Cartel (8 page)

"Miller. Lundy. And Kat."

"Kat?" Victoria said with pain in her voice. "I talked to her for over an hour about...nothing. Girl stuff. She asked me where I got..." Victoria covered her mouth again with her hand. "Oh, my God, Scott. How?"

"Across the border."

"Jesus Christ," Victoria said. "Were you there?"

"Nearby," he said. "But we got separated."

"How did they...How did it happen?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Scott said. Then he saw the look of hurt on his wife's face. "I really can't even if I...There's an investigation."

She stared at him for a moment. "That's not all, though. There's something else. Something you're not...Why did you come home in a cab?"

He hesitated. But Victoria didn't say anything. He al-ways thought she would have made a good interrogator. She knew how to use silence as a tool. Finally, he said, "I got suspended."

Marcus parked the Suburban a block from Scott Greene's house and on the opposite side of the street. Dwayne sat next to him in the shotgun seat. Dwayne was in his late-twenties, five or six years younger than Marcus, also a lot bigger, and had spent three years in Special Forces, until getting busted out with a dishonorable discharge after a third piss test came up positive for steroids. In the six months Dwayne had been with Dynamic International, Marcus had worked out with him several times and had seen that Dwayne's back and shoulders were covered with zits, acne being a common side effect of steroid abuse. Dwayne also had a hair-trigger temper, another common side effect, what people called 'roid rage.

"Why are we sitting on this guy?" Dwayne asked. "He's suspended. What the fuck can he even do?"

"Why don't you call Gavin and ask him yourself?" Mar-cus said and held his cell phone out to Dwayne. Gavin also had a temper, and he was one tough old bastard. He could eat kids like Dwayne for breakfast.

Dwayne turned his head and stared out the side win-dow.

"Yo, Cyril, you awake back there?" Marcus said.

"I'm here and yes I'm awake," came the muffled voice of Cyril from the back of the Suburban. "The way you drive it's impossible to sleep."

This was no ordinary Chevrolet Suburban, and it wasn't the same one Marcus had been driving that morning with Gavin when they had almost caught up to the DEA agents on the bridge and maybe ended this whole operation. This Suburban had been tricked out at a clandestine shop in Miami run by a retired spook from the CIA's Office of Sci-ence and Technology. The upgrade had cost $105,000.

Immediately behind the front seats stood a black fiber-glass partition that sealed off the cab from the rest of the ve-hicle. Between the seats was a sliding hatch, three feet tall and eighteen inches wide, barely big enough for a man to crawl through, that allowed access between the cab and the rear of the vehicle.

The rear compartment had been stripped clean, leaving nothing but empty space, and in that space, the retired spook had installed a state-of-the-art surveillance package: a bank of high-definition monitors, each one showing the view from one of the six cameras mounted around the Suburban's roof; a remote computer link that could pick up everything from live DOD satellite imagery to ESPN; GPS trackers; video and audio recording equipment, including a shotgun micro-phone for eavesdropping on distant conversations; a camera that popped up from a vent in the roof, like a periscope on a submarine, and could rotate 360 degrees and had a 20X zoom capability; a audio scanner and decoder that could pick up and record radio and cell phone traffic; a self-contained cooling and heating system that worked even when the vehicle's engine was turned off and the key removed; and a comfortable swivel chair mounted in front of the space-age, mission-control type console that operated everything. All of that and a small cot for naps.

The back of the Suburban was Cyril's domain. Cyril was a geek, but he had survived Airborne School, Ranger School, and the Special Forces Q-Course. He knew how to kill, but killing wasn't his primary task. Cyril's job was watching and listening.

Before joining Dynamic International, Cyril had spent several years with a U.S. Army and Joint Special Operations Command unit so secret it didn't even have a permanent name. Over the years the official name had changed from Field Operations Group, to Intelligence Support Activity, to Mission Support Activity; and some of the two-word code names the unit had used were Centra Spike, Tom Victor, Cemetery Ward, Gray Fox, and Intrepid Spear.

The unit's job was to gather actionable intelligence from a variety of sources, but its specialty was signals intelligence, meaning eavesdropping on landlines, computers, cell phones, radios, even face-to-face conversations. To keep things simple, the few people who even knew of the unit's existence called it The Activity.

