On the ICU floor, a complement of nurses made rounds at all hours of day and night. They’d quickly grown accustomed to the armed Federal stationed outside the coma patient’s room. After some initial unease, they now hardly noticed him. He sat quietly across from the door of room eleven, his M-16 laying across his lap, watching the comings and goings in the busy ward. It was tedious duty — the only thing more boring was sitting outside the ward door, where very little went on. The biggest challenge for the officers was staying awake.
Every two hours, a nurse would come and check on the patient, taking his temperature and verifying that all the equipment was still hooked up correctly and that the IV bag hadn’t run dry. Vital signs were monitored at the main nursing station that occupied the entirety of the central area of the ward, where a number of screens showed blood pressure, pulse and respiration readings for all occupied rooms.
Several of the pretty young nurses stopped to chat with the handsome policeman in their midst, but for the most part he could have been asleep with his eyes open. He’d asked one of the doctors what the chances were of the patient coming to; could he be playing possum? — she’d laughed and told him there was more chance he’d grow wings and fly. She’d pointed out the monitoring equipment to him and explained how it worked; they’d see substantial changes to his pulse and blood pressure if he ever came out of the coma.
At six a.m., a new nurse sauntered past the groggy officer, smiling at him flirtatiously and pausing for a few moments to inquire how he was holding up, and would he like her to bring him a cup of coffee on her next round. He accepted the offer graciously as she entered room eleven, clipboard and thermometer in hand.
Once inside, she expertly wedged a chair to hold the door closed, and moved hurriedly to the patient’s side. After a quick scan of the room for any cameras, she took a pen from her blouse and carefully unhooked the IV bag. With steady hands, she unscrewed the pen and extracted a small syringe concealed in its fully-functional shaft. She glanced at the door, pulled the orange safety cap off the needle tip with her teeth and inserted it into the catheter. She drove the little needle home and depressed the plunger. Satisfied that the vital signs on the monitor were still reading normal, she reconnected the IV, slid the spent syringe back into the pen shaft and returned it to her blouse pocket, where it sat innocuously with two other pens.
The entire episode had taken less than ninety seconds. After stepping back to the door and removing the chair, she smoothed her blouse and adjusted her bra so her breasts were nearly bursting out of the snug top. She breezed, smiling, out of the room and waved at the officer, promising to be back in a few minutes with some hot, strong coffee. He admired the fit of her snug white pants as she walked down the hall, and reminded himself there were worse gigs he could have drawn than this. If only something interesting would happen. The boredom was a killer.
Six minutes later, the monitor alarm sounded in room eleven, signaling that the heart rate had dropped to zero, as had blood pressure. A different nurse came running from the far end of the ward, and after taking a brief look, she called for help. A minute later, a team arrived at a jog pushing a crash cart. A harried doctor brushed past them to get to the patient’s side.
For hours, the Federal had fought a drowsy battle against sleep, but now the area around him was a crisis zone, with personnel running to and fro with grim expressions. So captivated was he with the unfolding life or death drama, it took more than thirty minutes for him to realize the nurse hadn’t returned with his coffee.
Chapter 4
At six-thirty a.m., Cruz’s day began with a call at home from the dispatch desk, who sought to patch him in to the ranking officer in charge at Angeles hospital. He pawed the sleep from his eyes and fumbled on the nightstand for the phone, almost knocking his pistol onto the floor in the process. He lifted the handset to his ear and croaked a greeting.
Two minutes later he was wide awake, shivering in his shower as he took a hurried rinsing before heading into the office. There was little point in driving all the way to the hospital to confirm that Santiago had taken his last breath. He had no reason to doubt that was the case. People died in ICU every day, and Santiago’s trauma had been severe. His bad heart had done the Mexican people a favor, sparing them the expense of trying the bastard and housing him, in luxury, no doubt, for the rest of his life. Cruz felt a fleeting spike of guilt; maybe the interrogation with the picana had been a little overzealous and had triggered the stroke, but a darker part of his heart actually hoped that was the case. Whatever, he’d sleep better after helping take out one of the most savage cartel bosses in the country.
The law worked differently in Mexico than in the U.S., and Cruz couldn’t see how his counterparts there ever got anything accomplished. Mexico used Napoleonic law as its basis, where the accused was assumed to be guilty until proved otherwise. It was usually a safe bet they were. In Cruz’s experience it was rare to meet an innocent man, especially in his area of specialty. How the American authorities could hope to be effective when they were constantly hamstrung by inquiries and hearings and attorneys was beyond him.
As he donned his uniform, he thought about the history of the drug racket in Mexico. It had all changed when the established marijuana traffickers, who also moved small amounts of Mexican heroin into the U.S., hooked up with the Colombian cartels and became their shipping arm. This relationship solidified in the 1980s, and soon the cartels were getting paid in product rather than cash. That created a substantial incentive for them to expand and move from transporting to full-scale distribution.
There had long been drug trafficking in Mexico on a regional basis, but once the cartels began getting huge sums of money from their cocaine distribution, the cottage industry developed into a national network. It hadn’t helped that, for many years, before it was absorbed into the current CISEN group, the head of the Mexican intelligence organization, the DFS, had sold DFS badges to the top cartel bosses, giving the traffickers an effective free pass to do as they liked. But the real power came to Mexico’s cartels once the Colombian syndicates imploded, leaving a vacuum that was filled by their Mexican partners. In a matter of a few decades, a small smuggling scheme in Mexico became a mega billion dollar enterprise, and the violence had escalated in proportion to the wages of sin.
Now the country was in crisis, as the government battled the cartels, which had a propensity for butchery. The war against them had begun in earnest under President Fox, in 2000, but escalated to the current fever pitch when Calderon became president in 2006. Both presidents had been very sympathetic to U.S. policy, and had cooperated with the U.S. initiative to quash the drug traffickers, which had only resulted in driving the violence levels through the roof.
Cruz clumped down the stairs and hit the button on his coffeemaker, impatient to get out the door. With Santiago dead, there was sure to be a bloody turf war. That would have been fine by Cruz, but innocents tended to get slaughtered at an alarming rate whenever one of these skirmishes flared up.
He gulped down a cup of scalding coffee and raced to his car, anxious to be in the office to brief his team on the likely outcome of Santiago’s passing. He also wanted to establish a game plan to deal with information-gathering, to establish whether there was any hint of a contract out on the President.