King of Swords a-1

by Russell Blake

  “Yes, yes. All right. I’m sure it was. Now, where is he being held?” Zapata repeated.

  “Hospital Angeles, in room eleven of the intensive care ward. He was transferred there this evening, and chances are that’s where he’ll stay for the duration.”

  “I know the facility. What else were you able to find out?”

  “There are armed Federales all over the place. Two on the floor with him, and more outside the building. In my opinion, any rescue operation would be ill advised, because they’re completely ready for one. They’re expecting it,” Ortega warned him.

  Zapata swirled his drink, lost in thought. After several minutes like this, he stood and toasted Ortega, signaling that their meeting was concluded.

  Ortega finished his tequila and placed the snifter on Zapata’s desk. “I hope your clients find this of value.”

  “Oh, I think I can promise they will. Thank you for coming by. I’m sure that their expression of gratitude will be unmistakable,” Zapata assured him as they walked to the lobby area of his opulent offices. The general grasped his hand and shook it warmly before walking out to the street, where his chauffeured car waited to take him to his mistress’ apartment for a spell, before heading dutifully home to his wife.

  Zapata placed a call to one of ten cell numbers he’d been given for use this month. Each phone would be used once, and then discarded. To reach his client quickly, he opted to dial the next number down the list. Even though all cell numbers had to be registered in Mexico, in an effort to curtail kidnapping calls from blind numbers, there were any number of domestic staff who would gladly sign for a line, and then give it to their employer in exchange for twenty dollars. Everyone won in that transaction — the client, who got a sanitized communication channel, the phone company, who sold a phone, the manufacturer, whose phone was purchased, and the unfortunate who pocketed the twenty dollars. It was a win-win for all except the police.

  When the phone was answered, Zapata relayed everything he’d learned. The conversation was short and to the point, taking less than sixty seconds from start to finish. There was absolutely no way in the world this method of communication could be traced, so it was the preferred option, other than ‘in person’ meetings.

  When you printed money in your back room, the inconveniences of contriving work-arounds to government surveillance were miniscule compared to the rewards.

  The hospital was quiet at five a.m., as the night shift finished its chores and prepared to hand over responsibilities to the fresh shift arriving at seven. The corridors were largely empty other than by the emergency room and intensive care. In the operating rooms, orderlies were busy preparing the chambers, sanitizing every surface in anticipation of the impending early morning surgeries. It was all part of the daily syllabus, and there was a rhythm to the activity that was startlingly efficient for Mexico, where things tended to be chaotic and unstructured.

  On the ICU floor, a complement of nurses made rounds at all hours of day and night. They’d quickly grown accustomed to the armed Federal stationed outside the coma patient’s room. After some initial unease, they now hardly noticed him. He sat quietly across from the door of room eleven, his M-16 laying across his lap, watching the comings and goings in the busy ward. It was tedious duty — the only thing more boring was sitting outside the ward door, where very little went on. The biggest challenge for the officers was staying awake.

  Every two hours, a nurse would come and check on the patient, taking his temperature and verifying that all the equipment was still hooked up correctly and that the IV bag hadn’t run dry. Vital signs were monitored at the main nursing station that occupied the entirety of the central area of the ward, where a number of screens showed blood pressure, pulse and respiration readings for all occupied rooms.

  Several of the pretty young nurses stopped to chat with the handsome policeman in their midst, but for the most part he could have been asleep with his eyes open. He’d asked one of the doctors what the chances were of the patient coming to; could he be playing possum? — she’d laughed and told him there was more chance he’d grow wings and fly. She’d pointed out the monitoring equipment to him and explained how it worked; they’d see substantial changes to his pulse and blood pressure if he ever came out of the coma.

  At six a.m., a new nurse sauntered past the groggy officer, smiling at him flirtatiously and pausing for a few moments to inquire how he was holding up, and would he like her to bring him a cup of coffee on her next round. He accepted the offer graciously as she entered room eleven, clipboard and thermometer in hand.

