“Or pass it to me,” Moose said. “Sometimes, I have beer for breakfast.” He tipped up his own bottle and guzzled it, then switched it for Neil’s. Neil gave him a halfhearted grin and rolled his eyes.
Jefferson looked at Noah. “The whole idea here is to let you become as familiar with the most likely scenario as you can be. Ortiz is a very difficult man to get close to, and about the only time he’s ever in any position that might be considered vulnerable is when he decides to go to his nephew’s bar to drink and party. From what we know of him, he seems to think it’s the safest place he can go, and if you study the urban layout, you’ll see that the place is incredibly defensible. The back door opens onto an alley that is gated on both ends, and the door itself is made of steel, almost three-quarters of an inch thick. The only windows in the place are on the front of the building, as you can see, and the way the room is laid out, there are several tables that are completely out of any line of sight—or line of fire—from anywhere outside the building. That means that any attack on him would have to come through the front door, or crash through the big window, and Ortiz generally has enough goons and firepower with him to handle anything up to a small platoon.”
Noah nodded. “And I take it the Mexican government isn’t interested in taking him down?”
Jefferson grinned at him. “Are you kidding? He’s in tight enough with some of the more powerful cartels that most of the government would do whatever it took to protect him. Anybody in power in Mexico is terrified of this guy, and that includes the federales.” Jefferson took a drink out of his beer. “That’s one of the things that makes him so dangerous. It’s a pretty safe bet that all the fingers will be pointing our way when he gets taken down.”
Noah looked around the bar once more, then back at Jefferson. “Any suggestions on how I should do it?”
“No, and no one else will give you any, either. You are Camelot, the team leader. You’re the one who has to come up with a plan, and then implement it. Your mission is to eliminate Pablo Ortiz; how you do it, and what collateral damage you decide to inflict, is entirely up to you.”
“So, suppose I decide to just blow up the whole bar with Ortiz in it?”
“That is entirely your call,” Jefferson said. “You have literally been granted a license to kill in the performance of your duties. What that means is that you can choose any method to eliminate your target, and if there is collateral damage, then so be it.”
“That was a rhetorical question,” Noah said. “I’m fairly sure I can manage to kill this guy without hurting any innocent people. Now, as for Henrique Valdes, the boss lady hinted that we might be better off if I leave him alive. Apparently, he has some value to another agency, and may become more valuable once Ortiz is gone?”
“That’s definitely a possibility,” Jefferson said. “It’s still up to you whether or not you take him out. Let me clarify one thing for you that may make the decision easier. Valdes is not a good guy. Yes, he provides us with some very valuable information from time to time, but he does so only when it benefits him or someone he wants to have in his debt. He will probably still provide us with good information, even if he replaces Ortiz, but still only when he expects to benefit from it. Now, sometimes that benefit is monetary, when we pay for his information, but sometimes it’s a matter of expanding his own power base, or someone else’s. Even Ortiz has benefited from information Valdes has given us, but it’s a safe bet that if Ortiz knew Valdes was talking to us, Valdes would be in the foundation of a very large building.”
Noah’s eyebrows went up. “In the foundation?”
Jefferson nodded. “Ortiz is one of the stockholders in a large concrete company, one that’s been in the news a lot over the last few years for its connections to organized crime and government corruption. The company is still going, but yes, we have a lot of information that a number of bodies have gone into the deep foundations of buildings that company has contracted for.”
They spent the morning talking over different options, and Noah asked a number of questions of the bartender and some of the girls who were playing the parts of whores. They told him a lot about how the business worked, and gave him a number of names of major drug dealers and suppliers who were known to frequent the place. There were so many that it solidified Noah’s plan to pose as a drug buyer in order to become a trusted customer of the place.