Anointed (Vanished Book 3)

by Michael Arches

  The nightmare never ended.

  -o-o-o-

  After what seemed like hours, Detective Pilgrim returned. “Against my objections, the powers-that-be told me to cut you loose. The hotel’s management would like to talk with Mr. Lamont and Ms. Brodie to find out whether they intend to remain in their suite.”

  Viola’s heart ached. Now, she’d gotten Cici and Alexander in trouble, too. Nobody was safe around her.

  Pilgrim escorted them out of the restaurant and through the bar. A half-dozen crime techs scurried about as they collected evidence. All of the bodies were already gone, but plenty of bloodstains remained.

  Pilgrim gave Viola and Alexander a disgusted wave as he left them alone.

  “Should I take off?” Viola whispered.

  “Hell, no,” Alexander said loud and hard. “We didn’t come all the way just to kick you to the curb when the game got rough. Remember, we’re from LA. Our assholes make yours look like preschoolers.”

  A middle-aged woman with perfectly styled blonde hair and an expensive business suit walked up to them. “Mr. Lamont, I’m the hotel’s general manager. I spoke to Cici. She has decided to leave the hotel. I want to emphasize that you’re not obligated to do so. But if you do want to make a change, I’m happy to personally help you find comparable accommodations.”

  He shrugged. “It’s up to her. I’m going to catch the next flight to LA.”

  The woman wrung her hands a few times before wandering away.

  Once Viola and Alexander were in an elevator alone, he said, “One thing about Cici, she’s always got five schemes percolating at once. I can’t imagine what she’s up to this time.”

  He seemed to be in remarkably good spirits for someone who’d almost gotten killed. Maybe LA really was a much tougher town, but hanging around with Viola had to be a dangerous occupation for anybody, no matter who they were. As a practical matter, she needed to learn how to handle a pistol. A big one.

  Inside the suite, Cici was already packing up in front of a camera crew. As soon as she saw Viola, she ran over and gave her a bubbly bear hug. “What a wild day, huh? Ain’t life grand? Always.”

  The woman seemed to think this was all fun and games. Viola had suspected Hollywood people were insane, and here was living proof. But these two lunatics had come to help her, so she embraced the crazy.

  “I am so, so, so happy to meet you!” Viola said. “You’re even prettier than on TV, and I didn’t think that was possible. You’re my guardian angel!”

  The cameraman made a motion for Viola to keep slathering on the sauce. She kept thinking up new nice things to say about her savior.

  When Viola finally ran out of compliments, she helped Alexander and Cici gather their things. They’d brought an incredible amount of stuff for a spur-of-the-moment trip. But neither talked about the most important issue, namely where they could go next.

  Finally, Cici made a motion to the cameraman to stop taping. “That’ll be it for a few days. You can head home in the morning. I’ll contact Bernie as soon as I get back.”

  He nodded and took off.

  When the door closed behind him, Cici said, “I’ve been communicating securely with a dear friend who’s been living a life-on-the-lam for years, thanks to the fucking Santiago cartel. This friend has a place where we can stay that’s out of the way and well-guarded. Alexander, you’re welcome, but I’m told it’s rustic.”

  He chuckled from deep in his chest. “I’ll do almost anything, but not rustic. I’ve already arranged the seat on the redeye home. How will you get to your friend’s place?”

  “She arranged for a car to pick us up. We’ll be in the hands of a top-notch security firm that my friend uses that’ll take us to the secure undisclosed location. Oops, Viola, is any of that okay with you?”

  She quickly nodded. “If it’s good enough for you and your friend, I’m sure it’s great for me.”

  Alexander smiled at Viola. “Told you she’d figure something out.”

  Chapter 25

  A guard named Samuel from Warrior Security Services picked them up in front of the Four Seasons. Cici exchanged codewords with him to make sure he was legit.

  During the drive, Cici told Viola about Athena’s much worse problems with the Santiago cartel. When she finished, Viola said, “God, how I pity her. How could anybody survive a bullet to the brain?”

