As Xander rounded the hallway that took him to the west wing of the mansion, the voices grew louder. They were shouting in Spanish, and though Xander didn’t understand their words, there was no mistaking their tone. As he walked past the dining room, there was a large open archway that led into what looked like a massive room. It was clear the shouting was coming from there, so Xander moved swiftly to the end of the hall and sidled up to the opening. The men continued to shout; then he heard the distinct sound of the slides of pistols being pulled back and released. Someone was ready to shoot. In a slow motion, Xander moved his head around the wall and saw two important things. First, three men were standing over a silver-haired man lying on the ground, with what looked like blood pooling around him. Second, through the window on the far wall, he noticed a woman steadying a pistol in the direction of the three men.
Zhanna.
Because the men had their backs turned to Xander, he quickly waved his hand once, and immediately Zhanna turned her pistol on him. He ducked back behind the wall in case she pulled the trigger on reflex, but when all he heard was the men continuing to shout at Romero, he spun himself around the wall, nodded to Zhanna out the window, and shot the two men on the right in the back as she took out the gunman on the left.
“Behind you!” Romero shouted, pointing his finger at the second entrance to the room on the far wall over Xander’s shoulder.
Xander spun while simultaneously dropping to a knee, flicked his right arm up and squeezed the trigger twice, dropping the man walking in the doorway. Romero and Xander heard two more shots on the other side of that wall, followed by a fiery redhead walking through the doorway, changing out her pistol’s magazine as she confidently strutted their way.
“Thanks for assist, Xander,” Zhanna said.
“Thank you.”
Xander rose to his feet and walked over to Romero. Romero was much paler than the tan version of himself from earlier in the night. A leaking hole in the side of your stomach tends to have that effect. No one knew that better than Xander. There were still nights he would wake from a nightmare, reliving the night on his yacht a few months back when he was blasted in the stomach himself. It was a strange thing to see your own blood flowing freely from your body. That stuff wasn’t supposed to make it to the outside. Xander still had pain once in a while from his nasty wound.
“Where are the rest of your men?” Xander asked Romero.
“Dead.” He looked up at Zhanna. “If it wasn’t for her, I would be as well.”
“What am I? Chopped liver?” Xander made a motion to the dead men lying at his feet. The men he’d just killed to save Romero.
“No . . . I—”
“Joking.” Xander stopped him. “Don’t waste your energy. Do you think you can walk?” Xander extended a hand to help the wounded man to his feet, but before he could get to it, he heard gunshots from upstairs. His arm recoiled like he had reached for a hissing snake; then he reached instead for his gun and bolted for the doorway.
“See if you can stop the bleeding!” Xander shouted to Zhanna on his way out.
As he jogged down the long hallway, he heard more gunshots above him. The gun sounded like Sam’s Glock, but through multiple walls and a flight of stairs, he couldn’t be sure. As he approached the banister, he eyed the top of the stairs. He didn’t see any movement. It was then that he remembered telling Kyle to message Zhanna what part of the house he and Jack were in. Xander pulled his phone from his pocket and pulled up Kyle’s reply.
Z, if you make it upstairs, we’re in the master bedroom closet. On the right side of the house.
Perfect.
Xander tiptoed up the stairs. He hadn’t heard another gunshot. He hoped that meant Sam had taken the rest of the cartel gunmen out, but he couldn’t know that for sure. He turned right at the top of the stairs, per Kyle’s text to Zhanna, and moved down the dark hallway. No one had managed to hit the lights up there, and he was happy that was the case. Life and death happens in fractions of a second when you are playing these deadly games. Darkness could aid in providing a millisecond hesitation from the enemy, and that would be long enough for Xander to take advantage. The house was quiet now. Too quiet. Xander opened three doors in the hallway for a quick check inside as he made his way to its end. One door left. According to Kyle, this was where Xander would find them.
He reached for the door handle, and just as he was getting ready to give it a twist, he heard something beyond the door. A squeal? A sob? He couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like a woman. His mind computed several things at once. Zhanna was downstairs, Sam could easily take these thugs out, and he hadn’t seen another woman other than Romero’s wife—
Romero’s wife.
Xander kicked in the door, and as soon as he did, a gunshot rang out. The room was dark, but when the muzzle flashed, out of the corner of his eye he saw a woman tied to the bed with two men hovering over her. As soon as he heard the blast, he dropped to the ground. If the man had been a good shot, Xander would be dead. As it turned out, Xander didn’t feel the burning sting of a bullet, so this time he was lucky.
But that wasn’t going to last.
He rolled to his right, and just as he did, he heard two more gunshots, followed by the splintering of hardwood as the bullets burrowed into the floor where he had just been. From his stomach, Xander whipped his gun around and squeezed the trigger. The man let out a shout and began to hop around. Xander had hit him in the leg. He moved his gun up the silhouette in front of the window and pulled the trigger again.
The shouts of pain stopped.
