Tariq threw himself to the ground as the rocket fired from a nearby hilltop streaked through the air and slammed into the truck, engulfing it in a ball of fire. Tariq felt the heat and the concussion and knew he should have been farther away, but he had wanted to be close enough to Dolgunov to see the horror in the man’s eyes as death claimed him.
The force of the blast knocked the other Russians to the ground. Tariq’s men opened fire on them before they could gather their wits about them. The streams of lead shredded them, chopping them into bloody heaps of flesh that barely looked human. Tariq didn’t raise his head until it was all over.
Then he stood up, brushed himself off, and turned away from the carnage. The men Dolgunov worked for would be upset about this, but they had gotten their money, after all. That ought to be enough to mollify them. In the end, they would consider the deaths of Dolgunov and the other men as just part of their overhead, another cost of doing business.
A few minutes later, with the suitcase nuke secure in one of the jeeps, Tariq and his fellow warriors drove away, leaving a column of black smoke from the burning truck climbing into the sky behind them.
CHAPTER 3
Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila, Mexico
Alfredo Sanchez pushed the steel-framed glasses he wore back up his nose. They had a habit of sliding down, and he had thought more than once about getting contacts.
He liked the glasses, though. He liked being able to take them off and have the world go soft and blurry around him for a moment. It was harder to see the ugly things that way. Life was reduced to a collage of bright colors, at least temporarily.
But then he had to put the glasses back on and see the truth again.
At the moment, the truth was that Pablo Estancia was a stupid fool.
“You brought them here?” Alfredo asked. His voice was cool and flat, revealing none of the inner turmoil he felt. He never revealed his true feelings unless it was absolutely necessary.
Pablo’s heavy shoulders rose and fell in a shrug.
“I thought you would like to question them yourself, amigo,” he said. “With so many important things coming up . . .”
Alfredo ignored that. He knew that Pablo was just fishing for information. He considered himself an important man in the cartel and resented it whenever anything was kept from him.
Pablo was important. Through a combination of brute force and animal cunning, he kept the pipelines of drugs and illegals moving smoothly in this area. But his abilities were limited to that. He had nothing to do with strategy and planning. Certainly not when it involved an operation as large and important as the one that Alfredo had put together.
“Since they’re here, I’ll talk to them,” Alfredo said. “Bring them in.”
Pablo nodded and left the room, which was large and well-furnished, like all the other rooms in this villa. An enormous flat-screen TV dominated one side of the room. The opposite wall was glass, revealing a courtyard with a pool surrounded by a tiled patio.
Normally the lights around the courtyard would be on so that Pablo could frolic in that pool with the drug-addicted putas he preferred. Those women might be young and still beautiful, not yet showing the ravages of the poison they put in their bodies, but they were still whores, Alfredo thought, and they were prime examples of just why Pablo couldn’t be trusted with anything too important.
Sometimes in the past when Alfredo had visited the villa, one or more of the women had tried to entice him. After all, he was slim, elegantly dressed, and with his dark hair he was handsome even when wearing the steel-framed glasses. Because he hadn’t succumbed to their charms, they had talked about him behind his back and proclaimed him to be a homosexual.
That was nonsense, of course. Alfredo enjoyed the company of women, but only the right women. There was a professor of antiquities in Mexico City . . . a diplomatic liaison . . . a lawyer . . . women who were intelligent enough to carry on a conversation and refined enough for an important man to be seen with.
So let the whores make their scurrilous comments about him. They were unimportant, not worth caring about.
Pablo came back into the room, trailed by five men. Two of them stumbled as they walked because they had black hoods over their heads and couldn’t see where they were going. The other three prodded them along with machine pistols.
“That’s far enough,” Alfredo told the three guards. He gestured, and one of the gunmen pulled the hoods off the prisoners’ heads.
Their faces showed the marks of the beating they had endured. Their mouths were bloody, their eyes swollen almost shut. Bruises discolored their features. Smears of blood had dried on their skin.
One of the men was Hispanic, the other black. They looked terrified but also stubbornly defiant, meeting Alfredo’s speculative gaze without looking away.
“You’re certain they are who you say they are?” he asked Pablo.
“The information is trustworthy,” Pablo said. He pointed to the Hispanic prisoner. “This one is Border Patrol. The other works for the DEA.”
Alfredo smiled coolly and said, “I wasn’t sure the Americans even had a border patrol anymore. What purpose does it serve when the funding is cut to the bare bones because the President wants more and more illegals in the country so they can vote for him?” He turned his gaze to the black prisoner. “And why enforce the drug laws? Sooner or later all drugs will be legalized in your country, because that’s what the voters want, eh, amigo?”
“You’d better hope that day never comes,” the man answered. “When it does you’re out of business.”
“A good point,” Alfredo admitted. “But until that time, we all still have our parts to play in this little drama.”
“Life isn’t a telenovela,” the Hispanic prisoner snapped.
Alfredo raised his carefully barbered eyebrows and said, “If it were, it would be so much more entertaining, wouldn’t it? All the men would be handsome, all the women gorgeous.” He clasped his hands together behind his back. “Tell me what you know.”
