Marion said, “I want to answer your question, but first I need you to excuse me for a minute. I’ll be back.”
Crocker looked at his watch. It was almost 2300. Time was clicking past as they talked.
He walked over to Lane and pointed to his timepiece.
“I know,” Lane said.
“Then what the fuck are we waiting for?”
“You’ll see.”
Ten minutes later, car doors slammed outside and CIA station chief Max Jenson entered with a Hispanic deputy. Jenson was a tall fair-haired man in his late forties who looked as big and strong as a defensive tackle. He leaned on the edge of a table and asked for a quick update, which Lane provided.
Then Marion returned with a short woman who wore a black-and-silver wrestler’s mask. He said, “This is Maria. She and other members of her family have been working for El Chacal for years. Now she’s cooperating with us.”
Ivan Jouma, the Jackal, lay in a lounge chair watching a prerelease DVD of The Lone Ranger starring Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp. What he saw was a working edit without music or sound effects. When Depp first appeared on the screen dressed as a bare-chested Tonto with white-and-black face paint and a black crow on his head, Ivan frowned.
“What the fuck?” he asked in Spanish. “Is he trying to look like a brujo or a nagual? Or is he making a joke?”
“I can’t tell,” the gray-haired doctor answered as he measured Jouma’s blood pressure. He knew that a brujo was an Indian witch doctor and a nagual someone who reputedly had the ability to transform into an animal. But as a man deeply rooted in science, he didn’t believe in either.
“How are the gringas?” Ivan asked.
“The mother became very agitated and had to be sedated, but the younger one is calm.”
“Good-looking ladies. I wonder what they’re worth.”
“How is your appetite, Jefe?” asked the doctor, changing the subject and pressing the skin under Ivan’s right ribs.
“Bad.” Ivan winced.
“Pain?”
“All the time.”
“Energy level?”
“Sucks.”
The doctor stopped, lowered Ivan’s shirt, and checked the results of the latest blood tests, which revealed that the hepatitis C type 1 that his client had been suffering from for years had reached the acute stage.
“What do you think, Doc?” Jouma asked.
The doctor rubbed his chin. In his estimation, the infection caused by the virus now affected eighty-five percent of Jouma’s liver. The oral ribavirin he’d given him and the interferon alphas he had injected twice a week for the last three years were no longer working. The side effects of the interferon included agitation, depression, and flulike symptoms.
Jouma froze the film on a frame of Johnny Depp walking along the top of a moving train. “If you have something to tell me, give it to me like a man,” he ordered. “Don’t be afraid.”
The doctor picked a folder off the cabinet to his right that had Olivia Clark’s name on it. After quickly confirming that the results of the recent blood tests matched the information on her stolen medical chart, he said, “Jefe, I recommend that we go ahead with the procedure.”
Jouma nodded and popped an Altoids peppermint into his dry mouth. “Fine. If that’s your opinion, we do it.”
The doctor cleared his throat. He wanted to clearly explain the risks, which included the body’s rejection of the new organ, infection, depression caused by the very long period of convalescence, and the danger of chemical dependency because of the need for strong painkillers.
There was peril for him, too, because if anything went wrong, he would be blamed and probably killed in a painful manner.
But before he could articulate any of this, Jouma’s private cell phone rang.
He picked it up and barked, “What?” in Spanish.
As the doctor reviewed the results of the Doppler ultrasound, echocardiograms, and blood tests one more time, Jouma listened, frowned, then asked into the phone, “Who told you this? The gringo?” Jouma nodded. “You think we can trust him?”
As the doctor listened to the jefe talk, he considered possible clinics in Mexico and nearby countries where the procedure could be performed.
He saw Jouma glance at his diamond-encrusted Hublot Big Bang chronograph watch, which retailed for over a million dollars.
“Move the merchandise to Tapachula and call the Federales,” Jouma barked into the phone. “Then call that video guy, Nelson. I want to record the señora’s final words, then send them to her stupid husband.”
Chapter Ten
Expect problems and eat them for breakfast.
– Alfred A. Montapert
It was a few minutes past 0500 by the time they launched-Crocker in the first SUV with Suárez, and Akil and Mancini following in the dark-blue Suburban with Davis and Nieves. They wore an assortment of straw hats and baseball caps pulled down low, sneakers, boots, and casual clothes to look like gardeners or day workers.
Underneath they had on lightweight eight-millimeter-thick Level III-A+ Dragon Skin Pinnacle Armor capable of stopping 7.62x25mm steel-cased lead-core bullets traveling at 1,450 feet per second. In warm weather the specially designed DuPont Supplex shoulder straps and carrier were designed to wick moisture and excess heat from the body to the surface of the fabric for release, but Crocker felt sweat dripping down his chest to his stomach and into the front of his jeans.
The sun hadn’t even begun to rise and the air was already dense and hot. They were driving west down a two-lane road past ranches, factories, subdivisions, and rough hills. Short, squat Maria, seated next to Suárez at the wheel, told him in Spanish to turn off at a dirt road. They bounced for a few minutes past a pen filled with chickens and pigs and stopped at a fence.
Akil hopped out and clipped the lock on the gate. Then they rolled into a scruffy little yard, parked behind some trees, and walked twenty feet to a shed. Maria pointed to a locked wooden box next to where some old clothes were hanging. Suárez kicked it open and retrieved two sets of keys.
“Por aqui,” Maria said as she led the men to two old pickup trucks loaded with lawn mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, rakes, clippers, and other assorted gardening equipment. She still wore the black-and-silver wrestler’s mask. Judging from her hands, she appeared to be a woman in her twenties. She stood about five feet two and was soft and round, with black hair.
“When are these guys going to show up and find their trucks missing?” Crocker asked Suárez.
Suárez spoke to Maria and translated back. “She says they don’t work anymore. We gave them green cards, so they closed the business and are moving to the States.”
“Where in the States?” Akil asked.
“Orange County.”
According to the arrangement Lane had made with Maria, each man had been paid thirty thousand dollars, and they’d been given an additional twenty thousand for the two trucks.
The vehicles were hardly worth it-a beat-up black regular-cab Ford F-150 with a missing front fender and 176,000 miles on the odometer, and an extended-cab silver Chevy S-10. But they worked, as Suárez and Mancini discovered when they drove them out of the yard and back onto the paved road.
The sun started to rise to their right, turning the dusty, polluted air an unhealthy-looking shade of brownish yellow.
From the passenger seat of the lead Ford, Crocker once again consulted the hand-drawn sketch of the estate Maria had given them. “There’s only one entrance? She’s sure of that?” he asked Suárez.