Blood of the Assassin

by Russell Blake

  He tossed the clothes he had worn on the boat into a plastic bag, to be disposed of somewhere other than the hotel, and resolved to run his first productive errand of the dwindling day – to buy several sets of clothes, so that he would further blend in with the local population. These were small things, but he was meticulous, and it was the small things that could trip one up. He had an entire laundry list of items he would need to get, but first things first: clothes, a good meal, and then some sleep. There would be plenty of time tomorrow to scope out the target and arrange for a meeting with his contact. For now, he wanted to get a sense of the place, soak in the local ambience, and familiarize himself with the pace so he wouldn’t stand out.

  Being a human chameleon was as much a mental adjustment as it was being adept at changing his appearance, and when he took a sanction that required him to be in a foreign country for any length of time, going the extra distance to immerse himself in the local culture was a necessary step. He wasn’t worried about the language issue – his Spanish was fluent from living in Spain – but he was concerned about the accent, which would place him as not from Mexico. Probably not a huge issue, but the more time he spent listening to the locals chat, the more he could modify the giveaways so he would be undetectable.

  When he exited the lobby, offering a polite smile to the reception clerk as he passed the counter, he was immediately struck by the sheer multitude of teeming humanity on the sidewalks, business hours having ended and the population now making its way home from work. The melodious cacophony of horns provided a contretemps to the blaring music from storefronts desperate to attract the attention of potential shoppers. At first it seemed chaotic to him, an incessant din of unbearable noise pollution, but as he settled into the pedestrian flow and ambled down the medium-sized thoroughfare it all began to make a certain kind of sense. Every city had its own beat, its own tempo, and Mexico City was no different. He had never been there before, and so had no idea what to expect, but what he found was similar to Madrid or Rome, albeit dirtier.

  That was good. People would be in a hurry in a busy big city, less likely to notice things that didn’t immediately concern or affect them. It would make his job easier if the gestalt of the place was bustling, which it was.

  He paused by a trash can and deposited his clothes bag, confident that it would be retrieved within minutes by an enterprising homeless person who didn’t mind the fishy smell, and then meandered for block after block until he came to a clothing store featuring decent quality men’s casual wear.

  Fifteen minutes later he was back on the street, three new pairs of pants and four shirts the richer, and he continued his walk, taking a circuitous route back to his hotel. The district he was in was working class, residences mixed with commercial buildings, with no apparent zoning or restrictions that he could tell. The tops of many of the buildings were unfinished, rebar sticking out at odd angles from the remnants of structural beams, the workers having never bothered to cut them off. Bright colors seemed to be mandatory, and many façades were painted a psychedelic rainbow of neon hues, with no evidence that anyone had given any thought to the neighboring schemes, resulting in a somewhat desperate carnival atmosphere.

  One commonality were the bars that adorned every window within two stories of street level – a reminder that in addition to being one of the world’s most populated cities, it was also one of the more crime-ridden. Razor wire and broken glass topped every wall, and most of the buildings had the look of fortresses that had been secured against even the most inventive and industrious intruders.

  Two blocks from the hotel, he came across a cell phone store and purchased a Nokia with a local number that he could charge with a pre-paid card containing a hundred minutes. The transaction was efficient, and the clerk dutifully marked down the information from his passport – a requirement that had been created to quash the rash of kidnappings that plagued the city, where ransom calls were routinely made from cell phones with no owner information.

  He returned to the hotel lobby and got several restaurant tips from the clerk, and then set out again, darkness now shrouding the city, mitigated by a riot of glaring lights from the storefronts and the endless procession of headlights on the busy street.

  Four blocks away, he found the first recommendation – a massive hall already filled with hungry locals seated at rustic wooden tables, laughing and chatting over beer and local delicacies. After a look at the menu he took a seat, his journey over, and the real work of preparing to assassinate one of the most prominent men in the world about to begin.

  Chapter 28

  Cruz’s night was spent tossing and turning on a couch that had been brought to his office in the early evening. There wouldn’t be a new condo until tomorrow, so he had chosen to stay at the office, where a skeleton crew was working the night shift and the bathrooms were equipped with a shower he could use. An officer arrived at eight p.m. with a suitcase and a Styrofoam carton containing enchiladas, rice, and beans, and he’d eaten a glum meal before hiding away in his office, the blinds on the window overlooking the common area drawn, working on the computer until he became tired enough to snatch a few hours of rest.

  At some point in the wee hours he actually drifted off, and his dreams were ugly and violent: Dinah’s head arriving in a box during an office birthday party for him, gunmen shooting at him in the shower, and his daughter, Cassandra, dead for so many years, crying out for help, begging for her daddy to rescue her as a dark figure prepared to do the unthinkable; then her childish frame morphing into Dinah as he watched, powerless to do anything, frozen inside the dream, and yet outside, as an observer.

