Final Target

by John Gilstrap

  “Back to the truck,” Jonathan said.

  “Ah, shit,” Dawkins moaned.

  “And quickly,” Jonathan added. He didn’t yet know where they were going, but he knew that they needed to leave the exfil site. They needed to be someplace unknown to whatever forces were so intent on betraying them. “Lose the radios from Uncle Sam,” Jonathan ordered. “And anything else you can think of that was handed to us by them.”

  In reality, the radios were the only items that did not originate in Jonathan’s shop back in Virginia. When reliability was key, the only way to ensure success was to do it yourself and then never let anything out of your sight.

  He pressed the TRANSMIT button on the remaining radio. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”

  “Your chopper pilot abandoned you, didn’t he? And you’re about to ask me to find a place for you to go.”

  Jonathan chuckled. Venice had an uncanny way of knowing exactly what he needed, sometimes before he knew himself. “That’s affirmative,” he said. “On both counts.”

  “I’m working on it,” she said. “I’ll get back to you in a few.”

  With the need for stealth no longer a factor, it took less than half the time to cover the distance back to the abandoned truck.

  “Same positions as before,” Jonathan said. “Let’s just get moving. This road takes us east.”

  “What’s to the east?” Boxers asked.

  “Distance,” Jonathan said. And they were off. He pressed TRANSMIT again. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”

  “I don’t have anything for you yet,” she said. Frustration and crankiness were very close cousins in Venice’s world.

  “I wanted you to know that we’re moving east along the exfil road. I want to avoid turning around, so hopefully, that will help you limit your search.”

  A few seconds of silence. “Okay,” she said.

  “Now, Mr. Dawkins,” Jonathan said, doing his best to lean forward without getting bounced through the overhead. Boxers always did enjoy a rough ride. “Tell me who you think is pissed off enough at you to kill you and your rescuers.”

  Though he was at a disadvantage in the dark, Dawkins’s face nonetheless showed shock. “I was going to ask the same thing about you two. Who did you piss off?”

  Boxers laughed. “That’s a long friggin’ list.”

  Jonathan didn’t want the conversation to veer away. “Tell me about how you got here and why you think you were taken.”

  “I’m a federal agent,” Dawkins said, as if it were the only obvious answer. “That makes me a big prize for the bad guys.”

  “I understand that,” Jonathan said. “How come the folks on the other side of my radio were so intent on seeing you dead?”

  “You asked that before. What makes you so sure that I was the target and not you?”

  “Because they brought us all the way into my least favorite part of the world to pull it off,” Boxers said. “If they wanted us dead, they could have killed us in Main Street America.”

  “I’ll make the same argument,” Dawkins said. “If they wanted me dead, why would they send you all the way out here? Why wouldn’t they have just killed me straight off?”

  Jonathan considered that. Was there a reason why some enemy back home would want to have Jonathan, Boxers, and Dawkins all in the same place? He couldn’t imagine why, but at this stage, everything was a question, which meant that no answers could yet make sense.

  “Let’s shift gears,” Jonathan said. “Let’s talk this through. Start with how you got snatched.”

  “Why don’t you start with how you got dialed in?” Dawkins said.

  “Because that’s none of your damned business,” Boxers said.

  Jonathan sensed a quick escalation and moved to intercede. “Look, Harry. May I call you Harry?”

  “It’s my name. Better than I can say about you.”

  “Okay, there it is again,” Jonathan said. “You know we just saved your life, right? A couple of times. And the smart money says you were not going to die easily. I don’t know why you don’t unconditionally accept us as the good guys here, but that’s none of my business. Whatever the various factors in play may be, how about you lose the attitude and roll with my inquiry?”

  “I don’t see—”

  “It doesn’t cut both ways,” Jonathan interrupted. “The act of saving your life buys us anonymity. Remember, we stand to die in the same crater as you if we don’t figure out what the hell is going on. So, how about you start with the circumstances of your capture?”

