by Scott McEwen
Hancock grabbed a handful of little tequila bottles from the minibar and sat down on the bed. “You gotta do what you gotta do, Billy.”
Jessup disassembled the rifle, and a few minutes later, there was a knock at the door. He gave the guitar case to a young man, and the man disappeared.
Jessup closed the door and locked it, turning to Hancock. “What are you gonna do now?” They were beginning to hear sirens down on the street.
Hancock grinned. “First, I’m gonna get fucked up. Then I’m goin’ down to the beach and have a swim.”
27
TOLUCA, MEXICO
13:00 HOURS
There was still no official body count, but thousands were already known dead in Mexico City. The public transportation system had been devastated by the quake. Key bridges, along with the elevated highway that ran through the center of the city, had collapsed, crippling the public transportation system. This left stranded citizens to the mercy of profiteering cab drivers, and Crosswhite knew it would take time for Paolina and Vaught to make their way to Toluca.
His Jeep had enabled him to drive a more direct route out of the city than most cars were able to manage, and he now stood facing a group of sixteen Toluca police officers in the empty parking lot behind the police station. There was still no cellular service out of Mexico City, so he was worried about Paolina and Valencia, but he reminded himself that Vaught was with them and tried to put the dilemma out of his mind. There was nothing he could do for the moment anyhow. If he left Toluca to go look for them, his chances of finding them would be almost nil. It was best to stick with the plan and wait for them to show up.
Each Toluca police officer had an M4 carbine slung over his shoulder, but their dark-blue fatigue-type uniforms, like those of many Mexican police forces, were not exactly uniform. No four cops were dressed the same, and a few of them wore uniforms a size too big.
“Doesn’t matter,” Crosswhite muttered in English—but he knew that it did.
He walked up to the youngest cop, a man of about twenty-one years, and offered his hand, introducing himself. He did this with all sixteen men and then stepped back in front of them.
Acting Chief Diego Guerrero came out the back of the station and stood watching.
Crosswhite faced the men. “I can see in your eyes that most of you don’t trust me, and I don’t blame you. I’m a gringo, so why should you? I could say that Chief Guerrero trusted me, and that should be good enough for you, but Juan is dead, killed by another gringo.
“So instead, I’ll tell you a secret: I’m the great-great-grandson of Captain John Cavanaugh. That name doesn’t mean anything to any of you, but it should. He was a member of the Saint Patrick’s Battalion of the US Army during the Mexican-American War. The San Patricios were two hundred Irish Catholic soldiers who refused to kill Mexican Catholics, and so they deserted to fight for Mexico. They fought with great distinction against the Americans—especially at the Battle of Churubusco—and when Mexico eventually lost that war, every surviving San Patricio was hanged as a traitor by the American army.
“That means one member of my family has already died for this country. That’s part of why I’m here, gentlemen. The other reason is that this is what I was trained for: teaching you men how to fight like American soldiers. If you listen to me, if you follow my instructions—and if you trust me—I can train you to outfight the Ruvalcabas on equal terms.”
The cops looked at one another, one of them asking, “What about the francotirador? It doesn’t matter how a good solider you are if a man can shoot you from so far away. We are not an army. There are less than one hundred men in the department now.”
“That’s plenty,” said a voice from Crosswhite’s left.
He turned to see Vaught standing there with Paolina and Valencia. Paolina had a bruise on the side of her forehead, and Valencia was holding a Rottweiler puppy.
He grinned at Vaught, weak in the legs with relief. “You came through, champ.”
Vaught grabbed briefly at his crotch. “Right here’s your champ. So what’s this bullshit about Irish traitors?”
“Don’t blaspheme,” Crosswhite said, walking over to Paolina. “That’s my heritage you’re talkin’ about.” He put his arms around Paolina and held her tight for a long time, whispering how glad he was to see her and how much he loved her.
The mood among the cops began to change, seeing that Vaught was Mexican American and obviously had respect for Crosswhite. Both men were soldierly and confident, and this became contagious over the next several minutes as Vaught mingled among them, explaining that he’d been up against the gringo sniper in Mexico City, and assuring them at the same time that the man could be outflanked and killed.
“Understand something,” he told them. “Any one of you is as good as either of us. All you need is training. Believe that.”
But when he spoke to Crosswhite in private a few minutes later, his attitude wasn’t quite so optimistic. “Dude, are you serious about training these people? The Ruvalcabas are gonna roll into this town and mop the floor with these guys.”
Crosswhite was watching as Paolina took Valencia into the police station with Chief Diego. “Where’d the dog come from?” he asked.
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I’ve trained lots worse,” Crosswhite said. “They’ll do fine.”
“I thought we were working for the PFM.”
“We were, but the quake changes things, so now we’re working for ourselves. I’ll make up a story and square it with Pope down the line, but for now, we stay off the grid. We lure the sniper into our kill zone, and we take his ass out. That sound good to you?”
Taking a moment to consider his options, Vaught pulled the can of Copenhagen from his back pocket and tucked a pinch of tobacco into his lip. “Isn’t this a little bit above our skill level? I’m not exactly sniper trained, and something tells me you’re not, either.”
