Damage Control

by John Gilstrap

  Tristan stepped over to help, grabbing the guy’s pant legs and lifting.

  “Thank you,” Jonathan said. He was liking this kid. He even liked the flashes of anger. They meant he was working his way out of the poor-me funk and could actually become a helpful player in his own rescue. When Jonathan hefted the body onto the floor of the backseat and went back to grab another, Tristan went with him.

  “Anyway,” Jonathan continued. “These guys clearly called in the fact that they had found the vehicle, and they’d clearly been given orders to kill us on-site when they found us. Now, their commanders are calling them back, asking how things went. The smart money says that when there’s no answer, somebody’s going to come looking for them.”

  “Plus, what would happen if somebody else just happened to drive past on this road?” Tristan offered.

  “Now you’re getting it,” Jonathan said. They lifted a second body and carried him to the Sandcat as well.

  “I just don’t understand why all of this is happening.”

  “At this point, none of us do,” Jonathan said. “Right now, we’re at that a stage that we used to call ‘adapt and evade.’ ”

  “Used to? So you were in the Army or something?”

  Jonathan answered with his eyebrows. It never paid to get into details about the past.

  Clearing the road of the bodies didn’t take long at all. Clearing it of the blood would be a job for Mother Nature. Jonathan didn’t worry about that. (They called it a rain forest for a reason.) By the time he and Tristan had finished with their third corpse, Boxers was already done and in the process of rummaging through the front seat of the Sandcat.

  “Hey, Scorpion,” Big Guy called. “You’ll want to see this.”

  Tristan followed. He was becoming a shadow.

  “Whatcha got?” Jonathan asked.

  Boxers handed him a sheaf of papers. Printouts of pictures. Each of the kids from the school bus, plus airport security pictures of both Jonathan and Boxers. As Jonathan paged through them, he cast a glance toward Tristan. The sadness had returned to his eyes, but he managed it.

  “Well, they definitely knew who they were looking for,” Jonathan mused aloud.

  “I don’t like this at all,” Boxers said.

  “Why?” Tristan asked. “Aren’t the police supposed to be looking for us? I mean we were kidnapped.”

  “The police weren’t supposed to know that,” Jonathan explained. “That’s why Big Guy and I were here in the first place. Keeping the police in the dark was a specific element of the ransom demand. Our job was to drop off the ransom and take you home. Now, it turns out that the police were involved from the beginning.”

  “Not just the police,” Boxers corrected. “The military police.”

  “The chaperones aren’t here,” Tristan said.

  Jonathan cocked his head. “Excuse me?”

  “The chaperones,” Tristan said. “Their pictures aren’t here. All of us kids, but none of the chaperones.”

  “I thought they were all killed,” Boxers said.

  “They were,” Jonathan said, catching Tristan’s drift. “But how did the police know that?”

  The question stopped Boxers dead. After a beat, he snorted out a laugh. “Yep, it just gets better and better.”

  Five minutes later, they were ready to go. With the bodies and the vehicle stripped of weapons, ammo, and any conceivable intel, Jonathan and Boxers made sure that the corpses were all tucked inside. Boxers restarted the engine, turned the wheel just so, and then used a stout stick to lean on the gas.

  The Sandcat lurched forward, then slowed to a steady roll downhill. For a second or two, it looked as if it might hit the Pathfinder, but then, in the final few feet, it veered as it should, and rolled off the edge of the road. It crashed through the underbrush, tearing up ferns and bushes. Gaining momentum on the hill, it grazed a tree, then flipped onto its side, beginning a roll that ultimately took it over the edge and down a hundred feet or more into the rocky gorge below.

  When it was gone, Jonathan high-fived Boxers and then they turned to see Tristan staring at them, dumbfounded. “You know, they had families,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything to celebrate.”

  “How about the fact that that’s not us?” Boxers said.

  Jonathan put a hand on the Big Guy’s arm. “Not now,” he said, and he led the way back to the Pathfinder.

  As they started moving again, Boxers pointed out his mirror at the column of black smoke that was beginning to fill the sky from the spot where the Sandcat had crashed. “Yes, siree,” he said. “Better and better.”

  Either Harriett hadn’t heard, or she’d chosen to ignore Gail’s warning. Either way, she was dashing toward her own death.

  “Harriett!” She yelled it louder this time.

  The clacking stopped.

  “Come back up! They’ll be waiting for us in the lobby.”

  “Waiting for us? They’re here for you.”

  Gail moved faster down the stairs. Even though she was confident that they would not be followed, she kept her eyes and her weapon trained up the stairs. “They shot at you, too,” she corrected. “Do you know who they are?”

  “I don’t know who you are,” Harriett countered. “You sure aren’t any cop.”

  Gail stopped at the thirteenth-floor landing. She had to get out of this death trap of a stairwell. “I’m not going to argue with you,” she said. “If you want to have a chance at seeing tomorrow, you need to come with me.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Not out the door to the lobby. Now, Harriett. Decide.”

