Final Target

by John Gilstrap

“Good to know,” Boxers said. “What I was going to say is that even if they got the word, how sure are you about the kid’s land navigation skills?”

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Jonathan said.

  “You know there’s a gunfight coming, right?” Boxers asked.

  “I can’t imagine Alejandro Azul letting us go peaceably,” Jonathan agreed. “But it’s a big coastline. He can’t be everywhere.”

  “We could change the exfil site,” Boxers said.

  Jonathan shook his head. “Not at this point, we can’t. We’ve already told Mother Hen, and she’s already told the contractor who’s coming for us. Torpedo Bomber. Too many moving parts to throw a wrench into the gears now.”

  “So, how do you think the Jungle Tigers will come for us?”

  Jonathan rubbed the back of his neck with his gloved hand. He couldn’t imagine how filthy he must be. “We have to assume they know about the bus,” he said. “And I presume he knows we need to get out before dawn. I’d set up roadblocks on the roads that approach the northern coast.”

  “You think he has enough manpower under his control for that?”

  “He does if he leverages the police and the military.”

  “So, this wait is tilting the odds even more in their favor,” Boxers said.

  Jonathan didn’t bother to answer the obvious. But he’d given his word, and he was by God going to honor it.

  “If those kids join us, they’ll be in more danger than if they stay behind.” Boxers knew how to push a point.

  “They’ll be in more danger tonight,” Jonathan countered. “But if we make it through, they’ll be a hell of a lot safer tomorrow.”

  “That’s a big if,” Boxers said.

  “They’re making the choice for themselves. I’ve said from the beginning that anyone who wants to stay behind is welcome to. And I’m sure a few will take us up on our offer.”

  “Suppose they all do?” Boxers asked.

  “Then the exfil craft will be a hell of a lot lighter, and we’ll make better time into international waters.”

  “We’re down to six minutes, you know.”

  Jonathan inhaled deeply and exhaled with a noisy sigh. “Yeah.”

  CHAPTER 32

  “They already have their boat,” Orlando announced, clicking off from the phone call he’d just ended. He rode with Alejandro in the back of his armored Suburban, on their way to the shore to coordinate the upcoming events of the morning. “They killed a watchman and stole a fast, long-range boat from Villa Sánchez Magallanes.”

  Alejandro looked at his wristwatch. “I thought you told me they stole a school bus from Tuxtla Gutiérrez. That was less than two hours ago. They could not be in both places at the same time.”

  “They must have others helping them,” Orlando said.

  If Orlando was right, and the thefts of the boat and the bus were connected—and the fact that the boat was designed for long range made this connection undeniable—then who were these other commandos? This was in fact an operation of the American government. They had betrayed him yet again.

  Charles Clark and his hand puppet Marlin Bills had not believed him when he threatened to expose them for who they truly were. They thought they had sway over him. What they had forgotten was that Alejandro was already a wanted man, and he had the criminal infrastructure to protect him. A fat-bellied senator and his chief of staff had no protection at all. Certainly, while they were in the fortress of the Capitol Building—the much-vaunted “People’s House,” where security guards kept out any people who did not have the money to bribe their way in—they were safe. But in their personal lives, they were as exposed and vulnerable to attack as any common citizen on the street. And if the senator himself was not, then his family certainly was.

  How dare they betray him this way?

  “Get Marlin Bills on the phone,” Alejandro said.

  “It’s after two in the morning!”

  “Get him.”

  “We’re supposed to go through Nicole Alvarez.”

  Alejandro felt his anger building. “Please don’t make me tell you three times, cousin.”

  Orlando pressed the numbers and then handed the phone to Alejandro while it was still ringing.

  * * *

  Awareness came slowly for Marlin Bills. Sleep had been elusive these past weeks and all but impossible for the past two days. A man of his age could exist for only so long without a good night’s sleep, so tonight he’d broken with his long-standing rejection of sleeping aids and taken two Benadryls with a finger of bourbon before going to bed.

