by Scott McEwen
Two bodyguards stood off to the side near the garden wall, much the same as they had the day before, pistols bulging beneath their jackets in shoulder holsters.
“Agent Pendleton,” Serrano said happily, almost arrogantly, getting up from the table to offer his hand to Crosswhite while ignoring Ortega altogether. “It’s good to see you again. I apologize for the wait, but I haven’t had time to speak in much detail with Captain Espinosa before this morning. I was just telling him I believe you’re the kind of man we can work with in the coming months—should Director Pope wish to continue our relationship.”
“That will be entirely up to the director,” Crosswhite said, offering his hand to the black-eyed, mustachioed Captain Espinosa. “Dave Pendleton, Captain. Good to meet you.”
Espinosa’s grip was firm and confident, unlike Serrano’s, which was limp and clammy. “Good to meet you,” he echoed.
“So,” Serrano said as they settled around the table, “what are your plans concerning Clemson Fields? Have you spoken to your embassy?”
“I have,” Crosswhite said, aware that Espinosa was scrutinizing him. “We think he’s in Tijuana right now. If that’s the case, it might be necessary for me to acquire him there.” He looked at Captain Espinosa. “That might be something you can assist us with, Captain.”
Espinosa stared coldly. “Are you under the impression that I work for the CIA?”
“Not at all, sir,” Crosswhite replied coolly. “As I mentioned to Senator Serrano yesterday, our primary goal is to remove the immediate threat to his safety. After that, we hope to see him elected to the office of the president, and from there to assist him in the removal of Antonio Castañeda in the North.”
Espinosa brushed a fly from his nose. “The CIA wants to be very deeply involved in Mexican affairs these days.”
Crosswhite glanced at Serrano and then back to Espinosa, deciding that the pleasantries were over. “Well, if I may speak openly, Captain, Alice Downly was an American diplomat killed on Mexican soil with your assistance. Am I correct?”
Espinosa stiffened in the chair, glancing askance at Serrano. “I have no idea where you get your information.”
“For the sake of argument,” Crosswhite said, “I’ll accept that as a yes. Now, please understand that my superiors in the CIA aren’t losing any sleep over Downly’s death. Quite to the contrary, Director Pope is relieved to have her out of the way. However, the US State Department is an entirely different matter. They’ve been holding off because Mexico City has suffered such a terrible disaster this week, but trust me: the US Secretary of State is gearing up to make real trouble over this Downly business. The best way for us to avoid any danger to both you and Senator Serrano is to see the senator elected president. That will put him in control of the political arena here and mitigate any threat to you. It’s my job to help make that happen, and that’s the service I’m here to offer. Now, if that’s not agreeable to the senator, he just has to say the word, and I’ll get on a plane today—leaving you gentlemen to deal with Fields and his band of assassins on your own.”
Crosswhite sat back, noting that Serrano’s cocky air had suddenly dissipated. Something just changed, he told himself. What is it?
Ortega cleared his throat, as if he were about to speak. Crosswhite gave him a look. “I remind you, Mike, that you’re here as a courtesy to your station and nothing more.”
Ortega was instantly cowed, and this caused Serrano to appear even more confused. “Will you clarify something for me?”
“If I can, Senator.”
“Are you here as Director Pope’s direct representative? Or some other faction of the CIA?”
“As I told you yesterday, I am here at Director Pope’s personal direction. Why do you ask?”
Serrano nodded, glancing at Captain Espinosa. “Because it might interest you to know, Agent Pendleton, that Clemson Fields called me shortly after you left yesterday. We had quite a long conversation about you.”
Crosswhite showed no change in his expression. “I assume he had many glowing things to say?”
Serrano shook his head. “None at all. In fact, he says you are a liar. I described you to him, and he said that your real name is Daniel Crosswhite—that you and Agent Vaught are working with the PFM to have me thrown into prison.”
“And?” Crosswhite said.
“And?” Serrano glanced again at Captain Espinosa. “And what?”
“I don’t know, Senator. You spoke with Fields, not me. What else did he say? Whatever it was, you seem to be very impressed by it.” He locked eyes with Captain Espinosa. “Or is this the moment where you order us both shot?”
Ortega felt his anus pucker up tighter than an Italian tenor’s trousers.
Serrano and Espinosa had both expected Crosswhite to be shitting himself at this point, but he obviously wasn’t remotely concerned, and this left them both in a genuine quandary.
“Do you have some identification?” Espinosa asked.
Crosswhite took a blue passport from his back pocket and tossed it onto the table.
Espinosa checked it over. “This says you are Canadian.”
“I am Canadian.”
“Then what are you doing working for the CIA?” Serrano blurted.
“At the moment, I’m trying to help save your life. Did you really expect Fields to admit to what he was up to?” Crosswhite returned his focus to Captain Espinosa, recognizing the glowering lawman as the most immediate threat. “You should have advised the senator much better than that, Captain.”
If Espinosa had sat up any straighter in that moment, his spine would have snapped.
“What are you talking about?”
“What am I talking about? Why would you allow the senator to speak with Fields at all? What were you thinking? I thought you were supposed to be looking out for this man. Now Fields knows I’m in Mexico. He knows everything that you two know. He even knows that I’ve taken Agent Ortega and his family under my protection.”
