Lethal Vengeance Read online

  A final kicker in the fourth bag was a Cold Steel GI Tanto knife with a black blade and polypropylene handle to match. Its sheath was adjustable for wearing on a belt, ankle or upside down, suspended from a shoulder rig. Also included was a pair of Leupold BX-1 Compact Rogue 10x25 compact binoculars.

  “Okay,” Bolan said when he’d moved that bag, as well. “The rest?”

  “You’ve got a first-aid kit including QuikClot combat gauze, morphine syrettes, suturing gear, adhesive tape and various accessories—scissors, tweezers, like that. Also in there, you’ll find a detailed map of Ciudad Juárez, plus highway and topographical maps of Chihuahua and neighboring states—Coahuila, Durango, Sinaloa and Sonora. No one told me how far you’d be traveling or how long you’ll be at it.”

  “Hard to say,” Bolan replied.

  “And need-to-know. I get it.” Finally, Ross took a cell phone from one of his pockets, handing it to Bolan. “This is clean, a burner, with my number saved to memory. Also the consulate’s, if it comes down to that. I didn’t bother with the law enforcement contacts.”

  “Just as well,” Bolan said.

  “Like I thought.” Ross hesitated, then added, “The phone has built-in GPS, but I’ve deactivated it. You’ll want to double-check that for yourself, I guess.”

  “No need.” Bolan lied. It would be the first thing he checked as soon as Ross was out of sight.

  “I guess you know you’re in a world of shit down here,” Ross said.

  “I’m up to date on the travel advisories.”

  Ross nodded, said, “Can you trust anybody? Hell, who knows? Some mornings, I’m not sure I trust my mirror. That guy looking back at me seems shifty half the time.”

  “I’ve had those days, myself,” Bolan replied.

  “Right. Well, good luck on whatever, then. If I don’t hear from you again...”

  “Consider it good luck,” the Executioner replied.

  He watched Ross drive away, then double-checked the burner’s GPS and found it was, indeed, switched off. He opened it, looked at the battery and SIM card, nothing there that seemed to be an independent tracker. Satisfied, he took one of the Glocks with him before he slid behind the RAV4’s steering wheel, fired up the vehicle and pulled out of the parking lot.

  From here on, he’d be rolling blind through no-man’s-land. A killer’s playground, right.

  And now there was a new killer in town.

  Federal Police Headquarters, Ciudad Juárez

  Captain Chalino Prieto sat at his desk, overlooking Avenida Hermanos Escobar in the Omega district, smoking his third cigar of the day. He had a bottle of Don Julio tequila in his desk, but thought it still too early for a drink, although he badly wanted one.

  Prieto was a portly man with double chins, and bags under his hooded eyes, black hair, just going gray at the temples, combed back from a squarish face. Clipped to his belt, an eight-pointed star of gold identified his agency and justified the Jericho 941 semiautomatic pistol holstered on his hip.

  Prieto’s suit was tailor-made from linen, to accommodate Chihuahua’s weather, and his cowboy boots were hand-tooled, polished to a mirror shine. His jacket’s side pockets were reinforced to bear the weight of brass knuckles on one side and an eight-inch switchblade on the other, razor-edged, its handle made of ebony.

  The captain was perusing a report of last night’s crimes in Ciudad Juárez—the ones recorded by police, that was—and noting that no middle-aged gringos were listed among corpses picked up off the streets. Prieto wasn’t sure exactly what to make of that, but guessed that all would be revealed to him in time.

  It always was.

  A rapping on his office door distracted him. Prieto called out, “Enter,” watching as Lieutenant Silvio Bernal entered and closed the door behind him.

  “Captain.”

  “Lieutenant. Now that we’ve identified each other, what’s the word from last night?”

  “Allende and Solana have confirmed the transfer.”

  “Sons of whores. You believe them?”

  Bernal shrugged. “I think they are afraid to lie, sir.”

