Revenge of the Assassin (Assassin Series 2) (6 page)

And make no mistake. Antonio was a predator. Of that, Gustavo was sure.

Once home, he turned on his computer and began downloading the thousands of photos and rap sheets his network had come up with through Interpol. It would be a painstaking and potentially fruitless chore, but he was infinitely patient and loved a project. And there was a point of stubborn pride in the equation. Gustavo’s nose was never wrong.

Now, it was a matter of discovering where and what young Antonio was running from, and then they could have an altogether different discussion than one revolving around chess. Which Antonio had beaten Gustavo at today, yet again, for the seventeenth straight time since they’d begun their irregular matches.

Gustavo was more than intrigued.

The files finally loaded, he began paging through the photos.

At three in the morning he came across one that stopped him. There were striking similarities, and yet the face was different.

He made a few notes and resolved to make a call in the morning to get some more information. Gustavo wrote down the sparse details on the file and yawned, beyond tired. He’d do a web search for more tomorrow. For now, he was beat.

If Antonio was the man described in the bulletin, he might be just what the doctor ordered for messy contingencies, as his subordinates grew bolder and deferred to Gustavo less and less over the years. It could never hurt to have a pit bull on a chain.

Especially one that loved the taste of blood.

Captain Romero Cruz walked with a slight limp to the kitchen, hurriedly buttoning his Federal Police shirt. A plate of eggs and chorizo sat steaming on the small dining room table, a cup of coffee at its side. He sat down, and Dinah, glowing as ever in a fitted dress and colorful purple blouse, emerged from the attached laundry room and placed her hands on his shoulders, leaning in and kissing his cheek. She was stunning, as always, with wavy black hair and huge eyes and a face that was beautiful in a non-traditional way.

“You’re going to be late, my love,” she warned playfully.

“They have to wait for me. I’m the boss,” Cruz responded, swallowing a forkful of eggs before grabbing her arm and pulling her closer to him. He kissed her neck and, with a minor adjustment, her lips.

“Good eggs,” Dinah said, pulling away and moving to the counter, where a glass of orange juice waited for her with a much smaller plate holding two pieces of toast.

This had been their regular routine since she’d begun staying at Cruz’s modest new rental condo, courtesy of the
Federales
. Ever since he’d been kidnapped by the head of the Sinaloa cartel, he’d been under twenty-four hour armed surveillance, and likely would remain so until he left his position with the police. Cruz was the head of Mexico City’s anti-cartel task force, which effectively made him the head of the national effort as well, given that DF, as Mexico City was called by the locals, was the largest city in Mexico, containing thirty percent of the nation’s population. He’d also developed somewhat of a reputation after a near miss assassination attempt on the last president was foiled by his team’s actions, which accounted for why he still had the job now that a new administration had taken office for its six year stint at running the country.

Usually, when an administration changed, the key positions went to new blood as payback for favors, but Cruz’s position was too critical to play politics with. Or alternatively, and more likely, nobody else wanted the job of tackling the most powerful and rich narcotics trafficking groups in the world. It was a position that wasn’t great for extended life expectancy, and Cruz believed that he was still heading the group because there wasn’t anyone foolhardy enough to take it. During his tenure, Cruz’s wife and child had been kidnapped and brutally murdered, he’d been shot in a bloody ambush that nearly cost him his life, he’d been kidnapped by the most powerful cartel kingpin in the world, and his life had been threatened by virtually every organized crime syndicate in Mexico.

This was a world where the most prominent people in the ongoing war against the cartels had a suspicious habit of crashing in aircraft accidents, or getting gunned down in heated assaults, so being the poster boy for the government’s push to eradicate narco-trafficking was slightly below lion tamer or Russian roulette gambler in terms of safety.

Cruz was used to it. He’d long ago reconciled himself to the idea that he would live as long as he lived, but that he’d do everything in his power to bring the groups that had butchered his family to justice in the meantime. He was brutally effective, and though his methods were controversial, nobody argued with the results.

