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CHAPTER SIX

Gary Manning used his key card override on the door. The electronic indicator light flashed red, then amber, then green. The automatic lock snapped back with an audible click, and he turned the lever handle. The door swung open under his touch then stopped as the chain caught.

Manning growled like a bear and put his shoulder to the door. The chain popped loose with a sharp sound and the door flew open. Hawkins rushed in, his silenced pistol up and ready.

He used the weight of his body to keep the door to the hotel room open as Encizo rushed into the room hard on his heels. Manning followed.

Phoenix Force stopped and stared.

Her rubber dress pushed up above her thighs, Bellucci straddled the nude al-Shalaan like a cowgirl on her pony. In one hand she held the end of a corded rope fashioned into a choker around the Arab powerbroker’s neck. With her other she used a riding crop to urge the hopping man into continued motion. From the welts and livid red marks on the man’s buttocks the dominatrix had not been shy about using the whip.

With each buck Bellucci hopped, causing her augmented breasts to bounce wildly. Al-Shalaan was barking something as the woman struck him. Phoenix Force’s dynamic entry caused the pair to snap their heads around in shock.

Bellucci screamed as she saw the men rush in. Al-Shalaan threw himself straight to the floor, squeezing his eyes shut against the vision of four sound suppressors bearing down on him.

Manning blinked, stunned by the incredulous imagery before him, then training took over and put his conscious mind in the passenger seat.

“Freeze!” he shouted in French. Then added, “Secure the room.”

Hawkins and Encizo immediately stood and pushed deeper into the suite, methodically clearing the room as James rushed toward the intertwined sex partners under the unwavering cover of Manning’s pistol.

“Don’t shoot!” the woman shrieked in terror, using French as Manning had.

“Stay down!” James snapped, and shoved her clear of al-Shalaan.

The featherweight woman tumbled off her partner’s back and slid across the marble tile of the floor. Her riding crop went spinning away. She curled into a terrified ball. James slid his pistol back into its shoulder holster and reached down with his free hand to snatch the loose end of the rope wound around al-Shalaan’s neck.

He jerked the man to his feet, pulled the auto-injector clear and jabbed it into the side of the terrorist facilitator’s neck. A second dose went straight into the man’s bloodstream. James shoved the man against the wall and let him slide to the ground.

“You want to dose the woman?” he asked Manning.

“Clear!” Encizo and Hawkins called in French from deeper inside the room.

“Yeah,” Manning answered.

The Canadian holstered his pistol as Encizo and Hawkins came back into the entranceway. Drawing his auto-injector, he moved toward the cowering prostitute. She tried to scramble away from him, but he was too quick and too strong for her. He pinned her against the bar. Her arm swung desperately, knocking a tumbler of ice and gin to the ground where it exploded into glass shards with a pop like a gunshot.

“I’m sorry, this won’t hurt,” Manning said in French, finding manhandling the woman a distasteful task.

Mission first.

He leaned his weight against her body and applied the auto-injector into the soft, smooth flesh of her neck. The woman’s heart was racing in terror, and the drug affected her almost instantaneously. He lowered her to the floor, avoiding the spilled liquor and broken glass.

Manning rose and surveyed the scene. James was using a tactical folding knife to cut the ropes from around the neck of the unconscious al-Shalaan. Hawkins was quickly shoving the Saudi prince’s attaché case, cell phone and laptop into a black nylon gym bag. Coming across the man’s suit jacket lying on the floor, the Southerner lifted the man’s leather wallet from the inside pocket and threw that in, as well.

Encizo was at the open door, scanning the hallway for witnesses and bystanders while covering the slumped bodies of the guards. He had collected guns from every man and dropped them inside a waist-high ceramic vase set beside the entrance to the room. Manning was satisfied that the operation was unfolding as smoothly as could be expected.

“We’ve picked up our uncle and we’re coming home,” he said into his throat mike.

“Copy,” McCarter and Price echoed.

“Get the wheelchair,” Manning said to Encizo.

Encizo disappeared around the edge of the door as he darted down the hall. Manning turned and crossed the room’s foyer to help James hoist al-Shalaan’s limp body off the floor. Behind them Hawkins had methodically made his way around to the woman’s purse, dumping the contents out onto the bar.

He let out a long low whistle as he shifted through the mess. “Jeez, how much drugs does this woman have?” He shook his head as he pulled up the menu on her phone and read some numbers, quickly scanning for prefixes that might be important. “Nothing.”

