Covert Network (A Jake Adams International Espionage Thriller Series Book 14)

by Trevor Scott

  With the heavy fusillade of gunfire, the two men under the SUVs threw their guns out and yelled that they were surrendering.

  Jake and Sirena moved out with their guns trained on the men in partial uniform. She made them get to their knees and roughly attached zip ties to their wrists and ankles, their faces eating dirt.

  Once that was done, Jake turned and saw Maria coming toward them with her gun pointed at the two men.

  Jake said, “No, Maria. We need these men to talk.”

  Maria looked at Jake with confusion. “Did you keep Gerhard Beck alive?”

  Shaking his head, Jake said, “That wasn’t possible. I’m afraid he wouldn’t surrender and he tried to kill me.” A lie, but a necessary untruth.

  Sirena got up and rushed to her old friend, pushing the gun down and embracing Maria in a tight hug.

  The three of them walked toward the front gate. The amazing thing was that with all the gunfire nobody had called the policia. But they were out in the middle of nowhere.

  When they got to the front gate, Jake and Sirena picked up Tiffany Larsen and shoved her in the back of the vehicle, strapping her into the center seat. Although Sirena had put a few bruises on the woman, Jake had to admit that the former porn star still had it going on. Now they would have to figure out how involved she was in the organization. Jake had to believe she knew everything. Otherwise he would have been forced to keep Gerhard Beck alive and hope for the best with the Peruvian Policia.

  Sirena pulled Jake aside and said, “How the hell are we going to explain this to the local authorities?”

  “The truth might work, but it also might get us stuck in a Peruvian prison for a while.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. Her head shifted toward the road and they all watched a car roll into the compound and skid to a halt.

  Jumping from the car, his pathetic little revolver in his hand, was the former Peruvian intel officer, Esteban Caro. He said, “You son of a bitch.”

  “Hey,” Jake said.

  “All I found was your dirt clothes.” Esteban hesitated, and added, “And a bunch of American cash. You really should lock that up.”

  “Did you keep the money?” Jake asked.

  “Of course not. I brought it here for you. What happened here? Who is the nurse?”

  Jake introduced Maria Vega to Esteban, and then what had happened here, including the fact that there were a number of women somewhere outside the back gate waiting for repatriation.

  “I will go help them,” Esteban said. “What about you?” He asked the question to Jake, but he meant Sirena and Maria also.

  “We were never here,” Jake said. “Give us a head start to get out of Peru.”

  “Who is the woman in the vehicle?” Esteban asked.

  “A retired porn star,” Jake said. “Don’t ask any more. You don’t want to know.”

  Maria moved closer and said, “I should stay here to explain what happened. I know the girls. Also, I’m still missing one of the girls I came to find.”

  That sounded like a reasonable plan to Jake. “One more thing,” Jake said.

  “Of course,” Esteban said. “What is it?”

  “You need to keep this away from the media for as long as possible,” Jake said.

  “Why? This is big news.”

  “I know. But it’s not over yet. If word gets out, others in the organization will scurry away and escape.”

  “I see.”

  Sirena said, “We will back you up completely through official channels eventually. But we need a little talk with this woman first.”

  Esteban nodded agreement. Sirena gave the man a hug and she went to her old friend and did the same, kissing her on the cheek and the forehead and whispering something in her ear. Then Sirena got behind the wheel of the SUV.

  Jake shook the man’s hand. “Take care.” Then he also gave Maria a hug and whispered, “We need to get a drink once everything settles down.”

  “Thank you, Jake,” Maria said, a strained smile on her face.

  Esteban pulled up his pants and nearly strut off toward the main barracks, Maria at his side.

  Glancing at the SUV, Jake leaned into the blown out front passenger window and said to Sirena, “I’m gonna sit in the back and have a little conversation with our friend on the drive.”

