Blood of the Assassin (Assassin Series 5) (30 page)

“What does that mean?” Cruz demanded.

“It means that it’s above your pay grade,
Capitan
. Just focus on apprehending the German, and we’ll handle the international diplomacy side of things,” Godoy dismissed.

“That’s not good enough. You placed me in charge of this. My reputation and career are on the line. Withholding information from the Chinese...if word ever got out, we’d have a major incident. And if the unthinkable happens, and it turns out we knew for weeks that there was a legitimate threat, and didn’t tell them...,” Cruz protested.

“With all due respect, we assigned you to this in order to catch the assassin, not to consult with the Mexican government on how to handle its diplomatic affairs. It’s not your concern. And if you would do your job, we wouldn’t have to worry about it,” Godoy snapped.

Cruz recoiled like he’d been slapped, then his eyes narrowed and he adopted an eerily calm tone.

“You gave me nothing to work on other than a rumor. I’ve been putting in twenty-hour days, and so has all my staff. If you have any suggestions as to what I’m missing, I’m all ears. In fact, I think that my offer to allow you to take this over is even more attractive, now. Given my obviously inadequate performance to date, right?”

Godoy couldn’t put it in reverse fast enough. “Now, now. That didn’t come out right. I simply meant that we’re all frustrated that the German is still at large, in spite of everyone’s best efforts. I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t doing everything possible.”

Rodriguez stood. “I’ll leave it to the two of you to sort this out. I have work to do. Gentlemen,” he announced, and then before Godoy could protest he stalked to the door and left.

Cruz couldn’t contain a small smile at Godoy’s discomfort. Taking his cue from Rodriguez, he rose, and handed Godoy the report he had printed. “Everything we know is contained in these pages. We’re coordinating with the security team on an hourly basis, and think we’ve made significant progress on preventive measures. But this has always been a long shot, given the dearth of information we’ve gotten. So while we can certainly hope that something breaks in our favor, right now I’d say that we won’t be able to stop the assassin from trying to kill the Chinese leader, unless he can’t figure out a clean escape plan. So that’s what we’re focusing on, even as we follow up all the other leads.”

“It’s possible that he’s seen the elaborate measures we’ve taken, and decided not to attempt it, isn’t it?” Godoy asked hopefully, floating a theory that had increased in popularity within the president’s inner circle. His desire to have the optimistic notion reinforced was almost pathetic, and for a second Cruz almost felt sorry for him.

“Anything’s possible. But I’m not betting on it, and neither should you,” Cruz said, and spun on his heel, glad to be out of the oppressive atmosphere – a combination of expensive leather, sour cologne, and flop sweat. If the powers that be really had talked themselves into the idea that the German would quit because the hit had become more difficult, they were delusional.

Which was nothing new, he supposed, as he rewarded the receptionist with a sneer when he blew past her. It gave him a childish sense of pleasure to be nasty to the imperious woman in return for her arrogant treatment of him whenever he was summoned, but he immediately felt bad about it once he was out of the suite.

She was just mirroring her boss’s attitude. Like a dog began resembling its master after a while, she had begun taking after Godoy.

Which, in the scheme of things, was punishment enough.

Dusk was fading into night as the daily rush hour clogged the streets, horns honking as drivers cut one another off to gain a few feet of fruitless advantage on the overpass near the green two-story building that housed a hardware store below and two residential units above. The neighborhood was seedy, even by Mexico City standards. The two plainclothes police detectives that had been recruited by Cruz’s task force had seen everything in their combined thirty-seven years of duty, and while this wasn’t a district most would be advised to be strolling in after dark, at least it didn’t boast multiple murders every night, like some of the surrounding areas.

Joel Ortiz and Ruben Lariel had been called in because they knew the streets better than any, and had protected their identities over the years, so they wouldn’t be spotted by someone who knew them while they investigated the lead that had come from the snitch who had told the task force about his friend’s recent transaction involving a gun and some papers for a foreigner. The transaction itself was almost routine; but most of the underworld business involved locals, or cartel-related new arrivals from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia. His friend had gotten the impression that this one had been from Europe – something about the accent, he’d said, while drinking heavily the other night with the informant, who had later been involved in a regrettable incident in which he’d been mistaken for a robber by the police.

