Ballistic

by Mark Greaney

  After the prayer Luz went with Inez to help her find a comfortable place for Elena to lie down. The bumpy drive must have been difficult for the pregnant woman, but Court noticed appreciatively that she had not complained once. She hadn’t even argued with her sister-in-law during the trip.

  Gentry took Laura aside while they were unloading the backpacks from the car. Softly, he asked, “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Who?”

  “The old couple.”

  She shrugged. “They are a little bit loco.”

  “A little bit?”

  “This hacienda has been in the Corrales family for over two hundred years. Luis has lived here his entire life; he was a Jimador, an agave farmer. But he has Alzheimer’s. Inez . . . well, I think she is losing her mind, too. After Guillermo died they just fell apart. He was everything to them.”

  “Why did you think they wouldn’t be here?”

  “They moved to Guadalajara, to a home for old people. But Inez tells me they did not have money to stay, so they returned here. I never would have brought us here if I knew they were—”

  “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay. It’s not safe for them to stay here.”

  “Maybe they can go someplace while we’re here.”

  Laura shook her head. “Look at them, Joe. Where are they going to go? We have to protect them.”

  “I’m not promising that we can protect ourselves. If DLR finds out where we are, he’s going to hit this place hard. His sicarios will kill everyone to get to Elena.”

  Laura looked like she was about to cry. Instead she just gazed off into the distance, out into the forest at the front of the property. “This is their home; if anyone needs to leave, it is us.”

  “Yeah, but we’re the ones the drug lord is trying to murder, so we’ll just hang out here till we figure out where we’re heading next.”

  Laura’s expression remained unchanged. Finally, she turned to Court. Said, “It’s all in God’s hands, anyway.”

  “Maybe so, but if it’s all the same to you and Him, I’m going to make sure all the doors are locked.”

  Shortly before ten Court walked the property inside the walls with Martin and Ramses. The three of them agreed; this big, lonely hacienda in the mountains was a great place to hide, but it would be an absolutely shitty place to defend if it came down to it. The walls around the property were ten feet high, but they were covered in vines and could be surmounted with little trouble; the massive back patio and garden could be watched over from the veranda on the second level, but there were so many wild-growing plants and trees and statues on the property, along with a four-hundred-year-old stone aqueduct and a long terra-cotta trellis, that enemies advancing on the casa grande would have plenty of both cover and concealment from most any direction.

  There were many buildings inside the walls. A simple stone chapel with a tile roof, a garden shed the size of many Mexican homes, and a broken-down wooden barn and stables all made this hacienda less like a walled castle and more like a tiny walled village.

  It was apparent to Court that they could not stay here long. If the Black Suits found them here, then they could be surrounded, the walls could be penetrated, and the building could be overrun.

  As they walked through the dark, checking the perimeter wall to make sure the gates were locked tight and there were no gaping holes, they tripped over sharp, spindly agave plants. As they did their best to find their way, Court asked Ramses, “How did you guys make it off DLR’s yacht?”

  The Mexican answered softly, his voice almost lost in the darkness. “Our role was to cut off de la Rocha’s escape via the helicopter and to kill the guards on the upper deck. The major was below with a team assaulting the bedroom. All I know is that he came over the radio and said to get off the boat, that it was a trap. We were on the helipad, we both dove off into the water, and the yacht exploded. It took us ten hours to get back to shore.”

  “So you guys definitely did not bring the bomb.”

  Ramses shook his head emphatically. “No. That is a mentira . . . a lie? Yes, we were going in to kill de la Rocha. We had no plans on leaving anyone on the boat alive. This is a difficult war; our enemies do not take prisoners, why should we? But no . . . we didn’t swim to La Sirena to put a bomb on it. If that were true, we would have attached the bomb to the hull and swam away; there would have been no need to go on board.”

  Court believed him, it was the only thing that made sense. Somehow de la Rocha was tipped off about the assassination attempt. “Who knew of the attack on La Sirena?”

