El Rey stood. “This is getting us nowhere.”
“You said earlier that I had one chance. What were you thinking?” Carla asked.
“You have to disappear. If you don’t, you’re dead.”
“I can’t just disappear. I have a career. Obligations, a home…”
“None of which will do you any good once you’re dead.”
“Where would I go?”
“That’s not the biggest problem. There’s a part to this story I haven’t told you. It involves an injection,” El Rey said and gave her an abridged version of his situation with the antidote. When he finished, he frowned. “So you see, you’d have to have a good reason to drop off the radar, to buy me time as an excuse for not terminating you. I can’t get you if I can’t find you.”
“Then I really don’t understand what you’re proposing,” she said.
El Rey laid out his thinking in precise terms. When he was done, the air hung heavy with tension. Carla studied Cruz’s face and then the assassin’s.
“It could work. Provided I went along with it and didn’t alert everyone I could think of the second I was back in my house.”
“Which you’re free to do. Just prepare a will first, because your life span will be measured in hours at that point. As will mine, and his,” El Rey said.
Carla sat in silence for a half minute and then leaned forward. “Presuming I disappear, I have one condition. I want an exclusive on this story, whatever it is. I mean, I can help you dig, too. I’m a researcher. It’s part of what I do. And with three of us trying to find out what’s going on, we might all have a better chance than without me helping.”
“Miss Vega, I have a wife I love very much. She thinks I’m dead. Right now her heart’s breaking, as is mine. I don’t want to have to stay dead, to walk away from the most precious thing in my life. So believe me, if anyone’s motivated to dig, it’s me,” Cruz said quietly.
El Rey looked at Carla. “You can have the exclusive. It doesn’t mean that you’ll ever get to tell it, though. Our theory that this is a rogue operation within CISEN may be dead wrong, and it may be officially sanctioned at the highest levels, in which case, well…then there’s not much you can do but move to Bora Bora and take up bartending.”
Carla fixed Cruz with a cool stare. “What do you want me to do first?”
“You’re probably not going to like it.”
“I think that’s safe to say. But do I have a choice?”
“Not a good one.”
Chapter 36
Carla’s neighborhood was deserted at 3:30 a.m., the moon now high in the inky vault of the night sky, and when Cruz dropped El Rey and Carla off near her neighbor’s townhouse, the street was absolutely still, with only a faint sound of traffic from the nearby Paseo de la Reforma, which was always busy regardless of the hour.
El Rey led her into the building, her feet shielded from the debris by a too-large pair of his running shoes, and guided her up the stairs to the roof. She watched in disbelief as he wedged the ladder in place between the two buildings and gestured for her to approach. She peered down into the void beneath it and shook her head.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“It’s not that hard. I managed it carrying you.”
She closed her eyes. “I’m afraid of heights.”
“No time like the present to conquer that fear.”
She shook her head again. “I can’t do it.”
“You want me to try again with you on my back?”
“That would be even worse. Isn’t there any other option?”
El Rey considered the question and then nodded and explained the alternative.
She smiled. “I like that one way better.”
“You just need to be convincing.”
“I’m on TV, remember?”
“All right. Let’s do it.” He led her back to the ground floor, carrying the ladder, and when they were in the backyard, he leaned it against the ten-foot-high wall separating the properties. “You go first. Sit on the top of the wall while I come up, and then take my hand, and I’ll lower you so that it will be a short drop to the ground.”
She did as directed, and when both of them were in her yard, he moved to her rear door, his lock picks in hand. Carla watched him massage the deadbolt tumblers until he had it open, and then he stood.
“You know what to do. Give me three minutes to get away. You remember my phone number?”
She repeated it to confirm. “And tomorrow morning…?”
“Just make sure you’re on time,” he cautioned, and then he was running, a dark streak in the gloom. He seemed to defy gravity as he leapt and pulled himself up and over the wall, all the time as silent as the grave.
Carla counted silently to herself. When three minutes had passed, she twisted the knob and opened the door. Sirens howled a Klaxon wail, and her bodyguards came running, weapons drawn.
Carla waved them off. “Sorry. I forgot about the alarm. I thought I heard something out here.”
“Señorita Vega, if there’s something on the grounds, it would be best if you allowed us to investigate,” the shift leader said.
She nodded and ran a listless hand through her hair, having no problem doing a convincing job of being sleepy. “Turn it off, would you? That noise is terrible.”
“Of course.” He went to the keypad and tapped in a four-digit code. The clamor quieted, and she offered a fatigued smile.
“Sorry, boys. I thought it might have been a cat I’ve seen back here a few times. I was thinking of adopting it if it’s a stray.” She covered her mouth and yawned. “Let me know if you see it so I can put out some milk.”
She brushed past the men and made for the stairs. They watched her, their faces impassive, and when she was out of sight, the leader rolled his eyes and shook his head.
In her room, Carla opened her floor safe and extracted the money she kept there – twenty thousand U.S. and thirty thousand pesos. She wasn’t unusual in keeping cash in her home; the banks in Mexico didn’t offer safe deposit boxes, so every house had a good safe. She dropped the banknotes into her purse along with her passport and, after spinning the combination dial, returned to her bed, where she lay sleepless, mind racing, for the rest of the night.
