Power and Empire

25

A waitress who was far too chipper for six o’clock in the morning had just brought John Clark a plate of eggs and wheat toast when his cell began to buzz on the table beside his plate. He accepted the call and put the phone to his ear, using his fork to fiddle with his eggs as he listened.

“Hey, Gavin,” he said.

“Smokinggun.txt!” Gavin Biery said, his voice jubilant.

Clark took a bite of eggs. He wasn’t hungry, but he knew he would need the energy. “I have no idea what that means.”

“Right,” Biery said. “It’s a white-hat-hacker term for the digital clue that breaks a case wide open. I’m always looking for this very thing when I search for hidden malware or forensic evidence.”

Clark trapped his phone between his ear and his shoulder while he used both hands to butter his toast. “Okay…”

Biery took a deep breath, as was his custom when he prepared to launch into a lengthy explanation. “The dark web isn’t what I’d call surf-friendly, but GRAMS lets you search some of the sites.”

“GRAMS?”

“Think of it as the Google of the darknet,” Biery said. “Anyway, I did some snooping for the name Matarife, figuring anyone who went by a moniker like ‘the Slaughterer’ probably has an ego the size of the Death Star. There are billions of sites on the surface web, so this kind of guy can hide in plain sight. The darknet is smaller. Users rely on anonymity, but they stand out more once you focus on them. Took me a couple hops from one sick site to another, but I eventually stumbled onto your guy.” Biery exhaled hard. “I gotta tell you, John, there’s a reason they call it the dark web. This Matarife makes snuff videos — stuff you can’t unsee. Prevailing chatter is that they’re the real deal. The computer script alone about made me puke. I thought I might be able to grab metadata from some of the photos but didn’t have any luck.”

Clark closed his eyes, willing himself not to interrupt. The crescendo of Gavin Biery’s voice said he was moving toward something big.

“But you know what? People aren’t suddenly born on the darknet. At some point, somewhere back in time, they had a presence on the surface web. That’s how they found that Silk Road guy, an old post on Reddit advertising his site. So I did a search on the only slightly less perverted visible portion of the Web. Turns out a user calling himself Matarife 13 had a long convo on an S-and-M chatroom three years ago where he posted some photos. He was running decent OPSEC even back then, using a VPN and an anonymizer program to scrub the metadata—”

“What?” Clark said, biting his tongue.

“He used a virtual private network and a program to wipe the digital fingerprint off any photos he uploaded — except he didn’t. Matarife chose a sloppy anonymizer that left behind EXIF data on a couple of his posted photographs.”

“And that means?”

“It means, John,” Gavin said, “that you need to get a pen, because I’m about to give you the GPS coordinates to this filthy piece of shit’s house.”

Outside the United States, crime bosses employ sizable armies to guard against the almost inevitable attack from rival gangs. Like something from a Hollywood action flick, cold-blooded men wearing dark sunglasses and tight black T-shirts patrol remote hacienda grounds with MP5s, AK-47s, and even the occasional Hi-Point SMG. These residences have high walls, rimmed with broken glass to discourage intruders. They’re often fortified with electric fences and vicious dogs.

Farther north of the border, cartels contend less with marauding competition and more with teams of raiding law enforcement. They’re still heavily armed, but these U.S.-based operations put more trust in CCTV cameras, often purchased from their local Walmart. Sometimes they rely on nothing but a good standoff from any neighbors and acres of grain sorghum to act as a buffer.

If Ernie Pacheco — Matarife’s real name — had known that John Clark was creeping through the sorghum field behind his ranch north of Alvarado, Texas, he would have opted for a lot more than three strands of sagging barbed wire.

The team of Campus operators had originally flown to Dallas on a commercial flight. Clark had declared his Wilson Combat .45 in his checked baggage but brought little more with him on this trip than the communication and surveillance equipment needed to watch Eddie Feng. He had none of the gear he would have normally used to execute an early-morning assault of a rural compound.

John Clark was a dyed-in-the-wool .45 guy. He’d used the 1911 weapon system to great effect in Vietnam and the many — way too many — years that followed. He’d eventually transitioned to a SIG P220—still in .45—but a brutal injury to his shooting hand had caused Clark to reevaluate his choice of sidearm. Long and painful months of rehab had finally returned his ability to shoot the trusty SIG Sauer, though at first with only his middle finger. He’d finally regained dominion over the tendons in his index finger — but the shorter single-action pull of the 1911 made accurate shooting a hell of a lot easier. Plus, it was the excuse he needed to buy a new gun and revert to the firearm system that was so ingrained in his muscle memory. The Wilson Combat Professional felt like he was reuniting with an old friend.

