by Andrew Mayne
The captain hesitates, then comes to the conclusion that cooperation is in his best interest. “The wife of some Venezuelan businessman.”
That sounds like an alias if I ever heard one. “Did she board the boat?”
“No. We were going to meet up with her in Palm Beach.”
That’s a good story to tell if you don’t want the captain to know your full plans. I doubt any of the people here really know who Marta is. They could think she’s just the wife of the absentee owner, not realizing they’re working for her.
“Who left the boat?” I ask.
“Just some cleaning crew.”
“Cleaning crew?” This sounds suspicious. “Was one of them a Hispanic female, mid-forties, about this high?”
“Yes.”
A cleaning woman. She might as well have been invisible. I never noticed Marta at first. My own bias was used against me. I turn to the lieutenant. “How long ago did you stop the vessel?”
“Thirty minutes ago.”
Damn. She could be anywhere in Miami. Once she saw the Coast Guard ship, she bailed as quickly as possible. Besides the airport diversion, she had a backup plan.
I walk out of earshot of the captain and crew to call Ratner. “We need to tell the media that we’re stopping cars on all the highways and doing random spot checks.”
“We can’t do that,” he protests in an exasperated whine. “It’s almost impossible.”
“I know.” I’m past the point of explaining things to him. “Give out the advisory, throw up a bogus Amber Alert. Just say we’re doing this. Right now, all that matters is that she thinks it’s possible. The last thing she wants to do is chance getting caught in a random car inspection.”
“So we bullshit.”
Asshole, you haven’t left us with many other options. “It’s all we got right now. We want her to stay put. Put out the alert.” It’s security theater, for an audience with something to hide. This woman just blew up a forty-million-dollar jet as a diversion. She’s not going to take any chances. She’d rather hide here and wait things out than find herself caught in a roadblock.
Even if we could do that kind of search, our odds of catching her would be one in a thousand. But as long as we create the impression that we’re being comprehensive, far more comprehensive than we can be, she’ll be extra cautious.
Knoll strides down the pier. “I take it she wasn’t onboard?”
“No. But this is her boat. It’s off to plan B for her.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know. And we only have a limited time to find out.”
67
KNOLL SPREADS A map across the trunk of a car. We all stand around—FBI, Secret Service, DEA, local police and even the Coast Guard—trying to figure out what Marta’s next step is going to be. Miami cops are already locking down intersections, but there’s no point in trying to stop everyone who matches Marta’s general description in this part of town. Absent a photo, I’m the only one who can identify her on sight. Which is, of course, why she wanted me killed.
The computer reconstruction of what I remember, combined with her old Air Force photograph, is good. But I could see that she’d had plastic surgery done since that photo was taken. Our portrait reflects a lot of guesswork about a woman I met for maybe three minutes.
Even still, Marta knows that as the fugitive, she has everything to lose. She can’t take chances by counting too much on the idea that she’ll blend in. I’m sure she always keeps someone near her who is armed and capable of protecting her. She’ll also want to be in constant contact with someone who will help her. If she’s like other heads of cartels, Marta already has safe houses, extra bodyguards and crooked lawyers on retainer in Miami.
The map is daunting and also misleading. It gives you the idea that the problem is contained within two-dimensional boundaries, which conveniently fold up and fit in your pocket. But as my FBI Academy instructor constantly reminded us, the map is not the territory.
There are millions of homes in these square inches. Tens of thousands of warehouses. In South Florida alone, there are several hundred known members of X-20 willing to help her. I assume she’ll want to keep her distance from the street-level thugs. They are about as reliable as they are honest. While the core members may be willing to lay down their lives for her, there’s no telling how her attempted assassination of the pope is going to go over among the extended members. She’s smart. She’s going to keep this among her captains at most. I suspect any support she calls upon is going to be most likely from outside the X-20 criminal network.
What she doesn’t want to do is hole up in some crack house used by X-20 and find out that the place is already under surveillance by local law enforcement and DEA. At this point, anything directly related to X-20 is a red flag. That said, we’ve sent unmarked cars and plainclothes detectives to all the spots where X-20 activity has been observed in the remote chance she didn’t actually have a plan B.
The Coast Guard lieutenant taps me on the shoulder. “We just got a call from the Navy. They spotted a small submarine about ten miles off the coast.”
Are you fucking kidding me? “Seriously? Does she have a damn white cat and sharks with lasers?”
He gives me a sympathetic nod. “Welcome to my world.”
“What happened?”
“They chased it until it surfaced. Looks to be a narco sub.”
“That would have been her exit plan if you’d stopped her out at sea. She’d have gone onboard.”
“Good thing we prevented her from leaving port,” he replies. They could search the ship at sea and never find her if she was sitting at the bottom of the ocean in a submarine.
“Yeah.” I avoid glaring at Ratner. If he’d done his homework like he said, we’d have staked out the Ocean Song and been able to catch her before she set foot on the pier.
