Redback (10 page)

‘Then fire me.’

‘I don’t want to fire you. I want you to quit after the Viguerra ridealong.’

‘Why do you give a damn about this ridealong?’

‘I don’t, but my superiors do. After Osiers we have to show the Mexicans we still want to be their partners. It’s connected to the trade negotiations. It’s way over your head, Marquez.’

‘Viguerra is crazy. Don’t send Green and Hidalgo.’

‘I’m not. They volunteered.’ Like fuck they did, Marquez thought, and Holsten changed the subject. ‘What’s happened with you is something I’ve seen happen several times before, in particular with undercover agents right around your level. I’ve seen it happen to the best. They have some success and then the boots get a little too big, the stride a little long. Overconfidence clouds thinking and out in the field they start acting like they run the DEA.’

Holsten, tall spare SAC with his sterile view of the world, laid it out and Marquez riding shotgun, lean and young still, but with far more experience in the field than Holsten, listened knowing that something else had happened to him. He knew as he crossed the border into Tijuana that morning that he was severing his connection with the DEA.

Holsten nosed over to the curb a half block from Starbucks, still wanting his coffee. On the sidewalk before they went in Holsten turned with his lips pursed and shook his head, lamenting, ‘KZ Nuts, the warehouse in Calexico, these are significant busts. You made them happen and it was a very big deal. You saw the Salazar organization developing before anyone else. If you hadn’t gotten scared after Takado was shot and lost your sense of purpose and gone after Miguel Salazar you’d be in a different place. But in our organization there’s no room for those kinds of flaws. I’m guessing you’d rather quit than go through the Internal Affairs investigation, the hearings, the whole show.’

‘I’ll resign, but between you and me you made a poor decision telling me to wait at that pass with Takado’s body. It showed a critical lack of experience, but fortunately for you experience in what we really do isn’t required in the upper levels of management. So I think you’ll be fine.’

He could see how angry that made Holsten and Marquez found it didn’t make him feel any better. He waited outside in the sunlight as Holsten went into Starbucks and ordered. When Holsten came out and they were back in the car Holsten said, ‘I took a cheap shot at you and you took one back. That’s fair, and right now you may not believe it, you may never believe it, but I’m very sorry to lose you. That’s probably why I’m so angry with you. No one I’ve ever known has shown as much promise. No one else in the LA Field Office could have made that KZ bust happen. Between us we’ll work up a good reason about why you’re moving on and I’ll write a strong recommendation letter. I’ll write it this afternoon and we’ll bury what happened in Tijuana and I’m sorry about the call I made after Takado’s murder. Leave your gun in El Paso before you cross the border with Green and Hidalgo and leave your badge there when you get back. I’ll mail you a letter of recommendation.’ Holsten turned, offered his hand and said, ‘You are the best talent I have ever seen. I wish you all the luck in the world with your next career.’

EIGHTEEN

I
n an El Paso motel Marquez dreamed a memory of childhood. The day was bright and blue and cold. He sat in a chair in an elementary school office that smelled of warm spoiled milk and carbon paper. Through a window he watched an American flag snap back and forth on a pole, and beyond the flag in the far distance he saw snow on the mountains. Behind the counter a typewriter clacked and stopped and a large woman in a blue suit led him into the principal’s office and pointed to a chair. Marquez sat down. His ear stung from where he’d been hit. His right cheek was raw and he had a lump in his throat because he didn’t start the fight. They ganged up on him but the school principal squatted down in front of him now to tell him that wasn’t true.

‘You don’t belong here. You don’t fit and your parents aren’t fit for our community. We were forced to let you go to school, but your family won’t last here and we don’t want you to stay. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re in my office today because you started a fight.’

‘I didn’t—’

‘I want you to get in another fight. Today I’m going to suspend you, but next time I’ll expel you. Do you know what expel means, son? It means I’ll get rid of you.’

