Ballistic

FORTY-SEVEN

The Puerto Vallarta police cars parked in the street at nine p.m. The officers left their vehicles and began directing traffic, forcing it on, ordering it to continue to the next intersection. One minute later the first in a long series of armored white SUVs pulled up in front of the beautiful seaside restaurant.

The Black Suits working the advance security detail went about their rounds in the restaurant. A stern-looking but polite man went with the maître d’ to each table and collected mobile phones while letting the stunned patrons know that their food and drinks would be taken care of. A group of four in the security detail moved through the kitchen with the restaurant manager, checked coolers and freezers, hallways and pantries, bathrooms and loading doors. They frisked the staff from head to toe. A pair of guards armed with .45-caliber Mac-10 sub guns stood in the doorways, two more junior members of the unit patrolled out back with AK-47s.

Daniel de la Rocha sat in an armored SUV with the commander of his bodyguards and his own close protection officer by his side. Emilio Lopez Lopez received the radio call from his advance team unit leader that the restaurant was locked down and secure, so he nodded to his boss, and the driver of the Yukon opened the back door of the vehicle. A team of Emilio’s best guards formed around their leader, and they entered the restaurant. Emilio had his right hand on his pistol in his jacket, and his left hand on his patrón’s lower back. An earpiece connected to his radio gave him updates from his team, and any threat would have Emilio Lopez Lopez shielding his boss, turning him around, and hustling him back to the SUVs in seconds.

Close behind the main scrum of the principle protection force was Nestor Calvo Macias, speaking into his Bluetooth earpiece. Javier “Spider” Cepeda, the leader of the Black Suit’s assassins, was in the crowd, as were a number of local dealers, enforcers, logistics managers, the chief pilot of Daniel’s many aircraft, and a few manufacturing and procurement executives.

Fourteen bodyguards on the premises ensured their leader’s safety, and nineteen other Black Suits all but filled the private dining area in the center of the building.

The private dining area was open-air, a cool breeze blew in from the Pacific and swirled around the tiled courtyard. Daniel de la Rocha sat at a table in the back of the room, behind a tall gurgling fountain and below a latticework arch of lovingly manicured bougainvillea. Other members of the Black Suits sat at tables of four around the courtyard. This was not a business dinner; it was just a dinner. They were here to eat and then to travel east to the safe house a few miles inland. This was de la Rocha’s first visit to PV since the massacre ten days earlier; he had business to attend to in the area and had spent the day working with associates of his commuter airline, and his drug manufacture and transporting enterprise.

The mood among the men was grim because the mood of their leader was grim. He was furious about the apparent escape of the Gamboas and the gringo. He fully assumed they were north of the border, but his hunt was far from over. Right now he had his entire workforce that operated in the United States: in Atlanta, in Chicago, in Dallas, in Los Angeles, in a dozen other cities — he had them all working on finding the Gamboas and the gringo.

So far Calvo had failed him, Spider had failed him, his fiftythousand-member-strong criminal organization had failed him.

But that did not really matter. Because all that mattered to Daniel was that Daniel had failed her.

Daniel gazed across his table to a corner of the courtyard, just a few feet away. A shrine of la Santa Muerte had been brought in by his advance security team, just a three-foot-tall icon of la virgen, dressed in the finest bridal gown handmade by a master dressmaker in Mexico City who worked exclusively on creating high-quality and highprice fashion for icons of la Santa Muerte. She stood on a table festooned with devotional candles that flickered in the sea breeze; the shadows played across the skeleton’s face, creating the appearance of movement and life.

DLR stared into her eyes. To him they were not vacant sockets in the plaster; they were windows into an abyss. Viewing portals into the soul of an angry goddess.

A bottle of Gran Patrón Platinum silver tequila was placed at his table by a waiter in a white coat. Next to the bottle a crystal dish of freshly cut limes, a crystal dish of salt, a small shot glass of the same crystal.

De la Rocha ignored the accoutrements and grabbed the bottle by the neck, took a swig of the clear liquor, stared at his idol, and promised her aloud that he would give her the tribute she demanded.

The unborn Gamboa child.

The waiter stood awkwardly with a menu in his hand, waiting for DLR to finish his prayer. While Daniel was still praying, the man cleared his throat.

