Stealth Attack

by John Gilstrap

  Silva settled himself. This probably did not matter in the grand scheme. Still, sloppiness got people killed.

  He presumed that Monroe’s conclusion was correct. How many FBI agents would be killed in a small Virginia town on any given day?

  Now that the agent was dead, it would be up to Santiago Pérez to decide whether or not to pay Patrick Kelly. As for the return of the girl, that would be Silva’s decision, just as it had been his decision to take her as collateral. He believed that maximum leverage led to most reliable results. Unfortunately, repatriation posed serious risk.

  He shook it off. All of that could wait until Monroe closed the loop on the ransom for the Alexander boy.

  In the end, the boy had to die. At this point, he was an unacceptable liability. While Ciara came from a family who understood the importance of holding secrets, the Alexander kid posed nothing but problems. It made no sense to release him back into the arms of that friend of his—his father figure—who makes his living investigating others. It was one thing to ransom the children of business executives who would fold quickly, pay promptly, and be reimbursed by their companies. It was something else entirely to deal with the children of anyone even distantly related to American law enforcement authorities. And Silva had no choice but to assume that this Jonathan Grave had such connections. After all, he was the chief executive officer of one of the United States’ most respected private investigation firms. It was one thing to poke the sleeping bear that was Security Solutions, but it was something else entirely to hand them an eyewitness.

  Already, Silva regretted making the ransom request in the first place. He did not need the money, and he certainly did not need the hassle. But at this point, with the money no doubt on the way, it was foolish to turn away from it.

  The only reason the boy still breathed was in anticipation of a proof-of-life demand from his people. After that, he would die. Killing him was the only sensible thing to do.

  As for Ciara, well, she had significant market value to him. Having lost his stable of workers to the raiders on his club, he needed to backfill with others. It took time to lure vacationers away from their hotels and party spots, and each time involved risk. Suppose they fought back? Suppose the local beat cop was new and hadn’t yet learned the rules?

  He winced as a shriek of pain from Alberto passed through the walls of his hacienda. His was a terrible business in so many ways. It was a shame that so many people had to suffer, but it was equally shameful that people didn’t listen, that they didn’t simply obey the rules and do their jobs.

  How could Alberto imagine even for a moment that he would escape punishment for what had happened on his watch? Alberto had only two jobs to worry about. He had to make sure that customers paid and then make sure that everyone else did their jobs. Silva had told him that he should have hired older, stronger security guards, but he’d allowed the man to convince him otherwise. Alberto had argued that the community’s fear of the Cortez Cartel in general and of Silva in particular would render any guards unnecessary—that the mere presence of armed men, irrespective of their ages, would be enough.

  And for many years, it had been.

  Silva clicked his laptop to life and navigated over to the video security files that Alberto referred to. It was concerning that on the day after Roman Alexander, loved one of a private investigator, was taken, his gentleman’s club was attacked and burned by strangers. Alberto called them American military, but that was not possible. As long as the feckless Tony Darmond sat in the White House, U.S. armed forces would never dream of following through on the threats they so often made.

  He clicked the security feed icon to open it, then dragged the status bar back a few hours. The screen showed three feeds—outside the front door, inside the reception area, and then inside the service hallway. Each of the bays had its own camera, but the cameras only ran at night to make sure the girls and boys behaved themselves. He linked the three main feeds to the system’s clock so they simultaneously displayed the same action.

  He watched as a Dodge Durango raced from the driveway and slid to a stop in front of the club. As Alberto had attested, one of the men from the vehicle’s right side was enormous. Beyond enormous. At least two meters tall, with the girth of a competitive weight lifter. The other two men looked puny by comparison, though he was certain they were not.

  They were dressed completely in black, including the cloths that covered their faces, and they were heavily armed with rifles and pistols. They moved as a team, as if in rehearsed motions.

  Once they stormed through the front door, Silva closed that feed to increase the sizes of the remaining two.

  The way Alberto Bris surrendered without so much as a threat disgusted him. The security feed had no audio, so he could not hear what was said, but the words clearly terrified Alberto, who immediately fell to his knees and presented his hands to be zip-tied.

  As one of the terrorists tended to Alberto, the other two, including the enormous one, charged into the service bays. They shot without hesitation as some of the customers fought back, and one room at a time, they stole Silva’s children.

  The whole operation took less than three minutes, and five minutes after that, the building was on fire.

  Silva clicked PAUSE, then backed up to the best frame he could find of the three terrorists. The featureless men clearly were professionals. It was in their stances and in the way they moved. The way they held their weapons.

  The big one seemed important to Silva. It was as if he knew of that guy. He’d heard of him before, but from whom? He didn’t remember the details, but he knew that it involved violence. It involved ruining someone else’s business.

  Antonio Filho. The name popped into Silva’s head, seemingly from nowhere. Filho had been a cocaine producer in Colombia—one of Cortez’s prime suppliers—until a paramilitary group like this one had attacked and set everything on fire. Unlike today, where most people had survived, Filho had lost just about everyone. Children were involved there, too, as he recalled, though they were his workforce in the field.

