The Polaris Protocol

by Brad Taylor

  The leader scowled like a child and said, “Didn’t show, or didn’t get pointed out?”

  Jack felt his survival time shrinking to seconds. He said, “I swear, he wasn’t at the airport. Maybe he came earlier or he’s coming later, but he didn’t leave while we were there.”

  Indifferent, the sicario said, “I think he’s telling the truth. Your information was ‘within the next couple of days,’ correct? It’s the same flight number each day. He might show tomorrow.”

  The leader said, “I might need you back in Juárez. It’s on fire right now and we may have an opportunity.”

  “What has happened?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s another player on the board, and he’s hitting Sinaloa. I have to think about it. Get more information. I’ll talk to you later with a decision.”

  Thrown back into the basement, the first thing Jack noticed was that he had a new neighbor. A boy of about eighteen was sitting in the corner in stylish jeans and an expensive shirt. Looking at Jack with the catatonic stare of someone not yet understanding what had happened to him.

  Or maybe understanding completely.

  27

  “Koko, roger. That’s our target.”

  Jennifer rolled her eyes at her call sign, wishing like hell she could change it to something more dignified. She turned to Pike and said, “Well, that pretty much eliminates the capture/interrogation plan.”

  “Yeah. I agree. It wouldn’t be too smart to kidnap a Mexican law enforcement guy in the Federal District.”

  After exfiltrating Retro across the border, linking up with some doctors read on to Taskforce activities, they’d received the go-ahead to explore from the Oversight Council. Flying from Juárez to Mexico City, otherwise known as the Distrito Federal, or DF, they’d begun to track the phone of the person who had received the call from the Sinaloa traitor.

  The primary trace had shown up centered on a tidy row of town houses located in the northeast of the city center, just outside the historic district in a middle-class neighborhood. Since the phone location itself wasn’t down to the meter, but instead had a circle of probable error upwards of the size of a football field, they’d spent most of yesterday locating the specific bed-down site, collating the multiple pings of the phone into layers that allowed them to neck down exactly which house contained it. The research done, they’d begun static surveillance this morning to refine a course of action.

  Jennifer had noticed a man in some type of police uniform exit the garage of the town house, followed by a woman carrying a baby, whom he kissed before walking to a car farther up the street. Since the garage serviced all three houses, at best it meant their target lived next to a policeman. At worst it meant the target was a policeman. She’d had Knuckles and Decoy tail the man until he was far enough away to get another ping that wouldn’t be contaminated by their previous traces. And had confirmed the worst.

  She said, “You think that phone intel was bogus? They killed a guy for no reason?”

  “Maybe, but more than likely it means the cop is bogus. Playing both sides of the fence. Either way, we can’t take him down.”

  Jennifer felt the only lead to her brother withering away. “What about a B and E, just to see what he’s got in the house? Might give us something.”

  “Yeah, but I just saw his burglar alarm go back in. We can’t do a surreptitious entry with a baby and mother inside.”

  As he was speaking the garage door opened again, and the mother exited pushing a stroller.

  Jennifer said, “There goes the alarm. Want to try it?”

  Pike thought a moment, then said, “A daylight B and E on an unknown floor plan? We don’t even know the lockset.”

  “I’ll use a window. I can pop that with a credit card.”

  “Jennifer, the windows are all barred.”

  She pointed above the garage. “Not on the second floor.”

  Jennifer saw him wavering and drove home the slipping time. “Pike, it’s an empty house but won’t be for long. We’re wasting an opportunity to neck down the threat.”

  He sighed. “You mean neck down your brother’s location.”

  “Yeah, that too, I guess. I hadn’t thought about it.”

  He smiled at her joke and keyed the radio. “Knuckles, what’s your location?”

  “Coming back down the south side, about two blocks away.”

  “Hold what you got. There’s a woman in a stroller headed your way. Get eyes on her and give us early warning when she starts heading back to my location.”

  “Roger all. What’s up?”

  “Koko’s going to do something stupid.”

  Jennifer smiled and opened the glove box, pulling out the little tool kit that came with the rental. She selected a small flat-head screwdriver and Pike said, “You see any chance of compromise, get out. Don’t push it, understand?”

  She nodded and slipped into the alley between the garage and the building next door. Barely three feet wide, it stank of garbage and had a stagnant stream of some ominous liquid running down the middle. She saw that the little corridor ended in a brick wall, connecting the town houses to the next building. She reached the wall, glanced back down the alley to the street, and began to climb like it was a chimney, placing one foot on the facing wall and one behind her, then doing the same with her hands. She inched up until she could get her hands on the parapet of the roof, then pulled herself over.

  She keyed her radio. “I’m up. Moving to breach.”

  Keeping low so as to remain out of view of the street, she reached the first town house, scuttling under the windows to the second one. She said, “We’re positive on the location, right?”

  Pike said, “I’ll be absolutely positive until you tell me I’m wrong. Second one in.”

  Great. That’s a lot of confidence. She inserted the screwdriver into the jamb of the window, then gently rocked it back and forth, springing free the latch. She placed her hand on the pane and pushed, but the window remained closed. She studied it for a moment, then saw the problem.

