by Jack Hardin
He returned to the other end of the building and grabbed up his welding helmet. He was so close. Everything had been dreaming of for the last few years and thought he would never get was finally within reach. Nico turned on the welding machine and the gas.
He would rest later.
The paradisal climate of the old island restaurant hit Ellie as soon as she pulled back the front door and stepped into Matlacha’s Olde Snapper House Marina. The familiar smell of fried fish and hush puppies lingered in the air, the top popping off a beer bottle, someone laughing heartily in the kitchen, Jimmy Buffett singing “Come Monday.” The red-painted walls were cluttered with colorful wood cutouts of the Jolly Roger, sea turtles, and various fish. Florida license plates representing the last fifty years were tacked up, and a green-back chalkboard displayed today’s specials—blue crabs and smoked frog legs. Ellie charted a course past the tables and chairs to the back deck, where Tyler was sitting at a bright blue picnic table looking out on the canal.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” He smiled and stood up. He slipped an arm behind her and gave her a kiss. Ellie could feel her muscles relax as he lingered. He gave her an easy wink as he pulled away. “You want to go out and come back in so we can do that again?”
“Tempting.” She slid onto the bench across from him. “Sorry I’m late.”
“It’s all right. I’ve just been flirting with the waitress. Probably best you weren’t around for that.” A glass of water with two slices of lemon sat in front of her, sweating off a little pool of water that had already drenched the coaster. A large basket of fried shrimp and hushpuppies sat between her and Tyler. “I went ahead and ordered,” he said. “Thought we could share this.”
“Thanks.” She reached out and grabbed a couple of shrimp. A fan was attached to an exposed rafter above their heads, and it oscillated slowly and with a bit of a limp. Ellie saw a flutter out of the corner of her eye and looked to see a three-foot egret walking toward her, its head bobbing in rhythm as to some unheard song. “Hey, Randall.” The bird tilted its head. Ellie grabbed a hushpuppy from the basket, tore off a piece, and held it out. He snatched it with his beak and worked at it as his spindly legs took him away.
“He’ll be back,” Tyler said. “He’s already hit me up for a shrimp.”
Randall was the restaurant's unofficial mascot and had been for the better part of two years. Someone—reports differ on exactly who—tossed a piece of grilled grouper to an egret standing in the seagrasses running along the back of the restaurant. The bird scarfed it down, and like a new world had dawned, it decided never to leave. He was the island’s version of a scavenger pigeon. Fortunately, he had yet to bring his buddies along.
Ellie took a sip of her water. “How’s your mom doing?” she asked.
“Better. The doctors say she has to take it easy for a few weeks. She’s not allowed to lift large boulders over her head anymore.” Last month, Tyler’s mother had been admitted to the hospital after suffering a femoral hernia. Tyler had flown to Texas to be with her for a few days.
“So just small boulders then?”
“Yeah, and she’s super bummed about that.” He took a bite of hushpuppy. “Nick and I are going to a car show up in Sarasota tomorrow night. You want to come?”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m flying to Mexico in the morning.”
“Mexico?” Tyler said. “You going to get some ‘avocados-from-Mexico’?”
“Work stuff.”
Tyler scratched at his chin. “If I remember right, you speak Russian, French, and Martian, right?”
“Portuguese.”
“Portuguese. Right. Well, if you plan on doing work stuff in Mexico, you might want to start learning Spanish.”
“I’ve considered it.”
“Well, you best start right now.” He raised a finger. “I’ll teach you the Mexican word of the day.”
“Oh no,” she murmured.
“The Mexican word of the day is ‘wheelchair.’ Now, ask me to use it in a sentence.”
“I won’t be party to thi—”
“Just ask me already.”
“All right, Tyler. Use wheelchair in a sentence.”
He cleared his throat and intoned a Mexican accent. “Juan and me only have one taco. But it’s okay, wheelchair.”
Ellie’s lips formed a hard line as she tried to remain serious. But she broke quickly, a smile appearing as she shook her head. “You’re a dork.”
