Cartel (7 page)

Once again, despite all the rancor Scott had tried to put into his words, they seemed to have no effect on Stockwell. He simply opened the drawer, pulled out Scott's duty pistol, a Glock .40 caliber, and laid it on the desk.

"My M-6 is in the trunk of my G-car," Scott said.

"You'll have to leave it and the car here while you're on suspension." Stockwell stood up behind Scott's desk. "If you wait a minute, I'll have one of the investigative assistants type you out a property receipt."

"Don't bother," Scott said. Then he turned around and walked out the door.

"This is far enough," said Mr. Jones, who was sitting in the passenger seat of the Suburban. They were on a dirt road that ran off U.S. Highway 83, fifteen miles south of Laredo. All around them was nothing but sandy dirt and scrub brush.

The driver braked to a stop and shifted into park. He didn't do or say anything. Just sat behind the wheel, eyes hidden behind his aviator sunglasses. Waiting.

Jones gave him a sideways look. The man was going by the name Gavin, although that wasn't his real name. Nobody used real names in this line of work. He was in his mid-forties, tall and muscular, hair buzzed to a quarter of an inch, and looking uncomfortable in the dark suit. Not a man used to suits, apparently. Probably more accustomed to wearing a uniform. Jones didn't know much about him, other than he had spent time in Army Special Forces and was now a part-ner in Dynamic International, one of the Agency's go-to PMCs, private military contractors. Jones hoped he was the kind of guy who followed orders and didn't ask questions.

Sergeant Felix Ortiz of the Policia Federal, shifted around in the back seat. "Why are we stopping?" He sound-ed nervous.

Jones glanced over his shoulder at Ortiz. "You're walk-ing the rest of the way."

"To Mexico?"

Jones pointed west, straight into the setting sun. "It's two miles that way."

The three of them stepped out of the Suburban. Gavin opened the tailgate and retrieved a dirty brown paper bag. He tossed the bag to Ortiz.

"What's this?" Ortiz asked.

"Clothes," Jones said.

"What's wrong with the clothes I'm wearing?" he said, pointing to a pair of khaki pants and a sport shirt.

"They're too new," Jones said.

Ortiz hesitated as if unsure what to do next.

"Open the bag," Jones ordered.

Ortiz opened the bag and peeked inside. His face tight-ened as the stench hit him. He pushed the bag out to arm's length. "You want me to wear these?"

"Think of it as a disguise," Jones said.

"Why can't you just drive me back across the bridge?"

"Because crossing the bridge, even in an official gov-ernment vehicle, leaves a record. You're a deep cover asset. We can't risk compromising your identity by being seen with us."

"I used to ride with Cassidy sometimes."

"That was DEA," Jones said. "We're different."

Ortiz looked in the bag again and frowned. "Yeah, I can see that."

"Quit whining and get dressed," Gavin barked, sound-ing a lot like a drill sergeant.

Ortiz stared at the two Americans for almost a full mi-nute, trying to determine, Jones surmised, if they were really serious. They were serious, and eventually Ortiz realized that. So he kicked off his shoes and stripped out of his pants and shirt.

"Underwear too," Gavin said. "And your socks."

Ortiz folded his arms across his chest and shook his head. Gavin took a step closer to him, and the sergeant backed away. "Now," Gavin said. Ortiz stripped the rest of the way and pulled on the filthy old clothes. Then, at Jones's direction, he stuffed his own clothes into the paper bag and handed it back to Gavin, who tossed the bag into the rear of the Suburban.

"Now what?" Ortiz asked.

"Now you walk to Mexico," Jones said.

"How am I supposed to get across the river?"

Gavin gave him a hard look. "Where do you think the term wetback comes from?"

Ortiz tried to match Gavin's dead stare. He was a veter-an federale and used to having people defer to him. Gavin didn't. And it was Ortiz who looked away. He asked Jones, "How do I get in touch with you?"

"You don't," Jones said. "We'll call you."

"I don't have my cell phone anymore."

"We know where you work," Jones said. "I'll arrange a meeting next week and give you a secure phone."

Ortiz scanned the horizon. "I'm a little turned around."

Pointing again into the setting sun, Jones said, "Just walk that way. You can't miss it."

