Poisonfeather (The Gibson Vaughn Series Book 2)

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  Ogden said nothing.

  “I appreciate you not insulting me with a denial. To answer your question, Mr. Ogden, the cartel took my husband and I in Chiapas as we prepared to flee into Guatemala. At the time, we didn’t know who had betrayed us. Only later did I realized that Charles Merrick was our patient zero. The source of the infection. Then we could only guess that the cartel had some sort of doubts about us. But when they took us alive, we thought foolishly that we would have a chance to plead our case directly to the patrón. After all, my husband’s loyalty had never been questioned. Had he not overseen networks that for decades had laundered billions in cartel money without incident? Instead, we were delivered to an abandoned warehouse. Water dripped from the ceiling. Humidity like a clenched fist. We were bound to wooden chairs. Hoods blinding us.”

  Lucinda signaled to one of her remaining men, who put the hoods back onto their heads while she continued her story.

  “We lived there, side by side, for days and nights. Yet I never saw my husband again. I heard him, though. And he heard me. Man from the CIA—you asked how I survived? Well, you have to make a choice, you see. It isn’t an easy one to make, but you have to choose to endure. To cling to sanity even as your face burns.

  “We knew nothing, as you well know, so we had nothing we could tell them. No way to satisfy them. And since our guilt was beyond dispute, that made them very angry. I confessed a thousand times. I would have confessed to nailing Jesus to the cross, but since I could not tell them to what I was confessing, they would not grant me the death I craved. They had a man. A gifted man. One at a time, we were untied and dragged into the adjoining room to this man so that the other might hear the screams. You cannot know the powerlessness and the despair that brings. To pray for your own agony to begin again if only to spare the one you love.”

  Lea listened to Lucinda King Soto tell her story with a mix of revulsion and empathy. Under the hood, she cried silent tears. For Lucinda King Soto, for herself. She knew enough theater to know that this story was but a preamble to something terrible.

  “They always gave us a few minutes’ respite between sessions,” Lucinda continued. “Time to whisper to each other pledges of love. Never did we speak of what was occurring. Always my husband told stories of our youth. How we met. Private moments to take us away from our misery. While the cartel men laughed and cursed us. Then it began again.”

  Far away, the muffled sounds of gunfire punctuated her story. Lucinda paused to listen.

  “My husband was not a healthy man, and the strain was inhuman. Twice his heart failed. Twice they brought him back. Unwilling for him to die on his terms. The third heart attack came as I was returned from my time in the other room. In a panic, they threw me to the floor and carried my husband away. I lay there. Unguarded. How do you survive? You make a choice, CIA. A choice to abandon your husband of thirty years, accepting that to stay means you will die together. But if you abandon him to die with those animals, then you have the chance to avenge him. You must break your wedding vows and run. Crawl, truthfully, on broken legs. Through a jagged hole and across miles of swamp until you happen upon a shop whose owner is too simple or too noble to turn you in for the reward.”

  “I can’t imagine what you’ve endured,” Veronica said.

  Lea recognized her mother’s charity voice. The warm, deeply concerned persona she assumed when addressing the media about this or that noble cause. Her entire childhood, Lea had never once heard it behind closed doors, and it sounded as false now as it had when she’d been a teenager.

  Lucinda seemed equally unmoved. “No, you cannot imagine. But fortunately, you won’t have to imagine for long.”

  “Listen to me. I had nothing to do with that,” Charles said. “If you want to torture someone, torture him. The CIA sold you out, not me. I was in jail.”

  “We couldn’t have done it without you, Charles.”

  “Ogden, you son of a bitch.”

  “Calm yourself, Mr. Merrick. You’re not going to be tortured,” Lucinda said.

  “Thank you—”

  “You’re going to listen.”

  “What? What does that mean?” Merrick asked, voice rising to a shrill note. “There is no money. What does that mean?”

  “Hector,” Lucinda said. “Begin with the girl.”

