Hunt the Jackal (18 page)

“I understand, ma’am. I heard.”

She was different from the series of emotionally needy women he had dated and tried, unsuccessfully, to save, including his first wife. Mrs. Clark was more like Holly—graceful, self-confident, strong, and smart. Unlike Holly, she was the girl in high school who dated the quarterback of the football team and wouldn’t have anything to do with wild, rough-mannered hooligans like him.

Now they were two mature human beings struggling to deal with a difficult situation.

In a small but clear voice she related the entire story of her kidnapping and what she had been through—her fears, impressions, descriptions of rooms, faces, the picture of La Santísima Muerte, the guards, the Jackal, her nightmares and dreams. She even talked about the problems she’d had as a young woman living in D.C.

Looking up at him with eyes pregnant with emotion, she said, “We live in a world of moral puzzles and strange connections. I don’t understand them all yet, but I’m determined to keep trying.”

He wasn’t sure he understood what she meant, but he answered politely, “Yes, ma’am.”

“But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”

“Ma’am…”

She sighed. “Whatever responsibility I might have in what happened, as a senator’s wife, and as someone who has made mistakes myself, my daughter, Olivia, is innocent. She didn’t deserve this in any way, shape, or form.”

“Of course not.”

“She’s a good kid, pure-hearted…” Lisa covered her eyes.

“When’s the last time you saw her?” Crocker asked gently.

“I’m not sure. I was drugged. The doctors found opiates and benzodiazepines, specifically diazepam, in my system. It was either two or three days ago. I don’t know.”

Crocker knew that benzodiazepines were the chief ingredients of the most effective sleeping pills, and diazepam was most commonly found in Valium. “Do you remember seeing your daughter in Tapachula?” he asked.

Mrs. Clark nodded. “That’s the last time, I believe. Very briefly when we got off the plane.”

“That must have been two days ago.”

“I think so. Yes.”

“You remember the plane you flew in on?”

“Vaguely. Very vaguely.”

“She was on it.”

“I believe so.”

“Was she present when you recorded your statement?” Crocker asked.

“No. I was waiting for her to appear, but she didn’t. I didn’t hear her there, either.”

“What about the Jackal?”

“I had the impression that he would be there, but he wasn’t.”

“Who was with you at the end?”

“Guards, a video camera operator, and a woman who did my hair and makeup.”

“How many guards?”

“The numbers and faces changed all the time. The first house we stayed in was bigger, newer, and more luxurious. Then about two days ago we were moved to the one in Tapachula.”

“So the Jackal wasn’t with you when you recorded your statement?”

“No, he wasn’t.”

Crocker rubbed his bandaged chin as he tried to put the pieces together.

“Did you see him leave, or hear a jet take off?”

“Not that I remember,” she answered.

He nodded. “Anything else I should know?”

“Yes.” She fixed her blue eyes on his and lowered her voice. “I know all about what the Mexican authorities said about the body, and the dental forensics that are taking place now. But I’m her mother, and I know she’s still alive and is probably with the Jackal. I think she’s in terrible, terrible danger.”

He took her hand and held it as she wept, then handed her a Kleenex from the box on the table beside the bed. “If Olivia’s alive, we’ll find her.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, but we will.”

Two Cuban doctors—one male and one female—sat across from Ivan Jouma and discussed the procedure step by step. They both wore white coats and serious expressions. The man clasped his hands together as he leaned forward and spoke in a deep voice. His beard and mustache were speckled with gray. The woman was younger, in her early forties maybe, with straight hair to her shoulders. They both wore old leather shoes.

As they related the possible complications, which included bleeding, infection, blockage of blood vessels, and leakage of bile, Jouma’s mind drifted back to his grandmother and something she had told him as a young boy as they sat in the backyard under a ceiba tree husking corn. “Big fish eat little fish. That’s the primary condition of nature. What separates us from savage, unruly animals is the concept of justice.”

He didn’t understand then, but he did now.
Justice,
he thought,
is what I’ve demanded since I was a kid living on the streets.
It hadn’t been offered to poor
campesinos
like himself by Mexican institutions, courts, or society. So he had fought to achieve it himself, in the only way he knew how, with the resources he’d been given.

Justice
, he repeated in his head.

To his mind, his quest to achieve it put him in the company of Gandhi and Che Guevara. All three were liberators and purveyors of people’s rights. While Gandhi and Guevara had used the poor’s outrage at being exploited, his strategy was different. He fed an insatiable need of the oppressor. The spiritual emptiness of rich people in the United States and Europe resulted in their need for drugs, which provided him a means to accrue money and power, thus tilting the scales of justice to his side of the equation.

