Oath to Defend (5 page)

10

Drake was stepping out of the shower when his phone started vibrating on the tile counter.
Caller unknown
, he saw, but he recognized the prefix.

“Hi Liz. Got anything?”

“What happened to hello, how are you, and all that?”

“You mean foreplay? I don’t have time. I just stepped out of the shower.”

“Gee, I hope that innuendo was accidental.”

He smiled at the phone. “Hello Liz, how are you, thanks for everything, got anything for me?”

“Better. Your man was picked up in a boat about a hundred yards off shore. Just before you guys went in. He knew you were coming.”

“He was swimming out there? Watching us the whole time?”

“That’s what the satellite images show. They dropped him off in Cancun and then he was driven to the airport. We can’t tell which plane he left on, or if he left at all. Our guess is that he flew out not long after he was picked up.”

“We may have a lead you can help us with.” Drake said. “We think his bodyguard was following someone he was waiting for at the ferry terminal. While we were following the bodyguard, this someone must have spotted us and called Barak. Mike is searching the surveillance videos from the ferry terminal to see if we can identify him. If we can, you might be able to listen in if he calls Barak.”

“You mean ask the NSA for a little Echelon help?” she asked.

“Barak’s a threat to our security. He’s also involved with the cartels. They should jump at the chance to help.”

Drake knew that the global network of computers operated by the five signatory countries of the surveillance agreement
─
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States—was able to intercept communications anywhere in the world. The system, which allowed governments to monitor citizens and their communications, was controversial. But it was very, very effective.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Liz replied. “Go dry yourself and call me if you ID the guy.”

Drake considered her reaction to his use of the word “foreplay” and smiled. Was she flirting with him? He dressed and left to join Casey in his room. It felt strange to think about someone being interested in him, or even noticing it, just a year after he’d lost his wife to cancer.

“Hey, Mike, you want another Dos Equis?”

“Sure. And grab one for yourself. I need another pair of eyes on this security video.”

“You got in.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“I’ve never questioned your skill. I just didn’t think you could do it this quickly.”

Drake fetched their beers and sat down next to his friend. Casey was searching the video one frame at a time. The big bodyguard was standing with his back to the wall reading one of the excursion brochures. In front of him, people were getting off the ferry.

They could see most of the main floor of the terminal on the glare-free screen of Casey’s laptop. Casey pointed. “He stands there like that until this group comes off the ferry. This guy, the blond with the sunglasses, blue polo shirt and the linen pants is the only single in the group, but the bodyguard doesn’t seem to notice him until,” he advanced the frames, “right now. See? He looks down at his cell phone, then looks right at the guy’s face. He’s making sure this is his guy. Watch. From then on, he keeps the guy in sight until he walks out with this tour group and leaves for his Range Rover.”

“Go back and run it again.”

Drake watched the sequence two more times and slapped his partner on the back.

“Mike, that’s our guy. He’s right here at the InterContinental. I noticed him on the bus we took from the lobby to the ferry terminal this morning.”

“There are two hundred and twenty rooms here,” Casey said. “We don’t know if he’s still here. How do we find him?”

Drake smiled. “You think Gonzalez could find another cooperative maid?”

Casey touched the neck of his bottle to Drake’s. “We don’t want to wear the lad out, but why not give him the chance?”

After Casey left to meet with Gonzalez, Drake called Liz back.

“Hello Liz, how are you and thanks for everything.”

“Wise guy. Got anything for
me
?”

“Mike came up with the guy on the security video from the ferry terminal. We think he’s staying right here, and we’re looking for him right now. If he’s here, what do you need to get a fix on him?”

“If you find him, get someone close to him with one of your cell phones. We’ll track both phones from that point on.”

“Uh, that might be a problem. If he’s the one that spotted us following the bodyguard, he knows what we look like.”

“Do you have anyone there he won’t know?”

“We have a pilot that wasn’t with us.”

“Use him. Just let me know which cell phone he’ll be carrying at least fifteen minutes ahead of time.”

“Thanks, Liz. Wish us luck?”

Drake hung up and called their pilot, who had stayed with the plane, and asked him to join them for dinner poolside in an hour. Then he left to see how Gonzalez was doing. He found Casey talking with their Latin Romeo in the hallway.

Casey turned to him and grinned. “Gonzalez has scored again, figuratively speaking. Our man has an ocean suite on the fifth floor. He registered in the name Sven Johannsen, from Denmark. He’s up there now, but he’s checking out tomorrow.”

