“I apologize for the inconvenience, Agent Touhy. I have to fly back to San Francisco tomorrow morning.”
“Right, right, you said that.” Touhy took a sip of the bourbon. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”
“So glad you like it. I’m sorry I didn’t give you any advance notice.”
“Yeah, well, you really cut into my social life.” Touhy laughed rumblingly and coughed. “Smoke?” He held out a pack of Camel Lights.
“Not for me, thank you.”
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to go back to Wild Turkey after this.” Touhy tapped out a cigarette and put it in the corner of his mouth and picked up a red Zippo lighter from the end table. He thumbed the Zippo, lit the cigarette, took a deep crackling lungful of smoke. “Trudy never let me smoke inside the house. Now I grab my little pleasures where I can.”
“I’m sorry about your wife.”
“It was a blessing, believe me. The last couple of years were no fun. I wouldn’t wish ALS on my worst enemy.” He blew out a white plume. “So you work out of S.F.”
His visitor nodded.
“How’d you like Mexico City?”
His visitor smiled. “You’ve done your homework. Mexico City was no walk in the park.”
“It’s where the action is. At least you speak the language. My Spanish is crap.”
His visitor shrugged, took a tiny sip from the highball glass.
“I don’t know how much I can tell you,” Touhy said. “I just keep the source files in my office.”
“You’re too modest. You’re the division security officer. You keep the files on the confidential sources updated.”
“There’s barely any updating to do. Which CS are you interested in?”
The visitor pulled a little spiral-bound notebook from his jacket pocket and consulted it as if he couldn’t remember. “SCC-13-0011.”
“That’s one of ours, all right. Number eleven, did you say?”
“That’s right.”
“What kind of background are you looking for?”
“Any criminal background, for example. Anything that might disqualify him. We want to send a team out here to do a joint debriefing of the CS, but I’ll be honest, my ASAC thinks it’s a waste of resources.”
Touhy took a large swallow of bourbon. “I don’t know what I can tell you that might make a difference.”
“Well, I’m not going to ask his name, of course, but maybe you could give me a rough sort of sketch of the man. Some details. What kind of job he has, where he lives, his standing in the community, all that.”
Touhy filled his lungs again with smoke and narrowed his eyes. Then he exhaled slowly, a narrow stalactite of smoke escaping through his pursed lips. “How’s Renny Haberman doing these days? Still a practical joker?”
“He’s great. Yes, still the office cutup.”
“Will you give him my best? We did basic agent training together.”
“I most certainly will.”
“Huh. Renny Haberman is my orthopedic surgeon. He’s not in the DEA.”
A long, long silence.
“Agent Touhy,” Dr. Mendoza said sadly. “I really wish you hadn’t tried to be clever.”
64
The old man had put up quite a fight, lunging toward the console by the front door, where he kept his DEA-issued.40-caliber Glock 23.
But age hadn’t been kind to him. His knees were fragile as glass, and the bourbon had slowed his reflexes.
Dr. Mendoza subdued him well before he got anywhere near the Glock.
Now the man struggled on the wall-to-wall carpeting near the TV. Flex-cuffs bound his wrists and ankles, duct tape over his mouth. A nasty purplish welt appeared on the supraorbital ridge where Dr. Mendoza had struck him with the leather Denver sap.
In the struggle, Dr. Mendoza’s hairpiece had come loose, but he no longer needed to look like a DEA agent named Hernandez in the San Francisco field division.
It was always preferable to extract information by means of social engineering. He never enjoyed the rougher methods and considered having to resort to them an admission of failure.
But when it was necessary, he was good at it.
He’d dragged the DEA agent’s body, with great difficulty, into the nearest bedroom. It was a guest room that appeared to get little or no use. The only furniture in the small room was a queen-size bed covered in a dark blue polyester-blend spread, two small unmatched end tables, and a bureau. The floor was covered in turquoise wall-to-wall carpeting. A fine layer of dust coated the furniture. Agent Touhy was a widower and lived alone, probably had no housekeeper. Maybe he did a quick run-through with a vacuum cleaner every couple of weeks.
Agent Touhy bucked and struggled, which only made it harder to get him onto the bed. Not impossible, though: Dr. Mendoza was strong. By struggling, Agent Touhy made it necessary for Dr. Mendoza to handle him roughly. He had to pull at the DEA man’s arms, wrench him this way and that. This caused pain.
The pain was nothing compared to what he was about to experience, though, if he did not cooperate.
Once he got Touhy onto the bed, he flipped him over with one hard tug. Facedown, Touhy bucked some more and then gave up. He tried to shout through the duct-tape gag, but the noise was nothing more than stifled, strangled nonsense. He was not going to be cooperative, which was too bad.
Touhy fought some more and tried to turn over, but Mendoza held him in place with one knee. Hog-tied with flex-cuffs on his ankles and wrists, the agent was not difficult to maneuver.
“Agent Touhy, you can make this all go very easily for yourself, simply by telling me the real name of confidential source number SCC-13-0011. That’s all I require. Once you give me the name, there’s no point in causing you any harm. I will leave you here, unhurt, until I’ve finished my work. I think you’ll agree this is the preferred resolution. Just a name. That’s all I ask.”
Dr. Mendoza waited for some signal of agreement. A nodding of the head, something. But Touhy simply breathed heavily through his nostrils, his face down on the coverlet. Dr. Mendoza decided to give the man a chance to agree and make things easier. He braced the back of the man’s neck with one hand and carefully pulled off one end of the duct tape.
Agent Touhy blurted out an obscenity.
Dr. Mendoza smiled. This was nothing more than the powerless tantrum of an infant. “You know the identity of all active confidential sources in the Boston division. Number eleven was just queried yesterday by the San Francisco office. The name is quite fresh in your mind.”
“You’re not Hernandez, you slimy little mother-”
Dr. Mendoza, latex gloves on each hand, replaced the flap of duct tape over Agent Touhy’s mouth. He disliked obscenity and had no use for personal slurs in any case.
From his coat pocket he withdrew a small rectangular nylon case. He unzipped it and opened it flat on the side table. He opened a sterile cotton gauze pad and squeezed a few drops of Betadine onto it. Force of habit: Even when he did his work for the cartel, he always maintained a sterile surgical field. He painted an orange oval on the back of Touhy’s neck.
The DEA agent struggled even harder, torquing his body from side to side. He knew something bad was coming; he knew many of the techniques employed by the sicarios for the Sinaloa cartel. Dismemberment, say, or decapitation.
But Dr. Mendoza didn’t use chain saws. His methods were more sophisticated and far more effective. And far less bloody.
Agent Touhy continued to struggle violently. He was not going to make this easy. Unfortunate for him, Mendoza thought. But so be it. Mendoza was prepared for all eventualities. He selected a single-dose vial of Amidate, twenty milligrams of etomidate. He carefully pointed the hypodermic needle at the carotid artery on the left side of Touhy’s neck. Behind his duct-tape gag, Touhy roared, but the etomidate worked rapidly. In less than a minute, Touhy lay flat on the bed, calm and compliant.