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  “Hey, don’t worry so much,” Bassman said, pinching the gangbanger’s raw, red cheek from the other side of the tub. “I hear they’re doing amazing things on the AIDS front these days. Making some real medical break-throughs.”

  Neves closed his eyes, his bloody lip quivering as he cried.

  “OK, OK, OK!” he suddenly yelled. “You win! What do you want? Get me a cell phone. I’ll give you everything I have. I got eighteen kilos at a safe house right now. Eighteen. You can have everything.”

  “We don’t want everything. We want Perrine. Where is he?” I said.

  Neves did some more flopping around and moaning.

  “Shit, shit,” he said.

  “You in the shit, all right, Tomás,” Bassman said, loudly palming Neves’s head. He banged it back loudly against the floor of the hot tub. “You heard of quicksand? Well, you just stepped in quickshit.”

  “He’s in Mexico, OK? He was here in LA. We set up some houses for him, but he’s gone now. I swear to God. Perrine went back to Mexico early this morning. One of my guys got him over the border.”

  “To where?!” I said. “Where did he go?!”

  “I don’t know. You think he’d tell me? I don’t know.”

  “Wrong answer,” Diaz said, squealing open the tub’s tap full blast.

  “No! It’s true! It’s true!” Neves yelled out over the water splattering loudly off the side of his face.

  We stood there as Neves screamed, lying flat on his back, and the water rose. In thirty seconds, it was up to his earlobes. After a minute, the water had reached his cheeks. He strained his neck, trying to raise himself up. Covered in the segmented weight vests, he looked like an overturned turtle trying to pull himself unsuccessfully out of his shell.

  “He went to his summer place near Mexico City,” Neves finally said, sputtering, the water now at his lips. “I’ll tell you exactly where on the map. Just turn it off! Turn it — ”

  Diaz put a hand to my chest as I reached in to grab the criminal who was screaming bubbles now under the rushing water.

  “Give him a second, Mike,” Diaz said. “He needs to see how serious we are.”

  “Exactly,” Bassman said, taking out a smartphone and thumbing it. “Let this guy soak his weary bones for a minute in peace, Mike. Can’t you see he’s had a hard day?”

  CHAPTER 88

  Though he hadn’t been to it in over a year, the estate in the Sierra de Pachuca, fifteen miles outside the central-eastern Mexican town of Real del Monte, was by far Perrine’s favorite.

  Built around a once-flourishing silver mine, the twenty-plus square miles of his property had been part of one of the original haciendas given by the Spanish crown to one of Cortés’s captains. The original grant was hung in a frame above the fireplace in Perrine’s office. At parties, Perrine made a point to show his guests the section on the yellowed parchment that granted the landowner not only the acreage and natural resources, but full ownership of all the area’s inhabitants as well.

  The beauty of a good ranching hacienda like Perrine’s was not just its plush main house and gardens, but its complete self-sufficiency and sustainability. On the twelve thousand rolling acres, they farmed massive herds of cattle and sheep, countless chickens. They even had corn and soybean fields and several freshwater resources, including a fish-filled mountain river. The staff who lived on the hacienda all year round was in excess of forty people. They were mostly vaqueros, whom Perrine took great pleasure riding with whenever he was in attendance.

  In summers past, in exchange for the local governor’s discretion and friendship, the hacienda often ran a children’s camp for local charities. But the last two weeks of August were reserved for Perrine’s expansive family’s dozens of children. The last time he had attended, two years before, eleven of the children were Perrine’s own. The children’s eight different mothers also stayed.

  Perrine fondly remembered eating dinner with them poolside, night after night, flirting with them as the endless courses and wines were brought by an army of waiters. After the fifth course, he would have trouble putting names to faces. After the seventh, he’d stop caring.

  He smiled at the memories. Had he ever been happier than during those two weeks, playing with the bands of his happy, screaming children all day and with their mommies all night? Had anyone?