“That was fast. Good work, Ricardo. I invited our pilot to join us for dinner. We’ll use him to get close to Mr. Johannsen. Do we risk being seen together?”

“And pass up a great dinner while we’re here?” Casey sounded almost indignant. “I say we draw straws. The loser gets to stake out the guy’s room and eat later.”

“And if you draw the short straw?” Drake asked.

“Not going to happen. I hold the straws, and they’re my men. Short straw, big bonus, no problem.”

“All right, make it happen. But I hope your growling stomach doesn’t screw this up.”

“Trust me, my friend. Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach. Those are words to live by.”

Unless you’re marching to Waterloo
, Drake thought.

Casey’s young Ranger from New York, Billy Montgomery, drew the short straw and left to keep an eye on the fifth-floor ocean suite. Drake and crew went to the open-air restaurant and took a table for eight. Their view included the white sand all the way to the dark waters of the Cozumel Strait.

After ordering a round of beers for everyone, Drake turned to Casey. “Liz is ready to track our man’s cell phone. She needs a call from one of our phones while we’re standing next to him. They’ll track him and monitor his calls, one of which we hope will be to or from Barak.”

“What do you plan on doing in the meantime?”

“Maybe I’ll stay here for another day. Barak’s no doubt left Cancun by now, but if we get something right away, we can follow him. Otherwise, I guess we head home and wait. We were so close!”

“We’ll get him, buddy. Then we can both get back to our day jobs.”

Drake grinned. “Do you miss this?”

“Sometimes, but stuck in a ghillie suit for three days, peeing on myself when I have to go—that I don’t miss.”

“DHS is putting me on retainer to act as a troubleshooter. We might be doing more of this. Are you up for that?”

“Will you get to call your own shots, or wind up doing what we did before? Going on missions that made no sense?”

“I’ll be on my own. Just like now.”

“I still have a family and my security firm to run,” Casey said, “but, sure, the Lone Ranger and Tonto can ride again. As long as we get to live like this some of the time. Have you tried the fresh lobster here?”

Drake just shook his head and smiled. He was reminded of the lyrics from an old Dave Matthews Band song: “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.” He hoped there was nothing about the man in the fifth-floor ocean suite that might cause any of them to die.

11

Barak excused himself after an elaborate dinner, and too many rounds of tequila, that left his hosts telling endless stories about torturing and killing anyone who opposed them. He had witnessed great violence in the Middle East, but if his hosts were to be believed, Mexico was keeping pace in both body count and sheer savagery.

Retreating to his upstairs room, he studied the floor plan of the restaurant in Tijuana where the birthday celebration for the Architect’s brother was to be held. The place was small, with only one private area closed off. That was where they would hold the party. The question was, should the brother meet the Zeta lieutenant alone, or would he surround himself with a small army of his own men. From what he’d seen and heard so far, the Mexican cartel leaders preferred the superiority of numbers. He’d have to plan for a full room of men protecting the meeting.

Barak’s men, on the other hand, usually worked alone and killed boldly. As believers, they embraced their own deaths. Martyrdom gave them an enormous advantage. Two men willing to enter a room and die there were more than capable of defeating a small army of men in a closed, small space. So, he thought, two men armed with MP5 Ks and 900 rounds per minute should be enough.

The problem, he knew, would be getting these two men into the room undetected. The brochure and menu for the restaurant his hosts—his employers—had given him listed a variety of Mexican delicacies he would never try; including ant eggs and cactus worms. There were, however, over a hundred brands of tequila stocked in the restaurant. That many tequilas would surely require more than one tequila distributor. One borrowed delivery van was all he would need to deliver his men to the restaurant.

The other possibility he considered was the hotel across the street from the rear of the restaurant and its loading dock. He knew the rear entrance would be guarded, but all of the restaurant’s vendors would use it. Two men walking toward the loading dock without a recognizable purpose, he concluded, would provide too much of a warning to anyone posted there.

No, he thought, the tequila delivery van would provide the best cover. If his men survived, it would also provide transportation away.

He made a call to his best man in Los Angeles and ordered that two men be prepared for a short trip south of the border. Then he went downstairs to talk with his hosts, who were still on the veranda.

“Ah, Señor Barak,” Felipe Calderon said, “Help me finish this bottle of Casa Noble, which is the finest tequila in the world. Have you made your plans?”

