With the explosives in place, all the data recovered and Max’s directive almost complete, Niko cut the power to the facility and they all rallied at the entrance. The locals said their farewells and took off into the night as Lena’s men started filing on to the last bus. Finn could hear the boats approaching the beach so he tossed the still unconscious Rojas over his shoulder and made his way to meet them. Yuri and Connor thanked Lena then grabbed all the gear and jogged out to the beach as well. Niko turned and smiled at Lena, this was where they parted ways. For this mission at least. Before he could realize what was going on, she yanked him by the back of the head, pulling his lips to hers, kissing him intensely. Instinctively he pulled her close and kissed her back. As quickly as it began, the kiss was over and she shoved him away.
Lena grinned at him. “Now I get to say I kissed the infamous Niko Gattilusio.” She laughed as she boarded the bus, the door closing behind her. He just stood looking at the air where she stood just seconds before, stunned. “Keep your comms up until your out of range.” Her voice rang through his earpiece, snapping him out of his shock.
“Roger that.” He responded, grinning back at her through the dirty glass of the bus door as as it drove away.
As soon as Niko lost sight of her, he made a bee-line for the beach. He tossed his gear into the boat and shoved it into the surf before hopping in. “T minus twenty minutes to ignition.” He announced over the comm as they headed out of the shallows. “North is waterlogged.” The phrase would let the others know they were safely off the beach and in route to their ship.
“Copy that.” Lena’s voice came across the comm now. “South One is walking the plank. South Two is bringing up the rear.” Her phrase told them that the first bus was already being unloaded, the captives were being put on the ship and her bus was right behind them.
“Copy that.” Niko acknowledged.
“Hey North.” Pablo’s voice came over the comm.
“Go for North.” Niko said with a smile.
“I packed a going away present for you.” Pablo told him. “Make sure you boys check your duffels.”
Connor scrambled and checked inside his duffle, pulling out a box of Montecristo cigars. “Sweet! Gracias amigo!” Connor thanked him and waved the box in Niko’s face.
“Thank you my friend!” Niko appreciated his thoughtfulness. “You are too generous.”
“It is I who thank you! That’s the most fun I’ve in a long time!” Pablo chortled. “Maybe next time you’ll take Castro with you!” They all laughed but Niko wished that he could. Cuba deserved better.
It wasn’t long before they saw the lights from the ship they arrived on, anchored exactly where they left it. The ship was just fifteen miles off the coast of Cuba but it was safely in international waters, making it untouchable to Castro’s henchmen.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.” Lena’s voice announced across the comm, indicating their ship had hoisted anchor and was leaving the dock.
“Mazel tov.” Niko replied, still nervous that her ship would get stopped before it left port. They had a solid twenty minutes to go before they were safe. “T minus three minutes.” He wished Lena had more distance between them and land before the charges went off but that was not an option to the plan. He said a silent prayer that three minutes got them far enough out that no one would think to stop her ship.
“Hey North.” She was talking to him. “Quit worrying.” She obviously knew what he was thinking.
“Stay outta my head, South.” Niko smirked in spite of his worry.
“Monica’s charmed G.I. Joes will cause enough confusion to widen the gap.” She reassured him.
“I’d pay good money to watch that show!” Finn chimed in.
Lena laughed. “Me too!”
They had evacuated everyone from the building and gotten them outside the one-hundred yard perimeter that the guards were programmed to secure. They all knew that once the charges went off, security for the resort, police, even fire personnel would be prevented from getting within that perimeter until the sun came up. Those guards were so entranced that only Raul Castro himself would be able to subvert Monica’s orders. After all, in their minds he was the one who gave them the orders in the first place.
Niko’s boat came to a drift as it approached the ship and the comms grew quiet once again. Quickly the lines were secured and the small boat was hoisted up to the deck. Niko tossed Rojas’ still limp body out of the boat while the others hauled the rest of the gear. Niko stepped to the railing and looked towards the shore then glanced one more time at his watch.
“T minus ten seconds.” He announced over the comm. “North is all aboard.”
