by Wilbur Smith
Back at the Walls Unit, a nervous prison governor was explaining to Johnny Congo’s attorney Shelby Weiss and his family friend, the well-known entrepreneur and philanthropist D’Shonn Brown, that the execution was being postponed. It appeared that the convoy carrying Johnny Congo to Hunstville had been ambushed. Congo himself had disappeared. There was no trace of him, alive or dead, at the ambush site. Nor was it clear what the exact purpose of the ambush had been.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Weiss impatiently.
“I guess it means that we don’t know if Congo was taken by friendly gangbangers who wanted to free him, or enemies who wanted to kill him.”
“I want to speak to the governor,” said D’Shonn Brown.
“I am the governor.”
“No, I mean the Governor of Texas. I want to speak to him now. I want to know what’s happening here and what he plans to do about it.”
So did the entire national and regional media, who were besieging the operational command post, demanding that Chantelle Dixon Pomeroy come out and explain how the Texas judicial system had so catastrophically failed to deliver a condemned man to his execution.
“Do you even know where Johnny Congo is?” one reporter demanded.
A look of panic flashed across Chantelle’s face before she recovered her usual self-possession. “I’m afraid that is sensitive information and I can’t speak to that point at this time.”
“There’s nothing sensitive about a simple yes or no. Do you know where he is?”
“Ah . . . I can’t . . . that’s to say it’s not appropriate . . .”
“You don’t know, do you? The most wanted man in Texas has missed his own execution and you have no idea at all where he might be. Isn’t that so?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way at all,” blustered Chantelle Dixon Pomeroy.
But she didn’t have to put it any way. It was obvious to everyone holding a mike, or aiming a camera, or watching at home on TV: Johnny Congo had got clean away.
When the Cessna 172 carrying Johnny Congo landed at the private aviation terminal of Jack Brooks Regional Airport, it immediately taxied to where a silver Citation X jet waited on the hardstand to receive him, with all its engines warming up.
Johnny climbed on board and an elegantly uniformed blonde stewardess was waiting for him at the top of the boarding ladder. She led him to the rear cabin where an impeccable dark gray suit, white shirt and deep blue silk tie, with black silk socks, shoes and belt were laid out on the bunk.
Showing no emotion whatsoever, the stewardess helped him out of his prison garb, which was emblazoned with the Death Row “DR.” She carried it away discreetly and left him to change into the suit.
When he was fully attired Johnny checked the contents of the crocodile-skin briefcase that lay on the opposite bunk. He hummed with satisfaction as he counted the wads of $100 bills, which totalled $50,000, and the bearer bonds to the value of $5 million. There was also a smartphone untraceable to him and a number of passports, including a diplomatic one from the state of Kazundu in the name of His Majesty King John Kikuu Tembo.
Johnny made a regal figure as he emerged from the rear cabin and went forward to the lounge of the Citation. Having been given the statutory two hours’ notice of the Citation’s flight plans the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Service had sent an officer to process the flight and His Majesty King John graciously allowed her to stamp his passport with an exit visa.
Johnny had stipulated the hire of a Citation X for the reason that it was the fastest commercial jet in the skies. The aircrew had been told to expect African royalty as the passenger and they were suitably respectful. Shortly after take-off, as the Citation was speeding south across the Gulf of Mexico, the pretty brunette who was a member of the cabin crew giggled as she plucked up the courage to speak directly to him, “Excuse me, Your Majesty, but we were informed that you had a special request for your in-flight meal this evening.”
Then with a flourish she set before him a bone-china plate on which lay a long sandwich, filled with meat and cheese and oozing mayonnaise.
Johnny Congo gave the girl a smile that pleased, excited and terrified her in just about equal proportions. “Right on!” he said. “I’ve been looking forward to my first Subway ever.”
He took a rapacious bite, and beamed contentedly as his cheeks bulged and his mouth filled to overflowing. Then he lay back in the cream leather chair and chewed contentedly.
