Oath to Defend (4 page)

8

With the team in position, Drake drove an electric golf cart down the path toward the presidential suite. Casey, riding shotgun, used their secure personal radios to alert the others that they were moving in. The in-ear tactical headsets with speaker and bone conduction microphones made them, he thought with a silent laugh, look like Secret Service agents protecting the President.

They saw no one outside guarding the suite.

“Gonzalez,” Drake asked, “you see anyone on the beach side?”

“Not from here.”

“Montgomery, anyone on your side?”

“We’re sitting just off the green on 15. Can’t see anyone.”

“All right, enter on my command.”

He stopped the cart on the turnabout in front of the suite and walked to the main entrance. With Casey standing to the left of the massive, carved front door, he took his Glock from the belt clip at his back and rang the doorbell.

After ten seconds and no response, he tried the door. It was unlocked. With a nod to Casey, he gave the command.

“Go.”

He pushed open the door and moved quickly to the right of the foyer as Casey moved to the left. Moving forward together, they cleared the media room to the right and then the elaborate bar and game room to the left. The only sound they heard was footsteps running across the terrace.

Drake saw it first, the blood and brain matter on the mahogany floor leading into the main room of the suite. It was Barak’s bodyguard, lying face down on the floor.

“The bodyguard’s dead,” Drake said into his radio. Make sure Barak isn’t hiding somewhere in here. Then we’ll meet in the main room.”

To get so close and fail made Drake coldly furious. They had been lucky to get this close, he knew, but with Barak on the run again, they might not get another chance at him.

“Mike,” he said, “how’d he know we were coming? Where did we screw up?”

Casey shrugged his shoulders. “We may never know. Maybe the bodyguard spotted us at some point. Maybe some gardener was a lookout. Remember the goat herders in Afghanistan?”

Drake nodded and said, “If the bodyguard spotted us, he did a hell of a job not letting on. Damn it, anyway. Let’s make sure there’s no sign we’ve been here and get back to Cozumel.” With a brief curse, he added, “I might as well let DHS know we missed him.”

Driving the cart back to the resort’s parking lot, Drake called Liz Strobel at DHS.

“We missed him, Liz. We found his bodyguard dead with two bullets in the back of the head. His body was still warm. He had to have been tipped off somehow.”

“Did you get out clean?”

“We’re leaving the resort now. We’re clean.”

“The Secretary will be glad to hear it,” she said. “How long ago do you think he slipped out?”

“Why?” Drake asked.

“I needed to make sure there were no repercussions. I bought satellite images of Cancun and the Mayan Riviera from a private space firm so no one else in the government would know what you were up to. Give me an approximate time he might have left, and I’ll see what we can learn.”

“We arrived in Cozumel this morning at 0630 and took a ferry to Playa Del Carmen at 0900. I don’t think there’s much of a chance he could have known we were here before this morning. You didn’t tell me about the lead until yesterday.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll check the images for that period and call you back. What will you do now?”

“We’re heading back to Cozumel. We’ll regroup. I’ll wait for your call. Good luck and thanks.” He ended the call.

“What did she say?” Casey asked.

“She’s checking satellite imagery to see if she can find out how Barak eluded us. You have to give her credit for that. Probably more CYA than tactical foresight, but getting satellite imagery was a good move. Why don’t you head back to the lobby and pick up your conference stuff at the front desk. I’ll round up our rides. No use letting them think we were just here for a free lunch.”

“Speaking of lunch….”

“Do not go there.”

Drake parked his cart in the lot and led the three taxis back to the lobby, where Casey was tipping the valet and waiting with the others.

“Let’s vamoose,” he said. “I think they just found the bodyguard, if
hombre muerto
means what I think it means. They’re calling the
policia
as we speak.”

“Anyone suspicious?” Drake asked quietly.

“The conversation I overheard behind the front desk included the word ‘cartel,’ so they’re probably thinking it’s drug related. I didn’t stick around to ask.”