Marcus adjusted the mouthpiece of his radio headset and keyed the microphone. The communications system they were using funneled all their transmissions through a com-puter scrambler that changed code keys every ninety sec-onds. Theoretically, the code couldn't be cracked, but Mar-cus doubted NSA would let private military contractors use a communications system that the agency's computers could not tap into. Still, the system was good, and there was no way law enforcement, terror groups, or drug gangs, no mat-ter how sophisticated, could intercept their transmissions. "Cyril, this Marcus, how do you read?"

"Lima Charlie," Cyril's voice said in Marcus's ear, using military-speak for loud and clear.

"You got eyes on?" Marcus asked.

"Roger that."

"Verify, please."

"Beige stucco and brick," Cyril said. "Brick looks to be...ochre. Two vehicles in the garage, a Ford Explorer, green, and a Ford pickup truck...standby one." A couple of seconds later, he added, "The truck is a four door crew cab, an F-150, gray in color."

"Did you say ochre?" Marcus asked.

"Ten-four," Cyril said. "That's my call on the color, ochre."

"What the hell is ochre?"

"Light red. Kind of like rust."

"Roger that," Marcus said, shaking his head. Whole company full of hardasses and he gets stuck with an egg-head. "Confirmed," he said. "You've got eyes on the target."

"Okay," Dwayne said, "so now that we got that shit out of the way, seriously, can you tell me why we're going to spend the night sitting on this asshole?"

Marcus said into his headset, "Boss, you want to field this one?"

"Field what?" Gavin said over the radio.

Marcus glanced at Dwayne, then said into his micro-phone, "Dwayne wants to know why we're surveilling this target."

"Is he on this channel?"

"No, but he can be," Marcus said with a slight smile.

"Put him on," Gavin said.

Marcus turned to Dwayne. "He wants you on comms."

Dwayne slipped his headset on. "Go for Dwayne."

"The short answer," Marcus heard Gavin say, "is be-cause I said so."

"Understood," Dwayne said.

"The long answer-which I don't feel in the least bit compelled to provide, but which I will anyway so as to pre-vent any future misunderstandings-is this: We have under-estimated Agent Greene from the get-go. We thought Ortiz was safe, yet Greene managed to not only find him, but he punched through our so-called security, kidnapped the little peckerhead, and got him across the border."

"But Ortiz didn't tell him anything," Dwayne said.

"Sergeant Ortiz said he didn't tell the DEA anything. We don't know that for sure."

"But this jackleg got himself suspended, no badge, no gun, they even took his car, so what can he do?"

"Probably nothing," Gavin said. "But I've been a soldier my whole life and I do what I'm told. The man paying the bills says watch the guy for a couple of days. If he stays home, he probably doesn't know anything of consequence. If he leaves, we'll follow him. Maybe he's going to the store for a gallon of milk and a loaf of bread. But maybe he's not. Three of his agents are dead. If I'm reading this guy right, he's not the kind who's just going to leave this alone and let nature take its course."

Dwayne sighed. "Roger that."

"Glad we got that straight," Gavin said over the radio. "Now shut up and do what you're told. No more stupid questions. Hooah?"

"Hooah," Dwayne responded, giving Gavin the proper U.S. Army response to just about any question-especially the question Hooah?-which basically meant, Do you un-derstand and acknowledge? And the response meant, Yes, sir, I understand and I am ready to go! But Dwayne's re-sponse lacked the usual enthusiasm that most commanders expected from their troops when given an order. So it made Marcus wonder if maybe steroids weren't the only reason Dwayne had been drummed out of Special Forces and the Army. Maybe he was just a piss-poor soldier.

Marcus himself had spent ten years in Special Forces, most of it with the 3rd SF Group out of Ft. Bragg. He did one tour in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. Even in Special Forces he had run into soldiers like Dwayne. They were high-performing fuckups. Good enough to get through all the schools but not good enough to make it with the teams.

Dwayne was staring out the side window looking like he'd just been handed a death sentence. "Jesus," he said. "Two days of this shit. Do you know how boring this is go-ing to be?"

"Look on the bright side," Marcus said.

Dwayne turned to look at him. "What bright side?"

