Ballistic

by Mark Greaney

  “Motherfucker!” The thick man screamed, rolled to his side, and grabbed his leg.

  “Listen, Matt. I am doing you a favor. Carmichael knows I don’t punch people in the jaw who are trying to kill me. I didn’t hit any organs, any arteries; you are going to be fine. Better than fine considering what Denny would do to you if he thought you and I were in cahoots. Put some pressure on your gut; don’t worry about your leg or shoulder. I didn’t hit anything vital.”

  “That’s fucking easy for you to say! Fuck, Violator! I saved your ass!”

  “And I’m saving yours! Okay, Matt, I’ve got to run.”

  “You are leaving? I’m fucking bleeding to death!”

  “No, you’re not. You’re going to be a stud around Langley. You survived a shoot-out with the Gray Man. How cool is that?”

  “It’s not cool at all, you mother—”

  Court knelt, patted him on the head. “You’re going to thank me, I swear.” Another quick pat. “Gotta go. Thanks again.” Court stood back up and pulled Jerry’s phone from his pocket, checked it for a signal. “Two bars. Call the embassy.” He tossed the phone on Hanley’s big gut, climbed behind the wheel of the Ford, and drove out of the parking garage.

  Hanley lay in the dark, holding on to his stomach and his shoulder. “Fucking Violator!” he screamed it at the top of his lungs; it echoed back to him in the empty garage.

  Then he took his hand from his shoulder to dial the cell phone with his bloody fingers.

  FORTY-ONE

  Just after nine p.m. Daniel de la Rocha sat on the sofa of his living room in a suburb of Cuernavaca, some forty-five minutes from Mexico City. Next to him, in his lap and up and down the length of the sofa were his children. His wife sat on the floor at his feet. The family watched the huge plasma television, a league match between Chivas de Guadalajara and Cruz Azul, two of Mexico’s best soccer teams.

  DLR’s phone chirped in the front pocket of his black sweatpants, annoying him greatly. He’d instructed his men not to bother him tonight under any circumstances.

  The chirping phone caught his wife’s attention as well, and she looked angrily at her husband.

  “You said no one would—”

  He looked at the phone. “I’m sorry, mi amor. It’s Nestor; it must be important.”

  “I asked for one night of peace with my family.”

  DLR’s oldest daughter, nine-year-old Gabriella, hushed them as she tried to watch the match.

  “Daniel . . . the American has escaped. He killed Carlos, el Carnicerito, something like six or seven federales; he shot up the CIA man, and he escaped with Pfleger. Apparently, one of them is wounded; there was a blood trail all the way out of the building to the—”

  “Wait! Nestor . . .” Daniel stood, his nine-month-old son nearly tumbled out of his lap onto the sofa. De la Rocha shot out of the living room, ran in his socks to his study, and shut the door.

  “You are telling me that the chingado gringo who I saw in the Tepito death house, chained like a piece of meat to the wall, half-dead and surrounded by a dozen armed men, has somehow managed to get away.”

  “Sí, patrón. I am working a lead right now. Pfleger’s car is missing; I assume they took it. I have everyone in the D.F. canvassing the—”

  “What is going on? He did not do that alone. Someone rescued him.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “No maybe. Madrigal! It must have been los Vaqueros!”

  “I’ll look into it, patrón.”

  “I want you to call the CIA right now and tell them that the Vaqueros shot their man!”

  “We don’t know yet, Daniel.”

  “I know it! I know Constantino Madrigal is behind this!”

  Calvo sighed into the phone. “I will look into all the leads, especially any information that Madrigal’s network is involved.”

  “Well, we know where they are going, then, don’t we? Tijuana!”

  “Jerry Pfleger did not create the visas.”

  “If he’s working with them, maybe he did, and he just didn’t tell you.”

  “That’s true, Don Daniel,” Calvo replied wearily. “We will have everyone focusing on the border and the highways to get there.”

  “Good. You stay on Madrigal, Nestor. You understand me?”