  Now the room was filled with noise. Annoying noise. A phone. At this hour? A phone?

  Oh.

  Consciousness came fully and immediately.

  That phone. The secret one that rang only at the whim of one person. He considered ignoring it but knew even as the thought formed in his head that he did not have the choice to ignore a call from Nicole Alvarez. Certainly not today.

  He rolled over in his bed, grateful for one of very few times that his wife had chosen not to accompany him to Virginia. He twisted the switch on his bed stand light and winced against the glare. The phone continued to screech, but he could not see it. What the hell?

  As his head cleared, he remembered that he’d forgotten to hook it up to the charger earlier tonight. It remained in the pocket of his suit coat, and his suit coat remained draped over a chair all the way over in the kitchen.

  Five rings? Six rings? Phones that carried the kinds of conversations that this phone saw did not come equipped with answering services. He swung his feet out of bed, rose, and padded out of the bedroom into his darkened living room and then to the kitchen that lay beyond. The whole apartment occupied only 850 square feet of space, but it seemed like a goddamned hike tonight.

  When he finally got to the screeching beast, he pulled it out of the pocket and stabbed the CONNECT button with his finger. “Who the hell do you think you are, calling me at this hour?”

  “I am the man who can turn your life into a fiery hell.” He’d been expecting to hear the voice of Nicole Alvarez. When he heard the thickly accented voice of a man, he wished that he’d taken the time to urinate before answering the line. “Do you know who this is?”

  “I could guess,” Marlin said. His throat thickened, and he cleared it. “But that would not be a good idea on this line.”

  “It’s Alejandro Azul,” the voice announced. “Do you hear that, NSA listeners? I am Alejandro Azul, and I am speaking to Marlin Bills, chief of staff to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. How is that? Am I clear enough for you, Mr. Marlin Bills?”

  Marlin heard the anger in the voice—the fury—and he winced against the blatant violations of secure communications protocols. He felt his heart rate triple, even as his drug-dulled brain tried to process just what the hell was going on.

  “This is inappropriate at any number of levels,” Marlin said. He heard the embedded politician in his words and knew as he uttered them just how stupid they sounded.

  “Do you want to talk about impropriety?” Azul said. His accent dimmed as he spoke. “Let’s do that. What do you think is the propriety of the United States sending not one, but two teams to kill my people and ruin my business?”

  “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Marlin said. “You have to understand that I just woke up—”

  “And I should be asleep,” Azul fired back. “But instead, I am left to fight the Americans without any support from my own country’s police or military.”

  “Whoa. Wait. What? I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. Slow down and start at the beginning. Start at why you are calling me directly. What happened to Nicole Alvarez? Why isn’t she making this phone call?”

  “Because I chose to make it myself,” Azul said. His tone was soft. It could not have been more menacing. “And I am the man Nicole Alvarez works for. You, on the other hand, work for the man whose life is soon to become very difficult
when I call the newspapers and tell them about our arrangement for funding his election campaign and, I can only presume, your own personal retirement fund.”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” Marlin said. “I mean, I understand the words, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Azul said. “Isn’t your boss in charge of the Justice Department?”

  “No, he’s not. He’s the chairman of—”

  “So, you expect me to believe that neither you nor he knew that the director of the FBI called the head of our national police force?” Azul’s accent was all but gone.

  “What? No!” Oh, this wasn’t right at all. Somehow, in the three hours since he’d drugged himself into a sound sleep, the whole world had come apart. This was bad. Very, very bad. “Please. Seriously. Tell me what happened.”

  Azul relayed the details of his phone call from Ignacio Flores announcing that he could not cross the specific demands from Irene Rivers. “The director of the FBI does not get involved in freelance mercenary missions, Mr. Bills. This is official action by the United States government.”

