Rancho Buena Fortuna

by Bill King

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  The walls of Frank White’s office were covered with framed black and white photos of his days as a football player at the University of Oklahoma. A knee injury his junior year had ended any thought of a professional career. He was now the Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau’s Houston field office.

  “I’m concerned with the direction the investigation into Pete Cortez is taking,” said White, a stocky, grey-haired man in his late forties who had made his reputation as part of the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts following 9/11. “That prick, Reggie Calhoun, is turning out to be a colossal asshole.”

  Jack Gonçalves rubbed his chin. He was sitting at the small conference table, over by the large windows overlooking the parking lot. He, too, had a worried look on his face.

  “What is with those guys in Washington?” he asked. “It can’t be possible that all of them—every last one of them—has forgotten what it’s like to be in the field.”

  “If they ever knew in the first place,” said the SAC. “I spoke with a friend of mine about this Calhoun character. He knows him pretty well and says the guy is a snake. Cold and slimy…and treacherous.”

  Gonçalves smirked, saying, “He didn’t look dangerous to me. He looked more like a weenie, a little tool.”

  “Well, unfortunately, it’s the little tools who also happen to have a law degree that are the most dangerous, probably because they’re trying so hard to overcompensate for their other inadequacies.”

  “Now that we’ve established that neither one of us likes the guy, what do we do about it?” asked Gonçalves. “If he’s really determined to find something on Pete, he probably won’t stop until he does.”

  “I don’t know which part looks worse: him shooting a high school kid in the stomach and having him suffer an excruciatingly painful death, or nearly decapitating someone with a personal weapon whose only purpose it to either gut or garotte another human being. Neither one exactly enhances the reputation of the Bureau, if you catch my drift.”

  “Well, to me it seems pretty cut and dried,” said Gonçalves. “Doesn’t self-defense count for anything?”

  “Maybe with God, but not with the FBI.”

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  Chapter 22

  IT WAS JUST PAST two in the morning when a tall, thin man with a neatly trimmed beard effortlessly slid open the door to the old barn. He maintained good light discipline, having turned off all the lights inside the weather-beaten wooden building before opening the door. The full moon allowed for good visibility, certainly good enough for his purposes.

  Two large black SUVs, their headlights turned off and their backup lights disabled, slowly backed out of the barn, one after another, before stopping about ten yards from the structure.

  The tall man slid the big barn door closed and walked over to the first of the two vehicles. He opened the front passenger door—they had turned the dome light switch to the off position to keep it from coming on—and climbed inside. As soon as he closed the vehicle door, the two SUVs began to pull forward, their headlights still off.

  Within ten seconds or so, they had quietly disappeared into the blackness of the night.

  The only reason the man sitting on the hillside, some three hundred yards away from the old barn, was able to see any of this is because he was using ATN digital thermal binoculars. He was also able to download the images to his cellphone, which he pulled from his left breast pocket. He punched a preset number and transmitted the video.

  Meanwhile, after a couple of minutes of driving in total darkness, the two SUVs turned on their headlights. Mateo Calderón, riding in the lead vehicle, sent a preconfigured text message to a burner phone located in the Bunker. It read simply, “ON OUR WAY. NO PROBLEMS.”

  They were traveling on a dirt and gravel farm road, so they kept their speed under twenty-five. Potholes were everywhere, hidden from view by the darkness outside. So were the snakes, out enjoying the relative coolness of the evening. Calderón rolled down his window and could hear the occasional popping sound of the snakes as the vehicle ran over them. He felt as one with nature.

  Fifteen minutes later, the two SUVs reached US highway 83, which runs parallel with the international border. The first vehicle, the one with Calderón, turned left and headed toward Laredo, while the second turned right toward Zapata, where it would then head north on state highway 16 toward Hebbronville. Calderón’s destination was Dallas, nearly five hundred miles away. The other team was headed for a private airport near Seguin, three hours away, where it would board a private plane headed for Chicago.

  Isabela remained behind at the Rancho, in charge of the last two teams. They would be leaving the following night, one bound for the east coast, the other for the west.

  The next round of assaults on the Federal Reserve was going to be truly spectacular.

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  The late-night calm was jarringly broken by the sound of a ringtone blaring “Me Rehúso” by Danny Ocean. Chucho reached into his back pocket and pulled out his phone.

  “Pronto,” he said, setting his beer bottle down on the wobbly old table and wiping his lips with his shirt sleeve. He’d once seen Marcello Mastroianni say that in an old Italian movie and thought it suited him.

  “Chucho, did you get my message with the video?” asked the man on the other end of the phone. “I sent it about ten minutes ago.”

  Chucho looked at his watch. It was two-thirty. He opened his IM app and noticed the message from his spotter who was surveilling the hacienda on the other side of the river. “Give me a second to watch it real quick. I’ll call you right back.”

  Chucho watched the three-minute video twice. The date-time stamp at the top of the frame indicated it was recorded at two-fourteen that morning. He glanced at his wristwatch. It was now two-forty. He hit redial to call the man back.

  “I just finished watching it. Is there anything not on the video that you want to tell me about?” asked Chucho.

