Suicide Mission

by William W. Johnstone

  She didn’t have to think about that offer for very long before accepting it. As soon as there was a good place, she pulled the pickup off on the side of the road.

  Bill reached for his door handle, but Catalina said, “You don’t have to get out. You can just scoot over. There’s room for me to slide past you.”

  Bill wasn’t sure about that, but he was willing to give it a try. Catalina slid out from behind the wheel, turned, and put her hands on either side of his shoulders as he scooted into the middle of the pickup’s bench seat. That put their faces only inches apart and caused her breasts to flatten against his chest. For a moment their thighs were tangled up with each other.

  “I hope this isn’t embarrassing you,” she said.

  “I’ve got boots older than you, darlin’,” Bill said. “You’re wastin’ your time flirtin’ with me.”

  They slid past each other. Bill settled behind the wheel as Catalina turned again and dropped into the passenger seat.

  “I wasn’t really trying to flirt with you,” she said. “Just habit, I guess. You don’t like women?”

  “I like women just fine.”

  “But you’re too old to be interested in them like that.”

  “The hell I am. If you’d wallered on me a little longer you probably would’ve figured that out for yourself.”

  That made her laugh. She said, “So you’re not too old, I’m just . . . what? Too young? Too slutty?”

  “Right now, señorita, you’re a job I’ve got to do. That’s all I’m thinkin’ about.”

  “Fair enough.” She took the flash drive out of her pocket and held it out to him. “Here.”

  “Much obliged,” he told her as he took the drive and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He fastened the snap holding the pocket flap closed.

  Catalina stretched out her long legs as much as she could and leaned back against the seat. A vast sigh came from her as she closed her eyes.

  Bill got the pickup rolling again and headed east toward San Antonio.

  CHAPTER 12

  San Antonio, Texas

  He used the burner to call Clark before they got there and found out the address of the place where he needed to go. When he reached 1604, the big outer loop around San Antonio, he took it north to Interstate 10, then cut back toward town and exited on Fredericksburg Road.

  As he drove past a Hooters, he glanced over at Catalina, who was still sleeping, and thought about how she would look in one of those little outfits the gals who worked there wore. It made for an intriguing mental image, and he didn’t feel guilty for thinking about it. She was a full-grown woman, after all.

  But despite her protests, there was a certain innocence about her. Sure, she had lived a rough life and probably had done a lot of things nobody would be proud of. Her sins were small ones, though, compared to the sort of things that went on in the world Bill had once inhabited.

  And now, evidently, did again.

  They hadn’t run into any more trouble on the way to San Antonio. Catalina had slept the whole way, the drugged sleep of exhaustion. Bill knew the feeling; he had been there himself from time to time.

  He remembered once in South America, in the Mato Grosso, with government troops chasing him from one direction and headhunters from another . . .

  He shoved those thoughts away. That was the past. It was all right for a man to dwell on what had been when he didn’t have anything in his future to look forward to. Bill wasn’t at that point in his life yet.

  He drove around northwest San Antonio until night had fallen. He expected Catalina to wake up every time they stopped at a red light, but she continued to sleep. Finally it was dark enough to head for the safe house. When he turned into the right block, he said, “Hey, you still alive over there? Catalina?”

  She didn’t respond. He took his right hand off the wheel and reached over to nudge her shoulder.

  She came awake like a wild animal, instantly alert and ready to fight. Bill hadn’t noticed that she’d slipped her hand into her purse before she went to sleep. Now it came out of the bag clutching something as she lunged at him.

  His own reactions were still pretty good. His hand flashed up and his fingers closed around her wrist, stopping her movement when the tip of the dagger she held was still a few inches from his throat.

  Another split second and the blade would have been in his jugular.

  “Whoa there,” Bill said, trying to sound cooler and calmer than he really felt. “Take it easy, Catalina, it’s just me, Bill Elliott.”

  He didn’t let go of her wrist until she said, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry, Bill. I should have warned you . . . Marty knew to always be careful when he woke me up.”

  “Are you sayin’ you’re like this every time somebody interrupts your nap?”

  She sat back in the corner of the seat and put the dagger back in her bag. As she used her other hand to rub the wrist he had grabbed, she said, “You get used to people trying to hurt you, you know? And even though you know you’re not in danger, when you’re asleep you sort of go back to that . . .”

  He nodded.

  “I understand. And I reckon you are in danger, just not from me.”

  “I don’t have the flash drive anymore. I can’t hurt the cartel.”

  “They don’t know that. And there’s a good chance they don’t know how much Marty told you. They want to get their hands on you so they can make you talk.”

  “And they wouldn’t believe me if I told them I don’t really know anything except that one phrase.”

  “Probably not,” Bill agreed.

  “They would torture me, and when they finally decided I was harmless, they would kill me.”

  “Yep.”

  She drew in a deep breath and blew it out in a sigh. “I thought I had known bad men in the past. But these hombres, they are more than that. They are monsters.”

  “You’re right about that,” Bill said. He turned in at a driveway that ran beside a sprawling, Spanish-style house that looked like all the other houses in this affluent residential neighborhood. The driveway led to a two-car garage that was connected to the house by an enclosed breezeway. The house was probably sixty or seventy years old. It had the look of the postwar housing boom to it.

