Crossers (17 page)

A young girl was selling flatbreads in front of the church. He bought a slice, earning a stare of disbelief and gratitude when he gave her five dollars and told her to keep the change. One must keep the muscles of generosity toned. He went inside, dipped his fingers into the holy water font, crossed himself, and sat down in the rear pew of the nave, next to a shrine to the Virgin, upon which vigil candles flickered in little glass jars. Except for three or four pious women at prayer, the church was empty. He was ten minutes early and settled back to wait for Félix Cabrera, who had been among his trainees at Benning, one of the best. Without question the right man for tonight’s job, a professional’s professional who’d done missions before in the United States, one in Phoenix, another in El Paso, a third in Dallas. El Verdugo, the Executioner, he was called for his meticulousness, for his preternatural calm—the man probably had a pulse rate of around fifty—and his accuracy with a pistol. Once, out on Carrasco’s ranch near Caborca, The Professor—no mean marksman himself—had challenged him to a contest shooting Gambel’s quail with .45 semiautomatics. Stationary birds were prohibited—they had to be hit on the run at a range of fifteen or twenty yards. When the match was over, Félix had accounted for nine, The Professor for five. He was not abashed to have been outshot by such a margin, for if the pupil is not greater than the teacher, then the teacher has failed.

The careers of teacher and pupil had followed similar paths. After graduating from the School of the Americas, Félix served with the Special Air Mobile Forces Group of the Mexican army, dueling with the Gulf Cartel in Tamaulipas and Matamoros until he and some thirty members of his battalion experienced a collective epiphany: they were earning roughly five hundred dollars a month fighting the cartel; they could do much better by joining it. They went to work as enforcers and assassins, as escorts for drug shipments, tasks for which their martial skills and martial virtues of discipline and valor made them far superior to the cholos previously employed in those capacities. Los Zetas, they called themselves, after the radio call sign of their old battalion commander, Zeta.

Then, as narco-barons often did, the cartel’s boss overreached. He attempted to kidnap and kill an American DEA agent and an FBI agent, which brought pressure from Washington on Mexico City to do something about him. He was busted and sent to Las Palmas prison. Though he continued to operate from his jail cell, some Zetas felt they owed no more loyalty to him and struck out on their own, scattering across northern Mexico. Félix fetched up in his native Sonora with several comrades and hired themselves out to Joaquín Carrasco.

That was when teacher and pupil were reunited, The Professor having deserted the DEA a couple of years before Félix had deserted the army. The cause of his flight could be traced to the kidnapping, torture, and murder of his friend, another undercover agent, named Carlos Aguilar. Carlos was an explorer who’d made an astonishing discovery—the Juárez Cartel operated a vast marijuana plantation in southern Chihuahua that employed several hundred field hands and was guarded by soldiers and state police. There was no way an operation that big could be clandestine; it had to have the full consent of the Mexican government. Though no cartel operated without some sort of official sanction, the partnership between the Juárez gang and the government was especially blatant. Exposing it became Carlos’s personal crusade.

One day he disappeared. His decomposed body was found in the Chihuahuan desert a month later. He’d been shot through the back of the head. Forensic experts determined that both shoulders and his ribs and jaw had been broken. In time informants came forth with details about what had been done to him, and it was truly unspeakable. He’d been tortured by experts for days before the Angels of Mercy sang to them, and they executed him. The El Paso office sent every available agent into Mexico to find out who had murdered its man and who had ordered his killing. The Professor was among them. For weeks, at enormous risk to himself—if he was caught, he would have suffered even worse treatment than Aguilar—he tracked down leads, met with snitches, compiled lists of names, and made a discovery of his own: Carlos’s torturers had been trained by the CIA, back when the Agency was involved in the drug trade to finance the Contras in Nicaragua. One of his colleagues uncovered a still more interesting fact—the word to abduct Aguilar had come not from the Juárez boss but from the commanding general of the Fifth Military District in Chihuahua City, whose soldiers protected the plantation, and who, it was said, received mordida amounting to a hundred thousand dollars a month.