  When he started awake, disoriented, not knowing where he was, he was bathed in sweat, his pulse pounding a tattoo in his ears as he fumbled with the blanket he’d found in one of the office cabinets. It took him a few moments to get his bearings, and then he groaned, a mournful sound, and peered at his watch in the dark. Four a.m., his mouth coated with a sour, bilious film from the meal and the two Tecate beers the officer had thoughtfully brought with dinner. He closed his eyes again and tried to get comfortable, but the rest of the short night was spent in fits and starts, each bout of slumber punctuated by ugly images that wouldn’t relent.

  He was back at his desk at seven, wearing the same dark blue slacks with a new uniform jersey, his six a.m. shower having been followed by a lukewarm meal ordered from a local café and picked up by one of the security team, and was going over the morning intelligence dispatches when his cell phone rang. He looked down at the flickering screen and saw a number he didn’t recognize. When he answered, he already half knew what the call was about.

  “Capitan Cruz. Do not say anything. We have your wife. She hasn’t been harmed, but that can change whenever we decide that you aren’t cooperating.”

  “You’re a dead man.”

  “You don’t listen very well, do you? I said not to talk. I’ll keep this short and sweet, for now. If you do as we say, your wife will live. If not, you’ll get pieces of her sent to you in the mail. Is this call being recorded?”

  “No. What do you want?”

  “You. But in the shorter term, we want you to stop any further actions against our group. You know who we are, yes?”

  “I know.”

  “Then you know we will carry out any threat we make. We want you to stand down from this ill-considered campaign you have launched against us. You can make that happen. If you have to move against one of our locations, you must give us notice so we can take appropriate action. There will be no exceptions.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Then your beautiful young wife will die, after we’ve amused ourselves with her for a while.”

  Cruz had to stall for time. That was the first rule of dealing with any blackmailer or kidnapper. Buy time. “No. Wait. I can sideline anything we have on the boards, demand more evidence, choose not to move yet. But I want my wife back.”

  “That’s not an option at this poi
nt, Capitan. Perhaps once you’ve proven that you understand the rules, and your task force has been effectively neutralized, you’ll get what you want. But for now, we own you, and you must do exactly what we say.”

  Cruz hesitated. He couldn’t give in too fast – they would be suspicious if he just rolled over. “I don’t have the power you think I have.”

  “You’re lying. You run the task force. Nothing big happens in D.F. without your express approval. Don’t try to bullshit me. You don’t want your beauty’s face carved up, do you? Shall I send you some fingers or her nose to get your attention? I thought you were smarter than that.”

  “You tried to kill me. It’s me you want, not my wife.”

  “True, but after some consideration, we decided that you could be more useful to us alive. So it’s your lucky day, really. But not for your wife if you screw with us. If you want to find her hung off a freeway overpass, just try me.”

  Another long pause.

  “You won’t hurt her if I cooperate?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  He cleared his throat and then lowered his voice to a whisper. “Then I have no choice.”

  “We have eyes and ears everywhere, so don’t get cute. We’ll know within minutes if you try to double-cross us.”

  “I can’t stop the search for Dinah. That would look suspicious, and it’s not how things work.”

  “Don’t worry about that. We aren’t worried. Like I said, we have ears everywhere. Let the whole thing play out. It’s not your concern. Just do as I instructed, and kill anything that will endanger our operations.”

  “I want to hear Dinah’s voice. How do I know you haven’t killed her?”

  “I was wondering how long it would take you to get to that. Here.”

  Cruz heard a rustling as the phone changed hands, and then he heard the most beautiful sound possible.

  “Romero. I’m so sorry I–”

  Dinah’s voice sounded scared, and then she was cut off and there was more rustling, and Cruz heard a sharp crack – a slap.

  “There. You know what you have to do. Don’t blow it.”

  The line went dead before Cruz could respond.

  The good news was that Dinah was alive. And the cartel had established contact, its demands simple. He could buy himself breathing room by simply standing down on any pending raids. But a more troubling aspect to the call had been the clear inference that they had people on the inside feeding them information. That meant the task force was compromised, and he would have to be extremely careful trying to locate Dinah. And the assurance with which the caller had dismissed the kidnapping investigation efforts currently underway, meant only one thing – somehow, they also had a pipeline into that group as well. It was separate from Cruz’s task force, so they had penetrated multiple levels of the Federales – not completely surprising, but disconcerting nonetheless.

  He had been expecting the call, and knew from the hundreds of kidnappings that headquarters dealt with every year that it would be impossible to trace it. Whatever phone they had used would be a burner they would immediately dispose of, registered to a maid in Toluca who would claim that she had lost it a week ago and had been too busy to report it. The cartels bought dozens of phones per day from people who needed the hundred dollars they would pay for a cell that had cost twenty, and there was no way to disprove a claim of loss. It was one of the loopholes in the system that everyone knew about but couldn’t stop.

  But the fact that Los Zetas had sufficiently co-opted officers in his own team to subvert any effort to find Dinah made things much, much harder. It meant that he couldn’t mount his own effort, and would have to rely on the investigation group – which he had just been told had no chance of saving her.