Of course, there are a lot of things I could have done. I could have double-checked his homework. Hell, I could have asked about Sister Marta back in Tixato.
Enough regret. I can still get her.
Marta thought the Ocean Song ruse was safe because she didn’t know how much we got out of Lamont. The little fact that her yacht is really called Marty was enough to tell us something might be at play on that front.
“The bodyguard you shot in the foot is at the hospital. He’s on painkillers and talking,” Knoll informs me.
“Anything helpful?” All we need is an address. One call to the SWAT team and this nightmare could be over.
“He says he’s done protection for Mrs. Verdez in the past when she visited Miami.”
“Verdez?”
“He thinks she’s the wife of a cartel lawyer. He had no idea who she was or what was in store for him at the airport if he made it all the way there.”
Interesting. Even people who work that closely with her don’t know who she really is. The bodyguard knew he was protecting someone important, who was involved in something shady, but never suspected she was at the center of everything.
“We got his cell phone?”
“Yeah. We’re tracking all the inbound and outbound calls.” God bless Knoll and his thoroughness.
I doubt there will be anything of use to us. He was, at best, a disposable person for Marta. His purpose was to divert our attention, and to get caught if that helped her escape.
“We get anywhere with the control-tower records?”
“Still looking.”
I stare at the map and get an uncomfortable thought. “That jammer?”
“Yeah?” Knoll looks at my finger on the stadium.
“That was some heavy-duty military hardware. And we still don’t know where she got what she tried to use to get the pope.”
“We got some military people on the wreckage. They think it was a turbine-powered drone. A Chinese knock-off.”
“Seriously,” Knoll says gravely.
“We need to get the CIA and NSA fully on this too. We keep thinking of this in the context of a rich drug dealer’s behavior. She’s obviously got a whole other level of connections going on.”
“I agree.”
The Coast Guard lieutenant speaks up, “We just pulled the harbor reports for anything that might match the vessel. About a week ago, we think the Ocean Song was harbored in Newport News, Virginia.”
“Virginia? That’s when the church exploded,” replies Knoll. That’s not all that far from Hawkton.
“She was there for that too . . .” My voice trails off as I spot the top of the conn tower for the Ocean Song sticking out above the marina. “I need to get a look onboard her yacht. This is her home away from home.”
68
MOLLY, A BOMB squad black Labrador retriever with a serious demeanor, gives me a suspicious glance before going up the gangplank to do a cursory search of the Ocean Song for explosives with her human partner. At almost two hundred feet long, there’s a lot to cover.
While we wait for Molly and her bomb squad partners to clear the boat, we compare notes on Marta and try to get a better understanding of this woman.
Our DEA liaison, John Noriega, checks a message on his phone then speaks up. “We’ve had a person of interest for several years by the name of Marta Diego. Suspected money laundering. She sounds like the description the shooter you caught in the parking lot provided. Very wealthy, she’s supposed to be married to an attorney with a practice out of Caracas. The interesting part is her husband is in his eighties.”
“Is it a cover?” asks Knoll.
“It makes sense,” replies Noriega. “When you have that amount of cash you need clever ways to launder it. The law firm could be an entire front and the marriage just a certificate to give her an identity. Operating out of Venezuela also offers a certain amount of protection from our scrutiny. When Chavez was in power, he was notorious for looking the other way when drug cartels wanted to park assets there.”
Marta’s ingenuity frightens me. “What do we know about this Diego?”
“She may be the actual owner of several properties around Latin America. Her law firm has created several different organizations that control the real estate.” He points to the yacht. “The Marty is owned by a company called Vesta Norte. The board members are spread out through different countries.”
“Let me guess, all lawyers?” It’s a common tactic, and it makes building a case a challenge.
“Yep.”
“Do we know of any properties in the United States?” If we can tie her to something here, that would help us trace her connections.
“Not tied to that firm. She’s smart and likely to set up firewalls. We’re looking into a European connection. Anything she has here would probably be controlled by some firm with an office in Brussels.”
Noriega continues, “Your suspect, Lamont, he was caught with about one hundred thousand dollars in cocaine. When we did the seizure we found an ultraviolet barcode on the bags. According to the numbers on them, that was just part of a much larger shipment. Lab tests indicate that batch was all produced on the same day. We’re looking at a quarter-billion-dollars-a-year business, just from that channel alone. Who knows how many other separate lines she has running.”
There’s no reason to think “Marta Diego” is her only alternate identity either. “Can we pull some credit card records?” I think for a moment, remembering the woman I met in Tixato. She had expensive tastes. “Take her photo down to the high-end shops in South Beach. Women’s watches, you know the kind. See if anyone recognizes her. She’s got good taste. High end but not flashy. Think more on the Hermès side than Dolce.”
The men try to interpret what I just said.
“Ask your wives. Think rich, but conservative. Better yet, have some people canvass the Palm Beach stores too. We need names. She’ll probably stick to the same cover story—wife of a wealthy attorney, maybe real estate money. Those are boring answers. That’s her cover, anything that doesn’t bring attention to herself.”