Though depleted physically due to his own excesses, he was pleased with himself. Once healed and stronger, he planned to take his cause a step further and tell the Mexican people that it was time to rise up against their inept, corrupt government, which protected the rich from the poor and made them vassals of the United States.

It was his reason for being.

The doctors had stopped talking and were staring at him.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Did you hear us, Señor Jouma?” the male doctor asked gently. “We asked if you have any questions about the procedure.”

He shook his head. “No, not now.”

“Then all you need to do is sign this consent form and we’ll start early tomorrow, at six a.m. We ask that you don’t eat anything after your dinner tonight.”

He took the pen the doctor offered and signed the document.

“The surgery will take approximately six hours,” the female doctor added. “Possibly longer. Afterward you will be taken to a recovery room, then to the ICU, where you’ll be connected to monitors that will display EKG tracing, blood pressure, breathing rate, oxygen level. You can expect to stay in the hospital for two weeks.”

“Yes.”

“During that time you will likely have a tube inserted through your throat so that your breathing can be assisted by a ventilator. Another thin plastic tube might have to be inserted through your nose into your stomach to remove air that you swallow.”

“When will it be removed?” The longer he was incapacitated, the more time rival drug traffickers and ambitious lieutenants had to take advantage.

“It will be removed when your bowels resume their normal function. You won’t be able to eat or drink until we remove that tube, and will be fed through an IV.”

“Then what happens?” he asked, calculating the timing of his return to Mexico.

“During this whole time, we will continue to monitor all your other body functions and immunosuppression medications. When we feel you are ready, you will be moved to a private room, where you will continue your progress.”

“When will I get back to normal?” In this dog-eat-dog world he had to anticipate every danger and challenge.

“Everyone responds differently, so it’s hard to pinpoint a specific time. But if there are no major complications, expect it to take twelve weeks.”

“Twelve weeks.” He thought he could handle that.

A
s Crocker
limped back to his room, his mind sifted through the things Mrs. Clark had just told him and settled on what he considered were two significant points. One, she had not seen either Olivia or the Jackal during the last four or more hours at the ranch. Two, the Jackal appeared to be in failing health.

What the two things meant, and how and if they were related to one another, he didn’t know but hoped to find out.

Entering the room, he spotted four familiar faces: Akil’s, Mancini’s, Captain Sutter’s, and Jim Anders’s. The last was the one he least expected.

They all seemed to be mentally engaged in the same problem.

“Jim,” Crocker said, addressing the deputy director of CIA Operations. “You come to try to help us save our jobs?”

“That’s not my agenda. No.”

“Then what’s going on?”

“We just received a preliminary report from the Mexican minister of the interior,” Anders said. “The results of the forensic exam were inconclusive.”

Crocker leaned his back against the wall and let the implications of what he’d just heard process through his mind.

“When you say inconclusive, what does that mean exactly?” he asked.

“It means that the remains they recovered were in such a deteriorated condition that a definite conclusion couldn’t be reached even with Olivia Clark’s dental records.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“The question is, what if anything can we do now?” Sutter said as he rubbed his chin.

“I for one never thought it was Olivia Clark,” Crocker declared.

“Me, neither,” added Akil.

“Why not?” Anders asked.

“Because she wasn’t at the ranch when we raided it.”

Anders: “What are you basing this on?”

“What I just learned from Mrs. Clark and my own observations,” Crocker explained. “Mrs. Clark told me that she didn’t see either her daughter or the Jackal during the last day she was at the ranch, and according to the satellite photos, the plane they had flown in on had left. Once we secured the ranch, we searched the house and grounds thoroughly. Unless the guards disposed of Olivia’s body, or locked her in some hidden underground chamber, she wasn’t there.”

“I agree,” Mancini added. “She wasn’t in the house. The Jackal wasn’t there, either. I believe he moved her somewhere else.”

“Where?” asked Anders.

Crocker shrugged. “Don’t know.”

As Crocker related what Mrs. Clark had told him about the last hours in the house leading up to the raid, Senator Clark entered silently and sat on the edge of the bed.

When he finished, Anders turned to the senator and asked, “Senator, what’s your opinion about this?”

Clark raised his left hand, which held a rolled-up document. He said, “I’ve had the forensic report translated and read it carefully several times. It states that the fire was so hot and burned for so long that the jawbone the Mexicans recovered had almost completely incinerated and the front teeth were destroyed. All they had to go on were some badly cracked molars.”

“That’s a professional translation?” Anders asked. “Can I see it?”

“Of course.”

As Anders perused it, Crocker asked, “What about DNA?”

“The high heat destroyed any DNA, which means we might never be able to ascertain one way or another,” Clark answered. “But I’ll tell you something that I believe is just as important: We’re almost certain the Jackal escaped alive. And as long as we know that, there’s a strong possibility that he took my daughter with him.”