  Ramses shrugged. They’d reached a large pond that came almost to the edge of the property; they moved under weeping willow trees along its far side, putting their right hands on the estate’s vine-covered wall for balance on the narrow bank. “Only Major Gamboa and the two of us, the other five on our team, plus those higher than us, not in the GOPES but in the federal government.”

  “And who would that be?”

  “Only the attorney general, and the special prosecutor assigned to the project.”

  “So one of those two men?”

  Ramses chuckled a bit while they walked. “I can narrow it down further. Major Gamboa felt that the attorney general was working all this time for Constantino Madrigal.”

  Court stopped in the dark for a moment. “Eddie knew his boss was ordering him to do the bidding of the Madrigal Cartel?”

  Ramses shrugged, but it was clear he wanted Court to understand their position. “Major Gamboa always said, ‘we will never get to the last guy, because the last guy is the one who is setting all this up.’ He was . . . what is the word? Fatal, about this.”

  “Fatalistic,” corrected Gentry.

  “Sí. The intelligence was so good, he knew the carteleros were using us as a proxy force. He knew that Madrigal and his Cowboys were to be last on the list of cartels, so he assumed Madrigal was pulling our strings. But we never expected to be double-crossed on the de la Rocha hit. The only thing I can think is that, maybe, the special prosecutor was in the pocket of Daniel de la Rocha.”

  “So what you are saying is, the attorney general is working for Madrigal. And the special prosecutor is working for de la Rocha.”

  “And we’re stuck in the middle,” confirmed Ramses.

  “Exactamente,” muttered Martin through his swollen jaw. He’d picked up enough of the English to give his take on the matter.

  “You can’t trust anyone in power, can you?” Court said it aloud but to himself.

  Ramses chuckled without mirth. “You just figured this out? Well, my friend, now I can say it. Welcome to Mexico.”

  Damn, thought Court. He had worked some dicey ops in his life, had dealt with some shady motherfuckers waving the flag of freedom or justice or honor or anything else to conceal their own nefarious objectives, but he had never encountered corruption so completely ingrained into a society. If all of what Chuck Cullen and Ramses said was true, which seemed pretty damn likely considering what he had witnessed and experienced in his thirty hours in western Mexico, the Gamboas had no one they could trust.

  Court thought it cynical of Eddie to knowingly work under these conditions, to take intelligence from corrupt bosses with their own agendas in order to execute his assassinations. But Court understood. Those were the rules around here.

  The rules sucked, but those were the rules.

  Eddie had known all along that he was in peril, that he was in too deep. Court wondered if his old friend had even expected to live long enough to meet his son. There was no way to know, but it depressed Court greatly to think about that heavy weight on the mind of his lighthearted friend.

  A new resolve grew inside of Court. A resolve to . . . to salvage something for Eddie Gamble. And for Chuck Cullen. Some tiny victory, some simple bit of retribution, some finger in the eye of those who took everything from these two good men.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When Court and the GOPES men returned to the casa grande,
they checked the building to find the best places to position sentries to look out over the property. Old Spanish architecture, like that built in Mexico in the 1770s, borrowed much from the Moorish buildings dotting the landscape of Ottoman Spain. One common feature was the mirador, or “overlook,” a balcony or atrium usually covered and usually adorned with an archway, that gave a vista of the property. This building was built in a horseshoe shape, with the concave portion facing south and surrounding the expansive patio and rectangular pool. There were three miradores on the second story of the casa grande, giving view to the front drive, the patio and back wall, and the overgrown fruit tree orchard that ended at the wall by the pond.

  Overwatch itself would not be hard here.

  The men did a quick inventory of their weapons. Between the eleven people in the home, the grand total of the arms at their disposal were the two Colt SMGs carried by the GOPES, Luis Corrales’s ancient double-barreled shotgun with a box of birdshot loads, two Beretta 9 mm pistols with a couple of magazines each, and a big .357 Magnum revolver with three live rounds.

