Blood Lies - 15

by Richard Marcinko

  The word “mutilation” comes to mind. “Decapitation” as well. That’s all I’ll say.

  Veronica helped me get Saul back to the pickup. He started moaning as we lifted him into the passenger seat.

  “You’re alive,” said Veronica. “Don’t try to move.”

  “I’m OK,” he said. “I jumped.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as that grenade hit the police truck, I knew I’d be next.”

  “Good guess,” I told him.

  “I wasn’t guessing,” he said. “I’ve read some of your books.”

  * * *

  Under perfect circumstances, we would have headed over to the border crossing, and there contacted the Border Patrol, Immigration, Customs, the National Guard, the U.S. Army, the FBI, and anybody else I could think of who might be interested in busting open a major case that tied terrorism and Mexico’s biggest cartel together.

  But perfect is a world we don’t live in. And given the strength and financial resources of the cartel, I wasn’t entirely sure who I could trust. So instead, we went to the motel where we’d faced down the iguana earlier, where I would have a little more leisure to consider my next moves. Instead of the iguana suite, we appropriated a pair of rooms on the back wing. The doors opened directly on a narrow concrete veranda, giving their occupants a lovely panorama of the glass-strewn parking lot.

  I realize I’ve hurt the feelings of a whole lot of hardworking Border Patrol types, insulted half the Homeland Insecurity Department, and made mortal enemies of a union hall’s worth of federal employees. Let me admit my remarks are not entirely fair: the majority of people who work on the border, in immigration, on counterterror, etc., etc., are honest and hardworking, and want to do the right thing. A good portion put their lives on the line every day to do just that.

  But at that particular moment, I couldn’t afford to take a chance on coming across the one or two bad apples I knew would be lingering in the barrel.

  Besides, my guest had an appointment with a toilet bowl, and if I tried taking him across the border, he’d never be able to keep it.

  “Nada!” he gurgled the second time I dunked him, headfirst into the fetid water in the motel bathroom’s skanky toilet. “Nothing.”

  “I’m sure you’re not that dumb,” I told him in Spanish. I dunked him again. The water was clean, by the way—you have to leave some room for escalation.

  “Nada! Nada! Nada!”

  Again. This time I flushed. He gurgled a few curses, but we got nowhere.

  He had taught me a few choice phrases relating ancestors and goats before finally agreeing to talk. I pulled him upright, threw a towel on his head, then dragged him back into the room. Shotgun and Veronica were both outside with Saul, keeping watch. It was roughly four in the morning.

  “Tell me about the tunnel,” I told him.

  “A cigarette. I want a cigarette.”

  “You tell me about the tunnel, and I’ll get you a cigarette.” If he wanted to die an early death of lung cancer, who was I to argue?

  He told me what I had already deduced—the tunnel had been built to get under the U.S. border. He wasn’t sure how far it went, and claimed never to have been through to the other side himself. I prodded him a bit, satisfied myself that he was telling the truth, then changed the subject to the ragheads training at the farm.

  “The foreigners we do not talk to,” he told me. “Off-limits.”

  “Two of them came into town and went into the tunnel. Where did they go?”

  “When did they come?”

  “Tonight.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. When did they go in the tunnel? We heard explosions at the camp. But we are never to go there. That is a strict order. Always.”

  We went back and forth like that, me probing, him denying. He was adamant that the camp was off-limits, and that even asking about it was dangerous. I believed him, more or less; clearly whoever had set up the camp wouldn’t want some cartel rent-a-thug to be looking over his shoulder. The cartel leaders would only be too happy to pass along such orders—secrecy was in their best interests as well.

  “What about my cigarette?” he said finally.

  “Will it improve your memory?”

  “I am telling you everything I know,” he said, almost crying.

  Nicotine addiction is a terrible thing.

  I took some parachute cord and tied his feet to the chair. I secured the chair to the metal bed frame before going out and getting Shotgun to come in and watch him.

  “Stand near the door,” I told Shotgun. “With your gun on him. He moves out of line, shoot him. No questions, no second chance. Grin while I tell him what I just said in Spanish.”

  Shotgun beamed a thousand-watt shit-eater as I repeated the instructions. The Mexican nodded grimly before I was done.

  Back outside, Veronica was sitting next to Saul on a pair of time-worn metal rocking chairs, gently extracting information from him. It seemed like a casual conversation on the surface, but as I listened I realized she had an agenda, doubling back to fill in holes and then giving the occasional poke when there was a discrepancy.

  “You have a second?” I asked, signaling that I wanted to be alone.

  She got up and we walked a few yards away.

  “Get anything useful about your grandparents?” I asked her.

  “Not really. He gave me the first names of the security staff he knows, including Paolo inside. Some information about how they staff and whatnot. But he doesn’t know much. They were pretty good about shutting him off. He was the token white man.”

  “Sure.” I mentioned before how pretty Veronica was. She was smart as well—you could hear the confidence in her voice, and tell from the way her eyes darted that she was curious about things. Those two traits don’t make a person smart, but they lay the groundwork.

