“We’ve got to keep this batch on track. What’s the temperature of the water bath?” I heard Hayes ask.
“Twenty-eight degrees.”
A chlorine smell wafted in and burned my nostrils slightly as I sniffed. I kept my head up but didn’t lock eyes with the guard. In captivity, you need to strike a balance between keeping your pride (any cowering can invite a sadist) and being overly confrontational (which can also set one off). Hayes returned and took the man at the door aside. They spoke too quietly for me to hear the words, but I could tell that the man with the rifle was agitated. Hayes seemed to be reassuring him, talking him down, keeping him from violence. It could have been an act to gain my trust, a strategy to make Hayes more sympathetic, the good cop.
He walked into the freezer, and the movements of the air crinkled the plastic sheeting hanging from the wall behind me.
It was strange to see that much gray hair on a man so fit. It made him look much older than his years.
“How have you been, Hayes?” I asked. I was trying to build rapport, to get him to see me as a person, not an object. It’s harder to kill someone you know, though from everything I had heard, that wouldn’t present Hayes with any problems.
“I’ve been better, Byrne. You?”
“Likewise. Are we in Mexico?”
“More or less.”
The guard watched me through the door, still cradling his rifle. Hayes gave him a nod, then leaned toward me, raising his callused hand to my neck.
I pulled away, seized his wrist. He seemed more amused than annoyed. The guard shouldered his rifle, finger on the trigger, and stepped inside, the muscles in his jaw drawn tight. “Your neck,” Hayes said. “I’ll have that cut stitched up for you if you want.”
I touched the skin. I’d thought it was just a scratch. Only then did I feel the crust of blood.
“I’m good.”
“Suit yourself, shipmate.”
I saw a woman walk past the door with a bottle marked Concrete Etch. Acid. Eats through organic material. I checked out the plastic sheeting again and shifted in my chair as the fear balled up my lower belly. “It’s been a long time, Hayes. What’s going on?”
He leaned against the shelf. “We are here to help you, Byrne. We have been watching Riggs and his men. We saw him take you in. We thought he might be setting you up. Or about to threaten or coerce you.”
“I’m only trying to get home,” I said. “I don’t want anything to do with this.”
“We all want to go home. You spent a while with Riggs.”
“Let me walk away. I won’t talk.”
“You’re free to go. This isn’t a kidnapping.”
I looked around. “You had me fooled.”
He smiled. “I can see how you might interpret it that way. We had to take a few precautions in case he was tracking you. Word to the wise: Don’t play ball with Riggs. Once you’re no longer useful, he’ll throw you out. He was gunning for you, Byrne.”
I remembered the shot that nearly killed me as I ran toward the cliffs on the peninsula.
“What did he tell you about me?” Hayes asked. “Did it square with what you remember?”
It didn’t. But there was another Hayes I’d only glimpsed. I remembered the first time we took contact close up. I had finished bandaging up one of our guys and saw Hayes walking away from an enemy KIA, wiping off his Ka-Bar. He’d driven it through the man’s eye. I had to clean up a bite wound on Hayes’s forearm.
“Let me guess. He took the false-humility route, brought out Nazar, and played the martyr. Did he talk about helping soldiers find jobs?”
“Something like that.”
“He runs a security-contracting company like a personal army, poaches the most experienced operators from their units after the U.S. spent millions training them, runs off-book logistics—ships, trucks, matériel—for the Pentagon, and charges three times the going rate to keep his mouth shut.” In the banquet room behind him, a man opened a trunk and start piling ammunition inside it.
On the way back from the peninsula, they had landed and swapped out the boat for late-model SUVs. They had all the gear you would need for amphibious direct action or an on-the-water interdiction. I didn’t know who was helping them, but they had serious support.
