Lethal Vengeance

So Ross had gone for it, and wasn’t sorry yet. Ms. X had claimed her name was Sharon Patowsky—clearly false—serving as some kind of “liaison” with the Department of Justice in Washington. He knew the drill for cover stories, legends, plausible deniability and had listened to the sultry voice, agreeing to fulfill her needs.

The guns and other gear had been no problem. Once he had delivered them to hard-eyed “Captain Brinkman”—yet another alias—Ross figured that his role in whatever might happen next was done. But why did he regret that now?

He had a final call to make and placed that from his office, where he checked for taps and bugs routinely twice a day. It stood to reason that the contact number was a front, would certainly be disconnected after Ross left confirmation of his errand, likely via voice mail.

But he had it wrong on that score. There was no recording, no robotic voice instructing him to press 2 for English and leave his message at the beep. Instead that sultry voice came on the line after a single ring.

“How goes it, Mr. Ross?” she asked.

“Delivery complete, ma’am.”

“Thank you for your help on this. We won’t forget it.”

Ross didn’t ask who “we” might be. In fact, he never got the chance. The line went dead, no parting chitchat, no goodbye. He let five minutes pass then tried the contact number from his cell phone, maybe living dangerously.

And he heard, “We’re sorry. The number you’ve reached is out of service at this time.”

Likely forever.

So much for the sexy voice and Ross’s tiny part in something that might prove to be explosive, maybe hot enough to blow the roof off Ciudad Juárez. But there was still a chance he could keep track of it.

And why the hell not, if he took precautions?

Ross had been a gambler all his life, beginning when he’d joined the Corps. And truth be told, he missed the action, maybe more than it was healthy to admit.

Sometimes Bolan begrudged the needs of his own body. Hunger, sleep, whatever—all of them got in the way when he was on a roll. But sometimes, getting started, there was nothing else to do but pause and think, no matter how the passing time burned like a steady drip of acid in his brain.

So he was eating now—tamales and a side of rice, served in a foam take-out container from a drive-through restaurant—and studying the maps Tim Ross had given him, comparing them to notes he’d taken when he’d met with Barbara, listing addresses for potential targets in his search for Hal Brognola.

The restaurant stood in the city’s Colegio district, which lived up to its name by hosting a dozen institutes of higher learning. Its central location also gave Bolan a wealth of choices for thrusts in various directions, depending on the target he selected to begin his task of running Brognola to ground, or locating his kidnappers. Conversely, if he had been carried farther off than Ciudad Juárez, Bolan would have to deal with that problem when it arose.

Meanwhile, he had to start somewhere.

During their fly-by meeting in El Paso, Barbara had supplied him with the names, addresses and unlisted phone numbers of the top cartel men in Ciudad Juárez. If Stony Man could pluck that information from the air, sitting three thousand miles away from the Chihuahua killing grounds, it stood to reason that Mexico’s federal and state police must also know exactly where to find the district’s leading narcotraffickers.

Kuno Carillo and Rodolfo Garza both had extradition warrants waiting for them in the States, their list of charges spanning every felony from smuggling tons of drugs to terrorism, an untold number of murders, plus a raft of lesser counts including weapons violations, money laundering, kidnapping—take your pick. The stumbling block to their arrests: in recent years, tension between the Mexican president’s office and the White House had impeded any US operations inside Mexico, including capture of the war-torn nation’s leading criminals.

On top of that, police corruption often shielded prime offenders—and, as Bolan knew too well, that was a two-way street. Mordida, the time-honored bribery that many underpaid officials throughout Mexico considered as their rightful due, was frequently as rife in Washington, New York, Miami, LA—take your pick—as anywhere south of the Rio Grande.

Bolan had long since given up on fixing that pervasive problem, if it could be fixed at all. He had a more specific task and this time his attention had been narrowed to a laser point.

One man to find, alive or dead, among 1.5 million native residents and thousands of tourists swarming over what promoters liked to call the “Borderplex.” So many hiding places, innocent civilians to avoid and cops to dodge when Bolan started rattling cages, hoping to shake something loose.

