First, creation of Vergara’s cover had required involving others whom he didn’t know, would never meet and therefore couldn’t trust. It was a twist on real life, wherein he’d graduated from Mexico’s third largest public university, the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, with a degree in accounting. Through Colonel Bravo, he’d acquired a fake diploma and official-looking transcripts from another university in Mexico City, where his photograph and made-up grades resided now in the administration’s files.
The first risk then: whoever helped Bravo create the bogus paperwork, even without knowing Vergara’s true identity, could sell him out to the cartel’s private investigators and start killers sniffing after him along the paper trail.
The next and more imposing problem: Colonel Bravo himself. A scrupulously honest officer, known as El Coro Chico—the Choir Boy—to his peers, Bravo had made enemies within the FMP, and even more inside the FIA, with his investigations of corruption in that sister agency. If anything happened to Bravo, should he be dismissed or even killed, there’d be no one left to verify Sergeant Vergara’s status as an undercover officer, much less to wield his evidence against the enemy in court.
In fact, Vergara realized some prosecutors would be quick to sell him out and put him “on the spot,” as gringos liked to say, if it meant they’d receive a handsome bonus for betraying him.
As for police protection, that would make Vergara laugh if it were not so deadly serious.
From the beginning of his covert work, his targets hadn’t been cartel members themselves. The leaders’ names were known throughout the length and breadth of Mexico, although they seemed to be untouchable. Vergara’s job was more specific: to identify corrupt police, with emphasis upon his group, the FMP, and the FIA, while gathering sufficient evidence to justify dismissal, trial and ultimate imprisonment.
The bottom line: if he should be exposed, every dirty cop in Mexico would want him dead, if only as an act of self-defense.
Scanning the floor below, its four long tables laden with cocaine, great rolls of plastic shrink wrap, strapping tape and incidental gear, Vergara didn’t have to guess how much tonight’s turnout was worth in blood money. He knew the product’s price down to the peso for an uncut gram, could multiply the grams and kilos in his head without a calculator, filing weekly coded spreadsheets with his bosses that detailed outlay for product, various expenses—bribes included—and predict what their profit should be upon delivery in the United States.
The numbers fascinated him. The second set of books he kept in secret, for the day when he’d emerge to testify, was yet another mortal risk.
Vergara flagged the other rifleman who paced his section of the catwalk, nodded at a coffee urn nearby and started over to it, yawning for effect. Back turned, he heard a window smash but missed the blur of a grenade in flight across the busy room.
There was no missing the explosion, though. It ripped into the wall below his metal walkway and, before Vergara knew it, he was plummeting through space toward painful impact on the concrete floor.
Another blast immediately followed, and a third, projectiles fired from somewhere in the dusk outside. Then automatic weapons started firing and Vergara noted that he’d lost his AK-101 while tumbling from on high, which left him unarmed.
With no recourse, he bolted for the nearest exit, running toward the parking lot reserved for workers who had vehicles. He’d barely reached his cover car—an old Volkswagen Clásico, the Jetta model in disguise—when a strong hand closed on his collar, slammed him against the car then spun him around.
A cold-eyed gringo stood before him, rifle slung over one shoulder, a massive pistol aimed between Vergara’s eyes. “Speak English?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
“Tell me your job in there.” A nod toward the cutting plant, flames now licking from its lower windows.
“Bookkeeper,” Vergara said.
“Good enough. Come with me.”
Calle los Olivos
Captain Prieto thought the damned, relentless telephone was driving him crazy. He’d meant to pass the evening in his high-rise condominium with a high-end prostitue who relieved his tensions once a week and wisely failed to charge him for the privilege. But no. He had been forced to send her packing when panicked calls alerted him to bloody chaos in the streets.
Murders occurred most nights in Ciudad Juárez, but this was clearly different. So far, two paramilitary strikes had razed facilities maintained by both the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels, each of their furious godfathers calling to ask Prieto what in hell was going on and how he planned to stop it.
The fact that he had no idea, could only put them off with hollow promises, made matters that much worse.
Prieto cherished his off-duty time. His pockets bulging with payoffs from the cartels, he had picked the condominium in the upscale Las Misiones district as a getaway from crime and his role in perpetuating it. Despite its name, the neighborhood was short on missions, leaning toward resort hotels, but it was generally free of random violence, its streets patrolled by city officers and state police.
But none of that was helping now.
Prieto had received his first call from Kuno Carillo, raving that one of his drug warehouses had been razed, a number of his soldiers and other employees killed, by one or more attackers who had left a note tucked into one dead gunman’s gaping mouth. Its terse message: “Give him back.”
Just that, and nothing more. Prieto didn’t have a clue to the identity of whoever was missing, much less who had either kidnapped or assassinated him, where it was done or when.
The second call surprised him even more. It was Rodolfo Garza on the line, reporting an almost identical assault on one of his cocaine cutting plants. More cartel soldiers and scut workers killed, others missing and likely scattered to the winds, but one corpse had another note protruding from its mouth.
Same message—“Give him back”—with no elaboration to facilitate that task.
