by Scott McEwen
He stood to leave. “Is there anything else you would like to ask before I go?”
She looked up at him, heartbroken. “Those women you say he rescued—they’re home now? They’re safe?”
He smiled. “Yes.”
“That’s all, then. Thank you for coming.”
“It was my responsibility to come.”
“Yes,” she said. “It was. Have a safe trip back.”
A few minutes later, she stood beside her mother in front of the big bay window at the back of the house, watching the helicopter lift off. It flew away to the east, and only when it was gone from sight did she sink to her knees to weep.
Short and stout, her mother stood with her hand resting on her Marie’s head, her own eyes full of tears as she stared off across the snowy linen landscape.
Oso whined to go outside.
49
TOLUCA, MEXICO
18:20 HOURS
With training over for the day, Crosswhite was drinking a beer with Vaught and three other policemen at the firing range when his satellite phone rang in his jacket pocket. Seeing that it was Midori, he ducked into the concrete building where they conducted their urban warfare training.
“Go ahead,” he answered. “It’s me.”
“Brace yourself,” Midori said. “I have bad news.”
“Shit,” he said, fearing that Mariana had gotten into trouble. “What is it?”
“Gil was killed two days ago in China.”
Crosswhite’s stomach hit the floor. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“He set some Russians on fire in Hunan—on an elevator. The police chased after him, and he crashed off a bridge into the Lishui River. We are hearing that they claim to have found his body a couple of hours ago.”
Crosswhite sat down on a concrete stoop, resting his forehead in his hand. “An elevator? Midori, what happened? That doesn’t tell me anything.”
“That’s all I know,” she said helplessly. “The Chinese are keeping a tight lid on it. Nothing has been released to the public, and I’m not the one who hacked into their system. Pope is the only one with access, but for what it’s worth, I really don’t think he’s hiding anything on this. He’s in Montana now breaking the news to Gil’s wife.”
“Christ,” Crosswhite said. “After all the shit he’s been through . . . to get run off a bridge in Jumbuck, China. How high?”
“Eighth highest in the world.”
“So pretty fuckin’ high.”
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Pretty high.”
“That’s it, then,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “Gil’s gone. Fuck, I can’t believe it!”
“I’m sorry, Dan. I know you were close.”
“It’s worse than that,” he muttered, lighting a cigarette. “He was my only friend.” That’s not true, he thought. Mariana’s my friend. “Well, it doesn’t sound like they’ll be shipping him back to the States, does it?”
“I’m sorry. I forgot to mention: the intel stream says he’s already been taken to a crematorium.”
“Bastards!” he hissed. “So was he over there working for Pope?”
“No. We have no clue what he was really doing over there. Pope doesn’t think we ever will.”
“What about the woman—the Swede?”
“She’s Swiss.”
“Whatever!”
“She’s back in Switzerland.”
Crosswhite spit in the dust. “Well, I just might have to pay her a visit myself one fine day.”
“If you do, be sure to keep me in the loop. I’d like to know what really happened. I won’t tell the boss.”
“Okay,” he said quietly. “Thanks for calling. I appreciate it.”
Crosswhite put away the phone and looked up to see Vaught standing in the door with a beer in his hand.
“What happened?”
“Gil’s dead. The goddamn Chinese ran him off a bridge. Can you fuckin’ believe that?”
“Shit, man. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” Crosswhite said. “Everybody’s sorry. You might as well cut out of here. Head for our embassy in DF and get yourself home.”
“What are you talking about?” Vaught said.
“There’s no reason for you stay involved in this. Mendoza’s dead, these cops are almost ready, and that sniper’s out there gunning for you. You’ve seen his face.”
Vaught tossed the beer half-finished into a corner. “Yeah, and what happens to your family when he blows you in half like he has everyone else?”
“My family’s taken care of no matter what happens to me—never mind how.”
“Good, but you’re not getting rid of me. I owe that son of a bitch.”
Crosswhite smiled. “Don’t you think you owe Serrano, too?”
Vaught waited to hear the rest of what was on his mind.
“If this caper’s gonna work,” Crosswhite said, “three key people have to be taken out: the sniper, Serrano, and Ruvalcaba.”
“What caper?”
“Mariana and I are putting Castañeda in charge of the southern cartels. That’ll give him exclusive rights to the narcotics trade.”
Vaught’s eyes widened. “On whose authority?”
“Our own.”
“Why Castañeda?”
“He’s honoring the truce. And he’s willing to continue.”
“You bet your ass he is!” Vaught hated Antonio Castañeda. “Who wouldn’t be with a monopoly on the drug trade?”
“Look,” Crosswhite said. “It’s our only chance to salvage anything out of this entire fucking mess. If Serrano takes over the north, border violence will resume. He hates the US. But with Castañeda in control, the CIA holds the reigns, and civilians don’t get butchered. It’s that simple.”
Vaught could see no other way. “So what’s your plan?”
“You stay here and deal with the sniper; I’ll go handle Serrano. Whichever one of us survives goes after Ruvalcaba. How’s that sound?”
“Honestly? It sounds like Pope belongs on that list too.”
