The Last Act: A Novel

by Brad Parks

  “Working for the FBI.”

  He delivered the line so straight I laughed. The Danny Ruiz I knew was a slacker who did his homework the period before it was due. He was at least three time zones removed from whatever preconceived notions I had about an FBI agent.

  Then I realized he wasn’t joking. In a practiced motion, he drew a wallet out of his back pocket and opened it up, displaying a gold shield.

  “Wait, you’re serious?” I asked.

  “Gotta grow up sometime,” he said with a small shrug, returning his badge to his pocket. “I am now Special Agent Daniel Ruiz. This is Special Agent Rick Gilmartin.”

  The other man nodded. He was taller than Danny, over six feet. He had blue eyes and a reserved, disapproving air about him—like I had done something wrong, but regulations forbade him from explaining it to me. Which probably made him just about perfect for the federal government. In his right hand, he clutched a metal briefcase.

  “You want to get some coffee or something?” Danny said. “There’s something we’d like to discuss with you.”

  At that moment, I got my first shot of nerves. This wasn’t Danny Ruiz, my onetime classmate, who happened to catch me in a show and now wanted to gab. He was acting as a representative of the United States government’s primary law enforcement agency.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked in a faltering voice.

  “Let’s just get some coffee. There’s a diner up the street.”

  He said it in an open, friendly way. He was still smiling.

  His partner wasn’t. The man hadn’t spoken a single word.

  * * *

  • • •

  I knew the diner well because it was the cheapest place in town.

  As we walked, Danny filled me in on his life since high school. After graduation, he went into the army—I vaguely remembered as much—where he was quickly disabused of his slacker ways. Then he used the GI Bill to attend John Jay College of Criminal Justice. As a senior, he scored high on some test and was soon being recruited by the FBI. He was now with the unit that investigated money laundering, which was considered highly prestigious.

  I listened with half an ear, distracted, nervous, trying to guess which federal statutes I had broken. Had I inadvertently laundered money? What was money laundering anyway?

  Danny was yammering on like we were talking over pigs in a blanket at a class reunion. But I imagined this was what FBI agents did. Lured you in. Relaxed you. Then sprang the trap.

  When we arrived at the diner, it was mostly empty. The theater crowd had gone elsewhere for its evening meal, to places that didn’t have paper place mats containing coupons for oil changes. The waitress signaled for us to sit anywhere we liked, and Danny selected a corner booth, several tables away from any other customers.

  “So if I’ve done the math right, you’ve been with the FBI, what, three years now?” I said as we sat down.

  “Three years, yeah. Hard to believe. It’s been a good ride, though. You’ve been acting this whole time?”

  I trotted out my usual line: “Beats having a real job.”

  Danny smiled again. “That’s good. Real good. That’s actually why we wanted to talk to you.”

  And then he said the last thing I expected to fall out of an FBI agent’s mouth: “We have an acting job for you.”

  “An acting job?” I repeated. “So I haven’t done anything wrong?”

  Danny laughed. Gilmartin didn’t.

  “No, no,” Danny said. “We’d like to hire you.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “First of all, you need to keep this quiet,” Danny said. “If you choose to move forward with this, we’re going to ask you to sign a nondisclosure agreement. But for now a verbal agreement will do fine. Is that okay? Can you promise not to tell anyone about this conversation?”

  “Uh, yeah, sure.”

  He leaned in closer. “Okay. Good. So this isn’t something we advertise, for obvious reasons, but the FBI sometimes hires actors. Our agents can only go undercover so often before they’re compromised. And then there are cases like this one, where we need . . . someone whose dramatic abilities exceed those of your typical FBI agent.”

  “What’s the role?” I asked, wondering if this was part of an elaborate joke.

  Danny sat back and nodded at Gilmartin, who opened his briefcase and extracted a mug shot of a middle-aged white man with receded brown hair and a fastidious goatee. His face was fleshy and pallid. His eyes had bruise-dark bags under them. I needed only one glance to see this was one sad character.