“Okay,” Anders agreed. “But under what circumstances?”

Senator Clark seemed confused by the question. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m not sure how to put this delicately,” said Anders. “Did she go willingly?”

“Olivia?”

“I mean, are we talking about a possible Stockholm syndrome condition here?”

All eyes turned to Senator Clark, who rubbed his forehead and seemed to struggle to find the right answer. “If you’re asking if my daughter has somehow bonded with that criminal and even become his lover, that’s a hell of a difficult question for me. My response is, I doubt it, and the prospect frankly sickens me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be sorry. Those are the kind of questions that need to be asked.”

“If we’re able to ascertain the reason they went off together and under what circumstances, we might begin to narrow in on a destination,” Sutter suggested.

“Maybe.”

“What do we know about the Jackal’s movements since Guadalajara?” asked Sutter as he poured himself a glass of water.

Anders shrugged. “We know from the same source that told us about the ranch that he was with the two women in Tapachula, and we also know that the private jet he flew in on left sometime yesterday afternoon.”

“The day of the raid.”

“Correct.”

“How do you know that?” asked Senator Clark.

“From satellite photos,” Crocker answered. “The last one we saw taken at 1600 yesterday afternoon showed no jet on the airstrip.”

“Maybe it was hidden in a hangar,” suggested Anders.

“There was a hangar on the property, which we checked and found empty. It looked like it hadn’t been used in weeks.”

“How certain are you of that?”

“Ninety percent.”

“Has the Jackal made a statement of any kind?” asked Sutter.

“Since the raid on the ranch?” Anders shook his head.

“So no one’s seen hide nor hair of him, or heard from him, since Mrs. Clark spoke to him yesterday morning in Tapachula?”

“Based on the knowledge we have now, that’s correct,” Anders answered.

“What do we know about the plane?” asked Clark.

“It was a private jet.”

“I found this,” Crocker answered, opening the door to the closet and reaching into the dirty, blood-stained utility pouch for the documents he had recovered from the hut by the runway. They listed the plane’s serial number (N662MS), purchase price ($8,950,000), and seller (Maxfly Aviation).

“Can I have them?’ asked Anders.

“Of course.”

“I don’t know that these will do us any good, but I’ll inquire.”

Upon receiving the order from the Jackal, Nacho Gutierrez activated three of his best young
sicarios
—Guapo, Osito, and Stallone. Dressed in designer jeans, tight T-shirts, and leather sneakers, they looked like hip young men out for a night of clubbing. But the savage expressions in their eyes spoke to a more serious agenda.

High-level hits like this one were worth lots of
plata
—tens of thousands of dollars each, as well as perks like sports cars, SUVs, expensive watches, and their pick of beautiful girls kidnapped from Mexico, Texas, and California. It was a results-reward, high-stakes business.

Good results, lots of money. Bad results, a kick in the ass, or maybe a bullet in the head.

These three former members of the Mexican navy boxing team took pride in their speed and cold-blooded efficiency. The first thing they did was locate Bob Marion of Global Banking & Investments, which took a couple of calls and a visit with his secretary as she was getting her nails done in a hair salon across the street from the office.

They caught up with Marion and a female companion two hours later as they were enjoying the salmon tartare
amuse-bouche
with a slightly chilled French rosé in the modern, atmospherically lit dining area of the chichi Lula Bistro in the Jardines de los Arcos area of downtown Guadalajara.

 Guapo (“handsome” in English), who had a pleasant, boyish face and looked like a young businessman, waited in a café across Calle San Gabriel until Marion and his date exited arm in arm on their way for a nightcap and dancing at the nearby Ibiza Club, which featured nude dancers covered in gold paint and feathers in cages that hung from the ceiling. The Dutch record producer and DJ Tiësto was performing a set there tonight, and Marion had scored two very expensive and hard-to-get tickets from a friend who worked for the promoter who had booked the DJ into the club.

Outside on the rain-slicked sidewalk, he kissed his Versace-clad companion, then slipped a tab of Ecstasy into her sweet mouth.

“I feel like letting go tonight,” he whispering, swallowing one himself.

“We only live once, Bobby.”

Her name was Selvina and she was slim and model-tall with a mane of wavy hair and toned arms and shoulders. She was the only child of an Estonian mother and a Mexican father and had recently entered the intern program at the audit and risk review division at Banamex, which was the Mexican affiliate of Citibank.

Guapo put away his iPhone, crossed the street, and called, “
Hola,
Bob. Johnny Valdez.”

“Who?” Marion asked.

“Johnny Valdez. We met at a party last month.”

