“I don’t know how to do that.”
“I know.” She pulled her hand back. “It’s hard.” She paused. “But killing is not the answer. At least, it wasn’t for me.”
“It depends on who we’re killing.”
Clearly, the child of his enemy was not the right target. He pulled out his disposable cell and dialed Garcia’s number from memory. For the first time, he wondered what the young man’s real name was.
Garcia answered immediately. “Are we getting out of the fan business?”
“Soon. Call the FBI and give them the code to the safe so they can get that woman out of there. Be sure to tell them there isn’t really any C4 inside.” He paused and made eye contact with Agent Palmer. “And tell them to take paramedics with them. She’s...injured.” He paused for a moment. “And have the mercs release her family.”
Garcia hesitated. “Does this mean you found McGrath? You killed him?”
“No. He’s untouchable...for now.”
“You realize that holding his daughter is the only thing keeping him from bringing the full weight of the government down on you. May I ask what has changed?”
“She’s not my enemy.”
Garcia sighed. “To be truthful, Boss, I was never happy with that part of your plan, not after what we saw on the video. I mean, what almost happened with Cummings’s kid. I’m glad you’ve changed your mind.”
“I’ll call you back shortly.”
Carl looked at Agent Palmer for a moment. She smiled slightly. It was a cute, girlie smile, and her nose crinkled up a bit with the effort.
“Thank you.”
He grunted at her. “Doesn’t make us best friends or anything.” They looked at each other again. “So, where is the girl?”
“Um, we received some intel. We’re pretty sure Melissa is being held at one of Reyes’s fortified compounds in Mexico.”
“You trust this intel?”
She hesitated a moment, then looked away briefly, almost like she was embarrassed. Carl found that reaction curious.
“We’re trying to verify she is at the location...that you gave us.”
“Wait. What? I gave you?”
“When you told Special Agent Cummings you wanted to arrange a meeting with Agent Klipser in northern Mexico, we assumed you meant Reyes’s compound in the north-central part of the country near a place called El Chappa.”
“Are you telling me that line of bullshit I gave Cummings to lure Klipser into my ambush actually led you to her location?”
She nodded. “We launched a drone to observe the compound, and we think we saw her there, but it was before the drone was within optimal visual range. We saw a girl, but we haven’t verified it’s Melissa. We think she’s still there.”
“And Reyes is there too?”
“We think so, but that is unconfirmed as well.”
He nodded and closed the front door, then walked past her and turned into the living room. President Mallory had taken a seat in front of the roaring fire. She half-turned when Carl reentered the room. He removed his overcoat and skullcap and took a seat beside her on the couch facing the fire. He leaned forward for a moment with his elbows resting on his knees.
They both were silent for a long time. They sipped toasted almond crème coffee and gazed into the fire. He wondered what she, the most powerful person on the planet, was thinking.
Carl remembered the firestorm of controversy Shirley Mallory ignited four years ago when it became clear she was the front-runner to be the next president. He remembered her speech to the nation as she addressed the issue.
“Yes, I had sex, and I wasn’t married. Yes, I had a baby in my mid-forties. What of it? It just means I’m like millions of other single mothers with careers who are trying to make this country a better place for our children”.
And BLAM! Just like that all the conservatives were silenced, and she surfed that wave of popularity right into the White House. She was the role model for every girl in the country and the symbol of empowerment for every woman on the planet.
Carl said, “You know, parents nowadays say the Internet is corrupting kids. All they do is download games on their phones and walk around texting or Facebooking all the time. But back in our generation, before the Internet, they said the same thing about TV.
“But you know what? I think TV was a good influence on kids sometimes.” He fell silent for a moment. “When Mark was about seven, he was visiting me for the summer, and we were watching a show where the commander of this space station was a black man. That was a first back in those days—and he was a single father with a son about Mark’s age. Well, Mark was never a hugging kinda kid, but when he saw that brown-skin space kid hugging his dad, all of a sudden it became cool to hug Pops.”
Carl fell silent for a moment as his mind drifted back almost twenty-five years in time.
“We’ve been hugging ever since. We’d walk down the street, you know, two grown men with our arms parked around each other’s shoulders, and we’d sit in theaters without a seat between us and not feel weird.” He glanced over at the president. “I’m gonna miss that closeness. My son was....” He felt his bottom lip trembling, and he had to take a moment to recover.
“He was everything to me. Everything. I can’t even begin to describe how it feels to know I’m going to have to live the rest of my life without him. To be honest I don’t think I want to try. I can’t tell you how much it hurts. Every day.”
Carl was silent for a while, then he looked sideways at Mallory. “You can’t prepare for that kind of pain.” He paused. “So I’ll go get your kid, Shirley, so you won’t have to feel what I feel. But it’s going to cost you.” He glared at her. “It’s going to cost you a lot.”
Chapter 50
0732 EST Wednesday
McLean, VA
Presidential pardons for his mercs, his CIA tech wizard, Garcia, and himself. Forgiveness for everything they’d done and everything they were about to do. Tech support for the operation. Weapons too. And a lot of money. That was the cost, and the president didn’t even blink.
