En El Medio

by Christopher Metcalf

  "Last question, do you happen to know who Mendoza was meeting with tonight?"

  "The general and the national police commissioner, I think. I'm not sure."

  "Great. They are dead by the way. The kid killed them, and Mendoza."

  The guy just shook his head.

  "What?"

  "The gringo boy, Felix, he is crazy. You could see it. Smart as anyone, but crazy. He killed them?"

  "Si. I saw him do it."

  "Who are you, gringo?"

  Preacher smiled down at the guy. "I'm nobody. I don't exist." And Preacher flipped the man over to pull out his wallet. When he had it, he pulled out the diver's license. He had collected an array of usable information in the past 24 hours. He had more with this man's identity.

  "Thank you for the information, Enrique. I will take this and I will see you again someday. I'll know you by your limp. Good night."

  Preacher stood and kicked Enrique in the temple. It was mean. He could have put a bullet through the guy's head to end his pain. But he left him alive, for another day.

  He turned and high-tailed it down the tunnel until he came to a set of steps going up to the garage. He reached the door at the top and opened it. The space was fairly large. Looked like about 15 vehicles, many high-end. He stepped in and ducked to move along the line of vehicles. He dropped to the floor and looked in the direction of the voice that shouted to another.

  "No one is answering over there," a man shouted.

  "Try the guard house." Came the response. Two men, like Enrique said.

  Preacher stayed low and moved along the rear bumpers of several vehicles until he reached the center of the building. He saw one man standing by an open garage door to the right and another seated in the open office of what looked like an auto shop. Parts hung on racks and a car lift had a Chevy raised six feet high. The guy on the right held a gun. Surprise, surprise, another AK-47. Friggin' ridiculous how many of those around.

  He needed a vehicle, so it was likely he would need to blow open two more black holes in the lives of these two men's families. Preacher scooted over to the fella looking out the garage door into the dark. He reached him and swung a right elbow up and around, making contact with the base of the man's skull. A disabling, but not lethal, blow.

  The noise of the man's weapon falling on the concrete caused the guy over at the desk to look up. Preacher stepped in close with the silenced Berretta aimed at his forehead. Preacher nodded to the phone. The guy placed the handset in the cradle on the desk.

  "I need a car. Any will do." He stepped closer and spotted a cabinet behind the desk. "Keys in there?"

  "Yes. But I can't just give you a car. They'll have my ass."

  "You have no need for an ass when you have a hole in your forehead. I don't need discussion now. Give me the key to that Jag and open the door behind it. Tell them I put a gun to your head."

  The man turned and reached for a set of keys with is right hand while his left hand snuck under the desk. Not smart. Preacher leaned over the desk to deliver a vicious blow to the man's head. He crumpled back into the chair and then to the floor.

  "I'll open the door myself, thanks." He grabbed the keys and moved quickly to the Jag, opened the garage door and fired up the engine. For maybe the 8,000th time in the last few days he wished Marta were here. She can drive literal circles around him.

  He sped out the open door, swung the vehicle to the left on squealing wheels, and blasted into the night before anyone in or near the Castle complex could think to stop him. A few blocks away, he reached into the backpack beside him on the passenger seat and pulled out a couple cell phones until he found the one he needed.

  "So tell me, who the hell is the kid? And try for the truth, please." Preacher spoke into the phone.

  Silence at the other end. Preacher could basically feel the brain activity as an answer was formulated by Meadows. "He's a kid, a punk. A drug-dealing teenager. He killed my friend. That's all."

  "Stan, come on. I can be a little dense sometimes, but I know a friggin' hit when I see it. And by the way, I saw it right in front of me."

  "You saw someone killed. You were there?"

  "Yes Meadows. Five dead, point blank. Swiss cheese, Uzi-style." Preacher downshifted and swung the fine-tuned sedan to the left onto a larger six-lane avenue.

  "Dead? Can you confirm?"

  "Confirmed. Visual confirmation."

