by Marc Cameron
“Hmmm,” Clark mused, loud enough for Pacheco to hear. “Works just like my grill at home.”
The chamber of the incinerator itself was a somewhat stubby cylindrical tank, approximately ten feet long by seven feet high. A large walk-in door was cut into the front, used for raking ash, replacing any of the foot-thick insulation, or loading refuse that was too large to fit into the rear chute. Secondary burners at the top of the chamber reached 1,200 degrees, igniting unburned gases before they could escape through a fifteen-foot chimney.
Clark waited for the reading on the control panel to reach 1,880 degrees and then lifted the heavy metal lid on the three-by-six-foot chute attached to the rear of the chamber. The rusty, coffinlike box was smeared with black oil and flecked with bits of fiberglass insulation and other trash. A trapdoor hung down in front of the firebox, telltale orange flames just visible around the edges of blackened metal. The face of a heavy steel ram was flush with the back end of the chute. A red plastic sign affixed to the box above the controls warned: Use by unauthorized persons is prohibited.
Clark looked down at his prisoner and smiled. “Don’t pay any attention to that. I’m authorized.”
Pacheco was no lightweight, and it took some maneuvering for Clark to get the thrashing man up over the edge. Both men were sweating, albeit for different reasons, by the time Pacheco landed inside the chute with his feet toward the fire chamber and his head against the ram. He rolled and thrashed, trying in vain to gain some kind of footing that would allow him to escape from the narrow prison. As he was wearing only gym shorts and a T-shirt, his hairy legs and arms were covered in black oil and grime in a matter of moments.
Clark leaned over the side, peering down into the greasy darkness. He caught the sudden odor of urine. That made sense. For an instant, he felt a pang of guilt, and then remembered the dead girls in the sorghum field, the snuff videos, and a child named Magdalena who was still somewhere out there, perhaps even dead already.
He clapped his hands together. “They say this can melt bone,” he said. “But I’d imagine they’ll find a knuckle or two.”
Pacheco began to sob.
Clark pushed the red button.
Nothing happened, except for the muffled screams, thrashing—and more urine.
“Ah,” Clark said. “The lid needs to be closed.” He reached toward the hinge and flipped a manual override that allowed the mechanism to operate with the lid open, before hitting the red button again.
This time, the heavy door at Pacheco’s feet began to slide upward, metal squealing against metal. At the same time, the ram at his head pushed him toward the waiting flames. Pacheco tried to brace himself, but even if he hadn’t been tied, the slippery steel box would have made that all but impossible.
Clark pushed the button again, relieved that the hydraulic ram actually stopped. It occurred to him that he should have tested it beforehand.
“Okay, Ernie,” he said. “Here we go. I need information. You have information. It’s a simple process.”
Pacheco nodded, seeing a possibility of survival for the first time.
Clark continued. “I should tell you, I’m not a patient man. I’m looking for Magdalena Rojas. You’re going to tell me where she is.”
More nodding and some muffled grunts.
Clark shrugged. “Not good enough. I told you I wasn’t patient, Ernie.” He pushed the red button again, waiting for the door to get halfway up and the ram to begin its movement before pushing it again.
“Sorry about that,” Clark said, ripping away the tape. “Guess I do need to take this off so you can talk.”
Pacheco spat out the paper towel and let fly a string of Spanish curses, hyperventilating to the point that Clark thought he might vomit. Clark reached as if to push the button again.
“Okay! Okay!” Pacheco said. “I dropped her at Emilio’s. She was good when I saw her last. I swear on my mother’s grave.”
“I’ve probably seen your mother’s grave,” Clark mused. “Zambrano. Where do I find him?”
Pacheco gave him directions to the ranch Caruso and Callahan had already visited.
Clark shook his head. He left his hand over the red button. “Already tried there.”
“Hang on!” Pacheco cried. “He’s got another place out in Palo Pinto County.” He rattled off the directions.
“And if he’s not there?”