“And you need to learn Spanish. Or at least Mexican. When will you be back?”
“Not sure. A few days, I hope.”
“Must be some good avocados,” he said, and then his sharp green eyes narrowed on her. “You’re not okay.”
She shrugged.
“Is it the Tampa case?”
“We just found out who was behind the explosion.”
“Really?”
She looked away, her eyes fixating on the empty table across from them. “I know him,” she said flatly.
“Know who? The—” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “You know the person who bombed the bus?”
She nodded. “Loosely, anyway.” They were alone on the back deck, and since Ellie had shared some of her clandestine past with Tyler before, as she picked at the basket of food she told him about the mission in Russia seven years earlier, how her team had been sent to arrest Pavel and to bring in his son too. She told him about the raid on the house, the false wall, and their inability to find a trace of them. “We never failed like that,” she said. “Never. Now I can’t stop thinking about what would have happened if we had stopped Peter and his dad when we were supposed to. All those people wouldn’t have—”
“Ellie, you can’t do that. You know better.”
“Do I? Peter came to the States and has functioned as a one-man sleeper cell for the last eight years. He was a school teacher for crying out loud. A school teacher, Tyler.”
“So the best thing you can do now is to find him. Quit that stinkin’ thinkin’ about what you could have done differently almost a decade ago.”
That settled her a little. She nodded. “Okay.”
“I worry about you sometimes,” he said.
“I know you do.”
“Maybe you should think about just settling down and doing something a little less strenuous.”
“That was my plan when I left Langley. If I remember correctly, you said I couldn’t just do nothing for the rest of my life. Something about ‘you can only play so many rounds of golf.’”
“Well, yeah, but I also didn’t mean you should go getting shot at and getting in gunfights at drug houses. In case you forgot, you almost got cooked to extra crispy in a fishing shack, and I had to stop a dude from sneaking into your house and killing you. Maybe just do something a little—I don’t know—safer. Normal.”
“So you want me to just stick around here and take up knitting?”
“Knitting is becoming a lost art. Someone has to revive it.”
“Thanks for watching out for me,” she said.
“Not only do I watch out for you, I watch you. Especially when you walk away.” She almost blushed at that. “Just be careful,” he said. “And pack an extra knitting needle in case things get crazy down in Mexico.”
“I’ll get right on that.” She took another bite of shrimp. Randall was perched on the railing farther down the deck, and she watched him jump off into the seagrass. “Katie is having some issues with her kitchen sink,” she said. “It’s leaking underneath. If you get some time can you stop by and check it out? There’s a key under a rock at the back corner if she’s not home.”
“Sure thing.” He took a sip of his tea. “So whenever you catch this guy and come back to me, I want to take you on a dinner cruise in Naples.”
“The one that goes out of the bay?”
“That’s the one,” he said.
“I’d love that.”
“You want that last shrimp?”
She
eyed it. “Maybe.”
“It’s okay,” he said and plucked it from the basket. He tore it in half and handed a piece across the table. “Wheelchair.”
Chapter Fourteen
The pressure inside the fuselage changed as the commercial aircraft began its descent into Mexico City. A patch of turbulence shook Ellie awake. She reluctantly raised her seat back and looked out the window. The flight from Miami had taken only three hours. Spread out before her were the outskirts of a city that boasted twice the density population as New York City and came in second to São Paulo, Brazil, as the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. Located in a geographical bowl between the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains in the west and the Sierra Madre Oriental mountains in the east, the city was blanketed by thick brown smog that covered the landscape like the exhalations of a million cigar aficionados. As the airplane drew closer to the earth, colorful haciendas gave way to a vast urban sprawl of unpainted, flat-roofed adobe houses that matched the earthen color of the desert floor and the mountains beyond.
Hailey remained asleep beside Ellie until a flight attendant came by and patted her shoulder, asking her to raise her seat back for the remainder of the flight. She sat up and rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands.
“Did you sleep?” she asked Ellie.