  "Identities?" The word was spoken matter-of-fact. Formal.

  "Did not get that."

  "Any military?" Again, a formal question.

  "Si. High-ranking. Looked like a general."

  "Anyone else?"

  Preacher just shook his head. "Walked right into it..."

  "Who else was eliminated?"

  "Eliminated, really? Police, high-ranking also. I heard it mentioned that he might have been the national police commissioner. Female, well-dressed. And Mendoza, cartel higher up."

  "Did you terminate the subject, the target?"

  "Terminate? Jesus Stan."

  "Did you?"

  "Terminate, really?"

  "You didn't get him did you?"

  "No, he..."

  "Hang up. I'll call you back." Meadows severed the line.

  Preacher drove darkened and low-lit streets, moving east. He worked through the past six days and began to laugh. Holy shit. What a plan. The phone rang 91 seconds later.

  "Yello'."

  "Sorry." One word, spoken by Frank Wyrick, the CIA's newest Special Activities Division interim sub-director with Seibel gone.

  "No reason to apologize Frank. Just doing your job, right?"

  "Yes, that. Not ideal, but decent results when you're involved, as usual." Wyrick was unemotional, calm. They hadn't spoken in six months and didn't know each other all that well. Wyrick had always done Seibel's communications and dirty work from the outside, as a contractor. He was truly a ghost. But now he was official, on the CIA payroll and running Special Activities Division operations initiated by Seibel. That meant the blackest of black ops.

  He and Wyrick were bound by the last seven years and the CIA and black ops and covert operations and Marta, and Seibel, of course. It was Wyrick who had officially killed Lance Priest by wiping out all evidence of his existence after being 'killed' in the 1992 World Trade Center bombing. An excellently fabricated story.

  Wyrick had basically erased Preacher. Brilliant stuff.

  "Results?" Preacher asked after several seconds as he turned onto a quiet street just three blocks from the bridge over the Rio Grande leading to Estados Unidos. He pulled the Jag to the side of the street and turned it and the lights off.

  "Some things, some jobs require specialists. They require Preacher. That simple."

  "This, this job? What was this job exactly?"

  "You tracked him down, found him in a couple of days. We'd been hunting him for weeks."

  "So? I found him, so what? Who is he?" Preacher looked out the Jaguar's windows into the waning night. Morning was on the horizon again.

  Wyrick didn't answer, not right away.

  "Wyrick, who is the kid? Why did you want him dead, terminated?" Preacher said the last word with all intended facetiousness.

  "They, we didn't want him dead. They, we, wanted him tested, challenged, made to work in a real-life stressful situation. You created that scenario."

  Preacher's forehead squinched up. His procerus muscle brought his eyebrows together as he worked through the angles. This was crazy. But reminiscent of an incident he went through himself a few years back in Dallas, the day he met Seibel.

  "You're friggin' serious." He shook his head as he uttered the words. This exercise, this mission was a test for the kid. He was being evaluated for future use by the CIA.

  Wyrick continued. "Now is probably not the best time to tell you, especially over a cellular radio network. So, let me tell you tomorrow, in person."

  Chapter 8

  Preacher was about to reply to Wyrick when a dozen bullets r
ipped into the back of the Jag and exploded the rear window. Only because he had scooted down into the seat did Preacher avoid two rounds that shredded the headrest above him and pierced the windshield as they shot through.

  In the same second, he turned the ignition, slammed the transmission into gear and jammed the gas pedal to the floor. He picked himself up only high enough to see through the steering wheel over the dash as more rounds struck the vehicle.

  At the end of the previously quiet street, Preacher sat up in the seat and ripped the wheel to the left into a tight alley for a hundred yards before ricocheting the Jag into a tighter alley to the right.

  He took the car up to 90 when he barreled onto an avenue going north toward the bridge. He could see the lights high overhead shining down on the international border crossing just a couple of blocks away. He didn't intend on crossing into the U.S. here, he just wanted to get into the security zone and then figure out his next steps.

