by Elise Noble
“And your gut says no?” Emmy asked.
“My gut says no.”
Lorenzo/Alonso knew Ernesto well enough to screw around with a girl in his hangar, and he’d been seen with him after all the lessons were cancelled, right after the attempt on Eduardo’s life. That wasn’t a casual friendship.
Emmy nodded once and wriggled free of Black’s grip to resume her pacing, and by the time a doctor appeared three hours later, she must have traversed the waiting area a thousand times. But the old man lived to fight another day. Emmy sank onto Black’s lap, and he made a silent wish that the only funeral they’d have to attend was for the man who’d flown to Barranquilla.
“He’s not called Ernesto Castillo,” Mack informed everyone over a video link on Blackwood’s internal messaging program the following morning.
Emmy hadn’t slept well, which meant Black had been awake for most of the night too, and now he sat in the dining room at Hacienda Garcia with two mugs of coffee in front of him. Emmy and Ana were also there, as were Seb and Marco.
“That’s not a huge surprise,” Black said. “Who is he?”
“Vicente Ochoa. Sixty-nine years old, whereabouts unknown.” Mack brought up a rather sparse file that looked as if it came from a government agency. “This is all I’ve found so far, buried in police records.”
Vicente Ochoa
Sicario
Nickname: La Parca
Area of operations: Nationwide, concentrated in the Amazonian region.
Kills: Thirty-six confirmed. Forty-three possible.
Black read through the notes underneath. Vicente Ochoa had been active for three decades until being captured and imprisoned. He’d escaped a year later and hadn’t been heard from since. Under “preferred methods,” the file listed an A-Z of assassination, everything from a simple bullet to the head to an elaborate car bomb. That seemed appropriate for a man nicknamed The Reaper. Fuck.
Known associates:
La Araña (deceased)
La Ostra (deceased)
La Leona (missing, presumed deceased)
The Spider, the Oyster, the Lioness. A woman? Black glanced at Emmy sitting beside him. That little fact really shouldn’t have surprised him and yet it did, mainly because the dates involved suggested she was the same age as Vicente. Back in those days, assassination had been thought of as a man’s job. Emmy and Ana were somewhat pioneers in their field.
“Can you find out more about the associates?” Black asked.
“I’m trying, but there’s nothing in the system. If they died years ago, those records are probably on a piece of paper somewhere.”
“Any word on the second set of prints?”
“Not yet.”
Black almost asked if Mack had tried Interpol, but that was a stupid question because of course she had. Mack knew how to do her job, and the best thing he could do was leave her to get on with it.
“Keep looking.”
“Did you find anything more?”
Other than the fact that Lorenzo/Alonso fucked like a stallion and could elude a small army, no.
“I’ll fly back to Medellín later today as long as Eduardo stays stable. We’re going to the hospital in a few minutes, so email me if anything new comes up.”
Mack gave him a salute. “Yes, boss.”
CHAPTER 15 - CORA
WELCOME TO HELL, part two.
Six days ago, I’d woken on a yacht. A large yacht, by the feel of it, but I still got seasick as it hammered through the waves. My spartan cabin contained only a bed with a blanket, plus a tiny bathroom with a single roll of toilet paper and a bar of soap. Spray blew against the porthole as we cruised towards a destination unknown. America?
Once a day, two bolts thunked back and the door opened to reveal an ape of a man with a tray of food and bottles of water. He never spoke, no matter how many questions I asked, and his expressions ranged from mild displeasure to an outright scowl.
On day two, I began to feel woozy, and by day three, I realised they were putting something in the bottled water. The stuff in the bathroom tap tasted nasty, but at least I didn’t fall asleep when I drank it.
Yesterday, we docked at a marina in the dead of night. Since I was supposed to be drugged, I acted unsteady as two men hauled me out of the cabin and onto a walkway.
“Scream and you’ll regret it,” the larger of the two warned me.
