Chapter 25
Anyone who’s had the flu has had those weird-as-hell vivid dreams. You get this whacked-out mixture of reality and surreality. You come in and out of being awake. Sweating. Feverish. Unsure whether anything that just happened in your mind happened for real. This, my friends, is exactly what it’s like to be drugged and hooded.
Hood on, obviously I couldn’t see much. The first sensation I had was hearing something. It was murmuring coming from the far corner of the room. Two males. Middle-aged. Whispering. Stopping every minute or so, as if to glance over at me. I heard snatches of their strange conversation: “…or before the other one checks in…” and then “…sure if the other doesn’t…”
I couldn’t tell where these guys were from. To tell the truth, I didn’t even recognize the accent, or whether they even had accents.
Suddenly, I was approached by a guy whose knuckles smelled like kerosene.
Offering me a drink of water, he removed my gag and lifted my hood—just enough for me to look down across my cheekbones and across the room. I tried to take a mental photograph so I could study it in my head after I glimpsed it:
On the far side of the room were two guys in track jackets. They had guns. An M24 and an M5.
The room was big and bare. Not much furniture.
There was a doorway, and through it I caught a glimpse of a tire. The tire of some kind of vehicle.
The tire was mounted on an airplane wheel.
It took me a split second but I quickly realized that I was in a hangar.
The hood was yanked back down over my face, and Kerosene Hands stuffed the gag back in my mouth. I heard some whispering behind me. And then I heard a yelp from what sounded like another room. A female voice. Muffled. Crying out. I didn’t know for sure it was Kyra, but I certainly suspected it. Then I heard some more whispering and a large metal object clanging against something.
Goddammit, you dogs. Don’t hurt her.
That’s what I tried to say. Those six words. But I was gagged.
I assumed six hours had passed since they put the gag on me.
But I have no idea if it was six or three. Or sixteen. Or sixty. The hood ensured that I couldn’t see any daylight. You can learn a lot from daylight. The height of the sun in the sky. The apex of its arc. The fact that it’s out, at all. The difference in angle fifteen minutes between glances, if you’re lucky enough to get a second glance, can tell you where north is.
Every little bit of info counts.
I wasn’t going to get that far, though. I could already hear what sounded like a hierarchy of conversation. Somewhere off to my left I detected what was distinctly a verbal command: not two guys talking but one guy telling another guy what the hell to do.
There’s my fulcrum.
I made up my mind that the next time they came to give me water or raise my hood or take a look at my sulky disposition I was going to spit out the gag and bite the hand that reached in. I was going to bite the damn thing as hard as possible and see if that little oral hello could get them to change their plan.
Because I was now convinced Kyra was tied up in the next room and was being ordered onto that plane.
And if that plane was going to Mexico, death would be a luxury.
Chapter 26
There really is no way to escape a situation like this. Not if it unfolds as planned. The plan, their plan, was that I’d be cuffed to my chair. Hooded. There were armed men in the room. They knew where I was. I didn’t. They knew what they intended to do with me. I didn’t. They knew who they were. I had no clue.
That meant I’d be worse than dead if I let their plan unfold.
I had to derail it somehow.
Even if it was just a tiny hiccup in their agenda. I had to prod the tissue of their intentions with a surgical instrument: to see how it responds, gain an edge. Because if I bite the ideal guy’s hand, he will want to beat the living shit out of me. And if he’s not allowed to do that yet, then I might cause a conflict between him and whoever is in charge.
But that’s not how this day would go.
“I don’t care, just get it done,” said the voice in charge.
My hood got lifted off. And before I could bite the guy who was lifting it off, I saw his face. And you know whose face it was?
Warren Wright. I should call him El Warren. Warren Wrong. I don’t know how he slipped his allegiance from the DEA to Diego Correra, but he must have. The shit-sucking brickhead.
“Colonel,” he said. “I need you to keep your mouth shut. Just do as you’re told and you won’t get hurt.”
I wanted to say the following: “Pretty much whatever you tell me to do, I’m going to do the opposite.” But I was gagged, so it sounded like “Heehee muh heheheh hoo.” And I gave up halfway through.
“Stop moving,” said Warren.
If I could just get him in a choke hold, maybe get my hand around his voice box and threaten to yank it out, I could get his minions to let me bargain for Kyra’s life.
But my handcuffs were tight. Too tight.
“Stop moving!” barked Warren.
I moved even harder.
“STOP!” he shouted, then added, “Trust me.”
I stopped.
Not because he told me to stop and certainly not because he told me to trust him. Trust you, you little bitch? I’d rather trust a garbage fire. But because I heard something in the background that was an absolute game changer.
The plane was starting its engines.
Chapter 27
I must have lost consciousness again, because the next thing I knew I was on that plane, with a pounding headache. They put silencing-headphones over my ears so I couldn’t hear anything. Hooded, gagged, and cuffed, I could barely tell if I was sitting or standing. The only sensation I felt were changes in altitude, which, let’s face it, with all my other senses deprived, made me wanna puke up everything I had eaten in the past year.
