“If I gave you my private number, would you call me if anything unusual happens?” DeLuca said. “I can tell you this much—I’m on a missing person investigation, and Sergeant Escavedo is the one who’s missing. We’re just trying to figure out what she might have been thinking before she disappeared.”
“Good enough,” Fowler said. DeLuca gave him the number for his encrypted SATphone and thanked him for his time.
In Juarez, MacKenzie and Vasquez set up shop, starting in the afternoon, in a bar called Club Zorro, Leon Lev’s most recent acquisition. Nobody there seemed to recognize the name Theresa Davidova. Vasquez made a deal with the bartender and didn’t dicker the price down when the bartender told him the house wanted fifteen dollars off the top from each transaction. MacKenzie, under the name Mila Zukova, was dressed as a “sexual service provider,” in black leather pants and a black lace halter top, accented with a blonde wig and enough makeup to paint a small barn. The customers, who paid Hoolie a hundred dollars up front, were all DEA agents Wes Vogel sent across the Rio Grande Bridge dressed as sailors and soldiers and sex tourists. MacKenzie spent an hour with each of them, talking about sports or the military or who their favorites were on American Idol, which put them at ease when it was time to make the requisite moans and screams for authenticity’s sake, in case anyone was listening through the walls (Vasquez had already checked the room for bugs). She helped one man with his daughter’s algebra homework. Three, she took out into the hall and kissed good-bye, to make it look good in view of the Nana, a round mustachioed woman who sat in a folding chair at the end of the hall, reading a wrestling magazine. Mack’s “satisfied” customers were asked only to talk her up on their way out the door. By late afternoon, once word had gotten around that there was a white girl getting one hundred dollars a throw (twice what the best Mexican whores could command), men other than DEA agents began to arrive, though Vasquez told them Mila had had a very busy day and was finished for the evening. His attention was piqued when a hard-looking mono-browed gringo who spoke broken Spanish with a heavy Slavic accent said he wanted to speak to the white girl. When Hoolie tried to intercede, the man said he wasn’t a customer and pushed his way past, the bartender shooting Hoolie a look to say, “Don’t fuck with this guy.”
Vasquez caught the man at the top of the stairs, tugging on his coat. The man turned and pointed a finger in Hoolie’s face.
“Touch me again, pimp, and I’ll cut your heart out and feed it to my dog,” he said. “What room is she in?”
“That one,” Hoolie said, pointing with his eyes.
MacKenzie was sitting on the edge of the bed when the man entered, Hoolie right behind him. She looked at the stranger.
“I will do anything except Greek,” she said in Russian. “You pay him first.”
“My name is Dushko Lorkovic,” the man said in Russian, but with a Serbian accent. “You’re the girl from Suma?”
Mack nodded.
“My boss asked me to invite you to a party, if you were good-looking enough,” the Serb said. “Tonight. He’ll pay you a thousand dollars. You’d better go if you want to work in this town.”
“I don’t go anywhere without my boyfriend,” Mack said. “Who’s your boss?”
“You know who he is. He owns this place. Why are you here?”
“I want to make adult films. I was told your Leon Lev could help me.”
“Does this idiot know that?”
“He thinks he’s my manager, but once I pay him back, I’m done with him. He’s harmless.”
“Tell him to get lost.”
“Please,” Mack said. “He has friends in Los Angeles who know my sister. I just have to pay him back.”
The Serb looked Hoolie over again.
“You can bring him,” Lorkovic said, “but wear something nice. And tell him to take a bath.”
He gave her a card from his pocket and wrote her name on the back of it, plus one.
“Give this to the men at the gate and they’ll let you in. I heard you were a dancer. Do you still dance?”
“I can dance,” she said.
“Then bring your dancing shoes, Mila,” Lorkovic said.
“What’d he say?” Hoolie said once the Serb had gone. “You were talking about me, weren’t you?”
“We’ve been invited to a party,” Mack said. “And we both speak very highly of you.”
