There was a pause while everyone digested that information. “I also think it was a bullshit piece of playacting, sir,” said Gibson. “If Nicky had really wanted to kill us tonight, we would be dead meat. Instead, he flips a grenade from a passing car — almost like a kid with a firecracker.”
“Why?” Atkins remained confused.
Swanson said, “To get our attention? To send a message? Who knows? The point is, Marty, that, once again, all three corners of this incident have CIA connections, just like in Mexico.”
“With you as the common link,” the director of intelligence said.
“He knew exactly where we were. That means there’s a leak in the information stovepipe, boss.” Gibson rubbed his palms, but showed no other sign of concern.
The director of intelligence knew that a bad situation had just gotten worse. “I’ll tighten the information flow on this end and try to deal directly with the two of you from now on,” he said. “This new incident may be a break we can use. Right now, you’re all in the same city. Kyle, I want you and Luke to work together until we nail this guy and find out what he’s up to. Swanson is the lead.”
Swanson tensed. He had just been saddled with a partner not of his choosing. “Yes, sir.”
“Gibson, are you on board with that?”
“Yes, sir. We’ll find him. We have to work with the Germans, though.”
Atkins was somber about that idea. The incident had happened on German soil, so there was no way to remain totally independent. And Gibson was right: they would need help. “Very well, I’ll contact the GSG Nine and you work with them. Keep it away from the locals.”
Over the years, Swanson had forged a good relationship with the élite counterterrorism and special-operations unit known as the Grenzschutzgruppe 9 der Bundespolizei, which was always shortened to GSG 9. It was excellent, but the promised stoppage of information at the Washington end had just as quickly been opened on the other, and the short hairs began to tickle his neck. How could they hope to keep the incident away from the police when GSG 9 was technically a police unit and not a military team?
“Marty, I don’t like the way this is going,” he said. “This guy has tried to kill me twice in a week and I’m getting pretty tired of him, but we’re moving too fast. I want to work alone; no cops, no partner — particularly someone like Gibson here, whom I just met — and with much less bureaucracy. It will be impossible to close the information channels, but the fewer people involved the better.”
Gibson looked across the table. “I saved your life tonight.”
“I appreciate that, and no offense intended, Luke, but it changes nothing. We are not a team.”
Atkins stopped them. “With no backup, you’ll be a sitting duck for Nicky Marks. It’s an order, Kyle. You and Luke work it out. And you have to be debriefed by the GSG Nine people. It’s not exactly a secret that somebody threw a grenade in the middle of Berlin tonight. They’ll want answers.”
Swanson scratched an ear. “What’s happening is that we’re playing by rules being set by Nicky Marks. He tried to kill me twice and failed, because I was sloppy. If we throw a full deck of operators at him, he’ll just run away. If we don’t, then he’ll be emboldened to try again, whatever his reason. Next time, he loses. If you want me to be the lead on this, let me lead.”
“What do you think, Luke?”
“If Swanson wants to take that chance, fine by me. He’s hung up on the whole ‘partner’ thing, but that’s okay. I can be his backup and his single contact with the agency. He doesn’t want a high profile, so I can deal with the cops and the stuff he might need. After all, I’m the one who knows Marks best.”
“Done, then. You guys make it work. Let’s find out what’s making Nicky Marks tick.”
The sniper could smell the green of the subtropical jungle of the Yucatán Peninsula. The playground of Cancún was on the toe of the north-facing boot, but outside the tourist haunts the ancient forests still ruled. An underlying stench of rotting vegetation was the predominant odor, and everything was so green the color was almost tangible. It was a palette that spread from bright harlequin to somber avocado, accented by the shadows of the sunlight that fell through the leaves in graceful lines and the long vines that crept around the jungle floor. The sniper’s clothing matched the tangled surroundings. A handmade Ghillie suit stuffed with twigs and leaves and vegetation belied any telltale sign that a human being was underneath it all. Even the skin of the rifle and the optics tube were camouflaged.
Perched among the curling roots of old trees, the shooter felt invisible to the target, Ramiro Delgado, who hadn’t even glanced toward the brush line in the past hour. He was too busy selling drugs and making money. The Mexican cops wouldn’t arrest an American for carrying or using a small amount of almost any drug, but a dealer wouldn’t be as lucky. A vehicle would come along the busy main road out of Cancún and turn left at the crossroad that led south toward El Naranjal, making two more turns onto roads even less traveled until it found Delgado’s mighty GMC Sierra pickup parked in a clearing.
The informant had said that young Ramiro was rich for his age because he operated an all-service drug emporium on wheels, complete with a sophisticated communications suite. He alerted his clientele of the day’s marketing location by Wi-Fi message. The informant was to be one of the day’s customers.
The drugs that Ramiro Delgado carried in the spacious truck bed would be dealt out on a cash basis, cut and resold on the streets of Cancún and Cozumel and up and down the Yucatán coast. Business had been brisk. The sniper waited, not wanting to attract attention by having to contend with collateral damage. Not that killing two dealers instead of one mattered. It’s just that it was an unnecessary complication.
The slender Delgado spoke with the latest arrival at his truck, as he carefully counted through the wad of U.S. bills, then stuffed it in his pocket and walked to the back of the truck to pull out two cardboard boxes. He sliced one open with a knife and handed a small plastic bag — a bolsita—of cocaine to the buyer, who also took out a knife and opened the baggie.
The customer liked what he tasted and stuffed the tiny bag into a shirt pocket, gave his supplier a fist bump for luck, took both boxes, and drove away. Ramiro had cut the coke earlier, and the contents would be diluted even further in a final bit of processing before being peddled at a price of about half a gram for ten U.S. dollars. By then, the product had been reduced to a point that bore little resemblance to the original pure syrup but still packed a powerful kick.
It made no difference to the sniper. Heroin, syringes, cocaine were all part of the drug food chain that would slake the thirsts of partying tourists and Mexicans alike, and maybe even reach up into Texas and farther north, with the price escalating at every step. What was ridiculously cheap for an American tourist in Mexico would be borderline expensive in Connecticut.
The sniper watched him go, then returned the scope to young Mr. Delgado. How old? About twenty-one? Not even shaving yet. Fuck him.
The wind was quiet as the sniper made the final adjustments on the Leupold Mark 4 scope, the distance exactly lasered, and it was time to shoot. Delgado made a note on a little pad, put the money in a safe beneath the front seat, then started punching information into his computer to summon his next customer. He sat very still in the front seat, concentrating on his work.
The sniper inhaled a soft breath, keeping things calm, let it escape, and barely felt the tightness of the trigger as it began to depress, ever so slowly, until it tripped and the M110 rifle fired, its bark reduced thirty percent by the stainless-steel suppressor on the end of the barrel. Even so, creatures were surprised and began their flights and chatter even as the 7.62×51-mm. round took Delgado in the left side, pulping the heart and spinning around the rib cage when it crunched bone. The body spilled across the seat like Jell-O poured from a mold.