by Desiree Holt
“Even a dummy like me knows there’s a ton of money in that.”
Kenzi reached across the table and placed her hand on his. “Don’t keep saying that. You are far from a dummy, so don’t say that again. Reyes has set up separate corporations for each of his activities. Now he’s opening companies overseas, expanding into foreign markets. One of the major things to deal with is currency exchange. Moving money from one country to another. You want to make sure the exchange rate is always in your favor.”
“Yeah, I can see that. I can also see what a headache it can be.” He smiled. “Juggling their millions. Or is it billions?”
She shrugged. “To me it’s just a bunch of numbers in a file. I let Reed worry about the actuality of it. I’m just involved in setting up the structure.”
“Structure?”
“You know, the holding company that all the others fall under, their outlines, how business between them is conducted and how to manage the currency exchange.”
The corner of his mouth kicked up in a hint of a grin. “Sounds fascinating.”
Kenzi laughed. “I’m sure it’s boring you to tears, but keep in mind that’s what I thrive on. Creating these corporations in the best possible way for the client.”
Before he could comment again, the waitress arrived with their food and they dug into it. Kenzi couldn’t help glancing now and then at the table where Alex Reyes sat. The man with him looked equally expensive, although instead of a suit he wore slacks and a silk shirt. But the sunlight glinted on the gold watch at his wrist and the medallion he wore around his neck. Sometimes she wondered, just for a brief moment, what it must be like to have that kind of wealth. Then she remembered the headaches that went with it and decided she had the better part of the deal.
“You know,” she mused, “that guy with Reyes looks sort of familiar, but I can’t figure out why.”
Trey shifted in his chair as casually as possible to take a look at the man. “He looks expensive, just like Reyes.”
Kenzi looked again, then shrugged. “Probably a business associate. The discussion they’re having looks more like that than just two friends having lunch. I wonder what the subject is that kept him in town when he planned to be away.”
Trey took another quick glance at the two men then turned back to his food.
“You said Reyes has multiple interests. Probably someone he has an important arrangement with. Do you know all his contacts?”
She shook her head. “But I’m sure Reed does. Oh, well.”
“You know, now that I look again, there’s something about him—”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Like what?”
“When we were prepping for the, ah, trip to Mexico, we were shown a lot of pictures. People we might see at the finca.”
“What kind of pictures?”
“Mostly of Hector Lopez Garcia and his top lieutenants. But they threw in a number of others without identifiers, just people who might in some way be connected to the Lopez Garcia cartel. Not that we expected to see them at the finca, but the military wasn’t taking any chances.”
“For the mission to rescue Dana?”
He shook his head. “Not just that. There are a number of missions that come up regarding the cartels. It started when JSOC—Joint Special Operations Command—began rotating teams in and out of Colombia. On the face of it, we were tasked with training Colombia’s top military, but sometimes those groups accompanied them on missions. We’re always being prepped because you never know when one of those assignments will come up. And it’s usually without much warning, so they want us to keep those images in our heads, in case we cross paths with any of those guys.”
Kenzi shook her head. “Alex Reyes wouldn’t be among them. Or, I’m pretty sure, any of his friends. The Reyes family has lived in the Hill Country for at least three generations. They’re highly respected members of the community, both locally and statewide. And he wouldn’t be sitting out here in public with someone if there was anything questionable about it.”
“You said he’s been a client with your firm a long time?”
She nodded. “And there’s never been a sniff of any trouble around him or his family. Byrnes, Calhoun and Raven would never have accepted them as clients if there was.”
“I’ll take your word for it. You certainly know the background on them. Anyway, I’m probably just seeing bad guys everywhere. It goes with the territory. But if for whatever reason you have reservations about this guy, you should pass that along to the firm.”
“First of all, Reed Calhoun would look at me like I’m crazy. Alex Reyes is so respectable he’s the poster child for it. He night take me off this project.” She sighed. “Or, worse yet, fire me for being suspicious of a client.”
“Then do what you said,” he suggested. “Look him up online and see if there’s anything that makes you uncomfortable. Is there some reason that today you got a bug up your ass about him?”
She shook her head. “Just…something when I was watching him.” She sighed. “It’s probably just me. I’m tired and see things that aren’t there. But I will do a search.”
It was unfortunate she had a mind that fastened on to things and didn’t let go. In the years since she’d joined Byrnes, Calhoun and Reed, she had never had a hint or a sniff of anything on the wrong side of the ledger, ether of the firm or its clients. The partners themselves were so clean they squeaked. Icons in the community, members of every politically important board, supporters of community organizations—she couldn’t see them even a tiny bit involved in anything seedy. Not for any amount of money.
But the brain that had gotten her though undergrad and law school with very high marks and earned her a high score on the bar exam left nothing to chance. It never hurt to collect information, just in case. Fiddling with her smart watch, she turned her wrist so the watch faced the table where the two men sat. As casually as she could, she pressed the button that would take a picture, capturing the image.
