Ballistic(146)
Inside Truck Two Calvo screamed at the two surviving members of his detail. “Fight him! Get out and fight him!” The men moved from side to side in their seats, but they were otherwise frozen in terror. They just watched as the man in the motorcycle helmet stood alongside their truck and reached into his bag.
“He has another bomb!” one shouted, but the man instead pulled out a piece of cardboard. He pushed it up to the windshield and the men inside the SUV read the single word written in black upon it.
“Calvo.”
All three men sat silently. The silence was broken by the slapping sound of an iron box covered in tar sticking to the driver-side window of the Suburban. The man in the black helmet stepped away from the vehicle, raised his pistol, and waited.
Twelve seconds later the side door of the truck opened, and Calvo was ejected by the boot heel of one of the two members of his security detail. Immediately, he fell down in thick wet cement that had inched back on the road to his side of the truck. The door shut behind him. He cursed as he tried to stand back up. The man in the motorcycle helmet stepped forward, his pistol still trained on the Suburban, and he grabbed the fifty-seven-year-old by his necktie, pulled him out of the cement and to the side of the road. Court walked backwards up the road, pulling the man with the cement-spackled coal black suit, still covering the SUV with his gun, until he disappeared around the side of the dump truck.
He let go of Calvo and reached into his backpack. He removed a black cell phone and handed it over to the Mexican.
In Spanish the man said, “Press 4. Then Send.”
Calvo did as he was told. Upon pressing the Send button an explosion rocked the canyon road fifty feet behind him. Shrapnel fired into the cement truck and pelted the hillside.
Thirty seconds later the cement mixer moved forward towards the west, and the only men left alive at the scene were buried under tons of rock and dirt.
A phone call was intercepted by intelligence agents from the Black Suits at three p.m. The call was recorded and then played back for Daniel de la Rocha and Spider Cepeda just twenty minutes later. It was determined that the call was placed from a mobile phone, and the caller was the American known as the Gray Man. The call was received on a landline at a Vaqueros safe house in Mazatlan and then patched through to the mobile phone of Hector Serna, chief of intelligence for los Vaqueros.
The entire conversation was in English.
“Who is this?”
“It’s me.”
“Why did you call that number? Where did you get it?”
“The number you gave me is compromised by the Black Suits. Calvo told me himself. I got this number from Jerry Pfleger the other day. I knew whoever answered could get in touch with you eventually.”
“You have Calvo?”
“Yes.”
“Incredible. Still, this line cannot be trusted.”
“It’s clean.”
“How do you know?”
“Calvo doesn’t know about it.”
“What if he’s lying?”
“He is too scared to lie.”
A pause. “Very well. When will you deliver him to us?”
“Calvo says the Black Suits know about the safe house in Tepic. We need to change the location.”
A long pause. “All right.”
“I can take him to the safe house where he was going today.”
“No. They obviously know the location of—”
“It’s the only other place I know of. They won’t be expecting us to hand him over. There is no reason to suspect they will be there.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Do you want him back or not?”
“Of course we want him back.” A short delay. “What time?”
“Midnight.”
“Why not earlier?”
“I think there are others looking for me. CIA. Russians. It will take some time to cover my tracks and get there.”
“We will come to you. Tell me where you—”
“Midnight. The ranch in Concordia. I’ll be there. Bring a lot of men and a lot of guns.” The call ended.
FIFTY-FOUR
At five p.m. the leadership of the Black Suits met in the huge main sala of the Casa de las Olas, an eleven-thousand-square-foot modernistic mansion overlooking the beach fifteen minutes south of downtown Puerto Vallarta on Federal Highway 200.
The men present in the meeting were protected by two dozen more sicarios patrolling the lush ten-acre estate, and they, in turn, were surrounded by Puerto Vallarta municipal police on the payroll of DLR. The cops patrolled the neighborhood in squad cars and sat in a pair of small, armed speedboats out on the water, just past the breakers.
Spider ran the main portion of the meeting while DLR stood next to him.