Requiem for the Assassin (26 page)

The minutes dragged by, and then it was six o’clock and the rest of her peers were packing their things and donning their jackets. Beatriz joined them and rode the elevator to the ground floor, where she was parked in the employee lot, walled and guarded to keep prying eyes from identifying CISEN employees. Her Chevrolet Chevy started with a grudging cough, and she scolded herself for putting off getting it serviced – she just never found the time, somehow, with life continuing to intrude on her best intentions.

The guard waved to her as she pulled out of the driveway and into the snarl of cars heading home. Mexico City was home to some of the worst traffic in the world, and the commute to her apartment less than five miles away could easily take an hour and a half each way.

She would get home, have a stiff drink, and then go to the nearby internet café and use the pay phone to try Carla. Other than that, she had nothing to go home to, other than a grumpy cat and an empty house since her husband had moved out a year earlier, after deciding that his twenty-something airhead secretary was better company.

Beatriz switched on the radio and listened to the bark of the rapid-fire announcer recounting the day’s tragedies and soccer scores, interspersed with overly cheery ads for desserts and hygiene products. Four mutilated bodies had been found in one of the southern
barrios
, victims of an ongoing territorial dispute between drug gangs. The governor of Baja was being investigated for tens of millions gone missing on his watch. The president was explaining why Pemex, the government-controlled petroleum company, had to be bailed out again after losing five billion dollars the last quarter – the only oil company in the world that managed to operate at a huge loss on a consistent basis, well understood by the population to be a massive theft scheme for its management.

Beatriz rolled to a stop at a red light and barely registered the movement near her rear fender before a snarling man with nylons pulled over his head was pointing a revolver at her head and screaming.

“Get out of the car. Now,” he yelled. “Do it, or I’ll shoot. I swear I will.”

Her heart raced as she debated flooring the gas and ramming the car in front of her, pushing her way into the intersection, but she discarded the impulse – her little Chevy would never make it, and it might enrage the carjacker and cause him to shoot her. She held up her hands and tried to speak calmly. “Okay, okay. Take the car. I’m opening the door.”

She reached over and unbuckled her seat belt, keenly aware of the can of mace in her purse, but spray versus a handgun at close range was no contest – she’d be dead the instant she went for it. The man was probably a drug addict on his last legs, desperate for a fix, because nobody in their right mind would choose her little crackerbox to steal if they were thinking clearly. Her shaking hand moved to unlock the door, and the gunman fired three times. The window shattered in a shower of safety glass, hollow-tip rounds taking most of the top of her head off at the point-blank range.

He was gone before what was left of Beatriz’s face hit the steering wheel, the strident blare of her horn like a death scream as the gunman darted between the cars and down a side street, where he vanished into the bowels of the city, leaving her to be another statistic on the nightly news, missed only by her cat, who would persuade the neighbors into adopting her within a day of missing dinner.

Chapter 44

Cancún, Mexico

Heat waves distorted the steaming asphalt as
El Rey
rode in the back of a taxi from the airport. Lush jungle edged the road and the air smelled of ozone and moisture, as clean as Creation Day following a passing tropical cloudburst that had dropped two inches of rain in fifteen minutes. Off to the west, lightning seared the sky with glowing branches through a dark curtain of retreating thunderheads as the storm surrendered the morning to the sun’s scorching fury.

After the moderate temperature in Mexico City, the ninety-percent humidity and heat were unbearable, but
El Rey
ignored the discomfort as the sorry car’s air-conditioning struggled in vain against the elements, his gaze distant as the landscape rushed by. He was there to kill a man, probably an innocent one. Instead, he hoped to interrogate the farmer and learn what he had in common with the others on the list, and then secret him away after staging another death – probably a boat explosion or a disappearance after swimming out to sea, the undertow having gotten the better of him.

