Bill sat up straighter and frowned.
“I hope you don’t mean what I think you—”
He stopped short as he spotted a woman coming along the River walk toward their table. He wasn’t the only one watching her. Nearly every male eye was on her, and so were a good number of the female eyes.
“Catalina,” Bill breathed.
Clark twisted in his chair to look back at her. He grinned as he said, “Yeah, I told the agents with her that this was where they’d find us. They’re close by, keeping an eye on her.”
“I thought she was in Dallas.”
“As soon as she heard that everything worked out all right down here, she made her minders turn around and bring her back.” Clark chuckled. “From all reports, she’s a very forceful young woman. Used to getting her own way.”
“Yeah, she’s all of that,” Bill agreed. “Pretty good car thief, too.”
Clark raised his eyebrows.
Bill ignored that and got to his feet to meet her. Catalina ran the last few yards and threw herself into his arms. There was nothing romantic about it; at least Bill didn’t think so. It was just the grateful embrace of two friends, two comrades in arms who had thought they might never see each other again.
Catalina stepped back, rested her hands on his shoulders, and said, “It’s all over, Bill?”
“Sure,” he answered without hesitation, but even as he said it, he knew that might not be true. He remembered what Clark had said about Barranca de la Serpiente and knew there was still work to be done.
But not tonight. Tonight was for being grateful that they were still alive and that the nation hadn’t been wrenched even further off its moorings.
“Hope you’re hungry,” Bill said with a grin. “You got here just in time for a late supper.”
Tariq had been praying almost nonstop since he was captured, praying for Allah to deliver him from the hands of the American infidel dogs. He couldn’t believe he had come so close to achieving his glorious destiny, only to have it snatched away from him.
Two more seconds and paradise would have been his.
Instead he was stuck now in this dreary cell, aching from the beating the old infidel had given him, locked away on the American military base behind layers of steel, concrete, and barbed wire. He was sure that he would be spirited away to some even more secret prison, possibly out of the country, where he would be tortured and humiliated by the blasphemers.
The little room contained only a bunk and a toilet. The light fixture was set into the ceiling where it was impossible for anyone to get at it. One wall was concrete, the other three impenetrable steel, as was the door, which had a small window set in it, the shatterproof glass laced with wire inside, and a slot where food could be passed into the cell.
The hour was late, but Tariq had spent a long time being interrogated. He hadn’t told them anything, of course, not even his name. The only words he had spoken had been to call on Allah for help.
The slot in the door opened, the panel that formed it rising from some sort of electronic signal. A tray of food appeared. Finger food, small sandwiches and pieces of fruit, because he wouldn’t be trusted with utensils of any sort.
Tariq wanted to refuse the food, but his stomach rebelled. He hadn’t eaten that morning, and by now he should have been dead for almost twelve hours. As much as he might have liked to, he couldn’t ignore the prodding of the flesh.
He stood up, took the flimsy cardboard tray, and returned to his bunk to eat. As he chewed a bite of one of the sandwiches, he paused suddenly as he came across something small and hard inside it. His tongue explored the object. It was a capsule of some sort, he decided.
He immediately thought that someone had smuggled it in to him so that he could take his own life. But that would accomplish nothing. While Tariq had no objection to hurrying his own passage to paradise, he wanted his death to mean something.
With the next bite he took, he slipped the capsule out of his mouth into his hand. He was sure that a camera was hidden somewhere in the cell to observe his every move. He kept the capsule concealed so that the watchers would remain unaware of its existence. It might come in handy later on.
Sometime during the night, the light went out so that he could sleep. When it did, he stood up from the bunk, went to the door, and used the faint light that came through the tiny window to examine the capsule. He twisted the two halves, breaking them apart.
The capsule didn’t contain powder or a liquid. Instead, hidden inside it was a small piece of paper rolled into a very tight cylinder. Tariq unrolled it, and a smile appeared on his face as he read the words printed on the paper in English, the only language he had in common with the man who had sent the message.
When he had committed the words to memory, he rolled the paper up again, inserted it into the capsule, and swallowed it without hesitation. He knew now that it contained not death but the promise of life.
Life . . . and vengeance on the Americans who had ruined everything.
The message had read: Be ready. We will get you out. Sanchez.
BOOK TWO
THE TEAM
CHAPTER 17
New York City, four years before the New Sun
“You sure they’ll be there?” Bailey asked.
“Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it,” T.J. replied. “My information is solid, man.”
Bailey curled his hand around the grips of the heavy revolver stuck in the waistband of his trousers.
“Better be,” he said. “If we’re gonna do this, I don’t want anything to go wrong.”
“Nothin’ gonna go wrong,” T.J. insisted. He bounced up and down on his toes, too full of nervous energy to be still as they stood in the shadows watching the warehouse across the street, not far from the docks.
Knowing T.J., he was probably full of something else, too, thought Bailey. A little chemical courage. T.J. could handle it, though. He had used all the time they were together in the sandbox and hadn’t let the unit down once. Not once. He and Bailey were the only survivors, true, but the others getting wiped out in an ambush hadn’t been T.J.’s fault, not by any stretch of the imagination.