  “Sí, mi patrón.”

  De la Rocha disconnected the call then pressed a button on his desk. “Emilio. Bring the cars. We are leaving immediately.” He turned back to the living room. His wife stood in the doorway.

  “What is it?”

  “Work. It is always work, mi amor.”

  “You are leaving again?”

  Daniel nodded. “Sí. I am sorry, but I have to go.”

  Court sat in la Iglesia de Nuestra Señora del Pilar, in the same pew as the day before. But Laura Gamboa Corrales was not by his side. He stared at the altar, at the crucifix, at the devotional candles. He smelled the incense and the wax.

  And he thought of her.

  Jerry Pfleger was bundled in the trunk of his own car now. They’d spent two hours dumping the Ford, taking a taxi back to Pfleger’s apartment in la Zona Rosa, getting a few changes of clothes, the twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of pesos Court had given Jerry as a down payment, a mobile phone, and some other odds and ends. They packed all this into Jerry’s car. Court strapped a bag of ice onto Jerry’s foot to keep the swelling under control, but Jerry limped so badly Court was forced to help the skinny American everywhere he went.

  On the way to Highway 85 to head northeast, Gentry took this detour to the church. Operationally, it was unnecessary, no doubt a little dangerous, even though he doubted the Black Suits would still be hanging around Donceles Street.

  He could not say for sure why he was here or what he was doing. But he wanted to come here, to sit, to think, just for a few minutes.

  He thought about Lorita, wondered what she was being subjected to, what she thought about him right now.

  His muscles still hurt, but the twitching was gone. His ankles and wrists were burned and blistered, but he’d survive it. The cuts on his chest burned. They needed some treatment, but they weren’t deep enough to worry about blood loss, and the sting would help him focus and stay awake for the next few hours. After that . . . after that he’d think about medicine.

  He had a plan, sort of. It was paper-thin, but it was action, and at times like these, Gentry preferred action to sitting around and hoping for the best.

  He thought of Lorita again, and he wondered if he loved her.

  Then he thought of Eddie, of Elena and the baby, and of the life that Eddie had left behind.

  Court wondered if he even knew what it meant to love.

  He looked around the church. There were only a few faithful here, but he regarded them, wondered about their capacity to love.

  No, Court decided. He was not like them. He was not trained to love.

  He was conditioned to hate.

  And now he was ready to kill.

  He stood slowly and left his pew. He had not prayed. He did not cross himself; he did not step up to the altar to kneel before it.

  But he did address the crucifix. From the center aisle, before turning for the door, he spoke softly. It wasn’t a prayer. It was a demand. Delivered in a threatening tone by someone who, like he had told Laura the day before, did not know how this all worked.

  “She trusts you. She is one of your people. You need to help her. To take care of her. I can’t do it by myself.”

  After the side trip to the church, the Gray Man was all business. He drove to Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez; just a few minutes before arriving, he had Pfleger use the store-bought cell phone to rent a car in his name from the Hertz office in the airport. They parked Jerry’s car in long-term parking, picked up the rental, and drove to another part of the airport. Then they took a taxi back into town, into the Reforma district, and here Court and Jerry took a city bus to el Zócalo. Two long blocks south of the main square, with Gentry helping the
hobbled Pfleger walk upright, they found a hotel parking lot that was unattended, and here the American assassin hotwired a Ford Mustang.

  At two forty-five in the morning, Gentry and Pfleger left Mexico City behind them and headed northeast to Pachuca, a ninety-minute drive. They ditched the stolen car in Pachuca, waited on a park bench across from the main bus terminal until it opened at six a.m., and then took the first bus heading north to Juárez. They would get off before Juárez and take a regional bus to Tijuana.

  Twenty-four hours on the road.

  As they sat together in the back of the bus, Jerry spoke his first words in hours that were not complaints or curses. “Why did we do all that?”

  “All what?”

  “We’ve been jumping on and off vehicles for a dozen hours. My foot is killing me, dude. I need a doctor.”

