Lisa put Tommy’s arm over her shoulder and turned toward her car. She was going to get out of there just in time.
David was pissed at his brother, and Lisa. But he was happy they weren’t going to be around to screw things up. He watched as Lisa put Tommy’s arm over her shoulder and turned toward her car. Just as he was about to finish making sure his team was on the same page, his cell phone began to ring. He pulled it from his pocket, and the number on his screen instantly made him nervous. He knew this was not going to be good news. He had seen Lisa on her phone in the car; he should never have trusted her.
“Hang on, Lisa. Wait right there for a second.”
Lisa turned toward him. The look on her face told him exactly what the private investigator who was calling was about to tell him.
“I’m just going to get Tommy out of here. He’s hurt, David.”
David held up his finger. “No, I’m going to need you to wait right there for a minute.”
David nodded to Jon, and Jon pulled a pistol from his hip holster, training it on Lisa and Tommy.
“What the hell is this, David?”
Fear wrapped around Lisa’s question.
“Just wait one minute,” David said.
Then he turned his back to them and answered the phone.
Lisa couldn’t feel her fingers. Somewhere between making the call in the car and Jonathan pulling a pistol on her, her nerves finally fried. Why would he be telling her to wait? What could he possibly want that was so important she couldn’t just do what he said and get the hell out of there? Her spine was on fire. A distant voice in the back of her mind was telling her just to run. Drop Tommy, and run. She couldn’t believe she ever tried to cover for David in this whole thing. She had put her entire career at risk. If it wasn’t for the money she owed, she would never have tried to throw the FBI off track in Mazatlán. From the looks of things now, she may have only made it harder on David.
As she watched his body language, the back of her mind was now screaming at her to get out of there.
But she didn’t run.
“Hello?” David answered his phone. “Yeah.” A pause. “Yeah.” Another pause. “You’re sure?” One last pause. “That’s what I hired you for. How long do I have?”
Those were the last words that Lisa heard David say. The last words she ever heard anyone say. Except for her own voice as she pleaded for her life. In front of her, David put away his phone, pulled out his pistol, pulled a silencer from his pocket, and fastened it to his gun.
“David? I’m going to go now, okay?” Her voice quivered.
David didn’t answer; instead he began to walk toward her. A knowing look on his face. Not sad, not angry, just . . . sure.
“David, what’s wrong?”
He raised the gun as he closed the distance between them.
“David! David what the—”
The last thing she saw was a spark at the end of the silencer.
Tommy dove away from Lisa as blood spattered everywhere from her forehead. David didn’t want to shoot her, but he didn’t have a choice.
She was a traitor.
“David! David what did you do?!” Tommy screamed as Lisa’s body collapsed to the ground.
Dead.
“What did you do?!”
David turned the gun on his brother.
“Did you know, Tommy? Did you?!”
Tommy began to sob.
“David, what did you do? Why would you do that to Lisa?”
“Answer me!” David shouted.
“Know what?” Tommy began to backpedal away from David on the sidewalk.
David could see the fear in his eyes, but he couldn’t tell if his brother knew or not. Fortunately for Tommy, and thanks to Lisa, he didn’t have time to stand around and find out.
“David, what’s going on?” Tommy shouted through gasping breaths. “Why did you do that to our sister?”
David couldn’t hold it in.
“She isn’t our sister, Tommy. Not even half. She’s not our blood, and her betrayal showed that blood matters.”
“What are you saying, David? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Lisa, aka FBI Agent Eliza Sanchez! The stray that our hippie mother took in, and now it’s come back to bite us!”
Tommy looked dumbfounded. His eyes were wide, and his chin may as well have been scraping the concrete.
“FBI? Eliza? She hasn’t gone by that name in more than ten years. What are you saying? She’s dead, man! You killed our sister! FBI? She doesn’t even have a job. She was fired weeks ago. There’s no way!”
“She wasn’t fired, Tommy. She was undercover. Giving up her own people who took her in.”
“You killed her, David. You killed our sister!”
“NOT our sister!” David screamed. “She just ratted us out. I’ve had her phone tapped for the last few days. Since she started acting weird about this job. You know what, I don’t have time for this shit. There is no way you didn’t know. But I don’t have time to deal with you right now. I have to pick up the pieces your FBI agent just scattered. If you say one more word, I’ll shoot you right between the eyes.”
Tommy didn’t say another word.
“How bad is it?” Jon said.
David turned to him. “The FBI are on their way.”
“What? Here? So we’re through?”
“Hell no, we aren’t through. Get ahold of Francisco. Tell him to go ahead and land, but wait at the plane for our instructions.”
Jon was baffled.
“What? You just said the FBI is coming. He can’t land here.”
“The PI said she only told her handler that we were here armed. Said she would explain the rest later.”
“David, they will be checking every plane that comes in,” Jon explained.
The look of frustration was heavy on David’s face. The last thing he wanted was to complicate things, but he knew Jon was right. It would make everything more dangerous if they stayed and tried to make it work there.
