The driver missed a few of them. The survivors lined up and fired toward the back of the vehicle as it sped past.
Ben Rabin and two of his commandos aimed their assault rifles from the shoulder and fired. They dropped the guards who had escaped becoming hood ornaments before they could pull off any more rounds.
Liquida, looking for a vehicle, had worked his way to the end of the complex of small buildings. He found nothing and began to suspect that he was going the wrong direction.
Hauling the heavy money bags was wearing him out. He was breathless and sweating and beginning to wish he had used the cart into which he had piled Leffort’s body.
Occasionally he got a glimpse of the mayhem outside through the various doors in the complex. With the electronic key card from the man in the pay room, Liquida seemed to have access to everything he needed except a car.
He picked up an assault rifle from one of the dead guards who had stumbled back into one of the buildings and died near the front door. The clip was mostly empty, but it still had three rounds. Liquida didn’t plan to use it unless he had to.
He sat for a moment and rested; he felt the weight of the bags and wondered how the hell he was going to get away. Suddenly there was an explosion outside. It shook the building.
Liquida dragged himself to his feet and went to the door. He looked through the blown-out plate glass opening. One of the double doors was missing, reduced to a pile of glass pebbles under Liquida’s feet.
He glanced down the street. A small concrete pillbox at the end of the road was belching black smoke. Chunks of fractured concrete littered the pavement around it. Liquida watched as a low-slung Jeep drove slowly past the smoldering wreckage and turned toward him, heading down the street in front of the building.
He stepped back into the shadows inside the door and watched as if in a daze as the Jeep cruised by. The breeze from the slow-moving vehicle blew curling white tendrils of smoke from the barrel of the recoilless rifle. As he looked on, Liquida was in no doubt as to the existence of the afterlife. Otherwise how was it possible that the man he had killed in a parking garage in Washington three months ago could today be driving a car in the jungles of Mexico?
His eyes remained riveted on the Jeep and its driver. The vehicle pulled sideways in the street as the gunner on the back opened up with a machine gun. The Jeep sat there. Liquida got an even better look at the man behind the wheel. There was no mistaking him. There couldn’t be two that looked like that, the one they called Herman Diggs, Madriani’s investigator. What was he doing here? More to the point, how was it that he was still alive?
Within seconds Ben Rabin and his men vaulted over the sandbags and opened fire into what was left of the confused guards. Mangled arms and legs lay everywhere. The speeding car had left a trail of carnage and chaos that unnerved the remaining defenders. Some of them threw down their weapons and gave up, while others ran.
Ben Rabin could see the black smoke from the blockhouse at the other end of the street three-quarters of a mile away. He could hear the distinctive automatic fire from the SAW. He wondered who the driver of the red car was and whether he was still alive.
His men started to round up the guards. Ben Rabin handed the satchel bag to his sergeant, nodded toward the huge satellite dish, and told him to take it down. “Find the control room. Gather any papers, laptops, data drives-whatever you can find-and get it ready for transport. And find the technicians. Get them all together. They don’t know yet, but they’ll be joining us for the trip back home.” In the meantime, Ben Rabin had to find a phone or a radio. By now the backup C-130 should be waiting for them in Belize.
Resistance seemed to stiffen at the other end of the road. Flurries of rocket-propelled grenades whistled past the Jeep. Adin sensed they were down to hard-core fanatics, the handful of guards who would fight to the death rather than give up.
He told the commando to stick to short bursts on the SAW. They were running low on ammunition.
He tapped Sarah on the leg and motioned her toward the back of the Jeep. “Time for you to get off,” he told her.
“Why?”
“Between here and the end of the road it’s liable to get hot,” said Adin. He was worried that if one of the rocket-propelled grenades ripped into the Jeep, she could be seriously wounded, or worse.
He grabbed a pistol from a box in the back of the Jeep, a Glock 23 with a fifteen-round clip. “I’ll catch up with you,” Adin yelled to Herman.
Herman looked back and nodded. The Jeep moved on down the street.
Adin took Sarah by the hand and walked her toward one of the buildings. “You’ll be safe inside until we get back.” They crossed the small strip of grass and headed toward the door, Adin with the pistol in his hand to make sure they would have no problems.
“Wait here.” He peeked inside. It was a small lobby. The building had taken the brunt of some of the fighting, window glass on the floor. One of the doors was missing.
He checked inside, took a couple of minutes, and found the place was empty. “Come on in.”
Sarah stepped over the broken glass.
“We’ll look for Bugsy when I get back.” He smiled at her. “We’ll find him, I promise. He won’t go far. He’s a good dog.”
“I know he is. I just want him back,” she said. Sarah started to cry.
He wiped her cheek with the back of his hand. “Don’t think about anything now. Just sit and relax.”
She laughed. “How can I? That’s easy for you to say. This is probably all in a day’s work.”
He gave her a serious look. “No. This is at least two days’ worth of work.” They both laughed.
Sarah had seen enough violence in a few hours to last her a lifetime.
“Here, take this.” He handed her the pistol.
“What about you? Aren’t you going to need something for protection?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“No, really.” She tried to press the gun back into his hand.
