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The journey to the office was excruciatingly slow due to an accident, and even with his detachable roof light it took him forty-five minutes to make it through the security gates of his building.

A few of his staff were already there, having anticipated that it would be a big day. Two of them were reading the newspaper featuring a banner headline and an old photo of Santiago. The story proclaimed that the top Templar chief was dead after having been apprehended in a gun battle. The article was short on facts and long on conjecture and hyperbole, which was to be expected. Mexicans were under no illusions that their media existed to tell them the truth about anything. It was more a form of entertainment, and the national pastime was figuring out who was lying more, the papers or the government.

Cruz figured there must have been a leak at the hospital. His team knew better than to talk to reporters; there was no way anyone was less than a hundred percent in his group. These men worked as diligently as Cruz did, having followed his example and committed to treating their job a crusade. Those who had found the pace too demanding were long gone, which was just as well. Cruz believed that he was fighting a war for the very soul and future of Mexico, and these men were his soldiers. Everyone shared that perspective and felt the same way. If the cartels won, Mexico lost. It was a battle between the productive and the predators. And predators couldn’t run a country or operate schools or build roads. Predators could only destroy and steal and abuse. They couldn’t be allowed to prevail, or the nation would be plunged into chaos, just as Colombia had been for two decades, before slowly pulling out of the tailspin.

He had Briones call a staff meeting for his immediate subordinates, who would brief their squads later, and went over the ramifications of Santiago’s death. They would be closely monitoring the situation in Michoacan from their Federal brethren there and would send resources, including soldiers and weapons, as the situation demanded. There was very little upside from Santiago’s death — although a major parasite had been removed from the game, the fear and expectation was that the younger, hotter heads would start a bloodbath in their bids for eminence in the region. It was almost a given that the bodies would start appearing, sans heads, at an increasing rate. Cruz only hoped they wouldn’t see any more daylight shopping mall shooting battles or grenade attacks on densely populated areas, as they had just a few years previous, before Santiago had ascended to the throne.

After the meeting broke up, Cruz motioned for Briones to sit.

“I thought about the whole assassination problem and concluded we need to gather more intelligence before we bring anyone else in on it. Nobody’s going to take this seriously if we don’t have something more that Santiago’s wild claims.”

Briones nodded. “One of the things we can do is see what events will be taking place that will bring the President in contact with the American president. There can’t be that many.”

“Agreed. But we’ll need to get our feelers out into the streets and see if there’s any buzz. Santiago was a blowhard, so he’d have been unable to keep his mouth shut. We need to nose around and find out whether he talked to anyone, and if so, learn what he said.”

“Let’s get Ignacio and Julio in and brief them,” Briones suggested. “If there’s any chatter, they’ll be the ones to pick it up.”

Ignacio Roto and Julio Brava were the two most senior plainclothes investigators on Cruz’s team. They spent much of their time in the streets, carousing and mingling with the criminal element of society in order to keep current on trends and rumors. They were a vital part of the intelligence-gathering apparatus Cruz had painstakingly woven in over the last five years, which, though controversial, was highly effective. The tactics consisted of spreading money around and nurturing informants, as well as buying drugs, soliciting kidnappers and murder for hire gangs, and generally wading waist deep in the cesspool that was the underworld of Mexico City. Cruz’s squad had twenty plainclothes officers working the streets at any given time, and was a lynchpin of his overall strategy. The tip about the meeting with Santiago had come up through the streets, first surfacing as a rumor of a cartel boss seeking to establish a new channel for methamphetamine trafficking into Michoacan, the state that bordered Jalisco, to the south.

Both Julio and Ignacio answered their cell phones and agreed to meet at headquarters in two hours. They both showed up wearing hats and sunglasses, with the diminutive Julio sheltered beneath the folds of a hooded sweatshirt. It wasn’t unknown for the cartels to hire private detectives to take photos of everyone going into headquarters, so both men avoided it as much as possible. But a summons from the boss couldn’t be ignored, so here they were — sitting in Cruz’s office, along with his sidekick, Briones.

Cruz laid out the meat of Santiago’s claim, and instructed them to try to get intel on a contract killing commission targeting the President. He told them to search for a conduit to El Rey; there had to be someone who acted as his agent, handling the hit requests and vetting the clients. That someone would be in Mexico City or Monterrey, the two hubs for criminal activity.

Julio asked to see the interrogation report. He read it carefully before placing it on Cruz’s desk. “If this is genuine, I can tell you where the assassination attempt will take place,” he said blithely.

“Really? And how would you know that?” Briones asked. He had always thought the little man pompous and arrogant, although he was undoubtedly a brilliant detective.

“Simple. The only place I can think of where the American president and ours will be together is at the G-20 conference. It’s obvious. At least, to me,” Julio explained. He shot Briones a smug look of superiority.

“How…where did you get that information?” Briones countered, smelling a rat.

“I have friends all over, and one hears things,” Julio replied mysteriously. The truth was less dramatic.

“Shit,” Cruz exclaimed. “If that’s true, you’re probably right. That’s…what, five or so weeks away? In Cabo San Lucas?”

“Actually,” Julio said. “The location’s in San Jose Del Cabo. They’ve been hard at work building a conference center for the last seven months — there’s a late May deadline.”

“How do you know all that off the top of your head?” Cruz asked.

Julio decided to come clean. “My cousin got shipped over there to help. He’s a civil engineer working on the security systems and presentation equipment for the conference. They’ve got a crew of six thousand trying to get the project completed — it’s been a train wreck to date, with all the usual incompetence and corruption. I hear about it from my sister almost every week when she calls. It’s about the worst kept secret in Mexico by now, and that’s saying a lot…”

“That’s ominous,” Cruz observed. “We have Santiago claiming he’s going to take out two of the most heavily protected heads of state in the world, and the summit taking place a short plane ride from Mexico City in a little over a month, with the U.S. president in attendance? That’s a little too coincidental for comfort…”

Julio looked at each of the men in turn. “I think we need to treat this as a genuine threat. Santiago’s cartel has more than enough money to hire El Rey, and has the motive — the current president’s war on the cartels has probably inconvenienced his group’s resources over the last four years, especially after the grenade attack in Morelia in 2008. Even though that got pinned on the Los Zetas cartel, Santiago’s crew has likely been given a bloody nose, at least — so he’d have reason to want to make a big splash.” Julio considered his next words carefully. “Taking out two presidents would send the message he was one of the big dogs, and a lot of people would support him, at least emotionally. The President’s war on drugs hasn’t exactly bestowed peace upon the country, and he’s pretty unpopular with many.”