Drake signaled the other men to load up, and soon they were back on Highway 307, heading south to the ferry terminal. As he stared out the window of his taxi, he thought about what Casey had said about Afghanistan. More than once, after days of surveillance from a nearby hillside, they had approached a target they knew was hiding in a village of mud brick dwellings only to find the man wasn’t there. How he’d been smuggled out, or perhaps slipped out through a tunnel they didn’t know about, they had never learned. Most likely, as his friend had reminded him, someone had reported their presence in time for their target to escape.

This time, though, no one at the resort knew who they were. Even if Barak had been tipped off, how had he left without them seeing him? Assuming Barak had shot the bodyguard, he might have already been gone before they surrounded his suite. No one had seen him, however, so maybe the bodyguard had been alone and his murder wasn’t even connected to Barak.

The bodyguard had to be the key. Drake remembered that when he first saw him at the ferry terminal, he had been looking at brochures for excursions to the ruins at Tulum. If he was staying at the Mayakoba, he asked himself, why wouldn’t he have booked his tour from there instead of driving to the ferry terminal?

Because he was waiting for someone on the ferry!

“Mike, when we saw the bodyguard at the ferry terminal, do you think he spotted us?”

“He never looked at me that I remember. He was reading a brochure and then, as the rest of us got on in our taxis, he got in his Range Rover and followed one of the buses. I don’t think he was paying any attention to us.”

“He wasn’t interested in us or seeing the ruins. Remember how he walked around, following that tour group? He wasn’t there for the tour. He was following someone. He was at the terminal waiting for the ferry from Cozumel.”

“I didn’t see him talking with anyone.”

“Maybe he was doing the same thing we were, just following someone.”

“That still doesn’t explain how Barak knew we were coming.”

“The guy he was following,” they said at the same time.

“He could have been the one who spotted us and tipped off Barak,” Drake said. “If he’s the one, he’s the only link we have to Barak. If we can access the security cameras I saw at the terminal, we might find out who the bodyguard was waiting for.”

“It’s worth a try,” said Casey. “You can buy your tickets for the ferry online, so I should be able to hack into the system when we get back to the hotel. But that still won’t tell us where Barak is now.”

“Maybe not, but it might give us someone who can lead us to him. That’s all we have right now.”

9

Barak was alone in the well appointed cabin of a Gulfstream G450 flying to Tijuana. The jet was owned by Mexico’s most powerful cartel, as was the black cigarette boat that had picked him up in the blue waters off the beach at the resort.

For the first time, he felt his life was out of control. When he was running his international security firm in Las Vegas, he had developed a private army of assassins that he kept hidden among the company’s other employees. No one had ever ordered him around the way Ryan and the Alliance were doing now. The Brotherhood, which sponsored him, had left him alone to carry out their plan to assassinate American and other world leaders. They had trusted him.

But he wasn’t sure they still trusted him.

Now he was being told what to do and when to do it. He knew he was being tested, but he could not let that knowledge interfere with his plan to use the demolition nuke in America. That would put an end to the humiliation of his current order to serve as a subcontracted assassin for Hezbollah in Tijuana.

He knew that Hezbollah had established a base in Tijuana and was doing some of the heavy lifting for the Tijuana cartel. Many of the two thousand murders in the last two years were the work of Hezbollah assassins, which was precisely why he was uneasy with the order to step in for them now. He was going to have to be very careful in the next few days.

The Gulfstream began its descent through the polluted clouds to the Tijuana International Airport, located just three hundred meters south of the U.S.-Mexico border. It taxied to the general aviation terminal and stopped in front of an idling black Mercedes S600.

Barak waited for the exit door to be opened for him, then walked alone to the Mercedes. The rear door was held open by a young Mexican with a pearl handled .45 stuck in the front of his jeans. Barak got in and found that he was alone in what he realized was an armored vehicle. He should have expected that a cartel flying its own Gulfstream around Mexico wouldn’t be driving anything less than the safest car in the world, next to the armored Cadillac the American President used. The cartel moved two thirds of the drugs smuggled into the U.S. and had operations in fifty-two countries around the world. It could well afford the best.

After the Mercedes was waved through a gate guarded by two soldiers, the driver said over his shoulder, “Señor, we have an hour’s drive to the villa. There is Scotch in the bar and a basket of tapas.”

