“These guys look hard. That’s how the plumber described them – and he was in the army.”
“I wouldn’t expect bodyguards to look soft.”
“Nobody knows who owns the ranch. It’s always been a source of mystery around here. You know how small towns can be.”
“You mentioned that it had been empty for some time. Who was there before?”
“Nobody knows – they kept to themselves. I just know they were there because the guy who delivers their groceries told me. But he said they went through a lot of tequila and Tecate.”
El Rey took a swallow of coffee and nodded. “Hardly earth-shattering. Where is this ranch located?”
The informant scanned the restaurant nervously. “I could use a little bonus. I’m short on cash.”
“That’s reasonable,” El Rey agreed. The arrangement was that Olivero would be paid the usual way, by his handler; but Olivero was angling for more, and El Rey was short on time and patience. “Say, two thousand pesos?”
“Three would be better.”
“Twenty-five hundred’s the maximum I can expense.” El Rey reached into his pocket and withdrew a wad of five-hundred-peso notes and counted them out. “Now stop stalling. Where’s the ranch?”
“About six kilometers outside of town, on the road to Alcocer.” Olivero finished his drink. “There’s a roadside shrine just before the turnoff. You can’t miss it – it’s fairly elaborate. Family of four, popular in the community. Very sad. Drunk driver never saw them.”
“Right or left side?”
“Right if you’re heading to Alcocer.” He rose. “That’s all I have. Might help if I knew who you were looking for.”
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” El Rey said, deadpan.
Olivero laughed nervously and waved a hand at him. “Okay. None of my business.”
“That’s right. Oh, but Olivero? If you breathe a word about our discussion to anyone, you’ll discover I wasn’t kidding.” The assassin’s tone could have frozen fire.
The informant’s eyes locked with his for a moment and then he quickly looked away. “Yeah, yeah. I know. Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe.”
El Rey drained his cup and debated following Olivero and neutralizing him. He put the odds at fifty-fifty that the man would sell them out. A glance at his watch convinced him to abandon the idea and go for a drive to Alcocer. He needed to move fast and didn’t have the luxury of tying up that loose end, as he would have if he’d been working on a hit.
The assassin placed a call to Cruz as he walked from the café and warned him about Olivero. “I’d have him picked up and locked away for the day, Capitan. I don’t need to tell you that we can’t afford a leak.”
“I’ll order the local office to send a car out to his usual haunts.”
El Rey told him about the ranch. “Can you pull up anything you can find on satellite and send it to my phone? It would save me time if I knew the layout.”
“Will do. Figure ten minutes.”
“Make it five.”
“I just got a piece of good news. The government bought us a little more time. They negotiated for delivery of the goods tomorrow by ten a.m. – apparently it’s not all that easy to locate a boatload of diamonds on short notice.”
“That will make it easier, assuming he’s there. Going in when it’s light out would be suicide.”
“I figured you’d be relieved.”
“Relieved would be when you tell me I don’t need to pursue this anymore.”
“Sorry.”
“Sure you are.”
He hung up and strode down the cobblestone street to the parking lot, his senses on alert. He was unsurprised when a man wearing the stained clothes of a laborer emerged from a doorway and began tailing him. As he’d suspected, Olivero was playing both ends against the middle.
The assassin continued past the lot and ducked down a side street, and then took off at a run. He disappeared into an alley and sprinted until he reached a cross street, and then rounded the corner and stopped, listening for running footsteps.
It was the laborer’s lucky day. He’d lost the trail and, in the process, saved his own life.
El Rey circled back and was on the road minutes later, no sign of anyone following him now.
Which didn’t give him much comfort, because if he was right, there might well be a welcoming committee waiting for him at the ranch – one intent on ensuring he never made it back alive.
