The Polaris Protocol Read online

  “You found this meeting somehow. Someone talked. I need to know who.”

  When Jack said nothing, Carlos motioned to one of the gunmen, who pulled him to his feet.

  Carlos said, “Don’t worry, we have plenty of time.”

  6

  I could tell the voice mail was eating at Jennifer. She couldn’t listen to it because of the crappy signal and desperately wanted to go back outside where it was stronger. Unfortunately, the mission took priority.

  “He probably just wanted to say hello.”

  She brushed a hair out of her face, saying, “That’s not it. I talked to him before I left, like I always do. He knew I was out of town. He wouldn’t call unless it was important.”

  Jennifer was very close with her family, calling both of her brothers and her mother once a week just to chat. Her father was the only one she had no time for.

  I said, “Well, whatever it is, you can’t do anything immediately from seven thousand miles away, even if you could hear the voice mail. It’s close to eleven. These guys will be leaving soon.”

  She leaned back, and I saw the fear in her eyes. “I hope nothing’s happened to Mom. I don’t know what else it could be.”

  I knew the unique dread she felt because it was baggage we all carried on deployment—that a tragedy would befall our family while we were gone—but it rarely came true. I had a little special sympathy, though, because in my case it had.

  I said, “Useless worry. Whatever it is, we’ll handle it. Together.”

  She squeezed my hand and said, “Thanks.” Her eyes shifted over my shoulder, and she squeezed again. “Pedro just passed Jake a compact disc. They’re preparing to leave.”

  I didn’t want to whip my head around, knowing she had the targets in sight. I said, “Go ahead.”

  She keyed her radio. “Knuckles, this is Koko. Trigger. Jake is leaving first. Pedro is paying the bill.”

  “Roger. How long?”

  “He’ll break the plane of the door in five seconds.”

  “Roger all. We got the ball.”

  We waited an additional ten minutes, and I saw we were going to be cutting the curfew very, very close. Our hotel wasn’t far away, but there weren’t very many cabs in this weird city, and we’d need to hoof it or be in danger of getting picked up.

  We hit the streets and Jennifer immediately shoved her phone in the air, looking at the signal bar. She began walking down the road like a beagle sniffing a scent, holding her phone this way and that.

  I followed behind her, saying, “Jennifer, it’s the witching hour. Let’s do this from our hotel.”

  She cut into an alley, saying, “We don’t have a signal at the hotel. Let me just check as we go.”

  She was headed in the right direction, so I let her continue. The narrow space of the alley was lined on both sides with four-story apartment buildings, turning it dark enough that her face was illuminated only by the screen of her phone. She said, “Somebody’s got a repeater around here. Signal’s getting stronger.”

  Exasperated, I said, “Jennifer, it’s past eleven. Come on.”

  She stopped, read the signal bar one more time, and dialed her voice mail. I looked past her, toward the end of the alley, and saw two forms leaving the glow of a streetlight. Coming our way. Great.

  They keyed on the light of her phone. One shouted in Russian. I said hello in English. They picked up their pace and reached us in seconds, wearing uniforms of some kind. I had no idea who or what they were but knew this wasn’t going to end well. I couldn’t allow them to check our credentials or run our names. We had met all the official requirements to be in Turkmenistan, but with only one more night to accomplish the mission, I couldn’t afford to have any kind of spike, any kind of surveillance effort mounted against us again.

  This country was a strange place, to say the least. It was a cult of personality, not unlike North Korea, with giant monuments to the “dear leader” all over the place and the police conducting a healthy bit of civilian control, which included watching all foreigners. We’d already lulled them once and gotten them off of us. A spike like this would get them back on. The documents we carried would link Jennifer and me to the entire team, which meant we’d have a blanket on us by tomorrow afternoon.

  Traditionally, they’d keep the effort going only long enough to prove that we were who we said we were. Two days from now it wouldn’t matter. They could follow us all the way to Gonur. Tomorrow it would prevent us from executing.