  Once inside, she expertly wedged a chair to hold the door closed, and moved hurriedly to the patient’s side. After a quick scan of the room for any cameras, she took a pen from her blouse and carefully unhooked the IV bag. With steady hands, she unscrewed the pen and extracted a small syringe concealed in its fully-functional shaft. She glanced at the door, pulled the orange safety cap off the needle tip with her teeth and inserted it into the catheter. She drove the little needle home and depressed the plunger. Satisfied that the vital signs on the monitor were still reading normal, she reconnected the IV, slid the spent syringe back into the pen shaft and returned it to her blouse pocket, where it sat innocuously with two other pens.

  The entire episode had taken less than ninety seconds. After stepping back to the door and removing the chair, she smoothed her blouse and adjusted her bra so her breasts were nearly bursting out of the snug top. She breezed, smiling, out of the room and waved at the officer, promising to be back in a few minutes with some hot, strong coffee. He admired the fit of her snug white pants as she walked down the hall, and reminded himself there were worse gigs he could have drawn than this. If only something interesting would happen. The boredom was a killer.

  Six minutes later, the monitor alarm sounded in room eleven, signaling that the heart rate had dropped to zero, as had blood pressure. A different nurse came running from the far end of the ward, and after taking a brief look, she called for help. A minute later, a team arrived at a jog pushing a crash cart. A harried doctor brushed past them to get to the patient’s side.

  For hours, the Federal had fought a drowsy battle against sleep, but now the area around him was a crisis zone, with personnel running to and fro with grim expressions. So captivated was he with the unfolding life or death drama, it took more than thirty minutes for him to realize the nurse hadn’t returned with his coffee.

  Chapter 4

  At six-thirty a.m., Cruz’s day began with a call at home from the dispatch desk, who sought to patch him in to the ranking officer in charge at Angeles hospital. He pawed the sleep from his eyes and fumbled on the nightstand for the phone, almost knocking his pistol onto the floor in the process. He lifted the handset to his ear and croaked a greeting.

  Two minutes later he was wide awake, shivering in his shower as he took a hurried rinsing before heading into the office. There was little point in driving all the way to the hospital to confirm that Santiago had taken his last breath. He had no reason to doubt that was the case. People died in ICU every day, and Santiago’s trauma had been severe. His bad heart had done the Mexican people a favor, sparing them the expense of trying the bastard and housing him, in luxury, no doubt, for the rest of his life. Cruz felt a fleeting spike of guilt; maybe the interrogation with the picana had been a little overzealous and had triggered the stroke, but a darker part of his heart actually hoped that was the case. Whatever, he’d sleep better after helping take out one of the most savage cartel bosses in the country.

  The law worked differently in Mexico than in the U.S., and Cruz couldn’t see how his counterparts there ever got anything accomplished. Mexico used Napoleonic law as its basis, where the accused was assumed to be guilty until proved otherwise. It was usually a safe bet they were. In Cruz’s experience it was rare to meet an innocent man, especially in his area of specialty. How the American authorities could hope to be effective when they were constantly hamstrung by inquiries and h
earings and attorneys was beyond him.

  As he donned his uniform, he thought about the history of the drug racket in Mexico. It had all changed when the established marijuana traffickers, who also moved small amounts of Mexican heroin into the U.S., hooked up with the Colombian cartels and became their shipping arm. This relationship solidified in the 1980s, and soon the cartels were getting paid in product rather than cash. That created a substantial incentive for them to expand and move from transporting to full-scale distribution.

  There had long been drug trafficking in Mexico on a regional basis, but once the cartels began getting huge sums of money from their cocaine distribution, the cottage industry developed into a national network. It hadn’t helped that, for many years, before it was absorbed into the current CISEN group, the head of the Mexican intelligence organization, the DFS, had sold DFS badges to the top cartel bosses, giving the traffickers an effective free pass to do as they liked. But the real power came to Mexico’s cartels once the Colombian syndicates imploded, leaving a vacuum that was filled by their Mexican partners. In a matter of a few decades, a small smuggling scheme in Mexico became a mega billion dollar enterprise, and the violence had escalated in proportion to the wages of sin.