“Roger that.” Lena responded quickly, then the comm went silent again.
Even though they were fourteen miles from shore, Niko watched as the charges detonated and the medispa exploded in a lump of orange and red. The blast was designed to be contained and restrained. The initial burst of flames receded quickly and now there was just a small glow in the distance.
“Visual confirmation.” Niko informed everyone but he got no response. He counted to twenty before he spoke again. “South, radio check. I repeat, visual confirmation.” A few more seconds passed and nothing. Niko felt his heart sink.
“Roger that North, I read you five by five.” Lena finally answered.
“Status report, South.” He needed to know they were OK.
“Sorry about the delay.” Lena was chuckling. “Captain Bligh was getting a little handsy over here. Had to have a little heart to heart.”
Niko laughed out loud. “Can’t really blame him.”
“I’m partial to Greeks, you know that.” Lena teased. “By the way, we are international boys and girls.” She gave him the code to indicate they had entered international waters and were clear of Cuban territory. They were safe.
Connor slapped Niko on the back and gave him a wide smile. “Roger that South. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.” Niko responded, nodding to Connor as they turned to head below deck.
“The pleasure was all mine.” Lena was teasing again. “See you at Carnival, yeah?”
“You just might.” Niko felt his heart lighten. “North, over and out.”
“South over and out.” She echoed and then the comm went silent a final time.
They had a little under a hundred miles before they reached their destination in Key West and transferred to the private jet. The flight to Burbank would take about five hours so Niko decided that giving Rojas another sedative was a much safer plan than having to listen to the good doctor blather on, risking Niko ripping his lungs out mid-flight. They all could use a little sleep after such a long day. Connor, Finn and Yuri all agreed, further sedation of their prisoner was a much safer plan.
Captain Davidson had just walked through the door to homicide when Lou’s phone rang. By the ringtone, Neil Diamond singing Sweet Caroline, it was no mystery who the caller was.
“Listen, Davidson is walking towards me now, can I call you back?” Lou didn’t bother saying hello.
“No!” Caroline shouted at her. “You need this info!”
“Why are you yelling at me?” Lou frowned at the phone.
Caroline adjusted her tone. “Sorry, I’m just a little frazzled. But this is important! I just got off the phone with the new medical examiner down in Colombia and you need to know what he found.”
“Hang on one sec then.” Lou set down the phone and tossed a pencil at Dillon to get his attention.
“Ow!” He winced.
“Sorry, but tell Davidson I’m getting new info from Caroline and I’ll be right back.” Dillon nodded as Lou put the phone back to her ear and headed to the break room. Fortunately, the room was empty. “OK, go.” Lou told her.
“Alright, well Monday when Dillon got the single paragraph coroner report on Luis Arcano, he asked me if there was anything I could do to look into it. Like colleague to colleague, you know?”
&n
bsp; “Right, and I am guessing there was.” Lou made the obvious deduction.
“Yes.” Caroline confirmed. “I have a friend that I met at a conference a while back who is a big deal down in Brazil.”
“You mean a fellow medical examiner you had a fling with at a convention?” Lou snickered.
“That’s besides the point!” Caroline protested. “What’s important is he put a call in to the coroner’s office that handled the autopsy. The doctor that did the shoddy report retired in January so he asked the new guy to take a second look and he did in a big way.”
“So, Luis Arcano didn’t die from a fall?” Lou was guessing.
“Not by his own doing. Apparently, the original examiner had done toxicology on Arcano but the findings never made it into the final report. I’m assuming the guy was looking to see if Arcano was drunk when he fell, which he wasn’t. However!”
“Caroline, can you get to it? Please?” Lou was fidgeting. “Davidson is doing a slow burn at my desk. I gotta get out there.”
“The expanded tox report showed trace amounts of suxemethonium chloride. It’s a miracle they detected it at all.” Caroline was shouting again.
“What the hell does that mean, Caroline?”