  It had been a long time since Silva and Filho had discussed this, but if he wasn’t mistaken, that attack had involved rescuing someone who had been kidnapped. Rescuing a child.

  Silva saved the photo of the terrorists, then closed the security footage. He’d seen all that he cared to see. He saw no point in watching till the camera lenses melted.

  He opened his encrypted list of email addresses and searched to see if he had anything for Filho.

  He feared no interference in his business from local officials, but if the bottom fell out of the world and they did come after him, they would find no contacts to anyone.

  He found Filho’s address, attached the photo, and asked if these people looked familiar. He clicked SEND and leaned back in his chair. Now he just needed to wait.

  * * *

  Venice’s computer dinged with an incoming email to one of her many covert email addresses—the one that she had given to the kidnapper. This would be the incoming ransom instructions.

  She reached to her landline and called Gail, who answered after the first ring.

  “Yes?” One of the internal security requirements within the team was to never give anything away with a telephone greeting. A simple yes or Digger’s favorite, yup, established the connection and forced the other party to commit to the conversation first. As spoofing increased—the masking of numbers to make them appear as if they belong to someone you know—even caller ID wasn’t enough.

  “Slinger, it’s here,” Venice said. “Can you come—”

  “I’m on my way.”

  The email could not have been less complicated. It merely instructed the recipient to call a number with a Saskatchewan area code within the next ten minutes. Three minutes had passed since the time stamp on the notification. Outside, the sun had dipped below the trees.

  “That’s gonna be a burner,” Gail said.

  “Really?” Venice snapped. “You
don’t think he’d use his home phone?”

  Gail stepped back and sat in one of the chairs around the conference table.

  “Sorry,” Venice said.

  “Stressful time,” Gail said. “Can you put the call on speaker?”

  “I’ll record it, too,” Venice said. She called through her computer. She considered spoofing the number to read as CORTEZ CARTEL, but decided it was a bad idea to poke the bear. Instead, she coded it as WORRIED MOM. She didn’t think Jonathan would approve of showing weakness like that, but she didn’t care. If these monsters took pleasure in her misery, then what was the harm in giving them a little more of a good time?

  She clicked the button and the call connected. “Six three four seven,” a male voice said, reciting the last four digits of the phone number.

  “You know who this is,” Venice said. Her voice would sound entirely different to the man on the other end. Not one of those patently electronic monster voices from the movies, but one that sounded very real and with a slight Maryland twang. “You called me.”

  “Tell me when you’re ready to write,” the man said.

  “How is my boy?” Venice asked. “Why did you have to hurt him like that?”

  “We’re not here to chat,” the voice said. “I’m going to send you a routing number in five seconds. You’ll get it or you won’t, but I will not repeat it. You’ve had time to gather the funds, so the transfer should go easily.”

  He started to read the number, but Venice interrupted him. “We need proof,” she said.

  “You’re not is a position to want anything but your son back.”

  “It’s not my money,” Venice said. It was the cover story they’d agreed upon. “The man whose money it is demands that we see proof that he is alive.”

  “You’ve seen the video,” the man said.

  “That was hours ago. Mr. Grave is not going to hand over two million dollars unless he knows that Roman is still alive.”

  “If he does not, then Roman will surely die.”

  “I understand that,” Venice said. Her voice cracked. “But I am not in charge of this part.”

  “I will arrange something,” the man said. “After the money is deposited.”

  “It has to happen simultaneously,” Venice said. She only hoped that the terror she felt in her heart did not show through in her voice.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We will transfer the money when you hand over my son. Not one before the other, but at the same time.”

  “You are not in a position to bargain here.”

  “I wish it wasn’t like this,” Venice said. “But my instructions are very clear. You can drop him off in a parking lot somewhere. When we see him alive and well, we will transfer the funds.”

  The man fell silent for a few seconds. Venice read that as a positive sign. Had she won him over to her side?

  “I have my instructions, too,” the man said. “They are explicit and exactly as I have presented them to you. My instructions are also to inform you that failure to comply will result in young Roman being dismembered. As a personal aside, I would like to emphasize that the people involved do not exaggerate and they do not hesitate. Now, copy down this number.”

  He read it, and both Venice and Gail wrote it down.

  Venice read it back to confirm, then said, “You really must tell your boss what my boss said.”

  The line went dead.

  Venice looked to Gail, whose form was only a blur through tears. Suddenly, there wasn’t enough air in the room. As her hands began to tremble, her mind went to the kind of dark place where a mother’s mind should never go. She saw Roman in pain, saw him bloody and screaming out for her.

  In that instant, she hated Jonathan Grave. She hated Security Solutions, Fisherman’s Cove, and everything about this life she’d chosen to lead. How many people had to suffer because of her and because of what she and her team did before it all collapsed under the weight of its own tragedy? How many lives could they crush before Karma finally retaliated?

  What kind of hubris had she embraced by claiming to be on the side of the angels when the results of their actions were so awful? Derek Halstrom, the love she’d finally found, had been killed inside her home during an attack. She herself had been attacked in this very office. God only knew what was the real truth of the violence that Digger brought with him while acquiring his own injuries.

