by Peter Nealen
The gangster was trying to fight him, but Brannigan’s grip was like an iron vise on his shoulder. He didn’t want the kid to die, yet. He wanted answers.
“Yeah, that’s not looking good,” he said, still gripping the gangbanger’s clavicle, hard enough that it would have hurt, even past the pain of the bullet hole in his chest. He wasn’t trying to torture the kid, but he was sending a message. He was entirely in control of the situation, and the dying thug’s feeble struggles were only going to cause him more pain. “Talk to me, kid.”
But the gangster only rasped horribly and passed out. Brannigan put a pair of fingers to the kid’s throat. He was alive; there was a fast, thready pulse there. But not for long.
“Got another live one over here, boss,” Childress called out.
Brannigan lowered the dying gangster to the pavement, turning him over into a hasty version of the recovery position, and stood up, drawing his pistol again as he moved around the side of the wrecked sedan to join the younger man.
Childress, his dark hair sticking out from under his ball cap in tufts, was standing over another gangster, a short, skinny man wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. The t-shirt was sopping wet, the blood blending in with the black cloth in the dim light of the few unbroken headlights reflecting off the pavement.
Brannigan squatted down next to the man. He’d been shot at least three times, but was still breathing. “Who sent you?” he asked.
“Chinga tu madre,” the man sputtered.
“What’s that, asshole?” Wade snarled, stepping forward, a boot cocked to kick the man in the ribs. But Childress intercepted him.
“Let the Colonel handle him,” Childress drawled.
Brannigan made a show of examining the gangster’s wounds. “I’d say you’ve got even less time than the guy I shot in the lung back there,” he said. “Make the most of it.”
The man panted hard, blood seeping from the holes in his chest and arm. That was when Brannigan noticed that it looked like a bullet had broken his humerus and severed his brachial artery; there was blood pumping from his armpit. He had less time than he thought.
That fact seemed to suddenly sink in for the wounded man, as well. His eyes widened as he started to shiver. “We just got the money and the target, man,” he said.
“No direct contact?” Brannigan asked. The gangster shook his head spasmodically.
“It was an email,” he gasped. “And cash in a safe deposit box.”
Brannigan stood. “I’d put some pressure on that arm of yours if you want to live,” he said grimly. “Otherwise you might not last long enough for an ambulance to get here. We’re a good way out, out here.”
He started back toward the car. “Somebody call 911 once we’re clear,” he said. “I’m sure not all of these punks will make it, but maybe some of them will.”
“What if they describe us to the cops?” Jenkins asked from where he was standing by the side of the road, his LWRC cradled in his hands, watching the dead and wounded gangsters.
Brannigan’s chuckle was dry and utterly humorless. “You think these types will talk to the cops?” he asked. “Don’t bet on it. And we’ll be far away by then, anyway.”
He looked the rental car over. There were a couple of bullet holes in it; that could be a problem. But they didn’t have time to worry about patching it up. They’d just have to keep it out of sight as best they could until it was go time.
It started up fine, though. Flanagan and Curtis were still outside, holding security. “Get in,” he called out. “We’ve still got a meeting to keep. No time to push it back.”
The two men got in, Brannigan put the car in gear, and then they were heading down the road, back east toward the coast, passing the vehicles the others had brought to the ambush. Santelli and Hancock were already getting the rest of the team mounted up and ready to move.
Somebody sure as hell doesn’t want us getting involved. Somebody who isn’t out on that GOPLAT, and somebody who has a lot of resources.
He chewed on the problem as he drove. He didn’t have any answers. There had been enough global tension over the last few years that the list of suspects could be a long one. And he wasn’t plugged in deeply enough anymore to be able to venture even a semi-educated guess.
It bothered him, this informational vacuum where the opposition was concerned. The job should have been relatively simple; go to the GOPLAT, board it, rescue the hostages, kill all the terrorists, and go home. But there was obviously something more going on, and the terrorists had contacts and backers at large inside the United States, who were making a concerted effort to go after his team, before they’d even stepped off.
