In Desperation (19 page)

Phoenix, Arizona

T
he secretary waved Hackett into ASAC Bruller's office.

Seth Bruller—Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix Division—was standing alone at his desk, sleeves rolled up, on the telephone.

He shot Hackett a look that made it clear: he was not enjoying this end of the conversation.

“Understood…yes, sir…I appreciate that…we will, sir.” Bruller ended the call, undid his collar button, loosened his tie and glared at Hackett.

“That was headquarters. They're not happy, Earl.” Bruller snatched the file containing the inventory of items and material collected from the motel by the Evidence Response Team from his desk. “Damn it, where's our lead on this?”

“We're waiting for Clarksburg to process the latents,” Hackett said.

“Still?”

“They've been promising it momentarily for the last three hours.”

Bruller dropped the file, shaking his head. “Have we got anything else? A plate, a sighting, anything?”

“Nothing's surfaced. We're going to informants in Tijuana, Juarez, Phoenix and L.A.”

“And?”

“We're leaning on them.”

“Not hard enough.” Bruller seized a printout of a news story. Hackett saw the logo for the WPA newswire. “What about Gannon, the brother who's running all over the place. You get anything from him?”

“Just attitude. If he's got anything, he's not saying.”

“His niece's life's at stake. Why doesn't he work with us?”

“Gannon doesn't trust us.”

“
He
doesn't trust
us?
”

“That's right and I don't blame him.”

“What?”

“Look at the facts—Salazar and Johnson were American ex-cops.”

“They were bad cops. It happens.”

“And you recall that little memo warning us of cartel infiltration of U.S. law enforcement?”

“What about it?”

“I don't know what happened with the motel, Seth. It was almost like they could hear us coming. We were so close, their coffee was still warm.”

“Are you saying these guys were tipped from inside the task force?”

“I don't know what to think.”

“I'll tell you what to think—think about doing your damned job by looking for criminals, rather than looking for blame!” Through his glass walls Bruller saw heads turn to his office. He sat down, repositioned the two framed photos of his boys in their Scout uniforms and pursed his lips. “You say Gannon doesn't trust us. Well, I don't trust the fact he just happened to be in Mexico when all this came down with his sister. It's just a little too coincidental, don't you think?”

“The New York Division interviewed his editors,” Hackett said. “Gannon's reason for being there checks
out. Our people found no red flags in his background. He was on assignment in Juarez when this happened.”

“What about Galviera? What did we find on him?”

“Nothing other than what we know.”

“That's it?”

“It's already in the report you have, Seth. He had financial trouble. He gambled. He was going to lose his company and sought relief through Salazar and Johnson.”

“And who else? Did you pursue that? Where are your informants? Who else did Galviera associate with? For Christ's sake, Earl!”

A soft rap on the open door interrupted them.

“Excuse me,” Bonnie Larson said. “I thought you'd like to know we've just received confirmations from the lab and EPIC. The prints of our kidnappers belong to two Mexican nationals in the Norte Cartel.”

“Get on it.” Bruller reached for his phone. “I'll advise NHQ.”

Returning to their desks, Larson pulled Hackett aside, dropped her voice. “Thank God I got you out of there. With all that yelling, I was afraid.”

“For me?”

“For Bruller.” Larson rolled her eyes. “The last time he was operational, cell phones were just a dream.”

Upon examining the new analysis, Hackett's stomach tightened.

The first man was Ruiz Limon-Rocha, a Mexican National. DOB: 14 July 1980. Height: 5'11". Weight: Unknown. Hair Color: Black. Eye Color: Brown.

The second was Alfredo Hector Tecaza, a Mexican National. DOB: 03 December 1986. Height: 5'10". Weight: 170. Hair Color: Black. Eye Color: Brown.

Limon-Rocha and Tecaza were ex-military recruited by a high-ranking member of the Norte Cartel. The two dead guys in the desert were American ex-cops, believed to be working for the Norte Cartel before betraying them.

Hackett also reflected on the task force, now hitting upward of seventy people from a range of jurisdictions.

Unease gnawed at him. The Norte Cartel was known for infiltrating law enforcement agencies.

His phone rang. Bruller wasn't finished. He had a question.

“What about Cora, the mother?”

“What about her?”

“How deep did we go on her background?”

