by Tom Wood
Jairo hesitated. “You’re the fifth person they’ll have robbed.”
“Then you shouldn’t have been nervous with me. It should be old hat by now. My fifth job was a walk in the park. Figuratively and literally. Gorky Park, if you’re interested.”
“I don’t want to be part of this,” Jairo said. “I hate them. But I have no choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” Victor said, then understood. “Ah . . . You weren’t scared the shakedown would go wrong, that I would see it coming. You’re scared of what happens when it goes right. You don’t have the stomach for it. That’s why you were drinking, isn’t it?”
Jairo was silent. He couldn’t look Victor in the eye.
One of the feral dogs was barking at gulls trying to steal the morsels of food it had found for itself. The gulls swooped down in daring raids as the dog chased them away.
“They’re not going to simply rob me, are they, Jairo? They’re going to kill me. That’s why it’s worked four times before: no one left to report the crime.”
“I—”
“Don’t bother. I don’t want to hear it. I want to hear how they’re going to do it. I didn’t see any signs that anyone is nearby, so they’re keeping their distance.” He glanced around. “Let me guess: I give you the cash; I take the rifle. I think it’s all fine; then I drive into an ambush when I try to leave the beach, when my guard’s down. Sound about right?”
Jairo could only nod.
“I like it,” Victor said. “Whoever thought it up knows their stuff. Can’t do much with my hands on the wheel. That’s why I don’t like driving. You’re getting nervous again, Jairo. Calm down—I’m not going to kill you.”
Jairo was confused.
“On one condition,” Victor explained. “After I’ve killed your friends, I want your assistance cleaning up the mess. I don’t just mean the physical mess, but the fallout. I have a job to complete, and I can do without the added attention. It’s proving to be difficult enough as it is.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to understand at this moment. All you need to understand is that this is a genuine deal. I don’t really have rules, Jairo. There’s not much I haven’t done. There’s even less I won’t do. If there’s a worse person out there, I haven’t met him, and I’ve met plenty. But if someone plays straight with me, then I’ll probably play straight with them in return. I’d like to call it a do-no-harm kind of philosophy, but in the business I’m in that would be beyond ironic. So let’s say that if I agree to a deal then I’ll honor it, and while I don’t necessarily expect the other party to do the same, there’ll be the severest of repercussions if they don’t. What I’m trying to tell you is that if someone leaves me alone, I’ll leave them alone. You could say I try to keep my word, but I’m also a very bad person. If I weren’t presenting you with a genuine offer, if I were trying to trick you, I would say something like, ‘I’m not going to kill you now’ or ‘I’ll help you get out of this,’ which would allow me to keep my word and still kill you later. Juvenile, perhaps, but who wants to grow up if they don’t have to? But that’s not what I said. I’m offering you the unprecedented chance to continue your miserable existence. All you have to do is back the winning team. So, are you going to switch sides?”
Jairo was even more confused. “They have guns.”
“A shocking revelation,” Victor said. “I can see that you are unconvinced. That’s understandable, as you don’t know me, so I’ll allow you to think about it. You can give me your answer in a few minutes’ time.”
“You’re as crazy as they are.”
Victor nodded. “More so, I assure you. But that’s enough talking. Let’s maintain the charade, shall we?” He secured the case in the load bed and then offered Jairo his hand. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
Jairo stared at his outstretched hand.
“At least try to play along, Jairo. There’s a good chap.”
A tanned hand took Victor’s, and they shook. Jairo’s grip was limp. He was shaking his head before Victor had finished. “No, they already know.”
He looked at Jairo. He looked at the open shirt and the loose shorts, the tattoos and the chest hair, the sandals and the hairy legs. Nowhere to hide a conventional recording device.
“You were supposed to give them a signal when you looked in the bag,” Victor said. “But you didn’t. They know I haven’t brought the money. They’re here.”
Jairo didn’t respond, but he didn’t need to say anything. A loud rustle came from the dunes, from beyond the long grasses, announcing the approach of several figures with guns.
• Chapter 3 •
They looked as Victor would have expected. They dressed in military fatigues, as if they were a legitimate army, but the clothes didn’t fit right. They didn’t quite match: olive green with woodland green, US Army–issue jackets with Colombian khakis that they attempted to pass off as uniforms but failed on the details. They had jungle boots and marching boots and hats of various types—caps, berets, and smocks. There were six in total, five armed with cheap assault rifles: Galils and FALs, all as old as Victor. They were clean, though, which was the most important detail. Whatever the failed attempt at a uniform, whatever the age of the weapons, these guys had at least some proficiency. Amateurs, but not incompetents.
Their arrival startled the feral dogs, who scattered, leaving whatever they had found to the gulls. Victory through perseverance.
The leader of the six was obvious. She walked—strode—ahead of the others, her face pinched by undisguised anger. The woman looked young, but so did her men. None of them were older than twenty-five. One of the men was still a teenager. They were a group of idealists that had become extremists, which in Victor’s experience was more of a short walk than a long journey. He had been paid to kill enough of the latter to know the steps.