And he was the only one willing to strap on a bull’s-eye every day and go into the office, wondering if today was the day a bomb or a sniper snuffed out his existence. That ensured a certain job security, if that phrase could be used to describe the circumstances in which he lived on a daily basis.

Dinah and Cruz had become an item following his recuperation from the shooting, and she’d taken to staying with him most nights for the last few months, going so far as to move in two large suitcases full of clothes. Cruz had mixed feelings about the situation at first because of the constant threat of danger surrounding him, but Dinah had shrugged it off.

“You have the best protection in the world ensuring you don’t even trip on a crack in the sidewalk. This is probably the safest building in all of Mexico,” she’d reasoned.

It was hard to argue, and truthfully, Cruz didn’t want to do so with any real enthusiasm. This was the first time he’d had a female companion since his wife had been torn from him, and it felt good. Nothing could ever replace his lost family, but if healing was possible, he’d done so, and had resolved to move forward and focus on the future, after having spent years dwelling on the past. Every two months, the department rented a new condo for him, in a different building in a different area of town; his possessions appeared at the new address as if by magic. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but it was the one that was keeping him alive, and so both he and Dinah had reluctantly grown accustomed to the disruptive grind.

Cruz admired Dinah’s curves while she stood in the kitchen, wolfing down her breakfast as she rushed to be at her job on time. She was a teacher, and she couldn’t be ten minutes late for work like Cruz could. The class wouldn’t wait, and it was policy that everyone had to be on campus fifteen minutes before school started. At the rate she was going, she wasn’t going to make it. It would be a miracle if she could get across town before the opening bell.

Cruz slurped his coffee and then rose from the table, his breakfast only half done. He approached Dinah and put his arms around her waist, nuzzling her neck as she finished her juice.

“Do you know what today is?” he asked.

“Monday. Now I have to run,
Corazon
. I’m already way too late.”

“It is indeed Monday, but no, I was thinking more that it’s been exactly six months since you began staying with me,” Cruz nudged.

“
Ah
. Has it? It really only seems like yesterday…”

Cruz fumbled with his shirt pocket and extracted a small black velvet box, moving it over her shoulders and positioning it on the counter next to her plate.

“Wha…what’s this?” Dinah asked in a whisper, suddenly serious.

“Go ahead. Open it.”

Dinah reached forward with trembling hands and pried the small case open. Inside sat a platinum band with a solitary one carat diamond. Dinah drew in a sharp intake of breath, and lifting the box, turned to face Cruz, who still held her waist, smiling.

“Is this…?”

“I love you, Dinah. It’s time. I’d like you to marry me. I know I’m not perfect, and I have my faults, but…”

Dinah’s eyes welled with moisture as she silently removed the band from the box and slipped the little velvet square back into his shirt pocket. She slid the ring on her finger and smiled through the tears.

“It fits.”

“Yes. I measured one of your other rings. Actually traced the interior circumference and took it to the jeweler. He said you’re a six. Looks like he knew his stuff,” Cruz explained nervously.

She shushed him with a long kiss on the mouth. Tears of joy trickling down her flawless cheeks, she gazed into his eyes and smiled. “
Capitan
, I accept your offer.” She kissed him again.

They’d come a long way since Cruz had met her while investigating
El Rey
. He’d have never thought it possible when he’d first seen her, hair gleaming in the sun, radiantly beautiful in the shabby little pawn shop lobby where Cruz and his partner had been waiting. And yet a kind of small miracle had taken place, and she’d been attracted to him, and now, ten months after first setting eyes on her and six months since their first full night together at his place, the most beautiful woman in Mexico was going to be his wife.

~

Once Cruz had been transported to the office in the armored BMW 760 Li that was his official vehicle, the usual crush of reports and urgent requests buried him. One benefit of his line of work was that there was never any shortage of events – the cartels were always up to something – so it never threatened to be boring or uneventful. He probably coordinated at least one major raid per week on a cartel stronghold or suspected drug or arms storage location, and while his group’s success rate wasn’t stellar, it was better than anyone expected. In a hierarchy that was historically riddled with corruption, Cruz’s group was considered above reproach – one of the very few clean organizations in a nation where their adversary wielded enormous financial resources they couldn’t hope to match.

