by Rachel Caine
“Juan Mercado’s son,” she said. “He’s only twenty-five, but he’s making a name for himself as a total bastard. His father’s grooming him as his heir, but Rudolpho is unpredictable.”
“Steroids will do that,” Stefan said. God, he sounded cold now, cold and hard and genuinely chilling. “Turn little paranoid men into big, paranoid men with muscles.”
In the photograph, Rudolpho Mercado looked frightening enough…. Big, overbuilt, with a clear vicious light in his eyes.
“What did you see?” Katie asked.
“Teal saw,” Stefan said flatly. “He wanted to make a point to the girls that he wasn’t going to put up with any crap. So he dragged one of the servants out of the kitchen and beat her. I don’t know if she’s dead. They took her away.”
“Oh Christ,” Katie whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Stefan continued to stare at the photograph. “Katie. I know it’s crazy, but what if there’s a way to get to the girls? To at least try?”
“In the middle of a drug lord’s compound? There isn’t a way. There wouldn’t be a way if we had the Army Rangers parachuting in at our backs.”
“Trust me,” Stefan said. “I think there might be. What do you know about tigers?”
It was a two-part self-working trick, driven less by any difficult stage magic than simple gullibility; Stefan had worked with the cage before, but not often, because he preferred up-close magic to stage. But in his early days, when he’d thought every magician needed to put on a David Copperfield show, he’d invested in some elaborate set pieces, including a pretty fair lady-and-tiger.
And he still had it, in the barn, under the tarps next to the space where Angelo’s Jaguar should have been parked.
“I don’t understand,” Katie said, frowning, as he pulled the canvas down to reveal the plain-looking iron-barred cage. “It’s a cage. So?”
“You’re looking in the wrong place,” Stefan said and pointed. Of course, she looked, and the second she looked, he stepped behind the illusion, and when she turned her head back, he was…gone.
He walked out from the other side of the cage, circled behind her and tapped her on the shoulder. She whirled, mouth opening in astonishment.
“It’s not just a cage,” he said. “It’s a way to get Teal and Lena out. Trust me. I can make people disappear. I do it for a living.”
“But—” Katie was struggling to get her head around things. “What kind of excuse is there to get this cage into their compound?”
“Simple. You didn’t read the file?”
“I skimmed it!”
He smiled. “Juan Mercado Tulio likes to collect exotic animals. He especially likes tigers. And this cage was built for a tiger illusion, so it’s exactly like the best transportation cages ever made, unless you know where to look. And the job of an illusionist is to make sure you don’t know where to look.” Stefan raised his left hand, shot his cuff back and wiggled his fingers. When he was sure she was looking there, he performed a little sleight of hand, palming and then displaying the key to the cage in his right. “Mercado’s bringing in a new tiger tomorrow. It was in the FBI file. Nothing more natural than bringing in a backup cage, too. All we have to do is get it close and park it near the compound, close to an exit. You go in, get the girls, get them out the gate, and I hide them in plain sight.”
“That’s crazy!” Katie blurted. She looked scandalized. And maybe a little intrigued.
“That’s show business. It beats bringing in squads of guys with automatic weapons and staging a pitched battle.” He snapped a queen of hearts out of the air and handed it to her. “Come on. You love me right now, don’t you?”
He strongly suspected she would have, graphically, if they hadn’t been in a hurry.
Chapter 13
I t took surprisingly little time to organize things; Katie was used to bureaucracy, where requisitioning a paper clip took two weeks. Stefan had a cartage firm at the hacienda in an hour, the plane fueled and ready in two, and they were wheels up before midnight. It was about an eight-hour flight, and she was surprised to find that although she usually found flying confining, the Learjet felt…restful. Maybe it was that she spent the hours curled next to Stefan, planning and drilling until they fell asleep with the folders spread open between them.
She woke up to the thin, pastel light of dawn filtering in through the cabin windows, and found Stefan already awake. He smiled. “Como está, querida?” he asked, in what sounded like—to her admittedly inexpert ear—flawlessly fluent Spanish.
