by Bill King
“Not a chance, cabrón,” said Chucho, releasing his grip on the man’s collar and letting him drop back to the ground. “Last week, I let you live so that you could talk to your friends and convince them to throw in with me. Instead, you chose to ignore my offer. Now you will die…slowly and painfully.”
Chucho stood back up and looked over at his three companions.
“Leave them where they are, all except this one,” said Chucho, pointing at the dying man he had just spoken to. “Him, we’ll leave with our signature, our calling card, something that will command respect…and fear.”
He pulled out a fat, thick knife with a ten-inch blade and began to do his work.
◆◆◆
“Holy smoke, Jerry, check out the screen for sector eleven-bravo,” said the fresh-faced CBP agent, nearly spilling his coffee onto the desk in front of him. The other two uniformed agents in the operations center looked up from what they were doing.
“Jeez, Ramon, that guy looks like a certified psycho,” said Jerry, a fair-skinned agent whose old-fashioned crewcut made him look like someone right out of the fifties. He was referring to the short, squatty man standing over the bodies of two men sprawled on the ground. “Zoom back and see if we can get a wider look at the scene.”
Ramon did so, revealing a bloody battleground with bodies lying everywhere.
“There’s three more bodies over to the right, next to the cottonwood tree,” he said. “They look pretty dead to me.”
“What, exactly, does pretty dead look like, Ramon?” asked the third agent in the room, who also happened to be the shift supervisor. “If you’re going to work law enforcement, you’re going to have to learn to be a lot more precise in your language…but, yeah, now that you mention it, I agree, they do look pretty dead to me, too.”
The three of them watched as the short man squatted down and pulled up one of the dying men so that they were face to face. For the first time, they were able to get a good look of Chucho’s face.
“Hey, man, check out the nose on that one,” said Ramon, chuckling and shaking his head back and forth. The other two were laughing, too.
Then they watched in disbelief as Chucho began to carve up the dying man, starting with his tongue.
“Now that’s some weird shit,” said the supervisor in a totally deadpan voice. “Even for the border.”
◆◆◆
“Good Lord, what’s that?” asked Graciela, her attention suddenly riveted to the large monitor mounted on the wall. “This looks like one of those gross slasher movies on the Sci-Fi channel.”
Despite being located in a remote part of Mexico, the Rancho received nearly a hundred channels over satellite television from both Europe and the States, in addition to dozens of Mexican stations.
She had just stopped by the Bunker to make sure everything was under control before retiring upstairs to the main house for the evening.
“It looks like a turf war on the other side of the border,” said one of the young women operating the surveillance console. “The whole thing took less than a minute, start to finish. One blink and we would have missed it.”
“Is this video from one of our observation drones?”
“No, Graciela. It is from the Border Patrol. They still have no idea we’re able to tap into their feed.”
They watched intently as a short, stocky man with his back to the camera knelt beside a man lying on the ground. He pulled him up to his face for a few moments before letting him back down again.
“How many bodies?” asked Graciela.
“Looks like four down, with three still standing,” said the young woman. “It appears that having a numerical advantage didn’t work this time. It just goes to show you that …”
What they saw next stopped all conversation dead in its tracks. The stocky little man knelt back down and, with what appeared to be a large Bowie knife, began to disembowel one of the men on the ground. The man’s body twitched spasmodically several times before going limp.
“Good God. He was still alive,” said Graciela, a look of revulsion on her face. “Get a good closeup of that man—the man with the knife. Where is this taking place?”
“It’s about five kilometers north of here, on the American side.”
“Find out who that butcher is, immediately,” said Graciela. “And also find out where he lives. I don’t want somebody like that running wild in our neighborhood. It will attract unwanted attention, which would be bad for business.”
The little man got to his feet and turned his head ever so slightly, revealing his face.
“Oh my God,” she said, almost breathlessly. “It’s Chucho.”
Graciela exhaled softly and walked toward the exit door. She had planned to have an early dinner in the library and watch a movie while she waited for the Venezuelans to return. The shift leader would notify her of their arrival on the hotline, a point-to-point secure telephone cable connection she had installed between all of the underground sites to keep the NSA from listening in.
It promised to be a long night waiting for the Venezuelans and she hated waiting. It was boring, and boring was painful for someone with her hyperactive mind. It was like driving a Ferrari in first gear. The movie would help, as would a bottle of pinot grigio wine. She looked at her watch. It was six o’clock.
The library was her sanctuary. Three months earlier, she had brought an upholstered wing chair from her childhood home in Monterrey and placed it in the library, a heretofore male bastion dominated by dark wood and dark, rich leather. Its flowery silk brocade fabric of soft greens and yellow clashed with the masculine décor in the room, but it was her favorite chair growing up and it gave her comfort. It was also her first stab at introducing décor that acknowledges the other half of the human race.
It had been a long week and she was exhausted. Once the Venezuelans returned from their mission to Cleveland, she planned to take some time off. Perhaps she’d fly out to the Bay Area to visit with old friends from Stanford and spend about a week recharging her batteries.
