Warriors in Paradise (21 page)

“Nancy, whom do you work for?”

“You know who I work for. I work for the CIA, and my cover at the American embassy is trade attaché. Oh, oh, you mean, who is my real, real boss? Well, he’s an interesting son of a bitch. I don’t know who he works for, but he is a very proper little shit. I’ve never fucked him, even though I’ve tried. I don’t think he’s gay; he’s just not all that interested in sex. He is the division director for Mexico and Central America in the DEA. Now, who he really works for? That is the question, isn’t it?

“Ha, ha, ha…who he really works for? Fuck! Wouldn’t I like to know?”

“Nancy, what is his name?”

“Oh, you also want to know that? Yes, of course. Otherwise you wouldn’t be asking, right? Oops, I just peed again. Hahaha, I just peed again!

“His name is Alexander Coombs. He’s a New England aristo-cat, sorry, sorry, aristocrat. He studied at Yale at the Center for Foreign Affairs. He then joined the Department of State, which is where I met him. He transferred to the DEA, where he has been for the past seven years.

“He’s a perennial bachelor. He lives in a fancy townhouse in McLean, Virginia. I have never seen him with a woman, or with a man. I don’t know what he does for kicks. Perhaps he likes to masturbate or stick a vibrator up his ass. Who gives a shit! I certainly don’t. I am sure nobody knows. He is all about United States, drugs, money, power, and beautiful, young chicks. He considers himself the ultimate patriot.”

“How do you contact him?”

“I dial his private cell. Of course, now you want to know the number. What else? Do you want the number, killer boy? Yes, I am sure you do. Here it is.”

Jonathan took note of the number she recited.

“Nancy, why did you kidnap the Canadian and Russian girls?”

“Because my darling boss, Alexander Coombs, asked me to. He requested me to select the girls for that little, fat, double-crossing piece of brown shit, to kidnap and deliver them to him. That is why we kidnapped the girls. So we could give them to our boss.”

“Nancy, what do they do with the girls?”

“I have no idea. I don’t ask, and he doesn’t tell me. If I needed to know, he would have told me. As I didn’t need to know, he didn’t tell me.”

“Nancy, where are the girls now?”

“I don’t have the faintest idea. He takes them in his fancy jet plane, and I never see them again. And frankly, I don’t want to see them again.”

“Nancy, how are the drugs smuggled into the States?”

“Mr. Toro has several reception-and-distribution centers: Lázaro Cárdenas on the Pacific; Veracruz and Tampico in the Gulf of Mexico; and, on the border, Reynosa next to McAllen and Tijuana next to San Diego. The drug-related business is done directly between Toro and Alexander Coombs. I am here to run interference with local authorities and to act as a contact of last resort.

“The United States will continue to consume drugs no matter what. Therefore, it is a lot better that we control the drug supply, eradicating the criminal element from the chain. True Americans do not want foreigners to exploit our weaknesses; we would rather do it ourselves.

“That is what the man, my boss, Alex fucken Coombs, tells me.

“You have beautiful eyes. They say that the nose represents your penis. Is your penis sharp and pointy like your nose, killer boy?”

Jonathan stood up, walked toward the door, opened it, and stepped out. We followed.

***

Jonathan said, “I think that is all the relevant information that we need. You have been here all night long. Time for us to go. But, before we leave, we have to decide what we’re going to do with Nancy Smith. Any suggestions?”

Santi said, “She knows all of us. She has witnessed the whole operation since it began. How sure can we be that she’s not going to come after us and call Alexander Coombs the moment we leave?”

“That is why we recorded the whole interrogation—so we would have some leverage,” said Jonathan.

“Yes,” said Caleb, “but the interrogation was conducted under coercion and under the influence of drugs.”

Jonathan said, “It doesn’t really matter how we obtained the information. This is never going to go to trial. This is not a matter for the lawyers. It is a matter for the intelligence and security agencies, and, in an extreme case, for the press.

“Before we leave, we show her the recording of her confession, untie her, and place her in her car. She is a survivor. She will keep quiet.”

I said, “It is risky, but I guess it is the best option we have at the moment unless we kill her. However, killing her is also a risky option.

“My question is, how are we going to deal with Toro’s death and/or his disappearance?”

Santi said, “We set it up as a shootout between Nancy’s bodyguards and Toro’s. The disappearance of Toro’s bodyguards would suggest that they were somehow involved and ran away. Toro’s people should be calling in during the day, and when they don’t get any response, they will come to an abandoned house and find five dead people. They will take care of the cleanup. That should pressure Nancy to stay quiet and let things play themselves out.”

“Will we have enough time to get to Washington, DC, and get to Alexander Coombs before he finds out?” asked Caleb.

Jonathan answered, “We have to assume that the only people who can reach Alexander Coombs are Nancy Smith and Nicanor Toro. So yes, I do believe that we have enough time to contact Alexander Coombs before he finds out.”

“What if he tries to contact Toro and doesn’t get an answer?” asked Caleb.

“Well, that is a risk we are going to have to take,” responded Jonathan. “If we leave in the next half an hour or so, we should be at the airport by seven thirty a.m. and in Washington, DC, by one p.m. Let us clean up all evidence of our presence and get ready to leave.”

***

Santi went to talk to Ramon. Caleb and I went to get the money we had found in Toro’s bedroom. There was close to two million bucks, half in one-hundred-dollar bills and half in one-thousand-peso bills. We took the American and half of the Mexican money.

We went to the kitchen and gave Ramon the rest of the Mexican pesos, asking him to distribute it among the staff and to urge them to leave as soon as possible. We asked him to remind them that Toro’s people would be coming sometime during the day, and they should find an empty house.