  Jake crawled into the back and glanced at Tiffany Larsen, who didn’t seem defeated as much as defiant. He would have to change that attitude. But he was sure of one thing: there was no way he could use sex against a former porn star. She had more than likely been perforated by anything and everything during her stint in that profession. No, this would take a subtler touch.

  32

  Eighteen Hours later

  Tiffany Larsen had been easier to break than Jake initially thought, considering her tough exterior. Then he remembered that she had won awards for her ability to take large male penile tissue up her anus, and he had complimented her on her accomplishments on the screen. Tiffany had not just hosted parties at her house in Montevideo, Uruguay, she had conceived of the idea to film everything surreptitiously. More importantly, she had been tasked by Gerhard Beck to train the young girls in pleasure without pain and, perhaps more importantly, to act like they were really into it. She had a full-day session planned on the art of the fake orgasm. Once Jake got the woman talking, he couldn’t shut her up. And of course he had recorded the entire conversation on an open line with Jake’s old pal, Kurt Jenkins.

  Later Kurt had talked with Jake and confessed that all of that talk had made him want to go home and do his wife.

  Sirena had continued to drive to the airport, checking in on Jake in the rearview mirror to make sure he was still in the game.

  Jake considered his most important asset in the espionage game was his ability to extract intel from adversaries. The subjects were not always as easy as Tiffany Larsen, but everyone eventually broke—even if they didn’t realize they were breaking at the time, like Tiffany. She was obviously smart, but she was also quite vain. Jake exploited her vanity.

  Once they got to the airport, Jake continued his conversation with Tiffany on the Gulfstream sitting on the tarmac. Sirena even got her shot at the former porn star, until her friend Maria Vega showed up and nearly tore Tiffany apart before Jake and Sirena could separate them.

  Jake turned Tiffany Larsen over to American State Department officials and Agency officers. But Jake got what he needed before turning Tiffany over to folks who could subsequently turn her loose. Hey, they had already done this once in Montevideo, so Jake had almost no faith that Tiffany would ever see a prison cell. The problem, of course, would be trying to figure out her crimes and the proper jurisdiction for punishment.

  Before they left Peruvian airspace, Kurt told Jake that they would make sure to move on all the intel Tiffany had given them—passing on everything to the FBI and INTERPOL, who would coordinate the law enforcement aspects of this case.

  Jake, Sirena and Maria had all slept on the short flight from Lima to Santiago, Chile. While they had been in the air, the Chilean Policia had raided the sex club owned by Pablo Moroso in the countryside outside of Santiago. Either someone had tipped the Penguin fucker about the raid, or he was the luckiest bastard in Chile, but Pablo had not been found. He was in the wind.

  But a number of good things did come from that raid at the sex club. First, the policia had been able to rescue all of the girls there without firing a shot. More importantly, at least to Maria, was that they had found the second Spanish college girl. The organization had intentionally separated the two girls to better control them. Jake and Sirena were pissed that they had been at the club and not been able to free the girls or find the Spanish girl who Maria had been seeking. Of course, it had been much more important to roll up the entire operation than to find one or two girls.

  Santiago was where Maria and the two Spanish college girls had been put on a plane for Madrid.

  That was nearly ten hours ago. Since they left the thr
ee Spanish women, Jake and Sirena had checked into a hotel, gotten some more rest in shifts, before they got a break with the help of Kurt Jenkins, the Agency, and the NSA.

  Now, evening in full swing, Jake and Sirena waited in a rental car outside a row house a short distance from the center of the city.

  “What do you think?” Sirena asked Jake.

  “I don’t know. Let’s hope Pablo is in there.”

  “Signals intel has him there,” she said.

  “He’s gonna run,” Jake said. “Even though he told us specifically that he was not running a bordello, that’s essentially what he was doing.”

  “With kidnapped young girls,” Sirena reminded him.

  “That’s confirmed. The Spanish girl was old enough, but so far at least five girls were ages twelve to thirteen. That’s illegal in almost every country.”

  “And should be punishable by death worldwide.”

