Between Two Scorpions

by Jim Geraghty

  After two minutes of carefully looking around the room, Jaguar concluded they were not being watched—or at least surreptitiously. Men were still stealing glances at Esmerelda.

  “Americans … There’s a big difference if they found a crazy man or a corpse,” he concluded.

  “Even if he’s not dead, our friends said he was acting crazier each time they went out there,” she said. Esmerelda didn’t want to be naïve or optimistic, but she felt Santa Muerte wouldn’t let misfortune wreck their lives so suddenly. “You said the old man hadn’t generated anything useful since the first sample.”

  Jaguar nodded. Once it became clear that not even Neuse could construct a functional fear drug that could be dispersed as an aerosol, they settled for the next best thing, a powder that when added to ingested liquid that could trigger a panic attack. After the last visit, a month ago, Jaguar determined he didn’t need to see Neuse anymore. The plan had been to leave him with just enough food and water to sustain him to the next visit; he would have to earn more by generating results.

  “Testing the panic syrup on the man who created it was probably a mistake,” Jaguar conceded.

  He drummed his fingers against the table. Could this be from Akoman’s work already? On the plane, he had seen the news coverage of America on high alert for terror attacks.

  No, Jaguar thought, it was not a coincidence.

  The drumming fingers made a fist.

  “We have to assume those Americans have Neuse, and that he’s told them everything.”

  “He’s a crazy old man, no one will listen to his stories of being abducted by the devil and his demons.” Esmerelda cooed, attempting to calm Jaguar’s building frustration. He calmed slightly, put his hand on hers, and wondered if she understood which particular kind of frustration was bedeviling him the most at that moment.

  “Countries are run by crazy old men,” Jaguar shook his head. “They may believe him, they may not, but for now we must proceed as if everything has been compromised. I can’t go back to the condo for a while. Stay away from your home, too. We’ll use the little place in Tepito.” It was a barely furnished dump, but it would suffice for carnal relief, he concluded. “Tell Las Calaveras I want them to watch the neighborhood around my place in Xochimilco, look for any Americans snooping around. And tell them to get rid of the skull makeup.”

  “They’ll never give that up,” Esmerelda said skeptically.

  “Theatrical flair is going to catch up to them someday,” he said. She laughed, and he watched her tongue in her mouth.

  “Considering your favorite mask, that’s ironic,” she teased.

  Jaguar put a hand on the gym bag by his feet. Damn it all, he thought. He was supposed to be having acrobatic sex with Esmerelda in his bedroom right now. He had covered his tracks, used every precaution, and none of it mattered. Now he would have to watch his back, wondering what American intelligence knew.

  CHAPTER 28

  XOCHIMILCO

  MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 24

  Alec and Katrina had not been to Mexico City in more than a decade; their last trip had been passing through to a wedding of friends. The intervening years had not been kind to the sprawling mega-metropolis, now the largest city in North America.

  One in four Mexico City residents reported being the victim of a violent crime in the past year—a mugging, home invasion, assault, or threat. Less than eight percent had gone to the police, believing that the police would do nothing, or victimize them again. Some locals believed that even those abominable statistics understated the scope of the problem; somehow the official numbers recorded only sixty or so kidnappings within Mexico City in the past year while the prosecutor’s office claimed to have investigated about eighty during the same time period. The rate of “express kidnappings” had increased dramatically; a cab driver or other seemingly benign figure would brandish a weapon and make the victim go to an ATM and withdraw the maximum allowed. These “kidnappings” usually lasted only a few hours; some managed to escape their captors and flee. Particularly shrewd thieves kidnapped a victim close to midnight, so that they could force the victim to withdraw the daily maximum from the ATM just before midnight, and then a second time again after a new day had begun. The few victims who did report their crimes to the police usually said the investigative process treated them as if they were the criminals.

