Blood Lies - 15

by Richard Marcinko

  The security goons at the front of the building were so busy doing whatever they were doing that they didn’t take any notice of us as we slowly made our way through the minefield. Things were proceeding swimmingly until, maybe twenty yards deep, I spotted what I thought was a mine just in front of my foot.

  I stopped, bent down, and examined it.

  Definitely a mine. I’d misread the pattern.

  Worse, as I stared through the glasses, trying to get my bearings, I realized I had missed at least two other mines. It was a Rogue-sized miracle that we hadn’t blown ourselves up.

  Goatfuck city.

  * * *

  The worst thing you can do in a minefield is lose your head. Objectively speaking, we were no worse off now than we had been a minute or so before. But ignorance is bliss, and while I wasn’t feeling particularly intelligent at the moment, I wasn’t feeling blissful either.

  There was really only one solution—Chet had to pick us up where we were.

  “Will do,” he said over the radio after I switched over to his frequency. “Where are you?”

  “Minefield on the east side. About twenty or thirty yards north of the guardhouse and garage.”

  “Repeat that? You’re in the minefield?”

  “That’s right. We’re in the minefield.”

  “On purpose?”

  “Don’t get existential on me. We are where we are.”

  “Well, try not to breathe too hard. I’m about five miles away.”

  Even if Chet was quick about it, he’d be an easy target when he came in to pick us up. We’d have to divert the bad guys’ attention somehow.

  “When the helo comes,” I told Shotgun, “throw Veronica in, grab the rungs, and get the hell out.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to double back, go behind these guys, and get their attention before Chet comes in.”

  “What happens then?”

  “I’ll shoot them all, and you’ll pick me up.”

  “Let me go with you.”

  “No. Stick with her.”

  The helicopter’s Lycoming engine and its attached rotors were pounding the air by the time I made it back to the low building where we’d come out. I went spread-eagle on the roof and raised my gun. As the helo bore in, de Sarcena’s men started coming around the corner of the garage building. It was a turkey shoot: I squeezed the trigger and started gobbling them up.

  Within seconds, I was the target. I emptied the M16, slapped out the empty mag, and jammed in a fresh one. They had me outnumbered, but de Sarcena’s goons were too used to attacking people who couldn’t fight back, and the sheer weight of my fire forced them back around the garage—the few that weren’t shot up, that is.

  I started to hop down, thinking I would follow, picking up ammo on the way, when I found myself in the middle of a windstorm: Chet and his helo were bearing down on me.

  A few of the goons refound their courage as the helicopter swooped in. Emptying the M16, I chased them back, then threw down the gun and grabbed the helicopter’s skid as it came within reach. As I did, something exploded above me—Shotgun had “found” a Carl Gustav in the helo cabin and fired it at the garage.

  The missile hit something flammable, and the next thing I knew I was treated to a preview of the afterlife: fire and brimstone surrounded me. The R44 thundered through the turmoil.

  We cleared through the flames and a large cloud of smoke. The razor-wire perimeter fence was dead ahead.

  “Up! Up!” I yelled.

  I tucked up my legs and closed my eyes. I may have cleared the fence by inches, maybe by miles; when you’re not looking, it’s all the same.

  A minute or two later, we settled down over a field a mile away. My arms and hands had locked around the skid strut, and I actually needed help from Shotgun, leaning out of the interior, to get them undone. I fell to the ground—fortunately just a foot or so away—then climbed into the helicopter.

  II

  Fun like that is hard to top, and I decided that we would call at least a temporary halt to our Mexican sojourn. Chester ferried us north, first getting us far enough away from the goons that we didn’t have to worry about being ambushed, then finally taking us to a ranch owned by a friend of Doc’s in New Mexico. The most strenuous thing we did for the next few hours involved elbow exercise and adult beverages.

