“How’s that different from a land crossing? I mean if Maria What’s-her-face turns out to be a bust?”
“Uncle Sam doesn’t have radar deployed along land. Terra firma leaves us with more options to duck and dodge. And if Maria Elizondo turns out to be a dead end, we’ll have to go back to the original plan and find us a forger.”
Boxers crossed his arms and leaned back against the side of the truck, his legs crossed in front of him. “You figuring to drive at night and hunker down during the day?”
“Exactly,” Jonathan said. “I think it’s foolish to assume that someone in this village isn’t going to turn us in. We took out their ability to make a landline call, and I don’t think there’s a useable cell tower within twenty miles, but there’s still shortwave and God knows what else. Father Perón made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t think that we’re safe here, and that the longer we’re around, the more danger we pose to the villagers. I want to be well-gone before any of that happens.”
Boxers shrugged. “Maybe we should just plow straight through and take our chances. The less time in country, the better our chances, right?”
“Depends. There are a lot of moving parts to this thing. The closer we get to the border, the more surveillance there is. I’m not sure it’s in our best interests to get there before Mother Hen and Lady Justice have had a chance to work out what’s really going on here. I know that you won’t go to jail without a fight—”
“Got that right.”
“—and I know that Wolverine doesn’t want us in custody, either. Meanwhile, we’ve got to assume that there’s a shoot-on-sight order out there for us here in Mexico.”
“So let’s just plow through and take our chances,” Boxers said.
It was a fair argument, Jonathan thought. The toughest roads were going to be through the jungle. Once they hit the desert stretches of Chihuahua they’d be able to haul ass. Using night vision, they could haul ass invisibly. “Okay,” he said. “I say we drive hard and long to put as much space as possible between us and this place. Under the cover of the jungle, I don’t see a problem driving in the daytime. When we get to the desert, we pull out all the stops. That’ll give the home team two days to untie the other end of the knot.”
Boxers sealed the deal with a nod. “Done,” he said. Then: “Who do you think is trying to screw us?”
“According to Mother Hen, Wolverine thinks she knows.” He caught Boxers up on all that he had learned through Dom’s chat with Irene.
“Unbelievable,” the Big Guy said when he was done. “So that asshole Ponder is diddling me from the grave. Man, I knew I should have killed him twice.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
As Tristan’s hosts led him into their house, the father flipped the light switch on. Tristan was surprised to see that it still worked, but then remembered that Scorpion had killed the telephones, not the power. The mother gestured to a cane-back chair that was pulled up to a four-place wooden table. As far as he could tell, the tiny house consisted only of two rooms—the kitchen, which was just inside the front door, and a dark living room on the far side of an archway.
She nodded to Tristan. “I am Dorotea,” she said. “This is my husband Roberto—”
The man nodded, but he did not offer his hand.
“—And this is our daughter Rebecca. She is fifteen.”
Fifteen my ass, Tristan didn’t say. She’s equipped like she’s eighteen. He tried not to be a perv and stare, but the girl had the kind of chest that was hard to ignore. He found himself becoming aroused by the oscillating breasts beneath her T-shirt, and tried to think of something else. He was in enough trouble already; the last thing he needed was to piss off her already-grumpy father by pitching a tent in his underwear while ogling jailbait.
“My name is Tristan,” he said. He sat in the chair, and Rebecca sat opposite him. She smiled. Constantly.
“Father Perón tells us that you are in trouble,” Dorotea said. “What kind of trouble would that be?”
“I, um, don’t think I’m supposed to talk about that,” he said. Fear grabbed a fistful of his guts. Why hadn’t anyone prepared him for this question?
“Yet we are supposed to feed you,” Roberto said. “This seems unfair, does it not?”
Actually, it did. “I just think I’m not supposed to say anything. If you knew, you’d be in danger.”
