Against All Enemies mm-1

by Tom Clancy

  “It’s okay; you’re going to feel fine,” said Somoza, sliding a pair of earphones over Campbell’s head.

  Rojas donned his own pair, as did Somoza, who then produced a bullet from the drawer and loaded the gun. He moved Campbell to a position away from the desk and held up the pistol point-blank to Campbell’s chest.

  “That close? Are you nuts?” asked Campbell.

  “Okay, listen, this is the way it goes. You take a deep breath and hold it. You count one, two, three, and I shoot. There it is again. One, two, three, BOOM! Okay?” Somoza had raised his voice so they could hear him despite the earphones.

  Campbell swallowed and glanced over at Rojas, his eyes pleading.

  “Look at me,” said Somoza. “Take a deep breath. Ready? One, two—”

  BOOM!

  Somoza fired after two, and that was how he always did it with new people who would tense up too much during the moment they expected to hear the boom. He fired early, when the participant was still relaxed.

  Campbell hunched over slightly and tugged off his earphones, as they all did. “Wow,” he said and gasped. “You tricked me! But it’s okay. I didn’t feel anything, maybe a little pressure.”

  Somoza unbuttoned the trench coat and tugged out Campbell’s shirt to prove to him that he’d not been injured. Then he dug into the coat and produced the flattened piece of lead. “Here you go. A souvenir!”

  Campbell took the piece of lead and smiled. “This is pretty amazing.”

  And then he held his mouth, raced over to the wastebasket, and retched.

  At this, Somoza threw back his head and cackled until his ribs probably hurt.

  Later, over coffee, Rojas spoke alone with his old friend, while Campbell was given a more in-depth tour of the facility by Lucille. Rojas shared his feelings about his son. Somoza talked about his own sons, who were growing up too fast as well and were destined to work in the business with him.

  “Our boys are a lot alike,” said Rojas. “Children of privilege. How do we keep them …I don’t know …normal?”

  “This is difficult in a crazy world. We want to protect them, but there is nothing you and I can do except teach them to make the right choices. I want my sons to wear bulletproof suits. Yes, I can protect them from the bullets but not from all the bullshit life is going to hand them.”

  Rojas nodded. “You are a wise man, my friend.”

  “And good-looking, too!”

  They laughed.

  But then Rojas sobered. “Now, Ballesteros has been having some problems again, and I want you to take care of him and his people. You send me the bill. Whatever they need.”

  “Of course. A pleasure doing business, as always. And I want to get some measurements of your friend, Señor Campbell. We’re going to make him a trench coat like yours — for being such a good sport.”

  “I’m sure he’ll really appreciate that.”

  “And one more thing, Jorge.” Now it was Somoza’s turn to grow serious, his voice burred with tension. “I have been thinking about this for a long time. We are both at the stage in our life where we no longer need to associate with the trade. My business is legitimate and booming now. Of course I will help our friend Ballesteros, but for me, this has to be the last deal, the last connection. I’m very concerned. The mess in Puerto Rico has us all concerned. I want you to understand that I still work for you, but I must cut connections here, and honestly, Jorge, I think you should pull out. Turn it over to someone else. It’s time. As you said, your boy is moving on. So should you.”

  Rojas thought for a long moment. Somoza was indeed speaking to him as a dear friend, and he was talking sense — but his words were born of fear, and Rojas could see that fear etched in the man’s eyes.

  “My friend, you should never be scared of anyone. People will try to intimidate you, but no one is better than anyone else. You need to be a fighter in this life.”

  “Yes, Jorge, yes. But a man must be wise enough to pick his battles. We are not young anymore. Let the boys fight this battle, not us. We have far too much to lose.”

  Rojas got to his feet. “I’ll think about it. You are a good friend, and I know what you are saying.”

