by Marc Cameron
Coyotes — also known as polleros or chicken herders — took a great many risks, but the return was good. Sixteen “chickens” through the tunnel brought thirty-two thousand dollars for two hours’ work. False documents, transportation within the United States, safe houses — those all cost extra.
“How long?” the mother of the little girls asked, spreading a cloth over a dusty bale of straw so her children could sit down and share an orange and some water.
“We just wait.” The coyote shrugged. “The truck will get here when he gets here.” He was a skinny, sunken-chested man, nervous and bouncy as if his neck were set on a spring. Going by the name of El Flaco, he was said to have a connection with the notorious Zetas Cartel — former paramilitaries from the Mexican Special Forces who’d decided protection rackets and narcotics trafficking were preferable to military discipline. Like the Sinaloa and other cartels, Zetas used tunnels to move drugs into Texas and guns back to Mexico. These same tunnels came in handy for smuggling illegal immigrants.
The Quiet One sat on the ground, leaning against a large wooden crate that lay on its side. A sliver of metal stuck out of the lid, so he slouched to keep it from poking him in the back. Still, he didn’t know how long they’d be there and it was preferable to leaning against nothing.
One of the little girls offered him a piece of her orange.
He took it with a smile. She couldn’t have been over six.
“What is your name?” she asked with the audacity peculiar to small children.
“Pablo,” the Quiet One said. “What is your name?”
“Beatrice,” the little girl said. “You talk funny. Where are you from?”
“Beatrice!” The girl’s father clapped his hands. “Stop bothering him.” He smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, my friend.”
Pablo waved him away. “It is fine. I’m sure I do sound odd to her. I went to school in Italy.”
“That explains the accent,” the man’s wife said, nodding to her husband as she peeled another orange. “I told you so.”
Pablo smiled and closed his eyes. Inside, his stomach churned. Was his accent really so noticeable that he could be undone by a small child and a witless woman? The squeal of a truck grinding to a halt outside roused him from his worries. So far, the journey had been dull and he hoped it stayed that way.
El Flaco climbed to his feet with a groan at the sound of the truck doors. He motioned for everyone else to stay put until he went outside to talk to his contact.
Before he took a step the barn door swung open and a man in a dark green uniform stepped inside pointing his pistol.
“Mierda!” Flaco turned to run but found a second Border Patrol officer waving at him from the back door. He hung his head in defeat.
Pablo was astounded to find that the arrest team consisted of only three Patrol agents — an older man with graying hair, a Hispanic man whose brand-new uniform screamed “rookie,” and a thick-hipped woman with frizzy blond hair. Seventeen against three seemed like bad odds. If it had not been for the trainee, he suspected there would have only been two of them.
The senior agent and the woman provided cover while the rookie acted as contact officer and went from person to person applying plastic zip cuffs behind their backs, then giving each a quick pat-down for weapons. The rookie brightened when he found Flaco’s pistol and passed it back to the female agent. The coyote’s head bobbed back and forth, alternately praying and cursing under his breath. Once searched, each prisoner was made to sit back down.
Pablo kept his face passive, but his mind raced to find a way out. Too much depended on his freedom of movement. Going into custody was out of the question. Leaning back against his crate, he began to work his restraints against the sharp metal shard that had poked him in the back earlier.
The senior agent holstered his sidearm and took off his green ball cap to run his hand through his silver hair. He nodded at the rookie. “I’ll call in for a bus. Cardenas, you and Stanton start getting names now. It’ll speed up the processing back at sector.”
The plastic flex cuffs broke, freeing Pablo’s hands moments before the female agent worked her way around the barn to him. She stopped directly in front of him, peering down across a small spiral notebook. She tilted her frizzy head and blinked large eyes as if seeing him for the first time.
“What is your name?” she asked in excellent Spanish.
“Pablo Mendoza,” he whispered, keeping his eyes wide and passive as he took note of her sidearm and the retaining strap on her holster. He’d watched her from the moment the rookie handed her Flaco’s pistol and knew it was still stuck behind her back in the waistband of her trousers.
