Target Deck - 02 (30 page)

“Bitches,” Jimenez huffed as he entered his bedroom. “Out!”

The two women moved in slow motion, lethargic as they oozed out of bed. They were still high.

“Now!”

The junkies staggered out, not even bothering to get dressed. His men would take care of them, one way or the other. He cleared off an area of his desk and laid his laptop computer down next to the weeping candle sticks. Santa Muerta had been appeased. Now she would grant him favor with The Beast that lived beneath his fortress. Night and day, it heard and saw everything.

Opening up the computer, he sat down wearing only his blood splattered pants.

With Arturo gone life had grown more difficult for the drug lord, but what had been lost with his pet intelligence agent had more than been made up for by The Beast.

With a few clicks, Jimenez opened up a program called Analyst Notebook which displayed a giant link chart showing how people were associated with one another. One by one he looked at the picture of each and every Judas Goat in his organization.

Using his cellular phone, he placed a call to his right hand man. Ignacio ran the nuts and bolts of franchising out tasks to various freelance agents from his base in Oaxaca City while Jimenez remained in his fortress up in the mountains. He would be waiting for the phone call.

Ignacio picked up on the first ring.

“Yes, sir?”

“It is time.”

Aghassi peeked out from behind the display case before carefully swinging it open.

A dozen of Jimenez' men sat around the television screens watching European soccer. Engrossed in the sport, they cheered on, oblivious to the Samruk mercenary as he slipped behind them and up the stairs. He was almost to the top when the two naked, large breasted women he had spotted earlier in the bedroom stumbled on by. They disappeared into the corner room of the villa, slamming the door shut behind them.

Back in the security monitoring room, Aghassi clenched his teeth. It was a near miss. He was more than a little creeped out by what he had seen in the compound, his nerves shot, and was in a hurry to get the hell off of the objective. He had to take care not to get sloppy.

“Shooter-One?”

There was a slight pause.

“Are you clear?”

“For now, I'm back in the security monitoring room.”

“The lights are on in the room you entered into on the second floor. Someone is there.”

It had to be Jimenez. Nikita saw him entering the villa and he must have been the one who kicked the girls out of his bedroom. It would be a simple affair to walk into the bedroom and shoot him dead with the suppressed pistol.

Aghassi hurried to restore the security room to its original condition before setting the timers on all of the alarms on a sixty minute delay. The security manager would find everything in place the next day when the alarms came back online after he and Nikita had escaped.

“Shooter-One, this is Spooky-One,” he said into his radio.

“Yes?”

“I'm going down the hall. We can finish this now.”

“He's isolated?”

“I think so. It is now or never.”

“Roger.”

Aghassi had his pistol drawn and the door halfway open when he heard footsteps pounding up the stairs. Closing the door, he held the pistol at the ready. The footsteps continued down the hall. Easing his way out into the hall once the coast was clear, he could see that the bedroom door was open. Jimenez was having a pow-wow with his men.

Shooting across the hall, he cracked open the door that the two junkies had gone through. Neither could be seen so he stepped inside. Voices came from the adjoining bathroom. The giggles and girl talk made it sound like they were taking turns doing lines of blow.

“I missed my chance,” he whispered into the radio. “I need an out.”

“The sentry is on the blue side of the villa, the green side is clear.” The sniper was using code words for the east and west sides of the building.

“Roger.”

Looking over his shoulder, he waited for another explosion of laughter, using the noise to muffle the sound as he pushed open a window. One leg after the other, he slipped outside and onto a narrow ledge, shutting the window behind him. Taking a deep breath, he stepped off and fell down to the ground. With his feet and knees together, his legs acted like a giant piston to help break his fall. It didn't prevent him from gasping in pain as he scuffed up his knees and elbows though.

Readjusting his earpiece, he tried making contact with his sniper overwatch once more.

“I'm on the ground. Talk to me.”

“The sentry is half asleep over on the far side of the building. From up here I can see a drainage ditch running towards the target wall we came up over.”

“I think I see it.”

Moving at a crouch, Aghassi walked through the grass until he found the shallow muddy depression. Getting down into it, he leopard crawled forward, arm over arm, happy to put as much distance as possible between him and the villa.

“We've faced some trying times. Times that have tried our faith,” Jimenez looked up at the goat skull mounted on his wall. “But tonight we strike back. Tonight we strike back at the gringos and their colonial masters.”

Jimenez spoke to his Lieutenants who he had called and gathered around him.

“The gringos come from the north and bring with them their military technology, their technology of oppression. But this technology can also be used against them. They forget that this is Mexico. The tax man, the pharmacist, the milk man, they all belong to us.”

The cartel soldiers chuckled.

“And the telephone company, they especially belong to us. Both the real cell phone towers and the ones we build, they are all ours. Now let me explain,” he took his time laying it out, assuring his men that he was still in control. “This computer program here compiles information. It takes the records of all cellular phone traffic in Oaxaca and shows us who is talking to who. We can look at it telephone to telephone like this,” Jimenez pointed to the computer screen.

Displayed on the screen was an icon for a single cellular phone. Branches reached out representing each call made with the phone to other cell phones and land line phones showed incoming, outgoing, and missed phone calls.

“This is what normal cellular phone traffic looks like,” the Jefe explained. With a few more clicks he brought up a new link chart showing one cell phone connecting to another single cell phone by incoming and outgoing calls.

“This,” he said pointing to the screen. “Is what the phone calls of a snitch look like. No one uses their phone to call only one number, except those who have been given a drop phone for one specific purpose, to rat on their brothers.”

The Lieutenants looked at each other for a long moment.

A few more clicks on the laptop brought up a new link chart showing side by side comparisons for two different phones.

“Now you see here, these two phones belong to the same person. One phone shows normal phone calls going out to his friends, family, and his brothers here in our family. However, the second phone is kept for one specialized purpose, to compartmentalize the calls to this single phone number from all the others. The Beast has sniffed out this information for us and there are many more like him but this cell phone belongs to someone in this very room.”

Jimenez reached over his computer and grabbed the
Smith and Wesson Governor
revolver. Spinning in his chair, he bounced the hand cannon in his fist. The pistol was capable of firing .45 ACP rounds but more importantly it was designed around the .410 shotgun shell. The massive revolver was essentially a scaled down shotgun.

“Jose,” Jimenez stated coldly. “This is your cell phone.”

The cartel lieutenant took a step backwards, his hands coming up in front of him defensively. Whatever words he was about to say died in his throat.

“What do you want me to do about this Jose? This is a dead ringer as they say. One phone that only calls one phone, always in the middle of the night? You are a source and you have been talking to that whore, the former Police Chief's daughter. She works with the gringos now, you know that!”

Jimenez aimed down the tritium night sights, lining up the front sight post square on Jose's face.

“At least in death, you will serve Santa Muerta.”

The drug lord squeezed the trigger and the revolver jumped in his hand with a flash, the recoil pushing the barrel up towards the ceiling. Jose's face disappeared in a splash of gore and shattered bone. He was dead before his body hit the floor.

Jimenez tossed the pistol back on the table where it landed with a heavy clunk.

“Next order of business-”

“SHIT!”

Cody looked away from the computer monitor and turned towards Frank. He had watched the entire exchange as it was recorded by the webcam imbedded in Jimenez' laptop. Aghassi's worm virus had infected the server, installed itself on the drug lord's computer, and started uploading through the cartel's own satellite uplink where it landed on Cody's computer.