Ghost Sniper (5 page)

8

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

10:00 HOURS

Agent Mike Ortega of the CIA arrived at ten sharp the next morning. He was a big guy with broad shoulders, dark brown eyes, and a thin mustache. The Mexican American carried himself with an arrogance that annoyed Crosswhite the moment he opened the door. Agent Mendoza, the PFM agent who had saved Vaught's life, stood just behind him, dressed in regular clothes now, his face turned to watch the door to the enclosed carport, his oversized Adam's apple protruding.

“You're Crosswhite?” Ortega asked.

“Right.”

Ortega offered his hand. He was one of those guys who felt it necessary to half crush the other guy's hand during a handshake, but he realized at once that Crosswhite's grip was at least as strong as his own. This surprised him, given that Crosswhite stood a head shorter and was built on a lighter frame. “I understand you've already met Agent Mendoza.”

“I have.” Crosswhite shook his hand as well. “
Bienvenido
.” Welcome.

“Is Vaught still here?” Ortega asked.

“In the living room.” Crosswhite motioned the two inside.

Vaught stood waiting in the center of the room and shook hands with both men. There was a moment of mild tension between him and Mendoza, but it seemed to pass quickly enough.

“Sorry I couldn't make it over here last night,” Ortega said. “This is my first time at bat in this kind of operation, and it's taken some time to get the kinks ironed out. They're still not ironed out completely, but I'm afraid there's going to be a lot of OJT for everyone involved.”

Paolina came out of the bedroom with Valencia in her arms, crossing the living room to take a seat on the sofa and set Valencia down beside her.

Ortega watched her for a moment, looking at Crosswhite. “Okay, look, we can't have indigenous personnel sitting in on this conversation, so she's going to have to step out for a while.”

Paolina didn't understand what had been said, but she knew from her husband's face that she had been insulted in some way, and she prepared for him to lose his temper.

“First of all,” Crosswhite said, “she's not
indigenous
. She's Cuban. And second of all, she's my wife. You got that, asshole?”

Ortega took offense immediately. “Hey, we're all on the same side here, fella.”

Crosswhite stared back at him.

Vaught glanced at Paolina, who sat watching passively, almost as though she knew what was about to happen.

“Well, suit yourself,” Ortega said, openly annoyed. “If you don't mind endangering her life, I don't see why I should.”

Crosswhite struck him with a closed fist just above the right eye to send Ortega reeling backward across the room. The CIA agent stumbled over the recliner and crashed heavily to the floor against the wall.

Vaught and Mendoza looked at each other in shock, eyes wide as Crosswhite stepped between them to stand over the bigger man lying on the floor between the wall and the overturned chair. “Either you apologize right now, or I kill you.”

Ortega's impulse was to get up and pound Crosswhite into the floor, but there was a fury in the smaller man's eyes that told him he'd better not even try it. “You're fucking crazy. Do you know that?”

“I'm not gonna tell you again,” Crosswhite said. “And you'd better hurry, because Fields is about ten seconds away from needing to find another goddamn station chief.”

“Okay, I apologize!” Ortega snapped, rubbing his forehead, where a slight goose egg was already beginning to form. “I meant no offense. I was only trying to protect her.”

Vaught glanced again at Paolina, who hadn't taken her eyes off of Crosswhite the entire time.

Crosswhite pointed at the overturned recliner, saying to Ortega, “That's your chair.” He turned to Mendoza, calming himself and indicating the far end of the sofa.
“Por favor, siéntese,”
he said easily.
“Nuestra casa es su casa.”
Please sit down. Our house is your house.

Mendoza smiled at him, saying,
“Gracias”
and moved to take a seat.

Crosswhite sat down in the center of the sofa between Mendoza and Paolina as Vaught gave Ortega a hand, hauling the big man to his feet and helping to right the overturned recliner.

Vaught turned to Crosswhite. “Can I bring a chair from the kitchen?”

Crosswhite nodded, and Vaught went into the kitchen. Paolina followed him. Vaught returned with a chair made of leather and split tree branches called an
equipal
. Paolina returned a minute later with a plastic bag of ice, which she gave to the embarrassed Ortega.

“
Gracias
,” he said quietly, putting the bag against the swelling over his eye.

“You're welcome,” she said in heavily accented English, sitting back down beside Crosswhite and pulling Valencia into her lap.

Crosswhite wasn't the slightest bit apologetic or uncomfortable. Fields had said to him the night before: “It's important that you impress upon Ortega from the start that this is not his operation. It is
my
operation, and nothing less than his one hundred percent cooperation will be acceptable.”

Crosswhite felt he had done a fair job of establishing the hierarchy of who shit where in the woods, while at the same time making it clear to everyone present that Paolina wasn't to be regarded as anything less than the lady of the house.

“So where were we?” Ortega said timidly, understanding Crosswhite's utter lack of respect for him must have meant that he was well protected from on high—very probably by Pope himself. He switched to Spanish for Mendoza's benefit, addressing Vaught: “I'm the one who requested the Operational Immediate putting you under the aegis of the CIA.”

