Rancho Buena Fortuna

by Bill King

  Calhoun nodded somberly and simply said, “Yes, Sir.” He enjoyed doing these internal investigations and he was good at them. He disliked the Bureau’s random cowboys, whom he felt abused their FBI badge to live out their childhood fantasies. “Who’s the subject?”

  “A special agent in the Houston office by the name of Pete Cortez. He was involved in a fatal altercation this past weekend while on a fishing trip on the Rio Grande. Two Mexican nationals were killed.”

  “What happened? Somebody try to steal his bait bucket?” His weak attempt at a joke was met with awkward silence.

  Hennessy smiled grimly and slid a manila folder across the highly polished table towards Calhoun. The file was about a half-inch thick.

  “This ought to give you enough to get started,” said Hennessy, a fleshy New Yorker who had spent his entire career prosecuting white collar criminals. “Two teenagers, one fifteen and the other eighteen. The eighteen-year old got his throat slit with an old OSS dagger that Cortez was carrying concealed, while the fifteen-year old was shot twice, once in the stomach and once in the shoulder. A third man—parrot beak nose, five-six, five-seven, probably in his thirties—ran off once the shooting started. No further information on him at this time.”

  “What about Cortez? Any history of similar behavior?”

  “The SAC in Houston speaks highly of him, but this is not his first incident involving the use of deadly force. In fact, it’s the third in less than two years. I’ll let Personnel know that you’ll be by to look at his file. You’ll find the two other incidents this past year or so in which he killed people with the very same knife...but both were officially adjudged to be in the line of duty.”

  “Anything else I should know?” he asked, sensing Hennessey might not agree with those previous assessments.

  “Just understand that the Bureau takes a public-relations hit when incidents like this one occur,” said Hennessy simply. His manner and tone signaled to Calhoun that the meeting was over. “So, keep me posted, Reggie. I’d like to receive updates every two or three days. Sooner, if you come across anything significant. Be thorough, but don’t drag this thing out forever. The quicker we can wrap this up, the better for the Bureau, but be thorough.”

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 6

  GRACIELA ESCORTED LÓPEZ NAVARRO and The Frenchman into a stark, subterranean room with concrete walls that looked like something straight out of one of those end-of-days movies.

  A bank of sixteen interconnected flat screen televisions dominated one wall of the room. In front of the video display was a long wooden table—fifteen feet long, to be exact—where two female operators sat, facing the big wall. The room’s soft green lighting made it easier for them to monitor the screens.

  Each woman also had her own desktop computer with a dual-screen monitor, where she was responsible for eight sectors. Sixteen sectors in total between the two of them. Their job was to monitor the access routes into, and out of, the sprawling compound.

  “Gentlemen, welcome to The Bunker,” said Graciela, with a note of pride she made no attempt to hide. “This is the nerve center of Rancho Buena Fortuna, our eyes and ears. From here, we can monitor activity along the border for a hundred miles in each direction.”

  The large security room was buried thirty feet below ground, beneath a steel storage shed that housed farm and ranch equipment. However, there was no access to the Bunker from the shed, whose real purpose was to hide the facility’s antennas from overhead detection. From the ground and from the air, it looked like an ordinary equipment storage shed.

  The only way to get in and out of the facility was by way of a fifty-yard long tunnel that connected it to the main house on Rancho Buena Fortuna. The Bunker tunnel was completely separate from the main tunnel that went to the other underground facilities, almost all of which were on the American side of the border.

  What really set the Bunker apart from other private security monitoring rooms, though, were the two operators who sat at the square table about six feet behind the women. Both were men in their early twenties who had grown up playing video games, and each one piloted a weaponized drone. It was their job to take care of any problems the observation team detected.

  Neither of the two young men had proven suitable to work at the long horizontal desk because neither of them had been able to maintain their focus for more than about ten minutes at a time. They repeatedly failed the unannounced practical exercises that Graciela liked to spring on them every few days. For that reason, she decided to bring in women to monitor the security screens. They had far more patience and displayed a greater attention to detail.

  What the men could do, though, was shoot and blow up things. That, they could do just fine.

  “Very impressive electronics display,” the Frenchman replied. “But I can see the same thing in any Best Buy store in the world. What makes this place so special?”

  Graciela nodded to a young woman with her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  “Alicia, put sectors one through twelve up on the front monitors.”

  For the next five minutes, Graciela proceeded to give the two men a rundown on the Bunker operation, especially its use of cameras and drones to extend its eyes well beyond the immediate geographical confines of the Rancho.

  “Carlos, fly your drone down river about three miles and find us a target for a little demonstration,” she said to one of the two young men sitting in front of the monitors that controlled the drone flights. He was munching on an apple he had brought from breakfast. “Oh…and throw the video up on the big screen so we can all watch.”

  As the drone followed the course of the river, Graciela called everyone’s attention to the quality of the picture.

  “The cameras on our drones are top of the line, state of the art,” she said with a hint of pride in her voice. “I developed them while I was in graduate school at Stanford.”