  But as his plane touched down on his airstrip late that morning, the estate was empty of all guests. Though he had sold the hacienda to a dummy buyer years before, he knew that it was possible for the Americans to know his connection to it, so he very rarely and briefly visited it these days. He’d come now only after a trusted source high up in the local policía had assured him there were no special directives to watch the place, no suspicious gringos suddenly filling the local hotels.

  Even if there had been any chatter, even with his current American project under way, Perrine would have been hard-pressed to cancel the affair that he was putting on tonight-it would have been unthinkable to shutter the event. He lived for the cartel’s annual bonus party, a formal dinner for himself and his top one hundred captains, resplendent with speeches and toasts and culminating in waiters carrying valises filled with cash on silver trays.

  Perrine sighed wistfully along with his Global Express’s whining jet engines as the plane taxied down the runway behind his twenty-one-thousand-square-foot mansion.

  What a life, he thought, taking off his sleeping mask and handing it to the new, blond American stewardess, Marcia, with a wink. He was truly a blessed man.

  CHAPTER 89

  Old Beto, Perrine’s head vaquero, was standing beside his long-faced butler, Arthur, on the other side of the forty-five-million-dollar aircraft’s drop-down stairs.

  “Beto, what is it? You look excited,” Perrine cried in Spanish as he handed his English butler his silk sport coat and began rolling up his sleeves. “Don’t tell me she foaled?”

  Bowlegged Beto nodded rapidly and smiled, the laugh lines around his bright eyes like cracks in brown glass.

  “Show me immediately.”

  They walked along the front of his massive, marble-stepped mansion and around the pool to the air-conditioned barn. Though he had several Thoroughbred racehorses, Perrine’s real passion was for the show horses. They walked past stalls filled with several million dollars’ worth of them. He stopped to pat and pet his favorites, She-Wolf, and Blue, and Troubled Queen. The prize horses took their names from the Jackson Pollock paintings that hung in the mansion’s front hallway.

  Perrine peered into Troubled Queen’s stall at the new-born foal. It was a filly, like he’d predicted. A pale-strawberry roan as pretty as her mother. The little horse peered back at him shyly before tucking itself back in, next to its mother.

  “Look! She is afraid of me, Beto!” Perrine complained. “Can you believe this? Afraid of me?”

  There was a troubled look on Beto’s face.

  “What is it?” Perrine asked.

  “What are we to call her?”

  Perrine stared at the baby horse, a finger pressed to his pursed lips. He finally raised his finger in the air like a maestro.

  “We shall call her La Rose,” Perrine announced.

  “La Rose,” Beto repeated reverently as Perrine patted the old man on his shoulder and turned.

  What he didn’t tell Beto was that “La Rose” came from the name of the captivating Paul Delvaux painting that he’d just picked up at Sotheby’s. Eighteen million was probably a tad pricey for the Belgian surrealist, Perrine thought, rolling his sleeves back down, but, hey, you can’t take it with you.

  Arthur was waiting for him outside the front door of the barn, holding his cream-colored jacket. Perrine slipped back into it and shot the cuffs.

  “Arthur,” he said.

  “Yes, Mr. Perrine?”

  “A plane will be coming in about twenty minutes with quite a few, uh, lake-house guests aboard.”

  Arthur nodded without batting an eyelash. The lake house was whe
re the men liked to blow off steam after the bonus-party festivities. Morning cleanup usually involved hoses and shovels, but boys will be boys.

  “Are those new cameras that I ordered installed?”

  “They went online yesterday with a closed-circuit feed into your bedroom, as you insisted,” Arthur said. “Shall I have Hector and Junior waiting with the van at the airfield?”

  “Yes, you shall, Arthur. Please remind them and the rest of the staff that these are special guests. Guests who will be treated with the utmost respect.”

  Perrine smiled proudly as he walked with his manservant toward his glittering pool, the tiers of manicured gardens, his magnificent mansion.

  “That is, until I kill them, of course,” he said.

  CHAPTER 90

  After another half hour, it looked like we’d gotten everything we were going to get out of Tomás Neves.