  22 TAKING THE FALL

  Zúñiga Ranch House

  Juárez, Mexico

  At about eleven A.M. the next morning, Moore, Zúñiga, and six more cartel members assembled in Zúñiga’s four-car garage with the doors cracked half open. Moore delivered the drug shipment he’d seized and watched as Zúñiga’s men inspected the bricks and did not find anything suspicious — notably, the tiny injection holes made by Moore and Towers as they’d planted the GPS beacons. The Sinaloa Cartel was powerful but not quite as sophisticated as the Juárez, who Moore believed would have X-rayed the bricks and possibly found the trackers.

  As Moore had hoped, Zúñiga seemed very pleased with the “gift” and most assuredly had plans in motion to move the stuff before nightfall. He nodded over the bricks, then faced Moore. “Your enemy is my enemy, it seems.”

  “When one cartel becomes too powerful, it is everyone’s enemy.”

  “I agree.”

  “All right. I would like to continue to help. Let me take a few of your men. We’ll all go kidnap Rojas’s son. Like I told you, we’re in this together,” said Moore.

  “Mr. Howard, maybe I am crazy enough to believe you now. Maybe I’m going to say okay.”

  “It’ll take most of the day to fly down there in one of your planes, so maybe we should leave now?”

  “Maybe I haven’t made up my mind.”

  At this Moore snapped, and he probably shouldn’t have, but he hadn’t gotten much sleep. He raised his voice to a near shout. “Señor Zúñiga, what else do you need? One hundred and fifty in cash, a huge drug shipment stolen from Rojas? What else? My bosses are growing impatient.”

  Torres, who’d been standing nearby, waddled up and raised his own voice. “Do not speak to Señor Zúñiga that way! I will twist off your head!”

  Moore glared at the man, then faced Zúñiga. “I’m tired of playing games. I’ve made a good offer. Let’s get this done.”

  Zúñiga gave Moore one final appraising look, then reached out his hand. “I want you to kill Rojas.”

  Two hours later, Moore, Torres, and Fitzpatrick, along with a pilot and copilot, were packed into a twin-prop Piper PA-31 Navajo on a southeast track toward San Cristóbal de las Casas. The weather was clear, the views spectacular, the company miserable, because Torres got airsick and had twice vomited into his little white sack. If it had been a long night, it was going to be an even longer day, and Moore looked across the cabin at Fitzpatrick, who rolled his eyes over the fat man’s inability to handle air travel. Torres apparently had a massive but delicate stomach, and Fitzpatrick had chided him before they’d boarded the plane about them being unable to lift off because of the “added cargo.” Torres’s revenge for that remark was potent, and currently in the form of a foul-smelling bag of vomit seated between his legs.

  Moore closed his eyes and tried to steal an hour or two of sleep, allowing the hum of the props to draw him deeper into unconsciousness …

  The lights on the oil platform winked out, and suddenly Carmichael cried, “We’ve been spotted!”

  Moore shook hard and sat forward in the airplane seat.

  Torres looked back at him. “Bad dream?”

  “Yes, and you were in it.”

  The fat man was about to say something, then put his hand to his mouth.

  Border Tunnel Construction Site

  Mexicali, Mexico

  High school student Rueben Everson had thought that working for the Juárez Cartel and smuggling drugs across the border was at first a pretty scary proposition. But then they had shown him all the money he could make, and over time, he’d grown used to the whole operation, even carrying large shipments while wearing a mask of utter calm. He’d been clever, all right, not making the stupid mistakes that had cost some of the other mules their freedom.
He’d always been smooth when talking to the officers, and he never carried statues or cards of all the saints those fools prayed to in order to keep them safe during a run. La Santa Muerte was the most popular among some thugs, who even built shrines to her. Making the skeletal image of the Virgin of Guadalupe seem like some savior when she looked like pure evil was just kind of stupid to him. Then there was Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, and one fool had even tried to stuff thirty pounds of pot inside a statue of Jude and walk across the border with it. What a jackass. One lesser-known saint was Ramón Nonato. The legend said that he had his mouth padlocked shut to prevent him from recruiting new followers. The thugs liked this idea, and prayed to him so that others would keep silent about their crimes.

