Cartel (6 page)

In the far corner of his field of vision, Scott saw Jones lead Ortiz to the elevator. As soon Jones pressed the down call button, the bell dinged and the elevator door opened. Ortiz stepped into the car. Jones held the door open and looked at his partner. The big man leaned into Scott and pushed him harder against the wall, putting so much pressure on his ribs they felt like they were going to crack. Then the man released him and stepped back. Scott's head was spinning and his legs felt wobbly. He had to brace himself against the wall to keep from falling down.

The man stood staring at him from six feet away. Then it clicked. The suit had thrown him off. That and the fact that this morning a quarter of the man's face had been hidden behind a pair of dark aviator sunglasses.

"State Department, my ass," Scott said, his words com-ing out hoarse and cracked. "I recognize you from this morn-ing."

A hint of a smile crossed the big man's face. Then he turned around and marched to the elevator. He and Jones stepped inside and the door closed. Scott heard the elevator car descending. He eased himself away from the wall and lurched down the hallway toward the restroom.

In the men's room, Scott splashed cold water on his face and took several deep breaths. He looked at himself in the mirror and saw that the man staring back at him looked like he had just been mugged. Which is exactly how Scott felt.

A few minutes later, he swiped his key card past a read-er mounted on the wall next to an unmarked door in the hallway and stepped into the DEA office. He headed for the file room, intending to pull every case file Mike Cassidy had ever worked on in the Laredo Field Office. Somewhere in all those investigative and surveillance reports there might be a clue as to the identities of those two dickheads who had just stolen his prisoner.

“I've been looking for you, Greene,” came a familiar voice. Scott turned around and saw Special Agent in Charge Robert Stockwell striding toward him. Stockwell, the man in charge of DEA's Houston Division, was in his early fifties, still several years away from mandatory retirement and ea-ger for one more promotion, some headquarters post with a good pay raise and a significant cost-of-living allowance to bump up his high three, the salary figure on which agents' pensions were based. Stockwell was a short man with big head, made even bigger by his wavy pompadour. He seemed proud of his full head of hair and wanted to make sure peo-ple noticed it. Street agents called him Bobby Socks. Scott had no idea where the nickname came from but it seemed appropriate.

“You found me,” Scott said.

“You look like hell.”

“It's been a rough day.”

“Your office,” the SAC said. “Follow me.”

Despite it being Scott Greene's office, Stockwell took a seat behind Scott's desk, in Scott's chair, which he had spe-cial ordered and paid for himself. For a moment, Scott just stood there, wondering what he was supposed to do, before deciding that no matter what the reason he didn't have to stand in front of his own desk like a kid being called into the principal's office. So he pulled up one of the two extra chairs he kept in his office for visitors and dropped onto the thinly cushioned seat. Then he tossed the habeas corpus onto the desk.

“What's that?” the SAC said without touching the paper.

“Two suits just took my prisoner.”

“I know.”

“Who were they?”

“State Department.”

“They show you any ID?”

“They had a court order signed by a federal judge.”

Scott nodded toward the paper. “That court order?”

The SAC stared at the folded sheet of paper but didn't move to pick it up. So Scott picked it up, unfolded it, and handed it to him. Stockwell took it and gave it a cursory glance, then said, “What about it?”

“You notice how the line where the judge's name is supposed to be typed is blank, and how you can't really make out his signature?”

“Are you saying it's fake?”

Scott looked at him for several seconds, wondering if Stockwell already knew what was going on, or maybe he didn't know and didn't want to know. Either way, this situa-tion had gone way above Scott's GS-14 pay grade and he needed help. “Yes, sir, I'm saying it's a fake."

Stockwell dropped the order on the desk. “It looks legit-imate to me. And so did the agents who brought it.”

“What about identification?”

“One of them,” Stockwell said, though he sounded de-fensive. “I don't remember his name, but he had legitimate credentials from the U.S. State Department.”

“Why did they want Ortiz?”