  Lea felt strong hands at her ankles and wrists untying her ropes. She knew now what part Lucinda had written for her. She had been cast as the sacrifice. The room exploded into chaos. Everyone yelling, no one listening. As soon as she was untied, Lea kicked out, fighting to get away. For half a second, she struggled free of one set of hands, and her heart soared with false hope. She was blind and outnumbered, and the two men easily overpowered her. They each seized an arm and cuffed them in front of her before marching her from the room.

  Merrick struggled against his ropes but could do little more than listen to his daughter scream. From the sound of things, she was putting up a hell of a fight. Over and over, he demanded that everyone stop and be quiet. He knew he could sort this all out if only they would let him call his son. He didn’t know what Martin had done with his money, but there was more than enough to reach some kind of accommodation. If only this madwoman could be made to see reason. But no one paid him any attention. It was this damn hood. To his side, Veronica yelled for him to give up the money.

  Far away in his mind, he realized that his daughter had stopped screaming. The room fell eerily silent, and Merrick heard the echo of gunfire like distant thunder from downstairs. It had intensified over the last few minutes, although it didn’t appear to have drawn any closer. He didn’t think he could endure his daughter’s pain. Why had she come to the prison? None of this should be happening. Through a haze of hot, frustrated tears he demanded the opportunity to speak. His chair rocked back and forth as he strained against the ropes, and then crashed on its side. The fall winded him, and he lay there listening to Lucinda King Soto mock his pain. He howled out his despair.

  “Rafael,” Lucinda said. “Set this imbecile upright.”

  Merrick heard footsteps approach, and Rafael began to heft his chair upright. A single gunshot, immediate and deafening, froze Rafael in place. Merrick couldn’t place where it had come from, but Lucinda called out in Spanish. He didn’t understand her words, but he recognized her fear. Merrick’s chair crashed back to the ground as Rafael swore in anger.

  A hail of gunshots cut him short, and Merrick felt a thud near his head. The guard grunted three times in quick succession and then deflated like an old balloon, whistling in Merrick’s ear.

  Lucinda gasped. “No, please, no, no, wait—”

  A single gunshot.

  Lucinda cried out, then said nothing more.

  Merrick couldn’t follow the action but guessed someone had slipped away from the battle downstairs. But who? They’d been spared whatever fate this psychopath had planned for them, but he doubted this was a rescue. The only question was whether this was the frying pan or the fire. Whichever it might be, best to start on the front foot.

  “Hello?” Merrick began. “Thank you. Whoever you are, thank you. She was insane. Please help us.”

  He felt his hood tug free. He blinked and looked up into the face of his daughter. In his shock, Merrick noticed for the first time how much his daughter resembled her grandmother. She knelt over Rafael, who lay on his side, left leg twisted beneath him at an unnatural angle. She rummaged through his pockets for the key to the handcuffs that shackled her wrists.

  Behind his daughter, Lucinda slumped in her wheelchair—a puzzled expression on her face, eyes looking blankly to the heavens, as if someone had told her a terrible joke but botched the punch line. Merrick looked back at his daughter, noticing for the first time the pistol in her hand and the blood splattered across her. The answer was obvious, but he couldn’t quite put it together in his mind.

  “Chelsea?” he asked dumbly.

  “I ruined your dress.”

  “What . . . ? It’s all r
ight. I’ll get you another.”

  “I don’t want another.”

  “Okay, that’s okay,” he said soothingly. “Now, listen. You need to untie us quickly. Before more come.”

  She put the gun down and reached for his left wrist. But instead of untying the ropes she unfastened his watch. She held it up for him to see, then brought her face close to his.

  “Dad, I need to tell you something.”

  “What is it, honey?”

  “It was me.”

  “What was?” He sought understanding in her eyes. “Untie us.”

  “I took your money. It was me. I wanted you both to know that when they come for you. Good-bye, Mother . . . you deserve each other.”

  Lea stood while he tried to make sense of what she’d told him. Damon and Veronica both began babbling in unison, trying to bargain with her, but Chelsea was already halfway to the door. Merrick held on to the preposterous notion that she was merely going to lock the door to give herself more time to free them. Only when the door clicked shut behind her did he understand.