“If he’s not at his other place, that’s where he’ll be,” Pacheco said. “Good luck getting to him, though. He’s got a shitload of guards. Lily’s guys. Emilio is a badass, but his woman, I ain’t shittin’ you, man, she’s the devil. And her guys ain’t much better.”
“Triad?” Clark asked. He’d been wondering where all the Sun Yee On goons were hiding.
Pacheco nodded. “She keeps a dozen or more around all the time. Look, amigo, I told you what you wanted to know. Can you please untie me now? You’re scaring the shit outta me. Know what I’m sayin’?”
“I’m not your amigo,” Clark said, his voice hoarse and pointed. “Let’s say Magdalena’s not with Zambrano. Where else would I look for her?”
Pacheco snorted. “What is it with bitchy little Magdalena? Did you bid on her? And if you did, how did you find me?” He studied Clark for a moment and then threw him a conspiratorial smile. “You wily bastard! I knew Lupe didn’t know how to make that computer anonymous. You found me with the IP address, didn’t you?”
Clark nodded. “How much did Zambrano bid?”
“Twelve grand,” Pacheco scoffed. “Can you believe that shit? Hey, come on, let me out and I’ll get you set up with somebody even better. If Magdalena’s your type, I got a line on a couple young ones down in Reynosa—”
Clark slammed his fist into the red button. The trapdoor rattled upward. The fire greeted them with a terrifying roar. A cyclone of orange and yellow whorled and danced inside the glowing chamber. At the other end of the chute, the ram slid into the battery with a resounding clunk. Pacheco drew himself into a ball, flipped sideways, bent his neck, doing everything he could to brace himself. Nothing he did would stop the unrelenting steel ram from pushing him toward the flames. Now free of the gag, he loosed a shattered scream—surely the same kind of cry the countless young women he’d murdered had screamed before him.
Clark lowered the heavy door to the sound of metallic thuds and hysterical, shrieking pleas. The frenzied howls grew more intense, drowning out the hydraulic hum of the ram—and then fell silent, leaving only the roar and pop of the flames.
• • •
The Slaughterer,” Clark said, sliding in behind the wheel of his rental car. “What a dumbass name.”
51
The Hendley Associates Gulfstream touched down on Atlanta Hartsfield’s runway 8 right at nine thirty-four a.m. Pilot in Command Helen Reid made the short taxi to Signature Aviation FBO and brought her airplane to a stop on the FBO’s ramp. She hung her Lightspeed Zulu headphones over the yoke and climbed out of her seat to go check on fuel. Chavez wanted a quick turn-and-burn—and it was Reid who would make that happen. The flight from Buenos Aires to Atlanta had been just over nine hours, thanks to a decent tailwind. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t be quite so lucky on the Atlanta-to-Tokyo portion of the trip. First, she’d have to take the time to grab more fuel in L.A., and the winds were on the nose, adding back any time they’d gained on the trip north and then some.
Reid liked the hell out of Domingo Chavez. He was a good guy with lofty goals and a commitment to mission that was beyond laudable. But no matter how important the mission, physical laws being, well, the law, Tokyo was a lot of miles and minutes away. Reid expected total time in the air to be almost twenty-five hours. She and Hicks were talented pilots, but no one wanted to fly with a pilot who’d been awake for twenty-five hours. To that end, Reid had made a call to her boss before they left Buenos Aires. To his credit, Gerry Hendley had two G550
pilots waiting inside the FBO when they landed in Atlanta. Sonny Cobb and Rich Caudill both had thousands of hours in the Army’s C37B, the military version of the G550. After the military, Cobb had flown for the U.S. Marshals Service’s Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation Division, and Caudill for the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Teams. Neither of the pilots was a stranger to Campus operations, and they often provided relief and augmentation to Reid and Hicks.
Reid gave each man a peck on the cheek and then went to hit the head inside the FBO, relieved that they’d made it to Atlanta so she didn’t have to let Chavez down.