“You’re right. Call Francisco, tell him to go to plan B. Tell him to divert at the last minute and to stop communicating with the towers. His pilots will have to be careful coming in to miss traffic, and quick getting back out, but it’s the only option we have. I don’t like it being so close to the drop, but our shell game of vans should still provide us with a shadow. We just have to get them out of here now, before the FBI knows what we’re driving.”
Jon turned to their men.
“Split up in each van and get to Atlantic Aviation at the Santa Monica Airport. We don’t have a man in the tower there, so I’ll be instructing Francisco to land, let the girl out, then take off. We’ll need to be ready to scoop her up and get the hell out of there.” Jon turned to David and pointed at Lisa, dead on the ground. “What do you want to do with her?”
David looked down at her in disgust.
“Leave her. Let her friends at the FBI deal with her now.”
Jon nodded, and the band of mercenaries split off, some of them going to the Santa Monica Airport, some of them going to set up around the house where they would be bringing the girl. David wasn’t happy about anything that just happened, but at least they were still in the game. He had a backup plan for all of this. Time in the SEALs taught him that nothing ever went according to plan, and you had to be ready for anything. His decision to tap Lisa’s phone had saved their ass. He learned long ago to trust no one. It hadn’t let him down yet. And not letting her and Tommy know the details of the drop location just helped him avoid a two-million-dollar loss.
David was feeling damn good about himself as they pulled away from the airport on their way to the biggest payday they had seen yet. But he knew it would be short-lived.
“Better call our man in the Middle East,” David said to Jon.
“I was thinking the same thing. No way out of this one now that Lisa gave us up.”
“No. I was ready to get the hell out of here anyway. But now w
e need that money more than ever. And we have to do whatever it takes to get it.”
Jon pulled out of the parking lot in the Hummer.
“Burn this city down if we have to?”
David looked at his partner in crime.
“And we may have to.”
32
Good Thing We’re All Crazy
Xander and the rest of Reign watched impatiently as Sam finished a call at the front of the airplane. She seemed animated, and that made Xander nervous.
She finally ended the call and walked over, shaking her head all the way over to them.
“You’re not going to believe this.”
Not good.
“You were right about Eliza Sanchez, Xander. That if we found her, we would find the party responsible for the trafficking.”
“Okay, so they found her. That’s great!”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of?” Xander was confused. “So they didn’t find her? Spit it out, Sam.”
“They found her all right. Dead. Just outside the Burbank Airport.”
“The FBI agent is dead?” Kyle said.
“Shot in the head out in the parking lot.”
“Damn . . . so what happened?” Xander asked.
“Apparently, that was where they were going to do the exchange.”
“Who was going to do the exchange?”
“This is the crazy part,” Sam said. “They aren’t clear on all the details, because she only gave her handler at the FBI a quick sentence before hanging up. But she was there to do the exchange along with her brother.”
Xander stood from his seat.
“Her brother? I don’t get it. The FBI said she was undercover. How could she be undercover with her own brother?”
“I know, it is all very convoluted. They are still working it out themselves. Marv thinks that she was undercover to keep them in the clear. The FBI didn’t know it was her brother. Remember, the report on her was that she was placed in a foster home. To a Melissa Tarter. The filed report was that she was going undercover to stop a small organized crime ring. The name she gave was Jonathan Haag. They gave her the detail because it was close to her home, and because it was a small-time ring. They thought it would be a good way for her to cut her teeth with the Bureau.” Sam noticed that Xander had zoned out. “Xander, what is it?”
“That name, Jonathan Haag. I did a few tours with a Jonathan Haag.” Xander’s mind was jumping all over the place. Alarm bells were going off like crazy. “What did you say the woman’s name was again that took Eliza in?”
The plane began to change its pitch and moved into its descent. They were getting close to the airport.
“Melissa,” Sam answered.
“Melissa what?”
“Um, Tarter, I believe he said.”
Xander’s expression went from confusion to revelation.
“Ho-ly shit.”
“What?” Kyle said.
“I know who’s behind this.”
“Right, I just told you, Xander, Jonathan Haag,” Sam reminded him.
“No, he’s involved, but he isn’t the one in charge.”
“So you know something the FBI doesn’t?”
“The FBI agent said it was her brother, right?”
“Right.”
“His name is David.”
Jack chimed in. “How the hell do you know that?”
Xander turned to him. “Because I had David Tarter and Jonathan Haag kicked out of the military for raping a woman in Afghanistan. She must have named Jon so she wouldn’t be implicating her brother if something went wrong. She must have changed her mind at the last minute. It wouldn’t surprise me if David was the one to pull the trigger himself.”
“This is crazy,” Kyle said.
“And if it’s Jon and David, David is definitely in charge. Jon used to follow him around like a little puppy. So the FBI missed the exchange?” Xander asked Sam.
“No, none of the planes we were tracking have landed yet. All they found at the Burbank airport was Eliza, dead. None of the chartered planes landed there.”
