He was right. Milares knew they were done if they stayed here. Like being pinned down by enemy fire—it was only a matter of time before they were hit. They had to get moving.
“You didn’t think this through did you, General?” Erazo reached his hand out. “Maybe you should return my pistol, and I’ll drive us out of here.”
Instead of handing the pistol back, General Barrios stepped forward and whipped it across Erazo’s head.
He grunted. His dentures skipped across the lobby, and he would have fallen over, but caught himself against the wall.
“I think I’ll keep the pistol, thank you,” the General said.
“And what are you going to do with it?” Erazo wiped a rivulet of blood from his mouth. He looked at it, then spat on the floor. “You can’t shoot me here. With the President dead, I’m the new center of power in this government. Shooting me here would be a waste. You’d throw away the best hostage you can find now.”
General Barrios lowered the weapon. Then he stepped to Erazo and grabbed him by the back of the neck.
“I’m not going to shoot you,” he said as he marched the old man out the front door. “I’m going to bring you to justice.”
Colonel Milares followed behind. What the hell was the General doing? They’d all be killed.
As soon as he stepped out, the smoky air punched him in the nose. It didn’t look so bad from the lobby, but the air was thick with smoke and the smell of gasoline. Ahead of him, the General was saying something to Erazo, but between the sounds of shouting and car alarms and police sirens, Milares couldn’t hear a thing being said.
They turned left, eastward, and then doubled-back, around the corner of their building. Down a couple blocks, Milares saw a bus engulfed in flame, throwing knots of black smoke into the sky. They kept moving northward for another block before they came upon a crowd of people—at least a hundred—packing the streets.
Most of their backs were to the Colonel and the other two men. But then, a woman with wild hair and black ash spread across he cheeks spotted them. She waved at someone and pointed in their direction.
Colonel Milares moved beside the General. Every second a dozen eyes spotted them. It wouldn’t be long until they were flattened by a stampede of rioters.
“Sir,” Milares shouted, “are we just going to stand here?”
“For now,” the General said. “Trust me, Nestor. I’m going to see that Diputado Erazo is given his chance for justice. These people will help me.”
The rioters down the block began to move toward them. They didn’t seem like they were in the mood to help anyone.
Milares had trusted his life to the General dozens of times already. But he seemed like a different man back then—a man who put himself at risk, but who was more in control of himself, more present.
But now, he was different. Distant. Perhaps too daring. Had the General lost his mind with everything that happened? Had something inside him snapped when he realized how many of Venezuela’s people starved to death every day? Did he believe he was part of that suffering, and this was some strange bid for suicide?
The rioters continued toward them, chanting slogans and readying their makeshift weapons to strike. But the General did not move.
“Sir, we should leave,” Milares said. “We aren’t safe here.”
“We were never safe,” the General answered.
They were close enough that Milares could make out the anger on their faces. One with hate slithering in his eyes. Another with a scar through his thick, black eyebrow, who looked like he’d bite a piece from a man’s neck.
Milares understood the anger. Many of them had been arrested before, he was sure. A quarter of them had probably been evicted. Half of them were likely starving. Surely they’d all known someone who died from lack of food or medical care.
They’d kill all three men where they stood. With their bare hands if they had to. The rioters screamed now. Running toward them, thirsting for blood.
“General, we need to leave,” Milares said.
“Hold your ground, Colonel,” the General replied. He had a feverish look. Like a man staring at his mortal enemy, ready to cut him down. He raised the pistol. And, slowly, General Barrios continued moving the pistol upward until its muzzle pointed at the sky. He popped off a handful of rounds, held his other palm up.
And the rioters stopped.
He lowered the gun and stepped forward. They must’ve thought he was out of his mind. But they watched him. The same way the members of the assembly watched him last night—the same way everyone watched General Barrios when they were in his presence. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. You couldn’t not take him seriously. The man was born to lead.
“My name is Pedro Barrios, General of the National Army of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,” he shouted, his deep voice reverberating off the buildings around them. “And I’ve brought a traitor to you, the Venezuelan people. This is Diputado Marco Erazo, head of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.” He held a hand toward Erazo.
“Last night, in an emergency session of the Constituent Assembly, this man asked me to suppress the will of Venezuela’s people by stationing armed troops on every corner in Caracas,” he said. “I very nearly did. But, I realized that I will not disobey the will of Venezuela’s people so that an old man and his allies can hold onto power.”
He stepped back, beside Erazo, and grabbed him by the arm. The General thrust him forward.
“And so, I’ve come to you, my countrymen, to help me decide on justice for this man.”
There was a moment of silence. Of only the sounds of burning fire and distant sirens.
Then, it was broken. Erazo started to cry.
Colonel Milares felt a pang of pity for him. Then, a rioter holding steel pipe as long as a man’s arm stepped forward. He sized up Erazo. Looked him up and down like the old man was a particularly large rat—an odd nuisance.
He cracked the steel pipe over Erazo’s head.
The old man gasped and hit the ground. Then, the rest of the rioters joined in. Stomping on him. Smashing him with bricks. Ripping his suit to nothing but patches of dark silk and cotton.
