Fear No Evil

Chapter 34

I ducked through the doorway and stood up in a five-by-five-foot space. A wooden chair bolted into the concrete floor faced a counter and a three-inch-thick pane of bulletproof glass two feet wide and three feet high midway up the far wall.

LED lights poking from the concrete ceiling lit the room. A small, remote-controlled camera glowed in the upper left corner.

The identically furnished room on the opposite side of the bulletproof glass was empty. The warden shut the hatch door behind me. The wheel spun the lock shut. I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.

From everything I’d read about Marco Alejandro, I knew I was dealing with a ruthless drug lord who was also a brilliant, multilingual, self-educated man who presented himself as a philosopher-king to his cartel members.

Alejandro was an alpha — alpha male who’d read, thought, connived, and murdered his way out of poverty in rural Mexico and eventually came to hold immense power as the leader of an ultra-violent, ultra-successful cartel.

Instead of sitting down to wait, I stood behind the chair and pulled myself up to my full six foot two inches to try to get a psychological edge over Alejandro, who was barely five six and, according to rumors, had had a chip on his shoulder about his height his entire life.

I didn’t have to wait long to see if it was true. The big hatch door in the other room opened and three guards in helmets, visors, and full stab gear escorted Marco Alejandro inside.

Alejandro, dressed in a blue prison jumpsuit and rubber slippers, wore a restraint system the warden had shown me as I’d donned the stab suit. Keyless, digitally controlled, electromagnetic handcuffs kept Alejandro’s wrists pinned to an electromagnetic belt at his waist, and around his ankles were electromagnetic cuffs connected by a length of twelve-thousand-pound-test airline cable that could be shortened with the touch of a button.

With close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, forty-nine-year-old Alejandro was built like a gymnast — big chest, shoulders thrown back like a matador, head up, present and alert as he moved to the chair. He studied me with interest even when the guards forced him into the chair, which had an electromagnetic plate that pinned the belt to the back. The cables retracted, giving him two inches of play between his feet.

Only then did the guards leave us alone. Only then did I come around, sit in the chair opposite him, and flip the single switch on the counter.

“Can you hear me, Señor Alejandro?”

He smiled, revealing a gold upper-left incisor and an otherwise perfect set of bright white teeth. When he spoke, it was with the barest of accents in near-perfect English. “You’re only the third voice I have heard in almost a year. Who are you?”

“My name is Alex Cross,” I said. “I’m a psychologist and investigative consultant to the FBI.”

“Who gave you permission to talk to me before the year was gone?”

“Judge Sands.”

“Judge Sands?” he said, sounding surprised. “Señor Cross, you must be a powerful and persuasive man to get that judge to change his mind.”

“A number of murders, including two U.S. law enforcement agents, convinced him that my talking to you sooner might help.”

Alejandro thought about that. “Why don’t I have a lawyer present?”

“Because I’m not here to accuse you of anything,” I said. “I’m here because there is an escalating war going on in the outside world.”

“War? Where?”

“Continental United States so far,” I said.

His eyes widened. “Is this true? On U.S. soil?”

I nodded. “On one side of the war is an as-yet-unidentified group that is kidnapping U.S. law enforcement agents, torturing them, getting them to confess to their corrupt ties to your cartel, and executing them. And on the other side of this war is your cartel, which, in response to one of those confessions, slaughtered the dead agent’s family. Three kids. Two grandparents. The wife tortured before having her throat slit.”

Alejandro took his eyes off me for the first time. “I am sorry to hear this.”

“You didn’t know?”

The drug lord’s gaze returned to me, his expression direct, amused. “What don’t you understand about a year of silence, no communication whatsoever?”

“You no longer run the cartel?”

“How could I? No, Señor Cross, I have passed my time talking to myself, wondering how life brought me to this solitude, confined to a small white room with no contact, nothing but me and the walls.”

“And God.”

He snorted. “The white man in the sky has not made an appearance yet. What do you want from me?”

“Your perspective,” I said. “Your opinion. You know, like an athlete who retires and begins a whole new lucrative career as a commentator.”

“You mean you want a snitch?”

“I want someone who can help me understand the situation enough to halt the needless killing before it develops into a full-scale war with a lot of innocent bystanders murdered in the process.”

He snorted again. “You do know that you can never stop that kind of violence, Señor Cross. I’ve spent my whole life in it. Never once stopped. Oh, maybe a week here, a week there. But violence, fighting for what’s yours, building an empire, becoming a king — that is the natural course of life. How are you going to stop life from doing its violent thing?”