  Is that possible? Marlin thought. How could it be? Maybe it was the drugs he had onboard, but he couldn’t think of a link that could be established to the FBI. Not unless someone was talking. And who could that be? How was—

  “You need to fix things on your end, Marlin Bills,” Alejandro said. “You have minutes, not hours. These people killed my brother. And we believe that Dawkins is still alive, and I don’t have to tell you the damage he can do to you if he is allowed to testify. I wanted to kill him, and you said no.”

  “We needed to know if he knew the full extent—”

  “He does now, doesn’t he?” Alejandro said. It seemed that the angrier he got, the softer his voice became. “If he didn’t know it before, then he’s seen it with his own eyes. This is for you to solve, Marlin. If I don’t hear—”

  Marlin clicked off. He didn’t need to hear more threats.

  And like most political disasters, this one never had to happen. It had started out as a small and contained strategy to raise campaign funds for his boss and to save a little extra for himself. The alphabet agencies reporting to Justice confiscated so many weapons per unit of time that they could not possibly keep track of them all. In a town like Washington, where money brought power, but official power brought no money, graft was an open secret. Elected officials had their coffees, millionaire cabinet members had their charitable foundations, and even beat cops had their free food and paid blindness, but staffers like Marlin needed to be a little more imaginative.

  Marlin’s longtime buddy Raúl Nuñez had been a bundler for longer than Marlin could remember, and he knew exactly the kind of people who could get important things done. All it took was a little cut for everyone. A cadre of bored agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives took the first cut as they skimmed seized weapons off the top and dropped them off at a place where people were least likely to find them—an orphanage, for God’s sake. The agents were paid by Alejandro Azul via one of his cutout companies. When it came time to sell the guns to the highest bidders, those payments were made to Raúl’s company, Western Results, which would then pay everyone else through various other corporate entities.

  The plan was perfect. Even though BATF likewise reported to Justice, along with the FBI and DEA, those agencies were still so traumatized and confused by post-9 /11 restructuring that they maintained tight silos of information. And they were all responsive to inquiries or commands emanating from the office of the senator who oversaw their budgets, which meant he oversaw their careers and their futures. The scheme worked like a well-tooled clock.

  And then Harry Dawkins upset everything. He’d noticed that cases involving Alejandro Azul had lower close rates, yet he’d remained undistracted by the fact that overall close rates were higher than ever. Leave it to some Boy Scout to find a problem where every regulator and news agency found solace.

  It wasn’t until just last week that Marlin learned that Raúl had been turned, that he’d been reporting back on the money-laundering operation. Dawkins was Raúl’s man, but by all indications, Dawkins was smart enough to suspect high-level foul play and he’d kept his mouth shut. Certainly, he hadn’t sent it up the chain of command. So, for now, it was contained.

  Or, he had thought it was, until the goddamned director of the FBI got involved. That was the connection he could not make, but the root of the connection did not matter. The fact of the connection was all that mattered.

  And only one person he knew could make things right again.

  * * *

  “Come on, Boss,” Boxers said. “We’ve got to go. We gave them an extra half hour. As it is, we’re already risking a daylight extraction. We’ve still got better than a hundred miles to drive, and it won’t take much of a delay on the road for us to get boned.”

  They were back on the bus again, Boxers in the driver’s seat, Jonathan sitting in the stairwell, and Dawkins sprawled across one of the seats in the third row.

  “Don’t you dare sacrifice a bunch of kids on my behalf,” Dawkins said.

  “You be quiet,” Boxers said. “You don’t get a vote.”

  “Bullshit,” Dawkins said. “I’m the reason you’re here, and that makes me the reason why these kids are in jeopardy in the first place. What good is getting rescued and being returned to my life if I’ve got to live with that kind of guilt?”

  “Sounds to me like you’ve led a sheltered life, G-man,” Boxers said. “Scorpion?”