  The Jag rounded a corner onto Avenida De Las Americas and he revved the engine up high before shifting into a lower gear. Looked good up ahead, except that it didn't. His headlights barely set the two vehicles aglow before the bullets started flying.

  They had the avenue blocked, just a couple hundred yards from the crossing. Complete disregard for authority. Great.

  Preacher slammed on the brakes and whipped the car around. Several more bullets hit the vehicle and a distinctive explosion let him know that at least one round had punctured a tire. Still he powered the gas pedal to the floorboard and fired the engine to turn back the other way onto Avenida Abraham Lincoln. Slow going. He pushed the vehicle up to its max possible speed on the shredded rubber attached to the right rear tire.

  No good. He stopped the Jag in the middle of the street, grabbed the backpack, the Berretta and an AK-47 he'd picked from the guard in the garage. He took off on foot sprinting back the way he had just came and dropped to a knee as the first truck came squealing around the corner. At 60 feet, the killing was easy as he put a dozen rounds into the windshield. The lessons learned from Fuchs during dozens of practice sessions at Harvey Point and then from Marta during live operations around the world have always proven most effective. Attack first. The best defense is always, always taking the offensive.

  He was up a second after and reached the truck four seconds later where he ripped open the passenger door and grabbed an Uzi and a bag of magazines from the dead passenger as follow vehicles rounded the corner on squealing tires. He took off toward the second and third vehicle that came to a screeching halt rounding the corner from Avenida De Las Americas onto Abe Lincoln.

  He applied Marta's attack method as he strafed the first and then second SUV. He raced to the lead vehicle and executed the passenger and driver at pointblank range before dropping the spent magazine, inserting a new one into the Uzi and taking aim at the second vehicle.

  The passengers in the front and second rows had guns pointing out the windows preparing to fire when he loosed 20 rounds their way. The result was immediate and deadly. The guy in the front passenger seat dropped his AK-47 to the ground as he fell back into his seat. The fella in the second row fired his AK into the air as he squeezed the trigger in a death grip. Preacher didn't have to think about it to know the man's flexor digitorium profundus muscle in his forearm had seized up when he was struck in the head and chest by several bullets. It happens.

  Preacher stepped up to the lead SUV and yanked open the passenger door to retrieve the weapons from the dead passenger and driver. Another Uzi and yet another AK. Damn. Instead of taking off into the night on foot, Preacher decided to take the vehicle. He heard tires squeal back where the two trucks had blocked the avenue ahead of the border crossing.

  After pulling the driver out and pushing the passenger to the street, he put the Chevy SUV in gear and spun the wheel to head toward the former roadblock. He had moved a hundred yards when he saw the two vehicles coming his way. They were small Toyota trucks and best of all, they were police vehicles. Great. Nothing like getting law enforcement and their thousands of humans and weapons into the action.

  About right now, he didn't much care that the dudes in these vehicles wore police uniforms. The fact that they had blocked off the street and fired at him told him all he needed to know. They were nothing more than secret police working for the cartel. He slammed on the brake and brought the SUV to a stop in the middle of Abraham Lincoln. He brought the borrowed AK-47 up and waited until the vehicles were within a hundred feet before he squeezed the trigger.

  He shot up the first truck's windshield and then turned his aim to the second. The secret to this exercise was a lesson learned from Fuchs. Shoot small. Keep your aim in the middle third horizontal equator of the windshield. Anything outside of that is a wasted shot. After putting a couple of dozen shots into the Toyotas, he hit the gas and moved up next to the stopped vehicles and hopped out to finish the job with the Uzi.

  Returning to the SUV, he did a quick body count over the past seven minutes. It was high. And it now included police officers. This had just escalated from a drug violence-related encounter to a regional and potentially international incident. He looked around and saw no other vehicles following him as he pulled away from the vehicular and human wreckage he had just created.

  He hung a left onto the avenue and drove away, the opposite direction from the border crossing. He had an idea.

