by Jack Slater
The van turned right, drove for several more minutes, and went left. From up at the front, someone barked, “Sixty seconds!”
“This is it,” Reyes murmured, fingering his rifle anxiously. “We’ll be fine.”
The time seemed to flow, not drain, away, and before he’d even blinked twice, the vehicle’s rear doors were swinging open, and they were pouring out, all of them. Their boots started against the crumbling sidewalk, and someone started shooting. In the moment, he wasn’t even sure whether it was his men or theirs, and then he opened up as well, bringing his rifle to his shoulder and firing round after round at the Federación safe house. In the darkness, it was hard to see whether he was hitting anything or just blazing away at walls.
The magazine ran dry, and with trembling fingers he ejected it and clicked in a new one.
Around him, he was faintly aware that his men had formed a protective bubble. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, but whether consciously or not, his sicarios were arrayed to take a bullet for him. One of them in the rear didn’t have a gun, just a camera, which was pointed at both him and Mendoza, never wavering.
Or occasionally wavering, anyway, as an errant round from inside the Federación safe house zipped just a few inches from the cameraman’s ear, prompting him to dive onto the deck.
Reyes reacted first. He felt somehow aroused by the proximity of death. Turning, he grabbed the cameraman by the webbing on his back, hauled the man bodily into an upright squat, and hissed, “Don’t drop that, you fool.”
The man, a boy, really, his fatigues and body armor hanging off an undernourished frame, nodded a hasty apology and brought the lens back up. Reyes studied it with conscious disinterest of the chaos around him, even as chips of concrete exploded in every direction.
“You’re supposed to get the action as well,” he added, grabbing the boy’s arm and pointing it toward the safe house’s front door, where a sicario was packing strips of plastic explosive to the frame and wiring it.
Another nod. More nervous this time as the kid recognized that he was screwing up, without recognizing that the demands being placed upon him were insane in the first place.
Reyes imposed them without conscious thought. This was a dangerous business, after all, and even more troublesome when your own people had enough time to think. Because when they could think, they could plan, and when they planned, they sometimes chose courses of action that did not fully align with your own.
The sicario yelled, “Duck!”
Unfortunately, he didn’t combine the warning with enough time to react to it, as his fingers reflexively clutched the detonator switch. The force of the explosion was bone-crushing. One moment the door was there, whole and intact, and gunfire was cracking in every direction, and the next it was simply gone, replaced by an eruption of dust.
A wave of heat and chemical stink burned Reyes’ nostril hairs, and he choked on the cloud of filth. “Keep that lens clean, boy,” he muttered. “And stay close.”
They can edit the audio out later, he thought.
He was careful not to be the first through the space that had once been occupied by the door, but he was equally careful not to be the last. Image mattered, more so now than ever, and this was the whole reason he was here.
The safe house was a drab, derelict kind of place in a drab, derelict part of town. His own cartel operated many like it, requiring only that they be situated near a major logistics route, and in neighborhoods that knew better than to report nefarious business in their vicinity.
Its interior was a maelstrom of chaos. White, plastic-wrapped bricks of cocaine were stacked against every wall, in every closet, on every table. No stranger to the stuff, even Reyes’ eyes bulged when he saw how much there was.
A crackle of gunfire sounded only a few feet away, and a cloud of white powder exploded to his right, causing him to crouch down and bring his rifle to his shoulder. He returned fire without knowing what he was aiming at and whether it was having any effect.
“Hell, Milo,” he yelled, his voice coupled with an almost manic laugh. “Why the hell did we ever give this up?”
It was not rational to relish this proximity to danger, he knew. And for many years, he had allowed himself to forget just how intoxicating it was. But right now, in this moment, he would not trade it for anything in the world.
He squeezed the trigger again, pumping half a dozen more rounds into the next room. They scythed through the plasterboard wall, joining a growing collection of holes in the fragile surface. Huge chunks of it began to chip away and rain in a waterfall of dust and debris against the floor as a renewed, deafening round of gunfire joined in all around him.
