Damage Control

by John Gilstrap

  Damned handcuffs.

  “Tristan,” the man said. “Tristan, listen to me. Come on, son, pull it together. You’re okay. You’re going to be just fine. We’re here to take you home. We’re the good guys, okay? The bad guys are all dead. You’re safe.”

  Was that possible? Who was this man? Nothing made sense.

  But he felt himself gaining some control. He spit to get the blood out of his mouth.

  The man with the blue eyes said, “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  Didn’t he just say that I was fine?

  “I don’t think this blood is yours,” the man said. He started to lift Tristan’s T-shirt, and Tristan pulled away.

  “No,” he said. What the hell was going on here?

  “Son, settle down. I’m only checking to see if you’ve been shot.”

  Really? Wouldn’t I be the first to know if I’d been shot?

  “His color’s good,” the big man said. “He moves good. I think he’s fine. I’m getting us out of here.” As he spoke the words, the bus’s engine started to make a screeching sound, and the big man yelled, “Shit! The engine’s been drilled, Boss.”

  Blue Eyes lifted the T-shirt again, and this time Tristan let him. “Did you kill the follow vehicle?” he called over his shoulder.

  The driver said something that Tristan couldn’t understand, and then the bus stopped again.

  “I don’t see anything,” Blue Eyes said. He let Tristan’s shirt fall back into place. Blue Eyes reached into one of his many pockets and pulled out a tiny key.

  “Tristan, I want you to listen to me.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I know all your names,” the man said. “My partner and I are here to rescue you, to take you home.”

  “What home?” Tristan asked. “Like, home home? In Scottsdale?”

  The man smiled. “That’s the one.” As he spoke, he slipped the key into the handcuff on Tristan’s wrist. As the bracelet fell away, his wrist started to throb. “One more.”

  The driver yelled, “Boss, we gotta go!”

  As Tristan’s eyes followed his rescuer’s hand and the key down the shackle on his ankle, he noticed for the first time how much blood there was on the floor. He was wet with it. As that shackle also fell away, something tightened in his belly. It was the same panicky feeling from the other day when the gunmen first stormed their bus in Ciudad Juárez.

  “Look at me, Tristan,” the man said. “Look at me, son.”

  Tristan raised his eyes to meet the blue ones. The man smiled. “You’re going to have to trust me, Tristan. I want to get you out of here, but first I want you to make me a promise.”

  “Who are you?” Tristan asked. His brain was starting to work again, and that seemed like a really important question.

  “We’ll get to that later, I promise,” the man said. His big partner had somehow disappeared from view. “Will you make me a promise?”

  Tristan nodded. “Yes. Sir.”

  Another smile. “Okay. I’m going to help you stand, but then we’re going to hurry out of here. I don’t want you looking around.”

  “Why?”

  “Promise me.”

  Tristan craned his neck and turned his head to see what the man was trying to hide, but Blue Eyes was too quick. A countermove for every move.

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “With you,” the man corrected. “I’m going to help you get out of the bus.”

  Tristan pulled his legs up under him and started to stand. “I can do it myself.”

  The man put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him back down. He was stronger than he looked. “I know you can,” he said. He took a deep breath, and the eyes turned sad. “Your friends are all dead, son. You don’t want to see that. That’s not how you want to remember them. Just look straight ahead and we’ll get you out of here.”

  The knot in his gut tightened. “They’re dead? All of them?”

  The man pressed his lips into a kind of pout. “I’m afraid so, Tristan.”

  “How?”

  “Scorpion!” the driver yelled, louder this time. “Can we save the counseling for later, please?”

  Blue Eyes—Scorpion?—stayed focused on Tristan. “We’re going to go right now.”

  With that, the rescuer grabbed the front of Tristan’s T-shirt in both fists and lifted him to his feet. As he rose, Allison’s head thumped against the floor of the bus, where she launched a spray of blood spatter from the gathering puddle.

  “She’s dead,” Scorpion said. “She can’t feel anything. Just keep moving.”