And he was starting now.

Chapter Three

Somewhere in Ciudad Juárez

As Hal Brognola came awake, he was aware of four things instantly.

The first was pain. Aside from minor bruising he’d received while grappling with his kidnappers at the Gateway Rio Grande Hotel, his neck still hurt from the injection he’d received during that scuffle and his head ached now, as well. He’d been sedated for a second time, with chloroform, which left a sickly sweet taste in his mouth and tingling around his lips and nostrils from the sopping rag that had knocked him out.

Okay. At least pain meant he wasn’t dead.

Second, Brognola realized that he’d been moved. He was no longer zip-tied to the wooden chair he’d occupied before, but rather laid out on a table of some kind, secured in place with leather straps across his chest and waist, around his wrists and ankles. From the chill, he knew it was a metal table, which put him in mind of autopsies, and that was bad.

Not dead, he reassured himself once more. At least, not yet.

Third thing: his burlap hood had been removed. Now he was blindfolded, but not with simple cloth. It felt more like one of those sleeping eyeshades he’d seen people wear on airliners and sometimes in the movies, where some actress partied through the night then slept the day away. The part over his eyes felt almost silky, lightly padded, fastened with elastic stretched over his head.

And finally, wherever he was now, the atmosphere had changed. Instead of being in a normal room—that concept almost made him laugh, but the big Fed restrained the impulse—this one felt clammy, as unfinished basements often did.

Oh, and it stank of death.

Brognola fought an automatic sense of panic, wrestling with it until his pulse and respiration simmered down. He didn’t want to think about his wife, Helen, waiting for him to call, time stretching out until she might be on the verge of panicking herself. She’d have no reason to suspect that he was out painting El Paso red, fooling around, much less that he’d forgotten her or their nightly call whenever he was forced to be away from home.

No, she would realize that something had gone wrong, preventing him from keeping their phone date. But what would be her next step? Lacking an El Paso telephone directory, she couldn’t call around to hospitals asking if he’d been in some kind of accident. She could reach out to the El Paso county sheriff’s office and/or the municipal police, but that felt like a stretch.

The FBI? And tell them what? That Hal Brognola, who’d left the Bureau years ago and climbed much higher on the DOJ command ladder, was maybe, possibly, at risk in Texas?

Two high-level G-men were among the delegates attending the El Paso conference. Wouldn’t they know if he had gotten mugged or crashed his rental car and wound up in the nearest hospital? Brognola still had no idea what time it was outside his reeking cell, but someone must have missed him at the meeting—or they would, when it convened.

And then?

He couldn’t say.

None of the other conferees were in the know regarding Stony Man. Helen knew some of it—her own abduction, way back when, had made sure of that—but she had never seen the Farm and didn’t have any of its unlisted phone numbers.

Who do you call? Brognola thought, and nearly laughed again.

Helen did have a contact number for emergencies, if he was somewhere other than his nine-to-five office. Leaving a message there would put some wheels in motion but would offer no immediate relief.

Those two unspoken words rang hollow in Brognola’s mind. Immediate relief.

Try any kind at all.

The bottom line: nobody but his captors knew where he was being held or what they’d planned for him. Ransom kidnapping was a modern plague in Mexico, an average of thirteen hundred cases yearly, victims often slain by their captors after payoffs were received. Over the past decade, abductions nationwide had doubled, many of the latter crimes committed by cartels as a side business or by dedicated gangs that did no other work.

If he’d been snatched for ransom, there would be demands for cash, counter demands for proof of life, and that could drag on through long-winded haggling. The up side: if that was why he’d been abducted and confined, Brognola stood a fifty-fifty chance of coming through alive.

On the other hand...

The way they had him laid out made him think of torture, what some spooks and politicians euphemized with double-talk about “enhanced interrogation.” That suggested his abductors might know more about him than the simple fact that he’d been in the middle of a law enforcement conference about border security.

