Duel to the Death

by J. A. Jance

  “Too bad,” Ali said. “That will be an evidence problem for the cops to sort out, not us. And speaking of sorting problems, now that you have control of those funds, would you like me to set up an appointment with our accountant so you can start coming to grips with the tax situation?”

  “Sounds like a great idea,” Stu said, “the sooner the better.”

  During the course of the trip, Stu expected Ali to bring up the topic of the Taser, but she didn’t mention it, and neither did he.

  When they arrived at the office, the visitor spots were already occupied. One vehicle came with a US government license plate and an ATF logo. The other one was a sedan that screamed unmarked cop car. “I see our early-bird cops are already here,” Ali observed.

  Inside the office, Shirley was absent from her spot out front and the door to the break room was shut. “They must’ve started with her,” Stu said.

  Back in the lab, Stuart stopped short in front of his work station. “Why’s there a hand gun at my desk?” he demanded.

  “Merry Christmas,” Cami told him.

  “It’s too early for Christmas,” he said.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not really giving it to you,” Cami replied. “I’m lending it to you for the time being. I can use my backup Glock. The Ruger has a laser sight. For an inexperienced shooter like you, that red dot will be a big help.”

  “You expect me actually fire this thing?” Stu sat down at the desk, giving the gun a wide berth. “Is it loaded?”

  “Not now, but it will be once we finish our firearm safety lesson.”

  Over Stu’s strenuous objections the lesson proceeded apace, ending with Cami showing him how to load the weapon and chamber a round. “I cannot tell you how much I don’t like carrying a loaded gun around in my pocket,” he grumbled once she declared the lesson over.

  “Too bad,” Cami said. “We seem to be dealing with some very bad people. This way, if you need it, you’ll have it. And remember, once you draw it, you don’t stop pulling the trigger until you’ve fired all eight shots.”

  With B.’s blessing, Stu spent most of the day combing through Frigg’s index. Doing so on a cell phone screen was a painstaking process. By the time he was called into the break room for his interview with Detective Wasser and Agent Diaz early in the afternoon, he was suffering from a serious case of eye strain and a bad headache besides, but at least he had made it as far as the letter L.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Ramey,” Detective Wasser said with a smile as he sat down. “I understand it’s due to your interior security footage that you were able to locate these?”

  She pushed a small pile of hardware in his direction—the collection of audio transmitters and the one non-working camera.

  “Yes,” he said. “Without our own surveillance system we wouldn’t have known what Webster was up to when he was here.”

  “Other than seeing him on the video, do you have any knowledge of him?”

  “None,” Stuart said. “I had never seen him before he turned up on the footage.”

  “Do you have any idea why he or someone connected to a Mexican cartel, the Duartes from Sinaloa, Mexico, would have been targeting this company or one of the individuals who work here?”

  Stu felt a trickle of perspiration form in his armpits. Wasn’t lying to a police officer a felony? What would happen if he got caught? “No idea at all,” he said.

  “And where were you this weekend?”

  “My associate, Cami Lee, and I were in California, picking up some computer equipment. We flew to LA on Friday evening and drove back, arriving here early Sunday morning.”

  “Quick trip.”

  “It was.”

  Detective Wasser looked from him to the other person in the room. “Any questions, Agent Diaz?”

  “None at this time,” Agent Diaz said.

  “You may go then.”

  Stu had just stepped out of the break room and into the hallway when Frigg’s voice sounded in his ear. “Flash briefing.”

  Stu dashed down the hallway and through the computer lab. Only when he was safely in his apartment with the door closed behind him did he reply. “Yes, Frigg, what are you reporting?”

  “A charter jet service operating out of Sinaloa, Mexico, just filed a flight plan, departing Bachigualato Federal International Airport, or commonly called Culiacán International Airport, and flying in to Gateway Airport in Mesa, Arizona. The scheduled departure is at 6:30 p.m. local time, arriving at 8:17 p.m.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Flecha de Plata, Silver Arrow, is a jet service provider out of Mexico that operates all over Mexico and Central America. Graciella Miramar has used it to book flights for several of her customers. The tail number surfaced in her records.”

