the vehicle, move.
Got it, chief, Chico says, and jogs up the trail to the huge black Suburban. The chief calls another crewman to the rear of the Ram and has him shine his light on the padlock securing the topper gate to the tailgate. He stands to the side of the lock to avoid possible damage to the cargo, puts the muzzle of his carbine to the juncture of lock case and shackle, and blasts the lock apart. He raises the topper gate and the crewman shines his light on the crates inside. Because of the attack’s diagonal lines of fire into the cab, the shipment shows no sign of having been struck.
Good, says the chief.
Driving in reverse, Chico brings the Suburban to within a few feet of the Ram, and the other men store their weapons in it. The chief orders them not to take anything from the dead men, not their guns, phones, money, anything. They have just removed the first crate from the truck bed when they hear a pulsing buzz from the Ram cab. They recognize it as an incoming phone call on what has to be a satellite unit, as no cell tower is in range.
They know the truck stopped, one of them says.
Don’t piss your pants, the chief says. By the time they get here we’ll be long gone.
Still, they step up their tempo, panting with effort, sopping with sweat, faces itching and bloated with mosquito bites. In another few minutes they shove the last crate into the Suburban, shut and lock the rear doors, scramble into the vehicle, and drive away.
In a large room on the highest floor of a towering Mexico City building whose blazing neon sign reads Zuma Electrónicas, S.A., a young technician called a screener sits before a row of computers, intermittently shifting his gaze between the monitors and the sports magazine in his lap. It is dull duty but pays well. Like the majority of employees of Zuma Electrónicas, the screener has a university degree in computer engineering. And like everyone else who works on the top floor of the building, he has a top security clearance and knows that the company has commercial ties—mostly clandestine—to numerous other business organizations and that its true ownership is a secret protected by many buffering layers of corporate law.
The monitors keep track of company transport vehicles equipped with encrypted GPS senders and appearing as yellow blips on a green geographic grid. On this slow evening there are only two blips to keep an eye on. Alpha vehicle is delivering a shipment from Mexico City to Acapulco, and Beta vehicle is collecting a shipment at a transfer point on the Laguna Madre and relaying it to a recipient in Irapuato. The screener does not know what kind of cargo either vehicle is carrying or any of the names of its crew. His data sheets tell him only the type of vehicle each one is and its schedule, including the cargo’s point of collection if the delivery did not originate from Mexico City. His responsibility is strictly to keep track of a vehicle’s progress and confirm that its cargo arrives on time.
Both vehicles are holding to schedule. Alpha is only two hours from its destination, and Beta collected its cargo and left the lagoon twenty-three minutes ago, its crew chief phoning in on arrival there and again on departure. The Beta is moving at a snail’s pace on what the screener knows is a difficult and circuitous backcountry trail that terminates at a junction road, but once the Beta arrives at that junction its progress will speed up and it will easily make the Irapuato delivery on schedule.
But now the Beta stops moving.
The screener looks at his wristwatch and enters the time on a clipboard form. An unscheduled stop by a company vehicle on business is always a matter for immediate attention. A flat tire or engine trouble can throw a delivery far off schedule, and a crew chief is obliged to call the screener about any such problem at once so that the company can dispatch speedy assistance if required and inform the awaiting party of the delay—and to dispel any worry about a hijacking. However, a crew chief isn’t required to call if he’s making an unscheduled stop shorter than three minutes, as for a roadside piss. The screener shifts his attention by turns from the unmoving blip to his wristwatch to the data sheet, which tells him the Beta vehicle is a new Dodge Ram pickup with less than four thousand miles on the odometer when it left the capital early this morning. When the third minute elapses he calls the crew chief’s satellite phone. He lets it buzz and buzz without an answer for almost a full minute before he picks upanother phone and calls the tracking manager to notify him of the stalled truck and its lack of response.
The manager says to keep trying to connect with the crew and to advise him right away if he makes contact or if the Beta resumes movement without having replied. Then the manager makes a phone call of his own. Within minutes of receiving it, a fire team of five armed men in a Ford F-250 truck races out of Ciudad Victoria, almost a hundred miles from the Ram’s location but the company’s nearest station to it.
Two hours later the fire team leader phones the tracking manager from the scene of the attack and tells him of the shot-up truck, the slaughtered crew, the stolen cargo. The hijackers must’ve made it back to the main highway before the fire team exited from it because the team spotted no vehicles on the dirt road. The manager tells the team leader to hold on while he relays the finding to the Director.
Awakened by the call, the Director, Rodrigo Wolfe—whose standing order is that he be notified without delay of any hijack, never mind the hour—listens to the manager’s report without interrupting him, not even on hearing that the ambushed crew was that of his young cousin Alberto Delmonte. He commends the manager for his prompt action and concise account and instructs him to tell the fire team at the scene to convey the bodies to the Nuestra Señora del Cielo medical clinic in Mexico City and to have the Ram towed to the nearest junkyard and converted to scrap. The manager knows that the medical clinic is owned by the company and it will see to the proper but covert disposition of the deceased.
Tell the fire team to say nothing about the hijacking, not to anyone, Rodrigo adds. And tell the screener nothing other than he was right to call you and everything has been taken care of.
Using a different phone, Rodrigo then calls his brother Mateo, the chief of security, and tells him what’s happened.
You notified the Zetas? Mateo asks.
Not yet. They’re going to be unhappy.
Has to be an inside job, Mateo says. Somebody tipped the hijackers to the transfer. Somebody of ours or somebody with Charlie, but somebody who knew about tonight’s run and who’s familiar with the trail to Boca Larga.
Rodrigo sighs and says, The only people of ours who knew those things are you and me, Alberto and his crew, the tracking manager, and the screener. Neither the screener nor the manager knew what the load was. But as you know, Alberto always told his crew what they were carrying.
Yeah. Showed he trusts them, he always said. Makes them even more loyal. Can’t say I entirely agreed with him, but I let him run his crew his own way.
On the Texas side, Rodrigo says, the only ones who knew about the run are Charlie Fortune and the delivery crew. At least that’s the way he’s always operated. I’ll find out if he did anything different this time. Still, the odds are that the inside guy is one of ours.
Either somebody in Alberto’s crew, Mateo says, or somebody who used to work the Boca Larga run in the past and who found out about Alberto’s run tonight. Whoever he is, you think he tipped the Zetas? They steal their own buy, and when we tell them it’s been ripped they act all pissed and demand their money back?
No. Scheme like that’s beneath
