Ballistic(136)
His second site was a bust as well. It was a safe house for the Black Suits, but when he entered, kicking in the door and clearing the rooms with his AK, he found no one there and no drugs, guns, or money. He thought about just torching the house, but it was on a city street in the Zapopan district of Guadalajara, and he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t end up burning down an entire block. So he climbed back into the Mazda and sped off to the east.
There were three more places on his to-do list; he hoped like hell he could find something worth destroying in at least one of them. He looked at his GPS.
Next stop, another Black Suit safe house, this one in Chapala. Court hoped this wasn’t a dry hole as well.
De la Rocha slept on a chaise lounge on the cool balcony just outside of his bedroom. He liked the feel of the outdoors. It reminded him of his time in the army, though in the army he wasn’t exactly sleeping on a balcony off an opulent master bedroom in a hacienda on his own 200-hectare property.
Spider was behind him, in the bedroom, sitting on a high-back chair positioned in front of the door. His M4 rifle lay across his lap. Extra magazines jutted from a bag next to him.
With no warning Nestor Calvo Macias barreled through the door. Spider launched to his feet, hefting his weapon as he did so, but the older man ignored him, stormed past, shouted out to his sleeping patrón on the balcony.
“The Gray Man hit the safe house in Chapala!”
De la Rocha sat up slowly on the chaise lounge and rubbed his eyes. “Chapala? Madre de dios. Did he steal the money we have cached there?”
“He did not steal it. He burned it.”
DLR cursed, rubbed his face some more. “¡Qué chingado! How much?”
“All of it. We had roughly seventeen million U.S. dollars palletized and awaiting transfer to the banks. I’ll get the figures from accounting and give you the exact amount.”
“And he just burned it? Set it on fire?”
“Sí.”
“What about the men guarding the—”
“One dead. One more missing that we assume—”
“And all the rest? Surely, we had more men guarding seventeen million dollars!”
“We had a dozen men there. The rest are alive; they did not know there was any problem until the fire started. They never saw the Gray Man.”
“Fucking execute every one of those stupid pendejos.”
“Sí.” Spider said, and he leaned out into the hallway. He barked commands to one of his underlings, sealing the fate of the survivors at the Chapala safe house.
“Daniel,” Calvo said, a soft pleading in his voice. “In four days he has performed nearly one dozen operations against us. I estimate the value of capital loss and production loss to be, conservatively, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty million dollars.”
“He is costing me more than twelve million dollars a day?”
“Conservatively.”
“But how long can he continue?”
Spider spoke frankly. “Mi jefe. Our organization is set up to effectively fight the military, the federal police, and the rival cartels. We are less equipped to target one man with the mobility and skills of the Gray Man. There is no way to know how long he can operate before we get him.”
Calvo interjected, “We think it is possible he is getting his intelligence from Madrigal, but we don’t know that he is working with the Madrigal organization.”
“Your counterpart in los Vaqueros, remind me of his name.”
“Hector Serna Campos.”
“Right. Reach out to him. Tell them it is war.”
“Daniel, going to war with Madrigal right now would only cost us more money. We cannot—”
De la Rocha screamed as he stormed from the balcony into his bedroom. “Do not tell me what I cannot do! They are fighting a war with me right now, through this one man!”
“We do not know for sure!”
“I know!” de la Rocha screamed, spit flew from his mouth, and he screamed again, a guttural cry of anger and frustration, pent-up rage without an outlet. “I had this man! I had this man in front of me in chains! I could have pulled the trigger on my pistol and ended this madness a week ago! Why did I not do this? Why did I not kill that pendejo? I’ve lost so many men because I did not pull the trigger.”
Calvo said, “He’ll keep killing your men if you keep chasing him. He’s too good!”
De la Rocha regained control of himself. He took a few breaths, rubbed the back of his bare neck, and then waved a dismissive hand. “Doesn’t matter. Men are easy to lose. Pride? Pride is a very difficult thing to lose.”
He turned to Spider. “My decision is made. As of this moment, it is all-out war on los Vaqueros.”