While listening to Garza shout demands, Prieto had a thought. He knew of one man missing in Juárez, although he’d been transported from El Paso in a snatch gone wrong, bungled by two imbeciles from his own department. Still...
Granted that snatching any member of the American Justice Department was bound to have some repercussions, Prieto couldn’t reconcile this evening’s mayhem with any official effort to retrieve a hapless victim kidnapped by mistake. He’d have expected diplomatic inquiries from Washington, delivered to Mexico’s attorney general or even the president if the victim rated such attention. FBI agents might open an investigation, either from the US Embassy or the consulate in Ciudad Juárez, but they had no authority in Mexico, except where graciously invited by the FIA or FMP.
What agency would dare assault cartel facilities without a lawful warrant? What group, aside from military units, even had the wherewithal to pull that off?
No matter. If the kidnapping he’d ordered was the cause of bloodshed in the city’s streets, pushing the two rival cartels toward all-out war, Captain Prieto had to know—and to start covering his tracks, before more shit hit the fan and spattered him.
His third call of the night, outgoing, found Lieutenant Silvio Bernal at home. Prieto could envision his subordinate, surprised and almost snapping to attention in his bachelor apartment on Rincón de San Marcos. On recognizing his commander’s voice, Bernal asked Prieto, “How may I help you, Captain?”
“I need to see the sergeants,” Prieto said. Before his lieutenant could ask which sergeants, he added, “You know the ones I mean.”
Realization hit Bernal. “Yes, sir. Is there some difficulty?”
“You’ve not heard the news, then?” Prieto asked.
“News? No, sir.”
How typically oblivious. It was a wonder the lieutenant had survived this long.
“We’re in deep shit, Bernal,” Prieto snapped. �
��To keep our heads above it, certain steps may be required. Are you prepared for that?”
A split second of silence followed, likely the lieutenant gulping silently, then he replied, “Yes, sir! I am awaiting your command.”
“You have my order. Find the sergeants. Set up a meeting within the hour. Tell them nothing to excite them, but state that their presence is required in Colonia Azteca. Choose a safe place. When you’ve done that, call me back with the address then meet me there.”
“Yes, Captain. It shall be done.”
“See that it is,” Prieto said. And then, when Bernal failed to cut the link, he added, “What are you waiting for?”
He hung up on Bernal’s apology, hoping the man had wits enough to pull it off without unconsciously alerting Esteban Allende or Pedro Solana to a trap. The sergeants, put together, barely had one normal brain between them, but they were streetwise to a point, and both were killers. Prieto kept track of off-the-books assignments, rating the performance of subordinates and saving up sufficient evidence to blackmail them if they began to lose their nerve.
“I can survive this,” he said aloud.
It would be no easy task, but it was doable. As for the sergeants who had caused all this with their stupidity, Prieto knew their days were numbered. His lieutenant could go either way, depending how well he stepped up to deal with their predicament. Bernal’s choice was to help Prieto and thereby himself, extending his complicity, or else die with Allende and Solana.
The next problem, Prieto realized, would be convincing two hostile cartels that neither was responsible for the attacks they’d borne today, without confessing guilt himself and being placed in a position of lifelong indebtedness.
And then, most challenging of all, he’d have to solve the problem of El Psicópata, something that Prieto should have done years earlier but had avoided for his personal convenience.
All that, and to prevail, he had to manage without a slip-up, leaving no evidence traceable to him, without finding himself on the receiving end of death.
“No problem,” he advised himself.
The only thing Prieto needed was a minor miracle.
Chapter Five
Bulevar Miguel de la Madrid
Bolan’s RAV4 was parked a hundred yards or so outside the southwest city limits, by a brackish desert lake labeled Laguna intertermitente on his map of Ciudad Juárez. The name translated as “intermittent lagoon.” Clearly a euphemism, since lagoons were coastal features, bodies of salt water separated from the larger ocean by barrier islands or reefs, but he got the intermittent part all right, as this one depended on rainfall over the Chihuahuan desert.
It was full dark now, a pale moon overhead, while city lights washed out most of the stars above. Bolan had all the light required to see his captive in the shotgun seat, staring out through the SUV’s windshield, eyes locked on the faux lagoon.
Their drive to the desert lake had passed in stony silence. Now Bolan said, “Here’s where we stand, bookkeeper. You work for a drug cartel, which makes you fair game in my book. To stay alive, answer my questions honestly. If I suspect you’re lying, it’s lights out.”
The prisoner half turned to look at him, one side of his lean face cast in shadow. “Before we start, I have a question of my own.”
Bolan considered that, replied, “One question, within reason.”
“You’re obviously an americano.”
“That isn’t a question.”
“I must know if you’re an hombre de la ley or something else.”
Bolan could translate “lawman” in a dozen languages. Now, cautiously, he answered with a question of his own. “What if I am?”
“It makes a difference, Señor. Your methods are...unorthodox. That tells me you are not with DEA or FBI, and since your CIA collaborates in trafficking, I doubt they would countenance attacking the cartels.”