“I know the scenery doesn’t help. You’ve got no reason to believe me. That’s fine. I was just trying to give you a heads-up. Check out what Riggs told you, though. Some of it’s true. The truck ambush. That was us. The records office too. No one was injured beyond a few scrapes and bruises. At the point, we went in nonlethal. Riggs and his guys shot back. Think about it. Stay away from him, for your own sake.”
“That’s a threat?”
“It’s good advice.”
“I can walk out of here?”
“We’ll need to make some arrangements. Give ourselves a head start. But, essentially, yes. I can’t say what Riggs will do. If you walk out there, you’re on your own.”
I had a feeling this was a ploy to test my loyalty, see whether I could be turned. If I left, I might get about twenty feet before they shot me in the back of the skull.
“If Riggs is lying, tell me the truth.”
“He’s full of shit,” Hayes said. “But I can’t read you in on the rest. The colonel’s good at all that politician stem-winder business. We keep our mouths shut. Live by it. Trust has to be earned. I wish I could tell you more. I owe it to you to change your mind, but I can’t. I swore. I’ll just say this: We can protect you, keep you safe until this blows over. Or you can walk away. That’s fine. You bailed before. I’ll understand if you do it now.”
“I haven’t seen you in over a decade. And after everything I’ve heard, you think I’ll join you? That’s…”
Hayes ran his hand back through his hair. “Insane. I agree. But that’s the way it is. I can see the bind you’re in, not knowing who to trust, Riggs or me.” The corner of his mouth ticked up. “I guess you could see which one of us kills you first, then go with the other guy.”
One of the women outside called for Hayes. He stood in the door. I took a step closer to hear.
“We’ve got company coming,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Riggs. Five, maybe ten minutes out.”
“Pack it up. Get those trucks out of here. I’ll burn everything exploitable left behind.”
I stepped into the doorway and looked over at the rest of the kitchen. The guard had joined the others in loading out.
On the counter, a glass retort sat over a low flame. Red vapor rose through the sphere, gathered in the neck, and dripped down the long glass tube into a beaker. A soldier stacked thick sections of milled pipe in a trunk and then closed the lid.
I was in a bomb factory. Used filter paper coated in white crystals lay at the very end of the counter. I looked away, tried not to betray what I had seen and understood.
A hand gripped my shoulder. It was the guard. I had seen all their faces. I could identify them.
“What are you looking at?” he asked. “And how the hell did Riggs find us so fast?”
“You got the tag from his wallet, right?” Hayes said.
“Yeah.”
Hayes stood on the other side of me. “Anything you want to tell us, Byrne?”
The man at my shoulder pulled his sidearm. It was suppressed, good for an execution.
Hayes stepped a foot away from me and looked me over. Then he reached for the bandage on my head, grabbed the corner, and tore it off.
I winced from the sting as the laceration opened up again.
“Riggs is three minutes out!”
“This guy is fucking doubled,” the man Hayes had called Speed said. He pulled me closer and put the gun to the back of my head.
Hayes took his knife out and stood in front of me. He folded the bandage over the blade and cut through it. Silver filaments glinted in the light.
“Pretty good,” he said.
“They put that on me at the police
station,” I said. “What is it?”
“Radar-responsive tag. We’ve been fielding them only over the last couple years. Flash radar at it and it bounces back a unique ID pattern from miles away.”
He passed it to Speed. “Flush that.” The man headed down a corridor. The rest of the crew was in motion, hauling gear toward the main doors.
Hayes faced me. “We’ve got to run. You’re coming with us, Byrne. No time to sort this out now.”
“I get it.” I moved toward the open doors in the rear of the kitchen. There were too many of them for me to escape out the back. I needed a distraction. “Can I help load?”
“Sure.” He went along, tossing gear into duffels. I walked to the far wall, near the door, and rested my hand on the counter as I leaned over to lift a Pelican case. I pinched one of the pieces of filter paper as gently as I could and hid it in my palm. It smelled like bleach, which probably meant it was primary explosive. That could easily blow from friction, shock, heat, or nothing at all, and it would take my hand off. As I reached down for a second case, I slipped the packet into the jamb of the door leading from the kitchen to a storage room. Then I knocked the doorstop out. The door slowly started to swing closed.
