by Mark Greaney
Laura shouted in the small room, “Don’t say—”
De la Rocha pounded the grip of the .45 into her head. Laura went down onto the filthy concrete. Dazed, she struggled back up to her knees.
Court’s head rose, and he looked at Daniel de la Rocha.
Slowly, very slowly, he nodded, and softly he spoke. “Okay. Okay. Listen very carefully.”
De la Rocha pulled the hammer back on the pistol, pressed it tighter against her head. “Oh, I am listening, amigo.”
Court nodded again. Then he shrugged. “Shoot the bitch. I don’t give a fuck.”
De la Rocha just stared, his mouth slightly open. He looked back to the Black Suit behind him. “He is a cold fucker, no, Spider? Reminds me of you.” Then back to Gentry. “It is a bluff. A very good bluff, but you are bluffing. You care about what happens to her.” He thought for a long moment; clearly, he had not expected this reaction from the American.
Gentry said, “I didn’t sign up for this shit. The old American guy, Cullen, paid me five grand to watch over his dead buddy’s family for a couple of days. Two large in advance, three more after we got back from Puerto Vallarta. He didn’t say anything about a goddamned cartel hit on them.”
Now de la Rocha’s dark eyebrows furrowed. He took in the English. Weighed the words carefully. “You are private security? A bodyguard?”
“I was. I just retired.”
DLR conferred with Spider for a moment. Court could not understand what they were saying. Then de la Rocha turned back, shook his head.
“No. No, señor. I do not believe you. It was a nice try, but my associate’s men tell him that you escaped the hacienda, and then went back, at great personal danger to yourself, to rescue la familia Gamboa. That does not sound like the actions of any hired gunman I have ever heard of.”
Court started to speak, but Daniel continued talking. He was not a man accustomed to being interrupted.
“You know what? Maybe I won’t kill her now. Maybe I’ll have my sickest, most fucked-up sicarios rape her puta culo until she dies. It will take a little longer, yes, but it will be more rewarding for my men. Maybe I’ll have el Carnicerito do it right now in front of you.”
Court looked over at the fat bald man in the leather apron. The torturer licked his lips.
A mobile phone rang. Emilio pulled it from the front pocket of his suit pants and looked down at it. He offered it to his boss. DLR took it, looked at the face, and with a sigh, he flipped it open. “Nestor, can it wait?” A short pause and then, “Está bien.” He took the pistol away from Laura’s head and replaced it with his foot. He pushed his Italian loafer hard on the back of her skull, shoving the tiny girl to the concrete floor. When she was down on the urine-soaked concrete, he turned and walked back into the stairwell.
The Little Butcher spoke with the Spider. Court tried to make eye contact with Laura, but she remained on her knees, her bound hands flat on the concrete in front of her, her head down. He wanted to speak, to tell her the only chance she had to survive was for him to act like he didn’t care whether she lived or died. It was a long shot, a hell of a long shot, but he’d seen no alternative.
He had to be cold as ice. He had to play like her life held no leverage with him.
Then she looked up at him from the ground, her eyes full of confusion and, yes, even heartbreak. Court had the impression she did not understand his ploy was for her benefit; she actually bought his bullshit about not caring about her.
Court turned away from her sad eyes and looked up to the narco lord across the room. He could hear snippets from DLR’s side of his phone conversation, but much of it was either too fast or spoken with too much Mexican slang for Gentry to understand. Still, he picked up some of the exchange.
“No deal. I need time to extract the information. Twenty-four hours — Okay, they can send one man to come look, but they cannot touch — Kill him? That’s fine… Okay, but they only get the body when we have what we need from him. Make that clear.”
DLR hung up the phone and stepped back in the dungeon, conferred softly with Spider for a moment. There was even a brief argument between them, but it settled down quickly. He then spoke to his prisoners. “Change of plans. Someone is coming to identify this piece of mierda.”
Jerry spoke up from the corner. “Who?”