Ruben eased off the gas of his twenty-year-old Pontiac and parked illegally at the filthy curb a few dozen yards from the suspect’s building – the home of one Virgilio Pontescu, who was not unknown to the authorities for his involvement in gun-running, forgery, blackmail, assault, and slavery. But other than an arrest as a teenager, he’d managed to evade spending serious time in jail, and he paid off the right people to be allowed to operate his little cottage industry without making waves. He had recently been linked to Los Zetas; but again, rumors were as thick as the rain that pelted the city during monsoon season, and even if he was, whispered talk on the street was a far cry from proof – and there were far more doing far worse than Virgilio, who wasn’t given to overt violence, at least that anyone had been willing to swear to in court.

Joel regarded his partner with a blank stare, and then rolled down the window and lit a cigarette – an annoying habit that infuriated Ruben, but to which he’d grown accustomed during the last decade they’d operated as a team. It had been some time since they’d been out on the streets, having traded their field shoes for desks a few years earlier, but in their day they had been the best, and their track record as investigative detectives was as impressive and lengthy as their tactics were unorthodox.

“How do you want to do this?” Ruben asked, shutting off the roughly idling engine and waving away some stray smoke.

“We watch for a while, and hopefully he shows up. Then we take him before he can get inside.”

“What if he’s already in there?”

“Do you see any lights on?” Joel countered, eyeing the dark façade.

“No, but maybe he’s taking a
siesta
.”

“Or maybe he’s not there. We watch and wait.”

Ruben grumbled a little and then settled in, having developed powerful muscles for sitting in one place for long periods of time on countless stakeouts.

Three hours later, the lights went off in the store below, and the proprietor exited through the front door, locked it, and then pulled down a steel security barrier to keep thieves from breaking the glass display windows. A shambling junky holding a hushed conversation with imaginary demons moved past the front of the shop ten minutes later, but other than that, the sidewalk was quiet, a downtrodden stray dog nosing piles of trash their only companion on the cul-de-sac.

Eventually, Ruben looked at his watch. “It’s almost midnight. Why don’t we check to see if he answers his door?”

“Don’t think so. No lights.”

“That’s okay. Maybe he left it open and we can take a quick look around while we’re waiting...,” he suggested, and Joel grinned.

“You want to take it, or should I?”

“Go back to sleep. I’ll be right back,” Ruben said, and opened the glove compartment and removed a leather bag with the tools of his trade in it.

Watching Ruben jimmy the front door was a thing of beauty, even as a few brave pedestrians hurried by. To all appearances he was fumbling with his keys – the trick being that he was picking the lock with practiced dexterity that would have made a magician gape. After twenty seconds of fiddling, he was in.

Joel eyed the street in the cracked side mirror, wary of being snuck up on while engrossed in Ruben’s artful craft. Two minutes later his cell phone vibrated, and he groped in his shirt pocket for it and stabbed it to life. “What?” he growled.

“It’s not good. Virgilio wasn’t taking a nap. Judging by the smell, he’s been dead for two days, maybe more.”

“Shit. From what?”

“My guess is that the pen stabbed through his right eye is the cause of death. But I’m no coroner,” Ruben rasped.

“I better call the crew.”

“Yeah. This is a dead end.”

“Very funny. Don’t ever lose that childlike naïveté.”

Joel disconnected and dialed the task force and broke the news, and his contact told him that they would handle forensics – to just get out of there and leave it to them. Joel didn’t need to be told twice, and when Ruben returned, the engine was already running.

“What do you think? Is this all a coincidence, that this guy they’re looking for was maybe doing a deal with Virgilio, and next thing Virg turns up smoked?” he asked rhetorically.

“Sure. Probably unrelated. People die every day.”

“Might have been an accident.”

“Yeah. He was signing a check and stabbed himself in the eye.”

