Damage Control

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Trevor Munro lived an immaculate life. Where so many others in his profession had surrendered to the temptations of women and alcohol and overeating, his was a life of discipline. It was a point of pride.

He’d written more than once in his diary that precise men lead precise lives, and precision translated to cleanliness and restraint. People could sense these traits in him. That was how he earned their trust. And once earned, that trust was never broken. Not by him. And if it was broken by others, then he made sure that they paid a heavy price for their betrayal.

This business with Felix Hernandez was particularly troubling for him because Felix was convinced that Munro had betrayed him. That of course meant that Hernandez would be after his blood, but that was far less of a concern than the affront to Munro’s reputation. The record needed to be corrected.

As he entered the mudroom through the garage door, he punched in the code to disarm the alarm, and then armed it again as soon as the door was closed. The light switch on his left illuminated a pathway into the kitchen. His was a world of white on black. The overhead lights sparkled against the polished white Sile-stone of the countertops, which blended perfectly with the white walls and the white cabinetry. Together, they provided stunning contrast against the gleaming black appliances and the black-stained walnut floors that he buffed to a high gloss every Sunday.

He crossed through the kitchen to his den, which doubled as a home office on the occasions when he just couldn’t bring himself to make the drive from Reston to Langley, and laid his briefcase on the floor at the edge of his desk.

The curtains and blinds were closed throughout the house, as they would remain until this terrible business in Mexico was resolved. Munro had received no specific intel that Hernandez had dispatched hit squads to the United States, but the man certainly had the resources to do so, and the temperament to make it happen. For the next few days, his would be the life of an undercover operator, reminding him of his early years with the Clandestine Service. He would stay away from windows, avoid prolonged exposure out in the open, and drive different routes to work, traveling at unpredictable hours.

The point wasn’t to be bulletproof, but rather to make it as difficult as possible for the bad guys to execute whatever plan they might have. Evasion, then, combined with the protection that Sjogren’s people provided, should give him an edge until this mess stabilized.

Should. Far from a guarantee, but perhaps that’s the way things should be. He was in charge of an operation that hadn’t gone well, and now pipers needed to be paid.

As Munro reentered the kitchen, he turned on the broiler on the wall oven and then walked to the refrigerator to retrieve the filet mignon that he had set in there this morning to allow it to defrost. As he lifted it, he knew from touch alone that the six-ounce filet was ready to cook. It was exactly six ounces, too-306 calories-specially cut and packaged by the butcher at the Whole Foods up the street. Throw in a cup of corn at 183 calories, and he had a healthy meal that wouldn’t add an ounce to the reading on the scale. He hadn’t exceeded his budget of 1,750 calories a single time in the past ten years.

Discipline and precision.

He’d just removed the steak from its plastic wrapping when his BlackBerry buzzed on his hip-a phone call, number blocked. He answered it. “Mr. Abrams. Do you have a name for me, or are you just calling to pester?”

“As much friggin’ fun as it is to pull your chain, Trev, I’m looking forward to the moment when I don’t have to chat you up at all anymore.”

“At last,” Munro said. “We have found common ground. Do you have a name or not?”

“Nope, no name,” Sjogren said. “But I do have a plan.”

Munro’s heart skipped a beat. Finally, some progress.

Sjogren continued, “My guy at the AG’s office says that they’re smuggling the snitch out of Mexico in the next day or two.”

“Through where?”

“He doesn’t know specifically, but somewhere in Ciudad Juárez.”

Munro’s bubble of hope burst. “That’s hardly helpful,” he said. He pulled a package of corn from the freezer, then pulled a measuring cup from the cabinet over the stove.

“I think it’s more helpful than you recognize,” Sjogren countered. “The only reason my guy knows what he knows is because the FBI is pulling strings from a really high level to grease the skids for this thing. What he told me was that the snitch isn’t coming alone. Specifically, she’s coming in with three fugitives. Does that ring any bells for you?”

Munro sighed. Everything with this man was such a tug-of-war. Why couldn’t he just-

“Did you say three fugitives?”

“There you go, Trev,” Sjogren said with a laugh. “Now you’re catching on. Care to guess what the names of the fugitives are?”

Hope bloomed again. Much larger than before. “Don’t toy with me, Mr. Abrams.”

“I got a Tristan Wagner, a Leon Harris, and a Richard Lerner.”

