Requiem for the Assassin (27 page)

A flutter of unease rose in the assassin’s gut as he continued forward. Something was wrong. The man hadn’t been there earlier, which in and of itself didn’t mean anything, but it was odd for a beggar to be in the tunnel – the first one he’d seen all day. The hair on the back of his neck prickled as his mind processed the remainder of the thought: the bum would have had to pay to get into that area. Not impossible, because he could have paid at one of the other stations and come that way, but in
El Rey
’s experience, the city’s homeless didn’t spend their change for metro tickets.

But did it mean something, or was it a harmless anomaly? Perhaps it was worth the few pesos’ investment in a ticket for him, the rushing passengers more generous inside than out on the street?

He continued to the platform and waited for a train, eyes roving over the area, watching for anything else that seemed out of place. A group of boisterous teens were talking loudly and listening to music on their phones, annoying bystanders. Nothing alarming there, only irritating. Tired workers leaned against the walls, waiting for the telltale whir from the tunnel, the clatter of steel wheels on rails, the rush of wind that preceded the arrival of a train. An occasional young woman busied herself with her text messaging or web crawling, face downturned, shutting out the world in favor of cyber-connection.

There
. Over by the vending machine. A pair of men in windbreakers, talking with each other, but all the while their eyes taking in the arriving travelers in much the same way
El Rey
’s were. He wandered to an old crone he’d seen on his earlier visit, sitting on a wooden crate selling newspapers and gum, and bought a copy of the evening news, perusing its lurid headlines as he glanced at the pair by the machine.

A hum sounded from the tunnel, followed by the clatter of cars rolling down the track, and after a brief honk of an electric horn, the train slowed and stretched along the platform. The doors opened with a hiss, and a trickle of passengers disembarked.
El Rey
moved toward the nearest aperture as he folded his paper. The two men got onto the next car down, and at the last moment,
El Rey
dropped his paper on the ground and darted out of the car to get it, narrowly missing the train as the doors closed and it pulled away. He cursed and glanced at the time, doing an inventory of the platform as he did, looking for anyone else who hadn’t boarded – and spotted a hard-looking man with the build of a fireplug thirty yards away.

Possibly someone waiting for his mate or child.

Or not.

He retraced his steps and ducked into the restroom while he waited for another train to come and go. He still had plenty of time to make the loop to the other station and then back, and if he was a few minutes late, Tovar would wait. He nodded to the newspaper vendor as he swept by her and continued to the connecting tunnel, where the crowds were thinning. The hobo was holding his battered tin cup out as
El Rey
moved by him again, and he felt the man’s stare linger as he brushed past.

The restroom was clean, with an attendant who washed every surface in exchange for a peso gratuity from patrons. The assassin went into one of the stalls and read the paper, his antennae signaling to him that something was wrong.

He allowed ten minutes to go by and finished up, tipping the attendant as he left. He was walking through the tunnel back to the platform when he realized what was off, recognizing his error too late. He dodged to the left the instant he registered a blur of motion from the vagrant, the incongruity obvious to him even as he cursed silently: the beggar was filthy, but his fingernails weren’t. The fingers clutching the cup were clean as a surgeon’s – or someone posing as a bum.

A silenced pistol shot barked in the tunnel, and he felt a burn in his upper thigh as he twisted, freeing his gun as a second shot scored a hole through his jacket, missing his kidney by scant inches. A third shot thwacked into his hip as he threw himself to the ground and opened fire at the panhandler, ignoring the screams around him as he emptied the gun. The little SIG Sauer sounded like sticks of dynamite going off in the tunnel, and he was already ejecting the spent magazine and slapping his spare into place as the shooter collapsed in a heap, his pistol clattering onto the concrete beside him.

El Rey
didn’t wait to see who else was working the surveillance. He forced himself to his feet as screams of terror continued from the remaining travelers in the passageway, most crouched by the ground, all cringing and staring at the assassin as though he was Satan risen from the underworld. He glanced to his left where a short woman was clutching her chest, shot by one of the vagrant’s stray rounds. A man was struggling to crawl away, leaving a crimson trail from the wound in his stomach, and
El Rey
pushed past him as he picked up his pace. Blood streamed down his leg from the two wounds, but he’d been shot enough before to know they weren’t fatal, assuming he got pressure on them soon enough.