  Chapter 9

  He was right.

  Standing in the night shadow of a four-story building, he had a clear view of the area around the Paso del Nortre Bridge, especially the pedestrian bridge beside the vehicle structure. His gut instincts brought him here.

  The kid assassin made his entrance from a side street just after 4 a.m. He wore a jacket, baggy jeans and a baseball cap. He also carried grocery bag. The punk looked just like many of the other men Preacher had watched approach the international pedestrian bridge during the past 20 minutes. Workers heading across the border in the early morning to a day's work for cash under the table in El Paso. It had been like this for decades and the kid knew this human capitol business model provided a means for his escape north.

  Preacher stepped from the shadow into the murky light cast by an array of streetlights in the area. He took a casual path that would intersect with the kid before he reached the gate allowing citizens to begin their cross-national overpass trek. An hour and a half had passed since Preacher flew out of the Castle's garage in the Jag. Three police cruisers were parked just 50-feet from the pedestrian bridge. Six officers stood drinking coffee, smoking and scanning the crowd.

  At least there were no soldiers here, yet. The Mexican Army had not been put on warning that a high-ranking officer had been slaughtered with five others in a house next to the home of the Juarez Cartel. Preacher had thought about that kill over and over during the past hour. He looked at it from eye level, from above, in reverse and in slow motion. He looked from the kid's emotionless eyes to the others he had only seen in a glimpse before the spray of bullets flew.

  Why had the kid done it? Why then, when the whole operation was under siege? And it clicked.

  The siege, created by Preacher mind you, caused the various stakeholders in the success of the Juarez Cartel to come together for an impromptu high-level meeting. And, wouldn't you know it, the punk just happened to be there to send the attendees of said meeting to the next life. A move that would undoubtedly destabilize the entire network for months, maybe years to come. It would create a vacuum that would, by nature, be filled. Interesting.

  Hell of a mission. Hell of an assignment for a newbie operative, if he even was one.

  Preacher pushed these thoughts out of his head as he walked past the gathering of police officers leaning against their squad cars. He walked casually on a trajectory to intercept the kid. Fifteen steps beyond the police, Felix spotted him. Preacher watched the kid, not with the set of eyes in his head, but those watching from on high. He had the area mapped out to the finite detail, which allowed h
im to take in the scene below from 500 feet.

  The kid didn't twitch, didn't break his stride in the least. Nothing. He was solid, no hesitation. Preacher was impressed, really impressed. The two of them stayed on their paths toward each other, watching each other every step of the way. Preacher wondered if the boy shared his gift of satellite vision. He'd not found anyone in any medical or psychological literature with his unique ability to see the world laid out below. Guess that's what made it unique.

  The two of them stepped up within five feet of one another. Their meeting here looked like other exchanges taking place between humans with a shared experience. Those gathered and chatting with others in the vicinity were undoubtedly talking about the violence and killings taking place on the streets of Juarez over the past two days. Occasional laughter could be heard as domestic workers and day laborers met up on the Mexico side of the border and trudged across by the hundreds to the U.S. of A.

  "So what happens if I yell over to those cops that you are the guy they're looking for?" The kid asked and nodded toward the police.

  "Hmm, I wonder," Preacher replied with a smile. "See, here's what I would like to know, what happens when I put a bullet through your right knee and then you're left shoulder and then kick you in the throat as you bend over, stifling your scream. And then I race over to the police and put bullets through their foreheads and out the backs of their heads. And then slip into one of their cars and pull over here to load you into the trunk and drive across town to deliver you to the front step of the U.S. Embassy so they can find you shot and bleeding and holding the gun that killed six police officers, along with many others, over the last 48 hours."

  The violent monologue caught Felix off guard. The kid's procerus contracted and his eyebrows squinched up with the rest of his forehead. Preacher was watching the reaction, but more importantly, he was watching from above for any movement, any tell.

  "That seems like a bit much," the kid finally said. "Who are you?"

  "I have the same question for you."