It felt like minutes later that the terrorist spoke, although it was probably only seconds. “If you are not Omega 7, what are you doing working for Juan?”
“You think a man as important as Juan Gonzalez only works with people you know? You think someone like Juan doesn’t have a trusted group of contractors, to whom he farms out certain jobs? Jobs that for whatever reason, he doesn’t want Omega 7’s name or reputation attached to?”
Carranco was clearly skeptical, but she hadn’t squeezed the trigger yet, and Tracie considered that a win. The beautiful young woman said, “Is that so? And what sort of contracting services do you provide for Juan?”
“I’m a tracker. I find people.”
“And he sent you to find me.” It should have been a question, but Carranco phrased it flatly, like a statement.
“That’s right.”
“Why didn’t he use an Omega 7 member?”
For the second time, Tracie took a calculated risk, one that could cost her life. “Look around you,” she said, making a show of gazing at the Big Cypress panorama. “What Omega 7 member would have been able to come out here and track you down?” She took a deep breath and continued. “None of them have ever been here. They’re revolutionaries, freedom fighters, not trackers or wildlife experts.”
“And you are.”
She shrugged. “I found you, didn’t I?”
“And we come right back to my question. How did you find me?”
“Simple. Juan took a map book out of his desk drawer and handed it to me.”
Carranco lowered the Mossberg again, pointing it at the ground. She continued to hold it in her two-handed grip, though, and regarded Tracie suspiciously. “What is so important he cannot wait a couple of days for me to return? I have been coming out here since I was a little girl and he has never before sent a…tracker”—she spit the word out distastefully, like she had bitten into rancid meat—“to bring me back.”
“I told you already, I don’t know what Juan wants. He hired me to find you and bring you back. That’s really all I can tell you.”
“Are you armed?”
“Look around you,” Tracie said, putting an element of exasperation into her voice. “Of course I’m armed. What kind of lunatic would come out here unarmed?”
Carranco seemed to consider Tracie words. Then she shrugged and said, “Well, if Juan wants me back in Miami so badly, we should probably be going right away, yes?”
“Absolutely,” Tracie agreed.
“Fine. But before we leave I must retrieve a few of my things from the cabin.”
The terrorist walked forward a few more steps. By now she could see Tracie’s backpack, as well as the small pile of empty water bottles she had been steadily draining throughout her surveillance.
What she still could not see, Tracie hoped, was the Beretta she had blocked from view with her body and dropped onto the ground when first challenged by Carranco. Now that she had allayed Carranco’s suspicions—she hoped—the next step would be to find a way to retrieve the gun and regain the advantage against her captor.
But it wasn’t going to happen. Not yet, at least. Carranco moved a little closer and said, “Step away from your things. Back up at least fifteen feet.”
Dammit.
Tracie stood her ground and Carranco’s eyes narrowed. She began to raise the Mossberg.
Tracie knew her only play was to keep up the fiction that Juan Gonzalez had sent her here. Be patient and wait for an opening. If she could convince Maria Carranco that they were not working at cross purposes, sooner or later she would get the break she needed and could take the terrorist down.
She nodded slowly and began backing up, hands at her sides, palms out, fingers spread. “Fine with me,” she said. “But we really need to get moving if we’re going to hike back to my truck before sunset.”
Carranco made no reply. She reached the spot Tracie had just vacated and picked up the backpack, sliding it onto one shoulder.
For just a moment Tracie thought she was going to miss seeing the Beretta, but then she bent at the knees and plucked the gun off the ground with her left hand, all the while keeping the shotgun trained more or less in Tracie’s direction. She examined the handgun quickly, glanced at Tracie once, eyes shrouded, expression neutral, and then slid it into a pocket of her camouflage fatigues.
Carranco inclined her head in the direction of the cabin and Tracie began trudging across the clearing. She still had her backup gun in its ankle holster and her combat knife in its sheath on her leg, but with her jeans taped to her ankles, there was no way to quickly access either one.
Besides, based on what she had seen of Maria Carranco thus far, she doubted they would remain in her possession very much longer. And in any event, she couldn’t do anything while being covered by the Mossberg, so she moved toward the cabin and waited to see what would happen next.
She didn’t have to wait long. When she reached the shack, she climbed a set of three cement block steps and stopped at the rough wooden door, hoping Carranco would climb up behind her and then reach past to open it. There would be no way for the terrorist to do that and remain balanced, and Tracie would make her move then.
Again she was disappointed. Carranco stopped at the base of the stairs and said, “Open it.” She didn’t move until Tracie had complied.
Tracie sighed and pushed the door open. It was heavier than she had expected. She walked inside the little cabin and immediately scanned for something she could use as a weapon. She would have to grab it, turn and—
No luck. In barely more than the time it took for her to enter, Maria Carranco bounded up the steps and into the cabin behind her.
Tracie resigned herself to waiting until they had returned to her truck before attempting to disable the terrorist. In some ways, waiting was a better idea, anyway. The two-mile hike through Big Cypress’s rugged terrain would be much easier to navigate with someone who was coming willingly than with a captive.