“You’ve thought a lot about this, for a drug lord’s numbers cruncher.”
Bolan’s prisoner chewed that one over for a moment then replied, “Because, like you, I have another mission to perform.”
“Which is?”
“How do I know that I can trust you?”
Bolan nearly laughed at that. Instead he answered back, “Trust this. If you can’t help me do my job, you’re worthless. That means dead.”
Another silent moment passed before the hostage said, “I also am an hombre de la ley.”
“So, not a bookkeeper.”
“In fact, I’m both—a certified accountant and a sergeant with la Policía Federal Ministerial.”
Bolan frowned, saying, “The last I heard, the FMP focused primarily on government corruption, leaving cartels to the FIA.”
“You are correct, but since the two are indivisible in practice, my commander—who I will not name—assigned me to work undercover with the Sinaloans and report which officers at any level I can prove to be corrupt. So far, the list I keep up here—” he tapped his temple with an index finger “—runs to some one hundred and fifty names.”
“And I suppose you can support all that with something other than your word?”
“I dare not carry what you’d call ID. My badge, credentials and a copy of my orders are inside a safe deposit box at Banamex—that’s Banco Nacional de México—under my true name.”
“And that is...?”
A longer hesitation. “Miguel Vergara. Yours?”
“You wouldn’t recognize it,” Bolan told him. “There are no public records of my existence.”
“Yet here you are.”
“And someplace else tomorrow. The bottom line is that I don’t go after cops.”
“No matter what they’ve done?” the man who might be named Vergara asked.
“Meaning I don’t kill them. If some evidence comes up along the way and they do time, they’ve earned it. Terrorists and mobsters on the other hand...”
“A scrupulous assassin,” Vergara said, not quite smiling.
“I’m their executioner. The predators condemn themselves.”
“Well, if you’re not concerned with corrupt police, including murderers in uniform, I fear I cannot help you.”
“Not so fast. I’m looking for a kidnap victim taken yesterday out of El Paso. He’s a lawman and a longtime friend.”
“Kidnapping—what we call secuestro—is an everyday affair in Mexico, I’m sad to say. Abduction of a gringo lawman from across the border, on the other hand, is an extreme anomaly. One of the cartels might assassinate him if he’s caused them any difficulty, but to kidnap him, unless it were for ransom...”
“There’s been no demand.”
“That is a complication. Sometimes los secuestros lose their nerve or have a falling-out among themselves and kill a prisoner before they scatter. Sometimes there is killing, even when a ransom has been paid in full.”
All bad news. “What about these other murders that we hear reported in the States, women and girls, like that. Serial killers, most accounts suggest.”
Vergara nodded, grim-faced. “Those crimes are the shame of Ciudad Juárez and all Chihuahua. But as you said, typically the killers prey on females. Still...”
“Go on,” Bolan urged. “Where I’m starting from, I’ll look at anything.”
“No one believes that all the killings in Juárez have been committed by a single man or group of men—a cult of Satanists, whatever. But there have been rumors that one man who kills for pleasure also makes a living from it, serving the cartels as they require.”
“How’s that work?” Bolan asked.
“If it’s true, the narcotrafficantes and associated mafiosos, chulos—pimps—whoever, may not wish to be associated with certain murders. When it’s feasible and suits their purposes, the stories say there is a man they can rely on to eliminate specific individuals and make the crimes resemble ot
her homicidios committed for his own pleasure.”
“A lunatic on contract,” Bolan said, knowing he wouldn’t be the first and likely not the last to fill a niche within the sordid world of syndicated crime.
“Exactamente,” Vergara said. “On the street, this one is called El Piscópata.”
“And someone knows his name, where I can find him.”
“No doubt, if they must reach out to him at need.”
It was a long shot, but Bolan was willing to try anything while keeping up his pressure on the local drug cartels. In fact, if Vergara was right about this psycho working part-time for the underworld, he might need to present the narcotrafficantes with a more specific message on his next time out.
“Okay,” Bolan said. “Tell me everything you know about this psychopath.”
Real de las Haciendas
Dean Jeffers didn’t care for meetings in hotels. They could be transformed into death traps so damned easily, particularly when the people he was meeting were the warlords of two rival drug cartels, plus one federal cop as rotten as the day was long.
Still, when he had no choice...
He’d been directed to the Hotel Parlamento, a posh resort with all of the amenities, five-star, its ownership untraceable to either the Juárez Cartel or Sinaloa’s interlopers. Did that prove the joint was clean? Hell, no—simply that whoever was running it behind the scenes had sense enough to stay there and avoid putting his name on any legal paperwork.
Jeffers was forty-one years old, still trim and fit, and close to wrapping up his fourteenth year of service with the DEA. He had applied straight out of Yale and he’d enlisted two weeks after graduating with the Class of ’99. Since then he’d been posted to Thailand, where an antiquated monarchy still claimed to run the show, then on to Turkey, Nicaragua and now Mexico, after a rough tour in Afghanistan, where he had honed his skill at dealing with the overlords of heroin.
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