Emilio Lopez Lopez stood against the wall just behind his jefe; Emilio stepped forward to the waiter and grabbed him by the arm of his coat, turned him roughly, and prepared to shove him away for his poor manners. But Daniel raised his bottle of tequila.

“It’s okay, Emilio. Thank you.” He looked at the waiter. “Just have your chef prepare something light. Grilled tilapia would be perfect.”

“Muy bien, Don Daniel,” said the waiter, and he shot off to the kitchen, clearly happy to walk away from his error with his life.

Nestor came over to the table, and they talked business for a few minutes, but DLR’s heart wasn’t in it, and finally he asked his consigliere to leave him to eat his meal alone. The rest of the Black Suits got the message; they ate at other tables and talked in hushed tones, worked their mobile phones or their laptops, tried like hell to be the one who determined just where in the world their targets had managed to disappear to.

A different waiter appeared with a cold watermelon soup, and DLR slurped it while lost in thought and melancholy. He continued to sip the tequila between gulps of bottled water and spoonfuls of soup; he just gazed around in the dark, at his men, at the fountain, at his idol on the table in the corner. Decorative paper lanterns strung across the courtyard on lines above the men’s heads swayed in the breeze.

In just minutes another waiter in a starched white coat came to DLR’s table; he pushed a tablecloth-covered rolling cart with a covered dish on it. With a subservient bow the man took away the empty plate of soup from the table and then replaced it with the covered dish.

“Buen provecho,” said the waiter, bon appétit, as he removed the cover and placed it back on the rolling cart.

De la Rocha did not look at the man, did not reply. He just took his fork in his hand, then distractedly glanced down at his plate as he began digging into his dinner.

His hand jerked up and away.

The plate was covered in slimy animal entrails, the reeking head and skeleton of a deboned fish, and other pieces of smelly waste.

“What the hell is this?” Daniel asked.

The waiter answered him in English, “That, sir, looks like shit, and this…” He held his hand out in front of DLR, showed him a device clutched in it. “This looks like a dead man’s switch.” The device was clearly a detonator, the waiter’s thumb was pressed down on a red button, and a wire ran from the device, down the man’s palm, and disappeared into his white coat.

De la Rocha looked up at the waiter.

It took a moment with the trim hair and beard, with the darker skin and the black-framed glasses, but he recognized him.

It was the Gray Man.

The American opened his coat and exposed a crude roped vest with two large bricks of yellow material coated in plastic hanging from it. They looked like bags of sand. He said, softly, “If my thumb leaves this trigger, for even one-tenth of one second, then this ammonium nitrate/fuel oil bomb will detonate, and everyone here will die. Including you.”

Emilio had been standing against the wall; he could only see the back of the waiter’s coat. He’d checked to make sure it wasn’t the same insolent bastard who had coughed while his jefe was praying a few minutes earlier. Satisfied that this was a new, and hopefully more professional, server, he’d not bothered to pay close attention to the presentation of the food. But now Emilio noticed the two men were in conversation with each other. It was not often that his patrón spoke to a waiter for so long.

Emilio stepped around the side of the man in the white coat, and when he did, he saw Daniel’s wide eyes. Immediately, he reached into his suit coat and rushed the table, recognizing the Gray Man at the same moment. He drew his Venezuelan Zamorano 9 mm pistol and knocked a chair out of the way to press it against the gringo’s head.

De la Rocha raised his hands into the air, panicked now that his bodyguard would shoot the American without hesitation. “¡No! ¡Tranquilo! Tranquilo!” Relax! Relax!

Guns appeared in the hands of everyone in the courtyard. Handguns, sub guns, a pair of pistol-grip shotguns. Some men approached the table while others stepped back and aimed carefully. No one knew what to do, but they all followed their leader’s wishes, and they held their positions.

“Everyone just take a few steps back. Emilio, lower your pistol and step away, but be ready. Spider, keep an eye on this pinche gringo and kill him if anything happens to me.”

Spider Cepeda held his Mac-10 with one hand. He stood ten feet away; the muzzle pointed at the face of the American assassin.

“You aren’t leaving here with your life, pendejo.” He said it slowly and confidently.