“Succinylcholine, Lou. It’s a paralytic that is quickly metabolized and nearly undetectable if your not looking for it. It can be used to induce cardiac arrest. A treating physician would automatically conclude death by heart attack in a man Luis’ age and no one would be the wiser. The re-examining coroner and I both agree that someone injected Luis at the top of the stairs, intending for him to have a heart attack but he fell and snapped his neck in the process. The coroner is exhuming the body to take another look. He’ll get back to me tomorrow.”
“Crap.” Lou felt a headache coming on. “So Luis was murdered too.”
“I would hate to be that other medical examiner right now. The new guy is instigating a full-blown investigation.” Caroline told her. “I’m thinking he got early retirement from an outside source, if ya get my meaning. This was the last case he handled before he put his papers in.”
“Retired on some private beach, I’m sure.” Lou was only partially joking.
Caroline sighed. “I gave the M.E. your contact information and told him that you were the lead investigator on Casius’ case. As soon as he has anything he will forward it to you.”
“Thanks girlie.” Lou smiled. “This is serious info. Thanks for filling me in. Now I gotta go tell the captain we have another lump of crap to toss in the pot.”
“Good luck!” Caroline chortled then clicked off.
Lou headed back into the office and filled her captain, Dillon and Vinny in on the new information. Davidson took the ball and ran with it giving them a report from the DEA that detailed the last month of surveillance on Ernesto Vargas including the point of his falling off the grid the day before Casius Arcano went missing. There was no doubt in any of their minds that the meeting between Ernesto and Carlos that took place two weeks before Christmas was somehow related to Luis Arcano’s death. Which, was now being re-classified a homicide. Luis’ wife and daughter were not in the country when he died so that scratched them off the suspect list right off the bat. The household staff had been dismissed for the holiday so none of them were viable witnesses to putting Carlos Vargas in the Arcano home at the time of death. Davidson was going to see about getting cell phone records for Luis Arcano and the Local Usage Details, or LUDS as they were known, for the Arcano residence. It wouldn’t be unusual for there to be calls between the men but they had to find something to put Carlos Vargas in proximity to the Arcano home at the time of his murder. That would get them the warrant they so desperately needed to bring him in.
“I wonder how Carlos got around when he was down there.” Dillon was wondering out loud.
“You mean vehicle-wise?” Lou asked.
“Yeah.” Dillon confirmed.
Lou thought about it for a moment. “That was nearly five months ago. Even if the car he used had GPS, would it hold data from that long ago?”
“Our GPS tracking server holds data for six to nine months.” Davidson informed them.
“I’ll call Maria Arcano and see if she can give us access to the GPS tracking server without tipping Carlos off.” Dillon picked up the phone and started dialing.
“If Carlos was using a company car while he was in town, if they still have the GPS data for it and it shows the vehicle at Arcano’s house on December 23rd, we get our warrant.” Lou made it sound so simple.
“I’ll leave you to it.” Davidson said then headed back to his office.
“You think Carlos would be stupid enough to drive a company car to the house?” Vinny wondered as he watched the captain leave.
“If he wasn’t thinking right.” Lou shrugged. “Something big had to have happened for Carlos to get his hands dirty. I’m guessing he learned about Maria’s plans to tell Luis she wanted to join the business. She was on her way home to tell him so that had to have been the breaking point. But what would that have mattered, honestly?”
“There had to have been some sort of plan in place before that. Something that would have gotten blown to bits if anyone messed with things.” Vinny was abusing his stressball as he talked it out with them. “Plan for what though? Was it drugs? What the hell was the Vargas family into that involved Arcano?!”
“It had to have been something big.” Lou grumbled. “The only one alive to clue us in is Carlos.”
“Yeah, but if we pull him in now, without a warrant or any leverage to make him talk, he’s going to lawyer up and we’ll be shut down right then and there.” Vinny stated the facts as his knuckles were turning white, pummeling the stressball. Lou was waiting for the thing to pop at any moment.
“We need that new coroner’s report and the GPS data to hammer him.” Lou looked over at Dillon who was still on the phone ranting in Spanish which meant it was going to be a while. After glancing at the clock and seeing it was not even noon yet, she decided to kill some time by checking her email.