  “Damned if I know, but she did. When you see her, you’ll notice she has lots of trouble moving the left side of her body, but she gets along amazingly well.”

  For over two hours they drove through the night on a roundabout route. It was almost eleven p.m. when they arrived at a remote ranch in South Park. Cici entered a code to open the gate that led to a long driveway. The house was completely dark, but as soon as they parked in front, the porch light turned on.

  Too late, Viola felt a pang of guilt for disturbing a new mom’s sleep. They should’ve waited until morning to come.

  Samuel went to the door first then motioned for Cici and Viola to enter. They grabbed Cici’s luggage and headed inside. Viola had nothing but the jail clothes on her back.

  Cici saw Athena and half-suppressed a yelp by putting her hand over her mouth. Athena stood inside the door holding a little blue bundle with a tiny pink face sticking out. The two women hugged as best they could without smashing the baby.

  Their joy at seeing each other seemed to fill the room. Viola just hoped that she and Cici hadn’t brought any additional danger with them.

  Athena was taller than most women. Her hair was medium-brown, with bangs that almost covered her eyes. She wore a pink bathrobe and moccasins. A well-tanned man with a pleasant, round face and a pug nose stood next to her.

  When Cici and Athena broke the clinch, Athena staggered backward a step, from tiredness or her physical disability. Viola obviously wasn’t the only one who’d had a tough day.

  Cici introduced Viola to Athena and her boyfriend, Beau Boudreau. The four of them chatted in hushed tones while Samuel brought supplies in from his SUV. He spoke briefly to another guard hanging around outside then took off.

  Athena yawned, and Viola realized how late it was. “I hate to keep you up any longer. Just let me know where I should sleep, and we can get acquainted in the morning.”

  Athena nodded. “Beau, can you show these ladies their rooms? I need to grab as much sleep as I can before Leo wakes up again. The kid is always hungry.”

  Everyone trudged upstairs. Athena and Leo entered the first open door. Beau led Cici and Viola farther down a long hall until he opened a door. “Viola, why don’t you try this room? If you have any problems, let me know, but I think you’ll be comfortable.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine,” Viola said as she entered. “Goodnight all.”

  Not having any pajamas, she removed her jumpsuit and slipped into the soft bed. It beat the hell out of her bunk at the county jail.

  -o-o-o-

  Saturday

  At three-thirty a.m., Leo woke up Athena with his now-familiar hunger cry. Beau slipped out of bed and collected the baby. After handing him off, her boyfriend fell right back to sleep.

  Athena nursed her son and thought about Viola Hawkins. For one thing, she didn’t seem nearly as tall as she appeared in her videos, and she was frail to the point of collapsing. Her ghostly white skin next to coal-black hair and eyebrows gave off a spooky air, like she was a ghoul or wraith. Her gaze had repeatedly darted from place to place, probably looking for lurking dangers. Athena had been hunted long enough to recognize the same panic about what could go wrong next.

  They were both in the same jam. The only way to keep the cartel from chasing her and Viola forever would be for the Feds to capture Carlotta and Pablo. Hopefully, the Vicksburg Plan would work, but it could take days or even weeks.

  When Leo was satisfied, he dropped back to sleep. Athena rolled out of her warm bed and placed his tiny body back in the bassinet. But after she returned to
bed, she couldn’t fall back to sleep. Too many worries spun around in her mind.

  -o-o-o-

  Leo woke Athena as the sun was rising, and she groggily went through the whole feeding routine again. Beau grabbed a shower then made breakfast for him and Athena. They’d eat again, with the others, whenever they got up.

  After first breakfast, Beau checked his messages. “Son of a bitch!”

  “Watch your language.” It was never too early to clean up their potty mouths so the young phenomenon wouldn’t imitate them. “What’s the problem?”

  “Carlotta and Pablo got away, bolted from the ranch right before the siege started.”

  “Son of a bitch!” Athena said before she caught herself. “So much for being able to force Carlotta to call off the Viper.”

