“I’ve got another vehicle,” he whispered. “Shit, and a third.” This one was parked across the road from the second one, on their side of the street.
“See any guards?” Boxers asked. “If I were their commander, I’d have left at least one guy to keep an eye on the trucks.”
In a neighborhood like this, it made even more sense.
His earbud popped. “Scorpion, Mother Hen. I’ve got bad news.”
Of course you do, Jonathan thought.
“SkysEye’s thermal imagery shows a number of people clustered around the target property. They all seem to be huddled behind some kind of shelter. Vehicles, mostly.”
“Shit,” Boxers spat.
Tristan went on alert. “What?”
“A small setback,” Jonathan told him. Into his radio he said, “Okay, download the photo to my PDA. I’ll find a way to look at it.”
Jonathan shifted his monocular away from the Sandcats, where he was certain there were guards, even if he couldn’t see them, and surveyed the surrounding buildings. In this part of the city, so many residences had been abandoned in place that it was hard to tell the ones that were occupied from the ones that were empty.
The houses here weren’t row houses in the strict sense of the term because they didn’t physically touch, but they were so close together that the difference was academic. Most were in various stages of rot, but a few showed visible signs of prosperity in the form of flower boxes in the windows or a wreath on the door. Scanning the closest structures on his side of the street, Jonathan focused in on the third property down, where the frayed drapes on the house were open yet the lights were off. That struck him as an odd combination. If people lived in the house, and if they were home, wouldn’t they make a point of closing the drapes—especially in a neighborhood as dangerous as this one?
If only because it was convenient, Jonathan locked on to that as an undeniable truth. He tapped Boxers on the shoulder and brought his lips to within an inch of his ear. “We need to get under cover,” he whispered. “I want to target the third house down on the left. It looks empty to me.”
Boxers said, “Aim my weapon and I’m yours.”
That was Boxers’ way of saying, Let’s go.
Jonathan turned to Tristan. “How’re you doing?”
“I’m okay. I think.” His eyes were wide, but his focus seemed sharp.
“I can’t explain all the details,” Jonathan said, “but we need to seek some shelter for a few minutes. We’re targeting the third house up there on the left. I don’t need you to do anything but stay close. Are you cool with that?” He asked the question as if there truly was a choice.
Tristan nodded. “I’m good.”
Jonathan flashed him a smile. “You’re my shadow, remember?” He stuffed the monocular back into its pouch.
“I remember,” Tristan said. He looked at Boxers. “And my safety is on.”
Boxers smiled, too. “I figured as much.”
“Hand on my ruck,” Jonathan said to Tristan. When he felt the tug, Jonathan snapped his night vision back into place and started moving.
The first two houses were obviously occupied, one of them playing the television or radio loudly enough to be heard out here on the street. That was good news. It covered the sound of their movement.
They advanced to the base of the short stairway that led to the front door of the abandoned house. Jonathan keyed his mike. “I vote we enter from the black side,” he said.
Boxers made a sweeping motion with his arm that said, After you.
While the Big Guy took a knee at the front corner of the house, his weapon to his shoulder, Jonathan made his way down the side of the house toward the back, taking care not to brush the side of the structure next door—they really were that close. About halfway down, he encountered a window that had been broken out. The bottom sill lay at chest height, an easy climb inside.
Jonathan hated anything that was easy. He didn’t trust anything that was easy.
Even with night vision in place, it was hard to see any detail of the interior, so he raised his M27 and twisted the lens ring on his muzzle light to ignite the infrared flashlight. With night vision in place, the infrared beam operated just like a visible light beam, except it was, well, invisible. Through Jonathan’s lenses, he might as well have been peering through a green-tinted window at midday.
From this angle, furniture and fixtures blocked a thorough view of every corner, but he saw no signs of recent occupancy. In fact, there appeared to be a huge water leak in the middle of the front parlor. Given that there was a second floor above the first, Jonathan considered that kind of uncorrected damage to be a good sign of abandonment.
“Do you need a boost or can you climb?” Jonathan asked.
“I think I can climb,” Tristan said.
That was the right answer. “Okay, stay there for a second.”
Jonathan shrugged free of Tristan’s grasp, planted his gloved hands on the gritty ledge, and hefted himself up. He didn’t feel any broken glass or nails or any other nasty stuff that could hurt Tristan when it was his turn. When his waist was clear, and he pulled himself inside, he drew himself to a knee, brought his rifle to his shoulder, and waited.
When no one shot at him or jumped out at him, he allowed himself to rise to a crouch, and then to a standing position. He keyed his mike. “I’m in,” he said. “I’m going to sweep the building.”
“Roger,” Boxers said. “I’ve got eyes on the PC.”
Some might argue that it was overkill to search the entire house for other people—they only needed shelter for a few minutes, after all—but a hidden bad guy had the power to ruin Jonathan’s day in enough ways that it was worth the time it took to make sure there was no one else in the building.
It took him all of three minutes. Once he got past the two front rooms on the first floor, the rest of the house had virtually no furniture, and therefore no place for bad guys to hide. He checked every closet, and saved the basement for last. He chuckled in spite of himself. He wondered if anyone entirely escaped their childhood fear of basements. Still, despite the creepiness, the cellar harbored no terrors.