“I have made my plan. I will need your help to get my men into the restaurant. I will need to borrow a tequila distributor’s delivery van. Can that be arranged?”

“Of course. Will you need the driver’s uniform as well?”

“Yes, two of them.”

“You will use just two men against the Architect’s brother?”

“Yes.”

“And you think only two men can do the job?”

“I am sure of it. I trained them. They are, shall we say, highly motivated.”

“My men are motivated, too,” Calderon replied. “They know I will kill them if they fail me.” He took another drink. “But they still might fail.”

“My men aren’t afraid of dying,” Barak said. “That’s why they won’t fail. They want to die.”

“No man wants to die, señor.”

“That’s where you are wrong, señor. Do you know where the word ‘assassin’ comes from? It comes from ancient Persia, where a man named Hasan-i-Sabbah created the Order of Assassins. This was about the time of the first Christian Crusade. He trained his men to be willing to sacrifice themselves on his orders, so they could enter Paradise. His assassins were highly skilled, intelligent, and well-educated. I have trained my men the same way.”

“And you promise your men Paradise if they obey you?”

“Allah promises that. I just help them believe it.”

The Mexican smiled. “My priest told me that I would go to hell for wanting sex with a woman who was not my wife. Is it the same, you and my priest?”

“We are both just humble servants helping our flocks believe. Now I must make a few more calls if I am to be successful.” He set his empty glass down. “The tequila was excellent. Thank you.”

“
Si,
it is excellent. I drink to your success so that you do not journey to Paradise with your men.”

Barak returned to his room, wondering if he should give in to the temptation to kill the man. Just because Calderon was feared as a cartel lieutenant didn’t mean the man would last a minute with him,
mano a mano
, as they liked to say. Any one of his men knew how to kill a thousand ways, and he was their teacher. This man, however, knew only the gun and the knife. What had he gotten himself into, working for men like this? When he had his nuke across the border, he would tell the Alliance this was his last time.

He called Ryan in Cozumel. “Are you enjoying your stay?”

“Are you enjoying yours?”

Barak gave an angry laugh. “You have no idea how much. I should be finished here day after tomorrow. Will you have my merchandise here by then?”

“It will be available when you have completed your assignment.”

“Don’t let me down. There is too much at stake here.”

“For all of us. Do your job and we will deliver, as promised.”

“Be sure that you do. Any news about my man?”

“Just that they found him dead at the Mayakoba. Nothing else so far. Call me when you’re finished out there.”

When I’m finished out here
, Barak thought,
and then pull off the devastation I have planned in Oregon, Ryan, I won’t need you ever again. I will be the one calling the shots from now on
.

12

Drake was enjoying grilled sea bass with a mango butter sauce when his cell phone vibrated.

“You may not have to get your pilot close to our friend from the ferry,” Liz Strobel said without preliminaries. “We’ve been monitoring all calls coming from your hotel. A call just came in from south of Tijuana that might be your guy.”

“Oh? What did you hear?”

“Caller asked if anything had been heard about ‘his man.’ Someone in your hotel answered, ‘They found him dead at the Mayakoba.’ The call came from the Guadalupe Valley south of Tijuana.”

“That has to be Barak. Can you track him?”

“We have his phone monitored.”

“Keep monitoring the guy upstairs. We need to know how he’s involved with Barak. We’ll head to Tijuana tonight. Do we know exactly where he is?”

“I’ll have satellite imagery for you before you get to Tijuana. DEA has a team working with the Mexicans at the Tijuana airport, I’ll see if they know anything that might be helpful.”

“Let me know what you find out. I’ll call you when we’re airborne.” He nudged Casey. “Our ferry friend just got a call from Tijuana. The caller has to be Barak. I need to get to Tijuana. Can you drop me off on your way back home?”

“And miss all the fun? How soon do we leave?”

“As soon as I check us out and we get to the airport. Tell the guys.” Abandoning his sea bass, Drake left the table.

An hour later, after a hurried checkout and a dash to the airport, Casey’s Gulfstream was waiting for them. His pilot had rushed ahead and filed a flight plan for the Tijuana International Airport.

“Steve says our flight time is three and a half to four hours, depending on conditions,” Casey said as they were boarding. “Anything you need from us before we’re all sleeping?”

“Liz is working on satellite imagery for us. We’ll sort things out when we have that. Go ahead and get some sleep. You’ll probably need it.”