  Painted shut.

  She ran the edge of the screwdriver around the pane, digging out as much latex paint as she could, then wedged the flat end back into the jamb. She lifted the handle, hearing the window groan from the leverage. She gave the handle another pull and the window popped free, sounding as loud as gunfire. Jennifer froze, straining to hear someone coming to investigate. After thirty seconds, she opened the window fully, then slipped inside.

  She debated leaving the window open but decided to close it to prevent anyone from becoming curious on the street. She saw she had entered a nursery, with the cloying, sweet smell of diapers and powder.

  Her radio came to life. “Pike, woman is headed back.”

  “How far out?”

  “Look on your map. See the park to the south? All she did was circle it with the kid. Now she’s coming home. You probably got six or seven minutes, unless she stops again.”

  “Roger all—break. Koko, exfil.”

  She left the nursery at a trot, saying, “Pike, I just got inside. I haven’t found anything yet.”

  She entered the master bedroom and quickly surveyed, hearing, “I can’t help that. Get out.”

  She swept the closet in the bedroom and found nothing. Moving down the hall, she entered a third room, a tiny cubicle. She saw a filing cabinet and a desk. She ran to the desk and began shuffling papers, all in Spanish.

  No good. I can’t tell if any of this is important.

  She heard, “Koko, you copy? I have the woman in sight now. She’s about three minutes out headed right toward me.”

  And the first thing she’s going to do is put that child in the nursery. Pike’s right, you need to leave.

  But she couldn’t leave with nothing. Couldn’t abandon her brother. Jennifer opened the filing cabinet and pulled out a f
older, seeing official documents. Each was a printout of some kind with a picture of a person in the upper left corner. Most had a red X drawn across the face, but one was untarnished. None were her brother.

  “Koko, this is Pike. She’s entered the garage. Status?”

  Out of time.

  She took a picture of the one unmarked document with her smartphone and heard the door close downstairs. She gently closed the drawer with the files, then began to ease out of the room but heard the woman cooing to the baby on the stairs. She froze, knowing she couldn’t get down the hall without the mother seeing her.

  She heard, “Damn it, Koko, what’s the story?”

  She clicked her transmitter twice and heard, “Well, that’s just great. Another damn teammate ignoring my exfil call. I’m coming in. I’ll get her attention and you get out.”

  She clicked rapidly four times.

  “Roger all. Story of my life. I’m standing by.”

  She heard the woman pass by the office and waited. The mother began singing in Spanish, then began making shushing noises. Eventually, Jennifer heard her footsteps on the stairs. When she was sure she was clear, she slipped out of the office and glided as lightly as she could to the nursery.

  She saw the baby in a crib, sound asleep. She opened the window and it gave a slight screech. The baby woke up and began to cry.

  Jennifer flung herself out onto the roof, thinking, Sorry about that, Mom.

  No sooner did she have the window closed than she saw a shadow in the room. She flattened against the wall, then slithered back to the alley. She dropped into the goo at the bottom, splashing the foul liquid on her shoes.

  Reaching the car, she saw Pike’s scowl. She closed the door and he said, “Tell me you have the exact grid to your brother, because this favoritism stuff is getting old.”

  She shook her head, feeling the tears well up and hating them in front of Pike. “I don’t think I found anything at all.”

  28

  Carlos waited outside the customs gate of terminal one at Benito Juárez International, feeling like someone had poured sandpaper into his eyes. He hadn’t slept in close to twenty-four hours and wondered how many Sinaloa hit men were now hunting him. The very fact that he was alive would be enough to brand him with suspicion. It wouldn’t matter that he’d escaped the assault on the Juárez house by the skin of his teeth. To Sinaloa, it would look planned. Or he’d simply be made an example of so they could pretend they knew what was going on.

  As for him, he had no idea. He’d received a call that the second American, Jennifer Cahill’s partner, was being brought through the gate, then all hell had broken loose. Instead of fighting, he had chosen to run, and had spent the last twenty-four hours driving from Juárez to Mexico City, weaving through towns and avoiding the major thoroughfares to keep him out of Sinaloa clutches.

  He’d made two phone calls on the way. One to Mr. Guy Fawkes—aka Arthur Booth—in Colorado, telling him the time was almost right to come to Mexico and having him start to dig into Grolier Recovery Services. Use his skills to penetrate and find out what they really did, because something wasn’t right about that company.

  After hanging up, he had laughed at the thought. Something isn’t right. That’s putting it mildly.

  The supposed anthropologist woman had had the balls to drive across the border by herself into cartel territory and had found the house with nothing more than a voice mail, then had managed to escape a ring of Sinaloa men, killing several in the process. If that weren’t strange enough, the man with her had somehow managed to escape his captors, drive across the border, find the same house, then slaughter everyone inside with a team of killers.

  Yeah, something wasn’t right, and he asked Mr. Fawkes to find out what that was. In truth, he wasn’t so sure that Arthur Booth wasn’t behind it to begin with. The entire cycle of events had begun when he’d captured the reporter at their initial meeting. Carlos would treat Booth as an enemy until he could prove otherwise.

