Ballistic

FIFTY-ONE

It took Gentry an entire day to get into position. For most of that time, while he drove the Mazda into the mountains, while he climbed and crawled, while he hid under a footbridge as armed guerreros passed just overhead, while he checked his GPS coordinates against the location given him by the Black Suit who now lay dead back in a ravine near Court’s mine-shaft hideout — all the while, he lamented this delay. He wanted to hit the Black Suits every single day, multiple times a day, so he worried that spending twenty-four hours doing nothing but moving unseen through the Sierra Madres, towards a location that might not even exist, would cause his operation to lose momentum crucial to its success.

He did not know, of course, that the day before Daniel de la Rocha had initiated a war against the Madrigal Cartel. This day of travel for Court was still very much a sixth day of bloodshed for the Black Suits, and the fact that Gentry himself was not involved in the fighting had gone completely unnoticed by Los Trajes Negros.

By measure of the number of incidents, by the number of dead and wounded, by the number of convoys hit or safe houses raided, momentum against the Black Suits was only growing.

Court moved through the darkness, the second-generation night-vision goggles provided by Hector Serna were nearly antiques compared to some of the gear that Court had used in his past, but they got the job done. He crossed a valley floor, got close enough to a village full of DLR’s men to smell the cooking fires and hear the dogs bark, but he remained invisible to the locals. At one in the morning he found a stream that was right where the dead Black Suit said it would be, and this lifted his spirits. He followed it into a black canyon; in the distance a waterfall roared, but he was not close enough to see it.

He moved on, his night-vision goggles and his GPS leading the way, but his ears, his sense of smell, his knowledge of the wilderness and how to move through it silently, this kept him alive.

By five a.m. he was in position. He shimmied halfway down a rock face that hung over a tiny canyon, and then Court slid below the treetops.

Dawn was still two hours off, but Court smelled tortillas and coffee from his perch in the sheer rock face. A rooster crowed. Dogs barked and goats bleated; there were all the sounds of human habitation. Occasionally, the scent of marijuana wafted up to his hide in the rock wall ten feet above the dirt road. Soon engines fired, large gaspowered generators, and as the natural light trickled into the jungle from above, electric lighting emanated from a clearing fifty yards ahead. A wide building, prefabricated metal painted a mute olive drab, appeared under headlights as a jeep backed up and turned around. A few seconds later it passed under Court’s position, full of men and guns.

Still enshrouded in darkness, Court Gentry prepared to attack.

A seven o’clock that morning Nestor Calvo hung up his mobile phone in his office at Hacienda Maricela. He’d been at his desk since five thirty, sitting in his tie and shirtsleeves, his coat draped over a leather chair in the corner. He drank mango juice and sipped coffee while he fired off phone calls and e-mails to his contacts in the United States. While his organization’s conflict with Constantino Madrigal grew by the hour, he’d been forced to spend his morning pursuing all leads related to Elena Gamboa. There was evidence that the Gamboas had left Tucson by bus, possibly to the northeast. On that vague nugget of questionable intelligence, Calvo spent ninety minutes contacting members of his network from Chicago to Boston, tasking people with checking all their sources, hunting for a pregnant Mexican woman, aged thirty-five years.

It was a needle in a haystack, Calvo knew, but it was also his job to do the bidding of his master.

His mobile rang again, it was his first incoming call of the day, and he flipped the phone open and answered. “¿Bueno?”

And five minutes later he stormed out of his office, pulling his Kevlar suit coat on as he shut the door behind him.

Daniel de la Rocha worked the gym’s heavy bag like an experienced middleweight boxer. He wasn’t the only man on the large teak floor — two more Black Suits stood around, already dressed for the business day, and shouted encouragement to him while he sparred with his trainer or worked the speed bag or pounded his gloved fists into the heavy bag. His trainer stood behind the bag in the corner giving instructions.

And Javier “Spider” Cepeda was there as well; he never left his boss’s side now, even though he also spent time giving orders to his underlings who came and went to execute their boss’s wishes regarding the war with los Vaqueros.

As was becoming his custom, fifty-seven-year-old Nestor Calvo Macias entered the room quickly, ignored the security detail and the others standing around, and walked purposefully up to his patrón.

