King of Swords

Chapter 13

The next morning, Cruz began his one-on-one meetings and the day lurched along in a predictably painful manner. Answering the same questions over and over, fielding the doubts many had about the validity of the operation, advising how to proceed from their current position, which amounted to being dead in the water.

Cruz wanted to allocate resources to the two most promising areas — Los Cabos, where the summit was going to be hosted, and Culiacan — the drug capital of Mexico. It was possible El Rey was holed up in a cabin by a lake somewhere, but if Cruz was El Rey, he’d be in Los Cabos at some point, scoping out the lay of the land and devising a plan of attack.

Accordingly, he called the Federales outpost there and alerted them to the situation, adding that he would be deploying resources within the next week to establish an operational base in the area. The officer in charge didn’t sound too thrilled — Cruz wouldn’t have been happy either, were situations reversed. Cops were territorial, so an incursion by outside parties was never appreciated. He understood the reception to his team would be less than ideal, but his job wasn’t to make friends; it was to battle the cartels.

Los Cabos consisted of the two towns, Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo, and was off the radar of the cartels, other than as an attractive money laundering destination. The issue was one of geography. Drugs were not shipped from the mainland on the ferry, because they’d have to run a gauntlet of almost a thousand miles of military checkpoints on the only road that stretched north to the border. The only other way of getting there was by plane. So the cartels just used the location to wash cash. Cabo was a ghost town, filled with large restaurants and clubs that were devoid of clientele, yet managed to turn huge profits year round. Some of the hotels were the same way — five percent occupancy at best, and yet wildly lucrative.

Cruz recalled, from the six weeks he’d spent in Los Barriles wasting away, that you could walk down the street at three a.m., drunk as a lord, and nobody would bother you. There was just no crime to speak of. The Federales in San Jose del Cabo were the equivalent of the Highway Patrol, cruising the highways and cleaning up after accidents, issuing the occasional speeding ticket when money was tight or Christmas was coming. Their ability to do anything meaningful in terms of real law enforcement or preventative action to deter a professional like El Rey was effectively nil, so they’d be of no use to Cruz.

He intended to fly a group of six into Los Cabos, who would put out feelers in the community and work with the existing infrastructure of police as they searched for signs of El Rey, without arousing undue attention. Technically, he didn’t have jurisdiction anywhere outside of Mexico City, but his mandate from the President carried with it the ability to commandeer resources anywhere in the country, and to extend his reach should it be required. In this case, Cruz had made the judgment call that it was necessary — he’d worry about documenting the details later.

Cruz wished he could go directly to the President and voice his concerns, but he didn’t have any relationship there. When he told criminals the President had given him the power to do as he liked, a more accurate description was that the President created his job and imbued it with that power, and then Cruz had been awarded the position. The truth was that he’d never been within a quarter mile of the President in his life.

No, he was effectively on his own on this one, and he knew it. His staff had continued to give him their support, for which he was grateful, and he had a larger group of officers at his disposal than any other agency, so he was hopeful that would be sufficient.

Briones stretched his arms and yawned, three quarters of the way through the day and four more meetings to go. “Have you asked yourself what the political consequences would be of the President being assassinated? I mean, we’re assuming this is some sort of a vanity play on Santiago’s part, but what about if it’s more subtle than that?” he asked Cruz, who was brewing coffee on his side table.

“Well, if the President is killed, leadership shifts to the Secretary of the Interior — the equivalent of the speaker of the house,” Cruz explained.

“Wasn’t he just killed in a plane crash?”

“Helicopter. Outside of Mexico City. Last November eleventh, to be exact,” Cruz confirmed.

Briones studied his boss, astonished at his recall. “How can you do that? Remember the date of something obscure?” he asked.

“It’s not as hard as you’d think. His predecessor, the man who hired me for this position, died in another plane crash the same month, five years ago. A Lear jet that crashed into the heart of Mexico City. You probably heard about it,” Cruz reminded.

“That’s right — I just didn’t remember who was on board. Seems like being Secretary of the Interior has a history of air accidents, doesn’t it? Am I just being paranoid, or is that another of those coincidences you don’t believe in?” Briones speculated.

“The black boxes were taken off the jet to the U.S., but that’s the last I heard of it. Like so many cases, everyone just moved on to other things and the matter was forgotten. If there was foul play, the government is keeping a lid on it — so we’ll probably never know the truth. They wouldn’t like to advertise it, if the cartels had brought down the number two guy in the government. Bad press and all…” Cruz observed cynically.

“If you’re offered a plane ride with the Secretary of the Interior, sounds like a polite, ‘No thanks, I’ll take the bus,’ might be better for your health, no?” Briones suggested.

“Haven’t gotten that invite yet, but thanks for the tip,” Cruz quipped dryly. “So what else do we have for today?”

“A few more meetings, but the lion’s share of the instructions have been handed out already. We’ll establish a hub in Los Cabos and begin surveillance on the site. We’ll also get a few undercover operatives to burrow around the strip joints and barrio drug-dealing areas to probe for chatter.”

