Reluctantly Del sat, opened it and started reading.
“Since you’re running short on time, I’ll save you the trouble of reading. It’s a deposition signed by a federal agent saying that you didn’t kill Eduardo Garcia.”
Del’s stomach bounced off the floor of his abdomen. He looked up, speechless, then back down to the folder to confirm.
“We had a mole in the warehouse that day.” Bradford, if that really was his name, smiled smugly at Del’s disbelief. “Your tax dollars at work.”
“If you had an undercover operative in there, how come you’re just now sharing this information?”
“Our man was so deep we couldn’t get a report from him until last night.”
Del flipped a few pages in the deposition. “Eduardo was the middle man who set up the sale. The deal went bad, and the buyers tied him up and executed him. With a shotgun.”
“Five minutes before the Texas Rangers arrived.”
Del cocked his jaw. It was possible. “Buckshot can’t be traced by ballistic matching, like a regular bullet.”
“There was no way to know the blast that killed Garcia hadn’t come from your weapon.” The man shrugged. “Until now.”
Del closed the folder, tapped his fingers on the cover. “It’s a neat story.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“Too neat.”
The man leaned back in his chair. “If you don’t want my help, I’ll take my folder and go. If, on the other hand, you want to clear your name, you hand that to your lawyer and all charges will be dropped. The records will be sealed, of course. Classified. But your slate is cleared. I might even be able to put in a word with the DPS. Get you rehired.”
He could have it all back. His reputation, his job. It seemed too good to be true. The trouble with things that seemed too good to be true is, they usually were.
Still, he wasn’t ready to let go of the folder. “And Elisa?”
“Your wife’s association with a gun smuggler makes her an undesirable in this country. Even marriage to a U.S. citizen can’t prevent deportation of someone judged to be dangerous or involved in criminal activity.”
Del shoved his chair back and stood. “She didn’t know Eduardo was working for Sanchez.”
“Is that what she told you?”
“That’s what I know. Furthermore, if you had an operative in the warehouse, he wasn’t a mole. If he was, he wouldn’t have been there alone. He would have had cover for himself and that cache of weapons. And if he wasn’t a mole, there’s only one other explanation. He was selling guns to a foreign military. An activity the United States Congress seriously frowns upon. So yeah.” He snatched the folder from the table. “I’ll take your deposition and give it to my lawyer. We’ll tell a story to the judge and all those nice reporters waiting outside. Only it might not be exactly the story you’d been hoping for. So, if I were you, I’d start worrying less about how I’m going to clear my name, and more about how you’re going to clear yours.”
He turned to leave.
“You’re an idiot, Cooper. You can’t win this. You’re dealing with the highest levels of this country’s government. The highest.”
“The higher they are, the farther they have to fall.”
“You’d really throw away everything for a woman?”
He stopped. “No, I’d be hanging on to the one thing that matters more than my job, my name, even my freedom. My self-respect.”
“I can have this whole thing taken out of here. Moved to a military tribunal.”
He pulled the door open. Kat and Captain Matheson stood ten feet down the hallway. Sensing trouble, they shifted to ready stances.
Del looked over his shoulder. Mr. Baseball looked as if he’d spent too much time in the sun. His face was red, and he’d popped a sweat.
Turning back to the hall, he gave Bull and Kat a silent heads-up signal with a faint jerk of his chin. “You can try,” he said to the man behind him as he walked out.
Kat and Bull flanked him on either side.
“What’s going on?” Kat whispered.
“Hold it for later, Kat,” Bull growled under his breath. Bradford’s footfalls echoed on the tile floor behind them.
“Cooper, wait.”
Grudgingly Del stopped and turned. His friends pulled up beside him, their duty faces on.
“We need to talk,” the man said, dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief. “Alone.”
“There’s nothing you could say that can’t be said in front of my friends.” He smiled. “Seein’s how you all work for Uncle Sam.”
The man’s gaze flitted nervously over the rangers before settling on Del. “What I’m about to tell you is highly sensitive information.”