In Lou’s inbox was the email from the MI5 agent that would start the ball rolling on one of their original three headless henchmen. Eliminating Esterhuizen having a biological anything for sale on the black market was paramount. The agent attached the official report to the email and Lou printed it out immediately, making a copy for Vinny so they could go through it together. It was neat and tidy. Seven different attachments from confidential informants from several different agencies. Each report contained statements that swore up and down the informants had no knowledge of Esterhuizen having anything but hardware for sale. Nothing about anything biological, period. Lou and Vinny both found one statement exceptionally amusing wherein the C.I. was more than happy to detail his role in the purchase of three dozen M134D-T’s, titanium gatling guns, that were being shipped out of San Pedro, California. Lou and Vinny’s own back yard.
“Make a note to pass that moron’s statement over to our new DEA friend. I’m sure he likes presents.” Lou chuckled and tossed Vinny a stack of sticky notes.
Vinny smirked and jotted on the pad then slapped the yellow square on his copy of the report. “That will be nice, start off accumulating I-Owe-You’s my first official day as Lieutenant.”
“When is that?” Lou raised an eyebrow. This was news to her.
“Today, genius.” Vinny grumbled. “They painted my office yesterday and it stinks all to hell. That’s why I’m still out here with you mooks.”
“I’m a mook now?” Lou threw an eraser at him. “You fickle bastard. I was your partner yesterday and today I’m a mook!” She knew he was joking but she decided to milk it a little to lighten the mood.
“I’m kidding!” He tossed the eraser back at her. “You’ll always be my partner, partner.” He winked at her.
“Ditto.” She smiled.
“OK!” Dillon shouted as he hung up the phone. “Maria gave me a guy in transportation and he paid off in spades! He told me they keep
GPS data on the server for maintenance and insurance purposes. They’ve had issues with abuse and certain cars requiring way more maintenance then necessary. It’s quite a comprehensive system that tracks mileage, oil pressure, air pressure on the tires, the whole shebang!”
“Get to it Mr. Jiffy Lube!” Vinny stared at him.
“Right. I just thought that was cool. Anyway, he’s going to email me the logs for the cars Carlos Vargas used down there over the past year.” Dillon smiled with satisfaction.
“Give them to me once you get them and I’ll put Barnes on it.” Vinny told him as he got up from his desk. “I’ll have her cross reference it with the surveillance reports on Ernesto, see how many times their paths really crossed.”
“Good call, Boss.” Dillon grinned and Vinny just rolled his eyes.
Lou’s phone chirped, indicating an incoming text message and when she looked she saw it was an alert that she had a message waiting for her in her secured Principate mailbox. There was no way to safely sneak and check it from the office so she needed to think of an excuse to step out and call Frank for an update.
“Hey, while we wait for the GPS data, want me and Dillon to make a lunch run? Pick up some caramel machiattos while we’re out?” Lou knew Vinny was a sucker for good coffee so there was no way he would refuse.
“Yeah, why not.” Vinny’s eyes lit up at the suggestion of good coffee. “Get me a pastrami. You know how I like mine, right sport?” He looked at Dillon to see if he remembered.
“You bet.” Dillon grabbed his keys while Lou gathered up her bag and without further discussion the two headed out. As soon as Lou got into the car she gave Dillon a knowing look and dialed Frank.
“Something come in?” Dillon asked and she just nodded.
Frank picked up on the first ring. “You get it?” He asked her.
“I got something but I can’t check it at the office. What’s going on?” Lou buckled herself in as Dillon drove out of the parking lot.
By the time they reached the deli, Frank had informed Lou of Juan Rojas’ operation in Cuba. While Frank continued, Dillon left her in the car to get lunch on his own. Lou listened as Frank told her that Ernesto Vargas was alive and had recently been in Cuba at Rojas’ facility. They wouldn’t know where he had gone until Max had interrogated Rojas and that was not going to happen for several more hours. They hadn’t heard anything from the Costa Rican team yet but just as Max had told Lou that morning, they had instructions to contact her directly. She would know something before Frank did on that front.
Shadows of Deceit (A Series of Shadows) Page 30