Alejandro thought about it. With the explosives that had been stored in the school building, it would not have taken much of an additional charge to set it all off.
“Were you with the other children?”
“Yes,” Mia said. “We waited for Scorpion and the others to join us, and then we walked into the jungle.”
“Where were you going to go?” In his peripheral vision, Alejandro saw that Hugo was coming back to life and glaring at Mia. He stepped between them to break eye contact. “Where were you going?” he asked again.
Mia hesitated. Finally, it seemed, she understood that she was violating a sacred trust. “America,” she said.
A laugh escaped Alejandro’s throat before he knew it was there. “America! The United States?”
Mia looked down.
Alejandro turned to Orlando. “Did you hear that, cousin? The orphans are going to America.” He looked back at Mia. “And did this Scorpion tell you how he was going to get there?”
Mia nodded without looking. “Yes,” she said.
CHAPTER 16
New Baltimore was a little spot on the map nestled between Gainesville and Warrenton, Virginia. If it had ever been a real town, it wasn’t much of one anymore, though it did have its own volunteer fire department.
Licorice Way lay about a mile west of Route 29, as the crow flies, at the end of a dirt road that was accessible from a gravel road. In odometer distance, it was nearly two miles, and what a very long two miles they were. To get here in the snow—or even on a dark night—you’d have to know exactly where you were going if you were going to avoid hitting a tree.
In Gail’s experience, a lot of these off-the-road country houses could be very charming, set in a bucolic countryside, with a great view of nature. Randy Goodman’s place was not one of those. The exterior walls were covered by the same asphalt shingles that covered the roof. The yard, such as it was, featured more dirt than grass, and it was littered with all manner of trash, from beer cans to an abandoned water heater. A screen door lay propped next to the decaying hollow-core panel of the front door.
Gail had no idea what kind of money crop-duster pilots made, but she for sure thought it would be at least adequate to afford enough house to keep the weather out. As she climbed the two steps that led to a sagging front porch, she watched where she put her feet and moved carefully, lest the rotted boards give way under her weight.
As she rapped on the door with her knuckle, the flimsy panel that was the door floated open. Her hackles rose. She’d been in a similar circumstance in the past, where the seconds following the floating door brought a prolonged gunfight. She’d debated whether or not to bring a firearm on this adventure, and she sent up a silent prayer of thanks that she’d decided to bring her little Glock 43 nine-millimeter just in case.
“Hello?” she called. It was inappropriate to draw down at this point but, man, was she itching to. “Mr. Goodman?”
Nothing. The inside of the house looked 1,000 percent nicer than the outside. In here, everything was well arranged. Along the far wall, she could see a corner of the kitchen, and it looked clean.
She was about to step deeper into the house when she heard hammering from somewhere outside, the sound wafting on the breeze from the far windows. Gail exited back out the front door, walked down the stairs to the matted yard, then walked around the house toward the far side. She noted the presence of a well-tended vegetable garden, which was surrounded by what appeared to be a recently constructed chicken-wire fence.
As she turned the final corner to the backyard, she saw a shirtless young man in the distance, wearing cut-off jeans and military-issue combat boots, swinging a hammer near what she supposed was a small barn or maybe a big shed. A stack of new lumber lay on the ground next to him, and he was nailing a shiny plank onto the structure’s weathered skeleton. At ninety degrees, with 90 percent humidity, it had to be terrible work.
“Excuse me!” Gail called, to no effect. She tried it again, with the same non-result. She started walking toward him across the lawn, which was much heartier back here. She called again, but as the words left her mouth, she caught sight of the white cords leading from his ears to a tiny music player strapped to his biceps.
She didn’t want to startle him. That could be dangerous for both of them. On the other hand, she couldn’t think of a way not to.
Good God, was it hot. Between the searing noonday sun and the humidity and bugs rising up from the grass, she was grateful to be wearing jeans and her field work shoes. While her balance was okay, the jury was still out on her decision to ditch the cane.