“Are we not in danger already?” Dorotea used a hand pump to fill two five-gallon cook pots with water, and hefted them onto the stove, which she lit with a wooden match after cranking on the gas.
“Of course we are,” Roberto said. “This boy and his friends have placed us in danger.”
“His name is Tristan, Papa.”
Big tits, a hot smile, and now she was defending him. Tristan prayed that he wouldn’t have to stand up and reveal that which was standing up.
“Where are your clothes?” Roberto asked. “And why is there blood on your arms and legs?”
Tristan’s stomach seized again. How do you explain blood without triggering something akin to panic? “I, um ...” It was the best he could do.
Dorotea took stuff from the refrigerator and started preparing dinner. She fired up some other burners on the stove, and the kitchen filled with the rich aroma of spicy food. “Are you a killer, Mr. Tristan?” she asked.
The fist in Tristan’s gut tightened more.
“You’re being rude,” Rebecca said. “Tristan is our guest. Can’t you see that he doesn’t want to talk about this?”
Roberto pressed on. “Tell me, Tristan. How can it be that in these troubled times, a boy as young as you can look as if he’s seen so much violence?”
Tristan cleared his throat. “It’s very ...” He searched for the correct word in Spanish. “Complicated.”
Roberto pulled out the chair to Tristan’s right and sat down. “I’m sure it is,” he said. “What simple solution could there possibly be for such a thing?”
The heat of the man’s glare was unbearable.
“Papa, you’re frightening him.”
Roberto didn’t reply, but Tristan guessed that frightening him was very much a part of the plan.
“Tell us what happened to you, Tristan.”
Tristan opened his mouth to answer—to say something, probably a lie—but then his voice wouldn’t work. Out of nowhere, completely without warning, he found his lip trembling. His vision blurred and the current reality of accommodating hosts was replaced with the old, far more vivid reality of Miss James being raped and murdered. He remembered the look in that soldier’s eyes on the bus when he was going to murder him.
Then he remembered how Scorpion’s face filled his field of view. He remembered the blue eyes and the calm tone. These men had sacrificed everything to deliver him from certain death.
Tristan was not going to betray all of that just for a meal.
“I can’t tell you that,” he said.
With the Pathfinder loaded up and ready to go, Jonathan and Boxers sat on the steps of the church where they could see the incoming routes and ate MREs from the supplies in their rucks. They both went Italian—Jonathan with ravioli and Boxers with spaghetti.
Boxers said, “So, what happens when we escort this Maria Elizondo babe across the border and she gets asylum?”
“I don’t know,” Jonathan confessed. “Special Friend thinks that Wolverine is depending on her testimony to bury the guy who got us into this. A senior spook named Trevor Munro.”
“Agency, right?”
“Correct.”
“And he’s tied to Colombian drug money.”
Jonathan hesitated, wanting to capture the nuance of it, as passed along by Venice and Dom. “He’s tied to a lot of drug money. Enter Felix Hernandez. Apparently, our time in Colombia cost him a boatload of cash, and he blames Munro and the Agency for it.”
Boxers coughed out a laugh. “They wish. The Agency could never pull off as cool an op as we did. Not in Central America, anyway. All the good spooks
are working the Sandbox now.” Sandbox meant the Middle East.
“Perception is reality, Big Guy. So Hernandez is putting pressure on Munro, who, coincidentally, is in line for a big promotion in Langley. This Elizondo lady is Wolverine’s key to a case that will take care of all of it.”
Boxers’ expression darkened. “You’re talking courtrooms and lawyers.”
“Exactly.”
“After all this, I think he deserves worse than that.”
“What do you have in mind?” Jonathan asked, as if he didn’t already know.
“I think he needs some special attention.”
Jonathan waved him away. “We’re not vigilantes.”
Boxers made a puffing sound with his lips. “Easy on the we shit, pal. The plan sucks.”
“Duly noted,” Jonathan said. He could think of no greater waste of time than getting crosswise with Boxers when he was in one of his bloodlusts.