Sometime after this information came to light, the special agent in charge summoned The Professor and the other agents back to El Paso. They were at first bewildered and then enraged when they learned why: the general was married to the sister of the minister of defense, who had gotten wind of the investigation. In this instance, the pressure flowed from Mexico City to Washington. To implicate El General in the drug trade and in the torture and murder of an American law enforcement agent would greatly embarrass the Mexican government. Phone calls were made to El Paso. The agent in charge had heard from no less a figure than the head of the Latin American desk in the U.S. State Department. To avoid an international scandal and to maintain amicable relations between the United States and its southern neighbor, the investigation was to proceed no further.

The Professor didn’t turn in his gun and badge in righteous indignation, like Dirty Harry in the movies. Being a good soldier, he obeyed orders. He stopped investigating and took a month’s vacation. It was a working holiday. He knew the identities of the three men who’d tortured Aguilar. He capped one in Mexico and trailed the second across the border to a house in Eagle Pass, Texas, shooting him through the window as he watched TV. There was law, and then there was justice. A week after disposing of him, The Professor picked up the trail of the third man. It led back into Mexico. He was on the road, south of Juárez, when his mobile phone jingled. The caller didn’t identify himself. He knew it was someone in the El Paso office by what was said. “This is to say thanks for doing what we all wanted to do. The dude you capped last week was still on the CIA’s payroll, a top informant. The spooks are pissed. They know you were the shooter, and we can’t help you. Don’t know where you are, but I know you’re in deep shit.” The anonymous caller went on to say that the mierda was rolling downhill—the CIA had prevailed upon the attorney general’s office to prevail upon the DEA to apprehend its rogue agent. In fact, a warrant had been issued for his arrest. “And that’s the least of your problems, know what I’m saying?”

He did. The Agency probably had an open contract out on him as well. So the question was, where were his chances of survival better? Mexico or the United States? He opted for Mexico, in effect repatriating himself. He traveled to Mexico City, where he set about counterfeiting a whole new identity. It was his own version of a witness protection program. He knew the right people; obtaining forgeries of the necessary documents—passport, driver’s license, birth certificate—was not difficult. He made certain cosmetic changes—dying his dirty blond hair to dark brown, removing the mole from his left cheek—but otherwise he didn’t get fancy. Thus was Gregorio Bonham born.

Señor Bonham journeyed to Hermosillo, checked in to a cheap hotel, then sought an interview with Victor Zaragoza, the federal police comandante in Sonora. The Professor wasn’t as familiar with the Hermosillo Cartel as he was with Juárez, but he did know that the way to Carrasco led through the comandante. In the lingua franca of the trade, he had given Carrasco
la plaza
, meaning that he had licensed Carrasco to traffic in the state, for which he received a certain amount in protection money. At police headquarters, The Professor was told that the comandante wasn’t in and to come back the following day. He did and got the same story. On his third try he was allowed into the comandante’s office. Except for the automatic rifles racked along a wall, it was as nondescript as a budget motel room. Zaragoza, a tall man with severe Castilian features and the build of a slightly underfed wolf, motioned for him to sit in the chair in front of his desk. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

The Professor was perfectly candid—he wished to meet Joaquín Carrasco; he believed he could be of great service to Don Joaquín, for he knew that the Hermosillo Cartel was at war with the Juárez organization over control of smuggling routes. The comandante glared at him, then said, affecting incredulity: “Joaquín Carrasco is a criminal, and you are telling
me
you wish to go to work for him? Are you crazy?” The Professor assured him of his sanity. “This is amusing,” said the comandante. “Tell me everything about yourself. I need to determine if I should arrest you or have you committed to an asylum.” He presented his curriculum vitae, his entire history; he enumerated his assets, which he thought would be as advantageous to Don Joaquín as they had been to the DEA. Zaragoza concluded the meeting, went to the door, and summoned two men, one of whom wore an Oakland Raiders T-shirt and looked as if he might have played middle linebacker. “This man is out of his mind,” Zaragoza said. “See if you can help him recover his senses.”

The goons took him out to a car and drove to a small unoccupied house near the bus terminal. There they tied him to a chair, put a hood over his head, and began to punch him in the liver, in the kidneys, in the ribs. He’d expected something like this—indeed, he would have been suspicious if it didn’t happen. The beating continued off and on for a couple of hours. He tried to distract himself from the pain by focusing on the smells aroused by the blackness under the hood. Then he heard Zaragoza’s voice: “Basta!” The blows ceased, the hood was removed, and the comandante stood over him with the passport and birth certificate he’d obtained in Mexico City. “We found these in your hotel room,” he said. “They’re forgeries.” Of course they were. Who are you? I told you, Gregorio Bonham. Is that your real name? No, I told you so in your office. What is your real name? I told you that, too. Tell me again. He did. And you say you were an agent of the DEA? Yes. But you still are, aren’t you? No. I am being completely honest with you. We will see about that. Zaragoza turned to his thugs. “He’s still crazy,” he said, and left.

