.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’m afraid if I say anything, he’ll stop trusting me.”

  “Is he getting paranoid?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because if he’s really got PTSD, he could easily become paranoid. So, yeah, don’t ask him any questions unless you want him getting suspicious.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shit just about covers it. Hey, have you heard from Gil?”

  “He’s in China,” she said. “He’s in touch with our asset in Beijing. He’ll be out of contact the entire time he’s inside the border. Chinese electronic surveillance is too dangerous.”

  “Does Pope know Gil asked you to arrange the asset?”

  “He asked me not to say anything.” Midori didn’t mention that she’d been communicating with Gil behind Pope’s back for some weeks now, since the discovery of the Turkish gold.

  “Good boy,” Crosswhite muttered to himself. “We’re finally on the same page.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means Gil’s not drinkin’ the Kool-Aid anymore—which is good to know.”

  “I’m worried about him. What’s he really doing in China?”

  Crosswhite laughed. “You tell me, baby, and we’ll both know!”

  40

  MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

  00:30 HOURS

  In the dark of night, the first two Ruvalcaba men stole silently, albeit somewhat awkwardly, into the bedroom of PFM Agent Luis Mendoza’s twelve-year-old daughter, clumsily clamping a chloroform-soaked cloth over her mouth and nose. Not until the girl was secured with nylon cable ties and removed from the house did the other men move on Mendoza and his wife.

  Agent Mendoza was smacked awake to the sight of his wife sitting on the edge of the bed with the barrel of a nickel-plated revolver stuck into her mouth.

  The blood in his veins ran cold with horror. “Take me,” he said calmly to the four men in black ski masks. “There’s no need to involve my family.”

  Mendoza and his wife were thrown onto their bellies, secured with cable ties, and put to sleep with chloroform before they, too, were removed from the house.

  A half hour later, Mendoza was brought back to consciousness with a bucket of water. He was strapped naked to a metal office chair in a dingy auto repair garage. His wife and daughter were tied naked, also soaking wet, to a support beam in front of him, their arms stretched above their heads, wrists bound with wire. There were eight masked men standing around, two of whom were in the midst of sexually molesting Mendoza’s wife and daughter.

  The wife and daughter were sobbing with fear and revulsion, and the sight of the abject terror in the eyes of his daughter—the light of Mendoza’s life—was more than he could endure. Tears spilled down his cheeks, and he began to plead.

  The largest man, the apparent leader, came forward and sat down backward on an old wooden folding chair, resting his arms along the chair back. “You are going to give me the names of the agents you work with, amigo. Also, the names of your superiors. You will tell me where they are working and where their families live. And for every lie you tell me . . . every question you refuse to answer . . . your wife and daughter will suffer.”

  Mendoza had broken out in a cold sweat. “I’ll tell you all that I can. Just make them stop.”

  But the men did not stop, and the hysterical sobs of his wife and daughter continued.

  Mendoza tried in vain to block out the plaintive cries of his little girl as she begged him to help her. He tore his eyes away from her molester’s bloody fingers, gnashing his teeth in anguish. His scrotum contracted, and his penis shriveled. His heart raced with excruciating anxiety, and for one frightening moment, he was so tightly gripped by despair that he was unable to breathe. “Make them stop!” he gasped. “I’ll tell you all that I can! Just make them stop—for the love of God!”

  “They will stop when you tell me what I want to know,” the masked man replied. “Now, who do you—”

  Mendoza’s daughter squealed in pain as her tormentor’s probing became more invasive, sending Mendoza into a mindless a rage. “Make them stop!” he shrieked, his vocal cords nearly tearing in his throat. “Make them stop! Make them stop! Make them stop!” He continued to shriek his demand over and over like a man coming unhinged, veins bulging as he strained against the leather straps binding him to the chair.

  Fearing that Mendoza’s mind might be on the verge of snapping, the leader—who had never personally interrogated anyone—signaled for the tormentors to back away from their victims.

  The men did as they were told, and Mendoza fell to weeping, unable to meet the shattered gaze of his wife. His head drooped forward, swaying from side to side as he muttered prayers for God to intervene.

  The leader produced a tape recorder from his jacket pocket and switched it on. “Now give me the names, amigo. Give me the names, and this will end.”

  Mendoza’s mind reeled with dread. Of course he was willing to give up every deep-cover agent working for the PFM, but there was a major problem: he didn’t know any of them. Deep-cover agents were kept isolated from one another, and on the rare occasions they did meet face-to-face, their real names were never used. He knew only the real names of three direct superiors, and he was horrified because he knew the man in the mask would never be satisfied with just three names.

  “I am a deep-cover agent,” he croaked, his voice raw from the force of his sh
rieking. His daughter was still crying, but his wife had managed to calm herself, and she was attempting to soothe the child in her own trembling voice. “We’re kept separate from one another,” Mendoza went on, “but I can give you the names of three of my superiors.”

  The masked man held the recorder to Mendoza’s mouth. “Say their names.”

  Mendoza spoke the names of each man as clearly as he could, providing all of the personal information that he remembered.

  “Very good,” said the man in the mask. “Now, I need more names, amigo. Give me more names.”

  Mendoza did not bother repeating the truth. He made up a name, claiming the man was a deep-cover agent working in Tijuana.

  The man in the mask switched off the recorder and sat with his hands drooped over the chair back. “You just told me you are kept separate from one another. But now you suddenly have another name for me?” He shook his head with a heavy sigh. “Either you were lying to me before, amigo, or you are lying to me now. Which is it?”

  Mendoza understood there was no escape from the impossible paradox in which he was trapped. “That might not be his real name,” he explained, trying his best to speak directly, to keep the fear from his voice. “We don’t use our real names—none of us do—and this is why. Surely, you must understand that.”

  The man in the ski mask scratched his head. “Why do you lie to me, amigo? Why do you want to make me hurt your family? Can’t you hear your beautiful daughter crying? Do you think I would go to all of this trouble for three little names? Eh? No! I would not!” He turned to a man standing near a red metal cabinet. “Usa el soplete.” Use the blowtorch.

  “No!” Mendoza shouted. “No! Please!”

  The man near the cabinet turned up the hissing blue flame of a propane torch and stepped over to Mendoza’s wife.

  “Noooo!” Mendoza shrieked as the man grabbed one of the woman’s ample breasts and put the flame to her nipple.

  Mendoza’s wife let out a screech of agony, writhing violently as her daughter’s screams of terror were added to the horrifying chorale.