by Scott McEwen
Ortega simply stared.
Crosswhite sat back, keeping the pistol ready. “The look on your face tells me I’m pretty goddamn close. I took your wife, Mikey, because I need you to fill in the blanks.”
Ortega bared his teeth. “You didn’t have to drag my family into this, you bastard!”
“Your ambition dragged your family into this. What else do you think put them in my path? You used them for cover after accepting this post because you thought it would get you a cushy assignment up in DC. So don’t pawn this shit off on me. Admit it: you were complicit to the Downly hit.”
Ortega’s eyes drifted again, and this time Crosswhite caught it. “You piece of shit!” he snarled, getting to his feet.
“I wasn’t complicit!” Ortega blurted. “I wasn’t! I didn’t know a goddamn thing about it until afterward. I swear to God! It was my job to help Fields clean up the mess that Vaught made—that’s all!”
Crosswhite put the muzzle of the pistol to Ortega’s head. “Who sent that fucking sniper down here? Tell me now, or I’ll blow your brains all over the wall!”
“Pope! Okay? Are you happy? It was Pope!”
“Gimme the sniper’s name!”
“Rhett Hancock! His name’s Rhett Hancock!”
The name meant nothing to Crosswhite. “Tell me more.”
“Pope hired him through a back channel. The crazy bastard doesn’t even know he’s working for the CIA. He thinks he’s working for Serrano. Now Fields has orders to kill him—after Hancock kills Vaught. That’s all I know!”
Crosswhite began to pace the kitchen slowly, realizing that the ATRU had become even more dangerous than he’d previously thought. “Here’s what you’re gonna do, asshole: you’re gonna arrange a meeting with Serrano and draw him into the open for me.”
Ortega was aghast. “Me?! I don’t have that kind of influence. Are you crazy?”
“You’ll contact Serrano,” Crosswhite went on. “You’ll tell him Fields has gone rogue; that Pope can’t control him. You tell him Fields is moving to take him out and that you have to meet with him as soon as possible to put together a plan.”
Ortega thought it over. “I want to talk to my wife before I do anything.”
“No. You don’t talk to your wife until after you’ve done what I need you to do.”
“Why? What harm can it do?”
“It can do a lot of harm,” Crosswhite said. “Right now, your wife has no idea she’s a prisoner. She thinks Serrano’s people are hunting her and the kids. If I let you talk to her, you’ll ruin everything with that big mouth of yours, and I’ll be forced to treat her like a prisoner. I’ll have to lock her and the kids in a concrete room until this is over. Is that what you want, dumb fuck?”
Ortega slouched back, brooding over his predicament. “Swear to me they’re okay.”
“What good would that do?” Crosswhite was disgusted by the sight of the man sitting before him. “Sit up in the chair like a man. Have some self-respect and stop feeling sorry for yourself. It’s no wonder Fields is sending somebody to kill you.”
Ortega sneered. “I’ve read your file, asshole. The only reason you’re not rotting in prison for murder is because Pope saved your hide. Now here you are judging him and me both. You’re a fucking hypocrite.”
Crosswhite stared at him, wanting to slug him with the pistol, but there was a measure of truth to what Ortega had said. “Yeah, well, no soy una moneda de oro para caerle bien a todo el mundo.” This was a Mexican phrase meaning, I’m not a gold coin to be liked by everyone.
Ortega chortled scornfully. “Speaking of gold, Fields knows about that, too. You and your thieving buddy Shannon are—”
Crosswhite kicked him over in the chair. “Not only is Shannon dead, you piece of shit, he’s worth fifty of you!” He kicked Ortega in the rump. “Get your ass off the floor! You got a phone call to make before Fields’s people show up and put a bullet in your head.”
58
BAJA CALIFORNIA
10:10 HOURS
Sid Dupree was smoking pot and watching television in the back room of Señor Sid’s Jet Ski Rental when he heard the door open and a customer enter the shop. He set aside the pipe and stepped out to see a fellow gringo flipping the Closed sign around. “What the hell you think you’re doin’, fella?”