“You got everything?” Manning asked.

“Yeah. All we have time for. I haven’t found the room safe, but it wasn’t on our op plan anyway.”

“Let’s go,” James said.

Encizo came back into the room, pushing the wheelchair ahead of him. Without preamble James and Manning slung the unconscious body of al-Shalaan into the seat. The big Canadian stacked the man’s loose clothing on his naked lap. This was a discreet hotel. If a VIP was being escorted dead drunk and naked to a waiting car by his entourage, then it was best not to make the situation hotel business.

Phoenix Force moved out of the room and passed the sprawled bodies of al-Shalaan’s guards. They turned down the hallway opposite the elevator bank. They moved quickly in a quintessential VIP protection pattern.

“Let’s go, guys,” McCarter said in the earjack. “The valet is giving me grief.”

“Pay him off, we don’t need the heat. The package is naked.”

“Whose fault is that? Just hurry. This fussy little man out here has numbered days if he blows that goddamn whistle at me one more time,” the ex-SAS commando said.

“I believe him. We’d better get moving,” Manning said.

“It’s nice to know cooler heads prevail,” James muttered.

Phoenix Force reached the end of the hall and opened a door set off to the right of the stair access entrance. They stepped into an Employees Only area where the hotel maids kept their cleaning carts and the bellhops cached folding trays for room service. A freight elevator stood to one side of the long, narrow staging area.

They moved quickly to the elevator, and Manning pulled a firefighter override key from his pocket and called the lift straight to the floor.

The elevator door opened with a pneumatic hiss and Encizo pushed the wheelchair inside.

McCarter’s voice came over the com link. “I’ve got sirens.”

“Copy,” Manning said. “We’re headed to the lobby now.”

The doors sealed shut and the elevator jerked as it started its descent. The inside of the freight elevator was deep and wide, big enough for a small forklift to fit into. The walls were dented and painted a flat, institutional white above metal plating that ran about halfway up the sides. It smelled like cleaning products.

McCarter spoke into the com link. “I’m moving to Route Bravo. The first gendarme has arrived.”

“Copy,” Manning acknowledged.

The elevator slowed, then halted and the door slid open. A rail-thin bellhop with slicked-back hair looked up in surprise.

Manning stepped forward in the manner of an arrogant bodyguard and brushed past the man. “Move!” he snapped in German.

Behind him Phoenix Force rolled out of the elevator and began to navigate the warren of halls behind the hotel’s lobby, heading toward the loading docks. They caught some stares from janitors and building workers, but no one said a word to the hard-eyed men.

They hit the back dock moving briskly. As if taking a cue from some off-scene director, McCarter pulled up into the loading bay. He was driving the stretch Hummer as part of the cover, right down to the chauffeur’s uniform. He locked up the independent disc brakes and jerked the heavy vehicle to a stop. Manning heard the sound of the automatic locks disengaging and quickly jerked open the back door on the big vehicle.

Hawkins and Encizo put their hands under al-Shalaan’s arms and catapulted him out of the wheelchair as James pulled it away, thrusting him through the open limo door. There was a shout from behind them, but the team ignored it as they leaped after the unconscious man and into the vehicle.

McCarter slammed his foot to the gas pedal before Manning had time to pull the door closed behind him and the big vehicle hurtled out of the loading dock and onto a side street.

“What’d you do?” McCarter demanded.

A Fiat suddenly appeared in front of him and he jerked the stretch Hummer into the other lane to avoid a rear-end collision.

In the back, the Phoenix Force commandos rolled up against the side of the vehicle with the sudden sharp swerve. They struggled to get the unconscious Saudi into a seat and a safety belt around him. James managed to click the buckle just before McCarter slammed on the brakes.

James was thrown backward, bouncing off the granite mass of Manning and landing on top of Encizo. The men scrambled to fit themselves into seat belts as McCarter slalomed the gigantic stretch Hummer in and out of traffic.

“This is bollocksed!” McCarter snarled to no one in particular.

“Let’s just get to the jetty!” James called back. “It’ll take them a while to shift the pursuit to the water. By that time we’ll have scuttled the boat and be gone.”

“That’s what I’m doing, mate,” McCarter agreed.

He tapped his brakes, snapped the steering wheel to the left, gunned the gas and zoomed past a black four-door sedan, then he cut the wheel back to the right. Behind him a single siren and flashing light bar became three.