“They didn't tell me,” Stockwell said. Then in a much sharper tone, he added, “I assumed it was because he was a foreign national who had just been kidnapped from his home country.”

“Did they say where they were taking him?”

“I didn't ask.”

“They weren't State Department,” Scott said. “They were Agency.”

“Why would the CIA be interested in a Mexican police sergeant?” Stockwell said dismissively. “You think that rube has some important insight into world geopolitics that the CIA doesn't?”

Scott thought Stockwell was giving the CIA too much credit, but he kept that to himself. Instead, he said, “Ortiz was a good informant. He gave Mike Cassidy information that led to several big cases. There's no telling what he knows or why the CIA wants him, but the fact is they did want him and now they have him.”

“I don't accept your premise that they were Agency, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is they had a court or-der and we—”

“A bogus court order.”

“You don't know that.”

Scott picked up the order. “Let's call the clerk of court and find out.”

The SAC reached over the desk and snatched the paper from Scott hands. “The prisoner has been transferred to an-other agency. End of story.”

“How did they know he was here?”

“I guess he used his one phone call.”

“To call the State Department?” Scott said, not even try-ing to hide his sarcasm.

Stockwell took a deep breath and leaned back in Scott's chair. He looked aggravated but quite comfortable. Scott knew the chair was comfortable. The reason he had paid for the chair himself was because of a compressed disc in his lower back, the result of a fast rope out of a helicopter in Afghanistan that hadn't gone as planned. The office chairs DEA bought on government contract did nothing to relieve the pain in his back. In fact, they aggravated it. So he had shelled out nearly $800 on a chair with a specially-designed ergonomic back rest and adjustable lumbar support. “Just so we're clear,” Stockwell said, “where did you apprehend Ser-geant Felix Ortiz?”

Scott hesitated. He glanced around his desk, half-expecting to see a recorder going. Of course, just because he didn't see one didn't mean there wasn't one.

“Do you need me to repeat the question, Agent Greene?”

“I apprehended him in a villa approximately thirty miles south of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.”

“You are aware, are you not, that extraordinary rendi-tions are illegal and a violation of DEA policy?”

“Felix Ortiz helped murder one of my agents,” Scott said.

“That doesn't change the policy.”

“Isn't it the policy of this agency and the entire Justice Department to go after people who murder federal agents, no matter where they're hiding?”

“It is,” Stockwell said, “but only on a case-by-case basis and only after the proper authorizations have been ob-tained.”

“But we do them,” Scott said. “We perform extraordi-nary renditions.”

Stockwell gave him a qualified nod. “In extraordinary circumstances, with multiple levels of review, and ultimate-ly, only after the administrator has personally approved the operation.”

“There wasn't time. I got an anonymous call at—”

“Of course, it was anonymous. And untraceable, right.”

Scott felt his face flush with anger. “I got the call at eleven o'clock last night. The caller had no idea how long the target was going to be there. So I rounded up my team and at sunrise we—”

“You invaded a sovereign nation and kidnapped one of its citizens, who also happens to be a federal police officer.”

“A federal police officer who lured a DEA agent across the border so he could be kidnapped and killed and have his goddamned head chopped off.” Scott was spitting the words out by the time he finished.

Stockwell stared at him for a moment; then, seemingly unperturbed, he said, “I looked at your personnel file. Seems that failure to seek proper authorization before conducting dangerous operations is becoming a habit with you.”

“I assume you're talking about Afghanistan.”

Stockwell nodded. “Where you got ripped with a five-day suspension.”

“My team and I took down the biggest heroin pro-cessing plant in Southwest Asia.”

“Again, without clearing it through channels. You were there to support the DOD's mission, not to make end runs around the Pentagon's chain of command.”

“Our mission was to hurt the Taliban and al Qaeda by interdicting their heroin shipments.”

“Except that particular warlord whose plant you de-stroyed was on our side,” Stockwell said. “And he was using some of that money to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda.”