The gringo turned to face him, a small backpack over one shoulder, his chiseled visage set. “I heard once that an American can buy things here he can’t get anywhere else in Mexico. That still true?”
Dupree stepped out from behind the counter. “Depends who you heard it from.” He was very tan with a shaved head, in his early sixties, and in good shape.
“A man named Steelyard.”
Dupree’s face split into a grin. “How is the old bastard?”
“He’s dead,” the gringo said.
The grin disappeared. “What happened?”
The gringo told the story, and when he was finished, Dupree stood looking sad. “Well, if a man’s gotta go, I suppose that’s the way to go, goddamnit.”
“I agree,” the gringo said. “Can you help me or not? I ain’t here to waste your time or mine.”
“What do you need?”
“Somethin’ to shoot and somethin’ to drive.”
“That ain’t gonna be cheap.”
“Important things never are.”
“This way.” Dupree led the gringo out back to an open yard cluttered with old Jet Skis, broken sailboards, and a couple of beat-up Winnebago campers. Five or six dogs lounged about in the sand, and there were at least ten cats sunning themselves.
“Sorry about the smell,” Dupree said, referring to the heavy odor of dog and cat feces. “Keeps people from nosin’ around.”
He led the gringo behind one of the Winnebagos to where an old sky-blue VW Beetle sat rusting away on four flat tires. “It’s gonna take a little bit of work,” he said, ducking into the camper. An air compressor kicked on a few seconds later, and Dupree remerged with an air hose. “We gotta roll this piece of shit outta the way.”
It took a few minutes to inflate the tires, and then both men rolled the VW forward. Dupree grabbed a rusty shovel and dug down through about two feet of sand until the shovel hit something made of metal. After some more digging, he uncovered a steel footlocker. He pried off the lid to reveal a cache of weapons: AK-47s, M4s, MP5s, an M40A5 sniper rifle, and assorted pistols.
“What exactly are ya lookin’ for?”
The gringo crouched down and took out an old Government Model 1911 pistol, checking the action to make sure it would cycle the rounds properly. “This’ll do.”
“You’re kiddin’ me. I thought you wanted somethin’ to shoot.”
The gringo stood up, hiding the pistol in the small of his back. “I’m lookin’ to protect myself. Not start a revolution.”
“Hell, I got one-a those under my mattress I coulda sold ya.”
“How much ya want for it?”
“A thousand,” Dupree said. “And that’s at a Steelyard discount. I take a lotta risk keepin’ this shit around.”
“It’s a fair price,” the gringo said. “Got anything to drive?”
“Well, if ya want somethin’ clean, it’s gonna take a couple of days and run you at least ten grand. I don’t deal in cars, and the Mexicans I do business with are gonna charge at least that when they realize you’re in a hurry.”
The gringo pointed to a battered green 1971 Dodge pickup parked near the building. “That run?”
“Yeah, it runs good, but it’s mine, and I don’t really wanna sell it.”
“I’ll give you nine grand, cash, for the pistol, the truck, and two boxes of cartridges.”
The doubt in Dupree’s eyes was plain to see. “When?”
“Right now.”
“You on the run from the law?”
/> “I’m on the run from a lot more than that. We got a deal or not?”
Dupree crouched down, taking two boxes of GI ball ammo from the locker and handing them to the gringo. He slammed the lid shut and stood up. “Remember, amigo, you get caught with so much as a bullet in this country, and you’re goin’ to jail.”
“Got it.”
They covered the locker over with sand and rolled the VW back into place, scattering the tire tracks with their feet. Then the gringo set his pack on the hood and unzipped it, counting out nine thousand dollars in used $100 bills.
If Dupree was shocked to see so much ready cash, he didn’t let on.
“We gonna deflate the tires?” the gringo asked, handing over the money.