  His second call had been to South America. If the POLARIS protocol actually worked and wasn’t just some trap to cause the implosion of Sinaloa’s grasp on the Juárez plaza, then it would be worth money to others, and that was all Carlos had left.

  They’d been approached on numerous occasions by Lebanese Hezbollah, and had actually helped them once or twice when it would pay off without risk, but for the most part, Sinaloa had stayed away from anything smacking of Islamic terrorism. The cartel’s fight with the government of Mexico was something they could handle, and they didn’t want to give the United States any reason to interfere, which is what would happen if they started assisting Hezbollah on a grand scale, but now Carlos’s fight was over. He would be dead if he ever went back to Sinaloa, and he couldn’t have cared less what the Americans did after he had his money. And so he’d called a Hezbollah contact, saying, “I have something that will help in your fight against the drones. You fear them in Pakistan and Yemen, but I can make that fear go away.”

  Not having any insight at all into the phenomena of global jihadist movements, Carlos didn’t understand the difference between al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, and, like most of the world, assumed they were painted with the same brush. They’d agreed to meet, and now Carlos waited on their arrival outside the international terminal, hoping he didn’t see a group of foreigners wearing something that looked like a bedsheet, highlighting who they were and putting cross hairs on him.

  He needn’t have worried. Three men exited, looked around, then focused on the sign in his hand. All appeared more Latino than like an Arab terrorist, wearing jeans and T-shirts with cheap rucksacks on their backs. They sported thick mustaches but no beards.

  The tallest one approached and said in English, “You are looking for an investment in South America?”

  Carlos replied, “Yes, I’m always looking for good investments.”

  The man smiled at the correct answer and held out his hand. Carlos shook it, saying, “You have no bags?”

  “Just our backpacks. We can buy what we need if we stay longer than anticipated.”

  Carlos nodded and led them to the car rental counter, saying, “Who did I talk with on the phone?”

  The tall one said, “None of us. We understand you have something that will help our brothers’ fight in Waziristan.”

  Carlos had no idea what he was talking about, beginning to feel lost. “I have an ability to confuse the Predator drones. Is that what you mean?”

  The man smiled and said, “Yes. That’s what I mean. So you know, we are but a conduit. Another man is coming, from Waziristan.” He said it in a condescending manner, as if Carlos was a child.

  Carlos held his gaze for a moment, then said, “I don’t give a shit where he’s coming from. As long as he has money. A lot of money.”

  29

  Jennifer, her eyes behind a set of small binoculars, said, “Holy crap, Pike—that’s the cop!”

  I jerked the binos out of her hands and focused. Sure enough, the target of the house we had left two hours ago was now leaving the residence of the kid on the document Jennifer had brought with her from the B & E.

  What the hell? This whole thing was turning into a real-life version of The Usual Suspects. All I was missing was hearing someone say Keyser Söze was behind it. I wanted to turn the operation off but couldn’t because of Jennifer. She was hell-bent on finding her brother, and since she could play me like a violin, here we sat with her pathetic lead from the B & E. Only now, the damn thing had actually gone somewhere.

  The one clue she’d taken from the house had been a photo of a document in Spanish with a picture on it. We’d sent it to the Taskforce and had found out the kid in the picture was the son of a textile tycoon and had been kidnapped yesterday. Just one more statistic in the multimillion-dollar ransom industry in Mexico.

  The family lived in a wealthy area west of the city center call
ed Polanco, where all of the houses were set behind high walls and gates. Why the cop had the kid’s picture we didn’t know, but Jennifer was convinced it was because he was in on it. Convinced it was a lead to her brother.

  I, on the other hand, was convinced the whole thing was asking for a compromise of Taskforce activities but had reluctantly let it go since the Oversight Council had sanctioned further operations. I was a little surprised we’d been given clearance to explore the lead at all, and my heart just wasn’t behind it. For once, I wasn’t demanding to be allowed to do something because I thought the risks far outweighed the rewards.

  It was a cold calculation, but Jennifer’s brother wasn’t worth Taskforce exposure, and I wasn’t as sure as everybody else that there was some overarching threat. Even though the Oversight Council flinched at the mere mention of my name, I understood when to push things and when to back off, and this was a case of needing to back off. Except Jennifer had looked at me with her damn puppy eyes. And the council had sanctioned it.

  Jennifer said, “What do we do now? He’s getting away.”

  “Do? What do you want to do? Run him into a ditch and demand answers?”

  Her face grew dark. “Yeah, that would be fine.”

  “Well, that ain’t happening. How about we ask the family what they know?”

  “You mean go knock on the door? With what? They won’t even let us in.”

  I tinkered with the idea a little longer, probing it like a tongue working a piece of meat stuck between the teeth. Yeah, that’s a gross analogy, but it explains exactly how I was feeling. Wanting to free the irritation in my mouth, but knowing the slop left over would be disgusting.

  I said, “Let’s go. You lead the way. You’re much less threatening. Get them to let us in. I’ll take over from there.”

  We called Knuckles, letting him know what was going on, then parked outside the gate of the mansion, punching the buzzer of the keypad outside. A man came on speaking Spanish, and Jennifer said, “We’re here to talk about Felix. We’d like to come in.”