Hawkins crawled over the barrier between the backseat and the driver compartment through the open glass divider. He swung down, twisted and slid into the shotgun seat. McCarter darted around a heavy diesel truck stacked with crates and the motion threw the former U.S. army commando up against the passenger door. Hawkins snatched hold of the handle above the window to steady himself.

“Let’s use the improved clearance on this thing,” Hawkins said. “Cut through something, drive over something. Those patrol cars are low-slung.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Hawkins looked at the NSA field version of the vehicle’s navigation device and watched their GPS coordinates speeding through the map display of the French city. He saw a series of switchback turns coming up on the road ahead toward the team’s exfiltration point.

McCarter burned through an intersection against the light. Horns blared in sudden panic, and the Hummer rocked on its suspension like a boxer avoiding jabs. They crested a rise and through a break in the buildings, and the Briton could see empty black under a dark sky. Behind them a police cruiser gunned forward and tried to pull parallel. McCarter swerved to cut him off and bullied the cop back with the superior weight of the stretch Hummer.

“Up ahead. Take that alley,” Hawkins barked, “drive across the parking lot and down the hill. There’s no way the cops’ll follow us in their cars. It’ll buy us minutes as they try to navigate the switchbacks down to the shore.”

“That’s crazy!” McCarter shouted. “We’ll flip for sure.” He jerked the wheel in a tight, 180-degree spin then let it flip back around. “Hold on!”

The Briton reached down and flipped off the all-wheel drive, switching the custom setting to front-wheel control. He tapped the brakes and the rear wheels of the Hummer locked up, screaming in protest as McCarter just managed to slide the rear end around.

The knobby front tires of the sliding vehicle clawed at the asphalt. They met the curb of the sidewalk and bucked up into the air. The rear wheels caught hold and as the front of the Hummer bounced back down McCarter snapped the vehicle back into all-wheel drive.

“Who dares wins,” McCarter gritted.

T HEY SPED INTO THE NARROW alley Hawkins had indicated. The former SAS commando struck a pair of garbage cans with the stretch Hummer’s heavy bumper. They bounced up into the air, spilling trash across the windshield, then bounced off the hood and flipped up over the vehicle’s roof. McCarter snapped the wheel to avoid a larger, industrial-size green garbage bin and scraped the wall of the alley. There was a shower of sparks, then the screaming of metal peeling away from metal as his sideview mirror was snapped off.

“Oh, we’re having fun now,” Hawkins said.

The stretch Hummer rocketed out of the narrow alley and shot across the street. McCarter lay on the horn as he cut across two lanes of traffic. A forest-green Audi locked its brakes as the Hummer suddenly loomed in front of it. The little coupe turned sideways, its rear end fishtailing.

The Hummer’s front wheels struck the edge of the sidewalk and bounced up again. McCarter wrestled the massive vehicle over a parking divider, uprooting a sapling as he did so. He weaved in and out of sitting vehicles as he crossed the parking lot. A middle-aged couple in evening dress appeared at the edge of his headlights.

The woman screamed and the man had the presence of mind to jerk back. McCarter turned his wheel, kissed the side of a parked Fiat and shot past the terrified couple.

“Sorry!” he yelled, knowing they couldn’t hear him. He glanced at his sideview mirror to see how close the pursuing patrol cars were, and then remembered he’d ripped the driver-side mirror clean off the body frame. His eyes darted to the passenger-side mirror. He saw spinning lights emerging from the alley across the street.

He turned his gaze forward again. A thick hedge of arborvitaes formed a wall at the rear of the parking lot. He cut his eyes toward Hawkins, then back toward the wall of foliage. He never slowed.

The bucking of the vehicle as it hit the curb rattled their teeth hard. Then the heavy bumper struck the arborvitaes like a battering ram and the Hummer slammed through and out the other side.

For a second McCarter couldn’t see anything but the rubbery, fanlike needled leaves. The Hummer hurtled through a shoulder-high fence of 4x4 planks and turned them into splintered kindling.

Then there was nothing.

The Hummer hovered for a moment out into open space and Hawkins had an absurd, momentary flashback to his childhood and the television show The Dukes of Hazard. The Hummer tilted as they hovered and they could see the lights of the city plunging down the steep hill below them.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Jack Grimaldi put the nose down of the Scout Defender helicopter and ran for the open water, putting the devastation of the forgotten New Orleans ward behind Able Team like a bad dream.

Below them roads stretched out in geometric patterns like gray scars on black skin. The mounds of rubble stretched out, then gave way before a wall of trees that delineated urban buildup from bayou as sharply as a fortress wall.