A phone call from DeLuca got Captain Martin, General LeDoux’s aide, to scramble a Predator out of Nellis to overfly Lev’s ranch for a falcon view. MacKenzie and Vasquez studied the photographs thoroughly to get a sense of the layout of the property. The UAV would stay in the air, armed with a Hellfire missile, in case firepower was needed on short notice, with a pair of A-10 “Warthog” gunships circling beyond the horizon to support them. Wes Vogel said he had an INS man who’d been undercover in Juarez for almost a year who he thought he could get into the party, though it was rather short notice—if he could, the man would identify himself by using the name of Hoolie’s childhood pet, a black dog named Oso.
As they expected, they were thoroughly searched at the front gate, asked to walk through a metal detector, and scanned with a hand-held scanner on the other side, as well as patted down, two men in black suits doing the patting while three more with MAC-10 machine pistols stood watch nearby. Hoolie paid the cab driver fifty dollars to wait outside the gate, where he got in line with a number of other cabbies and chauffeurs leaning against their limousines. MacKenzie thought the man who patted her down spent more time than he needed to searching her. She’d found a black silk dress with a slit up the side at a shop on Avenida Juarez. Hoolie was dressed in a charcoal gray suit and black shirt, his hair gelled to perfection.
“Éste no tendrá el culo tan apretado cuando Leon se acaba con él,” the man who frisked MacKenzie said.
“Espero que él ahorre algo para nosotros,” his friend replied.
“What’d they say?” MacKenzie asked as they walked down the long driveway toward the music, the path lit by a string of Chinese paper lanterns.
“The first one said he couldn’t understand what a hot chick like you was doing with a loser like me, and the second one agreed with him,” Hoolie lied.
The grounds were illuminated by colored lights and torches, including a large ring of lights in the middle of the west lawn that served as a helicopter landing pad. A white Sikorsky S-92 was parked at the far end of the lawn, while a Cobra gunship patrolled overhead. Hoolie told MacKenzie the band was playing conjunto/Tejano music, a musical form indigenous to the Rio Grande Valley developed by and for migrant farm workers and as authentic an American art form as the blues.
“My old man is old school—all he likes is mariachi,” Vasquez told MacKenzie. “He thinks conjunto is for the lower classes. This song they’re playing right now is by a group called Las Panteras. They’re maybe the biggest group in the borderland. They sing about the narcotraficantes like they were Robin Hoods, just because guys who make billions of dollars selling drugs occasionally build a soccer field or a library for their communities, like that makes them heroes.”
When they rounded the corner of the house where the band was set up by the pool, Hoolie’s mouth dropped.
“What is it?” MacKenzie asked.
“Remember when I said the band was playing a Las Panteras song?” he said. “That’s them. They’re the band. That’s Las Panteras.”
“Voy a hacer que usted me ame esta noche,” they sang, “abra su corazón…”
Perhaps as many as three hundred people circled the dance floor or milled about the pool with drinks in their hands. There were a dozen food stations forming a semicircle beyond the pool, with ice sculptures and large floral arrangements on the tables, where massive amounts of food were elegantly displayed, and a half dozen well-stocked open bars, one with a fountain pumping margaritas from the mouth of a large ice dolphin. A tin horse-watering trough the size of a small boat was filled with ice and cold beer, with stainless steel pans fu
ll of lime wedges pressed into the ice at either end. Platoons of waiters in white shirts, black pants, and brocaded Mexican vests circled bearing trays of canapés and grilled shrimp and Thai chicken skewers and other hors d’oeuvres or to freshen drinks. A phalanx of bodyguards stood watch as well, young men in Hawaiian shirts and earpieces or walkie-talkies, some of them openly bearing machine guns or wearing shoulder holsters. The male guests at the party were dressed in expensive suits and shirts but no ties, save the occasional string tie or bolo, gold chains still the favored bling accessory, topped by white or black cowboy hats. The women wore chandelier earrings and cocktail dresses of minimal coverage if they wore anything at all—in the pool, a dozen young women cavorted topless. Half of the women at the party were Latina, the other half Anglo, the men about 90 percent Mexican. Vasquez and MacKenzie circulated but didn’t see Theresa Davidova anywhere in the crowd. Josh Truitt had supplied them with a photograph.
