Rosarito Beach (30 page)

Mora took Jessica by the arm and guided her through the construction site. He turned once and saw Perez and the sniper exiting the second SUV. Just before Mora and Jessica reached the embankment, his cell phone rang. He could see a car on the beach about a hundred yards away. Caesar was standing next to the car and his hands were behind his back—as if they were cuffed or tied—but Hamilton wasn't visible.

—

K
ay was inside the car, holding Caesar's cell phone to her mouth, lying on the backseat. She wasn't going to let Mora's men shoot her before she had a chance to explain the situation to Mora. She wasn't worried about Caesar running away.

Mora answered her call on the first ring. “Now what?” he said.

“I want you to listen carefully, Raphael. Caesar has a collar locked around his neck, and the collar is filled with plastic explosive. And I'm holding a dead man's switch in my left hand. Do you understand what this means?”

“Yes,” Mora said.

“I'm gonna explain things to you anyway, just to make sure there are no mistakes. If my thumb comes off the button on the dead man's switch, an electronic signal is going to be transmitted to a detonator in the collar and Caesar's head is going to be blown off his shoulders. The collar and the detonator were manufactured by one of your fine Mexican craftsmen in Tijuana. So if I fall down and my thumb comes off the button, Caesar dies. If I'm shot and my thumb comes off the button, Caesar dies. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Mora said.

“There's one other thing. The transmitter in the dead man's switch has a range of two kilometers. This means that after I exchange Caesar for my daughter, if you try to kill me, you and Caesar had better be at least two kilometers away. And if you're standing next to Caesar when the bomb goes off, you'll die, too. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Mora said.

“Good. I've already explained the situation to Caesar, which is the reason he's standing outside the car like his feet are buried in the sand. Now, I know you've brought people here with you, so I'm going to give you two minutes to call your guys and explain the situation to them. Then, as soon as I step out of the car, you and my daughter come down to the beach. You send my daughter to me, and I'll send Caesar to you.”

Kay hung up, and then a horrifying thought occurred to her. What if Mora wanted Caesar dead? With Tito gone, who would be a better man to assume control of Caesar's empire? Caesar had come to power by killing his boss. Raphael Mora could come to power the same way—but without actually pulling the trigger himself.

Well, there was nothing she could do about that.

—

M
ora closed the phone.

This was the piece of Hamilton's plan that he'd missed. If Caesar was rigged so Hamilton could blow his head off like she said, he couldn't kill her until he and Caesar were at least two kilometers away. Which meant if a helicopter came in to pick her up off the beach, Perez couldn't shoot down the helicopter until the distance between the helicopter and Caesar was two kilometers—too far away to make an accurate shot. But was she lying to him?

He didn't think she was lying about the explosive charge. He did think, however, that she might be bluffing about the range of the transmitter. Two kilometers seemed unlikely. And if he was off the beach, a signal from the transmitter might be affected by the contours of the land. He mulled all that over for a moment but finally decided he really couldn't afford to take the chance that she wasn't telling the truth. As she said, not only would Caesar die, he would, too.

He still had the option of having Perez's sniper shoot her as soon as she exposed herself; Hamilton and Cesar would die, and then he could try and take over the cartel. He had come to the realization in the last hour, however, that he didn't want to become the new Caesar Olivera. If Caesar was killed, a struggle would follow and a lot of people would die—and he could be one of those people. He had a comfortable job with Caesar Olivera; he'd made a lot of money, certainly more money than he could ever spend in his lifetime. Why risk everything to earn more money he wouldn't have time to spend? There were some people whose egos demanded that they be the top dog. Caesar was one of those people; so was his idiot brother, the late, unlamented Tito Olivera.

Raphael Mora was not one of those people.

So Caesar would live, and not far in the future, Mora would track down Hamilton and present the woman to him so Caesar could exact a horrible revenge.

He called Perez, speaking in Spanish so Jessica wouldn't understand, and explained the situation with the explosive collar and the dead man's switch.

“I still want you to get into a position where you can look down at the beach,” Mora said, “but don't kill the woman unless I give you a direct order.”

He closed the cell phone and gave Jessica a little push. “Let's go. Walk down to the beach.”

—

K
ay got out of the car. In her left hand was a black tube with a red button on the top—the dead man's switch—and her left thumb was depressing the button. She went and stood next to Caesar. She watched as Jessica and Mora slid down the embankment, and when they were standing on the beach, she called Mora again.

“Send Jessica to me,” she said, and when she saw Jessica begin to walk toward her, she said to Caesar, “Go.”

