Czytaj książkę: «Lethal Vengeance»

Chapter One

El Paso International Airport

Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, stood a few yards off from Runway 12, watching as the Learjet 40 approached from the east. The aircraft descended to a textbook-perfect landing, its pilot throttling back on the twin Honeywell engines. It taxied toward him, gradually slowing to a halt. The engines switched off before its exit door opened behind the cockpit, on the port side, and a built-in set of steps unfolded to the tarmac.

Barbara Price came out to meet him. Wearing a tailored pantsuit and “sensible” shoes, she barely showed the stress of flying 1,900 miles—nearly the Learjet’s top range—from Stony Man Farm in Virginia to “The City with a Legend,” as El Paso called itself.

Bolan and Price were more than friends and colleagues, but they kept the greeting to a handshake. He followed her back to the plane, mounting the steps behind her to its cabin.

“You made good time,” he said as they sat facing each other with a folding table in between.

“No time to waste,” she said, not asking how he’d beat her there when he was coming from Los Angeles. He’d covered less than half the distance she had, and Price would know that automatically.

“So how bad is it?” Bolan asked.

“It doesn’t get much worse.”

“Tell me.”

He knew some of it from their brief phone conversation hours earlier. Hal Brognola, director of the clandestine organization known as Stony Man Farm and a head honcho in the Department Justice, had vanished from his hotel in El Paso the previous night, the next-to-last day of a law enforcement conference on terrorism and drug trafficking across the Tex-Mex border.

He knew El Paso was the Lone Star State’s sixth largest city, covering 256 square miles, with some 680,000 year-round residents. Across the Rio Grande, it faced Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s eighth largest city, smaller in size than El Paso but with 2.5 million full-time inhabitants. Together they formed the second largest binational metropolitan area on America’s southern border, after San Diego-Tijuana.

“Okay,” Price said. “I told you he was taken out of his hotel, and that’s confirmed from evidence recovered from the scene. We have his fingerprints on a hotel ice bucket and soda can he dropped when the kidnappers grabbed him. Local cops found his room key, same place, no evidence that anybody got inside the room after they lifted him.”

“Security cameras?” Bolan inquired.

“One long view of the hallway, from the other end. Two men, likely Latino, but no hits from facial recognition software yet. One of them jabbed him with a hypo. We’re assuming it was just a sedative.”

“Because why poison him and carry him away?”

“Exactly. When they took him out, another CCTV feed picked up a shot of the abductors hooding him and securing his arms and legs before putting him in a car trunk. No luck with an ID on the car, although it turned up on a traffic cam two blocks away, heading south. Stolen license plates. We assume the car was hot, as well.”

“Headed for Mexico.”

Bolan already knew four bridges spanned the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez: the Bridge of the Americas, Ysleta-Zaragoza International Bridge, Paso del Norte Bridge and Stanton Street Bridge. Combined, they permitted some twenty-three million vehicular passages yearly. Once across the border, southbound traffic could go anywhere in Mexico.

Brognola had been gone for thirteen hours. He could’ve traveled 780 miles within that time, at sixty miles per hour, but smart money said he’d probably been taken to a hideout tucked away in Ciudad Juárez itself.

“Who knew he’d be at the conference?” Bolan asked.

“Starting from the top,” Price said, “the AG who assigned him to it—over Hal’s objection, I might add. Kelly, his secretary, would’ve made the travel bookings. Then we’ve got the folks who organized the conference and the various official delegates from Justice, ICE, the DEA, likely a couple from the CIA pretending to be someone else. That’s ninety-five registered delegates, not counting Hal. Add on hotel staff, from managers to housekeepers. The Bureau will be grilling all of them, but...”

“By the time they finish up, it will be too damned late.”

“Bingo.”

Bolan went for the long shot. “Cell phone?”

“In his room. We can’t track him by GPS.”

“So it comes down to who might want to kidnap him, and why.”

“Cartels to start,” Price said. “Since 1997, the Juárez Cartel’s been under fire from both the Gulf and Sinaloa outfits, trying to control the city. That explains Chihuahua’s death toll in the Mexican drug war, and many of the killings in El Paso County.”

Bolan had crossed paths with each of those cartels at one time or another, but a nagging question still remained. “Would any of them know him? His connection to the Farm or covert missions?”

“They shouldn’t,” Price replied, “but when you’ve got billions to spend, I won’t pretend security in Wonderland is all that it should be.”