  Between dunkings, he told us he had taken Perrine to a San Diego cartel house with a tunnel in its basement that went under the border. The tunnel exited in a tire shop, where a waiting car took Perrine to a plane at the Tijuana Airport.

  He claimed that the plane had taken Perrine to an estate in Mexico near Real del Monte, where a party was going to take place. A chatty Salvajes cartel underling with whom he had coordinated Perrine’s transfer had bragged to him that his older brother had been invited to a black-tie function there tonight for what was called a bonus ceremony.

  Suitcases of money would be ceremoniously handed out as hookers were brought in by the busload. Neves told us it was common knowledge that nothing made Perrine happier than drinking and carousing with his most efficient and most brutal soldiers.

  At first, I thought, What a load of bullshit, but then I thought again. Perrine was amazingly cocky and arrogant. What better way to show how ballsy he was than to start a war with the US and then throw a party for his men.

  As Neves was disseminating this information, I was in constant contact with Emily, who was outside, working her phone, firing off everything we learned to the LAPD task force so they could compare it with the flowchart we’d been building on Perrine’s cartel. The cops and agents back at the shop were, in turn, collating everything through FBI, CIA, NSA, and DEA databases.

  The first glimmer of hope came when she called into the basement.

  “San Diego SWAT just hit the address Neves gave us, Mike. There really is a tunnel. And Mexican authorities confirm that a private plane did leave from the Tijuana Airport this morning at eight a.m.”

  We were passing around a box of Pop-Tarts twenty minutes later, gearing up for some more tubby time with Neves, when there was a knock on the sliding-glass door.

  “A DEA undercover in Cancún just drove up to a hacienda outside Real del Monte,” Emily said breathlessly as I opened it. “He got a hit on one of the Salvajes cell numbers we have. Not only that, but the CIA just learned that the estate in question used to be owned by Perrine! Word is, they’re taking this as actionable intelligence. We need to get rolling. JSOC is calling a meeting back at the base.”

  I left Neves with Diaz and Bassman and raced with Emily back to the SoCal Logistics Airport. After we badged our way through the guard booth, it was obvious some fires had been lit.

  It was like someone had dropped a pinball into one of those kinetic mousetrap sculptures. Uniformed soldiers were pouring in and out of the dormitories and hangars. Dozens of bearded Navy SEALs and Delta Force operators clustered in small groups, loading guns and equipment kit bags as soldiers with clipboards did flight prep on the Black Hawk and Little Bird choppers out on the tarmac.

  As we walked into the task force’s war room, a video teleconference with Washington and one of the JSOC generals was under way. Beside it in the split screen was a satellite image of a compound with a huge house, a pool, gardens.

  Colonel D’Ambrose, sitting at the rear of the room, cracked the door and came out when he saw us.

  “They sent up a drone,” he said. “What your contact said is true. There’s an enormous amount of activity going on at the estate. Not only that, CIA is still doing some forensic work on the imaging, but they think they spotted Perrine riding a horse on one of the mountain trails. The Defense Department is in conference right now with the president. We just got word that the president wants Perrine in a body bag. We’re going in tonight under cover of darkness with everything we got.”

  “We did it, Mike? We found Perrine?” Emily said as she collapsed in an office chair, rubbing her eyes.

  “I don’t give a shit about him, Emily,” I said. “We need to find my family.”

  CHAPTER 91

  It looked like the set of a spaghetti Western, or maybe Wile E. Coyote’s stomping grounds, rolling beneath my feet by midnight that night. Below was a wilderness of windswept desert, small buttes, and mesas. All of it was tinged green through the night-vision goggles I was wearing.

  I shifted my weight to wake my numb butt, perched on the cold, hard vibrating metal floor of the Black Hawk chopper. It’d taken some favor calling and even more finagling by Emily, but in the end, we were able to go on the raid on one of the supporting Black Hawks with the FBI’s hostage rescue team and some CIA personnel. Emily had emphasized my past personal contact with Perrine and my ability to ID him. I could ID him, all right, and was really looking forward to some more personal contact.

