by Sam Powers
Brennan nodded towards the gate. “After you,” he said.
Enrique opened the gate, the cage folding inwards with a squeak; he stepped into the corridor, Brennan right behind him. It smelled musty, like the humidity had gathered in the smoke-riddled blue-flowered carpet. The walls were covered in dusty rose wallpaper and the hallway led to a T-junction, where the rooms began. “You’re in 1215,” Enrique said, taking an old-fashioned key on a plastic room tag from his pocket. He stopped at a door halfway up the corridor, checking both ways before reaching for the doorknob.
And then he stopped, his arm still outstretched halfway to the door.
Brennan had pressed the tip of the silenced Sig to the back of the man’s head. “That answers a question,” he said quietly.
“My friend, I don’t think…”
“Shhh…” Brennan said. “You talk too much. Here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to open the door and walk into the room just as you were supposed to. But you’re not going to warn your friend in the bathroom.”
It had to be why the ‘contact’ hadn’t just given Brennan the key; he knew he could expect a trap, that a nervous cartel insider wouldn’t take ten days to explain what was going on or get back to them. Whoever had answered that email wasn’t the real Enrique, of that he was certain.
But if they hadn’t planned to ambush him at the door, whoever took him by surprise had to be in the only place he could hide and still have the advantage, the room everyone walks by when they first enter a hotel room. ‘Enrique’ opened the door nervously; Brennan followed him, his bag in his left hand, dropping the pistol to his side, so that his right arm hung down out of sight, the gun by his thigh, as they walked past the bathroom.
Then he pivoted and turned in a single motion, tossing his heavy carry-on backwards toward ‘Enrique’ as he raised the gun; the assassin stepped out of the bathroom, his own pistol in hand. The man’s eyes registered a moment of stunned surprise that his target was facing him before the bullet struck him in the forehead, the momentum snapping his body backwards slightly before he crashed to the carpet.
Brennan pivoted and dropped low, in case his guide had avoided the bag and was in a position to counterattack; but ‘Enrique’ had caught the case, then staggered backwards to lean against the far wall, by the windows. His mouth was agape at how quickly everything had gone wrong. Brennan took two quick strides forward then shoved the gun barrel into the man’s wide-open maw, feeling the suppressor scrape past teeth. The man made a gagging motion but did not resist, his eyes filled with terror at the imminent prospect of death.
“I could have killed you eight different ways already at ten different occasions; but you’re still alive. Nod if you’d like to know why.”
The man nodded, the barrel bobbing up and down.
“I need to know where your friends are holding my colleague. You’re not the real Enrique, so I have to assume he’s dead. Nod slowly again if that’s true.”
The man did as he was told.
“Good. There’s a chance you might even walk out of here. But for that to happen you have to show me on a map where I can find him.” He began to look the man up and down. “If you refuse to give me what I want, I’ll take something else. Something permanent, so that you know I’m serious. Let’s see, I could cut off a testicle…”
“Hmmm!” the man said. “Nhhh!”
“Or, maybe just the big toes on both your feet. You don’t technically need them for balance, as you can walk on the side of each foot…” He slowly withdrew the gunmetal suppressor until it was just an inch in front of the man’s face.
“Please…” the man said, his voice weak, plaintive. “Señor, I can show you where he is. The fact that we did not succeed means I am dead already to my employer; but if you cut my toes off, I cannot even flee…”
“Did you kill Enrique Obregon personally?”
He shook his head. “I believe that was Francesco, the man you shot.”
Brennan grabbed the tall, thin man by the lapels and turned him around before pushing him down onto the cheap loveseat, next to the obligatory hotel desk. He kept the gun on his hostage while he reached into the overnight bag and retrieved a map. He tossed it, folded, to the would-be assassin. “Write down the address, circle it, do what’s needed to identify it. But understand me when I say my people have a reach even the cartel can only dream of. If you cross me, we will find you, and you will truly regret every having been born before we kill you. Am I clear?