As she drew closer, she watched the glistening muscles of Goodman’s arms and back, and she felt something stir in her. She’d always had a special place in her heart for sweaty men—until she got close enough for the aroma to hit. This guy needed a shower.
“Hello!” Gail called louder when she’d closed the distance to maybe ten feet.
The kid jumped at the sound, whirled around, and brandished his hammer as a weapon.
Gail took a reflexive step back. Her hand started for her Glock, but she stopped herself. He had earned this reaction, after all.
The workman was instantly apologetic. He pulled the buds out of both ears with a single yank and lowered the hammer. “Jesus, you scared me!” he said. “Sorry about that.”
Gail went back to DEFCON Three. “My fault,” she said. “Are you Randy Goodman?”
Concern flashed across the kid’s face. “Who are you?” He looked like he was trying to grow a beard, but he needed a bit more testosterone to pull it off.
“My name is Gail.” As she spoke, she watched his hands. Old habits. “Are you Randy?”
He put the hammer on the ground at his feet and wiped his hands on the thighs of his filthy shorts. “Uh-huh. Sorry about”—he made a sweeping motion up and down his torso—“this. I wasn’t expecting company. Who are you again?”
“You’re a pilot, right? Former Army?”
A deep scowl creased his forehead. “Yeah.” He drew the word out for a second, showing his confusion. “I’m a mechanic, too. Or at least training to be.”
Gail showed her pleasant smile. “Good for you. Who hired you to abandon my friends in Mexico?”
Randy paled as his eyes cut toward the house.
“I’m not a cop,” Gail said quickly, taking a step forward. “But before you bolt, think back to the people you left behind. Remember what they looked like?”
He gaped. Clearly, he didn’t know what to do.
“Remember one of them in particular? Passing resemblance to the Abominable Snowman? Well, I call him Big Guy, and both he and Scorpion are still alive, and they are not at all happy with you.”
Randy’s face morphed into a mask of relief. “You mean they made it out?”
“That’s none of your concern,” Gail said. “But we all work together, and since I know who you are and the places you haunt, he does, too. When you two do finally meet, your experience will be way, way better if you cooperate with me.”
The mask became a grin. “God, I’d love to cooperate,” he said. “I was hoping someone would do something. The shit that went down just wasn’t right. I’d have done something myself, but I didn’t know who to call. That work isn’t exactly on the books, know what I mean?”
This wasn’t at all how Gail had thought the conversation would go—it felt too easy. And in the perverse logic that defined covert activities, easy almost always portended more bad than good. “I’m not sure I do,” she said. It was a hedge against time.
“Let’s walk,” Randy said, indicating the vastness that lay beyond the shed he was working on. “I’m not good at standing still.”
Gail readily agreed. Ever since her last fighting gig, standing for long periods had become something of a burden. “Lead,” she said. “Do you own this place?”
“I know it looks like a piece of shit,” Randy said, “but it’s got great potential.” Whatever he saw in Gail’s face
made him laugh. “Okay, call it long-term potential. But I’ve got thirty acres here, and as much as the house itself sucks, I can fix it. I figure I’ve got six months till the really cold weather, and I’ve never been much of a fan of air-conditioning.”
That sounded to Gail like a frequently delivered speech. “It sounds like I might just want to let you talk,” Gail said as they stepped out toward a distant tree line. “If you don’t mind, start at the beginning. How did you get involved with all of this?”
Randy pulled a rag, which might have been his T-shirt, out of his back pocket and wiped sweat from his face with it. “When I separated from the Army, I knocked around for a while, but nothing really grabbed my attention. I wanted to keep flying if I could. I really love flying.”
“Why didn’t you stay in?”
Randy cocked his head. It was that condescending look that young aviators seemed particularly practiced in. “Meaning no disrespect, have you ever been shot at, ma’am?”