  Jake couldn’t argue with her logic. Much information had come out since they had raided that camp outside of Lima. This Gerhard Beck was a malicious piece of crap. Apparently he had this strange theory that all humans were actually descendants of aliens from another world who had been brought to Earth more than ten thousand years ago. These aliens had encouraged the newly arrived to build pyramids in various locations around the world. But, most importantly, Beck was a true believer in the Nazca Lines and symbols found in the desert south of Lima over a hundred years ago. Jake guessed that he had done the world a favor by putting Beck out of his misery. Who knew what the law enforcement in Peru would have done with him?

  “Who lives at this place?” Sirena asked.

  “One of his clients,” Jake said. “A retired policia officer. Which is probably why he has not been found yet.”

  “The guy might be armed,” she said.

  “The apartment owner was picked up at the sex club mid coitus with one of the thirteen-year-old girls. The policia officers beat him into a coma.”

  “Too bad,” she said. “God does exist.”

  “Yeah, but I wish he hadn’t let these people start this organization in the first place.”

  “There is no recognition of good without the presence of evil,” Sirena said.

  Jake pulled out his gun and checked to make sure he had a round in the chamber, even though this was only a habit, since he knew his gun was ready. Then he put the gun back in its holster under his left arm, covering it with his light jacket. “All right,” Jake said. “Let’s go get evil.”

  The former policia officer lived alone on the second floor of this apartment complex. Jake and Sirena took the stairs instead of the elevator. By all measures, this was a nice place, Jake thought. If it weren’t for the music and other noises coming from various apartments, Jake thought it would have been a decent place to live.

  Since they had already met the guy, Jake decided to try a soft approach—simply showing up at the door. There was no way this guy could know that they had dropped a dime on his operation.

  They hesitated at the door, a determined glance on each of their faces, and Jake knocked lightly. But he made sure Sirena was the one he would see through the peep. It worked. Pablo Moroso didn’t hesitate to open the door once he saw Sirena. The man was wearing only a wife-beater white T-shirt and a pair of white boxer underwear with red hearts. He appeared to also be sporting partial wood. At first the man seemed glad to see Jake and especially Sirena, but then his disposition changed when Sirena drew her gun and stuck it into his gut, pushing the man back into the apartment.

  Jake closed and locked the door behind him. He had decided to let Sirena do most of the work here, while he would play the menacing heavy.

  “What are you doing here?” Pablo asked.

  “Sit down,” Sirena ordered, pointing her gun toward a faux leather sofa.

  Pablo did as she said, taking a position in the center of three cushions. When he sat down, the head of his penis slipped out through the relief access port and said hello.

  “Put that little guy away,” she said.

  He tucked his junk back inside his underwear. “It’s cold in here.”

  Jake wandered about the room, stopping in front of the large LED television, which was paused on a sex scene between an older man and a very young girl, who had the guy’s penis in her mouth.

  Sirena found the remote control on the coffee table and handed it to Jake, who let the video run. The girl shifted from the man and lay back on the bed. The awkward old man, corpulent and without a visible erection, mounted her and looked like he might die from the exertion.

  Jake couldn’t hit the stop button fast enough, and would have a difficult time scrubbing that image from his mind.

  Sirena directed her gun at Pablo. “You get off on child pornography?”

  Pablo said nothing, but his new erection talked for him.

  “You better settle down,” Sirena said, “or I’ll shoot that little pecker off and shove it down your throat.”

  Pablo covered his dick and tried to shove down to quell the problem. “I guess you were not interested in a new investment.”

  “You could say that,” she said.

  Finally, Pablo seemed to get it. “You two turned us in. You are with INTERPOL.”

  “No, it’s worse than that,” she said. “We are private citizens. Therefore, we have no rules to follow.”

  While the two of them were talking, Jake pulled out the DVD from a small player under the television. Then he found a metal case filled with more DVDs. There had to be hundreds inside, Jake thought. He guessed this was just part of the collection they were using to upload to the internet if the politicians and businessmen didn’t pay up. Or even if they did pay. He guessed a few of those would include the sodomy of penguins.