“But not from Julio or Ignacio’s groups. I want them out of the information loop. As far as they’re concerned, it’s just business as usual,” Cruz underscored.

“I know, I know. We have four guys from Paolo Arriata’s squad who are going in. So it’s compartmentalized,” Briones assured him. Arriata was another veteran of the undercover street operations Cruz had initiated.

“Good. All right, let’s get the next one in here and go through the drill.”

Briones rose and went to find their three o’clock appointment.

It was just beginning to get pretty hot in Culiacan, although it would get far hotter a few months later. Still, it was uncomfortable enough in the poorly ventilated confines of the jail, where prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing wiled away the days languishing on sparse mattresses in the general population area.

Moreno had been given his own cell once he’d returned from Mexico City, and the quality and quantity of treatment had improved significantly. Instead of being forced to sleep in a room with twenty other men, many hardened lifelong criminals incarcerated for murder and kidnapping, he got his own, more comfortable bed and a private toilet, including a sink. This was akin to a suite in the Ritz Carlton to Moreno, who’d been living in a bleak lean-to on the outskirts of town, surviving hand-to-mouth on whatever he could steal and sell.

As he’d gotten older, it had become more difficult to find legitimate employment; the only opportunities that had come his way over the last two years had been grueling construction jobs that required him to spend ten hours a day in the sun hauling concrete cinder blocks and mixing mortar with a shovel on a slab of plywood. With his pronounced limp and attendant complications, a lingering result of an unlucky two seconds on a tall ladder trimming plants on the second story of a home in town, he just couldn’t do it anymore.

Mexico didn’t have a safety net for its poor or unfortunate, beyond medical care at the notoriously shabby and inept social security hospitals — where one could easily die while waiting to be attended to. There were no social programs, no food stamps, no unemployment checks, no lobbyists sucking prosperity out of the economy for redistribution to the huddled poor. If you didn’t work, you starved to death. The only buffer was the family structure, where caring for the old or the infirm was considered obligatory, but Moreno’s four children were no help. One daughter lived in the United States, where she was struggling as an undocumented alien in Southern California, doing housework for wealthy housewives too occupied with their busy schedules to attend to chores like cleaning their own homes; a son was a fisherman in Veracruz who was barely keeping his head above water; and the other two were dead, one a victim of a traffic accident, and the other of Dengue fever, which cropped up in outbreaks from time to time, and for which there was no cure.

His daughter occasionally sent a hundred dollars, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough to live on, and there were no gardening jobs for a fifty-something year old gimp with a poorly healed pelvis. So Moreno did odd jobs here and there when he could, and had taken to alleviating the pain from his injury with the readily-available Mexican brown heroin, a habit that had rapidly consumed any savings he’d amassed. So he’d begun a career as a burglar, pilfering opportunistically — though he wasn’t very good at it, as proven by his recent capture. He couldn’t even run away from the two cops, who’d been alerted by a neighbor and were standing, waiting at the sidewalk when he’d climbed awkwardly out of the window.

He knew he’d been incredibly fortunate that the police captain, Cruz, had found his story valuable, and he resolved to set himself on a more productive path once he was released. There was a Catholic church organization that would feed him if he did work at traffic lights soliciting donations, and while that was a dead-end prospect, it beat rotting in prison for most of the remainder of his life. No, he’d been given another chance, and this time he wouldn’t blow it.

A guard came by his cell to inform him it was exercise time, followed by lunch in the general population. He pulled on his prison-issue shirt and followed the man out into the yard, where the scorching sun beat down on the assembled felons, dishing out further punishment for their abundant sins. He took up a position on the periphery of the yard, in one of the areas where the roof overhang provided some meager shade. A breeze would have provided some relief, but the surrounding twenty-five foot walls topped with razor wire and broken glass effectively blocked any, converting the jail into an oven. The concrete block construction made an unbearable proposition even worse, because the walls and roof absorbed the sun’s energy all day, and then continued to radiate heat throughout the sweltering night.

Moreno pulled one of three cigarettes he had left from a packet he’d been given by the guards upon his return and, stooping over, retrieved a match from his shoe and struck it against the ground. A shadow moved across his, and as he stood, he was assaulted by a spike of searing pain. A burly prisoner with a ragged scar across his face plunged a shank into his abdomen with machine-gun speed, again and again, puncturing multiple organs before Moreno fell to the ground in a puddle of spreading blood. The assailant moved hurriedly away from the twitching form, melting into the prisoners, all of whom averted their eyes out of self-preservation.

Moreno’s vision swirled as the world tilted and blurred, his lifeblood spilt in a miserable hellhole just as things were turning around for him.

By the time the uninterested guards arrived and called for a medic, Moreno was sliding into oblivion, struck down by an unknown assailant for reasons nobody would ever piece together. His last thought as he slipped from the world was that the whole mortality experience had been vastly overrated.