Ortiz stuck out his hand to Jones, but Jones ignored it. Eventually Ortiz dropped his hand and just nodded at Jones. "Thank you."

Jones nodded back.

Ortiz started walking west. He made it five steps. Gavin drew a Colt Government Model .45 caliber pistol from under his suit coat and shot Ortiz in the back. The Mexican police sergeant pitched forward onto his face in the dirty sand.

"Make sure," Jones said.

Gavin walked over to Ortiz and shot him in the back of the head.

A taxi dropped Scott off in front of his house at 6:30 p.m. He paid the driver and watched the cab disappear down the quiet suburban street. Yet even after the cab was gone, Scott remained standing at the end of his driveway, thinking about the day, about the people he'd lost, about his career. What was left of his career. Before today he'd had just the one suspension on his record, the five day rip he got in Afghani-stan, and that was more of an in-school detention than a real suspension since it was too impractical for DEA to send him all the way home just for five days. Scott's boss had even told him to keep his badge and gun because the Taliban had put a bounty on the head of every DEA agent in Afghani-stan.

This time was different. His suspension was indefinite. Pending the outcome of the OPR-OIG investigation, is how the SAC had put it. And Scott knew that indefinite could easily become permanent, as in fired, terminated, shit-canned. If the suits wanted to go after him as hard as they could, if they wanted to make an example of him, he had given them everything they needed.

Scott had gone all-out to catch Mike Cassidy's killers. That was the unwritten rule. That was what DEA expected of him. And that was what he expected of himself. As the frontline supervisor of a slain agent, it was his responsibility to lead the charge. Though the truth was that he had barely known Cassidy. Scott had only transferred to Laredo as the new resident agent in charge three months before Cassidy was snatched off the street in Nuevo Laredo while waiting to meet his informant, Felix Ortiz.

From what Scott did know of the man from the short time they had worked together, Mike Cassidy was a hard-working and dedicated agent. And like all good DEA street agents, he was suspicious of bosses in general and new boss-es in particular, which is why Scott and Cassidy hadn't spent a lot of time getting chummy. Having real friends on the job was something you had to give up when you went into man-agement.

Two days after he disappeared, Cassidy's corpse was dumped on the steps of Policia Federal headquarters in Nuevo Laredo, with his head missing and his body bearing obvious signs of torture. Lying on Cassidy's chest was a fig-urine of Santa Muerte, the female patron saint of the cult of death that so many Mexican cartel members worshipped, but who was particularly venerated by the Los Zetas cartel. Also lying on Cassidy's body were two other Santa Muerte icons: an hourglass, which symbolized that life was finite; and a ti-ny set of scales, symbolizing equality and justice, but which, in the eyes of those who worshipped Santa Muerte, really meant revenge.

As soon as Mike Cassidy's body was discovered, Scott had put every other investigation on hold and had focused his team entirely on bringing the killers to justice. The result, after three months of hard work, had been the federal grand jury indictment of Felix Ortiz.

Phone company records of text messages between Cas-sidy and Ortiz showed that it was Ortiz who had asked for the meeting that night and Ortiz who had picked the café where they were going to meet. Scott knew Ortiz hadn't shown up for the meeting because ten minutes after the scheduled time, Cassidy had texted Ortiz, "Where R U?" Ten minutes later he called Ortiz and left a voicemail mes-sage, which the DEA agents had recovered. The message was: "It's Mike. I've been sitting on my ass here for twenty minutes, and I'm starting to feel like I have a target on my back. Where the hell are you?"

Garza had a source at the Mexican phone company Telmex and had discovered from GPS records that Ortiz was one block away from the café where he was supposed to meet Cassidy ten minutes before the scheduled meeting and that he remained there for almost an hour. So Ortiz had not only set up Mike Cassidy, he had hung around to watch.

Five minutes after leaving the voicemail message for Ortiz, Cassidy had walked out of the café. Four gunmen were waiting, all wearing black military clothing and black hooded skull masks, the favorite operational uniform of Los Zetas.

Most of the abduction was caught on a bank surveil-lance camera across the street. Cassidy fought hard, but un-armed he was no match for his attackers. At one point, though, before the cartel gunmen stuffed him into the back seat of a dark SUV, Cassidy looked across the street directly at the bank security camera and pulled off the mask of one of his attackers, and for just a second the camera recorded an image of the man's face.