“Yeah, well,” Crosswhite said with a yawn, “I know a guy, and it so happens he owes me a favor exactly like the one we’re gonna need.”
28
AUSTIN, TEXAS
12:00 HOURS
Mariana Mederos was more than a bit disturbed to answer the door and find Clemson Fields standing in the hallway outside her apartment.
“What are you doing here?”
Fields had always made her nervous, even before she’d learned that he was a black bag guy for Bob Pope.
“Crosswhite has gone off the grid. What do you know about it?”
“Off the grid? Have you seen the news? Mexico City just had a major quake. The whole city’s off the grid.”
“He has a satellite phone. Protocol dictates that he use it to check in, and he hasn’t done that. So he’s either dead or he’s broken with protocol.”
The news was unsettling, but she somehow doubted that Crosswhite would be killed by an earthquake. “Protocol or not, I don’t think—”
“What did you meet with him about in Guadalajara?”
She darkened, not liking that Fields knew her personal comings and goings. “It was nothing to do with him going off the grid.”
“Are you refusing to tell me what was discussed? Am I hearing you correctly?”
“Listen, Clemson, I don’t work for you. I answer directly to Pope. If Pope wanted to know what was discussed, he’d call me. He wouldn’t send his little gestapo agent. So what the fuck are you doing here?”
My God, she thought to herself. I’m starting to talk like Dan.
There was shadow beneath his smile. “Did he mention the gold he and Shannon hid from Pope?”
She rested her hand on her hip. “Oh, for God’s sake. Missing gold now? Really?”
“Crosswhite’s a thief. That much is documented. There’s no way he’d pass up—”
“Yeah, well, Pope obviously trusts him. So—”
“Pope doesn’t trust Crosswhite. He trusts Shannon.”
Mariana had never met Gil face-to-face, but she had seen his picture and heard plenty about him from Crosswhite. “And you don’t trust Shannon?”
“I think Pope might be a little nearsighted where the guy’s concerned.”
She crossed her arms. “So what do you have on me—or rather, what do you think you have on me?”
He could see she was no longer quite the naive operative she’d been the year before.
“Have on you?”
“You know I’ll report this little visit to Pope, so you must think you have something on me to prevent that.”
“I don’t have anything on you,” he admitted. “But I know that you have a soft spot for Crosswhite. And I know that Pope considers him expendable.”
“So what?” she said, feigning indifference. “Pope considers me expendable. Probably you too, for that matter—everyone but Shannon. So get to the point.”
“Lazaro Serrano is going to be the next president of Mexico.”
“Yeah?” She laughed that off as insignificant. “Not if the PFM has anything to say about it. They’re building a solid case against him from what I hear, and Pope has assigned Dan to help them.”
Fields offered a devilish grin of his own. “Tell me: If Pope is keen to bring down Serrano, why has he been feeding him intelligence for the past six months?”
Mariana saw instantly the myriad dangers in this for Crosswhite, realizing he might be nothing more than a pawn in one of Pope’s intricate political chess matches. “What kind of intelligence?”
He cleared his throat. “Let it suffice to say that Serrano is well enough insulated that he has little to fear from the PFM—and least of all from Daniel Crosswhite.”
She saw she was being manipulated, but to what end? “You still haven’t told me what makes you think I won’t report this to Pope.”
Fields removed his glasses, cleaning them with a handkerchief. “Pope has plans for restoring the CIA to its former greatness, as you know. I’m one of the men he’s chosen to help him make that happen, so if he’s forced to choose between you and me—well, you’re smart enough to crunch the numbers yourself. You’re too new, too young, too inexperienced—and, quite frankly, too female.”
“You’re a bastard.”
Fields was unfazed. “We’re members of a very select group, you and I, and all members have to read from the same page. Crosswhite has gone off that page. I think he’s been planning to do so for some time now, and I think this quake has given him the perfect opportunity. Now, tell me what was discussed between the two of you.”
She smirked. “He wanted to tell me about the earthquake he was planning.”
He stared at her. “Is that supposed to be humorous?”
“Do you see me laughing?” She stepped back into the apartment and closed the door.
Fields smiled on his way back to the car, taking a satellite phone from his jacket and calling Pope. “It’s done. If she knows anything, this should set her in motion.”
Mariana stood watching him through the drapes of her third-floor apartment, seeing him put away the phone before getting into his car. She realized she would be expected to do something stupid now; something to expose herself or Crosswhite. “Maybe I’ll do something different,” she muttered to herself. “Maybe I’ll do something you’d never expect, just to see the looks on your faces.”
She went to the safe in her closet, removing her passport, a satellite phone, and $5,000 in cash. Then she went down to the laundry room—where she was sure there would be no electronic listening devices—and called Crosswhite on the non-CIA-issue satellite phone.
He answered almost immediately. “Okay. How much do they know?”
“Only that you’ve gone off the reservation,” she answered. “Fields was just here. I have intel that I can’t share over the phone.”
“Then we’d better meet again soon. The clock is running.”
Mariana told him where to meet her in Mexico.