  Jonathan watched as Dawkins stewed over his options in the darkness. He sensed that the PC was guarding a secret. And normally, that would be fine. We all had secrets. But when secrets posed a threat to Jonathan’s team, they needed to be laid bare.

  Dawkins took a huge breath and let it out as a grunt. “Oh, screw it,” he said. “Somebody probably ought to know.”

  “Sounds like it’s going to be good,” Boxers said. “A story to pass the time on a long drive.”

  “Here it is,” Dawkins said. “For the past four months or so, I’ve been working a case that was pointing to collaboration between my bosses and the Jungle Tigers cartel.”

  “That’s Alejandro Azul, right?” Jonathan asked. “The guys we just rescued you from?”

  “That would be them,” Dawkins said.

  “What does collaboration mean?” Boxers asked.

  “I don’t know the full extent of it,” Dawkins explained. “That’s what I was trying to figure out. Best I can tell from what I’ve uncovered so far, it was pretty standard stuff. Kickbacks and favors. Azul would give up just enough arrests to impress Congress, and in return we let him run his operations with a wink and a nod.”

  “What made you look at the link in the first place?” Jonathan asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Were you assigned this case? To look into corruption?”

  “Oh, hell no,” Dawkins said. “DEA is not a very introspective agency. And if what I think was happening was really happening, then it goes pretty high.”

  “So, that’s what I’m asking,” Jonathan said. “What makes you suspect that something hinky was going on?”

  Boxers laughed. “Did you really just use the word hinky in a sentence?”

  “Ignore him,” Jonathan said. “He’s easily amused.”

  “It was the fact that Azul was always getting away,” Dawkins explained. “We’d run ops against his stashes and factories, and he always got away. Miraculously. At first I thought it was the Mexican police that was clueing them in—and there’s a shitload of that going on. You know there’s no such thing as a clean cop or soldier in this jungle paradise, right?”

  “I’ve heard the rumor,” Jonathan said. Both as an employee of Uncle Sam and as a private operator, Jonathan had wreaked his share of havoc throughout many of America’s southern neighbors.

  “We tried shutting the Mexican narcos out of the loop and running the ops on our own or with the cooperation of some of the other alphabet agencies, but we’d still get shut out. This has been happening over and over again for more than eighteen months. There are a lot of smart minds planning smart ops to catch Azul, but he always squirts away.”

  “What about his assets?” Jonathan asked. “Legal and otherwise. Did you snag his product?”

  “Nothing worthwhile. Like I said, it looked like he was giving us just enough to tell Washington that we were doing our job, but it wasn’t enough to do any real damage to his supply chain or his bank accounts. Think about that. It’s one thing to get an alarm and scoot out yourself through the tunnels, but how did they have the time to ditch their product? Clearly, someone was giving them the nod.”

  “No question,” Boxers said.

  “But it gets deeper,” Dawkins continued. “The more I thought about it, the more it looked like it was somebody on Team Red, White, and Blue, but only Azul was having the kind of luck he was having. Pablo and El Chapo were slippery as hell, but at least we were
able to do some damage to their operations. Why was Azul so completely successful?”

  “I have no idea,” Jonathan said.

  “Unfortunately, neither do I,” Dawkins confessed. “You know they say to follow the money, right? Well, that’s hard as hell when the business model is built on laundered cash. There again, every time it looked like we were getting close, Azul would change his model and we’d be dead in the water.”

  “Sounds like a leak in your shop,” Boxers said.

  “Most definitely,” Dawkins agreed.

  “The trick is to find out who it is,” Jonathan said.

  “And that’s where I am in the investigation. Or where I was when I got snatched.”

  “A coffee shop in Mazatlán, right?” Jonathan asked.

  “More like an alley outside of a coffee shop,” Dawkins said. “I was walking to my car, and they came out of nowhere. A bunch of them. A swarm. In the middle of the day.”

  “Were they armed?” Boxers asked.