“Get to the point.”
Mr. Redface shoved his handkerchief into his back pocket. “You were right about the warehouse. Our operative was the one making the sale. But it wasn’t real. It was a sting. Our man didn’t have any cover because we had no intention of busting the buy, and we didn’t want to risk his cover by having a bunch of cops around.”
“What operative?” Kat asked, wide eyed. “What sting?”
Bull silenced her with a glare.
The man continued, uninterrupted. “Garcia was our in-country man. He made contact with Sanchez’s people.”
“Using a trip with the World-Aid Organization as his cover.”
The man nodded, swallowed nervously. “He got Sanchez’s men here, but we want the big kahuna himself.”
“Sanchez?”
“We’re going to extradite him—forcefully—from his own country the way we did Manuel Noriega in the early nineties. He’s harboring terrorists—not to mention producing a hell of a lot of drugs that find their way onto American streets. We just needed concrete proof. We had tracking devices in the packing crates with the guns. All we had to do was get them in his hands, wait for him to resell them to the terrorists, then snap a few satellite shots of nice little homing blips coming from terrorist training camps, and we had him cold.”
“So what happened?”
The man shook his head. “We don’t know. Somehow they got wind he might be tied to the rebel faction in San Ynez.”
“Resistance,” Del corrected automatically. Then he closed his eyes. “Elisa.”
If Sanchez’s goons had found out Eduardo had a rebel—resistance—girlfriend, it would have cast doubt on his loyalty to the colonel. Except, the Fed here didn’t seem to know she was a rebel.
“She’s the wild card in all this. Details about her are sketchy at best. Her stumbling into Garcia’s path just as he got wounded in San Ynez, forcing his care into her hands, might not have been an accident. Sanchez might have ordered her to cozy up to Eduardo to spy on him. For all we know, that baby she’s carrying isn’t really even his—”
Del grabbed the man by his lapels and pinned him to the wall. The other rangers calmed the passersby.
“Elisa doesn’t have any connection to Sanchez,” Del said. “She couldn’t. She’s part of the resistance.” He laughed. Finally, everything she stood for seemed so right to him. He knew what guilt she carried over her relationship with Eduardo. He couldn’t wait to find her and tell her the father of her child hadn’t been a traitor to his people after all, but a hero, as determined to stop Sanchez’s reign of terror as she was. Maybe he could take a plane, be there to meet her train when it arrived in Detroit.
He laughed despite himself, filled with pride for her. “Hell, she’s La Puma, the leader of the whole damn resistance movement. Sanchez would execute her if he caught her.”
The man Del held blanched. “Elisa Reyes is La Puma?”
“She was. Until she got pregnant and came to the United States to make a better life for her baby.”
“Oh, God.” The man closed his eyes. “I didn’t know.”
Del’s blood chilled. “What?”
“My men saw her pull out of the parking garage ten minutes ago with two of Sanchez’s goons.�
��
Elisa paced the walls of her eight-by-eight cell, digging at the windowsill, testing for weakness for the hundredth time and still finding none. As far as she could tell, she had been back in San Ynez, in this hole, three days, but she didn’t know how long she’d been traveling before that. They drugged her, she thought. She didn’t remember much of the trip.
She strode to the window and back again, her hand resting on her swollen belly. “It’s all right, little one,” she said. She’d taken to talking to the baby during her captivity. It reassured them both. “I got out of here once. I can do it again.”
She wondered where Del was tonight. If he, too, was behind bars, or worse.
A key scraped against a metal lock, and the door clicked open. Elisa raised her hand to shield her eyes from the light spearing into the dim room. “Back for more questions, Colonel?”
His pocked face sneered at her. “This time I expect some answers.” He slapped a baton against the palm of his hand. “I’ve been gentle with you so far out of respect for your…condition. But even my compassion has limits.”
“Hopefully they are broader than the limits of your intelligence, because I have no idea what you want me to tell you.”
“I want to know Eduardo Garcia’s mission.”
