Hostage Zero

by John Gilstrap

  She’d actually giggled at that. It sounded like something out of a movie. “Is this from-” She cut herself off, just in case. “Who sent it?”

  The young officer grasped the visor of his cap with his thumb and forefinger, a gallant tip of his hat. God, he was gorgeous. “Have a good day, ma’am,” he said.

  The envelope contained a second envelope, along with a U.S. passport with her picture but a new name, plus unsigned instructions for her to appear at Andrews Air Force Base in less than three hours, prepared for several days in a warm climate. She was to tell no one of the correspondence, and she was to make no unusual preparations before leaving.

  The Andrews flight had taken her to Hurlburt Field in Florida, and then onto a commercial flight under her new name to Santa Marta. At a precise hour, she was to be sitting at this bar in this hotel, with but one mission: to hand the second envelope to a man who would come by and speak to her.

  It was like being a freaking spy. It took everything she had just to keep her hands from shaking. Could it possibly get any cooler than this?

  Five times now she’d identified men in the crowd who she knew-absolutely knew — would be her contact, only to be disappointed as they glided past her to either meet someone else, or to get a drink, or to do whatever else they did instead of proving her right.

  She needed to settle down. If she made eyes at any more men, she was going to get thrown out on the suspicion of being a prostitute.

  Without conscious thought that she was doing it, Brandy repeatedly stroked the envelope she’d been dispatched to deliver, tracing her finger along the line where the flap sealed against the paper back. She’d been unable to contain her curiosity on the plane, and while in the lavatory she’d sneaked it open to take a look inside. She wasn’t at all surprised by what she’d found. What did surprise her was how little emotion she felt when she realized that because of her actions people would soon be dead.

  Commotion to her left drew her attention to the front door, where one of the soldier-policemen seemed to be having a dustup with someone. When she craned her neck for a better angle, she nearly laughed out loud when she realized that the other side of the confrontation couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. If she wasn’t mistaken, it was one of the boys she’d seen trying to score on the tourists just a few minutes ago. Poor kid probably tried to pick the wrong pocket and got caught.

  Did they cut off people’s hands for stealing in Colombia, or was that somewhere else in the world?

  Brandy tired of watching the show, but as she was turning back to her drink, the strangest thing happened. The policeman stood straight and looked directly at her. Then he pointed.

  She instinctively turned in her seat to see who was standing behind her. No one. Her stomach flipped.

  She turned back around, and sure enough, the man in the green camouflaged uniform was walking right toward her. He had the urchin with him, his fingers clamped on the boy’s ear. The kid walked cockeyed with oversized strides to keep up.

  Brandy felt an inexplicable urge to hide the envelope. She couldn’t do that, of course, because it would call attention to the very thing she was trying to conceal. What on earth could be going on?

  The officer brought the boy close enough that they could speak softly. “Excuse me, senorita,” he said in a heavy enough accent that she could barely understand his words. “Are you…” He let go of the boy’s ear, and gestured for him to complete the question.

  The boy cleared his throat. “Hello, Mrs. Chalmers,” he said in far better English than his escort.

  Brandy stiffened in her seat, her skin electric with chills. That was precisely the sign she’d been waiting to hear. Her mind raced for the countersign. Jesus, don’t blow it now. “Hello, Peter,” she said. “How is Aunt Consuela?” It had seemed like such an odd patter when she was memorizing it, but now she realized that the boy had been part of the plan from the beginning.

  “She is ill,” the boy said. “She wants to see you.”

  That was it. The entire countersign had been completed. The chances of it being an accident-that a random conversation could follow the same pattern-were zero. But what was she supposed to do now? Just hand the package to a boy?

  The kid seemed to be reading her mind because he glanced at the package, and then very subtly shook his head no. Without moving his head, he eyed the policeman.

  “You know this boy?” the officer said. “He is bad boy. Very bad boy. Thief.”