Colonel Milares’ guilt turned to shock as he watched it all happen for a moment. Until General Barrios put his hand around the Colonel’s shoulder and turned him away.
“He did it to himself,” Barrios said. “If he were a better man—a stronger man—none of this would have happened.”
The General was right.
Chapter 8
GREER WALKED ME OUT of Leavenworth like I was there to visit. Right through the front door in my tan jumpsuit. On the way up, none of the MPs gave me guff. Nobody even looked me in the eye. Commandant Williamson wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Probably on purpose. No knowledge, no liability.
I followed Greer through the front door, and even with clouds covering the sky on an early spring day in Leavenworth, Kansas, I had to stop and squint at the open air above me.
Felt strange. Looking up and not seeing plain concrete, or razor wire or even guard towers. I sucked the air through my nose. It chilled my nostrils. The fresh smell of a chilly late-March day.
Not a whiff of body odor. Or the bleach used to cover the stink inside the prison.
“Mason,” Greer snapped. He was ahead of me, looking over his shoulder, scowling and beckoning me forward.
I never enjoyed taking commands from an asshole like Greer, but I did appreciate being on the outside of Leavenworth quite a lot. So, I picked up the pace.
We took the front walk from the main doors, down a set of concrete stairs, past a flower bed that hadn’t been mulched since last spring, and into the parking lot. Wasn’t anything interesting or exciting on the way, but damned if it didn’t feel like the best three-hundred feet I’d ever moved across.
Greer dug in his pocket for his keys. Found them, then pushed a button and a black Chevy Tahoe’s lights flashed. The tailgate raised automatically.
“
We need to get you some new clothes,” he said. “You aren’t getting through the TSA dressed like that.”
“You sure about that?” I asked. “You just walked me out of the front door of the USDB.”
He stopped at the tailgate, then pulled out a small overnight bag. Greer sniffed the air as he dug clothes out of the bag.
“When was the last time you showered?”
“The morning I was thrown in solitary,” I answered. But I’d sweated through a boxing match since then, and stewed in my juices for a day or so inside my cramped solitary confinement cell.
“Then there’s something wrong with your body.” Greer moved around the side of the SUV, leaving a pile of clothes sitting in the open back. I kicked off my shoes, unzipped my jumpsuit, and practically ripped off my itchy prison-issued boxers.
I didn’t care that the ground was cold and wet. Or that I ached any time I moved. Or that I was standing buck naked in the parking lot of a military prison. I was just glad to be out of that place, and out of the uniform.
The dark blue slacks Greer left out for me fit well enough. The waist fit loosely, but it worked—he’d probably pulled my old measurements from my DoD file.
Greer reappeared with a stick of deodorant, just as I fastened the pants.
“Put this on. And for God’s sake, use as much as you’d like. Use more.”
I snatched it away and put it on. Plenty of it. More than I’d ever used. Greer didn’t seem to mind.
When I smelled halfway decent and had my new shirt, jacket and shoes on, we hit the road. I sat shotgun, and Greer drove with his window down. We merged onto the highway, heading east to Kansas City, wind blasting through into the car.
Neither of us said anything to the other. Wind or not, we wouldn’t have spoken. Wasn’t a single bit of idle conversation I wanted to have with Vance Greer. Not after what happened this last two days, and not before that, either.
I was sure he felt the same about me.
After thirty minutes or so, we pulled into Kansas City International Airport. Greer parked the car in long-term parking, and we got out.
I walked through the concourse with nothing but the clothes on my back. Greer had a briefcase, but the way he carried it, I didn’t think there was more than our tickets inside. Maybe a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste.
Greer and I boarded a plane for Orlando. Then, from Orlando, we hopped on another plane bound for San Juan.
Puerto Rico, just like he said. I was mildly shocked that didn’t turn out to be a lie.
At the San Juan airport, we disembarked and silently walked to a rental car company’s desk. A reservation had already been made for Greer.
We walked out to a jet-black Cadillac Escalade—the only one on the lot. Again, Greer drove, and again, I took shotgun. The Puerto Rican sky pinked as we drove south over rough highways, through tropical bushes and trees. The plants were so thick on either shoulder of the road; I couldn’t see more than a couple feet into the brush.
It was here that Greer broke the silence.
“You never should have gotten out,” he said as we crested a hill.
I laughed. “You were the one who took me out.”
“I’m not talking about prison, Mason,” he said. “You never should have left the intelligence community. We had our differences in London, but I knew you were a natural. Determined, self-reliant, smart. Not afraid to skin your knuckles on somebody’s teeth if it got the job done. You just needed some honing—someone to sharpen you.”
“That’s what you were supposed to do,” I said. “Ain’t my fault you kicked me out.”
“Yeah, well, you turned out pretty okay.”
“No thanks to you.”
Greer opened his mouth, then thought better of what he wanted to say. New trick for him. When I worked with him in London, he didn’t hold a damn thing back. If a thought was on Vance Greer’s mind, it was going in my ear whether I liked it or not.
“I overreacted,” he said.
First time I’d ever heard him show a little humility, too. Had to be some kind of angle he was playing.
“You underreacted,” I said. “You almost let a kid blow himself up when you shoulda dropped everything and helped me stop that bombing.”