  “To the teeth. You know, I always used to tell people that I would die on the street before I allowed myself to be taken like that. I mean, that’s the standard line we tell everyone when they’re going into unfriendly places. Well, I gotta tell you—when you see a swarm of guys with automatic weapons closing in on you, that SIG on your hip feels damned inadequate.”

  Jonathan had played the scenario in his head hundreds of times, and he’d seen what more often than not happened to kidnap victims—even in America, where, with the departure of death sentences in many states, the penalty for kidnapping was identical to the penalty for murder. From a business perspective, it actually made more sense to murder a victim than to let him go. If kidnappers came for Jonathan, there would definitely be a gunfight.

  “How did they transport you to this garden spot?” Jonathan asked.

  “I’m not sure. I think they drugged me. I literally have no memory of the trip. They put me in a car, and then I woke up in the jungle. Do you know how much time has passed?”

  “We’ve known about you for a little less than three days.”

  “How did you find me?”

  Boxers cast a knowing look back to Jonathan. They were getting to the scary part. “Your buddies at DEA fed us all the information that we know,” Jonathan said.

  “They supplied us with air and satellite support,” Boxers added. His tone was full of menace. Jonathan had heard that tone before. It never ended well for people who betrayed him.

  “So, this whole thing was a setup?” Dawkins said with a gasp. “My own guys are trying to kill me?”

  “Worse than that, they’re trying to kill us,” Boxers said.

  Dawkins stewed on that for a few seconds. “Then why didn’t they just kill me?” he said. “If they knew where the kidnappers were, then they had to know that I was there. Why not send a Mexican hit team in and take me out?”

  Those were very good questions.

  “I’ve got a theory,” Boxers said. “Maybe the Mexicans aren’t as corrupt as we assume them to be.” He cranked his head around to look at Jonathan. “Maybe this was a hit that needed to be hidden from them.”

  “And from the upper echelons of the DEA,” Jonathan guessed, reading the tea leaves. “Big Guy, I believe we’ve been played for suckers.”

  Through the enhanced darkness, Jonathan saw Dawkins’s eyes widen, as if an idea had dawned. “Tell me what you’re thinking, Mr. Dawkins.”

  “Please call me Harry.”

  “Okay.” As if that mattered even a little. “Tell me what you’re thinking, Harry.”

  “You talk about this whole thing being a secret from the Mexican government,” Harry said. “That resonates with the kinds of questions my captors were asking me.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jonathan said.

  “I’m not sure I do either, to be honest with you. I’m just now working through the thoughts. Tell me this: If you were a cartel badass and you had your hands on a bona fide DEA agent, what would you torture him into saying?”

  “I don’t know what you’re driving at,” Jonathan said.

  “What information would you want to know? What areas would you press hardest to explore?”

  “I’d want to know who the informants are,” Boxers said.

  “The structure of your organization,” Jonathan added. “Who’s located where and doing what.”

  “Yeah,” Dawkins said. “You’d want to know how the enemy works.”

  “Okay,” Jonathan said. “Is that not what they asked you about?”

  “No,” Dawkins said. “It didn’t strike me as odd until now, but as you lay things out, the topics they grilled me on were really strange. They wanted to know what I knew about their operations. Instead of learning new information, they were more concerned about what I already knew.” His eyes grew huge in the darkness. “At one point, they asked me who else I had involved in my investigation.”

  “That seems like a reasonable thing to want to know,” Boxers said.

  “Let me guess,” Jonathan said. “You never mentioned a special investigation.”

  “Bingo,” Dawkins said. “They were asking the very kinds of questions that the DEA bosses would want to ask to find out how exposed they were.”

  “So?” Jonathan prompted. “How exposed are they? How many people have you told about your suspicions?”

  The PC’s shoulders sagged. “Not a soul.”

  “Did you tell them that?”

  “Not in so many words, no,” Dawkins replied. “I didn’t really get what they were driving at. They were not very giving with their end of things.”