The drive only took ten minutes. El Rey rolled past the closed ranch gates without slowing and kept going for another kilometer before pulling off the road behind a grove of trees to make his approach on foot. He skirted a decrepit brick building with a partially collapsed roof near the property perimeter and continued through the tall grass with cautious steps. Something glinted by one of the wooden fence posts, and he froze when he spotted a motion detector. A breeze stirred the foliage around him and he relaxed a little – they’d have the detectors set with reduced sensitivity or receive false alarms all day. Still, it told him what he needed to know – ordinary ranches didn’t typically boast sophisticated electronics for security.
He continued along the fence line, noting that the barbed wire gleaming in the sun appeared new – it would be dull in another week, which meant that someone had only recently taken pains to get the ranch prepared for habitation.
Further along he noted a trip wire strung at ankle level beyond the fence, which told him still more.
Once back in the car, he called Cruz to give him a terse report, and then told him what he’d need. Cruz said nothing for a moment when he finished. When he finally spoke, his tone was sarcastic.
“Anything else? Maybe a suitcase nuke?” Cruz asked.
“No, just what I requested. Call me back to confirm.”
Chapter 47
Mexico City, Mexico
The Mercado de la Merced, one of the largest indoor flea markets in Latin America, was bustling in the early evening as bargain shoppers of all stripes meandered down the aisles. Yelling vendors hawked every imaginable contrivance, and the din was akin to the roar of a jet on takeoff. A home electronics salesman bellowed through a karaoke system at passersby, while across from him a group selling car stereos demonstrated the bone-crushing bass of one of their premium setups.
Mrs. Godoy stared straight ahead, her eyes determined behind her dark glasses and her face set in a frown as she negotiated the rows of junk. She clutched a green nylon suitcase in one hand and a scrap of notepaper in the other. Pausing at the end of the aisle to look around, her gaze settled on a string of piñatas hanging from a steel frame. She swallowed hard and moved to where the vendor was sitting to ask about prices.
The merchant was eager to make a sale and haggled with her for five minutes before she waved him off and continued down the aisle, her bag abandoned at the edge of his booth, where it went unnoticed for several minutes. When she’d disappeared around a corner, a young barefoot street urchin sidled up to the suitcase and, after glancing around, made off with it, moving fast, but not so quickly he’d attract attention.
He darted outside the building and made a beeline to a gray Nissan Maxima double-parked on Calle Rosario. A swarthy man wearing a striped blue polo shirt stepped from the passenger side, a handheld scanner gripped tightly in one hand, and did a quick sweep of the bag before taking it from the boy in exchange for a five-hundred-peso note. The urchin ran off, delighted at his newfound riches. The passenger tossed the bag in the backseat of the car and climbed back in.
He removed a cigarette from a soft pack in his breast pocket, lit it, and then blew a long plume of gray out his window before turning to the driver. “It’s clean.”
“Positive?”
“The scanner doesn’t lie. It would have detected a tracking device.”
The driver nodded and put the car in gear. “At least she’s playing straight.”
“Given her husband’s position with the police, she’s got to know how use
less they are.”
The driver laughed. “It would be better than even odds that if they caught us, the money would just disappear.”
The passenger grinned. “Beats working.”
After a glance around, the driver forced his way into traffic and began the long drive to the suburb where his boss was waiting to count the ransom money and verify it was all there.
Briones sat in the cockpit of a Bell 206B JetRanger helicopter that was hovering two thousand feet above ground level three blocks south of the flea market. In the rear of the aircraft, a pair of technicians sat with portable consoles, watching the screens intently. Briones checked his watch and switched his headset radio to transmit.
“Still waiting for the party to start. They made the grab,” he reported.
“Patience, Lieutenant. They won’t get far,” Cruz replied in his headphones.
“I know. But this is always the worst part – the waiting.”
One of the technicians interrupted him. “We have a signal.”
Briones nodded. They’d used a tracking chip that didn’t turn on for half an hour, expecting the kidnappers to check for one when they had the bag. “Okay. It just went live. Signing off.” He turned to the technician. “Where?”
“Moving west on Emiliano Zapata.”
“Intersection?”
“Coming up on Manuel-doblado.”
Briones looked at the other tech. “Cameras?”
The tech tapped in several commands and then nodded.