In the meantime, it was becoming increasingly clear that she would need to do something about Chucho. Having a psychotic serial killer operating in the same vicinity as the Rancho would bring intense interest from American law enforcement, a situation totally incompatible with her current ongoing operation.
◆◆◆
As soon as she arrived at the library, Graciela picked up the canary yellow hotline phone, sending an electronic signal down the line to the Bunker. Anna, the young woman at the Bunker console, answered on the first ring.
“Is Chucho still at the site?” Graciela asked.
“Yes, although it looks like he’s finished cutting open the man.”
“How quickly can we put a drone into position over the site?”
“Three or four minutes,” said the young woman. “Five at the most.”
“Good. Dispatch a drone to the site, Anna, and if he’s still there, follow him,” said Graciela. “If he has already left the area, fly around and see if we can find him.”
She placed the telephone back into its cradle just as she heard the sound of a knock on the library door.
“Come in,” said Graciela, her attention now focused on the double doors leading to the entrance hallway.
One of the Rancho’s security men opened the door from the hallway and held it ajar, in the process partially revealing a leather shoulder holster underneath his leather jacket. A plump woman in her late fifties walked into the room carrying a wooden tray holding Graciela’s dinner. She was dressed in a loose-fitting gray uniform dress with a white apron, the same as the rest of the women on the household staff wore.
“Thank you, Maria,” said Graciela, motioning toward the black marble topped coffee table. “Please, set it over there on the table. I’m planning to watch a movie tonight, so let Ramon know I don’t want to be disturbed.”
Ramon was the armed security guard stationed outside the library’s door. One thing for sure about
Graciela. She learned from her mistakes and Chucho walking unmolested into the hacienda was a mistake that would never, ever be repeated.
Maria closed the door softly behind her as she left the library.
Twenty minutes later, the hotline phone rang. Graciela picked up the handset with her left hand while reaching for the television’s remote with her right. She put the movie on pause.
“Yes, Anna.”
“No luck finding the little butcher man,” said Anna, one of the young console operators in the Bunker. “We had the drone on station within four minutes, but he and his companions were nowhere to be found. The dead bodies are still there, though.”
“Well, let’s leave them for the Americans to find. Bring the drone home.”
“Yes, Graciela.”
“Any news on the Venezuelans?”
“Nothing yet. This entire radio silence requirement makes things difficult to manage.”
“Well, that’s the whole idea,” said Graciela. “To see if we can pull off a major attack without leaving any trace. Nothing. Not for the FBI to find, not for the NSA. Nothing. Like ghosts who never existed.”
◆◆◆
The message from one of the security outposts came shortly after ten o’clock that night.
“They’re here,” it said simply. The message was sent using Wickr, a self-destructing message app for iPhone that offers military-grade encryption of text, picture, audio and video messages. The app also allows the sender to determine who can read messages, as well as where and for how long, an important capability for their line of work.
“Roger,” read the text reply from the Bunker. The operator on duty was a big fan of old American war movies. He had dreams of making motion pictures someday but, for now, he had to settle for the smuggling business because the pay was so good.
The hotline in the library rang. Graciela, who had dozed off, picked it up expectantly.
“The Venezuelans are three minutes out,” said Anna, the console operator. “The reception team is already above ground, waiting for them.”
“I’ll be down in five minutes.”
◆◆◆
As soon as the service elevator came to a halt at the rotunda level, the heavy metal door slid open and a dog-tired Mateo Calderón stepped out, followed by two women and two men. They all looked disheveled, having spent the past two days driving from Cleveland, a distance of sixteen hundred miles.
They had ridden in two separate vehicles the first day, spending the night at a rural motel in Arkansas, just west of Memphis on Interstate 40. They were back on the road again by six o’clock the following morning, consolidating into one vehicle for the long, tedious drive to the Mexican border.
“How was your trip?” asked Graciela. “You look terrible.”
“The trip going up to Cleveland was much better than the trip back,” said Calderón, wearily sliding his backpack off his shoulder and setting it on the floor beside him. “My back is killing me. In the future, we should limit the drives to no more than six hundred miles a day on the return trip. Maybe even five hundred. Mistakes happen when people get tired.”
“Next time, we’re going to experiment with using small airplanes, in and out of remote rural airfields,” said Graciela, smiling. “For what it’s worth, my back hurts just thinking about that drive. Anyway, are you or your people hungry, or would you rather just get some sleep and eat in the morning?”
Calderón looked over at his team, who were shaking their heads slowly back and forth. They looked like characters in one of those zombie movies and appeared to have only one thing in mind. Sleep.
“It looks like we’ll pass on dinner,” he said, smiling wearily.
“Any problems with the logistical arrangements?”
“None,” he replied. “You did well. Our contacts were right where you said they would be, when you said they would be. I would have liked to have gotten the bomb inside the Federal Reserve Bank, but that would have taken a lot more planning time than we had available to us. Still, the message was sent, loud and clear.”