~ ~ ~

The flight from Mexico City to Los Cabos contained a surprising number of serious, well-muscled police officers distributed among the passengers. The men were traveling in civilian clothes, their weapons safely transported in a special locked container in the belly of the plane, which they’d collect once at their destination. They weren’t chatty and kept to themselves, avoiding interactions with their seatmates, preferring to study the in-flight magazine or close their eyes during the short flight.

As the plane descended into the arid desert of the southern Baja peninsula, the plane bucked and bumped from the updrafts of hot air rising off the baking scrub below. Off to the left of their approach, the deep azure of the Sea of Cortez stretched into the distance; over a hundred miles of watery gulf washed between Los Cabos and the nearest point on the mainland.

The wheels scored the tarmac with a smoking streak before the aircraft decelerated down the long runway, recently lengthened for the G-20 as well as to accommodate Boeing 777 flights from the mainland; the final stopping point between Mexico City and China. As the plane turned to loop around towards the terminal, the men noted a phalanx of private jets of every description at the far end of the field; a testament to the money concentrated in the region. Everything from King Air twin-engine prop planes to Gulfstream G-5s nestled wing to wing, and even as high season wound down and the town headed into the dog days of summer, dozens of jets of every shape and size jostled for space.

The men disembarked, and in the baggage claim area met their local counterparts, the Baja contingent of the Federal Police, who’d retrieved their case of weapons and were waiting to take them to headquarters a few miles from the airport.

After a cursory orientation in their temporary new home, the team broke for lunch at a nearby open-air seafood restaurant situated under a huge palapa with a thatched roof. When lunch was over, they drove to the site of the newly-constructed convention center that would host the G-20 summit. It seemed that the workers milled about aimlessly amid the constant stream of vehicles that came and went, as deliveries were made and supplies distributed.

The lay of the land seemed relatively easy to secure, given that there weren’t any structures in the immediate vicinity of the complex. The only locations that were a concern were the school at the bottom of the steep slope and the surrounding hills. A sniper could possibly take a shot from the crest of the nearest bluff, but it would be extremely iffy at such a distance.

In the end, securing the site wasn’t their problem. The army would shoulder most of the burden for security during the summit, given the dearth of experienced police personnel. There were no armed conflicts with cartel members in southern Baja, so the local cops had never dealt with anything more dangerous than a shootout with a local dope dealing gang, an occasional drunk with a knife, or a furious wife hell bent on decapitating her wayward husband with a gardening machete.

Satisfied they understood the geography, the team moved to the surrounding outlying areas, which were largely residential. Two and three-story condominium complexes lined the highway, punctuated by occasional soccer fields and small commercial centers, and the occasional shop and restaurant. The large grocery store and attached mall across the intersection that led to the G-20 was a quarter of a mile away, so posed no obvious threat.

After completing their day’s orientation, the men checked into a nearby hotel. The undercover cops took siestas, because their shift would start at the fall of night, when adult entertainment began at the strip clubs as they flashed their neon promises onto the sidewalks of San Jose and downtown Cabo San Lucas. They’d be up until four in the morning most nights, talking up the girls and trying to see if anyone had spent time with a mainlander who seemed suspicious. It was a long shot, but a surprising number of criminals spent their lazy hours drinking with pros, and perhaps El Rey shared that habit. All the undercover officers carried reduced-sized sketches in their wallets, along with some lip-loosening bills, on the off-chance one of the young ladies had something to tell them.

They wanted to avoid passing the photo around indiscriminately, because it could tip the assassin that they were actively looking for him in Los Cabos; once this professional was on high alert, he’d vanish, leaving them holding air until he struck from out of nowhere. They would wait until a day or two before the summit commenced to take that last-ditch step of desperation and circulate the sketch to all law enforcement and armed forces in the area.

A big obstacle was that the local police were usually corrupt. Average salary was three hundred fifty dollars a month, so most augmented their income by taking bribes for all manner of favors — letting off traffic offenders, hassling business competitors, demanding money to protect shops and restaurants, and selling information to underworld connections; which presented the problem — El Rey would doubtlessly be plugged into the underground buzz, and would hear about a manhunt within hours of their going widespread with it.

Every prisoner taken into custody would be interviewed and shown the sketch, just in case somebody had encountered him. Additionally, the undercover cops would spread the word through the local drug dealers, in case El Rey had a habit, which many criminals did. Once the undercover officers had bought a few times, they would show the dealers the sketch, concocting a story that the man had stolen property from a connected cartel boss, who was willing to reward anyone who could help locate him. It wasn’t unknown for those hiding to do so in Baja — it was considered the boonies by mainland Mexicans; a wasteland out in the sticks that nobody in their right mind would want to go to if they could help it.

It wasn’t a comprehensive strategy, but it was a good start, and as the sun began to dip behind the Sierra La Laguna mountains the undercover team prepared to begin the first of many long nights in southern Baja’s dens of iniquity, searching for an illusive man with no name other than that of a tarot card.