As he climbed the steps back to the first floor, he radioed, “The house is clear.”
“The sidewalk isn’t,” Boxers replied. “I found our sentries. There are at least two, and it looks like they kill time crashed in the front seat of the vehicles. Lazy bastards.”
That news was bad, but it wasn’t devastating. It wasn’t even unexpected. Jonathan asked, “Are they an immediate problem?”
“Negative,” Boxers said. “So long as we’re quiet.”
Back on the first floor now, Jonathan walked casually back to the window where he’d made his entrance and announced to Tristan, “No bad guys.”
“I figured that from the absence of shooting,” the kid replied. “Am I supposed to join you in there?”
That had been Jonathan’s original plan, but now it didn’t make a lot of sense. “No, just stay put,” he said. “I’ll do this and we’ll get going.”
Jonathan moved away from the window, back toward the house’s tattered kitchen, and nestled himself behind some cabinets and a bar to fire up his PDA and open the attachment Venice had sent him.
He keyed his mike. “Okay, Mother Hen,” he said. “You have the controls. Give me a tour.”
Squinting to see the tiny screen, Jonathan opened the encrypted link and watched the satellite image move to Venice’s commentary.
“Here’s where you are,” she said. The image zoomed from a few hundred feet up to maybe thirty feet above the ground. On the screen, he saw himself and his team squatted at the corner. It was creepy to watch yourself in the past.
Then the image lifted to a hundred feet and tracked due north, passing over rooftops and abandoned streets. After three blocks, the image tracked eastward and then stopped on a building that Jonathan recognized as the target house. “As the crow flies, this distance is about a quarter mi
le,” Venice said. “A little less.”
Jonathan squinted harder. He couldn’t see any people, but he knew that Venice would get to it. She had her own pace for these things, and she was not to be hurried.
“You’ll note that there aren’t any people,” Venice said. “Now watch when I put in the infrared filter.”
The picture blinked, and there they were: a dozen or more human-shaped heat sources crouched behind vehicles and corners of nearby structures. While their weapons did not show up well, the ghosts of rifles were visible, and the postures of the forms holding them sold it.
“I count fourteen people,” Venice said, “but there could be more. Actually, there are more. Seventeen, counting the soldiers Big Guy spotted.” Clearly, she’d been monitoring the radio traffic.
They’d set up a textbook ambush—not that it was a particularly difficult one to engineer. “They’ve got the front pretty well covered,” Jonathan said. “Show me the black side.”
The image moved again, and when it settled down, he saw an aerial view of a standard alleyway that could have been in any city in America: tiny backyards that appeared to be enclosed by stockade fences, backing up to other backyards with stockade fences. The space in between was barely big enough to accommodate a sedan, let alone the trash trucks that no doubt cruised the space once or twice a week.
The infrared imagery revealed two more people hunkered down back there. “There are numbers eighteen and nineteen,” Jonathan said. “This isn’t going to be easy.”
“Are they ever?” Boxers asked over the radio.
When the odds were this badly stacked, their only chance for success lay in speed and overwhelming violence, and the configuration of the OPFOR confounded both of those factors. Taking out the guys in the alley would be a simple matter of expending about three dollars’ worth of ammunition, but doing so would alert the troops out front, and ignite the kind of firefight that was especially difficult to win. Throw in the fact that these guys were real soldiers—as opposed to the thugs and posers that Jonathan so often encountered in his job—and the odds diminished even more.
There had to be a way, though, because there was always a way.
“Can you pull up engineering drawings for the house?” he asked. He had no idea what he was looking for, but if you didn’t look, you couldn’t find anything.
“Stand by,” Venice said.
“Holy shit,” Jonathan said off the air. He was in Mexico, for God’s sake. How could she possibly—
“Hey, Scorpion, I’ve got good news. I just got a call from Wolverine. The house has a tunnel.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Veronica Costanza left the way she had come, through the panel in the bathroom, and from there to wherever the tunnel led. A sewer. How appropriate. If Maria had a brain in her head, she’d have used the escape route herself by now. This waiting was killing her. It had been hours, and the phone Veronica had left behind hadn’t rung.
Was it possible that this was an elaborate setup? Had Maria’s safety been traded by the FBI for some larger prize? She’d heard of such things happening before. The Americans were famous for turning their backs on one friend in favor of a newer, more important friend. Just ask the citizens of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan about that. Americans’ priorities changed with the wind. Perhaps Maria’s usefulness had been expended, and now they needed to give her over to Felix to gain some larger prize.
Maria told herself that these were foolish thoughts—the paranoia of the moment—yet they continued to nag at her. Was it so different from what Veronica promised would be her fate if she failed to wait for the Americans whose lives were so important? Yet wait she did, even as soldiers surrounded her house.
She never looked out a window—in fact, she made a point of staying away from the windows lest she present too enticing a target, bullet-proof glass notwithstanding—but she knew they were out there, and she knew that they were planning to hurt her.
