Damage Control

by John Gilstrap

  From the backseat: “Mother Hen? Who the hell is that?”

  “I think I count ten people,” she replied. “Maybe eight, maybe twelve. With the four-minute refresh rate, it’s hard to tell. It looks like they’re setting up an ambush around the vehicles.”

  Boxers brought the Toyota to an abrupt halt. “We’re less than half a mile away,” he said, answering Jonathan’s unasked question.

  “Less than half a mile from what?” asked Tristan. “What’s happening?” He couldn’t hear the radio traffic, but apparently he could read body language.

  It was official now: everything about this mission had come unzipped. And whoever was pulling on the zipper was damn good at his job.

  Jonathan said, “Stand by, Mother Hen.” To Tristan, he said, “Stay put. Big Guy, let’s chat outside.”

  They exited their respective doors and joined up behind the trunk. “Somebody’s gonna die,” Boxers said. “A trap? Somebody set a trap? Actually, that’s two traps. In less than a half hour. What the hell’s goin’ on, Dig?”

  Jonathan’s mind screamed to find an answer. Whatever was going on, the perpetrators had jammed them up big time. Jonathan and Boxers had no legal authority to be where they were in the first place, and they’d just left a field littered with bodies. That in itself wasn’t a big deal, provided they could get out of the country quickly. They’d stashed a Gulfstream G550 corporate jet at the hacienda of Rudolfo Gutierrez for just that purpose, but to use it, they had to get to it, and for that they needed the stashed SUV.

  “They knew that we’d need the vehicles,” Jonathan said, “and they knew precisely where we’d stashed them. How is that possible?”

  “There’s only one way,” Boxers said. “Somebody sold us out. What do you bet I can talk one of the trap-layers into telling us who?”

  “We’re not engaging them.”

  Boxers recoiled. “Come again?”

  “I said we’re not going to engage. Not with those odds, and not with the PC in tow.”

  “Who said I was goin’ to tow him along?”

  Jonathan knew that Boxers was just blowing off steam. Their mission began and ended with protecting the PCs and returning them to their homes. This wasn’t the time to pick a fight, even if the fight had been picked for them first.

  “We don’t need the vehicles anymore,” Jonathan said. “When we planned this, we thought we were going to have a bunch of PCs. Now we’re down to one, and we’ve already got a vehicle. That’ll be fine.”

  Boxers dropped his voice to a whisper. “No, it won’t. Our supplies are all there. Our IDs. Shit, half our ammo. We can’t just leave all of that.”

  “We’ll have to,” Jonathan said. There was no sense arguing the point. No way was he going to lead a party this size into a dozen guns. Certainly not when they were already lying in wait. Suicide was not on the agenda.

  “I don’t think this piece of shit has enough fuel to get us to Gutierrez’s place,” Boxers said. “And I’m guessing that gas stations will be hard to come by.”

  “We can’t use the Gulfstream anymore, either,” Jonathan said. The depth and desperateness of the situation was just beginning to hit him. “If they know about the ransom drop, and they know about the first-stage exfil site, we have to assume that they’ll know about the Gulfstream. We can’t risk it.”

  Boxers’ eyes narrowed as he processed the ramifications. “Look, Dig—Scorpion—let me put something on the record here. I am not retiring in Mexico. This place is a cesspool.”

  “I agree on both counts,” Jonathan said. “But I’m not dying here, either. We have to figure out another way.”

  “It’s a thousand friggin’ miles,” Boxers said.

  “So, clearly, we’re not walking. We need to think of something else.” He pressed his mike button. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”

  “I’m here.”

  “We’ve got a pretty significant change of plans here.” As he detailed all of the careful planning that now was meaningless, Jonathan tried to shake away the growing sense of dread that blossomed in his belly.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At four-thirty, the food court outside the Cineplex in Tysons Corner Center in Vienna, Virginia looked more like a school cafeteria than a public eating place. Kids by the dozens crammed the tables, jamming their faces with the fried crap that passed for food these days, while talking way too loudly about triumphs and crises that mattered only to them. Perhaps if these urchins spent more time in school instead of enjoying three months of sanctioned truancy every summer, the future wouldn’t look so bleak.