When they were back at her apartment, she’d do a search on her computer and see if anything matched. Maybe there would be a shot of Alex Reyes with the man and a caption would identify him as another respectable citizen. Then she could forget about it and kill the tiny flicker of unease Trey had ignited.
Chapter Six
“That was an extremely stupid thing you did.”
Hector Lopez Garcia, one of the most powerful drug lords in the Western hemisphere, stood in the richly paneled office in his estancia and did his best to control his temper. Getting to where he was today had been far from an easy task. So much of the drug trade in Mexico had taken a huge leap forward in the 1980s with the rise to power of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the country’s liaison with Colombia’s Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellin cartel.
But so much had changed since then. A meeting had been held to divide up the country into regions, each controlled by a specific group. But, of course, people were only human, and greedy and always wanting more. Bloody fights over territory allowed people like Lopez Garcia, who had been a lieutenant in another cartel, to form his own group and carve out a piece of the country for himself.
In the ensuing years, new groups had come to power while others had failed, and killings and arrests often left vacuums to be filled. Little by little, Hector had chipped away at some of the others, reducing their power and strength, and until now he had been considered third in the power struggle and outreach. Wresting land in the state of Sonora from Sinaloa had only become possible when their leader, El Chapo Guzman, had been arrested for the third time. A bloody battle in the chain of command had followed and allowed him to claim a stronghold, a place to build from.
His goal was to occupy that top spot, but unseating the Sinaloa cartel, which was now an international force, would not be possible with his lieutenants doing idiotic things that brought them unwanted attention.
Like the one standing before him right now, the one he had summoned for an immediate meeting. Felix Santiago,
his nephew and poor excuse for a lieutenant, glared at him.
“You said money is important. I had a chance to get some. Quick and easy. It was the smart thing to do. If we’d just killed the gringa, we’d get nothing for it.”
Hector swallowed the growl that rumbled up in his throat.
“First, you did not get the money. Second, twenty million is a paltry sum compared to what our organization clears. Third, we have a specific pecking order in this organization. No one goes off on their own. Nothing gets done except at my direction. Comprende?”
“But—”
Lopez Garcia sliced a hand through the air to cut off his nephew’s words.
“You brought us to the attention of people who don’t need to stick their nose in our business, like the officials in the United States who would like nothing better than to put us all out of business. Third, you cost me the lives of sixteen of my men and four more are recovering from wounds. A fucking disaster, and a total disrespect for those men.”
“If they were any good,” Felix sneered, “they wouldn’t be dead. Or wounded.”
“Not for you to say.” Hector’s voice was like ice, a fact Felix seemed to ignore. “Finally, and perhaps the worst, you disobeyed a direct order. That is unforgiveable. I told you to get rid of that nosy bitch of a reporter and do it in a way her body would never be found. Was that too difficult for your simple little mind?”
Hector watched his nephew’s face turn red as anger surged through him. He stood erect with his fists clenched at his sides, muscles in his arms bulging. If not for his sister, Luisa Elena, Hector would have disposed of his nephew long ago. The man was an idiot, had a short temper and too much arrogance for his own good.
“I analyzed the situation, saw an opportunity and jumped on it,” he insisted. “You said you wanted me to show initiative.”
“I also expected you to use your brain, never thinking you might not have one.”
“I say again, I saw another way to score.”
“And for your efforts,” Lopez Garcia said in measured tones, “you got nothing except the deaths of several very good men and the attention of one of the deadliest divisions of the United States military.”
“You don’t know that,” his nephew protested. “They could have just been a team of mercenaries hired by her bosses to retrieve her rather than pay the ransom.”
Hector inhaled a deep breath and let it out slowly, grateful that he did not have a gun in his hands. “Because I pay a lot of money to the right people to feed me information, I was able to learn that the team that rescued the reporter is part of Delta Force, an elite special missions unit of the United States Army. Those pendejos don’t shoot first and ask questions later. They just shoot. Which is why so many of my men are dead and the reporter is still alive. And why my house where you were holding her is no longer useful.”
“It should not have played out that way,” Felix argued. “We were prepared—”
“Mierda!” Hector spat the words out. “Bullshit! Quit lying to yourself. The reporter is gone, with all the information she acquired. You let your tiny brain take control of your tinier balls and now I have to clean up the mess.”
“I’ll clean it up,” his nephew protested.
“You won’t be around to.”
Felix frowned. “What do you mean? Are you replacing me? But I am familia.”
“Which is the only reason you lasted so long. But I have reached the end of my rope. I have sent my regrets to your mother.”
Who, by the way, had cursed him more violently than many of his men, then broken down in tears, then spat on the ground and ordered him to leave. A breakdown in the family was sad, but this was not a business for the faint at heart. Additionally, he had the other branch of the family to consider, the one whose skirts needed to be hospital-clean. His cousins, who had built the structure the public saw, who by agreement had created a shield between them so they were free to conduct their public business while he continued to build his cartel and bring in more money than any of the other ‘legitimate’ businesses.