Caesar was no longer raging the way he'd been in the trunk of the car. He seemed to have regained the self-control he was known for. His head was bleeding slightly where she'd struck him with the Glock, and his face was smudged with dirt. He was still missing one shoe. He now looked more like a guy you'd find sleeping in a doorway in Tijuana than the head of the most powerful drug cartel in the Americas.

The collar around his neck continued to emit a beep every three seconds.

“If it takes the rest of my life,” he said, turning to look Kay in the eye, “I'll find you. There is no place on this planet where you will be safe. If you were smart, you would kill yourself and your daughter right now to save yourselves the pain.”

Kay knew he was right. She knew she and Jessica would be running from Caesar Olivera for the rest of their lives. He'd never stop hunting for the woman who had killed his brother. But she'd worry about that later, after she had Jessica back.

“Go,” she said to Caesar a second time.

—

J
essica wanted to run to Kay, but she didn't. She didn't understand exactly how the exchange was set up, so she forced herself to walk slowly. She passed the man who had been with her mother, a big guy, not that tall, but broad. His hands were behind his back and he was wearing some kind of collar around his neck. It looked like those inflatable rings that people wore on long airplane flights, except it seemed to be made of canvas. The guy was a mess—and he looked pissed off—but as she passed him, he smiled at her and said, “Until we meet again.”

Jessica went cold thinking about meeting any of these monsters again, but she didn't say anything and kept on walking.

K
ay didn't have a helicopter coming for her.

The dead man's switch in her hand was a fake.

What she had was Roman Quinterez and one of his men heading toward the beach in a Boston Whaler with a two-hundred-and-fifty-horsepower outboard motor. Roman had been anchored off the beach posing as a fisherman. He picked the Whaler because it had a deep, V-shaped bottom—a place where Jessica could lie down and be out of sight—and the hull was made of fiberglass. Kay would have preferred a metal hull—a material better able to stop a bullet—but fiberglass was still better than an inflatable boat like a Zodiac. Boston Whalers, because of their double-hulled construction, were also unsinkable. Supposedly.

Roman had the
real
dead man's switch. Kay knew she wouldn't be able to swim holding the dead man's switch, and she thought the water might damage the electronics in it. At the same time, she wanted Caesar Olivera to die if he killed her or her daughter. So Roman was holding the real dead man's switch, and when Kay had raised her right hand after putting the explosive collar on Caesar, Roman, watching everything unfold with binoculars, had activated the bomb. Roman would kill Caesar if Kay and Jessica didn't make it.

As soon as Jessica reached her, Kay gave her a brief hug—they didn't have time for an emotional reunion—and took one of the two orange vests she had in the car and tossed it to Jessica. It wasn't a bulletproof vest; it was a life vest.

“Put that on,” Kay said as she donned her own vest. “We gotta hurry. You see that boat coming toward the beach? Head out in the water right now and swim to it. As soon as you get on board, get down on the bottom of the boat so you're out of sight. Now, go. Go!”

Kay looked down the beach as she ran into the surf after her daughter. Caesar had reached Mora.

—

G
et this goddamn thing off me!” Caesar said.

Mora touched the padlock binding the collar to Caesar's throat. “I can't. I don't have anything to cut through metal, and I'm afraid if I tamper with the collar or cut through the hose, it will explode. We need to get out of range; we need to get as far away from this place as fast as we can.”

Mora looked back and saw the Boston Whaler making its way toward the shore and the girl and her mother running into the water. He also looked up the coast, hoping to see Perez's men in a boat they'd commandeered from the Rosarito Beach marina, but they were nowhere in sight. He had known they most likely wouldn't make it on time.

Mora wanted to get off the beach immediately. He wasn't worried about Hamilton deliberately killing Caesar at this point. Hamilton knew he'd brought men with him, and she knew if she killed Caesar, Mora's men would kill her and her daughter. So he wasn't worried about her intentionally killing Caesar—but he was worried about her accidentally killing him. If her thumb slipped off the dead man's switch while she was swimming or getting into the boat, then he and Caesar would die.

He grabbed one of Caesar's arms and started running with him, but Caesar was having a hard time running with his hands cuffed behind his back; he stumbled once and fell. Mora jerked him to his feet and said, “Hurry. We need to get off this beach.”

They reached the steep embankment, but with his hands behind his back, Caesar was struggling to get up. Mora began tugging at him, doing his best to pull a two-hundred-pound man up a steep hillside, the sand caving beneath their feet as they climbed.