  Trevor Munro believed to his core that Hell must surely have a food court.

  Munro wasn’t here for the food. He’d already had his meal for the day, lunch in Langley with the DCIA in the director’s private dining room on the sixth floor. It was becoming his regular dining venue now that his star had finally begun to rise again.

  This one last thing—the business in Mexico—was the final detail that should earn him his own office on the sixth floor. Like so many triumphs, though, this one would come with its measure of indignity. Pausing at the top of the escalator, he adjusted his tie and patted the wings of his collar with a thumb and a finger, just to make sure that they lay straight. Image mattered.

  He found Jerry Sjogren right where he said he’d be, near the movie ticket kiosk. Somewhere in his mid-fifties, Sjogren was thick of middle and mostly gray, with an aura about him that shifted between grandfatherly and predatory, depending on his audience. Munro knew the predatory persona to be the real one, because he understood what the man did for a living.

  “You’re late,” Sjogren said when Munro came within earshot. If there was such a thing as a redneck New England accent, Sjogren had one. “Want to grab some lunch?”

  “Your time is bought and paid for,” Munro said. Neither man offered to shake the other’s hand. “And no, I don’t want lunch. Let’s walk.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Sjogren joked. “If a restaurant doesn’t have crystal glasses and linen tablecloths, you won’t eat in it.”

  Munro led the way to the elevator that would take them down to the first floor of the mall. They waited in silence for the car to arrive, and then for it to disgorge another gaggle of children. As two more kids—a boy and a girl, each maybe fifteen—tried to board with the men, Munro turned on them. “This elevator is closed,” he said. “Use the escalator.”

  “Screw you,” the boy replied. Then he got Munro’s glare and he backed off. He and his girlfriend were already walking away when the doors closed.

  “Way to keep a low profile there, Trev. Terrorizing children. Make you feel big?”

  Sjogren knew damn well that Munro hated the diminutive form of any names—Billy, Bobby, Tommy— but that he particularly hated changes to his own. He chose to ignore the affront. “It’s not about feeling big, Sjogren. It’s about feeling fulfilled. And fulfillment for me comes when I hear a report from my very expensive contractors that they’ve completed the job that I hired them to do.”

  The elevator doors opened again, and they stepped out to stroll the mall.

  “Interesting you put it that way,” Sjogren said. “Normally, when people pay a lot of money for expensive contractors, they know enough to stay out of the contractor’s way so that he can do his job.”

  Munro’s stomach flipped. “What are you telling me?”

  Sjogren recoiled. “Holy shit, I thought you knew.” He laughed. “It was a cluster fuck of major proportions. Hostages dead, money gone, and your guys still alive and on the run.”

  Munro’s emotional shield faltered. He pointed to the right, toward the door to the parking lot. The conversation had turned to one that demanded more privacy.

  When they were outside, Munro opted to keep them walking, despite the thick humidity and blistering sun. “How is that possible? How did you let it go so wrong?”

  “I didn’t let anything go wrong,” Sjogren said with a laugh. “You wanted me to find out who
killed your friend, and I did that. I even got you names—Harris and Lerner, though I’d be shocked if that was their real names. You asked me to arrange a way to snare them, and I did that, too. I even found a church to play along—and I gotta tell you it’s scary how really frickin’ easy that was. Everything I touched went fine. If I’d had my way, Harris and Lerner would both be dead now, and the dear little darling kids would be home, or at least on their way.”

  Sjogren paused. Munro knew he was waiting for a reaction, but he wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. One of the problems with ceding wet work to contractors was the lack of respect. The better they were at their jobs, the worse the problem became.

  Sjogren pressed his attack. “Things didn’t start coming apart until you had to go all Machiavellian and kill the kidnappers—who, by the way, worked for Felix Hernandez, about the most disturbed and disturbing asshole on the planet. I thought that’s the guy whose dick you were trying to suck in the first place.”