“Si, crystal clear,” he said. “Your friend is being held at a ranch owned by the Villanueva family.” He circled a spot just outside Barranquilla. “This doesn’t show up on most maps as having anything nearby, but it is a big jungle, Señor, and if you can find a satellite image, you will find the ranch.”
“So how come you’re less afraid of Villanueva than me?” Brennan said.
“It is a matter of circumstance,” the frightened man said, shrugging. “I am afraid of both; but you are the one here, with a gun.”
“True.” Brennan raised it and shot the man once, through the head, a small amount of spatter spraying the back of the loveseat. The thin man slumped onto it on his side, spasmodic; Brennan shot him once more through the head, picked up the map and his bag, and walked quickly out of the hotel room.
TWO DAYS LATER, 8:28 p.m., near LOS CEBONES, Rural Colombia
Brennan depressed the switch; he closed his eyes and missed the initial blast, not wanting to affect his night vision when the electricity was cut to the bulk of the compound. The C-4 explosion levelled the little cinder block shed, showering the area with chunks of debris and flaming diesel fuel, the tree line nearby quickly catching fire. The lower part of the compound was pitched into darkness save for the campfire, a chorus of confused and anxious voices chattering in Spanish, noisy enough to be heard from four hundred yards away.
He opened his right eye again and found the guard in his scope. As he’d expected, he was staying at his post, near invisible, even as his associate at the second shack rushed out of the front gate and around to the other side of the compound, along with the second dog and handler. The lights in the house, powered by solar and a separate generator, had stayed on. But the glare barely made it to within ten feet of the remaining guard, who was shrouded in shadows.
Brennan took a deep breath and held it, then slowly squeezed the trigger, allowing the shot to surprise him, so that he wouldn’t subconsciously try to avoid the kick and move off target. His wind adjustment was perfect. The bullet went through the guard’s neck, destroying the basal ganglia, the group of essential nerves at the base of the brain that connect it to the spine. The man slumped to his knees before pitching face first to the ground.
Across the compound, the fire had caught the longer grass between the fence and jungle, and most of the guards had rushed beyond the perimeter and around to the left side of the property to fight the flames. Brennan knew that if he was lucky, the immediate assumption would be that the generator had just blown, although there was every chance they were expecting company after the aborted hit in Medellin; his target had been held captive for twenty-two days, at least, and Villanueva was a cautious man.
He made his way quickly down the hill in the dark, ignoring the anonymity of the tree line. He followed the electric fence along the right side of the property. It had stopped humming, a clear sign that the generator was its power source, as Brennan had suspected.
Walter Lang was exhausted.
His captors had fed him a diet of weevil-riddled cornmeal gruel, bread and water; he’d only just taken to ignoring the tiny black bugs as they wiggled through his food; for the first ten days he’d stuck to bread and water, but the ongoing lack of nutrients and protein had taken a physical toll. He’d lost fifteen pounds and his face was gaunt; his eye sockets were sunken and sallow, his cheekbones prominent. They’d taken his Ray Bans, which were prescription, limiting his vision to ten feet ahead of him. His hair was matted with sweat and his bea
rd had grown scraggly. They’d taken his clothing when he was captured, and he wore just a stained set of cargo-pants, cut off at the knee to make impromptu shorts, along with plain sandals.
He held no illusion that rescue was imminent. His mission had been covert and deniable. Villanueva was believed to be supplying a third of the cocaine in the western U.S., but the agency had only a cursory interest in his shipping routes and main business, or that of his U.S. gangster contact, Paul Parker.
Villanueva’s people, on the other hand, had found a lucrative and accurate supplier of fake passports, social security numbers and stolen credit cards, and rather than just use the paper for smuggling had begun selling it to other criminals, including three suspected extremists picked up a few months earlier on their way to ‘jihad’ overseas. They were caught due to a tiny mistake, with one forgetting to sign his passport, then doing so at the airline departure counter in halting English script, despite an Anglicized false identity. Lang’s job was to find the forger; the fakes had used real passport blanks, which meant the forger had a contact from the State Department supplying him, probably someone clerical and low-level enough to go undetected. But that would include thousands of employees. A sweep was out of the question; Lang needed the forger to give him a name.
