Lethal Vengeance. Don Pendleton

new killer in town.

      Federal Police Headquarters, Ciudad Juárez

      Captain Chalino Prieto sat at his desk, overlooking Avenida Hermanos Escobar in the Omega district, smoking his third cigar of the day. He had a bottle of Don Julio tequila in his desk, but thought it still too early for a drink, although he badly wanted one.

      Prieto was a portly man with double chins, and bags under his hooded eyes, black hair, just going gray at the temples, combed back from a squarish face. Clipped to his belt, an eight-pointed star of gold identified his agency and justified the Jericho 941 semiautomatic pistol holstered on his hip.

      Prieto’s suit was tailor-made from linen, to accommodate Chihuahua’s weather, and his cowboy boots were hand-tooled, polished to a mirror shine. His jacket’s side pockets were reinforced to bear the weight of brass knuckles on one side and an eight-inch switchblade on the other, razor-edged, its handle made of ebony.

      The captain was perusing a report of last night’s crimes in Ciudad Juárez—the ones recorded by police, that was—and noting that no middle-aged gringos were listed among corpses picked up off the streets. Prieto wasn’t sure exactly what to make of that, but guessed that all would be revealed to him in time.

      It always was.

      A rapping on his office door distracted him. Prieto called out, “Enter,” watching as Lieutenant Silvio Bernal entered and closed the door behind him.

      “Captain.”

      “Lieutenant. Now that we’ve identified each other, what’s the word from last night?”

      “Allende and Solana have confirmed the transfer.”

      “Sons of whores. You believe them?”

      Bernal shrugged. “I think they are afraid to lie, sir.”

      “Because, if they just took the gringo out and dumped him somewhere—”

      “No, no, Captain. They swore to me that he was handed to El Psicópata.”

      “If I find out they’re lying, I’ll let that crazy bastard play with them.”

      Bernal paled just a bit on hearing that. “They wouldn’t dare, sir.”

      “Perhaps not. But as stupid as they are, I don’t know whether we can risk association with them any longer.”

      “If you wish it taken care of...”

      Prieto fanned the air with his left hand, as if to clear it of cigar smoke and the thought of executing two subordinates for being idiots. If he went down that road, how many members of the Federal Police would see another sunrise?

      “Never mind,” he told Bernal. “If they exhaust my patience, I can always make a deal with Kuno or Rodolfo.”

      The lieutenant fairly gulped at the pronunciation of those names. Kuno Carillo was the godfather, commanding the Juárez Cartel. His primary opponent in Chihuahua was Rodolfo Garza, a “king,” but still subservient to the rival Sinaloa Cartel’s Boss of Bosses residing in Culiacán Rosales. Either one of them would gladly do a favor for Captain Prieto, who accepted cash from both while turning a blind eye to their activities.

      “They are both worried, I assure you,” Bernal said, meaning the dim-witted sergeants.

      “As they should be, Lieutenant.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      Both Allende and Solana had undoubtedly greased palms for their appointments to the Federal Police and for later promotions through the ranks. Prieto doubted either one of them had gained his job on merit, much less rising to a sergeant’s rank by virtue of competitive examinations. They were smart enough to pay off their superiors and take cash from assorted felons, but as far as making cases that would stick in court, both officers were hopeless.

      Christ! They couldn’t even carry out a simple snatch without making a hash of it.

      The man they were supposed to kidnap was a chief of operations for the DEA in Washington, DC. His name was Howard Weinstock. Normally beyond the reach of enemies below the Tex-Mex border, coincidence had brought him to El Paso this week for a gathering that the US Attorney General called a “meeting of the minds” on strategy for tightening security along the Rio Grande in alignment with their current president’s concerns.

      Captain Prieto wanted to interrogate Weinstock, then likely would have passed him on to Carillo or Garza, whoever was paying more, and let them wring him dry before he disappeared forever in Chihuahua’s desert.

      Then the pathetic fools Allende and Solana had kidnapped the wrong gringo from the hotel hosting the law enforcement conference. Instead of Weinstock—forty-seven, six foot two, 180 pounds—they’d snatched another man entirely, older and two inches taller, heavier by thirty pounds at least, whose face bore only slight resemblance to their target’s. Dumb luck alone had spared the sergeants from a shooting fray or being captured at the scene and held for trial.

      In that case, once they’d started squealing like the swine they were, what could Prieto have done next to save himself?

      “Dismissed,” he told Bernal then waited for the door to shut behind his second in command before he focused on the problem posed by the two incompetents.

      “They have to go,” he informed the empty room at last.

      But who would pay him for the pleasure of eliminating them?

      Tim Ross was well-known at the US Consulate, but he still had to show ID each time he left the grounds and once again when he returned. Today the young marine guard made a show of studying the laminated card Ross handed to him, eyes flicking between the photo and the man’s face, then thanked him in a deadpan voice and waved Ross through the gate.

      Security was tight, of course, given the state of mayhem in Chihuahua. Nine years earlier, the State Department had recalled its staff from Ciudad Juárez and closed the consulate “indefinitely,” after cartel gunmen murdered three employees and a bomb went off outside another consulate in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. After a review, the consulate in Juárez had reopened one week later with increased security. Today it was a fortified blockhouse, three stories tall with small, bullet-resistant windows, concrete barriers and pylons supplementing metal fences topped with razor wire.

      Ross wouldn’t have said that he enjoyed the atmosphere in Ciudad Juárez, but what the hell. He hadn’t joined the CIA after his double tour in Afghanistan to be a paper-pusher in a tiny office cubicle at Langley, when there was a whole wide world out there. It was either join the Company or try to make it as a merc somewhere in the Third World, maybe sign up with someone’s private army operating at arm’s-length from Washington. But why risk that if he could do the same things for the CIA with benefits and have a pension waiting if he made it to retirement?

      Still, this deal...

      Ross didn’t know the woman who’d reached out to him, had never met her in the flesh, although he’d fantasized a bit about that flesh after their two brief conversations on the phone. Her introduction came by way of Ross’s immediate superior—at Langley, not the Juárez consulate—with an impression of the urgency involved. That opener came wrapped as a request and not an order, something Ross was free to skip, but something told him that refusal might return him to that cubicle—maybe a basement cubicle at that, with no way out.

      So Ross had gone for it, and wasn’t sorry yet. Ms. X had claimed her name was Sharon Patowsky—clearly false—serving as some kind of “liaison” with the Department of Justice in Washington. He knew the drill for cover stories, legends, plausible deniability and had listened to the sultry voice, agreeing to fulfill her needs.

      The guns and other gear had been no problem. Once he had delivered them to hard-eyed “Captain Brinkman”—yet another alias—Ross figured that his role in whatever might happen next was done. But