“Anything else?”

“I hate to even mention it, but yes...maybe.”

“I’m listening.”

“Most residents call Ciudad Juárez Paso del Norte and one magazine calls it the ‘City of the Future,’ but it has another nickname, too.”

“Which is?”

“The Serial Killers’ Playground.”

“The women, right?”

“Primarily,” Price said. “No two sources can agree on numbers, but at least four hundred have been murdered since the nineties, with about as many missing. There have been so many killed, in fact, they’ve come up with a special name for it. Feminicidio. Mostly young women, even girls, some of them prostitutes, the rest mainly sweatshop workers, underpaid and easy to replace.”

“You see the problem there,” Bolan said.

“Sure. Hal’s not a female and he isn’t young. Before we rule it out completely, though, remember that some serials switch-hit on victimology. They don’t all stick to one age, race or sex, much less to pattern victims who all look alike, drive the same make of car, whatever.”

“Still...”

“I grant you, it’s a long shot, but remember Mark Kilroy.”

“The kid snatched out of Brownsville by that cult in the late eighties.”

Price nodded. “One of an estimated thirty victims they took out before police caught on to them. They dealt drugs for a living, but also conducted human sacrifices, thinking that black magic made them bulletproof and physically invisible to enemies, including cops.”

“That didn’t work so well, as I recall.”

“Amen. One dipshit drove through a police roadblock, thinking they couldn’t see him or his car even when officers pursued him with their lights flashing. He led them straight back to the cult’s home base outside Matamoros, and it fell apart from there.”

“Most of them died, if I remember right.”

“Or got sent away for sixty years, the maximum in Mexico. My point is, you can have an evil person or a group of them mixing business with pleasure as the opportunities arise. And don’t forget, two of that cult’s top members were federales. One of them, the top narcotics officer in Mexico City, pulled twenty-five years at his trial. The other, who’d moved on to Interpol, murdered his second wife then shot himself. People are still debating whether his first wife committed suicide by hanging or if hubby tied the noose himself.”

“I hear you. Damn near anyone can kill for any reason. And in pairs?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time, by a long shot. Cults aside, the Hillside stranglers were cousins. Same thing with Dave Gore and Fred Waterfield in Florida. In Philadelphia, Joe Kallinger would take his fifteen-year-old son along to help. Lucas and Toole were part-time lovers, traveling from coast to coast,” Price told him.

“You’ve studied up,” Bolan observed.

“Know the enemy. Never let anybody tell you they’re all carbon-copy, cut and dried.”

“So, if a pair of psychos snatched Hal, he could well be dead by now and we have no way to start looking for them. Two Latinos in Mexico? Try looking for a needle in a needle factory.”

“I know. We have to try, though.”

“Right. First thing,” Bolan observed, “will be acquiring hardware on the wrong side of the border.”

Mexico had strict laws regulating guns, at least on paper, restricting possession of most types and calibers to the military and law enforcement. The country’s only legal gun store—the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales—stood behind walls on a military base outside Mexico City. Its customers had to undergo months of background checks, involving six separate documents, and were frisked on arrival by uniformed soldiers.

That said, Mexico’s version of the US Second Amendment, written in 1857, guaranteed all citizens and legal foreign residents the right to bear arms, but stipulated that federal law “will determine the cases, conditions, requirements and places” of gun ownership. The net result: while the one and only army gun store sold an average of thirty-eight firearms per day to civilians, smugglers brought an estimated 580 weapons into Mexico from the United States. Others doubtless arrived on flights of foreign origin or passed through Mexico’s forty-one seaports on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.

The results of that traffic in arms—and in drugs—had been making global headlines for the past thirteen years, since officials acknowledged their chaotic, ongoing drug war. At last rough count, the butcher’s bill included 250,000 dead and 30,000 missing, with 1.6 million persons displaced from their homes. The official body count so far included 12,456 cartel members; 4,020 federal, state and municipal police officers; plus 395 soldiers slain and 137 missing, presumed dead.

Hell on Earth, in simple terms—and that was without adding in the daily slaughter of civilians in places like Ciudad Juárez and Matamoros by human predators for the sheer love of killing.

“Tell me more about the killers’ playground,” Bolan said.