At this point I was barely maintaining the combat initiative. They won, whoever they were. They owned the day. I was being taken to where they intended me to be taken. The only thing I had control of was my thoughts. And I couldn’t even control those. Certain unwanted images kept floating relentlessly to mind. Namely, my youngest daughter.
“Trust yourself,” she said.
Myself? How? Why?
The word trust was popping up because Warren had said it. I reminded myself that my sensory-deprived brain was just misfiring its synapses, bringing random memories to the forefront, blending new memories with old ones.
I’d failed, as a soldier. I managed to get my ass abducted. All because I simply had to take an ill-advised shower. I didn’t have the good sense to check my house before getting naked and vulnerable, before separating myself from my weapon. A cardinal sin. And I had committed it.
“Mommy, you can do this,” said my implausible daughter.
Do what? Was I hallucinating? She hadn’t aged—my vision of her. It had been two years, but she wasn’t any taller. Sensory deprivation is guaranteed to fry you into mental anguish. No one survives it.
“Stay awake, Mommy.”
“I am awake, munchkin. I’m just sort of losing the battle right now. Don’t look at Mommy. Look at the sunrise over—”
Wham! Somebody hit me with a baseball bat. Aluminum. Hard as a slugger.
Here in this plane.
No, not a bat. It was a rib of the aircraft cargo area. I was lying down. This was the metal support, the curved girder that braces the fuselage.
I felt a pair of large hands move me back to whatever position I was in. I think we hit turbulence. Nobody hit me, actually. It was the air. The air hit us all.
Or, no, wait a minute.
We were landing.
Chapter 28
I was in the middle of a warehouse. In a chair. Cuffed. Muffed. Hooded. When the blinders finally came off, I had to squint. My vision was blurry. Everything was so bright. I couldn’t tell if it was the next day or the next week.
There were two guards posted at the main door to the warehouse. I could hear some footsteps echoing in the distance. They were coming from behind. My captors. The boss of my captors. I didn’t even turn. My final middle finger. Let them look at the back of my uninterested head.
I want to say I could smell his aftershave or his stench, but I couldn’t. I could only just hear him. Warren.
Warren Never Wright.
“I’ll need your full attention, Colonel,” he said.
The thing is, based on yet another weird exchange of murmurs I caught just now, I realized it wasn’t Warren who was in charge of this abduction. I heard a pair of high-heeled feet approaching. I’d recognize those shoes anywhere. Patent black leather asexual heels. Retail cost $69.99 at the naval base store. We ladies all had to buy a pair. And she was wearing hers.
General Claire Dolan.
She stood in front of me in full uniform. She had enough brass on her chest to outshine a pride parade.
“Sorry about the methodology, Colonel,” she said to me in her standard bludgeoning tone. One doesn’t get to the rank of general without tapping into one’s inner mega-bitch. But she might not necessarily be here to ruin my life. “I hope you’re physically undamaged.”
I didn’t say yes.
“I hope you’re mentally undamaged,” she added.
I’d worked under her Fifth Battalion six years ago. She was tyrannical, ruthless, and played her favorites, but she absolutely positively always got her job done. Something that’s been hard for me to relate to lately.
“I’m here to ask you about your informant,” she said. “Where are you getting your information from…about Diego Correra?”
I wasn’t going to answer anything until she assured me that Kyra and Rita were all right. If she was worth even one stripe on her rainbow scoop of medals, she’d quickly tell me that my two spiritual sisters were fine.
“Who is your leak?”
I didn’t answer.
She pulled up a chair really close to me and sat down. She took out a ballpoint pen from her coat pocket. I started to get the feeling that they’d ask me this question over and over until I gave in.
She started to whisper really close to my ear. “I know you’ve done a lot for your country. I know what happened after Matamoros. I know the price you’ve paid. Prices.” She leaned in even closer, talked even quieter. “You have my condolences. You have my sympathies. You have my prayers to the God of your choosing. But you don’t have my patience. Who. Is. Your. Leak?”
If I knew, I still wouldn’t tell you.
I sat unmoved. She took a deep breath in. She hovered her pen near the canal of my ear. Not in it. But around it. Hovering. She could poke my eardrum. Tidy. It would be easy for her to deny it afterward, easy to say it got punctured on its own. Perforated. It would be easy for her to deny touching me. Perforated eardrums hurt like crazy.
“You rose through the ranks pretty damn quick,” she said, launching one of those here is your dossier, you soon-to-be-dead tramp monologues. “Almost as quick as my royal ass. You paid your dues. Got the desk job promotion with the privilege of staying in the field. You did what any good rookie does, you made male officers jealous. Now, I don’t want to have to ask this one more time…”
“Who is your leak?” yelled Wright.
His voice echoed in this warehouse. If General Dolan seemed annoyed, Agent Wright seemed downright enraged. Not sure how I could be the source of his intense exasperation, given that I’m the one who sat under a hood for a day. Maybe he just hated that he was being dragged alongside me. Locked in this trash dump of a warehouse, wherever the hell this was.
“I’m not gonna keep waiting for an answer,” said Warren.
Luckily for us all, Dolan finally said the magic words. “Sergeant Holmes and Lieutenant Ramirez are fine.”