“Are you sure about that?” he asked. “There’s no turning back if we take that road.”
She drew a breath, asking herself if she was sure. “Yes. If what I think is happening is happening, it might be the only road open to us.”
“Okay then. I’ll meet you there in twenty-four hours. In the meantime, you watch your butt. Hear me?”
“I’ll be off the grid within the hour.” She switched off the phone and ran back upstairs to her apartment.
29
BERN, SWITZERLAND
04:10 HOURS
The ATRU assassin was a former member of German Army Special Forces, Kommando Spezialkräfte. His name was Jarvis Adler. He was thirty-two, blond and blue-eyed, handsome when you caught him from the right angle. A speed freak and sometime rapist in his spare time, he’d been hired recently as an operator for the CIA out of Bad Tölz. He had no idea why he had been contracted to kill Sabastian Blickensderfer, but he was happy to take the job, glad for the work, and keen to collect fifty thousand dollars—which amounted to only about forty-four thousand euros, but he wasn’t complaining. He’d been out of work for almost a year now, fired from his job with a security firm for failing his third random drug test in a row.
“Random,” he muttered in disgust, sitting in his car beneath the streetlamp he’d disabled the day before, across the snowy street from Blickensderfer’s home. The electronic dossier he had received on the Swiss banker was the most thorough he’d ever read. Whoever had collated the information had even gone so far as to include the brand of toothpaste that Blickensderfer used.
This attention to detail assured Jarvis that the CIA was quite serious about wanting the banker dead, which in turn gave him to understand that he’d better not botch the operation. It was no secret the CIA had undergone a complete overhaul during the last year, making the agency a great deal more like the World War II–era OSS (Office of Strategic Services) than the floundering CIA of the early twenty-first century, and every counterintelligence agency, from the Russian SVR to the Brazilian SNI, was nervous about it.
The CIA’s new director was a man named Pope, who had flown C-130s for Air America during the final year of the Vietnam War, and the word on Pope was that you did not want to end up on his bad side. Unexpected people (two of them women so far) were beginning to turn up dead in unexpected places at unexpected times: people no one wanted to talk about; people with questionable business dealings in the Middle East; wealthy people who were considered untouchable.
People like Sabastian Blickensderfer.
And whoever was ordering the hits wasn’t remotely concerned about them looking like accidents. One CEO from a Paris firm had been found dead in a Yemeni parking garage with his head slammed in his car door an estimated twenty-six times. His Arab bodyguards claimed to have been given the day off.
The White House refused to comment on the alleged assassinations, but what could anyone really say? For one thing, there was no proof at all of CIA involvement. For another, the United States had been attacked with two nuclear bombs just eighteen months earlier; bombs that had been manufactured in the old Soviet Union and eventually sold to Chechen terrorists by God knew who. No one liked to say so out loud, of course, but who could have blamed the US if it had retaliated directly against Russia for managing its nuclear arsenal so poorly? Most Europeans were secretly grateful that the crazy Americans had chosen to exercise what was widely regarded as an Olympian display of self-restraint—especially when one considered their wide-reaching response to 9/11.
Mysterious killings in the news were far easier to abide than the US launching another full-scale military invasion in their backyard or provoking Russia into a second arms race. Even the Chinese were satisfied to keep quiet on the issue—smiling to themselves as they obligingly bought up more and more of America’s growing de
bt.
Jarvis had fought terrorists as a German soldier, but he cared little for flags or politics. What he cared about was using his considerable skills to make a living. He was even willing to work for the Islamists if they paid him, though he was pretty sure they were fighting on the losing side.
A light came on in Blickensderfer’s house up on the second floor, and Jarvis glanced at his watch to check the hour. Just like the dossier said, Blickensderfer had set his alarm for 04:15.
Before getting out of the car, Jarvis did not check his pistol like they did in the movies. He knew that the suppressed Glock 30 was ready to fire a subsonic .45 caliber round resting in the chamber. He walked casually through the snow toward Blickensderfer’s home on the corner and trudged up the steps. Having memorized the security code from the dossier, he punched in the eight digits, and the lock clicked open.
As he stole into the house and closed the door, Jarvis wondered with admiration how the CIA came by that kind of information. He had intentionally waited for Blickensderfer to wake up before going inside. The idea of killing a man in his sleep looked good on paper, but it could be difficult moving stealthily through a strange house in the dark, and there was no way to be sure if the target was really asleep.
This way there would be no doubt as to whether or not Blickensderfer was awake. The target would be more alert, yes, but there was less uncertainty overall. There would also be light to see by and maybe a little bit of background noise to cover Jarvis’s movement through the house.
He moved up the stairs toward the sound of an electric razor, pausing at the landing to listen. When he was sure that Blickensderfer was in the bathroom and not using the noise of the razor as a decoy, he stepped into the master bedroom and crossed to the master bath, aiming the pistol at a naked Sabastian Blickensderfer, who stared back at him from the sink with his blue eyes wide in terror, the razor buzzing in his hand.
“Das ist nicht persönlich,” Jarvis told him. This is not personal. He squeezed the trigger.