Twenty minutes later, Reid and Hicks were back aboard and snoozing in the forward seats across from Lisanne Robertson. The Signature ground crew pushed the Gulfstream back from the ramp with Cobb and Caudill in the cockpit for the Atlanta–Los Angeles leg.
In the rear of the airplane Ding had Gavin Biery on speaker.
“Any information on Chen’s phone?”
“The last activity was a ping off an antenna in Buenos Aires at . . . seventeen-thirty Argentine time.”
“Shit!” Chavez said. “I saw him use his phone after that. That means he’s already dumped the phone we know about.”
“Well,” Biery said, “for whatever reason, he’s gone dark.”
“I don’t like this,” Jack said, feeling an uncomfortable gnawing at his gut.
“Maybe Yuki and her team will grab him,” Adara said. “If he uses one of the IDs Gavin found for him.”
“Maybe,” Jack said. “But that’s an awfully big if.”
“Okay, Gav,” Chavez said. “We’ll be wheels up from Atlanta in five minutes. I’ll check in again when we get to L.A. if I haven’t heard from you before then. Keep us informed if you get anything else.”
Chavez ended the call and then looked at the rest of his team. “ETA Tokyo one p.m. local. That gives us thirteen hours to figure out how we’re going to find this guy.”
• • •
Special Agent Olson was quick on the keyboard for a hunt-and-peck typist. Callahan actually used all her fingers, which made her fast, but Caruso was even faster. Both agents sat at the desks on either side of Callahan’s, consulting small notepads as they typed. The Old Man had made it clear that Callahan and her people were to glue their asses to the chair until they’d completed their paperwork—even if it was the weekend.
Dallas was a large field office and normally the special agent in charge left the day-to-day oversight of investigations to the various squad supervisors. This case had drawn enough national attention for someone to drop Dominic Caruso on top of them. That had the Old Man feeling antsy, and when the Old Man felt antsy, he got down in the weeds. He focused his wrath on the supervisors, and they, in turn, made the lives of working agents like Callahan a living hell. She needed to be out doing interviews, finding the trafficked kids, not in the hangar doing reports.
The FBI Form 302, or record of a witness interview, got a lot of press, mostly from people who felt their words had been twisted by the time they got to court. From Callahan’s point of view it wasn’t an exaggeration to say that the Bureau was fueled by the damned things—and paperwork in general. New agents learned quickly to plan on three hours of paperwork for every one hour in the field. So much for the intrepid gumshoe detective. Sometimes she felt like a typist with a Glock.
The time spent on paperwork did, however, give her the opportunity to accomplish at least one little bit of actual detective work. She’d already filled Caruso’s coffee mug three times, hoping that he’d get up and go to the bathroom. She’d seen him drop his cell phone into the pocket of his blazer, which now hung over the back of his chair. With any luck, the coffee would give him a morning “push” and he’d have to spend a couple minutes in the bathroom. Olson had said two minutes would be better, but a minute might be enough.
Finally, Caruso stopped typing and pushed back from the desk.
It looked like he was going to grab his phone, but Callahan said, “You done? We need to get on the road.”
Caruso said he had two 302s left, but that he would hurry—and scurried off to the bathroom in the back corner of the hangar.
Callahan waited for the door to close and then fished out the phone and passed it to Olson, who was waiting with a cord that he used to attach the phone to his laptop.
“We should probably get a warrant for this,” he said, working feverishly at the keyboard. “Don’t let him shoot me if he comes out.”
“It takes at least a minute to pee,” she said.
“This is some serious government-level encryption,” Olson said. “I’ll try and clone it, but the rest will take some time.”
“Can you get call logs?”
“Maybe.” Olson detached the phone and handed it back to Callahan. “What exactly are you hoping to find?”
Twenty feet away, the toilet flushed behind the bathroom door.
Callahan dropped Caruso’s phone back into his jacket and flopped back down at her desk, feeling more than a little guilty. “Find me all the numbers he’s called in the last forty-eight hours,” she said. “Specifically during the time we were making the arrests at Naldo Cantu’s place. I’m really interested in any of his contacts that go by the name John.”
