Ballistic

“Si, Daniel.”

“I trust we have men in Colima looking for him?”

“The entire police force plus other assets in the area. But I assume the Gray Man is gone by now.”

“Gone where?”

Calvo shrugged. “I do not know. But I wonder if he will go after other aspects of our enterprise. Marijuana, transportation, aircraft, shipping, kidnapping. As long as he is alive, we won’t know where he will turn up next.”

“Who is supplying him with the intelligence about our enterprises?”

“Someone with knowledge of the full scope of our operations. I would say either someone in the federal police or perhaps even someone in the Madrigal Cartel.”

“I know it is Madrigal.”

“You don’t know that.”

DLR walked out of the room, Spider close on his heels. Calvo followed.

“It’s Madrigal,” repeated DLR to Nestor.

“She told you that, did she?”

Daniel stopped in the hallway. Turned back to Calvo, and Spider took up his position at his boss’s side. De la Rocha said, “Her information has proven better than yours in this matter, consigliere. You would do well to improve your value to me.” DLR and Spider turned away again and disappeared up the corridor.

FIFTY

Gentry found refuge in a disused silver mine near La Rosa Blanca, a small mountain town a convenient drive to Guadalajara, with access to the Pacific coast and Mexico City. Both were within a few hours’ drive. Hector Serna had equipped Gentry with an old Mazda pickup, and Court used the entrance to a long-dormant horizontal mining shaft in the side of the mountain to store the vehicle during the nights. Court had visited a camping store in Guadalajara and purchased thousands of dollars in gear so he would not be uncomfortable during cool nights on the mountain. His gas stove, his small tent, his dried foods, and his gallon jugs of water kept his needs met. His battery-operated generators kept his mobile phones and his GPS charged, as well as giving him light when he needed it to work on one project or another on the cold ground by his truck.

Court had a lot of projects going in the mine shaft.

And he had a lot of targets to hit around western Mexico. In the past two days he had been busy: he’d killed a territory boss of the Black Suits in Nayarit, he’d destroyed two aircraft at an airport in Tepic owned by de la Rocha, and he’d torched a warehouse northeast of Magdalena.

Now it was the morning of his fourth day of his full-scale war on the Black Suits. He’d been up past three but still managed several hours of fitful sleep in his sleeping bag in the bed of the Mazda. Twice he woke up startled by noises close by; both times he grabbed one of his AK-47s and cut open the darkness around him with the tactical light attached to the fore end of the rifle. Both times hunched furry creatures ran off, deeper down into the black mine shaft.

Even though he was getting a late start, Court had big plans for the day. Hector Serna had passed Court some intel about the Black Suits’ locations in the area, and Gentry had noted them on his GPS. He’d set up a series of waypoints that would take him to each target on the way to his most distant destination of the trip. With luck he’d get to five sites before the end of his workday; he did not expect to return to his mine until the middle of the night, though he was not sure he would find things to destroy or Black Suits to kill at each of the stops on his route. Each piece of mayhem he planned had to be weighed against the chance for death or capture, and each location had to be somewhere he felt he could get out of quickly and cleanly.

Before noon he’d pulled into a warehouse district in Guadalajara and watched several train cars off-load crates that Serna promised contained pot grown down south in Chiapas and Guatemala. Court watched from a distance through his binoculars, and he believed Serna’s intelligence to be solid, but the loaded trucks idled there within the well-guarded fences of the station for over an hour. He’d tried to pick up the FM radio broadcasts from the walkie-talkies of the men by the trucks, but their handhelds were using some sort of encryption, and Court couldn’t read enough of their traffic to find out what the problem was. He’d planned on hitting the trucks on the highway, but they showed no sign of leaving the station, even at two p.m. Reluctantly, he made the decision to call off this mission, anxious to get on to the next waypoint and blow some shit up before the day was done.

His second site was a bust as well. It was a safe house for the Black Suits, but when he entered, kicking in the door and clearing the rooms with his AK, he found no one there and no drugs, guns, or money. He thought about just torching the house, but it was on a city street in the Zapopan district of Guadalajara, and he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t end up burning down an entire block. So he climbed back into the Mazda and sped off to the east.

There were three more places on his to-do list; he hoped like hell he could find something worth destroying in at least one of them. He looked at his GPS.

Next stop, another Black Suit safe house, this one in Chapala. Court hoped this wasn’t a dry hole as well.

De la Rocha slept on a chaise lounge on the cool balcony just outside of his bedroom. He liked the feel of the outdoors. It reminded him of his time in the army, though in the army he wasn’t exactly sleeping on a balcony off an opulent master bedroom in a hacienda on his own 200-hectare property.

Spider was behind him, in the bedroom, sitting on a high-back chair positioned in front of the door. His M4 rifle lay across his lap. Extra magazines jutted from a bag next to him.

With no warning Nestor Calvo Macias barreled through the door. Spider launched to his feet, hefting his weapon as he did so, but the older man ignored him, stormed past, shouted out to his sleeping patron on the balcony.

“The Gray Man hit the safe house in Chapala!”

De la Rocha sat up slowly on the chaise lounge and rubbed his eyes. “Chapala? Madre de dios. Did he steal the money we have cached there?”

“He did not steal it. He burned it.”

DLR cursed, rubbed his face some more. “?Que chingado! How much?”

“All of it. We had roughly seventeen million U.S. dollars palletized and awaiting transfer to the banks. I’ll get the figures from accounting and give you the exact amount.”

“And he just burned it? Set it on fire?”

“Si.”

“What about the men guarding the—”

“One dead. One more missing that we assume—”

“And all the rest? Surely, we had more men guarding seventeen million dollars!”

“We had a dozen men there. The rest are alive; they did not know there was any problem until the fire started. They never saw the Gray Man.”

“Fucking execute every one of those stupid pendejos.”

“Si.” Spider said, and he leaned out into the hallway. He barked commands to one of his underlings, sealing the fate of the survivors at the Chapala safe house.

“Daniel,” Calvo said, a soft pleading in his voice. “In four days he has performed nearly one dozen operations against us. I estimate the value of capital loss and production loss to be, conservatively, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty million dollars.”

“He is costing me more than twelve million dollars a day?”

“Conservatively.”

“But how long can he continue?”

Spider spoke frankly. “Mi jefe. Our organization is set up to effectively fight the military, the federal police, and the rival cartels. We are less equipped to target one man with the mobility and skills of the Gray Man. There is no way to know how long he can operate before we get him.”