  Our guest of honor, Pedro de Sarcena, snored in the back room. Doc had seen to his comfort with an especially generous dose of Percocet, a mixture of acetaminophen and oxycodone often administered to patients after surgery. Acetaminophen you know; it’s Tylenol by another name. Oxycodone is an extremely effective substitute for morphine; it has gained unwanted fame as a favorite of drug abusers in its time release form of OxyContin.

  Deciding what to do with de Sarcena was an important problem, and it occupied a good portion of the business meeting that Doc and I conducted once he arrived. But there were other problems as well, starting with the beautiful Ms. Reynolds, who believed that her arrival at the mansion had led directly to our escape. Her head had swelled to the point where it was larger than the other portions of her anatomy—an incredible accomplishment.

  And then there was Veronica, who had still not told me who she was, or what she wanted.

  She did both, with the help of a few longneck bottles of Corona.

  * * *

  Veronica Di Filipo was the daughter of a state police officer from Arrowsmith, Illinois, a very small town in the rural center of the state. (One of the highlights is the annual Labor Day parade; most years the Illinois State University Marching Band comes over and plays its heart out.) Unfortunately, Veronica’s father had been killed in the line of duty when she was very young; her mother died of cancer not long afterward, and she was raised by her maternal grandparents, Joseph and Marianna Cortina, who lived in a similarly small town in Michigan.

  Probably strongly influenced by the memory of her father, Veronica had gone to college and studied pre-law, then joined the Michigan State Police upon graduation. She became a detective, working undercover. Among other things, she helped bust a pair of drug rings before being promoted to a job investigating porn. The job included a promotion, but after the excitement of her undercover stint, it was understandably a lot less exciting.

  In the meantime, Veronica’s grandparents decided to retire. They started looking around, and eventually decided to move to Mexico.

  Retiring to Mexico was not as crazy as it sounds. With housing and other prices skyrocketing in the States, a good number of Americans have moved across the borders over the past decade or two. Even after the housing bust, they took advantage of the low cost of living and the weather, which in general is a lot balmier than Michigan’s.

  Roughly two years before I met her, Veronica’s grandparents found Angel Hills, which was just south of the New Mexico border. They’d visited a number of other luxury retirement communities, almost all of them on the coast. They liked Angel Hills because of its location, relatively close to the border and out of the path of most hurricanes. Like most other retirement communities, it advertised all the usual amenities: a swimming pool, clubhouse, and bingo three nights a week.

  “The brochure was one thing, the actual buildings another,” Veronica told me between sips from her beer. “I guess they weren’t that bad. They were decently constructed. But plain. Bottom line, they’re a bunch of buildings in the middle of the desert, surrounded by people whose language they don’t understand. Why move away from home in the first place? That’s where all their friends were. That’s where I was.”

  Progress on the construction of the development was frustratingly slow. Eventually their unit was finished and they moved in. There was still a lot of work to do: the grass wasn’t growing, the pool wasn’t finished. The housing market’s downturn in the States hampered sales, which slowed construction on the overall complex.

  Still, Veronica had to admit that it didn’t look any worse than many developments she�
��d seen in the States. Her grandparents were thrilled about it. Their Spanish had improved to the point where, while they were still clearly Anglos, they could keep up with most of the locals and with Veronica, who had minored in the language in college and honed her skills as an undercover agent.

  Things seemed to be fine for the first year or so. Veronica was too busy to visit again, but they spoke regularly over the phone and Skype, and used e-mail to exchange photos and the like.

  Gradually, the communications lessened. The calls stopped. The e-mails became terse. Worried that her grandparents were having health problems they wouldn’t admit, Veronica took a vacation and went to Mexico. She found her grandparents quiet and depressed. Work on the condo development had now completely stopped. At least half of the units that had been built were empty. That included several that had been occupied when she had last visited.

  There were other disturbing signs. The sales office had been closed. There seemed to be only one groundskeeper left; he was noncommunicative and smelled of booze. The people in the small Mexican town nearby were particularly standoffish and wary.