  Scorpion half carried Tristan as he stumbled down the center aisle of the bus. He stepped over what was left of the terrorist who had shot everybody, and he bumped up against Danielle, whose head was mostly gone. Scorpion seemed to sense when he was about to freeze because he pulled harder to drag him along.

  Tristan tried to do as he was told—to look straight ahead—and he understood why he was supposed to do it. But the temptation proved overwhelming. When he finally got to the top of the stairs, he dared a look backward.

  It was too awful to comprehend. Truly, they were all dead. These people who had shared this awful experience with him over the past week had all been mangled by bullets. None would ever speak again. Blood was everywhere. He didn’t know how that was possible.

  But he knew he was alone now.

  What about their parents? Who’s going to tell them?

  “Keep going, Tristan,” Scorpion said. The rescuer planted his hands in Tristan’s armpits and nearly carried him down the stairs from behind. His rifle hurt as it pressed against his back.

  Tristan stumbled on the last step and lost the flip-flop from his left foot. He watched it fall onto the grassy road cut, and as he reached for it with his toes, he saw—really saw for the first time—how bloody his legs and feet were. He could only imagine about the rest of him.

  His stomach flopped, and he retched, but he hadn’t eaten in days. Nothing but bile came up.

  The driver looked even bigger up close than he did at a distance. He was positioned just outside and in front of the door, his rifle pressed to his shoulder as he pointed the muzzle uphill.

  “We’re ready,” Scorpion said, and an instant later, the man’s grip switched from the front of his T-shirt to the waistband of Tristan’s shorts—at the small of his back—and he jerked the pants up in kind of a power wedgie. Scorpion’s other hand pressed against the back of Tristan’s head, bending the boy into an inverted L. He maintained that position as they fast-walked across the rutted roadway to a rusty beige Toyota SUV.

  Once at the vehicle, Scorpion opened the back door with the hand he’d moved from his head, and then Tristan found himself landing hard on the torn fabric of the bench seat. “On the floor,” he commanded. “Stay there till I tell you to get up.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  With the PC secure in the backseat, Jonathan swung his M27 to his shoulder to cover Boxers as the Big Guy tossed his ruck into the backseat, slid into the driver’s seat, and started the engine. “First thing to break our way,” Boxers announced. “Keys were in the ignition.”

  Jonathan opened the door to the shotgun seat, tossed his ruck on top of Boxers’, and they were moving even before he got the door closed. A few seconds later, after a violent J-turn, they were on their way, spewing a rooster tail of dust behind them.

  “You okay, Tristan?” Jonathan shouted. When he didn’t get an answer, he looked behind him into the backseat, where the kid sat in a fetal ball on the floor behind Jonathan. Tall and lean to the point of skinny, the kid was all arms and legs. Filthy and sweaty and blood-smeared, Tristan Wagner’s exhausted expression gave him the look of an old man in a teenager’s body. Good thing he was crouched on the right side of the floor. If he’d been on the left, Boxers might have crushed him as he launched his seat back to make room for his legs.

  The boy appeared to have slipped into that non-place that so many PCs—
precious cargoes—retreated to as they grappled with the challenge of understanding the unthinkable.

  “Tristan?”

  The boy’s eyes rocked up to meet Jonathan’s. They were a shade of green that Jonathan associated with cats, not people. He looked ready to cry.

  “It’s almost over for you, son,” he said. “I’m sorry for your friends.” He hoped that that last part hadn’t sounded like a throwaway line. He truly was sorry that they’d been killed, and he truly felt for the emotional grater that lay ahead for the kid. More than that, though, he wanted to keep the reality first and foremost in Tristan’s mind. Jonathan had seen too many rescued hostages slip into crippling denial. No matter how awful the truth might be, it was Jonathan’s experience that embracing it early on caused far less emotional trauma in the long run than did the slide into delusion.

  As Tristan pressed his hands to his eyes and started to cry, Jonathan turned around to face forward.

  “You want to tell me what the hell just happened up there?” Boxers said.

