Against All Enemies

to get him to the bar. No time to program that info into the phone now …

But he tugged out the device anyway and thumbed a direct-dial number to Langley. A familiar man’s voice answered on the speakerphone: “Three-two-seven here. What do you need?”

“Get me to the V Bar. Update Fitzpatrick.”

“On it. Hold on …”

Moore checked his rearview mirror once more, while the two fools chasing him swerved in front of a step van, and the driver floored it toward the next intersection.

Just as Moore’s car passed through the intersection, the light turned red behind him.

An old man rode into the street on a bike fitted with baskets fore and aft. The baskets were piled high with blankets and plastic bottles and several backpacks. He was in the crosswalk, along with several pedestrians shifting a few meters behind him.

The idiots tailing Moore could not stop in time.

The man and the bike arced up and over their car like toys flung in the air, and their car’s hood folded in like a taco, but they kept on, the man and bike clattering out of sight behind them, the other pedestrians screaming and running back toward him.

A voice buzzed from the phone’s speaker: “Next left. Make it. Then third light, right turn. I’ll call the local police and see if they can run some interference for you. I’ve got eyes in the sky on your position now. See your tail.”

“Thanks.” Moore jammed his foot harder onto the accelerator as the next light ahead turned yellow. He’d already noticed that in Juarez, red, yellow, and green lights were mere suggestions to drivers. Many only slowed down for red lights, then just blew on through them — even if they weren’t involved in car chases. He made the left turn as instructed.

The street sign read Paseo Triunfo de la Republica, and the bus stops, billboards, and clean sidewalks of this business district made Moore feel a bit more at ease. Pedestrian traffic was fairly heavy, and he thought the rocket scientists behind him might think twice about pulling any stunts in this area.

He scanned the side streets as he raced by, noting how they were lined on both sides by parked cars. You could travel only in one direction, but there were no signs to indicate that the roads were one-way.

The knuckleheads behind him were gaining, and the passenger slid out onto the windowsill and leveled his pistol.

That was it. Third light. “Three-two-seven? I won’t need you anymore, thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Roger that. I’ll check in later.”

Holding his breath, Moore hung the hard right down the next side street and floored it. He gasped as he rocketed down the alley, turned another hard left, careened off a Dumpster, and kept on moving. He was coming up behind the V Bar, which would be on his left-hand side.

He checked his six o’clock — clear for now.

A car shot across the intersection ahead and turned head-on, and with a start he realized it was the punks following him. They’d anticipated his move. They were supposed to be dummies. What was wrong with them? Why had they gone smart? Now they were playing chicken, and Moore had nowhere to go.

He reached into the backseat, tried to grab one of the guns — the guy’s on the floor or the Glock tucked into the dead man’s waistband — but both were still out of reach.

Then he slowed, was about to throw it in reverse, when another car raced up behind him, an older Range Rover with a huge Hispanic male at the wheel — big as a sumo wrestler or Samoan warrior — and Moore’s colleague and fellow JTF team member Fitzpatrick was riding shotgun. Were they the cavalry or the execution squad? Either way, Moore was sandwiched between members of rival cartels with a body in his backseat.

Consequently, he did what his training dictated. He prepared to abandon ship. He threw the car in park, whirled back and seized his Glock, then tossed himself out the door, rolling across the pavement to the cover of two parked cars. The driver’s door turned into a pincushion for small-arms fire.

God helps those who help themselves. Time for Moore to help Moore.

He crawled around to the back of the car, stole another look to the street, and saw that the two men following him were dead, their backs peppered with gunshot wounds.

Since Fitzpatrick was with the rest of the Sinaloas, Moore decided that if he surrendered, his colleague might be able to better control the situation — at least get them all talking instead of shooting. If Moore decided to bolt, he might not only draw their fire but be back to square one: still trying to get a meeting with the boss. Of course, getting the cartel’s attention like this was not what he’d had in mind.

His name was Scott Howard. What would a solar-panel businessman do, a guy whose most dangerous moments came on the golf course, not the mean streets of Juarez?

He thought a moment more, then shouted in Spanish to the men from the Range Rover. “I’m an American. Here on business! I was kidnapped!”

“Yeah, you were kidnapped by us,” answered a man who was definitely not Fitzpatrick. Moore peeked around the car.

A leather-clad gangster with a hoop in his nose kept tight to the back door of the Range Rover and tugged free an empty magazine from his pistol.

“Those guys shot at us. Killed the guy in my backseat,” Moore explained.

Another voice now: “We know. Come out here!”

As Moore slowly rose with his hands in the air, the gun in his right hand clearly visible, two men with shaved heads broke off from the group near the Range Rover. They carried the bodies of the two punks back into the Toyota with the red panel, then one guy jumped behind the wheel and drove off. Moore watched this as three other men surrounded him, including the tattooed guy with the nose ring. Fitzpatrick was with them and would not meet his gaze. Good. Another guy got in Moore’s car, backed out, and vanished.

The fat driver of the SUV weighed in at four hundred pounds, Moore estimated, with a belly that shifted in great waves, even as he breathed. Here was the infamous Luis Torres, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel’s enforcer gang and Fitzpatrick’s “boss.” He wore a black baseball cap turned backward, and a lavish pattern of lightning-bolt tattoos seemed to crackle up and down his massive arms. On one biceps he sported the intricate likeness of a skeleton dressed in flowing religious robes. This was Santa Muerte, the saint of death worshipped by drug traffickers. On a stranger note, his eyelids had been tattooed with pictures of another set of eyes, so when he blinked, it still appeared he was staring at you. The image was nearly as unnerving as the man’s face — so thick, so round, so cherubic that he strained to see past the folds of fat framing his eyes. And the teeth …the rotting and yellowed teeth, destroyed by a junk-food diet, no doubt, were enough to make Moore grimace.

But he didn’t. He sighed …At least they’d stopped shooting. For now.

Okay. He’d been captured by the Sinaloa Cartel. Check.

Don’t get yourself killed, he thought. And don’t let them see you shaking.

Torres pursed his lips and frowned at Moore’s gun, the long hairs on his chin sweeping forward like a broom. “What’re you doing with this?” His nostrils flared as he now spoke in English.

“I told you, I’m an American here on business.”

“So am I.”

“Really?”

Torres snorted. “I was born in South Central L.A.”

“I’m from Colorado,” Moore said.

“So you’re on business? What kind of business?”

“Solar panels.”

“And you’re carrying a gun?”

“I took it from the guy in the backseat.”

Torres’s gaze grew harder, and he snickered. “And you always wear a shoulder holster just in case you find a gun?”

Moore realized only then that his hoodie was still unzipped.

“You’re already dead. You know that? You’re already dead.”