I kept quiet even though the blood was rushing in my ears. I couldn’t have screamed if I’d wanted to, because if I didn’t reach my ultimate destination, I’d never find Izzy. Luckily, they’d left me fully clothed, and I’d activated the tracker for short bursts at a time, hoping beyond measure that my brother was following, that his bullet wound hadn’t turned septic and left him incapacitated.
They bundled me into the back seat of an SUV, and as I watched out the window, another girl was marched off the boat by two more apes and stuffed into an identical vehicle. Were the men clones? They all shared the same sullen looks and the same bad attitude.
As we drove, I glanced out the window whenever I could, although ape number one’s chest blocked the view most of the time. Florida. We were in Florida, according to the road signs. Miami, heading for Fort Lauderdale. I’d guess we travelled for half an hour before the SUV drove into a dilapidated warehouse through a huge roller door.
Ours wasn’t the only vehicle in there. The other car pulled in behind us, and we parked beside a red sports car, a white panel truck, and a third SUV with tinted windows.
Metal racks filled most of the vast building, stacked high with boxes of all shapes and sizes. Drugs? Stolen goods? Surely nothing legitimate. A series of wooden rooms had been erected to one side, made out of plywood that I’d later find out was sturdier than it looked. It was into one of these that I was unceremoniously deposited like an unwanted pet. At least on the boat, I’d had a window and a bathroom. Here, I only got the bed and the bottled water I absolutely didn’t want to drink.
Last night, soon after I arrived, I’d heard a girl sobbing on the other side of the wall.
“Hello? Are you okay?”
She didn’t answer, but moments later, one of the apes wrenched my door open and glared at me.
“No talking.”
Great. Was Izzy here? How could I check if I was confined to a box?
The apes visited more often than they had on the boat. Every two or three hours, they grunted their orders. If I needed to use the bathroom, they walked me over to a dingy toilet stall in the far corner, waited while I peed, then watched while I washed my hands in the basin outside which meant I couldn’t drink from the tap anymore. But on my third visit, I realised I could move the lid of the cistern and drink directly from the tank as long as I was quiet, which was disgusting but better than being sedated all the time. Then I emptied the water bottles under my bed.
After a day or two, one guard held me down while another stripped me naked, and I began to fear the worst until a doctor arrived. An actual doctor, with a black bag and a stethoscope. He poked and prodded me and drew a vial of blood, but when I asked him what part of the Hippocratic Oath this fell under, he ignored me.
“Healthy pending the results of the blood work,” he declared, sick freak that he was, then jabbed another needle in me.
“What the hell was that?”
“Contraceptive injection.”
Joder.
Every time one of the men came, I asked the same questions. Where was I? Who were they? Why was I here? What was going to happen to me?
It wasn’t until this morning that one of them had answered.
At first, I thought he wasn’t going to speak, but as I sipped water from my cupped hands, a soft voice came through the door of the toilet stall.
“This is a halfway house. You’ll be here for a week, maybe two, and then they’ll take you somewhere else.”
“Where? Where will they take me?”
“I’m not sure. It varies.”
Mierda. So I might not en
d up in the same place as Izzy? Where was she? If we all got moved on after a week or two, then she’d probably left already.
“What will they do to me?”
“Honestly? You don’t want to know.”
No, I didn’t. “How many other girls are there?”
“You need to hurry up and finish.”
He seemed nicer than the others. Rather than manhandling me to and from my cell, he let me walk by myself, and he held the door open rather than shoving me through it. Trust my gut, Grandma had told me. My gut told me that if anyone in this place could make my life a little more bearable, it would be that guy. Could I connect with him? He seemed human rather than primate.
Then at lunch, one of the apes came back, and my hopes were dashed.
The biggest question on my mind during the whole ordeal, though, was about Rafe. Where was my brother? And had he followed me here? I still turned the tracker on in bursts, but should I leave it on the whole time? Why hadn’t I thought to ask how long the battery would last?