  Jake turned to Pablo and said, “Where are the rest of these?”

  Pablo shook his head. “That is all I have.”

  Thinking about the camp outside of Lima and the sex parties that Tiffany and her husband hosted in Montevideo, Jake knew there must have been more recordings. He figured others would find those in Lima following the raid. But he also guessed that Tiffany would have saved some—perhaps in a safe deposit box. That wasn’t Jake’s problem, though. He and Sirena had done their jobs. They had taken down the sex trafficking ring. He would leave it up to the local police and INTERPOL to clean up the mess.

  Jake pulled Sirena aside and asked, “What would you like to do with this dirtbag?”

  She was obviously seething inside. Terminally pissed.

  Finally, she said, “Let me deal with him.”

  Considering the DVDs and anything else the local policia had confiscated at Pablo’s sex club, Jake knew that there would be enough evidence to convict this man for a long time. But what would happen to these videos of the young girls? Surely some would get leaked to the internet, or perhaps end up in the hands of others who wanted to exploit them. No, Jake knew that they would have to take the DVDs and dispose of them. Or at least hold them until all of the shitheads were brought to justice.

  Jake heard the man rush toward the apartment door, but Sirena also sensed the man was making a run for it. She tackled the man and his head smashed into the tile floor. In the scuffle, Sirena’s gun had fallen aside, so Jake picked it up and held it for her.

  Sirena and Pablo wrestled on the floor. He tried to punch her, but she easily blocked these attempts. Then she shoved her knee into the guy’s right kidney, which slowed his attack on her but didn’t stop it entirely.

  “You need any help?” Jake asked her.

  Wrapping her legs around Pablo, Sirena said, “With this penguin fucker? Not likely.”

  Now she had Pablo in a sleeper hold. The porn king was obviously turned on by the idea of Sirena subduing him, with his little penis popping out of his heart-covered underwear. But the man would not stop struggling. So, Sirena clamped down like a boa constrictor. As the man tried to take in more air, she tightened her grip.

  Jake was about to stop her, not sure how far
she wanted to take this. But this one was on her. This guy had been partially responsible for the kidnapping of Sirena’s friend, the two Spanish college girls, and dozens of other young girls for all over South America. Who knew were all of these girls had ended up? Jake had a feeling this guy couldn’t answer those questions. Tiffany could, Jake guessed.

  Sirena’s eyes were determined. Pablo’s eyes were bulging and concerned. But that concern slowly drifted off and his eyes finally stared up at the ceiling unknowing.

  Pablo’s body went limp in Sirena’s grasp. Yet, she still held on as if she were about to unlock her own jaw and swallow the man whole.

  Jake lowered himself to Sirena. “That’s enough, Sirena.”

  Her breathing became faster, and for the first time that Jake had known her, something strange happened. A tear streaked down her right cheek.

  “He’s gone,” Jake said softly.

  Finally, she let go of the man and shoved his limp body away from her. Sirena shook her head and sat up.

  Jake stood up and reached his hand to her. She gave him her right hand and he pulled her to her feet. Then she collapsed into his arms. Shooting a bad guy was dispassionate and distant. Strangling a person until the life left the body was much more intimate. Jake had been forced to do that in the past, and a few times that ended with the snap of a neck. The sound of a man’s neck snapping was one of the most disturbing sounds in nature.

  “Let’s go,” Jake whispered.

  She leaned her head against his shoulder. “I’m not sad that I killed him,” she said. “I’m sad that he didn’t suffer more.”

  “I understand.” Jake pulled away from her and found the case of DVDs. Then together they left the apartment and went down to their car.

  33

  George Town, Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands

  Jake and Sirena flew directly from Santiago, Chile to the Caymans on the billionaire’s Gulfstream. First they drank heavily and then they both slept like drugged patients.