  The garage door rose as the pickup approached it. Bill knew the truck had triggered a sensor of some sort. He drove into the darkened garage. The door rumbled down automatically behind them.

  A light went on over the door leading to the breezeway. Bill drew the Browning and held it on the seat beside him as a man walked through the breezeway and stepped into the garage.

  He was a medium-sized, balding man, with lean, alert features. The hair he had left was a nondescript brown. He wore khaki trousers and a polo shirt and looked like an insurance salesman who ought to be on a suburban golf course somewhere, playing eighteen holes with his friends.

  With a smile on his face, he said, “All clear, Bill.”

  Bill opened the pickup door and slid out.

  “Clark,” he said. “You didn’t tell me you were gonna be here to meet me.”

  “I figured you’d find out soon enough.” Clark looked past Bill into the front seat of the pickup. “I take it that’s Miss Ramos?”

  “Señorita Ramos, if you want to be accurate about it,” Bill drawled. He put his gun away. He trusted Clark as much as he trusted most men, and more than any of the other spooks he had worked with. They had been in some tight spots together, and Clark had never let him down.

  Clark stepped over to the open driver’s door of the pickup and said, “Señorita Ramos, let me welcome you to San Antonio. Don’t worry, you’ll be safe here. We have our agents blanketing the whole neighborhood. This house belongs to an agency of the United States government, and we’ve used it to shelter people like you before.”

  “People like me,” Catalina repeated. “You mean Mexican strippers and whores?”

  “People with whom we have common enemies,” Clark said, as unflappabl
e as ever. “People who are in danger. People we want to help.”

  “People who have something you want,” Catalina said.

  Clark shrugged.

  “Sometimes.”

  Catalina pointed at Bill and said, “He has it. I already gave it to him. Do you still want to help me?”

  Before Clark could answer, Bill said, “Could we go inside to have this discussion? It’s been a long day. When I got up this morning, I was still retired, and now I’m not anymore.”

  “That’s up to you,” Clark said. “You’ve done your job. You’re free to go anytime you want, Bill.”

  “I’m a mite curious. I’d sort of like to know what this is all about and what makes El Nuevo Sol important enough to be worth killin’ over.”

  “Well, then, let’s go on inside, sit down, and have a talk,” Clark suggested.

  Bill looked at Catalina, who was still sitting in the pickup. He nodded to let her know it was all right to get out. Once again he waited to see whether or not she was going to trust him.

  After a moment she opened the door and stepped out of the truck.

  Clark led the way into the house, where several men wearing bulletproof vests and carrying guns waited in the living room that had been turned into a command center. Another man monitored feeds from cameras concealed around the neighborhood. A man and two women worked at computer stations. All the activity looked a little out of place in the comfortably furnished house, which, although there was no visible evidence of it, was armored and secure enough to withstand anything short of a direct bomb hit.

  “Would you like something to eat?” Clark asked. He gestured through an arched entrance into a genteel dining room where thick drapes were drawn over the windows.

  “All I’ve had today is a bottle of water and a candy bar,” Catalina said. “I’d love something to eat.”

  “We’ll take care of that right away. Why don’t you go ahead and sit down?”

  “First, where’s the ladies’ room?”

  Clark pointed out a door. Catalina vanished through it.

  “She can’t get out of there, can she?” Bill asked.

  “What, after everything you’ve gone through, you think she might cut and run?”

  “It’s not likely,” Bill said, “but I’ve already been around her enough to know she can do some unexpected things.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry. Unless she’s got an industrial strength laser in her pocket, she’s not going anywhere. And as tight as those jeans are, I don’t think that’s likely.”

  “Noticed that, did you? About the jeans, I mean?”

  “I’m married,” Clark said as he held up his left hand and wiggled the ring finger. “But I wasn’t struck blind at the ceremony.”

  “I’m hungry, too. Reckon you can rustle up enough grub for me?”

  “Why, sure, cowboy. But first . . .” Clark held out his hand. “The young lady said you have something for us?”

  Bill took the flash drive from his shirt pocket and dropped it into Clark’s palm.

  “You can get those tech wizards of yours to work on it.”

  “You have any idea what they’ll be looking for?”

  “Not a damn clue, except that the phrase El Nuevo Sol seems to be important to everybody.”

  “That means ‘the New Sun,’ doesn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, that makes no sense. There’s only one sun. I mean, there are lots of suns in the universe, but you know what I’m talking about. Only one that means anything to us.”

  “Somebody else will have to figure it out,” Bill said. “I’m just a hired gun hand.”

  “And a damn good one.” Clark frowned. “I hear you shot up half of Del Rio. Seven men are dead back there. It’s lucky for you they all had ties to the cartel and weren’t innocent bystanders.”

  “I tried to be careful. Of course, with that much lead flyin’ around, there’s only so much you can do . . .”

  Catalina came back from the bathroom. She said, “I hope you can get me some clean clothes. I’d love to take a shower, but I don’t want to put these things back on.”