Munro coughed out a laugh before he could stop it. “I don’t understand how you can know the names of the fugitives and not know the names of the informer,” he said. “We need to know them all if we’re going to stop them.”

“No, we don’t,” Sjogren argued. “All we need to do is find your commando buddies and follow them. They’ll take us to the snitch. Then all we have to do is take them all out.”

“You say that as if it’s a simple thing to do. Have you any idea where Harris and his friends are?”

“Actually, I do. They had a bit of a firefight. They won, of course. But they couldn’t have gotten very far because the Mexican Army is out in force, looking for them. They even know what vehicle to look for. I’ve already talked with the Army commander down there, and he’s ordering his troops to sight and follow.”

“We can’t let them get through,” Munro said. The true ramifications of this new discovery hit him in a rush, eliciting an audible gasp. “My God, this means they know everything. We know they’ve connected the dots to the cathedral, and because they’re hooking up with this informer, that means they’ve connected it back to the drugs and Hernandez.”

“That’s the way I see it,” Sjogren said. “But there’s light at the end of that tunnel, too, if you look hard enough for it. Apparently, they need this guy’s testimony to make any kind of case. Otherwise, they’d be all over Hernandez, and after that, they’d be all over you.”

“You need to get a name,” Munro pressed. “We cannot wait for Harris to hook up with the informer. We need to take the informer out first.”

“I don’t think anybody disagrees with you, Sport, but weren’t you listening? We don’t know who the hell she is. Your butt buddy’s got himself a hell of an operation down there. I imagine it could be any one of hundreds of people. It’s not like they’re salt-of-the-earth types like me and you.”

Munro pulled the phone away from his ear and let it dangle by his side for a few seconds while he collected his thoughts. Part of having a disciplined mind was the ability to control the flow of information. This situation was at the proverbial tipping point, equally capable of going well for him or turning into a complete catastrophe. Progress one way or the other would be entirely dependent on the decisions he made in the next few minutes.

And then the decisions to be made after those. And after those. On and on for God only knew how long it would take. Munro needed to embrace this as a siege, not a-

As a bell rang in his head, Munro brought the phone back to his ear.

“-did you go? For God’s sake, Trev-”

“I’m here,” Munro said. “I had to put you down so I could think. Tell me where this shootout was. The one the Harris and his team won.”

“A few hours north of the exchange site,” Sjogren said. “North and east. I don’t have a name of the town. Hell, I don’t even know if there is a town. That’s still pretty remote country.”

“So they were still in the jungles?”

“Oh, hell yeah.”

“And who was killed in the shootout?”

“What, you want names?”

Munro rolled his eyes. “Heaven forbid,” he said. “We all know that names are beyond you.”

“Hey, screw you, Trev.”

“Of course I don’t need names. I don’t know these people. But who were they? Bystanders? Local cops? Army?”

“Oh, they were definitely Army. Why does that matter?”

This is what happened when you’re forced to deal with people of inferior intellect. You had to explain everything. “It matters because Harris knows he’s being looked for. He knows that the Army is involved, and he may very well know that they will recognize his vehicle.”

“How would he know that?”

“I would assume, were I he, that the group who spotted them would have called it in on the radio. Isn’t that in fact how your Army friends know the identity of the vehicle?”

Sjogren’s response was more guttural than verbal. Having some of his shit fed back to him apparently disagreed with him.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Munro pressed. “So, if they think that they’re being looked for, don’t you think they may take some countermeasures? Perhaps they’ve changed vehicles by now. Isn’t that what you would do?”

“Yeah, I suppose I might.”

“So here’s the bottom line, Sjogren. You don’t have a clue what you’re looking for out there. You can’t follow what you can’t see, and without following, there’s no stopping these people. You need to get a name.”

“I don’t have a name, Trev.” Sjogren’s voice vibrated with frustration. Munro had clearly struck a nerve. “It’s not like I’m holding out on you. I don’t have it.”

“I don’t hire you for what you know,” Munro fired back. “I hire you for the information that your contacts know. Sounds to me like it’s time to put some more pressure on your own butt buddy in the U.S. attorney’s office.”

“He doesn’t know, either. If he did, he’d tell me.”

Munro closed his eyes as he fought to control his temper. “Don’t concentrate on what he does know. Concentrate on what he can know. Everything’s possible when the stakes are high enough.”

