Spiral (19 page)

"And how does all this relate to Sosa?"

Garner looked at Haydon. "You know it's not Sosa, don't you?"

Haydon looked over the railing into the immense heart of the building.

"Gamboa's name wasn't in the news," Garner said. "But it's him, isn't it? He's the target."

"Yeah, it's Gamboa."

"Okay, then. Your field of suspects numbers in the tens of millions. Right now Benigo Gamboa is one of half a dozen men who have earned the wholehearted contempt of practically the entire Mexican population."

"As a part of the last administration, Lopez Portillo's?"

"He was minister of public works."

"You think the
tecos are trying to kill Gamboa?"

"Knowing their politics, knowing his crimes, I'd look into it very seriously."

"But that kind of pillaging of the public coffers by a departing administration is a longtime Mexican tradition," Haydon said. "The presidents and their cabinets have always left office with stolen fortunes. It's been the biggest unofficially acknowledged scandal in the western hemisphere."

"It's the same old song," Garner admitted, "But 'the people' are wanting to rewrite the last verse. You been keeping up with things down there?"

"Not closely."

"With Lopez Portillo, Mexico's institutionalized corruption got out of control. You know how much those guys got away with?"

Haydon shook his head, "Millions, I imagine."

"Well, it really got zany with Luis Echeverria Alvarez, who was president from 1970 to 1976. It's estimated that Echeverria—personally—got away with between three hundred million and one billion ... American."

Haydon looked at Garner skeptically.

"These figures are CIA-substantiated," Garner said soberly. "Then comes Jose Lopez Portillo, 1976 to 1982, Echeverria's tapado, chosen successor. He takes—personally—between one billion and three billion."

"Rumored?"

Garner shook his head. "There's confirmation."

"CIA again."

"They know a lot," Garner said. "Uh, sometimes the information comes around in odd ways, but the bottom line is, you can believe it."

"And Gamboa was part of that."

"He was one of the worst, one of the grandest sacadolares —dollar looters—of them all. From 1979 to 1982 he and guys like him, big businessmen and top-level bureaucrats, took from between fifteen and twenty-five billion dollars out of the country."

"In anticipation of the peso devaluation."

"Right. By the time that happened in the closing months of Lopez Portillo's administration, along with the nationalization of the banks, these people were home free. Fortunes—I mean fortunes—were already in banks outside the country. Secure. Then prices skyrocketed. Price of oil on the world market plummeted. Mexico became the world's second-greatest debtor nation. Now old Juan Doe can't even buy flour for his kids' tortillas, but these boys have mansions all over the world."

Haydon didn't say anything. In their silence he could hear floating up through the three stories of the arcade the muffled hum of the crowds pouring from the elevators into the cavernous lobby below, hundreds upon hundreds ferried down from the stone towers of the building. So far removed, Haydon thought. He felt utterly alone. The day before yesterday at this time Mooney had been followipg his daily routine, settling down in front of his television with a bottle of beer to watch the evening news. Yesterday at this time, he had been back at the office plowing through the paperwork of an investigation in which he was soon to make a heavy investment.

"Benigo Gamboa Parra got out of the country with nearly one and a half billion," Garner continued, almost pensively. "Homes in Los Angeles, Miami, here, Gstaad, London. He's into real estate. A son in law school at Harvard. A son in the importing business in Monterrey. He's got a couple of daughters and a wife who compete for the world's best-dressed list."

Garner turned so he could look over the rail with Haydon, shoulder to shoulder. "While he was in office, he was the center of several controversial financial scandals, which isn't an easy thing to accomplish in a society that accepts corruption the way they do."

"What kind of scandal?"

"Probably the biggest one involved something that's just recently surfaced in the news again. As ministry of public works, his office was responsible for awarding building contracts. A large number of the downtown buildings in Mexico City were built by the government. Naturally Gamboa gave the contracts to the construction firms that agreed to cough up the largest kickbacks. In order to be able to afford his financial demands, the contractors had to save money on their expenses, which meant they took shortcuts with their construction methods and materials. They undercut the building standards, put less rebar in the concrete, used less cement in the concrete, used shallow excavations for foundations, cut corners in every conceivable way . . . then paid off the building inspectors."

Garner shrugged and shook his head. "Then in the earthquake government buildings collapsed like sand castles, which is about what they were. Of course, Gamboa was long gone by then."

He looked at Haydon. "He's a bastard, Stuart. With government officials and business leaders like him—and Mexico has more than its fair share of them—it's a wonder the country is solvent at all. The guys have devastated their own people for personal gain. It's incredible." He paused. "The truth is, Stuart, if someone kills him, the world will be a better place without him."

"You said the
tecos were backed by wealthy Mexican businessmen and politicians," Haydon said. "Doesn't that exactly define Gamboa? How did he come to be at odds with his own people?"

"They're not his kind of people," Garner said, shaking his head again. "I know, it would seem like they've got the same interests, but they don't. Gamboa's theory of acquiring personal wealth was to milk the public, steal from them with both hands with total disregard for the long-term effects on them. If the economy collapses, to hell with it. He'd catch a plane out of there and live somewhere more pleasant. He was perfectly willing to sack the Mexican economy to enrich himself. He and Portillo. To them it was an expendable resource.

"The thinking behind the
teco—associated businessmen is quite a bit different. Sure, they're definitely out to make their fortunes at other people's expense, but they're looking at the long term. They're strongly nationalistic; they don't want to destroy Mexico. They may keep a stranglehold on it, controlling various industries, businesses, and political parties with Mafia-style corruption, but they don't squeeze the system to death. They give it enough air to keep it breathing, to keep it alive. They'd even like to see the country flourish, as long as they can stay behind the scenes and pull all the strings. They know what will happen if they kill the source of the golden eggs. Gamboa's crime was that he didn't give a shit about the goose."

