Blood of the Assassin

CHAPTER 28





Cruz’s night was spent tossing and turning on a couch that had been brought to his office in the early evening. There wouldn’t be a new condo until tomorrow, so he had chosen to stay at the office, where a skeleton crew was working the night shift and the bathrooms were equipped with a shower he could use. An officer arrived at eight p.m. with a suitcase and a Styrofoam carton containing enchiladas, rice, and beans, and he’d eaten a glum meal before hiding away in his office, the blinds on the window overlooking the common area drawn, working on the computer until he became tired enough to snatch a few hours of rest.

At some point in the wee hours he actually drifted off, and his dreams were ugly and violent: Dinah’s head arriving in a box during an office birthday party for him, gunmen shooting at him in the shower, and his daughter, Cassandra, dead for so many years, crying out for help, begging for her daddy to rescue her as a dark figure prepared to do the unthinkable; then her childish frame morphing into Dinah as he watched, powerless to do anything, frozen inside the dream, and yet outside, as an observer.

When he started awake, disoriented, not knowing where he was, he was bathed in sweat, his pulse pounding a tattoo in his ears as he fumbled with the blanket he’d found in one of the office cabinets. It took him a few moments to get his bearings, and then he groaned, a mournful sound, and peered at his watch in the dark. Four a.m., his mouth coated with a sour, bilious film from the meal and the two Tecate beers the officer had thoughtfully brought with dinner. He closed his eyes again and tried to get comfortable, but the rest of the short night was spent in fits and starts, each bout of slumber punctuated by ugly images that wouldn’t relent.

He was back at his desk at seven, wearing the same dark blue slacks with a new uniform jersey, his six a.m. shower having been followed by a lukewarm meal ordered from a local café and picked up by one of the security team, and was going over the morning intelligence dispatches when his cell phone rang. He looked down at the flickering screen and saw a number he didn’t recognize. When he answered, he already half knew what the call was about.

“Capitan Cruz. Do not say anything. We have your wife. She hasn’t been harmed, but that can change whenever we decide that you aren’t cooperating.”

“You’re a dead man.”

“You don’t listen very well, do you? I said not to talk. I’ll keep this short and sweet, for now. If you do as we say, your wife will live. If not, you’ll get pieces of her sent to you in the mail. Is this call being recorded?”

“No. What do you want?”

“You. But in the shorter term, we want you to stop any further actions against our group. You know who we are, yes?”

“I know.”

“Then you know we will carry out any threat we make. We want you to stand down from this ill-considered campaign you have launched against us. You can make that happen. If you have to move against one of our locations, you must give us notice so we can take appropriate action. There will be no exceptions.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Then your beautiful young wife will die, after we’ve amused ourselves with her for a while.”

Cruz had to stall for time. That was the first rule of dealing with any blackmailer or kidnapper. Buy time. “No. Wait. I can sideline anything we have on the boards, demand more evidence, choose not to move yet. But I want my wife back.”

“That’s not an option at this point, Capitan. Perhaps once you’ve proven that you understand the rules, and your task force has been effectively neutralized, you’ll get what you want. But for now, we own you, and you must do exactly what we say.”

Cruz hesitated. He couldn’t give in too fast – they would be suspicious if he just rolled over. “I don’t have the power you think I have.”

“You’re lying. You run the task force. Nothing big happens in D.F. without your express approval. Don’t try to bullshit me. You don’t want your beauty’s face carved up, do you? Shall I send you some fingers or her nose to get your attention? I thought you were smarter than that.”

“You tried to kill me. It’s me you want, not my wife.”

“True, but after some consideration, we decided that you could be more useful to us alive. So it’s your lucky day, really. But not for your wife if you screw with us. If you want to find her hung off a freeway overpass, just try me.”

Another long pause.

“You won’t hurt her if I cooperate?”

“That’s what I said.”

He cleared his throat and then lowered his voice to a whisper. “Then I have no choice.”

“We have eyes and ears everywhere, so don’t get cute. We’ll know within minutes if you try to double-cross us.”

“I can’t stop the search for Dinah. That would look suspicious, and it’s not how things work.”

“Don’t worry about that. We aren’t worried. Like I said, we have ears everywhere. Let the whole thing play out. It’s not your concern. Just do as I instructed, and kill anything that will endanger our operations.”

“I want to hear Dinah’s voice. How do I know you haven’t killed her?”

“I was wondering how long it would take you to get to that. Here.”

Cruz heard a rustling as the phone changed hands, and then he heard the most beautiful sound possible.

“Romero. I’m so sorry I–”

Dinah’s voice sounded scared, and then she was cut off and there was more rustling, and Cruz heard a sharp crack – a slap.

“There. You know what you have to do. Don’t blow it.”

The line went dead before Cruz could respond.

The good news was that Dinah was alive. And the cartel had established contact, its demands simple. He could buy himself breathing room by simply standing down on any pending raids. But a more troubling aspect to the call had been the clear inference that they had people on the inside feeding them information. That meant the task force was compromised, and he would have to be extremely careful trying to locate Dinah. And the assurance with which the caller had dismissed the kidnapping investigation efforts currently underway, meant only one thing – somehow, they also had a pipeline into that group as well. It was separate from Cruz’s task force, so they had penetrated multiple levels of the Federales – not completely surprising, but disconcerting nonetheless.

He had been expecting the call, and knew from the hundreds of kidnappings that headquarters dealt with every year that it would be impossible to trace it. Whatever phone they had used would be a burner they would immediately dispose of, registered to a maid in Toluca who would claim that she had lost it a week ago and had been too busy to report it. The cartels bought dozens of phones per day from people who needed the hundred dollars they would pay for a cell that had cost twenty, and there was no way to disprove a claim of loss. It was one of the loopholes in the system that everyone knew about but couldn’t stop.

But the fact that Los Zetas had sufficiently co-opted officers in his own team to subvert any effort to find Dinah made things much, much harder. It meant that he couldn’t mount his own effort, and would have to rely on the investigation group – which he had just been told had no chance of saving her.

That wasn’t an option. He had to find his wife. Even if he had to do it completely on his own, he would. The alternative wasn’t pretty. He knew how these butchers worked – they would string him along, raping and beating her periodically, and then when they felt his usefulness was done, they would contrive a meeting where she was to be handed over, and then kill them both. There was no other way he could see it ending.

He had to save her before any of that happened.

Even if he died trying.

There was no other way.