The two men stared sullenly at him and remained silent. After a moment, Alfredo nodded to Pablo, who barked an order. One of the guards lowered his machine pistol, pulled a blackjack from his pocket, and smashed it into the back of the Hispanic prisoner’s right knee. Despite his obvious determination not to, the man cried out in pain and fell to the floor as that leg folded up underneath him. The guard struck again with the blackjack, this time shattering the man’s kneecap.
Howls of agony filled the room until the guard put his foot on the prisoner’s throat, choking off the sound.
“Do you know how many bones there are in the human body?” Alfredo asked. “No, of course you don’t. But there are hundreds, and every one of them can be broken. It would take many hours to break all of them . . . but it can be done. It will be done unless you tell me what you know about El Nuevo Sol.”
The DEA agent shook his head and said, “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
His eyes told a different story, however. Alfredo could tell that the man had at least heard the phrase before.
“This is the last chance,” he said softly.
The prisoner just stared at him.
“The last chance for your friend, I should have said,” Alfredo went on. He nodded to Pablo again, then turned his back and took off his glasses. He took a fine linen handkerchief from his shirt pocket and began polishing the lenses as more screaming began behind him.
It took hours, as Alfredo had said, and the Hispanic Border Patrol agent died before they were finished. The DEA agent would be permanently crippled if he lived, which was highly doubtful. But when the questioning was finished and Pablo came to the guest room where Alfredo was staying, he had the information they needed.
“I want to hear it for myself,” Alfredo said.
“I think he’s still conscious,” Pablo said. “But we should probably hurry.”
They went back to the room next to the courtyard. The floors here
were tile, too, like the patio, and the blood might not be easy to clean from them, but that wasn’t Alfredo’s worry. He hitched up his trousers slightly so that he wouldn’t ruin the line of them as he knelt next to the broken heap of humanity that had been the DEA agent.
“Tell me what you know about El Nuevo Sol.”
“Just . . . just rumors,” the prisoner gasped. “Something big in . . . in San Antonio. We were on the trail . . . of a man named Chavez . . .”
Alfredo’s face was unusually grim as he glanced up at Pablo. Chavez was one of the cartel’s computer experts . . . if the prisoner was talking about the same Chavez, which seemed likely. He had handled many of the details of communications with the cartel’s partners in this operation, routing the emails through so many anonymous digital pathways that no one could ever trace them.
But in order for that to be possible, Chavez had to be privy to a great deal of sensitive information.
“Is he here at the villa?” Alfredo asked.
Pablo looked distinctly uncomfortable as he said, “He works out of his own place. He has an apartment over the club where his girlfriend works. She’s a, uh, stripper.”
“Bring him here,” Alfredo ordered. “We need to find out if he’s had any contact with these men.”
“Chavez would never betray us.”
“You’ll pardon me if I don’t take your word for that, Pablo. I want to talk to him myself.”
“Of course, of course, Alfredo, right away.” Pablo made a sharp gesture to his men. “Take care of it! Find Chavez and bring him here.”
Alfredo looked down again at the DEA agent, who was gasping for air through his broken mouth and nose.
“What is El Nuevo Sol?”
“I . . . don’t . . . know.”
Alfredo believed him. And so there was no more point in keeping the man alive. Alfredo took a small .25 caliber semi-automatic pistol from his jacket pocket, placed the muzzle against the DEA man’s right eye, and pulled the trigger. The little bullet wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the skull, so it just bounced around inside the prisoner’s head, scrambling his brain and making him twitch like a broken puppet for a moment before he died.
Alfredo stood up and handed the pistol to Pablo. Even though only one shot had been fired from it, he didn’t want to put it back in his pocket.
“Clean that,” he said. “While we’re waiting for Chavez.”
CHAPTER 4
Martin Chavez sipped his drink as he watched the nearly naked young woman contorting on the stage in time to the loud, pounding music.
Catalina was a better dancer and more graceful than any of the other women who worked here at the Paloma Azul. Her body was slim but curved where it should be, with enticing hips and firm, high breasts. Her long brown hair swirled around her shoulders as she moved, alternately concealing and revealing the dark brown nipples that crowned those breasts.
Pride filled Marty as he watched Catalina dance. It wasn’t every man who could say he had a girlfriend so sensuous and so beautiful.
Especially when he was a little overweight, nearsighted, and spent most of his time hunched forward in a chair, staring at a computer screen.
His phone chimed. He couldn’t actually hear it over the music, of course, but he felt it vibrate momentarily in his shirt pocket. He took it out and saw that he had a message from Guadalupe Cerna. Lupe lived across the hall from him, and Marty slipped him a little money each month to pay him for keeping an eye on his place.
“Tres hombres,” the message read. That was all, but it was enough. Three men were upstairs looking for him.
Marty tapped some keys on the phone and accessed the feed from the camera he had hidden in a light fixture at the end of the upstairs hall. He stiffened in his chair. The three rough-looking men were still standing there in the upstairs corridor, talking to each other. The feed didn’t have audio, but Marty didn’t have to hear what they were saying to know they were upset.