Leaning forward, Barak opened the panel of the bar and found a crystal tumbler, a bottle of Glenmorangie Scotch (his favorite), and a plate of tapas on ice. As they drove through Tijuana’s squalid streets, he savored an olive that reminded him of his boyhood in Egypt and poured two fingers of scotch in the tumbler. He was used to luxury, but it was always nice to be treated with respect.

Most of the drive south and east passed in silence. When they reached the Guadalupe Valley and the Mexican wine country, Barak saw that the paved road they were traveling was lined with vineyards, olive orchards, and small farms.

“Most people don’t know we make fine wine,” the driver said proudly. “They think only of tequila and cerveza. You will taste our fine wines when you drink tonight at the villa.”

“Are we close?” Barak asked.

“See the lights on that hilltop?” The driver pointed to his left. “That is where you are going.”

Barak looked out at the lights of an arched veranda that ran along the front of a two-story villa. Small floodlights lined the driveway and illuminated a vineyard on one side and an olive orchard on the other. Two black Cadillac Escalades were parked in front of the villa. As they drew nearer, he saw that the villa was guarded by men wearing paramilitary dress and carrying AK-9s, the new Kalashnikov assault weapon. He counted ten men on the drive up and could see more moving in the shadows around the villa. Whoever he was meeting wasn’t taking any chances with his personal safety.

The driver stopped in front of a gravel terraced walkway lined with blooming lavender. With a flourish, a young man approached and opened the rear door of the Mercedes.

“Come, señor, I will show you the way.”

Barak stretched for a moment, enjoying the fragrance of the warm evening, before he followed the young man up the steps. The villa, he saw, was magnificent with adobe and flagstone walls and a red tile roof. The veranda was lined with potted cacti. Three men were seated at a table in the middle of the veranda.

“Thank you, Manolito,” the shortest of the three men said. “You may go. He turned to Barak.

“Come, join us,” he said. He nodded to one of his comrades. “This is Jesus, the head of our armed wing. This is Saleem, our friend from Hezbollah. I am Felipe Calderon. Please have a seat.”

Barak sat, facing the three men. Jesus, he knew, was the enforcer for the cartel and a former member of Mexico’s elite commandos that had been trained to fight the cartels. According to information he’d received from Ryan and the Alliance, Saleem was the head of Hezbollah in Tijuana. Felipe Calderon was the top lieutenant for the cartel and reported directly to its leader, a man known as El Verdugo, the Executioner.

“I understand, Señor Calderon,” Barak said, “that you have requested my services. May I ask why?” He paused. “Surely Jesus is capable of carrying out your desires.”

Calderon gave a thin smile. “Thank you for recognizing that,” he said, “but this time Jesus and his men must not be involved. Do you know about the little war that has been going on here in Tijuana with our rival for the last several years?”

“I do.”

“Then you know they blame us for the arrests of their leader, the Architect, and his top lieutenant. Which we deny, of course. What you do not know, because we have just learned this, is they have borrowed commandos from our main competition to the east. They plan to kill El Verdugo and as many of the rest of us as they can. We want you to put a stop to this.”

Barak nodded. “And how do I do that?”

“We know that Ramon Guerrero, the brother of the Architect, and Antonio Mendoza, the borrowed commando from the east, will be having lunch on the day after tomorrow at the Cien Años restaurant in Tijuana. It’s Ramon’s birthday. He wants a proper celebration. You will make it his last celebration, his last birthday.”

“How am I to do this for you?” Barak asked, wanting to know the cartel’s expectations.

“You are the master
assassino
, Señor. That is for you to figure out. Use the assassins you have trained. If there are casualties, they cannot be traced back to us. We do not want to start a war with our competitors to the east.”

Barak gave this some thought. “In return, I understand you will help me get my merchandise across the border.”

“If you are successful, we will help you. That is why Saleem is here. Our business is feeding the American appetite for our drugs, not killing the Americans. That’s what you and Saleem want to do. It would be very bad for us if America learned that we helped you with your merchandise.”

“Then we have a deal.”

Calderon nodded. “Now let us drink a little tequila. Then you will eat with us, the finest food, and drink some Mexican wine, also the finest. Then you will get to work.”