“Let’s check in the house,” Vasquez shouted over the music.
Another hundred people filled the mansion. Guests milled about the kitchen or smoked by the fireplace, where the head of an enormous black bull was stuffed and mounted on a plaque above the mantel. Original paintings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera hung on the walls, the furniture Spanish mission style, the couches rich coffee-colored leather, the floor made of Valencia tile and terra cotta. A large rec room three steps down had been converted into a small strip club, where dancers writhed to loud hip-hop music beneath colored lights and strobes and fog machines, some girls giving lap dances that went well beyond any lap dances Vasquez had ever seen before. The bar doubled as a cocaine station where guests could either snort the drug in powdered form or smoke it as crack. A number of other drugs were evidently available as well, an old man serving as a kind of bartender/pharmacist in attendance to assist people with their selections.
Again, Theresa Davidova was nowhere to be found. Hoolie suggested searching upstairs, though a trio of bodyguards at the bottom of the sweeping staircase were stopping anyone from going up. Mack took Hoolie’s arm in hers, moving to the patio, overlooking the pool scene below, Hoolie turning to eye the house for any kind of fire escape or other means of accessing the upper floors.
“A dónde usted piensa ir?” a man in an embroidered red silk shirt asked them. “You look like maybe you’re lost, amigo.” He was young, good-looking, with a mustache and sideburns, his hair combed straight back.
“We’re looking for a friend of ours,” Vasquez said. “A woman named Theresa Davidova. We were supposed to meet her here.”
“I’m looking for a friend, too,” the man said. “My dog, Oso. He’s a Chihuahua but he’s old. He wanders off sometimes.”
“I had a dog named Oso, too,” Vasquez said. “This is my friend Mila.”
“Galiano Diega,” the man in the red shirt said. “How do you like the party? Wes said you’ve never been to one of these before.”
“I was at a frat party in college that made this look like a three-year-old’s Chuck E Cheese party,” Vasquez said.
“The hardcore stuff is happening down by the spa. I think maybe you need a party favor,” Diega said, slipping something heavy into Vasquez’s coat pocket. When he reached in, he felt a small automatic pistol, a .30-caliber Beretta, he guessed, though he didn’t take it out to examine it. “I was here two days ago and managed to stash these,” Diega said. “Would you like some gum? Compliments of Peggy Romano.”
He held out a small box, which he slid open to reveal two pieces of gum, which didn’t look all that appetizing considering that they’d already been chewed. Vasquez took one and MacKenzie the other, recognizing them as suboral nanotransmitters developed by DARPA, each resembling a wad of gum concealing a two-way radio, made entirely of plastics that wouldn’t trigger metal detectors or show up on X-rays. To transmit, you simply spoke normally, and with a little practice, using a minimal ventriloquist technique, agents could speak to each other or to their controllers without moving their lips. To listen, you clenched the device between your teeth, the vibrations transferring sound to the ear along the jawbone. If you got caught, all you had to do was swallow your gum.
“How’s our girl doing?” Vasquez heard DeLuca’s voice ask, as soon as he activated his transmitter.
“Your girl is right here, so don’t talk about me in the third person,” MacKenzie said.
“Nice dress,” DeLuca said. “We’ve got you on UAV cam.”
“It’s the Kevlar push-up bra that creates the effect,” MacKenzie said. “Don’t look down my dress. No sign of Theresa yet, but there are other places to look. What’s going on?”
“Just sitting around the motor home,” DeLuca said. “Vogel’s man will fill you in there.”
“This is big,” Diega told Vasquez and MacKenzie. “Bigger than anybody knew, and we don’t have the numbers to do anything but watch. The big Sikorsky at the end of the lawn belongs to Cipriano Cabrera. The Cobra overhead is flying cover for him.”
“That looked like Mexican Air Force to me,” Vasquez said.
“It is,” Diega said. “I couldn’t believe the people he brought with him. He had the heads of the Fuentes family, Oscar Quintero, Pedro Meraz, Henry Zaragosa, the new head of the Felix family, I don’t know his name—it’s like the who’s who of the Mexican drug lords. Diega Murillo from Colombia. Plus the mayor, a man from the president’s office, a bishop—I never saw anything like it. And they all came here to meet somebody.”