“Yeah. Just woke a bit ago.”
They were on the ground fifteen minutes later, and as the engines whined down, a flight attendant got on the microphone and welcomed everyone to Aeropuerto Internacional Benito Juárez. The airport was notorious for annually serving tens of millions of passengers over its design capacity, and after twenty minutes on the tarmac, a gate finally became available.
Each with a backpack slung over a shoulder and with nothing to pick up at baggage claim, they cleared customs and then made their way out of the terminal. They had gained an hour flying west. It was just after 5 PM local time. The blazing sun was still high in the sky, shining down with a fervent intensity that reminded Ellie that they were much closer to the Equator than they would be back at home. She and Hailey took the air train to the connecting terminal. Once there, they checked in at the counter reserved for private and business jets and were led outside to the tarmac where an Embraer Phenom 300 jet was waiting for them. They went up the stairs and ducked as they entered. The pilot greeted them and offered for them to settle into their seats as he finished performing his pre-flight checks in the cockpit.
Hailey’s eyes were gleaming as she took in the plush cabin, its polished wood accents, creamy leather, and luxurious styling. “I know our infrastructure is crumbling back in the States,” she said, “and that the deficit isn’t getting any smaller. But it’s times like this when I start thinking that I’m okay with how my tax dollars are spent.”
“Your tax dollars paid for about half of the leather on your armrests,” Ellie said. “If even that.”
Hailey laid her bare forearms across the leather. She closed her eyes. “Still though...hmmm.”
The pilot notified them that they were ready to go, and within five minutes he had wheels off the ground and the aircraft climbing up through the smog and away from the city. Both agents brought their phones out and started working through recent work emails and memos, getting their minds prepared for their work here in Mexico.
“Have you heard anything from Agent Cooper yet?” Hailey asked.
“No. I was hoping to by now.”
“I was talking with a former college friend who’s still stationed in Miami,” Hailey said. “He worked with Cooper on a border raid up near El Paso a couple years back. Said the guy’s a real piece of work. I guess they stormed this stash house and once they had everyone in handcuffs, Cooper walked right up to one of them, popped him hard in the mouth, and started cursing at him. Broke his nose and a few teeth.”
Ellie had spent enough time in the CIA to know that years in the field can harden even the most logical agents and officers. The more time spent in the trenches, the harder it was to remember what it was like to sit behind a desk, where the lines between right and wrong did not blur so easily. When innocent lives were at stake, and evil men stood proudly in your way, it suddenly wasn’t so easy to remember where you were supposed to draw the line.
“As long as he helps us find Pavel, I’ll be content to let him be his own man,” Ellie said.
An hour and a half after takeoff, they touched down on the single airstrip that made up the Fresnillo airport. The pilot negotiated the aircraft to the front of a hangar, and after turning the engines off, he stepped out of the cockpit, brought the airstairs down, and welcomed them to Fresnillo.
Ellie was first to the door. She stood at the top of the stairs and paused. The air was distinctly clearer out here. It was noticeably quieter. The sun was reaching for the horizon in the west, staining the desert and the plane and the runway with a vibrant hue of orange signaling the end of yet another blazing hot day.
A blacked-out Chevy Suburban was parked in front of the stairs, both rear doors open. A man in black cargo pants and a tan polo was casually leaning back against the front door, munching on an apple with his ankles crossed. His brown hair came just over his ears, and his skin held the dark golden hue of a man who has spent years assigned to desert locations. He peered through wraparound sunglasses at the two female agents making their way down to him.
“I’ll be damned,” he called out in a rich southern drawl. “They didn’t tell me they were sending a couple of the Homeland pin-up girls.”
As they drew nearer, Hailey said, “And they didn’t tell us they were sending us to meet with the resident moron.” She tossed her bag through the open door, got in, and shut it.
The apple crunched as Cooper took another large bite before lazily tossing what was left of it down the runway. He looked at Ellie. “Feisty one.” He grinned and extended his hand.