Villanueva’s associates had pegged him as DEA almost as soon as he’d arrived in Colombia, which wasn’t far off, but also meant they were sure he could offer more valuable information. So they’d interrogated him and, when that failed to work, tortured him. First, he’d been water boarded: drowned and then resuscitated repeatedly, the pain and fear almost unbearable. When that failed, they move onto electro-shock and applications of nerve pain.
After two weeks of it, Lang had been left a shuddering mess, unsure of whether he’d said anything but believing he’d remained unbroken. Eight more days had passed without incident, other than the occasional visit from a guard with food. Lang defecated in a pot in the corner that they emptied every few days, leading to a terrible smell and swarms of flies drawn by the heat. He’d passed the time as taught, by creating memory and counting games that could take his mind off the heat, pain and loneliness. First, he’d tried counting flies and cockroaches, but had given up after a few days and a sense of futility in telling one fly from another. So he’d switched to recalling the plot lines from the British TV episodes of Sherlock Holmes, starring the late Jeremy Brett. When that became impossible, he’d moved on to trying to find a mathematical relationship between the number of syllables in various nursery rhymes, and when he ran out of nurseries, he moved onto regular songs by genre.
Were they even trying? Did the agency give a damn, or had he been written off, abandoned off the books? Walter had developed a degree of world-weary cynicism about his role in service of the American people over his decades with the agency. What would he do himself if he was in David Fenton-Wright’s position? Save the money, time and embarrassment by just leaving him there? He liked to think not.
He was counting the syllables in Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” when the blast happened, the shockwave shaking the shack’s walls.
For a moment, Lang’s hope returned.
Across the compound, the figures of the guards fighting the flames were backlit by the burning grass and foliage, dark smoke obscuring the stars above. Brennan kneeled and took out his cutters, quickly snipping through several connected segments of the lower right-side fence and leaving a small curtain of wire to pull aside. He put the tool away then crawled through the hole, coming out behind the shack. He moved cautiously around the due-north side, aware that someone from the mansion could be paying attention. The guards were occupied with the fire, and had managed to set up a hose, to start spraying down the burning area with water.
Brennan quickly moved up the shack’s steps and knocked a pattern on the door. “Walter!” he hissed.
In the shack, Lang heard the knock and the sound of a muted voice. He couldn’t tell who it was. “Hello?” he replied. He raised his voice slightly. “Hello?!?” He put his ear to the door and heard “stand back,” so he quickly moved to one side. The door exploded inwards with the force of Brennan’s kick, slamming against the interior wall of the shack.
Lang wasn’t sure what he was seeing was real. He’d hallucinated before, but the images had been surreal and warped. “Joe?” he asked, his voice halting and weak.
“Come on, we’re getting you out of here,” Brennan said. His friend looked haggard, skin and bones. “Can you walk?”
“Yeah. I mean, I think so. I’m weak and have dysentery. Need some real food and clean water.”
Brennan moved back to the doorway and looked around. At the mansion, someone had figured out that the generator might be a diversion and had the sense to assign two guards to the roof, to use the spotlights more efficiently. One light was trained on the area around the destroyed generator, while the other was sweeping the yard, ensuring the compound wasn’t under attack. The flames had either been beaten down, watered out or were smoldering, and guards were beginning to re-enter through the main gate.
“We need to go, now,” Brennan said.
Lang looked glassy-eyed and confused. “My assignment… we need to find the forger,” he said, dazed, his eyes dancing around as if he’d lost track of where he was.
Brennan threw an arm over Lang’s shoulder. “Lean on me,” he said. “Watch yourself as we go down the steps.” Brennan had prepared for quick exit; beyond the tree line on their side of the compound, a small path ran down into the neighboring valley, where a de Havilland Beaver float plane was tied up and waiting. “We’ve got to move quickly beyond the tree line, okay? You’re going to have to be able to run on your own.”