  Since they were clearly unhappy, Veronica asked her grandparents to come back north with her. Spend a few weeks visiting, she suggested. See a few old friends.

  They made excuses. When she pushed, they refused. She suspected something was wrong, but couldn’t decipher what it was in the two days she was with them. She left baffled and worried that one of them had some sort of medical problem they weren’t sharing.

  She got an e-mail from them a few days after she returned, telling her how much they enjoyed her visit. That was their last communication.

  E-mails weren’t returned. Their phone—they only had a land line—went unanswered. Within a few weeks, Veronica discovered that their Skype account had been closed. Eventually she got a message on a return e-mail that their in-box was full and not accepting any more e-mails.

  Worried to the point of almost becoming frantic, Veronica flew down to New Mexico, rented a car, and traveled over the border. There was no one home at her grandparents’ house. When she went to let herself in with her key, she found it didn’t work. That wasn’t much of a barrier for a practiced detective—she got the lock open easily enough by slipping a credit card through the jamb slot and work the bolt back.

  Her grandparents’ unit was completely empty—“broom clean” as a real estate agent would say.

  There was no trace of the pair. The sales office was still closed. Veronica couldn’t find a maintenance person, nor was there anyone at the pool or other community buildings. There was supposed to be a volunteer neighborhood patrol and a development police force; Veronica saw a pair of vehicles but couldn’t find anyone manning them. The security offices were in the community center, which was itself closed.

  The units near her grandparents’ were unoccupied, and the neighbors Veronica approached claimed to have just moved in and didn’t know them. One thing struck Veronica as odd—while the development had been marketed to Americans, the only two residents she met were Mexican. Neither seemed to have much time for her.

  She went to the police in the nearest city, about a half hour away.

  She suspected this would be useless. She was right. Frustrated, she identified herself as a fellow police officer, which had exactly the opposite effect than what she intended: rather than getting increased attention and a modicum of sympathy, the officer she’d been talking to turned almost mute. His boss was worse.

  The American embassy was no help. Various and slight connections she knew through her job were equally useless. Her grandparents had disappeared with no trace, and no one seemed concerned enough or capable enough of figuring out what had happened. Veronica finally decided to take a leave of absence from her job and investigate on her own.

  She discovered that the company that had developed the condos had gone bankrupt almost on the very day that her grandparents moved into their house. Bankruptcy is a complicated business in Mexico. There’s the legal tangle, which is as convoluted as any tangled rope you’ve ever seen. (Nautically speaking, we call them ASSHOLES in the running line.) And then there’s the overlay of corruption, a shadow system that almost always dictates what really happens.

  I’ll cut through some of the knots, skipping about two beers’ worth of the story in the process, and simply say that the Tabasco cartel ended up owning Angel Hills. They also ended up owning the bank that had financed much of the project, and the construction company that did most of the building.

  Still unable to get any real information about her grandparents, Veronica decided to do what she did best—she went undercover. Posing as an accountant who could speak good English but was a Mexican national, she got a job in the crooked bank, which had a large office in the city a half hour from Angel Hills. She began as a liaison to American customers, and was soon promoted to work directly with American banks.

  Much of the business came from borderline legal companies under the cartel’s control. It was only then that she began to realize just how extensive the cartel’s holdings were. It had tremendous cash flow on both sides of the border.

  The cartels rely on American banks to help them “wash” their profits and conduct their business. As the cartels have grown, they’ve sunk their fingers deeper into the pies of what were once legitimate businesses, shades of the Mafia decades ago. And so in some cases the banks have no reason to suspect that the cash going into their safes comes from illegal sources. But there’s also a good deal of what you might call willful ignorance. Gee, big Mexican customer, where did you get all that money? Wait, wait, don’t tell me—I don’t have a right to know.

  And more importantly, I don’t want to know.

  Once you see the numbers, you begin to understand why. A few years back, investigators found that Wachovia Bank18 had taken $378 billion from Mexican “casas de cambio”—currency exchanges, very often little more than fronts used by cartels to launder money—and put it into U.S. accounts.