Adin looked down and lifted his left pant leg a few inches. Strapped to his ankle in a holster was a small snub-nosed revolver.
They were still laughing when Sarah looked over his shoulder and saw him. At first she just stood there with a quizzical look on her face.
“What’s the matter?”
“Look out!”
Before the words cleared her lips, the shot rang out. The explosion of the Kalashnikov reverberated through the room as Adin flung himself into Sarah. They landed in a heap on the floor.
Liquida tried to line up for another shot, but the guy was on top of her. He moved for a better angle. As he did, the wall behind him came alive with bullet holes as the blast of gunfire echoed through the room. At first he wasn’t sure where the shots were coming from. Then he saw the gun in her hand pressed to the floor by the weight of the man’s body.
A second flurry of shots, one of which nicked his shoulder, told Liquida he’d had enough. He fired another round from the rifle as he retreated out through the back door, the way he had come in.
Sarah pulled herself out from underneath Adin and fired two more well-aimed rounds at Liquida’s fleeting shadow. “Are you all right?” She turned and looked at Adin. He wasn’t moving. There was blood on the floor. She rolled him over and looked into his face. She put her cheek to his nose searching for breath and felt for a pulse at his throat. There was nothing. She knew that the spark of life that had danced so freely in those large brown eyes had been extinguished. He was dead.
Sarah knelt there looking at him. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. She tapped the muzzle of the gun on the polished stone floor as rage crowded out every other emotion. Fury filled her as she raised herself up and glared at the dark hallway and the wall with the two shadowed bullet holes.
With purpose she walked toward the rear of the building, squeezing the pistol in her hand. She saw drops of blood where Liquida had gone. Sarah knew she hit him. Now she would track him into the bush and kill him. She wa
s not without caution, but anger filled her every pore. Her body was awash in a sea of adrenaline.
Chapter Sixty-Four
The wounded soldier leveled the barrel of the machine gun at the wrecked red sedan as it raced toward them. Finger on the trigger, he was trying to save the last few rounds. He would wait until the car was on top of them before he opened up.
The Jeep blocked the road. At the last second, Herman held up a hand. “Hold it! Don’t shoot.”
The commando eased off on the SAW.
“I know them.” Herman smiled as he saw Harry through the broken windshield. He looked like Poseidon holding a trident in his lap.
As the car pulled up next to them, Herman realized that the fire engine red exterior was not all paint. The driver’s-side window came down. Herman was left staring at the stern and angry face of his boss.
“Where is she?” I ask.
“She’s OK,” says Herman. “She’s in a building back there for safekeeping. Adin is with her.”
“Who the hell is Adin?”
“That’s right, the two of you never met,” says Herman. “A young man. Nice guy.”
“I’ll bet. So tell me, is he responsible for bringing her down here or are you?”
Herman swallows hard.
Joselyn is behind me with her hand on my shoulder. “Relax!” she says. “You’ve killed enough people for one day.”
“I’m just getting warmed up,” I tell her.
“Don’t say something you’re going to regret. She’s OK and that’s what counts.”
“We’ll talk about it later,” I tell Herman. “Where is she?”
He points up the road behind him. “Third building on the right. How you doin’?” He looks at Harry.
“Better than you at the moment.” Harry smiles. “See you later.”
We pull away and drive toward the building.
“Cut him some slack,” says Harry. “If you lived with your daughter and tried to tell her no lately, you would know it ain’t easy.”
“What are you saying?”
“She’s a lot like you.”
“Hold your chin up just a little higher and ask a couple more questions, I’m sure he can hit you dead center,” says Joselyn.
“OK, enough,” I tell them.
“He’s in a bad mood,” she says.
“You think he’s bad now, wait till he talks to his daughter,” says Harry.
Liquida lugged the money as far as he could. He wasn’t going to run any farther. He stashed the bags behind some brush and started dripping false blood spoor down the path leading to the small lake behind the complex.
The area was dotted with deep cenotes, some of them with sheer cliffs, walls fifty feet high. In other places, surface lakes bubbled up in the otherwise dry jungle where thick, deep mudlike brown cement ringed their shores.
Liquida dripped blood almost to the edge of the water from several different directions along three different trails so in case she got lost she could still find her way to the lake. If there was one thing that was certain, it was that Liquida wasn’t going back to those buildings or anywhere near the landing strip. He could hear explosions in the distance, not rifle fire or artillery. Whoever won was busy blowing the place up, carefully timed detonations. To Liquida this spelled one thing-the military hand of government. And he didn’t care which one. They were all bad.
He stanched the bleeding from his shoulder with a handkerchief, then carried the rifle into the bushes and waited. Liquida checked the magazine. It was empty. He had one round left in the chamber. If he couldn’t kill her with that, then he shouldn’t be in business.
Sarah tried to keep her head, to recall everything Adin had taught her about the pistol and how it fired. The Glock had no external manual safety. She pressed the magazine release on the side and checked the clip. She had only six rounds left plus the one in the barrel itself.
It was the problem with the small light handgun. It was so fast and easy to shoot that you could squeeze off fifteen rounds in a matter of seconds and not even know it. She slid the magazine back into the handle and pushed it home until it clicked into place.