Nobody in the house knew our names. We were safe in that department. We also knew that the police were not going to get involved, so we wouldn’t have to do any major cleanup before leaving. The deaths of Toro’s and Nancy’s bodyguards would never be made public. We were sure that their bodies were going to disappear. Nevertheless, we tidied the bedrooms and bathrooms as best we could.

Half an hour later, the house staff had left. The only people in the house waiting for us were Ramon and the pilot.

We went to the see Nancy Smith.

***

As we opened the door to the storage area, we knew something was wrong. The stench was unbearable. She had defecated and wasn’t moving. Jonathan put her fingers to her neck and said, “She is gone, probably a heart attack. That is always a risk with the use of chemicals.”

“And, of course, the 7,350 feet above sea level of Mexico City didn’t help her much,” added Santi.

I thought about Nancy and a praying mantis. A large female mantis goes after the largest available preys that she can manage, as they have the most nutrients. However, in this instance, Nancy had misjudged the preys. We had proved too much for her.

“Help me clean her and dress her up. We will place her with her gun exactly where she shot Toro. That should provide a complete picture of what happened: Nancy shoots Toro, Toro’s guards shoot her bodyguards, Nancy dies of a heart attack, and Toro’s guards run away with the money and drugs.”

The four of us cleaned and dressed her as best we could. It was horrible and disgusting, but we did it rapidly, efficiently, and without talking. I picked her up and carried her to the living room. I placed her exactly where she had shot Toro. I dropped her as she would have fallen after a massive heart failure. The picture of the layout would tell that she suffered cardiac arrest brought about the stress of the shootout.

We didn’t think anybody would inspect the puncture marks in her veins. We were sure there was not going to be any formal inquiry, any forensic investigation. It was a risk we had to take.

We straightened everything and erased our presence in the house as much as we could. We then left for Toluca Airport.

My backpack looked bulky with everything we had plus Toro’s money.

“Uncle Jonathan,” I said, “are we going to be checked when leaving Mexico and on arriving to the States?”

My uncle responded, “I called in a few favors. We are flying in a private plane with high-security clearances. No records will exist of its coming and leaving Mexico or the United States. Nobody will check our documents or our belongings.”

Our wits and knapsack were safe.

Chapter 8: Deeper into the Rabbit Hole

Friends and family

I
felt more confident with my uncle’s assistance. The three of us were good, but we were far better with my uncle’s contacts, knowledge, and experience.

Jonathan called the pilot of the jet plane he had borrowed and told him to expect us within the next twenty minutes. As soon as we arrived at the airport in Toluca, we walked through the private departures exit to a military hangar. My Uncle Jonathan just nodded to a Mexican sergeant as we walked toward the plane.

The pilot and the copilot shook hands with my uncle and greeted us. We took off almost immediately. The jet belonged to a security company owned and managed by an ex–special ops friend of my uncle.

He kept in touch with his friends and others in the special operations community, retired or otherwise. Those in the special ops community shared similar traits and experiences, which made them special in the sense that they could always relate to others like them. They had trouble connecting with civilians.

Soon after I contacted Uncle Jonathan, he called a friend who had served with him and my father in army intelligence in Afghanistan. When he told him that he needed to go to Mexico without a paper trail, his friend offered him the plane used for joint black ops in Mexico with the discreet approval of both governments.

The Warrior Gene

We were dehydrated and tired. Yesterday and early this morning had been intense. We fetched some nonalcoholic beverages and bags of comfort food. The three of us sat in a row facing my uncle.

Without preliminaries, my uncle said, “I am surprised how far you have gotten. The three of you have gone up against some very nasty and powerful enemies and prevailed. You have done all that in part because of your army training,” he said, eyeing Caleb and me, “and your fighting skills,” he added, looking at Santi. “You are very unusual individuals. But that is not all. There is something else at play here, something that makes you—when you are together—more than the sum of your individual selves. Together you are a formidable force.

“The military observed over time that some soldiers were able to defend themselves better than average, and some were even able to defeat their own trainers without any formal training, including advanced trainers in the Navy SEALs and special ops. The Department of Defense wanted to know why. Therefore, it conducted and funded research on the subject, narrowing it down to a gene that is called the warrior gene.

“Not everybody has it, perhaps less than a third of the male population. Its carriers are more willing to take risks than other people, while simultaneously being able to better assess their chances of success in critical situations.

“Within the warrior gene, there is a bolder mutation called the Extreme Warrior Gene, where the gene has been influenced by the environment and may be transmitted to the offspring. Carriers of the extreme warrior gene are natural-born warriors. It is very rare. It happens once in a million. The three of you must have it.

“The odds of Caleb and Charlie converging and becoming friends is low, but the odds of the three of you meeting and teaming up is astronomically minute, perhaps lower than one in a billion. Be that as it may, here you are—you met, became friends, and now you’re working together as a single organism.

“The warrior gene is on the X-chromosome that men inherit from their mothers. And you all have very dominant mothers.

“The three of you met under a very unusual set of circumstances of aggression and near violence. Caleb was being insulted and threatened by a group of bullies when he met Charlie. Santi met Charlie when they were fighting each other. You recognized in one another kindred spirits.

“I am sure that when you and Caleb were in the service, you both had a little trouble following orders, but when both of you were on one of your solo missions, you didn’t have any trouble following each other’s lead. Sometimes Caleb would be the leader, and sometimes you were. Leadership for you came naturally, depending on who was better suited for the situation.

“When this problem started and you went after the cartel, you didn’t have any difficulties following Santi’s lead even though you had just met him, just as Santi didn’t have any issues relinquishing his leadership and following yours when the situation called for a change of guidance. Circumstances determined who the best one to lead was. The rest of you followed naturally, without glitches. That happened because it is written in your genetic code. You naturally maximize the chances of winning.