  From up here, Gail could just see the top of her head down on the eleventh-floor landing. Harriett’s hands were to her mouth, a posture of stress and indecision. This was taking way too much time, but Gail couldn’t just leave her. If it hadn’t been for Gail, Ms. Roller Derby wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.

  The clacking started again, and Gail was thrilled to see that Harriett was coming back up.

  “Faster!” Gail hissed, and she headed down to meet her at the twelfth-floor landing. “What’s in here?” she asked, reaching for the door handle.

  “Storage, I think,” Harriett said. “Used to be offices, but they moved everybody out.”

  Gail pulled the door open carefully, revealing a large unlit space that looked like it used to be a cubicle farm, but was now home to a maze of boxes and assorted junk. On the far side, a building width away, she saw what she hoped to see: another emergency exit, with a reasonably clear aisle leading to it. As she closed the door behind her, it all went black.

  “I can find the light,” Harriett said.

  “I don’t want the light,” Gail said. “Why are there no windows?”

  “The office doors are closed. Only the executive offices have windows.”

  Then Gail got it. The lights would stay out. This cubicle farm was the center ring of a square. The bad guys had all the advantage now as it was. If darkness could give Gail a tiny edge somehow, she was all for it. “What do you know about the security systems here?”

  “Why are those people after you?” Harriett’s mind seemed stuck on stuff that just didn’t matter.

  “Focus, Harriett. The security systems.”

  “I have no idea. You saw the guards.”

  “Do you know where the cameras are?”

  “Everywhere, I guess.”

  Useless.

  Gail reached out into the darkness. “I’m going to grab your hand,” she said, “and I’m going to put it on my belt. I want you to hang on and keep up.” Once linked, she started moving down the center aisle, placing her feet in spots where she saw in her memory were not occupied by junk. After twelve steps—a number chosen because she knew that her full strides while walking equaled about twenty-six inches (see what routine exercise does for you?), and correcting for the smaller steps in the darkness, she figured that twelve steps gained her about twenty feet of distance.

 
From there, she pivoted what she estimated to be ninety degrees to her left, and she started walking more carefully, cautious of bumping into something.

  “I want you to listen to me carefully, Harriett,” she said. “If the lights suddenly come on, or if the door opens, I want you to drop to the floor right away. And I mean drop where you stand.”

  “Why?”

  “Sweetie, you just need to stop asking questions for a little while. But the answer is so you don’t get shot. The bad guys won’t hesitate to fire, and I need a clear lane of vision to fire back. How’s that?”

  “I wish I didn’t ask.”

  “I get that a lot from people at times like these.”

  “You mean you get a lot of times like these?”

  If only you knew, she didn’t say. In fact, she didn’t say anything.

  Gail holstered her weapon and walked with her arms outstretched before her with her forearms crossed. That way, if they ran into an unseen vertical obstacle that was thin—say, a pillar or an open door—there was zero chance that the obstacle would smack her in the face. She moved with frustrating caution, fully conscious of the fact that a stack of tipped-over stuff would be a clear indication for the bad guys of where she’d gone.

  The destination was an office. She didn’t care which one; she just wanted a place where she could make the most important phone call of her life.

  Harriett turned out to be more adept at following than Gail had expected. She stayed with her every step, never going faster, never dragging her down, and, most important, never falling, which is more difficult in a dark environment than most people think.

  Finally, Gail’s hands found a wall. From there, she started moving to the right. In theory, sooner or later they’d encounter a doorknob, and that’s where she’d declare that they’d found a place to stop.

  It turned out that the doorknob was only a few steps away.

  Gail drew her weapon again—not because it made any sense that someone might be on the other side, but because she wanted to have a weapon in her hand.

  As she pushed the door open, the splash of sunlight was startling.

  “Quickly now,” she said. She pivoted her hips to sort of sling Harriett into the office, and then she followed behind quickly.

  “Why are we here?” Harriett asked. “What are we going to do from here?”

  “We’re going to call the cavalry,” Gail said. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and hit the speed dial. When the other party picked up on the second ring she said, “Mother Hen, this is Gunslinger. I need help.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Venice’s mind raced as she listened to Gail over the open phone line, leaning on Venice to engineer a way out of the predicament. As she pulled her keyboard out from under the edge of her desk, Venice slipped her headset into her ear and hit the button to redirect the sound.

  “It’s not that easy to pull up security plans,” she said as her fingers flew across the keyboard. With advance notice, she could research sites and steal passwords. With a little planning she could be brilliant with this sort of thing. Doing it on the fly was second to impossible. “It could take some time.”

  “I don’t have time,” Gail said. “They have to know that we ducked into one of the floors. If they have enough cameras in place, they may even know exactly where we are.”

  Venice’s stomach clamped. Gail had stated it exactly: when a commercial facility had any security at all, they tended to have a lot of it. It was an either/or kind of thing. The bad guys probably knew exactly where she was hiding. Even if Venice could pull up the access she needed, it was likely too late to be of much help. With advance notice, she could have recorded empty hallways and played them on the security screens in real time, but even that would have been difficult.

  “I just don’t know what kind of help I can be.” She searched for some way to gain access into a system that she’d never researched.