  Now the country was in crisis, as the government battled the cartels, which had a propensity for butchery. The war against them had begun in earnest under President Fox, in 2000, but escalated to the current fever pitch when Calderon became president in 2006. Both presidents had been very sympathetic to U.S. policy, and had cooperated with the U.S. initiative to quash the drug traffickers, which had only resulted in driving the violence levels through the roof.

  Cruz clumped down the stairs and hit the button on his coffeemaker, impatient to get out the door. With Santiago dead, there was sure to be a bloody turf war. That would have been fine by Cruz, but innocents tended to get slaughtered at an alarming rate whenever one of these skirmishes flared up.

  He gulped down a cup of scalding coffee and raced to his car, anxious to be in the office to brief his team on the likely outcome of Santiago’s passing. He also wanted to establish a game plan to deal with information-gathering, to establish whether there was any hint of a contract out on the President.

  The journey to the office was excruciatingly slow due to an accident, and even with his detachable roof light it took him forty-five minutes to make it through the security gates of his building.

  A few of his staff were already there, having anticipated that it would be a big day. Two of them were reading the newspaper featuring a banner headline and an old photo of Santiago. The story proclaimed that the top Templar chief was dead after having been apprehended in a gun battle. The article was short on facts and long on conjecture and hyperbole, which was to be expected. Mexicans were under no illusions that their media existed to tell them the truth about anything. It was more a form of entertainment, and the national pastime was figuring out who was lying more, the papers or the government.

  Cruz figured there must have been a leak at the hospital. His team knew better than to talk to reporters; there was no way anyone was less than a hundred percent in his group. These men worked as diligently as Cruz did, having followed his example and committed to treating their job a crusade. Those who had found the pace too demanding were long gone, which was just as well. Cruz believed that he was fighting a war for the very soul and future of Mexico, and these men were his soldiers. Everyone shared that perspective and felt the same way. If the cartels won, Mexico lost. It was a battle between the productive and the predators. And predators couldn’t run a country or operate schools or build roads. Predators could only destroy and steal and abuse. They couldn’t be allowed to prevail, or the nation would be plunged into chaos, just as Colombia had been for two decades, before slowly pulling out of the tailspin.

  He had Briones call a staff meeting for his immediate subordinates, who would brief their squads later, and went over the ramifications of Santiago’s death. They would be closely monitoring the situation in Michoacan from their Federal brethren there and would send resources, including soldiers and weapons, as the situation demanded. There was very little upside from Santiago’s death — although a major parasite had been removed from the game, the fear and expectation was that the younger, hotter heads would start a bloodbath in their bids for eminence in the region. It was almost a given that the bodies would start appearing, sans heads, at an increasing rate. Cruz only hoped they wouldn’t see any more daylight shopping mall shooting battles or grenade attacks on densely populated areas, as they had just a few years previous, before Santiago had ascended to the throne.

  After the meeting broke up, Cruz motioned for Briones to sit.

  “I thought about the whole assassination problem and concluded we need to gather more intelligence before we bring anyone else in on it. Nobody’s going to take this seriously if we don’t have something more that Santiago’s wild claims.”

  Briones nodded. “One of the things we can do is see what events will be taking place that will bring the President in contact with the American president. There can’t be that many.”

  “Agreed. But we’ll need to get our feelers out into the streets and see if there’s any buzz. Santiago was a blowhard, so he’d have been unable to keep his mouth shut. We need to nose around and find out whether he talked to anyone, and if so, learn what he said.”

  “Let’s get Ignacio and Julio in and brief them,” Briones suggested. “If there’s any chatter, they’ll be the ones to pick it up.”