“We've been through all this. You saw our reports. No record, no warrants. She admitted to her past addiction to hard drugs but has been clean for over eleven years, since her daughter's birth.”

“She admitted to knowing drug dealers.”

“Yes, in the past, but her neighbors told us she is a clean-living, churchgoing single mom.”

Larson's line rang. She picked up the call, then started waving frantically at Hackett.

“Right,” Bruller was saying into Hackett's ear, “but her boyfriend was a money man for the Norte Cartel. We need to polygraph her. Let's get that set up.”

Hackett hung up, knowing Bruller was right. He should've trusted his instinct and polygraphed Cora earlier.

“Earl!” Larson cupped one hand over the receiver. “It's EPIC. They just got a lead that a
sicario
for the cartel just entered the U.S. at El Paso. They think he's our guy for Salazar and Johnson and he's on a bus to Phoenix now. Arizona DPS is talking to the bus company and the driver. They're getting set to take it down now!”

Willcox, Arizona

A
ngel watched the desert roll by his window.

The bus, westbound on I-10, had just left New Mexico. It was nearly full with weary passengers: leather-skinned men in faded denim shirts, young mothers with small children, a few students, and a few grandmothers; people running away, or going home, people who kept to themselves. When they spoke, they talked softly in Spanish, their privacy protected by the drone of steel belts on asphalt.

Angel was alone.

The seat next to him was empty. He was taking in the wide-open landscape and mountain ranges, the territory where Cochise and Geronimo once rode.

But every few seconds his eyes shifted to the driver.

Something's wrong
.

Angel had been watching him in the big rearview mirror and, when the light was right, studied his reflection on the windows.

It was essential to Angel's survival that he be aware of every sound, action and reaction.

Yes, he'd entered the U.S. earlier in Texas without incident. But his counterfeit documents had been scanned into computers. And the bus terminal went smoothly, but he'd noted the security cameras and an intelligent ticket
agent who seemed capable of remembering faces when he glanced at him.
“Just one way to Phoenix, sir?”

Angel took nothing—absolutely nothing—for granted as he continually assessed every iota of information to determine if it was a threat.

And now, he may have detected one.

Through the driver's body language
.

A short time ago, somewhere around San Simon, something twigged. The driver had taken a call on his cell phone. Angel could not hear any of it over the rush of the wheels and the fan pushing conditioned air, smelling of fabric freshener and diesel, through the old bus. But in seconds, the driver's reaction to his call telegraphed alarm in a million ways.

While on the phone, he'd glanced into his mirror and quickly inventoried his passengers, nodding as he spoke. Angel noticed how, upon ending the call, the driver repositioned his grip on the wheel with both hands, then licked his lips. Then he dragged the back of one hand across his mouth as he constantly checked his side mirror.

As if he is expecting to see someone come up beside them
.

The warning signs accumulated.

Trouble's coming.

Angel had to act but he needed to keep calm. He controlled his breathing the way he'd been conditioned since his first days as a professional assassin.

At that time, the cartel had sent him to a secret training camp, where for several hard months hired mercenaries from around the world taught him how to maintain and shoot with accuracy every kind of gun, from pistols to assault rifles. He was instructed on how to use knives, bows and employ everyday items as weapons.
Here is how a paper clip can be used to puncture an eyeball
. The mercenaries taught him self-defense, how to read and escape dangerous situations and survive as a fugitive.
They taught him the art of killing hand to hand, but not how to live with death on his conscience.

Angel had soon understood that killing was not possible for all the prospective hit men at the camp, where cartel enemies had been delivered for execution.

Some could not do it.

They could not look into the eyes of their target, a defiant man, a sobbing woman, even the pleading child of an enemy kneeling before them, and end their life. Some broke down, lost their minds.

They were the first to be executed.

Angel was different.

He held enough hate in his heart, knew the smell and taste of it, so that squeezing the trigger was a release.

An embrace
.

But with time, killing had exacted a toll, and now he knew that his days as a
sicario
were numbered. He was tired of the torment, tired of living in the crosshairs, of facing eternal damnation. That is why he brokered his deal with the priest.

That is why he would bring it all to an end after this final job.

But it would end on his terms.

Not here.

Not with a white, potbellied bus driver squirming in his seat. Angel continued studying his actions for the next few miles and contemplated his options.