They had covered this ground before. She could only be thankful he seemed fixated on Eduardo and had not connected her to La Puma. If he had, no doubt she would be dead.
She had to stall until she could come up with an escape plan. Last night and the night before, she had denied any knowledge of a mission. The way he was cracking the baton against his hand, she doubted that would work again.
She decided on another tactic. One she hoped would gain her as much information as she gave away. “How would I know what his mission was?” she asked, her lips thin. She felt shamed that she had been involved with a traitor. “He worked for you.”
Sanchez paused midswing. “You think Eduardo worked for me? How interesting.”
Thwack. The baton hit his palm.
“Eduardo Garcia was one of former Presidente Herrerra’s personal bodyguards.”
Elisa’s breath stalled. Eduardo? One of Herrerra’s elite protection units? Those men had been the crown jewels of the San Ynez military when it was an honorable force. She could not believe one of them would turn on his countrymen.
Sanchez circled her with his baton. “Now he offers to sell me guns. I want to know for what purpose.”
So did Elisa. “What does it matter? He is dead.”
“Yes. It’s unfortunate I had to have him killed, and leave all those lovely weapons behind. But I could not risk letting him live once I found out who he was.” Sanchez tipped her chin up with the baton. “And that he had taken a rebel lover.”
Elisa’s heart tried to break out of her chest. He did not know who she was. He could not. Calming herself, she realized what the colonel had just said. “You had him killed? But—”
A knock sounded on the door. A young soldier popped his head in and said breathlessly, “Colonel—”
“Fool! I told you I did not want to be interrupted.”
“But, sir—”
With one step, Sanchez was at the door and rapped the baton on the boy’s shoulder hard enough to snap bone. The boy writhed in pain. “But, sir…we’re under attack!”
Three dozen members of the San Ynez People’s Resistance Movement—supported by an American infantry squad—fired into the air and generally raised a racket in front of the Sanchez compound while six special forces paratroopers—and one former paratrooper—parachuted inside the rear wall. Silently they gathered their black chutes and rigging and stuffed them behind bushes, then moved out across the compound. Though they could talk to each other with a mere whisper into the ultrasensitive micro-electronic headsets they each wore, they communicated only by hand signal, unwilling to risk announcing their arrival with even the slightest noise.
The main house was lit up like the castle at Disney World, and to give Elisa credit, it did look to Del a little like Gene Randolph’s estate, except it was stucco instead of brick, and had a red tile roof instead of Gene’s cedar-shingled one. Plus, Sanchez’s mansion was about twice as large as the Randolph estate. Drug dealers lived in style these days.
Only one guard stood watch at the back door, and he wasn’t very well trained. One of the paratroopers took him out so easily that he almost seemed disappointed the man hadn’t put up more of a fight. It looked as if all the San Ynezian soldiers worth their salt had bought the diversion out front, as they were supposed to.
Inside, four of the paratroopers headed upstairs, to the office suite where Sanchez was likely to be. Del and one volunteer, the kid who had taken out the guard outside, went down, looking for Elisa.
They found her much more quickly than they’d anticipated. She stood at bottom of the stairs. Right behind her stood Colonel Sanchez, with a gun pointed at the swell in her belly that held her child.
The young paratrooper spoke excitedly into his headset when he should have been looking for cover. “Charlie One, Charlie One. I’ve got him. I’ve got Sanchez. Do you read?”
Sanchez swung the muzzle of his pistol away from Elisa momentarily, and fired. The paratrooper tumbled down the stairs, blood arcing from a wound in his neck.
“You’ve got no one,” Sanchez said. His black eyes were dead calm. The eyes of a madman.
“Let her go, Colonel,” Del ordered. “And maybe I won’t kill you.”
“Del?” Elisa cried.
“Wrong,” Sanchez yelled. “Drop your weapon and come out, and maybe I won’t kill her.”
“Del, no!”
He wanted to go to her. Gather her up and tell her everything would be all right. But he couldn’t. And it might not be.
