“Not planning and abandoning are entirely different things,” Jonathan said. “You told us that Alejandro’s men would come to kill you, and that’s what they did. Tried to do. Is there a reason for you to think that has changed?”
Gloria glared at him in the green glow of the light stick. “How do I know I can trust you?”
“Do you have alternatives that I’m not seeing? You trust me, or . . . what?”
She looked like she had an answer but was hesitant to share it.
“Say what you want to say,” Jonathan prompted.
“How do you know you can trust us?”
Jonathan laughed, genuinely amused. “Because I believe we both know the ways of the world.” He darkened his tone. “I think you understand the basics of the work I do. I trust that you know that there’s no walking back from betrayal.”
“That is a threat?” Gloria seemed incredulous.
“It’s a fact,” Jonathan said. “I don’t go out of my way to hurt people, so if people go out of their way to hurt me, I take it very personally. So do they.”
“I see,” Gloria said. “So, what is the next step?”
And thus, all roads led back to him being out of ideas. “Is there a safe place where we can drop you off? Drop the children off?”
“There used to be,” Gloria said. “It was called the House of Saint Agnes.”
Jonathan let the shot glance off his armor and waited for her to offer up a real answer.
“There is an orphanage,” Gloria said. “But it is far from here.”
“How far?”
“Thirty, forty kilometers.”
Jonathan winced against a stomach cramp. Behind him, a few feet away, he could feel Boxers’ displeasure. “Well, we’re not walking there, for sure. How about a family nearby? If just for the smallest ones?”
Gloria thought about it. “There is a family,” she said. “Ernesto Gabay and his wife. Only two kilometers from here. Certainly less than three. But they already have children. Five of them, I believe.”
“Are they trustworthy?” Boxers asked from the sidelines.
Gloria’s eyes sparkled in the green glow as she asked, “Is anyone trustworthy when they understand what the Jungle Tigers would do to them—and their children, not to mention ours—if they found out?” The beheadings, tortures, and mutilations of ISIS had nothing on the sadistic shit pulled off by the cartels.
“We can’t make the trip with the little ones,” Boxers proclaimed. “We have to do something with them.”
“This family,” Jonathan said. “The Gabay family. Do you trust them or don’t you?”
She hesitated, cut her eyes to Boxers. Then she looked at her feet. “The risks are too great,” she said. “For everyone.”
“The little ones are a problem,” Boxers said, his annoyance palpable. “We don’t even have a plan yet. All we know is that we’re in the middle of nowhere, and that in order to live, we need to get out of the country. From where we are, the only conceivable means of escape is by boat. In the best case, that would mean commandeering a vessel that’s capable of holding seventeen people to go all the way across the Gulf of Mexico. But that’s only after we hike over a hundred miles through forest to get to the boat. With little kids in tow.” That was a lot of words for Boxers, and they’d gotten his steam up.
“There you go,” Jonathan said.
“What? There what goes?”
“That’s our plan. All we have to do is find a boat.” Jonathan sealed the deal with a smile. He looked to Gloria. “What do you think?”
She looked confused. “Your plan is to hike through the jungles to get a boat that will take us to the United States?”
“Exactly,” Jonathan said. Of course it was a ridiculous risk, but any plan was better than none.
“I think we’ll all die,” Gloria said.
Jonathan dismissed her words with a wave. “Nah. We’ve been doing this for years, and I haven’t died yet. Not even once.”
CHAPTER 9
Venice Alexander never slept well when the boys were on a mission. While they were in the thick of whatever op they were performing, it fell upon her—and often her alone—to be their eyes and ears. It had been this way for more years than she cared to calculate, and it never got easier. If anything, it got progressively harder.
Venice didn’t know how much longer she could keep up the pace. Jonathan was himself an adolescent in his core, and when he paired with Boxers, their antics could be exhausting. She knew intellectually that no operators in the world were better than they at what they did, and she understood that Scorpion and Big Guy were blessed with some kind of Teflon in their DNA, but they took risks that felt unreasonable and unnecessary, and sooner or later, the bottom was going to fall out of their luck jar, and when that happened, she didn’t know how she would be able to cope.
During hot operations, she wondered sometimes if her job wasn’t actually harder than the guys’. While they were the ones shooting and getting shot at, at least they knew what was going on. She could listen in on the radio banter, but even then she was left to imagine what was happening.
To date, thank God, her imaginary images had all been worse than the reality. The boys always came home, and they always recovered their precious cargo.
But their paths were littered with the remains of countless shattered laws. What Scorpion and Big Guy did was considered homicide in every corner of the globe where they plied their trade. That was a fact that troubled Venice far less than it used to. They all had secure cover, and the guys didn’t exist in any official records, thanks to the work they performed at the behest of Uncle Sam, but there was always that chance for disaster, that chance to be prosecuted and sent away forever.
It was one of the great fictions of Jonathan Grave’s life that he believed that she could take the rest of the night off just because he had told her to. As if it were that simple just to shut off her awareness that they were in harm’s way. It was impossible on any day, but tonight they’d been betrayed.