  He laid his head on the carpet and wept for himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The rear façade of the Wolstenholme Hotel could have been more forbidding. Sure, it was possible. Throw in a few gargoyles. Maybe a moat and fill it with alligators.

  Gibson told himself it would be fine. Chances were, Deja and her boarding party had drawn attention away from the rear entrance. Unless the fifth floor were disciplined, which up until now they had been. He judged it to be about thirty yards. Thirty yards of open, well-lit parking lot between him and the hotel. All it would take was a single man with a rifle to ruin his night. Gibson wouldn’t even hear the shot that put him down. He scanned the darkened windows again. Nothing.

  It wasn’t a comfort.

  He broke cover and sprinted across the parking lot. No serpentine or zigzag nonsense; he put his head down and ran for his life. Thirty yards later, he threw his back against the hotel and strained to hear any indication that he’d been seen. So far so good. Now he needed a way in. Vehicles were parked in tight formation around the loading dock, so he didn’t feel like rolling the dice there. Emerson wouldn’t leave his escape route unprotected. Instead, Gibson hoisted himself up on a dumpster, where he realized the jump was a lot farther than it looked from up on the fire escape. Don’t be such a baby, he told himself; it’s only a ten-foot jump from the top of a dumpster to an antique fire escape. In the dark. If he missed, he was going to break something. Hell, he might break everything.

  “You can do this,” he whispered to himself.

  Gibson took a short run up, leapt, and reached for the bottom edge of the fire escape. Actually, the jump was the easy part. The hard part was absorbing his forward momentum with his shoulders and arms so that his lower body didn’t swing him loose and let gravity slam him down onto the concrete.

  To his surprise, he managed to hang on. He hauled himself up and rolled his shoulders in their sockets. A pair of gloves would’ve been nice; he wiped the blood on his pants and picked splinters of black metal from his palms, then climbed the fire escape to the third floor. He knew someone had been in his room, because the window was open, and the smell that greeted him made him gag. It reminded him of a latrine that had taken a mortar round when he’d been in the Marines. He remembered the sad bastards tasked with cleaning it. Not the kind of thing they put in the recruiting commercials. Gibson covered his mouth and nose with the collar of his shirt and climbed inside.

  His room had a new guest.

  Gibson stood over the body lying on his bed—fully clothed, on top of the covers. From the look of him, he hadn’t been dead long enough to decompose, but he’d taken at least one round to the gut, which explained the terrible smell despite the window opened for ventilation. Gibson reckoned he’d found one of the second-place finishers from the airfield shoot-out, although why the body had been brought back here he couldn’t guess. He doubted it was out of respect for the dead.

  Time to move.

  The door guard blocked the door so it couldn’t close all the way. As if someone had just run down the hall for ice. Gibson slipped out into the hallway and made his way to the stairwell at the front of the hotel. Along the hall, every door was cracked open the same way. Morbid curiosity forced him to check all the rooms in turn. In every bed, another body. All strangely serene despite the brutality of their deaths. This was a morgue now, not a hotel. But so far he couldn’t count Lea among the dead, and that gave him some small hope. Near the end of the hall, Gibson found the sheriff and Jimmy Temple; they lay side by side in a queen bed. They hadn’t been shot like the others but were dead all the same. Gibson touched the scar around his throat, cursed, and left them as they lay. Emerson Soto King had a lot to answer for.

  In the last room, he found the answer for why the doors had all been cracked open: a simple but effective bomb attached to a radio detonator, wrapped around two barrels of acetone that would act as an accelerant. By design, hotel doors swung closed to act as fire breaks, and propping the doors open would cause the fire to spread even faster. Now that he thought about it, the windows hadn’t been opened to air out the rooms but to provide oxygen to feed the fire. He’d bet good money that he’d find a similar device on every floor. The old hotel would go up like a bonfire. It would cover the fifth floor’s tracks crudely but efficiently. Investigators would spend years attempting to unravel what had happened in Niobe, much less be able to prove it.

