He knew El Paso was the Lone Star State’s sixth largest city, covering 256 square miles, with some 680,000 year-round residents. Across the Rio Grande, it faced Ciudad Juárez, Mexico’s eighth largest city, smaller in size than El Paso but with 2.5 million full-time inhabitants. Together they formed the second largest binational metropolitan area on America’s southern border, after San Diego-Tijuana.
“Okay,” Price said. “I told you he was taken out of his hotel, and that’s confirmed from evidence recovered from the scene. We have his fingerprints on a hotel ice bucket and soda can he dropped when the kidnappers grabbed him. Local cops found his room key, same place, no evidence that anybody got inside the room after they lifted him.”
“Security cameras?” Bolan inquired.
“One long view of the hallway, from the other end. Two men, likely Latino, but no hits from facial recognition software yet. One of them jabbed him with a hypo. We’re assuming it was just a sedative.”
“Because why poison him and carry him away?”
“Exactly. When they took him out, another CCTV feed picked up a shot of the abductors hooding him and securing his arms and legs before putting him in a car trunk. No luck with an ID on the car, although it turned up on a traffic cam two blocks away, heading south. Stolen license plates. We assume the car was hot, as well.”
“Headed for Mexico.”
Bolan already knew four bridges spanned the Rio Grande between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez: the Bridge of the Americas, Ysleta-Zaragoza International Bridge, Paso del Norte Bridge and Stanton Street Bridge. Combined, they permitted some twenty-three million vehicular passages yearly. Once across the border, southbound traffic could go anywhere in Mexico.
Brognola had been gone for thirteen hours. He could’ve traveled 780 miles within that time, at sixty miles per hour, but smart money said he’d probably been taken to a hideout tucked away in Ciudad Juárez itself.
“Who knew he’d be at the conference?” Bolan asked.
“Starting from the top,” Price said, “the AG who assigned him to it—over Hal’s objection, I might add. Kelly, his secretary, would’ve made the travel bookings. Then we’ve got the folks who organized the conference and the various official delegates from Justice, ICE, the DEA, likely a couple from the CIA pretending to be someone else. That’s ninety-five registered delegates, not counting Hal. Add on hotel staff, from managers to housekeepers. The Bureau will be grilling all of them, but...”
“By the time they finish up, it will be too damned late.”
“Bingo.”
Bolan went for the long shot. “Cell phone?”
“In his room. We can’t track him by GPS.”
“So it comes down to who might want to kidnap him, and why.”
“Cartels to start,” Price said. “Since 1997, the Juárez Cartel’s been under fire from both the Gulf and Sinaloa outfits, trying to control the city. That explains Chihuahua’s death toll in the Mexican drug war, and many of the killings in El Paso County.”
Bolan had crossed paths with each of those cartels at one time or another, but a nagging question still remained. “Would any of them know him? His connection to the Farm or covert missions?”
“They shouldn’t,” Price replied, “but when you’ve got billions to spend, I won’t pretend security in Wonderland is all that it should be.”
“Anything else?”
“I hate to even mention it, but yes...maybe.”
“I’m listening.”
“Most residents call Ciudad Juárez Paso del Norte and one magazine calls it the ‘City of the Future,’ but it has another nickname, too.”
“Which is?”
“The Serial Killers’ Playground.”
“The women, right?”
“Primarily,” Price said. “No two sources can agree on numbers, but at least four hundred have been murdered since the nineties, with about as many missing. There have been so many killed, in fact, they’ve come up with a special name for it. Feminicidio. Mostly young women, even girls, some of them prostitutes, the rest mainly sweatshop workers, underpaid and easy to replace.”
“You see the problem there,” Bolan said.
“Sure. Hal’s not a female and he isn’t young. Before we rule it out completely, though, remember that some serials switch-hit on victimology. They don’t all stick to one age, race or sex, much less to pattern victims who all look alike, drive the same make of car, whatever.”
“Still...”
“I grant you, it’s a long shot, but remember Mark Kilroy.”
“The kid snatched out of Brownsville by that cult in the late eighties.”
Price nodded. “One of an estimated thirty victims they took out before police caught on to them. They dealt drugs for a living, but also conducted human sacrifices, thinking that black magic made them bulletproof and physically invisible to enemies, including cops.”
“That didn’t work so well, as I recall.”
“Amen. One dipshit drove through a police roadblock, thinking they couldn’t see him or his car even when officers pursued him with their lights flashing. He led them straight back to the cult’s home base outside Matamoros, and it fell apart from there.”
“Most of them died, if I remember right.”
“Or got sent away for sixty years, the maximum in Mexico. My point is, you can have an evil person or a group of them mixing business with pleasure as the opportunities arise. And don’t forget, two of that cult’s top members were federales. One of them, the top narcotics officer in Mexico City, pulled twenty-five years at his trial. The other, who’d moved on to Interpol, murdered his second wife then shot himself. People are still debating whether his first wife committed suicide by hanging or if hubby tied the noose himself.”
“I hear you. Damn near anyone can kill for any reason. And in pairs?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time, by a long shot. Cults aside, the Hillside stranglers were cousins. Same thing with Dave Gore and Fred Waterfield in Florida. In Philadelphia, Joe Kallinger would take his fifteen-year-old son along to help. Lucas and Toole were part-time lovers, traveling from coast to coast,” Price told him.
“You’ve studied up,” Bolan observed.
“Know the enemy. Never let anybody tell you they’re all carbon-copy, cut and dried.”
“So, if a pair of psychos snatched Hal, he could well be dead by now and we have no way to start looking for them. Two Latinos in Mexico? Try looking for a needle in a needle factory.”
“I know. We have to try, though.”
“Right. First thing,” Bolan observed, “will be acquiring hardware on the wrong side of the border.”
Mexico had strict laws regulating guns, at least on paper, restricting possession of most types and calibers to the military and law enforcement. The country’s only legal gun store—the Directorate of Arms and Munitions Sales—stood behind walls on a military base outside Mexico City. Its customers had to undergo months of background checks, involving six separate documents, and were frisked on arrival by uniformed soldiers.
That said, Mexico’s version of the US Second Amendment, written in 1857, guaranteed all citizens and legal foreign residents the right to bear arms, but stipulated that federal