“Cease fire!” Reyes yelled after ten or twenty seconds of this madness. He repeated the call, and still it took until his men’s guns ran dry before they all stopped firing.
He cupped a hand to his ear and listened. Mendoza shot him a curious look but said nothing, though the ringing in Reyes’ ears was so intense that he might not have heard it anyway.
“Any of you fuckers left?” Reyes called out, his voice cold and hard and mean and mocking. He repeated a line he’d heard in some horror film. It seemed fitting. “Come out, come out, wherever you are…”
There was no response. Not a conscious one, anyway. Just a low, guttural moan.
Mendoza snapped his fingers and pointed at one of the sicarios, crouched like the rest of the insertion team near a wall of cocaine bales stacked like sandbags on top of each other. “You – take two men, go see if anyone’s out there.”
Expressionless, the man nodded and grabbed a shooter from either side. They moved like gangsters, not soldiers, charging forward on adrenaline, not tactics.
Reyes waited, watching to see whether they were about to be cut down by a hail of renewed gunfire.
“Only two of them left,” came the cry. “It’s clear.”
He grinned and bounded to his feet, charging through the chipped doorway into the next room, where he found half a dozen of Carreon’s men. Four of them were obviously, visibly dead. One was wearing a white string vest and Lakers basketball shorts and looked perfectly fine – if a little hung over – as long as you didn’t look at the back of his head.
Which was entirely missing.
The cause of death for the rest was more immediately obvious. Overwhelming gunfire had ripped their bodies apart. One, a lanky skinhead with a strangely potbellied gut, still had a cigarette behind his left ear. Reyes surreptitiously glanced to see whether the camera was still following him, then leaned over and plucked it free. He placed it between his lips and rummaged in his pockets for a lighter.
Now that the combat was over, he was suddenly jittery. He tasted copper at the back of his tongue and had the sudden, almost overwhelming urge to be sick.
Pull yourself together, he thought angrily. Not now.
Concealing the trembling in his fingers, he conjured fire from the flint and sucked in a deep, healing drag of nicotine and tar, which helped settle his nerves. He took another, then turned to the main event.
His remaining sicarios – who seemed to be at least two lighter – were arrayed in a loose semicircle around a pair of captives, who had their hands bound behind their backs with plastic flex cuffs. One was dressed in a full tracksuit that seemed straight out of a 1980s boxing film, and the other was naked to his waist, blood oozing from a deep, scarring wound to his cheek that was flowing onto his shoulder and then down, staining his torso into a vivid piece of surrealist art.
He pointed at the one on the left. “You – what’s your name?”
The man seemed stunned to be asked. The acrylic material of his tracksuit rippled like waves on the empty ocean as he quivered, searching his mind for a response. “I –”
Reyes dragged in another breath of nicotine. In one fluid motion, he drew his side-arm and fired. “Too slow,” he grunted. “What about you?”
It took the guy in the tracksuit a couple of seconds to realize that he was dead. Or at
least, that long to topple to the ground, an open hole at the center of his forehead. Reyes figured that was sufficient evidence of his untimely passing for even the most stringent coroner to accept.
The kneeling man gaped at him with all the comprehension of a lobotomized goldfish. Reyes stared, transfixed, as a particularly luminescent droplet of already thickening blood rolled down his taut frame. “I have one piece of advice for you, and you can choose whether or not to take it. Don’t keep me waiting.”
A glimmer of understanding glinted in the man’s eye. “Oscar,” he choked, his Adam’s apple bobbing manically. “My name is Oscar.”
“Thank you, Oscar.” Reyes smiled bloodlessly. “Did you see what happened to your friend?”
He took another drag of the cigarette, which by now was over halfway burned. He could feel the heat of the ember against his knuckles.
Oscar nodded, not daring to trust his vocal cords. They rarely did.
“Good. Let’s see if we can avoid the same happening to you, shall we?”