  This time, Munro had to stop. It was just too much to process while walking. “Felix didn’t care about them. I had his blessing.”

  Sjogren laughed again, causing Munro’s ears to burn. Everything was funny to this guy. People who laughed too much died early in Munro’s world

  “Felix now, is it?” Sjogren mocked. “So you two really are butt buddies. I’d heard that, but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t think that even you Agency guys were stupid enough to go to bed with the likes of him.” He poked Munro with his elbow. “You know, Trev, friendships like that can be hard to survive.”

  “None of the hostages survived?” Munro asked. It seemed impossible. “Have you verified that?”

  “One or two might have,” Sjogren said. “My guy on the ground—an army captain named Palma—told me there were thirteen dead on the ground, including the kidnappers and two of Palma’s own guys, but a full count is complicated by the fact that we don’t really know what the starting numbers were. We know that your butt buddy’s goons killed a couple before the bus ever got to the jungle, but since you insisted that the goons die first, we don’t know who or how many. The only kid missing is a seventeen-year-old named Tristan Wagner. Stupid name, yeah, I know. The four chaperones are missing, too, but like I said, they might have been killed before. I haven’t looked it up in the dictionary, Trev, but I’m pretty sure this set the new definition for a cluster fuck.”

  Profanity notwithstanding, Sjogren’s larger point was spot-on. But what seemed so shockingly simple to that beefy boor—getting the Crystal Palace to go along with the scheme—turned out in the end to require a great deal of heated last-minute negotiation.

  The original plan had called for Hernandez to keep the ransom—three million dollars. Then, the right reverend Jackie Mitchell changed the rules at the last minute. She decided that for the kind of risk she was taking, her own three million was not enough. She needed the ransom, too, for a total of six mill. Any less, she said, and she’d go to the FBI. She’d take some heat, she reasoned, and might even face jail time, but she rolled the dice that it would all go harder on Munro than it would on her.

  As with any good game of brinksmanship, it’s impossible to tell when the other party is bluffing. As a longtime veteran of such games, Munro sensed that she was serious. Given all the scandals she’d endured in the last year or so, she’d been coming from a very weird psychological starting point. Under the circumstances, such self-destructive behavior was well within the bounds of reason.

  In the end, he’d had no choice but to blink.

  Getting Hernandez to agree took some work, as well, but it turned out that settling the debt owed to him by Harris and Lerner—Munro was likewise willing to bet those weren’t their real names—was worth the three million dollars. Unfortunately, Felix’s largesse did not extend to the soldiers who’d done the kidnapping in return for a share of the payment. They would be angry when they found out that there’d be no payment for their efforts—angry enough to pose a security risk to Felix. Therefore, they had to die, too.

  Now, after all that, Munro had nothing to show for all of his efforts but collateral damage. Worse, if Sjogren knew these details from his people on the ground, then Hernandez must know as well, and he’d be furious.

  “What are you going to do to fix this?” Munro asked.

  “What am I going to do?” Sjogren said, aghast. “I’m going to call it a day and watch the fireworks. The question is, what are you going to do? You screwed the pooch big-time on this. Not only are Harris and Lerner still out there—now they know they’re being hunted. You don’t have a clue who they are, but depending on who they might talk to, they’ll find out who you are. Or maybe they’ll just figure out how totally screwed up the Crystal Palace folks are. Oh, yeah, and let’s not forget what’s going to happen when all those big parishioners get wind of what you did with those little parishioners. Of course none of that will matter if Hernandez gets to you first.” Another laugh, this one heartier than the others. “Hell, Trev, I get nervous just standing next to you.”

  “We can’t let them get back into the country,” Munro said, the barest outline of a plan forming in his mind.

  “How’s that?”

  “If we can keep them in Mexico, we can keep this contained. If they cross the border, it will be too late.”

  “You don’t even know who you’re looking for. How are you gonna do that?”