She moved into the middle of the cabin, taking in her surroundings. On one side was a cot, rickety and very basic but neatly made. A gas cook stove was set up on another wall, next to a rudimentary counter upon which had been placed a gas lantern and Carranco’s store of food supplies. Next to the counter sat a small table and a single rough-hewn bamboo chair. The chair was obviously handmade and she wondered if Carranco had constructed it.
The other two walls were stocked with weapons. Rifles, shotguns, handguns, knives, bombs and bomb-making supplies shared space with chemicals and unmarked wooden crates filled with God-knew-what.
Tracie’s pulse quickened. The killer was even more dangerous than she had realized, and that was saying something given the havoc Carranco had wreaked back in D.C.
Stallings was right. This psychopath had to be removed from the picture, one way or the other, before she murdered more people, ruined more lives.
She put a smile in her voice, trying to keep things light, determined to make an ally out of the terrorist until the time was right to make her move. “How long will it take you to get your things together?” she said. “We really should get going.”
She turned to face the woman and barely had time to flinch. Her peripheral vision caught a blur of motion and she tried to jerk out of the way as Carranco swung the shotgun like a baseball bat at her head.
The barrel caught her flush on the temple and she dropped straight down. The last thing she remembered thinking before the darkness rushed in was, Mossberg. Just like I thought.
40
Tracie’s head pounded relentlessly. The blasts of pain radiated through her skull with every beat of her heart, and she became aware of them even before realizing she had woken up.
Heartbeat/pain.
Heartbeat/pain.
Heartbeat/pain.
Her mind felt fuzzy and confused. She was almost positive she hadn’t had too much to drink last night because she almost never had more than one drink. A drunk covert operative was a covert operative
living on borrowed time.
Heartbeat/pain.
Heartbeat/pain.
She reluctantly opened one eye, bracing for the explosion of discomfort that she knew would follow. Waited a moment. When the pain wasn’t as bad as she expected, she eased her other eye open and everything came rushing back.
She was in the middle of nowhere: Big Cypress National Preserve, hard by Everglades National Park. She had come here to bring a cold-blooded female terrorist back to Langley, or to kill her if necessary.
And she had been blindsided by that terrorist.
Her head was resting on her shoulder and she could feel dried blood crusting the right side of her face. She tried to look around, to take in as much of her surroundings as she could, without alerting her captor to the fact she had regained consciousness.
Carranco had duct-taped her into the homemade bamboo chair she had seen upon entering the cabin. The chair was placed in the center of the tiny structure and she guessed she had been secured into it with her own tape. It was crudely constructed, solid but splintering in places, badly in need of sanding. Razor-sharp slivers of bamboo poked at her and made an already painful situation even worse.
She deserved it. Deserved every last scrape, scratch and headache for allowing this disaster to unfold the way it had.
And unless she could figure a way out of this mess, and quickly, she was going to die out here alone. She would simply disappear and no one would ever know what had happened to her. Even if Aaron Stallings sent another operative to South Florida after Carranco, that agent would never find this place, would never find her body, would never…
No.
She wouldn’t do this.
She had to stay positive. Negativity would get her killed just as surely as a gunshot to the head.
A deathly silence hung over the cabin, and Tracie wondered where Maria Carranco had gone, and why she had left Tracie alive. If she didn’t believe Tracie’s story about Juan Gonzalez sending her out here to bring Tracie back to Miami, why not just kill her and be done with it?
Sweat rolled freely down her face, mixing with the dried blood and leaving pinkish-red trails as it dripped onto her already-soaked blouse. As stiflingly hot as it had been outside, it was even worse inside the little tinderbox sitting in the middle of a clearing under the brutal subtropical sun.
The two small screen-covered windows flanking the front door were complemented by identical windows in the rear of the shack, theoretically allowing for the flow of air. But a breeze would be required for that to happen, and the air outside the shack was as dead and still as a corpse.
Convinced she was alone, Tracie lifted her head off her shoulder in a tentative experiment to see how much pain she was going to have to endure from the gash above her ear.
An ice pick stabbed through her skull, the pain hot and sickening, turning her stomach and making her feel like she might puke. She squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on compartmentalizing the pain like she had been taught years ago during her training at The Farm. She had learned that once the initial shock of a blow to the head—or anywhere else on the body, for that matter—wore off, managing the resulting pain was as much a mental issue as a physical one.
What most people called “a high threshold for pain” was really nothing more than the ability to take that pain and file it away in a tiny portion of the brain, to acknowledge it but move past it, to understand it was going to be present no matter what, and to accomplish what one needed to accomplish in spite of the pain.
She held her head steady and counted to one hundred, refusing to let it drop back onto her shoulder.
Breathed deeply.
Reopened her eyes.
And saw Maria Carranco standing directly in front of her. The terrorist’s own eyes were narrowed and she held Tracie’s Beretta steadily, aimed at her chest.
Tracie tried to hide her surprise. She had assumed she was alone, and Carranco had obviously been standing or sitting right behind her; that was the only way she could have been inside the cabin without Tracie seeing her.