He saw Serrano and Espinosa exchange more dazed glances. Realizing he’d guessed correctly, he dug in his heels. “That’s right. Fields told you that Ortega and his family have disappeared. Did he ask where they were? Did he happen to mention he wants them dead? I’ll bet he left that part out.” Crosswhite took a pack of cigarettes from inside his sport jacket and lit one.
“I don’t mean to be rude, gentlemen. I understand this is Mexico, and I respect your sovereignty—I do—but we’re playing on the world stage here. That’s why it doesn’t matter if I’m from Canada or Ireland or fucking Norway.” He pointed at Serrano with the cigarette between his fingers. “What matters is keeping you alive, Senator. And without me—without Pope’s blessing—your road to the presidency will be long and narrow. Now, do you want my help or not? Because my services happen to be in great demand.”
For a fleeting second, even Ortega thought Crosswhite was telling the truth.
“I do,” Serrano said quietly. “You must understand that—”
“What I understand is that you need to tell me what else Fields had to say and what else you said to him. That way I can assess the damage that’s been done and come up with a way to fix it.” Crosswhite crushed out the cigarette on the table top, glancing at Ortega. “What are you looking at?” he said in English. “Did you think I was making all this shit up?”
Ortega shrugged and shook his head, obviously more confused than anyone else at the table. “I—I don’t—”
“Shut up.” Crosswhite turned back to Captain Espinosa, keeping the initiative. “Was I incorrect? Are you not the senator’s advisor?”
Espinosa glanced at Serrano.
“He’s a trusted advisor, yes,” Serrano said. “But he didn’t—I didn’t speak with him before I spoke with Fields. It was my decision to speak with Fields. My error.”
Crosswhite feigned incredulousness. �
�I’m sorry, Senator, but am I to understand that you have no political advisor?”
Serrano stiffened, his embarrassment beginning to show as he realized that Crosswhite was accustomed to dealing with much more sophisticated power brokers.
Crosswhite let him off the hook, turning back to Espinosa. “My apologies, Captain. I was under the impression you were an actual advisor.”
Now Espinosa was also embarrassed—not to mention annoyed with Serrano—exactly as Crosswhite had planned. Crosswhite saw, too, that even the bodyguards were off balance, which meant they’d been briefed to expect an entirely different kind of meeting with an entirely different outcome.
Now that everyone was sufficiently agitated, he said, “Excuse me, but can one of these two gentlemen show me to the restroom?”
“Um, yes,” Serrano said. “Of course.” Grateful for an opportunity to gather his thoughts, he gestured for one of the bodyguards to show him the way.
Crosswhite stood up and moved toward the house, pausing for the bodyguard to catch up.
Captain Espinosa glanced at Serrano, his face an open display of displeasure at having been made to look foolish in front of the CIA.
As the bodyguard approached, Crosswhite spun into him, striking the vagus nerve in the side of the man’s neck with the inside ridge of his hand. The bodyguard’s entire body went ramrod stiff, and he toppled over backward, landing on the ground without making any attempt to break his fall. Crosswhite launched himself at the second bodyguard, pouncing like a mountain lion to jam his thumb deep into the man’s eye socket and stealing the Glock pistol from beneath his jacket.
He turned and shot Espinosa in the throat as he was rising from his chair. The police captain pitched over into Serrano’s lap, and Serrano stared in wide-eyed disbelief as Crosswhite shot him in the forehead. The fat man fell over against the table and flopped to the ground. Two more headshots finished the bodyguards, and Crosswhite stalked over to where Serrano’s girlfriend sat, too petrified to move or make a sound.
The Chihuahua barked at him twice as he pointed the pistol into her face, speaking calmly in Spanish. “I’m with the CIA. Do you know what that is?”
She nodded, the magazine still in her hands.
“If you give anyone an accurate physical description of me, I will find you, and I will kill you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she croaked in English.
“You got a helluva set of tits, honey.” With that, he turned and walked back to the table, where Ortega sat in his own piss, trembling like a dog shitting a peach pit, blood from both men spattered on his face.
“I told you all you had to do was be yourself,” Crosswhite said.
Expecting to see Crosswhite and Ortega lying dead on the ground, Oscar Martinez came out the back door carrying a pair of black rubber body bags and stopped dead in his tracks.
Crosswhite aimed the pistol at him. “Those other two assholes still out front?” he asked in English.
Oscar nodded.
“What was supposed to happen?”
“I was to . . . I was to . . .” Oscar’s jaw began to tremble.
“It’s okay,” Crosswhite said. “You can tell me.”
“I was to put your bodies into these bags and to . . . to call Ruvalcaba’s people to come take you away.”
“Go out front and call those other two assholes back here. Double-cross me, and I’ll feed you to that goddamn Chihuahua.”
Oscar ducked back inside, and Crosswhite followed a few steps behind.
Ortega was still sitting in the chair staring at the bodies on the ground when he heard two more shots inside the house. A few seconds later, Crosswhite walked up and smacked him in the back of the head. “Get your ass up, Mikey. We’re done here.”