“Where were you born?”
“In a village near Bogotá.” Pablo told the same plausible lie he gave everyone. Who in their right mind would admit to being from a country known for drug production and deadly cartels? Incriminating lies were so much easier to swallow.
“Colombia,” she said to herself, making a note beside his name in spiral notebook. “OTM.”
She was a tall woman, and her hips would provide her with a low center of gravity. Seated as he was, Pablo would need her off balance for his plan to work, even if his hands were free.
“Will they send me back to Bogotá?” he whispered, stuttering a bit as if he was frightened.
“Pardon?” She stooped, bending closer so she could hear him.
Pablo caught the woman’s legs between his own, clamping down like a vise. Locking his ankles, he rolled sideways, throwing his full weight against the startled agent. Already off balance, she toppled easily, landing flat on her face in the dust with a sickening thud.
Pablo was on her in an instant, straddling her back as if she was a horse. He grabbed a fistful of frizzed blond hair with his left hand, brutally pounding her head against the ground. His right hand went for the H&K pistol in her holster. He’d reasoned that as a law enforcement officer her sidearm would be in better working order than Flaco’s rusted thing. In this situation, he could not afford a single malfunction.
Stunned, the female agent put up little resistance and her H&K slid easily from her holster with a satisfying snick. He shot her once in the back of the head, not because she was an immediate threat but because he couldn’t shoot accurately at the others with her bucking and thrashing beneath him. The rookie was closest so he got the next two rounds, one in the vest, then a follow-up to the neck. Pablo spun immediately, throwing rounds at the senior agent who’d already dropped his cell phone and drawn his weapon. The agent fired as he fell, but the rounds went high and wide. Pablo shot again, striking him high in the ribs. The round hit his vest, but blunt trauma caused him to drop his pistol. Now Pablo had time to take careful aim and finished him with a shot to the head.
Flaco bounced on the floor, jerking against his bonds. His face a twisted shout, his mouth moved, but no sounds came out. The rest of the group had fallen to the dirt at the first sign of shooting, becoming the smallest targets possible. Little Beatrice and her sister whimpered next to their parents.
The coyote found his voice as Pablo kicked the pistols away from the dead Border Patrol agents.
“What have you done, señor?” Flaco whispered. “The Americans will hunt us down like dogs.”
Pablo raised a wary eyebrow. “Our contract was for you to get me into the United States safely with no law enforcement involvement.” He retrieved Flaco’s pistol, then rolled the dead woman before using it to shoot her once in the forehead.
Little Beatrice flinched at the shot and buried her face in her mother’s lap.
Flaco’s mouth hung open as Pablo’s plan began to dawn on him.
“So,” he said, nodding frantically. “You shoot them with my gun, then kill me with one of theirs to make it look like a gunfight.”
Pablo grinned. “You are smarter than I first believed,” he said.
“You should reconsider,” the coyote said. “If you do this thing, my people will come looking for
you. They are very cruel and powerful.”
“Your people?” The Quiet One smirked. “You have no idea who I am.”
Flaco’s eyes jumped from person to person around the dark confines of the barn. “But what of all the witnesses, señor? Surely you would not kill them all. Even the little children?”
“Some things are too important for sentiment,” the Quiet One said, inhaling quickly through his nose to steel his resolve. “It is best I begin at once.” He retrieved the rookie agent’s pistol and a second thirteen-round magazine from the dead man’s belt. He had little time, but plenty of ammunition.
The idiots just sat there, trussed up like lambs for the slaughter, blinking stupidly.
Ibrahim Nazif, a Yemeni citizen educated from the age of fourteen at an al-Qaeda camp in Paraguay’s lawless Triple Frontier, smiled. He thought of what the blond agent had noted about him in her book. “OTM,” he chuckled to himself as he shot Flaco in the back of his bobbing neck and continued down the line, stopping only long enough to look each victim in the eye as he pulled the trigger.
OTM — other than Mexican indeed.