She had a confident gait and held a rigid posture. Camouflage paint dirtied her face. Her hair was short and straight. Binoculars hung by a leather strap from her neck. Unlike her men, she carried no rifle, but had a sidearm holstered on her left thigh. She drew the pistol as she neared and aimed it at Victor with her left hand, but the safety stayed on. He was in no immediate danger, because killing him meant they wouldn’t get the money.
The commander stopped when she was close, but not too close. Victor raised his palms.
“Don’t shoot,” he said without inflection.
“Where’s your weapon?” she demanded.
Slow and obvious, Victor lifted one flap of his shirt to reveal a Glock tucked into his waistband. He had bought it in the back streets of Guatemala City, where small arms could be purchased cheap and were readily available.
“Lose it,” she said.
Victor did. A good pistol, but no use in a six-on-one gunfight. He threw it toward the dunes, high in the air, so it didn’t go far. His gaze was on the woman, so he didn’t see the Glock land, but he was listening hard for it to do so. Twelve or thirteen meters, he noted, should he need to sprint for it. He wasn’t sure how this was going to go just yet, so he wanted to keep his options open.
“Where is it?” she demanded.
He played ignorant—“Where’s what?”—but not dumb, because his answer only angered her further. He wanted her angry.
“The money,” she spat. “Where is it?”
“Far away from here. Safe. Secure. Hidden.”
She edged forward. “Where?”
“I’ll take you to it, if you like.”
“Tell me or I’ll put a bullet through your skull.”
Victor shrugged. “Then you won’t get the hundred thousand.” He glanced at the bag Jairo was still holding. “Well, the other ninety-nine thousand, to be exact. I’m guessing a grand isn’t a good consolation prize.”
One hundred thousand dollars wasn’t a lot of money to Victo
r, but to some aspiring terrorists living in tents in the jungle, it would go a long way to keep them sustained. Someone had recently told him that revolutions took time, and were expensive. When the average citizen in this part of the world earned less than ten thousand dollars per annum, it wasn’t hard to see how such a group would kill for the kind of cash Victor had brought to them. Or hadn’t brought.
The woman said, “I don’t have to shoot you in the head. I can shoot your dick off if I want to.” She stepped closer. “You’ll be begging to tell me then. You should know that I’m a great shot.”
Victor remained silent. He didn’t have to say anything. They both knew it was a bluff. The old weapons and the mismatched clothes answered for them. They were desperate for funds. She wouldn’t risk hurting him too much. If he died of shock or blood loss. they would miss out on much-needed cash. This was a new situation for her—the shakedown-cum-ambush had worked every time until now—and she wasn’t sure of the best way to handle this particular scenario. She was making it up as she went along. Victor had been in similar situations. He knew what to do.
“Okay,” she said, having worked out her next move. “You take us to the money.”
“No,” he said.
“No?”
She was shocked. His refusal wasn’t part of her next move.
Victor said, “If you want the cash, you do it my way. I’ll take you to it. But only you. Your guys wait here. They can build a fire from driftwood. Sing songs about workers controlling the means of production until we get back.”
She smiled with contempt, stepping closer, and answered with a predictable “No.”
Which let him ask, “You’re not scared of me, are you?”
She hesitated, because there was no correct answer. If she agreed, she would lose face in front of her men. If she denied, there was no reason not to go with him.
She smiled at Victor, as if this was a misunderstanding that had spiraled out of control, and lowered the pistol. “We can fix this, can’t we? You want the rifle. We want the money.”
He nodded. “It was supposed to be that simple. It could’ve been that simple. Play straight with me and I play straight with you.”
Jairo, standing at the edge of Victor’s peripheral vision, tensed.
The woman holstered the gun, fast and easy. “It still can be. See? We’ll all go to fetch the money. I’ll go with you. My men follow in another truck. Okay?”
“Sure,” Victor said with a smile of his own, as though she had convinced him it was only a misunderstanding, that her intentions were to make the original deal work.
Pleased to have the situation under control, she turned to face her men, to tell them what to do next. She had a new plan.
The only problem with it was that she now stood too close to Victor, who took a fast step forward—up behind her—and closed the distance enough to snatch the gun from her unfastened holster in his left hand while he grabbed her hair with his right.
In an instant, the muzzle was against her cheek.
“Change of plan,” he said.
• Chapter 4 •
The five guerrillas with rifles went into a panic—muzzles coming up, shouts, threats. Victor ignored them because he had their commander as a human shield. She was a lot smaller than he was, but that didn’t matter. None of the five were calm enough to risk a headshot, especially in the semidarkness, especially because Victor didn’t keep himself, or his hostage, still.
He had her hair bunched tight in one fist, pulling back to keep her head from being in line with her hips, robbing her of her strength, her stability. He kept the muzzle pushed into her cheek despite the tactical naïveté of doing so—the closer the gun, the more opportunities she had of going for it—but it was for show, to make a statement, both to her and her men.
She said, “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I haven’t before,” Victor said. “I’m not going to start now.”