Long ago his great-grandparents and great aunts and uncles had created the solid structure for the cartel, appointing Hector’s grandfather as the head of that area, with the two cousins leading the empire their great-grandfathers had put in place. One that was totally disconnected from the cartel yet provided a place to funnel all their cash and wash it so it came out clean.
And soon will bring all of us even more millions.
They had a plan in the works, and it was being organized in very careful steps, so it was important for him and his people to avoid doing things that brought groups like Delta Force into their country and onto their property. It was good for his people to have the reputation of being cold-hearted, to be willing to kill to achieve what they wanted, but not to be messy in their activities. Especially when it concerned the United States.
Right now, he didn’t need any unwanted, unfavorable publicity, and his cousins needed to be able to finish their work without Hector’s operation causing a disaster. If fucking Felix had just killed the reporter as ordered and disposed of her body, none of this would have happened. She would just be another missing person and there would be nothing to point a finger at the Lopez Garcia cartel.
He glared at his nephew, angry that he’d done something so stupid.
“What are you going to do?” Felix challenged. “Lock me in my room?” But even as he said the words, his face paled.
“Ah,” Hector sighed. “If only it were that simple.”
He pressed a button on the house phone and Pedro Gomez, his closest confidant and right-hand man, the one who had been with him since the very beginning, walked into the room. When he closed his fingers around Felix’s upper arm and urged him toward the door, the younger man tried to jerk away. But Pedro’s grip was like iron, his fingers digging into Felix’s flesh.
“No!” Felix shouted the word as Pedro began to tug him from the room. “No, Tio Hector. I will make it up to you, I promise. Just give me a chance. Please.”
“Don’t demean yourself more by begging.”
Hector spoke the words in a cold voice. Then he turned away, shutting his ears to his nephew’s screams, grateful when the door closed, blocking them out. Sighing again, he walked to the bar against the wall and poured a strong shot of perfectly aged bourbon into a glass, dropped in one ice cube and tossed back half the drink. Still holding the glass, he walked to the big picture window that looked out on the acres of green rolling lawn.
He had worked hard for this estancia, with its lush acreage. For his stable of fine horses, his garage of high-dollar vehicles and the expensive jewels he showered on both his wife and his mistress. More blood had been shed—and continued to be shed—than in some official world battles. In many instances, the killing had become senseless, people slain with cruel heartlessness to serve as warnings to others and sometimes just for the pleasure of killing as brutally as possible.
But Hector liked to think he was not an animal, like many of his competitors. He had a brain and used it, so as vicious battles between cartels had continued to rage over the country, he’d made a decision. His family, after all, had been in Mexico for generations, raising cattle as their primary visible business. The drug business was seen as just another enterprise that would increase their income, one they kept well under the radar as they built their empire. Unlike many of the other cartels, they weren’t looking for front-page all-out bloody war with the others. Little by little, they’d built their foothold until they were ready to put their expansion plans into place.
Hector had researched other geographical areas where they could get a foothold and expand their business. Rather than fight a useless and damaging war in an effort to take over more territory in Mexico, he’d developed a plan to spread his operation into the United States, Canada and Europe. Others were doing it, looking to move away from the sudden spate of crackdowns by the Mexican military, which Hector was sure were just for
show.
There was untapped money in the billions around the world. Hector Lopez Garcia had his eye on that prize, saw it as his ticket to rise from being a midlevel Mexican drug lord to an elite worldwide distributor. An entrepreneur cloaked by so-called respectable businesses. Progress was slow, but steady, and he had a solid plan in place as well as people to structure it and manage it for him. He had chosen well, but his asshole nephew could have put a big crimp in it.
The last thing Hector needed was for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration to fix an eye on him, or the damned Department of Homeland Security—which insisted terrorists were being smuggled into the United State by the cartels—and start directing resources to shutting him down. Or the Drug Enforcement Administration. He had deliberately downplayed his place in the cartel battles.
It was important now for him to fly under the radar, to make sure the United States continued to focus primarily on the mammoth Sinaloa cartel and some of the others, along with the idiots who ran them. He wanted to be someone hardly worth their trouble, until he had all the pieces in place. At the right time he would emerge as the international leader in the drug cartel world, as well as an astute businessman with other enterprises. Those would bring additional capital as well as give him places to filter the drug money. Perhaps he would even relocate, maybe to Europe.
Right now, however, he had to control the damage that the high-visibility kidnapping had created.
He heard the door open behind him and turned to see Pedro Gomez re-enter.
“Is it done?”
Gomez nodded. “As you requested. Leon is handling the disposal.”
“Thank you. This was a very difficult thing to do.” He was not looking forward to the conversation with his sister.
“Will there be anything else?”
“Is Diego still here?” His top lieutenant, Diego Escamilla, had breakfasted with him earlier to discuss the situation.