Chapter 37
Carla’s street looked completely different bathed in cool morning light, Cruz thought as he sat, his expression stony, behind the wheel of a Ford Mustang El Rey had stolen several hours earlier. The assassin waited patiently next to him, an old AK-47 in his hands, his attention focused on the front door of Carla’s home.
They’d discussed how they would proceed, and Cruz had reluctantly agreed, although he hated the idea of being involved in gunfire in civilian territory. But as much as Cruz disliked it, there was no other way, and it was too late to back out now.
The big V8 engine rumbled quietly as Cruz checked his watch for the fifth time in as many minutes. El Rey glanced at him before returning to his vigil.
“Relax. You’re making me nervous with the fidgeting.”
“Sorry.”
“You’d think you’d never operated in the field before.”
“It’s not that. I’m just not used to being on this side of the law.”
“It’s no different regardless of which side you’re on. Chill out. I need to concentrate.”
Cruz took several deep breaths. The assassin was right. He was letting his nerves get the better of him, no doubt due to lack of sleep.
They both saw movement at Carla’s front door at the same time, and then the iron gate across her driveway opened, and then a dark gray Chevrolet Tahoe pulled out and stopped at the front curb. Carla had told them that her routine never varied – at 8:30, one of the bodyguards brought the car around and waited as she and the other two men came down the steps for the ride to her office.
“Now,” El Rey hissed. Cruz slipped the transmission into gear and rolled down the street at a slow pace. Carla stood on her front stoop and
programmed the alarm, her two bodyguards looking stiff in their charcoal suits and aviator sunglasses. They seemed to intuit something was wrong as the Mustang slowed just behind the SUV, and both were reaching for their weapons when the shooting started.
El Rey squeezed off a long burst at the house, taking care to avoid hitting Carla or her escorts, spraying the façade next to them instead as well as putting several rounds into the rear door of the Chevrolet for good measure.
“Go,” El Rey screamed, and Cruz goosed the accelerator as the bodyguards rounded the Tahoe and fired at the car. But hitting a fishtailing vehicle accelerating to high speed with handguns was a doubtful proposition at best, and only a few of their rounds thumped into the trunk as the Mustang carved the corner at the end of the block and disappeared from sight.
“That went well,” the assassin shouted, ears ringing from the roar of the weapon. “Two blocks up make a left, and then another three, a right.”
“Don’t worry. I remember.” Cruz gunned the gas and swerved, narrowly missing an Audi sedan backing out of a driveway. “You sure you didn’t hit anyone?”
“You do know who you’re talking to, right?”
“I’m just asking.”
“Every shot went only where I wanted it to go. Although it’s dicey with one of these things on full automatic. I mean, they’re not the most accurate even on single fire…” El Rey turned to look at Cruz’s scowling profile. “Don’t worry. Everyone’s fine.”
Two minutes later they coasted to a stop in an alley by a bakery and got out of the car. El Rey left the weapon inside and rounded the fender to where Cruz was standing by the driver’s door.
“Okay. Just like we discussed. We split up, and I’ll meet you back at the house in an hour. Go get something to eat. Buy a good book. The hardest part’s over,” El Rey said, and Cruz nodded. That area didn’t have a traffic camera, so they could disappear on foot without leaving a trail. The police would find the car soon enough, leaving them empty-handed.
Cruz walked off in one direction, El Rey in the other. At the corner the assassin flagged down a taxi, outwardly calm – a young man on the way to work. Cruz circled the block and at the next boulevard hopped on a bus heading east. He took a seat toward the back and closed his eyes, trying to ignore his stomach growling as the bus bounced toward the far edge of the city, his heart rate only now dropping to a normal level.
The police arrived at Carla’s home within six minutes, and in another ten there were five squad cars closing off the street, an officer at each end of the block directing traffic. Carla was inside, on the phone with her publicist, Samantha, her voice tight with an edge of panic.
“That’s right. They almost killed me. Thank God nobody was hit. There must have been fifty shots. The house is a disaster,” she said.
“Good Lord. Who would do such a thing?”
“I’ve been working on an investigation into the cartels. I was threatened before, but I didn’t take it seriously.”
“Threatened! Why didn’t you say something?”
“It was just a note. And nothing happened. But I must have struck a nerve.”
“My God. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know what I can do. You know the cartels. They’re everywhere.”
“You have to duck out of sight, Carla. Listen to me. Your safety is more important than your job.”
Bingo. Carla knew her friend Samantha well and had hoped she’d arrive at the conclusion she did, making going into hiding her idea, not Carla’s.
“I don’t know, Samantha. I mean, I can’t just drop everything…”
“You listen to me. Get your skinny ass out of Mexico City, now. Take a vacation somewhere the cartels have never heard of. I’ll run interference here. In fact, I’ll be able to get more mileage out of this than if you were still here.”
“Isn’t that rather melodramatic?”