  Ignacio Roto and Julio Brava were the two most senior plainclothes investigators on Cruz’s team. They spent much of their time in the streets, carousing and mingling with the criminal element of society in order to keep current on trends and rumors. They were a vital part of the intelligence-gathering apparatus Cruz had painstakingly woven in over the last five years, which, though controversial, was highly effective. The tactics consisted of spreading money around and nurturing informants, as well as buying drugs, soliciting kidnappers and murder for hire gangs, and generally wading waist deep in the cesspool that was the underworld of Mexico City. Cruz’s squad had twenty plainclothes officers working the streets at any given time, and was a lynchpin of his overall strategy. The tip about the meeting with Santiago had come up through the streets, first surfacing as a rumor of a cartel boss seeking to establish a new channel for methamphetamine trafficking into Michoacan, the state that bordered Jalisco, to the south.

  Both Julio and Ignacio answered their cell phones and agreed to meet at headquarters in two hours. They both showed up wearing hats and sunglasses, with the diminutive Julio sheltered beneath the folds of a hooded sweatshirt. It wasn’t unknown for the cartels to hire private detectives to take photos of everyone going into headquarters, so both men avoided it as much as possible. But a summons from the boss couldn’t be ignored, so here they were — sitting in Cruz’s office, along with his sidekick, Briones.

  Cruz laid out the meat of Santiago’s claim, and instructed them to try to get intel on a contract killing commission targeting the President. He told them to search for a conduit to El Rey; there had to be someone who acted as his agent, handling the hit requests and vetting the clients. That someone would be in Mexico City or Monterrey, the two hubs for criminal activity.

  Julio asked to see the interrogation report. He read it carefully before placing it on Cruz’s desk. “If this is genuine, I can tell you where the assassination attempt will take place,” he said blithely.

  “Really? And how would you know that?” Briones asked. He had always thought the little man pompous and arrogant, although he was undoubtedly a brilliant detective.

  “Simple. The only place I can think of where the American president and ours will be together is at the G-20 conference. It’s obvious. At least, to me,” Julio explained. He shot Briones a smug look of superiority.

  “How…where did you get that information?” Briones countered, smelling a rat.

  “I have friends all
over, and one hears things,” Julio replied mysteriously. The truth was less dramatic.

  “Shit,” Cruz exclaimed. “If that’s true, you’re probably right. That’s…what, five or so weeks away? In Cabo San Lucas?”

  “Actually,” Julio said. “The location’s in San Jose Del Cabo. They’ve been hard at work building a conference center for the last seven months — there’s a late May deadline.”

  “How do you know all that off the top of your head?” Cruz asked.

  Julio decided to come clean. “My cousin got shipped over there to help. He’s a civil engineer working on the security systems and presentation equipment for the conference. They’ve got a crew of six thousand trying to get the project completed — it’s been a train wreck to date, with all the usual incompetence and corruption. I hear about it from my sister almost every week when she calls. It’s about the worst kept secret in Mexico by now, and that’s saying a lot…”

  “That’s ominous,” Cruz observed. “We have Santiago claiming he’s going to take out two of the most heavily protected heads of state in the world, and the summit taking place a short plane ride from Mexico City in a little over a month, with the U.S. president in attendance? That’s a little too coincidental for comfort…”

  Julio looked at each of the men in turn. “I think we need to treat this as a genuine threat. Santiago’s cartel has more than enough money to hire El Rey, and has the motive — the current president’s war on the cartels has probably inconvenienced his group’s resources over the last four years, especially after the grenade attack in Morelia in 2008. Even though that got pinned on the Los Zetas cartel, Santiago’s crew has likely been given a bloody nose, at least — so he’d have reason to want to make a big splash.” Julio considered his next words carefully. “Taking out two presidents would send the message he was one of the big dogs, and a lot of people would support him, at least emotionally. The President’s war on drugs hasn’t exactly bestowed peace upon the country, and he’s pretty unpopular with many.”