Black List (9 page)
M
cAllen, Texas, sat only five miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, and just beyond that was the highly dangerous Mexican city of Reynosa. Nicholas had both stolen from and sold information to some of Mexico’s worst organized crime figures. He could envision a million scenarios, none of them good, whereby the meeting at the Casa De Palmas was only a ruse to draw him across the border to an undesirable end, so he had made sure to take appropriate precautions.
Because of his size, even weapons designed for children were usually too large and unwieldy for him to handle. They also fired only lower-caliber ammunition that didn’t have enough knockdown power for his taste. To remedy the situation, Nicholas had all of his equipment custom made by some of the finest gunsmiths and engineers in the world.
His favorite weapon was a three-shot, .45-caliber handgun with a tiny grip and a dramatically ported barrel that helped significantly reduce the pistol’s recoil. Despite the clever design, it took everything Nicholas had to control the weapon and bring it back on target for follow-up shots. Nevertheless, it was an incredible equalizer—an elephant gun that put the mouse on equal footing.
There was an array of other gear that Nicholas never traveled without, and he took his time loading up the Denali. If he couldn’t return to the
ranch, if he had to run, or if any of a million other things happened, he always wanted to be prepared. He had learned at a very young age that no one else was going to look out for him. Only
he
was going to look out for him. And for him to survive, he needed to think of everything and be as prepared as possible. The problem, though, was that no one could be prepared for
everything.
Be that as it may, Nicholas hadn’t come all this way to allow himself to be paralyzed by his doubts. He had come to repay a favor.
Once all his gear was loaded, Nicholas gave the dogs a few minutes of exercise and then had them hop into the cargo area. He closed the tailgate, walked around to the front, and climbed into the driver’s seat.
A white-tailed hawk spun circles in the sky above as the Denali made its way across the ranch and out onto the county road, south toward McAllen.
Had he wanted to, Nicholas could have enlisted the help of Knight’s security team, but he had decided against it. This was personal. He refrained from involving others in his affairs whenever possible. The less people knew about him, the better—even Knight’s security team.
And while Caroline hadn’t specifically asked him to come alone, the message had been clear. She was in trouble and didn’t want anyone else to know that she had reached out to him. Fair enough. He could understand that. He had his dogs and more than a few aces in the hole, just in case.
As he drove, he was gripped by a tumult of emotion. There was apprehension, of course. It was always that way when he traveled outside his comfort zone. There was also a twinge of excitement. It had been so long since he had last seen Caroline. She was not only brilliant, she was beautiful, and much like that evening at the hacker conference years ago, he had found himself changing clothes multiple times before settling on the right thing to wear for this meeting.
Even he knew the effort was ridiculous. Their relationship had never been anything more than friendship, but still, she mattered to him and he wanted to look his best. In a sudden bout of impulsiveness, he had even shaved off his neatly trimmed beard in the hope that along with it he might be able to shave off a few years. It was ironic that a soul dealt such a miserable hand and treated so cruelly by life could possess such
hopefulness; his insecurities were both heartbreaking and incredibly endearing to those closest to him.
To his credit, Nicholas was no fool. He knew how the world saw him. He was well aware that romantic entanglements were not something he would ever have to worry about. And, as he grew older, he began to make peace with the idea of spending the rest of his life alone. This had caused him to place even greater value on the handful of friendships he did have. It also played a significant role in deciding to answer Caroline’s call for help.
His mind was drawn back to the task at hand as the rugged, rural landscape of south Texas began to give way to the outlying residential communities of McAllen.
Just over one hundred years old, McAllen was one of the fastest-growing urban areas in the United States. It had benefited tremendously from the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, as well as the
Maquiladora
economy that allowed Mexican factories to import raw materials tariff free and produce goods to sell back to the United States. McAllen was in essence a boomtown catering to Americans and Mexicans alike. International trade, cross-border commerce and health care, on top of drug running and human trafficking, were making a lot of people in the Lower Rio Grande Valley very wealthy.
And for every wealthy person the border towns of south Texas produced, there were a thousand more who would do anything just to become wealthy. It was just this category of person Nicholas was on the lookout for as he rolled into McAllen.
One of the most common get-rich-quick schemes in Mexico was kidnapping, and it had already spilled across the border into the southern United States. While holding victims for ransom meant big paydays, “express” kidnappings were starting to come into vogue. Express kidnappings were a step above a mugging. Kidnappers first cleaned out your wallet, then forced you to the nearest ATM, where they made you withdraw the maximum amount allowed by your bank. Victims were normally then released, although some were held until the next day in order to make a second run. Nicholas didn’t plan on falling prey to either crime.
Every time traffic slowed or he was required to stop for an intersection,
he made sure to keep enough space between vehicles so that he could always see the rear tires of the vehicle in front of him. That meant he would be able to drive around the vehicle and not be boxed in.
He was well aware of the minor “accidents” carjackers orchestrated in order to steal high-end vehicles right off the street, and he was on his guard, constantly monitoring not only what was happening in front of his SUV but also along the sides and behind.
