King of Swords a-1

by Russell Blake

  “So I can’t work as an independent contractor? You’ve seen the quality of my jobs. They’re some of the best here,” he said, now almost pleading.

  “Nope. All the hiring takes place out of Monterrey, and I know for a fact that you need to have a company with at least a three year history, and a bond. I’m afraid you’re out of luck. Now, could you move aside? I need to get these work orders distributed,” the engineer finished, dismissing him to his fate.

  El Rey descended the shaky stairs and considered his options. He hadn’t foreseen the company he’d weaseled his way into having a dispute with the builder. That had never come up in his contingency planning. He cursed inwardly, then calmed himself — losing his patience would accomplish nothing, and was a luxury he couldn’t afford. What was done was done. But this was a disaster for his plan. There was no way he’d be able to mount the light fixtures now, much less stay on to do maintenance up to the big day, ensuring the detonator was in place and functional. He was screwed. And he only had three weeks to come up with an alternative plan; the blink of an eye in terms of this scope of a hit.

  All the work and preparation had just been flushed down the toilet by a larcenous contracting company. He momentarily entertained a vision of the company owner, flayed alive and suspended over a fire, and then dismissed it. Satisfying as it might be to take his frustration out on someone, he needed to spend his time more productively.

  Opening the door of the junky, beaten car he’d bought in the barrio for a thousand dollars, he fumed at his ill fortune, and then reconciled himself to plodding forward. It was a setback, but he was used to overcoming adversity. It’s what made him El Rey.

  Which was all well and good, but wouldn’t get the job done. He was running out of time, and the clock was ticking even as he sat in the dusty lot cursing his fate. The engine turned over with a puff of alarming-looking black smoke. He wheeled around and headed for the exit, mind working furiously on alternatives.

  He needed a plan. And he needed one fast.

  That afternoon, two uniformed Federales entered the large administration tent that had been erected to house the hundred or so support staff for the project. They spoke with the project director. After a few minutes, he directed them to a computer terminal and brought over an overweight woman in her forties, who was chartered with keeping track of personnel. They unfolded the sketches of El Rey, with facial hair and without, and began the tedious process of going through sixty-five hundred badge photos on the off-chance they found someone who resembled their target.

  The woman was chatty, regaling them with stories of her move to Los Cabos from Durango, where she’d had a travel agency in a past life, before the internet had obviated her business. She seemed singularly incapable of appreciating how little both men cared about her banal history or her opinions of the region’s charms, and how they compared with Durango, which to hear her tell it was the Garden of Eden crossed with Shangri-La.

  They listened politely, but soon were exchanging glances of annoyance as she kept up a rapid-fire monologue of excruciatingly dull observations, many of which involved the antics of her beloved cats, which she believed possessed magnetic charms and would surprise and delight anyone within earshot. The older of the two leaned in and whispered to his companion, speculating on the ramifications of shooting her, maybe just to wound.

  The hours dragged on as they stared at photo after photo, assembling a group of men that came relatively close. By the time they’d seen all the photos they had thirty-seven possible suspects, which they downloaded to a removable drive for forwarding to Mexico City. It was now two o’clock, and Mexico City was an hour ahead, so the photos probably wouldn’t be looked at until the next day.

  The men thanked their new friend for the hospitality and headed for the exit with palpable relief, intent on getting back to the Federales outpost so they could send their findings via e-mail. They stopped at a Burger King on the way to the office, having missed lunch in favor of being regaled with the precocious hijinks of Mister Mittens and Tiger, and wolfed down burgers with air-conditioned relief. It was three before they got to the station and had sent all the photos, and they sat back, exchanging war stories with the local officers while waiting for instructions on what to do next.

  ~ ~ ~

  Briones returned to headquarters late in the day, having spent much of it getting Cruz settled in and outfitted. There had been some complications with the internet that had taken time to work through, and then some shopping, so by the time he made it in, it was already five. He checked his e-mail and found twenty-two messages. With a resigned sigh, he began poring through them, sending single-sentence responses to most. The last five were the photos from the Los Cabos team. He rubbed his eyes and began paging through the various shots. A few looked close, and could have been the man. He just didn’t remember so clearly — too much time had gone by.

  And then he stopped.

  Briones peered at the screen, and then enlarged the image. He was almost a hundred percent sure, although there were some differences, most notably the goatee and the hair color, which was considerably lighter than he recalled. But the nose and eyes were the same. Not daring to jostle his mouse for fear of somehow deleting the image, he reached out and dialed Cruz’s number.

  “I think I’m looking at a photo of El Rey, from the construction site in Los Cabos,” Briones said excitedly.

  “You think, or you are?”

  “I’m almost positive. Remember, I only saw him for a few seconds, assuming that was him. But I believe this is the guy.”

  “Send it over to me,” Cruz instructed. “Find out if he’s at work or when he’s next due in. But let’s cover all options immediately. I want every officer in Baja to have that photo within the hour, and if he’s not at work, I want the man traced down and found. Send out a team to the address listed on the manifest. There’s the slimmest of chances he didn’t use a fake name and address, although I think it’s a given that he did. If so, I want everyone on the streets tonight, asking every bar, strip club and restaurant whether they’ve seen him. It’s show time — this is our first real break.”