As Xander scrambled toward the light coming from a half-shut door on the wall beside him to flee from the gunfire the other two men would surely be raining down on him, a worry flashed in his mind. According to Kyle’s text, this was the room he and Jack were in. But clearly they weren’t. Xander dove through the door and kicked it shut, then dove once more for the claw-foot tub against the wall to his right. Just as he pulled his leg down into the porcelain tub, gunshots blasted, and after blowing holes through the bathroom door, the bullets ricocheted off the marble floor and walls around him. He should have been worried about himself, but all he could think about were the gunshots he’d heard when he was downstairs. He had assumed they were from Sam’s gun. But since she, Kyle, and Jack weren’t where he expected, he worried that maybe Sam had been ambushed by the men who were torturing Romero’s wife on the bed.
His mind snapped back to what he could control, and that was getting rid of these two gunmen so he could then get answers about where his friends were. He pulled up his pistol and shot out the lamp shining on the sink counter. More bullets came blasting through the door in response to the noise he made.
“Ah! Oh God, it hurts!” Xander shouted. Not his best performance. “Please! You got me! Por favor!”
The first gunman kicked in the door. They had believed him. Maybe there was a future for Xander at the Academy Awards after all.
Xander sat up and spent his last two bullets on the large shadow that moved into the bathroom. When that shadow fell to the ground, Xander was staring at two arms extended toward him. He threw himself backward and lay down flat in the tub as fast as he could, and it was just as two more shots were fired in his direction. Then he heard two more shots, but they sounded like they had come from farther away. Maybe the hallway. He eased his head up to see above the lip of the tub, and saw no one. Then the light came on, and Sam in all her ferocious beauty walked around the corner.
“There’s no time for a spa treatment, Xander,” Sam said with a wry smile on her face.
Xander pulled himself out of the tub as Kyle walked into the room. Xander gave him a sideways look.
“What?” Kyle said, shrugging his shoulders.
“What? Don’t you know your right from your left?”
“What are you talking about?” Kyle was genuinely confused.
“You told Zhanna that you and Jack were on the right side of the house.” Xander swapped o
ut his last magazine in his Beretta.
“Yeah, the right side.”
Sam turned and gave him a look.
“What?” Kyle asked.
They gave him a moment. Then he turned as if he would be facing the house, trying to figure out what they were talking about. His shoulders slumped and he turned back to them.
“Oops?”
“Oops?” Xander said. “Pretty big oops there, brother.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Kyle held up his arms. “I must have been sick that day you trained me on how you must always be facing the house to call out a side.”
Sam scoffed. “Some things fall under the category of common sense, sweetheart. Good thing you’re cute.”
“Uh, I hate to interrupt, but does someone want to help me untie this young lady?” Jack said from beside the bed.
16
The Tendency to End Up Dead
The group finished squabbling over which side of the house was which, helped Jack untie Romero’s wife, then made their way downstairs. The mansion looked like a war zone. It had been a while since anyone had heard a gunshot, but everyone was still on edge as they reached the war-torn foyer. Bullet holes and bodies were the new decor, and as Zhanna helped Romero in from the hallway, he looked like if he wasn’t careful, he would fit right in soon.
“You don’t look so hot, you going to make it?” Xander asked.
Romero removed his arm from around Zhanna’s back and stood on his own. He was wobbly at best.
“I’ll be just fine. My men just radioed that the perimeter is clear. I can’t thank you enough for your help. Is everyone in your group all right?”
“They’re fine. So much for the horse race tomorrow, I guess.”
Romero looked as if he might protest.
“Save it, we’re leaving. We’ve had better welcomes.”
“I’m sorry about this, Xander. Is there anything I can do to make it right?”
Xander didn’t hesitate. “Tell me where I can find your son.”
“My son?” Romero played dumb.
Xander was over it.
“Look, Romero, we both know I didn’t come down here for a horse race. I came down here because there is a human trafficking operation tied to your name in the intelligence circle. We can play friendly all you like, but there isn’t a damn thing funny about selling little girls into slavery. Now, either it’s you or it’s like you said and it is your son. I’ll find out either way, so let’s make this easy.”
“It’s not that simple.”
Xander racked the slide on his Beretta. “Oh, it’s exactly that simple.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment. Romero winced and placed his hand over the bandaged wound on the side of his stomach. Two of Romero’s men walked through the front door, their assault rifles down by their sides. Romero took a deep breath, straightened his posture, and gave Xander a long look.
“I thought we would make good friends, was I wrong?”
“I’ve got plenty of friends. Which is it, Romero, you or your son?”
Romero glanced at his men, then took a sweeping look at Sam, Zhanna, Kyle, and Jack. It was clear he was trying to decide if there was a way out of this conversation. Xander cleared his throat, letting Romero know that there wasn’t.
“What I told you in my office was true. I haven’t seen or spoken with my son in a year.”
“And you also said he was the reason the cartel was here tonight. That you’d been trying to keep him from trashing your name.”
“I am businessman, Mr. King. I would never have my hands in such things that you are speaking of. That being said, I don’t know where my son is. And if I did, I couldn’t tell you. Regardless of what he has done, he is still my blood. You have to understand that.”