  The dozen nap-of-the-earth airborne helicopters in our armada included Black Hawks and Little Birds, two Cobra attack helicopters, and even a twin-bladed Chinook filled with a contingent of first-recon marines. Far above, somewhere among the glittering stars, there was even an AC-130 Spectre gunship bristling with machine guns and mortars and Hellfire missiles to back us up.

  Not knowing what to expect, the Pentagon had broken out the entire toolbox. Which couldn’t have made me happier. Perrine and his cartel were for all intents and purposes no different from an enemy army. It was finally time to deal with them as such.

  It had been mostly flat desert, but as we flew, the terrain suddenly started to change. From the flat desert floor, low, corrugated hills with more vegetation began to rise. Soon the hills turned into majestic, rugged cliffs and sheer mountain-stream-filled valleys.

  “We are coming in, in five,” a voice called over the radio. A minute later, we went past a ridge, and Perrine’s house was there. The Unabomber’s cabin this was not. The satellite images hadn’t done it justice. The dramatically lit, breathtaking French Second Empire mansion looked like a block someone had airlifted from the Champs-Élyssés and plunked down in the middle of the Mexican mountains. Every one of its lights was blazing on its marble steps and columns like it was an opera house on opening night.

  There were soccer fields, several barns, something that looked like a racetrack. At the rear of the house were illuminated gardens that tiered down and down to a massive, magnificent, softly lit tiled pool. Beyond the pool was a runway with three corporate jets parked at its end.

  No wonder the US government hadn’t told the Mexicans about the raid. How could this opulent palace so boldly exist out here in the middle of nowhere without their knowledge or consent?

  The answer was, it couldn’t. Staring down at the compound, I knew the rumor that Perrine was more powerful than the Mexican president was a hundred percent true.

  CHAPTER 92

  As we came closer, I tightened my helmet’s chin strap and checked the safety on my M4. I winked at Emily, across from me, to hide my mounting anxiety. Like me and the rest of the HR team, she was loaded for bear, dressed in black combat fatigues and strapped down with guns and gear. She winked back, then crossed herself and started praying.

  As I was about to join her, an alarm suddenly went off in the forward cabin’s glowing console. It sounded like a police whistle followed by a fire alarm.

  There was a lot of excited chatter over the tactical line. Before you could say surface-to-air missile, a white streak whooshed up off the slope to left. As I watched in stark, helpless, gaping horror, the c
orkscrewing streak connected with the forward rotor of the Chinook, at the end of our column of aircraft. There was an air-cracking boom and a bright flash of light, and the Chinook was spinning and dropping, spiraling downward like a spinning leaf in October.

  “Chalk three is hit!” came a voice over the mike. “Hard landing! Hard landing!”

  Another sizzling corkscrewing missile flew up, just missing the Black Hawk across from us. Down through its wafting contrail, I could see men on the roof of a small cinder-block house perched on the edge of a ridge.

  “Roof left! Roof left!” someone shouted over the line as one of the Cobra attack helicopters broke rank and dove toward the house.

  I almost wet myself when its electric machine gun went off. It sounded like something caught in a shredder, or a massive industrial accident at a power plant. With an extended, sizzling, spine-tingling zap, a blinding white rope of bullets and tracers the size of Coke bottles beamed down out of the attack chopper, into the structure.

  As the helicopter continued to rain lead, the second Cobra swiveled up and around on its axis like a record, and not one but two rockets sledded off from beneath its underbelly and downward in an exhilarating shower of sparks. A split second later, the guardhouse, or whatever it had been, disappeared in a blinding, three-story pa-powing blossom of white light. The concussion of the explosion that came a sliver of a second later whapped warm against my skin where I sat on the wobbling deck of the Black Hawk.

  “We have small-arms fire!” someone said redundantly as from all around the well-lit house and compound, small flashes of light began to sprout. I clapped my hands over my ears when the gunner in the door of our chopper suddenly opened up with his.50 caliber. The sound of its empty brass shells pinging off the metal wall beside my head sounded like a hyped-up jazz drummer hitting the high hats.