Stealth Attack

by John Gilstrap

  Dawkins’s face pinched up. “I’m still here because I’m going with you. At least I thought I was.”

  “I thought you had a job,” Boxers said.

  “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

  “No,” Jonathan said. “I just don’t—”

  “Call it revenge,” Dawkins said. “I’ve seen these sonsabitches from a whole different angle than you. My fingertips still hurt on cold days from when they pulled out my fingernails.”

  “That was a different cartel,” Jonathan reminded.

  “Different pockets on the same suit,” Dawkins replied. “Yeah, I’ve got job, and it’s a damn good one. I get to help Uncle Sam move at a glacial pace to bring justice to those assholes in a court of law where they’ll probably never show up. Working with you guys is more . . . satisfying.”

  “Hey,” Gail said over the speaker. “I’m outta here. I’ve got to go knock on some doors.”

  The line went dead, and Jonathan kept his eyes on Dawkins. They’d worked together before and he was a good operator. But the more times they tapped that well, the more Thor learned of their operations. And the more he knew, the more vulnerable they could all be.

  “I don’t know what this hesitation is all about, and I’m not going to beg for the chance to risk getting shot up, but if you’re heading to Mexico—especially if you’re heading to Sinaloa—I know people who can help flatten the discovery curve. It’s your call.”

  Roman’s clock was ticking faster and faster. If Dawkins could help them move farther faster, then there really wasn’t much of a decision to be made.

  “Okay,” Jonathan said. “Welcome aboard. Again.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Less than a minute after they’d disconnected from Gail, Jonathan’s phone buzzed with an incoming text message from Venice. “Check your email and get back to me ASAP.”

  “Uh-oh,” Jonathan said. This was odd at two levels. One, Mother Hen rarely texted him unless it was directions for his GPS. She preferred phone calls, as did he. And two, she rarely deployed urgent pleas like “ASAP.”

  “What’s up?” Boxers asked.

  “I don’t know yet.” The message from Venice was essentially a forwarded email from Roman. “Roman found a computer. Maybe this isn’t as bad as we thought.”

  After reading the introduction, all three of them shared a look of dread.

  When the video was over, Boxers said, “We’re not going to Mexico anymore. We’re friggin’ invading Mexico.”

  The video changed everything. Any lingering doubt about the stakes had just been obliterated.

  Roman’s script had mentioned nothing of the cartels, but the language and the imagery—breaking bones and sending the body home in pieces—were dark with cartel fingerprints. And since the cartels were involved, there was no way in hell that Mexican law enforcement officers would lift a finger. Not an effective finger, anyway. They had their own families to think about. God knew they couldn’t make ends meet on their salaries alone, and they wouldn’t want to give up that lucrative second income they earned by simply not seeing anything illegal going on.

  “Are you going to pay the ransom?” Boxers asked.

  “If it comes to that, sure,” Jonathan said. A million here, a million there, Jonathan couldn’t outlive his money in three lifetimes.

  “Be careful,” Dawkins said. “A lot of this does not fit the cartel model. First of all, Roman was not the target of the hit. That was Ciara Kelly, and the purpose was not money. It was influence. That’s the first departure.”

  “The cartels are terrible people,” Jonathan said. “But they always pay their bills.”

  “Who’s to say these guys who have Roman are even with the cartel?” Dawkins asked.

  Jonathan’s phone buzzed again, this time with a call from Venice. He put it on speaker. “Hi, Ven. How’re you holding up?”

  “What are you going to do?” As blunt and direct a question as he’d ever heard from her.

  “The mission hasn’t changed,” Jonathan said. “We’re getting him back.”

  “Are you paying the ransom?”

  “I will if it comes to that,” Jonathan said.

  “How can it not come to that?”

  “Have you gotten the terms yet?” he asked. He wanted to push the conversation back to current action, not hypothetical decisions.

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay, then, for the time being, we stay on the course we’ve charted,” Jonathan said.