The car rolled over the bridge on the southern end of the island, and the verdant underbrush gave way to miles of gleaming white hotels lining the sea side of the land spit in an endless symbol of man’s encroachment. Groups of tourists waited at bus stops along the only road north, pink as freshly boiled shrimp. The driver glanced at the assassin in the rearview mirror and smiled, revealing teeth pocked with decay.

“This your first time here?” he asked.

“No.”

The cabby deduced that his fare wasn’t in a chatty mood, and instead of regaling him with his customary description of the resort town’s delights, concentrated on the road. He pulled onto the sumptuous grounds of a huge hotel, three glass pyramids jutting from its roof – the Melia. A valet came running from beneath the overhang, sweat beading his face, and held the car door as the assassin passed some pesos to the driver and climbed out with the mini-duffle he’d carried on the plane. A bellman swung the hotel entry door wide for him, and he entered the expansive marble lobby, peering up at the inside of the glass pyramid as he approached the reception desk.

His room overlooked the shimmering turquoise of the Caribbean Sea, and after setting his bag on the bed, he opened the sliding glass door and went out on his patio. Six stories below, the surf crashed against the white sand, each swell dissolving with a booming roar before being sucked away from the beach to make room for another – a fitting metaphor for life, he thought, as he watched the infinite procession. Like the waves, humans arrived with sound and fury, mistaking their momentary intensity for substance, only to expire after a brief explosive climax like so many before, replaced by new arrivals equally convinced of their unique importance.

After several minutes of watching the spectacle, he returned to the room, luxuriating in the chill of the air conditioner, and connected his laptop. Once logged onto the network, he went to his email, where there were two messages, one from Carla and one from Cruz. Carla’s was from another blind email account, sent that morning at six a.m., and he skimmed it quickly. She’d been researching the names, and had discovered that the farmer was the plaintiff in a lawsuit that had been filed half a decade ago in Baja California Sur, but beyond that and his land ownership, there was nothing more on him in any of the systems she could access. On Perry, she’d learned that his cause célèbre, the turtle charity, was also focused on Baja; but beyond that tentative link, there was nothing else. Neither the admiral nor the archbishop appeared at all concerned about turtles, so other than the four of them having a tenuous connection to Baja, a thousand-mile-long peninsula with a population of millions, there were no other commonalities.

Cruz’s message was short: a link to an article in that morning’s Cancún newspaper and a curt instruction to read it and call him.

El Rey
navigated to the site and absorbed the news and then powered on his burner cell phone, waited for it to connect to the network, and then dialed Cruz’s number.

“I gather you saw it,” Cruz said by way of greeting.

“Damn. I could have saved myself a lot of flying.”

“I hear Cancún’s lovely this time of year.”

“Like the surface of the sun crossed with a steam bath.”

“When are you returning?”

“I’ll be on the next flight out. No point lingering here.”

“You think it was a competitor that killed him?”

“I’ll assume so. Which is alarming, considering that I’m supposed to be the only one with the contract.”

“I’ll be here whenever you get back. Not like I have a lot of places to go.”

“All right.”

El Rey
hung up and looked at his duffle, still packed. He typed in the address of a travel site and scanned it for flights to Mexico City. The next one was at two p.m., leaving him just enough time for a bite to eat in the hotel restaurant before returning to the airport. His job in Cancún had been done for him, though whether by fate or another contractor, he might never know. The paper had devoted a scant four lines to the farmer’s murder, a robbery gone wrong, and contained little detail other than the time and place he was found, and his name.

Hardly anything to show for sixty-four years on the planet. His eyes drifted to the window and the waves outside as he powered his computer down and stowed the laptop back in the bag.

They needed to connect the dots soon, because at the rate things were going, everyone on the list would soon be dead, taking their secrets with them to the grave.

The possibility that he was being played against another party changed his already dim view of CISEN. When he’d agreed to work with them, his conditions had been clear, and this assignment clearly violated the terms he’d laid out. So even the microscopic trust he’d placed in the organization was now gone, and he would have to view them as he viewed all his prior patrons: potentially lethal for no apparent reason.

