Target America: A Sniper Elite Novel by Scott McEwen

recommend that you be asked for your resignation. I’m sorry, but your shenanigans have gone far enough.”

13
    MEXICO, CHIHUAHUA
    Twenty-eight-year-old Mariana Mederos was a second-generation Mexican American working as a field agent for the CIA in the city of Chihuahua, the capital of Chihuahua State. She was five foot nine, with a runner’s physique, brown hair, and brown eyes. She’d been two hundred miles south of the border during the New Mexico Event. Awake at zero hour chatting with a contact over the internet, she heard the incongruous roll of distant thunder and felt the tremor in the earth a short time later. Her satellite phone rang soon afterward with a call from the Mexico station chief wanting to know if she could supply any intel as to what the hell had just happened. No one else within the agency was as close to ground zero, and there hadn’t been even the slightest jot of intelligence to indicate that a nuke had been in play.
    Since those early hours after the explosion, life had moved pretty fast for Mariana, even if only in the communicative sense. Much of her work was done over the computer from the privacy of her apartment, where she kept in contact with her network of informants—common citizens on the CIA payroll. It didn’t cost a great deal to keep the information flowing in the drug-ravaged state, with its struggling economy.As little as a thousand pesos a week (less than one hundred dollars) could be enough. The majority of the intel she collected was passed on to the DEA and the ICE, to be used in the war on drugs—a “war” that she believed the United States had been fighting with at least one hand behind its back, especially when she considered how much of the information she passed up the chain that was never acted upon.
    After the New Mexico Event, however, the nature of her job took on a whole new aspect with an unprecedented sense of urgency. Suddenly she was the CIA’s go-to gal on the ground in the middle of a hot zone, and within only a few hours, she found herself entrusted with resources and information that were customarily reserved for personnel well above her pay grade. The “company” was coming to Chihuahua, and it would be her responsibility to establish arriving operatives in and around the city, introducing them to the appropriate contacts or state officials.
    The Mexican government had given its tacit approval for this, but only at the intelligence level. The Policía Federal Ministerial, Mexico’s equivalent of the CIA, was agreeing to a limited influx of American intelligence personnel for one reason and one reason only: nuclear weapons scared the living hell out of everyone, and when it came to such a threat, it didn’t much matter whether or not you liked or trusted the CIA, because its people were the ones you unquestionably wanted on your team upon confirmation that the lunatic fringe had gotten their hands on the bomb.
    This morning Mariana had agreed to meet with a contact in La Catedral de Chihuahua, a large, ornate Catholic church in the Plaza de Armas. This would be her first face-to-face with the contact Carolina Rodríguez, a woman from the northern part of the state who had sent her an email claiming to have detailed information about the explosion. She had asked that Mariana bring one thousand American dollars, apologizing for the size of the request, though promising that Mariana would find the information well worth it.
    Seated at the back of the cathedral, pretending to be lost in prayer, Mariana considered the amount of Carolina’s demand, knowing that a thousand dollars was a great deal of money to the woman who supported three daughters by cleaning houses for less than ninety dollars a week. Mariana guessed the information she was bringing would eitherbe worth a great deal more than a thousand dollars or nothing at all, and she was leaning toward the latter, but this was the kind of lead that had eventually killed Bin Laden in 2011.
    There