The electronic contents Jonathan had uploaded from the phones he’d captured had to be deciphered and analyzed. If she could identify even one of the men who’d attacked them, then maybe she could identify the size of the conspiracy they faced.
It was too much work on too short a leash for Venice to do it all alone.
So she called in a colleague who lived only a few blocks away as reinforcement.
Gail Bonneville was a former FBI agent and sheriff from Indiana who only a while ago had come closer than any other to breaking Jonathan’s cover. She had ended up joining the team instead and for a while had served on the covert side of Security Solutions, the high-end private investigation firm that Jonathan had established years ago. After sustaining life-threatening injuries, Gail had changed her role in the company to run the overt, legitimate side.
What no one ever spoke of aloud was the love affair Gail and Jonathan had enjoyed—tolerated?—until it had become untenable. Gail was not going to be happy about being brought back to the dark side of the business—especially at 3:25 in the morning—but Venice didn’t see another way. Other than Father Dom D’Angelo, Gail was the single person in all of Fisherman’s Cove who had any idea why Jonathan disappeared for days or weeks at a time.
Actually, that probably wasn’t true. The legit side of the house employed some very smart investigators, who’d probably connected at least some of the dots for themselves. If so, they’d proven to be smart enough to keep their opinions, conclusions, and questions to themselves.
From her spot in the War Room—the teak conference room in the part of the converted firehouse that served as the headquarters for Security Solutions—Venice watched the security feed as Gail Bonneville approached the building, punched in her alarm code, and then chatted with the armed guards in the stairwell, who allowed her to pass.
Thanks to her injuries, Gail still walked with a cane, but from the way she carried it, Venice figured that it was employed more as a self-defense wea
pon than as a balancing aid.
The door to the outer office opened and shut, and then the security box to the remote suite of offices that everyone called the Cave beeped. That door opened, and there was Gail.
She did not look happy.
“Venice, I can only assume that you know what the time is, and that whatever this business is about, it is very damned important.”
Venice rose from her command chair to greet the new arrival. “I do, and it is.”
“Why am I even here?” Gail asked. “I could not have been any clearer with Digger when I told him I wanted out of—”
“They’ve been betrayed, Gail.” Venice fired the words like a weapon to end the bitching and bring the conversation back around to something useful.
It worked. Gail froze mid-word and then helped herself to one of the other chairs around the huge rectangular conference table. “What happened?”
Venice relayed the story of the disappearing air support and satellite cover.
“And those were government assets?” Gail asked.
“Yes. Well, that’s what they purported to be.”
Gail scowled. “That’s not like Digger,” she said. “He doesn’t like to use Uncle Sam in his operations.”
“That’s why I was on the line, too,” Venice explained. “Sort of as the truth test and second set of eyes.”
Gail absently rubbed the scar above her left eye as she thought things through. That scar was the only remaining mark on her face from the attack that had injured her. Such a difference from the early days, after she’d been left for dead.
“Why was DEA running their own rescue operation?” Gail asked. “That’s what the FBI is for. And if not them, then Dig’s old pals among the D-boys or SEALs.”
“I don’t have an answer for why DEA was running their own rescue,” Venice admitted. “But I do know why the USA’s real muscle isn’t doing it. It’s politics.”
Gail got it before Venice had to remind her. “The Mexican trade deal.”
“Bingo.”
“The president wants to pretend that the drug cartels aren’t a threat.”
“Exactly.”
Gail cocked her head. “So, was Wolverine involved in this?”
“Yes,” Venice said. “Though to what degree, I don’t know. I know that Dig met with her and that this mission was the result.”
“You don’t think she’s part of the betrayal,” Gail said.
Venice shook her head vigorously. “Oh, heavens no. I don’t much like Wolverine, but she would never stab him in the back.”
Gail thought some more. “How sure are you that that second team was sent in to kill Digger and Box?”
Venice started to answer, then checked herself. Details mattered. “Okay, let’s split hairs. I’m one hundred percent certain that the guy who called himself Overwatch deflected the arriving operator to Jonathan’s location, and I’m one hundred percent sure that the exfil chopper pilot left without them. What I can’t say for certain is who they were coming to get. It’s possible that the guys were just collateral damage.”
More thought. “And tell me again what we know about the precious cargo in the first place.”
“Not much,” Venice admitted. “This was more of a hurry-up case than most. There really hasn’t been much time for communication.”
“So, where are the guys now?”
“Last I heard from them, I’d vectored them into a jungle schoolhouse called la Casa de Santa Inés, the House of Saint Agnes. There was a party there that they wanted to—”
Venice’s satellite phone rang. “Speak of the devil,” she said. There was no doubt who would be on the other end, because only one party knew the number. Still, to be on the safe side, she opened the line and greeted the caller with “Pasta Palace, how can I help you?”
“Hi, Mother Hen. It’s me.”
“What’s wrong?” Venice said. Jonathan rarely called out of the blue, and when he did, it always meant trouble.
“Quite a lot, actually,” he said.
“Okay if I put you on speaker?”
Hesitation. “Who else is there?”
