Cartel (15 page)

"It's been in my family a long time," Rodrigo said. "My grandfather took it from an American soldier when Black Jack Pershing and George Patton came across the river hunt-ing for Pancho Villa. I've heard stories that my grandfather was a Villista. But then again, I've also heard he rode with Zapata."

"Maybe he did both," Benny said with touch of pride.

Rodrigo smiled. "Maybe he did." Then the priest turned to a small table standing beside the door. A wicker basket sat on top of the table. He laid the old revolver inside the basket and covered it with a cloth napkin. When he turned back he was smiling. "Like I said, this is a bad neighborhood and you can't be too careful." He looked at his niece. "But I bet you didn't come just to hear stories about your great-great-uncle, did you?"

Benny shook her head. "We're in trouble, tío."

"Come into the kitchen," Rodrigo said. "I was just sit-ting down to a late supper. Join me, please."

In the kitchen, Scott, Benny, and Father Rodrigo sat at a rough wooden table eating cheese, crackers, and hard salami and drinking wine from hammered steel cups. The rectory was a comfortable two-bedroom cottage that had been added on to the church more than a hundred years ago, Father Rodrigo said, when San Judas Tadeo was a thriving parish and had needed two priests.

"I practically grew up here," Benny said. "My favorite place to play was the wine cellar. Do you remember, tío?"

"I remember more than once I had to climb down that old ladder to get you out."

"There were no lights," Benny said. "And sometimes my flashlight would go out."

"The reason there weren't any lights was because it's not really a wine cellar," Rodrigo said. "I used to store wine down there." He smiled and pointed to the dark green, unla-beled bottle on the table. "Medicinal wine like this, of course. But that's not why it was built. It was a priest hole."

"A what?" Benny asked.

"An escape tunnel," Rodrigo explained. "A lot of churches added them back in the 1920s during La Cristiada, when President Calles made most of the teachings of the Catholic Church illegal and sent the army to hunt down priests who were still celebrating the sacraments."

"I'm sorry," Scott said, "but I've never heard of...What did you call it?"

"La Cristiada," Rodrigo said. "In English it's called the Cristero War, but it's not very well known outside of Mexi-co, and even here, despite the fact that the government mur-dered nearly a hundred priests, most people have forgotten it."

Benny shuddered. "I just thought it was a wine cellar."

"You were a little girl having fun," Rodrigo said. "There was no reason to tell you."

Scott ate another cracker topped with cheese. Then Fa-ther Rodrigo poured more wine into all three cups. "It's good, isn't it?" he said.

"Delicious," Scott agreed after a sip.

"It's made here in Nuevo Laredo," the priest said, "from Mexican grapes grown in the Guadalupe Valley in Baja."

"And I bet the little old ladies donate it to you by the case," Benny said.

Rodrigo gave his niece a devilish smile. "Not all of them are old."

Benny blushed.

* * * *

After they cleared the table, Benny asked her uncle if they could use his computer.

Rodrigo didn't ask any questions. He simply showed Benny and Scott into his study, which turned out to be a cramped room the size of a broom closet, with just enough space between the walls to wedge a small desk.

A jumble of papers covered half the desk. On the other half squatted an old computer monitor, the kind shaped like a pyramid lying on its side, with a convex screen, probably with vacuum tubes inside its hard plastic shell. A banged-up keyboard and a plug-in mouse lay in front of the monitor. The monitor, the keyboard, and the mouse all had wires run-ning down to a huge rectangular central processing unit, the old "tower" design, which stood under the desk.

Scott and Benny squeezed into the room and stood shoulder to shoulder. Father Rodrigo stood behind them in the doorway. "Does it have a USB port?" Scott said.

"To be honest," the priest said, "I'm not sure what that is. I don't know much about computers. Someone donated that one."

"Let's see what the keyboard is plugged into," Benny said as she dropped to her knees on the hardwood floor and crawled under the desk. She slid the CPU out enough to get a look behind it. "There are two USB ports. The keyboard is plugged into one, and the mouse is plugged into the other one."

"We probably don't need the keyboard," Scott said.

Benny unplugged the keyboard and inserted the flash drive into its spot. Then she crawled out from under the desk.