  “We burned our trail. There is no way the Black Suits are going to find us. They’ll look for your car and find it at the airport. They’ll think we wanted them to think we got on a plane, but they’ll be smart enough to see that you rented a car. They will find the rental there at the airport, and they might think we did, in fact, fly out of Mexico City, but if they are good, they’ll check with the taxi company and see that we tried to throw them off. Then if they are good and they are lucky, they might even find out about the Mustang stolen several miles from where the cab dropped us off, but I seriously doubt it.”

  Pfleger rubbed his calf with a grimace as the swelling caused the nerves to flare up.

  “Even if they managed every bit of that, they’d have to be more dialed in than the FBI to find the Mustang in Pachuca, and even if they did, there was no video security at the terminal there, and we paid in cash, so there is no chance in hell they will track us now.”

  “But won’t they still guess that we are going to TJ?”

  Gentry nodded. “Oh, yeah,” he said, as if it were obvious. “They’ll be all over Tijuana when we get there, scanning the border, ready to kill us all.”

  “That’s great,” Pfleger said. “And then, even if they don’t, you are going to kill me when this is all over.”

  “Not if you do what I say.”

  “Bullshit. I saw what you did to the CIA guy, the guy who saved your ass. You fucking murdered him.”

  Court shrugged. Smiled wearily. “It had to be done.”

  “Right. You’ll say that about me in a couple of days.”

  “Only if you try anything cute.” Gentry pulled a pair of zip ties from his pocket. He’d picked them up at a grocery store back in the capital. He made a two-link chain with them, with his left hand in one of the links and Jerry’s right hand in the other. He tightened the bindings. Court found a small sleeping blanket that the bus provided, and he tossed it over his and Jerry’s laps. To anyone looking it would appear as if the two men were holding hands. An old woman sitting across the aisle noticed their apparent public display of affection and clucked disapprovingly.

  “So we are going to TJ even though we know they will be at the border, waiting for the Gamboas to cross?”

  “Let me explain what is going to happen, Jerry. We are going to the border. To Tijuana. When we get there, Elena, Luz, and Diego are going to cross the border. You are going to set up their crossing from this side, and you and I are going to sit in some hotel room together, just sit there and look at each other, until I get a phone call from Elena telling me that they are safely in the United States. If I don’t get that call, if they don’t make it across, Jerry, you are going to die a very, very slow and very, very miserable death right there in that hotel room. You have one chance to arrange a fucking foolproof crossing for them, so you better start coming up with something quick.”

  Jerry began shaking his head before Court finished talking. “I can’t ever be sure someone will make it over! Yeah, if we had the documents, I could just about promise. But with a midnight run there are too many variables. I always tell people I’ll get them over within two or three tries.”

  “These people don’t have two or three tries. If they are caught and they go into the system, then de la Rocha can make them disappear. You get one shot at this.”

  “I am telling you, I can’t promise anything!”

  Court shrugged. He closed his eyes and tucked his head against the headrest. He pulled the blanket up high to his shoulders and said, “Well in that case, Jerry, you are going to die.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Diego Gamboa Fuentes sat on the park bench, three hundred yards from the border crossing into the United States. His eyes darted to everyone around over the age of ten. He was terrified of being seen by the wrong people, and he was certain the wrong people were crawling all over the place.

  This was the third day he had sat here in this spot, and each day he became more and more certain that Jose and tía Laura were not going to appear, and more and more certain that the men walking around the park were working for the Black Suits. The air was only seventy degrees, but sweat dripped from Diego’s big dark sunglasses and from the scalp of his nearly shaved head.

  He’d followed Joe’s instructions to alter his appearance, as had tía Elena and his abuela. They remained at the hotel, a few miles south of here, in hiding, because they just knew the Black Suits were close by.