“Oh, then fuck you very much!” Vaught retorted in English.

Mendoza chuckled, apparently knowing enough English to understand that much.

“I'm sorry,” Ortega said, “but I believed then, as I do now, that it's extremely important. Lazaro Serrano is simply too high up in the Mexican government to let this opportunity pass—not to mention, he's very probably the one who ordered the assassination of Alice Downly. If he didn't order it, then he certainly made it possible. What I don't understand, however, is why Langley doesn't want this handled by Mexico station. My people are more than capable of handling the logistics of such an op and providing you a safe place to stay.”

Vaught cleared his throat, glancing at Crosswhite. “Well, my new friend here has already explained the reasoning behind that—at least he has to me.”

Ortega wasn't interested in making eye contact with Crosswhite. “Then Mr. Crosswhite is privy to information that hasn't been made available to me.” Crosswhite offered no explanation because Ortega wasn't cleared to know about the ATRU. Ortega turned his gaze on Mendoza. “Agent Mendoza?”

Mendoza leaned forward, pressing his palms together. “The PFM agrees this is very, very important,” he began in Spanish. “We've suspected Serrano for some time, but there's never been any evidence against him before now.” He looked up at Vaught. “The PFM is pleased with what you've done. You've helped to shed light on the corruption inside the Federal Police, and you've given us our first real evidence against Lazaro Serrano.”

Vaught always knew when his balls were being buttered. “Yesterday you were pissed I'd blown your cover. What's changed?”

Mendoza sat back. “My point of view. Yesterday I had just killed five men. I had never killed anyone before, and I was very affected by it. The true purpose of a deep-cover operation is to obtain information, to obtain evidence, and had you not taken action yesterday, I never would have been in a position to witness Serrano order a murder with my own eyes. That action alone proves he is far more than complicit—he is an actual decision maker within the cartels. This is very significant information. Also, if not for you, I would not have been there to confirm the existence of the gringo sniper. Until now, this man has only been a ghost—always rumored, never seen. So today it is obvious to me and to my superiors that you have done Mexico a service.

“Now we must plan together how best to use this information to our mutual advantage. It is true we can arrest Serrano for ordering your murder, but he has powerful allies, and our word might not be enough to gain a conviction on this charge alone. Our court system does not work the same as in the US—there are no juries, for example—so it would be best to draw Serrano into a trap; to find a way for the PFM to catch him in the act of conspiring with known cartel members.”

“And exactly how do you plan on doing that?” Vaught asked.

“Right now we have two distinct advantages,” Mendoza went on. “One, he has no idea that we now know for certain what he is. Two, he thinks you're dead. Tomorrow the PFM will announce that your body was found in a building along with the bodies of five known
cartel members. No one will be sure of exactly what happened because a grenade blast will have left the crime scene impossible to decipher. This will put you out of Serrano's mind. Then, when the time is right, after he has forgotten all about you, you can magically reappear—but only at a moment when he has begun to feel vulnerable in other ways. The idea is to scare him into making a mistake.”

“So you're planning to apply pressure in the meantime,” Crosswhite said.

Mendoza grinned. “Yes. Pressure creates stress, and men under stress are prone to making mistakes at crucial moments. Up until this point, Serrano has lived a stress-free existence, with little more to worry about than which woman to take to bed on a given night. With your help, Agent Vaught, we're going to change that.”

“And the gringo sniper?” Vaught asked.

Mendoza turned to look at Crosswhite, saying in slightly accented English, “I understand you've had some experience in this area, Agent Crosswhite. Or is my information incorrect?”

Crosswhite looked around the room, chuckling under the collective gaze. “Well, hey, I'm just here to provide the beer on this one. I'm not going operational.”

Paolina was staring hard at Mendoza, her eyes like brown bullets.

“Yes,” Mendoza continued, switching back to Spanish, “I understand, but the PFM would very much appreciate your help in this operation. We feel it's time you gave something back to Mexico in exchange for the unfettered privacy you have enjoyed as a guest in our country.”

Crosswhite glanced at Paolina, who now looked like she wanted to claw out Mendoza's eyeballs. Then he looked back at the PFM agent and laughed. “Yeah, okay, sure. I'd love a chance to give back.”

“Excellent,” Mendoza said, rubbing his palms on his knees. “Mexico is grateful for your generosity.”

Vaught snickered, leaning across the coffee table to offer Crosswhite his hand. “Welcome to the team,
champ
.”

Paolina jerked the stun gun from between the sofa cushions and
leapt over the table after him. Crosswhite grabbed her around the waist as Vaught shoved himself over backward in the
equipal
, only narrowly avoiding the outstretched weapon, its cruel blue arc of electricity snapping and crackling in the air as Crosswhite swung her around with a
“Whoa!”
and lifted her off the floor, setting her down safely on the far side of the room and blocking her path. “Easy, baby.”

