Free The Bourne Retribution by Eric Van Lustbader Page A

one drug lord she needed to see. The Gulf cartel had been decimated by Los Zetas to the point that they were merely vestigial, and as for the Sinaloa—still the largest cartel in numbers—Los Zetas had for some months now been eating away at their traditional territory. It was only a matter of time before Raul Giron, head of the Sinaloa, would lose what control he had left. The strategies devised by the paramilitary minds at the core of Los Zetas were too much for the old-school peasant drug overlords. After she briefed Marsh, they had been met outside her father’s house by a contingent of fifteen heavily armed men, who led them to the waiting armored vehicle, and they had set off for the place Matamoros had indicated.
    Marsh, stirring beside her, brought her back.
    “Why did you do it?” he said.
    “Do what?” Her mind was still on today’s strategies.
    “Seduce me.”
    She glanced over at him and shrugged. “How else was I to know what kind of man you are?”
    “You mean it was a test?”
    “To keep you or to send you packing, yes.”
    He shook his head in disbelief. “I don’t see what you could—”
    “In the throes of sex, men reveal parts of themselves even they are not aware of. There’s something in you, Wendell, something I don’t want to let go of.”
    “You mean I can be of use to you.”
    “That’s a poor and inaccurate way of putting it. I sensed I could trust you, that you might have learned from your transgression.”
    “That I have.”
    “Well then, our coupling was a success”—she smiled in that way that could shrivel another woman and send shivers down a man’s back—“for both of us.”
    Marsh stared at the metal floor between his feet. She sensed him brooding and, before the fear set in, she said, “You’re perfect for your role in this little play of ours.”
    “Play?” Marsh said. “Is that what you call a meeting with the most feared man in Mexico?”
    She put a hand on his forearm. “ Cálmate, Juanito, por favor .” She smiled in that winning way of hers. “This is all foreordained. My father’s power protects us better than these armed men.”
    “Then why are they here?”
    Her smile widened. “ Machismo , Wendell, is the watchword by which I have lived my life. I had no choice. This is why I chose to leave Mexico, which still today is no place for a common woman. But now I come back to Mexico as a citizen of the world. This is an unknown to men like Matamoros. The world beyond Mexico is a mystery to men like him. They know what they know, and that’s all. Their knowledge of their world is complete, it’s what makes them secure. But it also limits them.”
    “But Matamoros is different,” Marsh said. “He was trained by the Mexican military.”
    “And you think the military is any different from the cartels?” She shook her head. “Only in how it wages war. But you see, Wendell, for all of the military’s superiority in weapons, helicopters, manpower, it is no match for the cartels, whose fervor of purpose makes them stronger. They bend the Mexican state to their will. Everything else is extraneous and of no interest to them.
    “But I bring them a means to their end—drugs and money. Here in Mexico, these are the only two things that must be respected.”
    By this time they had reached the northern precincts of the Distrito Federal. They made a right, then another, and finally a left. At the end of the street, they turned into a curving driveway that led to an enormous house of pale pink stucco, in the Mexican hacienda style. The instant their vehicle began to crunch over the crushed-shell drive, men appeared from the feathered palm-frond shadows around the house. They were grim-faced and clearly armed, but they made no threatening move. It was as if they were statues strewn about the property, but Maricruz was under no illusions. At the drop of a hat they could turn into land mines.
    The vehicle ground to a stop in front of a country-style portico.