  Oh, great. Now she was going to have to pay a fine for him or something. “No,” she said, hoping that her smile looked genuine. “He’s a friend of mine.”

  The cop looked very confused. “He is friend? Esta un amigo? ” Apparently he thought it might make more sense if he heard it in Spanish.

  Brandy nodded and smiled more widely. “ Si. Yes. He’s my amigo.”

  Definitely a cop, Brandy thought, not a soldier. He was examining her. “But you not from Colombia,” he said.

  Oh, shit! She drew a quick breath, and her heartbeat doubled. Truly, she was not cut out for this line of work. What was she supposed to say to counter that?

  The kid took care of it. He darted the two-step distance that separated them and sat on her lap, wrapping his arms around her neck. “Don’t let him hurt me,” he said a bit too loudly, drawing attention from others in the lobby. “He hits me and kicks me. Don’t let him!”

  The move startled Brandy, but nowhere near as much as it startled the cop. He seemed keenly aware that he was being watched.

  “We’ll be okay,” Brandy said to the officer. Then she gave a little wave to the others in the lobby. “Really, we’re fine.”

  The cop hesitated, but in the end had little choice but to slither away.

  When it was just the two of them again, the boy released his death grip and eyed Brandy’s chest. “Nice boobies,” he said.

  A laugh escaped her throat before she could stop it. “ What? ”

  He pointed. “Boobies. A-okay.” He gave a thumbs-up and beamed a brown-eyed smile.

  She laughed again. “Why, thank you.”

  “Can I see them?”

  “No!” Brandy felt herself blushing as she glanced around the room to make sure they weren’t still being watched. “How old are you?”

  “I’m eighteen,” he said.

  Uh huh. “In that case, I’m seventy-three and way too old for you.”

  The boy gave a resigned shrug. “Okay. You need to follow me.”

  Brandy scowled. “To where?”

  He nodded to the envelope. “To where that needs to go.”

  The boy stood and without looking back, started walking back toward the main door.

  Brandy struggled out of her chair, bumping the table and spilling some of her drink. “Wait!” she yelled at a whisper. Who the hell was this kid? By the time they reached the door, they were walking together, and the boy seemed more than happy to be holding her hand.

  Her hours in the air-conditioning had allowed her to forget just how impossibly hot it was outside. She’d worn cotton capris and a lightweight blouse, thinking that they would fit the bill for “dressing for a warm climate,” but she realized after just one block of walking that she in fact did not own a wardrobe that would make this kind of peanut butter-thick humidity anything but oppressive. She was sweating, for heaven’s sake! That’s okay when you’re in the gym, but out here on the street it was humiliating. She was soaking her blouse. And just what are you supposed to do with a sweat-soaked blouse when you’re in a foreign country?

  Two blocks away from the hotel, they turned right to head farther away from the water and the breezes it provided. “Where are we going?” she asked again.

  The boy shot a smile over his shoulder. “Not far. We’ll be there soon.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Soon,” he said, pointing to a spot somewhere up ahead.

  As the water fell farther away and the temperature rose, so did the terrain, and there was not
hing subtle about the hills. To think that she’d thought Rome was exhausting! That was like a basketball court compared to these hills.

  Brandy tried her best to keep up with the boy who was her guide, but he inevitably pulled away-in one case as far as a half block ahead-before turning around and waiting for her. She felt an odd urge to apologize to the kid.

  Farther still, and higher still. The street started to take on that old Europe look with narrow roadways and unbroken walls of building facades. Fifteen minutes into their sojourn, Brandy began to have second thoughts. The neighborhood was not a place where she would feel comfortable walking alone, and the presence of a twelve-year-old who featured himself a real man did nothing to make her feel safer.

  Come to think of it, what kind of fool follows a kid whose name she doesn’t even know? For all she knew, she was being set up for a mugging or a kidnapping. But if that had been the case, how would he have known the signs and countersigns?

  No, this was the real deal. What had Jerry Sjogren called it? Tradecraft. This was real tradecraft-the life of a covert operator. And let’s be honest, it didn’t get a lot better than this.