  Chapter 19

  Sergeant Obregon, the head of the team that had been sent to Baja, crouched behind an abandoned car forty yards from the one-room dwelling that had been listed on the security pass docket for the suspect, whose name, Adrian Sendero, was undoubtedly fake.

  After discovering he’d been fired from the project, they had been watching the house for several hours, but there was no sign of life. Sergeant Obregon had the sensation in his gut that this was going to be a waste of time, but his job was to run down all leads, and this was the only one they had. So here he was, carrying out surveillance on a hovel in one of the worst barrios in San Jose del Cabo — a section that had originally started off as a squatter camp, with electricity pilfered from overhead power lines and open sewage running downhill towards the ravine, and had gradually become a neighborhood, such as it was, with cracker boxes like the one they were staking out, built from cinderblock and bags of cement purloined from work sites.

  It remained a grim area, redolent with the fetid odor of garbage and poverty; the pervasive squalor spoke of a population at the end of its rope. These were life’s losers — the sick, the drug addled, the hopelessly alcoholic, the mentally ill. Nobody with any sort of income lived there; even the lowest of the low, the unskilled laborers, could do better. Crime was constant, and never reported, partially because the police were unlikely to show up and partially because the denizens were mostly criminals as well.

  It was the type of area where the residents kept to themselves. Nobody wanted to know what you were doing, and it was best not to be curious about their affairs. It was a place the unwashed came to die, enslaved by heroin and methamphetamines and alcohol. AIDS was a near-constant among the intravenous drug users, and corpses being hauled out by the coroner’s office was an almost daily occurrence.

  Obregon’s ear bud crackled as th
e com line came to life.

  “Car headed your way.”

  He squinted in the dark and watched as a battered twenty year old Buick LeSabre trundled to a stop near the shack. A man swung out of the car, clad in a filthy white undershirt and soiled pants, accompanied by an obese woman in an ill-advised tank top and shorts that strained to contain her modesty. They cackled with inebriated laughter, and the man veered to the front door, which consisted of a slab of plywood held in place by two rusted hinges. He fished a key out of his pocket and unlocked the padlock securing the chain that acted as the door lock, and was caught unawares by the bright floodlights from the assault team as they flashed their dazzling focus on him.

  “Stop. Put your hands up. Do not move. This is the Federal Police. Repeat, do not move,” Sergeant Obregon instructed through a handheld megaphone.

  The couple froze in place, and within seconds, were surrounded by armed men, weapons at the ready.

  Twenty seconds after it started, the operation was over. The man was clearly not the one in the photo, given that he was emaciated, filthy, reeking of cheap tequila, and with a profile more akin to a living skeleton than a human being. After a few minutes of interrogation, it also became obvious that nobody lived with him in the little hothouse. The sergeant entered, to be confronted with a soiled mattress, a reeking bucket with a lid fashioned from a piece of sheetrock being used as an ad hoc toilet, and a few odds and ends. Illumination was provided by a single light bulb dangling from a wire affixed to the corrugated tin ceiling with a rusty nail. Two holes in the wall with rebar bent to serve as security bars afforded scant ventilation. Obregon gagged at the smell wafting from the dirt floor.

  As expected, this was a dead-end.

  The team packed their gear and loaded into the black pickup which had been called in after the operation was terminated. They headed back to the station.

  It was unlikely they’d get any traction from circulating the photo around the local prostitutes and drug dealers, but at that point it was the only option they had left. At Cruz’s behest, they’d erected road blocks at several key intersections, ostensibly as sobriety checkpoints but in reality to spot-check suspicious travelers; but those were long shots, at best. As the night wore on, the officers grew increasingly frustrated. It was obvious their target had either gone to ground, or had somehow eluded them.

  Wherever he was, El Rey wasn’t there.

  ~ ~ ~

  Cruz wasn’t surprised. While the badge photo had been a lucky break, their losing streak in the case had held, and it had been too little, too late. That was how things had been going from the outset. The assassin always seemed to be one step ahead of them or had benefitted from pure luck, such as getting fired before they collared him. Cruz began to have a little empathy with the men on the El Rey taskforce who’d made zero progress in over a thousand days.

  He’d met with them and turned over the photo, in the slim hopes their network could generate a lead, but that was unlikely given they had no presence in Baja. In typical fashion, they hadn’t even considered sending personnel to Baja once the photo was in hand, preferring to question whether the likeness was even El Rey, considering that it didn’t resemble most of the sketches. In truth, Cruz couldn’t prove it was him any more than they could prove that it wasn’t, so it was a classic stand-off. They obviously felt that Cruz was encroaching unfairly into their investigation, while he believed they were incompetent asses. Relations remained cordial, but strained, and Cruz expected nothing helpful.

  The rest of the week was similarly frustrating. There was no buzz on the streets, the flesh trade had yielded no leads, and El Rey didn’t buy drugs from any of the local substance purveyors. The team continued to go through the motions, but each day brought an increasing sense of hopelessness, as the opening date of the G-20 summit loomed with no progress on their end.