“So they moved exchange point?” Zhanna said.
“Yeah,” Xander said. “But the question is, where? And they should already know this by now. In a high traffic area like Los Angeles, if a plane diverts course, alarm bells would be going off right and left.”
Sam’s phone began to ring.
“It’s Marv.”
Sam put the call on speaker.
“You’re on speaker, Marv. What have you got?”
“Hello, Reign. A controller at the Burbank Airport just reported a plane diverting last minute, no longer communicating with them. This has to be Francisco Romero and our girl. They are either going to LAX or to Santa Monica Airport. I’ll let you know ASAP. We are scrambling SWAT to both airports and freezing air traffic. If we want to keep this girl safe, we’ll have to be delicate. We’ll do our best to clear a path for you to land, but there is a lot of traffic over Los Angeles.”
Xander said to Kyle, “Go ask Bob how far out we are.” Then he announced confidently to Marv on the phone, “He’s going to Santa Monica Airport. No way he tries flying blind into LAX, one of the busiest airports in the world. Have the team go there, but keep them away from the plane. We can’t have anything happen to the girl.”
“It might be too late to get a team there in time. He’s probably landing now if he’s going there.”
“Bob says five minutes if it’s Santa Monica,” Kyle shouted from the cockpit.
“We’re five minutes out, Marv. Tell tower to clear a path.” Xander said.
“Will do.”
Sam ended the call.
“What’s the plan once we land?” Jack said.
“Do our best to not let Francisco’s plane leave,” Xander said.
“You mean, like block the runway?” Kyle said.
“I’ll leave that up to Bob. He’ll know better than me. But as for us, we have to be ready for a gunfight. David and Jon are real assholes, but they are highly trained soldiers. The men they have with them that we’ll run into on the ground will be too. Let’s get the girls into the bathroom. They’ll be safe there.”
“Son,” Jack said to Xander, “I don’t know what you done in a previous life, but you got a crazy-shit magnet installed in you somewhere. ’Cause every situation we get into, you attract the craziest of shit.”
Xander nodded with a raised eyebrow, agreeing that Jack was probably right.
“Then it’s a good thing we’re all crazy too then, cowboy. Fight fire with fire.”
Jack’s response was to pull out his Colt Python and check its status, then he grabbed his sniper rifle from its bag to get it ready for action. Everyone else followed suit readying their own weapons. They didn’t know exactly what they would be flying into, but they sure as hell weren’t going to be caught off guard.
33
Playing Chicken . . . with an Airplane
Xander’s jet descended into Santa Monica Airport. The sun had yet to set, so it was easier for Bob to navigate the circling crowd of planes waiting to be cleared for landing. Inside the plane, Reign was hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. Best-case scenario: law enforcement foiled the handoff of the young girl from Francisco Romero to David Tarter. Worst-case scenario: the plane landed before anyone was ready, and they were able to unload the girl.
Now that it was out in the open who was responsible on both ends, thanks to the recently deceased FBI agent, Xander knew that Francisco, David, and everyone else involved would eventually get what they had coming to them. The concern was obviously for the girl. If Tarter did manage to get her from Francisco and made it out of the airport, that was a real problem. In this situation, some might have thought since David and his crew now had a lot of heat on them, that he would forget the exchange and run for cover. But Xander thought the opposite. He figured it was now more important than ever for Tarter to finish the transaction. He would need the money, which figure
d to be substantial, to make his getaway clean.
It didn’t surprise Xander that Tarter and Haag were caught up in this sort of racket, given how he found them raping that woman in the Middle East. He just couldn’t believe the coincidence in them being involved in this case, which he happened to be pursuing. Xander knew a lot of people, good and bad, so he supposed it was bound to happen. But this was just crazy.
If David knew that Xander was after him, it would change things. He would think differently. Because he would want revenge. He never forgot the look in David’s eyes when he stopped him from hurting that woman. And that look only became angrier when he and Haag were court-martialed because of it. Either way, it didn’t matter to Xander. The kind of scum that would sell a child into slavery wasn’t any more of a motivating factor. Because it was David didn’t further motivate him either. What it did do was make him understand that the danger in this mission had just been taken up a few notches. Both Tarter and Haag were good SEALs as far as skill. And a couple of Navy SEALs on the other side of the fight would always be a tougher go. He made sure that the rest of the team understood that, and that each risk they took would be greater because of it.
They couldn’t see any major commotion from their position just beyond the runway. Then Bob’s voice came in over the loudspeakers. Just as they were about to touch down.
“Traffic controller said the plane in question touched down four minutes ago. Hang on, they’re radioing back in.”
Sam looked at Xander. “You think they’ve had enough time to hand off the girl?”
Xander got up to go to the cockpit. “Four minutes? I’d say so. If Tarter was ready, they probably already have her.”
Bob chimed back in. “Xander, the controller is asking us to abort the landing. They say Francisco’s plane is heading for our runway, going to take back off.”
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