What the hell have we gotten ourselves into this time?
Behind them, wailing sirens and flashing lights began to converge on the site of the ambush, as local law enforcement and ambulances responded to the sounds of gunfire and the locals’ emergency calls.
Chapter 6
Ciela International’s headquarters wasn’t in Corpus Christi; it was in Bonn, Germany. It wasn’t a German company, either. It was a transnational conglomerate with an Esperanto name, which to Brannigan made it just that much more pretentious. And suspicious.
He didn’t know for certain why Chavez had hooked them up with Ciela, but he somehow doubted it was because the company was a fine, upstanding exemplar of ethical global trade.
The Ciela office in Corpus Christi wasn’t fancy, either. It was an ugly, off-white, corrugated steel building in an industrial park on the western edge of town. The parking lot, bordered by a deep drainage ditch alongside the edge of the road, was lit by stark, orange sodium lights and surrounded by palm trees. There were a handful of cars in the lot as they pulled up just before ten o’clock at night, but no lights were on in the building, and no one was moving around outside. It looked like they were closed up tight.
Brannigan combat-parked, backing into the outermost parking spot, facing the building, and shut off the car. He watched as the rest of the team’s vehicles moved into vague overwatch positions in the surrounding lots. There wasn’t any high ground, so they couldn’t get much standoff, but they would be close if he and Flanagan had to holler for help.
He watched the building for a moment, as he rummaged in the small go bag under his seat for another magazine to replace the spare he’d reloaded with. Maybe somebody at Ciela had tipped off the gangbangers after Chavez had made contact. Maybe whoever was supporting the terrorists out on the GOPLAT simply had lookouts along the coast, watching for anything out of the ordinary. A quick glance through the lot didn’t turn up any likely vehicles, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Brannigan knew that there were plenty of unmanned vehicles out there for surveillance use, and if the Ciela building was using some kind of off-site servers for the surveillance cameras set up on the corners of the building and several of the light posts, then they were vulnerable to cyber attacks.
That gave him pause, and he squinted at one of the cameras, even as he stayed well back in the shadows, avoiding the sodium lights’ illumination. Some of the later information he’d gotten from Chavez and Van Zandt had included the use of the drone to attack the El Paso border crossing. Cyber stuff was usually outside of his wheelhouse; he wasn’t a Luddite, but he also wasn’t much of a computer guy. But he knew enough to know that it was a threat, and that the more the tech companies tried to encourage people to use their “cloud” services, the more often reports seemed to come out about massive amounts of information being stolen by hackers.
But after a few minutes, he didn’t see any sign of another ambush. “You see anything?” he asked Flanagan and Curtis.
“An ugly-ass building and some cheap rice-burner cars,” Curtis replied. He was holding up his phone like he was taking pictures. “I don’t see anybody lurking around in the landscaping. Place looks dead.”
Brannigan looked back at him, a faint frown creasing his face. “How can you tell?” he asked.
Curtis grinned, his teet
h flashing white in the darkness. He tapped a small, rectangular attachment plugged into the base of the phone. “Thermal imager for a smartphone,” he said. “Cost me about three hundred fifty bucks.”
“That thing actually works?” Flanagan asked.
“Sure it does,” Curtis replied. “They wouldn’t have started selling it if it didn’t. Saw something about it at SHOT Show a couple years back.”
Brannigan could almost hear Flanagan rolling his eyes. “Because nothing that’s a worthless waste of hundreds of dollars ever shows up at SHOT Show,” he said.
“Hey, it works, okay?” Curtis retorted. “I can even see Santelli’s engine with this thing.”
“Well, then,” Brannigan said, pushing the door open and swinging his boots out of the car. “Let’s go see what Ciela has to offer, shall we?”
