MacClesh lowered his glasses. “Yes?”
“It’s a hundred and fourteen degrees. Black clothes, helmets, ballistic vests . . . we’ll be carrying men back down the hill because they can’t walk any farther.”
“I agree, Comandante.”
Garza went on. “I can think of two reasons for the apparent stillness of the compound. One, he is unaware of our approach. Or two—”
“He is avidly aware of our approach.”
“I want to ride in directly,” said Garza.
MacClesh nodded, but he was thinking, she could see that.
“I will go to the promontory alone,” he said. “We cannot go in blind.”
Garza was too anxious. She knew this without MacClesh having to tell her. He was right.
“We will both go,” she said.
IN A WAY, the chauvinism of the men in her unit provoked her into being so tough. They had created her reputation as much as she had.
MacClesh was huffing by the end of it. The climb was more treacherous than it had appeared. It wasn’t a cliff, exactly . . . but it was close. The rock was so hot from the sun that Garza felt her soles—good boots, American made—softening. She had no gloves, and her fingers were blistering on the blazing rock.
It was too much time to think. Chuparosa was anything but careless. Perhaps he had—by giving the mayor of Nuevo Laredo a phone number that led straight to Nacimiento de los Negros—been hoping to provoke a fight? Was this to be an ambush? Was his goal to destroy the famous Unit 9 in order to further demonstrate his power to the world?
Eventually they made it, crouching behind a jagged line of rock that constituted the ridge at the summit of the small mountain. Garza drained the last of the water from the bladder of her CamelBak, while MacClesh took out his binoculars.
They were roughly two hundred yards away—close enough for a trained sniper to pick them off if exposed. And the Zetas, with their military background, were full of men who knew how to use a gun.
MacClesh slowly scanned the compound from behind the rock. When he turned back to Garza, his dark, craggy features showed nothing.
Garza looked. The old fort was about two hundred yards wide and maybe half as long. In the center were the foundations of some ruined building. Next to them stood a huge house of tasteful modern design, with expansive glass windows, broad decks, and patios. Surrounding the house was a small patch of lushly planted earth, featuring beautifully maintained bushes, fruit trees, and beds of flowers. A huge pool lay behind the house next to several plain adobe outbuildings.
“My god,” she said, amazed at the existence of his oasis in the desert. Such beauty required water to be trucked in every day—probably from at least fifty miles away. The expense in water alone must have been enormous. Every bush and every plant in the garden was in full flower. Hothouse plants, she supposed, trucked in and replanted, then pulled up and discarded as soon as the flowers began to fade. How many gardeners did it take to keep it like this? Ten? Fifteen?
But there was no evidence of gardeners—or anyone else, for that matter—in the compound.
Then she began to see them. Dark lumps scattered here and there.
“Madre de Dios,” she said.
“Indeed,” MacClesh said. “Shall we go down, Comandante?”
“Right away.”
THE RUN TO THE SMALL DIRT TRACK that circled the fort took less than half a minute.
The gate was closed and locked. It was constructed of two-centimeter steel plate. A ribbon of Semtex made short work of it, blowing a jagged-edged rectangular hole out of the gate.
Before the dust settled, and as the hollow boom was reverberating back and forth between the sheer sides of the valley, the line of men entered the compound.
“Clear right!”
“Clear left!”
“Cover!”
“Moving!”
The men gradually hopscotched across the dry ground, covering each other as they moved from one position of cover to another. Garza waited at the gate with MacClesh.
The silence was deafening. It was over in a minute or two. There was no gunfire, no opposition.
After what Garza had seen through MacClesh’s binoculars, none was expected.
Her radio crackled finally. “All clear, Comandante.”
Garza stepped through the hole in the gate and strode across the open ground toward her men, who stood in a ring around the house.
As she neared them, she heard a soft buzzing sound. For a moment it puzzled her. But then she recognized it.
Flies.
There were more than twenty bodies on the ground, scattered seemingly randomly around the property. They had all been shot in the back of the head.
And they weren’t gangsters. None of them had tattoos, and none of them appeared to carry guns.
Three were women wearing maid’s uniforms. Several carried gardening tools on their belts.
One was a boy no more than eleven or twelve years old.
It was immediately clear that somebody had killed all the people who worked for Chuparosa.
The blood spatter pattern told Garza that none had been moved. Blood and brain matter were splashed in front of each of them. They had died where they lay.
The most striking thing was that all the blood spatter radiated out from the villa at the center of the compound. The dead lay all around the building, 360 degrees.
This told her that they had not been shot by intruders. Indeed, the gates had been locked.
These people had been murdered by someone inside the house.
MacClesh came out of the house. “There’s brass on all of the patios,” he said, holding up a bottlenecked brass bullet casing. “Military rounds. Four shooters armed with SCAR-Hs.”
Garza knew that these rifles that had been proposed as a replacement for the American M4 carbine used by the U.S. Army. They were much desired among the criminal element in Mexico, but still very hard to get hold of, very expensive. Even the U.S. Army didn’t have many of them yet.
“Four shooters?” she said. “How do you know?”
“Because they are dead also. Someone executed them, too. There was one shooter lying on each corner of the house. SCARs lying on the decks next to them. Expensive weapons, left behind. We’ll know all the details once we run all the ballistics.”
Garza looked up at the sky. None of this made sense. But instinctively she knew that, whatever terrible and puzzling thing had happened here, Chuparosa would not be among the dead.
He had done this. Ordered the shooters to wipe out his people—his cooks, gardeners, maids—and then executed the shooters.
“When do you think these people were shot, Major?”
“All the blood’s dried out in the sun. Flies have had time to gather. Five, six hours, maybe?”
This confirmed what Garza suspected. She got on her radio immediately. “I want everyone to exercise extreme caution. There may be booby traps here.”
She felt a pang of anger. She had truly thought she had a shot at finding Chuparosa today.
A call from the main house broke into her thoughts. “Major! Comandante! I think you need to see this!”
THE INTERIOR OF CHUPAROSA’S HOUSE was startlingly beautiful.
Most of the gangsters’ houses Cecilia Garza had seen were expensively acquitted, but sad and seedy. Especially the few larger mansions she’d been inside, owned by cartel higher-ups, which were without exception gauche and hideous—full of huge mirrors, gold furniture, self-portraits, expensive nudes, and paintings of tigers and Ferraris.
But this place had an austere beauty. It was immediately clear that someone had collected every item in the house with care. And with an artistic eye. Which made it all the more bewildering that they had—apparently—left it all behind.
Had she chased out Chuparosa? Or had flight been his plan all along?
The decorative theme was Mexican. A small Toltec carving here, a Mayan mask there. But there was the strong sense of a very particular personality here, unlike some houses of the newly rich, which felt as though they’d been bought by the yard from a bad interior decorator.