“Who?” Vasquez asked.
“I don’t know, but I heard it’s some new business partner,” Diega said.
“A G5 landed on Lev’s private airstrip about ten minutes ago,” DeLuca said. “Whoever was in it is choppering in now.”
MacKenzie, Vasquez, and Diega watched from the patio as a large black Eurocopter Twinstar landed in the circle of lights on the lawn. As the rotors spun down, a door in the side of the luxury helicopter lowered to the ground. Two bodyguards exited first, followed by a man in a black turtleneck, his hair thinning on top. He had a blonde girl on one arm and a black girl on the other, and he was followed by two more bodyguards, one carrying a pair of briefcases, the other carrying an AK-47. Diega identified the two men walking out to greet the visitor as Cipriano Cabrera and Leon Lev.
“Peggy’s got a face recognition program running right now,” DeLuca said. “We’ll let you know who the new guy is as soon as we learn anything.”
“What’s going on at the spa?” Vasquez asked Diega.
“Spa,” Diega said, “movie studio—take your pick. That’s where Lev makes his films. There’s more money in Internet porn than there is in drugs these days, so the cartels are diversifying.”
“They’re shooting a movie?”
“Something like that,” Diega said. “Just a party flick. Sometimes they get distributed but sometimes he just gives them to his guests as souvenirs. Probably nothing too extreme tonight, considering. No barnyard animals. But you can never tell.”
“Wait here,” Vasquez said to MacKenzie. “I’ll go look for Theresa. You keep an eye on the visitor. Where are they meeting?”
“Upstairs,” Diega said. “In the conference room. I tried to get a bug in there but I couldn’t.”
“If you want me to come with you…” MacKenzie said.
“Wait here,” Vasquez said. “I’ll be right back.”
He made his way around the dance floor and headed for the spa, a collection of single-story buildings roofed in red tile, the walkway lit by flaming torches.
“What am I going to be looking at?” he asked into his transmitter.
“It’s a little hard to tell from bird’s eye, but it looks like about fifty men and maybe twenty or thirty women, out in the open. I can’t say how many more indoors. Be careful. It’s pretty raw.”
“And watch out for the Serb you met earlier,” Peggy Romano added. “Dushko Lorkovic. We pulled his file—he was one of Mladic’s top thugs in Srebrenica, probably killed a couple hundred Croats either
on his own or using the death squad he commanded. And two of the previous owners of the bars that Leon Lev bought who refused to sell.”
“This is confirmed or spec?” Vasquez asked.
“One hundred percent confidence,” Romano said. “There’s an open warrant out on him from the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.”
The spa area was surrounded by an adobe wall, where two men stood guard at a wrought-iron gate. Vasquez walked past them as if he knew what he was doing, and they let him pass, convinced by the authority of his gait. He heard a rustling in the bushes to his left, and a low moaning. Beyond that he came to a hot tub, where a young Latina was having sex with three men, while a fourth man filmed the action. There was a gas-fired pit in the central of the courtyard, and beyond that a large padded mat, something like the wrestling mats Vasquez had competed on in college, where a circle of people had gathered. When Vasquez pushed his way toward the center, he saw a young man engaging with what appeared to be identical triplets, a cameraman circling them. Vasquez realized he probably didn’t have to worry about calling too much attention to himself. Two-thirds of the men and women were naked, but others were clothed and simply observing. Couples groped each other in the darkened corners, on couches and in large easy chairs. There was a lap pool and a large pool house where a full-blown orgy was in progress, perhaps twenty men and fifteen women in various assemblages and combinations, with two cameramen maneuvering through the bodies. Vasquez looked into various rooms and places and stayed only long enough to satisfy himself that Theresa Davidova was not among the participants.
When he returned to the patio, Diega was alone.
“Where’s my partner?” Vasquez asked.
“Lev’s man took her,” Diega said. “I couldn’t stop him. He said he’d be right back.”
“What man?” Vasquez asked. “The Serb?”
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