The other two men followed, their weapons secreted under their shirts. “This isn’t unusual at all, showing up in an industrial park after ten at night,” Flanagan said.
“Time’s wasting,” Brannigan replied, as he led the way across the parking lot. “We can’t afford to wait until normal business hours. And I doubt that they’d want to do this kind of business during normal business hours, anyway.”
“Which makes me wonder just what it is these people really do,” Flanagan wondered darkly.
“You and me both, brother,” Brannigan replied.
They neared the glass double doors, adorned with simple, white block letters spelling out “Ciela International” and a street address in Bonn. The lobby beyond was dark, but small enough that Brannigan could see the wall when he peered through the glass. There was another door off to the right, and a camera in the upper left corner.
He tried the doors, wondering if he wasn’t summoning the Corpus Christi Police Department by doing so. No alarms sounded. The door swung open as he pulled; it was unlocked.
Curtis was glancing back and forth, as if watching for a trap. “Just be casual,” Brannigan said. “Act like we belong here.” It was best, he figured, to act as if they were under surveillance, either by law enforcement or their mysterious and deadly earnest rivals.
He walked into the tiny anteroom; it was too small and barren to call it a “lobby.” Curtis and Flanagan followed, keeping their gun hands free without being obvious about it.
A small speaker next to the camera in the corner crackled. “The inner door is unlocked, Mr. Zebrowski,” a voice said. It was artificially deep and distorted, the kind of voice that villains in movies usually used over the phone.
Brannigan kept his expression neutral. He hadn’t specified, but apparently Chavez had decided to re-use his alias from the Khadarkh job. Considering how that had gone, he probably needed to talk to Hector about changing that up a bit.
The door was heavier than the glass exterior doors; he was pretty sure it was reinforced steel, and would probably stand up to all but one hell of a torch or breaching charge. Ciela clearly took their security seriously.
Beyond, the short hallway leading into a larger room full of cubicles was dark, though there was enough light coming in the windows from the parking lot to illuminate a typical, cookie-cutter industrial office space, all the way down to the fake motivational posters on the walls. He had a sudden memory of meeting Van Zandt in a very similar place, one that he was sure had been abandoned shortly after their meeting.
If every one of these jobs involved going to one of these soulless cubicle farms set up in random rental office spaces, it was going to get really old, really fast.
He moved down the hall, his hand unconsciously slightly closer to where he could snatch his shirt out of the way and get to his pistol. This didn’t feel right. There were no lights on at all that he could see, doors to side offices and closets forming dark holes in the orange-illuminated white walls.
Curtis was close behind him, holding a position just off to one side. Brannigan made for the main cubicle farm space ahead, though he was careful to glance into the two side doors as he passed them, moving at such an angle that he could draw and fire into the door in a heartbeat if a threat appeared inside. Curtis was moving up to take each space over from him, moving in the classic dance of Close Quarters Battle, even if they were moving more slowly and deliberately, without the kind of kinetic intensity that they’d have displayed on an actual hit. This was just caution.
Brannigan slowed as he neared the corner leading into the main room. Easing around the corner in such a way that he could draw and fire without exposing too much of his body, he took in the main room.
It looked just as dark and empty as the hallway. Darkened cubicles filled most of the space, with a narrow corridor along one wall leading toward the back offices. It was a very familiar view; the place might have been a carbon copy of Van Zandt’s temporary headquarters before Burma. He was beginning to suspect that there were only one or two floor plans for industrial rental office spaces, and everyone used the same one.
The room was dimly lit by orange light coming through cheap, bent venetian blinds in the windows along the far wall. That was the only illumination, except for the line of light spilling from the partially open door of one of the offices at the far end.
“Nobody hiding in the cubicles,” Curtis whispered. When Brannigan looked over at him, he had his phone with that thermal camera attachment out again.
“As if that thing could see through the cubicle walls,” Flanagan hissed.
“It can see thermal blooms,” Curtis protested. “Come on, I’m not an amateur.”
