“Madre de Dios,” I muttered as I thumbed in those words.
Ten minutes after I’d hit Send, I got another phone number in response. I texted that number another four words in Spanish that translated to “Pray for us sinners.”
I received a third phone number about twenty minutes later.
My stomach fluttered as I thumbed in what was supposed to be the final response, this one in English: My name is Dr. Alex Cross. I work as a consultant to the FBI. I saw and spoke to Marco Alejandro last night in Colorado. He sends his regards and asks you to please see me on an urgent matter. Now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
I finished the text with the last lines of the Hail Mary prayer on Alejandro’s specific order. Without the lines, whoever was on the other end of that text would evidently not believe what I’d written.
They believed it. I’d no sooner sent the text and ordered another cup of coffee than my cell buzzed with an incoming message.
Be out in front of your hotel in twenty minutes. No weapons. No recording devices of any kind. You may bring your phone but it will be placed in a lead-lined bag for the duration of your journey.
My journey? I felt uneasy. How far would they be taking me?
I tried to call Ned and John but they didn’t answer. I texted them to call me. The message seemed to go through, but I noticed it wasn’t marked as delivered.
It still had not been delivered after I paid for breakfast, so I tried again out in front of the hotel, facing a busy street with cafés, high-end stores, and other hotels. The doorman asked if I needed a taxi and I told him in my rudimentary Spanish that I was waiting for a ride.
It took several attempts before he understood, and he gestured that I should wait to one side of the doors. I walked over and sat on a small bench and got anxious at the idea that my words to the cartel leaders might be mistranslated and therefore misunderstood. Then again, Marco Alejandro spoke perfect English.
A ruggedly built man who looked like he had Indian blood in him sat on the bench next to me and sipped from the coffee cup he carried.
“Dr. Cross,” he said in thickly accented English, his eyes dancing over me, his expression amused. “You understand the rules, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Your phone, please.”
I didn’t like it but handed him my phone. He put it in a thick pouch.
“Here is our ride, then,” he said. “You will climb in the back.”
He got up, carrying my phone, walked to a white Chevy Tahoe with dark windows, and opened the front passenger door. He paused to watch me open the rear door, then nodded and climbed in.
I followed suit, was unsurprised to see a second man sitting in the seat beside mine and another even bigger man behind me.
“Hands on your thighs, Señor Cross,” the one beside me said after I’d shut the door and the SUV had pulled away from the curb.
I did as he requested and sat passively as he patted me down. He was thorough but found nothing more than my wallet, FBI credentials, and passport.
“He’s clean,” he said.
A hood came down over my head from behind. I tensed up.
The man beside me said, “No need to panic. We’re putting headphones on you as well. I hope you like mariachi music.”
Chapter 63
John Sampson followed Ned Mahoney and Captain Eduardo Rodriguez, their Mexican liaison, down the old green-tiled halls of the central morgue in Mexico City. The place reeked of disinfectant and they saw several autopsies under way in the small operatories they passed.
Captain Rodriguez stopped at a set of double doors. “I must warn you, cell phones don’t work in here. Something about the X-ray machine and natural magnetic lines beneath this building. I always turn my phone off because it goes crazy trying to find a signal and the battery gets shot.”
Sampson and Mahoney thumbed off their phones and put them in their pockets before following Rodriguez into a huge cold-storage locker where bodies awaiting autopsy were kept in individual chilled drawers.
Rodriguez went directly to the three drawers on the bottom, opened the first one, slid the corpse out, and drew back the sheet to reveal the face of a handsome guy who looked to have been in his late thirties when he was shot with a small-caliber bullet that entered between his eyes.
“Enrique Alejandro,” Rodriguez said. “Tortured before they did him the favor.”
He drew the sheet all the way down. He’d been burned repeatedly across his torso and his groin. “The coroner says they used a soldering gun on him with different size tips.”
Rodriguez covered Marco Alejandro’s cousin, slid his body back inside the cold drawer, and opened the one next to it. The corpse was Latino, fit, early fifties, by Sampson’s guess. He too had been burned repeatedly with a soldering gun.
“General Guerra,” Rodriguez said. “His involvement is especially tragic and hypocritical. He had a son who died of a drug overdose and he always said his son’s death was what drove him to fight the narco-traffickers.”
Mahoney said, “His confession says otherwise?”
“You will read it for yourself when we are done here.”
“Give us the highlights,” Sampson said.
Rodriguez hesitated but then said, “The general was under the influence of the cartel long before his son overdosed. The tragedy of his son’s death gave Guerra cover to act as if he were fighting the Alejandros while working on the cartel’s behalf at the highest levels of the Mexican government.”
“And door number three?” Mahoney said after Rodriguez pushed the general’s body back in its locker.
He opened the third locker, pulled out the corpse, and drew back the sheet on a buff man in his mid-forties, blond hair slicked back, shot between the eyes.
“We have an ID on him?” Mahoney asked.
“I have not yet read his confession,” Rodriguez said. “So I personally do not know who he is.”
“I think I do,” Sampson said, coming closer. “Yeah, that’s him. He showed up on the scene when Catherine Hingham was found, said he was her boss and tried to claim her body as part of a CIA investigation.”
“Name?”
Sampson thought about that, remembered how condescending the man had been, how it had annoyed him. “Weaver. Dean Weaver. I’m sure this is him.”
“One way to find out,” Mahoney said. “Let’s go read those confessions.”
Captain Rodriguez got a slightly pained expression on his face as he pushed the CIA officer’s body back into its drawer. “This will be in a few hours, señors.”
“A few hours?” Mahoney said. “No, that is not happening.”
“Special Agent Mahoney,” Rodriguez said firmly. “The confessions are still being processed in our forensics lab. You will be able to examine them once that process is completed, which will be only a few hours.”
They left the cold storage area and walked back down the hallway. Sampson felt his phone buzz with a text, saw it was from Alex asking him to call.
Mahoney said, “Can you at least get us pictures of the confessions in the meantime? So we know what we are dealing with?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Rodriguez said and pulled out his phone.
Sampson called Alex. It went straight to voice mail, which was not part of the plan. At the prompt, he said, “Calling you back, Alex. We were in some kind of cellular black hole. Tag, you’re it.”
He hung up. Mahoney said, “He said he’d answer immediately if we called.”
“He did say that,” Sampson said, feeling the first drip of worry as he looked at his phone. “C’mon, Alex. Where are you when you’re supposed to be sitting in that café waiting for us to reach out?”