“You run your side of the op, Agent Palmer,” Carl said. “I don’t think you want me talking to your boss.”
“He’s been relieved. My boss is sitting next to you.”
She gave no further details. He looked at Agent Palmer and then at the president.
“I don’t believe the end always justifies the means. One of these days we all are going to have to answer for what we’ve done.” He stared into the fire. “But that day is not today. You want the girl back, and I want Alfonso Reyes dead, so our missions are aligned. We’re allies until this is over.”
Palmer said, “We should get back to my office, then, and start planning the op.”
“Nah, Sista,” he said quietly. “That’s not how the game is played. I’ve seen enough of your fucked up government missions to last me a lifetime. You go getting all covert on this guy, and he’ll see that shit coming from a mile away. Then the girl dies, and he goes into hiding.” He looked at her. “I’ll plan the op with my people, and you will assist us.”
Palmer nodded, and Carl pressed redial on his cell. He enabled the speaker so the women could listen and placed the device on the stone table.
“Go ‘head,” Garcia said.
“Get ready to dictate our account number because we have a client.”
Palmer angled her head so he could see a tiny flesh-colored comm device stuck in her ear.
“Ready,” Garcia said.
“Go.”
Garcia spoke the account number, and Palmer nodded. Carl assumed that her team on the other end of her comm device had received it. No one said anything as they waited for the transfer to go through. Carl looked over at the president.
“You have any more coffee left?”
She nodded and poured the remaining coffee from the flask into his mug. It filled it up only halfway. He added cream and sugar, then sipped. As he gazed into the fire, he sensed that both wome
n were staring at him.
He looked to his right first and locked gazes with Agent Palmer. Her face was completely unreadable. He sensed that her brief show of emotion by the door had been a side of her that people rarely saw. She’d allowed him to take what he needed from that encounter so he could stay strong.
Still, he could tell she was a government agent to her core. He sensed that if she didn’t get what she wanted from their alliance, she would be every bit as dangerous as Agents Klipser and McGrath.
When Carl turned his attention to the president, he sensed conflicting qualities in her. She was both vulnerable as a threatened mother, and strong as a world leader. But she was also a politician. He knew she had unequaled capacity for betrayal if it was necessary for the good of the country. In the back of his mind, he began to formulate some contingencies.
“Dayum!” Garcia said a few seconds later. “Is this a mistake? What the hell kind of client is worth two hundred and fifty million dollars?”
“The president’s daughter,” Carl said. “That’s who Alfonso Reyes kidnapped.”
“The president of what? The United States?”
“Our mission is to go down there and rescue a girl and kill a man. Call your people in-country and tell them I want a meeting with Reyes. Tell him I tricked the government into paying his ransom to me. He’s seen me and knows I look like him, so he’ll understand how I could have pulled it off. Tell him if he wants his money, he has to give me the girl and guarantee me safe passage back across the border. Tell him if he agrees, he can have two hundred million, and I keep fifty. Then I’ll sell the girl back to the president for another hundred. Tell him that’s the price he and the US government have to pay for killing my son.
“If he doesn’t agree, tell him he can keep the girl, I’ll keep all the money, and then I’ll hunt him down at some later date when he’ll never see me coming. Remind him of our exploits against the Feds this week, so we’ll have credibility.”
“Okay,” Garcia said. “I’m on it, but I’ve found out a few more things about Alfonso Reyes. Apparently, he’s well connected on both sides of the law. It’s rumored he’s cozy with a phantom military man called El Patron.”
Carl glanced at Palmer, and she nodded. That was not new information to her.
“El Patron?” Carl said hesitantly. “What does that mean?”
Garcia said, “Literally, El Patron means ‘the landlord’ or ‘the boss.’ In this case, ‘boss’ is probably more appropriate. The man is a very powerful crime lord, but he’s in the military. Anyone associated with him is going to be well protected.”
“Very well. I’m going to give your number to Agent Palmer, and she’s going to coordinate with you from her office here in Virginia. She’ll be sending you a blanket pardon signed by the president for you, me, and the rest of the team, and she’ll send along some intel, some surveillance drone comm channel access codes, and she’ll arrange some special military hardware for the mercs.”
“Um, don’t take this the wrong way, Boss, but do you really trust these people?”
“I trust them to look out for their interests, and right now their interests coincide with mine. What they really need is a team that is effective and expendable and not related to the government. If this op goes sideways I’m sure the TER will blame it on the ‘American Terrorist.’ Either way, now this is a business transaction between two rival terrorists, and not a power play between a terrorist and a US President.”
Palmer agreed. “Reyes gains nothing by killing her before he gets his money, so as long as we control the meeting site, Melissa stays alive. We have a recovery unit standing by near the border, but we can’t intervene across the border if you get in a bind.” She paused. “Unless we’re absolutely certain we can recover Melissa by that action.”
“Understood.”
Palmer spoke the thought Carl knew she and the president were thinking.