  They had no night vision equipment, only a couple of shitty dimestore flashlights, and no weapons that could really reach out and touch someone at a distance.

  Yeah, Gentry realized, if the bad guys came, it could get ugly. If they came hard, it would be over in minutes.

  A second meeting was held in the big sitting room at ten thirty. Luis Corrales had gone back to his bedroom to sleep, but everyone else was present and accounted for. Elena lay on the couch with her swollen feet elevated on a pillow and her mother-in-law rubbing them, and the rest of the group either stood against the wall or sat on dusty chairs or tables. Court passed off Martin’s pistol to Laura; the police academy and her badass, overly protective brother had taught her how to shoot, and Court recognized from her actions in Vallarta that she had no problem killing bastards who needed killing. The other pistol went to young Diego. He’d never fired a weapon, so Laura took him aside and gave him a quick primer on the location of the safety and the concept of the magazine and the sights. Ignacio had not stopped drinking tequila since the first offering two hours earlier, so Court and the two federales decided he’d be no help in a fight. Ernesto angrily sent his forty-five-year-old son to a bedroom on the second floor.

  They talked about the security situation for a while, though the Gamboas seemed to think it highly unlikely that they would be in any danger here at the hacienda. But Court insisted they needed to do their best to be ready, and after Court questioned Inez about secure places around the property, she showed the entourage a door off the kitchen that led to a steep and narrow stairwell down to a dark subterranean hallway. The hallway ended at a long stone cellar where, back when this was a working hacienda, casks of tequila had been stored. The women moved enough bedding down there for everyone, creating a hiding place and a dormitory, but only Elena, Luz, and Inez bedded down immediately.

  Court approved of the cellar as a last-ditch defensive position; he saw the benefit that it was somewhat hidden and any attacking force would be forced to send all their number up a hallway that could be turned into a fatal funnel of fire from those defending the cellar.

  But he also saw there was no other way out, no possible means of escape.

  Fuck it, he decided. It was the best they could do here in this humongous dark house of horrors. They did not have the luxury of choice in picking their defensive positions.

  Court took Luis’s shotgun and kept his stolen revolver. Before heading back to bed, the old man had wandered around for a while, calling Court Guillermo several more times. In the morning who knew what he would think of what was going on around his house? Gentry was not going to let the confused old man roam the hacienda with a twelve gauge. Court had enough potential problems on the outside of the hacienda.

  The shotgun was old and simple, and the loads it fired would only be effective at very close range, but it was better than nothing. He’d asked Martin for his submachine gun, and the Mexican officer looked at the gringo like he was out of his fucking mind.

  “I’m not giving you my gun,” he mumbled through his swollen jaw.

  Court didn’t blame him, and he didn’t bother to ask Ramses.

  There was one more security issue, and it was big, and it was one that Court saw no good way to deal with. In order for them to find a way out of this mess, to get reporters to come help or honest people in the army or somebody with some authority somewhere to save them, the Gamboas were going to have to use a telephone. Elena would, by necessity, be calling people who the narcos, either directly or through intermediaries in the corrupt police, would be monitoring. He worried someone might accidentally say something to give away their location, might tip off the bad guys that Elena was laying low somewhere and that this big dead hacienda owned by her sister in-law’s in-laws just might be that somewhere.

  It seemed farfetched that the connection could be made, but Court had learned in his time working both for and against drug merchants that there was enough money and murder in this industry to motivate absolutely limitless amounts of labor. Enough men tracking down enough leads would, eventually, lead the enemies of the Gamboas to Casa Corrales.

  And the Gray Man knew his side could not possibly win a pitched battle, so he hoped like hell he and those he would die to protect would be long gone when the bad guys came.

  But that was a problem for tomorrow. He forbade anyone to use either their cell phones or the landline in the hacienda before morning, because a nighttime attack on this dark place would be a slaughter.