In the cramped space of the cargo bay, Gadgets Schwarz and Carl Lyons worked feverishly to keep Blancanales alive. The former Black Beret had often served as the primary team medic, but all of Stony Man’s attention had received combat medic training. They may not have been as skilled as James, or even as skilled as Blancanales, but they knew enough to keep a man alive during a rapid transport. They hoped.

Schwarz tore the stethoscope from his ears and let the air bleed out of the blood pressure cuff he had wrapped around his unconscious teammate’s arm. He looked over at Lyons.

“Pulse racing, BP dropping,” Schwarz said. “Narrowing pulse pressure—he’s at ninety-eight over ninety.”

Lyons nodded, his face grim. “His heart’s beating faster to try to compensate for lack of volume in his blood vessels because he’s bleeding out so fast. The increased heart rate is dumping more blood out to bleed internally so it’s a vicious cycle. If he doesn’t get under a knife soon he’s done, Gadgets.”

“IVs?” Schwarz asked.

“Yeah.” Lyons nodded. “All we can do is try to slam enough volume in there to keep his heart from running dry and seizing into cardiac arrest.”

Schwarz was already pulling 1000 ml bags of clear saline solution from the medic box set in the bulkhead of the helicopter. Lyons snapped some latex tubing around Blancanales’s arm to try to get a vein to rise.

“Jesus, I can see his abdomen filling up with blood,” Gonzales muttered. “It looks like a balloon.”

“Shut up. Don’t speak unless spoken to,” Lyons growled. Then he turned and looked at the Mexican informant. “I know you’re hurting, buddy. That’s one nasty gash. You’ve got to put pressure on it, understand? Get the dressings out of the kit at your feet. We didn’t save you to have you bleed out on the way home.”

Gonzales nodded, and Lyons could see the man was edging into shock. He kept an eye on the Mexican as he prepped the emergency medical equipment he was using on Blancanales. The man’s hands were shaking as he applied the pressure dressing to the ragged, seeping wound in his leg.

The aqua-green light of the tactical bulbs inside the cargo bay cast the huddled men in the same, strange quasi-illumination as night-vision goggles.

The Able Team leader secured the needle into a vein on the inside of Blancanales’s arm, then ran the tubing out and spiked it into the bottom of the saline bag held by Schwarz. Schwarz had another 1000 ml bag dangling between his teeth, and he promptly began to squeeze the bag Lyons had just hooked up, forcing fluid into Blancanales’s leaking vascular system.

Lyons shifted position and began to start an IV in his friend’s other arm. He repeated the process with methodical, almost automatic efficiency. Blancanales would die if he screwed up.

He might die anyway.

Lyons spiked the second bag and gently squeezed, pushing the liquid out. He looked down at the face of his unconscious teammate, and in the uncertain light of the helicopter cargo bay the veteran’s skin was ashen gray.

Schwarz looked out through the windows and saw tangled delta bayou give way to the black waters over the coast. He turned his head and called out to Jack Grimaldi in the pilot’s seat.

“We close?” Schwarz yelled.

“How’s he doing?” Grimaldi shouted back.

“Not very good, Jack!” Schwarz answered.

“Then we’re nowhere near close enough,” Grimaldi replied.

“I KNOW ,” P RICE SAID . Her voice was flat, emotionless. “I understand, Jack. This is part of the game.” Steel threaded itself into her voice. “I understand how bad he is. I have a flight medic crew with the 160th Special Operations Wing coming to meet you at the rendezvous. They have a flight surgeon, two flight nurses and a paramedic. They’ll get him to the secure wing of Bethesda Naval Hospital.”

She stopped talking and dots of color grew on her cheekbones. Sitting near her, Carmen Delahunt and Akira Tokaido quickly looked down at their computer screens. They could hear Grimaldi shouting into his com link through the speaker of Price’s encrypted sat phone.

“Can it!” Price snapped. “I know he could die. There is no way I can justify jeopardizing the Farm to risk you setting down at a civilian hospital. End of story! The NOPD is all over that warehouse now, and what do you think the survivors are telling them, Jack? You think a bunch of men-in-black can just show up at a major metropolitan trauma center and frighten an emergency room full of people and a surgical team into keeping quiet?”

Price lowered her voice and the emotional exhaustion was just as evident as her resolution. “Stony Man is more than just a single operative. You want to save him, you fly your ass off. Stony Base out.”