  Overall, the crime rating for Mexico City was “critical” with the State Department’s travel warning cheerfully informing visitors, “beheadings, lynching, torture, and other gruesome displays of violence as well as high numbers of forced disappearances have become routine occurrences in various parts of the country, including the Mexico City metropolitan area.” The list of recommended security precautions included, “Replace two lug nuts on each wheel with specially keyed bolts that locks or can only be removed with a special attachment to the tire iron.”

  “They will steal your tires,” Alec shook his head.

  Katrina shrugged. “In the Soviet Union, people stole windshield wipers for the rubber.”

  Ward couldn’t stifle his laughter at the State Department warning. “‘Although Mexico employs strict gun-control laws, criminals are usually armed with handguns,’” he read aloud. “Gee, it’s almost like those gun control laws don’t work, huh?”

  Before getting on the Dulles-to-Mexico-City flight, Katrina had assigned Dee to look into the banking and other electronic records of any staff of the targeted building, hoping to find an indication that someone took bribes. Dee said she found something almost as good, flirty texts between the married doorman and his neighbor’s teenage daughter. Katrina printed out the texts, along with the birth record of the girl next door and the cell phone number of the doorman’s wife.

  Despite being given no details about why they were in Mexico, the Agency’s Mexico City station had left Katrina, Ward, and Alec an armored SUV that would stand out wherever it went—pretty much useless for surveillance, but handy if they ran into trouble. Ward took it and was instructed to try to find an inconspicuous parking place that would allow him to arrive on scene quickly. Katrina hadn’t trusted the red-bearded walking armory to handle covert surveillance. Better to have him entering explosively at the first whisper of “Hey, Kool-Aid Man!” She left first, and told Alec to follow, ten minutes behind, on a different route. She didn’t mention that she could blend into the crowd like a local and get ignored, while her gringo husband could not.

  Despite the urban menaces plaguing much of Mexico City, Coapa was a nice neighborhood. Xochimilco had a large park not far away, full of relative greenery and a canal that must have once been scenic but was now rather polluted. The map indicated the park included something labeled the “Island of the Dolls.”

  “The guides don’t do it justice, nobody’s tried to rob me yet,” Alec muttered to Ward through his lapel microphone as he walked through Coapa around the dinner hour. The street had mostly two and three-story buildings, some small internet cafes, bars, corner markets, a farmacia, and the universally ubiquitous 7-Eleven.

  Vendors began packing up their wares from tarp-covered stalls set up on the sidewalk. Alec understood perhaps every third word he heard; like many Americans, he was convinced he “more or less” spoke Spanish because could order off the menu, understand the words that were phonetically similar to English, listened to Shakira, and occasionally stopped to ogle an attractive anchor on Univision while clicking through the channels.

  “Hey, Alec,” Ward’s voice snickered in Alec’s earpiece. “I looked up what the name of this neighborhood means. In Nahuatl, Coapa translates to ‘nest of snakes.’”

  “Haven’t we had enough snakes?” he groaned. “Why did it have to be—” he paused as he saw someone step out of an alley up ahead, looking his way as if she expected him, “—skulls.”

  She was stunning, remarkably tall for a Mexican woman. The skin around her eyes was painted black, as was the tip of her nose. Her lips, which would ha
ve looked puffy and kissable with standard red lipstick, were painted white with black lines, looking like teeth; the “teeth” extended to the sides of her mouth. Beyond the skull makeup, she was striking and almost beautiful. Some of it was her hair, curled up in an almost old-fashioned bob. Alec couldn’t quite make out the words on her neck tattoo—or for that matter, her arms; both were covered in tattoos. She wore a white t-shirt with Santa Muerte on it, tight enough to demonstrate she had curves to go with her menace.

  The Agency’s Mexico City station warned that one of the reasons this neighborhood was relatively quiet was the rule of a gang, “Las Calaveras”—which translated to “The Skulls.” A mostly-female gang was pretty rare, and it was theorized that they were an offshoot of a larger gang with a similar taste in war masks, “Los Craneos.” As the Craneos had expanded their smuggling and distribution operations well beyond the city, Las Calaveras had stepped in to take over the day-to-day management of protection rackets, keeping rival gangs away from the turf, and other criminal operations. It was hard to tell where the graffiti ended and the public murals began, and the implied threat for crossing the gang was not subtle.