Dupree took the cash and turned for the shop. “They’ll be flat again in half an hour. I’ll get your keys.”
The gringo reached in the open window of the car to snatch an old tan ball cap from the passenger seat. “Canyonlands, Utah” was stitched to the front of it in brown lettering. “How much for this?”
Dupree turned around. “Smell like cat piss?”
The gringo took a sniff. “Nope.”
“In that case, it’s free.”
The gringo pulled on the cap and followed him into the shop.
59
TIJUANA, MEXICO
11:10 HOURS
A frustrated Clemson Fields arrived at Villalobos’s motel and knocked sharply at the door to room 11. Villalobos was not answering his phone, and there were pressing problems in Mexico City. He needed a man he could depend on to neutralize Ortega before the guy realized his wife and kids had probably been chopped into little pieces and showed up at the US Embassy in hysterics, blabbing everything he knew about the Alice Downly affair.
“Come on, Villalobos, open up.” He stood, looking around. Villalobos’s car was parked right in front of the room.
Putting his ear to the door, he could hear music inside. “Hey!” He thumped the door with the heel of his fist. “Late night or what? Open up. We’ve got trouble down in DF.”
There was a small restaurant across the street, so he crossed to the road to check if Villalobos might be eating breakfast. The man was not there, so Fields went back to the room. He thought briefly to involve the motel manager, but an old instinct left over from the Cold War told him he’d better not. He went to his car and took a lock-pick set from his briefcase.
“I haven’t picked a lock in ten years,” he muttered, glancing around before fitting the needles into the lock. Luckily, the lock was old, so he was able to get the door open in under three minutes.
Fields slipped into the dark motel room and switched on the light. What he saw made him catch his breath. Propped on a pillow, Villalobos was tied naked to the bed with strips of torn sheet, his arms and legs outstretched, a blue condom over his shriveled penis, and his chest covered in blood that had spurted from his severed jugular vein. His empty wallet lay on the table near the door, and a blanket was thrown over the television which was on, playing Mexican music.
For the first time in his thirty-year career, Fields felt the impulse to run, but he ordered himself to remain calm. He’d been in a similar situation in East Berlin in 1980. “This is no worse than that,” he told himself. “And I’m not being hunted by the KGB.”
He peeked through the curtains to be sure no one was watching the motel and stepped into the bathroom. A bloody white hand towel lay on the floor. He found five or six strands of long, dark hair on the shower stall floor, but this was an almost useless clue. Eight out of ten women in Mexico had long dark hair.
“Murdering whore,” he mumbled, moving back into the room.
Realizing he had no way to safely dispose of the body, he unplugged the television and stood with hands on his hips, looking at the corpse. Villalobos’s dark eyes stared down at his shriveled genitalia. “Thank God this is Tijuana,” Fields said to himself. “In any other city, this would draw a lot of attention.”
He searched Villalobos’s bags and discovered that the murderer had stolen his silenced H&K pistol. At least he didn’t have to worry about the police finding the weapon in the room.
Five minutes later, Fields was sitting at a red light, wondering what to do about Ortega. “Damn it.” Now he had no choice but to call the clowns from Baja.
60
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
13:50 HOURS
Midori walked into Pope’s office unannounced and shut the door. “We need to talk about Fields.”
Pope looked up from his computer, rocking back in his chair. “Have a seat.”
She took the chair before his desk. “He’s run amuck. He just called the boys from Baja.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“They’re maniacs.”
The CIA director took off his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Fields has a tough job down there right now. As you know, my primary Mexico assets have gone off the grid. So he’s doing the best he can with what he’s got to work with.”
“You mean he’s doing the best he can to cover up the fact you had Alice Downly assassinated.”
Pope let out a sigh. “It would appear that I’ve trained you too well.”
“Tell me why you did it, Robert.”