He was free and now he could concentrate every ounce of his strength and every cent of his enormous wealth on the complete and utter destruction of Hector Cross.
As they left U.S. airspace, Johnny Congo mused aloud, “Not Hector Cross alone. I am going to get that skinny bitch Jo Stanley who he’s been screwing and also his itty-bitty baby girl. I am going to make Cross watch as I off them slowly, with tender loving care. Only then will I start working on him.”
Night had fallen and Route 190 was no longer a war zone. But if anything the chaos had only increased in the aftermath of Johnny Congo’s escape. Banks of floodlights lit up the road all the way from the gas station to the two burned-out dumper trucks, surrounded by their discharged cargoes of rubble that marked the point where the trap that caught the prison convoy had sprung shut. In truth though there was little need for any additional illumination: not with the headlights and multicolored roof lights of ambulances, fire trucks, tow trucks and a host of police vehicles all attending the scene.
Every cop from Polk, Walker and San Jacinto counties had been called in to marshal the traffic that had piled up on either side of the blockage. Drivers were being directed away to a hastily arranged set of diversion routes, but not before every single one of them had been told to show their driver’s license, provide contact details and describe anything that they had seen, or even better recorded during the brief, bloody, one-sided battle. Everybody who’d been at the Shell gas station or Bubba’s was also processed. As a result, more than two dozen witnesses had been asked to stay behind to be interviewed at greater length by the detectives, and numerous phones and tablets containing still photographs and video footage had been collected.
Pretty much every image they contained had been already uploaded on to one social media platform or another by the time the first squad car arrived at the scene—this was the twenty-first century, after all—and the best footage was already being played on TV stations across the nation. The entire media corps that had been gathered in Huntsville for the execution had decamped to Route 190 to report on the events that had prevented it, and other news organizations had still more personnel and equipment hurrying to this stretch of the East Texas highway.
To add to the hullabaloo, the number of law enforcement agencies present at the scene was multiplying like viruses in a petri dish. The Governor had requested assistance from the FBI and called out the Texas State Guard, but no clear chain of command had yet been established and so the usual turkey-cocking was taking place between representatives of the various local, state and national organizations, all jostling to make sure that they took any credit that was going for any shred of success, while avoiding the looming shitstorm of criticism and blame that would pound down on anyone deemed in any way responsible for the afternoon’s disaster. Anyone like Major Robert Malinga of the Texas Rangers, for example.
“My God, Connie, did you ever in your life see anything like this?” he asked as he picked his way between the charred remnants of the shot-down helicopter toward the wreckage of the BearCat. A few yards away a young cop, not much more than a kid, was slumped on his knees by the side of the road, throwing up into the grass. Just beyond him a dismembered head, still wearing the headphones of a helicopter pilot, was wedged between the branches of a pine, like a kid’s soccer ball in a suburban garden.
“I did a tour in the Pech Valley, Afghanistan,” the woman walking alongside Malinga said. “Things got real kinetic there. Saw buses hit by IEDs, markets after T-men had blown themselves up. Thi
s is right up there with the best of them.”
Lieutenant Consuela Hernandez was Malinga’s second-in-command. Every time she went home, every other woman in the family—her sisters, mother, grandmother, aunts, cousins, all of them—would tell her how pretty she would be if she only made an effort. But making an effort, just so she could find some slob to spend the rest of her life with, the way all those other women had done, was not Connie’s style. She had served six years as a Criminal Investigations Special Agent in the U.S. Military Police Corps before joining the Rangers. Within a week of arriving at A Company, she’d already convinced Malinga that she was a good cop. The one thing he couldn’t understand was why she was a Ranger. “The MPs have always been a great place for a woman to get ahead. But I hate to say this, the Rangers haven’t had the greatest reputation when it comes to gender equality.”
“I know,” Hernandez said. “That’s why I’m here. Just wanted the chance to piss you all off.”
For a fraction of a second, Malinga had feared that he’d been landed with a professional ball-breaker, the kind who was only ever one off-color joke away from a sex-discrimination suit. Then he noticed the sly smile playing around the corners of Hernandez’s mouth, realized she was yanking his chain and burst out laughing. From that moment on they’d got along just fine.