“I brought Gunslinger in. I need extra hands and an extra brain to figure out what all that business with the sat link was about.” Gunslinger was a handle that Gail had always hated, but nonetheless it had stuck. Venice felt much the same way about her own moniker, Mother Hen.
“Hey, Gunslinger. How ya been?”
“Mostly sleeping until about a half hour ago,” Gail said. “Maybe you should do the talking.”
“Okay,” Jonathan began. “Here’s where we stand. . . .” It took the better part of five minutes to relay the details of the encounter at the House of Saint Agnes.
As Jonathan spoke, Venice watched Gail’s face for some kind of tell. In addition to her injuries, another reason for Gail’s departure from the covert team was her inability to cope with the level of moral ambiguity that permeated so much of what Jonathan did. Given her law enforcement background, Gail had never fully been able to wrap her head around all of that. When Jonathan was done with his monologue, Venice had no better feel for Gail’s mood than when he’d begun.
“So, are we to understand that the school is essentially leveled?” Gail asked.
“There’s nothing essential about it,” Jonathan said with an audible smile. “It’s gone. And so are ten more bad guys.”
“But are you, Big Guy, and the PC all right?”
“Big Guy took some shrapnel in his thigh, but I don’t think it’s a big deal. Everybody else is fine.”
“What about the people from the school?” Gail asked.
“Well, now, that’s where things get complicated,” Jonathan said. “We now number seventeen people, and we all need to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Fourteen!” Venice and Gail said it together.
“Yeah, fourteen. Thirteen of them are kids, the oldest kid is maybe fifteen, and the youngest are ten.”
“Good God, Digger!” Gail exclaimed. “What are you thinking?”
“OPSEC, Gunslinger,” Jonathan chided. “No names. And without going into too much detail, these are the lives we saved by killing the cartel shitheads who were going to kill them first. Not exactly how I planned things, but show me any plan that survives first contact.”
“So, what do you intend to do?” Venice asked.
“The original plan to chopper out was replaced by a plan to hustle our PC to a friendly crossing point. Now I’ve got a school load of indigenous locals with death sentences on their heads and no longer any country to call their own. I have a plan, but I’m not all that happy with it. In fact, it pretty much sucks. I’m open to any suggestions y’all might have.”
Jonathan kept his tone light, but Venice knew that his message was a serious one. It was one thing to improvise tactically—no one was better at that than he—but it was something else to build an entire plan on the fly.
“Tell me where you are right now,” Gail said. “Not physically. We can get that from your GPS locator. Where are you in the evac plan?”
“For the time being, we’re stalled,” Jonathan said. “The kids need sleep before we can move them anywhere, and soon we’re going to need food and water. They were all supposed to grab provisions before we fled the school, but I won’t know what we’re really facing until we’ve got some light.”
“Do you have vehicles?” Venice asked.
“Don’t want to go that way,” Jonathan said. “Too easy to set up ambushes.”
“So, are you just hunkered down in the jungle now?” Gail asked.
“Pretty much.”
“Won’t that explosion have drawn a lot of attention?”
Jonathan chuckled. “It had to. When word gets back to Alejandro Azul and his Jungle Tigers, smart money says he’s going to be perturbed. I don’t know what kind of search assets he has at his disposal, but while I think we’re more or less invisible from the ground—at least for the time being—if he gets his han
ds on some airborne infrared, we’re pretty much boned. Whatever we decide to do, we need to do it fast.”
“You said you had an idea that sucked,” Venice said. “What’s that?”
She could hear his sigh over the phone. “Exfiltration by sea.”
Venice and Gail shared a look. Are you kidding me?
“Are you still there?”
Gail cleared her throat. “Uh, Scorpion, what specifically are we talking about?”
“We need to get us a boat that can get us from the Yucatán Peninsula to whatever the closest point in the United States is.”
As he spoke, Venice’s fingers flew across her keyboard. A map popped up on the big screen on the far end of the conference table. Gail walked up to it for closer inspection. “The Yucatán is a big peninsula,” she said.
“The closest town to us appears to be San Raymundo,” Jonathan said. Venice could hear him clicking the keys of his laptop. “That puts the closest useful water at Laguna de Términos. What is that? A hundred fifty miles?”
“The nearest point in the United States, then, would be the southern point of Texas,” Venice said.
“Right.”
“That’s six hundred miles.”
“Right.”
Venice and Gail exchanged looks again. Neither wanted to ask the obvious. Finally, Venice said, “Do they make boats with that kind of range?”
“I’m sure they must,” Jonathan said.
Gail said, “If I recall, you don’t like boats.”
“I like them better than the idea of dying young.”
“I guess what I’m asking is, do you even know how to drive a boat?”
“No,” Jonathan said. “I mean, I suppose I could get it to move, but land navigation and nautical navigation are only distant cousins. The ground doesn’t have currents that try to take you places you don’t want to go.”
“How much fuel would a boat like that take, even if we can find one?” Venice asked.
“More than a little, I would imagine,” Jonathan said. “And the last thing we’d want is to waste fuel by getting lost.”
Gail leaned into the speaker on the conference table. “Are you saying we need to find you a pilot, too? Or a driver or whatever the hell you call a boat person?”
Final Target Page 10