“Slow down!” Caesar said.

“Hurry!” Mora said.

—

R
oman Quinterez watched Caesar and Mora start up the embankment.

He knew the transmitter in the dead man's switch didn't have a two-kilometer range, only one kilometer—a thousand yards. Old Mr. Durant, the man who built the collar bomb, also said there needed to be a clear line of sight between the transmitter in the dead man's switch and the receiver in the detonator. Once Mora and Caesar reached the top of the embankment, Roman would lose sight of them.

Roman had been hunting Caesar Olivera for ten years, ever since his wife and daughter were killed, and he knew he'd never be able to arrest Caesar. He also knew that if Caesar lived, he would hunt down Kay Hamilton and her daughter and kill them in the most gruesome manner he could devise.

Roman took his thumb off the button on the dead man's switch.

In addition to the plastic explosive in the collar, there were more than a hundred small ball bearings. When Roman released the button, Caesar's head disintegrated into a red mist of blood and brains. The ball bearings in the collar shredded Raphael Mora's face and chest, and he was dead before his body hit the ground.

—

J
essica was ten yards from the Boston Whaler when she heard the explosion on the beach. She turned her head to see what had happened, but a handsome man with a Vandyke beard called out, “Hurry, sweetie. You need to get in the boat.” When Jessica reached the boat, he reached down and pulled her over the side, and said, “Lie down on the bottom of the boat.”

A moment later, Kay reached the boat and the man with the Vandyke began to pull her on board. Jessica went over to help, and Kay screamed, “Jessica! Get down!”

Jessica dropped to the bottom of the boat, but before she did she looked back at the beach. There was a small cloud of smoke and two bodies lying on the embankment.

As soon as Kay was on board, she said, “Jesus, Roman, what did you do?”

Roman smiled at her. He had a beautiful smile. “I couldn't let him live, Kay.”

Kay shook her head, not sure if she should be mad or grateful, then said, “Roman, tell the guy driving to make the boat zigzag. He's got to make us a harder target. Don't head straight out to sea.”

Two seconds later, a grenade exploded off the port side of the Whaler.

—

I
t took Perez a few seconds to understand what had happened.

He and his sniper had crawled through the construction site and taken positions behind a mound of earth. He watched the exchange take place, saw the boat heading toward shore, and saw the girl and her mother running through the waves to meet the boat. He figured the boat would be the sniper's target when Mora gave the command.

When he turned his head to see what Caesar and Mora were doing, he saw them trying to scramble up an embankment, but he couldn't understand why they were moving so frantically.

And that's when the explosion occurred.

Perez's first reaction was to run to help Caesar Olivera, but he could see that neither Caesar nor Mora was moving. He took out his binoculars and trained them on the two men lying on the beach. Caesar didn't have a head; Raphael Mora didn't have a face. For a moment he didn't know what to do, then he made up his mind.

He looked back out to sea and watched Hamilton being pulled into the boat.

“Kill them,” he said to the sniper. “Use the RPGs.”

—

T
he sniper lived for moments like this.

He was the man who'd shot the armored-car driver in San Diego with the .50 caliber round. There wasn't a weapon he couldn't shoot, and that he couldn't shoot well. His dream—a dream he'd only told his boyfriend—was to one day assassinate someone really important, like the U.S. president or the president of Mexico. He picked up the grenade launcher and took aim at the Boston Whaler.

In San Diego he had been shooting at a moving vehicle, but the vehicle had been traveling on a smooth surface and going in a straight line. The Whaler was being tossed around in the surf, and when he fired the first shot, the boat had just made a hard starboard turn. He missed the boat by ten yards with the first grenade.

He calmly inserted the second grenade into the launcher, while Perez yammered in his ear for him to hurry. Now the boat was moving fast and zigzagging at the same time. He sighted again, tried to anticipate the next turn the boat would make, took a breath, and fired—and missed a second time, the grenade exploding in the water behind the boat.

He heard Perez cursing, but he ignored him and picked up the .50 caliber rifle. He was much better with a rifle than the RPGs. The boat was now about four hundred yards away—not far at all for a man with the sniper's ability. He sighted in on the man driving the Whaler. He was exposed, sitting at a console in the middle of the boat, steering the boat with an automobile-like steering wheel. He aimed at the back of the driver's seat and fired.

The .50 caliber round went through the seat back like it was paper, went through the driver's back and chest like they were paper, too, and embedded itself in the boat's instrument console. The driver fell forward and collapsed on the steering wheel, and the boat began to turn in a long arc back toward the beach.