Her body was a mass of tension, but she didn’t struggle. She didn’t fight. She knew she was at his mercy.
“We can work this out.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do all this time. It never had to reach this stage. I only wanted to buy a rifle.”
She said, “Take the rifle. It’s yours. Take it and go. Keep the money.”
“Your sudden generosity is rather touching.”
“You don’t have to kill me.”
He wasn’t planning on killing her. At least not yet. Not when there were five automatic weapons waiting to shred him to pieces the second he executed his hostage. Which was why such hostage situations never worked. It was nothing more than a bluff. If the hostage taker were suicidal, he wouldn’t take a hostage in the first place. The hostage taker needed the hostage alive, because it was the only thing keeping him alive in turn. The problem was that most hostage takers didn’t realize this until it was too late, until they had already trapped themselves.
The five guys with the rifles didn’t understand this dynamic and neither did their commander. If any of them had, escape would have been impossible for Victor. He’d been on their side of proceedings once before, but he hadn’t needed the experience to know how these things played out. It was little more than common sense.
In time, however, the guerrillas might work out that he was as much a hostage as the commander, so it was important not to hang around and give them the chance.
Victor said, “Tell your guys to drop their weapons.”
“Then you’ll let me go?”
“I’m not leaving here until your men have dropped their guns. If they don’t, you’re leaving with me.”
Once they were disarmed, he would have time. He could place his shots. Her pistol was, like the rifles, an old gun. A Colt 1911. Solid, reliable, but it held only seven rounds in the magazine. Which gave Victor two spares if he failed to land all head shots on the guys with rifles.
“Drop your weapons,” she called to her men.
They hesitated, which was the natural reaction. He could see them struggling between the need to obey and protect their leader and the fear of leaving themselves unarmed. She repeated herself, louder and more forcefully. It was enough for the five men to start lowering their guns.
Victor readied himself. He would be shooting with his left hand, which was not his preference, but he was almost ambidextrous. Five targets. Seven rounds. Not easy, not without risk, but doable.
Except for the one element he had neglected to account for.
Jairo said, “Let her go or I’ll shoot you dead.”
A quick glance over Victor’s shoulder told him it was a genuine threat. Jairo had pulled a weapon of his own. An automatic; Victor could identify the model in the dim light. He knew Jairo had been armed, but hadn’t expected him to draw it. He wasn’t the sort. Dutch courage, maybe.
Nothing about Jairo suggested to Victor that he was any kind of marksman, but the man was only a few meters away. Victor’s back was a wide enough target that at this range even a poor shooter could hit him.
A one-eighty spin would put the woman between Victor and Jairo’s pistol, but would only expose Victor’s back to the five guerrillas. He twisted ninety degrees instead, enough to keep both sets of enemies in his vision with a half turn of his head. It was hard to move fast on the sand without losing his footing.
“Stay out of this,” Victor said.
“What are you going to do now?” the hostage asked him.
“I mean it,” Jairo insisted. “Let her go.”
Victor could see the five guerrillas were edging forward. The change in situation had given them a new play. They weren’t going to shoot Victor if he turned around long enough—too much chance of a through-and-through hitting their commander if they grabbed their guns in time—but they were going to rush Victor instead. He wouldn’t be able to drop them all if they did, even
if he didn’t have to worry about Jairo shooting him in the spine.
“You’re going to die,” the hostage hissed at him.
“I’m starting to get that impression.”
He had tried reason. He had tried being reasonable, and it hadn’t worked. Now it was time to bring emotion into the proceedings.
Victor released the commander’s hair and wrapped his arm around her rib cage. Once he had a tight hold, he took the muzzle from the woman’s face, pushed it against the back of her left thigh, and squeezed the trigger.
The dense muscle of the hamstrings and quadriceps, combined with the thick layer of subcutaneous fat, suppressed the gunshot, muting it to a wet popping sound. The .45-caliber round exploded her femur and burst through the front of her leg, spraying blood and flesh in its wake.
Victor was strong enough to keep her upright with just one arm, but she was becoming heavier by the instant. He had severed her femoral artery because he wanted the sight of so much blood pumping out of her leg to focus her men’s attention, but it also made her unable to support her own weight. Without his assistance, she would have collapsed straight to the ground.
The guerrillas and Jairo didn’t know what to do. They were stilled with shock and horror at the sight of the wound and all the blood, overcome with fear and concern for the commander, who passed out within seconds.
Victor called, “No time left to argue. We do it my way. She’ll bleed to death within a minute unless a tourniquet is applied. Throw down your weapons.”
The guerrillas hesitated, but only for a moment. Once the first had dropped his rifle, the other four followed suit. Jairo was the only one left with a gun in his hand.
“Lose it,” Victor said.
Jairo kept it pointed at him.
“She doesn’t have time for this.”
The gun didn’t move.
One of the guerrillas yelled, “Do what he says.”
Jairo didn’t listen. His aim held firm as the commander bled. She was pale now. She didn’t have much longer, that was obvious. Victor could see that. Jairo could see it too.