Chapter 14 - The Counter-StrategyI didn't sleep for the rest of the night.
At six in the morning, I stood outside Roberto Mendez’s office building downtown, waiting for him to unlock the front doors. When he saw me standing there with the black plastic case under my arm, his eyebrows shot up in concern.
"Gabriel? What happened?"
We sat in his inner office with the blinds pulled tight. I laid out everything: Elena’s hidden journal, the fifty thousand dollars in cash, the audio recordings between Patricia and Treviño, and the phone call from the syndicate enforcer.
Roberto listened in complete, stunned silence, his hand resting on his chin as he carefully reviewed Elena’s journal entries.
"This man on the phone... he’s bluffing about one thing, Gabriel," Roberto said after a long pause. "He wants you to think you're legally liable for those shipments, but under Mexican federal criminal law, an innocent carrier who has no knowledge of illicit cargo inside sealed secondary floors cannot be prosecuted without proof of intent."
"Proof of intent?" I repeated. "They have my signature on the cargo manifests!"
"Which Elena signed on your behalf while you were on the road!" Roberto pointed out, tapping page fifteen of the journal. "Look at the dates. Every single fraudulent manifest was signed using a forged stamp while you were physically driving secondary routes in Nuevo León. We have your GPS truck logs from your company to prove you were nowhere near the loading docks!"
I let out a long, ragged breath as the weight on my chest lightened slightly. "So I'm not trapped?"
"You're not trapped legally," Roberto said firmly. "But physically? These men are dangerous. If you go to that loading dock tonight alone with that cash, they won't just take the drive—they'll eliminate the only witness left who can connect them to Treviño and Patricia."
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"So what do we do?"
Roberto pulled his desk phone toward him and dialed a direct extension. "We call Prosecutor Gomez. But we don't tell her we're handing over evidence. We tell her we're setting a federal sting at the old freight depot."
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