Rancho Buena Fortuna

by Bill King

  “No, I grabbed the last one,” he said, reaching over and picking up the can, probably because he felt if he didn’t, Cortez might snatch it. “I think all we have left is diet Mountain Dew. Will that work for you?”

  Cortez made a scrunched-up face and shook his head back and forth a couple of times. “Anything new on this Chucho guy?” he asked.

  “So far, nothing,” said Janak, whose short and stocky physique was in stark contrast to Cortez, who still resembled a beanpole. The joke among people who knew him was that the lenses on Cortez’s glasses were fatter than he was. “My hunch is that he’s a Mexican national, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that he lives on the other side of the river. The border is still pretty porous, after all.”

  “Yeah, I think I heard that somewhere in the news,” said Cortez, smiling. “What do your Mexican counterparts say?”

  Janak rolled his eyes and took a swig from his can of coke. He was a big, stocky guy who drank soda nonstop all day long to keep himself hydrated.

  “They’re still checking. You know the drill. Even if they immediately recognized him, they’d drag it out for a few days, maybe even a week, just for show.”

  “What about the two bodies?”

  “The boy was claimed this morning by his grandmother, right after the autopsy was completed,” said Janak, his exaggerated Texas drawl accentuating every syllable. “The other guy, the one whose throat you slashed, is still in the morgue, waiting for somebody to claim his body. My guess is that nobody ever will.”

  “Have you been out to the scene yet?” asked Cortez, his throat feeling severely parched. He was beginning to have second thoughts about that diet Mountain Dew.

  “No, the county sheriff’s office is handling the investigation, along with the Border Patrol. Our only connection is because you were involved.”

  “Who is our counterpart with Border Patrol?”

  “Frank Diaz,” he said. “One of your fellow Aggies. You don’t know him by chance, do you?”

  He shook his head. “It’s a big school, Bobby. More than sixty thousand students. That’s like me asking you if you know every, um, Bohemian in Texas?”

  “Well, at least you didn’t say Bohunk,” said Janak, smiling. His ancestors had immigrated Texas a decade or so after the American Civil War, settling into a large community of Czechs in Victoria County, south of modern-day Houston. “Let me call Diaz and tell him we’re coming over to see him.”

  “Sounds good. Can we swing through a Whataburger on the way so I can grab me a Coke?”

  ◆◆◆

  Pete Cortez and Bobby Janak arrived at the U.S. Border Patrol station in Laredo a little after four in the afternoon. Frank Diaz was there to meet them when they checked in at the reception desk.

  “Frank, this is Pete Cortez,” he said. “Pete, Frank Diaz.”

  The two men shook hands. Diaz was about the same height as Cortez and was wearing a dark green CBP uniform that fit like he had his own personal tailor.

  “Nice hat,” said Diaz, referring to the maroon ball cap that Cortez was wearing. “Today must be Casual Tuesday at the FBI.”

  “I’m practicing for eventual assignment into the Witness Protection Program,” he replied, taking off the cap and tucking it in the back pocket of his jeans. “No better way to blend into the background in Texas than to wear an Aggie cap and drive a pickup truck. It’s what we in the business call basic tradecraft.”

  “I stand in awe,” said Diaz, smiling and motioning for them to follow him down the narrow corridor. “Let’s go back to my office where we can talk. I’d also like for you to look at some photos and see if we can come up with a last name for this mysterious Chucho guy.”

  On the wall behind his desk was a framed diploma from Texas A&M University, sandwiched by smaller ones from the Border Patrol Academy in Artesia, New Mexico, and the Customs and Border Protection Officer Basic Training program at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia.

  “I’ve read your statement from the other day and it seems fairly comprehensive,” said Diaz, reaching across his desk for the manila folder that contained his file on the incident. “Is there anything you might have left out, anything you might have remembered in the days afterward, that might give us more to go on?”