All three men reached under their jackets and took out guns. One of them lifted his foot and drove it against the door, splintering the jamb and making the door fly open.
Marty’s eyes widened. Watching three men break into his apartment was bad enough to start with, but the fact that he recognized these men made it even worse.
They worked for Pablo Estancia, the same man Marty worked for.
Marty uttered a stunned curse under his breath. Pablo wouldn’t have sent those men to look for him—and in such a violent fashion—unless he’d found out what Marty had been up to.
It had seemed so easy at first. Just hack into the cartel’s network, shift a little money here, a little more there, never enough for anyone to miss it easily, and over time he had a substantial amount in an untraceable overseas account.
It was stealing, sure, but when it was just pixels on a screen it didn’t really seem like a big deal.
It would be a big deal to Pablo, though. Anything that made him look bad in the eyes of the cartel was a big deal.
The three gunmen had disappeared into the apartment. Marty had cameras set up in there, too, but he didn’t think there was any point in accessing them. He knew what the guys would be doing: tearing the place apart looking for him.
And when they didn’t find him, they would come back down the outer stairs and enter the Paloma Azul, since Pablo knew that Catalina worked here.
He had to get out.
Now.
The music boomp-boomped to a halt as Catalina ducked back through the curtain at the back of the stage and vanished. The customers hooted and whistled and applauded, no doubt trying to coax her back out for an encore.
That effort was doomed to failure. Catalina performed precisely the number of sets she was supposed to, and she could time each set down to the second so that she never spent any extra moments on stage. She gave exactly what she was paid for, no more, no less.
Marty put the phone away and stood up. The room was crowded, with men lining the bar, sitting at all the tables, and perched on the stools around the stage. A mixture of tobacco and marijuana smoke filled the air and made the already dim lighting hazy. The spotlight was turned off at the moment and wouldn’t come on again until the next dancer took her place in a few minutes. The customers concentrated on their drinks.
That gave Marty a little time to move without anybody paying attention to him. He circled the room, heading for the door that led backstage.
A bouncer named Ontiveros stood there, brawny arms folded over his massive chest. He was a bodybuilder, thick with muscle. He could pick up pale, soft Marty and tear him in half like a phone book.
But he wouldn’t because he knew Marty, knew that Catalina was his girlfriend. That puzzled Ontiveros as much as it did everyone else who knew them—why would any woman as beautiful as Catalina have anything to do with someone like Marty?—but he accepted it, as did the others who worked here. He gave Marty a nod and moved aside from the door.
Marty’s heart slugged heavily in his chest as he went down the short hallway to the dancers’ dressing room. If Pablo wanted to talk to him about some work matter, he would just call and have Marty come to the villa.
The fact that he had sent three of his apes to fetch Marty spoke volumes. Pablo was mad about something, and it had to be the money Marty had skimmed from the cartel.
It had been a foolish thing to do. Marty had known all along that it would probably result in his death if he was ever found out, but the temptation had been too strong. He was like everyone else: he wondered what Catalina saw in him. He had to be worthy of her, and the only way he could do that was by being rich.
He stepped into the dressing room and found himself surrounded by nude or nearly nude female flesh. He was used to it, though, and was able to concentrate on Catalina, who sat at one of the dressing tables in only the G-string she had worn at the conclusion of her set. She was touching up her makeup, but she spared a glance for Marty in the mirror and smiled at him.
“Was I good?” she
asked.
He didn’t know how she could ever wonder about such a thing. She was more than good. She was spectacular.
“Wonderful,” he said, “but we have to go.”
Her smile turned into a frown.
“Go? I have two more sets to do.”
“Not tonight.” He leaned closer to her and lowered his voice. “We need to get out of here. Now.”
Her brown eyes widened, and she said, “Oh, Marty, what have you done?”
“Nothing, I—” He couldn’t explain it to her, not now. There wasn’t time. “We just have to go, okay? You need to get dressed.”
Still she hesitated, and he thought that he should have gone out the back door of the club and left her here.
But he couldn’t do that, and he knew it. Pablo’s men knew who she was. They would grab her, take her back to the villa, try to force her to tell them what she knew about his little scheme . . . which was exactly nothing.
That lack of knowledge wouldn’t stop them from putting her through hell and eventually killing her.
He never should have done it, never should have put her life at risk. But it was too late to think about that now. All that mattered now was living through the next few minutes.
“Please, Catalina,” he said.
“Oh, all right. But if I get in trouble, it’s your fault.”
Truer words had never been spoken, he thought.
She pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. She didn’t need a bra. Her feet went into a pair of running shoes. She picked up her bag and asked, “Are we going upstairs?”
Marty shook his head.
“Out the back.” He didn’t tell her they would never be able to go back to the apartment again. Everything there was lost.
But he had enough money to replace everything. He just needed to get to somewhere with a computer. There was a coffee shop a few blocks away . . .
What they really needed to do, he realized as they went down the hall, around a corner, and out a narrow door into an alley, was get across the border.
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