But she would not go quietly. Or peaceably. Her six-shot revolver would see to that. Weighing over a kilogram once it was loaded, her Taurus .44 Magnum was designed to kill attacking bears. She imagined it would stop Felix and his men. It would stop five of them, anyway. The sixth bullet would be for herself.
She knew the horrors that awaited her if Felix ever got his hands on her. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
So she continued to wait in the dark, both literally and figuratively. She’d turned off the lights so as not to throw shadows across the windows, and at the same time to be able to better see shadows that were thrown from outside. She sat in a fat padded chair in the only windowless corner in her house. The front door stood to her left, the kitchen and its back door to her right. Through the kitchen and into the bedroom lay the route to her survival—perhaps the route to the soldiers’ invasion.
And she waited. If the soldiers charged, it would end in seconds. If she fled, the end would be delayed—perhaps for moments, perhaps forever—but at least the end would come on her terms. That was worth something, wasn’t it?
You will do this, Maria. You must do this. These people are more important to my boss than you are.
As Veronica’s word replayed through Maria’s mind, she remembered the glare of the agent’s eyes. The coldness of them. All of those meetings they’d had exchanging information, all those friendly chats, she realized now had never been about friendship. They’d never been about good triumphing over evil. In the FBI agent’s mind, it had only been about a job. It had been about getting a conviction against Felix Hernandez. Maria was important only so long as she was useful.
And she didn’t doubt for a moment that Veronica Costanza and her FBI would hunt her down and see that she was killed if she did not do exactly as she had been told.
And so Maria waited for the American fugitives who were more important than she.
“You were a fool to be a patriot,” she said aloud. If there were listening devices, so be it. Let there be a record of her final thoughts.
Saying those words aloud, though, made her cringe. This had never been about patriotism. It had never been about justice or about returning her beloved Mexico to the way it used to be. From the very first days, it had been about revenge.
Maria closed her eyes and forced herself to recall the images that she had spent so many years pushing away. She made herself look once again at her big brother Jaime, and the gaping wound in his throat, cut all the way back to the bones in his neck. She remembered the dullness of his once-bright brown eyes, lifeless under their drooping, half-open lids. She remembered the brightness of his blood-soaked T-shirt. He was only sixteen when Felix’s men murdered him and left the body on the hood of her father’s car, a piece of paper stuffed into his mouth, scrawled with the word, ladrón—thief. Skinny and awkward, he’d been seeking respect when he began running money for the drug lords. One day, he took enough pesos for himself to buy a sandwich and a Coke.
For that, they took his life.
For weeks afterward, men stalked Maria on her way to and from school. They wanted her to know that they were watching, and that she would live or die at their whim. They wanted her to know that they were above the law—better still, that they were the law—and that murder was but one of the enforcement tools at their disposal. That was twelve years ago. She was only ten years old, but like everyone else in her neighborhood, both her virginity and her life were as fragile as the desires of the men who paid allegiance to Felix Hernandez.
After Jaime’s murder, Maria’s parents had moved her away. Her father was an engineer by training and education, but to be an engineer one had to live in the city, and where there were cities there were drugs. So they moved to the country, where her father dedicated himself to farming, yet nothing grew at his hand. When her mother died of a heart attack two years later, the pressure and the stress became too much for Papa. Maria was only sixteen when he hanged himself in the barn. His note apologized for his weakness. Apologized for leaving her alone in t
he world.
Terrified of a life on the street, Maria turned to the convent, but her anger burned too deeply. Even as she prepared to take her vows to God, she found herself vowing to seek revenge on Felix Hernandez, who had killed not only her brother, but by extension her mother and father, as well. He’d murdered her entire family, and she was going to hurt him.
Maria had heard her entire life how beautiful she was, and sometimes she could even see the beauty herself in the mirror. With no money and no education, and with a future as a nun shut down by her heart, she turned her beauty into a weapon.
Everyone knew that Felix Hernandez liked his mistresses young and beautiful. Though well into his forties himself, he was never seen in the company of a woman older than twenty-five, and occasionally his tastes ran to those in their early teens.
Getting close to him had been surprisingly simple. With short enough skirts and enough cleavage showing, it was just a matter of being seen.
Felix liked coffee, and he liked to take it in the same café every morning. To launch their relationship, Maria made sure to be there at the same time he was. She made eye contact and looked away, and that was all it took. Felix sent a henchman to her table.
“That man over there is Felix Hernandez,” the henchman said. “He would like you to join him at his table.”
Maria made a show of looking over there and then said with as much disinterest as she could muster, “I know who he is. Tell him that only a coward sends a surrogate to ask such a thing. If he wants me to join him, he may ask me himself.”
The henchman looked horrified.
“Are you afraid to repeat my words?” Maria pressed. “If so, send Mr. Hernandez over, and I will be happy to tell him myself.” It was risky to say such a thing, but her mother had told her that to be of value, something—some one—must be difficult to obtain. Maria wasn’t interested in a one-night stand. She wasn’t interested in being one of many mistresses. Her plan from the beginning was to win her way into Felix’s inner circle where she could do as much damage as she possibly could. In order for the plan to work, he needed to feel that it was his idea.
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