“Put it away and keep your gun hand ready,” was all Brannigan said, as he advanced on the open office, his boots rolling soundlessly on the cheap carpet.
He paused just outside the door. It was only cracked a few inches, so he couldn’t see much of the inside, just a handspan worth of white wall.
“You might as well come in,” a throaty, very female voice said. “It’s not like I didn’t already see you come in the front door.”
He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the light. He squinted, his hand still hovering near his pistol, ready to draw, but when he could focus, he let it hang.
The woman standing up from behind the desk and coming around to greet them could have been anywhere between twenty-five and fifty. Her features were nearly flawless; if she had lines on her slightly angular face, they were well-hidden. Her dark hair was swept back to a clip behind her head, except for a couple of strands that fell down in front of her ears, framing her face. She was wearing an off-white blouse and knee-length skirt; it was business attire, but somehow this woman managed to make it look far more…risqué.
She came around the desk and held out her hand. There was a faint smile on her red lips as she looked up at Brannigan with glittering green eyes. “You must be John Brannigan,” she said. Her English was faintly accented, and Brannigan had to admit that it was sexy as hell.
The frontal assault of sex appeal did not mean that he wasn’t entirely aware of the warning in her words. She knows my real name, not the alias that Chavez gave her. He didn’t dare take his eyes off her long enough to glance at Flanagan or Curtis, but he was pretty sure Joe would have picked it up.
Kevin was probably staring and drooling.
“Come in, sit down, make yourselves comfortable,” the woman said. She hadn’t let go of Brannigan’s hand, but was gently pulling him into the room. “Coffee?” she offered, waving to the Keurig machine on the table against the wall. Her smile got slightly wider, and a mischievous glint came into her eye as she said, “Or maybe something stronger? I think that you could probably use a good drink, after what you’ve already been through tonight.” She smiled at him over her shoulder as she rounded the desk again and sat down. She produced a bottle of Pierre Ferrand and a pair of glasses and put them on the desktop.
Brannigan took the offered chair, across the desk from the blond woman who was pouring a generous glass of cognac, and leaned back, watching her
with narrowed eyes. Tread carefully. This woman knows way too much.
“What makes you say that?” he asked, as she pushed the glass across the desk toward him and started pouring another. There were easily three fingers of liquor in the glass; more than he was willing to even look at under the circumstances. He knew he wasn’t a lightweight when it came to booze; he wasn’t the raging alcoholic that many Marines he’d known were, but a Marine leader had needed to be able to at least show he wasn’t afraid of the stuff. But this was clearly a situation where he’d need all his wits.
She smiled again, her eyes smoldering with amusement, as she finished pouring, set the bottle down on the desk, and picked up the glass. “Oh, come on John,” she said teasingly. “You know as well as I do that those poor sicarios down by the river didn’t shoot themselves.”
He watched her with narrowed eyes. “You had us under surveillance?”
“Of course I did,” she said, sipping at her drink. He noticed that she didn’t drink very much. The level of the cognac in the glass barely went down at all. “Knowing things is part of my business. Knowing more than the competition is vital to my business.”
“Who’s the competition?” Flanagan asked from where he was leaning against the doorframe, behind Brannigan. Curtis was out of sight; Flanagan must have pushed him out on rear security, probably because he didn’t trust his friend’s judgement in the same room with this bombshell of a femme fatale.
Smart move, Joe.
She looked up at him, that same seductive look of amusement on her face. “Why, it could be just about anyone,” she replied, taking another sip. “Ciela International works in so many fields.”
“Just who are you?” Brannigan asked. “You seem to have us at a disadvantage.”
She did a convincing job of looking mortified. “Of course, where are my manners?” She put the glass down and leaned across the desk, holding her hand out again. In the process, Brannigan got a rather graphic reminder of just how low-cut her blouse was. “I am Erika Dalca. CEO of Ciela International.”