  Cortez’s eyes quickly scanned the office. Judging by his photos, Diaz was married and had two boys, probably now in their early teens, who played baseball and soccer and basketball. He was obviously an outdoorsman, judging by the assortment of photos of the boys posing with their first deer, the bird dogs, and the various family fishing outings. The wedding photo, with Diaz dressed in a Marine Corps uniform, confirmed that he was still married to the same woman in the later family photos.

  It’s amazing what you can learn about someone just by sitting in their office for ten seconds.

  “No, that was pretty much it,” said Cortez. “The whole thing probably only lasted a minute…two at the most. I just remember the two younger guys referring to him as Chucho. They were both pretty deferential, so he was clearly in charge.”

  “Not exactly a textbook example of leadership, running away at the first sign of a fight,” said Janak, not sure what to make of that factoid.

  “Well, he’s not the first person I’ve ever seen run from a fight and I doubt that he’ll be the last,” Cortez replied matter-of-factly. “Who knows? Maybe he had to take a leak really bad.”

  “Did you go into the service after A&M?” asked Diaz, noticing the big gold ring on Cortez’s right hand.

  “Yeah, I spent five years in the Army. A tour in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. How about you?”

  “Four years in the Marines,” said Diaz. “I got out to come back home and look after the family business, but the economic collapse in 2008 put the business on life support. By 2011, my folks finally decided to just sell the building and walk away from the business, so I decided to go into law enforcement.”

  “Well, not too many civilian professions allow you to carry a gun and occasionally shoot it, much less require it,” said Cortez. “Seems like a marriage made in heaven for guys like us.”

  “You make a good point there,” said Diaz, getting up from his desk chair. “Let’s go find a computer that nobody else is currently using and have you look at our gallery of local riffraff. See if anyone jumps out at you… figuratively speaking, of course.”

  What Cortez did not yet realize was that Chucho was also looking for him…with the loser of the chase likely to end up a dead man. And next time the little man wouldn’t forget to bring his gun.

  ◆◆◆

  Chapter 8

  THE FIRST GROUP OF Venezuelans showed up two days after El Indio and The Frenchman had visited Rancho Buena Fortuna. It was dusk and only a faint glimmer of light remained visible as the sun gradually disappeared into the western horizon. Graciela, dressed in blue jeans, a Foo Fighters tee shirt and pink flip flops, stood in the open doorway to the main house, waiting for them to arrive.

  Graciela, dressed in blue jeans, a Foo Fighters tee shirt and pink flip flops, stood in the open doorway to the main house, waiting for them to arrive.

  A blue Ford delivery van, covered in dust from the dirt roads leading to the hacienda, pulled up under the massive limestone portico that dominated the front façade of the main ranch house. The driver, a heavily tattooed man with a scar running diagonally across his right cheek, got out and walked around to the passenger side. Graciela recognized him from several days earlier as being one of the Frenchman’s bodyguards.

  The driver slid open the side door and four people quickly alighted from the van, two men and two women, each appearing to be in their early twenties. There was nothing particularly remarkable about their appearance, which was the whole point. They needed to be able to blend in with their surroundings so that, afterwards, no one would ever remember having seen them, much less be able to describe to law enforcement what they looked like.

  Each of them carried a backpack, slung
over a shoulder. Again, nothing that would make them stand out. Instead of schoolbooks and a laptop computer, or food and water, their packs contained their personal weapons and ammunition, tightly rolled inside a change of clothing to prevent the noticeable outline of a pistol showing through the exterior of the backpack.

  A fifth person, their leader, pushed open the front passenger door and stepped out of the vehicle. He, on the other hand, was anything but nondescript. He stood six-foot-six, with eyes as dark as coal to go along with his dark brown, almost black, hair.

  Graciela walked down the porch’s three steps and extended her hand to the tall man.

  “My name is Graciela,” she said, embarrassed at the thought that she was probably blushing like a young schoolgirl, at least on the inside. “Welcome to Rancho Buena Fortuna.”