The first technician’s voice rose. “Turning north on Manuel.”
“See what we have on the cams.”
The second tech scowled. “Too many vehicles to be sure. Probably a half dozen. Could be any of them.”
Briones grunted and looked to the pilot. “Let’s maintain a decent amount of distance. Say half a kilometer. Don’t want them getting spooked.”
The Maxima wended its way north until it stopped outside a pharmacy in a residential area of Emiliano Zapata, a lower-middle-class neighborhood known for high crime and one which the police were reluctant to patrol. The two men got out of the car and retrieved the bag, and then walked around to the back of the building. A heavyset man with a conspicuous bulge in his pocket nodded to them as they approached the rear door, where three more thugs waited.
The door opened and the new arrivals entered, bag in tow, and then the heavy wooden slab slammed shut, leaving the men to watch the alley.
“They’re stationary now,” Briones said into his headset microphone.
“Address?”
Briones gave Cruz the information. He spoke to someone in the background and returned to Briones. “The SWAT team’s ten minutes out, no more. Can you set down somewhere they can pick you up?”
“There’s a soccer field we passed a minute ago. In Popular Rastro. How long till they get there?”
“Figure five to seven.”
“Then I’ll be waiting.”
The pilot executed a turn and banked toward the field. There was nobody in the deserted area to watch the helo drop from the dusk sky, its blades thumping rhythmically as it descended to a soft landing at one end of the expanse. Briones hopped down from the aircraft and ran in a crouch until he was clear, and then the helicopter rose again, its downdraft flattening the grass around him. When silence had returned to the grounds, he raised a handheld radio to his lips and spoke into it.
“I’m on the ground.”
“Roger that.”
Luis Hierro took a long drag on the joint he was enjoying as his right-hand man counted the stacks of hundred-dollar bills, feeding them into a bank bill counter that rifled through them at machine-gun speed. Every so often he stopped the counting and checked several of the banknotes at random, eyeing the magnetic strip with a seasoned eye and studying the watermark with a jeweler’s loupe.
“What you think, man?” Hierro asked, holding the smoke in as he spoke.
“All good so far.”
“How much longer?”
“Dunno. Maybe ten?”
Hierro nodded. “Okay. I’m going to grab some asada. You want some?”
“Sure.”
“When you’re sure it’s all there, pack up and let’s get ready to hit it. I want to be in Puebla by tonight.”
“What about the cop?”
Hierro shrugged. “Pop him. Bastard asked for it.”
Chapter 48
Briones sat in the situation van as the SWAT team deployed, circling the building where the tracking chip had remained stationary for the past twenty-five minutes. Four snipers had taken up positions on neighboring roofs, the darkening sky making them impossible to spot in their black helmets and balaclavas, their sound-suppressed rifles equipped with night vision scopes, removing any chance of a miss.
The radio in the van hissed and the quiet voice of the squad leader came over the air.
“We’re ready to go in. Just say the word and we’ll move.”
Briones leaned forward, eyeing the screens before him where the leader’s helmet camera broadcast a high-resolution real-time image. “Wait until the bad guys are down before taking the door. I’ll give the signal, and I want the roof shooters to take them out simultaneously.”
“10-4, Lieutenant. Ready?”
“On my count. Three…two…one…fire!”
Up on the roofline the snipers’ rifles popped in unison, the special load subsonic cartridges barely louder than champagne corks. The cartel watchers died in silence as the sniper rounds hit home, all of them easy chest shots at the sub-hundred meter distance. The pair framing the door tumbled backward and the snipers fired again, ensuring that they were dead by the time they hit the pavement.
Running boots filled the alley as one of the officers cut the building’s phone line, and then there were two dozen heavily armed men standing by the back door as the squad leader tried the handle. He glanced at the nearest officer, shook his head, and stepped back. The officer removed three charges from his satchel and attached them where the hinges opened inward. He gave a thumbs-up, and after inserting triggers, stepped away. The men pulled back a respectful distance and the leader nodded.