  They’d had a bit of luck the day before. Members of the Tijuana Cartel had spotted some new men in the area, thought them to be a rival cartel up here muscling in on their plaza, and they reacted accordingly, responding in the only way they ever responded to threats to their bottom line—they opened fire. No civilians had been hurt or killed, miraculously, but the daily machine-gun fire in the streets of TJ had picked up considerably since, as more guerreros for the Tijuana Cartel had been sent out to find and scare away the new visitors to this lucrative crossing point.

  Diego and his family had heard the shooting, but they learned the reasons behind the cartel-on-cartel street battle the evening before on the news. They hoped this meant the TJ narcos were, although unwittingly, providing a level of protection for them, giving Los Trajes Negros a little something to worry about while up here in the north.

  Diego did not want to come out today, to wait at the park for the three p.m. meeting time. He did not expect to see his aunt or the gringo, and he did not like leaving the hotel. He knew he would have to be the one, eventually, to leave cover and make contact with the local coyote to try and find some transportation over the border, but he was more than willing to wait a few days before attempting this. They had little money, no connections, and a palpable fear of the men of the Black Suits.

  Getting over the border on their own was going to be tough.

  A man walked past the bench; Diego had not even noticed him approach. His hair was razor short; Diego could tell even though the man wore a ball cap. His goatee and mustache were full but trimmed close to his face; his eyes were hidden behind mirrored lenses. He wore a long-sleeved cotton shirt and baggy jeans, the typical attire of a laborer, not the nicer clothes of a cartelero. But when he slowed in front of Diego, the young Mexican stiffened in fear.

  “Follow me,” the man said softly in Spanish.

  Diego recognized the accent. The voice.

  It was Jose. The American.

  He had changed his appearance so completely Diego hesitated, even when the man crossed the park, sat down on a small Vespa scooter, and turned back to him. The boy on the bench rose tentatively; he wondered how Joe had pulled up on the scooter and then crossed the park without Diego noticing. It was like he had just materialized out of thin air.

  When Diego arrived at the Vespa, Joe started the engine, motioned for Diego to climb on back, and then they drove off down the street without a word between them.

  Court returned the scooter to the shop where Jerry had rented it that afternoon, then took a taxi with Diego back to the hotel where Luz and Elena were staying. The two women were floored by the American’s change of appearance. They both agreed that, with the right clothes, he looked like he could actually
be a member of Los Trajes Negros.

  Like Diego, the women had made an attempt at a transformation. Luz had dyed her hair red; it did not look natural, but neither did it look out of place for a woman of her age. Elena Gamboa Gonzalez wore a white floral dress that looked new; she’d cut her hair short, into a bob not unlike her sister-in-law Laura’s. She wore big sunglasses and high heels.

  But Elena was still pregnant. Court appreciated her going to the trouble to try and disguise herself, but he could not imagine the hit men for the Black Suits ignoring a pregnant lady just because her hair was shorter than that of their target.

  Diego and Court collected the two women and had a new taxi take them to a supermarket, where they all climbed into yet another cab that drove them south to a local transit bus stop. When the cab drove away, Gentry led the family up the street a hundred yards, then they turned left down a narrow callejón and arrived at a horridlooking hourly motel.

  Sickly prostitutes stood out front, but Gentry led the Gamboas past them and then up a single flight of stairs in the back. He slipped his key in the lock of a tiny room with no windows.

  Inside it was dark. Court had forbade talking on the trip through town, so as soon as he closed the door, Elena said, “Why are we here?”

  As a response Court flipped on the light to the room. A single bed that sagged in the middle, a threadbare comforter, a backpack lying on top. With his eyes Gentry directed the families to look in the bathroom.

  Jerry was tied with telephone cord and strapping tape to the plumbing in the tiny and filthy bathroom; his head on the shit-stained porcelain, and his wounded foot positioned high on the rim of the dingy bathtub.

  “What took you so long?” he asked as Gentry looked in on him past the three Mexicans in the doorway.

  Court addressed the Gamboas. “We’ve been compromised.”

  “Where is Laura?” Elena asked.

  He sighed. “The Black Suits have her.” He said it in Spanish so Luz and Diego would understand.