Marquez kept the subsequent fights after school and off the school yard, but it didn’t matter. The family moved anyway. They were always moving. ‘We’re nomads following the Great Dope Route,’ his father had said. ‘Like Marco Polo,’ and his mother would giggle, though they had nowhere and no one, and now he was leaving again, leaving the DEA and all of his friends, everything he was connected to. He tossed in the bed and sweated. He pushed the covers back, dozed, dismissed the childhood dream, and much later that morning crossed from El Paso into Juarez with Hidalgo and Green.

They drove over the concrete trench that had once been a river and now was lined with fences. In Juarez dust and litter swirled in wind as they followed Viguerra’s lieutenants to a warehouse on the outskirts of the city. Inside the warehouse, Viguerra broke from his lieutenants and greeted them.

‘You’ll ride with me,’ he told Marquez. ‘We’re inviting ourselves to a meeting at a big hacienda.’ His eyes lit with sudden humor. ‘A cartel meeting where one of the things they’re voting on is raising the price on my head.’ He tapped his sidearm. ‘I’ll be voting.’ He winked at Hidalgo and Green. ‘If anyone asks, you must say you are American water inspectors making sure that none of the river that used to flow to Mexico still does. You are here to check for leaks. All of the local people will understand.’

Last time they met Viguerra told Marquez, that yes, it was true, that officially he was of the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, but that he thought of himself as a soldier, not a policeman. ‘I think like a soldier and we are in a war, a guerilla war where we are not the ones in power. The drug cartels are the powerful ones. They have control but with the people’s help I fight them as if from the jungle.’

An hour after reaching the warehouse Hidalgo, Marquez, and Green climbed into the Vietnam-era Huey copter that Viguerra intended to use in the assault. In the seats around them were Viguerra’s ‘troops.’ They flew south staying low and flanking dry hills. Outside a military encampment the helicopters landed and unloaded most of the men and equipment, then sat with rotors still running as Viguerra walked among his men before they loaded into jeeps and two troop carriers. Marquez rode with Viguerra and Hidalgo and Green rode in a troop carrier.

‘It’s an hour from here,’ Viguerra said.

The assault began at dusk with the cutting of phone and electrical lines and the sniper shooting of two cartel guards in the gatehouse. Two helicopters rose from hills behind the hacienda and with heavy machine gun fire pinned down the guards inside the courtyard gates, then fired rockets into the cars parked there. When the thick wooden courtyard gates blew off their hinges, return fire flashed from the house. Windows shattered. Roofing tiles slaked off and fell three stories on to men fighting below as the helicopters poured fire into the house.

Viguerra’s men fought their way into the lower floors and the return fire died down to sporadic shooting from the upper floors, clearing fire likely as Viguerra’s men moved in and up. Then in seconds everything changed as a missile struck the lead helicopter. It spun, rolled to the right, then dove into the vineyard below the house. A second helicopter went down and the third was burning as it raked through the air above Marquez. Its tail snapped on landing and Marquez left Viguerra and ran down to try to help the men inside get out.

They burned before he got there but he was near the helicopter, sheltered by it when the blast came. The concussive roar enveloped and deafened him. He felt it from the inside out. Splintered rafters, shards of roof tile, and chunks of adobe rained down into the fields around him. A widening billow of gray-black smoke rose from where the house had been and it took him a moment before he could accept what he saw, that the house was gone. He watched a length of the adobe wall surrounding the outer courtyard slide down the slope and topple over.

Then men emerged from the ground like ants into the orchard. Armed men, cartel men, and that meant a tunnel, an escape route and he realized the house had been booby-trapped for a raid. It was why Viguerra and his men met so little resistance.

Shooting started in the fields, but the cartel gunmen outnumbered Viguerra’s men and the shooting quickly died. There were shouts, vehicle engines starting. Marquez climbed back to where he’d last seen Viguerra and the jeep with the keys in it, but not Viguerra. For ten minutes he searched and when he didn’t find him he drove the jeep back out to the road. Someone shot at him as he drove the perimeter of the orchard trying to find Hidalgo and Green.