  That wasn’t an option. He had to find his wife. Even if he had to do it completely on his own, he would. The alternative wasn’t pretty. He knew how these butchers worked – they would string him along, raping and beating her periodically, and then when they felt his usefulness was done, they would contrive a meeting where she was to be handed over, and then kill them both. There was no other way he could see it ending.

  He had to save her before any of that happened.

  Even if he died trying.

  There was no other way.

  Chapter 29

  When Briones entered the command center at seven-fifty, Cruz let him get settled and deal with his stack of inbound reports and messages before calling him into his office and pouring him a cup of coffee. Briones looked as though he’d gotten about as much sleep as Cruz, which didn’t bode well – this investigation would be a marathon, not a sprint, and it wouldn’t do to have everyone exhausted by the time the big day arrived.

  Cruz told him about the call and the conclusions he’d come to, and Briones was visibly shaken and furious.

  “The penalty for selling out your colleagues should be death. Especially if the information leads to disastrous consequences, like yesterday. It’s a straightforward transaction – they’re being paid to furnish data that results in you or your loved ones being killed. I say an eye for eye,” Briones seethed.

  “I appreciate the sentiment, and I don’t disagree, but none of that will help right now. I can’t trust anyone. That was made abundantly clear, and was actually smart of them. If I’m isolated, then I’ll be less effective. They know their psychology.”

  “So what are you going to do? We obviously can’t just sit around and twiddle our thumbs while an investigation that we both know is going to go nowhere meanders with no results, sir.”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet. But I wanted to enlist your support. You’re the only one I completely trust. The others...I mean, I trust them, but not with Dinah’s life. We have a leak. Multiple leaks. And I can’t take the chance that one of the men out there isn’t part of the problem. There’s someone on the cartel task force that’s feeding them info – although I question how high up they are. If they were part of the top tier, we wouldn’t have had any success with operations like the meth lab sting. They would have been warned and gotten everything out of there before we had a chance to take it down.”

  “It could be someone who is in the command chain, but not privy to the operational decision making...”

  “Exactly. But I can’t be a hundred percent sure...and I can’t afford to dilute this team’s focus on stopping the German. That’s still got to be the priority for them. But I need to come up with something better than just sitting around waiting for the next phone call...”

  “The only good news in any of this is that we don’t have anything active planned against Los Zetas right now. So it won’t be doing much to play along and claim that you’ve intervened against any raids. You’ll have the benefit of appearing to be doing exactly what they’ve demanded, without actually cooperating.”

  “I suppose that’s a bright spot. But I can’t say it’s much of one.”

  They sipped thoughtfully on their coffee, and then Cruz turned to business. “What progress have we made on Rauschenbach? Do we have anything?”

  Briones took him through the long list of preventive measures that had been put in place, and updated him on the data collection process. The results weren’t reassuring.

  “Then we don’t have anything more than we did when we were alerted to this.”

  “I’m afraid not, sir. Nothing has come back from immigration, either. He hasn’t entered the country yet, at least not in any traceable way.”

  Cruz leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, then out the window at the city’s sprawl. “Oh, he’s here. It’s only a gut feeling, but he’s in the country by now. There’s no way that a professional would leave things to the last minute. And our captive assassination expert, El Rey, agrees. When we were out at the site, he made it abundantly clear that it would take significant planning to pull this off. I believe him.”

  Briones looked troubled for a moment, then cleared his throat, his expression turning sheepish. “I’m
sorry, sir. I completely forgot. Yesterday, he came by and wanted to see you. You were on the call with headquarters dealing with...with Dinah’s kidnapping, so I didn’t want to interrupt. I told him that he could talk to me, but he wasn’t interested. Said he needed to talk to you because you had been to the site with him. With everything that happened, it just...I’m sorry. It slipped my mind.”

  Cruz waved his hand. “That’s understandable. Frankly, I’m not sure I would have been much good yesterday. But did he give you any hint what he wanted?”

  “No. He just repeated his contempt for our approach and said he would talk to you, and nobody else. He’s really a complete prick.”

  “Yes, he is that. But he’s also very good at what he does.”

  “Which is kill people for money.”

  “Yes. Or at least that used to be his vocation. Before he turned over his new leaf.”

  “Do you believe any of that for even a second?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe. But for the record, yes; I sense that he’s out of the game. He’s made enough money to last ten lifetimes, and this has afforded him a chance to start fresh without having to look over his shoulder every day. So yes, I think he’s done with the cartels and the killing. I can see it in his eyes.”

  “Maybe, but he’s still a killer. And he’s still part of that world, even if he’s switched the sides he’s working for. Now he’s just CISEN’s killer,” Briones spat.

  Cruz’s hand stopped with his coffee mug halfway to his lips, his eyes with a faraway look in them, and then he slowly put it back onto the table top and steepled his fingers. Briones was working himself up into another indignant froth, but then hesitated when he saw the expression on his Cruz’s face.

  “How did you leave it with him? With El Rey?”

  “I...well, I suppose I told him that you would get back in touch with him once you had a free moment...”