Cartel (10 page)

Scott nodded. "Something like that."

Benny Alvarez shook her head like she was used to it. She pointed to the outdoor tables. "You want to have a seat?"

Scott glanced around. "Isn't this a bit...public?"

"Safe as anywhere else in Mexico."

"Which means not safe at all, right?"

Benny shrugged. "Probably not. But especially not for a DEA agent without a gun."

"What makes you think I'm not carrying-"

"Are you?" She stepped close and ran her hands around his waist, giving him a quick but expert pat-down.

"Hey," Scott said as he shoved her away.

She shot a wicked smile at him. "Told you."

"Are you nuts?"

"Are you wearing a wire?" Benny asked.

"Lady, I just got suspended. Meaning no badge and no gun. And no, I'm not wearing a wire. You called this meet-ing, not me. If you've got something to say, quit playing games and just say it."

She pointed to the nearest sidewalk table. Scott kept looking at her, trying to read what was behind those dark eyes. Finally, he nodded and walked to the small plastic ta-ble.

* * * *

Marcus watched through a pair of ten-power binoculars as Greene sat down at the table opposite the woman. "Who is that?" he asked Cyril through the open hatch.

"He's supposed to be meeting a cop named Benny Alva-rez," Cyril said from the rear compartment.

"I know who he's supposed to be meeting," Marcus said. "What I'm asking you is who is that woman?"

"I've got her zoomed and I'm running facial recognition on her right now. It's going to take a few minutes."

"How many is a few?"

"We're running off a wireless connection," Cyril said. "It's not like we're hard-wired into the system."

"How long?" Marcus said, still looking through the bin-oculars.

"I've seen it take up to half an hour."

Marcus sighed. Then he keyed his headset. "Sierra One, Sierra Two."

"Go," came Gavin's voice over Marcus's earpiece.

"We have eyes on Tango One. He's meeting at the café with a Mexican female."

"Who is she?"

"Unknown at this time," Marcus said. "We're running face-rec on her."

"Do you have a hot mic on his phone?"

Marcus lowered the binoculars. "Stand by one," he said into his headset. Then he leaned toward the open hatch. "You heard him?"

"I heard him," Cyril said. "We don't have that software package onboard."

"Why the fuck not?" Marcus said. "No, wait. You tell him."

"You're the team leader," Cyril said.

"This is a tech issue. You're in charge of tech. You tell him."

"Shit," Cyril said. Then he keyed his own headset mi-crophone and called Sierra One.

"Go ahead," Gavin said.

"Sir, we don't have that software with us right now."

"Why the hell not?" Gavin snapped.

"I was upgrading the system when you...when we got called out tonight, and the mission parameters were only to track Tango One."

"Don't tell me about the mission parameters, son. I wrote the goddamned op order."

"Yes, sir," Cyril said.

"You're wired in," Gavin said. "Can't you...download it or whatever it is that you do?"

"Yes, sir, I can."

"Then do it."

"It's going to take a little time, sir. It's a sizable pro-gram."

"How much time?"

"An hour."

"That's unacceptable," Gavin said. "Marcus, you there?"

"I'm here, sir."

"Designate the female Tango Two. If they split up, you stay on one, I'll follow two. I want a hot mic on his phone ASAP. I want to hear what they're saying."

"Roger that, sir," Marcus said.

The waiter asked what they wanted. "Nothing for me," Scott answered, then added, "Some water, please." The waiter, who was probably the owner, a big man in a white T-shirt stretched nearly to its ripping point, gave Scott a sharp look that said, If you don't want anything, why are you wasting my time and sitting at my table?

"Dos Modelos, por favor," Benny said quickly. Then af-ter the waiter walked back inside, she told Scott, "You wouldn't want to drink the water anyway."

"Were you Mike Cassidy's source?"

"I was his lover."

Embarrassed, Scott cleared his throat. "I didn't know that."

"We didn't take an ad out in the newspaper or anything, but it wasn't much of a secret. He stayed with me a couple of times a week, and about once a month or so I'd go up and spend the weekend with him."

"I didn't know much about Mike's...personal life."

"He was divorced."

"I knew that."