“I didn't know that at the time,” Scott said. “But even if I had, it wouldn't have made any difference to me. DEA is a single-mission agency. Our job is to arrest drug traffickers, not cooperate with them.”

“And you did the same thing here,” Stockwell said.

“Ortiz can give us everybody who was involved in Mike Cassidy's murder.”

“You got three agents killed.”

Scott let the SAC's words sink in. They were true, and they hurt. A lot. "You're right," he said. "They were killed on my watch. And it's my fault."

The SAC leaned forward. He laid his forearms on Scott's desk and laced his fingers together. "I need to inform you, Agent Greene, that per DEA protocol, I have notified OPR and Justice Department OIG. They will be launching a joint criminal investigation...I suggest you get an attorney."

The Office of Professional Responsibility, OPR, was DEA's internal affairs unit. Street agents called it the Rat Squad, and they called the desk jockeys assigned to it cheese eaters. Of course, every law enforcement agency needed internal investigators because there were some bad cops, and DEA, like every other agency, had its share. But most of the OPR agents Scott had met seemed to get a real kick out of screwing over their fellow agents.

Justice Department OIG, the Office of the Inspector General, was just as bad, maybe worse. Normally the back-benchers at OIG spent their days investigating fraud, waste, and abuse within the Justice Department, doing important work like harassing employees who used too many pencils or who made single-sided copies instead of double-sided. But sometimes they got the chance to step up to a real criminal investigation, and Scott was sure that whoever got assigned to his case was going to bring his A-game because the only reason most OIG agents were OIG agents was because they didn't have what it took to make it into the big leagues of federal law enforcement, and they got a perverse thrill from taking down someone who had.

Basically, Scott was fucked, and he knew it. But the in-vestigation would take weeks to complete, and in that time if he could find Ortiz he might still have a shot at securing indictments against everybody involved in Mike Cassidy's murder.

"How long do I have?" Scott asked.

"You're suspended as of right now, pending the out-come of the OPR-OIG investigation."

"Agents aren't normally suspended until after the inter-nal investigation is finished."

"The potential charges against you are too serious to wait," Stockwell said. "The government of Mexico is going to request extradition."

Scott laughed at the irony. "They wouldn't send us Ortiz, but they want the U.S. government to send them me?"

"They're threatening to charge you with kidnapping and murder."

"When you say murder, you're talking about the cartel gunmen who were guarding Ortiz and who tried to kill us?"

"I need your badge and gun."

Scott leaned over in the chair enough to pull his leather credential case from his back pocket. When he tossed it on the desk the heavy badge made a thud when it landed. "What about my agents?"

"I'm putting them on restricted duty," Stockwell said, "until OPR decides whether or not to open separate investi-gations."

Restricted duty was better than suspension. Scott didn't want to see his agents' careers wrecked because they did what he asked them to do. "Snatching Ortiz was my deci-sion," he said. "I didn't give my team any details until we were almost to the target."

"You're claiming your agents didn't realize they had crossed the border into Mexico with their weapons and tacti-cal gear?"

"I told them it was surveillance only. The weapons were strictly for self-defense."

Stockwell shook his head. "That's the story you're going with, that your agents brought pistols, machine guns, bullet-proof vests, and cargo carriers into Mexico and yet had no idea they were there to capture a fugitive Mexican cop who participated in the murder of a DEA agent?"

"That's exactly what happened."

"Good luck selling that to OPR"

"Who's doing the next-of-kin notifications?"

"Not your problem," Stockwell said. Then in a softer tone, he added, "But since they were your people and I know you're worried about their families...I have six agents coming down from Houston to handle all three notifications simultaneously. I don't want a situation where we have one family calling another family before we've notified every-body."

"Thank you," Scott said.

Stockwell nodded.

Scott stood up. "Is that all?"

"And your gun."

"Top drawer on the right," Scott said. "I put it there this morning before I went across the border to ID the bodies of three more dead agents, who, as it turned out, were killed by the Mexican Federal Police."