  Venice fell silent on the other end of the line.

  “Mother Hen? Are you there?”

  “It occurs to me,” she said in a heavy tone, “that you’ve always said it was a mistake to pay the ransom.”

  Jonathan’s breath caught in his chest. He had, indeed, always said that.

  “You said that once a ransom is paid, all the advantage goes to the bad guy. You said that when the reason to keep people alive goes away, so do people’s lives. I believe that that is your pithy quote.”

  Jonathan glanced at Boxers and got a silent Don’t pull me into this.

  “I don’t know what you’re looking for, Ven.”

  “Let’s start with an honest assessment,” she said. “The rules don’t change just because he’s my son.”

  “Actually, they kinda do,” Jonathan said. “I’ve known you both since you were born.”

  “Then pass command to someone else,” Venice said. “I need you to think clearly.”

  “I think I’m thinking as clearly as I can with as little information as we have,” Jonathan said.

  “I know you have a plan,” she said. “You always have a plan.”

  How could she read his mind like that? “I think it might be too generous to call it a plan,” he said. “Think of it more as a template.”

  He explained that he’d done similar operations in the past. The weakest moment for the bad guys in any ransom exchange was the exchange itself. Transferring money could be done remotely and at the speed of light. The physical transfer of a person, on the other hand, required someone to show themselves, if only it was the hostage.

  Then there was the timing of events. When a hostage transaction was truly about money and not some international political bullshit, the deposit of the funds and the transfer of the hostage had to happen simultaneously if they were going to happen at all. The kidnapping industry among the cartels had put a whole new spin on the meaning of “Mexican standoff.”

  Jonathan’s play in the past had been to take positions at the handoff location well ahead of the scheduled transfer. If everyone played by the rules, the bad guys got rich on ill-gotten gains and the hostage got to go home to his or her family. If the bad guys broke the rules, it came down to marksmanship to make sure that the hostages were not killed in the crossfire.

  “This is a high-risk game,” he concluded. “A dangerous game.”

  Venice asked, “Suppose the rules of the transfer don’t meet your criteria?”

  “Sooner or later, they always meet the criteria,” Jonathan said. “We’re talking lots of money, and these dickheads love their money. There might be some negotiation in the middle, but sooner or later, we’ll get what we need.”

  “Meanwhile, Roman continues to suffer.” Venice’s voice cracked again.

  Jonathan hated speaking to frightened parents. It was never his strong suit. Now that the frightened parent was essentially family, he hated it even more. But she had a right to know the facts for what they were.

  “This is a shit sandwich, Ven,” he said. “There’s no good way to eat it, and it’s going to be damned unpleasant. But we need to face some basics. First, that beating they laid on Roman? That was for the benefit of the camera. We know that because the blood was still flowing.”

  “And they said they’d keep beating him until they got the ransom.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Boxers said, earning an angry look from Jonathan.

  “I’ve got this, Big Guy.”

  “I
’m just sayin’,” Boxers continued. “For now, he’s an important asset to them. Makes no sense for them to bust him up so long as he doesn’t try to get away or pull some other stupid shit.”

  Dawkins added, “And from the brief glimpse we got of his shackles, that’s not likely.”

  On the other end of the phone, Venice snuffled.

  “We’ve never lost a PC,” Jonathan said, referring to precious cargo, the hostages they’d rescued over the years. “We’re sure as hell not starting now. The instant you hear from them again, let me know. Do not respond on your own, and do not get the police involved.”

  “Suppose they can help?” she asked.

  “Think it through. We’ve walked this walk dozens of times. Now that this is an international incident, not only are federal law dogs gonna want in on it, we’ll have to deal with State Department pukes, too. Chances are good that we’re going to have to break some things and hurt some feelings before this is all over. We don’t need that kind of paper trail. And Roman doesn’t need that kind of delay.”

  “What do I do if they call?”

  Interesting question. Jonathan couldn’t imagine that happening under the circumstances, but this was a bizarre op already. What’s a little more bizarreness?

