Deadly Assets

[THREE]

The tall bartender approached Payne and O’Hara. He carried an almost empty bottle of Irish whisky, and held it up to them.

“Looks like you’ve killed one, gents.”

Mickey looked at the bartender, then at Matt-and suddenly burst into laughter.

Payne chuckled, and shook his head.

The bartender made a quizzical look.

“What?” he said.

“Bad reaction for a bad day,” Payne said. “Good people were murdered this morning just blocks from here.”

The bartender shook his head, his expression now one of disgust.

“What’s wrong with this world today, huh?” he said.

“Give him one, too,” O’Hara said, waving his index finger between both their shot glasses. “After what I’m about to show him, he’s going to need it.”

The bartender raised his eyebrows, then filled the two glasses, drained the bottle into a third, said, “They’re on me. My condolences,” and turned away.

O’Hara pulled out his cell phone and brought up a photograph on it.

He held it up for Payne to see.

The image was of the severed head of a bearded brown-skinned male on the keyboard of a notebook computer. The difference between that head and Tim O’Brien’s was that it had a handwritten note stuck to the dried blood: Editors of Obrien: This source no longer wishes to talk for your stories. Tomas was warned to stop. Now you are. No more articles. Period. CDNA.

Payne shook his head and turned to O’Hara.

“CDNA?”

“Cartel del Nuevo Acuña.”

“The New Acuña Cartel? Have you talked with Byrth about it?”

O’Hara nodded.

“I did. O’Brien did. Tomas certainly did. Jim put him in touch with the Texas Rangers there. CDNA is a relatively small organization that’s based just across the border from Del Rio, Texas. Its plaza, which is what they call their smuggling routes, skirts the big plaza at Nuevo Laredo, which is twenty miles downstream and controlled by the Gulf Cartel.”

O’Hara picked up his shot glass and held it up before him.

“To Tomas.”

Payne did the same, then they banged the glasses on the wooden bar, then downed the Irish whisky.

“Tomas? Who was he?” Payne then said, feeling the warmth of the alcohol again reach from his throat to his belly.

“A stringer we hired to work with Tim O’Brien,” O’Hara explained. “Tomas Rodriguez, thirty-five, married, one child, a boy, and one on the way.

“Tomas needed work. About six months ago, he was having lunch, sitting at a sidewalk mercado in Acuña, when an elderly man, uninvited, took the seat across from him. The man put a copy of that day’s Acuña Noticias on the table and drummed his fingers on the cover story. It was about four male bodies that had been found in a narco fosa, their hands and feet bound and a single bullet hole in their heads. The story bore Tomas’s byline.”

“A narco fosa?”

“It’s what they call a cartel shallow grave. Just like mob ones in the good ol’ guinea gangster days-whack ’em, maybe cut ’em up, maybe not, then bury them in a basement, an unmarked hole in a field, somewhere.

“The man said he’d been ordered to relay a simple message: ‘No mas.’ He said that meant no more coverage of the shallow graves, no more coverage of drugs and humans moving through the plaza near Acuña and across the Rio Grande, no more mention of CDNA. No mas.

“Then the elderly man stood and left.”

“And Tomas didn’t stop,” Payne said, unnecessarily.

O’Hara shook his head.

“Tomas, despite knowing full damn well that journalists are being targeted all over Mexico, did not think much of the old man’s message. He was a newsman, he said, and he reported news. But the next day, after he published a piece on a stash house near where the dead from the shallow grave had last been seen alive, Tomas had been in his newspaper office-it’s a two-room masonry building on the southern edge of town-when the roar of a motorcycle rattled his window. That was immediately followed by the sound of gunfire. He ducked under his desk. When the shooting seemed to be over, he peered out the window and saw that his Volkswagen had been shot up, its windows shattered, the two left tires flat.”

“Jesus,” Payne said.

O’Hara nodded, then went on: “That night he put his wife and their young son on a bus and sent them to stay with relatives in Texas, outside San Antonio.

“He remained in Mexico but backed off on the cartel articles. Then, probably for pure intimidation purposes, they firebombed his newspaper office one night. Now he could not publish the newspaper. No matter. He wasn’t intimidated. He went underground and started publishing about the drug war on the Internet, in a daily blog in addition to social media, writing under La Verdad-‘The Truth.’ When the cartel found out, they offered a bounty to anyone who gave them the name of who was behind La Verdad-or anyone in that person’s family.”

O’Hara pulled up another image on his cell phone. It showed a bloodied, shirtless male body hanging from a rope tied to a bridge overpass. A dirty white bedsheet with hand-painted lettering was draped over the bridge. It was in Spanish. Payne saw that it was signed “CDNA.”

“Someone gave up one of Tomas’s photographers,” O’Hara said, “and, judging by the wounds, the cartel tortured him, most likely trying to get information on Tomas. Then they killed him. Hung him over an Acuña highway as an example. The narco mantra reads ‘This will happen to all who write lies about us on the Internet. You will pay. Signed CDNA.’ Tomas took off for San Antonio.”

“And they killed him there,” Payne said. “Just like O’Brien.”

“Just like O’Brien,” O’Hara repeated, “and his wife. Emily just learned she was pregnant.”