Bracing the gun in both hands, Sarah moved cautiously down the trail as she followed the drops of blood. She could hear explosions in the distance and began to wonder if she had made a mistake. It might have been wiser to go after Herman, tell him what had happened.
Then Sarah steeled herself and said no. Liquida had killed both her girlfriend, Jenny, and now Adin. He had tried to murder her not once, but twice. Adin was an innocent victim. She knew he was dead only because he had been standing too close to her at the wrong time. She knew that if she didn’t find Liquida now, he would be gone.
In her own mind, he had passed from the realm of the human to a lower form of life. Killing him was like flushing an amoeba. He was diseased in the way a rabid animal was and required killing for the same reason. She couldn’t believe she was having such thoughts, that she could harbor such hate. A year ago she had been in college, but so much had happened in that year. She shook off the thought and looked down the path.
The jungle growth was low, the trail covered with overhanging brush. In places, Sarah had to stoop to get under it. Suddenly something snapped off to the right. She stopped, her eyes trying to penetrate the dense foliage. It was as if she could feel hands coming out of the brush at her. A noise to the right-she turned and fired, squeezing off two quick rounds. She listened and heard nothing except the pounding of her own heart. She could feel the surging blood at her temples.
Sarah looked down the path and saw a continuous trail of blood. She began to wonder if she had wounded him more seriously than she thought.
Again she heard the snapping of brush off to the right. She knew he was there. She turned with the pistol and aimed toward the sound, but this time she didn’t fire.
Liquida could hear her footsteps as she moved down the trail, snapping twigs and dry leaves under foot. She would never make it as an Indian scout. He sat on a rock and listened as she came closer.
He tried to gauge how far back she was. Then he picked up another stone and tossed it back up the trail and across to the other side. A second later he heard two more shots. By now she must have been sweating blood.
He sat calmly on the rock and listened as she crunched down the track toward the lake. He waited a few seconds and threw another stone. She fired again and then click.
Liquida smiled. He checked the one remaining round in the rifle. It was time to go to work.
Sarah stood stone still on the trail and trained her eyes on the traces of blood to where they ended twenty feet ahead at the edge of the lake. It was as if someone had dripped it along the path using a paintbrush. She silently slipped the magazine with the two remaining rounds back into the handle of the pistol. The slide on the top had been held open after she had fired the single round in the chamber. She knew he would hear the empty click. He was somewhere off to the left. The last stone he threw nearly hit her.
She steadied the pistol with both hands and kept her thumb on the slide release the same way Adin had shown her at the FBI range. As soon as she pressed it, the slide would spring forward and carry the first of the two rounds from the clip into the chamber. From there, in less than a second, if she could get a clear shot, she could pump the two rounds into him. She tried to envision the silhouette targets from the indoor range-center mass, chest high.
Liquida was about to step out onto the trail when he heard the thrashing in the brush behind him. He turned to look and before he could move, the Doberman was on him, flashing teeth and dog breath. The animal seized his arm, the sharp canines ripping into his flesh.
Liquida tried to fling him from his arm. The dog hung on like a bear trap, growling and kicking up dust as he pulled with his hind legs. Somehow Bugsy had lost his leash running through the brush. Liquida got a grip on the rifle with his left hand, finger on the trigger; he tried to steady it but the dog was in too close. He couldn
’t get the muzzle of the barrel on him. He kicked the animal in the stomach, and the dog bit down harder all the way to the bone.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Sarah heard growling and thrashing in the brush. She pointed the pistol toward the noise and waited.
“Bugsy! Here, boy. Come here!” She knew from the sound, like a parent knows a child. She tried to coax him out, but he wouldn’t come.
Suddenly there was the sound of a shot, close, no more than twenty feet away. The dog screeched.
Sarah saw red. She held the point of the pistol chest high and fired into the brush. With the second shot, she heard a deep groan and suddenly everything went quiet.
She stood there on the trail looking at the bushes and listening. She waited a few seconds. “Come on, Bugs. Come on out.” But the dog didn’t come. There was no sound, no movement in the brush.
She waited, what seemed like forever, and then slowly began to inch her way down the trail toward the lake. She called the dog again but heard nothing.
She reached the edge of the mud, the soft shore, with her back to the water. She held the gun out, even though she had no more bullets. She wanted to close the slide but couldn’t remember how. She pressed the slide return on the side, but it didn’t work. If Liquida stepped out now and saw the slide was back, he would know that the gun was empty.
Sarah remembered the snub-nosed revolver strapped to Adin’s ankle, but it was too late. A second later Liquida crashed through the brush with the butt of the rifle over his head. He came at her swinging it like a club.
She saw the mass of blood on his left side as the rifle came down on her shoulder. It drove her to the ground as she dropped the pistol in the dirt.
Liquida pounded on her back with the butt of the rifle as if driving a post into the ground. He dropped the gun, descended on her, and pulled out the stiletto. He straddled her back and pushed her face in the dirt. Taking the handle of the blade in both hands, he raised it above his head like an Aztec priest in a ritual sacrifice.
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