He heard automatic gunfire from upstairs, and realized he wasn’t going to get help from the paratroopers anytime soon.
Partially hidden by the door frame, he sighted his Hechler and Koch on the center of Sanchez’s forehead, but Elisa was too close to risk a shot. Del had barely an inch as a margin of error.
“You drop her,” he said, hoping his voice sounded more confident than he felt. “You’ve got no cover. I’ll kill you before you before her body hits the floor.”
Sanchez laughed demonically. “Then it looks like we have a standoff.”
Del caught movement in the hallway off to Sanchez’s right and a little in front of the colonel. Hope winged through his chest, and he smiled. “Tell you what,” he proposed. “I’m only interested in the woman. You let her go, I’ll let you go.”
“You think I believe that?” He moved the pistol to Elisa’s temple, dug the barrel in deep. She bit her lip, but held her silence. The movement in the side hall went still.
“It’s the truth. You let her go, I’ll let you walk right by me. Look.” He lowered his pistol an inch. “I’ll put my gun down if you lower yours. We’ll do it together, an inch at a time so neither of us gets the drop on the other.”
“Del, no! You cannot let him escape.”
Difficult as it was, Del ignored her. He lowered his pistol another inch. “Come on. A little at a time. Just ease the gun away from her, and I’ll put mine down.”
Del held his breath, watching for any sign of cooperation. Slowly the colonel’s hand dropped. Maybe half an inch.
“That’s good,” Del encouraged. He lowered his gun again. “Now you. A little more.”
They played the game until Del’s pistol rested on the floor, still cupped in his hand. The colonel’s weapon hung at his side.
Still pulling Elisa with him, he shuffled forward a step. Then another. One more put him directly in line with the intersecting hall.
A figure leaped out of the shadows. Del’s gun was up again in a flash, but he didn’t need it. The young Hispanic man made a tackle on Sanchez that would have made a pro linebacker proud. A second young man caught Elisa as she spun away.
Pulling out plastic restraints, Del ran down the stai
rs to secure their prize.
Elisa pulled back from the man who’d caught her to look at his face. Then she flung herself back into his arms. “Miguel? What are you doing here, my brother?”
Del put his foot on Sanchez’s throat, and the man who’d tackled him backed away. “What about me? Don’t I get a hug, big sister?”
“Raul! How did you know…?”
“Your ranger friend paid us a little visit,” Raul answered.
“Along with a few dozen American soldiers,” Miguel added ruefully.
Raul hung his thumbs in the waistband of his pants and arched his back. “Seems they needed a little help with their invasion.”
“It’s not an invasion, it’s an extradition,” Miguel said. “And all they needed was intelligence.”
Raul cuffed him on the back of the head. “Then why did they ask you?”
Miguel rolled his eyes. “We gave them the layout of the house. But only if they let us come along.”
Del smiled at the reunion as he finished securing the colonel’s hands and feet.
Sanchez sneered up at Del. “Go ahead, Americano. Kill me. I spit in your face with my dying breath.”
“Kill you? And deny your right to a fair trial and to spend the next fifty or sixty years rotting in an American prison? Not a chance, Colonel.”
Finally ready for a reunion of his own, he stood.
But Elisa bent over the fallen paratrooper. “He is still alive. Miguel, find something to use as a pressure bandage. Search these rooms.” She waved down the hall, then pulled off the trooper’s headset. “Raul, figure out how this works and call for help.”
“No need,” Del said. He spoke quietly but urgently into his own set and listened for the reply. “They’re on the way.”
Everything moved at light speed after that. The paratroopers arrived and then the regular infantry. Medics carried the wounded man away, while other soldiers carted Sanchez off under heavy guard. Elisa was removed to “debrief” with two men in suits. They had to be spooks, Del figured. Nobody but spooks wore suits to a raid. An American lieutenant asked Del to help round up Sanchez’s key officers.
Much to his great displeasure, Del’s reunion would have to wait.
The Last Honorable Man Page 20