With every hour that passed, I grew more and more worried. The revelation that there was more than one ultimate destination left me scared for both my future and Izzy’s, and also sick to my stomach because this ordeal might all be for nothing.
There was little to do in my prison but think, and that depressed me so much I almost turned to the bottled water. What did they put in that anyway? Prescription drugs? Illegal substances? Something to get the girls hooked and compliant and willing to do anything as long as the sweet oblivion kept coming?
No, I couldn’t touch it.
I’d resigned myself to a long wait, a slow journey through all nine circles of hell, but I plunged into the fiery depths faster than anticipated.
That very afternoon, in fact.
The first hint I got that anything was wrong came after a lunch of dry cheese sandwiches, when a particularly greasy ape led me to the bathroom. Halfway through the warehouse, he turned as if he’d seen something, paused, and shrugged.
Another ape ambled past.
“Where’s Luigi? I can’t find him.”
A grunt suggested he didn’t know, and we carried on walking.
Then all hell let loose.
A muffled boom shook the walls, and a jagged hole appeared in the roller shutter. Black-clad men with guns swarmed everywhere as light flooded the warehouse, and it wasn’t long before the first sounds of gunfire deafened me. My heart went from the trippy, fluttery beat I’d experienced for the last week to an all-out sprint.
Should I run? Hide? Throw myself on the floor and hope the bullets missed?
Movement above caught my eye, and I looked up in time to see my brother leap from one giant stack of shelves to the next, high above my head.
Thank goodness.
Rafe had found me, but my relief was short lived as someone yelled, “Grenade!”
A flash of light blinded me, and something knocked me to the ground. A shock wave? A person? Smoke began to fill the air. Hands grabbed me under my armpits and dragged me deeper into the warehouse, and then we burst through a hidden door into daylight, the first daylight I’d seen in days.
I scrambled upright and turned, expecting to see my brother, but it wasn’t Rafe.
The guard who’d talked to me this morning stood there, his mouth set in a thin line.
Now what?
We locked eyes for what felt like hours, although in reality, it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds.
“Go,” he said.
Like an idiot, I stood there. Was he letting me leave?
“Get out of here.”
He turned on his heel and disappeared inside, back into the chaos. For a moment, I froze, my brain telling me to run but my feet refusing to comply. And what about Izzy?
“Cora?”
I almost collapsed with relief. But before I got a chance to hug my brother or even speak, a scream came from inside the building. A female scream. Probably not Izzy, but what if it was? What if she’d been delayed in leaving somehow? And even if it wasn’t Izzy, another girl was trapped inside and the place was full of freaking ninjas with guns and that could have been me and…
“We have to help her,” I whispered.
“No, we have to leave.”
“There’s a woman trapped.” My voice rose in pitch, bordering on hysterical. “What if she can’t get out? She might die!”
“Cora, we have to leave now.”
I ran for the door, not that I had a clue what I was doing, but I couldn’t stand outside and listen to a girl die. I got it halfway open, wide enough to glimpse the flames, then Rafe grabbed me around the waist and yanked me back.
“No.”
“Let me go!”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’m a da Silva. Of course I’m crazy.”
“Joder.” He cursed under his breath. “Wait here. Hide behind that truck. I’ll be back.”
Rafe pointed towards a dilapidated panel van rusting in the corner of the lot, its tyres flat and the driver’s door hanging lopsided on its hinges. I stumbled towards it as my brother slipped back into the warehouse, but before I even got halfway, bile rose in my throat.
What had I done?
I’d sent my brother into an urban war zone, and if something happened to him, it would be my fault. I half turned around to run after him, but if he got out and I was missing, he’d waste more time looking for me. What should I do?
My hesitation was a mistake. A big mistake. Huge.
A strong hand wrapped around my wrist, and one of the apes dragged me away from the warehouse.
“Get off me!”