If anybody was to blame for that “incident,” it was Bailey. He’d been on point when they were clearing the houses in a village. He was the one who’d let the insurgents flank them on both sides and catch them in a crossfire . . .
Bailey shoved that thought out of his mind. He’d been brooding about it for years now, and that hadn’t changed a damn thing. Dead was still dead. Those guys weren’t ever coming back. So he had to look out for himself, and when T.J. had come to him, first time they’d seen each other in a good six months, with the idea of ripping off the guys in the warehouse, Bailey hadn’t had to think about it for very long before he said yes.
“You can make more in one night than you could make in a year working at that club, man. And it ain’t like these are good guys we’d be rippin’ off. They’re assholes, man. Drug-dealin’ assholes.”
“So if we steal the drugs and sell them, what does that make us?” Bailey had wanted to know.
A cocky grin had spread from one side of T.J.’s face to the other.
“Robin Hood, man. That makes us Robin Hood.”
“Stealing from the rich and giving to the . . . We’re not exactly poor, T.J.”
“Speak for yourself, man. You can’t be rakin’ it in, workin’ the door at some club. And I know I’m not makin’ much bartending in this joint.”
They were sitting in a booth in the little bar where T.J. worked. It was late, and they were alone. The bar was closed, and so was the club where Bailey worked.
They were quite a contrast, sitting across the table from each other. The ponderous-looking white guy, so big the other grunts in the squad had nicknamed him The Incredible Hulk, and the frenetic little black guy. But Bailey and T.J. were best buds and had been since the day they’d met, which oddly enough was half a world away, even though they had both grown up in New Yor
k City—T.J. in Manhattan, Bailey across the river in Brooklyn. New York was a big place, though, so it wasn’t surprising they had never run into each other.
“We’re liable to get ourselves killed,” Bailey had objected when T.J. laid out the plan. “The buyer and the seller will each have a crew of hardasses with him. The two of us won’t be any match for them.”
“But we’ll have the element of surprise on our side,” T.J. had argued. “Plus we’ll have some of these.”
He reached into his backpack, which lay on the seat beside him, and took out something that he placed on the table between them. Bailey’s eyes grew wide as he looked at the object. A pleasant haze from the alcohol he’d consumed this evening had enveloped his brain until now, but it burned off like fog in the morning sun at the sight of the thing on the table.
“What the hell? That’s a grenade!”
“That’s right. Ordnance, man. We can blow their asses off if we have to.”
Bailey shook his head and said, “We’ll blow our own asses off, more than likely. Where the hell did you get that?”
“I got my sources,” T.J. said serenely. “Look, it’s simple. We go in and show them these babies, and they turn the money over to us. Actually, I’ve been thinkin’ about it, and I think we should leave the coke there. It’d be easier to trace than the money will be.”
“You think? Couple mooks like us turn up with a fortune in coke, that’ll draw attention we don’t want.” Bailey pondered and then slowly nodded. “But the cash is a different story, especially if we’re careful and don’t make a big splash with it. We’ll have to hold it back, though, T.J., and just spend a little at a time. Think you can do that?”
“Sure, no worries.”
Bailey didn’t really believe that. T.J. and the concept of impulse control were total strangers. He might intend to lay low for a while with his share of the loot. He might even believe that he could do it successfully.
But Bailey knew better. The cravings would hit T.J. and he’d have to do something to satisfy them, and once he was flying, there was no telling what he might do or say.
Maybe Bailey could sit on him, though, until the heat died down. If the take from ripping off that drug deal was as much as T.J. claimed, it might be worth running the risk.
“All right,” Bailey had said, that night in the bar. “Let’s do it.”
That was how he came to find himself standing in the shadows with a couple of grenades in his pocket on a hot, muggy night. The water was close enough that the air stunk . . . or maybe that was just his own sweat and worry he smelled.
“Ooh,” T.J. said beside him. “Here they come.”
A big, expensive car slid to a stop in front of the warehouse. According to the intel T.J. had overheard in the bar, that would be the Ukrainians with the money. The Arabs with the drugs were already inside the building, waiting for the cash just like Bailey and T.J. were.
Bailey leaned toward his friend and said in a low, urgent voice, “Maybe we should hit them out here, leave the Arabs out of it entirely. They’re just something else than can go wrong.”
“Out in the open? No, man, we can handle it better inside. Those camel humpers, they’ll stay out of it once we tell ’em we ain’t after their coke. They’ll still have their merchandise, and they can always sell it to somebody else.”
The plan still seemed a little sketchy to Bailey, but what the hell. A man had to run a few risks to get ahead. He wouldn’t ever do it working the door at some club, letting in a bunch of rich kids who had more money than sense.
Two big men got out of the car, one from the passenger seat in front, the other from the seat behind the driver. The driver stayed where he was for the moment, and so did the other man in the backseat. The two big guys looked around but didn’t seem to see anything threatening. Not surprising, since there was nothing to see in this neighborhood at this time of night. All the buildings were dark.
One of the men nodded to the second guy in the backseat. He got out carrying a briefcase. Bailey’s eyes fastened on the case. According to T.J., there would be 1.2 million dollars in there.