  Some of Rueben’s colleagues relied heavily on other kinds of good-luck charms: sentimental jewelry, watches, pendants, rabbits’ feet, and other types of talismans, as well as Scarface movie posters. The one lucky charm that made Rueben laugh was the yellow bird Tweety from the Looney Tunes cartoons. At first he hadn’t understood why so many mules and other drug traffickers found the bird so popular, but then he’d realized that Tweety never gets caught by Sylvester the cat, so the little bird had become a hero among thugs. The irony, of course, was that they called themselves “mules” while a bird was their mascot.

  At the moment, though, no manner of magic or religion could save Rueben. He’d been caught by the FBI, had met a kid who’d had his toes chopped off over a bad run, and was now forced to work for the government if he was going to avoid jail time. The easy-money runs to save up for college were gone forever. Agent Ansara had been very clear about that. They’d injected him with a GPS tracker and had turned his cell phone into a listening device via the Bluetooth earpiece. He was a dog on a leash.

  Earlier in the day, he’d been called by his cartel contact and told to report to Mexicali, where a car was being loaded for him, and while he was standing there, inside the warehouse, a middle-aged man with glasses and hair covered in dust walked over to him and asked in Spanish, “Are you the new one?”

  “I guess so. But I’m not new. I just haven’t worked over here before. They usually have me pick it up someplace else. What are you guys doing in here? Digging another tunnel?”

  “That’s none of your business, young man.”

  Rueben thrust his hands into his pockets. “Whatever.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “You’re still in high school, aren’t you?”

  “Are you my new boss?”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  Rueben frowned. “Why do you care?”

  “How are your grades?”

  Rueben snorted. “Are you serious?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “They’re pretty good. Mostly A’s and B’s.”

  “Then you need to stop doing this. No more. You will either die or get arrested, and your life will be over. Do you understand me?”

  Rueben’s eyes burned. I understand you more than you know, old man. But it’s too fucking late for me. “I’m going to go to college, and this is how I’ll pay for my tuition. As soon as I have enough money, I will quit.”

  “They all say the same thing. I need money for this and for that, but next week I will quit.”

  “I just want to go now and get this over with.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Rueben.”

  The man proffered his hand, and Rueben reluctantly took it. “I’m Pedro Romero. I hope I do not see you here again. Okay?”

  “Wish I could help you out, but you will see me again. It’s just the way it is.”

  “You think about what I told you.”

  Rueben shrugged and turned as one of the loaders marched up to him and said, “Ready to go.”

  “Think about it,” Romero urged him, sounding very much like Rueben’s father.

  I wish I had, old man. I wish I had.

  Rueben drove the car across the border and surrendered the car to a team of Ansara’s men without incident. They dropped him off at a rental-car office, and the man there gave him a ride home in the airport bus. A black Escalade was parked across the street from his house, and Rueben climbed into the backseat once the bus had left his street. FBI agent Ansara was at the wheel.

  “Good work today, Rueben.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “The old man was right, wasn’t he?”

  “Yeah, okay, he was. I should’ve quit before you busted me, but now I’m fucked.”

  “No, you did great. You got me some good pics and audio of that man. Now we can ID him and see what’s going on at that warehouse.”

  Rueben closed his eyes. He wanted to cry. He could barely sleep now. He dreamed they would come for him during the night, dressed as skeletons armed with knives for carving up his heart. He watched his parents attend his funeral, and while they were leaving, a carload of sicarios raced by and unleashed machine-gun fire on the crowd, killing his parents, both shot in the head and gazing skyward to whisper, “You were such a good boy. What happened to you?”

  Delicias Police Station

  Juárez, Mexico

  As a CIA agent, Gloria Vega had worked in more than twenty-six countries, performing missions as brief as eight hours and as long as sixteen months. She’d witnessed her share of bloodshed and corruption, and had been prepared to witness more of the same when she’d joined JTF Juárez and realized she was being sent into a city known as the murder capital of the world. However, what she hadn’t expected was that the bloodshed would occur between members of her own force.