  “Then take a few notes,” Gail said. “Dennis Hainsley is the key player here. Remember—” Venice heard chatter in the background as Gail turned away from the phone. “All American Industries. One of the big last-minute donors. He’s very important to Reverend Mitchell. Harriett Burke says that his meetings had a big negative impact on Dr. Mitchell’s mood.”

  Venice clicked to a different screen and typed the information formlessly, as stream-of-consciousness words.

  Then she clicked back to the business of getting Gail and her new friend out of harm’s way. She started with the easy stuff, cross-referencing Crystal Palace with security companies, but that produced nothing. Then she found the Scottsdale building permits office. Most jurisdictions required that building plans be submitted to the public record. If she could find those, and the schematics for the Crystal Palace, then she should be able to find a way out for them.

  The problem was the lack of time. Even with the highest of high-speed connections, it took time for—

  “Shit,” Gail said. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “They’re on the floor. The lights just came on.”

  “Keep the phone live,” Venice said. “Whatever happens, don’t hang up.” She glanced across her desk to make sure the recorder was running, and the green light assured her that it was. She looked to her keyboard, but realized that with the clock run down to nothing, she had no options available that would help.

  The sound in her ear rustled as Gail put the phone down. That’s what Venice assumed she was doing, anyway.

  “I want you to lie flat on the floor,” Gail whispered. “If I tell you to do something, do it. But if I don’t you just stay put till it’s all over.”

  “Are they here?” another voice asked. Venice assumed that to be Harriett.

  “Shh.”

  Then things went silent. Venice froze at her keyboard, hands poised over the keys as she leaned closer to the screen, as if by doing so she could get her earpiece closer to the action. She closed her eyes, trying to turn the sounds into images, but the electrical connection combined with the fuzziness of the cellular service made it almost impossible to discern nuance.

  A minute passed, maybe two. Twice, she heard Harriett ask something, but both times, Gail responded with a long, soothing shhh.

  More silence.

  Then a crashing sound, loud and tinny through the phone line.

  “Here!” a man’s voice yelled, but a gunshot cut it off.

  Then there were a lot of gunshots. One weapon was louder than the others, and it hammered long and hard in three-round bursts.

  Gail was shouting something, but over the cacophony, Venice couldn’t make out words. Men shouted, too, and in the background, a woman screamed. It was the sound of panic.

  The maelstrom continued for fifteen or twenty seconds before it finally ended in a silence that lasted for a few seconds, then erupted again for a few shots and then fell silent again.

  Venice sat riveted in her chair, her eyes closed, trying to see through her ears what was going on.

  “Are they down?” a man’s voice asked.

  Venice’s eyes filled with tears.

  “What is this?” the voice asked, and then there was a shuffling sound again in Venice’s ear. “Hello?” a male voice said into the phone. “Anybody here?”

  Venice wanted to hang up, to run away, but she didn’t. If the phones hadn’t been encrypted, this would be the time to break the connection, before the bad guys could trace it back. As it was, the phones and their signals were untraceable, and it therefore posed no harm for Venice to remain on the line.

  “Who are you?” she asked. She winced at the tremor in her voice.

  “That’s a stupid question,” a man said. “If you’ve been listening, then you know I’m the guy who just killed your friends. Have a nice day.”

  The line went dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  By the time Captain Ernesto Palma arrived at the site of the massacre, all but one of the bodies had been pulled back up to the road. They were twisted and horribly b
urned, but he was able to recognize a couple of the faces. The stench in the morning heat nearly overwhelmed him. The others on the scene—a couple of local police officers plus the three soldiers he’d brought with him—stood silently, clearly waiting to see how he would react. Their silence somehow amplified the noise of the flies.

  Despite the damage done by the fire, they’d obviously been shot. Each in the head, for sure, but in at least one case, he saw blood on a soldier’s shirt that indicated a back wound as well.

  “It appears they were executed,” said Cayo Almanza, the police corporal who commanded the local authorities.

  “Does it?” Palma asked.

  “I believe so. Clearly they were shot in the backs of their heads.”

  The erupted foreheads told him that much. “Execution is a loaded word, Corporal.”

  “How else to explain it? They appear to have been shot and then shoved into the vehicle to cover up the murder.”

  Palma knew that the corporal was wrong about the execution, yet he decided to let the misperception lie unchallenged. “As you say,” he said. It was a sentence he’d found to be useful over the years to leave people in a kind of limbo, wondering whether he’d just agreed or disagreed with what they’d said. Palma enjoyed keeping people on edge. Nervous people were easier to work with.

  “I believe that this was the work of the American missionaries,” Almanza said.

  On that, the corporal was almost certainly correct, but again Palma said nothing.

  “The alternative would be that it is the work of the cartels.” For whatever reason, it seemed important to Almanza that he impress Palma. The idiot had no way of knowing that the work of the cartel and the work of the missionaries were one and the same. Even the missionaries didn’t know that.

  While no one but their families would mourn the loss of the soldiers who had been killed in the past two days, the rising body count could begin to project weakness, and the perception of weakness could unnecessarily complicate everyone’s lives.

  “Who found the bodies?” Palma asked.