  “We have everything you need,” Clark assured her. “Now let’s get you something to eat.”

  They sat down in the dining room to thick sandwiches and salads and big glasses of iced tea. There was nothing dainty about the way Catalina ate, which didn’t surprise Bill. She was a big, athletic girl, so it made sense she would have a good appetite, especially after being on the run for so long and not being able to eat much.

  Clark disappeared, and Bill figured he was supervising the effort to extract the intel from the flash drive. There was no telling how long that would take. It would all depend on how heavily encrypted the data was and how long it took to break through that encryption. Luckily, Clark had some of the best computer people in the world at his disposal, not just here on the ground in San Antonio but back in Virginia and in other places around the globe. This day and age, the way everything was connected, distances didn’t mean much anymore.

  “How long will I have to stay here?” Catalina asked while they were eating.

  “Don’t know,” Bill said. “I guess that’ll depend on what they find out.”

  “Will I be put in the, what do you call it, witness protection program?”

  “That’s not my call. Might be some diplomatic problems if they did that. You’re a Mexican national, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “If your government finds out that we’ve got you, they’re liable to demand that we give you back. You could be the cause of an international incident.”

  Catalina grimaced and said, “If you turn me over to the Mexican government, you might as well be turning me over to the cartel. There’s not much difference in the two anymore.”

  “Well, that’ll all get worked out,” Bill said, knowing that in the end it might not work out to Catalina’s satisfaction . . . or to anyone else’s, including his. But like he had told her, he didn’t make the decisions.

  They had finished the meal but were still sitting at the dining room table when Clark came back into the room. Bill knew instantly that something was up. Clark never lost his calm demeanor, but he looked like he was about to now.

  Bill got to his feet. So did Catalina. Bill said, “You found out something from that flash drive?”

  “We did,” Clark said. “There were a lot of emails on there, all in code, of course, but our people broke it. The cartel has teamed up with a Middle Eastern terror organization, Bill. They’ve set up a training camp in Mexico. Basic training for terrorists that the cartel will smuggle across the border posing as Mexican illegals.”

  “They’ve been doin’ that for awhile, haven’t they?”

  “Yeah, but from the sound of the emails, they’re expanding the operation.” Wearily, Clark scrubbed a hand over his face. “That’s not the worst of it, though, at least not in the short run.”

  Almost wishing he didn’t want to know, Bill asked, “What’s the worst of it?”

  “They’ve got a suitcase nuke, and they’re planning to set it off in downtown San Antonio, right in front of the Alamo.”

  CHAPTER 13

  San Antonio

  The motel sat alongside the interstate, part of a long string of similar motels, car dealerships, and shopping centers. It was owned and operated by one of Tariq’s countrymen who had immigrated to the United States more than twenty years earlier.

  The man might have had a suspicion that Tariq was more than he seemed, but nothing of the sort was spoken. Tariq knew that the proprietor still had relatives back home and would have threatened them if he had to, but it wasn’t necessary. The man did everything he could to be helpful. He had two rooms ready, one for Tariq . . .

  The other for Alfredo Sanchez.

  Tariq wasn’t happy about the man coming along, but Sanchez had insisted. He wanted to make sure everything went according to plan, or so he said.

  Of course, when th
e time came for the New Sun to rise, Sanchez would be far away, well out of the blast radius. Tariq knew and accepted that. He didn’t expect Sanchez to sacrifice his own life. The man was a mercenary, not a true believer. Sanchez’s only true allegiance was to his own profit and power.

  And as such, not even his assistance in furthering the cause of Islam would keep him from going straight to hell when his time came.

  The two rooms were next to each other, adjoining, in fact. Tariq parked the car in front of the door to his room. The device was in the trunk, and it would stay there, perfectly harmless with the detonator deactivated, until Tariq activated it and set it off at high noon the next day. He would park as close to the Alamo as he could, then walk to the plaza in front of the old building, stand for a moment watching the ebb and flow of the godless Americans around him, then take out his cell phone and punch in the fateful numbers.

  That was all it would take to wipe downtown San Antonio off the map and resume the sacred task of punishing the Americans for their unholy ways.

  Tariq knew about the Alamo. He had forced himself to watch the movie starring the imperialist infidel warmonger John Wayne. He knew the old building was a shrine of sorts . . . a shrine to evil and corruption. Tariq would go to his death gladly, knowing that it would be blasted to atoms, knowing as well that he would be striking a blow into the heart of the weak, crippled giant America had allowed itself to become.

  “You’re sure no one will bother the car?” Sanchez asked as they got out.

  “Why would they?” Tariq said. “No one has any reason to suspect us.”

  “I’m worried about that damned whore,” Sanchez said.

  Tariq shrugged and said, “It is troubling that she got away, but how much could Chavez have told her? Even if he knew anything vital about our plan, why would he trust the information to an immoral woman like that?”

  Sanchez snorted, which made a surge of anger go through Tariq.

  “When it comes to women, not everyone is as concerned about their morals as you are, my friend. There’s no way of knowing what Chavez might have let slip to her. I wish we could have gotten hold of her before we left. Estancia’s men could have made her talk.”