“Buenos días, Señor Serrano. Gusto en verle.” Good morning, Mr. Serrano. It’s good to see you.
Serrano didn’t reply. He turned and began haranguing the apparent leader of the crew, a skinny fellow with an AK-47 over his shoulder. “You didn’t even put a fucking bag over his head, cabrón? Now he’s seen my fucking face, and we have to kill him! You stupid fucking cabrónes — all of you!” He slapped the man upside the head and stormed out of the room, hissing angrily over his shoulder, “Get rid of him!”
He shouted for someone to follow him on his way out of the building, and a heavy door slammed shut.
Vaught lay waiting for the sniper to reappear, but he did not. The men milled around the room for a minute or two, talking among themselves as they discussed who would kill the American. Suddenly there was a horrendous burst of automatic fire. As the bodies dropped around him, Vaught closed his eyes, waiting for the lights to go out.
An empty magazine clattered against the concrete, and he looked up to see one of the cartel members smiling crookedly down at him as he slipped another thirty-round banana clip into the AK-47 and pulled back the charging lever.
“Can you sit up?” the fellow asked in Spanish.
“I can try.” Vaught rolled to his back, and with some effort did manage to sit up on his own.
The skinny gang leader, now sprawled out on the far side of the room, riddled with bullets, began to choke on his own blood, and the gunner put a single round into him, silencing him for good.
The gunner then crouched behind Vaught and slipped a key into the handcuffs.
“I’m Mendoza,” he said. “An undercover agent with the PFM.” This was the Policía Federal Ministerial, or Federal Ministerial Police, an agency formed in 2009 to fight corruption and organized crime throughout Mexico, modeled loosely after the FBI.
Vaught sat rubbing his wrists where the steel had bruised him. “Where were you earlier, when my people were getting slaughtered in the street?”
Mendoza shrugged. “I learned of the planned attack only a few minutes before it happened. By then, there was no way for me to send warning without getting myself killed. I’m afraid my saving your life is going to cause the PFM a lot of trouble. I’ll probably get reprimanded for not letting these people kill you. It’s taken eighteen months to work my way this deep into the cartels. Now all that time is entirely wasted. After what I’ve done here, I can’t risk going back to them as the lone survivor. They’d kill me whether they believed me or not — just to be absolutely sure.”
“Well, I’m really sorry about that,” Vaught said.
“You should be, cabrón.” Mendoza helped him to his feet. “What you did was stupid. You don’t have the authority to pursue criminals in Mexico. Your job was to protect your people, nothing more.”
Vaught swayed slightly, and Mendoza guided him to a chair, taking a phone from his pocket. “I have to call my superiors now to find out what to do with you.”
“I need to get back to my embassy. You can help me do that.”
Mendoza waved a finger. “Your embassy is already surrounded by Mexican security. Right now Lazaro Serrano thinks you are dead. It might be best to keep it that way.”
“Hey, look,” Vaught said. “My people need to know about that sniper as soon as possible. He’s an American, trained by our special forces. What do you know about him?”
“Almost nothing. He’s someone the cartels brought in special for this assassination. We didn’t know anything about him before today, but I did hear someone say he’s been contracting for the cartels for some time.”
“Who said that?”
Mendoza gestured at the dead man he’d just shot. “He said it.”
After a tense telephone conversation with his commander, Mendoza slipped the phone back in his pocket. “As I expected, my superiors are angry I didn’t let these people kill you. They say you asked for it. Now, because of you, my deep-cover operation is blown, and other agents might be at risk. My commander made it clear that under no circumstances are you to go back to your embassy. The PFM will now use you to build a case against Serrano. That will keep me out of the picture and protect my identity — which will also help to protect our other deep-cover agents within the cartels.”
“I’m sorry,” Vaught said, leveling his gaze, “but I don’t work for the PFM. I work for the DSS. I have diplomatic immunity, and I’m getting back to my fucking embassy.”
Mendoza took the stun gun from inside his jacket and set it on the table. “I don’t want to use this again, but I will.”
“Again?”
Mendoza smiled his crooked smile once more.
“You made me piss myself!”
“I had to make sure you didn’t do anything else stupid before I could figure out how to save your worthless life.”
“So what the fuck do we do now? I’ve got a bullet in my arm, and it’s going to need attention soon.”
“Right now the PFM is asking the CIA for permission to use you.”
“I don’t work for the C–I-fucking-A either!” Vaught flared in English.
Mendoza had a hatchet face, bushy eyebrows, and a protruding Adam’s apple. “We’ll soon see who you work for, my friend.”
“Fuck this!” Vaught said, again in English, getting up weakly from the table. Mendoza took up the stun gun and zapped him in the thigh to send him toppling to the floor.
Vaught grabbed his leg. “Oh, you fuckin’ cocksucker!”
Mendoza sat laughing in the chair. “You owe me a life, my friend. So now we’re going to wait until my superiors talk to the CIA.”
“You motherfuckin’ cocksucker,” Vaught muttered, digging the can of Copenhagen from his pocket and putting a dip into his lip. “You just wait!”
3
Wearing a camouflage snow parka, Gil Shannon lay well ensconced within a copse of tall pines halfway down one of the most challenging ski runs in the mountains above the village of Malbun, a .308 Remington modular sniper rifle pulled into his shoulder as he eyed his target: a man dressed in a yellow ski jacket and green pants. He and his blond fiancée were flanked by five security men, all of whom had pulled to the side of the run for a breather. A heavy snow had begun to fall over the past few minutes, and with the coming of late afternoon, Gil knew this would be the group’s last run of the day. If he didn’t take the shot now, it would mean spending a fourth night in the Malbun ski lodge.
Landlocked between Switzerland and Austria, the small country of Liechtenstein covered only sixty-two square miles and was the only nation located entirely in the Alps. Traveling on a Canadian passport, Gil had spent the last three days stalking Sabastian Blickensderfer, a forty-year-old Swiss banker on holiday with his wife-to-be.
CIA Director Robert Pope had targeted Blickensderfer for termination because of his financial ties to the Islamic terrorist organization Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Blickensderfer’s money-laundering operations were well known to the CIA. However, the US and British governments considered him untouchable due to his close financial and familial ties within the Swiss government, which viewed Blickensderfer’s illicit business affairs as inconsequentiaclass="underline" if Blickensderfer didn’t launder AQAP money, someone else would, and at least the millionaire businessman was able to provide useful intelligence on the movements of certain Islamic clerics. This was enough to keep Western intelligence agencies such as the CIA and MI6 from filing serious grievances.