Sitting in the front seat on the right side of the plane, Drake looked down at the lights of Cancun as they crossed over the Cozumel Channel. Just one night ago, they’d left Oregon to fly to Cozumel, and now they were flying red eye again, chasing the man who called himself Barak.
Who was he, and
what was he up to now?

In the days following the attempted assassination of the Secretary of Homeland Security and the raid on the offices of ISIS, Barak’s international security firm headquartered in Las Vegas, DHS and the FBI had found the employment records of felons who had converted to Islam while in prison and met their deaths while trying to kill the Secretary. There were other felons, too, men spread around the world in the ISIS offices, who were also converts to Islam. But it wasn’t clear that these other men were involved in Barak’s terrorist plot.

They were, however, American citizens who were free to travel back to and around the country without raising suspicion. To a man, they were capable of blending into their surroundings, and as security guards and personal protection specialists, they had almost unlimited access to the very people Barak had targeted on his assassination list, which they had found. As far as Drake was concerned, Barak’s felons constituted the perfect terrorist fifth column. They were homegrown, most of them, and members of minority races, often ignored, invisible to most people. They had been raised as victims in a society they hated. Add the promise of Paradise, Drake knew, and you had the perfect clay from which to mold into an assassin.

There had been no other assassination attempts, however, after their raid on the ISIS offices. The employees with adopted Muslim names and prison records had all disappeared. The remaining thousands of ISIS employees went to work for other firms, as the company’s contracts were taken over by smaller security firms like his friend Mike’s in Seattle.

Barak and his bodyguard had fled without a trace. Why were they in Cancun? Why stop in Mexico, Drake wondered, when Barak could have easily fled further south to Central or South America? And why Tijuana, within spitting distance of the U.S. border? With all the cartel violence in the last couple of years, Tijuana had to be one of the most heavily watched cities in Mexico. The Mexican president had stationed over a thousand
federales
in Tijuana as part of his war against the cartels. The DEA had an office there, too, to assist the Mexican army and provide intelligence. Tijuana was not a city Drake would have chosen if he were on America’s most-wanted list.

When they reached cruising altitude, he called Liz at DHS for an update.

“You’re putting in some long hours,” he said when she answered.

“I have to keep the ball rolling,” she said. “This isn’t exactly an authorized mission. It’s easier for me to ask for what I want directly, as the Secretary’s executive assistant, than to pass it along to someone else. Otherwise, someone might ask who authorized our surveillance satellite over Mexico to be shifted to look at Tijuana. When I ask for it, they just assume it’s been authorized.”

“Isn’t the Secretary backing you on this?”

“Of course he is, but if someone has to fall on a sword, it’ll be me, not him.”

Drake grunted. He didn’t like the idea of Liz falling on a sword, but he understood what she meant. “Any luck finding out where Barak’s holed up?”

“Sort of, the GPS locator on the phone that called your guy in Cozumel indicates it’s in the middle of the Mexican wine country. Looks like a villa, or maybe a replica of an old hacienda. It’s about an hour south of Tijuana, perched on a knoll. It has a clear line of sight for anyone approaching it. We know the phone is there now…along with thirty or forty men guarding the place.”

“If it’s Barak, he’s not taking any chances that we’ll get as close as we did in Cancun. Can we get intel on the place from the Mexicans?” Drake asked.

“We’re working on it. DEA in Tijuana is carefully asking about the place, but the cartels’ informants are everywhere, so we have to be careful. The unconfirmed rumors are the place belongs to the Tijuana cartel.”

“Terrific. So to get at Barak, we have to take on a cartel the Mexican government can’t even crush.”

“Well,” she said, “you could wait for this to be referred to the Pentagon and let them send in Delta Force. Your old outfit,” she said unnecessarily. “Tracking down a lone terrorist is one thing, Drake, but this doesn’t look like it’s a one-man job.”

“Oh, I’m not alone. I have Mike and his guys. They’re as good as anyone the Pentagon is likely to send in. Besides, we don’t have time to wait for anyone. Any chance we can get Mexico to raid the place?”

“DEA says maybe, but only if we can prove this is a cartel hangout and not just some terrorist we’re after.”

“Okay, we can work with that. See if you can get permission for us to tag along as advisors if Mexico is willing to raid the place. If they won’t, we’ll just have to find another way in. And Liz, thanks for seeing this through with me.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Just be careful,” she added. “We don’t want an international incident down there.”

No
, he thought,
we certainly do not.
Unless it means I’ve found Barak and put an end to both him and his plans. Then it would be worth it
.