  Gibson knew better than to attempt to disarm the bomb himself. It wasn’t his skill set, and simply because the bomb wasn’t complex didn’t mean it hadn’t been designed by a pro. Good bomb-makers always anticipated attempts to defuse their work. His best hope was to find Lea and get far from here before it detonated. At the mouth of the main staircase, angry voices rose up from below, trading threats and promises of violence. Gibson slipped out onto the stairs, but heavy footfalls drove him back into hiding. He held his breath as Emerson led half a dozen men down the stairs. If they’d gone any direction but down, he would’ve joined Jimmy Temple for one final night’s rest.

  Below, gunfire exploded in an ugly cacophony. From the sound of things, Deja had her hands full. Hopefully she would hold their attention long enough for him to free Lea. Gibson glanced out onto the third-floor landing and saw that one man had been stationed on the landing to guard the rear. The gunman had his back to the wall with unobstructed views up and down the stairs. He would cut Gibson down before he took three steps.

  A gun would come in handy right about now, and he was glad Deja wasn’t there to tell him so.

  Guo Fa didn’t know the new players down in the lobby, but they had his eternal gratitude. They’d drawn most of the security detail away from the presidential suite, and that presented a window of opportunity. Fate had smiled upon him, and he would not allow it to pass him by again.

  At the airfield, he’d cursed himself for underplaying his hand here in Niobe and allowing Merrick to escape. But then the planes had left without Merrick, and the firefight for the right to claim Merrick had exploded the night—decisive and brutal. Fa had watched the chaos from the tree line, a knowing smile creeping across his face: Gibson Vaughn had proven more resourceful than Fa could possibly have anticipated. Well, he hoped the hacker enjoyed Merrick’s money; he’d more than earned it. Meanwhile, Fa’s prize lay at the end of the hall. He drew his gun, tightened the suppressor in place, and made his cautious way down the hall. Fa had to admit to being more than a little curious about the identity of the presidential suite’s mysterious guest. It was the only piece of the puzzle that still eluded him.

  As he neared the suite, he heard a shot from inside. Fa rushed forward, fearing Merrick had been executed before he could be questioned. More gunfire caused Fa to reconsider. Not an execution, a fight. But who? He hadn’t seen anyone enter. As he pressed himself to the wall and crept forward, the door to the suite opened. A blonde woman in a yellow dress emerged. He recognized the
dress from the airfield, although he’d been too far away to see who wore it. Fa assumed Merrick had arranged entertainment for his flight. It seemed an accurate assessment now, for she held a pair of heels in one hand and closed the door delicately behind her, as if she were slipping out quietly after a one-night stand. In the other hand, she held a gun, and when she turned, Fa saw blood splattered across her dress. He recognized her as the bartender from the Toproll. Not at all who he’d expected to come through that door, but she didn’t give him time to puzzle it out. She saw him and her eyes went wide. Her gun jerked up in his direction.

  Fa shot her.

  The impact drove her back against the door, knocking the gun from her hand. The shoes flew into the air. Her legs buckled and she sat down hard, collapsing onto her side. Fa tsked under his breath the way another man might at finding a stain on a crisp white shirt. He hadn’t intended to shoot her, but what alternative had she given him? He watched her crawl after her weapon. She had heart. He stepped over her and picked up the gun, then rolled her onto her back with his foot. Her dress shone black with blood. The bullet had struck her in the chest and could have missed her heart by only millimeters. Lucky to be alive. Not that she would last for long without medical attention, and there were no ambulances on the way to save her. He leveled his gun to finish it. She raised her hand to block the bullet.

  She did have heart.

  Something stopped him, and he looked at her more carefully.

  Charles Merrick’s daughter.

  She’d been right under his nose all this time. He cursed himself for missing it. Obviously she’d dyed her hair since he’d seen her last, but that was no excuse. He hoped his blunder would not prove fatal to his plans. Chelsea Merrick might yet prove a useful lever, but he didn’t have time to waste tending to her injury. Every second that ticked by saw his window sliding shut. Fa took her by an ankle and dragged her to the nearest room. She whimpered as he yanked her over the threshold. The rooms on the lower floors held bodies from the airfield, but not the fifth floor. Until now. Fa brought her the towels from the bathroom and pressed them to her chest. She would live or die on her own.