  The shouting had reached her desk only five minutes ago, and they’d all rushed to put on their armor, grab their rifles, and get outside. Inspector Alberto Gómez had pulled on a balaclava to conceal his own identity and stood beside her. Each end of the street had been cordoned off by Federal Police vehicles, and Vega estimated that a crowd of at least two hundred officers in black uniforms and balaclavas had gathered and were shouting and screaming to “Bring out the pig!”

  And then, before Vega, Gómez, or anyone else could stop them, a half-dozen officers rushed inside the station, and the crowd roared once again. This time Vega heard a name: Lopez, Lopez, Lopez!

  She knew that name, all right, and her blood felt as though it’d turned to ice. Lopez was one of Gómez’s colleagues, an inspector with nearly as many years on the force. Vega’s own investigation had concluded that Lopez was clean and trying to do the right thing; he was the man Alberto Gómez should have been. On the flip side, Gómez’s phones had been tapped, he’d been followed by two other spotters that JTF leader Towers had provided to Vega, and she had gathered enough evidence to present to Federal Police authorities to bring down Gómez for corruption and indisputable ties to the Juárez Drug Cartel. Towers, however, wasn’t ready to pull the trigger on that operation, because Gómez’s arrest would tip off the cartel. All the dominoes needed to be knocked over simultaneously.

  And so with time to spare, Gómez had turned the situation around before Vega could react. As she whirled toward the entrance door, six men dragged Lopez out of the building, one of them gripping the old man by his shock of gray hair. Once Lopez’s clean-shaven face was spotted by the crowd, the screaming grew louder, and some hollered, “Kill the pig!” The officers surrounded Lopez, and at least two reared back and began pummeling the old man.

  “They’re teaching him a lesson before they arrest him,” shouted Gómez in her ear. “He’s been taking money from the cartels and serving as an informant for them. Children have died because of him. And now he needs to pay.”

  You fucking hypocrite is what Vega wanted to say. “They can’t do this. They can’t beat him up!”

  The group broke into a chant: “Lopez is the devil and must go down! Lopez is the devil …”

  The chant continued, and Vega flinched as another officer with biceps the size of her hips struck a hard blow to Lopez’s cheek.
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  That was it. Gloria Vega, former Army Intelligence officer and CIA operative, now embedded with the Mexican Federal Police, had seen enough.

  She raised her gun into the air and fired off a salvo, the rat-tat-tat silencing the crowd. Before she knew what was happening, a hand wrapped around her neck, other hands had wrenched the gun from her grip, and still more hands were dragging her back into the police station. She screamed and tried to writhe out of their grip, but it was no use. They dragged her inside, and there she was immediately released as Gómez passed in front of her and tugged off his balaclava. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “It’s not right. What evidence do they have? They can’t beat up the old man like that!”

  “He’s in bed with scum. So he is scum!”

  She bit her tongue. Oh, God, how she bit her tongue.

  “I told you I would try to keep you alive,” Gómez added. “But you make that very hard when you do something like this! Now, listen to me. Lopez isn’t the only one. The other commanders are dirty as well. Today we are going to clean up this house, and you’re either going to help or I’m going to put you in a jail cell to keep you safe.”

  She wrenched off her own mask as the shouting outside seemed to reach a fever pitch. “You’d better lock me up for now. I can’t watch this anymore.”

  Vega rubbed the corners of her eyes, the frustration burning so deeply that she thought she might vomit. How much more could she take? How long would they have to wait before she could slap cuffs on Gómez and be done with it? He was the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing who needed to swallow a bullet. She imagined herself shooting him right there, cutting off one vein of corruption but realizing that the network was so complex that his death wouldn’t make a difference. No difference at all. Her heart began to sink.

  “Gloria, come with me,” he ordered.

  She followed him into his small office, where he closed the door so they were out of earshot of the other inspectors and officers. “I know how you feel,” he said.