  “That explains why they didn’t kill you outright,” Boxers said. “They needed to keep you alive long enough to find out how big the hole in their boat was. The question that’s nearer to my heart is, how did we get wrapped up in this? Do we have enemies at DEA?”

  “Probably,” Jonathan said. “None that I know of, but why should DEA be different than every other agency in Washington? I think it’s pretty clear that somebody’s coming after us.”

  “Maybe you guys are just expendable,” Dawkins offered.

  “How do you mean?”

  Dawkins shrugged in the darkness. “Just that. You guys are contractors of some sort, right? That puts you off the books and out of reach if something goes wrong.”

  “You mean, maybe it’s not personal?” Boxers said. “Only business.”

  Dawkins answered by letting the question hang unanswered.

  Jonathan liked it. “Actually, I think you nailed it,” he said. “We were hired to snatch you and bring you back to the chopper. From there, I guess Big Guy and I would have had another fight.”

  “But the pilot was too much of a pussy to stick around for it,” Boxers said.

  “What about the sat link? That guy went running, too.” Jonathan caught Dawkins up on the essential elements of the satellite debacle.

  “Sounds to me like this was an off-the-books op,” Dawkins said. “Unsanctioned.”

  “And that makes it personal,” Jonathan said.

  “Ooh, I’m so gonna hurt somebody when we get home,” Boxers mumbled just loudly enough to be heard.

  Jonathan recognized the signs that this train was about to leave the rails. “That’s for later,” he said. “For now, let’s concentrate on not letting them win. Let’s get back to what your kidnappers asked you about. Anything in there that might give us a hint about who the players are?”

  Dawkins took a few seconds to think the question through. “You know, there was one line of questioning that confused me. Three or four times they brought up a specific place. The house of something.”

  “I don’t suppose you could drill a little deeper,” Boxers said.

  “A saint’s name,” Dawkins said. “Not one of the usuals.”

  “An unusual saint,” Jonathan said.

  “A woman. Not Teresa, not Catherine. Nothing like that.”

  Jonathan considered running through a list of saints but wo
rried that it would only confuse the man.

  They rode in silence for the better part of two minutes.

  “Inés!” Dawkins nearly shouted it. “La Casa de Santa Inés.”

  Boxers jumped. “Jesus!”

  “No,” Jonathan said through a smile. “Inés. I think that translates to Agnes in English. I forget what she’s a patron saint of. Okay, so what’s the significance?”

  “I have no idea,” Dawkins said.

  “Then give us some context,” Boxers said. “You say they kept bringing it up. What does that mean? What were they asking you about it?”

  “They wanted to know what I knew about it,” Harry said. “I kept telling them that I had never heard of it, but that didn’t satisfy them. In fact, that was the line of questioning when they took the two fingernails.”

  Jonathan shuddered. He couldn’t imagine how much that must hurt.

  Dawkins asked, “We don’t know where we’re going. Is that right?”

  “We know we’re getting you back home,” Jonathan said.

  “You just don’t know how yet,” Dawkins said.

  “We’ve never lost a PC,” Boxers said. That wasn’t entirely true, but it was close enough.

  “I’m just wondering if, say, this adventure takes another two, three days, are you guys keeping your faces covered the whole time?”

  Jonathan sighed. The question was not out of line, and it made a good point. “You remember the point about not crossing us, right?” he asked.

  “Vividly.”

  Jonathan pulled the NVG array off of his head, then slid his balaclava off. He extended a hand. “Nice to meet you,” Jonathan said. “I’m Scorpion. This is Big Guy.” Boxers kept his face covered, probably because he needed the NVGs in place to drive.

  “Still no real names?” Dawkins asked.

  “We’ll never know each other well enough for that,” Jonathan said.

  His earbud popped. “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”

  “Go, Mother Hen.”

  “I think I’ve found a place for you to hole up for the night. It’s not much, but the satellite picture shows it to be a real structure with a roof.”