  “No, Chucho. The whole thing only lasted a couple of minutes. If I had been taking a leak at the time, I would have missed it.”

  “No lights at all, huh? They’re in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a dark night and they’re still maintaining strict light discipline. This pretty much confirms my suspicion as to who these guys are.”

  Chucho was silent for a few moments, trying to wrap his head around the significance of what he had just seen. His thoughts went back to the woman by the swimming pool and the red laser dots trained on him and his two men.

  “Sneak down there and take a look around the barn,” said Chucho. “Call me back within thirty minutes. Be careful and don’t do anything stupid. That place is like a scorpion nest. Be careful which rocks you kick over.”

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  Pete Cortez arrived at his old desk the following morning to find a note from Jack Gonçalves saying that Reggie Calhoun wanted to talk to him that morning before he returned to Washington. The note said for him to be in the JTTF’s interview room BRAVO on the fifth floor at seven-thirty. He glanced down at his wristwatch. It was seven-fifteen, which meant he still had time to pour himself a fresh cup of coffee without being late.

  He arrived at the interview room precisely ten seconds early and found Calhoun squirming uncomfortably in one of the unpadded metal chairs, waiting for him. Gonçalves must have had someone swap out all the chairs in the room with metal folding chairs. Calhoun wore a look of impatience, illustrated by the fact that he kept checking his watch every ten seconds.

  “It’s about time you showed up, Cortez,” he said, gesturing with his hand for Pete to sit in the chair directly across from him. “I only have about twenty minutes before I need to leave for the airport, so let’s make this quick.”

  “I’m all ears, Agent Calhoun,” he said, with more than a hint of arrogance in his voice. “What is it that you’d like to talk to me about today?”

  “Look, Cortez …”

  “It’s Special Agent Cortez, if you don’t mind. If I can man
age to be civil towards you, I think that, surely, you can extend me the same courtesy.”

  Calhoun seemed to be momentarily taken aback, but he quickly regained his composure.

  “Okay, Special Agent Cortez. I hope you do realize that I have you dead to rights, that carrying a dagger with a seven-inch blade is illegal in the state of Texas.”

  “Yes, you brought that to my attention the other day. However, as a federal law enforcement officer, I am legally authorized to do any number of things that may not be permissible for the general populace. Besides, the Texas Legislature made seven-inch blades legal during the last session. If you’re going to charge someone against Texas law, at least try to stay current.”

  “Just think of what kind of image you are presenting to the public at large…that of a rogue FBI agent carrying a killing blade, slashing throats, nearly decapitating innocent victims who have already indicated their intention to surrender.”

  Cortez wasn’t worried about this man’s debating skills. Clearly, Calhoun was used to talking with people who shared his experiences, lawyers and bureaucrats who were more concerned with advancing their own careers. The fact that there were two completely different FBIs was never more evident than it was now in this room.

  “The main image I’m concerned about is that of a still-living and breathing law enforcement officer who, by acting in self-defense, is still able to continue to serve the public by bringing criminals to justice. Is that too old-fashioned or simpleminded for you, Special Agent Calhoun?”

  “Look, Cortez, if I really wanted to, I could recommend you be discharged from the Bureau and face criminal charges,” he said, trying to show his best sincere look. “But I don’t want to do that. Can’t we just work this out like gentlemen?”

  “And what, exactly, would that look like?”

  “You agree to admit you used poor judgement in carrying and using the dagger and I’ll recommend in my formal report that you only receive an official letter of reprimand,” said Calhoun, relaxing and thinking that he had finally broken through. “What do you say?”

  More than anything, Cortez wanted this goat screw to be over with. A logical man would probably take the deal, but not him. His oppositional defiance was too deeply ingrained for simple logic to break through.

  “I say you’d better get going if you want to catch your plane,” said Cortez, looking him square in the eye. “The hot Texas sun can be brutal on your thin skin.”

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  Pete Cortez retrieved his cell phone from the guard sitting at the security desk outside the SCIF. He had just attended the morning update for the Houston JTTF’s Federal Reserve special task force and, for obvious reasons, absolutely no electronic devices were permitted inside the Special Compartmented Information Facility, where highly classified special access information is discussed.

  He powered up his phone and checked his recent call log for missed calls. Bobby Janak had called at eight-thirty. The clock on the wall read eight-forty. He tapped on the phone number to return the call.

  “Hey, Bobby, what’s up?”

  “It looks like your man, Chucho, has gone into the extermination business,” he replied. “We had thirteen area drug dealers murdered yesterday in two separate incidents. The second one took place over in Zapata and was caught on a local bank security camera. Our favorite little troll shot three men, whom the DEA subsequently identified as mid-level traffickers.”

  “By my math, that means that ten were killed in the other incident?”

  “Yeah. There’s no video of that one, but neighbors told the local police in Hebbronville that four men, including a man who matches Chucho’s description, stormed into a house known for drug dealing, shot the place up, and calmly walked back out the front door less than a minute later.”

  “What’s the story on those ten stiffs?”