“I agree, but Pope’s a bridge too far. So we’ll go after Mexico’s chief of station instead: Mike Ortega. We’ll take his family and force him to set something up.”
“No way!” Vaught said. “Absolutely not. I draw the line at kidnapping.”
“We’re not gonna hurt ’em, champ.”
“I don’t care. Ortega might be a dumb-ass, but he’s on our side. You’re just pissed at him because he insulted your wife.”
Crosswhite smirked. “Okay. You come up with a better idea. I’ll sit here and wait.”
Vaught was out of his depth, and he knew it. “You can’t be serious. You can’t really be willing to kidnap a man’s family.”
“You have no idea the shit I’ve done for far less worthy causes. And I’ll tell you like I tell everybody else at this same crossroads: this is the business we’re in. You’re either willing to do what needs to be done, or you’re not.”
Vaught dug the Copenhagen from the cargo pocket of his trousers, putting a pinch of tobacco in his lower lip. “Your man Shannon: He did this same kinda shit?”
Crosswhite shook his head. “Gil had principles. He was a better man than me—by a lot—but I have to play to my strength.”
“Which is what?”
Taking a last drag from the cigarette, Crosswhite flicked it out the door. “I don’t give a fuck about consequences. I never have.”
50
PUERTO VALLARTA, MEXICO
19:00 HOURS
“I have to meet with Fields in Tijuana,” Mariana said to Antonio Castañeda, seated by his pool. The last time she’d seen the pool, she’d watched Crosswhite drown a man in it. To be back there gave her the creeps. “Can you supply me with two men I can trust to watc
h my back?”
Castañeda sipped from his glass of tequila, his beady eyes glossy—the only outward effect that excessive amounts of alcohol seemed to have on him.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“You don’t have any men you can trust around me?”
“Pffft! I have dozens of men I can trust.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem, my beautiful Mariana, is that if Fields or his men see two of my men following you around, they’ll know exactly who they are and take steps to neutralize them.”
Sometimes Mariana allowed herself to forget that Castañeda was an ex–Special Forces operative. Making it a point never to forget again, she said, “So do you have any suggestions? I can’t go up there alone. Fields is too dangerous.” She explained about Fields wanting to use her to get to Jessup.
“I see,” Castañeda said. “He wants you to sleep with him.”
She cocked a dark eyebrow. “He’s knows better.”
The drug lord set aside his drink, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “Do you honestly believe that? Tell me how else do you think you will get this man Jessup to talk to you about the gringo sniper? Military men disclose that kind of information only under the most intimate of circumstances.”
She immediately thought of Anna Chapman, the Russian spy arrested by the US Justice Department in 2010 and deported back to Russia. Married to a British national, Chapman was purported to have slept with a number of rich and powerful American men during her intelligence gathering operations in the US. Even the thought of being used in that manner was enough to make Mariana bilious.
“I’ll think of something.”
Castañeda reached for the glass, resting back in his chair. “Suerte.” Good luck.
“About my support?”
He drew a breath, taking time to think it over. Had Mariana been anyone else, he would have left her on her own, but she had earned his admiration somehow. When they’d first met two years earlier, he’d given very serious consideration to abducting her and leashing her to his bedroom wall, but his inclinations had changed over the past eighteen months.
He whistled across the pool to a beautiful young woman in her early twenties who lay naked on a chaise lounge. “Tanya!”
Tanya sat up, her brown skin glistening with oil. “Sí, papi?”
“Go get your sister, my love.”
Tanya got up, slipped into a silken red robe, and strode into the house. She had long raven hair to the small of her back, and a perfect physique.
“My God, I love her.” Castañeda chortled happily and took a drink. “Why won’t you agree to stay with me for a while?” he asked Mariana. “Give me six months of romance, and you’ll never have to work again. You can leave the CIA and live wherever you like in the whole world.”
Though Mariana knew she was pretty, she also knew she did not possess Tanya’s stunning beauty or that of her older sister, Lorena. “You only want me because you can’t have me,” she said, now accustomed to his gallant overtures.
“You make me burn with desire,” Castañeda said, his throat feeling tight. “And it agitates me very much—because taking you against your will would only spoil it.”
“Then use that,” she said, maneuvering him. “Let me be the one woman you actually respect.”
He smiled. “I must think about this.”
Lorena came from the house wearing skintight jeans and a red-and-white soccer jersey tied in a knot just above her navel. She was so similar in appearance to her younger sister that most people who saw them together believed they were twins. “Sí, Papi?”
“Mi amor,” he said, his voice liquid and sweet. “Mariana needs someone to look after her in Tijuana. There is a CIA man up there who might wish to do her harm. I want you and Tanya to go with her and keep her safe for me.”
Lorena glanced at Mariana. “Sí, papi.”
“You will leave within the hour. Go and tell your sister.”
Lorena went back inside.
Mariana looked at Castañeda. “Are they . . . reliable?”
“If you ever see either of them use a straight razor, there will be no need to ask.”
She felt a chill. Both young women were truly beautiful, but there was an undeniable lifelessness behind their obsidian-colored eyes. “It’s smart,” Mariana admitted. “No one will ever see them coming.”