“I do understand,” Xander told him as he tucked his gun in the waistline of his pants. “But you have to understand that I will find him, and stop him.”
Romero took a step toward Xander. Sam raised her gun, and so too did Romero’s men. Now the room was on edge. The two men were standing face-to-face, neither of them willing to back down.
“Don’t be fooled by the friendly demeanor I have shown you on this night. I assure you, I am not the sort of man you want to find yourself on my bad side. If you go after my son, you will have an enemy in me.” He took another step forward. “You must know that you don’t want an enemy like me.”
This time it was Xander who took a step forward.
“And you need to know that my enemies have the tendency to end up dead. All of them.”
Just as the tension was about to boil over, José, the undercover CIA agent who had been in Romero’s fold for more than two years, walked in from the hallway.
“Sam, Xander, I have new information regarding the latest trafficking shipment that will be moving across the border.”
Romero turned in José’s direction, a look of disbelief on his face.
“Traitor! I trusted you!”
Romero went to move toward José, but Zhanna kicked his legs out from under him. His wound had drained his strength, and he dropped to the ground with ease. But he still had a fire inside him, and it was clear that he didn’t like to look weak.
“What are you waiting for? Shoot them!” he shouted to his men at the front door. But they were too slow to react: Sam had already pulled on them.
“No, no,” she said to the gunmen. “There’s been enough killing for one night. Drop the guns and you won’t be next.”
“Shoot them!” Romero shouted again, sounding desperate. But his men recognized there was no way to win this one, so they laid their weapons on the floor. “Cowards.” Romero was disgusted.
“Listen,” Xander said to the now-unarmed men, “get him some medical attention.” Ignoring Romero, he then said to the rest of his team, “Let’s get out of here. José, you can fill us in on the way to the airport.”
“All right, what do we know?” Xander skipped the small talk and got down to business with José. They helped themselves to Romero’s only SUV that didn’t have blown-out tires from the shoot-out earlier, and Kyle was driving them back to the airport.
“You really know how to make an entrance,” José said. “You always leave this kind of carnage behind?”
“It tends to follow us around,” Xander said. “So what do you know?”
“Right. An undercover FBI agent has sent word that a shipment is being finalized tonight for the San Diego border, and should be there around nine tomorrow evening.”
Sam spoke up from the front passenger seat. “Wait, there is an undercover agent working with the ones responsible, and they sent us here, what, on a wild-goose chase? They’ve known the entire time?”
“I’m not sure about the specifics, ma’am,” José said. “Last I heard the agent had gone dark. Been weeks since the agent had checked in. I’m assuming the FBI considered her dead.”
“And now, tonight, this agent all of a sudden reappears?” Xander was trying to understand. “Seems like an awfully big coincidence, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, sir. This is all third party to me. As you know, I’ve been in the dark myself. The only reason I knew this information at all was because I was given a burner phone at my intel drop this morning. I guess because they knew you were going to be here, that I might need access to information. An encrypted email just came in during all of the commotion. That’s all I know.”
“I understand,” Xander said, then shifted focus to Sam. “We need a conversation with Marv, stat. He’ll be able to clear this up for us, give us our real target, and stop wasting our time having us fight other people’s battles. If this is the way it is going to be working with US government agencies again, you can consider me retired.”
Sam just nodded and turned to get to work on the situation. They needed information, and they needed it fast. Xander didn’t like the way things were shaping up. He had put his team’s lives on the line, and maybe for nothing. That didn’t sit well with him at all
. He knew Sam was thinking the same thing, and he knew she would soon get to the bottom of it.
17
Taken
As Xander’s newly formed clandestine unit, Reign, was seemingly chasing their tails in Sinaloa, things in another part of Mexico had become downright scary. Sixteen-year-old Carrie Taylor’s life was about to change drastically, and what was worse was her eleven-year-old sister, Bethany, was there too.
The two girls were on a cruise with their parents, and out and about for the day at their first port of call, Puerto Vallarta. Carrie’s mother and father had been discussing whether or not to let Carrie make a little money babysitting her sister for a while, and since her parents wanted some alone time by the beach, Carrie was allowed to take her sister shopping a few blocks away. It was the worst decision her parents ever made.
“Can we go see if they have any postcards?” Bethany asked her big sister. Her eyes wide as half-dollars, her smile as broad as the ocean just down the road.
“Why? Are you going to send one to your boyfriend?” Carrie teased.
This had been an ongoing hot button between the girls. Carrie knew her little sister had a boyfriend; she had seen the notes Beth kept “secret” in her top drawer. She couldn’t help that her mom made her do laundry and she had to put Beth’s clothes in that drawer. It was cute, her sister’s first crush. She wished she could tell her that all boys will do is break your heart, but she didn’t want to ruin her sister’s fun with her own already cynical view.
“I don’t have a boyfriend, Carrie!”
“All right. Whatever. But we better hurry, the stores are probably about to close and Mom and Dad don’t want us out after dark.”
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