The entire budget for the Mexican army was a billion dollars a year, and the army worked alongside the
Federales
to battle drug trafficking. The budget for the entire Mexican Federal Police force was thirty-five billion, but that included all duties – only ten percent or so was spent on anti-cartel activities. The rest went to personnel and administration and general law enforcement, and in the way that large government bureaucracies were always inefficient, the
Federales
were no different than, say, the Pentagon, where hammers cost two hundred dollars.

The actual money that made it to the street level battle against the cartels was a laughable few billion. Contrasted against the estimated eighty to a hundred billion of wholesale value drugs moving through Mexico – cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, marijuana – the army and law enforcement was perennially outgunned and outspent. If the cartels spent twenty percent of their profits on battling law enforcement, the government’s efforts were dwarfed by a factor of six or seven.

The sad reality was that Mexico would never be able to spend sufficiently to curtail the cartels, certainly not as long as its huge neighbor to the north was the largest market for illegal drugs in the world. Everyone knew it – Cruz, the government, the cartels. But that didn’t mean that there couldn’t be successes along the way. Over the last few years, a sustained clampdown in Tijuana, one of the largest gateways for drug smuggling, had devastated the Arellano Felix cartel there, leaving a power vacuum. So wins could happen. Of course, the ultimate futility of the victories was simply that another cartel would step in and take over the territory – in this case, the Sinaloa cartel had radically increased its hold in Tijuana, and nothing much changed except who the money stuck to at the end of the day. Shipments continued unabated, supply in the U.S. was constant, and the cash flowed like champagne in a rap video.

It was easy to get demoralized, but Cruz considered his job as much like that of a doctor. Patients would come and go, and yes, everyone ultimately would die – nobody escaped that final outcome. But in the interim, if he could save some people, or extend their lives, then he counted it as a success. True, one could view the entire exercise as futile – after all, the patients always died eventually – but that perspective wasn’t useful. Everything if viewed in that light was pointless, and nobody would ever get out of bed and do anything if they thought about it too much.

No, better to stay focused on the small, sustainable victories and leave the big picture to its own devices.

Cruz hurried into his private office, trailed by his younger lieutenant, Briones, now fully recuperated from the shooting that had almost taken his life during the confrontation with
El Rey
at the G-20 financial summit. Cruz tossed his satchel on his desk, then plopped down behind it, eyeing Briones warily.

“What’s the damage today? What have we got going on?” Cruz asked.

“The tip we got yesterday about the construction supply bodega seems to be panning out. We’ve had it under surveillance all night, and there’s a surprising amount of traffic for a storage facility that supposedly closes at six,” Briones reported.

“Out towards Toluca, right?”

“Near the airport. Four different SUVs, all luxury, visited between nine p.m. and midnight. Then nothing more until this morning, when what looks like three night guards were relieved by a day shift of two. The strange thing is that they were all heavily armed. I wonder if that means anything?” Briones wondered aloud.

Cruz held back a smile. “Considering that gun possession is a felony in Mexico, you may be on to something. Seems like a lot of firepower to keep some kids from stealing a few bags of cement for beer money.”

“That was my thinking,” Briones said, smirking. They both knew that the bodega was likely a distribution point for the Sinaloa cartel. “Has it seemed to you that we’re getting an awful lot of luck thrown our way lately against the Sinaloans? I mean, I’m not complaining, but over the last few months, I’d guess that ninety percent of our leads have been Sinaloa deals. That’s almost the polar opposite of how last year went.”

Cruz nodded. “My guess is that the other cartels are trying to move against them, so they’re rolling over whenever possible. I’d say this is just a routine power play. Same as it ever was,” Cruz opined. “The continued war of attrition – survival of the fittest.”