Ortega got unsteadily to his feet. “Will you take me to my wife and kids now?”
Crosswhite took him by the arm, setting off toward the house. “What I should do is drown you in the goddamn pool, you piece of shit.”
71
TIJUANA
12:30 HOURS
Mariana stood outside the door to her motel room, watching as the twins’ sheet-covered bodies were loaded into an ambulance. She didn’t know who had discovered them, and she didn’t ask, but she knew from overhearing the police that they believed the girls to be prostitutes, robbed and murdered by a client wielding a hammer. The forensics people had taken the sisters’ fingerprints, expecting them to match up with those from another grisly murder scene a few miles away.
Mariana doubted there would be a match, as the twins had never mentioned killing Villalobos.
The police questioned her briefly, and she denied knowing anything, but she knew it had to have been Fields.
Her cab ride to meet Jessup for lunch was not a pleasant one. She glanced out the back window to see Fields following in his blue sedan. There were two Mexican men in the car with him, and now that he’d taken both of her phones, she had no way of calling Crosswhite or Midori or even Castañeda for support. She decided to keep a hard-copy list of every phone number in the future, but now that Fields had let slip the name Hancock, she didn’t think he had any intention of allowing her to live.
Her urge to run to the US Consulate was strong, but there would be no real protection for her there. Consulates were not embassies. They were not in place to serve US citizens abroad. Their primary function was to provide visa services to foreign nationals. Any services they provided to American nationals were treated as courtesies rather than as any sort of US citizens’ rights. And once Mariana was finally admitted into the secure facility—which would probably take at least a couple of hours due to her lack of identification—there would be no leaving again until and unless they allowed her to leave. Pope would know within an hour of her arrival at the facility, and there was no way to predict how he might react. She now believed he had ordered Downly’s assassination, and for all she knew, he would advise the consulate general of Tijuana to treat her as a fugitive—or, worse, a potential terrorist.
Realizing that the US Consulate building could all too easily become a prison, she decided she was safer on the street, where she could at least move around.
She arrived at the restaurant to find Billy Jessup waiting for her at the bar.
“What’s the matter?” he said. “You look worried.”
Survival instinct kicked in. “I’m in trouble.” After all, Jessup was a man and, in a bizarre way, the closest thing to a friend she had at the moment.
“What kind of trouble?”
“I’m being followed. I think they’re looking to kill us both.”
He glanced at the entrance. “Out front?”
“Yeah. Blue car.”
He took her hand. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”
Jessup led her into the back through the kitchen.
“Hey, you can’t pass through here!” said a kitchen worker, attempting to block their way.
“Go fuck yourself,” Jessup muttered, shoving him aside and leading Mariana out the back door. Ducking into the alley, they didn’t make it three steps before they were caught in a cross fire: Fito and Memo firing Taser guns from behind adjacent dumpsters.
Mariana was hit in the neck with close to 40,000 volts at 25 watts; Jessup, in the shoulder. They went down convulsing as Fields pulled up in the car. They were both zapped again and dumped into the trunk.
Twenty minutes later, they were unloaded at gunpoint behind a dilapidated office building in a deserted section of town. Fields shot Mariana in the leg with a freshly loaded Taser, and she went down again, convulsing on the concrete.
“That’s an attention getter,” he said with a twisted smile.
Jessup stood watching with his hands behind his head, wanting to help, but Fito and Memo were covering him front and back with pistols.
When she recovered well enough t
o speak, Fields stood over her. “What did Crosswhite and Shannon do with the gold they found in Paris?”
She glared up at him, now sure that he intended to kill her. “I don’t know anything about any gold, you fuck!”
He zapped her again, and she screamed, her bladder finally letting go.
“That’s enough!” Jessup shouted.
Fields glanced at him. “If he says another word, shoot him in the head.”
Fito aimed Villalobos’s silenced pistol at Jessup’s face, and Fields returned his attention to Mariana.
“Crosswhite would not have gone so far off the reservation unless he had money and a plan—not with a wife and a baby on the way. So you’d better tell me what he’s up to, or it’s going to be a very long afternoon for you.”
Mariana was too badly convulsed in that moment to speak, so he stood waiting patiently.
Jessup began to wonder if he was caught up in something to do with the CIA.
Fields knelt down beside her, looking into her wild eyes. “Just breathe,” he said calmly. “We’ve got all day.” He stood back up, taking her satellite phone from the pocket of his overcoat. “I tell you what we’ll try. We’ll give your boyfriend a call and see what he has to say about your little predicament.”
She drew a deep breath, forcing out the words. “He won’t tell you anything. He’ll know it won’t do any good.”
“I think you’re right. I think he’ll let you die. But this way, he’ll know it’s his fault.” Fields stepped on her throat with his shoe to prevent her calling out before he was ready, and she began to strangle.
Crosswhite answered. “Where the hell have you been? Are you okay?”
“I’m a little annoyed at the moment, actually,” Fields said. “How are you?” There was a pregnant pause at Crosswhite’s end. “What, no smartass remark? I’m disappointed in you, Daniel.”
“Where is she?”
“I literally have my foot on her throat. Would you like me to send you a photo?”