  “I can’t tell them that we’ll call them back,” Venice pushed when he didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

  “No,” Jonathan agreed. “I don’t suppose you can. If it comes to that, tell them that you don’t know where I am at the moment and that you’re tearing up the world trying to find me. Obviously, you’re going to record the call and do everything you can to track it down, but they won’t know what your skills are. Treat the contact as a research opportunity. Gather every bit of data you can find.

  “If he dumps out a lot of information on where to make the pickup, trace all that down and give us as much info as you can. Here is the key element, and you cannot forget this: No boy, no money. Hard stop. They need to provide real-time proof of life. The instant they do that is the instant that we get Roman back.”

  It was Venice’s turn to be silent.

  “Talk to me, Mother Hen. Are we on the same page?”

  More silence. Then: “Yes.”

  “Okay, I gotta go. Remember, don’t let thirty seconds pass between the ransom details and getting in touch with me.”

  He clicked off.

  “A little abrupt there, don’t you think, Boss?” Boxers asked.

  “We’ve got shit to do,” Jonathan said. “Holding her hand is not even on the list.” He turned to Boxers. “Your turn, Big Guy. We’ve got to get fly a thousand miles or so into Mexico, and we’ve got to get there with guns and ammo.”

  “Whoa,” Dawkins said. “Then what? Knowing what airport they flew into hours and hours ago is a big step from knowing where they are. It’s a big country. How are you going to find two people who may or may not even be there?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that yet,” Jonathan said. “But we do have names. We have Ernesto Guzman, the guy who stopped Alvarez, the RoadRunner driver. We’ve got his boss, Cristos Silva, and we’ve got somebody named . . . What was it?”

  “Billy Monroe,” Dawkins reminded. “And I know the names Guzman and Silva. Maybe there’s a way to track them down.”

  “These are names,” Big Guy said. “More one-offs. It’s a big country, remember?”

  “Not necessarily,” Dawkins said. “This Guzman dude has some connection to the Cortez Cartel, right? By definition, if we stay consistent with our assumptions, that means he’s got to be dialed into the bad-guy network south of the border. DEA is not completely blind in that network. Just the opposite, in fact. We’ve been infiltrating with various levels of success for years. That means he’s not just another random guy.” Dawkins seemed excited. “He’s a bad guy with connections that I might be able to leverage.”

  “You tellin’ us you have a key to the front door of the Bad Guy Club?” Boxers asked.

  “If not to the front door, then certainly to a window. A good friend of mine runs a watering hole down at Mazatlán, not far from the airport. If she doesn’t know Ernesto Guzman, she can probably point us in the direction of someone who will.”

  “How good a friend is she?” Jonathan asked.

  Dawkins smiled and winked. “Good enough to make sure the blade is sharp if she has to cut my throat.”

  “Hell, I have relatives I don’t like that much,” Boxers said.

  “Back to you, Big Guy,” Jonathan said. “What do we have to do to go across the border?” Jonathan asked.

  * * *

  Angelina Garcia loved her car, though she took a lot of heat for it. Most of her colleagues preferred SUVs, and those who didn’t mostly seemed to go for tree-hugging hybrids. Her Mini Cooper was neither large nor especially fuel efficient, but it was as cute as could be. She’d fallen in love with the brand after the first of the Bourne movies with Matt Damon, and she’d owned three since then. She considered it to be a dachshund of a car—you wanted to laugh at the looks until you realized what a hearty beast it really was.

  Today, she was running later than she’d like, but her boss had bombarded her with a thousand questions about the Pérez case, and he was not a man to walk out on just to feed your face with barbecue. Although that’s exactly what she was about to do.

  She only had forty-five minutes. She had a conference call with Washington at 1:30, and that was something to be very, very prepared for. In truth, she probably should have just eaten on campus today, but to hell with that. This was Fat Freddie day, and come hell or high water, she was not turning away from his Carolina-style pulled pork. It was really that wonderful.