“Molly didn’t pick anything up,” announces the detective with the bomb dog, who have both returned to the dock. “I’d like to do a more thorough search.”
“Go ahead. But we’re going onboard. We’re going to have to risk it.” I head up the gangplank and resist the urge to pat the animal on the head.
I start at the bow of the vessel where Marta’s stateroom should be located. “Check out the crew quarters,” I tell Knoll. “I’ll bet she keeps a spare room in case they get boarded and she doesn’t want to look like the owner.”
Part of Marta’s success is her invisibility. She exploits our own biases. If I’d knocked on the door of one of her mansions, she could have answered as the maid and I’d never have thought twice.
The main stateroom, presumably Marta’s, is like a large hotel suite. A king-sized bed sits in the middle with a wall separating it from the bathroom area and a walk-in closet. I have to give her credit, the design is tasteful. Lots of wood inlay and natural materials. Nothing overtly flashy that screams drug dealer. I’ve been on busts where the houses look like they were designed by a cokehead flipping between Scarface and the Home Shopping Channel, compulsively buying whatever they see.
Even Marta’s bathroom resembles something out of Architectural Digest. Everything is picture-perfect. Hairbrushes, makeup and perfume are stored away neatly. I touch one of the towels. It’s softer than anything I’ve ever felt. There’s a walk-in shower and a bathtub with high walls. Back in the dressing area, I search through her closets. The brands are all what an affluent woman would wear if she didn’t want her outfits to scream “wealthy.” They’re the kind of clothes a politician’s wife would own.
In the bedroom, I find a hidden door that opens to a small office. There’s an empty spot for a laptop computer, which gives me an idea. Although the logbooks may be unreliable, we have other means to track where she’s been. I call into my radio. “Can we get someone to check IP logs with whoever is their satellite provider? If we can’t see who she was talking to, we can at least create a map of where they’ve been . . .” I stop mid-sentence as my eye catches something.
Behind the desk is a wall filled with photographs. Hundreds of images of young faces smiling at the camera. These are the children in the orphanages she runs. Unlike Groom’s show photos, these are personal.
This is her work desk.
She likes to see their smiling faces as she controls a billion-dollar narco empire, killing people, bribing judges and trying to level my entire apartment building.
Damn, she’s a complex woman.
I study the photos and see parts of the orphanage in Tixato. The Tixato photos seem to be grouped into one area. The other photos show children in what appear to be different locations.
“Who do we have that’s a Latin American expert?” I ask over the radio channel.
“I’ve been to most places there. What do you need?” responds Noriega.
“Can you come to the stateroom? I want to figure out where all her orphanages are located.”
Noriega and I sort through the photographs and put them into three piles. One is for all the Tixato photos. The second is the children whose photographs were taken in a much more rural environment. The third is for children who have features that appear similar to those of people living in the southern part of South America, like Uruguay.
Noriega holds a photo up and stares at something in the background. He snaps an image on his phone and makes a call. “Hey hon, can you do me a favor and tell me what kind of flower that is?” There’s a pause. “Got it? Ah, that’s it. Thank you.” He puts away his phone. “What did you say they called h
er in Tixato?”
“Sister Marta.”
“But she’s not really a nun?”
“Hardly.”
“I think she may have a nun fixation.” He shows me the photograph of a young girl next to a white orchid with three petals.
“What am I looking at?”
Noriega points to the orchid. “That flower is the White Nun Orchid. We know the things she really wants to hide she makes sure there aren’t any record of, right?”
“When she can.”
“On the DEA’s end, this photo helps put things together for us. We don’t have any evidence of Marta Diego ever being in Guatemala. It’s a black hole for her in Central America. If she goes there, it’s under a different name.” He points to the flower. “See that? It’s the national flower of Guatemala. I think all of these children are from an orphanage there.”
“So we know she’s been there, but doesn’t want any part of her drug empire to lead there?”
“Exactly.”
Ratner knocks on the door of the stateroom. “I think you want to see this. I found it stashed in a locker.” He walks over with a digital camera. “I was going through the photos, looking for one of her.”
Ratner is doing anything and everything to try to make up for his screwups.
“Any luck?”
“No. But I heard you guys mention Guatemala.” He shows us a picture a man with a thick mustache trying to pull a fish into the boat. Ratner points to him. “See that jerk-off catching the marlin off the stern of this boat?”
“Yeah?”
He smirks, feeling he’s saved a little face. “That’s Atilio Baqueró. He’s the resident minister for Guatemala in Miami. The time stamp on the photo was taken a week ago. You wonder what he was he doing on this ship?”
69
ATILIO BAQUERÓ IS inside the T Lounge sipping mid-shelf vodka as he talks to a secretary for a car dealership in Hialeah. She’s impressed by his diplomatic status and how connected he is to the Miami community. She doesn’t mention that she’s a former call girl turned DEA informant. He leaves out the part about his wife and kids in Miami Lakes.