  Alec fully expected to be ambushed as he approached the address, a luxury condo complex, but the skull-painted woman just watched him. A lookout, he concluded.

  Alec tried to look like he wasn’t rushing as he walked the last few blocks to the lobby of El Grande, a relatively new four-story luxury condominium with terraces and balconies surrounding a green courtyard. He used his standard counter-surveillance techniques, used an indirect route, and saw no sign of the skull-faced woman following him. The door buzzed upon Alec’s approach. Katrina was already waiting for him, standing before a nervous-looking doorman, a mustached sheepdog of a man.

  “This is Manuel, who’s going to let us into the unit,” Katrina nodded, adding something in Spanish. Alec understood “gracious,” “kind,” “appreciation,” and “easier alternative than having a Federal Police unit kicking down the door.”

  “Señor is out, and has been out for several days,” the nervous Manuel objected. “I should really call my supervisor—”

  “Manuel,” Katrina offered a grin. “We’ve been over this. If your wife saw those texts …”

  Manuel looked sheepish. “Just do whatever you have to do quickly.”

  “Let’s take the stairs,” Katrina nodded.

  CHAPTER 29

  “You were followed,” Katrina said quietly, not quite inquiring.

  “I noticed her and lost her,” Alec said.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” she sighed. As soon as the station report indicated a female gang was active in the area, Katrina suspected that Alec and Ward would underestimate them. “Remember that old German counterterrorism team advice: ‘Shoot the women first.’ Any woman in a male-dominated group like a terror cell or gang has to work ten times as hard to be accepted—tougher, smarter, more ruthless—”

  “I suspect that applies to women on counterterrorism teams, too.”

  “Obviously,” she said dryly.

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Alec and Katrina heard in their earpieces as they stepped into the hallway. They shared a glance; Katrina repressed the urge to respond, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

  “Dee, please tell me hubby isn’t visiting and demonstrating hydrostatic calisthenics,” Alec said softly into his microphone.

  “I’m in, I’m in!” Dee boasted. “This guy had some of the best private computer security firewalls I’ve ever seen. Mr. Juan, tear down this wall!”

  Alec and Katrina tried to act normal as Dee continued her excited cheers of victory in their ears, as Manuel jingled the keys on his chain and prepared to open the door to the fourth-floor condominium.

  “How does a folder labeled ‘Identidades’ sound? Oh, man. Jackpot. Bingo. Jacko. Bingpot! Juan Lopez, Juan Garcia, Juan Sanchez—this guy has a lot of aliases. Got photos. Dang it, he’s handsome.”

  Manuel the doorman opened the door to the condo. Alec and Katrina casually kept their hands on their not-so-concealed pistols and entered. On a desk in the corner, the resident’s computer hard drive under the desk was already alive and humming, evidence of Dee’s ongoing hacking intrusion.

  “Señor?” Manuel called out. No one answered. There was no indication anyone had been in the condo for some time. He nodded and let them in. Alec put a twenty-dollar bill in Manuel’s hand.

  “Muchas gracias, señor,” Alec said. Katrina shot him a disapproving look; she had just finished threatening the man. He shrugged. “I never know how much to tip in a foreign country.”

  It took only a few moments of searching for Katrina to find postcards postmarked from Ashgabat, Turkmenistan in one of the desk drawers. She found several photos of the man he surmised was Juan Whatever-His-Real-Surname-Was, and a strikingly beautiful woman. She looked on the back for a date.

  What threw Alec was how normal the place seemed. He perused the bookshelf—Alec always believed you could learn a lot from a person from the books they read and cared to keep—and found a terrific collection of works on the Aztec, Mayan, and Inca empires in Spanish and English. The artwork on the walls was similarly expensive and spectacular.

  “I have art envy,” Katrina sighed. They progressed to the master bedroom.