  “That was Gracie’s first patent,” said López Navarro, his face beaming with pride. After all, he and his wife had practically raised her, as if she had been their own daughter. “I hired the best patent attorneys in California to handle the process.”

  The Frenchman nodded and smiled.

  “There,” Graciela said abruptly, pointing to the big screen at what looked like a small pile of trash on the American side of the river. “Zoom in on that closely.”

  Carlos zoomed in the camera until a cluster of four bottles, most likely beer bottles, came into focus.

  “Can you make out the brand of beer?” the Frenchman joked.

  “Sí, señor,” said Carlos, who zoomed the camera in even closer and adjusted the focus to the point where it was crisp enough to read the labels. “It’s Dos Equis. Notice the red XX?”

  The Frenchman smiled approvingly, nodding his head slowly up and down a couple of times.

  “Now for some fun, Carlos,” said Gracie, smiling and laughing softly as she rested her hand on his right shoulder. “See the bottle that is second from the right?”

  “Sí, Gracie.”

  “Shoot it…but only it.”

  One second later, the bottle exploded into pieces, with the largest piece landing about five feet behind the other three bottles.

  “We’re still working to refine the accuracy and range of the gun but, as you can see, it’s already pretty accurate.”

  “Very impressive,” said The Frenchman, smiling broadly, his teeth reflecting a lifetime of poor dental care. “This will come in handy if things go sideways, but what I need is stealth, though. I need to make sure my people can cross into the United States undetected and then travel, once again undetected, to any location in the country… and then get back out of the States… “

  “Undetected,” said Graciela, finishing his sentence for him. She nodded toward one of the women.

  “Verónica, put sector nineteen on the big screen, please.”

  The scene with the pile of beer bottles along the Rio Grande was immediately replaced by the sc
ene of an indoor command center configured similarly to the one they themselves were standing in. The sign on the wall in the background read UNITED STATES CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION LAREDO SECTOR. The Homeland Security logo was to its left.

  “We were recently able to tap into the Border Patrol’s video feed at their Laredo operations center,” said Graciela, her arms folded across her chest as she stood to the side of the big screen mounted on the wall, the pride in her voice unmistakable.

  She looked more like a young suburban soccer mom than a woman conspiring with two of the most dangerous criminals on the planet.

  “That allows us to watch, in real time, whatever they are watching anywhere in the Laredo sector’s area of operations,” she continued. “We intend to further exploit the technology in search of other opportunities… an audio feed being first on priority list.”

  “Gracie tells me that the American desire for—how did you phrase it, my dear?—interagency interoperability means it’s highly likely that we will be able to take this security breach and broaden it to give us almost carte blanche access to all of Homeland Security.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, Tío Memo,” she said. Tio was Spanish for Uncle and Memo is a nickname for Guillermo. “But I do feel confident in saying that the Laredo Border Patrol will not be the full extent of what we can eventually tap into.”

  “How long do you think it will be before The Bunker is fully operational?” asked The Frenchman.

  “We’ll probably still be working out some kinks over the next week or two, but it’s pretty much ready now,” she replied, looking over to El Indio.

  “Excellent,” said López Navarro, flicking a cigar ash onto the cement floor. “I think now we should show our new friend the staging and crossing area.”

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 7

  THE HAUNTINGLY PURE VOICE of Johnny Rodriguez singing “Riding my Thumb to Mexico” blared through the vehicle’s audio system as Pete Cortez guided his F-150 pickup truck down US-59 toward Laredo.

  It was still springtime and he was driving with the windows rolled down. The rush of cool air—cool being a relative term in Texas—felt good and helped to clear his head. He had cranked up the volume so that he could hear the music over the rhythmic sound of tires thumping on the road while the outside air rushed into the cab of the pickup.

  Cortez had just driven past the city limits sign for the town of Goliad, the halfway mark in his three hundred-mile trip from Houston. Two minutes later, he wheeled his truck into one of the empty diagonal parking spaces in front of the Empresario Restaurant, which was located on the town square, directly across from the County Courthouse. He planned to grab a quick lunch before continuing on for the final two hours of his trip.

  From the exterior, the restaurant didn’t look like much but, heck, this was small town Texas and hundred-year old buildings in old downtowns don’t hold up forever in the hot Texas sun. The harsh weather ultimately takes its toll, even on stucco and brick.

  Jack Gonçalves, his boss at the Houston JTTF, had called his counterpart in San Antonio and offered to loan Cortez to him for a week or so in hopes of locating this mysterious Chucho fellow. Laredo was a satellite office of the FBI’s San Antonio field office. They both understood that, in the Bureau’s revolving game of Whack A Mole, Cortez was this week’s mole.

  Cortez made his way through the front door of the restaurant and stopped, stretching his legs and arching his lower back to get his circulation flowing again. He found a small square table along the far-left wall and sat down. A particularly aggressive red wasp, the kind that rain holy hell down on Texas for most of the year, followed him through the doorway. It quickly lost interest in him, though, alighting instead on the young lawyer seated three tables away.

  The interior décor was a distinct improvement over the exterior. The room was narrow and deep, with a row of square tables along the two side walls. A third row ran down the middle, thus leaving room for both customers and wait staff to get around. Each table was covered by a green and white checkered plastic tablecloth.

