It was Henrietta Chong and a WPA news photographer, who fired off several rapid shots of Gannon, Cora and her defense attorney entering the FBI building.
Chong and the photographer were approaching them.
“Any comment on speculation the FBI now has Cora under suspicion?”
No one responded.
“Jack? Any comment on this turn in the case?”
Gannon knew this was his fault, unless Hackett had tipped them.
He shook his head, his stomach tightening.
49
Las Vegas, Nevada
T illy Martin’s face beamed at Vic Lomax from the big flat-screen
It was followed by the scowling mugs of Ruiz Limon-Rocha and Alfredo Hector Tecaza of the Norte Cartel. Then Carlos Manolo Sanchez, the young one. Then Lyle Galviera stared at him. Then the replay of Salazar and Johnson, the dirty cops murdered in the desert south of Juarez.
And here again was the footage of Cora pleading alongside the FBI.
That stupid fucking bitch.
Lomax had canceled his meeting on wagering trends and revenue-per-room percentages, locking himself away in his glass-wall office overlooking The Strip to replay the latest network news reports on the Phoenix kidnapping.
This new information disturbed him. He watched, tapping one of his business cards on his chin.
Lomax knew the drug trade well and figured the young one, Sanchez, was likely a Norte hit man. This was not good. The heat was increasing, all of it brought on by that fool, Galviera, and his stupid bitch.
Cora.
Never in a million years did Lomax expect to see that skank again.
Then, after all these years, comes this shit with her kid, and her reporter brother comes right to his house.
Right to my goddamn home! I should’ve killed the fucker.
Now the shit keeps piling up and the Norte Cartel has gone into full vengeance mode on Galviera.
And now it’s getting too close to me.
Lomax had his own operations with his own business partners.
But his connection to Cora would cost him. Those Mexican motherfuckers were going to drink Galviera’s blood and cut off the head of anyone remotely linked to him. There are truths in the universe that must never be challenged, and one of them is that you do not rip off the Norte Cartel and expect to live.
No matter what he did, his connection to Cora was a liability. He had to do something to remove the risk.
The best defense is a good offense.
He turned the business card over.
A phone number was penned on the back, a very important phone number that Lomax had paid fifty thousand dollars to obtain.
He had a cell phone on his desk, one he’d taken from his casino’s lost and found. He’d use it to call the number, then have a staff member toss it in the fountains at the Bellagio.
Calling the number was dangerous, but it was Lomax’s only way to get his message to the very highest levels of the Norte Cartel-to its very heart.
Because the information he had exceeded any rip-off.
Lomax knew about Cora, Donnie Cargo and the mystery surrounding the murder of Eduardo Zartosa-little brother of Samson Zartosa, the head of the Norte Cartel.
Whether Lomax’s information was true or not didn’t matter to him.
As long as it’s true enough to save me.
He held the phone steady, checked the card and started pressing numbers on the keypad.
50
Chihuahua, Mexico
T he mansion stood on a craggy palm-shrouded hill with a sweeping view of the mountains, fifty miles west of Ciudad Juarez.
The only way to access the property by ground was a winding road whose entrance was gated and guarded by private security officers, ex-soldiers armed with AK-47s.
Other security officers patrolled the grounds on all-terrain vehicles and by horseback. The entire property was fenced with razor wire and necklaced with motion sensors, laser-activated trip wires and several dozen security cameras.
Ownership of the land was not listed on any government records. On paper, the estate of Samson Zartosa, leader of the Norte Cartel, did not exist.
His security was formidable.
His fortress had never been penetrated, although two idealistic federal drug agents on a rogue operation drove near it one night, determined to arrest Zartosa for the cartel’s murders of their fellow officers.
Soon after, their car was found parked at a federal police station-their corpses in the trunk.
Zartosa’s compound was a small village of buildings for his cars, his security team, their quarters and vehicles, their equipment, the servants and other compound staff. Zartosa’s house was a three-story, ten-bedroom colonial hacienda overlooking a man-made pond, gardens, two swimming pools, a private zoo and a small amusement park.
The house had several offices. The largest was Zar tosa’s. Next to it was the office for his second-in-command, his Comandante, Garcia Deltrano.
Deltrano was on the phone, managing a shipment with a troublesome contact controlling Norte routes into New York City. A problem had arisen from a greedy distributor, an ex-Wall Street player whose voice dripped with arrogance toward Mexicans.
“Give me bigger numbers or nothing moves,” he said. “That’s the deal.”
The cartel had taken steps in advance and Deltrano would resolve matters with a few sentences and a few mouse clicks.
“Is this not your nine-year-old daughter entering her private school?” Deltrano sent a photo, then another. “And is this not your wife, only thirty minutes ago, shopping for your daughter’s birthday?” Deltrano sent one last photo. “And here are the overweight, overpaid security men you hired to protect them.” Two white men, naked and bound, guns held to their heads stared in fearful humiliation at the camera. “Do you wish to accept our new number?”
Deltrano quoted a figure that halved that of the original shipment.
Stunned, the American said nothing.
Deltrano whispered a command into a second phone and the head of one of the naked men exploded from a gunshot. The man beside him, drenched with warm visceral matter, screamed for his life.
“This is the last time I ask. Do you accept our new figure?”
“I accept. Yes, God, yes.”
Deltrano ended the call, went to the kitchen and got a cold Canadian beer, a gift from a distributor in Toronto. Upon his return, one of his secure lines was ringing. He didn’t recognize the number. Deltrano checked his state-of-the-art call tracking system. The call was coming from Las Vegas, Nevada. Deltrano answered.
“Si?”
“My Spanish is not so good, so I’ll say this in English, okay?”
The voice was coming through a voice changer, making it sound digitized, robotic. Deltrano listened.
“This is for Samson Zartosa and concerns the unsolved murder of his brother Eduardo twenty years ago in San Francisco. Fate, it seems, has delivered an answer. The mother in the Phoenix kidnapping, Cora, is responsible for Eduardo’s murder. She was there.
“Tell Zartosa that no matter what he hears or sees, all of his attention should be focused on Cora. To prove the validity of my information, tell Zartosa that I know Eduardo died with God in his hand.”
The line went dead.
Who was this caller? How did he get this number? Was this a police tactic? Deltrano’s mind raced. He used the most current phone tracking program, obtained from a military intelligence source; he had linked it to credit card and financial databases obtained through several international banks controlled by the cartel.
The number came up for a cell phone owned by Harry Burgelmeyer, of Muncie, Indiana. A deeper check showed he owned a tow truck company in Muncie. Recent credit card use showed he was a guest at Caesars. Deltrano called the cell phone number. It rang through to the message: “You’ve got Harry. You know what to do and I’ll get back to you. If you need service, call the shop’s twenty-four-hour line.”