“Let’s go, before the Gray Man pushes that button on his phone.”
Court did not push the button on the mobile phone, as there was no explosive hidden in the courtyard of the seaside restaurant. The Black Suits lost Gentry in the crowd of the Malecon, the busy beach promenade of Puerto Vallarta. Court ditched his waiter uniform in an alley, went through the entrances and out the exits of a half dozen bars and eateries, then climbed onto a parked pickup truck, leapt to a second-floor balcony of a beachside apartment building. He would spend the night on this balcony, curled into a ball on a soft patio chair, the sea breeze blowing against his face.
Below him the Black Suits ran through the streets, drove convoys of SUVs and pickup trucks through the foot traffic, grabbed shorthaired and goateed Americans and pushed them up against walls, shone tactical flashlights in their faces, and then shoved them back on their way in frustration.
The local cops were out in force as well. They were hunting the Gray Man at the behest of the Black Suits. Gentry imagined word would have gotten to the CIA by now, any American black ops teams in the area tracking him would be racing into downtown Puerto Vallarta.
He wondered if Gregor Sidorenko had operatives in Mexico hunting him, too. If they could find him in the Amazonian jungle, it was a safe bet the Russian mob boss would have a crew here.
But none of these forces had the power to search every apartment in the entire city. He was safe here for a night. And by morning they would have given up, they would have assured themselves that he’d slipped through their net again.
Court scrolled through e-mails on his phone, all from Hector Serna, intelligence chief for the Madrigal Cartel. Each e-mail was a nugget of information. The address of a Mexico City bank; the tail number of a cargo aircraft known to run meth and black tar heroin for the Black Suits; addresses or satellite coordinates of safe houses, warehouses, parking lots of vehicles all purportedly owned by de la Rocha’s organization.
Court’s target list was an embarrassment of riches.
He sent Serna a text message, requesting some items that he would need the following day. Once Serna replied with details of the drop-off of the goods, Court put the phone in his pocket and looked up at the stars.
He heard another confrontation below, angry men shouting at confused civilians.
To a man, Spider’s sicarios were scared of Spider. And Spider was surely afraid of Daniel.
Court was a single operator, which freed him of suspicion of others within his organization, simply because he had no organization. He was a lone man with neither friends nor close associates.
He had to be suspicious of everyone, trusting of no one, and he preferred this to working for a group that could turn on him in an instant. This had happened to him in the past. And he preferred this to working for a handler who had double-crossed him. This had happened to him in the past—twice.
Court lay on the softly padded teak chaise lounge, looked at the beautiful night above him, ignored the honking horns and the killers below him, and he knew that this would be his last true rest for many nights to come.
He thought of Laura.
FORTY-NINE
Daniel de la Rocha’s estate deep in a canyon at the foot of Sierra del Tigre was his largest and most palatial. He’d named it Hacienda Maricela, after his youngest daughter, and he came here to relax as often as his travels would allow. At present his wife and children were at their home in Cuernavaca; it was better suited for kids, thought Daniel, and he was careful to keep la Santa Muerte out of that particular property, if only to placate his devout-Catholic wife.
Hacienda Maricela was a mammoth early twentieth-century home and hunting lodge surrounded by two hundred hectares of private forest. The nearby town of Mazamitla provided its local police force to augment the hundred-man security detail that protected the Black Suits’ leadership when they stayed at the residence, and a private airstrip, a heliport, and a paved road dotted with checkpoints that led out of the canyon and up to the highway towards Guadalajara provided safe and easy access for Daniel and his men.
De la Rocha’s men had even built a stop on the rail line that passed through the forest so that large goods could be delivered by freight train.
The property was also Daniel’s favorite place to train with his men. There were rock walls, obstacle courses, a rappelling tower, an outdoor long-distance firing range, a dojo, and myriad other opportunities for the ex-military men to hone their martial skills. DLR flew his Eurocopter through the canyons and ravines, horrifying his men with his death-defying flying.
The morning after the dinner in Puerto Vallarta, DLR and Spider were training in the hacienda’s massive indoor firing range. A few of Spider’s men stood around and watched, and Emilio Lopez Lopez stood just behind his principal, protecting him here even in Daniel’s own home.