“Feminicide covers a world of kinks and fetishes,” Price said. “As I mentioned, no one really knows how many girls and women have been killed or when it started ramping up. Local authorities downplay it with an eye toward tourism and foreign investment in factories, and the victims never found go on the books as runaways. Officially, Chihuahua police admit 260 murders since they started keeping track in 1993, claiming only seventy-six fit ‘serial’ parameters with rape, torture and mutilation. But that’s ridiculous. Women’s groups peg the total somewhere between four and fifteen hundred when they add in missing persons.”

“How bad is it, really?” Bolan asked.

“Amnesty International counted 370 by 2005. Chihuahua prosecutors finally admitted 270 murders statewide in 2010, with 247 inside Juárez. They logged another 300-plus in 2011, with 59 percent in the state capital. Since then, the yearly stats go up and down like yo-yos, depending on who you trust.”

“With no convictions?”

“Sure, a few. In 1996 Omar Sharif—a bus driver from Egypt, not the actor—went down for three murders, sentenced to thirty years, but the killings escalated after he went away. At that point, cops claimed he was part of a gang called Los Rebeldes—that’s ‘The Rebels’—who kept killing after he was put away. Police arrested five of his alleged accomplices then cut them loose for lack of evidence. Sharif died during his fourth year in prison.”

“Any others?”

“A few. In 2001, police nabbed an alleged pair of team killers and charged them with eight homicides. One died during interrogation. Then his buddy confessed but later recanted, claiming police torture, and out goes that case.

“In 2008, prosecutors charged Sergio Barraza with killing one teenage girl, but the court acquitted him for lack of evidence and he split for parts unknown. They later tried him again in absentia—that’s a thing down here, no double jeopardy—and he was convicted, but they still haven’t found him. Meanwhile his victim’s mother was assassinated by an unknown gunman while picketing the governor’s palace—shot once in the head at point-blank range.”

Bolan rarely swore but now said, “Sounds like a steaming crock of shit.”

“And still continuing today, although most of the press in Mexico has tried to play it down,” Price said.

“Sounds like they need a wakeup call.”

“I’d say. And then some.” She frowned and asked, “What are you packing?”

“Flying in from LA?” he replied. “Not a thing.”

“Just as well. We’ve got a friend at the US Consulate in Ciudad Juárez. He’s CIA, name’s Tim Ross.”

As she spoke, Price handed Bolan what appeared to be a passport photo of a white man, late twenties, with hair a little on the long side and a well-trimmed Vandyke. Bolan committed the face to memory and passed the photo back to her, asking, “What does he know?”

“Nothing about the program, you or Hal. He helps us out from time to time with hardware, paperwork, whatever. He pulled two tours in the sandbox with the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines before he joined the Company, but I’d discourage getting him involved beyond delivery of gear when you arrive.”

“You’ll make the contact?”

“That’s affirmative. Just let me have your wish list.”

There were cocktail napkins in a slot beside the folding table. Bolan took out a pen, filled up half of one and then handed Price his list.

She read it over. “You’re pulling out all the stops.”

“I don’t see any other way to play it.”

“Right,” she said. “You’re driving over, then?”

“I’ve got a rental in the airport’s short-term parking lot.”

“Okay. I’ll set a meeting on the other side for you and Ross, then text you an address.”

“Sounds good.”

“Thoughts on the process, once you’ve gone across?”

“No suspects and no motive,” Bolan said. “The only way I see to play that hand is to bet the limit and keep raising until somebody folds.”

“You know we can’t help with the federal or state police across the line. Even if we could tell them what you’re doing over there, who knows which officers are trustworthy?”

“I know of at least one. But for this mission I’ll figure none of them and work from there,” Bolan replied.

It was, he knew, a decent rule of thumb for Mexico. The federales were divided into two departments. The Federal Judicial Police, founded in 1928, was disbanded in 2002 due to its own rampant corruption and criminal activity. It was replaced by the Federal Investigative Agency and attached to Mexico’s Secretariat of Public Safety as a “preventive” force against crime. Its counterpart, the Federal Ministerial Police, an investigative force tasked with fighting corruption and organized crime, was created in 2009 along FBI lines, directed by the Attorney General’s Office. Bolan would be ignoring the country’s third federal force: the Mexico City Police, which had no national reach, its officers confined to handling matters inside the Federal district. It would take a crystal ball to tell which members of the policing agencies were also drawing paychecks from the drug cartels.