South Main Street was lined with old-fashioned streetlights and mostly single-story retail shops that looked like they had been built in the 1950s, their signs written in English and Spanish. Parked at an angle to the narrow concrete sidewalks was a mixture of pickup trucks, minivans, and cheap American sedans, cheek-by-jowl with BMWs, Porsches, and Mercedes. The contrast couldn’t have been more stark.
Crossing from South Main Street to North was to literally go from one side of the tracks to the other. Instead of single-story shops, majestic palms now bordered each side of the street. There was a small, green square called Archer Park and across from it, the Casa De Palmas hotel.
Nicholas drove past slowly, taking everything in, including the adjacent parking structure.
A device sitting on the armrest next to him chimed and he glanced down at the screen to see “Casa De Palmas WiFi acquired.” Smiling, he continued on, familiarizing himself with the neighborhood and the different routes he might have to take on his departure.
Half an hour later, he pulled into the McAllen Convention Bureau and Visitors’ Center parking lot and found a spot facing Archer Park and the Casa De Palmas beyond. It was now time to do what he did best.
C
asa De Palmas had been built in the Mission style, with archways, a mock bell tower, red Spanish roofing tiles, and a cream stucco façade offset with brilliant white trim. The original structure dated back to the early 1900s, and as far as Nicholas was concerned, so did its security.
Using the hotel’s own WiFi service as his access point, he had the Casa De Palmas’ firewalls defeated within minutes. And once he was in, he owned everything inside the hotel. Anything that touched the Casa De Palmas computer system now belonged to him.
Nicholas began the next stage of his reconnaissance by scrolling through the guest registry. He searched for Caroline Romero’s name but came up empty. He searched credit card transactions at the hotel bar and restaurant and also came up empty. He remotely searched the concierge’s computer and still found nothing. As far as he could tell, Caroline had left no electronic “fingerprints” at the Casa De Palmas. He wasn’t surprised.
He next shifted his attention to the hotel’s less than impressive CCTV feed. Pouring himself a small cup of espresso from the thermos he had brought, he took a sip as he clicked back and forth, studying the different images.
All of the closed-circuit cameras were placed exactly where he expected
them to be. There were feeds from the lobby, the loading bay, the different levels of the garage, and so forth. All the footage was recorded on two inexpensive, motion-activated DVRs located in the security office. As far as Nicholas could tell, they kept the footage for a week and then purged it, possibly making a hard-copy backup on a DVD or a removable drive of some sort. It didn’t make a difference. One week’s worth of footage would be more than enough.
After studying the live camera feeds, he tapped into the DVRs and scrolled backward through the day’s traffic. He had plenty of time until his meeting with Caroline, so there was no need to rush. He was looking for anything out of the ordinary; anything that suggested he might be walking into a trap.
When he finished scrolling through with the current day’s footage, he scrolled back and reviewed the footage from yesterday, paying particular attention to who arrived and who departed. While there were some visitors that gave him pause, most notably security men accompanying wealthy women to lunch with their girlfriends, there really wasn’t anything that set off any alarm bells. So far, so good.
Just to be sure, Nicholas scanned one more day’s worth of footage. Content for the time being, he moved on to the next phase.
There wasn’t anything a business did these days that wasn’t done on computer, and Casa De Palmas was a perfect case in point. Locating the HR director’s computer, Nicholas was able to figure out which security guard would be on desk duty for the evening and when he had last been off. With that knowledge, he was able to select the garage footage from which he would build his loop.
Once he had partitioned a portion of the DVR and copied the garage footage over from two nights ago, all he had to do was rebuild the timestamp data and make sure that when the switch took place, everything synched up. It wouldn’t do any good to have the true feed to the guard be nighttime while the bogus feed from the garage still showed daylight outside.
At best, the work was tedious, but that was all. Soon enough, Nicholas had built himself a virtual cloak of invisibility that would cover the garage. Even better was the fact that while the guard inside the security office of
the hotel would be unknowingly watching footage from two nights ago, Nicholas would be able to monitor the live feeds from the garage cameras. Sitting in his SUV on the upper level, he’d be able to watch all the comings and goings from the garage and would still have access to all the footage from the remaining hotel cameras. It gave him the edge, and that edge could make all the difference between life and death.
Checking the time, Nicholas reviewed the recent spate of arrivals at the hotel. The Casa De Palmas shuttle had recently disgorged a group of guests, presumably from the airport, and several expensive sports cars had dropped off groups of attractive, well-dressed women, many of whom seemed to know one another and had proceeded to the hotel bar.
Watching the mostly dark-haired, Latina women arrive at the hotel, he realized that he had no idea what he was looking for. Caroline could look exactly like she had the last time he saw her or she could look completely different. It was amazing how women could so easily change their appearance. She could be a blonde for all he knew or she could look exactly like any of the women who had entered the hotel over the last half hour.
Exercising his talents by taking over the hotel’s camera system had made him feel empowered, but realizing that he didn’t know what he was looking for began to put him on edge again.