• • •
Clark took a short nap parked among half a dozen class-A motorhomes in a Walmart parking lot in West Fort Worth. No one bothered him while he waited for the store to open, and he slept deeply, his activities of the past six hours notwithstanding.
Purchasing a handgun in a state where he wasn’t a resident posed a problem, so he’d have to make do with the Glock 19 and the Wilson Combat .45. It was, however, no problem at all to purchase extra magazines and ammunition. He wore a baseball cap against the dozens of security cameras inside the store and made sure to keep it pulled down over his eyes as he chatted with the young man behind the sporting-goods counter. No one appeared to give a second thought to the old dude stocking up for a trip to the shooting range. He bought more ammunition along with three extra magazines for the Glock 19 and two more for the Wilson, giving him five and four respectively—and a total loadout of 109 rounds carried on his person. He threw in a bottle of brake fluid, along with a couple energy bars and a twenty-ounce bottle of water—name brand, with a heavy-duty container, not the generic stuff.
He stopped by a swimming-pool supply store for a bag of chlorine granules. The Internet was rife with people using the stuff for purposes other than intended, but Clark was just another old dude buying shock treatment for his pool. He didn’t get a second look.
Loading magazines was a Zenlike experience for him, and Clark took his time, thinking through his plan as he depressed the follower and slid in each successive round. He tucked the mags in the pocket of his navy blue windbreaker and stuffed the remainder of his gear into the CamelBak hydration pack. He left the Gemtech suppressor attached to the Glock, and put that in the pack as well, wearing the Wilson on his hip for the time being. In his pocket, he carried a small flashlight, a Zippo lighter, and a heavy-duty Benchmade automatic knife called a Presidio. He was not one to consider blades very good defensive weapons. They just weren’t tactical. Offensive killing was an entirely different story.
Clark spent the next ten minutes sitting in the parking lot studying Google Maps of the area around Zambrano’s place, committing the various possible routes of approach to memory. He’d look at them again when he got closer, but it gave his mind something to chew on while he made the hour-and-a-half drive.
In the meantime, he pushed the speed-dial button for his wife. She answered on the first ring.
He had no news, at least none that he could share with her. Sometimes it was just comforting to hear her voice.
• • •
Emilio Zambrano had done Clark the great favor of building his house on a lake. People in the United States tended to feel more secure when th
ey faced the water, as if any threat would have to work too hard to get to them from that direction.
There were several lots for sale across this arm of the reservoir, and it was a simple matter for Clark to park and pretend to be an interested customer. He would eventually work his way closer, but a pair of 18-power marine binoculars from a quarter-mile away helped him rough out the beginnings of a plan.
Zambrano had gone a step further than most and picked a site in a secluded bay, cut back approximately fifty meters from the main body of the lake. The home itself was a gray brick two-story, tucked in at the head of the bay in between two limestone ridges that were covered with cedar trees. The eastern ridge jutted out farther than the one on the west and looked like it would make a good vantage point when he did decide to move closer. A long grassy hill, as manicured as any fairway at Augusta, ran down from a raised deck on the front of the house to the water’s edge. A runabout, gleaming white in the Texas sun, was tied up to a set of floating docks. To the right of the house, a swimming pool had been cut into the side of the hill along with a brick cabana that matched the house. The cabana, as well as a small utility shed partway down the hill, hid much of the pool from any boats that happened to venture too close to the property. For Clark’s purposes, the outbuildings conveniently created a blind spot from above, leaving a good portion of the dock invisible from the upper portion of the property.
Clark watched long enough to count seven different men wandering the grounds. There was something going on up at the pool, but the angle was wrong so he couldn’t tell what it was. He took a swig of bottled water before pouring the remainder into the dirt and replacing it with about a half-cup of brake fluid. He re-capped the bottle and put it in the CamelBak with the unopened sack of pool shock. After one final gear check, he drove to the other side of the lake.
