Delta Ghost (20 page)

“Running... down that street... 128
^th
...”

“How many?”

“Two guys... on foot...”

“Keep running,” Venn ordered. “And stay on the line. We’re almost there.”

He floored the accelerator.

The Mustang bucked and leaped like its namesake, vaulting through a red light and causing traffic to slew sideways. With one hand Venn grabbed the siren and jammed it onto the roof.

“Kid, have you crossed a wide road yet?” he yelled. “Adam Clayton Powell Jr Boulevard?”

“I think... ahead... yes,” gasped Clune.

“Okay. Turn left and come down it.”

Venn swung down West 125
^th
and took the corner leftward into the boulevard in a scream of tires. Cars streamed in either direction, one or two of them already moving to pull over at the sound of his siren.

He tore up the boulevard, his eyes scanning the crowds on the sidewalk. Harmony spotted the kid first. “There.”

Clune was staggering, as though winded, or because of an injury, or maybe both.

“I see you,” said Venn. “We’re straight ahead.”

He saw Clune lift his head. Behind him, two men turned the corner and began to close in on him, barging their way through the crowd.

The kid spotted them and angled to the edge of the curb. Venn pulled in, keeping the engine running.

“Boss, look out,” yelled Harmony.

A car was heading at speed toward them from the north, weaving among the traffic. A black Chevy Equinox.

Clune was ten yards away. He wasn’t going to reach them in time.

Venn flung open the door and drew the Beretta and aimed it across the Mustang’s hood, shouting,
“Get out the way, get out the way.”
The screams rose around him and cars began to swerve and run into each other.

The Equinox kept on coming. Venn saw the rear window on the driver’s side slide down and the barrel of a gun protrude like a snout.

He fired just as the other gun flashed, and heard the shot sing past his shoulder. His second shot caused the barrel to jerk back into the car and the car itself to swerve. But it kept on coming.

On the other side of the Mustang, Harmony had opened her own door and Venn heard her gun blast once, twice. The driver’s-side tire of the Equinox exploded and the car rocked and skidded so that the passenger side swung round toward them.

More guns though the windows, front and back, and Venn stood to get a better aim and loosed off a volley into the visible part of the windshield. The glass erupted in a sunburst of pebbles and blood coated the inside of the cockpit. Harmony fired into the rear, provoking a scream.

Clune staggered to the Mustang and collapsed alongside it.

With his free hand Venn pushed his head down so that he was shielded by the car. Venn turned and saw the two men who’d been chasing Clune on the sidewalk, almost upon him with guns drawn.

He fired, one shot each because the magazine was running low, hitting each of them squarely in the chest, dropping one man to his knees and sending the other sprawling backwards so that he cannoned into a group of people who were cowering, dazed, behind him.

Amid the cacophony of human screaming and car horns and distant sirens, Venn became aware of another noise.

He whirled just in time to see a second car advancing at speed, this time from back in the direction he’d come. This was a dark blue Volkswagen sedan, and it too had gun barrels protruding through the windows.

He yelled,
“Harmony. Behind us,”
and loosed off three shots, at the same time as the guns opened fire.

Bullets raked the Mustang, spanging and ripping through the bodywork. Venn crouched low, feeling his car rock and judder under the impact of the shots. Harmony rolled across the hood and landed beside him and Clune.

He reached inside and turned off the ignition and through the open passenger door on the other side saw the VW shoot past. Without pause Venn fired through the door, seeing one of the half-lowered windows of the VW shatter.

The VW continued for a few more yards and began to turn, sliding on its tires, the driver using the handbrake. As it began to pick up speed once more, heading back at them, Venn sprawled prone on the sidewalk and took careful aim and pulled the trigger of the Beretta.

The VW rose into the air, tilting slightly, hurtling toward them. Venn rolled, pulling Clune with him, hoping Harmony could fend for herself.