“You speak Spanish.”
“I told you, I work the streets all over Los Angeles,” Stefan said, switching back to English. “My Spanish is better than my Mandarin, but I’m working on it.” His smile faded. “Katie, I don’t like you going in alone. I was hoping you’d get someone else to come with you. Your friend Alex, maybe.”
“You’re cute when you’re overprotective,” she said. “Besides, I can’t involve her in this. I’ve left her with all of the information we put together in case things go wrong. She’ll be able to follow up from back home. It’s not much safer there, not considering who we’re dealing with here, but she’ll have more resources.”
“It’s just that…you’re a cop, not some kind of commando.”
“I’m an FBI agent with tactical training. I’ve been sent in undercover before, and I’ve had to sneak into bad guys’ hideouts before, too. Trust me.” She said it with a confidence she really didn’t—couldn’t—feel. There was a vast gulf between a midnight raid on a kidnapper’s hideout with the resources of the FBI and a tactical team at your back, and walking into the tiger’s cage of a foreign country and a drug lord known for torturing and killing DEA agents.
And if she felt that way, there was no possibility she could fail to make her best attempt to get two young girls out of there. She knew Stefan felt the same—more so, since he’d seen through Teal’s eyes just how vicious her captors could be.
“Are they awake?” she asked. “The girls?”
Stefan’s eyes flickered briefly, going blank, then warm and alive once more. “They’re awake,” he said. “While you were out, something happened.”
She tensed, pulling herself upright away from comfort. “What?”
“It’s strange. I’m not sure I can explain it. Teal’s always alert to her surroundings, and she’s quick to take advantage if she can, but…they left her unguarded. Not for long, but long enough. She made a break for it, and she almost made it.”
“Did they hurt her?”
He avoided answering that, and from the grim set of his lips, she thought about what had happened in the car. Tasers. It was the easiest way to control the girls. “She’s fast, Katie, she’s amazingly fast. I think they wanted to see just how fast. I think they wanted a demonstration.”
“Oh God,” Katie said. “Proof of concept, for the buyers.”
“She gave them a show, if that was what they wanted. I can’t name any Olympic sprinter who could have crossed that courtyard in the time she did, even with her hands tied behind her.” He shifted, clearly uncomfortable. “The thing is, I’m almost sure I saw a video camera in a window. I think they were taping her. It was a setup, and Teal fell for it.”
Katie made a frustrated sound low in her throat. “You’re sure you can’t send them a message? Let them know we’re coming for them? It’d be an enormous help if they had some sense we were on the way.”
“I’ve been trying, but no. It’s a one-way pipe, from Teal to me. She’s sensing my presence, but nothing else. I’ve been sending as much as I can, but there’s no sign she’s picked up anything at all.”
“Then we’ll improvise,” Katie said and stood up to stretch. “How much time?”
“We’ll be on the ground in half an hour.” He still looked grim and far away, lost in the memory of Teal’s near-escape. “Not soon enough.”
This was part of what she loved in him—the darkness, as well as the light. The desire to protect, to save,
to risk everything for others.
She kissed him. He was surprised, but his lips warmed under hers, and he cupped her face in one hand and drew her closer to him with the other. She shifted over to sit on his lap and put her arms around his neck. God, he tasted good, and felt even better. I could touch him forever, she thought, and moaned into his open mouth when his all-too-clever hands roamed under the silk shirt.
He said her name, but it was muffled against her skin, and then he hit a seat control with one deft, clever motion, and then they were falling backward as the chair reclined. Oh, better, much better.
“How long did you say?” she asked again, voice shaking.
“Thirty minutes to landing,” he said, and concentrated on unbuttoning her shirt. “But I don’t think we’re that far away from where I want to be right now.”
They landed at the local airport in thirty-three minutes, and deplaned fast. Stefan had arranged for local transportation for the tiger cage—a shiny, nearly new flatbed truck. He saw it loaded aboard, making adjustments to the position with minute accuracy, and then gave Katie the thumbs-up.
