Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (8 page)

The Ranger glanced at Arlen who gave the okay, so he removed it from the back of his pants and passed it to me, grip first. The weapon felt a little light.

I gestured at Gomez to give ’em up – he knew what I meant.

Digging into a pocket, he came out with six rounds of 9mm ball ammo in the palm of his hand. I took ’em, fed ’em into the magazine with my thumb, racked one into the chamber, reached around and holstered the weapon. “Now,” I said. “Someone care to tell me what the fuck this is all about?”

“So this warrant for my arrest is genuine?” I asked Arlen after he’d given me the main points.

“Afraid so.”

“It’s one of those shoot-to-kill warrants, Cooper,” said Chalmers, grinning like a simpleton.

I took a seat on the edge of the bed.

Arlen glanced at Chalmers. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

“What about the Ranger?” the spook asked. “This is a national security issue and he’s not …”

“I ain’t going nowhere,” said Gomez. “The warrant was issued by DPS, which makes Cooper
my
responsibility. You want me to leave the room, he’ll have to be re-cuffed.”

“And I’ll shoot the first person who tries,” I promised. “How about it, Chalmers? Like to give it a go?”

“Let him stay,” Arlen said, exasperated. “If you can’t trust a Ranger, then we might as well just throw in the towel.”

Chalmers didn’t like it, but he had little choice. He turned to Gomez. “Nothing you hear in this room leaves this room.”

“You’re talking to a shadow, pal. I’m not here,” he said, sitting on a chair by the front door, resting an ankle on the top of his knee, hands behind his head like he was settling in for a good show.

“Okay, Cooper,” Chalmers said, facing me. “What do you know about FARC?”

Ordinarily I’d have smacked something like that into the stands; but, still not sure I wanted to play, I answered by folding my arms.

“I’ll take your silence as ignorance,” he said.

“Take it any way you like, Buzzby. And if your imagination’s not up to it I’ve got suggestions.”

Chalmers looked to Arlen as if I’d just said something that proved his point.

“Can we just get on with it?” Arlen said, exasperated.

The spook took an iPad out of his brief case, muttering to himself, tapped in a code and propped the device on the bench over the bar fridge. Photos taken with long lenses appeared on screen. They showed a series of armed men and women who were mostly under the age of twenty-five, dressed in jungle-pattern combat gear, berets on their heads and ammo bandoliers across their chests. They were mostly
mestizo
faces wearing serious-business-to-attend-to expressions.

“FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The Marxist–Leninist militia claims to represent Colombia’s rural poor in its struggle against wealthy landowners and industrialists. In reality, though, it’s a guerilla organization made up of thugs and murderers, prepared to sell their services as assassins and mercenaries to Leftist governments in the region. Washington has designated it a terrorist organization.”

The display on Chalmers’ iPad moved through a voyeuristic parade of gruesome killings.

“A few years ago, FARC was all but wiped out, chased from Colombia by successive government crackdowns that began with the victory against drug lords Pablo Escobar, José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, Carlos Lehder, and the demise of the Medellín Cartel. Today, while restricted to the Ecuadorian jungle bordering Colombia to the east, the mountainous jungles and forests on the Panamanian border in the north and the ismuth known as the Darién Gap, FARC has found a new reason for being. It’s now Colombia’s biggest reseller of cocaine and marijuana. And its primary customers are the Mexican drug cartels – the Beltran-Leyva, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Chihuahua Cartel, the Gulf Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, the Juárez Cartel, Los Zetas, La Familia and so on. We –”

I interrupted: “And all this is somehow relevant to me because … ?”

“There’s something big going on,” said Chalmers. “And that’s why the CIA has been called in.”

“Golly gee willikers,” I said. ‘The CIA?’

“Are you
sure
this jerk’s the right man for the job?” Chalmers pleaded.

“There’s no one righter,” Arlen replied.

“Righter for what?” I asked.

“You’re a cop killer, Cooper,” Chalmers sneered. “And where you’re going, credentials don’t come any better than that. Now, can I get on with this?”

Credentials? Where you’re going?
I had a sudden feeling that being cuffed by Gomez and put into the care of the Texas Department of Public Safety might not be such a bad option after all.