  “I have no idea,” Jonathan said. “You got eyeballs on the guys who joined us. What did you see?”

  “Looked like army to me,” Boxers replied. “Maybe police, I have a hard time telling them apart.”

  “They fired the first shot, right?”

  “That’s the way I saw it. They took out the driver, and then everything came unzipped from there.”

  Jonathan tried to pull the details into some kind of recognizable form. No one was even supposed to know that they were here.

  He’d been contacted the usual way, through a blind email address via a reference from another client. After the security checks were completed, and funds had been deposited in Security Solutions’s offshore account, Jonathan had made contact, via an untraceable prepaid phone, with a Beatrice Almont, who turned out to be the lawyer for the Crystal Palace Cathedral in Scottsdale, Arizona.

  The name sounded familiar to Jonathan, and a quick Internet search reminded him that the Crystal Palace was spiritual home to Reverend Jackie Mitchell, a fire-and-brimstoner whose preachings were beamed throughout the world to her million-plus-member congregation.

  Ms. Almont obviously had no experience in dealing with the likes of Jonathan, whose line of work made most officers of the court pretty damn jumpy. Under the circumstances, though, she didn’t have much choice.

  Tristan and his friends were missionaries from the Crystal Palace, sent to Mexico to help with recovery from a recent earthquake. The very thought of it angered Jonathan. These missionary trips with children were just extended photo ops as far as he was concerned. In the grand scheme of things, what could a bunch of kids possibly contribute that would be worth the risk of sending them into the lawless land of diseases and bad medical care? And after doing so, how could the so-called responsible adults claim to be shocked when things go horribly wrong? Dangle a carrot in front of an alligator’s mouth for long enough, and sooner or later it’s going to snap at it.

  In the case of the Crystal Palace missionaries, fate struck swiftly. Less than half an hour after the busload of innocents had crossed into Mexico, gunmen stormed aboard as it was waiting at a traffic light in Ciudad Juárez. The speed with which the ransom demand had arrived in Reverend Mitchell’s email told Jonathan that there was nothing random in this human seizure, and the efficiency of the kidnapping and the subsequent extortion left little doubt in Jonathan’s mind that it was a well-planned operation executed by well-trained, well-funded professionals. In that part of Mexico, that meant Felix Hernandez was involved. The fact that the hostages were subsequently transported over a thousand miles to their current location closer to the Guatemalan border than that of the United States hinted at a cooperative deal between drug lords that meant more trouble for the Mexican government.

  The terms of the ransom could not have been simpler: Pay the money, get the hostages back. Done and done. Any attempt to involve the police or the army or the United States government would result in the summary execution of every hostage.

  In his initial conversation with lawyer Almont, Jonathan had felt compelled to be blunt, lest she not understand the seriousness of the hostages’ plight. “There’s good news and bad news when dealing with the Mexicans,” he’d said. “The good news is, the drug cartels have reduced kidnapping to a business. They don’t bluff, and they don’t jerk you around. You give the bad guys the cash, and they let their hostages go. If they didn’t, people would stop negotiating with them, and they’d lose a major revenue stream.”

  “You’re assuming that this is drug related,” Ms. Almont said. “That isn’t necessarily the case.”

  Jonathan’s research showed that she was a corporate lawyer, more used to negotiating lease terms than ransom payments. Her voice didn’t exactly tremble, but the stress was plain. “They were taken in Ciudad Juárez,” Jonathan explained. “If it’s violent, and it’s in Ciudad Juárez, the drug cartels are involved.”

  “You sound experienced in these things.”

  “I’m assuming that’s why you called me.”

  He sensed that she was marking time in the conversation, perhaps to wrap her head around it all. “You said there’s good news and bad news,” she said after a few seconds of silence.

  Jonathan thought it was obvious, but apparently not. “Like I said, it’s a business for them. For the intimidation side of the equation to work, they have to show no mercy when the ransom fails to appear.”

  “You mean they kill the hostages.”