Marion, who was terrible at remembering names but good with faces, examined the young man’s smooth features, ears that stuck out slightly, and defined jaw against the databank of images in his head. He noticed but wasn’t alarmed by the black Cadillac Escalade that slid by and stopped at the curb.

“Don’t you remember?” Guapo said, smiling and keeping up the false charm. “Tony Alvarez’s house in La Florida?”

At the mention of the coworker who worked the Jackal’s account and had recently been roughed up by a group of U.S. intelligence officers, Marion grabbed Selvina’s arm and started to pull her across the street. As he maneuvered around the Escalade, the back door opened and Guapo pushed them both inside.

One of Selvina’s new Prada high heels fell off in the process, causing her to release a stream of Russian curse words into the dark interior. She stopped abruptly when a silenced Glock 9mm was pointed at her face.

As the vehicle moved quickly, Marion sat determined not to show any fear. He explained to Guapo that he had nothing to do with Tony Alvarez and demanded to know who the men were and what this was about.

Guapo reached past the girl and slapped the back of Marion’s head so hard that it jolted him out his cocoon of security and privilege. Marion started to worry that maybe he had been arrogant to think that playing both sides of the fence—Ivan Jouma and the FBI—wouldn’t catch up with him.

But there was nothing he could do now but wait for an opportunity.

As the vehicle turned into an alley between two office towers, Guapo asked for their phones and Selvina’s purse.

She was reluctant to hand it over but relented soon after Stallone grabbed the front of her dress and pulled so hard that the cotton-Spandex-blend shoulder straps snapped.

A very tense six minutes later, the Escalade entered the underground garage of a dark office building and wound down four levels to the bottom, which was being used as a storage area for desks, partitions, chairs, and other furniture and equipment. As he was dragged roughly from the vehicle, Marion said, “El Chacal is a close business associate of mine. He won’t like this.”

Without saying a word in response, Guapo duct-taped Marion’s wrists behind his back, then taped him to an executive chair.

Marion watched dry-mouthed and trembling as Selvina’s dress and bra were ripped off, revealing the tattoo of a dragon on her lower stomach. The three men made a series of lewd comments about the meaning of the tattoo; then Stallone punched it hard, causing her to double over and fall to her knees.

“Tell me about the dragon,” he said, grabbing her by the hair. “What’s it mean, bitch?”

“Nothing,” she whimpered.

“It’s silly, like you. Isn’t it?”

He grabbed her by the hair, lowered his zipper, and forced her to perform oral sex on him. Guapo snapped pictures with his iPhone, then took a turn. She spoke to herself in Russian and blubbered, causing black mascara to streak down her face.

How far are they going to take this?
Marion asked himself as he stared at the ceiling and scolded himself for staying in town.

“Tell me what you want,” he said, “and I’ll give it to you now!”

Osito, who was the shortest and most muscle-bound of the three, ripped off Selvina’s panties, leaned her over a desk, and started to sodomize her, which made Marion throw up over the front of his suit.

He tried to ignore the sound of Osito’s pelvis smacking against Selvina’s butt and the little squeals of pain that sometimes issued from her mouth. But that was impossible.

By the time Osito was finished, Selvina resembled a rag doll, stripped of will, humanity, and dignity.

Osito pulled out of her, shouting
“¡Olé!”
, spun her so that she faced him, and shot her in the head. As Selvina crumpled to the cement floor, Marion lost control of his bladder. He decided he didn’t care what came next, he just wanted it to end quickly.

Without asking him a single question, the three
sicarios
took turns beating him with bats and sections of pipe until all his teeth were dislodged or broken, blood dripped down the front of his suit, and his head was a throbbing, swollen mass of pain.

Then Guapo pointed a Glock to his smashed nose and asked him for descriptions of the four
gringos
who had executed the raid on the house in Puerto del Hiero. All Marion could remember was that they were Navy SEALs from a base in Virginia.

Slipping in and out of consciousness, he repeated that information twice and described the four men as best he could.

“Should we do the
guiso
?” Osito asked, pointing to some empty oil drums along the wall. The
guiso
was the practice of putting a victim in a fifty-five-gallon drum, pouring gasoline over him, and setting him on fire.

“Not here,” Guapo said. “Too much smoke.”

Instead, they stripped him naked, shot him in the groin, carved the word
“rata”
into his stomach, then used rope to string him and Selvina by their ankles from a pipe that ran along the ceiling.

The staff at what was now called the Hospital Santo Tomás needed the room, so Crocker, Sutter, Akil, and Mancini moved to a suite at the nearby Balboa Palace, where Akil and Mancini were staying. Despite its designation, it wasn’t luxurious at all. Two and a half stars on Hotels.com with a slew of negative comments about the rudeness of the staff and the filth.