And if they went that route, the up side disappeared. He would end up like Kiki Camarena from the DEA, in Michoacán, or Daniel Mitrione of the CIA, in Uruguay.

With slow death on the menu, Brognola knew he had to do everything within his power to escape. But what power, and how?

If he could only free one hand...

Somebody’s coming.

The big Fed could hear a door open and close then heavy steps descending what he thought were wooden stairs. It sounded like one man...and was he humming to himself as he descended?

Yes.

To Brognola, it sounded like that old José Feliciano song about Christmas.

For Christ’s sake. “Feliz Navidad.”

El Psicópata was subconsciously aware of humming, but he made no effort to curtail it. He was safe at home, immune to interruptions from the world outside, free to behave as he saw fit, indulging in the only pastime he truly enjoyed.

He leaned toward happy tunes, which might strike some people as paradoxical, but the internalized music had seen him through some rugged times, beginning with the earliest of childhood memories. He’d been too young to understand or to mourn losing his parents in the auto accident that—he had later learned from yellowed newspapers and bootlegged autopsy reports—had turned them into twisted skeletons of blackened ash.

From his first home, which he could not recall, he had moved on to a state-run orphanage in Zacatecas—picture sodomy endured from older boys and staffers, whippings when he first complained before discovering that silence was expected of him—then to foster homes that ran from bad to worse.

A dictionary had enlightened him that “foster” was a verb, meaning to stimulate, encourage and promote. Each so-called home, for him, had stimulated fear, encouraged pain, promoted nightmares, till he woke one morning and decided something had to change if he was going to survive.

He’d torched the fourth place after moving silently from room to room wielding a butcher’s knife. The police had been too blind, stupid or apathetic to see past the fire that had left his foster “parents” and their spoiled brats in the same shape as his birth parents. As a result, they’d sent him to another home. While that childless couple was sincere enough, eager to please, the damage suffered by El Psicópata prior to meeting them was irreversible. He’d aged out of the system twelve months later and was on his own, determined to avenge himself upon the world that never wanted him.

From Zacatecas City he had traveled the twelve hundred miles due north to Ciudad Juárez. He’d started out hitchhiking along MX 45 and taught himself to drive by watching Good Samaritans who stopped for him. A few miles south of Torreón he’d killed a honeymooning couple, left them to the desert as a sacrifice and driven on in their car. When he was halfway to Delicias, a fellow hitchhiker attracted him and learned that there were no free rides. Two cars and three more sacrifices later, he’d rolled into Ciudad Juárez, running on gasoline fumes, and abandoned his last ride—a little something in the trunk—near an industrial park.

Already, the Chihuahuan capital had earned a lawless reputation, luring gringo tourists with its reputation as a town where “anything could happen” and frequently did. Low-paying jobs were plentiful in Ciudad Juárez, permitting him to put a roof over his head, but when it came to “honest work,” El Psicópata had little patience. It was easier to jack-roll drunks and gringo tourists straying off the city’s beaten paths. Some managed to survive his avid ministrations, others died, and no one of importance seemed to care.

Within another year he had accumulated enough cash to purchase an old house one mile from a Petróleos Mexicanos oil refinery in far southwestern Ciudad Juárez. It had six rooms on the ground floor and, down below, a basement that he’d transformed into a workshop and playroom.

He had not earned his nickname yet. That came later, after Juárez courted infamy for murders by the warring drug cartels and the rising death toll from feminicidio striking down prostitutes. Journalists from the United States described it as a “playground” for serial killers.

Not a single killer obviously. Who could work that long and hard, achieve so much, within a few short years? But as El Psicópata came into his own, adopted a creative signature, collected certain souvenirs that pointed to a single hand at work, his legend grew. He hadn’t bothered keeping score, could only estimate how many souls he’d reaped so far, before his life had taken a dramatic turn.

El Psicópata had been hunting, chose a teenage prostitute who presumed to call herself Chantelle Amor, but hadn’t noticed when her pimp observed him and—against all odds and common sense—reported him to a detective from the FIA. The lawman came for him alone, another strange anomaly, and literally caught him red-handed.