Chalmers squeezed his remote at the iPad and continued the show-and-tell. “The war on drugs launched by former Mexican President Felipe Calderón in ’06 has claimed more than seventy thousand lives to date. That number is greater than all US combat fatalities in the Vietnam War. Mass graves are continually being discovered, children are being used as hit men, beheadings and dismemberings are commonplace. Just across the Rio Grande, kidnappings, murders, maimings and revenge killings are being committed on a daily basis, and in pretty much all population centers big and small. Americans of Mexican descent are being targeted by the cartels and used to commit a range of violent crimes on both sides of the border. Within Mexico, whole police forces have either capitulated or been wiped out; entire units of the Mexican Army have deserted to the cartels …”

I yawned.

“Keeping you awake, Cooper?” Chalmers snapped.

Aside from the fact that none of this was news to me, I
had
been up since 4 am. And pretty much from the moment I opened my eyes I’d been assaulted, chased, shot at, framed, hunted or cuffed. “It’s been a long day and the real shitty part is – it’s barely half over,” I said.

“Then why don’t I just go and ask room service parked in the Charger outside if they’ll go get you a pillow?”

“Can we get to the meat?” Arlen suggested to Chalmers.

I wasn’t sure I appreciated that allusion.

The spook took his annoyance out on the remote and stabbed it at the iPad. One file closed, another opened.

“A few weeks ago, El Paso CBP and DEA agents intercepted a shipment of cocaine worth around thirty million dollars.”

The screen illustrated Chalmers’ narration with some shots of the raid itself, mostly agents slicing open bags of chicken shit to reveal the packages of cocaine within, tightly wrapped in clear plastic with warehouse batch numbers clearly visible.

More old news. I stifled another yawn.

“Forensic analysis confirmed that the cocaine was Colombian and Ecuadorian, and the chicken manure Mexican,” Chalmers continued. “Unconfirmed HUMINT on the ground in Panama has traced the shipment back to this man, Juan de Jesús del Los Apostles de Medellín, alias Juan Apostles, alias the Saint, alias the Saint of Medellín, alias Jesús de Medellín.”

The pictures fading in and out on screen showed various photos of a tall, lean, fit-looking guy who looked forty but was probably older, with a full head of swept-back, layered salt and pepper hair, tan skin and a playboy smile. A Latino Don Johnson. All he needed was a pastel-pink suit. If the accessories in the photos were any indication, Jesus of Medellín enjoyed the company of Ferraris, Polo ponies and twins – brunettes, mostly.

“Apostles came from a wealthy Medellín family,” Chalmers continued. “He was educated at Oxford University, England, where he earned honors in economics and business. On returning home he walked into the family fortune, which was made in construction. Within a year, that fortune had disappeared.”

“Did you say honors?” I asked.

“A lot of that fortune went to FARC. My friends at MI6 say that, while at Oxford, the Saint was involved in several underground Marxist–Leninist organizations.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said.

“Don’t believe what?” asked Chalmers, warily.

“Forget it.” I doubted that Chalmers had friends but I wanted to know where this was going and where I fitted into it more than I wanted to wind him up some more, so I asked: “How does a garage full of Ferraris fit with the whole Marxist–Leninist thing?”

“At last, a reasonable question,” Chalmers said, his voice dripping with condescension. “The Saint is a man of contradictions. He donates money to various orphanages in Mexico and Colombia on the one hand while he kills mothers and fathers and fills the orphanages on the other. In this regard, he’s following in Escobar’s footsteps. He’s also a practicing Catholic who’s been married three times and divorced three times. His first wife was Miss Venezuela. She came in second in the 1988 Miss Universe pageant.” He fumbled with the remote and found a picture of the woman – tall, bikinied, blond and centerfold material. “We don’t have photos of his other wives.”

“Does Miss Venezuela have a twin?” I asked.

“How is that even relevant, Cooper?”

“Move it along,” I suggested.

“Late in 2006,” the spook continued, “at the start of the crackdown on the Colombian cartels, Juan Apostles disappeared for a while before turning up in Mexico, working for the Gulf cartel, where he came into contact with this man.”

Various other photos appeared, none of them as nice to look at as the ones of Miss Venezuela. These showed a Mexican male with a shaved head, broad nose, thick neck and small black eyes that could have been plastic buttons stitched onto tan leather. Blue tears tattooed on his face ran from the outside corner of his left eye, the droplets growing bigger as they ran down his cheek so that the tears on his neck were the size of chicken eggs.