  A napkin dispenser and a condiment rack holding salt and pepper, ketchup and hot sauce anchored down the tablecloth from the wind gusts created by the overhead fans. For some reason he had never figured out, customers always had to specifically ask for mustard, even in a hamburger joint like this.

  The table arrangement was virtually identical to the thousands of mom and pop restaurants that dot small town America. What brought the customers back, though, was not the fabulous décor. It was the fact that it served good old Texas comfort food, the kind that made your arteries congeal after a lifetime of being thusly comforted.

  Cortez felt the buzzing of his cell phone, which he typically carried in the breast pocket of his shirt. It was Gonçalves.

  “Yeah, boss,” he replied, smiling at the waitress and mouthing the words, thank you, as she brought him a menu and a glass of ice water.

  “How’s the drive?”

  “Hey, three hundred miles through south Texas,” said Cortez, glancing down at the plastic menu that had a small red splotch of dried pico de gallo salsa that had been dripped on it by one of the previous customers to use that menu. “Life just doesn’t get much better than that. I stopped off in Goliad for a quick lunch and should be in Laredo by three.”

  The restaurant was now full, as a couple of old men in bib overalls sauntered through the front door and claimed the last open table, the one next to the restrooms. Cortez never could understand why people would ever accept a table just a couple of feet from the bathroom, no matter how hungry they were. It was one of many quirks he inherited from his father.

  “The reason I called is to let you know Bureau’s Investigation Division in Washington has opened a shooting incident review into your dust up last weekend,” said Gonçalves.

  “I guess I would have been surprised if they hadn’t.”

  “According to the SAC, the agent spearheading the actual investigation is a guy named Reggie Calhoun. I’ve never run across him. Have you?”

  “Nope, me neither, but my hunch is I’ll be having the pleasure of meeting him in the not too distant future.”

  “He’s due to arrive here in Houston tomorrow to talk to me and White. I assume he’ll fly down to Laredo soon afterward to see the shooting site and talk to folks, including you.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier if I had just stayed in Houston?”

  “Yeah, but the SAC and I don’t want to make this too convenient for them,” said Goncalves. “I’m sure this a-hole Calhoun wants to wrap this thing up as quickly, and with as little effort, as possible. And, as it has been pointed out from above to the SAC, this is your third fatality incident in the past two years. The old man likes you, Pete, but he’s not optimistic that this one will turn out well for you.”

  “I’m painfully aware of that and I really do appreciate everything you and the SAC are doing to guard my backside,” said Cortez, swatting away an annoying gnat that had taken a shine to the glistening sweat on his face below his eyes. “Assuming this would not be a massive violation of protocol, could you do me a favor and let me know your impressions after you speak with him in person?”

  “Sure thing. Enjoy your lunch and drive safely. That stretch of highway is a deathtrap.”

  “I’ll text you when I get to Laredo,” he said before ending the call and tucking the phone back in his shirt pocket.

  The waitress, a young woman whose nametag identified her as Jennifer, appeared at his table and took his order, after which he resumed reading that day’s Wall Street Journal on his iPhone.

  When Jennifer returned a few minutes later with his burger and fries, he looked up and noticed the young lawyer a few tables away standing and waving a rolled-up stack of papers in the air, trying to swat the red wasp before the vicious predator could get him first. When the young lawyer finally nailed the pesky critter, the customers in the restaurant let out a chorus of cheers.<
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  “At a boy, Ralph,” Jennifer shouted, pumping her fist in the air. “Chalk another one up for mankind.”

  Fifteen minutes later, after finishing the last of his meal, Cortez stood up, left a five-dollar tip on the table and walked over to the cash register by the door. He paid his bill with a credit card and walked outside to his pickup truck. He glanced down at his watch. Twelve-thirty. Good, he thought. I should be in Laredo by three at the latest

  ◆◆◆

  The FBI’s Laredo resident agency is located on Shiloh Drive, just off Interstate 35, not far at all, as the crow flies, from the Rio Grande and the border with Mexico.

  It was a quarter to three when Cortez walked into Bobby Janak’s office. He had changed out of his new suit before taking off on the three-hundred-mile drive to Laredo and was now dressed in blue jeans, boots and a light green long-sleeve cotton shirt. A sweat stained maroon Texas A&M ball cap was tucked into the back pocket of his jeans.

  “Hey, Pete, long time no see,” said Janak, picking up the remote control and lowering the volume on the television set that was sitting on the credenza beside his desk. In contrast to Cortez, he was wearing a starched white long-sleeve shirt and dark blue tie. Because of the warm weather, his suit jacket was hanging on a hook in the corner of his office and his shirt sleeves were rolled up. “What’s it been…one day? Two?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t expect to be back down here so quickly, either, but the old man wanted to get me out of Houston for a while, so he banished me to the outer reaches of the planet,” he said, plopping his weary frame down into the grey metal government chair beside Janak’s desk. He pointed to a can of Coke that was setting on the desk, right next to the computer monitor. “Got another one of those sodas?”