  “I’m going to trap them,” Munro said. Just like that, the plan became fully formed in his head. As he walked away from Sjogren, he said over his shoulder, “You’re still in this. Keep a phone nearby in case I need you.”

  Mother Hen—a.k.a. Venice Alexander (it’s pronounced Ven-EE-chay, by the way)—sat in her office on the top floor of the converted firehouse in Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia, watching helplessly as the nightmare unfolded. Her official job title was something like director of operations for Security Solutions Inc., the private investigation firm that served as the cover for Jonathan Grave’s hostage rescue shenanigans. When the boys weren’t out saving lives, she in fact managed seven investigators, who each ran as many as eight different investigations simultaneously. The legitimate side of the business earned a fortune—not that Jonathan needed it—and numbered among its clients some of the biggest corporate names in the world. Few of the staff on the overt side of the business understood the covert side—or if they did, they had the good sense to keep their suspicions to themselves.

  Routine investigations, though, could never hold Jonathan’s attention. He lived for the adrenaline rush of the rescue missions. When he was away on an op, it fell to Venice to manage whatever intel they could get, and to troubleshoot things when they went wrong.

  Right now, things were going very, very wrong. And she’d sent for reinforcements.

  When Gail Bonneville arrived in the War Room—the high-tech teak conference room that was decked out with every techno-toy imaginable—her hair was still wet from the shower that Venice’s call had interrupted. Even disheveled, Gail had an air of athletic grace about her that always thrummed a pang of jealousy in Venice, whose constant battle with the same thirty pounds had once again turned to a losing one.

  “What’s wrong and how bad is it?” Gail asked as she helped herself to one of the ergonomic chairs that surrounded the massive table. As she spoke, she lifted a panel in the table to reveal a computer screen, slid out a keyboard, and logged in to her account.

  “All the hostages but one are dead,” Venice said. She took a couple of minutes to fill in the rest of the story.

  A former member of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, and a retired sheriff of a small community in Indiana, Gail Bonneville had a law degree and a PhD in criminology. After one particularly difficult op in West Virginia, she’d decided that extra-legal door crashing didn’t suit her, and she’d assumed official control of Security Solutions’s legitimate side. She kept her finger on the pulse of the covert side, but she no longer put herself in the position of perhaps having to shoot peo
ple whom she had no authority to kill.

  As Gail listened to Venice fill in the details, the space between her eyebrows folded into deep furrows. “How’s Digger holding up? He’s never lost a hostage, has he?”

  Venice gave a look that said, Are you kidding me? “You might have noticed that Dig doesn’t exactly bare his soul to me.”

  “To anyone,” Gail acknowledged. She sat back in her seat and scowled even deeper. “I don’t understand how this is possible,” she said. “The entire population of people who knew about this is either in this room or in Mexico getting shot at. How could their plan have leaked out?”

  “That’s why I called you in,” Venice said. “None of this adds up. I thought of Reverend Mitchell at the Crystal Palace and whoever is advising her, but that doesn’t make sense, either. Even if she had reason to betray us—and why would she when the mission is to rescue her parishioners?—Digger never divulges operational details to a client. To prevent this very scenario.”

  “Like I said,” Gail concurred, “we’re witnessing the impossible. You and I haven’t leaked anything.” A pause. “Right?”

  Venice’s ears turned hot. She’d known Jonathan since she was a little girl, and she’d been his right hand for nearly as long. Gail was the newcomer, and while she was Jonathan’s regular bed partner—who the heck knew where their relationship stood these days?—how dare she question—

  “I’m sorry,” Gail said, clearly interpreting Venice’s glare for what it was. “Of course you didn’t. Boxers doesn’t say two hundred words a month about anything, and he’d cut out his tongue before he talked about an upcoming op, so he’s out, too.”

  Venice didn’t like the remaining implication any better than the veiled accusation against her. “Are you saying that Digger sabotaged himself?”

  Gail held up a hand. “I’m not suggesting that he did it on purpose, but you know how Jon can be when he gets into his gamesmanship mode. Remember how we first met?”