"No, I mean he was divorced when we met," Benny said. "I had nothing to do with whatever happened with his wife."

"I wasn't suggesting-"

"Legally, I'm still married," Benny said. "But my hus-band disappeared five years ago."

"Disappeared how?"

"Los Desaparecidos. The Disappeared. According to the government, more than twenty-six thousand people have disappeared in Mexico since the so-called war on drugs be-gan. My husband was one of them."

"I'm sorry."

The waiter, owner, whatever he was, came back and set two opened bottles of Modelo Especial on the table. Drops of condensation ran down the sides of the bottles.

"Gracias," Scott said as the man walked away.

"You don't speak much Spanish, do you?" Benny said.

"I'm trying to learn."

She raised her bottle. "And we appreciate the effort. Salud."

He raised his bottle and touched hers. They each took a sip. The beer was cold and felt good going down his throat.

"I'm sorry about your agents," she said. "I've lost many colleagues myself."

"Thank you."

"Why are you here?"

"You called me, remember?" Scott said. "Well, not me personally, but I got your message."

"What do you want?"

"To get the people responsible for murdering my agents."

"Including Michael?"

"Of course."

"I could give you the names of all four of the police of-ficers who were there this morning, but it wouldn't help you."

"Why not?"

"They're being transferred tomorrow," Benny said.

"Transferred where?"

"South. Far enough away from the border so you can't come across and get them, like you did with Sergeant Ortiz."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Scott said.

Benny laughed. "Michael told me about you."

"About me?" Scott was surprised.

She nodded.

"What did he say?"

"That you were tough. He called you a..." She snapped her fingers trying to recall something. "What was that word he used...throwdown. Does that make sense?"

"You mean a throwback?"

"Yes, yes, yes. That's it. A throwback. What does that mean?"

"He didn't tell you?"

She smiled. "I want to see if he told me the truth."

"It means somebody who's old school. From a past era. With old-fashioned ways."

"Un anticuado."

"I guess."

Benny smiled again. "He told me the truth, then."

"About me or about everything?"

"No man tells the truth about everything."

Scott's only answer to that was a shrug. Then he asked, "How did you two meet?"

"He tried to sign me up as a CI," she said. "I told him to make love to me instead."

Scott cleared his throat again. "I don't really need to hear all the ins and outs. Oh, shit. I'm sorry. That came out totally wrong."

Benny stared at him with a look of confusion. "I don't understand."

"Nothing. Nothing at all. It was just...an expression, and in this situation it could be...taken out of context."

"Oh," she said, still wearing that same confused look.

Scott took a sip of beer to try to cover his embarrass-ment.

"I'm just messing with you," Benny said, her face break-ing into a big grin. "I get it, in and out...like sex." She laughed. "But you should see your face right now. You're the reddest white man I've ever seen."

Scott had felt the blood rush to his face and knew he was blushing badly.

"Michael was a really good lover," Benny said, a sly grin still on her face.

"Like I said, I don't really need to hear..."

Nodding, she said, "All the ins and outs."

"Right."

"So what do you want to talk about?"

"You tell me," Scott said. Then before she could an-swer, he said, "By the way, how do you know my boss's tel-ephone number?"

"Michael gave it to me. He said if anything ever hap-pened to him and I needed to talk to someone, to call Señor Peterson. Michael said I could trust him."

"But why did you call tonight?"

"Sergeant Ortiz doesn't know anything," Benny said.

Scott Greene had serious doubts about whether he could trust Benny Alvarez. Certainly, Mike Cassidy had trusted her. But he had ended up dead. And apparently Glenn Peterson trusted her, at least enough to send Scott down here to meet her, alone, at night, unarmed, and while on suspension. The question was, should he trust her, and if so, how much? What alternative did he have? None that he could think of. So holding back wasn't going to get him anywhere. Conversely, if he trusted her, maybe she would trust him enough to tell him something he needed to know.

"We don't have Ortiz," Scott said.

"I know you took him from a hacienda this morning," Benny said. "Four men were killed. Two of them were off-duty police officers."

"I didn't know that."

"What's that word you use, about la luna, the light from the moon? It means working-"

"Moonlighting," he said. "Working an extra job."