All the derision was gone from the Bostonian. In fact for the very first time in Munro’s memory, Jerry Sjogren may have just been rendered speechless.

“Hey, Jerry?” Munro said.

“Abrams.”

“Right. You know that part I said about anything being possible when the stakes are high enough? You might want to take that one personally.”

He pushed the disconnect button. As he turned back to the business of fixing dinner, he felt a sense of calm, as if he might have taken the first step toward victory.

Maria Elizondo stuffed three hundred thousand American dollars-all hundred-dollar bills, banded in five-thousand-dollar stacks-into a Tyvek envelope, sealed it, and placed the package on a shelf in the massive safe that sat next to her desk. That brought the daily total to three million five hundred forty-two thousand dollars. She made the appropriate notations in the ledger book, and then placed that into the safe as well. She pushed the door closed, turned the bolt, and then spun the lock.

It was time to go home. Her office, such as it was, occupied one hundred square feet of tile-floored grandeur in the far southeast corner of the main building of the compound known as Hacienda del Sol-a ridiculously pretentious name, she thought, for a hideous concrete bunker of a house surrounded by fifteen-foot-high walls in one of the more squalid sectors of Ciudad Juárez, which itself was one of the most squalid cities on earth. Yet another expression of narcissism from a man whose opinion of himself could not possibly be overstated.

Maria shed the sweater that she always wore to counter the chill of the air-conditioning and hung it over the back of her chair, where it would be waiting for her in the morning. She had to hurry now, before another delivery of cash was dropped through the louvered steel slot in the reinforced concrete wall.

She grew so tired of the overbright yellow light that shined from behind the wire-reinforced recessed light fixtures in the ceiling that some days she swore that she felt ill from the lack of sunshine and unfiltered air. After days like today-ten hours without a break-she thought she might go mad if she had to face this one more time.

Face it she would, though, because Felix Hernandez trusted her, and only a fool denied Felix what he desired.

With all surfaces cleared, and all drawers and cabinets locked, she picked up the telephone receiver from its hook on the wall next to the entrance and waited while the call completed itself. The person on the other end of the line answered it merely by picking it up. Protocol prohibited him from saying anything until he was spoken to.

Maria said, “Purple, sapphire, salmon, moon.”

The guard on the other end said, “Apple, rose, seawater, penguin.”

The random words were chosen anew every morning, and they needed to be recited in precisely the correct order for either Maria or her security counterpart on the other side to unlock their side of the door. This was part of Felix’s paranoia that his enemies might somehow gain control of the compound, and by so doing merely wait patiently until it was time for the occupant of the vault to go home, and when the door opened therefore have access to his money.

He called it double redundancy, which in Maria’s mind was itself singly redundant.

With the pass codes properly delivered, she spun the knob of the cipher lock on her side of the door and disengaged the bolts. A few seconds later, she heard the second set slide out from the wall. She pushed while the guard pulled, and as the door moved outward, she wondered if the blast of frigid air felt as refreshing to the guards as the enveloping warmth felt to her.

Per their protocol, all six guards in the adjoining room had their rifles to their shoulders, aiming outward in an arc, waiting to shoot anyone who might attempt to rush the vault during the short time that it was open. Once outside the vault, she let the guard push the door closed, and then she waited for him to spin his lock before spinning her own. Neither knew the other’s combination.

“The lock is set,” the guard said, and the others lowered their rifles.

Maria said nothing to these men. No pleasantries, minimal eye contact. They were not her friends, and she was not theirs. If Felix so much as suspected relations among them, all of their lives would be endangered. In his paranoid world, people who liked each other were more likely to conspire against him, and any conspiracy could only be about stealing his money.

Or, of course, about taking his life. In truth, there were far more people in the world who wanted him dead than cared about his money. Maria, in fact, numbered herself among them.

Exiting the Banking Room, as it was called, Maria stopped in the doorway to the next room and held her hands out to her sides to be frisked. Though she wore tight-fitting jeans and a T-shirt, the pat-down was necessary, if only to give these teenage guards an excuse to touch her body. She knew that they lusted after her, and she didn’t mind it a bit. Let them have their dreams. These days, there was so little to dream for.

After clearing that last search and grope, she was free to go.

Or at least she thought she was. As she passed into the center hall, an all-too-familiar voice called, “Maria! I need you!”