A man and a woman rolled a heavy crate toward the banquet room, and as they forced it across a threshold, the moving blanket over it fell forward.
Arabic writing covered the side, and I couldn’t help but think that whatever weapon had been stolen from that armored truck was sitting fifteen feet from me. I watched as the door closed the last few inches to the jamb and steeled myself for a sprint. The filter paper blew, barely a gram of explosive. Without a second’s hesitation, Hayes’s crew shouldered their weapons and ran toward the blast. I sprinted the other way, shoved the rear exit open, and ran into an alley behind the restaurant.
Cool, dry air enveloped me. The night was pitch-black, and after the explosion and the lights inside, I couldn’t see anything. I stumbled over something, heard what sounded like a plastic bucket skitter off to my right. My eyes adjusted and I saw ten feet of concrete-block wall looming at the end of the alley ahead of me.
It was a dead end. I sped up, jumped, planted my foot, and got the tips of my fingers onto the top of the wall. The rough edge of the concrete cut into my skin. My shoes skidded as I tried to push myself up, but I managed only to push out and tear myself off the wall.
Footsteps came from behind me.
Silhouetted in the door of the restaurant, a gunman raised his rifle toward me. There was no cover, nowhere to run.
A crack broke through the quiet, echoed off the walls. With what they were firing, that meant the bullet was already here. My body tensed. But there was no pain. I looked back to see the truck pull away at the far end of the alley. It must have been the lift gate slamming down.
A second figure appeared in the doorway and leaned toward the gunman, who lowered his weapon.
“Good seeing you, Byrne.” It was Hayes’s voice. “Be careful out there.”
I dragged a pallet over, propped it against the wall, and climbed the wooden slats like a ladder. I jumped off the top as it fell back and then hauled myself over the wall.
Hayes had called off the shot. I appreciated it, but it would take more than not killing me for him to earn my trust. Maybe he just couldn’t afford to make that kind of noise and give away his position. Or maybe I was supposed to draw fire. I had to get to the colonel before he decided I was one of Hayes’s men and before Hayes’s crew had a chance to pick me up again.
The next alley was like a UN of garbage, with dumpsters for a Chinese restaurant, a taco shop, and a Thai place. Most signs were in English. I must have been just north of the Mexican border. What I thought was a shadow was a crowd of rats that flowed away like a parting sea as I passed through.
I ran for a few minutes until I found a pay-phone kiosk. As I came around, I saw it was empty except for a few burger wrappers. The phone had been ripped out. I was on a commercial drag of one-story buildings, all vacant or closed for the night. A car rolled by at the far end of the street. I stepped back into the alley and walked along the rear of the stores.
I looked through a high window and saw a phone in an office. The caulk around the glass was dried out, the frame rotting wood, the window single-glazed, about eighteen inches high and three feet wide.
The putty gave way easily as I dug it out with my thumb. After a minute, the glass started to lean out from the frame with a creak. I wriggled it out, then hauled my chest up to the ledge, pulled myself through, and tumbled forward onto the beige carpet. I picked up the phone on the desk.
“Directory Assistance.”
“I need the police, nonemergency.”
It took a few minutes to raise the local cop from the interrogation. They dropped the call on the transfer, and I had to start from scratch. Finally, a desk sergeant who’d been around that afternoon put me through to the officer’s cell. He gave me Hall’s number.
Hall sounded out of breath and surprised that I had called.
“Byrne? Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
There was a loud noise as someone took the phone away.
“This is Riggs. Where are you?”
I looked out the front window and gave him the address.
“Are you with the operators?”
“I got away.”
“Do you know where they are?”
“They’re close by, but I’m alone.” I heard something in the alley, ducked behind the desk, and lowered my voice. “Can you get me out of here?”