CHAPTER 15
Coral Gables, Florida
8:35 PM
Quinn shut the door of the black crew cab Silverado and tossed the keys to a Hispanic teenager beside the valet stand. The kid was so busy watching Garcia’s long legs spill out of the backseat that he missed the keys completely. Quinn had to admit, she looked incredible in a white wraparound sundress. A simple gold chain fell across high collarbones to rest in the cleft of her breasts. She winked playfully at the boy and looped an arm through Quinn’s, showing she belonged to him. Quinn caught his breath at the simple act.
Thibodaux shut the door and fell in behind the couple as they walked toward the sprawling Italian villa, shaking his head.
Quinn’s mind reeled at the thought of Garcia walking beside him. Over the years, as Kim had grown more distant and Mattie had gotten older, thoughts of them and the difficulties of trying to hold the family together had threatened to knock him off task. He’d become a pro at compartmentalizing during missions, focusing on the problem at hand, then allowing himself a moment of melancholy only when the shooting stopped and he was in a safe place.
He shook off the worry and steeled himself to Garcia’s touch as she snaked her arm around his waist, getting into character as his girl-toy. He could not dwell on the fact that he was standing next to one of the most amazing women he’d ever met. Dealing with a man as brutal as Valentine Zamora would require his full concentration.
Hanging torches lit a wide cobblestone walkway that led from behind the marble stand up a series of steps nearly thirty meters to the massive columns that comprised the front entrance to Valentine Zamora’s rented villa. The whiteness of the limestone structure appeared to glow against the dark green of the surrounding gardens and deep purple of the night sky.
Both men wore light khaki slacks and polo shirts, Thibodaux’s navy blue to Quinn’s black. The colors made them less visible if it became necessary to work among the shadows — urban camo, Jacques called it. The Cajun, supposed by Zamora to be Quinn’s bodyguard, carried his Kimber ten-millimeter in an inside-the-waistband holster over his right kidney, hidden by the tail of his polo shirt. The small Colt revolver still rested comfortably on the inside of his left ankle. Garcia carried no gun. Her weapons were more formidable than any bullet or blade. As the principal, Quinn went in clean. There would be plenty of killing tools available at such an event if he found one was needed.
“Twenty-nine dead in New York,” Quinn said as they approached the front door. He wanted them all to remember what they were dealing with. “Three times that wounded.”
“One-day missions suck,” Ronnie whispered. “If I didn’t have to get back to training tomorrow, I’d dearly love to help you nail this son of a bitch.”
Quinn thought about her leaving and didn’t know if he felt sadness or relief.
“Laissez les bons temps rouler,” Thibodaux said, clenching his square jaw as he reached for the brass doorknocker shaped like a lion’s head. Let the good times roll.
* * *
The gap-toothed twins greeted them under a heavy wrought-iron chandelier. Honey-colored clay tile and thick wooden ceiling beams accented the whitewashed walls of the spacious foyer. The blond twins wore black one-piece swimsuits with necklines that plunged well past their belly buttons, exposing enough cleavage that Thibodaux, who constantly worried that his wife had her very own spy satellite, hunted for a place to cast his eyes. Zamora seemed to have invited a great many similarly dressed woman to the party. In fact, though the interior of the house was exquisitely decorated in finely carved wood and tapestries, it was impossible to notice much beyond the female décor.
“Looks like you’re a bit overdressed,” Quinn said as the gap-toothed twins jiggled and flounced their way through the double doors to let Zamora know Quinn, and more importantly Veronica Garcia, had arrived.
“You say that to all your girls,” Ronnie said with the confident verbal equivalent of a shrug.
“How many guests you reckon are here?” Thibodaux grabbed a mojito from a passing waiter in khaki shorts and a white polo.
Quinn scanned the mass of people. “Maybe a hundred and fifty.”