  Please take a bribe.

  If they didn’t, the mission was blown. Not to mention Jennifer and I would probably spend the night in some dump prison. Damn, Pedro, couldn’t you have left an hour earlier?

  I played stupid, saying, “Hello. My friend is trying to get her phone to work.”

  In broken English, the taller of the two said, “It is not permitted to be on street.”

  I feigned surprise, saying, “Sorry, we didn’t know.”

  The shorter one said, “Papers.”

  Must have learned English watching old World War II movies.

  Jennifer watched the exchange with wary eyes, listening to her voice mail. The taller one tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Stop phone.”

  She complied, shrinking behind me, saying nothing. I pulled out my wallet, letting them see the crisp twenty-dollar bills they could exchange on the black market. I withdrew one and said, “This paper?”

  He took it, glancing at his partner, saying again, “Papers.”

  Perfect.

  His partner tapped Jennifer and said, “Give phone.”

  She looked at me, and I held out another twenty, saying, “Here’s more ‘paper.’”

  The shorter one took it while the taller one said, “Give phone. Not allowed.”

  What the hell is he talking about? I knew the cellular rules, and we were meeting them. We were on their network and paying their taxes. More than likely, he wanted the iPhone lookalike just because he thought he could hold us up. Since it was working in Turkmenistan, he thought it was unlocked and something he could now use for himself. Unfortunately, it was actually a special piece of Taskforce equipment, and I wasn’t going to allow him to have it.

  I pulled out another twenty, looking at the smaller man and saying, “Here, go buy your own.” The tall one grabbed Jennifer’s arm that held the phone. She jerked it away and took a step back.

  The shorter one took the twenty. The taller one pulled out a baton like he was drawing a sword.

  Oh shit.

  Jennifer saw the weapon and raised her arms in a defensive stance. She did it out of instinct, but the move amped up everything.

  I said, “Whoa, whoa, there’s no need for this. Here, take everything we’ve got.”

  The smaller one snatched the money out of my hand while the taller one said, “Give me phone.”

  Jennifer said nothing, waiting to see what the taller one would do.

  He raised the baton, and I stepped forward. The shorter one shouted and jumped back, pulling his own baton. I held up both hands to him, saying, “Stop, stop.”

  The taller one cracked me on the shoulder, and that was it. A perfect little bribery now in the toilet. I knelt down from the blow as if it had really hurt, then went in low on the shorter man, knowing the tall one was no longer a threat.

  I used a single-leg takedown, throwing him onto his back, then scrambled on top, pinning his arms and crossing my hands into the collar of his wool uniform. I scissored my hands out, the collar cutting the blood flow to his brain. He was out in seconds. His partner wasn’t as lucky.

  I turned around to find Jennifer holding his head low and pistoning her knee into his face, his arms flailing uselessly in the air, the baton long gone. His head snapped back after the contact and he collapsed unnaturally onto the ground.

  I was on him immediately,
hissing, “Jesus Christ, Jennifer. You might have killed him.”

  I checked his pulse and relaxed when I found it strong. His face was a mess, though. I left the twenties on the ground and stood up.

  “Can we get to the damn hotel now?”

  She was breathing hard, her hair askew, but her eyes were clear. Not even caring about what had just occurred. “Pike, Jack’s in trouble.”

  “You mean like a car wreck or something?”

  “No, I mean like bad-guy life-or-death trouble.”

  7

  The sicario watched the mechanics of his work with detached indifference. The suffering of his chosen target didn’t faze him at all. Like a butcher at the slaughterhouse, he had killed so many living things that it no longer registered as a repulsive task. It was simply work. Unlike the butcher, who killed cleanly and with the ultimate goal of creating food, the sicario drew out the death, with no other goal than that which was dictated by his capo. And he could make it last days if he was told to. A bullet to the head was preferable in his mind, as it was much less messy, but that wasn’t his call. Sometimes, the capo wanted to make a point.

  Like today.