Since departing El Paso, Angel had used the bathroom a few times, familiarizing himself with the layout of the old bus, a Strato AirGlider, and the distribution of passengers, mentally noting which ones were using wireless laptops or cell phones, possibly watching news sites.

He was vigilant. None of the passengers, so far, posed a threat.

They were passing the Dos Cabezas Mountains and, according to the signs, nearing the exit for Willcox. That's when Angel noticed a car had materialized alongside the
driver's left, then eased its way ahead of the bus, giving Angel a clear view.

It was a gleaming white Ford.

A Crown Victoria, no markings, no roof lights. But the push bars on the front bumper and back dash lights were telltale indicators of an unmarked police car.

Then the bus driver lifted two fingers in a subtle wave.

Angel very calmly collected his bag and headed to the bathroom. The passengers, many of them dozing, were oblivious to what was transpiring.

The bathroom was locked. It was occupied.

Angel waited.

Then he felt the bus decelerate.

He rapped softly on the bathroom door. Through the windows he could see the bus was leaving the interstate. Angel heard movement in the bathroom just as the public address system in the bus crackled with the driver's voice.

“Ladies and gentleman, we're making an unscheduled stop in Willcox to have a mechanical issue checked. It will not take long. Please remain on the bus and accept my apologies for any inconvenience.”

The bathroom door clicked and a large grandmother navigated her way out, muttering in Spanish. Angel waited, then entered the small room, holding his breath.

Inside, Angel locked the door and stood on the lid of the toilet seat. Above the toilet, in the ceiling, was a combination vent and escape hatch. The hole was about eighteen-by-eighteen inches, covered with screen.

The hatch cover was open, tilted upward toward the front of the bus. Angel noticed the wires that likely connected to an indicator light on the driver's console. He used his small knife to cut them.

He removed the screen, hooked a long strap of his pack to his shoe then hoisted himself smoothly through the hole, pulling his pack after him. He lay flat on his
stomach, keeping low to the bus roof, hanging on the lip of the hatch as the wind rushed over his body.

The bus turned on to the business loop. As it crawled along, Angel glimpsed a scattering of settlements before it approached the downtown and clusters of sleepy low-rise buildings.

Over the noise outside he could hear someone knocking on the locked bathroom door, then a man's voice, muffled but impatient.

The bus stopped at a traffic light beside a large dump truck loaded with fine gravel or sand. This was Angel's chance. Keeping close to the roof, he waited for the right moment, slid to the side and leaped into the truck.

Angel's pulse raced.

Sand stuck to his moist face and hands as he waited in the dump truck, waited for voices, for a siren, for a commotion, for an ending.

Then the dump truck jolted and its transmission grinded as the driver upshifted. The truck rolled slowly through downtown Willcox.

Angel peered over the side, saw his bus disappearing as the dump truck turned and headed out of town.

He was now two hundred miles from Phoenix.

Clarksburg, West Virginia / El Paso, Texas

S
teve Pollard had to be certain.

At the FBI's crime data center outside Clarksburg, the fingerprint analyst needed to check another aspect of the Phoenix kidnapping.

Pollard's standard operating procedure was to leave no stone unturned.

He'd already identified the two kidnapping suspects, Ruiz Limon-Rocha and Alfredo Hector Tecaza. Check that off. But he was troubled by the elimination prints from the Phoenix case. Pollard had used them to compare with Limon-Rocha and Tecaza's impressions but was uncertain if the elimination prints themselves had been submitted through the network of crime databases.

Pollard was submitting them now. Better to do it twice than risk an oversight, he thought. Even though he didn't expect anything, he had to exhaust all possibilities.

After submitting the elimination prints, Pollard was about to check the daily email on success stories circulated to all the fingerprint examiners in the section. But he didn't get the chance. One of the databases yielded a hit on one of the elimination prints Pollard had just submitted. His eyes narrowed at he concentrated on the result.

What the heck?

It came out of the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, the national database that held details on a range of violent crimes, including serial murders and unsolved homicides, some going back over twenty years.

One of the submissions had yielded a possible match from an unsolved case. Pollard sat up, went to work making comparisons.

I don't believe this
.

A few minutes later he started making phone calls.