  “I mean, they make a show of killing them as violently and with as much gore as possible before dumping the bodies in a public place in plain sight of dozens of witnesses who know better than to have seen anything. Ciudad Juárez saw four thousand murders last year, all of them carried out by the cartels.”

  “Four thousand! Why haven’t I heard about these?” Ms. Almont asked.

  “The newspapers won’t write about them,” Jonathan said. “A few of the stories get printed, but mostly they get quashed by the editorial boards.”

  “I guess they don’t want to scare off all the tourists,” she guessed.

  Jonathan laughed. “Clearly you’ve never been to Ciudad Juárez. No, that’s why they quash the stories about the growing number of murders in Aruba and the Mexican Riviera. Bloodbaths and spring break make bad partners. The reason they suppress the stories in the northern areas is to keep their own families from being targeted.”

  He could hear the shock in the lawyer’s voice. “Is it really that bad? The cartels are running the newspapers?”

  “And the television stations and the police force and the army. Well-orchestrated intimidation is a powerful weapon, Counselor.”

  “So, are you suggesting that we pay the ransom? I thought you specialized in hostage rescue.”

  “I specialize in returning hostages to their loved ones,” Jonathan corrected. “If I can accomplish that by paying off the bad guys and not get shot at, I’m happy.”

  “And you think that will work?”

  “I think we need to plan that it will,” Jonathan hedged. “But we prepare for the possibility that it won’t. They may be businessmen, but they’re also murderers.”

  “That’s why we need you,” she said.

  “Whether you need me or not is your decision. I’m telling you what we bring to the table.”

  “And I’m just supposed to trust you with three million dollars? I don’t even know who you are.”

  While Jonathan understood her hesitation, he didn’t have patience for it. “You called me, Counselor,” he said. “Not the other way around. Hire me or don’t hire me. Just don’t waste my time.” One fewer opportunity to put his life on the line for strangers wouldn’t bring a tear to his eye.

  Almont said, “I’ve never been in a position like this before. Everything I know tells me that this is a matter for the State Department and the Mexican police.”

  “And I’m telling you that’s the biggest mistake you can make. Word travels
at the speed of light, and bullets aren’t a whole lot slower. Do not expect hesitation from these people, and don’t expect mercy.”

  The lawyer took her time weighing options. “How do I know you’re really the best?”

  “You’ve seen my fee,” Jonathan said, “and I assume you heard about me from someone you trust. The fact that I’m still alive to be talking to you must say something.”

  “I don’t even know your name.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “Scorpion is not a name. It’s a cartoon character. You could be anybody.”

  Jonathan reached the end of his patience. “Okay, Ms. Almont, I’m done with you. If I get word in the next two hours that my fee has been deposited in my account, I’ll get back in touch with you. If I don’t, so be it. Either way, best of luck.”

  Then he hung up. Twenty minutes later, he heard from his bank. Four days after that, here they were on the tail end of it all, and the kidnappers had won on every count.

  And now this.

  “You know, we’ve still got a perfect record,” Boxers said. “For rescues.”

  Jonathan appreciated the effort to make today’s outcome somehow less shitty than it really was, but he wasn’t buying.

  Boxers read his expression for what it was. “I’m serious. They executed the hostages before we were even part of the game. That’s not on us.”

  Then Jonathan understood that the Big Guy wasn’t trying to make Jonathan feel better; he was trying to make himself feel better.

  “Something to talk about over some scotch when we get back to the World,” Jonathan said.

  “Can’t happen fast enough for me,” Boxers growled.

  Jonathan’s earbud popped, startling him. “Scorpion, this is Mother Hen. There’s a problem. A big one.”

  Jonathan exchanged looks with Boxers, whose radio carried the same traffic as his. The law of averages mandated that something start going his way. He pressed his transmit button. “Go ahead.”

  “SkysEye is picking up heat signatures from people gathered around your first-stage exfil site.”

  A big problem indeed. “I need more than that, Mother Hen. What are you telling me?”