Serrano sat puffing a cigar. “Is this new chief supposed to have killed all seventeen men himself?”
Ruvalcaba made a face. “Of course not. My point is that he apparently possesses the strength of will to hold the police force together even in the face of his brother’s very public assassination. ”
Serrano shrugged. “So the Toluca police have rallied around the memory of their martyred chief. We’ve seen it before. Juan Guerrero was a brave man—a man of the people. It’s only natural they would stick together long enough to fight a battle in his name. After all, they are Mexicans, are they not? It’s our fault for underestimating them. Now we’ll do it right. We’ll send Hancock back to Toluca with orders to kill ten or twelve policemen in the street, all in broad daylight. That will put a most definite end to their resolve, I assure you.”
Ruvalcaba demurred. “I don’t believe it’s that simple. But it doesn’t matter because Hancock won’t go back to the same city twice. I’ve asked him before, and he has always refused. He considers it too dangerous.”
“He works for us,” Serrano said. “He goes where he’s told.”
Ruvalcaba cocked an eyebrow. “You tell him that.”
Deciding to leave the issue for the moment, Serrano gestured at the large yellow envelope he’d placed on the table when he first arrived. “That is a gift for you. It will take your mind off our problem in Toluca.”
Eying the politician, Ruvalcaba reached out and picked up the envelope. He shook out all eleven files onto the table and sat looking them over. “Are these — these are PFM agents!”
“Straight from the hands of the CIA,” Serrano said with a twisted smile.
“Puta madre!” Ruvalcaba pulled one of the photos free from its staple. “This man was one of mine!”
“Luis Mendoza?” Serrano asked.
“You knew already?”
“The CIA told me yesterday afternoon. Mendoza and the American DSS agent are helping the PFM to build a case against us.”
“That can’t be,” Ruvalcaba said. “I’ve been told they were dead.”
“The PFM falsified the crime scene. Both are still very much alive. Vaught has disappeared, but we will get this pig Mendoza to tell us where he is, and Hancock will kill him for us. The gringo sniper has even more to fear from him than we do. You’d better plan on three or four simultaneous abductions. Once word gets out that Mendoza and his family have vanished, the other agents in that file will take extra precautions. And forget the Toluca police for the moment. We’ll send Hancock after Mendoza. He’ll be more than happy to help once he realizes there are witnesses who can place him behind the rifle that killed Alice Downly.”
39
Midori Kagawa had come to work for Pope at the CIA as an analyst and computer programmer even before graduating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when Pope was still in charge of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). For the past ten years, she had been blindly loyal to him, deferring to his judgement on all matters. Recently, however, she had noticed a change in Pope. There was a coldness to the CIA director now where before there had been only the distracted genius concerned with protecting his operators in the field.
Midori believed she knew the cause of the change. Pope had been shot twice in the chest the year before, in two separate assassination attempts. He himself had shot the second attacker to death at point-blank range, and though Pope had made a full physical recovery, he had never met once with a psychologist. There were times now when Midori could see that he was struggling with the emotional trauma of the previous year, and this convinced her that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress.
Since the discovery of Turkish gold in the French storage unit, Pope had become obsessed with expanding the reach and power of the Anti-Terrorist Response Unit. Midori believed that he had set unattainable goals for the new special mission unit — such as reaching into the House of Saud to assassinate members of the Saudi royal family whom Pope had found to be complicit with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the same terrorist network responsible for the now-infamous attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi.
Midori viewed this objective as pure fantasy. Whether an ATRU assassin left evidence or not, the royal family would readily suspect CIA involvement — viewing the lack of evidence as evidence in and of itself — and with Saddam Hussein long dead, Saudi Arabia now had much less to fear in the region, and thus much less reason to tolerate the CIA’s picking off minor members of its family.
It was true that a lesser member of the House of Saud — a naturalized American citizen—had been instrumental in aiding Chechen terrorists to purchase a pair of Russian suitcase nukes eighteen months earlier, but the Saudi royal family had accepted no responsibility for this, instantly disinheriting the man in the wake of the attempted nuclear attacks on US soil.
While Midori remained prepared to assist Pope in his plans for expanding the ATRU to the best of her considerable abilities, she was not prepared to sit idle while he effectively turned his back on the operators who had helped him gain control of the CIA. Without the direct involvement of Gil Shannon, Daniel Crosswhite, and Mariana Mederos, the US Naval Fleet in San Diego Bay — including two brand-new aircraft carriers — would have been destroyed in a nuclear explosion, and Robert Pope would have been run out of JSOC on a rail. As it turned out, Pope was hailed as a hero before the Senate, and his appointment as director of the CIA had been approved unanimously.
Midori had only briefly considered discussing her concerns with Pope, realizing that to even voice an opinion on the matter would preclude any future assistance she might want to offer Gil, Crosswhite, or Mariana. The way things stood, Pope trusted her implicitly, and she needed to keep it that way in order to remain outside his suspicions. So she didn’t view helping Gil save Sabastian Blickensderfer’s life as a betrayal of Pope’s trust but rather as an act of loyalty to the man who had enabled Pope to ascend to power.
The concern weighing most heavily on Midori’s mind at the moment was Pope’s willingness to allow Clemson Fields such a free hand in dealing with the Alice Downly assassination. This was another matter she didn’t dare offer an opinion on for fear of arousing suspicion. Fields had scheduled a flight to Mexico City via a CIA aircraft without providing any itinerary. The CIA’s deputy director, Cletus Webb, had signed off on the flight without asking a single question, fully aware that Fields was Pope’s point man in the Mexico crisis.
At first, Midori assumed that Fields had consulted with Pope before scheduling the flight, but that assumption proved false, after she’d asked Pope in passing, “Any idea what Clemson Fields is doing in Mexico City?”
Pope had merely shrugged. “I told him to fix the Alice Downly problem. He’s probably using the earthquake as cover to get into the capital unnoticed. Agent Vaught made a real mess of things down there, and we’ll have to smooth Mexico’s ruffled feathers at some point, so it might as well be now. Don’t concern yourself with Fields. He’s been around a long time.”
Something else worrying Midori was that Pope had expressed no concern for Dan Crosswhite’s well-being since the quake, nor had he directed her to attempt contact. So she decided to make contact on her own, using Dan’s private number and catching him in the middle of training the Tolucan police officers.