“¿Jefe?” asked the voice on the other side.
“Yes. What do you want?”
“I have good news, Jefe,” his aide said through the door.
“What?”
“Your nephew Luis called from California. He said that your horse Mr. Piloto won the handicap race at Hollywood Park.”
“Señor Piloto?” the Jackal asked, trying to remember if he’d ever heard his nephew talk about that specific horse, or if he’d ever seen it. He’d purchased dozens of quarter horses over the past ten years and housed them in stables in Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico.
“He called it Mr. Piloto,” the aide continued. “I wanted to tell you the news, Jefe, because I think it’s a good sign.”
“Yes, this is a good omen. Thank you.”
“Goodnight, Jefe. Sleep well.”
As Crocker ran along the bay, he focused on the red-and-yellow lights of boats moored in the water. Disparate images flashed in his head-his distraught father leaning over his kitchen table; Ritchie’s bisected body lying on the ground; Holly sitting up in bed in a frilly white nightgown reading, her auburn hair framing her face; Mrs. Clark kneeling in the corner of the shower shivering; the Mayan woman who sold him the Datsun; the Ferris wheel spinning in the amusement park.
The seeming randomness of the images disturbed him, but he couldn’t get them to end, even as he pushed himself harder and faster until his lungs burned and his whole body begged him to stop. Eight miles wasn’t enough.
By the time he had logged ten miles and the images kept repeating and overlapping, he concluded that his brain had been affected by the chlorine poisoning. But that felt like an excuse, and what he wanted was a direction, or a sense of closure. So he kept pushing himself through the sweet night air.
At the fourteen-mile mark, he arrived at the uneasy feeling that some kind of danger waited somewhere in the dark and was about to strike. But as hard as he ran and concentrated, the why, where, who, and when eluded him.
At eighteen miles, he started to feel light-headed. And at twenty-one, he lost consciousness, stumbled, and fell in some long grass.
When he awoke twenty minutes later, he didn’t know where he was, or how he had gotten there. He felt a sharp burning sensation just below his right knee where the flesh had been ripped away. And slowly the unease returned, and the dilemmas involving Captain Sutter and his job, and the situation with Olivia Clark, all came into focus.
As he groped in the dark and pulled himself up, he knew he had to do something to solve them. But he didn’t know where to start.
Chapter Nineteen
The only easy day was yesterday.
– A SEAL Team motto
At six-fifteen Friday morning, thirty-eight-year-old Gloria Maldonado stood before the closet in her small two-bedroom Guadalajara apartment, studying her figure in the mirror and trying to decide what to wear to work. She asked herself whether or not she should wake up her thirteen-year-old son, Ernesto, before she jumped in the shower, when she heard the doorbell ring.
“Ernesto, my love,” she called, glancing at the clock and wondering who it could be at that early hour. Holding the bodice of her nightgown shut, she had turned and started out when she heard the front door open and her son call, “Mom, it’s for you.”
“Who?”
“Some colleagues from work.”
She didn’t know what that meant. Alarmed, she grabbed a robe from the closet and put it on as she hurried to the front door to see who it was and what they wanted.
The three well-dressed sicarios told her that they had been sent by Nacho Gutierrez and needed her help with something immediately. She noticed dried blood on the sleeve of the good-looking one’s shirt. Understanding that if Nacho wanted something, you didn’t mess around, she threw on a blouse and skirt, combed her hair back, handed her son fifty pesos, and told him how much she loved him and that she wanted him to buy his lunch at school and take the bus.
The sicarios walked her to the Escalade, which was parked outside the entrance, and drove her to her office at Inicio, which was a division of Mexican Immigration. As they waited in the lobby, she hurried to her cubicle, turned on her computer, logged in to the system, and pulled up the immigration card that had been filled out by Thomas Mansfield, a Canadian who had arrived in Guadalajara a week ago with three other business associates. She printed out their passport photos and records and gave them to the sicarios, who discussed them in hushed tones as they escorted her back to the Escalade.
They didn’t seem pleased or angry, so Gloria kept quiet. She didn’t know if they were going to shoot her in the head and desecrate her body or shake her hand. After they drove her back to her apartment, they handed her seven thousand Mexican pesos (approximately $544.44) for her time.
She thanked them profusely and got out.
The sicarios turned the Escalade around and took off in the direction of a Zetas safe house near the University of Guadalajara campus. There they watched in wonder as a young one-armed computer hacker named Miguel X used various programs to search databases to try to locate someone named Thomas Mansfield who was or had been a Navy SEAL. When Miguel’s efforts failed to produce a match, he tried the name of one of the men who had arrived with Mansfield, Manny DaSilva. That didn’t work, either.
Miguel X, who tended to get hyper when he got stressed, offered the sicarios coffee and told them not to worry. He explained that he was going to load Mansfield’s photo into a very advanced facial recognition software program called PicTriev and try to match it with visual images from various large databases on the Web.
The process took time, during which the sicarios fidgeted, bit their nails, checked their phones, riffled through Miguel X’s collection of comic books and pornography, and smoked.
Twenty minutes later, Miguel X jumped up from his desk, boasting that he had found an 89 percent match with the photo of a U.S. Navy SEAL named Thomas Crocker, whose picture was published four years ago when he placed eighth in an Ironman competition in Lake Placid.
According to PeopleFinders.com, a man named Thomas Crocker, in his early forties, currently resided on Cherry Oak Lane in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Manny DaSilva, whose photo matched that of another Navy SEAL named Joseph Mancini, lived a quarter of a mile away on Palmetto Drive.
The sicarios rewarded him with ten thousand pesos and ten grams of high-grade cocaine.
Armed with the information about Crocker and Mancini, Guapo, Osito, and Stallone drove to Don Miguel Hidalgo y Castilla International Airport, where they texted Nacho Gutierrez, then caught a flight to Dallas-Fort Worth. Once they arrived in Dallas, they purchased tickets for a connecting flight to Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., then called a Zetas contact in northern Virginia and told him to meet them with an SUV when they arrived at 5:15 p.m. local time.
At eight the same morning, Crocker, Mancini, Akil, and Suárez arrived at Tocumen International Airport, after a short, sleepy ride from Panama City. They had just passed through Security and were buying coffee and sweet rolls from a vendor when they heard a message in Spanish and English over the PA telling a Thomas Mansfield to report to the airport information desk immediately.
“That’s you, boss,” Akil said.
“I remember my alias. Thanks.”
Crocker found a Copa Airlines attendant, who pointed him in the direction of the info desk. There a dark-skinned woman wearing thick glasses examined his passport, then pointed to a green phone at the end of the counter.
“Hi,” he said into it. “It’s Tom Mansfield.”