The front of the VW slammed down on the hood of the Mustang, the wrecked car sagging under the weight, its front tires splaying. Venn rose to his feet and with the Beretta in a two-handed grip sprayed the VW’s windows and smashed windshield until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. He pulled a new magazine from his pocket and rammed it home.

The sirens were almost upon them, and he could see the flicker of flashers in the distance.

Venn stooped and hauled Clune to his feet. To the kid, and to Harmony, he said, “Come on.”

Stumbling, they ran from the scene.

F
ranciscus didn’t regard himself as a self-deluding man. He’d made mistakes before in his life, plenty of them, and he liked to think he’d acknowledged every single one of them. Full recognition of your errors was the first step in combating the corrosive acid of regret, which was something that was of no use to anybody.

But he thought that his failure to kill Salazar earlier, before all of this, was one of the gravest errors he’d ever made, and one that no amount of acceptance would prevent him from rueing until the day he died.

Franciscus was sitting in his BMW in a parking lot on Sixth. His secretary had called him, her normally brisk and professional voice overlain with distress, to say that two cops had visited his office with the news that his eldest daughter was in trouble. When she told Franciscus the information they’d persuaded her to divulge – that he’d gone to the courthouse to interview Espinoza – Franciscus knew Venn was on to him.

It meant he couldn’t go back to his office for now. Which was why he was sitting in his car, using his iPad to search for information on Daniel Clune, the British man whom Salazar was hunting, and whose mug shot was plastered up all over the city.

There wasn’t anything online. When he realized he wasn’t getting anywhere, Franciscus took out his phone and called a number in Washington D.C.

The call was answered after a couple of rings. “Cavendish.”

“It’s Franciscus. Can you get me a rap sheet, if there is one, on a guy named Daniel Clune? A British national. Around 24 years old.”

“Yes.”

“Also – and this may be more difficult – I need to know if he’s wanted in Britain.”

“No problem,” said Cavendish. “I have a guy here who has contacts in Scotland Yard. Might take a little longer, though.”

“As soon as you can.”

“Understood.” Cavendish didn’t ask why Franciscus sought this information. Franciscus was trusted to work on his own, within broad limits.

While he waited for Cavendish to call, Franciscus thought about Diego Salazar.

Salazar had run the Castillo cartel for the past thirteen years. The cartel was based in Monterrey in north-east Mexico, but was effectively a transnational operation, since most of its trade was plied across the border in Texas. It had been existence since the early 1980s, but ever since Salazar had assumed command, its reach and its power had increased exponentially. Heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine... its products were diverse, and of high quality.

For the past thirteen years the US authorities had tried every weapon in the War on Drugs to bring the cartel, and Salazar, down. Captured footsoldiers had been tempted and cajoled and threatened into turning witness against Salazar, but they’d either proved impossible to win over, or they’d turned out to be such small fry that nothing they could reveal could so much as hurt Salazar. The DEA had sent in several undercover operatives over the years to infiltrate Salazar’s inner circle. These agents had either disappeared without trace, or been returned in multiple dismembered parts.  The CIA had proposed assassinating Salazar, either directly or by paying a rival drug baron to do the job. But Salazar was smart, as the limited intelligence available on him had revealed. He’d set up the command structure of the cartel so that it was like a hydra, with the result that if he were removed from the picture, others would spring up to take the helm and protect the operation. The trouble was, these other, secret leaders-in-waiting couldn’t be identified with any certainty.

It was then that a new strategy was floated. One that was discussed outside the intelligence organizations of the United States, outside the Pentagon, outside Congress.

The strategy boiled down to this:
Beat Salazar at his own game
.

A rival operation would be set up, based in South Texas. One which produced better quality narcotics than Salazar was able to, even with the financial and human resources he had at his disposal. One which would flood his target market in the United States, and thereby crowd him out.

The goal was to drive him back across the border, to force him to concentrate his business in his own country and to abandon the idea of selling Mexican drugs to American users. Then, once he was no longer a threat, the Texan operation would be wound down. The backers of the operation would lobby Congress for vastly increased funding for rehab programs, for drug education, for law enforcement in the South and South-West regions of the nation.

