Lethal Agent (Mitch Rapp #18)(60)
There were five men left outside and their discussion quickly went from heated to a full-blown shoving match. For a moment, Rapp thought they were going to start shooting at each other, but he didn’t get that lucky. Tattooed Guy managed to get control and dialed a phone while the others huddled in tight around him. They looked like they were working out the next play in MS-13’s annual football scrimmage. Did these people receive no training at all?
Rapp picked up the suppressed M4 and fired at the tightly grouped men on full automatic. Not surprisingly, they were all down before half his magazine was expended.
He stepped out of the hole, ducking under various low-hanging tree branches as he approached the men on the ground. All were dead or headed in that direction so he glanced up at the circling drone and raised one of his hands, palm up. The sentiment would be clear in any language.
Is that all you’ve got?
One of the men on the bottom of the pile started moving and Rapp shot him in the side of the head. He wasn’t going to get anywhere with these soldiers. That had already been proved during his interrogation of the men the DEA had picked up. He needed to talk to the man in charge.
Rapp walked over to the nearest SUV and turned off the music. At this point, there wasn’t much he could do other than load the product and drive off in one of Esparza’s pimped-out vehicles. If that didn’t piss the man off enough to reach out, nothing would.
He was about to climb in when the ring of a cell phone became audible. Rapp had to search through the pile of men, but finally found the phone in Tattooed Guy’s lifeless hand. The blood on the screen confused its touch sensitivity but Rapp finally managed to pick up.
“What?”
The screaming on the other end started with what he assumed was a stream of Spanish epithets.
“Speak English, dipshit.”
“I’m going to carve you up and feed you to my dogs, you . . .”
The sentence devolved into Spanish again.
“Who is this?” Rapp said, crafting his tone to sound vaguely irritated. “Lorenzo Varela? Why don’t you shut the fuck up and let the big boys work.”
The name belonged to the leader of an upstart cartel run by a college-educated kid from Mexico City. Just the kind of guy someone like Carlos Esparza would despise.
“Varela? You stupid piece of shit! This is Carlos Esparza!”
Rapp didn’t respond immediately, instead glancing nervously up at the drone. “Bullshit.”
“You want me to prove it? How about I send a hundred men with pliers and blowtorches up to you? I’m going to—”
And more with the Spanish.
Rapp waited for the cartel boss to run out of oxygen before he spoke again. “Look, man. The DEA said this was Varela’s shipment. They didn’t say anything about you.”
More Spanish. Rapp was starting to regret not paying more attention in high school.
“I don’t want a war with you, Carlos. I just needed some money to disappear with. Your product’s in a hole to the northeast of the house. Why don’t you send some guys over to get it.”
“And are you still going to be there when they show up, pendejo?”
“I could be, but I don’t think you can afford to lose any more men.”
“Fuck you!”
Rapp didn’t respond immediately, making a point to look thoughtfully up at the drone he hoped Esparza was watching from in real time.
“Maybe we can make this work for both of us,” he said finally.
“What?”
“I need money and to get as far from U.S. law enforcement as I can. And you clearly need men who can tell one end of a gun from the other.”
Esparza laughed hard enough that Rapp thought he might choke. “You just stole my drugs and killed eighteen of my men. Now you’re asking me for a job?”
“Why not? I said I’d give the coke back.” He thumbed at the bodies behind. “And you’re suddenly light on personnel.”
“Then why don’t you get on a plane to Mexico and we can have a talk face-to-face.”
“Okay.”
Esparza started laughing again, this time sounding less enraged and more incredulous.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’re either crazy or you’ve got balls too big to fit on a plane.”
“Probably a little bit of both,” Rapp said honestly.
CHAPTER 30
ABOVE CENTRAL MEXICO
NORMALLY Rapp slept like a baby on planes. Today, though, he was in an economy class seat wedged between a woman who weighed north of three hundred pounds and a man who let out brief, choking snores every twenty seconds or so. If he’d been on a C-130 over Afghanistan, he’d be spread out on a pile of cargo netting, dead to the world.
It wasn’t just the seat, though. That imaginary C-130 would land in a country where he’d spent much of his adult life. In the Middle East, he knew the players, had access to highly trained backup, and spoke the language. He understood the culture and had a deep understanding of his enemy’s capabilities and motivations.
When he touched down this time, he’d have none of those advantages. His Spanish was barely good enough to order a Coke. And worse, this wasn’t one of the simple search-and-destroy missions he’d become so good at over the years. Killing Carlos Esparza wasn’t the objective. In fact, the opposite was true. He needed to ingratiate himself with the man. To use him to learn about the ISIS network and follow it back to Sayid Halabi.