NINETEEN

S
even or eight cars and pickups were pulled over and a small crowd had gathered near a concrete power pole. He slowed to a stop and as he got out of the jeep he watched a man turn a young boy’s head away so he couldn’t see what the crowd was looking at. He worked his way in, asking as he did what vehicles anyone had seen coming out the hacienda road. Then he got a view.

Ramon Green and a young judicial police officer were chained back to back against the pole, heads bowed in death, intestines pulled out, flung like rope in the dirt. He knew what he was seeing, but still had to touch Green to be sure. He took Green’s wedding ring off and knelt there. Brian Hidalgo wasn’t found until the next morning. Many regular
federales
were part of the search and it was
federales
who told Marquez Viguerra was decapitated, his head left on a stake along the highway shoulder, and
federales
who drove Marquez miles out a road following a dry creek to an abandoned adobe house. Inside the house they showed him Hidalgo’s body, and then he sat for a long time outside on a rock near the dry creek.

Later in the afternoon, a Mex Fed contemporary of Viguerra told Marquez, ‘I’ve seen these kinds of wounds before. This is a man who works for the one you asked about. They brought your agent here to question him. This man who does this is not a Mexican. This is not something that a Mexican would do. You need to understand that.’

Marquez spent days getting debriefed by agents in the El Paso Field Office. Holsten and Boyer flew out. He spent hours with Holsten reconstructing the events, then handed over his badge and flew home to LA.

Three days later, Marquez broke the lease on his apartment and crossed back into Mexico and began to hunt Stoval and the man who worked for him whose name he’d learned was Kline. He communicated half a dozen times with Kerry Anderson, who helped him and passed on information. He didn’t talk with anyone else other than Sheryl. In August he picked up a message from her telling him she had applied for a transfer to headquarters in Virginia and it looked like she was going. He didn’t call her back but he wished her luck.

Near Guadalajara he picked up a lead on Stoval’s man and followed that south to Mexico City, and when that went nowhere he went much farther south into jungle villages where he heard this Kline was often seen. He searched for six weeks before backing away from the jungle. Late one afternoon, sitting with a beer outside a bar along a dirt road, he was approached by an American who did not identify himself but told Marquez he needed to hide or fly home.

‘Why is that?’

‘Because the men you’re looking for are looking for you. Come here, let me show you something.’ He led Marquez to the cracked side mirror of a pickup truck and turned the mirror so Marquez could see himself. ‘Look at yourself.’

Marquez turned away instead and from behind him the man said, ‘I’m your only friend here and I’m warning you, don’t stay here tonight. They know you’re in the area. Questions are getting asked about you, not just here but in the States. Information is being traded. You’re being branded a rogue so your government can disown you. Stoval has a contact within the CIA that he provides information about the Salinas government in return for information he needs. He knows you’re no longer with the DEA and one of his men extracted personal information about you from one of the DEA agents killed here. Are you hearing me?’

‘Yeah, I’m listening.’

‘They’re hunting you. They’re asking more questions.’ The man tapped his chest. ‘If I found you, believe they can.’

‘Who asked you to find me?’

‘I’ll give you his initials. KA. Does that make sense?’ Marquez nodded and the man offered his hand. ‘Fly home, Marquez.’

TWENTY

E
mrahain Stoval walked out along the General-Guisan- Quai. He did not mind the tourists as many did and liked the reflection of light off the water at this hour. He liked the smell of the air. He liked Zurich. It was a walking city and walking helped him think. He pondered this John Marquez, former DEA agent. Marquez had eluded them for months. He should be dead by now. According to one source Marquez was an embarrassment to the DEA and incompetent, but Stoval, who judged the DEA incompetent, had concluded that Marquez was just the opposite.

Mexican police officers who had taken his bribe money had promised that it would not take long to find him, but after months of nothing they talked as if they were pursuing a ghost. But now there was new information that Marquez was back in the north, not far from El Paso or possibly in El Paso. Taking him in Mexico was better, but he couldn’t count on that any longer, and he didn’t see sending the same people in the same way again. It just wasn’t getting done.