  The boy had stopped again, but this time only four or five doors ahead of her. That smile beamed again, and he pointed to a doorway. “We are here,” he announced.

  He pointed at the pink facade of a row house that might once have been grand, but now sagged with age. It occurred to her that this is what San Francisco neighborhoods might look like if no one painted or did repairs for twenty years. The heavy wooden door used to be purple. It was equipped with a substantial old-style knob that looked to be made of brass. Brandy wondered if she would be able to raise a high gloss from it if she polished it aggressively.

  She stood in front of the door on the crumbling brick sidewalk and shot a glance to the boy.

  He smiled.

  “Should I knock?”

  He jabbed a finger toward the door. “Just go in,” he said.

  Brandy hesitated. This didn’t feel right at all. Why was he making such a point of her going first? Was this some sort of a trap?

  “It’s okay,” the boy said. “I am not allowed.”

  Oh, now that made sense, didn’t it? When you’re arranging to have someone killed, you didn’t need nosy street urchins hanging around to witness the event.

  “The man is waiting for you inside,” the boy said. He sealed the deal with that magnificent smile.

  For crying out loud, what was she so nervous about? She was meeting an envoy of the secretary of defense. It was as if she were walking into a meeting with Secretary Leger himself. There could be no safer place in the world for her. This was what tradecraft was all about.

  There’d be no doing it slowly, though. She needed to proceed with the commitment of pulling off a Band-Aid. She climbed the stoop, turned the knob, and pushed the door open.

  In the transition between the bright sunlight and the darkened interior, she felt completely blinded.

  She called, “Hello-oh!”

  What the hell was that? The second syllable of hello escaped without her thinking, driven by a piercing pain above her right breast. For half a second, it registered as a thick pin-prick, but then in the next half second, she realized that it was growing in intensity. She brought her left hand up to touch the pain, and then another jolt struck her again in the chest. This one hurt ten times worse than the first, and though she wanted to yell, she could produce no sound.

  The agony was exquisite-completely off the scale. It caved her in in the middle, and as she doubled over, she got the first glimpse of blood on the floor. How about that? There was blood on her hand, too. And on her blouse. She felt the world spin, and as she struggled to steady herself against the wall, she lost her grip on the envelope. She saw it slipping through her fingers in slow motion, and while she tried to reach for it, nothing about her body was working right anymore. She had no choice but to watch it sail across the filthy linoleum.

  As she slid down the wall to join the envelope on the floor, she saw a form step out of the shadow on the side of the center staircase. He carried something at his side. Something in his hand. As he closed to within a few feet, he raised the object at arm’s length and pointed it at her head.

  Brandy gasped. “Please don’t-”

  Three bullets for a single kill was embarrassing, but there was no other way. True silence was a necessity in the middle of the day, and that meant using subsonic loads to launch a bullet through a suppressor at a slow enough speed that the round would not create its own sonic boom in flight. For light loads like that, Mitch Ponder used a. 22 with a full copper casing. If he could have gotten close enough to guarantee a one-shot kill, he might have used a fully suppressed. 45, but by the time the combustion gases made it through the baffles of a. 45 suppressor, there was never enough left to eject the round. If he’d wanted to live in a world where you only get one shot at a target, he’d have been born in the nineteenth century.

  Silhouetted as she was against the sunlight, a head shot was out of the question, so he’d gone for center of mass. Even then, the distortion of the light caused him to miss the heart twice. Just as well, he supposed. If he’d hit the sternum, the slow, light bullet might not have penetrated the chest cavity at all.

  “Please don’t,” she said.

  Mitch hated it when they begged. No matter how small and underpowered the weapon, a bullet through the eye at close range always made it to the brain. Finally, she lay still.

  Mitch stooped to pick up the envelope his target had dropped and gave it a quick glance to make that no blood had splashed that far. He wasn’t sentimental about these things, but in his line of work, you didn’t want objects in your possession to be spattered. He smiled. Another advantage to using small rounds.