“Okay,” Lang said. He didn’t ask what the alternative was; both knew they’d only have minutes before Villanueva’s men caught up to them. The pair staggered down the steps; Lang stumbled and fell, then regained his feet; a moment later they were crawling through the hole in the fence.
They were at the tree line when the spotlight caught up to them, the light blinding for a split second; voices were raised, calling after them, yelling. Brennan pulled the machete from his pack and started to quickly hack a path into the overgrowth. Walter followed closely, squinting to keep view of his friend, bullets zipping through the leaves around them, crisp, green, disintegrating flotsam floating around them, shouts becoming louder, frantic voices in Spanish. At the fence, the guards had discovered the clipped hole and were inspecting it; a trio climbed through the hole to follow immediately.
The machete was taking too long and Brennan gave it up, tossing it aside and pulling his way through the overgrowth. He looked back; Walter was barely keeping up, stumbling just to stay standing. “About two hundred yards,” Brennan said, anticipating the question that Walter was too tired to ask. A few moments later Brennan pushed the foliage aside, revealing a steep hill down to the stream, a hundred and twenty degree drop off. It was checkered with rocks, scrub brush and thorny bushes. Another bullet whizzed by and a leaf by Lang’s head disappeared. “This is going to really suck, so make sure you bundle yourself up in a tight ball…” Brennan said. He took his jacket off and put it over his friend’s shoulders. “Wear this. It might help.”
Lang looked down the hill, to where he could just make out the moon glinting off the plane’s white wings. It looked about a half-mile away. Then he heard the voices, almost on top of them. “We’re out of options, I guess,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Brennan, taking off his pack and discarding it. “After you.”
Lang closed his eyes and dove down the hill. He did as suggested, tucking himself into a ball, but it didn’t help either man avoid the rocks, logs and brush, and they bounced painfully throughout the trip. At the bottom, Lang uncurled himself, feeling every jab and stone, lying on his back to get his wind.
A hand reached down and grabbed his. “We have to keep moving,” Brennan said, hauling Lang to his feet. Above them the guards were trying to clam
ber slowly down the hill; it was too steep to stay upright and fire accurately at them, but the odd shell whistled in from nearby and thunked into the muddy bank by the stream. The plane was only twenty yards away now, the engine firing, spitting gasoline and spluttering for air, prop beginning to rotate, pistons whining. The pilot, Eddie, was an agency freelancer, a veteran hired hand. He climbed out of the cockpit and stood on the pontoon to hold open the passenger door as they clambered first onto the float and then up and inside.
“Get us out of here, Ed!” Brennan yelled over the prop noise.
Their exit ticket jumped back into the cockpit and into the pilot’s chair. The plane taxied ahead on the water, the grizzled pilot pushing the engine to its limit. Bullets skipped through the water as the guards tried to bring the plane down, and one ricocheted through one side of the hull and out of the other, just as Eddie managed to pull the yolk back fully. The plane shuddered as its pontoons escaped the surface tension of the river in a shower of water; it began to gain altitude, a chorus of tracer bullets accompanying it into the night sky.
5./
WASHINGTON, D.C. June 17, 2014
The senator poured himself a glass of cold water from the pitcher that sat just ahead of him on the semi-circular chamber table and flicked through the multi-page list of notes and questions again. His square-framed glasses glinted under the room lights. He took another sip of water. Then he played with his pen, tapping it on the long, smooth desk, which was shared by the committee members. Then he cleared his throat, his aged, wrinkled and baggy face betraying no hint of emotional investment,
The committee desk was elevated, seating for a dozen politicians set in front of the back wall of the chamber, a pair of tables ahead of it for witnesses and their legal representatives, each featuring a pair of microphones and a similar pitcher of water. His colleagues waited patiently for the senator to collect his thoughts.