I drink my coffee and call the number.
Diego Vega answers on the first ring. He's Carlos Vega's nephew and the current operational head of the cartel's northeast territory, a position he inherited when his uncle went to prison and one he has managed with the particularcombination of brutality and paranoia that characterizes men who know they're not smart enough for the job they hold.
"We have a problem," Diego says without greeting or preamble.
"The Salinas job is done."
"I'm not talking about Salinas." A pause follows, with voices in the background, muffled, as if he's covering the phone. Then he's back. "The prosecutor. Navarro."
The name lands in my chest like a stone dropped into still water.
"What about her?"
"She needs to go away. Not dead. Not yet. We need her as leverage. If she recants, files a motion to vacate, we can get Alejandro's conviction overturned."
"A federal prosecutor isn't going to recant."
"She will if she's motivated properly."
I set down my coffee. "You're talking about kidnapping a federal prosecutor."
"I'm talking about a strategic acquisition of a valuable asset." Diego sounds pleased with himself, the way he always does when he's repeating something someone smarter told him to say. "You take her. You hold her somewhere off the grid. You convince her that cooperation is in her best interest. When she agrees to play ball, you bring her back and she does what needs to be done."
"And if she doesn't agree?"
"Then we explore other options." His voice goes flat. "But that's phase two. Right now, I need you to bring her in. Clean, quiet, no mess. Your specialty."
I'm quiet for a long time, long enough that Diego says my name twice.
"Mateo. You hear me?"
"I hear you."
"This is for Alejandro. Your brother. Your blood. He's sitting in a cell right now because this woman made it her personal mission to destroy him. Everything you've done, every job, every body, you did it so he could have a life. And she took that from him. From both of you."
He's not wrong. That's the part that burns. Everything I've built, every skill I've sharpened, every piece of my humanity I've surrendered, it was all for Alejandro. To keep him safe. To give him something better than what we were handed. And Sofia Navarro, with her RICO statutes and her righteous fury, dismantled all of it in a courtroom in lower Manhattan.
If she won't cooperate, I'll have to kill her. I sit with that thought the way I sit with every job: clinically, without flinching. I've ended lives for less. Men who skimmed profits, who talked to the wrong people, who simply became inconvenient. Sofia Navarro is a threat to my brother's freedom, which makes her a threat to the only thing in this world I care about. The calculus is simple.
Except it isn't. Because kidnapping and killing a federal prosecutor isn't cleaning a crime scene. It's an act of war against the United States government, and the response will be proportional. And because somewhere underneath the clinical assessment, in a place I don't examine too closely, there's a voice saying that killing a woman whose only crime was doing her job well would make me something I haven't been yet, something worse than what I already am.
"The heat will be enormous," I say. "FBI, Marshals, NYPD, every agency in the city will be looking for her."
"Which is why it needs to be you. Anyone else leaves a trail. You don't."
"I'll need time to plan."
"You have forty-eight hours to get this in motion."
"That's not enough."
"Make it enough." Diego's voice hardens. "And Mateo? This isn't a request. The family has decided. If you can't do this for your own brother, we'll find someone who can. And they won't be as gentle as you."
He hangs up. I stare at the phone on the counter and let the silence fill the apartment.
Forty-eight hours to plan a kidnapping. The logistics aren't the problem. I can plan an extraction in my sleep because it's just a sequence of variables to control. Entry point, exit route, transport, containment. The problem is the target. Sofia Navarro isn't a cartel associate who knows the rules and understands the risks. She's a civilian, a government official, someone whose disappearance will trigger a response I can't clean away with bleach and a hacksaw.
And she's the woman who put my brother in prison.