Tracie nodded at the gun in Carranco’s hand and said, “What’s the matter, did I bend the barrel on the Mossberg?”
Carranco smiled thinly. “Do not give yourself that much credit,” she said. “The Mossberg is an effective weapon under the right circumstances, but for close quarters, a 9mm handgun is more than sufficient. But of course, you know that already.”
Tracie took a deep breath and forced herself to ignore the steady drumbeat of pain in her skull. “Juan is going to be very unhappy with you when he learns what you’ve done to me.”
“Give it a rest,” Carranco replied. “Juan Gonzalez did not send you here. I know you are CIA.”
Tracie snorted. “You’re delusional, babe. Why the hell would you think I worked for the CIA?”
“Obviously you do not realize what kind of relationship Juan and I have,” she said. “I am not a typical Omega 7 member, and the closeness with which he guards information when dealing with other members of the organization does not apply to me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tracie said. The sick feeling was building in the pit of her stomach and it wasn’t entirely due to her head injury. She thought she knew what Carranco was going to say and didn’t like it one bit.
“It means that Juan told me about the beautiful, red-haired CIA operative he sent off to Cuba on a wild goose chase. Congratulations on your safe return, by the way. I, of all people, understand how difficult that is to accomplish.”
The terrorist paused and then smiled again. “Not that it matters now, of course.”
There was no point trying to continue selling the fiction that she was working for Gonzalez. To do so would only anger Carranco and likely make things worse than they already were.
If that was even possible.
The only chance she had now was to keep Carranco talking, to drag things out and hope for an opening she could take advantage of. It seemed unlikely, but she wasn’t going down without a fight. She said, “So you knew who I was the minute you saw me.”
“More or less,” Carranco said, “although I wasn’t completely certain until you unwrapped the blouse from your head and I saw that hair. Then I knew for sure.”
Tracie flexed her hands in an effort to determine whether there was any play in her bindings.
Nothing.
She tried moving her ankles and discovered them secured tightly as well.
Carranco clearly knew what she was doing when it came to immobilizing a prisoner.
Things were going from bad to worse and the question she really wanted to ask was, Why didn’t you just kill me when you had the chance and get it over with?
But suggesting her own death to a psycho with a gun didn’t seem like the smartest move, so instead Tracie said, “How many more Americans do you plan on killing? I assume, from looking at the munitions you’ve stockpiled here, that you don’t intend to stop with the NCC massacre.”
“You assume correctly.”
“What can you possibly gain from this? Murdering people over something that may or may not have happened a quarter-century ago?”
“Oh, it happened alright. But how could I expect you to understand the concepts of honor, and of accountability?”
“Honor and accountability? Are you kidding me?” Tracie knew she should shut her mouth now, knew that by continuing the discussion she was probably accomplishing nothing besides hastening her own death.
But she couldn’t help it. Listening to the twisted logic this black-hearted soul was using to destroy innocent lives was making her angrier and angrier.
Her head pounded and her stomach flip-flopped and she ignored it all. Said, “How is there any honor in killing Allan Nesbitt, NCC’s CEO, a man who wasn’t even out of college when the Bay of Pigs happened? How can you consider that ‘accountability’ in any way, shape or form?”
“I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand,” Carranco said, her voice tigh
t with emotion.
Tracie nodded at the stockpile of munitions lining one wall of the cabin. “And how did you get all this stuff out here, anyway?”
Tracie’s goal was to keep Carranco talking, to drag everything out. But by the same token, she really was curious to learn the answer to that particular question. Even with a decent-sized box truck, it would have taken more than one load to transport all of the deadly weapons and materials stacked in front of her, and no box truck in the world would have been able to get all the way out here in the muck and the soft, wet terrain.
“A person dedicated to the cause of justice can accomplish much if she is willing to work at it,” Maria Carranco answered serenely. “And I have worked extremely hard for a long time to put myself in a position where I can begin getting retribution for the injustice that was inflicted on my people.”
“Justice?” Tracie scoffed. “You think you’re getting justice? Is that what you consider the murder of more than a half-dozen innocent people to be?”
“I would not describe them as ‘innocent,’” Carranco said coolly. “And in any event, we are not here to debate the point.” She removed a combat knife from a scabbard at her ankle and moved around behind Tracie’s chair.
The terrorist began sawing through the tape securing her right ankle to the chair, and a moment after that, she freed Tracie’s left ankle as well. Then she stood and said, “I am going to remove the tape from your wrists now. I suggest you do not forget who is armed and who is not.”
Tracie smiled. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“What do you mean?”
“You forgot to mention the qualifier.”
“I do not understand.”
“You should have said, ‘Do not forget who is armed for now.’”
Anger clouded Maria Carranco’s pretty eyes and she tightened her grip on the combat knife. She raised it as if to slash at Tracie and then regained control of her emotions. “You do not concern me,” she said. “Before our little encounter, you had in your possession two handguns and a combat knife. Now you possess none. So you tell me, Miss CIA Agent: who should be worried?”
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 70