  Agent Rick Gilmartin cleared his throat and spoke for the first time.

  “This is Mitchell Dupree, a former executive for Union South Bank,” he said in a nondescript, TV-news-anchor, anywhere-in-America accent. “USB is the fifth-largest bank in America, just behind Citigroup. Dupree worked for the division that dealt with international business in Latin America. To his friends and neighbors, even to his family, he appeared to be very ordinary. But all the while he was leading a double life, working for the New Colima cartel.”

  “New Colima is the latest bad flavor to come out of Mexico,” Danny explained. “Around the time you and I were lining up senior prom dates, they split off from the Sinaloa cartel. Their first big moment was when they killed thirty-eight Zetas and dumped their dismembered bodies in the middle of the Mexican equivalent of I-10 at rush hour. It was like, ‘You think these guys are tough? You don’t know what tough is.’

  “Basically, New Colima is to Mexico what ISIS is to the Middle East. You know how we had Saddam, and we thought he was a pretty bad guy until we got ISIS, which was far worse? It’s the same thing here. The US government went all in to break up Sinaloa and arrest El Chapo. All it did was create a power vacuum that New Colima has only been too happy to fill.”

  Gilmartin took over: “They’re militarized to an extent no cartel has ever been, and they’ve been hugely aggressive when it comes to taking territory, establishing supply lines, bribing officials, and recruiting manpower. Their drug of choice is crystal meth, and they were smart enough to concentrate on markets in Europe and Asia first, so they were able to get strong without the US authorities bothering them too much. Then they made their move here. There are some estimates that a third of all crystal meth in America is produced by New Colima.

  “But the drugs are only part of the story,” Gilmartin continued. “Money is the gas for a cartel’s engine. It’s what allows them to buy guns, men, and planes, the things they need to keep growing. The DEA likes to seize a few kilos of product, hold a press conference, and declare it’s winning the war on drugs. At the FBI, we realize we’re never going to be able to stop the inflow of drugs. This country is just too huge. It makes more sense to go after the money. One of the biggest logistical issues for cartels is that they’re in a cash business. Cash is big and bulky and vulnerable to seizure, especially when you’re talking about the huge sums the cartels deal with. In the new global economy, cartels want to be able to move money safely and conveniently with the push of a button. But they need people like Mitchell Dupree to do it for them. Dupree laundered more than a billion dollars of cartel money over the course of about four years or so.”

  He paused as the waitress came over and placed waters in front of us. At Danny’s insistence, I ordered a cheeseburger. The agents stuck with black coffee.

  Gilmartin waited until she was gone, then said, “Dupree eventually got sloppy. By the time we caught him, we were able to tie him to an offshore account that had several million dollars in it. We think there might be others, but we never could find them. The US Attorneys Office convicted him for money laundering, racketeering, wire fraud, pretty much everything it could get to stick on him. He’s now six months into a nine-year sentence at FCI Morgantown in West Virginia.”

  “FCI stands for Federal Correctional Institut
ion, but don’t let that scare you,” Danny interjected. “It’s minimum security, mostly white-collar types, strictly nonviolent offenders. The place looks like a college campus—no bars, no razor wire. We’re talking about Club Fed here, not some hard-ass place where you have to become someone’s bitch if you want to survive.”

  Gilmartin went on: “For our purposes, Dupree is now a small means to a much bigger end. We have him on wiretaps talking about a trove of documents that he secretly kept as insurance. We believe he’s told the cartel that if anything happens to him or his family, he’ll release the documents. They could be used to prosecute the entire top echelon of New Colima, including El Vio himself.”

  “That’s the boss of New Colima,” Danny said. “It translates loosely as ‘the seer,’ because supposedly he’s the guy who sees everything. It’s kind of an ironic name, because he’s only got one good eye. The other is all weird and white. So the seer is actually half-blind.”