“His name is Arturo Perez. He is also known as the Tears of Chihuahua. He deserted from the
Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales –
Mexican Army Special Forces – and was recruited by the Gulf Cartel in 1999 to join their private army, known as
Los Zetas
, shortly after returning from training at Fort Benning.”

“
Our
Fort Benning?” I asked.

“You know of any others?” Chalmers replied.

“What did we train him to do?”

“Locate and apprehend cartel members.”

“So he located them and having located them asked them for a job?”

“Seems so,” said Arlen.

“Fort Benning and Oxford should hook up. What came first? The nickname or the tattoo?”

“The tattoo is apparently a celebration of his favorite pastime.”

“Which is?”

“Pain. His thing is flaying people, mostly while they’re still alive. The people who know about this kind of practice say flaying exposes raw nerves resulting in the most excruciating pain there is. It was a popular punishment in the Middle Ages. People would die from heart failure during the process.”

Several photos played on the iPad showing a number of deceased, the skin on their thighs, arms or stomachs removed to reveal the raw muscle and fat beneath.

“Shit,” I murmured.

“This guy’s a prince,” said Arlen. “We think Tears of Chihuahua led the attack on Horizon Airport.”

A photo of Gail Sorwick appeared. Her eyes were closed and she seemed asleep, except that the bed beneath her was a cold hard stainless-steel autopsy table and the sheet covering her body was plastic. A succession of shots came and went with the sheet progressively pulled back. Eventually, photos showed the deceased’s body turned over. Close-ups revealed deep cuts in her skin in the small of her back, beneath her buttocks and down across her hips – long knife cuts in the shape of a square.

“Oh, man,” Gomez said under his breath.

“This is why we think it was Perez. Sure looks like his handiwork. The theory goes that he was about to flay her when he was either interrupted or simply ran out of time. Uncharacteristically for Perez, the cuts were made post mortem, hence the lack of blood.”

“And – lemme guess – the reason you’re not sure it was him is connected somehow to the comment about me having those unbeatable cop-killing credentials.”

Arlen nodded. “Vin, if this was in fact a Mexican raid on US soil by a cartel, it represents a dangerous new phase in their strategies. We need intel. We need to know who and we need to know why. Juan Apostles is a Colombian with direct ties to FARC. The DEA thinks Apostles and Perez are using those ties to forge a super cartel, seamlessly linking supply and distribution. Apostles and Perez have no respect for American law enforcement. If they succeed in their venture, raids like yesterday’s might well become commonplace, and that will rapidly escalate into a full-scale border war with Mexico. We need someone on the inside down there. Perez and Apostles are always looking for new recruits and you’d be a special prize. You’re an ex-combat controller so you know US airspace procedures, you’ve had all kinds of Special Forces training and –”

“And after the
El Paso Times
hits the streets tomorrow morning with your picture on the cover and the headline, ‘Cop killer wanted, dead or alive’, they’re the only people in the world who’ll want to know you. Gotta ensure your legend’s authentic, right?”

I liked Chalmers even less when he had the upper hand.

“You’re perfect for the job, Cooper,” he continued. “I’ve spent some time going through your records. You like to kill. You’ve developed a taste for it. How many people have you put down? Can you count them? Do you see their faces in your sleep?”

“That’s enough!” Arlen snapped.

“In all the ways that count,” Chalmers continued, “you’re really no better than this Perez character.”

As much as I feigned disinterest, Chalmers’ comments had reached in and twisted something in my gut. He was right. I
had
lost count and, now that he mentioned it, very few of the people I’d planted had faces I could recall, though their shadows haunted my dreams. Sure, every one of them might’ve deserved it, but I’d appointed myself judge, jury and executioner in most instances and that wasn’t how it was supposed to be. “Assuming I succeed in buddying up to these psychos,” I said to Arlen, doing my best not to seem affected by Chalmers’ comments, “What do you want?”

“If it was Perez who led the raid, we’ll need evidence that’ll stand up in court. Only then will governments in Mexico and Colombia cooperate with us in capturing him and Apostles and extraditing them to US soil.”

“What kind of evidence?”

“DNA. We have blood and semen and other DNA material recovered from the scene. We need a match.”

“You want me to pick up a urine sample?”

“Or hair or clothing …”

“Or a mouthful of cum,” Chalmers interrupted, smirking.

I had six rounds in the Sig. And I could get by just as easily on five.

“Not helpful, Chalmers,” said Arlen.