A crowded great room, adorned with waist-high Tuscan vases and an eighteenth-century Italian fresco, separated the entry from a long covered porch. People milled here and there in knots of four or five under the pool-length lanai and at small round tables set around the cabanas on the other side of a long, rectangular pool. A covey of tittering girls soaked in the steaming Jacuzzi. Underwater lights flashed and swirled as guests dove and swam in the blue-topaz water.
The air was heavy with the smell of chlorine, sunblock, and alcohol. Stubby palmettos and sculptured hedges of holly and long-leafed oleander beyond the cabanas gave the entire area a jungle-like feeling, affording small, isolated pockets where couples could get away for a few private moments.
Zamora stood with four other men, one of them the ever-present Monagas, who kept back a few steps behind but within arm’s reach of his boss. Zamora wore a white linen sport coat with black slacks and matching shirt, open at the collar. The two men with him looked Hispanic. Shorter, stockier, and a decade older than Zamora, both spoke with the abrupt, animated gestures of men used to having things go their own way.
The Venezuelan’s head snapped up the moment the twins got to him. He excused himself immediately from the conversation and all but ran to meet Quinn and Garcia at the veranda. Cathy, the mousy brunette from the track, padded up behind him. She’d been dangling her legs in the pool and little puddles formed on the concrete around her toes. Arms folded across her chest, she kept one leg slightly ahead of the other as if she would have rather been wearing anything but the scrap of a bikini.
Monagas stood beside her. A disgruntled curl hung beneath the scraggly beard on his uneven upper lip.
Quinn forced a smile as Zamora took Garcia’s hand and pressed a kiss.
“I am overjoyed you decided to come, Mr. Quinn,” the Venezuelan said, stifling a giggle. He kept Garcia’s hand until Quinn threw an arm around her shoulder and tugged her away.
“This is a beautiful place, Mr. Zamora,” Garcia said, full lips parted slightly. She was very good at what she was doing.
“Call me Valentine, I beg you.” Zamora swept his arm around the grounds, narrowly missing Cathy standing behind him. He shot her a hateful glare, then smiled back at Garcia. “I have rented it every year of the past seven. It is modeled after a villa in Tuscany that I also rent during my trips to Italy.”
“You know,” Quinn said in spite of himself. “I’m in real estate. If you want, I could help you get into a place of your own so you don’t have to rent all the time.”
Zamora stared, his eyes narrowing to tiny slits. “I rent because I want to, Mr. Quinn. Not because I have to. It keeps me fluid.”
“He knows that,” Ronnie said, squeez
ing Quinn’s arm. “You should have heard him talking about you and your big entourage back at the track. All the way here he was Valentine this and Valentine that. You’d think he was your groupie.”
Zamora raised an eyebrow. Pleased. “Is that so?” Quinn shrugged, wishing he could drag the guy behind one of his manicured hedges and beat him to death.
“I have to finish an important business matter,” Zamora said. “Then you must let me show you around. Please enjoy the pool until then. Cathy, my darling,” he spoke over his shoulder without taking his eyes off Ronnie. “Please find Ms. Garcia a bathing suit.”
“It’s okay,” Ronnie said, opening her clenched fist to reveal the tiniest crumple of yellow cloth. “I brought my own.”
The corners of Zamora’s lips perked under his pencil-thin mustache as if he’d just spied his favorite entree on the menu.
“Most excellent,” he said. “Cathy will show you the changing room.”
Quinn gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Hurry back,” he said.
“You are a very lucky man,” Zamora said, watching the women walk away.
“Oh,” Quinn said. “I don’t know about that. I just have the one. You seem to have an entire harem.”
Zamora swept his arm again. “Pick any one of them. I won’t mind.”
“What about their dates?” Quinn asked.
“The only man here with a date is you, Mr. Quinn.” Zamora leaned in, confiding a secret. “And someone may try and steal her away if you are not very careful.” He stood back and clapped his hands together, holding them to his lips as if in thought. “Now, you must excuse me while I attend to the drudgeries of my business.”
Monagas remained a moment longer, giving them each a long up-and-down look. Scoffing to himself as if he couldn’t be bothered with speaking, he turned to join his boss.
* * *