Haydon stared down into the cavern, thinking. After a minute he said, "You ever heard of Lucas Negrete?"

"Jesus. Now there's a bad man," Garner said. "Does he figure into this, too?"

"Somehow," Haydon said.

"Damn, Stuart, what the hell's going on here?" Garner's forearms were on the railing again, and his fingers were turning the square of paper, tracing the edges, turning, tracing the edges.

"The position of chief of police of the federal district of Mexico City was a plum under Lopez Portillo," he said. "It was a license to outright banditry. He gave it to his friend Arturo Durazo Moreno, who, at the time, was actually wanted in the United States for drug trafficking. As warlord of the federal district, Durazo became fabulously wealthy, scooping up the graft that came to the top like cream.

"He was as ruthless as he was greedy. He formed his own personal brigade of secret police, called the Jaguars. Negrete was its head. They were legalized terrorists, protected by the Mexican government. Negrete is famous for organizing an incident later known as the Tula River Massacre. As Durazo's number-one lieutenant, Negrete was responsible for collecting tribute from the Colombian drug cartels who used Mexico City as a stopover before final shipment north. At one point, a group of these Colombians tried to cut Durazo out. I guess they got a little cocky. Negrete arranged a meeting just outside the city on the Tula River one night to discuss this. The Jaguars killed eighty-seven Colombians. That kind of crap. Story after story. You wouldn't believe it."

Haydon said, "According to Gamboa, Negrete is his 'security adviser.' "

Garner whistled softly. "You've got something serious here, Stuart. This is for the FBI."

"They're already on it."

"But the HPD is continuing to pursue it?"

"That's right."

Garner shook his head and took his pen out of his pocket again. He wrote a name and an address on the square of paper and handed it to Haydon.

"I've done some work related to the tecos for this woman," Garner said. "I'll have to call her first, see if it's all right for you to talk to her. The woman's been through a lot. I would understand if she refused."

Haydon took the paper and nodded. "I'm grateful," he said. "But do me a favor, Mitchell. Tell her ... my situation. Tell her it's important to me."

Chapter 20

THEY
drove the rental car east on Navigation, while behind them the glittering spectacle of the city came alive against the peachy afterglow of sunset. In front of them the streets of the East End were gloomy and sullen. After Wayside they got their first glimpse of a lighted derrick, and then down the fall of a side street the splayed fingers of dock cranes at the Turning Basin. Then at Seventy-seventh, Navigation made a forty-five-degree sheer to the right and swung around parallel to the ship channel. Suddenly the freighters loomed off to their left across the Booth Rail Yard, leviathans berthed in rank and sluggish waters, groaning in their slips, stained with seepage, draped with lights against the night. In the lambent glow of millions of small globes, the web-world of the wharves lay in a netherscape of cranes and derricks, masts and cables, warehouses, silos, elevators, tugs, and barges. They passed Canal Street on their right, and then Navigation rose, climbing above it all, spanning Brays Bayou, which wandered back into the city. In the near distance the long, graceful, and incandescent arc of the Sherman Bridge crossed the ship channel just below Brady Island.

On the other side of Brays Bayou, they turned off Navigation onto Cypress and crossed a small low-railed bridge to Brady Island and a sprawling well-lighted parking lot. The lot was only a third full. It was still too early for most of the diners who came to the two upscale restaurants that sat next to each other on the channel side of the island, their dining rooms looking up the channel toward the Turning Basin. They drove to the left toward Shanghai Red's, a restaurant with a movie-set atmosphere, an imitation of somebody's idea of the rusty tin warehouses in that infamous Chinese port. Passing slowly by the front, they looked down the rows of cars and continued past Brady's Landing, the larger, more exclusive establishment.

At the end of the parking lot, there was a chain-link fence separating it from a collection of warehouses with low-pitched roofs. They drove to the end of the paved lot and rounded the fence to a strip of asphalt drive, and then around a screen of dead sunflowers to a caliche lot. There were no port authority warehouses on the island, but across the narrow channel where the freighters lined the wharves they could see the long numbered sheds of the official Port of Houston. On the other side of the warehouses, near the northern foot of Sherman Bridge, a cluster of streetlights indicated the gates of the main entrance to the port. To their left the warehouses were continuous into the basin and back out to the island on the near side of the channel.

Bias parked at the edge of the caliche, facing three freighters sitting prow to bow at warehouses 27, 28, and 29 across the cut of water. Bumper-high weeds in front of the car marked the island's northern bank, a five-foot drop to the channel. He cut the lights and the motor.

"Let's get out so we can hear," he said. He reached up and flipped off the switch on the interior ceiling light, and they opened the doors in darkness.

Sounds were distant and muffled, a chugging gasoline motor across the water, a humming electric motor on the lighted deck of one of the ships, the voice of a man unseen on the deck of another, the heavy clanging chunk of a water-lock door slamming shut.

"Shit," Rubio said.

"What's the matter?"

"This is no good. I don't like it." When he was tense, the hissing from the notch in his lip was more pronounced.

"Why?"

"I don't like the water, doing business around the water."

"It's all right," Bias said. What
he
didn't like was Rubio's sudden wariness. It didn't give him anything to lean on. If Rubio was nervous, Bias was doubly so. He relied heavily on the Indian's instincts.