He reached the end of the tunnel and leveled his weapon at an older businessman hugging the wall and clutching his briefcase and overcoat to his chest.

“Your coat. Take it off,” he ordered, but the man was immobilized with fear and didn’t move.
El Rey
took a step closer and motioned with the pistol. “I said take your coat off. Now.”

The man did as instructed, and
El Rey
slid it on. “Thanks,” he said and continued around the corner, aware that he was being filmed by the overhead security cameras as he went.

He pulled his burner cell from his breast pocket and called Cruz. When he answered,
El Rey
was typically terse. “Ambush. I’ve been hit. Meet me where we discussed in five.”

He hung up just as the two cops rounded the corner and sped toward him, pushing past the others running from the gun battle. He plunged the gun into the overcoat pocket and pointed with his left hand. “Someone’s shooting. There’s blood everywhere. Do something, for God’s sake. Do something!”

The men looked at him, seeing the blood on his pants, and for a second
El Rey
was afraid he’d have to shoot them. Then they broke into a reluctant trot, service revolvers drawn, the worst day of their three-hundred-dollar-a-month careers in full swing.
El Rey
didn’t hesitate or look back. He ran toward the turnstiles with the rest of the panicked throng, using the mayhem he’d helped create to get clear of the station before the police, or the remainder of the hit team, found him.

Each step to the street level was agony, and he felt himself getting light-headed from the blood loss and the pain, but he ignored it and clutched the handrail for support. The rectangle of open air at the top of the stairs looked impossibly far, but he drove himself up, gritting his teeth as he struggled toward it.

Once on the sidewalk he moved more slowly to avoid attracting attention, hoping that the trail of bloody footsteps he was leaving wouldn’t be noticed until he was safely gone. He held his hand to the hip wound, and it came away slick with blood. He wiped it on the jacket beneath the long overcoat, which covered him to the knee, and forced himself to keep walking.

Cruz was in the Explorer in front of a McDonald’s, double-parked along with a half dozen other scofflaws whose passengers were inside buying dinner.
El Rey
pulled himself into the back seat and closed the door behind him and then lay flat as Cruz pulled away.

“How bad is it?”

“Lot of blood. One in the leg, which went through, the other in the hip. That one’s still in there. You’ll need to dig it out and stitch me up. Hope you don’t faint easily.”

“Can you make it till we’re back at the house? It’ll be at least fifteen minutes.”

“Give me your belt. I can slow the bleeding from the thigh. Can’t do much for the hip other than ball up my jacket and keep pressure on it.”

Cruz did as asked as he pulled around the corner. The assassin improvised a tourniquet and lay back for a moment, drained, then struggled out of the overcoat and jacket. Cruz hit a rough patch of pavement, a particularly ugly series of the city’s infamous potholes, and
El Rey
flinched and drew in a ragged intake of breath.

“Try to avoid the worst of it, would you?” he said.

“Will do. Just hang on. I presume you have a field kit at the house?”

“What’s the saying? Don’t leave home without one…”

Cruz grinned humorlessly and eyed the assassin in the mirror, taking in his ghost-white face and eyes squeezed shut against pain Cruz knew too well from his prior brushes with death.
El Rey
was as tough as they came, so if anyone could make it even shot to pieces, he could; but judging by the amount of blood pooling on the Explorer floor, it would be close. He increased his speed and returned his attention to the road, anxious to get the cutting over with before he lost the patient for good.

Chapter 46

The following day, Cruz went to meet Carla at an out-of-the-way hotel they’d agreed to use as a rendezvous. Cruz checked in, paying cash, and once in the room called her and told her the room number. She arrived fifteen minutes later, and he was taken aback when he opened the door. She looked little like she had at their last meeting – more like a student now, in sweats, her hair dyed almost black, and the disguise completed with sunglasses that covered most of her upper face, and a cap. She smiled as she entered and glanced at the bed, and then she removed the glasses and sat at the small two-seater square wooden table by the window. Cruz joined her and, after offering her water, sat back as she described her research progress.