  “I am Mateo…Mateo Calderón,” he said, gripping her hand firmly, but not as firmly as he would have had they both been men sizing each other up.

  Mateo Calderón was a natural born leader. Cold. Cunning. Magnetic.

  Even as a young child, the other kids, including the older ones, listened whenever he spoke and followed wherever he led. He received high marks in school and his teachers predicted nothing but success for him, be it in business or sports or politics or whatever path he chose to pursue. At six-foot-six, he cut a striking figure, a man who stood out in a crowd. Strong and aggressive, he went through life like a tomcat out for a night on the town.

  Everyone assumed he would follow his father into the law. In a sense, he did…just on a different side of it.

  While still in his early teens, one of his coaches had bestowed upon him the nickname, Fósforo—Spanish for match, the kind you strike to spark a fire—in deference of his quick and violent temper. The name stuck with him, like death in a killer’s eye. It was at the core of his DNA, a reflection of his fierce competitiveness, the spark within that made him a winner in everything he pursued in life.

  He was relentless in everything he chose to do, and for him, the end always justified the means.

  Like many his age at that time, Mateo was a fervent admirer of Hugo Chavez. He believed in the charismatic leader and in his vision for Venezuela. When that dream experienced a few bumps along the way, he put the blame squarely where it belonged…on the United States. To his mind, they had deliberately sabotaged the Venezuelan experiment, exerting their paternalistic influence on multinational corporations and their client states to stymie the Chavez dream for Latin America.

  Mateo hated America and Americans. All of them. They lived off the sweat and toil of the rest of the world, leaving the pernicious stench of misery and chaos on everything their hands touched. Technology would be the great equalizer among societies and, soon, he would return the favor.

  Three years earlier, on the second anniversary of the death of Hugo Chavez, Mateo Calderón had brought together a group of like-minded young radicals to take the fight directly to the evil giant to the north. They named themselves “El Moviemiento 28 de Julio” in honor of Chavez’s birthday.

  It was a day that would soon set the course of the western world in a new direction. The local press quickly shortened the group’s name to M-28 and, before you could say Simón Bolivar or George Washington, yet another revolutionary group aspiring to be in the vanguard of a new world order got lost in the global clutter of anarchist factions.

  Now he was crawling out from underneath his rock, but why in the United States, when the climate in Venezuela these days made it seem ripe for the picking? The answer was simple. Not geopolitical. Money. Money to finance the revolution. They possessed a valuable skill set that a pair of opportunistic criminals felt they could use to extort unimaginably large amounts of money from the wealthiest government on the planet.

  For that reason, El Indio, Mateo Calderón and The Frenchman were going into business together.

  ◆◆◆

  The Frenchman had given Graciela the rundown on Calderón’s background, so she knew that he had been raised in a life of privilege. He had also warned her that he was a proud, violent man who demanded to be taken seriously.

  “Grab your things and follow me,” said Graciela, pausing briefly at the front door to the hacienda and looking back at the others. “We have your work area all set up for you. Your living quarters will be down there, too.”

  She turned her head toward Calderón as they walked through the vestibule and said, “Your supplies began arriving this morning.”

  Graciela led the visitors down the rustic entry hallway and back into the kitchen. There they descended the stairs to the basement, where three grizzly-looking men sporting tattoos on their necks and arms stood guard over by the far corner of the cavernous stone basement. Each was holding a H&K MP7A1 submachine gun. El Indio had recently upgraded their weapons from the basic MP7s because the newer model could now penetrate most body armor. That was especially important in their line of work.

  Having been notified of the arrival of the Venezuelans, her security men had already moved aside the sliding wall to reveal a service elevator that would take them down to the sub-basement tunnel. The visitors, along with Graciela and one of her guards, stepped inside and slid the collapsible metal gate closed. The other two guards remained at their posts in the basement. Graciela pushed the button with the down-arrow and the elevator slowly descended to the tunnel floor thirty feet below.