  He saw a shadow on the floor and recognized the silhouette as Jaime, the boy who’d been his legs for this job.

  “Did I do good?” the boy asked. His tone brimmed with pride.

  Mitch stayed on his haunches and pivoted his head. “You did very good,” he said.

  “Then pay me now?” Jaime held out his hand, palm up.

  Mitch smiled. “Absolutely.”

  He proved yet again that a bullet through the eye always made it to the brain. The boy was dead before his knees buckled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  According to the meticulous research package that Venice had assembled, at the height of his career, Bruce Navarro had lived the life of the privileged. Big house, expensive cars and mistresses on both coasts, with a couple more rumored to be ensconced in Europe and Asia. On his tax returns, he reported an annual income north of two million dollars. The bulk of it came from perfectly legitimate clients as the result of legitimate and capable legal work. Nothing in the record proved that Sammy Bell or the old Slater crime syndicate had any direct connection to The Navarro Firm, but Venice had been quick to point out that in her haste she might easily have overlooked a “legitimate” client that was in fact a cutout for a criminal enterprise.

  The information provided by Alice Navarro Harper turned out to be invaluable. The man once known as Bruce Navarro was now Tony Planchette, and his new address was Standard, Alaska, twenty miles or so west of Fairbanks. He’d stayed in reasonably steady contact with his sister over the years, despite the continuing surveillance from both sides of the law, by blanketing Jersey City with junk mail advertising whatever bogus product best served the coded messages on the cards. Technically it was mail fraud, but Gail thought it was a brilliant-albeit expensive-means of covert communication. He mailed thousands of cards so he could communicate with his one sister.

  When Alice shared the stack of coupons she’d accumulated over the years, Gail realized that the accumulated newspapers and magazines in the house were a ruse to camouflage the stack of messages in the minds of anyone who might want to conduct a search. Bruce used a random rotating cipher, the key for which was embedded in the numbers under an otherwise meaningless bar code. The text
itself often read as gibberish that must have annoyed the crap out of some of the recipients, but at the rate of one every six or eight weeks, apparently no one ever got angry enough to call the authorities.

  Besides, this was America. If you wanted to pay the freight to post gibberish to the community, it was your God-given right to do so.

  The essence of the various messages was fairly chatty, offering details on how he was adapting to an invisible life. Gail got the sense that they were as much a reassurance to his sister that he was still alive as they were any real communication.

  And, unless Alice was concealing something, there was no mechanism in place for Bruce to get any information in return. For Bruce’s safety, Alice had to assume that all of her outgoing communication was carefully monitored, and all it would take to raise the heat to intolerable levels would be for them to suspect that she was corresponding with Bruce. That alone would confirm that he was alive, and from there, nothing good could possibly follow.

  This was Gail’s first trip to Alaska, and as she drove her rented Jeep away from the airport parking lot of the Fairbanks airport, she was surprised how featureless an area it was. No hills to speak of, lots of trees and squatty construction that looked as weather-ravaged as any she’d ever seen. It wasn’t that the place was ugly; it just wasn’t as exotic as she’d wanted it to be.

  Gail had spent the final two hours of her flight from Dulles studying the satellite photos that Venice had been able to download for her, showing the location of Bruce Navarro’s home and the geographical features that surrounded it. It had taken some doing, too, since the public satellite mapping sites don’t have a lot of detail of this part of the world. Venice had had to enlist the aid of SkysEye, a private satellite mapping company owned by Lee Burns, a longtime friend of Jonathan’s. For a ridiculous annual subscription fee plus even more ridiculous tasking fees, Lee Burns’s orbiting spy network could accomplish amazing things.

  Navarro’s change in lifestyle had been huge. He went from manicured acreage with horse stables and a swimming pool in the midst of unspeakable wealth in Great Falls, Virginia, to a foundation-mounted double-wide in the middle of nowhere.