  “Stop!” She shouted it while slamming her hands down on the table, startling the shit out of Gail.

  “What?” Gail shouted back.

  It took a few seconds for Venice to reel it all back in. “I was having a panic attack,” she said. “I was seeing failure.” As she locked eyes with Gunslinger, a weird sense of calm floated over her. A hard resolve. “We have to win. There is no other option.”

  “I know that,” Gail said. “And you’re strong enough to plow through this.”

  “Yes, I am,” she said. An idea formed in her head. “I think I know how to do it.”

  She entered the routing number into her computer and went to work.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Roman watched in horror as the animal who was Guzman tortured the man only ten feet away. Guzman had stripped the victim of his clothes, down to his underwear, deaf to his screams as the fabric pulled on the leg that looked all wrong. It hung kind of sideways, and as the pants pulled away, Roman thought he might barf at the sight of a bright white protrusion that could only be a shard of bone.

  The abuse unfolded directly in front of where Roman sat against a stable wall, his bound hands having gone numb a long time ago. He should have closed his eyes to make the images disappear, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not until after he’d seen the blows delivered, then he would look away, as if that would erase the awfulness from the files in his brain.

  It went on forever, it seemed. Until the sun was beginning to disappear. As darkness spread around them, the images of the torture became somehow more awful in the shadows.

  Roman’s vision sparkled as he watched Guzman’s hammer turned the poor prisoner’s elbow inside out. He thought he might pass out, but he had no such luck.

  The screams were unearthly. Inhuman. Stomach-wrenching. He couldn’t tell if the man was screaming for mercy or merely screaming. Roman found himself wishing that Guzman would just kill the man. Make the suffering stop.

  But the blows continued. Guzman was wet with perspiration and spattered blood by the time the prisoner fell unconscious. The poor man’s torso collapsed backward, his head thudding against the filthy floor.

  Guzman stood over his victim, his chest heaving from the effort of it all. As he looked up, he seemed surprised to see Roman still sitting there. In the encroaching darkness, the man’s eyes were indiscernible disks of shadow, but the set of his mouth and jaw were clearly visible.

  He pointed at Roman with the head of the sledge, lifting it as if it weighed nothing. “I told you, didn’t I?” he said in heavily accented English.

  Roman drew up his legs to push himself away, but there was no place to go.

  Guzman stepped closer, the hammer still extended.

  “Please don’t,” Roman said.

  “Let us dance a little,” Guzman menaced.

  * * *

  Angelina Garcia felt as if she were under arrest. The safe house sat on a wooded lot in Oakton, Virginia, an old-growth hamlet of million-dollar homes nestled in Fairfax County. She’d been locked out of her Bureau accounts and had been forbidden to contact anyone about anything. She was to be totally invisible while the official apparatus told the press that an FBI agent had been killed in Manassas and that a man bearing a withheld name was being sought in connection with the murder. As for the identity of the murdered agent, the Bureau would release that once the next of kin had been notified.

  It had been a stupid plan from the beginning, but Angelina didn’t have the courage to reveal her thoughts to Director Rivers personally. The Manassas RA was a small community, a wildl
y dysfunctional family whose members gossiped more than soccer moms. The headquarters carpet cops thought they could control agents’ activities out in the real world, but they’d lost touch with reality.

  When word spread that an agent had been killed, three things would happen simultaneously.

  First, every office would do an inventory of who was present and who was missing. Second, all the reporters within a thousand miles would start working their sources to find out what had happened, and third, every parent, spouse, sibling, and friend of every agent in every office would burn up the switchboards to determine whether their loved one was safe.

  By now, Angelina figured that Jacobs had filled her closest associates in on what the reality was and, perhaps, the reason why, presuming Director Rivers had chosen to trust him. From there, the odds were fifty-fifty whether or not the secret could be kept. If recent history has proven anything, it was that the most efficient way of getting a secret exposed on the front page of the New York Times was to share it with an FBI agent. The prospect of sinking ships with loose lips didn’t seem to be that much of a deterrent anymore.

  On the positive side, the secret only had to be kept for a couple of days at most. But on the vastly larger negative side, that was a couple of days of real worry that her mom would have to endure. Through her, the kids would worry, too.

  That was the element of this plan that Angelina would not tolerate, even if it meant losing her job. This bullshit might end up being her last straw, anyway. In flagrant violation of her quarantine, she texted her mom that she was fine and unhurt. She would be away for a couple of days, but Mom shouldn’t worry. Angelina was not the agent who was killed.

  Then it all went to shit.

  Apparently, the geniuses who concocted this plan had forgotten about social media—how everybody was their own cinematographer. God only knew how many people had flooded that parking lot by the time the official investigation had started. Agents from the Bureau would have been instructed to collect all the phones from people as evidence—with a promise to be returned, of course—but that only worked for the ones who stuck around long enough to be noticed and were foolish enough to confess that they’d taken pictures.