  Nestor Calvo spent the entire afternoon and evening on the back patio that he had converted into a makeshift office. The twenty Black Suits had been picked up by a pair of helicopters owned by de la Rocha and ferried from Puerto Vallarta to a stately mansion thirty minutes southwest of Guadalajara. Here, just like at all of the fifteenodd safe houses owned by the cartel’s leadership, the building and grounds were patrolled by dozens of armed guards, all with special operations military training. An outer cordon of security, all infantry trained and their fidelity to the organization proven by years of employment, drove the highways and back roads in pickup trucks. On the roof of the casa a team of guards even kept watch with antiaircraft missiles, lest anyone—police, military, or competing cartel—try to hit the property from the skies.

  Calvo smoked a Cuban cigar and sipped warm Dominican rum as he typed notes on his laptop, stayed in constant phone contact with his intelligence contacts back in PV, and kept both eyes flickering up to the large television that had been brought outside from a bedroom and wired to the satellite through a bathroom window.

  The intelligence chief of Los Trajes Negros monitored international reaction to the massacre, the official government response in Mexico City, and the back channels to the military and government and police that kept him in the know.

  All this was the work of ten men, but Calvo kept up, and truth be told, this is what he loved. The intrigue, the negotiations, the public media stance, and the backroom threats. This was his world, and he found it intensely satisfying.

  But he had another duty today, and that irked him to no end. Young Daniel, his boss, was unequivocally more interested in finding a fetus and ending its life in order to satisfy the perceived whim of some stupid idol. De la Rocha put more stock into the gaze of a plastic figurine on his bedside table than he did in the reports of his intelligence chief, and he ordered Calvo to focus on doing the bidding of the statuette, instead of doing the business of running the second-largest cartel in the region.

  To this end, for this stupid fool’s errand, Calvo had made and taken over fifty phone calls in the previous three hours. And even though his heart wasn’t in this task, even though he found it an idiotic, unprofessional, and reckless waste of time to divert his attention, the Black Suit’s men, material, and political capital to such a trivial task as the life of one unborn child—well, Nestor Calvo was nothing if not a professional, and he did his job.


  And he did it well, as evidenced by the fact that he had, in fact, determined the general location of the Gamboa family.

  De la Rocha shot out the back door. It was one in the morning, but he still wore his suit and his tie; his face around his trim mustache and goatee had been shaved clean for dinner with his men, so he still looked as fresh as he had when Calvo had first seen him at eight a.m. the previous morning.

  “Emilio said you wanted to talk?”

  “Sí, Daniel.”

  “Tell me you have found something!”

  “I have found something.”

  Daniel moved closer, sat on a leather and wicker settee next to the desk. He poured himself a shot of rum from the Waterford service next to his intelligence chief, leaned back in the sofa, and crossed his legs.

  “What is it?”

  “You already know that the two Policía Federal sicarios who survived the gringo at the Parque Hidalgo were killed in Nayarit on the way to eliminate Elena Gamboa.”

  “Yes.”

  “Witnesses of the attack on the road said two men in PF uniforms killed our men.”

  “Federales killed the federales?”

  “Sí.”

  “Madrigal’s men did this?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So, if it was not los Vaqueros, what do you make of it?”

  “I have a theory.”

  Daniel smiled. “Of course you do, consigliere.”

  Calvo nodded. “On La Sirena—Colonel Gamboa’s assault force was how many men?”

  “Eight.”

  “And how many of their bodies were recovered.”

  De la Rocha nodded thoughtfully. “Only six.” He sipped the warm rum from the Waterford crystal glass.

  “Exactamente. Two were never found. And then today, two federales appear and kill our sicarios. My contacts in the federal police report no desertions in the Nayarit area; all men on duty are accounted for. Of course, it is still possible that men not on duty did this, but why? The only other person in the area with any control over government forces is Constantino Madrigal, but if these men were working for los Vaqueros . . . explain to me how Madrigal benefits by killing sicarios on their way to kill the wife of a dead PF officer.”