As long as they don’t have it, she’ll be kept alive.
CHAPTER 2
Greer
The illegal trade of guns isn’t an overly lucrative business, as opposed to drug dealing. Ironically, many buyers are drug dealers who like their pistols, submachine guns, and assault rifles to show might. While these transactions equal roughly $1 billion annually, it’s still small potatoes if a bad guy wants to make serious money.
As such, you’d think the CIA wouldn’t be all that interested in an arms dealer. However, those small arms, while not generating a lot of revenue, are more about providing power in communities, particularly those controlled by gangs.
In this instance—whereby I’m stuck in a small cinder block cell in the basement of some warehouse—it is to provide weapons to major transnational gangs. Here in El Salvador, gang activity is a huge problem, and it extends throughout South, Central, and North America.
Hugo Mejia is the man I’m after. I was charged by my employer, the Central Intelligence Agency, to come to the capital city of San Salvador, Mejia’s home of known record, and gather as much intel as possible so that our government can take him down. While the gang activity here in El Salvador is widespread and vicious, our government isn’t so magnanimous that it wants to help the poor souls here. No, the CIA is more interested in taking down those portions of the gangs that are rooted in the United States, being fed guns by Mejia.
The gang highest on their target list is Vecindario 18, a transnational criminal organization that actually started in Los Angeles and spread southward where it has grown tremendously. As members were arrested in LA and deported to their home countries, the numbers swelled in Latin America. There are an estimated thirty to fifty thousand members of Vecindario 18 with the most violent congregated in Central America. The arms that Hugo Mejia traffics run on a two-way street between Central and North America, and since that puts US citizens in danger, he has to be taken down on his home turf.
Gathering intel on Mejia included a hell of a lot of following him around, stakeouts watching his house and weapons compound, as well as a long process of becoming a housekeeper so that I could eventually infiltrate his office and steal data.
That was done successfully just yesterday after working deep undercover in his home for almost two months. I played the part of a lowly, not-so-smart maid, easily passing as a native, given I have my Argentinian mother’s complexion and I’m fluent in Voseo Spanish and the local vernacular of Caliche.
While cleaning his office one day, it was quite simple to pop a USB drive into his laptop as he ate lunch with his family. The drive contained a virus that would hack past his firewall and password and download a mirror image of his entire hard drive. When it started the download, I knew I’d hit pay dirt—scrolling rows of dealers, suppliers, as well as the gang cells he sold to. Even a terrorist sleeper cell I recognized to which he’s supplying grenade launchers, mortars, and antitank guns.
I retrieved the USB just as I finished dusting. It was nearly quitting time, and I was less than half an hour from a clean getaway.
And that’s when the proverbial shit hit the fan when a guard walked in and saw me slip the USB drive into my pocket.
What followed was a long, drawn-out affair—me against several guards—including a rousing chase through the city, but I was no match for Mejia’s reach. I was captured, and now I’m in a cell.
I have no clue where it’s located as they put a bag over my head until we reached our destination. I was taken to a sublevel floor with no windows and shoved into a cell complete with mold-covered walls and iron bars. There’s a bucket in the corner for a toilet and a filthy mattress on the floor. I’ve been pacing back and forth ever since, trying to make contingency plans on how to save my own life.
The only saving grace is they haven’t found the USB drive, and I most certainly didn’t swallow it. As long as I don’t give up the location, I’ll stay alive and hopefully will figure out a way to escape.
Every once in a while, a man will walk by my cell door. While Mejia clearly uses Vecindario gang members as his muscle—and they’re all easily recognizable with some form of the number eighteen on either their clothing or tattooed on their skin—the men patrolling this basement level are a militarized force. They’re wearing uniforms of black shirts and fatigues with combat boots. They’re carrying M4 Carbines with pistols holstered at their hips. While I don’t see any identifying patches, it makes me wonder if they’re local, off-duty police on his payroll or just former military for hire.