"All the white people in this neighborhood, somebody's bound to notice a black man sitting in a parked car and call the cops on us."

Victoria yanked open a dresser drawer. "I told you I didn't want to come here. It's dirty. The schools are bad. And no one speaks English." She closed the drawer after a few sec-onds, having taken nothing out of it. "I want to go back to Dallas. I want to go home."

Sitting on the bed, Scott said, "I'm assigned here."

"You're suspended here."

"Just until the investigation is over."

She pulled open another drawer. "How long will that take?"

"I don't know," he said. "Hopefully not long." Trying to sound a lot more optimistic than he felt.

Victoria left the drawer open but turned to face Scott. "Why are you even being investigated?"

"I just...don't want to talk about it. Not yet."

She turned away and slammed the drawer closed. "And that's exactly the problem. You never want to talk about anything." Then she opened the drawer again, dug through it, but didn't take anything out. Finally, she closed it and turned to face Scott. "Your father wanted you to go to law school."

"You wanted me to go to law school."

"Is that so bad?"

"I was a cop when we met."

"Yeah, a Dallas cop. Not a DEA agent. And you said you were thinking about going to law school."

"I did think about it," Scott said. "And I decided not to."

"But you waited until after we got married to tell me that."

"I like my job."

"That's not what you said when you were stuck in D.C."

"That was headquarters," Scott said. "And that's not the job. This is the job. Right here. On the border."

Victoria shook her head. "You actually like this place."

He nodded. "Yeah, I do."

"Well, I hate it." She yanked open the drawer and slammed it shut. "And I hate your fucking job."

There was an open overnight bag on the bed, but so far Victoria hadn't put anything in it. Scott didn't know if she was packing to leave or just blowing off steam.

"Four cities in ten years," Victoria said. "Four schools for Jake, two for Samantha. When does it end, Scott? When do we get to stay on one place?"

"The transfers haven't hurt them. They're both doing great in school."

"How would you know? You're don't get home until af-ter they're in bed."

"That's not true. I read to them all the time."

"Once a week," she said. "On weekends."

"I see their grades. I know how they're doing."

"What about me?" Victoria said. "How am I doing? Have the transfers hurt me? I've had to quit three jobs." She stared at him, waiting for a response, but he didn't say any-thing. "And let's not forget Afghanistan, where you picked up a parasite that nearly ate a hole in your stomach."

Scott stood up so suddenly that Victoria took a half-step back. "No, let's not forget Afghanistan."

Victoria shook her head, her long blond hair swinging across both shoulders, and held her hand up in a stop ges-ture. "No. No, you don't. Not that again. The counselor said-"

"I don't give a damn what the counselor said." Scott's voice rose with each word. "It wasn't his wife fucking her tennis instructor."

Victoria looked horrified as she glanced at the closed bedroom door. "Keep your voice down," she pleaded. "The kids will hear you."

And there it was, Scott thought, the scab ripped off the wound that would not heal, Victoria's fling with her twenty-something tennis instructor while Scott was risking his ass in Afghanistan.

When he found out about the affair, Scott had followed the tennis punk around for a couple of nights and discovered the son-of-a-bitch was screwing at least two more of his middle-aged, bored housewife students. He had really en-joyed telling Victoria about that, and he had relished sending her to a clinic for an STD test.

But even after that, Scott had still wanted to smack that no-good, wife-chasing, tennis-playing Lothario around. Land just one good punch, right on the nose. Punk had probably never been hit by anything harder than a tennis ball in his entire life. But what if the punk went crying to the police? Scott might end up with criminal charges filed against him, and if the charges stuck, especially a felony, his security clearance would be revoked and DEA would have no choice but to fire him.

Then he'd had an even worse thought. What if the punk turned out not to be the weak sister Scott took him for? The kid was six-two, a hundred and eighty pounds, and almost fifteen years younger than Scoot. No doubt in better shape. How embarrassing would that be, getting his ass handed to him by the punk who was sticking it to his wife?

So Scott and Victoria went to counseling instead. Where, as expected, the counselor laid eighty percent of the blame on Scott. What a colossal waste of time and money that had turned out to be. He could have stayed home and listened to his wife bitch at him for free and saved the hun-dred bucks an hour.