Her shoulders sagged, but only for an instant. Felix expected his women to appreciate his advances. Standing tall and donning a smile, she turned and entered the ornate study that served as Felix Hernandez’s office-at least in this house. Hacienda del Sol was only one of four homes where he divided his time in random rotation.

“Hello, Felix,” she said. As she approached, he rose from behind his desk and met her halfway for a kiss. It was a lip-only kiss, and he did not smell of alcohol, so she relaxed a little. When he was in this mood, he rarely wanted to root and paw at her as he did when he was drunk.

“You seem surprised to see me,” Felix said.

“I am surprised to see you. I didn’t expect to see you for several days.”

He led the way to a pair of love seats that flanked a coffee table in front of his desk. He gestured for Maria to sit, and then sat next to her. He was a handsome man by any reasonable standard, with strong Latin features, jet-black hair, and a dazzling smile that melted every female heart. Maria had always thought that his eyes looked empty, as if made of glass.

“One way to remain unpredictable,” he said, “is to occasionally double back on your own tracks.”

“You need to be careful,” she said. She sold it with a gentle squeeze of his arm, a gesture designed to reassure him that she truly cared.

“That’s the second time that’s been said to me in just the last hour,” he said with a wry smile.

Maria scowled. “Really? Who else?”

“An associate of mine,” Hernandez said. “His name doesn’t matter.”

“What does he say you need to be careful about?”

His eyes grew even emptier as they peered into her. “My associate-who knows many things and is rarely wrong-says that I have been betrayed.”

The words chilled Maria’s blood far more effectively than the air-conditioning had. She willed herself to maintain eye contact, yet again touching his arm. “I don’t understand.”

“He tells me that someone very close to me has been talking to American agents, plotting to do me harm.”

The chill turned to ice. How could he possibly know? She’d been so very careful. “You mean to kill you?”

He cocked his head and stared deeper. Maria felt as if he were trying to set her on fire from within.

“I don’t understand, Felix,” she said. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but the fact that people are trying to kill you is hardly news.”

The glare continued for a few seconds, and then he smiled. “Indeed,” he said. “But the threat is not to kill me. The threat is to have me imprisoned for the rest of my life.” Finally, he looked away. “But even that is not what troubles me. This associate was very specific. The informant is very close to me, and probably a woman. That means that someone to whom I have been extraordinarily generous is planning to repay me with the worst kind of betrayal.”

Maria’s mind raced. What was her best play now? Clearly, he suspected her-he’d have to suspect her-so would it be most convincing to pretend to be totally clueless, or should she become defensive?

“Surely you don’t suspect me,” she said before she even knew that she’d chosen a course.

“Should I?”

Her strategy materialized out of nowhere. She bolted to her feet and stormed to the door, furious.

On cue, Hernandez shot out his hand to grab her wrist. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Maria whirled on him and slapped his face. “How dare you!” she said. Tears clouded her vision.

Hernandez shot to his feet, too, his face red with rage.

“Go ahead!” Maria dared. “Go ahead and beat me. Have me shot. If you think so little of me-if you think for even a second that I could betray you-by all means shoot me yourself.” She pulled her arm from his hand. “Bastard.”

Her heart hammered at an impossible rate as she headed again for the door.

“Stop!” he commanded.

When she turned this time, he hadn’t moved. He still stood in front of the love seat, his face slack with surprise.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Maria said, pointing her finger at him. “I am not like your other mistresses. Yes, I know you have them. They pretend to care for you because they fear you. I love you, Felix. I would lay down my life for you. How dare you suspect me of such a despicable thing?”

He moved toward her. “Where are you going?” His voice was softer now.

“Home,” she said.

He reached for her hands with both of his, but stopped when she recoiled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I was being… stupid. Please stay. Please stay the night.”

“I am going home,” Maria said again. “Unless, of course, you want to have your guards drag me back here so that you can rape me.”

The thought seemed to horrify him. “Maria. I would never-”

“And neither would I,” she said. “Never in a million years would I betray you.”

“Stay, then.”

She shook her head emphatically. “No, not tonight. I couldn’t tonight. I need to be alone tonight.”

Hernandez seemed to be at a loss for words, as if he hadn’t found himself in this position before.

“Will you be back tomorrow?” His voice sounded oddly childlike now.

This was a new expression. There was tenderness there somewhere.

She might actually feel something after she drove a stake through the monster’s heart.