  “When we confronted Dupree about the documents and offered him a deal, he refused to tell us where they were,” Gilmartin said. “No matter how much pressure we applied, he kept his mouth shut, which was great for the cartel but very frustrating for us.”

  Danny’s turn: “We looked everywhere for those damn documents. We executed warrants on his home, his office, his social club. We had agents follow him to see if he had a hidden storage unit. We plowed through his financials looking for signs he was renting another office or house. We got nothing.”

  Back to Gilmartin: “Dupree made an offhand comment on one of the wiretaps about a remote cabin he or someone in his family owns. It’s his getaway. But we couldn’t find any record of it. We think that’s where he stashed the documents. So, really, it’s pretty simple. We want you to go into the prison under an alias, posing as an inmate. You’ll become friendly with Dupree, earn his trust, and then get him to tell you where that cabin is.”

  “And how am I going to do that?” I asked.

  “That’s the challenge, Slugbomb,” Danny said. “If we thought this was easy, we wouldn’t need to hire you. Obviously, you can’t let on you know about him, the bank, or the cartel. It would make him suspicious. You’re just another inmate, there to serve your time. If he wants to confide in you about what he’s done, great. But we’re not looking to prosecute Dupree for anything else. All we want is the location of those documents.”

  “What if he won’t tell me anything?”

  “We think he will,” Gilmartin said. “We’ve talked to some counselors at the BOP, the Bureau of Prisons, and they tell us that their minimum-security facilities allow for quite a bit of inmate interaction. Friendships form quickly. Based on this, our SAC—sorry, special agent in charge—has approved a six-month operation, starting from when you enter Morgantown. Obviously, if we’re able to secure the documents, we’ll pull you out immediately. But if after the end of six months you still don’t have anything, the operation ends all the same. The psychologists say it’ll either happen by then or it won’t happen at all.”

  Six months. I’d be out by March. The waitress appeared with the coffee. She slid the check, facedown, on the side of the table with the guys in the suits.

  “And what happens to this guy, this Dupree, when I find the documents?” I asked.

  “It depends if he cooperates or not,” Gilmartin said. “If he doesn’t, there’s nothing we can do for him. If he does, he and his family get WITSEC—federal witness protection. We’ve offered it before. He’s refused, because he thinks he can’t trust us. Once we have the documents, he won’t have a choice.”

  I looked back and forth between the two agents for a moment. Danny was taking a tentative sip of his coffee. Gilmartin hadn’t touched his.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I . . . I do musical theater. We can’t go more than three sentences without bursting into song, and even then we follow a score. What you’re talking about here is more like improv. I took a class on that once, but this is . . . This is improv on steroids.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” Danny said. “You’re smart, likeable. You’re from Hackensack—the Sack, baby! You got the gift of gab. You’re also a guy he won’t see coming. FBI agents, we’re cut from the same cloth. The way you talk, the way you think, you’re a creative type. He’ll never suspect you’re working for us. And, no offense, you’re, what, five-two?”

  “Five-four,” I said defensively.

  “Whatever. Point is, you’re no one’s image of an FBI agent. You’ll probably crack him in three days.”

  Before I could think to voice any of the other myriad questions that were starting to form, Danny leaned in again.

  “Plus, we’ll pay you a hundred grand, minimum.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Fifty when you go in. Fifty when you come out, whether you succeed or not. Plus, there’s a hundred-thousand-dollar bonus if we’re able to secure indictments based on information you provide us.”

  Two hundred thousand dollars. It was a dizzying amount of money. A sleep-better-at-night amount of money. A look-at-yourself-differently-in-the-mirror amount of money. And for six months’ work. I couldn’t imagine the job in Arkansas was going to pay more than thirty a year.

  “We’ll put this all in writing, of course,” Danny continued. “It’ll be in a contract you’ll sign with the bureau where you agree to be an informant for us and you understand there are inherent risks and blah-blah-blah. Right now all you have to do is say yes.”