“This had better work,” Katie said, “because if it doesn’t, we’ll never leave Colombia alive.”
“I know.” Stefan didn’t look up from his intense inspection of the cage’s mechanism. “I told the pilot to stay ready, that when we come, we’ll be coming fast.”
“Stefan…you don’t have to do this. I won’t think any less of you.”
“I would.” He evidently found everything to his satisfaction, rose from his crouch on the bed of the truck and hopped lightly down. “Right. Time to go. You know where I’ll be.”
“I know,” she said, and kissed him, light and quick this time. “That’s a deposit. You can collect on the way home.”
“Is that an opportunity to make a joke about interest?”
She smiled and walked away. She didn’t look back as the truck’s engine coughed and caught. She didn’t know if he waved at her, or watched her, because when she finally turned, the truck was disappearing behind the hangar, and she’d missed her chance.
“Be safe,” she told him. “I can’t lose you now.”
The airport was a study in odd contrasts. There were Americans present—several of them—sitting at tables, reading newspapers, looking bored. American contractors. And out on the tarmac, brand-new planes…spray planes. Katie had read the file on the way down to Tumaco, but she hadn’t quite believed how open and obvious the business was here. U.S. pilots were shuttled here every few weeks, put in those brand-new crop dusters, and sent out to spray pesticides over Juan Mercado Tulio’s vast coca crop. Most of them never left the airport during their trips, except when they flew. A Western-style hotel had been built for them right on the edge of the property, complete with a swimming pool and an ocean view. They never saw Colombia, except when flying over it and dumping their cargoes.
No doubt some of the pilots also flew cocaine out, too, back to the U.S.
Katie went to the main terminal and out through the front entrance. Tumaco was a hellhole of poverty and corruption; the street outside the airport was a rutted dirt road, and it was probably the best the place had to offer. Beggars were everywhere, as were filthy, gaunt children offering services as guides, porters or anything else a corrupt visitor might want to buy.
The place made the worst slums Katie had been through look like middle-class housing, and for the first time, she doubted that they were going to be able to pull this off at all.
She relaxed a little after the first few minutes. Nobody looked at her for long; Stefan’s skill at disguising her was standing the test. She was dressed in blue jeans and a locally made embroidered shirt, just another peasant woman in the crowd. She had pulled her hair back into a severe bun; it emphasized the sharpness of her face, turned her American features into something more ambiguous. Her skin was already dark enough to pass for a native, if one with more Norte Americano in her veins than Maya—there were women on the streets similar enough in skin tone to be cousins.
Katie walked. It would have been faster to get there in a cab, but peasants walked. The morning was hot for February, but not blistering yet. The humidity was, of course, high; on the west side of Tumaco, the Pacific stretched out in a wide glittering net, and the thick subtropical growth rolled right up almost to the water’s edge. Tumaco wasn’t a tourist destination, despite the lovely views. It was far too dangerous a place.
Most of the people walking with her on the road were heading to the same place: the Mercado estate. It was a vast sprawl of a place, and she’d studied the aerial photographs and gotten as close a pinpoint on the girls’ locations as possible from Stefan just after landing. She knew which gate to enter—luckily, it was a common entry and exit point for the kitchen staff and gardeners—and at least generally where the girls might be found.
It was time to put her true training into play—not the FBI training, which had served her well all these years, but the skills granted to her by nature, and honed by the Athena Academy.
It was an unusual gift, one she’d spent years concentrating on suppressing: Katie Rush could make herself invisible. Not physically…she still registered on film and surveillance. But in a strange way, she could simply make herself not there to direct observers. It took time and concentration now—it had been a protective skill, when she’d been younger, something for when she’d been vulnerable. It would have made her a spectacular assassin. It could, and did, make her a very effective FBI infiltrator.