“Some gringo with la CIA.”
Jerry’s next comment squeaked out in a plaintive whine. “The CIA is coming here? Now?”
De la Rocha nodded. “They insist on making sure this is the cabrón they are looking for. If he is the correct person, then el hombre de la CIA will go away, and we can work on this pinche gringo here to get the information we need.” He looked up at Gentry now. “Then they want us to kill him and dump his head near the embassy.”
Pfleger shot out of the dark corner, up to de la Rocha. “Wait! No! If the spook is on the way, I’ve got to get out of here! I can’t let them see me! I’ll go to prison for working with you guys!”
De la Rocha shrugged. Clearly, he didn’t give a shit about Jerry Pfleger. Still, he said, “You are staying here with your prize; that’s what you asked for, wasn’t it? Somebody give Jerry a mask.” One of the federales pulled a balaclava from the side pocket of his cargo pants, tossed it to the American, who pulled it over his head, struggling to orient the holes for the eyes. When he had himself situated, he looked up at Gentry. Clearly, the prisoner could out him still, mask or not. This plan didn’t make much sense. Through the nylon mask he said, “Mister de la Rocha, what if—”
“Enough from you!” Daniel pointed the .45 at Jerry, and Jerry shut his mouth. He stepped back against the wall with his hands up in compliance.
De la Rocha looked to Court now. “You don’t make very many friends, do you? La CIA is desperate for me to kill you.”
Gentry asked, “And what do you get in return?”
“La CIA will provide us intel from the DEA on the Madrigal Cartel’s connections with governments in South America.”
Jerry took a step back towards the light again. “And money, right? I still get—”
DLR pointed the pistol at Pfleger again. “Plata o plomo?” Money or lead?
“Money, jefe. Definitely money.” Pfleger backed up again.
De la Rocha continued. “So I am going to leave you now; my associates insist I not be here when la CIA arrive. But I am going to take your little puta with me. The spy will be brought here to identify you and then taken away. The Little Butcher will have the next twenty-four hours to find out what you know about Elena Gamboa, and I will have the rest of my life to find out what little Lorita knows about Elena Gamboa.”
It was quiet in the room.
“The only question is, which one of us will have the most fun with our work?”
Spider took the girl by the hair and pulled her up to her feet. She screamed with the movement. DLR looked at Gentry one last time as he started for the door. “You have cost me much, and now you will repay me.”
As he entered the stairwell, he called back to the room, “Carnicerito, help our American friend Jerry here and torture this prisoner so bad he won’t be able to speak when the spy comes to identify him.”
The fat man replied, “Sí, jefe.” And he turned the dial on the table to its maximum voltage.
THIRTY-NINE
The Black Suits picked up the CIA man in Chapultepec Park; as prearranged he wore a red tie and stood on the steps of the National Museum of Anthropology. He was a thick man, blond hair that ran just past his collar and a chunky neck from which the tip of his chin barely peeked. He was getting thicker by the minute, too. He’d just finished a dulce de leche ice cream cone, purchased at a stand across from the steps, and had just wiped his thick hands clean of the sticky residue as the Black Suits pulled up.
He’d been one fit and fine son of a bitch a while back, but he’d let himself go.
His current job did not require staying in shape.
A gray van pulled to a stop in front of him on
Las Grutas Avenue, the side door slid open, and the thick man from la CIA climbed in.
Four sets of well-practiced hands went to work on him immediately as the van drove off to the south towards Paseo de la Reforma. His briefcase was taken and searched, he was hooded and frisked, his wallet was pulled from his poplin pants, and his white button-down shirt was lifted up to check for a wire.
The hands that felt him up, he knew, would also be the hands that killed him if they were so instructed by their masters.
The van turned left, which the CIA man noted from under his blindfold, but he really did not expect to be able to discern where he was being taken.
He’d been to Mexico City before, yes, but this was not his turf.