She nodded. "The two policias were moonlighting."

He let a moment pass. He really hadn't known there were any police officers at the villa, but even if he had, he doubted it would have made any difference. He would have taken his team there anyway. He wondered which ones they were.

"Why did you say that you don't have Sergeant Ortiz?" Benny asked.

"We did have him. But somebody took him."

"Someone took him?" Benny asked. "From the DEA?"

"Two men with a court order," Scott said. "Or some-thing that looked like a court order."

"I don't understand."

"Neither do I, but the bottom line is we don't have Ortiz anymore."

"Were they Anglos?"

He nodded.

"When I said Sergeant Ortiz doesn't know anything, that wasn't correct," Benny said. "He does know one thing. And that is why he was taken from you. Before you could make him tell you."

"What does he know?"

"That Los Zetas didn't kill Michael."

Scott shook his head. "We have a video that shows the men who kidnapped him wearing black military-style uni-forms and Santa Muerte masks."

"They were trying to look like Los Zetas."

Scott remembered the tattoo Garza had pointed out on the dead gunman at the villa. "Say for the sake of argument that I believe you, that the men who kidnapped Mike Cassi-dy weren't Los Zetas. Then who were they?"

Benny glanced at the café to make sure no one inside was too curious about their conversation. Then she whis-pered, "Sinaloa."

"How do you know that?"

"I saw the photograph."

"What photograph?"

"The one you sent to us," Benny said.

He knew she was talking about the screen capture they had lifted from the bank surveillance video that showed Mike Cassidy pulling the mask off one of his captors.

"We sent that photo to every police agency in northern Mexico, hoping someone could identify the man in it."

"A lot of people know who he is."

"Then why wouldn't anyone help us?"

"This is Mexico."

Scott didn't know what to say to that. He'd been on the border for six months and in that time he'd had to face the fact that there were vast cultural differences between the United States and Mexico, but decency and depravity exist-ed on both sides of the border. He had hoped that DEA's re-quest to law enforcement officers in Mexico for help in iden-tifying the man in the photograph would appeal to their sense of decency. Apparently, it had not.

"Do you know who he is?" Scott asked.

She nodded.

"Who?"

She hesitated and glanced again at the café. Then she said, "His name is Santiago Estrada. He is called el Cubano, the Cuban, and he is the leader of Los Negros, the...how do you say? La unidad paramilitar?"

"I know what Los Negros is," Scott said. "You're talk-ing about the paramilitary unit, the enforcement arm of the Sinaloa cartel."

"Sí," Benny said.

"And the man in the photograph, you're sure he's..."

"Santiago Estrada." She nodded vigorously. "El Cubano. I'm sure."

Scott knew the name, but he'd never seen a picture of the man. Estrada was careful. As far as DEA knew, he'd never been arrested, at least not under that name; nor had he ever served in the Mexican military, which photographed and fingerprinted all of its members, again, at least not under that name. If it was true that the man in the photo was Santi-ago Estrada, this was the break in the case Scott had spent the last three months looking for. But he sensed there was even more. Maybe it was his cop intuition, maybe just wish-ful thinking, but he had the unmistakable feeling that Benny Alvarez was still holding something back. "Is there anything else?" he asked. "Besides Estrada?"

"Yes."

"What is it?"

Benny stared at him for a long time. She was trying to take his measure. He understood that. Finally, she said, "Mi-chael had a video."

The bad news was that the shotgun microphone had proven totally ineffective. The noise from the café-the sounds of the soccer match and the accompanying shouts and cheers from the customers watching it-drowned out the conversa-tion between Scott Greene and the woman. The good news was that Cyril had overestimated the time it would take to download the program he needed to hot mic Greene's cell phone.

The once top secret program, exposed by the media a few years ago, was still the best way to monitor face-to-face conversations. Though it involved a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo that Marcus couldn't begin to fathom, the bottom line was that the program could activate a smart phone's built-in microphone and use it to eavesdrop on anyone within the microphone's audible range. Even if the phone was turned off, the program could remotely switch it on. All the pro-gram needed was the phone number and the name of the car-rier.