“You were shot at and almost killed outside your house. One of Mexico’s most beloved television personalities. Are you kidding? This is pure gold. I can keep the headlines going for weeks with speculation about where you’re hiding. It’s a dream come true.” Samantha was reliably consistent and viewed the world in terms of photo ops and sound bites. She was also a gossip, ensuring that long before the evening news the town would be buzzing about the shocking gun battle in its rarefied heart, and the cartel angle would be common knowledge.
“Maybe you’re right,” Carla said, allowing herself to be talked into it. That it hadn’t appeared to have been her idea was even better, because knowing Samantha, she’d take great pains to tell her network of contacts that she’d forced her stubborn client to go underground for her own good.
“Damn right I am. Call me when you’re somewhere off the radar. I don’t want to know where. You know how I am. Can’t keep a secret to save my life.”
“That’s why I love you, Sam.”
“Stay safe. And call.”
“Okay. I need to talk to the office and let them know.”
“Do it from the road, girl. Get moving. For all you know, they could be watching you right now. God, it’s scary. I just frightened myself thinking about it.”
“I have to make a statement to the police, and then I’ll get going.”
“Promise?”
Carla fought the urge to smile. The plan was working perfectly. She’d disappear, her imminent demise a public concern, with proof that the cartels wanted to stop her relentless journalistic probing etched into the mortar of her house façade by every bullet hole. Carla had no doubt that Samantha would be able to get maximum mileage out of the situation, and if anything, when Carla returned to the spotlight, she’d be a bigger name than ever before.
Carla cleared her throat as she caught a glimpse of a detective in a brown overcoat pushing past the uniforms on the front steps, notebook in hand.
“Promise.”
Chapter 38
Guadalajara, Mexico
The dark-haired man sat on the veranda, staring out at a nearby clearing where a small girl wearing a white sun dress ran with a butterfly net, trying to catch a particularly colorful example as a smiling woman stood watching from the shade of a tree. His head bobbed silently as though he was keeping time to a song only he could hear, and then he held up the morning paper and threw it onto the large outdoor dining table where he was seated across from the fair-haired younger man.
“I don’t like it. I smell a rat,” the dark-haired man said. The younger man drank his orange juice, displaying no outward emotion, waiting for the older man to finish. “She’s been warned, somehow.”
“It’s possible. Although it’s also possible that it’s exactly what it seems. Unrelated to our project.”
“We can’t take the chance. I’m telling you it’s gone south on us. Either the assassin spilled the beans, or someone in CISEN did.”
“It’s going to be virtually impossible knowing which. Assuming you’re right. Which, with all due respect, we have no way of verifying.”
The dark-haired man’s stare hardened as he studied the younger man. “You don’t sound convinced.”
“What I want to avoid is escalating this any further. As of now, four of the six people we gave to CISEN to handle are dead. The woman’s gone into hiding, and the other’s disappeared. I’m actually more worried about the farmer than the reporter at this point.”
“Worry about both of them. We have no idea what the woman knows. She’s a potential bomb that could explode in our faces at any time.”
“True. But don’t forget that the assassin is still hunting her.”
“For all we know the botched attack was him trying to snuff her out.”
“I highly doubt it. This is a man of skill. He dispatched the others with zero complications. There’s no reason he would suddenly go for the obvious, especially since he was specifically instructed to make the deaths look accidental, which he did with all the others. No, it’s not him.”
“Doubt all you want. I’m
saying she found out about it, and this is a ruse.”
“You say that because you know we have a contract on her. But absent that piece of information, you’d draw the same conclusion I did, which is that it’s a genuine third party who has its own reasons for wanting her silenced. I’ve already begun investigating, and the preliminary report is that it’s one of the cartels. She was working on an exposé of some sort.”
The little girl shrieked in delight as she trapped a butterfly in the net, and emitted peals of laughter as she ran toward the woman, who was holding her arms wide. The sound startled two of the horses in the corral near the barn, which snorted and stamped their hooves nervously.
The dark-haired man eyed the paper again, his brow furrowed, and glowered at his companion.
“I appreciate your willingness to disagree with me when you think I’m acting hastily, but I’m making an executive decision here. I can feel something wrong in my bones, and that feeling is rarely wrong. We’ve been sold out, one way or another. So here’s what I want to do: look for a leak in CISEN. Put pressure on your contact there. As far as the assassin goes, assume he’s a loose cannon, and that’ll have to be dealt with. No arguments. Am I clear?”
“Perfectly. But we have a problem. The assassin isn’t an ordinary operative. He’s something of a legend. A magician of sorts. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not easy to take out a man like that. I expect he’s paranoid, highly skilled, and would see anything coming from a mile away.” He paused, allowing his words to sink in.
“That’s logistics. I don’t particularly care how hard it is to do. I want it done. As to the woman, we’ll need to get more people looking for her. We can’t assume that the CISEN assassin will deal with her. And with respect to the leak within CISEN, I’d remind you that we have no idea what the reporter actually knows – only that she’s nosing around sensitive areas. But we have to assume that someone in the organization tipped her off, or at least pointed her in the right direction. I want that person found.”
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