“No one ever does,” he said, taking a drink. “I choose my women very carefully.”
“Like you’ve chosen me?” she asked, continuing to maneuver him.
“One kiss,” he said, leaning toward her with his beady eyes so unattractive. “Please.”
“I’m a terrible actress, Tony. I promise you’d be disappointed.”
He sat back with a frustrated smile. “I suppose you’re right.” He thumped his fist lightly on the arm of his chair. “Me has embrujado.” You have bewitched me.
51
TOLUCA, MEXICO
00:15 HOURS
Rhett Hancock had arrived in Toluca early in the day to begin his reconnaissance of the town, riding in the backseat of a Dodge Charger with darkly tinted windows and two of Ruvalcaba’s men riding up front. All three were heavily armed, determined not to be taken alive.
Now it was night, and Hancock sat alone in his room on the north side watching pornography on television with the sound turned down. He was tired of living in motels and hotels, tired of being bored all the time. Nothing pleased him anymore, not even sex. The only thing that excited him was having a target in the crosshairs, and there weren’t enough of those to sustain him.
He fumbled with an empty tequila bottle beside him on the bed, tossing it onto the floor without thinking. The bottle shattered against the tile.
“Fuck,” he muttered, making a mental note not to climb out on that side of the bed in his bare feet.
The blond actress on the TV screen was having sex with two men at the same time. She reminded Hancock of his second girlfriend. Her name was Jennifer, the only girl he had ever loved, and he had accidently killed her on his seventeenth birthday.
They’d been driving home on a Saturday night in young Rhett’s restored 1977 Pontiac Firebird, having spent the night drinking around a bonfire at a buddy’s farm in Kansas. Racing along on a black moon night, they sang aloud to a lonesome Lynyrd Skynyrd tune with the T-top open, the wind blowing through Jennifer’s long blond hair. The song began to increase in tempo, and she cranked up the volume as Rhett downshifted into third, gunning it through a wide curve and out onto his favorite stretch of open road.
“Lord, I can’t change!” they sang. “Won’t you fly . . . high . . . free bird, yeah!”
From the pitch black, a ten-point buck leapt in front of the car.
Rhett hit the brakes, cut the wheel, and promptly lost control. There was only one tree along that stretch of road, a hundred-year-old red oak, and they hit it head-on doing better than seventy-five miles per hour.
He came to in a ditch the next morning, sitting up in the mud with a splitting headache, dried blood caked to his face. The first sight he saw was the Pontiac smashed against the tree. The second sight was Jennifer’s mangled body wrapped around the pillar post of the windshield, most of her face sheared off by the glass.
Rhett was put on juvenile probation for a year, working manual labor jobs after school and drinking in secret. He withdrew from his family and hardly ever spoke. At the age of eighteen, he was put on adult probation, where he remained until his twenty-first birthday. At the age of twenty-three, after a brief legal battle to seal his juvenile record, he was able to enlist in the United States Army.
The rest, as they say, was history.
Hancock sat staring at the porn star in his drunken stupor, allowing himself to think of Jennifer for the first time since the morning of the crash. Th
e pain of thinking back on her smile, her voice, even the smell of her became more than he could stand. He snatched the Sig Sauer from beside him on the bed, thrust it under his chin, and squeezed the trigger.
The hammer dropped with a click, but the gun did not fire.
“What the fuck?” he said in shock, breaking out in a cold sweat and jacking the slide to eject the bullet.
He examined the round to see a perfect pin strike in the center of the silver primer.
“No fuckin’ way,” he whispered. Sick to his stomach, he got out of bed and stepped on a shard of the broken tequila bottle. “Motherfucker!” he swore in pain, falling back on the mattress and grabbing his foot to pull out the jagged piece of glass. “Motherfuckin’ son of a bitch!”
The cut was not big, but it was deep in the sole of his foot, just forward of the heel. It hurt badly and bled profusely. Hancock glanced at the television. The girl was up on all fours now, her two comrades really going to town on her.
He grabbed the pistol and hurled it at the old television. To his amazement, the weapon bounced off the glass picture tube and clattered across the tile. He sat staring after the gun for a long moment, feeling more hopeless and lost than ever before. Hancock’s eyes welled with tears, and he began to sob. He fell over on the mattress and cried himself to sleep.
In the morning, he awoke hung over with a foul taste in his mouth. His foot was throbbing, but the bleeding had stopped. He got out of bed on the safe side and limped over to his rucksack on a chair near the window, digging out a military first aid kit and taking it back to the bed. He filled a syringe with lidocaine and injected the foot near the wound, wincing as he depressed the plunger. Then he injected himself at the ankle. When the entire foot was numb, he pressed his thumbs down hard on either side of the wound to get it bleeding again, squeezing out a pea-size globule of pus. Wiping away the pus with a wad of cotton, he injected five hundred milligrams of amikacin directly into the wound to kill off any remaining infection.
Next, he took a foil packet of sutures from the aid kit and closed the wound with three stitches. Hancock slapped a patch of sticky black adhesive tape over it and went to take a shower, standing beneath the water for a long time.