The charges detonated and the door blew inward. The leader tossed a pair of flash bangs through the opening and waited until they exploded, and then the men followed him in, weapons sweeping the room as they went in low.
Three men lay stunned on the floor, a blanket of dollars strewn everywhere around them by the blast. One reached for his belt and had a Beretta 9mm free when a hail of rounds punched into him. The other two were holding their heads and groaning. Four officers moved to them, assault rifles trained on the stunned men’s torsos, and quickly disarmed them.
The leader pointed to the two interior doors and trotted to the first. He tilted his head at the second and held up five fingers. His men closed in on the door, the remainder taking up position behind him, and a voice crackled over his helmet comm system.
“Front office is secured,” reported the head of the team that had gone in through the front door.
He nodded and took a breath, and then reached out and gently twisted the lever. To his surprise, it opened, and he pushed the door wide and ducked back behind the safety of the cinderblock wall in case anyone fired from within the next room. The other door swung open and his men moved through it, guns at the ready.
They found themselves in a dark room, empty except for a form huddled in a corner. One of the officers hit the light and the leader approached the naked, shivering man, his face crusted with dried blood and his skin discolored by bruising. The leader knelt down, and the man dared a look at him through eyes swollen nearly shut, and even in his brutalized condition the leader recognized Eduardo Godoy of the Federal Police.
The leader activated his earbud and reached Briones.
“We’ve secured the building. Victim’s in bad shape. We’re going to need an ambulance to get him to a hospital immediately.”
“Three are standing by. I’ll send them in
,” Briones said. “Any survivors?”
“Two. Want to handle the interrogations?”
“I wouldn’t miss it for anything. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“We’ll need to secure the cash, too. Room’s full of loose bills.”
“I’ll bring two men to handle the money. I want it all accounted for. No slipups. Everyone leaving the scene will be searched.”
“I understand.” It wasn’t unheard of for tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, to go missing in a chaotic crime scene. “Ounce of prevention.”
“That’s right. Any familiar faces?”
“Negative.”
“I’m coming around the corner. Be there shortly.”
The leader motioned to one of his men and pointed to Godoy. “Get a blanket and cover him up.”
Briones arrived and strode to where Godoy lay awaiting medical attention, curled beneath a navy blue field blanket. Briones crouched beside him and spoke softly. “Sir, help will be here in a moment. Just hang on. We got the kidnappers – you’re no longer in danger.”
Godoy’s mouth worked, but no words came out. Briones winced at the sight of his ruined teeth and averted his eyes. Godoy tried again, and this time managed to croak a few halting words.
“Hierro. Did…you…get…him?”
Briones’s brow furrowed at the name. Luis Hierro had been the bane of the task force’s existence for years, but they hadn’t heard much about him for at least six months.
“Hierro? He’s involved?”
“He…did…this.”
Briones rose and crossed into the other room, where the squad leader was standing over the two cuffed survivors. Briones leaned into him and whispered, “Luis Hierro. Is he one of the dead?”
The leader’s brows rose. “Hierro? No. I’d have recognized him. Can’t mistake that ugly mug.”
Briones nodded and moved to the prisoners. “Where’s your boss?” he demanded.
Neither of the men spoke. Briones knelt beside them and lowered his voice. “The man you tortured to the point of death? He’s a top Federal Police official. Which means that you can expect that to look like a massage compared to what we’re going to do to you. So you either talk, or you’re going to suffer ten times what he’s been through – and I’m not exaggerating. We have a special place in our hearts for scum who target cops, and you’re the only ones left to take it out on.” Briones paused to let his words resonate. “Now here’s the deal. One of you talks, and the other gets the full treatment. I don’t care which. Neither of you talks, I’ll personally put the word out that you rolled over on Hierro and told us everything you knew. Which means you won’t live more than a few minutes once you’re out of the infirmary for your multiple injuries sustained while resisting arrest and attempting to escape during the interrogation. That’s the only deal you’re going to be offered, and when I leave, the offer’s off the table.”
Rage of the Assassin: (Assassin Series #6) Page 22
