Rosarito Beach

by M. A. Lawson

  Thank God Kay had the video of Tito killing Cadillac Washington.

  13

  While Kay was moving María Delgato to Neah Bay, Tito Olivera was moved to the U.S. Marine Corps brig at Camp Pendleton.

  Government agencies are not known for moving swiftly, particularly when there are issues involving the responsibilities and purview of those agencies. No bureaucrat likes any action that might result in a precedent for giving his work to some other bureaucrat. In the case of moving Tito Olivera into a military prison, several organizations had their fingers in the pie: the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, the U.S. Attorney in San Diego, the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Marshals Service, the DEA, and the Pentagon. For once—and most likely because of Caesar Olivera’s attack in San Diego that resulted in the deaths of almost a score of people—all these entities moved at what, for them, was a blinding rate of speed.

  In a long, formal document composed by various legal elves, it was agreed that Tito would be placed in the brig, and although the Marshals Service would be the primary agency responsible for guarding him, the marshals would be “augmented” by marines at Camp Pendleton. In other words, if Caesar Olivera was dumb enough or arrogant enough to try to free his brother from the brig, he was going to have to deal with a battalion of superbly trained, armed-to-the-teeth marines.

  Marshal Kevin Walker personally escorted Tito Olivera from San Diego to Camp Pendleton in a helicopter, but before they left, Walker made a phone call. He couldn’t obtain a phone number for Caesar Olivera, so he called Tito’s lawyer.

  “Prescott,” he said, “this is U.S. Marshal Kevin Walker. We met the other day in Judge Foreman’s conference room.”

  “Yes, I remember you, Marshal. What can I do for you?”

  “I want you to pass a message to Caesar Olivera. As you know, Tito is being transferred to the brig at Pendleton, and I want you to tell Caesar that I’m taking him there myself. Tell him that if any of his people try to free him while he’s being transported, the first thing I’m going to do is shoot Tito in the head.”

  “That’s an outrageous threat to make, Marshal. You’re basically telling me you intend to murder Tito. I intend to report this phone call to—”

  “Pass on the message, Prescott. I’m not bluffing,” Walker said, and hung up.

  14

  There is a boxy, windowless, concrete structure on Caesar Olivera’s estate in Sinaloa. It sits in a low spot so it can’t be seen from the main house and spoil the view of the mountains. On the roof of the building are a number of antennae and small satellite dishes.

  This building was where Caesar often held meetings, and almost all of his financial affairs were managed from there. It was guarded around the clock by armed men and was swept daily for electronic eavesdropping devices—although it was hard to imagine anyone having the nerve or the ability to penetrate Caesar’s estate. The penalty for a guard found sleeping on duty was death.

  Inside the building were state-of-the-art communications and computer systems—and state-of-the-art computer security. There was a conference room with a table large enough to seat twelve—the sort of table where a board of directors might sit—two standard offices with desks and file cabinets, a small kitchen, three bedrooms where people could stay overnight if necessary, and another room filled with racks of servers. Finally, there was one large room that had ten computer stations, half a dozen plasma screens mounted on the walls, and STU-III telephones for holding scrambled, encrypted conversations. It was the sort of room one might see at the Pentagon or the New York Stock Exchange, and normally this room was the domain of the Harvard MBA and some of her financial people who turned large amounts of Caesar’s drug money into legitimate, profit-making investments.

  This room was now occupied with different sorts of people: computer hackers and other Internet experts who were essentially electronic detectives. There were five men and three women, and they were pecking on keyboards and talking quietly on telephones. One of the women was in charge of coordinating their activities and maintaining an up-to-date spreadsheet of all intelligence acquired.

  The room had become Raphael Mora’s operations room—his war room—and the people in it were searching for María Delgato and helping Mora plan Tito Olivera’s escape.

  —

  Mora was in the conference room by himself, studying a large paper contour map of Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton. Most of the base was surrounded by a fence, and access points were manned by guards. Mora knew, however, that the fence and the guards were not the only barriers preventing people from reaching the brig where Tito was incarcerated.

  Since 9/11, U.S. military installations had significantly upgraded their security measures, and Mora suspected, although he didn’t know for sure, that there were cameras and motion detectors all along the perimeter of the large base. Most likely, roving patrols as well. One area that was not fenced in was the coastline that ran for several miles along the west side of the base. Mora laughed out loud at the thought of a horde of tattooed Mexican gangbangers making an amphibious assault against Camp Pendleton.

  “What’s so funny?” Caesar said. Mora hadn’t heard him come into the conference room, and he was embarrassed by his laughter.

  Caesar was wearing scuffed work boots, jeans, a wash-faded denim shirt, and a straw hat on his head. He looked like a strawberry picker you’d see north of the border. Mora figured he had probably been looking at the grapes he’d planted on a few acres on the north side of the estate; he’d hired a wine maker from the Napa Valley to help him produce his own wine.

  “Uh, nothing, sir. I was just thinking—”

  Caesar removed the straw hat, dropped it on the conference table, and took a seat. “Where do we stand?”