Scott pressed the POWER button.

"I'll leave you two to your work," Father Rodrigo said as he walked away.

The system took forever to boot up, the old monitor flashing long strings of DOS code during the whole process. Finally, a primitive version of Microsoft Windows appeared on the screen. Naturally, it was the Spanish edition. Scott pointed to the screen. "Can you...?"

Benny sat in the small, unpadded wooden chair and rolled the mouse around to make the pointer show up. Then she launched the file manager, found the USB drive, and opened it. There was only one file on the drive. It was named meeting.wmv. "There it is," she said.

And Scott was sure her voice held a hint of apprehen-sion. He was sure because he felt the exact same way. They'd almost been killed several times tonight trying to protect this video. What the hell could be on it that was so important? He was about to find out. He took a deep breath, then said, "Open it."

Benny double-clicked the file and the Windows video player started up. There was a delay lasting nearly a minute before the video actually appeared on the monitor, and then it was in a window that only filled a quarter of the screen. The vid-eo started playing. It was poor-quality footage shot from a low angle in what looked like a luxury hotel suite. Clearly it had been taken with a hidden camera. Scott had seen a thou-sand videos just like it taken during DEA undercover meet-ings.

There were two men in the frame, both Mexican, sitting around a coffee table. One man sat on a sofa, the other in an armchair. There were drinks on the table.

"Can you make it bigger?" Scott said.

Benny double-clicked the title bar and the window ex-panded to fill the entire screen. A time stamp in the bottom right corner indicated the video had been shot five months ago.

The man in the chair was in his fifties, thin, urbane, with good posture, dressed in a light gray suit. The other man was younger, forties, overweight and sloppy, wearing a tan guay-abera shirt and brown slacks. He was leaning back, semi-reclined, slouching really, against the corner of the sofa far-thest away from the man in the suit.

A single audio speaker stood next to the monitor. Scott turned the volume knob. On the monitor the man in the suit was speaking in Spanish, but the words seemed garbled. "Can you understand him?" Scott asked.

Benny shook her head. "Not everything." Then she pointed to the screen. "He just said, 'to the border'."

Then from off-camera came an American voice speaking English: "Gentlemen, please, let's stick to English. My Spanish is passable, but I don't..." The next words were gar-bled. Then, "...tions or misunderstandings."

The man in the suit nodded, then said to the man on the sofa, "In exchange for your help, we guarantee protection of your shipments to the U.S. border."

The man on the sofa said, "Que sobre..." Then switched to English. "What about beyond the border?"

"A la Madre," Benny said.

Scott reached over her shoulder and clicked the mouse to stop the video. "You know them?"

She pointed to the man on the sofa. "That's Javier Gutierrez. El Gordo."

Scott stared hard at the man's face, but it was difficult to make out much detail on the low-quality video. But he knew the name. Every DEA agent-especially those on the border-knew the name Javier Gutierrez, the man who had proudly adopted the sobriquet El Gordo, the fat man.

Gutierrez was the leader of the biggest and most power-ful drug cartel in Mexico, the Sinaloa cartel, and he was the largest supplier of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and metham-phetamine to the United States. He was also the most wanted man in Mexico and was under indictment in the United States for drug trafficking, racketeering, money laundering, kidnapping, and murder, which put him No. 1 on DEA's top ten most wanted list.

Scott touched the stilled image of the man in the suit. "What about him?"

"Oscar Ramirez," she said. "The deputy attorney general of Mexico."

"Son of a bitch," Scott said.

"He was a personal friend of the president of Mexico."

"Was?"

"He's dead." Benny touched the time stamp with her finger. "He was assassinated a month after this video was taken."

"Who killed him?"

"Like most murders in Mexico, it's still unsolved."

Scott clicked the mouse and restarted the video. He moved the slider back a few seconds and watched again as the second highest-ranking law enforcement officer in Mexi-co said to the world's biggest drug trafficker: "In exchange for your help, we guarantee protection of your shipments to the U.S. border."

Then Gutierrez said, "Que sobre..." and continued in English, "What about beyond the border?"