After more pummeling, he was forced to lie tied up on the bare concrete floor, where he spent the night. The next day his tormentors, who may well have been trained by the same people who’d tutored Carlos Aguilar’s torturers, shoved his head into a tub of water until he was at the point of drowning. This was repeated three more times before the comandante reappeared to put the same questions to him. He gave the same answers. “How I wish I could believe you!” exclaimed Zaragoza, and once again left. More punches, more bobbing for apples in the tub, and then a new method—he was poked in the thighs with an electric cattle prod, with the promise that his testicles would be next. On his third visit, Zaragoza informed him that he had done some checking with certain friends in the United States. It seemed he was being truthful about his work with the DEA, but he wasn’t convinced that Señor Bonham, as he now called himself, was no longer in their employ. The Oakland Raider jerked him to his feet, pulled his pants down, and flung him onto the floor. His smaller teammate poked him between the legs with the cattle prod, but didn’t switch it on. “Listen, pendejo, I don’t enjoy this, I am not a sadist,” said Zaragoza. “If you don’t tell me the truth, those huevos of yours are going to get fried.” “Go ahead,” The Professor gasped. “I won’t tell you anything different.” At a gesture from Zaragoza, Oakland stood him on his feet and pulled his pants back up. “Muchacho, you’ve got cojones, I’ll say that for you,” declared the comandante. He gathered from that comment that he’d passed his employment test.

The thugs returned him to his hotel and told him to stay there. He staggered to his room and collapsed onto the bed, aching all over. Sometime later in the afternoon a knock awakened him. He opened the door. His visitor was a short, heavyset man in the costume of the prosperous ranchero—a straw cowboy hat, a snug waist-length jacket, snakeskin boots. Four men were with him, dressed like vaqueros, though herding cattle was not what they did for a living. Joaquín Carrasco motioned to his bodyguards to wait in the corridor, entered the room, doffed his hat, and sat down in the only chair. “Do you know who I am?” he asked. Yes. And how did he know? “I recognize you from photographs in our files.” “The files of the DEA?” That was correct. “But you no longer are in their service?” That too was correct. Carrasco folded his knotty peasant’s hands over his mouth and flossed his front teeth with a thumbnail. “You know,” he said, “that thing those Juárez boys did to your friend was very bad for business. Bad for everyone, not just them. It was very stupid! It drew so much attention! I don’t wish to make the same mistake. If you were sent here to spy for the DEA, tell me. Nothing will happen to you. I will even pay for your transportation back to the United States, I swear it.” The Professor replied that he had no desire to go back to the United States. The government of the United States had allowed the death of his friend to go unavenged, it had betrayed him; now he would betray it in turn. His wish was to enlist his services with Don Joaquín. “So how shall I call you? By your real name or this Gregorio Bonham?” inquired Carrasco. He preferred El Profesor. When he was instructing for the American army, that was what his students called him, out of respect. “Then El Profesor it will be. Get yourself cleaned up, and pack your things. You will come with me to my ranch and we can discuss what you can do for me.”

With Carrasco’s blessings, The Professor resumed his pursuit of the third and final torturer of Carlos Aguilar and nailed him a week later. In the meantime a new president representing a new political party, the first one to take power since the Revolution, had been elected. The former minister of defense, the brother-in-law of the general commanding the military forces in Chihuahua, had been replaced. Carrasco felt the time was right; he could eliminate the Juárez Cartel’s chief patron without fear of government retaliation. The Professor was given the mission, and nothing could have pleased him more. No micromanager, Don Joaquín had only one instruction: “This new government won’t shed any tears for our general, but we don’t want to alarm them.” The implication was clear—it should look like an accident. To assist him in his work, Carrasco, through Comandante Zaragoza, secured him a badge and a card identifying him as Capitán Gregorio Bonham. He was also issued a nine-millimeter pistol, a radio, handcuffs, and for appearances’ sake if for no other reason, a black field uniform and bulletproof vest. He was, however, to perform this task in plainclothes.