The reason the plan was devised outside of the normal political and legislative frameworks was that it was utterly illegal. And, to most people, morally indefensible.

So the Delta project was born. Under the guiding hand of its brainchild, a US senator, it had begun operations six years earlier. Initially a small, barely noticeable player in the South Texas drug scene, it had been carefully and judiciously nurtured until it started to have a definite impact on Salazar’s business. The genius of it was that Salazar appeared not to notice that he had a rival. He was simply led to believe that demand for his product was dropping off, when in fact his former customer base was getting its supply from a new outfit.

The nominal head of the home-grown drug business was Oscar Flores, a former associate of Salazar’s who’d changed his name to Flowers after moving permanently to the US. Flowers had never been part of Salazar’s organization and therefore wasn’t seen by Salazar as a genuine traitor, but rather as an expatriate who’d taken his own path and was now manufacturing narcotics in order to sell them on to distributors like Salazar. Accordingly, Flowers and Salazar maintained a trade, Flowers manufacturing relatively trivial amounts of product and selling them to Salazar, while Salazar continued to produce his own supply of the drugs while using Flowers’ wares as a top-up, a supplementary source.

At some point, probably within the last few months, Salazar had become suspicious of Flowers. Why, or in what way, was never clear to the people behind the Delta project. But last week, there’d been a confrontation between the two men, and Salazar had had Flowers killed.

The Delta team had debated furiously what to do about the situation. The senator had pushed for Salazar to be assassinated. It wouldn’t bring down his organization, but if Salazar had discovered the true nature of the Delta project, he was a major political liability. Franciscus, who’d been instrumental in setting up the project from the beginning, argued that Salazar should be left alone. Like his cartel, the Delta operation could survive the loss of Flowers. There were others, waiting in the wings, who’d take over running it. The plan should proceed as before, with Salazar slowly but surely being crowded out of the US market.

Franciscus’ view had prevailed. And now, with events spiralling out of control, he realized he’d been wrong. Salazar
should
have been terminated, just as the senator had wished. It would have caused a serious disruption to the delicate balance of power in the region, and Delta would have had to retreat a little and its tactics to be rethought... but at least all of this could have been avoided, this invasion of New York over a thousand miles away, which brought the Mexican cartel dangerously close to Washington, both geographically and politically.

Still. Franciscus knew that regret was, if this time unavoidable, then at least not something to be indulged in just yet. There’d be plenty of time later.

His thoughts shifted to Daniel Clune. An unknown quantity. He looked unprepossessing in his mug shot on the posters Franciscus had studied in the courthouse after he’d visited Espinoza, and the man was so young that at first Franciscus thought Espinoza had lied to him, despite the threat Franciscus had made to his family.

Who was the kid? What was a British youth doing caught up in the dark, adult world of drug cartels and pitiless violence?

It bothered Franciscus deeply that he didn’t know anything about the boy. Which made it all the more important that Franciscus find him.

Franciscus leaned his head back against his seat and closed his eyes. He felt the city all around him, felt the hidden presences of Salazar and his men and the cop, Lieutenant Venn, and felt an almost intolerable frustration at the fact that there was nothing,
nothing
he could do at the moment to locate any of them.

Franciscus sat like that for close to thirty minutes. Then his phone rang.

It was Cavendish, his contact in Washington.

“Daniel Clune is unknown in the US, other than that he arrived here two months ago on a three-month visa,” Cavendish said without preamble. “But he has a record in the United Kingdom.”

Franciscus sat up, listening hard.

“Five arrests,” Cavendish went on. “One for DUI, what the Brits call drink-driving, age eighteen. One for causing a public disturbance during a student protest when he was at university. Two for petty theft, shoplifting-type stuff. One for insurance fraud.”

Franciscus waited. After a few seconds had gone by, he said, “That’s it?”

“Yes. No jail time. Slaps on the wrist. And he was acquitted on the fraud thing, on a technicality, even though he probably did it.”