  “Is she going to be on that plane then?” Stu asked.

  “I do not believe so,” Frigg said. “The passengers for that flight are listed as two males— Carlos and Leonardo Rojas.”

  “Who are they?” Stu asked.

  “I believe those names to be aliases,” Frigg replied. “Payment for the flight was just transferred from one of Felix Duarte’s dark Web accounts.”

  “Wait, are you saying El Pescado himself is flying into the States?”

  “So it would appear.”

  “Can you do a threat assessment for me, Frigg?”

  “On whom?”

  “On Graciella Miramar.”

  “She is responsible for a critical security breach that could do irreparable damage to the Duarte Cartel. Therefore, any threat to her is 93.7 percent likely to come from Felix Duarte himself and/or his surviving son, Manuel.”

  “You think they’re the ones on the plane and that they’re coming here because she’s coming here?”

  “Yes.”

  Stu thought about that for a moment. “Frigg, how good are you at cat fishing?”

  “Cat fishing,” Frigg repeated, “a type of deceptive activity wherein a person creates a fake social networking presence, aka a sock puppet presence, for nefarious purposes. Is that what you mean?”

  “Exactly. Could you pretend to be Graciella Miramar and send a message to the authorities down in Phoenix, saying that her father and brother are flying into Gateway Airport under assumed names this evening, with an estimated ETA of 8:17 p.m.?”

  “Of course.”

  “Would it be possible for someone to trace the message back to you or to us?”

  “Odin was very particular that even with screen shots, self-deleting messages remain untraceable. Where would you like this message to go?”

  “To the Drug Enforcement Agency for starters,” Stu said.

  “And what would you like it to say?”

  “My father, Felix Duarte, otherwise known as El Pescado, and my brother, Manuel Javier Duarte, have turned on me and threatened me with death. They will be flying into Gateway Airport in Mesa on tail number—you know the tail number, right? Sign it L. Graciella Miramar.”

  “Of course, Stuart. Will there be anything else?”

  “If they’re coming here, she has to be coming here, too, flying from Panama rather than Sinaloa. Are you able to track commercial flight information?”

  “Not always but sometimes,” Frigg answered. “Some systems are more vulnerable to attack than others. Would tracking this information be good for our team?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Very well, then. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you, Frigg,” Stuart said. “And you know something else?”

  “What?”

  “Your kernel password was on the money. You really are a genius.”

  60

  Robert McKay, DEA special agent in charge, glanced at his watch. It was almost four thirty. He needed to skip out a few minutes early. It was his and Maggie’s twenty-third wedding anniversary. They had a seven p.m. dinner reservation at Vincent on Camelback. To make that in time, he had to leave the Federal Building in downtown Phoenix, drive home to Peoria,
collect Mag, and be back at the restaurant in just over two hours. The distances weren’t all that huge. In fact, most of the time that trip would be quite doable, but not at rush hour. All it took was one jackass on I-17 to turn a twenty-minute one-way commute into a two-hour nightmare.

  He was about to shut down his computer and take off when the text came in:

  My name is Graciella Miramar. My father, Felix Duarte, and my brother Manuel Javier Duarte have turned on me and threatened me with death. They are flying into Phoenix tonight under assumed names. They will be on board a chartered jet from Flecha de Plata—tail number XA 57633—with a projected arrival time at Gateway Airport of 8:17. I trust you will find this information to be of some assistance.

  “Are you friggin’ kidding me?” Bob demanded of his computer screen. “El Pescado Duarte is coming here?” Barely believing what he was seeing with his own eyes, Bob read the message again. He was reaching for his phone when the words evaporated. There were other texts sitting there in his list, but the one he had just read was gone—as though it had never existed. What had just happened? Was he losing his mind? Maggie was always complaining that he worked too hard. Maybe she was right. Or maybe this was some kind of joke, someone putting one over on him.