Scott had sent the image to DEA and FBI headquarters, and even to the CIA and the NSA, in hopes of identifying the man using facial recognition software, but all of those agencies' computer whizzes had reported back that they had gotten no hits. The face wasn't in any of their databases. So Scott sent the image to the Policia Federal and to the coun-try's lead investigative agency, the Policia Federal Ministe-rial, known as the PFM, which had a few years ago been created to replace the notoriously corrupt AFI, the Agencia Federal de Investigacion.

Neither the PF nor the PFM had responded to Scott's requests to help identify the gunman.

When Scott and his team had tried to contact Ortiz, they couldn't reach him. When they went to his apartment in Nuevo Laredo, unarmed, per Mexican law, and only there to interview Ortiz, his wife said she hadn't seen him. Scott thought Ortiz was either dead or soon would be, so he pushed the U.S. attorney's office in Laredo into indicting the missing Mexican police sergeant.

After a federal arrest warrant had been issued for Ortiz, Scott had gone through the motions with the Justice and State departments to file the warrant with Mexico and to re-quest extradition, but the Mexican government, after much foot-dragging, had declined the extradition request. So with extradition off the table, the Mexican government had no reason to arrest Ortiz.

Then Scott had gotten the late-night, anonymous phone call from a man who said he knew where Ortiz was hiding out. Scott had jumped on the information and had arranged the hasty cross-border snatch job.

Now he was standing at the end of his driveway in the dark, with this morning's raid and the deaths of three of his agents hanging around his neck.

Scott walked up his driveway toward the open garage, where his wife's Ford Explorer and his F-150 pickup were parked. On the way he picked up a bicycle with pink and white tassels hanging from the handlebars and a set of training wheels. His daughter couldn't ever seem to remember that at night her bicycle went in the garage with mommy's and daddy's cars.

When Scott stepped into the kitchen, his wife, Victoria, was setting the dinner table for three: herself and their two children, six-year-old Samantha and nine-year-old Jake. It had been a while since Victoria had set a place for Scott. Most nights she put a plate in the microwave for him. Some nights she didn't.

Samantha was the first to spot him. "Daddy," she shout-ed as she hopped off her booster seat and ran toward him with her chubby arms outstretched. Scott scooped her up and spun her around at arm's length. He hugged her tight and planted a kiss on each cheek.

"Dad, did you catch any bad guys today?" Jake said from his seat at the table.

"Yeah," Samantha said, echoing her brother. "Did you catch any bad guys today?" It was the same question they always asked him on the nights he got home before their bedtime.

"As a matter of fact, I did catch a bad guy today," he said.

"How bad was he?" Samantha said.

"Really bad," Scott said. "Super bad."

As Scott set his daughter back down on her booster seat, Samantha gave her brother a cocky look. "I told you daddy always catches bad guys."

"Not every day he doesn't," Jake told his sister.

Samantha looked up at Scott. "Daddy, don't you al-ways-"

"That's enough, you two," Victoria said. "Time to eat."

The two kids dug into their roast beef and mashed pota-toes.

"I didn't hear your car," Victoria said.

Scott looked at his wife. Tall, blond, green eyed, and quite beautiful at thirty-five, in a Dallas debutante WASP sort of way, with the trim well-toned legs of an avid tennis player and a self-esteem-boosting postpartum boob job. "I took a cab home."

A crease of worry crossed Victoria's face. "A cab?"

He nodded.

"What's wrong?" she said.

Scott looked at the kids. They were chomping down dinner, seemingly oblivious to everything else, but he knew that both of them kept at least half an ear cocked toward anything their parents said. And that was especially true with Samantha, who, like all women, had bionic hearing. So Scott nodded and Victoria followed him into the den.

"What happened?" she said. "Are you in trouble again?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing," Victoria said. But of course that wasn't true. "Tell me what happened?"

"I lost three agents."

Her forehead wrinkled. "What do you mean, lost?"

"Killed."

Victoria's hand shot to her mouth. "Oh, my God." She didn't know his agents well. She'd only met them once, when, at the end of his first week as the new resident agent in charge, Scott had hosted an all-hands barbeque at their house, but she knew their names well enough to at least put faces with them. "Who?"