He mentioned nothing about the worthless plans from he had received from his mentor, Umberto, and his academic colleagues.
“Now the real excitement begins,” he said, a cryptic smile breaking out on his face. “We’ll grow this thing exponentially, like a pandemic virus of bloodcurdling violence.”
◆◆◆
Chapter 14
FOUR DAYS HAD PASSED since the Venezuelans had returned from Cleveland. The Frenchman, through one of his contacts in Marseilles, had arranged for a heretofore unknown offshoot of al Qaeda to publicly claim responsibility for the Federal Reserve bombing.
A major reason no one had ever heard of the group—Al Saif, or the Sword—is that it did not, in fact, even exist. Al Qaeda was oddly silent, which should have been a dead giveaway to authorities, but it wasn’t.
Within a matter of hours, a gaggle of self-proclaimed experts were climbing all over each other to be on television, expertly educating the rest of the country on the history and goals of this fictitious new terrorist group. Much like meteorologists, political pundits never have to worry about being wrong because nobody ever remembers what they said in the first place.
By all appearances, U.S. law enforcement had no idea that M-28 had been involved in the incident. Fósforo preferred it that way, at least for the time being. He didn’t want to expose his sanctuary in Venezuela and suddenly have the Americans hunting for him there. Better to fly under the American radar for a while. There would be time later to announce the involvement of M28 to the entire world. Just not now.
The logistics support group that Graciela and the Frenchman had put together in Cleveland, as well as along the route there and back, simply evaporated into thin air. Set up to operate as independent cells, none of them knew the identity any of the others, so security was easier to manage. An acquaintance of Graciela from her student days in California, a former community college teacher named Jacob Renfroe, was the on-scene controller who acted as the go-between between Fósforo and the various Cleveland support cells.
His bloated body was found floating in the Cuyahoga River three days after the bombing. Fósforo, in a spur of the moment decision, had decided to make sure the door leading back to both him and the Rancho had been permanently closed.
It was just past nine in the morning and Graciela and The Frenchman were sitting in the library waiting when the call from the security gate came. She reached over and picked up the telephone handset.
“They have arrived,” announced the voice on the other end of the line. “We just let the two vehicles pass through.” The perimeter security gate was three kilometers down a winding, hard-packed gravel road from the main house.
“They should be pulling up to the front of the house in about three minutes,” said Gabriela to the Frenchman, setting the phone back down on the end table. She stood up and glanced at her wristwatch. “Shall we go out onto the front porch and greet them?”
By the time they stepped through the front door and outside onto the porch, they could already see a plume of dust being kicked up into the air by the two oncoming vehicles that were still a couple hundred yards away. A minute later, the two black SUVs came to a stop in front of where Graciela and The Frenchman were standing. The passenger door of the lead vehicle swung open and Mateo Calderón stepped out. He stretched his arms before walking over and shaking hands with The Frenchman and Graciela.
“Hola, Mateo. Welcome back. It’s good to see you again,” said The Frenchman, embracing the terrorist, whom he always addressed by his given name, rather than by his nickname, Fósforo. He spoke in Spanish, one of five languages he spoke with varying degrees of fluency.
“I am well, Francés,” he replied in Spanish. Francés in Spanish means Frenchman. “I have brought the people you asked for.”
The other passengers in the two SUVs piled out of the vehicles and walked back around to the rear to retrieve their luggage. There were eight of th
em this time—two four-man teams. As with the previous Venezuelan team, their equipment and supplies preceded them and were waiting for them in the same underground storage room. The group was escorted through the house to the basement by two of Graciela’s men. Once there, they would take the elevator down to the underground labyrinth.
“They’re all experienced, right?” the Frenchman asked. “Nobody is on their first mission, I hope?”
“Don’t worry, Francés, they are all battle-tested,” said Calderón, removing two cigars from his jacket and offering one to the Frenchman. “All but one took part in the Valéncia police station attack last month. This was a good opportunity to get them out of the country for a while, at least until things calm down back home.”
“What about the one who did not take part?’ Graciela asked. They were still standing on the front porch, while the others were being escorted down to the underground facility.
“She was otherwise occupied in Maracaibo,” said Calderón, lighting a Cuban cigar and blowing the smoke to his left, away from Graciela and the Frenchman. “Perhaps you remember the kidnapping of two opposition party leaders last month?”
“Yes, I remember reading something about that,” she said. “Things didn’t turn out well for them, as I recall.”
“No, once we received the ransom money, the plan was to turn them loose down by the docks. Instead, Isabela killed them both.”
The Frenchman, who was walking down the front hall toward the library, stopped suddenly in his tracks. He looked Calderón square in the eye, an ominous tone to his voice.
“So, she’s a freelancer?” he asked, accusingly. He did not look pleased.
“No, she made an on-the-spot judgement and, in my opinion, the correct one,” said Calderón. “She overheard them speaking in hushed voices about one of my paid assets, a judge in Maracaibo. They knew about his links to M-28 and said they had proof, secured in a safe in their lawyer’s office.”