 

At that moment, in Texas at the El Paso Intelligence Center, DEA analyst Javier Valdiz was drafting a new intelligence note on the Norte Cartel for FBI Special Agent Earl Hackett in the Phoenix Division. This one would expand on the summary he'd sent earlier on Ruiz Limon-Rocha and Alfredo Hector Tecaza.

Valdiz worked quickly, marrying up-to-the-minute raw data with the history of the Norte Cartel. He consulted the org chart of cartels in Mexico, Central and South America and criminal networks throughout the Caribbean and their tentacles into the U.S. and elsewhere. The latest edition was complex, starting with leaders and commanders, flowing to plaza bosses, gatekeepers, soldiers, enforcers, transportation chiefs and
sicarios.
The genealogical aspect to the charts showed bloodlines going back generations, family networks, affiliations.

The Norte Cartel, also known as the Zartosa Cartel, arose from the barrios of Ciudad Juarez to challenge all existing cartels in a battle for control of the prized shipment routes into the U.S.

The Norte Cartel trafficked in marijuana, Colombian cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. It controlled major distribution hubs in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, California, and in Chicago, New York, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid and Rome.

It was effective at bribing and threatening government
officials, infiltrating police agencies and operating a near-perfect unit of elite, young, highly-trained assassins. Its membership was said to number two thousand, making it among the most powerful, deadly and vengeful of all the major narco organizations. To steal from the cartel meant grisly death. To challenge them in any way ended in torture, mutilation and decapitation, with corpses displayed as warning. The cartel had no alliances and waged war with all rivals, Valdiz wrote.

The Norte Cartel was led by Samson Zartosa aka Twenty-five, El Monstruo. DOB: Unknown. Height: Unknown. Weight: Unknown. Hair Color: Unknown. Eye Color: Unknown. Second in Command was Garcia Deltrano aka Thirty, Comandante. DOB: 16 July 1967. Height: 5'10". Weight: 180. Hair Color: Black. Eye Color: Brown.

Cartel history, intelligence and legend indicated Samson Zartosa rose from the gutter of a Juarez barrio to become one of the world's wealthiest and most-feared drug lords.

Samson Zartosa's father, a carpenter, was stabbed to death in front of his wife and their three sons by two men who'd come to their home demanding money. Samson, the eldest, was fourteen. He led his two younger brothers to find and kill their father's killers, and their families.

It turned out that the two men were thugs in a feared gang.

Consequently, the Zartosa family's stature and respect was instant. At fourteen, Samson assumed control of the murdered men's barrio gang, and in a few years built it into a merciless drug cartel.

Along the way, tragedy befell the Zartosa family three more times. The boys' mother died young of a heart attack. Eduardo, the youngest brother, was in his late teens when he was killed while on vacation in California. Hector, the middle brother, died two years ago during a
gun battle with Mexican military forces that left twenty Norte members dead.

When Samson learned Hector had been betrayed by a DEA informant, he ordered the decapitation of the informant's family members. Next, through threats and bribery, the Norte Cartel determined the informant was being guarded by Mexican and U.S. officials in a mountain hideaway. On the day a convoy was to transport him to an airstrip, two hundred Norte Cartel members surrounded the vehicles, extracted the informant and executed him on the spot.

This was the last known betrayal of the Norte Cartel until the recent rogue action by Salazar and Johnson. The latest up-to-the-moment intel showed that Salazar and Johnson were working for the Norte Cartel, handling security for the San Diego and Phoenix cells, when they attempted to set up a rival route and the upstart “Diablo Cartel,” using Lyle Galviera's courier company.

Their operation, said to have involved upward of five million in stolen Norte Cartel money, resulted in their murders, Tilly Martin's abduction, the disappearance of Lyle Galviera and the dispatch of a Norte Cartel assassin, believed to be destined for Phoenix.

Valdiz exhaled and began reviewing his note to clear with his supervisor when his computer pinged. He'd received an encrypted email from the FBI's fingerprint unit in West Virginia.

His attention was drawn to the subject line: Alert re Phoenix Kidnapping & Cold Case.

What's this?

He opened it and began reading when his phone rang.

“Valdiz.”

“Hey there. Steve Pollard, FBI's fingerprint section in Clarksburg. I just sent you an alert on the Phoenix kidnapping.”

“It's a hell of an alert.”

“I've alerted ViCAP people, everybody. We need to talk about this.”

“I think so. This changes everything.”