“Countless times,” Gail said without dropping a beat. “I used to be on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Each time I’ve been shot at, I have shot back.” As the words came out, they seemed half a click too melodramatic, but she wanted him to know that he in no way intimidated her. They seemed to have the effect she was hoping for.
“Wow,” Randy said. “That sounded really patronizing, didn’t it? I’m sorry. I just meant to imply that I really hated being shot at. That’s why I got out of the Army. And then I found out that civilian flying jobs are hard to find, and when your specialty is rotary-wing aircraft, the market is super small. I ran into Pappy kind of by accident, but he hired me on.”
Gail laughed before she could stop it. “Pappy?” she asked. “Is that the guy in the office? Is that really his name?”
Randy smiled. “Well, his real name is Grace. Homer Grace. And before you smack him around too hard in your mind, he earned a Medal of Honor in Vietnam. He was a gunship pilot, and he did amazing shit to save fifty-three guys who had no hope but him and his mini-guns. I got nothing but respect for Pappy. And meaning no insult, so should you.”
Gail felt herself blush, and she suppressed the urge to apologize. She’d have loved to hear the whole story, but now was not the time. “Point taken,” she said. “So, after you left the Army . . .” She thought of that as seeding the conversation.
“Well, I came here to work for Pappy. Flying is flying, but I gotta tell you, that insecticide shit smells toxic as hell. Between you and me, I’m open for something new.”
“And that something new brought you to Mexico?”
“It was a little more complicated than that, but yeah, essentially.”
As they walked farther out into the field, Gail found herself wishing she’d brought a hat to fend off the searing heat of the sun. As the buildings left her field of view, she finally understood Randy’s attraction to the place. The rolling hills led to a tree-lined pond and, beyond that, a copse of dogwoods that looked like something out of a painting. “Do you mind telling me the story?”
Randy cast her a sideward glance. “How much trouble am I really in?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Gail said. “I know that my abandoned colleagues are beyond pissed, but I also know that they are inherently reasonable men.”
Randy still looked nervous—as he should have—but he seemed relieved to tell the story to someone. “Pappy’s place is not my future. I want to drive eggbeaters for real. So I heard about this opportunity to fly for an independent outfit. My old unit has a Facebook page, just like every other old unit, and they place these employment openings from time to time. That’s what I responded to.”
“What was the company?” Gail asked.
“I never knew,” Randy said. “I mean, even now, after it’s all over, I don’t know.”
“Who wrote the check?”
Randy laughed. “Yeah, check. There was no check. Strictly a cash deal. I called the number, and the voice on the other end told me to go to a Starbucks in Woodbridge, way on the other side of Prince William County. I went there, and I found a lady sitting at a table, reading the Wall Street Journal and wearing a red baseball cap. Those were, like, our password, know what I mean?”
Gail nodded. “I’m guessing there was an actual pass phrase, too, wasn’t there?”
His eyes widened. “Yes,” he said. “And that was the term she used, too. Pass phrase, not pass word. I thought that was kind of strange. It was ‘Traffic here really sucks,’ and she responded, ‘You should have seen it before they widened the road.’ Real cloak-and-dagger shit.”
“What was the job?”
Randy held out his hands in a silent ta-da. “To fly to Mexico,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“No, that’s what it turned out to be,” Gail said. “What did this lady tell you it was going to be? And who was the lady in the first place?”
He scowled as he tried to pull up the name. It probably didn’t matter, because what were the chances that whoever it was would use her real name? He held up a finger when it popped into his mind. “Nicole,” he said. “Nicole Alvarez.”
“She was Mexican?”
Randy shrugged. “I have no idea. From her looks, I’d say she was Hispanic, but I don’t know more than that. Hell, I guess she could have been Italian, too. I just don’t know. She had a pretty prominent scar on her face, too. An X under her eye.” He drew a cross on his own cheek.
“Did she say who she works for?”
He wobbled his hand noncommittally. “No, not really. She said she worked for the government, but she didn’t get more specific than that.”