“I helped you,” he said. “You called me on the way.”
“Everything was done by then,” I said. “He already had the bomb on him. If you would’ve kept on it with me when I wanted to keep on it, that never would’ve happened.”
“You got it done.” Greer sounded like he was getting pissed at me. Like I had done something wrong. “You didn’t need me.”
I grumbled. The son of a bitch had a hell of a pair on him.
“All I’m saying is don’t let my mistakes hold you back from being your best self. Your country needs you. It needs your dedication.”
“My country threw me in jail.” My anger was getting the better of me. I was tiptoeing a line I shouldn’t cross. So I shut my mouth and I looked out my window before I said anything too stupid. Greer was great at crawling under my skin.
“That aside, all I’m saying is a guy like you can really get some good done in the world if you focus on your missions. Don’t waste your time with all this wife and kid bullshit.”
My fingers curled into a fist. I almost snapped right then. Thought about clapping Greer’s skull against his window. But that seemed like a bad idea for more reasons that I could think of at that moment.
So, I kept my eyes out of the window, scanning the thick, tropical brush on the side of the road.
Before too long, I saw a painted, wooden sign on the road. Or most of one. The top third looked like it had been sheared off. Probably from hurricane Maria. What remained was the base of a lighthouse and the word “Maunabo.”
My Spanish was good enough that I knew Maunabo was must have been a town.
Sure enough, a minute or two later we started to hit the outskirts: small houses, half-wrecked by the hurricane. Most without roofs, almost all of them with boarded up windows and doors, the boards grayed from being left out in the rain and the sun for months.
As we went further into town, I saw a few houses with un-boarded windows and doors. Almost all of them with laundry hanging on lines in the backyard, or piles of debris nearby, waiting to be picked up by someone who probably hadn’t been around since the hurricane knocked the entire island’s power out.
Greer continued through intersections with blacked-out traffic lights. We drove one of the few cars on the road, so approaching an intersection almost always meant waiting for pedestrians carrying jugs of water and food to cross the street.
Finally, we stopped curbside at a four-story building with scaffolding out front, where men worked on installing windows and repainting the dingy, scarred paint with a coat of bright, coral orange.
“Can you share a hotel room with me without killing me?” Greer said as he turned the key and shut the engine off.
“It depends on how long you can keep your stupid yap shut.” I opened the door and got out. This might be the longest night of my life.
Chapter 9
TURNS OUT I NEEDED sleep more than I thought. Soon as I got up to our room and hit the bed, I passed out. I didn’t dream. Hardly ever do. It was like I blinked my eyes, and when I opened them again the sun was up and Greer was looking out the window at the harbor two blocks over, sipping coffee from a disposable cup, a cigarette burning in this other hand.
Like the rest of the town of Maunabo, the electricity didn’t work in our room, but the plumbing was fine. After I got out of bed, I took that shower I needed. The water went ice cold after thirty seconds, but it was better than showering in Leavenworth. When I got out, I had to put on the same dark blue suit I’d worn yesterday. It reeked of deodorant and body odor.
“I’m going to introduce you to some new friends,” Greer crushed his Styrofoam coffee cup and tossed it on the hotel bed as I laced up my shoes. He sucked down the rest of his cigarette, then flicked it ou
t of the window.
“You’ll hate them,” he said as smoke fell from his mouth.
“If they’re friends with you, I bet I will.”
We went through the darkened hotel lobby, out the front door and then walked two blocks to the harbor.
Maunabo’s harbor looked like a floating pick-a-part, only nobody seemed to want anything from these leftover boats after they’d been hammered by hurricane Maria. Half of them didn’t appear to be tied to anything—just trapped in the flotsam collecting around the pilings.
Greer led me down a set of old stone stairs.
“Ballast from the old Spanish galleons that used to trade here.” He patted the stone wall to our right. “They’d come from Spain filled with these stones, then leave them behind as they loaded up. People used them to build the first roads around here.”
“You like boats, Greer?”
“If I had more time for them. Not everyone with our job gets to have a life.”
He looked at me from the sides of his eyes. I don’t know why he suddenly got so pissy.
At the bottom of the steps, we immediately turned left, going down a wooden dock wide enough for three men standing shoulder to shoulder. Surrounded by the rusting ships, all the glass broken out, all the cabins looking like junk piles on the inside, I wondered how anybody still lived on the island of Puerto Rico. The hurricane knocked the stuffing out of everything.
About halfway down the pier, I noticed two men loading up their boat with supplies. A beat-up cooler, some plastic grocery sacks with food, and a couple gas cans. Guess the harbor wasn’t completely abandoned.
“Morning, gentleman!” Greer waved and I almost did a double take. I’d never heard him act or speak in a way that didn’t make me wonder if he were suffering from an extra-long hangover.
One of the men looked up, then dropped the duffel bag he carried and came toward us.
He was short, with dark, graying hair and brown skin, crinkled from too much sun. He was probably around fifty years old. He smiled as he approached, the corners of his eyes wrinkling like an old paper bag. I noticed three of his front teeth were gold.
Jackal: Barrett Mason Book 3 Page 4