“Suppose Wolverine is wrong.” Boxers said. “Suppose all that financing shit is a coincidence? What happens then? We’d have unidentified enemies lurking out there.”
“You know what I think about coincidences,” Jonathan said. “If we start citing possible enemies, the list gets really long really fast. Frankly, at this moment, the list is operationally irrelevant.”
Boxers thought about that for a few seconds. “Oh, I don’t know. I think people’s efforts to kill me are always relevant.”
“Fair enough. But at the end of the day, we still have to get that kid home.” He looked at his watch. “Do you think he’s had enough time to eat and bathe?”
Boxers laughed. “I dunno. He was pretty rank.”
Jonathan decided to give him ten more minutes.
Dinner was a quiet, unfriendly affair. Tristan knew that they were pissed at his silence, and they rewarded it with an icy silence of their own.
All except for Rebecca, who seemed to be on his side. She said so with her eyes.
The meat was pretty good. He thought it was chicken—okay, he prayed it was chicken, forcing himself to ignore all the possible alternatives that people said tasted like chicken—and it came with rice and beans and a vegetable that he’d never tasted before, and hoped that he’d never taste again. He forced himself to eat slowly, in part because he knew how long it had been since his stomach had seen real food and he didn’t want to barf it all up in front of his hosts, but mostly because the Gonzalezes ate slowly. Given all that had transpired since he’d last seen kindness, the last thing he wanted to do was insult people by being gluttonous.
But Jesus, the vegetables were just plain awful. Still, he choked them down. Surely, there’d be brownie points awarded somewhere for that.
When the meal was done, Rebecca cleared the dishes, refusing Tristan’s offers to help, and Dorotea single-handedly wrestled the big pots of water one at a time over to a small porcelain claw-foot tub that had escaped his notice in the corner of the kitchen and poured them in.
“For you,” Dorotea said in Spanish.
Apparently, this was for him to take a bath. A new terror arrived. He was supposed to get naked in front of all these people? At the thought, the tent reappeared in his undershorts. An image flashed through his mind of Rebecca soaping him down, and in that instant, his ability to stand without embarrassment disappeared. Again.
“I promise we will not peek,” Dorotea said, apparently reading his thoughts. Her smile told him that she truly read his thoughts. “Come, Rebecca.”
Yeah, cum, Rebecca.
God, did I really just think that?
Thirty seconds later, he was alone in the kitchen. He considered the option of ignoring the bath, but when sanity overtook him, he realized that he smelled like a team of horses.
Moving hesitantly, he rose from his chair and walked to the tub. Having witnessed the heft of the water, he was shocked to see how two potfuls barely covered the bottom—would barely cover his bottom.
He stripped quickly and lowered himself into the tub, taking comfort in the fact that the lip of the tub extended above his shoulders. The feel of hot water against his flesh brought a level of comfort that shocked him. It was as if someone had injected a shot of civilization into an existence that was only evil and dark. He found the soap in the dish and started the process of washing away the nightmare.
By the time he was done, the water was the color of rust. And cold.
He’d nearly fallen asleep when the door banged open, revealing the enormous hulk of Big Guy filling the frame. “Quit playing with yourself, kid,” he said. “It’s time to go.” Then he left as abruptly as he’d arrived.
In a flash of panic, Tristan looked down at his lap, just to be sure. “I wasn’t playing with myself,” he said to the empty room.
When he was dried and dressed—the family had left him a new pair of shorts and a T-shirt, just inside the door—he stepped out of the kitchen out into the night.
“Do you feel better?” Dorotea asked.
“He smells better,” Roberto said. The comment drew angry glares from both his wife and daughter, but he clearly didn’t care. He headed back into the living room.
“I do feel better, yes,” Tristan said. “Thank you all for taking me in.”
Dorotea grabbed his hands in hers. “Go with God,” she said.