  “If you don’t mind, let’s begin with the security at Camp Pendleton. Tito is being kept in an isolation cell on the ground floor of the brig, a two-story concrete structure. So far he hasn’t been allowed outside his cell for meals or exercise. I don’t know if they’ll continue to keep him confined twenty-four hours a day until his trial, but I’ll be informed if there’s any change in his status.

  “The brig is approximately seven miles from the Camp Pendleton main gate off I-5, and is located in an area where there are a number of large warehouses and a few barracks where some marines are housed. To reach the brig, you have to pass through one of the perimeter gates, and guards do ID checks and random vehicle checks. A carful of men who look like they might work for us will certainly be given closer scrutiny.

  “Just before one reaches the brig, there is a second gate. Until Tito was placed in the brig, this gate was not manned and was always left open. Now there are concrete vehicle barricades and guards stationed at this access point armed with heavy-caliber weapons. I’ve been further informed that Pendleton has over a thousand military policemen and if an attempt is made to breach the gates or the brig itself, these MPs will respond within minutes. The general in charge of the base is running drills to improve their response time.”

  “Who is providing this information?”

  “A female staff sergeant who works in an administrative capacity associated with the brig.”

  Caesar didn’t bother to ask if Mora was paying the sergeant or threatening to kill her family to force her to do what he wanted. Caesar didn’t care.

  “Sir, the bottom line is, I believe any sort of direct assault against the brig will fail. Within minutes, our people would be surrounded by marines and killed, and Tito might be killed as well. And there is something else you need to know.

  “Inside the brig, there are no other inmates on the corridor where Tito is being held and two U.S. marshals are in the cell adjacent to Tito’s at all times. Four marshals have been assigned to the base, and they are on twelve-hour shifts. The senior of these four marshals is the liaison with the marines, and he is constantly checking the procedures fo
r guarding the brig. Personnel are not normally allowed to bring weapons into the brig, but an exception has been made for the marshals. I think this is very significant in that it means that Marshal Walker has the capability to follow through on his threat to kill Tito immediately if anyone attempts to break him out of jail.”

  “What do we know about the marshals guarding Tito?”

  “Everything. They all have families: wives, children, mothers, siblings. The problem is that the marine guards at Pendleton, who are rotated frequently, all have standing orders that Tito will not be allowed outside the brig without an order signed by Judge Foreman, the man who placed him in the brig.”

  “Can we obtain a copy of Foreman’s signature?”

  “I already have it, and of course we can duplicate it. I also have a copy of the court’s stationery and copies of similar court orders. The problem is that when they do decide to move Tito there will be a lot of . . . of fanfare. The brig will be notified days in advance. They’ll use a team to execute the transfer, and he’ll probably be moved by helicopter, as he was when he was taken to Camp Pendleton. In other words, it’s not as simple as someone just showing up with a court order to move Tito.”

  “So as of right now,” Caesar said, “you don’t know how to free my brother.”

  “No, sir,” Mora said.

  Caesar glanced at his watch, said, “Excuse me,” and left the conference room. He walked across the hall to the kitchen, removed a bottle of water from the refrigerator, and when he returned to the conference room, he pulled a vial from his shirt pocket, shook out two pills, and swallowed them. “My doctor says my cholesterol is too high and I need to take a little aspirin for my heart. More chicken, he says, less red meat, more exercise, fewer cigars. My father smokes two packs a day, has never taken a pill in his life, and he’s seventy-nine years old.”

  “Uh, yes, sir,” Mora said, not sure what else to say.

  “What about the woman, the informant?”

  “Once again, I’m sorry to report that I have no information regarding her at this time. She was taken away right after Tito was arrested, and right now I have no idea where she or her mother is. Her brother is supposed to be in Canada and I have people looking for him there, but I suspect Miguel Delgato is also in the DEA’s custody. We’re doing all the usual things: looking at telephone records of María Delgato’s friends, checking credit-card charges, et cetera. But we have a year to find her, sir. I’ll find her.”

  “And Tito’s men, the ones who were arrested with him?”

  “Rodríguez and Gomez. I already have people exploring ways to get to them in MCC. It won’t be difficult, but I think we need to wait awhile. We need to let the administrators at the jail relax a bit before we move on them, and then I want to take out both men simultaneously. They’ll be dead in less than two months.”

  “What about the video of Tito killing Washington?”

  “That’s our biggest problem if Tito goes to trial. Tito’s lawyer has seen the video, and he says that even if all the witnesses are dead, the video alone is enough to convict him. It shows Tito very clearly killing Washington, and when Tito was arrested he had on his person the weapon he used. The DEA agent who arrested Tito, a woman named Hamilton, followed precisely all chain-of-evidence requirements regarding the video and Tito’s weapon. She also had several duplicates of the video made, and she used video experts from L.A. to make the copies. Copies of the video have been given to the Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting Tito and to Tito’s lawyer, and other copies have been put in other secure locations. The original is in a safe at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I don’t think we’ll be able to impugn the video, and I think destroying the original will be futile. Tito’s attorney has filed motions claiming the warrant to videotape Washington’s bar was flawed, but he doubts he’ll be successful excluding the video evidence.”