He’d foolishly thought that having the president’s signature on his pardon would ensure that the intelligence agency honored its obligations, but given Tovar’s threats, that wasn’t a certainty. And now he needed his shot. A bad position to be in, to be sure, but one in which he had no choice.

He shouldered his bag and went to the beach restaurant, where he put his misgivings aside to make room for grouper with a soy-teriyaki glaze, the high point of his day so far. Puffs of cotton-ball clouds drifted lazily offshore as he considered his options, none of which were good, and when he was finished with brunch, his ordinarily placid expression was marred by a frown, which accompanied him to the airport and, later, home to Mexico City and the nest of vipers to whom he’d pledged his life.

Chapter 45

Mexico City, Mexico

El Rey
approached the downtown metro station cautiously, insulated from any potential foul play by the crowd of people around him on their evening way, either late office workers or early diners. An arid breeze blew from the mountains, concentrating the perennial smog layer that blanketed the city in the western sky, making for a dazzling light show of purple, magenta, and orange as the sun sank behind the craggy peaks.

He’d gotten in touch with Tovar with the news of the farmer’s murder and had agreed to a meeting with him in the metro that night. He’d get his vial of antidote, which, as with the last two, he’d take to a lab for testing – a preventative measure to ensure he wasn’t injected with poison instead of the correct substance, and that it was the same as his two earlier shots. He’d been warned that it would take three or four injections spaced every six months to clear his system of the neurotoxin that was dormant in his cells, a particularly ugly bit of business CISEN had obtained from the CIA.

His senses were on hypersensitive when he arrived at the station an hour early, after having spent most of the late afternoon familiarizing himself with every inch of the warren of connecting tunnels beneath the streets.

Cruz had offered to accompany him into the metro as backup, but he’d declined. Cruz might have been street savvy for an officer, but there was nobody more adept than
El Rey
, and having the cop around would be more hindrance than help if anything went wrong. He didn’t expect it to, but after the events of the last week he had no faith in CISEN’s integrity and was taking no chances.

He was on high alert as he descended the steps into the depths of the city, an environment he’d be happy to see the last of after spending hours there. No matter how much money had been spent on modernization, the underground bunker smelled of dank earth and unwashed humanity. Millions passed through it every day, mostly manual laborers who used a bucket and rag for their infrequent concessions to hygiene.

El Rey
was dressed as an office worker, wearing a moderately priced sports coat and black dress slacks that effectively hid his SIG Sauer P250 Subcompact semiautomatic 9mm pistol – a small gun with twelve rounds that was devastatingly effective in close quarters yet fit in one of his jacket pockets with only a slight bulge.

He paid his tariff and passed through the turnstile, noting that the pair of transit police that had been stationed near one of the ticket counters had drifted closer to the bottom of the stairs and seemed completely oblivious, their presence more for deterrent value than of any practical use he could see.

As he made his way into the first wide passageway, the tiled tunnel walls shining in the glare of the artificial lights, his eyes roamed over the sea of faces moving toward him – a nightmare from a security standpoint, but equally so from an attacker’s. He was unrecognizable with his goatee and modish sideburns, his disguise as a metrosexual hipster complete with a black straw fedora the likes of which were all the rage.

The meeting would take place on the platform beneath an ornate nineteenth-century iron clock at one end of the long span. He repeated his earlier route, his muscles relaxed as he strode purposefully with the rest of the crowd toward the platform. His plan was to take a train north one station, disembark, and then return, so he could study the platform from the opposite side immediately before his meeting, ensuring it was only Tovar as his welcome committee.

He made a left into the middle section of the passageway and slowed with the passengers in front of him, delayed by a homeless man begging from a filthy horse blanket, his castoff clothes covered with grime.
El Rey
eyed him with suitable upwardly mobile distaste, and for an instant their gazes locked before the vagrant looked away.