“Or committed suicide.”

“Seems reasonable to me. You see anything suspicious?”

“You mean besides the corpse with a Bic jammed through its frontal lobe?”

“Yeah. Besides that.”

“He had lovely curtains. Might have been, what do they call that now, metro-sexy?”

“Metro-sexual.”

“What you said.”

“I don’t think that’s suspicious.”

“Speak for yourself.”

Ruben pulled away and rolled down the street, his exhaust proclaiming his blissful lack of concern for mundanities like tune-ups or preventive maintenance, and then the old wreck turned the corner and was gone, leaving the mangy, miserable dog, still foraging hopefully, as the only witness to their departure.

The mood in the room was bleak as Cruz announced that their only lead had turned up skewered with a writing implement. One wag ventured a morbid joke about pens being mightier than swords, but the laughter was forced.

“Gentlemen, I know we’ve all been putting in a hundred and twenty percent, but we’re getting down to the clinch now, and we can’t let up. We got this lead by following up on every detail, no matter how seemingly random, so we need to stay focused and not lose steam. He’s out there somewhere, and we need to keep turning over rocks until we find him.”

Briones raised his hand. “Why don’t we release his photo to the press? Plaster it all over the TV and the newspapers? It can’t help but stir the pot. Offer a reward. It’s worth a shot.”

Cruz couldn’t tell him that he’d floated that very idea past Godoy that morning, and it had been shot down. CISEN and the president’s team were obviously playing a game with the Chinese, where they didn’t want to alarm them. That was the only reason for not distributing it on every street corner.

“I ran that up the flagpole. Still waiting for a response. Good suggestion, though,” Cruz said.

“How about circulating the photo to every cop in D.F.? That would be a good start. Maybe we’ll get lucky?” Briones suggested.

El Rey
was sitting quietly in a corner at the back of the room, studying his fingernails, and when he heard the suggestion, he looked up. “Has that ever worked? You did that with me. Did it help?”

Briones flushed at being called out in front of his peers, but Cruz interrupted.

“It’s a good idea and a necessary step.”

“Well, I suppose it can’t hurt, but those photos are ancient history, and the likelihood that he still looks even vaguely like them are slim to none. Take my word on this. You don’t become the highest paid assassin in Europe by not taking simple precautions like changing your appearance regularly. That’s kind of Hit Man 101, if you get my drift. I think you need to stop relying on this man behaving like a moron and start preparing for reality. Unless you get a miracle, you’re not going to find him in time,”
El Rey
said, then returned to his examination of his cuticles.

“Well, then what do you suggest?” Briones countered. The officers on either side of him nodded with raised eyebrows, and one threw his pencil down on the table in disgust.

“Circulate the photo to the media. Why? Because it’ll put him on notice that the risk just increased. At this point, psychology is all you have. Your best bet is to make his chances so poor that he gives up, and being all over the TV, even if he no longer looks anything like the photo, will have an effect on him. Assassins are a paranoid bunch. They have to be, to survive for any length of time in this business. Seeing an image of yourself is never good news, especially if it’s out in the open. That signals that the stakes were just raised and the odds of a clean getaway went down.”

Cruz held up a hand as the room exploded in conversation, the men talking over each other, and gave it twenty seconds to settle.

“Noted. As I said before, it’s in the works. What else?”

“Everyone in this room should go to the site and walk it, and then walk the neighborhood around it, and study the layout. If an idea comes up, no matter how outlandish, bring it up. If you see anything that seems off, bring it up. If someone looks at you crosswise, bring it up. Preparation is your best defense right now. Because you’re not going to catch him in time. I agree with you on that point.”

More muttering and angry exclamations sounded from men who had poured their souls into the investigation.
El Rey
seemed impervious to it all, not an iota of concern disturbing his matinée idol-smooth features.

The meeting continued for another twenty minutes and then broke up in disarray, the reality of the situation settling in. Cruz gestured to
El Rey
as he moved towards the door.

“Can I see you in my office for a moment?” he asked, more a demand than a request.