Another nod. A little shakier this time.
“Your boss tried to kill me. Did you know that?”
“My… my boss?” Oscar stammered, unconsciously glancing toward the body of one of the men lying crumpled on the ground, and in the process displaying his own shattered ear lobe to Reyes.
“Fernando Carreon, you idiot,” Reyes snarled. He took one final drag of the cigarette, then stepped forward, placed it between the tip of his forefinger and thumb, and grabbed the back of Oscar’s head. “You know the consequences of playing dumb, don’t you, Oscar?”
Without giving the captured sicario a chance to reply, he manipulated his head into a jerking nod, yanking at the man’s vertebrae and sinews until he moaned with pain.
“Excellent,” Reyes said, raising his voice over the unwanted sound. He placed his lips near Oscar’s ears and hissed, “Tell me what you want, and I will let you live. I’m a man of my word, Oscar. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” the man gasped. “I’ll help you. I just don’t know what you want.”
Reyes took a step back. He pointed at two of his men and grunted, “Hold him.”
“Please…” Oscar begged.
To no avail.
Reyes violently pushed Oscar’s head to one side so that his undamaged ear was pressed against his shoulder, and the broken one was wide open. He pressed the lit cigarette into the seeping wound and twisted it between his fingertips until the ember sizzled in Oscar’s flesh. The sound of the bubbling screen was only audible for a fraction of a second before it was replaced by a keening howl from the lips of the man in front of him.
Like a wounded animal, Oscar attempted to lunge in any direction so long as it was away from the pain and the men who were hurting him. His sinews strained, his muscles bulged, and droplets of loose blood splattered around the room.
But he was unsuccessful. Reyes’ men restrained him, holding him upright as he sagged, all energy drained.
“Fernando Carreon. You do know you the name of your boss, don’t you?” Reyes snapped.
“Of course, of course,” Oscar gasped once more. “But I don’t know him. I’ve never even seen him. I’m nobody.”
“You understand this is a war, don’t you?” Reyes said, leaning forward once again. He glanced at the destroyed cigarette in his fingers and flicked it contemptuously into Oscar’s face. “You must know why we are fighting?”
Oscar squinted with a mix of fear and incomprehension. “I don’t, I swear. Don’t you?”
Reyes took a step back, understanding that he would get nowhere with this man. He drew his side-arm for a second time. “Obviously not.”
He pulled the trigger.
He didn’t expect to feel anything when Oscar slumped to the floor, and he did not. Reyes holstered the weapon and kicked the body to check that he was dead.
“Make sure you’ve got all the footage you need,” he told the cameraman.
“What about the rest of this place?” Mendoza asked quietly. “I’m guessing there’s at least five tons of product here. We could use it.”
“Pick five of the men,” Reyes said, walking back through the destroyed remnants of the Federación safe house. “Tell them to pack as much as they can carry and burn the rest.”
34
Pope entered the safe house carrying two cups of coffee in a cardboard holder balanced precariously over a bag of fast food. He kicked the front door closed behind him, then walked over to where Kelly was sitting in front of a bank of computer screens.
Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, though it was so short anyway that it almost resembled a man bun, and she had a ballpoint pen behind her left ear. She barely looked up as he entered.
“Figured you might need a pick me up,” he said, dropping the food onto the table beside her, and just about managing to avoid spilling one of the coffees all over her right shoulder. “Black or white?”
“Huh?”
“Did you hear any of that?”
Kelly pushed away the laptop, and sank back into her chair, expressing a slight sigh. “Not really.”
“You drink your coffee with milk?”
She looked almost affronted at the suggestion. “No.”
“Then take this one,” he said, twisting it out of the holder and handing it over. “Should still be hot.”
“Thanks,” she said with a tired smile, perhaps recognizing her earlier reaction could be construed as ungrateful. She put the paper cup on the table and rubbed her eyes.
“You look exhausted,” Pope said, sipping his own. “How long you been at this?”