“Now I really do feel back in the Pech,” Hernandez said, looking at the BearCat.
The back of the armored personnel carrier had been obliterated. The rear axle had collapsed so that the whole vehicle had slumped toward the ground. A couple of crime scene investigators were working their way through the vehicle. In the light from their torches, Malinga could see the blackened corpses of the SWAT personnel who’d been sitting in the back of the carrier when it had been attacked. Every one of them had been wearing helmets and body armor, but their bodies had been ripped apart by the sheer ferocity of the assault.
“What the hell hit them?” Malinga asked one of the CSIs.
“Everything,” the investigator replied. “First, there was some kind of projectile that was powerful enough to blow through the armor on the rear of the vehicle like it wasn’t any thicker than a tin can. Then someone just let rip with an unbelievable barrage of shotgun fire from no more than twenty feet. We’ve counted almost sixty twelve-gauge cartridges on the road and they must’ve been fired unbelievably fast. No one inside had time to fire a single round.”
“They weren’t in any condition to shoot,” Hernandez said. “Even if the blast hadn’t killed them, they’d have been totally stunned and disoriented. Talk about a flash-bang.”
“Any trace of the perpetrators anywhere? Fingerprints, DNA, anything?” Malinga asked.
The investigator shook his head. “Not that we’ve found. There’s a limit to what we can do here, so we’ll take the vehicles away for examination. But my bet is we’ll be lucky to find anything at all. They torched the trucks they rode in on. Whoever they were, they sure knew what they were doing.”
“That they did,” Malinga agreed. Walking away from the BearCat, he spoke to Hernandez. “You know the single most common denominator among convicted criminals? Stupidity. Sure, they’re sociopathic, liable to have substance-abuse issues, have an exceptionally high rate of clinical depression, all that good stuff. But above all, they’re dumb. Not these guys, though. They were real smart, or the guy in charge of them was. And they had money. They had trucks, getaway vehicles, automatic weapons, ground-to-air missiles, for Chrissakes.”
“That’s some serious coin,” Hernandez agreed.
“So the question becomes, was Johnny Congo rich and smart enough to put this together from jail, or was there someone else who did it for him?”
“Smart and rich, huh?” Hernandez mused. “I don’t know whether to arrest this paragon or marry him.”
Jo Stanley was lying asleep next to Hector Cross in the master bedroom of his London home, a charming old mews house, impeccably decorated in a restrained, masculine style, just a stone’s throw from Hyde Park Corner, when she was woken by the buzz of her phone against her bedside cabinet. She rubbed her eyes as she blearily made out Ronnie Bunter’s name on the screen. “Hey, Ronnie,” she murmured, trying not to wake Cross. He stirred and for a moment she was worried, but then he grunted and rolled over, taking half the duvet with him as he fell back to sleep.
“Hi, look, I’m sorry to be calling you now,” Bunter was saying. “I guess it must be pretty early in England.”
“Quarter to five in the morning.”
“Oh, maybe I should call back later . . .”
“No, it’s OK, I’m awake now. Hold on, I’m just going somewhere I can talk.” Jo got out of bed and tiptoed across to her bathroom. She closed the door behind her, turned on the light, groaned at her pallid, un-made-up, early-morning face in the bathroom mirror and said, “So, how are you?”
“Oh, you know, getting by.”
Obviously, he wasn’t. “And how’s Betty?” Jo asked.
“Not so good,” Bunter said sadly. “Her condition’s gotten a lot worse. That’s kind of why I called you.”
Jo frowned, concerned as much by the exhaustion she could hear in her old boss’s voice as the news he was bringing her: “How do you mean?”
“Well, I guess I’m going to have to take a step back, away from the firm, so I can spend more time with Betty, whatever time she has left . . .”
“Oh, Ronnie, that’s such a beautiful thing to do,” said Jo, “putting Betty first like that. God, I think you’ve got me shedding a tear!”