He sat quietly between his minders as they drove through traffic; he’d ridden hooded in vans, surrounded by a local gun crew, more times that he cared to remember. In Beirut, in Kosovo, in Thailand, in Somalia, in other shit-splattered dumps around this godforsaken planet.
Usually, he was bundled like laundry into a car or van to be hauled to some secret location to meet with a contact. But this was different. He was here, in Mexico, and not some other poor agency sap, for one reason and one reason only.
He had an ability that very few others possessed.
He had the ability to positively identify Courtland Gentry, code name Violator, call sign Sierra Six, nickname the Gray Man, in one second flat.
And why not? They had worked together for five years.
* * *
The thick CIA man had spent the last two days in Puerto Vallarta, waiting for word from local case officers that the target had been found. He suspected a wet team from the Special Activities Division had moved into the theater as well, but they wouldn’t have any contact with him, nor he with them. Yesterday morning he flew to Mexico City to wait at the embassy for a sighting of the man Langley suspected to be their number one persona non grata ex-employee. The embassy was papered with photos of the guy sliding on the telephone lines above the shoot-out in PV. From just the picture, the thick CIA man in the van honestly had no idea if it was his former colleague or not, but the stunt sure sounded like something Violator would have tried, and like something he could have pulled off.
Hell, the CIA man knew better than to ever bet against Courtland Gentry. When it came to close-quarters battle, when it came to kicking in a door and taking out the bad guys in the room, when it came to sending in a small covert unit against a larger enemy and longer odds, Sierra Six had been the best.
So, the CIA man suspected it was Court; he was here, and he was shooting it out with the narcos.
Lord have mercy on the narcos.
A connection had been made between Gentry and the leader of the GOPES team blown up on the boat as well. Eduardo Gamboa had worked in the DEA for years, and Violator and he had shared a Laotian prison cell for a few weeks more than a decade prior.
Tenuous. Tenuous at best, but not too tenuous for Langley to call the thick CIA man, roust him from his bed and shove him on a Company Lear, race him to Mexico and plop him on his fat ass to wait for a chance to positively identify the target.
So now he rocked back and forth, shoulder to shoulder with a vanload of goons from the Daniel de la Rocha organization, the Black Suits, some seriously bad motherfuckers who claimed to be holding Violator, or somebody who looks a lot like him, somewhere in Mexico City. These pricks didn’t need money, so it wasn’t the reward they were after. It was some quid pro quo worked out high above the CIA man’s pay grade. It bothered him that Langley would play ball with these guys, but Denny Carmichael, current head of the National Clandestine Service, had a boner for Violator, so God only knew how Denny would scratch DLR’s back if he gave up Court.
The CIA man pondered it all.
Court. Violator. Sierra Six. The Gray Man.
The asshole who ruined my life.
The van stopped for a moment. The American thought this was the end of the road, but no, they moved forward again and made a right turn; he swayed along with the men sandwiching him.
If the Agency’s assessment was correct, if this was, in fact, Violator, in a few minutes the American would have the chance to let Gentry know how much trouble he’d caused.
And the CIA man had his orders. He had been ordered to identify Violator, yes, but that was not all.
He’d also been ordered, if allowed by Los Trajes Negros, to stick around and watch Court Gentry die.
* * *
For a time Court realized that he missed the full-body electric shocks provided by the car battery. Twice during a ten-minute zapping by the Little Butcher and his device of misery, Court had blown a breaker switch on the console. The old contraption used fuses that had shorted, and they had been replaced, but the American was able to endure more punishment than anyone that had ever been wired to the fence. So the machine had been put to the side so that a new method could be used on him.
The donkey prod.
At first el Carnicerito had just touched the two sharp prongs to Gentry’s bloody chest. The shock was more acute than the all-over electricity he’d been receiving from the shock machine. The prod created a sting and a burn, and it was god-awful but not as bad as the musclewrenching misery of the car battery juice sent through the fence. Then the Little Butcher used the donkey prod in more and more painful locations on Gentry’s body, inevitably focusing his attention on his prisoner’s genitals. Twice he’d shocked him there. The first time he didn’t have the prongs seated correctly, and the gadget just buzzed.