9

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

10:30 HOURS

The next morning, Lazaro Serrano was eating breakfast on the patio behind his expansive home. A young woman in a green-and-red ­bikini swam in the pool, pushing around a Chihuahua on a small rubber raft. The little dog was barking at her and wagging its tail, and she was laughing and calling for Serrano to look. He smiled and waved and went on eating. He was fifty years old with a belly and thinning hair, bushy eyebrows, and a thick black mustache.

Oscar Martinez, his chief assistant and confidant, came onto the patio with the morning edition of
El Universal
and sat down across from Serrano; one of the servants had already set a place for him. He was a slender man in his midforties, with a head of thick, dark hair and a boyish face that easily shaved ten years off his age. “The body of the American DSS agent has been found,” he said, sipping from a porcelain coffee cup.

Serrano looked up from his breakfast with a measure of surprise. “So soon? What did those fools do with it?”

Oscar rubbed his hands together before reaching to put a spoonful of sugar into the coffee. “Well, it seems they did not do anything with it. The body was found in the same building where you last saw him, along with the bodies of six of Ruvalcaba's people.” Hector Ruvalcaba was a powerful narcotics trafficker—a
narcotraficante
, also referred to as a
narco
. The year before, with Serrano's help, Ruvalcaba had escaped from a maximum security prison via a three-quarter-mile-long tunnel dug from beyond the facility's walls to directly beneath his cell. Serrano had since helped him take over the southern narcotics trade, leaving Antonio Castañeda as his only competitor. Castañeda controlled the North. “They were all killed by a grenade blast. It seems to have been accidental.”

Serrano went back to eating. “One of those idiots must have dropped it and blown them all up.” He shook his head in disgust. “Why am I surrounded by fools, Oscar? Tell me that.”

Oscar smiled and sipped his coffee. “I do not know.”

“You're sure the American is dead?”

The younger man set the cup down on the saucer, wiping his mouth with a linen napkin. “Yes,” he said, clearing his throat. “His name was Chance Vaught, a US Army veteran.”

“Are you sure it's the same man? The agent I saw on the floor was Hispanic.”

Oscar nodded confidently. “Yes, it's him. His father is a gringo, but his mother is Mexican. They're shipping the remains back to the United States this week.”

“Good,” Serrano said, taking a sip of freshly made orange-carrot juice. “We don't need him stinking up Mexican soil.” He sat back with a smile and wiped his mouth. “Be sure to send my condolences to the Vaught family through the American Embassy. It's important to maintain good relations with our neighbors.”

“I will,” Oscar said. “I've already sent them to the embassy itself.
Should we expect problems concerning the three federal policemen that Vaught killed?” He tapped the edition of
El Universal
. “They're on the front page today.”

Serrano shrugged, picking up his knife and fork. “That's Captain Espinosa's problem.” Espinosa was the Federale captain who had turned Vaught over to the detectives working for Ruvalcaba. “He's got people inside the city police. He's a true professional, that one, a man I can count on—like you.”

A thin smile spread across Oscar's lips, and he wondered for perhaps the thousandth time what would happen if Serrano ever found out he was gay.
I'd probably disappear too
, he told himself, making a mental note to increase his vigilance.

“Will the project in Toluca still be going forward?” he asked. Serrano and Ruvalcaba had been trying to turn the town, located southwest of Mexico City, into a trafficking hub for the past six months.

“Yes, of course,” Serrano said, cutting off a piece of steak. “Why wouldn't it be?”

“Well, I thought you might want to postpone it because of all that's happened here.”

Serrano stabbed his fork into the piece of meat and pointed at Oscar with it. “I'll tell you this, Oscar. That chief of police in Toluca is a brave man; a true Mexican with very large
huevos
, but he is another fool. Why can't he see which way things are going in this country and go with them? Because I tell you this, my friend, sooner or later, those stupid gringos in the North are going to see there is no way to win this useless war. Then marijuana will become legal, and all of this” —he waved his free hand at the estancia—“all of this money, it goes away. This kind of business cannot last forever. So why doesn't this policeman in Toluca accept Ruvalcaba's offer now to secure himself a future? Why does he throw his life away so uselessly? I will tell you why: it is because he is a fool. A brave fool, but a fool.”

He poked the meat into his mouth and chewed as he spoke. “We all want a stronger Mexico. Me more than anyone. I am a true patriot; a man of my country. But this strength cannot come without
money. And am I not generous with my money? Do I not give back to the people? This idiot policeman could do the same”—Serrano stabbed a finger against the side of his head in frustration—“but he is too stubborn to listen! No,
this brave man
, he is going to rebuild the country all by himself, like Pancho Villa reborn. Well, Pancho Villa was gunned down in the dirt like a dog, my friend, and this Toluca man is no better than him.”

“Lazaro!” the young woman called from the pool. “When are you coming to swim, my love?”

He smiled and held out his hands. “Later,
mi amor
!” He turned to look at Oscar. “Do you see? I am not even finished eating, and she wants me to go in swimming already. Like I have no other responsibilities besides swimming with a dog that pisses in my pool.” He shook his head and went back to cutting his steak. “Fools, Oscar. I am surrounded by fools.”