Then another man stepped into the frame, wearing a black suit that made Scott think of an undertaker. He was only visible from the chest down, but as he set his drink on the table, his face dropped into the frame. He said, "I can promise you protection all the way to fucking Canada if you want."

"Holy shit!" Scott said as he reached for the mouse, but he missed and sent it skidding across the desk. It almost tumbled off, but Benny caught it and stopped the video.

"What is it?"

Scott tapped the man's face. "That's the son of a bitch who snatched Ortiz away from me."

"Do you know him?"

"He said his name is Jones and that he works for the State Department."

Benny turned to look at Scott. "But you don't believe him?"

"About as far as I could throw him."

"What?"

"No," Scott said. "I don't believe him."

"Then who is he really?"

"If I had to guess, I'd say Agency."

"What agency?"

"The Agency," Scott said. "CIA."

Benny nodded and restarted the video.

Jones sits on the opposite end of the sofa from Gutierrez, closest to Ramirez. The American and the Mexican deputy attorney general each sip their drinks. Then Jones turns to Gutierrez. "And all we want in return...is your help de-stroying Los Zetas."

Gutierrez smiles. "Can't the all-powerful American government destroy a single Mexican cartel? You conquered Iraq and Afghanistan. You killed Osama bin Laden. Your bombs make the earth shake. You have more money than the entire rest of the world."

"It's better for us if you do it," Jones says.

"And afterword," Gutierrez says, "what happens to the Nuevo Laredo plaza?"

Jones and Ramirez share a look. Then Jones says, "It's yours."

Ramirez adds, "The cartel de Sinaloa can have the en-tire border."

"Why?" El Gordo asks. "Why give me the border?"

"Certain people in my country are fans of your presi-dent's policies, particularly his more moderate stance on what we euphemistically call the War on Drugs. And those people are eager to see the PRI win the next presidential election and remain in power for years to come."

"Better the devil you know, eh?" Gutierrez says.

Jones smiles. "Better the devil who is your friend."

Gutierrez turns to Ramirez. "Your guarantee, it comes from..."

"El presidente."

Gutierrez looks at Jones. "And yours?"

"Very high up," Jones says.

"How high?"

"The top."

Gutierrez is silent for a moment. The other two men watch him. Finally, he picks up his glass and stands. His head is out of the picture. He raises his drink. "Salud."

Jones and Ramirez stand with their drinks in hand. The three of them clink glasses. Jones and Ramirez say simulta-neously, "Salud."

After long pulls on their cocktails, everyone shakes hands. They exchange a few more words. Then Gutierrez leaves.

"You think he'll go through with it?" Jones asks.

"He hates Los Zetas," Ramirez says. "He probably would have done it without the guarantees."

"I wanted him locked in."

"What if he turns on you?"

"Manuel Noriega turned on us," Jones says. "Pablo Escobar turned on us. Everyone turns on us eventually. And everyone pays the price."

"Plata o plomo?" Ramirez says. "Silver or lead?"

Jones smiles. "Exactly."

They drain their glasses and shake hands. Jones leaves.

A minute later, Ramirez walks toward the camera. He bends down and reaches for it. The screen goes black.

The entire video lasted twenty-two minutes.

"Holy shit," Scott said.

"Yeah," Benny answered. "Holy shit."

Scott stared at the blank monitor. "We just saw the deputy attorney general of Mexico give the northern third of your country to the Sinaloa cartel."

"With the help of your CIA," Benny snapped.

Scott started to formulate a response in defense of his country. But he quit before he'd even formed the words. She was right. She knew it. And he knew it. "How did Ramirez die?"

"He went to work every day in an armored car with a police escort. One night when the car pulled up to his apart-ment building in Mexico City, there was a well-dressed cou-ple kissing by the main door. When Ramirez got close to them, the couple stopped kissing. They had a machine gun pressed between them. The man shot Ramirez and his two bodyguards, and the woman threw hand grenades at the po-lice cars. Then two motorcycles picked up the man and woman and they all got away."

"It had to be Los Zetas," Scott said. "They found out Ramirez cut a deal with Gutierrez to give the entire border to Sinaloa."

"Maybe it was the CIA."

"They had no reason to kill him. They had what they wanted, a three-way deal between the CIA, the Mexican government, and the Sinaloa cartel."