  He listened to the man beg and plead through the gag strapped to his mouth and reflected on how the times were rapidly changing. As early as a year ago, he could have done this work without any fear of interruption—the violence in Ciudad Juárez was so extreme that nobody would even investigate the screams. The battle that raged for control of the Juárez plaza, as the crossing points into the US were called, had been horrific, giving Ciudad Juárez the unenviable title of the most dangerous city on earth. A year ago there had officially been three thousand screams such as this. He knew there had been many, many more that nobody had heard. Bodies that were yet to be found and tabulated.

  But that was then. Now it was prudent to prevent the target from alerting anyone, be it the hated Sinaloa cartel, the authorities, or even some splinter from his employer, the fragmented Zetas cartel. So he used the gag as a precaution.

  The sicario watched his wild eyes and the drool from his sobs, believing the man could take one more dip before passing out. To his front was a fifty-five-gallon drum sawed in half and filled with water that raged and bubbled like a mountain river, but not from the force of racing downhill. From the propane stove underneath. His target was hung above it on a winch and had already tasted the pain, his feet burned into a mess of molten plasticlike flesh extending to just above the ankles.

  The sicario spoke to the man next to him, a doctor who was paid to keep the targets alive. “One more, and he’ll need to be treated.”

  “Yes, yes. He is strong. I can treat him. He won’t die.”

  The man was obsequious and obviously afraid. The sicario had seen the doctor glance at him repeatedly, then look away, and had noticed how he trembled when they were close together. The sicario understood why. For one, it was simply the job and his reputation for brutality. Coming from the killing fields of Guatemala, he had taught Los Zetas the art of psychological warfare. Had brought the techniques of beheadings and other public displays of death, instilling fear in the enemy. He had achieved a mythical status among all who had heard of him, but more than that, he knew his real-life visage lived up to the legend.

  During a battle in the civil war he had been touched by the volcanic flame of a white phosphorous grenade—a grenade thrown by a fellow Kaibil—and had been burned on his head, losing his eyebrows and leaving his forehead looking like melted wax. They had shaved him in the hospital, and he’d kept that discipline ever since, meticulously shaving every bit of hair off his head. The effect was disconcerting, and he liked it that way. Fewer people to test him.

  The sicario watched the target violently shake his head left and right, the spittle from his screams dripping down the cloth of the gag onto his chest. Ignoring the pleading, he lowered the man and the sweet/sour odor of boiling meat permeated the room again, reminding him of his mother’s kitchen, of dinners long ago in Guatemala when he was a child. Before he had joined the Guatemalan Kaibiles Special Forces unit. Before he’d had his humanity sucked out of him like life-giving oxygen from a hole in a space suit.

  He intently studied the target’s face, and when his eyes rolled back in his head, he hoisted the man up. It did no good to punish him if he couldn’t feel the effects. As two other men lowered the target to the floor, avoiding the destroyed flesh of his lower legs, the doctor went to work, inserting an IV and treating the burns. The back-and-forth of treatment and pain would go on until the heart stopped. Some men lasted longer than others. The record had been three days, but the sicario didn’t feel this one had that sort of stamina. Two days at the most.

  He went into the other room for a drink of water and felt his phone vibrate. He looked at the number and answered immediately.

  “Yes, El Comandante.”

  “Pelón, I have a task for you. It needs to be done immediately.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Sinaloa has something big in motion. I don’t know what it is, but there is a man who does. He’s an American, and I’ve just found out they mean to bring him here to Juárez.”

  “You want me to kill him?”

  “No, no. That’s what they’re trying to do. He’s apparently a reporter who knows of their plans. I want you to snatch him from them. Find out what he knows. Find out how he can help us.”

  That was a tall order. Ciudad Juárez was huge, as big as El Paso, and absolutely flooded with drug cartel safe houses much like the one he was in. Getting to the man and getting out alive would mean a fight, and with the balance of power between Sinaloa and Los Zetas, it would more than likely mean a running gun battle. He wouldn’t get to pick the time and place of capture, like he ordinarily did. Sinaloa would be waiting, and Los Zetas no longer had the monopoly on violence they’d once possessed.