  The only good news was that Cruz’s chest wound was healed and hardly ached at all any more. The leg was also mending, albeit grudgingly. He’d been to the physical therapist’s for instruction on exercises he could do, and religiously performed them every morning and evening.

  The other surprising occurrence was that Dinah had taken to calling every few days to follow up on the case and to see how he was doing. Cruz was unsure how he felt about that. It had been two years since his family’s heads had been shipped to him, and life inevitably had to move on, but it had also only been two years since the tragedy, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for anyone new in his life. He felt guilty over his attraction to her, but also recognized that it was mutual — he could tell by their conversations, where Dinah had subtly but unmistakably indicated interest; women didn’t call regularly to see how you were doing out of a sense of charity. Even though he’d been off that horse for some time, he still hadn’t completely forgotten how to ride.

  Cruz woke up every day with a sense of impatience, and a tremor of doom, as the days to the summit counted down. He’d made scant progress and wasn’t kidding himself. At the rate they were going, El Rey would succeed in his objective, and life for every man, woman and child in Mexico would forever change, as their neighbor to the north exacted retribution for the nation’s savagery and the cartels ruled the day. That was a future Cruz didn’t want to see, and it was that prospect that kept him getting up early to fight to prevent it with every ounce of energy at his disposal.

  The Acapulco night cloyed hot and humid, the air scented with the distinctive verdant aroma of the tropics. Off in the distance, the lights of the waterfront strip twinkled as partygoers celebrated their Friday fiesta; dancing and drinking until the oncoming dawn chased them to bed. The town was in decline from its heyday in the Sixties and Seventies, when the Hollywood set had made Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta must-go-to destinations, but it still saw its share of celebrants from Mexico City due to proximity — at a hundred and eighty miles away, it was the closest accessible beach resort, and still a popular getaway for those seeking a respite from the densely populated Distrito Federal — the term used by locals for Mexico City and its surrounding environs.

  Cartel violence had sullied the reputation of the seaside paradise. It had joined the ranks of notoriously embattled areas like Morelia and Culiacan, as roving gangs of armed thugs terrorized whole neighborhoods, and the cops either stayed away or were on the drug traffickers’ payrolls. Still, the tourist zone along the water was relatively safe, and travelers from the southern Mexican states went there in droves, ignoring the sporadic outbursts of violence.

  Booming music and peals of laughter drifted up into the hills, the din amplified as it refracted off the inky water. El Rey jabbed at the button to raise his driver’s side window so he could hear himself think. He’d been in town for two days and had finally connected with his contact; a minor underworld facilitator who claimed to be able to get him anything he wanted, and had proved useful doing so in the past. The beauty of this transaction, if consummated, was that the local network could reliably get the items he required into Baja with no problems. That was worth the supplier’s substantial premium, because delivery was as much of an obstacle as securing the required materials.

  The industrial section of Acapulco was ominously dark and seething with menace. It was infamous as an area where people disappeared, where headless corpses with bound hands cropped up all the time. Even a predator like El Rey experienced a sense of trepidation sitting alone outside the deserted warehouse at midnight, waiting for the appearance of his host. He’d had a discussion with the man over the phone, where a price had been agreed upon, along with detailed specifications for the order, but he’d wanted to be paid in cash, as was increasingly the case due to anti-money laundering provisions in the formerly compliant banking industry. So El Rey had gathered a knapsack and seventy thousand dollars, before driving southwest from Mexico City, sticking to the toll roads in order to avoid the ever-prevalent banditos who haunted the free roads.

  The last few times he’d needed something special he couldn’t get i
n Culiacan or Mexico City, this contact had arranged for the goods to come into Manzanillo, the main port on the Pacific side, yet another dangerous town in the trafficking chain that ran up the coast. All shipments from South America that came up the west coast offloaded at Manzanillo, so it was a natural hub for criminality and violence. The customs officers there were legendary for their corruption, and it was considered foolhardy to ship into the port without an established connection, which the contact clearly did.

  El Rey assumed that this shipment would traverse the coastline via shrimp boat or small freighter before changing craft somewhere off Manzanillo, and then move north into the Sea of Cortez from there. The logistics of the smuggling didn’t interest him, as long as the items arrived in time, which is why he was willing to pay this source double the price asked by less-established providers.

  A Toyota Sequoia with a bank of spotlights across its roof pulled around the corner and rolled to a stop at the curb in front of the warehouse. Four men got out, surveying their surroundings before approaching the building and unlocking the multiple locks on the heavy steel entrance door. Two of the men took up a position on either side of the entry and stood with their hands in their loose sweatshirt pockets, the bulges of their pistols obvious.

  El Rey waited to ensure that was the total welcoming party, and then pulled up the street with his lights out until he was twenty yards away. He opened his door and stepped onto the pavement, slick from a cloudburst a few minutes earlier.

  The synthetic soles of his Doc Marten boots gripped the surface securely. He walked confidently towards the two men, the bag and his free hand clearly visible so as to avoid any accidental bouts of nervous shooting. After a brief confirmatory discussion, one of the men made a cell call, and a few moments later, the door opened and his source welcomed him into the dank interior.