“My God!” Payne blurted. His mind then immediately went to Amanda, who they recently had learned was with child.

“And the bastards knew she was pregnant,” O’Hara went on. “They put on the Internet a photograph of Tomas’s head on the computer with another note that read ‘The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son.’”

“That’s some damn message.”

“If they weren’t sending a message, Matty, he’d just wind up in a narco fosa. Hell, they hacked up Tim.”

They were lost in their thoughts for a long moment.

O’Hara then said: “While reporting news is not a perfect craft-never will be-I would suggest that it is getting worse as fewer people are willing to pay for publications that produce long-form journalism-the hard-hitting, in-depth pieces. That’s a damn necessary craft needed to protect this thing we call a free society. Corruption is a cancer wherever it feeds. And there no longer are real checks and balances in government.”

“No argument,” Payne said, nodding. “Seems that no matter which political party’s in charge, the politicians essentially take turns enriching themselves and their supporters. Not that that’s anything new. Remember what Mencken said about that a hundred years ago?”

O’Hara made a wistful smile.

“You mean good ol’ HL, the Sage of Baltimore? My hero scribe? Every one of his social commentaries, alongside those of Samuel Clemens, should be etched in stone. I will take a wild guess that the one to which you refer is: ‘Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.’”

“And yet,” Payne said, “it’s just accepted. To this day. Meanwhile, too much of what passes for today’s so-called investigative journalism is some perky TV reporter, her ponytail poking out of an Action News ball cap, waving a failed health department inspection at a restaurant manager and demanding to know if he’s cleared out all the cockroaches. No one puts the time into life-changing stories like your Follow the Money series. Tim seemed to be trying, which I suspect is in large measure your influence, including that solid piece he did on the Commish’s grandson.”

O’Hara met Payne’s eyes. “And now his heroin stories that he connected to the guys who set up Garvey.”

John A. Garvey-a thirty-six-year-old architect who was married to the granddaughter of retired police commissioner Joseph Gallagher-had been arrested at Philadelphia International Airport with two kilograms of cocaine hidden in his luggage. During a routine sweep of luggage coming off a flight from the U.S. Virgin Islands, Molly the chocolate Labrador retriever alerted on Garvey’s bag. When he retrieved it at the baggage claim carousel, he was approached by a blue-uniformed officer from the department’s Airport Unit, and Garvey immediately confessed. He explained that in Saint Thomas he’d been blackmailed to be a courier, that they threatened to kill his wife and kids if he did not transport the drugs.

“Every other news outlet,” O’Hara said, “ran with the screaming headline: ‘Former Police Commissioner’s Relative Busted for Smuggling Cocaine.’ That by itself was a cheap shot, because Gallagher had been one helluva top cop. But Tim wanted to know more. So, I approved the request to send him to the Virgin Islands to investigate the blackmailing angle. It’s what led him first to the story of Colombian coke being routed through the USVI to here and then to yesterday’s story about the ring of Mexican nationals pushing black tar heroin in Kensington and Strawberry Mansion. That one apparently was the one story too many.”

“They’re moving record amounts of smack,” Payne said. “Especially now that prescription painkillers on the street are so expensive. Four hits of heroin cost the same forty bucks that a single Percocet or Xanax pill costs.”

O’Hara nodded and added: “And if we hadn’t reported on the coke and heroin connection-if we’d been more like all the other media, and just wrote up Garvey’s arrest, and not dug deeper-then Tim and his wonderful wife would probably still be alive.”

Payne shook his head.

After a moment he said, “How did you know to go to his house today? Couldn’t be coincidence. .”

“It wasn’t. He e-mailed me.”

“He what?”

“I got an e-mail this morning that said ‘If you’re reading this, either I screwed up the reset button-or I’m probably dead.’ He’d set up a time-delayed e-mail. He wrote in it that it was insurance against losing the material in the event they acted on the death threats.”

“A what? A time-delayed e-mail?”

“It’s rather simple, actually. It’s a remote e-mail server. He addressed an e-mail to me, attached the article with the sources and background material to it, and then, instead of clicking on SEND, he set a time and date for when he wanted the e-mail sent, anywhere from, say, a day in the future to a year in the future. Initially, O’Brien’s were set to be sent after a five-day period, unless he reset the schedule, which he could do from any computer or even his smartphone by simply clicking an icon he’d set up. So, if something happened to him-he went missing or got whacked-out went the e-mail. If he didn’t get kidnapped or whatever, then he’d click the icon, or go back into the e-mail, maybe update the file, and then the clock was reset for another five days.”

“But this didn’t happen five days ago.”

“Anytime there was a heightened threat, usually coinciding with the publishing of his articles, the schedule got moved up. In this case, it was one day. He was probably about to reset the delay for another twenty-four hours.”

“You said the schedule could be set up to a year in advance?”

“Or longer. Five days, five months, five years, doesn’t matter.”

Payne was quiet a moment, then said, “What do you think are the chances there’s more coming from some remote server?”

O’Hara nodded.

“The e-mail this morning came with his first draft of the next piece he was working on attached. Another along the lines of Follow the Money. It’s good stuff. And I’m betting that there’s more.”