  Initially formed in the late nineties as an enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel, the core of Los Zetas was defectors from the GAFE—Mexican Special Forces—who took their name from the code letter Z given to them when they were working with the federal police trying to halt the flow of drugs. The government couldn’t offer nearly as much money as the Gulf cartel, and the men had simply switched allegiances. Before they defected, the GAFE had done many cross-training events with the Kaibiles in Guatemala, and the connection still lingered, pulling in defectors from that Special Forces element as well, including the sicario.

  By 2007, Los Zetas were doing much, much more than simply enforcing for the Gulf cartel. Their tendrils extended all the way into Central America, and their brutality became legendary. They split from their Gulf masters, forming their own cartel, and the blood began to flow, with Los Zetas proving to be more ferocious than any other cartel. The guard dog had turned on the master.

  In recent years almost all of the original Special Forces leaders had been killed, leading to infighting for control and less restraint as the violence spiraled upward. Los Zetas had turned feral, killing each other as much as anyone else. Like a bonfire, they were consuming themselves in a spectacular spasm of destruction and running out of fuel. Now, with the Gulf cartel in alliance with the Sinaloa cartel, the Juárez plaza was in danger of being lost forever, and Los Zetas would do anything to prevent it.

  The sicario knew that refusal of the mission would simply mean his death. There was no form of loyalty anymore. It wasn’t like the early days, when accomplishment counted and the Special Forces bond meant something. Now it was a day-to-day fight for existence.

  He said, “You know where he will be taken? What area of the city?”

  “No. Not here. But I know where in El Paso. It’s why you have been chosen.”

  “I don’t work in America. I can’t work in America. If I’m caught there, I won’t be deported.”

  “So don’t get caught, Pelón. It’s just across the border, in an area nobody controls. It will
be easy.”

  Despite his fearsome reputation, the sicario still worked for a boss, was still subservient to the Zetas chain of command, and he knew exactly why he was being given the task. Someone would need to penetrate the border into El Paso, capture the guy, then return. Someone who had the ability to avoid a majority of the scrutiny at the bridge. Someone who knew how to get around in America.

  The sicario didn’t fit the last requirement. He hadn’t been across to El Paso in over thirty-five years and had no idea what the city was like. But he did have the ability to get back and forth, since he had an American passport.

  Because he’d been born there.

  8

  The sicario puttered in the northbound traffic on the Paso del Norte Bridge, seeing the line of cars snaking out before him. He’d done his research and knew it would be at least a two-hour wait. While the bridge operated twenty-four hours a day, he’d decided to cross when traffic was heaviest, giving the men working border control less of an incentive to focus on him.

  Inching forward every few minutes, surrounded by all manner of cars, some seemingly held together by duct tape, he reflected on his future. Or more precisely, his lack of one.

  From the beginning, the cartels had led a Darwinian existence of dog-eat-dog, with only the strong surviving. Even Osiel Cárdenas, the man who had created the original Zetas enforcement arm, had the nickname El Mata Amigos—the Friend Killer—because he had executed his partner to seize control of the Gulf cartel. Back then, though, there were lines. Reasons for the violence, with a degree of logic, because random killing was counterproductive for business. The sicario had seen that change.

  The leadership of Los Zetas had become paranoid. Or maybe they were simply crazy, with the calculated thinking of the original members lost to the savagery of the animals who took over from below. It really didn’t matter why. In the past the sicario had killed for a purpose. Sending a signal to the authorities, getting revenge for transgressions, or simply showing the consequences should someone interfere with cartel business—it had all been designed to retain control. The killings were thought out before they were ordered, with potential repercussions discussed at least as much as the operation itself. Now Los Zetas butchered anyone suspected of working against them based on rumor alone, with no thought given to the fallout.