  The fees and interest generated to the bank on $378 billion will buy you more than a Big Mac at the local Mickey D’s, I guarantee.

  Weeks turned into months as Veronica sorted through the tentacles of the crime organization. She was learning a lot about the cartel’s finances and its connections with supposedly legitimate businesses and politicians, but none of it was getting her any closer to finding her grandparents. She was considering leaving the bank with evidence she had gathered when one of the cartel underbosses named Heriberto took an interest in her.

  “Heriberto was actually very nice, in a slimy, criminal way,” Veronica told me after taking a long, suggestive pull on her beer. She’d changed into a plain sweatshirt the ranch owner leant her; I’ve never seen a sweatshirt worn so well. “These guys are so used to getting their way that most of them are basically slap and grab apes. He wasn’t. Not that I was actually attracted to him.”

  Dates with Heriberto primarily meant going to parties as eye candy. Heriberto’s main job for the cartel was importing stolen cars from the U.S. and selling them in Mexico, and vice versa. While the car business was definitely a moneymaker, it was more a sideline for the cartel, and Heriberto didn’t have access to the top people Veronica suspected were involved in whatever had happened at Angel Hills. But one afternoon he took her to a party at de Sarcena’s pseudo-Versailles mansion. De Sarcena was debuting some rap music videos he had commissioned, a common pastime among cartel honchos. The songs portrayed him as a tragic Caesar figure, betrayed by a number of underlings; those underlings, no surprise, were next seen on a flatbed truck at the front of the estate, heads on one side, bodies on the other.

  It was a pretty powerful message, even without the music. The entire crowd was forced to pass by the truck; de Sarcena wanted to make sure everyone understood the lesson. Heriberto’s stomach turned. Veronica was unsure if it was because of the general gore or because he had been considering throwing in with some of the men. In any event, he immediately made a beeline fo
r the grass beyond the gravel, where he joined most of the other partygoers emptying their stomachs.

  Veronica, who had seen sights even worse during her undercover days, stood on the gravel alone. At some point, de Sarcena came up to her.

  “These bodies do not bother you?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “They are traitors. One doesn’t waste emotion on traitors. They deserve worse.”

  A beautiful woman good with numbers and English who could withstand such sights—this was a very rare commodity. A few days later, two of de Sarcena’s thugs showed up at the bank and told her that she was to come with them for a job interview. She was naturally suspicious. Sure that her background had been uncovered, she let them lead her outside to a waiting Cadillac Escalade. Veronica fingered her purse as she approached the truck, waiting for the right moment to pull out the pistol she had hidden inside.

  Just as her fingers unsnapped the clasp, the rear window of the SUV rolled down. De Sarcena leaned through it.

  “I am in need of someone in my accounting department,” he said. “Perhaps you will have lunch with me.”

  Veronica reasoned that if the cartel leader had decided to have her killed, he wouldn’t have made the trip himself. The gun stayed in her purse. She went along to lunch, and had what she described as a rather routine job interview. She had memorized all the phony facts she’d fed the bank, which was a good thing—de Sarcena had already raided the personnel department and had a copy of her résumé for reference.

  The next day, she started at the mansion.

  She had been there for roughly three months when I nearly bumped into her in the Salon of Peace. She claims to have guessed what I was up to, but decided not to say anything. No one in the cartel had the guts to steal from the boss, and she was both fascinated and perplexed by my boldness. She also knew that the cash would not be missed—bundles of money were stashed all around the mansion, relics of de Sarcena’s rise and accompanying paranoia.

  “He always wants cash nearby, in case he has to flee,” said Veronica. “He has accounts in a dozen countries, South America, Europe, Russia, Hong Kong, and of course the U.S. The financial side of the operation is as sophisticated as a London bank. But in his head, he’s still the kid who had to scrape to make ends meet when he was going to school.”