His other hand clamped over my mouth, and he plucked me off the ground and carried me to another black SUV, or perhaps it was the same vehicle from earlier. Who could tell? Thirty seconds later, I found myself squashed in the back between him and the vaguely human guard, the one who’d tried to help me escape earlier. His stony expression told me exactly what he thought of my presence.
Mierda.
Behind us, a series of bangs erupted, but when I tried to turn and look, the ape shoved my head down.
For the third time that week, we took off for a destination unknown, and the worst part? When I went to rub some feeling back into my wrists, I realised my bracelet was missing.
CHAPTER 16 - CORA
WHENEVER YOU WATCH the movies, undercover work seems so glamorous. Think James Bond, Ethan Hunt, Jason Bourne, La Femme Nikita. Well, let me tell you, the reality couldn’t be more different.
Although my previous lodgings weren’t five star, it turned out the rooms on the boat and in the warehouse were a vacation compared to what awaited me at the luxury mansion in… Truthfully? I had no idea where we were. After I got recaptured outside the warehouse, we’d driven around for what seemed like hours before the ape behind the wheel got a phone call and we came to this place.
From the outside, the house was beautiful. Acres of manicured lawns, tall white columns framing the front door, pale pink stucco on the walls. An ornate fountain in the centre of the drive. I couldn’t see the ocean, but I heard it washing against the shore not too far away.
But inside, the place was filled with vermin. Vermin who walked around laughing and joking, wearing well-cut suits, fancy watches, and expensive leather shoes. In the ballroom, they sipped champagne poured from one of the bottles in the ice bucket, helped themselves to food from the buffet, picked whichever girl they wanted from the line-up, and then they raped her.
Last night, it had been my turn.
When I first arrived, an ape shoved me into a prison cell on the third floor. A comfortably appointed cell, but a prison cell nonetheless. Behind the fancy drapes, bars covered the windows, and anything sharp or pointy or heavy had been either removed or bolted down.
“Take a shower and dress up,” he told me. “I’ll come back in an hour.”
“Then what?”
“Then you perform.”
“What if I don’t want to
?”
He gave me a malicious smile. “We’ll make you. Some of the men like that.” A shrug. “And if it doesn’t work out? There are plenty more girls where you came from.”
His words sent a chill through me. Every instinct told me to resist, to fight whatever they tried to make me do, but even if I managed to escape, I’d never find Izzy that way. After everything we’d gone through to get this far, I couldn’t just give up. Where was Rafe? Had he made it out of the warehouse? With no answer to that question and no way for him to track me even if he was still alive, I had to assume I was on my own.
The room itself was reasonably spacious, decorated in pale pink with accents of purple. I wondered why they bothered. If we were basically slaves, why give us double beds and showers with three nozzles? I rapped on the mirror in front of the dressing table with my knuckles. Metal rather than glass, and the padded stool was screwed to the floor.
The closet held a variety of dresses, all of them designer, none of them comfortable. No underwear. And everything was too tight or too short or both. But with little choice other than to comply with the ape’s orders, I blow-dried my hair, put on make-up from the box on the bathroom counter, squeezed myself into something stretchy and black, and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
In some ways, the waiting was the worst part. Sweat trickled down my spine as I imagined what might happen to me. I’d read Fifty Shades of Grey. Would there be whips? Ropes? Chains? Bile coated my throat, and with every minute that passed, I hated myself a little more. Hated that I had to give up my dignity and hated myself for being so far out of my depth in this situation. If Rafe were here, he’d know what to do, but he wasn’t, and I didn’t have a clue.
Finally, an ape came back and herded me towards the ballroom. Half a dozen girls stood by the floor-to-ceiling windows, whispering amongst themselves, and all heads turned when I walked in.
“They’ll tell you what to do,” the ape told me.
Their expressions ranged from fear to sympathy to nervous smiles, and when he shoved me in their direction, two of them stepped back so I could join their little group. Three blondes, two brunettes, and a redhead.