  She paused for a moment to let the implications of what Beau had just said sink in. “Dammit! They must’ve been tipped off. I’m getting fucking tired of the leaks at DOJ.”

  “Me, too, but there are a hundred thousand working people in the department. It’s incredibly tough to find one mole who very much wants to stay hidden. We’ve been after him for months, but no progress.”

  She’d tried to find the spy herself several times, too, and had failed. Time to try again.

  Beau typed like mad for a minute. “Even though I’m on vacation, I told Yang and the head US Marshal in Denver how infuriating it is to go after drug lords who seem to know everything going on within our agencies.”

  This was ridiculous. Athena was ready to spend big to stay safe. She’d heard about several new hacks on a dark web forum that would cost way over a hundred grand. She’d spent years cultivating her connection with a hacker’s group out of Shanghai. Two weeks ago, they’d offered her a chance to buy several of their cutting-edge hacking tools they claimed would penetrate almost any UNIX network. That was the architecture for most business and governmental computer systems. The biggest sticking point was the price, $154,000 in Bitcoins. She’d politely declined, but she saw now that had been a mistake.

  Couldn’t hesitate any longer, even though she’d be breaking several major national security laws. Worse, the Shanghai hacking group’s leader was almost certainly connected with the People’s Liberation Army. Which meant giving them money would constitute treason. But desperate women did desperate things.

  Beau was still talking when she tuned back in to reality. “What?” she asked.

  He glared. “You’re cooking up some scheme. I see the signs all over your face.”

  “So? Waiting around for the FBI to do its job has been a huge mistake. And by the way, I already know Ken Chen, who runs your International Corruption Unit. If I find anything good on my own, I’ll slip him an anonymous tip. Happy?”

  “Thrilled. Leo and I will visit you in Supermax every month, I promise.”

  -o-o-o-

  Viola felt like a princess who’d woken up in a magical palace after a very long sleep. But as soon as her eyes focused, she realized she was in a rather small, sparsely decorated bedroom. The sun had risen far above the horizon, and dust motes filled the air. Someone had used a sachet on the dresser that smelled of rosemary.

  She lifted the covers, and cold air swirled around her reminding her that she was naked. Her only possessions happened to be the cheap sneakers, underwear, and jumpsuit she’d received in jail. But then she noticed a small pile of clothes on the dresser. Athena must’ve left them. They were about the same size, even though Viola was much thinner.

  She put the clothes on, which was a vast improvement over prison orange.

  A note on the nightstand said: The bathroom is two doors farther along the hallway on the right. You share it with Cici. Come downstairs whenever you’re ready.

  The smell of cooking bacon and toast encouraged Viola to hurry.

  After washing up, she headed to the kitchen where Beau, Athena, and Cici had gathered. “Listen, I don’t have any money to pay for my lodging, but I know how to cook. Let me take over.”

  Beau and Athena were standing at the stove. They glanced at each other and shrugged. Cici was drinking coffee at the dining room table. She didn’t stir.

  While Viola cooked, she listened to the others. Athena and Cici seemed to have a lot of catching up to do.

  Athena said, “For our B&B’s guests, here are the ground rules. Number one, nobody ventures outside during daylight hours. Second, you will not engage in any communication of any kind with the outside world unless I clear it in advance. Third, everybody picks up after themselves. If you don’t, you’ll be responsible for changing Leo’s diapers for a day.”

  “No need to worry about picking up,” Viola said. “I’ll do all the housework, along with the cooking.”

  Athena grinned. “The offer is much appreciated.”

  -o-o-o-

  As soon as Athena finished eating, she returned to her most important task—protecting all of them from the cartel. Because the Feds hadn’t captured the Santiago leaders, she needed to focus on finding the bastard hidden within DOJ who’d warned them.

  First, she bought the UNIX hacking tools from the Chinese group. Then, it occurred to her that the mole’s warning to the cartel was the best place to start looking for him. She had to locate that message, and she knew from Beau when the raid was planned. Carlotta and Pablo had left shortly before, so that gave Athena an approximate time when the mole’s message must have been delivered.