  Ray Jacobs, her boss, had his Jockeys in a knot over the fact that Fernando Pérez made bail. They needed his testimony, or they needed him to rot in jail. Preferably both. Having him run around free—even on a million-dollar bond—was nobody’s preference, and the U.S. attorney’s office had made that clear to the judge.

  It wasn’t Angelina’s fault that judges don’t always listen to prosecutors, but Ray Jacobs was the kind of guy who had to hold someone under him responsible for any shit that might flow down on him. Ray was a special leader that way.

  She prayed every night that she’d get her transfer to Salt Lake City. One of the many quirks that separated her from most of her fellow agents was the fact that she had no desire to one day become a special agent in charge of anything. And she certainly did not aspire to any job in any corner of headquarters in Washington. The Northern Virginia Resident Agency was close enough, thank you very much.

  Like any other bureaucracy as vast as the FBI, climbing the ladder meant crawling up your own ass while kissing the asses of others. The brass had somehow lost touch with the real world, and Angelina didn’t want that to happen to her. She got into this business for all the recruitment poster reasons. Truth, justice, the American way. All that sappy stuff.

  She’d done damn good work so far with the Pérez case. She’d ridden Fernando like the cowgirl she once was—and would be once again, when she settled on the spread she’d bought in Utah. She was the one who made Fernando break, made him lose focus and drop his guard. His father never would have discussed the details that Fernando had. He’d thought he was among friends, and he was pissed that Angelina had left him so little room for error.

  He should have known that every breath he’d taken in the past six months had been watched, recorded, and catalogued. Such was the price for bringing poison across the border for distribution to little kids. Such was the price for financing the trafficking of children across the border, only to then rent them out an hour at a time to American psychos.

  Angelina was doing God’s work on earth, and she was proud of it.

  But she was ready for a change. Everything about Washington, DC, and its suburbs was bad for kids. Raised in overprivileged and self-important affluence, Northern Virginia kids learned not to respect anything but their own feelings and priorities. Raised so
close to politics, they learned that there’s nothing wrong with lying, so long as the lies served to benefit themselves and their friends. It was a toxic place, and she was ready to punch out.

  Fat Freddie’s took up both floors of an ancient building that sat within fifty yards of the railroad tracks. Famous not just for his barbecue and beer, Fat Freddie Franklin had built a reputation in Prince William County as a philanthropist. Every week, he sponsored a fundraiser for one cause or another. He had a special warm spot for first responders and military, so that made the mega-calories go down a little easier.

  The fifteen-minute delay in her arrival had made a difference. The lot was way more full than it normally was.

  She spied a spot reasonably close to the building, but closer to the Dumpster than she liked. Better to walk a little farther than inhale the stink of grease and garbage, she thought. She kept looking.

  * * *

  Patrick Kelly saw the Mini Cooper the instant it turned the corner a block away. How could he not? It was a shade of yellow that just shouldn’t happen. Having nearly given up on her, he felt real relief that she’d finally arrived.

  As she approached, though, the relief turned to dread.

  You can walk away from this.

  Was that the smart thing to do or the cowardly thing?

  It’s for Ciara.

  If he didn’t go through with this—if he didn’t commit murder—then wouldn’t he be causing the murder of his only child?

  None of this was right. None of it was fair. This wasn’t what he’d signed on for when he agreed to help Pérez and Silva. It was outrageous for them to put him in this position.

  The Mini Cooper slowed as it entered the parking lot, which was crowded with many times the number of cars he’d expected to see in a town so small in the middle of the day.

  He could do this. The key was to not hesitate. Not even for an instant.

  As he leaned to his right, his hand found the pistol grip for his AR-15. He’d only shot it a few times at the range, but he knew how it worked. The magazine was in place in the well, but the dust cover was closed. He didn’t know if the bolt was closed or not. He didn’t know if there was a round in the chamber, for that matter.