“What’s to stop you from simply disappearing with the ransom money?”
“The problem with that scenario, Agent Palmer, is that it leaves Alfonso Reyes’s head attached to his shoulders.” He paused for a moment and reached for his coffee mug. He took another sip, then he looked to his left.
“Madam President, there is one more thing you can help out with.”
Mallory raised an eyebrow.
“If I get the girl, and it looks like Reyes is going to get away, I’ll need a backup plan.”
“Agent Palmer will get you anything you need to get my daughter back.”
“Anything?”
Chapter 51
0018 MST Thursday
Northern Mexico
Two hundred fifty million dollars. That was the latest ransom demand for Melissa Mallory, and that was how much the president and her people paid…to Carl Johnson. That amount of money was so mindboggling, he had no real concept of its value. The money was in Carl’s accounts, so if Reyes wanted his money, he’d have to negotiate for it like a businessman rather than make political extortion demands of a head of state.
By Carl’s way of thinking, there were many better candidates one could kidnap for ransom that would not result in Reyes becoming a covert ops target for the rest of his life. So his objective, in addition to the money, must be to realize some kind of power play at the expense of the president.
Agent Palmer acknowledged McGrath’s team had already considered that was Reyes’s agenda, but she seemed genuinely surprised when Carl suggested the drug man would kill Melissa anyway, most likely after the second ransom was paid.
“He gains nothing by killing her,” Palmer had said, “other than becoming a target of US forces.”
Carl had said, “He’s already a target, isn’t he? Whether he gives the girl back or not, right? He’s not stupid, so you can expect him to know that. He wanted to get on the map, with the boost in status he would have earned by giving the US a bloody nose. Except now that I have robbed him of that status by stealing his ransom money, we have to keep him in damage control mode. If he messes this up, he’ll lose his status and his money.”
So the president green-lighted the mission.
Carl considered his entry into Mexico as the easiest part of the mission, even though the operation hadn’t really started yet. Garcia had put out the word through his in-country contacts that Carl was coming for a face-to-face meeting Thursday afternoon, so there was no need for him to sneak illegally across the border. In truth, though, Carl and his team were making their move before sunrise.
Carl drove down to the crossing at Columbus, New Mexico. The mercs, all with valid passports, had done the same in a different SUV while Carl was flying from Virginia back to Albuquerque.
I-25 from the Albuquerque International Airport, or the Sunport, as it was known, was almost a straight shot to the El Paso crossing, but everyone agreed it was better to avoid that congested port of entry. The TER team wanted to keep the kidnapping and the rescue secret, and that would not be possible if they brought Melissa back through El Paso.
So, at Las Cruces, Carl turned west and merged onto I-10. He passed the signs indicating a turnoff to the Santa Teresa Port of Entry and kept driving toward Deming. He then turned south to Columbus, a tiny town he passed through in two minutes flat. He dimmed his headlights and slowed as he approached the Port of Entry gate three miles south of town.
Both sides of the crossing were well lit and modern, and Carl got the feeling the facility had been recently remodeled. There was a rest stop advertising refreshments, snacks, and maps. The Port of Entry crossing looked modern and inviting. The building encompassing the border gate seemed new also, though only one lane on each side of the building led to the opposite country.
The crossing looked more like the entrance to a nice metro parking lot with a modern, curved roof covering the guard office and the transition point. It wasn’t like the monster crossing he’d seen at El Paso, where there were many lanes entering and exiting the country, as well as dozens of buildings and miles of traffic
jams on both sides, with people waiting for hours at all times of the day or night.
Carl approached the border crossing in his white-man disguise. There were only two guards on evening duty on each side of the border, and none of them showed the slightest bit of interest in him. Garcia had already taken care of the documents needed to take his car across—temporary Mexican insurance and the required deposit intended to make sure drivers didn’t leave cars south of the border—so he simply presented the papers at the crossing and was allowed to drive right on through after only a cursory inspection.
He drove into the darkness, following the dim green map on the GPS screen of the tiny device stuck to the old SUV’s dash. The map rotated every time he made a turn or when the road changed directions, but the arrow representing his car always pointed up. He was many miles from his destination, so he turned off the female voice that offered turn-by-turn directions.
“In one hundred five miles, turn left on....”
He’d never been to Mexico before. In fact, the darkness enveloping the border town of Puerto Palomas after midnight was so complete that Carl was hard pressed to even see there was a town outside his SUV. Every couple of minutes, he saw a few estates with well-lit fences a mile or two away from the highway. He glimpsed other structures along the road, but they were mere shadows in the night.
Almost half an hour later, he turned west onto a road without a number. Then he hit Highway 10 that reached south into the empty desert lands of north-central Mexico. The uneventful trip gave him plenty of time to reflect on the unexpected turn of events of the day.
Driving across Mexico on a mission of mercy, he found himself in league with the very people he despised. He had blamed these people for his son’s death, so he had wanted them to be the bad guys. He needed the president and her minions to be evil. Now, he just couldn’t see them that way anymore.
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