The man seated across from her was David Whittaker, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). He had thinning gray hair combed straight back, a graying goatee, and wire-frame glasses. He wore a blue polo shirt with his agency’s patch on the breast and a badge hung loosely from a chain around his neck. He rose from his chair to hand Towers a USB key, which probably contained his own presentation. According to his file, Whittaker had been working for several years on the cartels’ gun-smuggling operations and had more recently helped organize ten-member teams based in seven border cities to address the problem. The cartels were recruiting “straw buyers” in the United States, who made purchases of firearms on their behalf and then paid people to bring the weapons across the border. In one of his reports, Whittaker noted that the Juárez Cartel had created an elaborate network based in (of all places) Minnesota to have weapons smuggled down into Mexico. Because law enforcement efforts had been doubled and redoubled in states such as California, Texas, and Arizona, the cartels had resorted to more extreme measures and remote locations to serve as hubs for transport. Whittaker’s contacts also led him to believe that military-grade weapons from Russia were being smuggled up through South America. Going after the cartels’ gun-smuggling operations was at least as difficult, dangerous, and frustrating as was trying to bring down their drug operations, and Whittaker’s report ended on an ominous note: He wasn’t sure the cartels could ever be stopped, only delayed, slowed, temporarily dismantled …
Moore caught the gaze of the man near the head of the table, Thomas Fitzpatrick, who, despite his surname, could easily pass for a Mexican sicario. His father was half Irish, half Guatemalan, and his mother was Mexican. He’d been born and raised in the United States and been recruited out of community college to join the DEA. Eighteen months ago he’d been sent into Mexico to penetrate the Juárez Cartel, but as happenstance would have it, he’d more easily penetrated and become a trusted member of the Sinaloas. He worked for a man named Luis Torres, who was Zúñiga’s right hand and head of his enforcer gang.
Fitzpatrick, whose sinewy arms were covered in tattoos depicting Catholic imagery and whose head was shaven, narrowed his gaze and spoke rapidly in Spanish: “What’s up, Moore? I hope your Spanish is good, because these guys will lay you out in a second if you don’t sound legit. And to be honest, my cover right now is more important than you, so you’d better brush up and forget about all those terrorist languages you’ve been speaking. You running with the big dogs now.”
Moore’s Spanish was excellent, although his knowledge of gang and cartel slang was admittedly lacking. He would, indeed, have to brush up on them. He answered in Spanish: “No worries, vato. I know what I need to do.”
Fitzpatrick, who went by the nickname Flexxx, reached across the table and made a fist, three of his fingers sporting thick gold rings. He banged fists with Moore, then settled back into his seat.
Gloria Vega glanced over at Moore and asked in Spanish, “Take a shower lately?”
“Yeah, but …yeah …I’m still jet-lagging.”
She rolled her eyes and faced the projector screen being lowered by Towers.
Moore squinted at the intelligence photograph of two young Hispanic males.
“I assume you’ve all seen this?” asked Towers.
“Yeah,” Moore began, hoping to demonstrate to the others that he wasn’t a total slacker. “The guy on the left is Dante Corrales. He’s the leader of the cartel’s enforcer gang. They call themselves The Gentlemen, if I recall. The guy on the right is Pablo Gutiérrez. He killed an FBI agent in Calexico. Mr. Ansara would like to get his hands on him.”
“You have no idea,” said Ansara, with a hiss of anger.
Towers nodded. “Our boy Corrales is a very clever young man, but he keeps hitting the Sinaloas head-on. We don’t think his superiors approve of this.”
“Why?” asked Moore.
Towers looked to Fitzpatrick, who cleared his throat and said, “Because of Escuadrón de la Muerte, the Guatemalan death squads. They’re back in action after a two-year hiatus. They’ve reorganized, and they’re killing members of Guatemala City’s meth labs and maritime exporting ops out of Puerto Barrios and Santo Tomás de Castilla in the Caribbean. They’ve also taken out cartel members at the Port of San José and Port of Champerico on the Pacific side.”
“And let me guess, they’re only hitting the other cartels. The Juárez Cartel has not been touched.”
“Exactly,” said Towers. “So if they want to terrorize the Sinaloas, why not use Los Buitres Justicieros? That’s what their most prolific hit team is calling themselves …the Avenging Vultures.”
“And we think at least a dozen of their members are now in Juárez,” said Fitzpatrick. “If you think the regular sicarios are hard-core, these guys are insane.”
“Sounds like a powder keg,” said Moore.
“Torres and Zúñiga know these guys are in town, and they’re concerned,” said Fitzpatrick. “There’s talk of hitting the Juárez guys again, but Zúñiga’s more concerned about securing a tunnel, and he’s unwilling to pay the Juárez Cartel for the rights to use one of theirs.”
“Why doesn’t he dig one of his own?” asked Vega.
Fitzpatrick snorted. “He’s tried. And every time Corrales and his boys come down and kill everyone. They have a lot more money than we do. They’ve got spotters everywhere. A huge network. Corrales has also paid off most of the engineers in town, so they’ll never work for Zúñiga. That little bastard has got the whole place locked up.”
Towers pointed at the photograph. “All right, our problem is this. Corrales is, at this moment, the highest-ranking member of the cartel we’ve identified, and in this case old-school conventional wisdom holds true: If we can identify and take out the leader, in most cases the cartel will fall. These are complex and sophisticated operations, and they’re not run by dummies. I’d daresay it takes a freaking genius to pull off some of the stuff they do. Whoever our guy is, he’s masked himself awfully well, and his organization has become the single most aggressive cartel in Mexico.”
“Persons of interest?” asked Moore.
“Not many,” said Towers. “We’ve investigated the mayor, chief of police, even the governor. You know less-educated guys like Zúñiga keep a higher profile, which satisfies their egos, but this guy is extremely well insulated.”
Towers brought up a color-coded flow chart representing the various facets of the Juárez Cartel’s operations. He continued, “The bottom line is this — we need to identify links the Juárez Cartel might have to terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to meth and coke labs in Colombia and Guatemala, and we need to positively link them to their gun-smuggling operations in the U.S. We also need to identify and attempt to expose the cartel’s contacts within the local and Federal Police forces. That’s phase one. Phase two is simple — we take ’em out.”