  Are smarter women more attractive? Damned if I know—I love all women.

  In a theoretical sense, of course.

  “You’re a pretty good interrogator,” I told her.

  “He’s easy. He doesn’t even know he’s being questioned.”

  “You want to try with our friend inside? He claims he doesn’t know anything about the camp. He’s probably telling the truth, but maybe you’ll have better luck.”

  “Sure.”

  “I told him I’d get him some cigarettes.” I glanced across the street at the café. The place was closed, of course. “Think they have a computer in there?”

  “Assuming they’re owned by the cartel, they will,” Veronica told me. “Everyone has to keep their records electronically.”

  “Aren’t they afraid of the government getting a hold of them?”

  It was a stupid question, and Veronica didn’t even dignify it with an answer.

  * * *

  “Wait until you get flashing green on the sat phone,” Shunt told me over the cell phone. “Then hook the USB cord into the computer at the front. Be careful with the cover off. Don’t touch anything metal.”

  “Like your head?” Shunt was walking me through the procedure to hook one of the terrorist CPU units into my sat phone so it could be used as a modem. I’d already connected the monitor and keyboard from the café’s computer.

  “My head is nonconducting,” answered Shunt. “It’s thick, too.”

  “Amen.”

  “Oh, good—here we go—I have the connection,” said Shunt. “Go ahead and boot up the tango CPU.”

  It took a few seconds for the computer to do its thing.

  “All right, I have you,” Shunt told me finally. “You see the Windows splash?”

  “It’s asking for a password.”

  “Hang on.”

  The screen blanked. Back in New York, Shunt used one of his private-label software tools to take the password from the protected sector of the hard drive—or at least that’s what I think he was doing. I can’t understand half of what he says.

  The screen came up. There was an error messa
ge on it, indicating the disc had a bad sector.

  “These guys are decent,” said Shunt. “I need you to reboot, then press the F12 key as it comes up. If that doesn’t work, we’ll get more complicated.”

  We went through the process three times, changing small things until finally the regular screen came up. But from that point, Shunt had the computer completely under his control.

  “Military-level encryption,” he said. “They spent a bundle.”

  “They have a bundle. Can you decode it?”

  “Not a problem. That’s why I get the big bucks. By the way, would this be a good time to talk about my raise?”

  “It’d be an even better time to talk about kicking your butt.”

  “Come to think of it, I’m pretty well paid for what I do.”

  He is, actually.

  * * *

  The encryption gave Shunt a lot more trouble than he was willing to admit. Used to having their networks probed and compromised by the Israelis as well as U.S. intelligence, the terrorists had employed several layers of protection, and Shunt finally decided to mirror everything on the CPUs’ hard drives into his system so he could analyze it and attack it properly. While the data was uploading, he had me reconnect the monitor and keyboard to the computer in the bar. He took it over, and within a few minutes used it to get inside the cartel’s system.

  “This is more like it. Tell me what you want.”

  “E-mail. Financial records. Connections with the terrorists. Payoffs to American officials—everything you can get.”

  “How about their instant messaging service? They use two.”

  “No Twitter account?”

  “Haven’t found one yet. Give me a few minutes.”

  While Shunt went to work, I went over to the cigarette machine. I didn’t have the right change, but the machine didn’t seem to mind once I broke the glass: it gave me all the cigarettes for free.

  Our guest practically leapt out of his tie-downs when he saw the cigarette pack in my hand.

  “Careful,” I told him, glancing at Shotgun across the room. I put my hand on the Mexican’s shoulder and pushed him back down. “You want to die of lung cancer, not lead poisoning.”

  I took out a cigarette and lit it for him. With his hands tied behind his back, he needed help smoking. I called Saul in and had him do the honors.

  “He’s not acting,” she told me outside. “He doesn’t know anything about the camp. They were told never to interfere. That’s why they didn’t go over in the first place.”

  “What about the tunnel?”

  “The cartel uses it to move people and drugs over the border, but not too often. Dick, I think my grandparents are alive.”

  “Why?” I tried to keep my voice neutral, but her frown said I hadn’t succeeded.

  “They carted some residents away when they got nosy about the tunnel. I think my grandparents were among them.”

  “Where did they send them?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m not sure he knows. But they were alive when they left. I’m going to go push him some more.”

  I hate being negative, so I didn’t tell Veronica what I was thinking: There was about as much chance of her grandparents being alive as there was of Santa Claus coming down from the North Pole and shaking my hand in the morning.

  “So, when do we rescue Angel Hills?” Saul asked when he came out a short while later. He was so cheerful I decided he must have gotten a contact tobacco high from the secondhand smoke inside.

  “You don’t need to be rescued,” I told him. “You can leave the town anytime you want.”

  “We don’t want to leave. We want to kick the goons out. And besides—we can’t leave. I told you what happens.”

  “You can leave tonight without a problem,” I said. “Go through the tunnel I found.”

  “We don’t want to leave.”

  I wondered. “Why didn’t you tell me about the tunnel when you stopped the other day.”

  “I didn’t know anything about it until Veronica mentioned it.”