The sniper couldn't see Hamilton or her daughter. They were lying on the bottom of the boat. But he could see the shoulders and head of the other man in the boat. He took aim at the man's head—he could see the man's beard through the scope as if it were a foot away—but with the boat turning and bouncing up and down in the waves, it wasn't going to be an easy shot. Then he had an idea.

A .50 caliber bullet has enough power to penetrate the cast-iron engine block of an automobile—and the shroud protecting the outboard motor on the Boston Whaler was not made of cast iron. It was made of sheet metal and was considerably larger than a man's head.

The sniper shot the engine. Black smoke poured out of the motor and the boat stopped. Now the sniper could kill everyone in the boat and he wouldn't even need to be able to see them. He'd just keep shooting .50 caliber rounds into the fiberglass hull of the Whaler until they were all dead.

—

K
ay saw the man driving the boat get hit and fall over the steering wheel. She had no idea who the poor man was, just that he was one of Roman's friends. The boat begin to turn in a circle, and Roman started to get up to grab the steering wheel, but then Kay heard a loud twang and the motor began to billow smoke and the boat stopped dead in the water.

“Jesus,” Roman said. “What the hell is that guy shooting?”

Kay didn't know what they were going to do next. Before she could think of anything, bullets started to penetrate the sides of the Boston Whaler, going in one side of the boat's hull and out the other. Kay realized the bullets were hitting the boat in a systematic manner, starting at the stern and moving toward the bow. The shooter was marching his shots up the hull, spacing them about a foot apart.

Kay and Jessica were lying in the bottom of the boat, just behind the steering console, which was in the middle of the boat. And when Kay saw bullets punch through the fiberglass hull like it was made of soft cheese, she threw herself on top of her daughter.

A moment later, Roman cried out in agony. He was near the stern, just a few feet away from Kay and Jessica, and was hit in the right thigh. The .50 caliber bullet certainly broke his femur.

Then another shot penetrated the hull and blew a hole in his chest.

Oh, God, Roman. I'm so sorry.

“Move to the stern! Move to the stern!” Kay yelled at Jessica, and the two of them scrambled over Roman's body, keeping their heads down, looking for cover in the part of the boat that the shooter had already hit. As they were moving, one shot grazed the rubber sole of Kay's right tennis shoe, making her whole leg tingle. If the bullet had hit her foot, it would have blown it off.

As the sniper continued to march bullets toward the bow of the Whaler, Kay said to Jessica, “We have to get out of this boat. I want you to go over the starboard side, then—”

The sniper had reached the bow of the boat, and after a brief pause where Kay assumed he was reloading his rifle, he begin to march his shots back toward the stern where she and Jessica were huddled.

“—as soon as you're in the water, take off your life jacket. If you don't, you'll be bobbing in the water and that guy will kill you.”

Bullets continued to punch through the hull; the last shot fired was about three feet from Kay's outstretched legs.

“Do you understand?” Kay screamed.

“Yes,” Jessica said. Her eyes were the size of saucers.

“I'll go first to distract the guy. I'll go over the port side . . .”

A bullet passed over Kay's legs. “Christ!” she screamed.

There was no more time to talk. Kay jumped up and dove over the side of the boat, just praying that Jessica would move quickly. If Jessica did as Kay had instructed, she would be on the side of the boat not visible to the beach. Kay, however, would be a target.

Kay struggled to get the life vest off. The damn thing was an orange neon sign and keeping her head above the water. The shooter fired at her, and the bullet struck the hull of the boat that was now behind her, missing her head by no more than an inch. Thank God she was bobbing around in the water. She finally got the vest off and dove under the boat.

Jessica was in the water and her vest was already off. Kay swam next to her daughter and said, “Start swimming out to sea. Stay underwater as long as possible and don't travel in a straight line. Go.”

“What are you going to do?” Jessica said.

“Just do what I'm telling you. Go!”

“But, Kay, look,” Jessica said, and pointed over Kay's shoulder, away from the beach.

Kay didn't have time to look. “Just go!” she screamed at Jessica.

Jessica dove and started swimming out to sea. Thank God she'd been taking surfing lessons and was a strong swimmer. But Kay didn't know how long she'd be able to last.

Kay didn't follow Jessica out to sea. She was going to continue to distract the sniper to protect Jessica, and instead of swimming away from the beach, she swam parallel to it and kept her head above water. She zigzagged as best she could, but she knew the shooter was good and if he took enough shots at her, he was going to kill her. And her wonderful daughter was probably going to drown.