Now, she made herself a colorless, faceless peon, no more interesting than the dun-colored beetle trundling along the roadside. She put work into it, well aware that it was her only hope of getting inside the compound, and tensed as the road curved, and she saw up ahead the first of Mercado’s guard posts. There were no papers—most of the peasants in Tumaco didn’t have any, and couldn’t read or write—but the guards were locals, and they’d recognize strangers. They sat or stood in shaded enclosures, sipping drinks and watching the passing parade with flat, snake-cold eyes. Katie kept her eyes down, and kept the image of that trundling brown beetle in her mind. I’m nothing. I’m beneath notice.
None of them so much as glanced her way.
Katie breathed in deeply, then out, when she was past their sight. The back of her neck ached from tension, and the thin cotton shirt was already soaking with sweat. It’s only going to get worse from here.
She resumed her concentration, and kept moving steadily toward the girls.
Stefan’s luck was holding. Juan Mercado Tulio’s compound had more exotic and dangerous animals than the average zoo, and as a consequence, the sight of cages arriving were nothing special. Stefan had taken pains to make himself look grubby and working class, and his story—told ad nauseum to anyone who wanted to listen—was that he was to wait with the cage for the tiger importer to arrive, that he’d already been waiting for days without sleep, that his sick wife needed him home…in short, whining. Even among the paranoid, whiners were annoying, to be avoided if at all possible. His truck driver, who was the biggest risk, left in disgust after an hour of sitting parked outside of the gates, gone off to a cantina for a morning drink or three. He might have done it anyway, but Stefan thought that a nonstop monologue about Stefan’s imaginary bruja of a wife and his pack of unpleasant children probably contributed to the man’s hasty departure.
The guards had come and gone, not much interested in the cage, which appeared to be entirely empty. They’d thoroughly investigated the truck, which was completely innocent, and had interrogated Stefan himself for five minutes before being driven off, as well.
Now, he sat silently in the cab of the truck, eyes half-shut, and waited for Teal to open the channel. It was something to do, something to keep himself from thinking about the hideous danger Katie was walking into. We also serve who only sit and wait….
He didn’t want to sit and wait, but he was sensible enough to know that he’d get her killed if he interfered. Katie ha
d skills he couldn’t fathom. He had to let her use them.
The connection to Teal opened with a clarity and urgency he hadn’t felt since she’d started to control the strength of her sendings, and Stefan felt himself slipping dangerously toward trance state. No. I need to stay focused. Stay alert.
Teal was being hustled down a stucco hallway with a tile floor, then out into the blinding morning sunlight. Stefan felt the morning’s heat on her skin, and she twisted to look behind her. Lena was also being taken out. Both girls were bound and gagged. They’d taken extra precautions—two huge guards per girl, one guiding, one armed with a Taser.
The girls were being moved. Not just inside of Mercado’s compound, but to a large black Hummer parked in the center of the white-stoned courtyard—the same courtyard Teal had raced across earlier in her bid to escape. Teal fought when they pushed her into the SUV, and Stefan’s fists clenched hard in impotent anger as Teal watched her friend receive the same rough treatment.
Why move the girls? Why now? Was it because of what they’d seen when Teal had demonstrated her abilities? It didn’t really matter; if the girls were being taken from the compound, the plan was destroyed.
Time to improvise.
Stefan slid over to the driver’s side of the truck. His driver had taken the keys, but hot-wiring was nothing new to him—a necessary street-survival skill in his youth. Stefan started the truck, idled it for a few seconds until the door slammed shut on Teal, locking her in the Hummer, and then he eased his flatbed into Reverse and pulled it back out of the road and onto a rutted path.
Three minutes later, the SUV glided past him, kicking up rocks and dust, heading into Tumaco. Stefan jumped down from the cab of the truck, stuck his hands in his pockets and strolled toward the compound gates. He asked for water from the guards and was told to go away; he grinned, just another fool, and shrugged. “That’s all right,” he said in Spanish. “I can pay.” He pulled two cold cervezas from thin air and held them out. Cheap local beer, but beer nevertheless.
