Chapter Two
A night in the hotel and a few good meals, and Bud was ready to take on the day.
Today wouldn’t be an ordinary one, though. Most people go their whole lives without walking into a Mexican drug cartel leader’s home.
There are rules and procedures to be followed before being allowed behind compound walls, and Bud answered the door in the plush robe provided by the resort.
He’d met Arturo on previous visits, and he nodded pleasantly to him as he accepted the garment bag.
Arturo watched while Bud donned the provided boxers, khaki pants, and oxford blue button down.
Finally, he slid the provided shoes on and felt inside the pockets of his pants.
As always, he found a money clip with more than enough cash to get him through the day should he need to find his own way back to the resort.
Moving around in Mexico without ID wasn’t a good idea, but he couldn’t take anything of his own into the compound – not even his wallet.
Manuel hadn’t reached the top of the cartel by taking chances.
Bud handed his key card to Arturo and said, “I believe I’m ready.”
“Sorry, amigo. I’ll need to see you run a comb through your hair before we can go.”
“Of course. I apologize for not remembering. I shipped some Scotch a few days ago, I trust it’s made it to Manuel?”
“It has.”
Bud’s hair was usually shaggy and unkempt, but he’d had a mostly respectable haircut before making the trip.
The comb slid through with no problems, and Arturo clapped him on the back as he pocketed the hotel key card.
There wasn’t a doubt in Bud’s mind that someone would be going through his things today, but nothing he’d brought would give away any secrets.
Shadow had taken everything off the laptop except the essentials, and Bud’s burner phone wouldn’t give them anything either.
The club’s encryption app was hidden inside one of his social networking apps, and they’d never find it.
Arturo’s BMW was silver this time, and his muscle was waiting for them in the back seat.
The first time Arturo had driven Bud, he’d been relegated to the back seat while the muscle sat up front, but Bud had carefully cultured his relationship with these men over the decades.
He’d been with Manuel and Arturo when word had reached him of his wife’s death, and they’d arranged for him to have help getting home to his daughter as quickly as possible.
So long ago, and yet it still hurt as if it’d happened a few months ago.
Arturo once again drove like he was in the Talladega Five Hundred.
The Yucatan Peninsula is flat, the roads are straight, and Arturo’s boss owns the Policia, so it didn’t take long for them to travel nearly a hundred miles inland to Manuel’s huge compound.
The guards at the gate waved them through, and Bud frowned as he caught a whiff of coyote.
“Just for the outer boundary,” Arturo explained. “And only because he’s proven useful.”
Manuel’s a were-Jaguar, or Nahual in Mexican legend. Arturo is his second in command and also a Jaguar, while most of their muscle are yarará — rattlesnake shifters. There’s a damned good reason the cartel is feared.
Manuel met them in the foyer and walked Bud through the house.
His men had orders to either perform cavity checks or observe a change to animal and back to human, but Bud hadn’t been required to change for them in at least twenty years.
Clothes were provided in Bud’s preferred labels and sizes because of the risk law enforcement might put a bug into his clothes while the airlines had his luggage.
The same could be said of his wallet. The latest bugs could be a tiny dot one might not notice on a credit card, and anyone could be placed as a cashier to have access to his card or ID.
He’d know if someone stuck something up his ass or in his ear, though.
“How’s your daughter?” Manuel asked as they rode the elevator to the lower levels. “I understand she married and is working for your government?”
“She’s a mechanical engineer and is designing ways to retrofit our aging dams — she isn’t law enforcement. She’s doing quite well and is happily married.”
“And does her husband know his happiness depends upon hers?”
Bud chuckled. “She married one of my men who moved to Chattanooga, so yeah — he’s aware.”
“Chattanooga is giving me fits. I sent a man to increase sales, but he isn’t giving me the kind of results he has in other cities.”
Manuel never talked about business until they were safely ensconced in his office downstairs, and Bud lifted an eyebrow in question.
“New roofing tiles that shield, and a clear space-age material in the windows that doesn’t convey vibrations. The entire house is supposed to be safe from the snoopers now, but I still keep it to the lower two basement levels.”