  “All the earth-digging equipment didn’t make you suspicious?”

  “They were fixing the roads and putting more sewer lines in. It made sense.”

  More like wishful self-delusion, or maybe purposeful ignorance. But then there was a huge amount of that going around where Mexico was concerned.

  The Mexican authorities had been willfully ignorant about the cartels for years. Americans had been beyond obtuse on the various immigration and border issues that allowed all manner of criminals to thrive. And both countries had closed their eyes rather than deal with illegal immigration. The situation was so out of hand now that many serious people claimed it couldn’t be solved.

  Another reason never to be considered serious, if you can help it.

  * * *

  I had plenty of evidence for the secretary of State; all I had to do was get it back to her. Given what her aide had told me when I was hired, she wouldn’t particularly like it—but that just added to the fun factor. I could wrap up the guard and de Sarcena with red ribbon, and deposit them and my pictures of the camp at the front door of Harry’s place—aka the Harry S. Truman Building, the State Department’s HQ.

  The only trick was to get them across the border. I had a feeling the cartel was looking for me—a feeling Shunt confirmed when he called to update me on his progress a short time later. The acting head of the cartel had figured out who had caused all the ruckus and offered a reward of ten million dollars for my head. My body they would take for free.

  Interestingly, there was no similar reward for de Sarcena. Obviously his replacement didn’t really want him back.

  “These IMs are going to accounts on both sides of the border,” Shunt told me. “I wouldn’t trust any of the crossings if I were you. A Border Patrol agent could easily figure you were his get-rich-quick plan. I’d be suspicious of anyone near the border. Hell, that’s enough cash for me to think about taking you out.”

  No shit. For that kind of money, I was tempted to do it myself.

  Dodging the overworked and undermanned Border Patrol is not exactly hard. The American-Mexican border is 1,933 miles long, and upward of half a million25 people cross the border each year without being apprehended. Then again, they don’t have a fat price tag on their heads. And the cartel would certainly make things even more difficult.

  Going overland, especially around here, made no sense. But I already knew where there was an easy and direct route back: the tunnel at Angel Hills.

  XII

  It took Shunt close to forty-five minutes to upload all the data from the two CPUs we had taken from the compound. I decided that the half-dozen laptops we’d found could wait until we got back across the border. In the meantime, we packed everything into the “borrowed” pickup and prepared to get the hell out of Dodge.

  We blindfolded our prisoner—his name was Celereno—more for form’s sake than for security; we weren’t taking him anyplace he hadn’t seen before. I told Mongoose and Junior to meet us near Deming, about a half hour north of the border (less if I was driving), with de Sarcena. While I relished the idea of depositing him on the secretary of State’s doorstep, I was supposed to appear at some mixed martial arts events in California in a few days. Business before pleasure, I always say: we’d drop de Sarcena and the guard off at the U.S. Marshal’s office in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I talked to Danny and got him working on finding an FBI agent we could trust to turn over the original evidence to. I’d talk to the State Department as well, as soon as I decided on the best way to ruin the Secretary of State’s day.

  Besides breaking into the cartel’s instant messaging system, Shunt was monitoring the Mexican police computerized dispatching system. There had been no further mention of Angel Hills or the fracas at the terrorists’ camp. It wasn’t unusual for the police in the area to not bother checking in with dispatchers for hours if there was no problem; you can figure out the reasons why that would be on your own.

>   Of course, none of this meant that the cartel hadn’t flooded into Angel Hills. I had Junior launch a new drone from the ranch and fly it south over the development. The UAV showed the place was quiet.

  And so we headed out.

  “How are we going to find my grandparents?” asked Veronica, who was sitting between myself and Shotgun in the front of the truck; Saul rode with the bound guard in the back. She stretched her legs—they looked good even in jeans.

  “If we had more of these thugs, we could interrogate them,” Veronica said. “One of them’s bound to know. We can grab them when they report for work. Celereno says they come in at eight.”

  “I don’t think we want to hang around that long,” I told her. “Eventually, the police are going to wonder what happened to their unit. And then there’s the Mexican village to consider. We want to get in and out as quickly as possible. Our job is done.”

  “Mine isn’t. I want to find my grandparents.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “I want to talk to the people in the development when we get there,” added Veronica. “And to the Mexicans. Now that the cartel has been kicked out, they won’t be as scared. Maybe the Mexicans are the people to start with.”

  “They haven’t been kicked out,” I told her.

  “Don’t kid yourself,” Shotgun said. “Once the cartel realizes what’s going on, they’ll hit that town with everything they’ve got.”

  “Are we going to just let that happen?” asked Veronica.

  “It’s not why we’re here,” I told her.

  “Why are we here?”

  “To rescue a kidnap victim, and to find a terror camp. We’ve done both.”

  “The people in the development have probably gone over the border by now,” said Shotgun.

  “Would you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why should they? Why should they run away? Why should they give up their homes? Huh? Why should they be cowards? Would you do that? Tell me. What would you do?”

  “Hell, I’d kick ass. Right, Dick?”

  * * *

  Right, Shotgun.