She reached for a face towel and dabbed it against her eyes as Bunter said, “I guess that means that Brad will be taking over.”
Jo forgot all about her tears as she absorbed the thought of such a radical, unexpected changing of the guard. “OK-ay-ay . . .”
“You sound kinda skeptical about that idea.”
“No, not at all, Brad’s a great attorney.”
“But he’s not the right person, I get it. And I don’t necessarily disagree. Maybe I should make someone else senior partner . . .”
“But, Ronnie, you can’t do that. I mean, this is a family business. Your daddy started it. You took it on. If Brad didn’t take over from you, that’s basically telling everyone in Texas law that you don’t think your boy is any good. Brad would never forgive you till the day he died. You’d lose him as a son. He has to get the job.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” said Bunter without much enthusiasm. “Maybe I’m just being old-fashioned. I guess the way Brad practices law is more in tune with the way the whole world is these days.”
“I guess.”
“But, Jo, there’s something else I have to tell you, and you’re not going to like it.”
Jo was struck by an icy feeling of dread as she realized that whatever Bunter was about to tell her was the real reason he had called now, rather than waiting for a more sociable time of day. “Go ahead . . .” she said.
“Johnny Congo’s escaped. I just saw it on the TV news. Someone—they don’t know who just yet—ambushed the convoy taking him to Huntsville for the execution.”
“Oh God, no . . .” Jo leaned her back against the wall and slid slowly down till she came to rest on the marble tiles of the bathroom floor. She could hear the sound of footsteps outside the bathroom. Hector must have woken up. Jo held her head in one hand, her eyes screwed shut as she lowered her voice and asked, “What happened? Does anyone know where he is right now?”
“No, they don’t even know for sure that he’s alive. But in the absence of a body, we have to assume he is.”
Jo said nothing. Bunter broke the silence. “I’m so sorry, Jo, I know what a shock this must be to you.”
Her voice was cracking as she said, “It’s my fault.”
“No, don’t you go thinking that. How could you possibly be to blame for what happened today?”
“Because it wouldn’t have happened if I’d let Heck kill Johnny, when he had the chance. He wanted to do it, but I said n
o.”
“Of course you did. You believe in the rule of law, as you should.”
“But what good is the rule of law if people like Johnny Congo can defy it, and get away with their crimes?” Jo asked, feeling as though all her most cherished beliefs suddenly counted for nothing. “I was the one who wanted to play by the rules and now that monster is out there . . .”
“Listen, Hector’s beaten Congo once, he can do it again. He’d never blame you, either. He’s a better man than that.”
“He’d never blame me out loud, no. But deep down inside, he’ll know that he was right, and that Catherine Cayla’s in jeopardy because I wouldn’t let him trust his own instincts.”
Jo was crying again now. She cursed under her breath, looked around for something to wipe her face and pulled some toilet paper from the roll as she heard Bunter saying, “Listen, Jo, I know how tough it must be for you right now, but sweetheart, take some advice from an old man who’s seen a lot in his time. Don’t rush into anything. Take your time to process what I’ve just told you, and give Hector time to do the same thing too. Believe me, things’ll work out better that way. You’ll be a lot stronger facing up to this as a couple than as two individuals.”
Jo shook her head, as if Bunter could see her. “No, I can’t . . . I have to leave. Being with Heck is like living beneath a volcano. When the volcano’s quiet and the sun’s shining, life is wonderful. But you know that the volcano’s going to erupt some day, and when it does, your whole world will be destroyed. I thought I could deal with that, but now Congo’s free and I feel so scared . . . I can’t live like that any more.”
At the very moment she was talking about leaving Cross, the one thing Jo suddenly wanted more than anything else in the world was to feel his arms around her and to lean her head against his chest. There was a pause before Bunter said, “Well, if that’s really how you feel, you’d better come on back to the firm. If you and Heck are meant to be together, you’ll find your way to each other again. But until you do, come back to Houston, back to the office. It’ll be good for you, and good for us too.”