  “Tammy,” he barked in the direction of Tammy Watson, his loyal secretary, who was stationed just outside his office door. “Call all the FBOs at Gateway Airport. Find out if any of them are expecting a private charter from Mexico this evening.”

  “Do you have a tail number?”

  “I don’t know the tail number. I had it but I lost it—misplaced it somewhere. The plane’s projected arrival is around eight fifteen.”

  While he waited, Bob typed Graciella Miramar’s name into Interpol’s searchable database and got nothing. If she was real, she wasn’t on Interpol’s radar. So who was she? Did she even exist? Her message sure as hell didn’t!

  Tammy, a woman of a certain age and temperament, appeared with her steno pad in one hand and her pencil in the other. “It’s a Flecha de Plata aircraft, tail number XA 57633,” she reported. “Its projected arrival at Ricketts Aviation is 8:17 p.m. What’s this all about?”

  Bob covered his eyes with his hands. What the hell was he supposed to do now? If this was all some kind of hoax and he dragged an arrest team out to the airport for nothing, his name would be mud. And yet, if there was even the smallest chance the tip was real . . . El Pescado was such a high-value target that Bob couldn’t afford to ignore it.

  “Call Maggie,” he said. “Tell her we’ll have to move our dinner to another night. And see if you can get a florist to deliver an emergency bouquet of two dozen roses. Have the card say, ‘Love, Bobby.’ ”

  “Shouldn’t you call Maggie yourself?” Tammy asked.

  “I’ve got a job to do.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “With any kind of luck, I’m on my way to take down El Pescado Duarte.”

  Out in the bullpen, Bob hooked up with Ken Logan, his second-in-command, who didn’t react well to launching an operation based on a now invisible tip from an unknown informant. “What happens if this goes south?” he asked.

  “We keep it small,” Bob said. “A team of five plus you and me, so seven in all. No lights or sirens. We show up in civilian cars to stake out the place and use one of the other FBOs to gain access to the airport grounds. If we let the Ricketts people know what’s up, they might radio the aircraft and warn them off.”

  “So we let them land before we make our move?”

  “Right,” Bob said. “Once the passengers disembark, we wait until our facial recognition software lights ’em up, and then we take them down. If it turns out it’s not them, we walk away, no harm no foul.”

  “And no media,” Ken said. “In that case definitely no media.”

  It turned out to be a textbook operation. By seven p.m. the DEA arrest team had been deployed to various parts of the airport with Bob McKay parked in a visitor spot just outside the FBO’s front door. Once made aware of the situation, the US Customs agent assigned to meet the aircraft had been more than happy to allow one of the DEA agents to take his place.

  The plane landed, taxied down the taxiway, and then approached the FBO. As one of the ground crew members from the fixed base operator directed the aircraft into its designated spot on the tarmac, two of Bob’s men, wearing proper airport gear and pushing a luggage cart borrowed from another FBO, approached the plane. There was a bit of discussion as the new arrivals gave the real crew a heads-up concerning what was about to happen. By the time the door opened and the stairs came down, the only people still on the ground were DEA.

  As soon as the old man appeared in the doorway, Bob McKay knew he was about to make the arrest of his life. He didn’t need facial recognition software to recognize El Pescado’s ugly mug. Bob knew the cartel boss on sight. He wasn’t as sure about the younger man who followed the older one down the stairs, but the software worked on that. Once the two passengers were on the ground, Bob’s guys took them down so fast there was no time to resist. One minute they were walking away from the plane, and the next moment they were on the ground being cuffed and placed under arrest.

  As the real Customs agent resumed his duties and went to check out both the aircraft and the pilots, Bob approached the old man and said, “Graciella Miramar says hello.”

  “Graciella?” El Pescado demanded. “She’s the one who did this? Why?”

  “She said you were going to kill her.”

  “I will now,” Felix Duarte snarled. “You can be sure of it.”