Another deviation, then. Instead of arresting him, baring the secrets of his subterranean rec room and packing him off for sixty years at La Palma prison, Lieutenant Chalino Prieto, El Psicópata’s personal savior, had had a better idea.

A sadist without boundaries, it seemed, could earn protection by performing certain favors for the FIA and for cartels that had their own armies but sometimes wished to shirk responsibility for certain acts of mayhem. They’d be offloaded to independent operators with a history of dodging the police. Some cast-off prostitutes, police informants, possibly a lover or a relative of some soldier in disfavor with his boss who’d benefit from sampling the sorrow of loss but hadn’t earned extermination yet.

In short, a homicidal psychopath was useful in Juárez, and by no means the only one at large.

The present sacrifice was not El Psicópata’s normal prey. He favored females younger than himself, although his sacrifices had included men, as well, a few minors, a handful of old indigens. This one was different: a former man of substance by the look of him, though he’d come down to nothing in the end. Captain Prieto, promoted since striking his bargain with El Psicópata, left nothing with this one to identify him, and it mattered not.

His orders were simple: make it seem as usual, disposal offering no pointers to the truth, assuming the remains were found.

Which left him worlds of what gringos described as “wiggle room.”

He could afford to take his time and relish the experience.

Hacienda de las Torres

Bolan scanned his target from a block out, through his Leupold BX-1 binoculars. The neighborhood—at least this part of it—was seedy and presumably a menace after dark. It was an hour off from sunset, too long since Brognola had been lifted from El Paso. Bolan planned on teaching local predators to walk in fear, just like their decent neighbors and the tourists who occasionally strayed into this part of Ciudad Juárez.

Assuming they could walk—or breathe—when he was done.

In any case, he had a message to deliver and he didn’t need a living gofer to carry it back home.

The district took its name from Avenida de las Torres—Avenue of the Towers—running north-south for miles, directly through the dark heart of Juárez. In this section, the towers ran toward blocks of public housing that were barely habitable, high-rise breeding grounds of crime. Life was cheap here, thanks to teenage gangs and cartels fighting over turf, not caring who got caught up in the crossfire.

Bolan wasn’t looking at one of the housing projects now. His target was a warehouse owned and operated by members of the Juárez Cartel, defended—so they thought—by what appeared to be a couple dozen thugs with weapons openly displayed, and probably an equal number on the inside.

He had no good reason to believe that either of the two warring cartels had snatched Brognola from El Paso. Even with persistent leaks and the payola rife in Washington, only a chosen few, all at the highest level, knew about the covert operations he directed. The number who could offer up specifics to the enemy would hardly fill a large booth at a pricey restaurant. More to the point, if someone had been selling Stony Man’s secrets, a blow should’ve been struck against the Farm, not Hal Brognola, when he was at a conference more than halfway across the continent.

There had been attacks on Stony Man, costing the on-site team and Bolan dearly, but he had no fear of that being repeated anytime in the foreseeable future.

No, he was starting with the drug cartels because, between them, they controlled Juárez in every way that counted. Sure, the cartels existed in Chihuahua by the sufferance of federales and the politicians who appointed them, but gangland overlords, by definition, had to know what was occurring in a city they controlled or hoped to claim.

Bolan was certain of one thing: someone in Ciudad Juárez knew why Brognola had been snatched, who had abducted him and where he could be found, either alive or dead. The clock was running and, to get results without undue delay, Bolan was starting at the top.

Not literally at the gated dwellings of Kuno Carillo or Rodolfo Garza yet, but by the time those top-flight narcotrafficantes got his message, he’d be knocking at their door—and maybe blowing down their houses.

First things first.

When every second counted toward survival but you had no leads on the solution to a lethal problem, cool heads normally prevailed. Which didn’t mean that “cool” and “calm” were synonyms.

Juárez was on the verge of an apocalypse. Its self-appointed rulers simply didn’t know it yet.

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