King of Swords

killer.

Six minutes later, the monitor alarm sounded in room eleven, signaling that the heart rate had dropped to zero, as had blood pressure. A different nurse came running from the far end of the ward, and after taking a brief look, she called for help. A minute later, a team arrived at a jog pushing a crash cart. A harried doctor brushed past them to get to the patient’s side.

For hours, the Federal had fought a drowsy battle against sleep, but now the area around him was a crisis zone, with personnel running to and fro with grim expressions. So captivated was he with the unfolding life or death drama, it took more than thirty minutes for him to realize the nurse hadn’t returned with his coffee.

Chapter 4

At six-thirty a.m., Cruz’s day began with a call at home from the dispatch desk, who sought to patch him in to the ranking officer in charge at Angeles hospital. He pawed the sleep from his eyes and fumbled on the nightstand for the phone, almost knocking his pistol onto the floor in the process. He lifted the handset to his ear and croaked a greeting.

Two minutes later he was wide awake, shivering in his shower as he took a hurried rinsing before heading into the office. There was little point in driving all the way to the hospital to confirm that Santiago had taken his last breath. He had no reason to doubt that was the case. People died in ICU every day, and Santiago’s trauma had been severe. His bad heart had done the Mexican people a favor, sparing them the expense of trying the bastard and housing him, in luxury, no doubt, for the rest of his life. Cruz felt a fleeting spike of guilt; maybe the interrogation with the picana had been a little overzealous and had triggered the stroke, but a darker part of his heart actually hoped that was the case. Whatever, he’d sleep better after helping take out one of the most savage cartel bosses in the country.

The law worked differently in Mexico than in the U.S., and Cruz couldn’t see how his counterparts there ever got anything accomplished. Mexico used Napoleonic law as its basis, where the accused was assumed to be guilty until proved otherwise. It was usually a safe bet they were. In Cruz’s experience it was rare to meet an innocent man, especially in his area of specialty. How the American authorities could hope to be effective when they were constantly hamstrung by inquiries and hearings and attorneys was beyond him.

As he donned his uniform, he thought about the history of the drug racket in Mexico. It had all changed when the established marijuana traffickers, who also moved small amounts of Mexican heroin into the U.S., hooked up with the Colombian cartels and became their shipping arm. This relationship solidified in the 1980s, and soon the cartels were getting paid in product rather than cash. That created a substantial incentive for them to expand and move from transporting to full-scale distribution.

There had long been drug trafficking in Mexico on a regional basis, but once the cartels began getting huge sums of money from their cocaine distribution, the cottage industry developed into a national network. It hadn’t helped that, for many years, before it was absorbed into the current CISEN group, the head of the Mexican intelligence organization, the DFS, had sold DFS badges to the top cartel bosses, giving the traffickers an effective free pass to do as they liked. But the real power came to Mexico’s cartels once the Colombian syndicates imploded, leaving a vacuum that was filled by their Mexican partners. In a matter of a few decades, a small smuggling scheme in Mexico became a mega billion dollar enterprise, and the violence had escalated in proportion to the wages of sin.

Now the country was in crisis, as the government battled the cartels, which had a propensity for butchery. The war against them had begun in earnest under President Fox, in 2000, but escalated to the current fever pitch when Calderon became president in 2006. Both presidents had been very sympathetic to U.S. policy, and had cooperated with the U.S. initiative to quash the drug traffickers, which had only resulted in driving the violence levels through the roof.

Cruz clumped down the stairs and hit the button on his coffeemaker, impatient to get out the door. With Santiago dead, there was sure to be a bloody turf war. That would have been fine by Cruz, but innocents tended to get slaughtered at an alarming rate whenever one of these skirmishes flared up.

He gulped down a cup of scalding coffee and raced to his car, anxious to be in the office to brief his team on the likely outcome of Santiago’s passing. He also wanted to establish a game plan to deal with information- gathering, to establish whether there was any hint of a contract out on the President.

The journey to the office was excruciatingly slow due to an accident, and even with his detachable roof light it took him forty-five minutes to make it through the security gates of his building.

A few of his staff were already there, having anticipated that it would be a big day. Two of them were reading the newspaper featuring a banner headline and an old photo of Santiago. The story proclaimed that the top Templar chief was dead after having been apprehended in a gun battle. The article was short on facts and long on conjecture and hyperbole, which was to be expected. Mexicans were under no illusions that their media existed to tell them the truth about anything. It was more a form of entertainment, and the national pastime was figuring out who was lying more, the papers or the government.

Cruz figured there must have been a leak at the hospital. His team knew better than to talk to reporters; there was no way anyone was less than a hundred percent in his group. These men worked as diligently as Cruz did, having followed his example and committed to treating their job a crusade. Those who had found the pace too demanding were long gone, which was just as well. Cruz believed that he was fighting a war for the very soul and future of Mexico, and these men were his soldiers. Everyone shared that perspective and felt the same way. If the cartels won, Mexico lost. It was a battle between the productive and the predators. And predators couldn’t run a country or operate schools or build roads. Predators could only destroy and steal and abuse. They couldn’t be allowed to prevail, or the nation would be plunged into chaos, just as Colombia had been for two decades, before slowly pulling out of the tailspin.

He had Briones call a staff meeting for his immediate subordinates, who would brief their squads later, and went over the ramifications of Santiago’s death. They would be closely monitoring the situation in Michoacan from their Federal brethren there and would send resources, including soldiers and weapons, as the situation demanded. There was very little upside from Santiago’s death — although a major parasite had been removed from the game, the fear and expectation was that the younger, hotter heads would start a bloodbath in their bids for eminence in the region. It was almost a given that the bodies would start appearing, sans heads, at an increasing rate. Cruz only hoped they wouldn’t see any more daylight shopping mall shooting battles or grenade attacks on densely populated areas, as they had just a few years previous, before Santiago had ascended to the throne.

After the meeting broke up, Cruz motioned for Briones to sit.

“I thought about the whole assassination problem and concluded we need to gather more intelligence before we bring anyone else in on it. Nobody’s going to take this seriously if we don’t have something more that Santiago’s wild claims.”

Briones nodded. “One of the things we can do is see what events will be taking place that will bring the President in contact with the American president. There can’t be that many.”

“Agreed. But we’ll need to get our feelers out into the streets and see if there’s any buzz. Santiago was a blowhard, so he’d have been unable to keep his mouth shut. We need to nose around and find out whether he talked to anyone, and if so, learn what he said.”

“Let’s get Ignacio and Julio in and brief them,” Briones suggested. “If there’s any chatter, they’ll be the ones to pick it up.”

Ignacio Roto and Julio Brava were the two most senior plainclothes investigators on Cruz’s team. They spent much of their time in the streets, carousing and mingling with the criminal element of society in order to keep current on trends and rumors. They were a vital part of the intelligence-gathering apparatus Cruz had painstakingly woven in over the last five years, which, though controversial, was highly effective. The tactics consisted of spreading money around and nurturing informants, as well as buying drugs, soliciting kidnappers and murder for hire gangs, and generally wading waist deep in the cesspool that was the underworld of Mexico City. Cruz’s squad had twenty plainclothes officers working the streets at any given time, and was a lynchpin of his overall strategy. The