“I looked harder at Perry’s charity, since that’s the only real solid connection with anything Mexican. I ran a background on his father, but it’s unremarkable, and frankly, there’s not a lot there. Got a green card in the eighties. Worked as a manager at a custom metal fabrication shop. Died six years ago of lung cancer at the age of sixty-one.”

“And the mother?”

“American Latina, from Los Angeles, born and bred there. She was twelve years younger than dad. Worked in an office, now retired and living off her son’s largesse.”

“Remind me I need a son who’ll support me when I’m in the autumn of my years.”

She eyed him over the top of the phone she was reading from and smiled, and for an instant he saw the international superstar again.

“That leaves us with the charity. It’s kind of like Greenpeace, fighting to preserve whole stretches of Mexican coastline for sea turtles.”

“Anything shady about it? Or any connection between the charity and any of the names on the list?”

She shook her head. “Unfortunately, not that I can find.”

“What about its other supporters? Any links there?”

“Not really. Just a hodgepodge of the usual celebrity friends. Perry was the largest contributor.”

“Then how does it help us?”

“It doesn’t. But it’s something we can scratch off the list.”

Cruz groaned inwardly. Carla was doing her best, but it didn’t appear it was going to be a big help.

“Good. What else have you come up with?” he asked.

“The archbishop also did a lot of charity work. His cause was the rights of the indigenous people or, more broadly, of the little guy.”

“But no turtles.”

“Not even little ones, no. His replacement appears to have done a 180 in terms of policy, though. His new proposals aren’t at all supportive of the young archbishop’s work, which isn’t that strange, but is a little sad. The young archbishop was a progressive. This one appears to be a step backward.”

“Who is he?”

“Franco Arriola. Fifty-seven. A hardline conservative, according to his reputation.” She held up her phone so Cruz could see an image. He drummed his fingers against his leg absently as he stared at it.

“He looks familiar.”

“He’s one of the more influential members of the Church in Mexico City. A political mover and shaker, too. Kind of has to be to get his own diocese, given his conservative stance. That’s sort of out of favor these days as the Church tries to remake itself for a modern Mexico.”

“Interesting. Anything tying him to the others?”

“No.”

“What about the admiral or the farmer?”

“I’ve spent the most time on the admiral since he was the one that was attacked. I figured there had to be something in his closet, some rivalry or indiscretion, but there’s nothing beyond a career of exemplary service and a loving wife. Three kids, all girls. No scandals, all married.”

“Maybe blackmail was a motive, and when he wouldn’t buckle, they took him out?” Cruz said, thinking out loud.

“If so, it’s a secret that’s so well-hidden I haven’t gotten a whiff of it. I mean, the man was a model officer, his men loved him, and he was incorruptible. And he came from family money, so there was no shortage of cash. My guess is you couldn’t buy him.”

“Maybe that was the problem?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“He was in charge of the Pacific fleet, correct?”

“Yes. For the last eight years.”

“Including the ports?”

“Of course.”

“A lot of drugs move through those ports,” Cruz observed.

“I’m sure they do. But I’m not seeing the link between him and the others.”

“No interaction with the archbishop of any sort? A common cause? Social circle? Maybe through the wife or one of the kids?”

“Nothing.”

Cruz sighed. “And the farmer?”

“There’s literally nothing remarkable about him. Even his land isn’t particularly attractive. I was thinking it might have something to do with the cartel wanting his land, or a cartel link between the four of them…”

“Actually, the six of them. You and I are on the list too, remember?”

“Right. But we have zero in common, much less a connection to the others. No, I’m afraid if there’s anything linking us, I still haven’t found it.”

They discussed the results of Cruz and
El Rey
’s research, such as it was, which had also yielded nothing of note, and before long it became obvious that they had little to discuss.