A phone call was intercepted by intelligence agents from the Black Suits at three p.m. The call was recorded and then played back for Daniel de la Rocha and Spider Cepeda just twenty minutes later. It was determined that the call was placed from a mobile phone, and the caller was the American known as the Gray Man. The call was received on a landline at a Vaqueros safe house in Mazatlan and then patched through to the mobile phone of Hector Serna, chief of intelligence for los Vaqueros.
The entire conversation was in English.
“Who is this?”
“It’s me.”
“Why did you call that number? Where did you get it?”
“The number you gave me is compromised by the Black Suits. Calvo told me himself. I got this number from Jerry Pfleger the other day. I knew whoever answered could get in touch with you eventually.”
“You have Calvo?”
“Yes.”
“Incredible. Still, this line cannot be trusted.”
“It’s clean.”
“How do you know?”
“Calvo doesn’t know about it.”
“What if he’s lying?”
“He is too scared to lie.”
A pause. “Very well. When will you deliver him to us?”
“Calvo says the Black Suits know about the safe house in Tepic. We need to change the location.”
A long pause. “All right.”
“I can take him to the safe house where he was going today.”
“No. They obviously know the location of—”
“It’s the only other place I know of. They won’t be expecting us to hand him over. There is no reason to suspect they will be there.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Do you want him back or not?”
“Of course we want him back.” A short delay. “What time?”
“Midnight.”
“Why not earlier?”
“I think there are others looking for me. CIA. Russians. It will take some time to cover my tracks and get there.”
“We will come to you. Tell me where you—”
“Midnight. The ranch in Concordia. I’ll be there. Bring a lot of men and a lot of guns.” The call ended.
FIFTY-FOUR
At five p.m. the leadership of the Black Suits met in the huge main
The men present in the meeting were protected by two dozen more
Spider ran the main portion of the meeting while DLR stood next to him.
“Four teams will hit the Concordia ranch at 12:05 a.m., four separate vans will attack from each point on the compass. A fifth team will come in behind the main attack with the objective of receiving Nestor and then taking him out of the area. We will all meet back here by dawn.”
De la Rocha sipped bottled water and looked through the fifteenfoot-high windows off his left towards Bandaras Bay. He was distracted for many reasons, not the least of which was that he would not be going on the rescue mission to recover his consigliere. It was determined to be too dangerous for the organization itself to expose DLR to what was certain to be one hell of a firefight.
Spider, the leader of the armed wing, would also be staying behind. Daniel had ordered this, and Spider was not happy about it, but since the execution of Emilio Lopez Lopez, Spider had been in charge of DLR’s safety, so it only made since he would stay at the house by DLR’s side.
Both men had led forces into battle, and neither man wanted to stay behind at this palace on the beach while their soldiers fought and bled and died and killed one hundred miles north of here. But logic prevailed.
And DLR had a feeling that staying here tonight, with a relatively small contingent of twenty armed men or so, would not be without action of its own.
As the discussions of the coming operation petered out and the men who would soon head off to battle began strapping weapons and gear to their bodies, DLR stepped out of the
At the end of his last prayer he looked up slowly into the face of la Santa Muerte, then called out to Spider. Cepeda shot out of the scrum of his men down in the
“
“Do you think the gringo really got the phone number he called today from Jerry Pfleger?”
“No. Calvo gave him that number because he knew his agents were monitoring it. The old bastard is as cunning as they come.”
DLR nodded. “Yes. He is very cunning.”
Spider stood dutifully over his master.
DLR turned and looked up to him. “I want everyone staying behind ready for action tonight.”
Spider nodded. Confused. “Of course.”
Daniel stood and left the dining room through the curtains, heading for his master suite in the back of the mansion.
A cluster of small, uninhabited islands sit in Bandaras Bay, just a few hundred yards off of Mismaloya. Collectively called Los Arcos, they are named for the archlike formations carved out of the rock by centuries of pounding surf. During the day the protected marine reserve around Los Arcos was full of scuba divers, snorkelers, and pleasure boats, but one hour before midnight the only creatures in the waters around the tiny islands were fish, lobster, sleeping blue-footed boobies and other sea birds.
Fifty yards closer to shore a pair of private boats bobbed in the water. In each boat four men sat with M16 rifles in their laps. Two men in each boat had an M203 grenade launcher mounted on their M16s.
Each boat also had a radio and a two-million-candlepower flashlight to scan the calm water in all directions.
They were hardly battleships, but the two converted gunboats would certainly present an obstacle for anyone trying to make it to the back of Casa de las Olas from the water.
Court Gentry knelt waist-deep in water that was surging back and forth in the black recesses of a small grotto in one of the rocks of Los Arcos. His eyes looked past the two small boats and towards the white sand beach beyond them. A pair of men with flashlights strolled back and forth on the sand, rifles hanging on their backs. A wall of white boulders and brown shale ran up to the right of the small beach.