She glanced at her watch. “Oh – well, I guess all night.”
“You need to cut yourself a break,” he chided. “You won’t catch anyone with tired eyes. Believe me, I’ve been there.”
“Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”
He pushed the bag of breakfast food over to her. “Hungry?”
She opened it up to take a look, but he suspected it was only to be polite. Her nose scrunched up as she pushed it back. “I’m good.”
“Suit yourself,” he shrugged. “Let me guess – you’re a cyclist. Body is a temple, and all that?”
“Runner,” she said with half a laugh. “And I’m vegetarian.”
“My bad,” Pope said with the scarcely concealed glee of a husband noticing his wife’s abandoned plate. “I’ll remember next time.”
“No worries.”
“So, how you getting on? Anything from Chernobyl?”
“Maybe,” she nodded, bringing the coffee back to her lips and draining about half of it in one gulp. “Then again, maybe not. There’s a lot of noise. Just not sure how much of it is signal.”
“Sounds about right. Why don’t you show me? Maybe I can help lighten the load.”
She brought her chair over to him, then leaned back to pluck her laptop. The screensaver had initiated, so she wiggled the mouse, and a map of DC flashed up onto the screen.
Pope pointed at it, his finger landing on one of a number of small red dots. “What are these?”
“Pings from SIGMA,” Kelly replied, tracing her finger gently around the Beltway. “We’ve got good coverage everywhere inside here. Usually not more than a couple of blocks between each Geiger counter.”
“Okay,” Pope said, opening his mouth wide and inhaling about half his bagel in one bite. “So that’s twice on H St. – two nights in a row. That’s around Chinatown. Picking up take out?”
“That’s my guess.”
“Then once more across the intersection. Where is that?”
“A Walmart, I think.”
“And then a bunch of pings heading up 5th, and one on M Street. You get anything on the cameras?”
“You could say that,” Kelly replied with a helpless laugh. She tapped the keyboard and switched tabs, then flicked through what had to be a couple hundred faces, still shots taken from city security cameras.
Pope grabbed a napkin and cleaned the gr
ease off his fingers. “Who are they?”
“I fed our images of Conway’s handler into Metro PD’s facial recognition algorithm, and tasked it to search for any matches beyond 80% confidence in this search grid,” Kelly said, tracing an imaginary circle around the cluster of SIGMA radiation pings. “I think we’ve got a problem.”
“Which is?”
“None of the SIGMA devices have gone off in the last eighteen hours. I’m guessing he’s showered, or maybe he just took pictures of the file and dumped it. Either way, looks like this well’s about run dry.”
“Great,” Pope grumbled. “And that’s why you’re on the cameras?”
“Exactly. It seems pretty likely that our guy either lives or works within this ten block by ten block square. So that’s where I’m looking.”
“Good job. Still, that’s gotta be home to twenty thousand people. Plus everyone who commutes in and out every day.”
“Well… That’s my problem.”
“What are you doing to solve it?”
“The legwork,” Kelly shrugged. She tapped the keyboard again, and the image on screen zoomed out. Suddenly, in addition to the half a dozen red dots were tens, perhaps hundreds more blue ones. “Each of these is where the facial recognition algorithm pinged.”
She clicked on one of them, and a grainy surveillance shot of a tall blonde man in a raincoat and baseball cap came up. “This is our guy. Problem is, he never leaves the house without either a cap or a hood up. That makes the algo way less accurate. So I’ve been going through them one by one.”
“You need a hand?”
Kelly chuckled forlornly. “I could use a couple dozen rookies to help me sift through all this.”
Pope cracked his knuckles and shot her a wicked grin. “Well, you’re shit outta luck. I’m all you got.”
Six hours later they were both still at the task, and by this point his eyelids were beginning to droop even though it was only an hour past lunch. He looked up from his laptop after dismissing yet another surveillance image as a false positive and groaned. “You were at this all night, too?”
