Russell Blake - King of Swords

~ ~ ~

Briones returned to headquarters late in the day, having spent much of it getting Cruz settled in and outfitted. There had been some complications with the internet that had taken time to work through, and then some shopping, so by the time he made it in, it was already five. He checked his e-mail and found twenty-two messages. With a resigned sigh, he began poring through them, sending single-sentence responses to most. The last five were the photos from the Los Cabos team. He rubbed his eyes and began paging through the various shots. A few looked close, and could have been the man. He just didn’t remember so clearly — too much time had gone by.

And then he stopped.

Briones peered at the screen, and then enlarged the image. He was almost a hundred percent sure, although there were some differences, most notably the goatee and the hair color, which was considerably lighter than he recalled. But the nose and eyes were the same. Not daring to jostle his mouse for fear of somehow deleting the image, he reached out and dialed Cruz’s number.

“I think I’m looking at a photo of El Rey , from the construction site in Los Cabos,” Briones said excitedly.

“You think, or you are?”

“I’m almost positive. Remember, I only saw him for a few seconds, assuming that was him. But I believe this is the guy.”

“Send it over to me,” Cruz instructed. “Find out if he’s at work or when he’s next due in. But let’s cover all options immediately. I want every officer in Baja to have that photo within the hour, and if he’s not at work, I want the man traced down and found. Send out a team to the address listed on the manifest. There’s the slimmest of chances he didn’t use a fake name and address, although I think it’s a given that he did. If so, I want everyone on the streets tonight, asking every bar, strip club and restaurant whether they’ve seen him. It’s show time — this is our first real break.”

Sergeant Obregon, the head of the team that had been sent to Baja, crouched behind an abandoned car forty yards from the one-room dwelling that had been listed on the security pass docket for the suspect, whose name, Adrian Sendero, was undoubtedly fake.

After discovering he’d been fired from the project, they had been watching the house for several hours, but there was no sign of life. Sergeant Obregon had the sensation in his gut that this was going to be a waste of time, but his job was to run down all leads, and this was the only one they had. So here he was, carrying out surveillance on a hovel in one of the worst barrios in San Jose del Cabo — a section that had originally started off as a squatter camp, with electricity pilfered from overhead power lines and open sewage running downhill towards the ravine, and had gradually become a neighborhood, such as it was, with cracker boxes like the one they were staking out, built from cinderblock and bags of cement purloined from work sites.

It remained a grim area, redolent with the fetid odor of garbage and poverty; the pervasive squalor spoke of a population at the end of its rope. These were life’s losers — the sick, the drug addled, the hopelessly alcoholic, the mentally ill. Nobody with any sort of income lived there; even the lowest of the low, the unskilled laborers, could do better. Crime was constant, and never reported, partially because the police were unlikely to show up and partially because the denizens were mostly criminals as well.

It was the type of area where the residents kept to themselves. Nobody wanted to know what you were doing, and it was best not to be curious about their affairs. It was a place the unwashed came to die, enslaved by heroin and methamphetamines and alcohol. AIDS was a near-constant among the intravenous drug users, and corpses being hauled out by the coroner’s office was an almost daily occurrence.

Obregon’s ear bud crackled as the com line came to life.

“Car headed your way.”

He squinted in the dark and watched as a battered twenty year old Buick LeSabre trundled to a stop near the shack. A man swung out of the car, clad in a filthy white undershirt and soiled pants, accompanied by an obese woman in an ill-advised tank top and shorts that strained to contain her modesty. They cackled with inebriated laughter, and the man veered to the front door, which consisted of a slab of plywood held in place by two rusted hinges. He fished a key out of his pocket and unlocked the padlock securing the chain that acted as the door lock, and was caught unawares by the bright floodlights from the assault team as they flashed their dazzling focus on him.

“Stop. Put your hands up. Do not move. This is the Federal Police. Repeat, do not move,” Sergeant Obregon instructed through a handheld megaphone.

The couple froze in place, and within seconds, were surrounded by armed men, weapons at the ready.

Twenty seconds after it started, the operation was over. The man was clearly not the one in the photo, given that he was emaciated, filthy, reeking of cheap tequila, and with a profile more akin to a living skeleton than a human being. After a few minutes of interrogation, it also became obvious that nobody lived with him in the little hothouse. The sergeant entered, to be confronted with a soiled mattress, a reeking bucket with a lid fashioned from a piece of sheetrock being used as an ad hoc toilet, and a few odds and ends. Illumination was provided by a single light bulb dangling from a wire affixed to the corrugated tin ceiling with a rusty nail. Two holes in the wall with rebar bent to serve as security bars afforded scant ventilation. Obregon gagged at the smell wafting from the dirt floor.

As expected, this was a dead-end.

The team packed their gear and loaded into the black pickup which had been called in after the operation was terminated. They headed back to the station.

It was unlikely they’d get any traction from circulating the photo around the local prostitutes and drug dealers, but at that point it was the only option they had left. At Cruz’s behest, they’d erected road blocks at several key intersections, ostensibly as sobriety checkpoints but in reality to spot-check suspicious travelers; but those were long shots, at best. As the night wore on, the officers grew increasingly frustrated. It was obvious their target had either gone to ground, or had somehow eluded them.

Wherever he was, El Rey wasn’t there.

~ ~ ~

Cruz wasn’t surprised. While the badge photo had been a lucky break, their losing streak in the case had held, and it had been too little, too late. That was how things had been going from the outset. The assassin always seemed to be one step ahead of them or had benefitted from pure luck, such as getting fired before they collared him. Cruz began to have a little empathy with the men on the El Rey taskforce who’d made zero progress in over a thousand days.

He’d met with them and turned over the photo, in the slim hopes their network could generate a lead, but that was unlikely given they had no presence in Baja. In typical fashion, they hadn’t even considered sending personnel to Baja once the photo was in hand, preferring to question whether the likeness was even El Rey , considering that it didn’t resemble most of the sketches. In truth, Cruz couldn’t prove it was him any more than they could prove that it wasn’t, so it was a classic stand-off. They obviously felt that Cruz was encroaching unfairly into their investigation, while he believed they were incompetent asses. Relations remained cordial, but strained, and Cruz expected nothing helpful.

The rest of the week was similarly frustrating. There was no buzz on the streets, the flesh trade had yielded no leads, and El Rey didn’t buy drugs from any of the local substance purveyors. The team continued to go through the motions, but each day brought an increasing sense of hopelessness, as the opening date of the G-20 summit loomed with no progress on their end.