Bud had heard of the roofing option, but not the windows. He’d have to ask Aaron Drake about it. The elevator doors opened, the two stepped into the large game room, and Manuel sat on a sofa instead of taking Bud to his office.
“I’m sure this makes you breathe a lot easier,” Bud commented as he sat in a chair across from the drug kingpin. “While we’re on the subject, I bring a proposal from the Chattanooga chapter.”
“I thought they were only dealing in legal weapons?”
“Officially, yes. However, they sent a member off to learn gunsmithing, and he’s been brainstorming with their sniper. He’s come up with something the snipers are raving over. Black market price is fourteen-grand in U.S. dollars. The boat’ll have a .338 to look over.”
“What is their proposal?”
“They’ve recently increased their territory to protect two more schools.
They’ll give an assurance of keeping their territory at the current boundaries, and they’ll provide you with four sniper rifles minus the accessories — one now and three on my next delivery.
In exchange, they need assurances their guns will never be used in America, and you’ll stop funding the local gangs to fight the MC. ”
Manuel didn’t look like he was of a mind to accept, so Bud added, “My daughter lives in Chattanooga and is married to their enforcer. One of the gangs recently grabbed her with the intention of… doing bad things.” Bud couldn’t say the word rape in relation to his Angel, much less the prospect of them killing her.
He passed off the hesitation with a shrug.
“She killed the five men who kidnapped her so there wasn’t much for me to do once we got her back, but I’d just as soon not have to live through another phone call like that. ”
“I’ll have my snipers look it over. No promises.”
* * * *
There was always a party when Bud visited.
A few hours into it and just after midnight, Bud, Arturo, and Manuel left the raucous craziness for the media room upon Arturo’s signal.
The men spoke rapid-fire Spanish to the operator as they all took a seat — Bud had picked up a decent amount of Spanish over the years, and was pretty sure the operator was assuring them everything was on schedule.
Their boat would meet the RTMC’s borrowed yacht at coordinates randomly chosen within a twenty-square mile area.
“The coordinates went out an hour ago on schedule,” Arturo told Bud. “Our boat’s about a mile out.”
Bud hoped his men hadn’t run into trouble and would make the drop-off on time, but with everyone in the room able to smell stress and unease, he didn’t let himself consider any other possibility. His men had made this trip once or twice a year for decades and they knew the drill.
“Arturo tells me you’ve replaced your Brain with a Shadow.”
“We have. It’s impossible to survive without a hacker in today’s landscape.”
“You trust him? I’m sure you have ways of ensuring loyalty, but for a hacker, you need unassailable trust.”
Tricky conversation. If the club had known who he was at first, they wouldn’t have considered him, but Shadow had more than earned their trust by the time they found out. They’d made him pay for not being honest up front, and he’d done so without argument.
Bud shrugged. “The boy’s mother was compensated well for her agreement to keep the story away from the media. The future-governor never intended his son to know, but he didn’t count on the child one day acquiring the hacking skills to get into any database on the planet.”
“One weak link can bring us all down.”
“I’m aware.” A cat and a wolf locked in a stare-down is never a good thing, but Bud wasn’t of a mind to look away.
“Rumor has it the governor’s an owl.” Manuel didn’t look away, but toned down the threat with his body language.
“Rumor is correct.” Bud relaxed his stance as well.
“So your new Shadow is truly a shadow in the night?”
Bud inclined his head in acknowledgement, but added, “The nickname comes from being a shadow online. He can get in and out of a system without leaving a trace.”
The operator turned the volume up so they could hear better, and Bud smiled as he saw his men’s large yacht slide into view on the high-tech night vision equipment.
Neither boat had its lights on, but both captains skillfully edged close enough for the crew to tie the smaller boat off to the larger one.
The inside lights came on once everyone was on the lower floor of the yacht.
Arturo had his guys open a few crates to look inside, and finally called on someone to inspect the sniper rifle.
Again, Bud had to concentrate to get what he could from the Spanish, but he gathered the man was their most expert sniper, and his suspicions were confirmed when he broke the rifle down and put it back together.
More rapid-fire Spanish, and Manuel told Bud, “We’ll add ten grand on to the agreed upon price, and if my man is happy with the weapon we’ll accept four free with your next shipment in accord with your terms, to be renegotiated every two years.”