She clicked the end button and set the phone down. Her face was a flat affect as she turned toward her office. She heard the soft sounds of wheeled tires and turned as Aaron Kurtzman rolled toward her.

She managed a smile as she took another mug of coffee from his beefy hand. “You didn’t make this pot, did you?”

“Nah, you’re safe,” he replied. “Cowboy made it.” He paused, watching her take a sip of the strong brew. “Hal is en route to where Able Team is taking Gonzales.”

Price nodded. “You give him the rundown on Rosario?”

“I did.” Kurtzman looked her in the eye. “Just so you know, he concurs with your assessment about keeping Pol out of a civilian hospital.” He stopped. “Even if…” He let the sentence trail off.

“This is the world we live in,” Price said. “Rosario knows it better than anyone.”

Kurtzman nodded and Price turned away. She put a hand on Carmen Delahunt’s shoulder as she worked a computer screen, a headset over her red hair.

“What’s the word on Phoenix now?” Price asked.

“Unpleasant,” Delahunt answered. “They haven’t initiated communication since informing us they were forced to escape and evade the locals. They haven’t made contact with Charlie Mott at the rendezvous coordinates yet. I have no idea if they’re waterborne or still driving.”

Price turned toward Akira Tokaido, who had his ear-buds down around his neck for once. He was working two keyboards and muttering into the microphone of his own headset. His finger tapped the enter button on one of his keyboards and the screen of his G5 laptop began to scroll information.

“What’s the word on the local law-enforcement response for Phoenix?” Price asked.

Tokaido didn’t turn his head. His gaze jumped back and forth between his screens and his lips mouthed words. He struck the space bar with his thumb and the scrolling screen froze. First the encryption-decryption software translated the signal, identified the language and then routed it to the proper translation program. The result was a rolling screen that looked like a digitalized version of a court recorder’s transcript.

“They have three patrol cars on the pursuit now. They’ve called for backup and six more shift patrolmen have responded. They asked for a helicopter, but we caught a break, as the air unit was tied up with something else. The locals haven’t informed any other agency of the chase—so they must not realize Phoenix is going to go waterborne and exit the country.”

Tokaido looked up and smiled. “Apparently, David’s driving scares the hell out of them.”

“Well, it scares the hell out of me, too,” Price replied, her voice wry.

C ARL L YONS SET A BOTTLE of spring water in front of the silent Gabriel Gonzales. The informant looked grateful and snatched it up. He opened it and chugged down several long swallows. The special-operations medic had left only a few minutes before, leaving behind some white, oblong pills in a paper cup for Gonzales’s pain.

The medic, dressed in an OD green flight suit bereft of name tag or any identification markers, had done his primary survey, dressed the man’s wound, hooked up a slow IV drip to replace the blood loss and deemed him “fit for questioning” before leaving the pills.

Having obviously done this before, he addressed Lyons’s primary concern even before the ex-LAPD detective could ask it. “Don’t worry,” he said, after coming out of the room. “The pain meds won’t keep you from questioning him. They may, in fact, help him a little, loosen him up. He won’t be inebriated or too stoned to remember details.”

The man reached down and picked up his green canvas medic bag and left the building to where an unmarked Ford Explorer was waiting. At no point during his interaction had the medic asked who the hurt man was, or who Lyons and Schwarz were or who they worked for. He’d simply done what was required of him without unnecessary comment and then left. The hard-nosed Lyons was impressed, almost in spite of himself.

He watched Gonzales take his pills and then wash them down with the water. The informant sat in a straight-backed chair in front of a small metal table in a nondescript room. A black lamp with a flexible neck and a powerful bulb sat turned off on the table. There was a tablet of lined paper and a ballpoint pen on the table in front of the man.

Lyons reached over and turned on the lamp. Gonzales blinked against the sudden harsh illumination. Then the big ex-cop turned to where Schwarz was waiting beside the door, and nodded once. Schwarz reached over and turned off the overhead lights in the room.

Now the hard light of the lamp provided the only illumination in the room. It cast a sharp-edged white pool that plunged the rest of the room in deep shadow. Just beyond the reach of the lightbulb Lyons pulled up a chair and sat opposite Gonzales.

Behind him the door next to where Schwarz was standing swung open, revealing a dark hallway. Hal Brognola, his face cloaked in shadow, entered the room, closed the door behind him and took a seat against the wall.

“Gonzales. Excuse the setup,” Lyons said, his voice neutral. “It’s for your own protection.”