  “Because, if they just took the gringo out and dumped him somewhere—”

  “No, no, Captain. They swore to me that he was handed to El Psicópata.”

  “If I find out they’re lying, I’ll let that crazy bastard play with them.”

  Bernal paled just a bit on hearing that. “They wouldn’t dare, sir.”

  “Perhaps not. But as stupid as they are, I don’t know whether we can risk association with them any longer.”

  “If you wish it taken care of...”

  Prieto fanned the air with his left hand, as if to clear it of cigar smoke and the thought of executing two subordinates for being idiots. If he went down that road, how many members of the Federal Police would see another sunrise?

  “Never mind,” he told Bernal. “If they exhaust my patience, I can always make a deal with Kuno or Rodolfo.”

  The lieutenant fairly gulped at the pronunciation of those names. Kuno Carillo was the godfather, commanding the Juárez Cartel. His primary opponent in Chihuahua was Rodolfo Garza, a “king,” but still subservient to the rival Sinaloa Cartel’s Boss of Bosses residing in Culiacán Rosales. Either one of them would gladly do a favor for Captain Prieto, who accepted cash from both while turning a blind eye to their activities.

  “They are both worried, I assure you,” Bernal said, meaning the dim-witted sergeants.

  “As they should be, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Both Allende and Solana had undoubtedly greased palms for their appointments to the Federal Police and for later promotions through the ranks. Prieto doubted either one of them had gained his job on merit, much less rising to a sergeant’s rank by virtue of competitive examinations. They were smart enough to pay off their superiors and take cash from assorted felons, but as far as making cases that would stick in court, both officers were hopeless.

  Christ! They couldn’t even carry out a simple snatch without making a hash of it.

  The man they were supposed to kidnap was a chief of operations for the DEA in Washington, DC. His name was Howard Weinstock. Normally beyond the reach of enemies below the Tex-Mex border, coincidence had brought him to El Paso this week for a gathering that the US Attorney General called a “meeting of the minds” on strategy for tightening security along the Rio Grande in alignment with their current president’s concerns.

  Captain Prieto wanted to interrogate Weinstock, then likely would have passed him on to Carillo or Garza, whoever was paying more, and let them wring him dry before he disappeared forever in Chihuahua’s desert.

  Then the pathetic fools Allende and Solana had kidnapped the wrong gringo from the hotel hosting the law enforcement conference. Instead of Weinstock—forty-seven, six foot two, 180 pounds—they’d snatched another man entirely, older and two inches taller, heavier by thirty pounds at least, whose face bore only slight resemblance to their target’s. Dumb luck alone had spared the sergeants from a shooting fray or being captured at the scene and held for trial.

  In that case, once they’d started squealing like the swine they were, what could Prieto have done next to save himself?

  “Dismissed,” he told Bernal then waited for the door to shut behind his second in command before he focused on the problem posed by the two incompetents.

  “They have to go,” he informed the empty room at last.

  But who would pay him for the pleasure of eliminating them?

  * * *

  Tim Ross was well-known at the US Consulate, but he still had to show ID each time he left the grounds and once again when he returned. Today the young marine guard made a show of studying the laminated card Ross handed to him, eyes flicking between the photo and the man’s face, then thanked him in a deadpan voice and waved Ross through t
he gate.

  Security was tight, of course, given the state of mayhem in Chihuahua. Nine years earlier, the State Department had recalled its staff from Ciudad Juárez and closed the consulate “indefinitely,” after cartel gunmen murdered three employees and a bomb went off outside another consulate in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. After a review, the consulate in Juárez had reopened one week later with increased security. Today it was a fortified blockhouse, three stories tall with small, bullet-resistant windows, concrete barriers and pylons supplementing metal fences topped with razor wire.

  Ross wouldn’t have said that he enjoyed the atmosphere in Ciudad Juárez, but what the hell. He hadn’t joined the CIA after his double tour in Afghanistan to be a paper-pusher in a tiny office cubicle at Langley, when there was a whole wide world out there. It was either join the Company or try to make it as a merc somewhere in the Third World, maybe sign up with someone’s private army operating at arm’s-length from Washington. But why risk that if he could do the same things for the CIA with benefits and have a pension waiting if he made it to retirement?