  Say yes. The word would come a lot easier if he wasn’t talking about prison.

  “I have to talk it over with my fiancée,” I said. “You said I can’t tell anyone, but—”

  “Of course, of course,” Danny said. “The nondisclosure agreement is really for things like social media or press interviews. You can definitely talk it over with your fiancée. I think I saw her on Facebook. Amanda, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Our offices are technically closed for the holiday anyway. Take tonight and tomorrow, talk it over, think about it. Come Tuesday, our SAC is going to want an answer. If it’s not you, we need to hire someone else. But you were my first choice. I vouched for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I know we’ve given you a lot to think about. Once you sign the agreement, we can help you craft a backstory and talk you through some of the other details.”

  He reached for his wallet and produced a twenty, placing it on the table as he pocketed the check. Then he pulled out a business card, which he handed to me.

  “This has my office number and cell number,” he said. “Don’t bother with the office number. You’ll just get shunted to my voice mail. Call the cell if you have any questions.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Danny nodded at Gilmartin, who stood. Danny slid out of the booth behind him.

  “We’ll let you eat in peace,” he said. “Good seeing you, Tommy.”

  “You too, Danny.”

  Gilmartin nodded curtly. Danny knocked twice on the table, then led their exit.

  I ran my fingers across the embossed lettering on the business card. My erstwhile Little League teammate Danny was now Daniel R. Ruiz, Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office.

  The waitress set down my cheeseburger just as a Chevy Caprice whipped past the diner. It was, technically, unmarked. But only to someone who didn’t recognize those classic law enforcement specifications: the dual exhaust pipes, the reinforced suspension, the souped-up engine.

  Danny was driving. He had taken off his suit jacket. His service weapon was in a holster, snug against his left shoulder.

  I stared at the top of the burger like the answers to all of life’s riddles were hidden amidst the sesame seeds.

  A hundred thousand dollars. Maybe two hundred, depending on how persuasive I could be. And I could be, if it mattered that much. Right
?

  I went to the theater that day telling myself this was it.

  But maybe the Morgenthau wasn’t the last act after all.

  CHAPTER 3

  Herrera saw them from a distance, three Range Rovers, all black and bulletproof, ripping along in a lopsided V formation, kicking up plumes of dust that stretched for half a mile behind them like long, billowing snakes.

  El Vio might have been in any of the three. Or none. You never knew for sure.

  You never knew anything with El Vio.

  As the vehicles closed in, their windshields glinting in the bright sun, Herrera could already hear the General’s voice barking orders in excited, high-pitched Spanish. The General was chief of security for the cartel. He did not sound very secure.

  These inspections were never announced. Nor did they conform to any pattern, at least not that Herrera was aware of. There might be three in one month, nothing for an entire year, then two on consecutive days.

  Be unpredictable. That was El Vio’s first rule, both for his generals and for himself. Change everything, all the time: the places you stay, the restaurants you frequent, the women you sleep with. It was impossible to ambush a man who never kept a set schedule.

  Rule number two: Don’t drink, take drugs, or do anything to dull your wits. Even for a moment. Because that could be the moment you’d miss something that could cost you your life—whether it was the drone flying overhead, the snick of a safety coming off a gun, or the subtle shift in a man’s eyes as he lied to you.

  Three, be daring—atrevido, in Spanish. Atrevido was one of El Vio’s favorite words. Timidity was for shy woodland creatures. Running a cartel required bold action. Hit your enemies hard enough, fast enough, and they’ll be too stunned to hit back.

  Four, and most important, make sure the Americans never had anything concrete on you. Mexican police could be bribed or intimidated into not arresting you. Mexican judges could be bribed or intimidated into not convicting you. Mexican jailors could be bribed or intimidated into letting you go free. Not so with the United States. Therefore, extradition was the worst of all possible outcomes. El Vio dreaded extradition more than death.