The driver emerged from the car as well and reached back into it to retrieve a pump shotgun with a pistol grip. He walked beside the money man toward the door that led into the warehouse’s office area. The other two men fell in behind them.
The door opened before they got there. All four of the men disappeared inside.
“Time to go to work,” T.J. said, still bobbing on his toes.
Bailey reached up and pulled the rubberized ski mask over his head. On a night like this the thing was hot and stifling, and for a second he felt a surge of claustrophobic panic. He shrugged into the cheap Windbreaker he had brought with him and worked tight-fitting gloves onto his hands. The only skin visible was around his eyes, and he had worked lampblack into it earlier.
The goal was that nobody would be able to tell if he and T.J. were white, black, brown, yellow, or whatever. If somebody started looking for a big white guy and a little black guy, there was a chance the trail would lead back to them sooner or later, and they didn’t want that.
Bailey tried to take a deep breath, but the ski mask made that difficult. He said, “Screw it, let’s go.”
A few days earlier, after they had decided to pull the job, T.J. had asked him, “Whatchu gonna do with your share, man?”
It was a question Bailey hadn’t really considered. When you got a bunch of money, you had that money. That was as far as his thinking had gone. Bailey had forced himself to ponder the matter for a moment, then said, “Go to the mountains, maybe.”
“The mountains? Why? Most guys, if they rich, they wanna go sit on a beach somewhere.”
“I’ve been where it’s hot and sandy, remember?” Bailey had said. “Didn’t care much for it. But I’ve never really seen any mountains.”
“All that snow? I dunno, man. I’m not much for the cold.”
“What do you think the weather’s like here all winter? At least if you’re some place up high where there’s a lot of snow, it’d be . . . I don’t know . . . cleaner somehow.”
“Maybe so, man, maybe so. You gonna be rich enough you can do whatever you want, that’s for sure. One point two mil, baby, that’s what we gonna split.”
Those snowcapped mountains Bailey imagined might as well have been a million miles away from this squalid New York street. He put all thoughts of them out of his head to concentrate on the job at hand.
T.J. had scouted the place ahead of time, once he knew where the deal would go down, and had found a way in, a window in an alley that had been boarded up. He had pulled all the nails except a couple in each board, so Bailey with his great strength had no trouble wrenching them loose. He had to do it carefully, though, and not make too much noise that might alert the men inside. The window was so narrow that his shoulders barely fit, but he made it.
Once they were in, T.J. led the way, finding a path through a maze of hallways the same way his instincts had led him through streets like rabbit warrens in those dusty towns on the other side of the globe. He had an instinct for such things that made him valuable despite his drug habit and his jumpy nature.
If it had been T.J. on point that day instead of him, maybe the rest of the squad would still be alive, Bailey had thought more than once.
They reached the open area of the warehouse. The huge, high-ceilinged room was like a cavern. It was empty except for a folding card table that somebody had set up.
The two crews stood facing each other across that card table. Two briefcases sat open on the table. The glare from a bare lightbulb overhead shone down on clear plastic packets of white powder in one case and tightly banded bricks of money in the other.
In the shadows, T.J. licked his lips and whispered, “Maybe we’ll take just a little bit of the coke, okay?”
“No, just the money,” Bailey said.
“Okay, okay,” T.J. muttered.
The boss of each crew stood sligh
tly ahead of his companions. The two men talked in heavily accented English, the Arab promising that the cocaine was high quality goods, the Ukrainian saying that it had better be.
Bailey took one of the grenades from his pocket and pulled the pin. As long as he held on to the arming lever, nothing would happen. He slipped the pin in his pocket so he could replace it once they were out of here . . . assuming, of course, that he didn’t have to use the grenade. Then he drew his revolver.
Beside him, T.J. had armed one of his grenades and drawn his own gun, a Glock 9mm that he had gotten hold of somewhere. T.J. was a champion scrounger and always had been.
But Bailey suddenly found himself wondering about the grenades. T.J. swore they were the real thing, but you couldn’t exactly test that out, could you? What if they wound up tossing the grenades at the feet of those ruthless killers, and the damn things just thudded to the floor and lay there, harmless?
In that case, he and T.J. would wind up very dead, very quick, Bailey thought.
But he couldn’t back out now. He didn’t want to, and anyway, it was too late, because T.J. had just stepped out into the open, waved the Glock, brandished the grenade where the men couldn’t miss it, and yelled, “Don’t move or we’ll blow you all to hell!”
CHAPTER 18
Bailey stepped out behind him, moving to the right and waving his own grenade in the air so they couldn’t miss it. He pointed his revolver at the Arabs while T.J. covered the Ukrainians. The man with the shotgun started to raise it, but T.J. waggled the Glock at him and said, “Uh-uh, man, don’t do it. This baby’ll turn you into hamburger if I toss it over there.”
Bailey felt himself trembling a little inside as he looked over the barrel of his gun at the Arabs. T.J. hadn’t been sure where they were from—he thought maybe they were Syrians—but it didn’t really matter to Bailey. The swarthy faces, the beard stubble, the mustaches . . . after his time in the sandbox, they all looked the same to him.
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