But the second time he rammed the pincers hard against the American’s balls, pressed the button, and Court had spewed vomit nearly six feet into the room.
The five Mexicans burst into laughter.
The gringo soon fainted, but smelling salts returned him to his torture session, lest he miss any of the good parts.
Jerry Pfleger stood against the wall to the side; he’d turned away from the cruelty long ago, and he just stared at the moldy bricks in front of him. His body shook; he told himself it was the cold, morguelike air in the basement dungeon, but that wasn’t it at all.
He was scared.
He wondered if this was all worth one million dollars.
Jerry looked back over his shoulder when the torturer waddled over to a rubber bucket on the floor against the wall and retrieved a well-soaked iron rod from it. Jerry winced again and turned his head back into the corner. Listened as the dungeon master spoke to his prisoner softly as he prepared the device. “You have suffered much already, amigo, and the only way to prevent more suffering is to tell me where we can find Señora Gamboa.”
The long device dripped black oil, and the Little Butcher held it up like it was some sort of prize.
Court’s head hung low, but still he looked at it. Pfleger watched the muscles of the man’s body tighten in revulsion.
He knew where that thing was going.
The elevator again came to life, and the car began to lower slowly.
The rod went back into the bucket, but the torturer said, “We will get back to our fun in a moment, my friend. You now have some time to think about things.”
The freight door opened, and a large, hooded man in a tropicweight poplin suit was led in by the two men in federale uniforms. The large man’s arms were not bound. He was put directly under the light at the center of the room, and then his hood was removed. He recoiled at the bare bulb and then focused on the scene before him.
The nude prisoner, bloody and wet, chained to the metal fence that was bolted into the wall and fixed to iron posts in the cement floor. The wires running to the rolling cart, then on to the battery on the dolly.
The blond man took a few more moments to look around, to size up the six other men in the room with him, and to sniff the air. He took in the odor of decaying human flesh. He looked around impassively for a few seconds more, seemingly unfazed by all in view, as if torture chambers were nothing much to see.
Then he spoke, his words calm and confi
dent like he was a man comfortable with these surroundings. In Spanish he said, “It looks like you guys started the party without me.”
* * *
Court knew an old coworker from the Agency was coming to identify him. He fully expected to be staring face to face with Zack Hightower, his former team leader in the Goon Squad.
But it was not Zack Hightower.
It was Hanley. Matthew Hanley.
Gentry had not seen Matt in more than five years, and even back then they had never spent much time around each other. Hanley was a SAD executive; he had run Gentry’s old unit, Task Force Golf Sierra, from Langley, passed instructions primarily through team leader Hightower, who relayed orders on to the rest of the men.
Court had last seen Zack back in the spring, and Zack had told him Hanley was out of SAD and riding a desk somewhere in the Third World, his fall from grace the fault of Gentry himself.
And now here he was, in a secret torture chamber operated by a vicious drug cartel somewhere in or near Mexico City.
No words were spoken between the two at first. Instead Hanley addressed the fat man behind the table. “You in charge here?”
“You might say this is my office,” came the proud reply.
Hanley just nodded. Then he stepped closer to Gentry.
“I must ask that you do not touch the prisoner,” said the Black Suit from behind. The two federales in the room took a step forward but stopped when Hanley nodded again.
The thick American kept his hands to his side, but he moved even closer to the prisoner. He only stopped his slow advance when the two men’s faces were inches apart.
Court looked too wounded to speak; his eyes were swollen and vomit coated his bloody lips. As far as Hanley could tell, the younger man was out of it. But Gentry did speak, his words soft but strong enough, loud enough, to be understood by anyone in the room who spoke English. “Do what you gotta do to me, Matt, but the guy in the corner is a State Department dip working for the Black Suits.”