Tristan felt his throat thicken. “I hope so,” he said.
Rebecca was next. “I hope you don’t get killed,” she said. She flashed him a shy smile, and then turned away.
As Jonathan watched the good-byes between Tristan and his hosts, and Boxers cranked the engine on the Pathfinder, Father Perón stepped up on Jonathan’s right. “You have a difficult trip ahead of you,” the priest said. “You know that, right?”
“Father, when you get right down to it, just about everything I do is hard as hell. We’ll make it.”
“He is very young,” Perón said, nodding toward Tristan.
“He’s seventeen,” Jonathan said. “I’ve commanded soldiers his age. They always surprise me with their toughness in the end.”
“After years of training, no?” Perón countered. “And the training comes only after a stated desire to be a warrior.”
Jonathan planted his fists on his hips and gave the priest a hard look. “Father, if you’re here to make a point, how about you just get to it?”
“These people who are chasing you,” Perón said. “These drug lords. Very, very bad people. Every one of us has suffered at their hands. Every one of my parishioners will be terrified of retribution.”
Jonathan said nothing, let the words carry their own weight.
“I hope that you will forgive the betrayal that no doubt lies in your future,” Perón said.
Ah, so that was it. “Father, we all make choices. Some are courageous, and some are not. You and your parishioners have shown us only kindness. When this is all over, I’m confident that that’s all I will remember.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
As they climbed into the Pathfinder and closed the doors, Jonathan inventoried their situation. They had plenty of water and gasoline, adequate food, and roughly eight hundred rounds of ammunition between them, counting all the weapons. Throw in the supply of GPCs—general purpose charges, blocks of C-4 with det cord tails that were good for so many things—a couple of claymores and assorted other toys, and they should be able to sustain themselves in an all-out firefight for at least a few minutes.
With the engine started, Boxers fitted a pair of NVGs—night vision goggles—over his eyes, but Jonathan stopped him. “Let’s save those for the desert,” he said. “Or for an emergency. I don’t want to run out of juice. Remember, we don’t have any spares.”
He could tell that Boxers wanted to argue—ownership of the night was an operator’s leading advantage over the bad guys—but the facts were the facts. The Big Guy grudgingly turned on the headlights and headed down the road they’d marked on the GPS.
Boxers announced, “Next stop: The middle of friggin’ nowhere.”
Instead of a better place, though, he thought about home. He wondered if his mom had told the family that he’d been kidnapped. Isolde, his older sister, would certainly be worried, but twelve-year-old Siegfried probably wouldn’t understand. What responsible parent would saddle his kids with such ridiculous names? It was his dad’s inside joke to the world. A fourth-generation American, his father, Richard Wagner, had thought it would be fun to name the kids after operas written by the nineteenth-century composer of the same name yet different pronunciation.
Tristan had never wanted to come on this stupid trip in the first place. In fact, he’d already arranged a cool job as a ticket taker at the local Cineplex when Pastor Mitchell announced this missionary opportunity. She was always announcing that sort of thing, so Tristan hadn’t paid much attention at the time. When they got home from services, though, his mom was way spun up by the opportunity to do the Lord’s work for the poor people of Mexico.
“If it’s so important,” Tristan had argued at the time, “why don’t you go? I’ll stay home and take care of Ziggy.” See what happens when you start with a name like Siegfried? It becomes an even stupider name like Ziggy.
His mom hadn’t taken well to the backtalk. Once she finished bitching about his attitude, she dialed in to the need for him to expand the extracurricular chapter of his high school résumé. How else, she asked, could he expect to get into the Ivy League?
He hadn’t yet broken it to her that he had no interest in working that hard for a piece of paper when nearly identical pieces of paper could be obtained from Buttscratch University in Bumfuck, Idaho. All things in time.
And that night wasn’t the time. Thinking back on it, he wasn’t sure he’d ever actually said yes; but he had never said no either, so voilà. A living nightmare.
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