  She checked the messages sent and received from the encrypted communications network the cartel had been using in recent months. She found a steady stream of transmissions during the critical time, but without an encryption key, she couldn’t read the content.

  Time to see whether I got my money’s worth from the Chinese. She used the UNIX hacks to penetrate the network so she could view the messages inside in plain text.

  There, she found the damning evidence. Someone identified as GZ had sent Carlotta a hurried warning. DOJ and DEA are about to surround your Colorado headquarters. They want to seal you in and starve you out. Leave immediately.

  Who the hell was this? Her fury exploded, and the letters GZ burned into her brain. She was shocked by how easily he’d betrayed his loyalty to the Justice Department and the American public.

  She had to find the two-timing son of a bitch. Although she didn’t know the mole was a man, he’d written like one.

  Athena followed the message from the network to a VPN hosted by a server in Miami. Over the years, she created and bought other hacks useful for burrowing into networks, and she used some of them as she traced the short text. In fact, she had to rely upon her whole bag of tricks.

  Her hacks broke through the firewall at the Miami VPN, and she followed the message backward to a second VPN in Georgetown on Grand Cayman Island. And so it went.

  Athena had been hacking at the Internet for years, but it still took her hours to break into another VPN in Bangkok. When she did, she found that GZ’s message had come from Tashkent, Uzbekistan. From there, she traced the source of the message with only three sentences to Vancouver, British Columbia.

  Athena had hoped to be able to spend her day visiting with Cici, but finding the DOJ mole took priority.

  Chapter 26

  Santiago Ranch, near Vail

  By the middle of the afternoon, Carlotta was mentally cursing the Feds every few minutes. According to numerous live reports from the local Denver news stations and CNN, a hundred different kinds of cops had surrounded Casa Santiago. They were pissed at missing their main targets, so they were tearing her beautiful home apart board by board, looking for secret hiding places. Worse, a statewide dragnet was being conducted to find her and Pablo.

  How long can we stay hidden? She didn’t know, but all morning, everyone at their new headquarters worked frantically to review the paper files they’d saved from the casa. She wouldn’t need some information again, so Carlotta ordered those documents burned in the ranch’s massive stone fireplace. The rest
of the files were scanned, encrypted, and stored in the cloud under Jesus’s close supervision from Houston. Then, the originals were burned, too. Bless the Virgin, the police hadn’t gotten their grimy paws on any of this evidence.

  Carlotta had her doubts about how safe her encrypted records would be on some server run by Amazon Web Services, but Jesus claimed that AWS couldn’t break his encryption, and if their server farms were reliable enough for the US Department of Defense, they were good enough for anybody. Carlotta just had to memorize a sixteen-digit alphanumeric encryption key.

  After the file management work was finished, she let out several heartfelt sighs of relief. The worst of the danger had passed. That didn’t mean she could go on vacation. Hundreds of cops from all over would be looking for her and Pablo.

  Despite the threats, she couldn’t let her businesses fall apart. She needed to keep contacting her hundreds of minions about day-to-day things, a subtle reminder that they owed her their complete loyalty, even without her holding hostages. She also thought about eliminating a few particular pains in the ass to remind everyone else of their duty.

  Unfortunately, her minions couldn’t visit her at the new ranch because the cops were surely watching her people. But she could use Pablo’s fighters already out in the wild to punish anyone who crossed her.

  Her next most pressing problem was to prepare for the police surrounding the new headquarters. Carlotta called a wholesale food distributor in Eagle-Vail and ordered a four-months’ supply of nonperishable food.

  That done, she ordered two portable generators and a thousand gallons of gasoline from a ranch supply store. The generators could power their new home and its well if the cops cut off their electricity.

  She’d saved the worst task for last. Carlotta sent an encrypted text to Fernando in Nicaragua informing him about the raid at Casa Santiago. Thank God, she was over a thousand miles away and couldn’t hear her father rage in response to the news.