  When Caesar didn’t say anything for several seconds, Mora said, “Sir, I’ve only been working on this problem for a few days, and we have almost a year to come up with a solution. I need more time.”

  “Okay,” Caesar finally said, and placed the straw hat back on his head and left the conference room. Mora knew he was disappointed—and he knew it was not good to disappoint his employer. He also couldn’t help but wonder why Caesar was willing to spend so much money and manpower to free Tito. He knew Caesar had spoiled Tito as a child, and had been more like a father to him than an older brother, but when Tito became an adult Mora could tell that Caesar didn’t have much respect for his brother’s intelligence or his character. Did Caesar feel obligated to move heaven and earth to save Tito because they were related, or was it a matter of pride, showing the world, especially the Americans, that he couldn’t be defeated? Whatever the case, Mora could tell that Caesar would never give up, and if Mora failed, Caesar would blame him.

  Years before, Mora had developed a plan in case he had to run. He had a suitcase already packed with alternate identities and cash, a fast, untraceable method for leaving the country, and places picked out where he could hide. He’d always assumed, however, that he’d be running from the police and not his boss. If it appeared that freeing Tito might be impossible . . . Well, he was glad the suitcase was packed.

  15

  Kay Hamilton was dreading the year that lay ahead.

  After she killed Marco Álvarez in Miami, she spent almost two years meeting with government lawyers, preparing for the trials of Álvarez’s men that she’d arrested, and then appearing at trial after trial to testify. Kay liked catching crooks—everything that followed after she caught them was boring and irritating. It was rather like hunting: the hunt was the fun; skinning and butchering the critters after you shot them was just work.

  She knew the same thing was going to happen now that she’d arrested Tito Olivera. She was going to have to work with the U.S. Attorney’s Office to arrest the two bankers who were laundering money for the Olivera cartel. Then—and this was not going to be fun at all—she was going to have to work with the San Diego DA and the San Diego cops to prepare for the trials of the three detectives who’d been arrested for taking bribes and passing on information to Tito’s people. Her relationship with the city cops had never been very good, but after cutting them out of Tito’s arrest and Jim Davis embarrassing John Hernández at the meeting with the judge . . . well, things were chilly to say the least. On top of all that came preparations for the trials of Tito Olivera and his fellow felons: Ángel Gomez, Jesús Rodríguez, and a dozen other thugs they brought in after they arrested Tito—arrests made possible in part by the bugs she’d forced María to install in Tito’s house. It was going to be an awful year.

  She had to do something else in the year to come. Before Jim Davis retired she needed to suck up to the right people in Washington and make them believe that she was the one who should replace him. She knew, in spite of her performance in Miami and her role in bringing down Tito Olivera, that she was going to have a tough time convincing the powers that be to give her the job. For one thing, she was almost positive that Davis wasn’t going to recommend her. He was going to say pretty much the same thing he’d told her the other day—that she was a great field agent but lousy at working with outside agencies, and her idea of leadership was kicking her employees in the ass. Somehow, if she was going to get his job, she had to go through a major makeover.

  She also wondered if she really wanted Jim Davis’s job. Davis spent most of his time dealing with budgets and personnel bullshit, feeding statistics to the bean counters back at headquarters, and coordinating with Justice Department lawyers and other law-enforcement agencies. Most days he didn’t even leave the office, and she knew if she was chained to a desk it would drive her insane.

  So did she really want the job?

  Yeah, she did.

  Maybe it was a matter of ego, but she also didn’t want to end up like Figgins and Patterson, still doing grunt work when she was fif
ty, maybe taking orders from some dummy like Wilson. She had to polish up her image, maybe take a couple of management classes, learn to play the political games. But what she really needed were a couple of high-powered female politicians on her side. If she could get some senator like Barbara Boxer pushing for her . . . hell, who knows? Maybe she could end up running the DEA.

  Okay, that was a stretch, but a GS-15 position before she retired wasn’t totally out of reach.

  She stopped fantasizing about Barbara Boxer becoming her political guardian angel and turned back to the computer to finish up a report that was a week overdue. Then she glanced up at the clock on the wall: five p.m. Fuck it. The report could wait until tomorrow. She took her sidearm out of her desk drawer, slipped it into her shoulder holster, and put on her blazer to hide the weapon.

  She started toward her place in Point Loma, then realized she wasn’t in the mood, quite yet, for going home to an empty house and decided to stop at a bar downtown on B Street that catered to law-enforcement types. She ordered a martini and soon began bullshitting with a deputy from the San Diego Sheriff’s Department. He had a big bandage on his left forearm, and he told her how he’d responded to a domestic beef—and how the lady who’d been getting smacked around by her husband sicced a ninety-pound pit bull on him when he tried to arrest the guy. He had to shoot the dog, and the sheriffs were now getting sued for killing the mutt.

  Kay, in turn, told him an I-can-top-that story about breaking into a trailer/meth lab in the Glades that was being protected by a six-foot alligator. “You ever tried to shoot a gun at a moving alligator while falling backward off the stairs of a doublewide?”

  The deputy was a good-looking guy, a year or two younger than her, and doing his best to pick her up. But she didn’t want him. She wanted Robert Meyer.