  Once the elevator door reopened, they stepped out into a large open area. Their movement triggered the motion sensor lights in the tunnel. Despite the recently installed ventilation system, the air was still stale and cool. We’ll need to work on that, thought Graciela, making a mental note to herself. Parked a few feet away from the elevator was a couple of six-passenger golf carts.

  “We don’t mind walking,” said Calderón, looking disapprovingly at the golf carts. “After all that time spent crammed inside the delivery truck, it’ll do us some good to be able to stretch our legs just a little bit.”

  “The tunnel is nearly five kilometers long to where you will be setting up,” she replied matter-of-factly. “That’s about an hour at a normal walking pace.”

  Calderón wasn’t sure if she was exaggerating about the distance so he smiled, bowed his head slightly and extended his hand forward, palm up. “After you, senorita.”

  They loaded their backpacks onto the two carts and each found a seat. Calderón had difficulty comfortably fitting his six-foot-six-inch frame into the cart, so he wound up riding by himself in the rear seat, facing backwards. This allowed him enough space to stretch out diagonally along the bench seat of the lead golf cart, which Graciela was driving. As they proceeded down the long corridor, motion detectors triggered the lights ahead of them.

  “Why don’t you have normal light switches that turn the lights on all at once?” Mateo asked in a loud voice so that he could be heard in the front seat.

  “The motion sensors are more energy efficient,” she replied. Here they were engaged in a massive criminal enterprise, he thought wryly, and she was still concerned about reducing their carbon footprint.

  ◆◆◆

  It took them nearly fifteen minutes in the carts to reach their destination. Unbeknownst to the Venezuelans—or to the Americans, for that matter—they were now roughly two-and-a-half miles inside U.S. territory.

  At the end of the tunnel, they came upon a large, circular cul-de-sac about sixty feet in diameter. Spread out along the circular walls were six evenly spaced steel doors: two were oversized double doors that led to large storage areas; two more were normal thirty-two-inch single doors that led to living quarters.

  The fifth doorway opened into a large service elevator, which would take them up to their exit point on the Texas side of the border. The sixth doorway led to a specially designed storage facility with extra thick concrete and lead walls. Each door had a three-inch tall letter mounted in the center to identify it from the other doors.

  “We call this space the Rotunda,” said Graciela, applying the p
arking brake with her foot before climbing off. She left the key in the ignition. “We don’t have statuary along the walls like most formal rotundas seem to have but, who knows, maybe we’ll commission some statues in the future to commemorate some of our most successful operations…kind of a Rogues Gallery, one might say.”

  She walked over to the single door marked with the letter B.

  “Let me show you the living quarters where you’ll be staying,” said Graciela, entering a numeric code into one of the punch boxes.

  There was a soft click as the tumblers dropped, and she pushed open the door. They were greeted by the dank smell of cool stale air. She would need to adjust the HVAC in this sector, she thought to herself. They proceeded down another tunnel for about sixty feet until they came to another steel door. She entered the code and pushed open the door.

  “Yes, yes, it looks good,” said Mateo, his eyes scanning the room as he walked through the doorway and into what appeared to be a modern, upscale apartment. This one, though, was located thirty feet underground and had no windows.

  They were standing in the living room of the visitor’s quarters, which included a modern kitchen and a large living room with two big screen televisions. The furniture looked like it had been purchased recently from Ikea. It was sleek and modern, in stark contrast to the furniture upstairs in the main house, which was decorated with heavy antique furniture collected from throughout Latin America. The kitchen opened into the main living area. It had rosewood cabinetry and dark marble counters and was equipped with state-of-the-art appliances, even though it was unlikely any of its guests would ever use anything other than the refrigerator, coffee machine and microwave.

  Adjoining the big room were two bathrooms and two bedrooms. Each bedroom contained five sets of bunkbeds. Twenty people in all could be accommodated in this suite of rooms. That was more than enough for the current group of Venezuelans, but the Rancho’s business model anticipated steady growth.