“We’re almost there,” he said. “Sit tight. Do not move. You’ll be okay.”
“I’ll be here.”
See which one of us kills you first. Hayes had been joking, but maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.
Chapter 15
COLONEL RIGGS STOOD beside the open door of a van. Inside it, a tech sat hunched over a laptop.
“What happened to the signal?” Riggs asked.
“We lost the pattern. They may have removed the tag. It’s going to take another minute or two to triangulate the last position. We’re within a mile.”
He turned and barked to the men. “Get ready!”
A black Mercedes pulled up. From the back stepped Caro. He had arrived at LAX two hours earlier, connecting through Frankfurt on his way from the Emirates.
Caro stepped out of the car, buttoned his suit jacket, and marched to meet Riggs. They greeted each other, and Riggs took him aside.
“The shipment is gone,” Riggs said. “Hayes took it. We tracked him here.”
“Does he have it with him?”
“We don’t know.”
“How far is he?”
“Within a mile.”
“We knew this was going to be difficult. The right thing always is. We’ll get it back.”
Caro’s arrival had brought Riggs calm for the first time since the cargo was stolen. Caro came from a hard part of the world. He and Riggs had been through a lot of ugliness together. And Caro understood, in a way few Americans did, about means and ends, the necessities of small savagery here and there to achieve a larger peace.
A voice came from Riggs’s radio. It was Hall. “Byrne called. We have his exact location. He wants us to get him out.”
“And the rest?”
“Rough location. Within five hundred meters.”
“Good.”
Riggs briefly outlined the situation to Caro.
“Do you have someone you trust to take care of Byrne?” Caro asked. “Who knows the whole story?”
“Hall.”
“Put him in the lead.”
“You came straight from the plane?”
Caro nodded. Riggs gave him a SIG Sauer. Caro checked the brass in the chamber and switched it to his left hand.
“May I borrow that?” he asked and pointed to Riggs’s pocket.
“Sure,” Riggs said. He pulled out a knife, a black Benchmade folder. He flicked open t
he five-inch blade. It would be more useful to Caro, who liked to work quietly and up close.
Caro gave the edge a quick inspection. “Thank you,” he said. “Why don’t we go after the single man first and see what he has to say about the others before we take them out. What did you say his name was?”
“Byrne. Tom Byrne. It should be easy. He thinks we’re coming to save him.”
“Good.” Caro closed the knife. “Let’s try to take him alive.”
Chapter 16
AS I CROUCHED in the dark, waiting for the colonel to arrive, I thought about the last time I’d seen John Hayes, or at least the last time I could remember him distinctly. I’d stabbed him in the chest with a needle, with five needles, really. When someone loses a lot of blood, the vessels constrict. It’s impossible to find a vein and start an IV, so there is a tool called a FAST1 that looks like an EpiPen. You slam it into the breastbone just below the throat. The five needles go into the marrow of the sternum, allowing you to deliver fluids without having to go through a vein.
Hayes and I survived that day. Our team had been sent to scout a roadside cluster of buildings to see if anyone was making IEDs there. We called the highway through the area Shakedown Street, because of all the contact we took when we drove through. Our objective was at kilometer marker 38, so we called it K-38.
It turned out to be a major complex for the enemy militias. One moment we were walking through a silent village. The next, gunfire poured in from three sides.
The RPG that cut up most of my guys left me with a grade-three concussion, so I’m hazy on the details. The official write-up says I killed nine.
Corpsmen and medics are combatants first. The tactical-combat casualty-care guidelines lay it all out: Your first duty is to return fire, take cover, and put down smoke. Only after you eliminate the enemy fire do you look after your Marines. There’s no point in stopping a hemorrhage if more bullets are coming. You or the casualty or both are just going to get hit again.
The explosion knocked me out for a moment. When I came to I was still deaf from the blast, and when my hearing started to come back I heard men crying through the ringing in my ears.
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