  They had been searching for barely two minutes when the condominium’s landline phone rang. Alec and Katrina looked at each other.

  “Dee, can you trace the call coming to this unit’s landline right now?” Katrina asked aloud. She grunted an affirmative reply. Katrina nodded to Alec and he picked it up.

  “Hola!”

  “Why are Americans walking around my home?” Jaguar asked in English. His voice purred, a little irritated that he was suffering a home invasion, but rather pleased that his home alarm system had alerted him, and his countermeasures were already underway. Alec put his hand over the bottom of the phone.

  “Silent alarm,” he cringed and whispered to Katrina.

  “Cupping your hand over the phone does not impede my home surveillance equipment,” lectured Jaguar.

  “Oh, yeah?” Alec looked around the room for anything like a lens and raised a middle finger to the mirror. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “That’s rude, American,” Jaguar answered.

  “You’re the Juan I’ve been looking for,” Alec said, glancing around, determined to spot the hidden camera. “How about you and I meet, amigo, and we’ll talk about why you kidnapped Francis Neuse, how you poisoned the director, who you’re working for, and you and I go from there like men? Mano a mano.’”

  Katrina rolled her eyes as Alec tried to bait Juan’s machismo. She suspected the phrase “mano a mano” probably represented most of Alec’s Spanish vocabulary.

  Jaguar laughed. “They call me the Jaguar, not the rat. You seem quite proud to have found one of my homes. I assure you, American, you will never find me, but some night, when you least expect it, I will find you.”

  “Buddy, you’re bragging to the wrong guy,” Alec shot back. “Last week I found J. D. Salinger, D. B. Cooper, and Amelia Earhart. Together.”

  “I’m going to find you, and I’m going to—”

  Alec hung up. Katrina looked at him in surprise.

  “He’ll call back.”

  A moment later, the phone did ring. Katrina shook her head in amusement. “You’re terrible undercover, but a master of getting under someone’s skin.” Alec smiled and answered the phone.

  “Listen, American—”

  “No, you listen!” Alec said, smiling as he spotted a small circular lens atop a picture frame next to the bedroom door. He strode close, fairly certain Juan the Jaguar was watching him through the lens. “Whatever you’ve done with your life until this moment, know that it has not prepared you for this. Sure, it’s bought you a nice place, nice woman,” Alec held up the picture of Esmerelda. “You’ve got skull-faced women watching your neighborhood for you. You thought it made you untouchable, bey
ond anyone’s reach. But here I am, walking around your bedroom, talking to you on your phone, rifling through everything you own, learning all about you. I want you to send a message to your friends, the chick in the video up in New York, the guys who helped you grab Neuse, all of ’em. It’s an important message. Make sure they get it. You ready?”

  Jaguar grunted. “What?”

  “It’s like they said in their video,” Alec declared, stared into the camera lens. “You … are not safe.”

  Alec reached out and pulled the camera out of the frame. He dropped it on the ground and he stomped on it a few times for good measure. He looked at Katrina, certain she would be impressed.

  Katrina rolled her eyes again. “Are you finished?”

  They quickly rifled through the house, grabbing anything that could be useful. An older laptop computer, the picture of Esmerelda, a comb for DNA samples. Everything was sealed in plastic bags and dumped in messenger bags around their shoulders. In the closet, Alec pulled out a set of clothes.

  Katrina frowned. “We’re supposed to be looking for metaphorical dirty laundry.”

  Alec stuck his nose in a black shirt and recoiled. “Smell that.”

  “No,” Katrina said firmly.

  “Sulfur,” Alec said. “Maybe he’s been working with chemicals or something. Bomb-making?”

  “Bag it,” she concluded, checking her watch. He placed it into a messenger bag. “Time to move, Alec,” she said insistently.

  She turned to the door, where Manuel was still waiting patiently and unnerved by what he had heard. He began saying something in Spanish—to Alec’s ears, it sounded something like, “señora, you must leave, I shouldn’t have let you in here”—when he turned to face someone out in the hall and registered a look of shock and horror before bullets tore through him.