“You were on the periphery of that world when you were in the Army,” Gail reminded. “What did your gut tell you?”
A shrug. “I guess my head always defaults to CIA, but that’s really just a guess. I can tell you that the groups I ended up working with were drug enforcement guys. DEA.”
“You know that for a fact, or that’s what they told you?”
“Well, I didn’t do background checks, but that’s what they called themselves, and that’s what their badges and jackets said.”
Gail had a badge, too, and while it was real, it was nowhere near legitimate. “Fair enough,” she said. “So, you met with this lady named Nicole.”
“Right. I started to sit down in the coffee shop, but she didn’t want to do that. She wanted to walk. She kind of poked around my street cred as a pilot, and then she asked me if I was up for some night work that was likely to get dangerous. When I asked for more details, she reached into her purse and pulled out a stack of hundred-dollar bills. A thousand bucks in folding money. She told me I had to take them first and pose for a picture, holding them.”
Gail recoiled. “A picture? And you agreed to that?”
“Ma’am, for a thousand bucks, I’ll do just about anything. She told me that there’d be ten grand more, but by accepting the money, I was an accomplice. Maybe that word should have been a warning bell.”
“Maybe,” Gail agreed.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills. “Anyway, I’ve still got it. I learned the hard way that you don’t leave stuff in the house up there that you don’t want to get stolen.” He tucked the bills back into his pocket and chuckled. “Mostly, I solve that problem by not havin’ anything around that’s worth stealing. Cash, I keep with me. So, anyway, this Nicole chick took our picture and told me to keep the money, and to show up that night at a farm out in Fauquier County. A lot of land, but a shitty little farmhouse. Well, okay, a damn palace compared to what I got, but not the kind of place you think would have its own airfield.
“When I got there, that’s when I met the first of the DEA guys. They were all war painted in camo and didn’t talk much. We all loaded into a sweet Aerostar and flew for a couple of hours, until—”
Gail held up a hand to interrupt. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “What is an Aerostar?”
“It’s a plane. A twin-en
gine executive prop job. I love those things. Anyway, so we took off out of this guy’s field, flew for a couple, three hours to an airfield in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn’t tell me where, but judging from the humidity, it had to be somewhere along the Gulf of Mexico.”
“Do you have any idea who owned the house or the plane?”
“No, but I still remember the address.”
Gail smiled as she pulled the slim reporter’s notebook out of the pocket of her jeans and a pen from her shirt. Always a compulsive note taker, she had in recent years moved from the speckled notebooks everyone used in school to the trimmer beige-covered pads. Since the shooting, she’d lost a fair amount of strength in her left arm, and these pads were easier to handle.
“Okay, tell me the address,” she said. She jotted down what he gave her.
“I also heard a name mentioned among the operator guys. Raúl, I think. I only remember it because of the glare he got from one of the other spooks. It’s funny the things you notice when you’re scared and trying to notice everything.
“Anyway, we climbed into a bigger plane at the airfield—a private jet that was loaded with weapons. None of them were for me, but for the other guys. Nicole gave me a packet with charts and maps and told me that I was going to fly a couple of contractors to a set of coordinates, drop them off, and then orbit until instructed to pluck them from another set of coordinates. The exfil site was a work in progress. If things went one way, I’d go to one site, and if things went another way, I’d go to another. There were four potential sites altogether, all of them within a mile or two of one another.”
Gail said, “I presume that those two contractors were in fact the colleagues you abandoned?”
“I wish you wouldn’t put it that way,” Randy said. “All I did was follow orders. I’d have stayed for them if they wanted me to. Hell, I’d have even fought for them. That was the job, you know? I’m nobody’s coward, just because I don’t like taking fire.”
The level of indignation startled Gail. Apparently, she’d struck a nerve. “I meant no harm,” she said. “Just stating facts the way they appear from my side of the equation. You say you were ordered to . . . leave without them?”
Final Target Page 18