“Yeah, sure,” Gonzales replied. In his mind’s eye the Mexican informant was seeing the burly blond-headed man sitting across from him as he had been in the New Orleans warehouse—the automatic shotgun booming, Zetas bodies being thrown around by the impact of the 12-gauge rounds. “Where’s my handler?” he asked. “Where’s Hart?”

“You’ll see him in a bit,” Lyons replied. “He’s taking care of your wife and daughter. I know you’re worried about them, but they’re safe. We pulled you free of that warehouse, and my very good friend took a knife to the stomach to get you out. So, now, in return, you will fill us in on the missing pieces.”

“I don’t know much that I hadn’t already passed on to my handler,” Gonzales replied. “I only knew something big was coming. I thought it was a drug deal.”

“This Bellicose Dawn,” Brognola said.

He was a faceless voice in the shadows. Gonzales instinctively looked up toward the sound and was immediately blinded by the glare of the lamp. He held his hand up, blinked, then looked down. He nodded.

“I passed that much on,” he said. “Then I tried to find out more and somehow Lagos knew that information had gotten out. I was supposed to meet them for a dinner. I wound up hanging in that warehouse instead.”

“What’d you find out?” Lyons asked.

“I only know bits and pieces. It doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t sound like a drug deal.” Gonzales paused and drank more water. “It sounds like an assault, an attack or something.”

“A terrorist attack?” Schwarz demanded.

“Maybe,” Gonzales replied. “I mean, that seems the most likely. But these are Zetas, you know? Former commandos, so maybe it was a takedown.”

“A robbery?” Lyons asked. “Why would they switch from multimillion-dollar drug deals to strong-arm holdups?”

“I don’t know,” Gonzales said. “I overheard Lagos. What I got was that he was supposed to set up a cache and rendezvous point in New Orleans. I gathered the launch point was Puerto Lobos on the gulf coast of Mexico—a fishing village and resort town north of Mexico City.”

“You been there?” Lyons asked.

Gonzales shook his head, but then said, “Yes.” He paused, swallowed. “Puerto Lobos has a regional military commander, regular Mexican army, and also a police chief. Neither of them are averse to narcotics money as long as trouble stays out of their backyard. I was on a fishing trawler converted for smuggling that stopped there once. The Zetas have a way station, mostly for the Colombians, they run there. Airstrip and docks. It is run by Montoya Aslargo. He’s the one I overheard Lagos talking to.”

“Tell me about Montoya Aslargo,” Brognola demanded.

Gonzales shrugged. “I’ve never met him, I stayed on the boat. I know only that he used to be a unit commander in the Mexican border patrol, before I worked for them. Then one day he shows up in a million-dollar hacienda in Puerto Lobos, keeping things running smooth between Lagos in the north and a guy named Reyes running the show in Mexico City.” Gonzales shrugged again. “He loves Celine Dion.”

“What?” Schwarz burst out laughing.

“I don’t know, that’s all I know. Lagos used to make fun of him for listening to her all the time…” Gonzales trailed off. “I’m just saying…Besides…”

“Besides what?” Lyons demanded.

Gonzales shrugged, took a drink from his water, then started picking at the crystal-blue label. “Just rumors, gossip. Stuff I overheard Lagos telling that psychotic bitch of a girlfriend he had, about Aslargo.”

“Just tell me,” Lyons said. “You’re not on TV for Christ’s sake.”

“Just that Aslargo hadn’t really come out of the border patrol like everyone thought.”

“Then how’d he get enough juice to get away with paying off the army and the police? How’d he get the job being the go-to guy?” Lyons snapped.

“He was working for Reyes,” Gonzales answered, his voice very soft.

“Reyes?” Lyons asked. “You said he was the guy running the show in Mexico City.”

“Reyes is Cisen,” Gonzales said, meaning the Mexican National Security and Investigation Center.

“The Mexican CIA?” Lyons demanded.

“Yeah. And this Bellicose Dawn thing? Maybe it doesn’t come from just Zetas in Mexico City. Maybe it doesn’t come from the Colombians. Lagos told la chicka loca that maybe it came from them, from Cisen.” Gonzales shrugged. “This is all I know, man.”

“Okay,” Lyons said. “We have a name and a location. We’ve done a lot more with a lot less.” He reached out one heavily muscled arm across the desk and pushed the pen and notepad closer to Gonzales. “Tell us again. From the top. Write down the names, give us dates.”