  Jonathan missed the clarity of purpose that his life in the Unit had offered back in the day. The mission had always been the focus, and all this distracting sideline shit had been somebody else’s decision. It wasn’t that he wasn’t up to the decision making, but in the old days he could always tell himself that he was operating under orders, whether from the officer in the command tent or the asshole in the Oval Office. His was but to do or die.

  At its face, this should not be a difficult decision. The kids were not his problem. Boxers was 100 percent right that every second of delay pushed them closer to daylight and the disaster that would bring. Not only did they need to be loaded by dawn, but they needed to be at least twenty-four miles off the coast, beyond Mexico’s territorial and protected waters.

  Those territorial waters represented the single weakest point in this cobbled-together plan. Jonathan and his team were felons and were fleeing the country where they had committed their felonies. Granted, they’d committed their crimes against other felons while in the act of saving their own lives—justifiable homicide in any First World country—but a just verdict required getting in front of an honest jury. Even in the United States, honest juries were becoming an ever-rarer breed as politicians and the popular media conspired to redefine “truth” to have less to do with matters of fact than with harmonious political narratives. In a shit hole like Mexico, where crime and fear drove every element of society, juries knew the correct answer long before the case ever went to trial.

  Jonathan knew that to be caught was to be killed. And God only knew what would happen to Dawkins.

  “Look, Boss,” Boxers said. “Either we have faith in the kid’s land navigation skills or we don’t. If they’re on this road, then we should run into them, right?”

  Jonathan checked his watch. They had in fact run out of any extra time that they might have folded into the schedule. “Okay,” he said. “Get started for the shore. If we find them, we find them. If not . . .” He saw no reason to complete the sentence.

  “Watch your feet,” Boxers said as he reached for the handle that would close the folding door. He pulled it shut as he cranked the ignition.

  As Big Guy ground his way into first gear, Jonathan stood and used the vertical handhold to swing around to the bench seat on the right-hand side of the first row.

  The bus shuddered as Boxers engaged the clutch.

  “I can drive if th
e bus is too much for you,” Dawkins said.

  Boxers jammed on the brakes and sent both other men out of their seats. Dawkins, who’d been sitting sideways, slid off the seat entirely and onto the floor.

  “Oops,” Boxers said through a grin. “My bad.” He started forward again.

  “Vindictive son of a bitch, isn’t he?” Dawkins mumbled to Jonathan as he picked himself up.

  “You should see when he’s in a bad mood,” Jonathan said.

  After they had gone thirty feet, a burst of automatic weapons fire wiped away the humor, and Jonathan’s hand went to his M27. “Shots fired!” he announced. It was reflex. “Where?” The acoustic tricks of the jungle, combined with the shielding offered by the bus, made it hard to tell where the shots had come from.

  “Behind us,” Boxers said. He hit the brakes and stopped.

  “The hell are you doing?” Jonathan said. “You said they’re behind us. Hit the gas.”

  Boxers’ face bloomed into an enormous smile. “Take a look out the back.”

  From context alone, Jonathan knew what to expect. He walked down the center aisle to the back panel of the bus and spun the big handle that opened the emergency exit door. A hundred yards back, Tomás was the lead runner in a wedge of kids who wanted to hook a ride. Jonathan waved them in with large sweeping motions of his arm.

  Tomás arrived first but stopped to let the others pass. “That step is too high,” he said to his followers. “Go around to the side.” When they were past, he turned and looked up at Jonathan. “Hi, Scorpion,” he said. He held out his hand, and Jonathan grabbed it and gave him a boost into the bus through the emergency exit.

  “Is this all of you?” Jonathan asked.

  “Gloria wouldn’t come,” Tomás said. “She tried to stop the rest of us from coming, too. She even broke the radio you left.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She is scared,” Tomás said. “We are all scared.”

  The bus started up again with a jolt. Jonathan got the hint and reached out and closed the emergency exit door. When he turned back, Tomás had seated himself on the edge of one of the benches, and he was wriggling out of his rifle sling. Jonathan felt an odd surge of pride. This was a special kid.