“Chuparosa did not come to New York for President Vargas,” said Garza, getting the words out quickly.
“No?” He reacted with exaggerated surprise. “But how could that be?”
Garza took one step toward him, all she allowed herself. “He was here for you.”
León pursed his lips, finding this very curious.
Garza said, “You realized that when we went to see you earlier today. You figured out that he had found out about you, your true identity, somehow. Someone like him is the reason why you live behind that wall, those guards, this foreign government.”
León signed heavily. “I am sorry, Comandante Garza—”
“León. Lion.” Her next words reeked of the vomit still on her breath. “Ochoa. Wolf.”
León’s façade of innocence faltered. “Ochoa?”
“He would have succeeded in killing you here,” she said. “Because safeguarding presidents is our first priority. The Hummingbird was exploiting that certainty to allow himself a shot at a much more elusive, yet much more worthy target. Someone who leaves his gilded cage but once each year. Yes, Chuparosa would have been killed in the act. But not before he killed you.”
León looked at the nearest portraits before answering her. “And you warned me, Comandante Garza. And then you killed my assassin.” León—Ochoa, the former cartel leader—bowed slightly at the waist, obscenely.
“You scrubbed your home in Mexico, your cars, everything. And had another man live in them for a time. Then had him killed in your place.” She took another step toward the man. “Your plastic surgery did not result in a fatality. For you, it was a complete success. For the man living in your house—and for the doctors after they performed the surgery—it was indeed fatal. It was his DNA the American DEA matched.”
She looked at his face, the one he had grown into in the years since it was rebuilt. So few photographs existed of Ochoa, and all of them grainy.
“Or perhaps,” she said, “the DEA made sure it matched. Why did you flip? Why did you turn your back on your former self?”
León’s contempt for her was showing. “Prison was coming. My time and my luck were both running out. The end comes for everyone. I did not want it to come for me. So I made a new beginning. I accepted it. I became a new man. A mansion in the United States instead of a shithole prison in Guadalajara. The choice was an easy one. Retirement in secret. And yes—interestingly, an opportunity to atone.”
“To settle scores with your former rivals. But I thought the past was history.”
“You are very dedicated and enterprising, Comandante. Now, if you don’t mind—”
Garza stepped back and drew her Beretta. She settled into a balanced shooter’s stance, the weapon trembling slightly in her hands.
She said, “I want to tell you a story about my mother and sister.”
CHAPTER 78
Fisk and Dubin were trying to badge their way through three rings of Secret Service security, still a block away from the consulate. Dubin was alternately trying to work his phone and stepping between Fisk and another agent, trying to talk them through another checkpoint.
“She’s going to kill him,” Fisk kept saying.
Fisk’s arm was throbbing with pain. He could not get anyone to listen to him.
She was going to ruin herself for revenge. Fisk had to stop her.
CHAPTER 79
Andrés León looked at the weapon trembling in Cecilia Garza’s hand. If he was nervous, he did not show it.
“Comandante,” he said. “Put down your weapon.”
Garza smiled painfully. “Welcome home,” she said.
León held a hand out toward her, trying to stop her from doing anything rash. “This is not Mexican soil. We are in a consulate in New York City, still subject to their laws. You can’t shoot me here and expect to claim it rightful under Mexican law—”
Garza said, “I know full well there is no extraterritoriality here. This is not sovereign territory of Mexico. However, I know also that the host country may not enter the consulate if it acts as a refuge.” Garza felt her shivering ease as she said these words. “You are surrendering to me, Mr. Ochoa. Surrendering to the daughter and sister of two women you kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery.”
León swallowed and said, “I did no such thing—”
“You did! You and your people! No one crossed you! No one did anything that displeased you! You did it!”
“Comandante, listen to reason. You are upset. Your emotions are running away with you. Please listen to me. This thing you are trying to achieve, it will never work. The United States needs me too much to let me go.”
“You are in my custody now, a Mexican citizen in the custody of a federale. They dare not intercede in this matter. Because then the people of the United States and the world will know that they took you in. Knowing who you were. What you were. And that they hosted you, that their taxpayers funded the ‘retirement’ of a former Mexican drug cartel leader and trafficker in human lives.”
“No,” said León insistently. “President Vargas himself will not stand for this.”
“He will!” said Garza. “He will have no choice. I give him no choice. Either he turns a blind eye to this . . . or else I tell everyone in the country just who was behind his rise to prominence. Who funded his miraculous political victory. And that the person he entrusted to help craft this antitrafficking treaty was a filthy trafficker himself.”
Garza backed to the only door to the room, opening it.
“Whereas if he goes along, then it is simply another example of the former administration being corrupted by association with the criminal element.”
CHAPTER 80
Fisk never made it inside the consulate. In part because of his own dire warnings while trying to be let through the outer perimeter, the vice president’s interior security ring closed ranks around the detail. No one was allowed in or out until the vice president and his eleven-car motorcade were many blocks away.
Dubin returned from a conversation with a Secret Service agent he knew and pulled Fisk aside on Park Avenue. “Nobody was killed. No shots fired. The dinner went off without a hitch.”
FISK ARRIVED AT TETERBORO AIRPORT in New Jersey just in time. The presidential jet was idling on the tarmac, the big Boeing 737 having been cleared for the small airport by a rare special dispensation from the FAA. Bags were being loaded in.
Fisk’s arm was screaming at him, his fingers and thumb completely numb. He used his Intel badge to get onto the tarmac. Though well outside the radius of the Boeing 737, he was close enough to see the heavyset man in the gray braid being led aboard the plane by EMP agents—in handcuffs.
Fisk felt all the tension go out of him then. It was an incredible feeling, as though Garza’s soul had been spared. León was alive. He held his bad arm, hoping to take some of the pressure off it, and was about to turn and leave when he saw Cecilia Garza leave the contingent boarding the aircraft, starting toward him.
It must have been the blue sling that caught her eye. Her raven-black hair whipped around from the night wind and the wash from the turbines.
She looked drained, exhausted. He must have looked like hell, too.
“You watched the video,” he said.
She looked away and nodded.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I wanted to kill him,” she said. “I wanted it so badly. To put him down right there inside the consulate . . . and suffer the consequences, whatever they might be.”