  Still, this deal...

  Ross didn’t know the woman who’d reached out to him, had never met her in the flesh, although he’d fantasized a bit about that flesh after their two brief conversations on the phone. Her introduction came by way of Ross’s immediate superior—at Langley, not the Juárez consulate—with an impression of the urgency involved. That opener came wrapped as a request and not an order, something Ross was free to skip, but something told him that refusal might return him to that cubicle—maybe a basement cubicle at that, with no way out.

  So Ross had gone for it, and wasn’t sorry yet. Ms. X had claimed her name was Sharon Patowsky—clearly false—serving as some kind of “liaison” with the Department of Justice in Washington. He knew the drill for cover stories, legends, plausible deniability and had listened to the sultry voice, agreeing to fulfill her needs.

  The guns and other gear had been no problem. Once he had delivered them to hard-eyed “Captain Brinkman”—yet another alias—Ross figured that his role in whatever might happen next was done. But why did he regret that now?

  He had a final call to make and placed that from his office, where he checked for taps and bugs routinely twice a day. It stood to reason that the contact number was a front, would certainly be disconnected after Ross left confirmation of his errand, likely via voice mail.

  But he had it wrong on that score. There was no recording, no robotic voice instructing him to press 2 for English and leave his message at the beep. Instead that sultry voice came on the line after a single ring.

  “How goes it, Mr. Ross?” she asked.

  “Delivery complete, ma’am.”

  “Thank you for your help on this. We won’t forget it.”

  Ross didn’t ask who “we” might be. In fact, he never got the chance. The line went dead, no parting chitchat, no goodbye. He let five minutes pass then tried the contact number from his cell phone, maybe living dangerously.

  And he heard, “We’re sorry. The number you’ve reached is out of service at this time.”

  Likely forever.

  So much for the sexy voice and Ross’s tiny part in something that might prove to be explosive, maybe hot enough to blow the roof off Ciudad Juárez. But there was still a chance he could keep track of it.

  And why the hell not, if he took precautions?

  Ross had been a gambler all his life, beginning when he’d joined the Corps. And truth be told, he missed the action, maybe more than it was healthy to admit.

  * * *

  Sometimes Bolan begrudged the needs of his own body. Hunger, sleep, whatever—all of them got in the way when he was on a roll. But sometimes, getting started, there was nothing else to do but pause and think, no matter how the passing time burned like a steady drip of acid in his brain.

  So he was eating now—tamales and a side of rice, served in a foam take-out container from a drive-through restaurant—and studying the maps Tim Ross had given him, comparing them to notes he’d taken when he’d met with Barbara, listing addresses for potential targets in his search for Hal Brognola.

  The restaurant stood in the city’s Colegio district, which lived up to its name by hosting a dozen institutes of higher learning. Its central location also gave Bolan a wealth of choices for thrusts in various directions, depending on the target he selected to begin his task of running Brognola to ground, or locating his kidnappers. Conversely, if he had been carried farther off than Ciudad Juárez, Bolan would have to deal with that problem when it arose.

  Meanwhile, he had to start somewhere.

  During their fly-by meeting in El Paso, Barbara had supplied him with the names, addresses and unlisted phone numbers of the top cartel men in Ciudad Juárez. If Stony Man could pluck that information from the air, sitting three thousand miles away from the Chihuahua killing grounds, it stood to reason that Mexico’s federal and state police must also know exactly where to find the district’s leading narcotraffickers.

  Kuno Carillo and Rodolfo Garza both had extradition warrants waiting for them in the States, their list of charges spanning every felony from smuggling tons of drugs to terrorism, an untold number of murders, plus a raft of lesser counts including weapons violations, money laundering, kidnapping—take your pick. The stumbling block to their arrests: in recent years, tension between the Mexican president’s office and the White House had impeded any US operations inside Mexico, including capture of the war-torn nation’s leading criminals.