So I spoke up.
“I want verification,” I said to her. “I want to be treated like a human being.”
“Then act like a colonel.”
“I’m not a colonel anymore,” which was a fine thing to say, but then I stumbled right into what was clearly her verbal trap. “I was discharged two years ago.”
“Yet you prance around…all around the continent…shooting villagers and setting shit on fire.”
“Villagers?” I had to correct her. “Murderers!”
“You don’t raise your voice at us!” said Warren, who at this point was fuming, who stood up and kicked his metal folding chair across the room. “Not us!”
I’m guessing he’d promised Dolan I’d cooperate instantly. It started to seem more and more likely to me that they had already questioned me while I was drugged and that maybe I didn’t say jack to them. Even while drugged. High five to Drugged Amanda and Her Stubborn-as-a-Morgue Mouth.
Warren kept yelling and was clearly ready to take over the whole interrogation. “You put the lives of hundreds of agents in jeopardy.”
Yes, sir, I did.
“Compromised US–Mexico diplomatic relations.”
Yes, sir, I did.
“Committed enough criminal acts to be tied up in a box for life.”
“You have no proof of any of that,” I said to him. Loud. Turning to give him the direct eye contact he probably didn’t want. Bully. “If you did, we wouldn’t be talking in a warehouse.”
He leaned in. “You better hope there isn’t some sort of Geneva Convention thing you’re relying on in your head right now, thinking, hoping, that we don’t get out some power tools and Guantánamo you into a more cooperative bitch.”
“If Rita and Kyra are in the next room, then prove it to me,” I said.
He stood there. Unflinching.
“If all you want is the name of a leak,” I continued, “I don’t have the name of a leak. This conversation is over, so take us home.”
“No,” said Dolan.
“Well, then we’ll just stay here for a really long time and trade beauty tips,” I said. I’d lost my cool at this point. “Who does your beehive? When was the last time you rechiseled it? Was it here? In this room? And by any chance are you gonna tell me where the hell this shit hole is?”
General Dolan stood up, a sneer forming on her face. “You’re in Mexico City, babe. You wanna leave?” She tossed the pen in my lap and added, “Find your own way home.”
Chapter 29
“Find your own way home?” questioned Rita. “That’s what she said to you?”
“Let’s not worry about it,” I replied.
“I hate that whore,” said Kyra. “Always have.”
The three of us were literally standing on a street corner in what felt like, by American standards, a back alley, but what was really, by Mexico City standards, an actual street. Quaint, with little colorful stores and square houses all sandwiched together. The whole thing would be lovely if it weren’t so run down. This was the bad part of town in Mexico City, Distrito Federal.
“That’s north,” said Rita, pointing eighty degrees to the right of the setting sun.
“Find your own way home,” repeated Kyra. “How about my boot finds its way up your ass?”
“That would be fun but you’re not wearing boots,” said Rita.
None of us were. They had left us in almost nothing worth wearing outdoors. We barely had the clothes on our backs. All jokes and wardrobe malfunctions aside, we had a more horrific problem looming over us now. We had literally nothing. No weapons. No car. No bikes. No phones. No cash. No credit cards. No food. No water. I had on a pair of prison-issue overalls and sandals, which was only slightly better than the towel I was wearing when they brought me in. Kyra was in yoga pants and a T-shirt. Rita was rocking mom jeans and a turtleneck sweater.
“We can’t stay in one place,” I said, adopting command mode. “We have to keep walking.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said both of my best friends, snapping into soldier mode.
I pointed across the street and we crossed. We began our hike. “Are either of you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” said Rita, “physically and mentally. They didn’t torture us. Are we really gonna walk to Texas?”
She was only 38 percent kidding.
I didn’t answer her. I honestly had no idea how we were going to get back. This situation would be hard enough for normal people to undo, but for the three of us, who were high-profile targets for every kind of bad intention from every kind of a bad-intending person, we were in for a long night.
Dolan didn’t get promoted to general based on her sagging tits. She was a ruthless witch, who out-ass-kicked in every ass-kicking contest she entered. And she entered all of them. If she felt a mission needed to be done a certain way, she would destroy whoever contradicted her. And she would get that mission done. Had to tip my hat to that. But she hated me. Not sure why. I had never spoken to her face-to-face before today, but I’d hear things around the base. She wanted me erased from the Corps.
She couldn’t kill me. But technically she could certainly find a situation to let me die in. Here. In Mexico.
And would Warren Wright stop her? Apparently not.
“Do you think we’ll see any hostiles?” asked Rita.
“Affirmative,” I replied.
“What exactly should we be on the lookout for?” she asked.
“Them,” I said, pointing across the street.
There were four guys standing at the far end of the block. Locals. Mean-looking.
It would be better if they just wanted to do us. We could repel that sort of thing. But they didn’t have that sort of “do” in mind.
Chapter 30
“They could be drunk,” said Kyra.
At this point we had walked several blocks in a tangential path that took us away from whatever barrio our four enemies spawned from. We would stop to point at shit in store windows so that we could yap with each other like giggly little tourists, so that we could happen to glance to our rear without looking like we were glancing to our rear.
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