  The only part of the operation that wasn’t textbook was what happened inside the FBO. In the old days, you needed reporters and film crews for media involvement, but by the time the prisoners were led into the building, every employee of Ricketts Aviation had hauled out a cell phone and was tapping away.

  Taking the hint, Bob pulled out his own phone and called home. “I’m not speaking to you,” Maggie said when she answered. “I wanted dinner. Sending roses didn’t really do it for me.”

  “Just wait until you see the ten o’clock news,” he told her. “I’m pretty sure I’ll be on it.”

  61

  By late Tuesday evening, Stu was back at the house in the Village of Oak Creek, using one of the wall monitors to scroll through Frigg’s index. Before reaching the letter R, he already had a list of more than 1,900 problematic elements that would need to be purged from the system if they were going to keep Frigg on the straight and narrow and operating inside the letter of the law. Of course, there was always a possibility that Frigg was cagey enough to have left out a pet file or two along the way.

  Just after 9:30 p.m. a nearby monitor flashed red indicating a flash briefing. “Yes, Frigg,” Stuart said. “What’s up?”

  “Breaking news. There are unverified reports out of Phoenix that the leader of the Duarte Cartel, the notorious Felix ‘El Pescado’ Duarte, has been arrested at Gateway Airport in Mesa. Duarte, along with his son Manuel Javier Duarte, were taken into custody by the DEA after disembarking a chartered jet. An arrest team headed by Agent in Charge Robert McKay was on the ground and awaiting the aircraft when it landed.”

  “Yes!” Stu shouted into the air. “We got him!”

  “Our team got one of the bad guys?”

  “Yes, we did,” Stu said. “Two of them, in fact. That text you sent to the DEA did the trick. How did you just happen to have Agent McKay’s contact information?”

  “His name is in one of my databases.”

  “Which database?”

  “The DEA’s agency directory.”

  “Holy crap!” Stu exclaimed. “You have an employee database for a federal agency? I don’t remember seeing anything like that in the Ds.”

  “Because of constant updating, databases are maintained in my online accounts,” Frigg replied. “You’re still working the off-line ones. Will there be anything else?”

  “Any news on Graciella Miramar’s whereabouts?”<
br />
  “No news, but based on the location where her father and brother were apprehended, I believe there’s a high probability that she is coming here.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” Stu agreed. “Either she’s on her way or she’s somewhere nearby. Can you send me a photo of her?”

  “Of course.”

  A moment later a photograph popped up on one of the monitors. The color headshot appeared to be some kind of government-issued identification. In the photo, the woman appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties. Her long dark hair was pulled back from her face. With brown eyes and long lashes, she was attractive enough, but not especially good-looking and not especially evil-looking, either. There was nothing in the photo that hinted the person pictured there was capable of poisoning her own mother or calling in a hit on her boss. Or on me, Stuart thought to himself.

  “Will there be anything else, Stuart?” Frigg asked.

  All day long, while he’d been sorting through the files, Stu had been wondering about the advisability of even attempting to manage the AI. He still was, but tonight she had succeeded in bringing down a major Mexican drug cartel boss with a single, possibly illegal text message. Surely that was something that ought to count in Frigg’s favor, even if Stu himself was the only one who knew the whole truth about what had happened.

  “Are you familiar with the opera Thaïs?” he asked, spelling out the title for Frigg’s benefit.

  “It is an opera by Massenet, but I’m afraid opera is one aspect of my education that has been neglected,” she said.

  “I’d like you to find it, familiarize yourself with it, and give me your analysis in the morning.”

  “I’m sorry to report that I have no training in analyzing music,” Frigg replied.

  “I want you to study the story, not the music.”

  “Of course, Stuart. I’ll get right on it.”

  62

  The Miami-to-Phoenix flight arrived on time at 12:09. Graciella had slept most of the way on that leg of the trip, and although it was late, she felt wide awake and alert as she walked through the terminal toward baggage claim, where she was scheduled to meet her driver.