“We’ll have to see how things develop,” Pope said quietly. “I’m not sure Mexico is the place for you. You don’t speak the language, and Crosswhite’s a big boy.”
“He’s got vulnerabilities, Bob: a pregnant woman and a little girl to worry about.”
“What did you expect, Gil? That I would pay him and not use him?”
Gil let out an impatient sigh. “All I’m asking is that you consider his circumstance.”
“I have,” Pope said. “It’s the circumstance he’s put himself into. Crosswhite doesn’t use his head when it comes to women. He never has. Be careful you don’t start falling prey to the same lack of judgment.”
Gil was annoyed when they got off the phone, but he reminded himself that so far Pope had always played him straight and that he owed the man a lot.
He was coming from the shower when the door to his room burst open, and three burly men covered in tattoos bum-rushed him, tackling him onto the bed and raining down punches. The blows landed like sledgehammers against the side of his head, and he went unconscious.
When Gil came around, he was duct taped naked to a chair, and his mouth was taped shut. Four ugly men sat around the room staring at him with vacant expressions. Blood was leaking into his left eye, and his head throbbed. At first he thought they were Blickensderfer’s people — which would have been bad enough — but then he took a closer look at their tattoos.
They were Bratva — the Brotherhood. Russian Mafia.
This is it, he told himself. And it’s gonna be ugly. He closed his eyes for a moment, just long enough to say good-bye to Marie and to promise himself that he’d go out with as much dignity as possible — but he didn’t have much in the way of confidence. These men were professionals at taking away a man’s humanity.
11
The gringo sniper’s name was Rhett Hancock, and he was no longer the innocent, towheaded little boy his mother had taken to church on Sundays. He was now afflicted with a sickness — a brutal sickness that went well beyond the post-traumatic stress of war. Something inside of him had long snapped, and he knew it. He was addicted to riding the meteor of pure adrenaline, and he simply could not get enough of it.
Today he was in a cantina on the outskirts of Acapulco, a once-thriving vacation destination that had recently been all but eliminated from the world’s tourism brochures due to ever-increasing drug violence in the region. Hancock was thirty-five, a former US Ranger and a veteran of both the Iraq and Afghan wars, with twenty enemy kills to his credit. Diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress shortly after the end of his fifth tour, he was honorably discharged from the US Army against his wishes and offered a meager disability pension on his way out the door. With his army career in ruins and no other marketable skills, Hancock had immediately jetted off to Latin America in search of mercenary work.
First he had sought to offer his skills to the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia through a Colombian national he had met in the army. The AUC, or, in English, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, was a paramilitary organization formed in 1997 to fight left-wing insurgents seeking to take political control of various regions within the cocaine-producing country. By 2008, however, the AUC had been labeled a terrorist organization and was broken up by the Colombian government with the help of the US military. So Hancock had turned to the Mexican cartels.
An intermediary had introduced him to Hector Ruvalcaba, and the meeting had gone well. Hancock was impressed with the paramilitary infrastructure of the Ruvalcaba cartel, and Ruvalcaba offered him a lucrative one-year contract that same day. It wasn’t until after he’d assassinated two different competing cartel bosses, however, that he finally learned of Lazaro Serrano’s existence. And once he’d met with Serrano himself, Hancock understood that this was the man who actually pulled the strings of the Ruvalcaba cartel.
Hancock sat in the far back corner of the dimly lit cantina with a half empty bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila and a shot glass resting before him on the roughly hewn tabletop. He was dressed in jeans and combat boots, a black Under Armour compression T-shirt, and a black cowboy hat. Billy Jessup walked up to the table and sat down with a bottle of Estrella beer. Jessup was not a Latino, but his mother was 100 percent Lakota Sioux, so his features were similar to those of many Mexican people, and he did not stick out among them, being generally regarded as Mexican himself until he opened his mouth to demonstrate his terrible Spanish. He was Hancock’s spotter and intelligence collator, keeping in contact with Serrano’s number two man, Oscar Martinez. He and Hancock had met in the army during the war.
“I’ve got some troubling intel,” he said, tossing a manila envelope onto the table and rocking back in his chair, with the beer resting on his Texas longhorn belt buckle.
The gringo sniper stared at him with his lifeless blue eyes, downing another shot of tequila. “Troubling how?”
Jessup took a drink. “Have a look.”
Hancock opened the envelope and removed a photo of another gringo with dark hair. The man was standing on a street corner with one arm around a pretty little Latina with long black hair, and a small child under his other arm. Hancock put down the photo. “So who the fuck is he?”
“His name’s Daniel Crosswhite, a Green Beret who served in Afghanistan. Oscar’s contact inside CISEN says the PFM went to visit the dude three days ago in Mexico City. The contact doesn’t know why they went to see him, but it was the day after your hit on Alice Downly.” CISEN was Mexico’s version of the CIA.
The half-drunk Hancock sat nodding his head. “I got an idea. Why don’t you ask that faggot Oscar why Serrano doesn’t have a guy inside the PFM? If he did, then maybe we’d know why they went to visit this motherfucker. Isn’t a spy inside the Mexican CIA pretty much fucking useless unless you’re fighting the fucking Russians or something?”
Jessup took another pull from his beer. “Serrano’s been trying to get a guy inside the PFM for two years, but that agency’s locked up tight. Hell, most PFM agents use false names, so there’s no way anybody can even get at their families.”
Hancock lifted the tequila bottle by the neck, thumping the bottom of it against the photo. “So why bring me this?” He poured himself another shot and set the bottle aside. “Who gives a fuck about some gringo and his Mexi-whore?”
“You don’t think it’s a heavy coincidence for the PFM to visit an ex — Green Beret living in Mexico City the day after you assassinate an American official?”
Hancock chuckled. “Maybe he’s a suspect.”
Jessup sat forward to put the legs of the chair back on the floor. “Would you still think it was funny if this Crosswhite was ex — Delta Force and a Medal of Honor winner?”
The gringo sniper sobered up very quickly. “How the fuck could the PFM know a gringo did the hit on Downly?”
Jessup shrugged. “Rumors about a gringo sniper are all over the place down here. Maybe somebody’s finally started taking them seriously. Maybe this guy is some kind of a hunter. Who knows?” He tapped the photo with his index finger. “But I’m telling you: this shit right here ain’t no goddamn coincidence. It’s got something to do with you.”
Hancock elbowed aside the tequila bottle and leaned into the table, a faint spark showing behind his eyes. “Then I’ll go to DF and kill the fucker.”
Jessup shook his head. “Don’t be stupid. There’s no way you can go anywhere near Mexico City now. Besides, we’ve got the Guerrero hit coming up in Toluca. Serrano is serious about making an example of him.”