“I’m with her,” she said and, without taking his hand, went around to the other side and joined her partner in the SUV.
Cooper was left outside alone. He shrugged to himself. “I like feisty.” Cooper got in, started up the vehicle, and pulled off the runway. A minute later they were passing up the airport’s front gate.
Fresnillo was home to over two hundred thousand inhabitants and one of the world's richest silver mines. The Santo Niño de Atocha—“The Holy Child of Atocha”—was a devotional statue situated near the heart of the city and drew tens of thousands of religious pilgrimages each year. In the west, the mountains crawled out of the horizon like the rugged backs of dinosaurs, and spread out before them was a flat pan of reddish-brown desert that saw less than a foot of rainfall each year.
Cooper headed south out of town, taking Federal Highway 23 and speaking again once he got the vehicle up to cruising speed. “So you two are here to find El Oso, huh?”
“The Bear?” Hailey said.
“Yeah.” Cooper leaned back and set a wrist on the steering wheel, let his hand droop lazily down to the other side. “Mr. Pavel Petronovich. Folks around here call him ‘The Bear.’ I guess since he’s from Russia and all that.”
“What do you know about him?” Ellie asked.
“Not a whole lot more than that he’s got connections somewhere in Europe and supplies the cartels in this region with some of their weapons. Can’t fight a war if you don’t have guns. Until yesterday, it's never been much in our interest to find him. We stay busy enough trying to find the men who are Pavel’s customers—the ones who need the guns.”
“I didn’t see your report on him come through,” Ellie said. “We were told you were going to email us what you had.”
That got a good chuckle out of Cooper, and the smallest hint of a reaction from the man to his right. “Yeah… they didn’t ask me first. I’m not so good with email.”
The two female agents exchanged glances but said nothing. “So what’s the plan then?” Hailey asked.
“I’m waiting on some information. When I get it, we’ll start making house calls.”
Ellie was beginning to think that Hailey’s friend in Miami was onto something. Cooper was shaping up to be a real piece of work. And she didn’t appreciate that they had come all this way just for him to keep them in the dark with stunted and cryptic answers. He seemed to sense a stiffening in the back seat.
“Either of you ever worked out here in this wonderful country of Mexico?” He didn’t wait for an answer and pointed out the window with his chin. “Well, you both have entered the nest of Satan. Out here, it’s not just cocaine anymore. It’s heroine, fentanyl, and meth. Lots of meth. They all learned pretty quick what every good capitalist knows: the game is about diversification. And for every up-and-coming kingpin that me and my team takes down, three more take his place. With all the pressure on the cartels up along the border and in places like Sinaloa and Guerrero, Zacatecas is becoming the next big stage.”
“How long have you been down here?” Hailey asked.
“El Paso for four years. Been here in Zacatecas for two working with the Federal Police. But half of them are in the cartel’s pocket. You’d have better odds at a roulette wheel in Vegas than trusting any of the locals.”
Ellie looked out her window onto a ruddy landscape that was as flat as the back of an iron skillet. Somewhere across the distance—in a mountain cave or rural mansion or dirty slum—was Pavel Petronovich. Something had conspired to give Ellie a second chance at bringing him in. This time, she promised herself, he wasn’t getting away.
Cooper’s cell phone was attached to a holder clipped to an air vent. It rang, and he grabbed it up, set it to his ear. “Yeah,” he said gruffly. There wasn’t much of a conversation to be heard. A couple “mhms” and an “okay,” and then he hung up. Cooper looked over at Arturo and grinned conspiratorially. “Marco just got home.”
Arturo nodded slowly like he understood but showed no emotion either way. Cooper grabbed the wheel with both hands and took the Suburban off the highway and onto the naked hardpan without even bothering to slow down. The vehicle bounced hard on its struts as it made the quick transition from the elevated stretch of asphalt to the dirt. Ellie and Hailey both reached for the sides of their doors to stabilize themselves against the sudden disparity. “What are you doing?” Hailey yelled.