  On top of that, police corruption often shielded prime offenders—and, as Bolan knew too well, that was a two-way street. Mordida, the time-honored bribery that many underpaid officials throughout Mexico considered as their rightful due, was frequently as rife in Washington, New York, Miami, LA—take your pick—as anywhere south of the Rio Grande.

  Bolan had long since given up on fixing that pervasive problem, if it could be fixed at all. He had a more specific task and this time his attention had been narrowed to a laser point.

  One man to find, alive or dead, among 1.5 million native residents and thousands of tourists swarming over what promoters liked to call the “Borderplex.” So many hiding places, innocent civilians to avoid and cops to dodge when Bolan started rattling cages, hoping to shake something loose.

  And he was starting now.

  Chapter Three

  Somewhere in Ciudad Juárez

  As Hal Brognola came awake, he was aware of four things instantly.

  The first was pain. Aside from minor bruising he’d received while grappling with his kidnappers at the Gateway Rio Grande Hotel, his neck still hurt from the injection he’d received during that scuffle and his head ached now, as well. He’d been sedated for a second time, with chloroform, which left a sickly sweet taste in his mouth and tingling around his lips and nostrils from the sopping rag that had knocked him out.

  Okay. At least pain meant he wasn’t dead.

  Second, Brognola realized that he’d been moved. He was no longer zip-tied to the wooden chair he’d occupied before, but rather laid out on a table of some kind, secured in place with leather straps across his chest and waist, around his wrists and ankles. From the chill, he knew it was a metal table, which put him in mind of autopsies, and that was bad.

  Not dead, he reassured himself once more. At least, not yet.

  Third thing: his burlap hood had been removed. Now he was blindfolded, but not with simple cloth. It felt more like one of those sleeping eyeshades he’d seen people wear on airliners and sometimes in the movies, where some actress partied through the night then slept the day away. The part over his eyes felt almost silky, lightly padded, fastened with elastic stretched over his head.

  And finally, wherever he was now, the atmosphere had changed. Instead of being in a normal room—that concept almost made him laugh, but the big Fed restrained the impulse—this one f
elt clammy, as unfinished basements often did.

  Oh, and it stank of death.

  Brognola fought an automatic sense of panic, wrestling with it until his pulse and respiration simmered down. He didn’t want to think about his wife, Helen, waiting for him to call, time stretching out until she might be on the verge of panicking herself. She’d have no reason to suspect that he was out painting El Paso red, fooling around, much less that he’d forgotten her or their nightly call whenever he was forced to be away from home.

  No, she would realize that something had gone wrong, preventing him from keeping their phone date. But what would be her next step? Lacking an El Paso telephone directory, she couldn’t call around to hospitals asking if he’d been in some kind of accident. She could reach out to the El Paso county sheriff’s office and/or the municipal police, but that felt like a stretch.

  The FBI? And tell them what? That Hal Brognola, who’d left the Bureau years ago and climbed much higher on the DOJ command ladder, was maybe, possibly, at risk in Texas?

  Two high-level G-men were among the delegates attending the El Paso conference. Wouldn’t they know if he had gotten mugged or crashed his rental car and wound up in the nearest hospital? Brognola still had no idea what time it was outside his reeking cell, but someone must have missed him at the meeting—or they would, when it convened.

  And then?

  He couldn’t say.

  None of the other conferees were in the know regarding Stony Man. Helen knew some of it—her own abduction, way back when, had made sure of that—but she had never seen the Farm and didn’t have any of its unlisted phone numbers.

  Who do you call? Brognola thought, and nearly laughed again.

  Helen did have a contact number for emergencies, if he was somewhere other than his nine-to-five office. Leaving a message there would put some wheels in motion but would offer no immediate relief.

  Those two unspoken words rang hollow in Brognola’s mind. Immediate relief.