  “That’s where it gets really interesting. They represented the leadership of almost all the drug trafficking gangs in south Texas, except Laredo and San Antonio, of course…the wide-open spaces, so to speak. Apparently, they were in the middle of a big meeting when our man, Chucho, interrupted.”

  “You said almost all,” said Cortez. “I’m assuming the guys in Zapata apparently had missed the earlier meeting in Hebbronville.”

  “Yeah. Including them, it was pretty much a clean sweep of the senior rural trafficking leadership between here and San Antonio,” said Janak. “Of course, that doesn’t include the networks in the two cities—those are the major leagues, so to speak—but these guys control all the towns and smuggling routes in between. If I was just starting out and wanted to control the south Texas business, this is exactly how I’d do it.”

  “No kidding. If I was the big drug kingpin in Laredo, I’d be paying close attention to this guy and whoever he works for,” said Cortez. “You can bet your ass that he works for a rival cartel and that this is just the beginning of the bloodshed.”

  “That’s all we need is to bring even more violence from northern Mexico across the border and into south Texas.”

  “It was never a matter of if, Bobby,” said Cortez. “It was always a matter of when. So long as we’re sitting up here playing defense, they’ll keep coming, and more aggressively each time. There’s just too much money involved for them not to.”

  “Well, we already know our friend, Chucho, is a vicious little so-and-so, a real live sociopath.”

  “Yeah, he seems to be building up quite a body count,” said Cortez. “So far, he’s been focusing on the underbelly of society, but I don’t think it’ll be too long before he starts becoming a lot less discerning in his selection of victims. It might be a good idea if you guys down there either caught him or killed him.”

  “Damn, I never thought of that, Pete,” he said, sarcastically. “It’s always such a special thrill when our big city brethren share with us the wisdom of their experience.”

  “I guess I had that coming,” said Cortez. “I’ll check with Gonçalves and see if he can spare me to fly down there today for a couple of hours.”

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  “Mi Coronel,” said Chucho, taking his phone off speaker and pressing it to his ear. “Thank you for calling me back. Did you have a chance to look at the video I sent you this morning?”

  Chucho was feeling apprehensive about this phone call, especially since he had not been able to locate the FBI agent El Coronel had told him to take care of. Hopefully, he could change the subject to the mysterious activity at the Rancho while he tracked down the American policeman. Anyway, that was his hope.

  “Chucho, my boy, I thought I made myself perfectly clear concerning the Rancho,” he said, the sternness in his voice unmistakable. “Back off. Stay away. There are forces at play that you do not want to get crossways with. Do you understand me?”

  Chucho breathed a sigh of relief. No mention of the FBI agent, at least so far.

  “I asked if you understand me?”

  “Si, mi coronel. I understand.”

  “Good, because if you kick over this hornet’s nest, I won’t be able to protect you.”

  Chucho said nothing, but the suspense was now killing him. Despite his assurance to El Coronel, he was more intent than ever to discover what was going on at the Rancho.

  “And Chucho, my contacts have told me that your FBI agent has been called back to Houston to work on a separate matter, one concerning the recent rash of attacks on Federal Reserve buildings. I think that has bought you some breathing time, at least until they solve that particular problem, so use your time wisely.”

  Chucho exhaled deeply and said, “Si, mi coronel.” The mention of Cortez brought him back to the immediate problem at hand. He had to do something permanent about the FBI man…or else.

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  Chapter 23

  ISABELA BUCKLED HER SEATBELT and leaned back in her seat, closing her eyes. She and her three team members had left the old barn at the Rancho three hours earlier and had driven, nonstop, along US highway 83 to
Uvalde, arriving just before dawn.

  Their pilot was already at work preparing the Beechcraft King Air 350i turboprop airplane that would be flying them to Madera, California. From there, they would drive north to the San Francisco Bay Area, where they would make contact with the onsite logistics coordinator Graciela had set up.

  The black SUV from the Rancho had taken them to the apron where the plane was parked. Even though she desperately needed to use the restroom, Fósforo had been very clear that they were not to go inside any of the buildings at the small municipal airport and that included the restrooms. She would have to wait until she got on the plane.

  It had only taken a couple of minutes for them to load their weapons and equipment onto the plane. Fifteen minutes after the team’s arrival at the airport, the pilot taxied the plane over to the runway and soon they were airborne, eventually disappearing into the early morning sky.

  Once the plane had leveled off at its cruising altitude, Isabela picked up her turquoise iPad and turned the power on. She and her team had spent the past three days at the Rancho going over their plan to completely level the Federal Reserve Bank building in downtown San Francisco.

  The previous three attacks had been primarily for training, to get the Venezuelans accustomed to operating in the United States and matching wits with American law enforcement. Even though innocent people had lost their lives in Cleveland, Kansas City and St. Louis, the primary intent of those attacks was not to kill people.

  For this round, though, it was, and the higher the body count, the louder the message it would send.

  She and her team had a full week to prepare and rehearse once they arrived in the Bay Area. The planning done by Fósforo and Graciela had been painstakingly detailed. After the Cleveland planning fiasco, Calderón had cast aside the original concept of using the weighty intellect of university professors as planners and chose to do it himself.