“I’m trying to stabilize the border. Downly wanted to escalate hostilities. The president was in support of sending Special Forces troops into Mexico, and I couldn’t talk him out of it. Such an escalation would get out of hand, and many, many innocent people would die.”
“So it’s mathematics?”
“Life is mathematics.”
“No. Life is breathing human beings. And you’ve lost sight of that.”
“You’re wrong,” he said quietly. “I’m the only person in this town who hasn’t lost sight of it. What is one life weighed against thousands? Or hundreds? Or even just dozens? We kill based on numbers, and numbers never lie. You know that as well as I do. Are you upset because I weighed the life of an American woman against the lives of hundreds of Mexicans and found her wanting?”
“You broke the law.”
“We break the law every day. That’s our job.”
Aware she was losing the battle of logic, Midori changed her tack. “Do you know that Fields is using Mariana to get to Jessup?” She noted the hint of surprise in his eyes. “You didn’t, did you?”
“Mariana left the reservation,” he said obdurately.
“She left because Fields scared her off of it!”
“She left because she worries more about Crosswhite than she should.” He was showing irritation for the first time. “She’s throwing away her career over a man who belongs in prison.”
“My God, what a hypocrite you’ve become.”
“There is no hypocrisy. Crosswhite murdered in Chicago for personal profit. The people we kill from this building are killed to serve the greater good. That’s a mathematical fact.”
“And suppose Fields orders the Baja boys to kill Mariana?”
“If she isn’t smart enough to avoid that trap, she doesn’t have what it takes. I shouldn’t have to remind you that I didn’t order her to Mexico. She went down there of her own volition, and she met with Castañeda without consulting me.”
“I see. That’s why you don’t care what happens to her.” Midori got up from her chair. “What about me, Robert? Am I expendable?”
He looked up at her, his expression suddenly soft and calm. “You’re my most loyal protégé, and I value your life above all others.”
She walked out of the office, and he sat staring at his computer, wondering if Mariana would do as he’d planned. I’m not so sure now, he thought to himself. She’s become less predictable.
61
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO
16:10 HOURS
Serrano’s assistant, Oscar, found him trimming rose b
ushes in the garden on the south side of the estate, where a large marble water fountain had recently been installed. The senator was dressed all in white and wore a wide-brimmed gardening hat against the sun.
“That man from the CIA is on the phone.”
Serrano looked up from his work. “Fields?”
“No, the other one. The pocho: Ortega.” Pocho was a pejorative term used to refer to Mexicans born in the US. Chicano would have been more politically correct.
Serrano had met Ortega only once and had not been overly impressed with him. “What does he want?”
“I don’t know,” Oscar said. “He won’t tell me, but he insists it’s extremely important.”
Serrano took off his sun hat and gloves, and Oscar gave him the house phone. “This is Lazaro Serrano. I’m very busy today. How might I help you, Señor Ortega?”
“We need to meet,” Ortega said. “You’re in danger. Clemson Fields is planning to move against you.”
Serrano wasn’t sure if the feeling that began to rise up in his gut was fear or anger, but it certainly threatened to spoil his afternoon. “What’s happened? Fields and I have an agreement.”
“I don’t know about your agreement,” Ortega said, “but I have received an Operational Immediate from Director Pope warning me to protect you. We have to meet. I have classified information that you need to hear at once.”
“What kind of classified information?”
“I can’t be specific over the telephone.”
“Very well,” Serrano said with an impatient groan. “Come here to the estate, and we’ll talk it over.”
“I’ll be arriving with a gringo,” Ortega said. “Pope has sent him from the US to neutralize Fields, and he wants the two of you to meet.”
“Fine, fine,” Serrano said. “How soon will you be here?”
“Within the hour.”
Serrano broke the connection and tossed the phone to Oscar. “The CIA is becoming a very large annoyance to me, Oscar. This man Pope up in Washington believes I work for him.” He wagged his finger. “I do not work for him. And to prove it, I should send the heads of these two men back to him in a FedEx box.”