Still, he’d regained proficiency with a variety of weapons. Necessities of the mission and common sense made him grab a Glock 19, a spare fifteen-round magazine, and a Gemtech GM-9 suppressor from the Gulfstream before the others departed for Argentina. He wanted to have a little deeper pockets when it came to ammo loadout. The argument of .45 versus nine-millimeter went out the window when you were out of bullets. Even so, he didn’t abandon the Wilson in favor of the Glock. He carried them both. He was a firm believer in “Two is one and one is none,” and the .45 remained his primary weapon in the Askins Avenger holster at three o’clock, while the Glock rested comfortably over his right kidney in a Comp-Tac holster inside the waistband of his pants.

Along with the pistols, Clark carried a Benchmade AFCK folding knife, a small roll of Gorilla tape, and a pocket Streamlight flashlight. It wasn’t much, but he’d done more with less. His rules of engagement made the job a little easier.

If anyone fought back, he intended to kill them.

From the looks of the waist-high Johnson grass and dry stalks of grain sorghum, little else but mourning doves and rattlesnakes had spent much time in the fields behind Matarife’s house in years.

Clark stayed low as he moved, crawling when the stalks were short, stooping in a fast duckwalk when the plants gave him better cover. Earth-tone 5.11 slacks and a black sweatshirt helped him blend well into the long morning shadows. The field was damp from recent rains, but the day promised to be a hot one for September and the ground was already beginning to steam. The humidity and muggy odor of wet earth, not to mention the fire ants and the high probability of coming nose-to-nose with a pit viper, brought back so many memories that Clark found it nostalgic… almost.

Ding Chavez hadn’t exactly been wrong in his earlier assessment. John knew full well he risked becoming far too focused on the human-trafficking aspects of this op. The sight of the girls at Naldo Cantu’s, covered with track marks and surrounded by used condoms, brought back memories he’d suppressed for decades, memories that made him who — and what — he’d become. Just looking at the poor drugged kids made him feel like his teeth might shatter. He was nearing seventy years old. Still a tough old bird, no doubt, but old was fast eclipsing tough as the operative word.

For as long as he could remember, something inside Clark had pushed him to check out danger, to go and see, to help. Some accused him of being addicted to violence. If he was honest with himself, there had been a time when he relished a good fight. When there was going to be violence on his watch, he certainly didn’t want to miss it. But the fight wasn’t the main thing. His wife, Sandy, had summed up his sentiment best when she caught him coming back in from his private range early one morning on their Emmetsburg, Virginia, farm.

“John,” she’d said, sipping her morning coffee and looking even more beautiful than she had the day he’d met her. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. You’ll still be relevant.”

It was at once the kindest and most pitiful thing anyone had ever said to him.

Maybe that was it. Relevance.

His workouts were less intense now, his runs slower. His hair was thinning… no, it was just plain thin. Even worse, each passing year saw him get a little more emotional. Hell, he got choked up when his grandson caught a pop fly at a baseball game. And all that blubbering just served to piss him off. He abhorred the idea of going soft.

But a guy past his use-by date wouldn’t be inching through a dry sorghum field behind a murderous bastard’s house. Pound for pound and year for year, he could still hold his own against most threats. He was the personification of the sentiment “Never underestimate an old man in a dangerous profession.” Like Jack London, he wanted to go out on his own terms, “as ashes instead of dust.”

And so Clark fought the clock by fighting bad men, whenever and wherever he found them.

The sorghum was thick enough now that he had to drop back down and belly-crawl. The tops of the plants rattled and hissed when they brushed together, brittle and heavy with grain. He moved as quickly as possible, taking care not to disturb the stalks any more than necessary. Only a trained observer would be able to see the ripple of his approach by watching the tops of the plants.

Clark heard the distant splash of someone taking a morning swim in a pool. He estimated the house to be less than a hundred meters away now. Crawling, he tapped the Wilson Combat with his elbow, habitually making sure it was still in the holster where he’d left it. Ahead, the plants began to thin and Clark found himself entering a small clearing. A mound of fresh earth, roughly two feet high and at least eight feet wide, blocked his path. Beyond the dirt pile, at the far edge of the clearing, rutted tracks ran between the grain rows toward the house.

Clark dropped flat, his chest to the damp earth, scanning the edge of the clearing. He turned his head as he looked, knowing from experience he could miss important elements of danger if he moved only his eyes. Searching inch by inch, foot by foot, he searched for anything out of the ordinary — game cameras, tripwires, fishhooks strung at eye level.

Just inches from his nose, half an earthworm hung from a ball of roots and sod, exposed to the air, cut in two by whatever tool had been used to turn the clods. The worm was still moist, telling Clark the dig was recent, probably during the hours of darkness. Small piles of tiny white pellets were visible here and there among the clods of rich black soil. At first glance he took the white stuff for fertilizer, but he inched forward, getting a closer look. He rolled one of the gray BBs between a thumb and forefinger — he moved forward immediately, scuttling around the edge of the piled dirt, dreading but knowing what he would find. He fought the urge to vomit as he came to the lip of a hole dug in the middle of the clearing, eight by eight feet square and four or five feet deep. At the bottom of the pit, from beneath a layer of dirt and pellets of kitty litter, the pale fingers of a delicate hand reached toward the sky.