DLR saw his man in the mirror on the wall. He dropped his arms to rest and turned to face Calvo. “You bring more bad news, don’t you, Nestor?”

“Super lab number six has been destroyed.”

“What do you mean, ‘destroyed’?”

“Destroyed, Daniel. It was there, and now it is not. There is fire. There is wreckage. Twisted metal. Dead bodies. A complete loss of the complex there and all its material.”

DLR just nodded as his trainer wiped his brow with a towel.

Calvo next said, “The Gray Man destroyed two full batches of product. Plus the capital equipment there. And he killed a few men. Some of the foreigners working there are gone. We don’t know if he kidnapped them or if they were killed or if they ran off on their own.”

De la Rocha flexed his chest and arms, then smashed his right fist into the heavy bag.

“Something else,” said Calvo, quietly. “A laptop was taken from the office of the administrator of the laboratory. The administrator has told my men that everything was locked and encrypted, with one exception. There was one file that was open at the time of the theft. This file had sensitive information on it, which we must assume is now in the hands of the Gray Man.”

De la Rocha punched the bag once again, then turned back to his consigliere. “What information?”

“Physical addresses of our real estate in Mexico.”

“Shit!” shouted DLR. “Madrigal now knows the location of all of our properties?”

“If the Gray Man is working for Madrigal… then yes.”

“¡Hijo de puta!” Son of a bitch! De la Rocha screamed, punched the heavy bag with all his might. He turned back quickly to his consigliere. “Cuernavaca? Was the Cuernavaca house on the—”

“Sí, jefe.”

“Nestor… my kids. My wife. That is my fucking home!”

“I know.”

“He said he would not touch my family!”

“With apologies, Daniel, he has not touched your family.”

De la Rocha waved away his last comment. “What do we do?” He stuck his arms out for his trainer to begin removing his gloves. The older man rushed over to comply.

Calvo shrugged. “Two days ago we complained he has cost us fifty million dollars. But now? To establish new routes and safe houses, to change distribution channels from our current properties into the United States? This could cost us ten times that amount.”

Spider had been silent, but he said, “Jefe, we must get you out of here, now!”

“My family,” DLR said softly. “Move them.” A Black Suit spun away, out of the room, pulling a phone from his belt to contact the Cuernavaca detail and have them move de la Rocha’s wife and six children.

But he did not get far. The man ducked his head back into the room. “I am sorry.” He looked around, did not know whom to address. “But where do I tell them to go?”

DLR said, “The property in Portugal. Get them to the airport in Mexico City and have the jet meet them there tonight!”

Calvo shook his head. “No. The address of the Faro estate was in the file.”

“Motherfucker.” The drug lord said it in English. He’d learned it while serving in the Mexican military, training in the United States. “He is destroying us.”

“No,” said Calvo. “Because you will not let that happen. You will give the Gamboa woman back to—”

“No!” DLR grabbed Calvo by his lapels and slammed the older man up against the mirrored wall. “I will not!”

“Daniel, this fiasco is simply costing us too much money, too much time, too much—”

“I don’t care! I don’t care about any of that. I want Elena Gamboa and this gringo assassin dead! Now they threaten my children?”

Calvo shook his head, undaunted even under the threat of physical violence from his boss. “No one is threatening your—”

Spider got between them in an instant. “Jefe. We have friends who own entire chains of hotels, condominiums, real estate of all kinds. We can send your family anywhere; we can rent out an entire floor, an entire estate! I’ll double protection on your family, and you can tell your kids it is a holiday.”

Calvo and de la Rocha stared at each other a moment more, then the younger man let go of the elder’s suit coat. Without breaking the staring contest, he spoke to Spider. “Triple the guard on them. And notify everyone here. We will leave for Puerto Vallarta within the hour; we have more cops working for us there than anywhere else. I will fly the helicopter. Bring Laura Gamboa with us, we will take over the biggest place we can find there, and we will continue war on Madrigal until the Gray Man is liquidated and Elena Gamboa is found.”

Calvo stormed out of the room without another word. As he walked back towards his office, he decided he would do what he could to end this madness, no matter his master’s wishes. The American called him “adult supervision.” It was an insult to DLR but, Nestor acknowledged, there was some truth to the gringo assassin’s words.