Damage Control

by John Gilstrap

  Gail had a point. Boxers often railed against the shortcuts Jonathan took in the area of opsec—operational security. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that he’d let his tongue wag more than was prudent.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gail said, dismissing her own argument. “We’re where we are. How we got here matters less than fixing it. We need to find a way for them to get out of there.” She started typing. “Let’s start with the topo maps.”

  While Gail typed some more, gaining access to the computer files Jonathan had used to plan the mission, Venice brought the giant wall screen to life. From there, they could monitor each other’s screens. Two seconds after the images appeared, Venice’s computer rang like an old-fashioned telephone.

  Venice’s heart jumped, and as her hands flew to enter the right commands, Gail said, “What’s that?”

  “Bad news,” Venice replied. “Always, always bad news.”

  Boxers drove slowly—on these roads, slowly was about the best you could do—while Jonathan worked his GPS and map. They’d set a general course to the north, just to put distance between them and the bad guys. Outside, the scenery never changed: a wall of green wetness that smelled of rot. They kept the windows down and the air-conditioning off, both to give the engine a break, and to keep their sense of hearing intact.

  “I wish we’d had a chance to collect intel,” Boxers said. “Maybe those guys had shit in their pockets that would give a clue who they are.”

  “Woulda, coulda, shoulda,” Jonathan said without looking up. “I’m thinking that maybe when we get to the U.S. border, Wolverine will be able to talk us across. Without passports, that could be a problem.”

  Boxers laughed. “Yeah, well, on the spectrum of our problems right now, let’s call that one minor.”

  Jonathan looked over his shoulder again to check on their PC. Now that the shooting had stopped, he let the kid sit upright in his seat. “Hey, Tristan, did they let you keep your passport?” He wasn’t surprised that the answer was no, but it was worth checking, just to be sure.

  “Why are they doing this?” Tristan asked. “What did I do to hurt them?”

  Boxers smirked to his boss. Between the two of them, Jonathan was by far the more sensitive, and that was a very low bar. Jonathan hated the touchy-feely stuff. Back in his days with the Unit, they had psychologists to take care of that crap.

  “You didn’t do anything, Tristan,” he said. “You can’t think of it that way. You were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes, it’s no more complicated than that.”

  “But we were targeted,” Tristan said. “They knew exactly who they were coming for. They even had our pictures.”

  A bell rang in Jonathan’s head, and he sat taller in his seat. The maps could wait for a minute. “You mean physical pictures?”

  “Yes. Well, not on paper, but they had it on their iPhones.”

  Jonathan cursed under his breath. Yeah, they should have gathered intel; but it would have been a ridiculous risk. “What did they tell you about why you were being taken?” Jonathan asked.

  “Nothing,” Tristan said. “They just told us, you know, to stay in our seats and be quiet and stuff. They never said why.”

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “Allison did,” Tristan said, “but that really pissed them off. They yelled really loud and hit her. Told her to shut up.” His voice caught at that last part. “After that, I guess nobody wanted to chance it again.”

  The SUV hit a pothole that caused them to lurch hard to the left. Jonathan damn near lost control of his computer.

  Boxers said, “Sorry about that. I’m lodging a complaint with the Department of Public Roads.”

  Jonathan kept focus on Tristan. “Did they speak English or Spanish?” he asked.

  “Both. They mostly spoke Spanish to each other, but they spoke English to us, even though most of us are pretty fluent.”

  Jonathan was trying to picture the event in his mind. “So, during your days of captivity, did they forbid talking? Don’t speak unless spoken to?”

  Tristan shook his head. “It wasn’t like that at all. They let us talk among ourselves, but they listened pretty carefully to what we were talking about. One of them was a big fan of pop music. He and Ray talked a lot about that.”

  Jonathan was sensing the presence of training among the captors. Stockholm Syndrome was a very real factor in hostage situations, and smart hostage takers know how to build rapport with the victims they intend to kill. Done skillfully, that engineered sense of friendship will cause victims to take violent action against their rescuers.

  “Four people were missing in the bus back there,” Boxers said. “All the adults. What happened to them?”

  “Mr. Hall and Mrs. Charlton were killed in the beginning, when the terrorists first stormed the bus. They tried to stop them. The terrorists didn’t give a warning or anything. They just came in, shouting. Mr. Hall and Mrs. Charlton stood up—not really interfering, even—and they shot them down without a word. Just bang, bang.” Tristan’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know how many people were taken? How did you know my name?”

  “Homework doesn’t stop when you graduate from school,” Jonathan said. “People who care about you hired us to rescue you.”

  “People who care about me? Who’s that? What does that even mean?”

  “Believe it or not, that’s none of your business,” Jonathan said. “Tell me about the executions.”

  “I did. After they killed Mr. Hall and Mrs. Charlton, they just dragged the bodies out of the bus and dumped them on the ...” The boy’s voice caught in his throat and he went quiet. A few seconds later, he cleared his throat. “They dragged them out onto the street and we drove off. The terrorists kept yelling at us to keep our heads down and to stay in our seats. While we drove through the streets, they made us change seats—nobody could sit with who they were sitting with—and then they passed out handcuffs and ankle cuffs, and made us chain ourselves to our seatmates.”

  Jonathan admired the level of detail in Tristan’s storytelling.

  “After a day or so, maybe two, that guy who was dead in the aisle made a speech about nobody caring enough to pay for our release, so he unlocked Mrs. Blazak’s handcuff and he let her ankles go and then he dragged her out of the bus by her hair. He took her right outside the bus and made her kneel down, and, you know, just put his rifle to her head.” His eyes reddened again. “She was a really, really nice lady and they just blew her head off.” He grew quiet.

  Jonathan gave him a half minute or so to collect himself. “What happened after that?”

  “He just left her there. Climbed back into the bus, and within an hour, he was trying to do small talk again. I hated that son of a bitch.”

  Hate was good, Jonathan thought. As emotions went, that was one that tended to focus the mind.

  “That leaves one more, right?” Jonathan asked. “Miss James?”

  Tristan pushed filthy tendrils of blond hair out of his eyes. “We’d been held hostage for a couple of days, I think. The kidnappers said something about people not being fast enough. They took her outside and two of them ...” His voice faltered again.

  “Take your time,” Jonathan said.

  “You have to understand that she was really a nice lady. She was like a thirty-year-old grandmother, you know? She was all about stopping the death of decorum. That’s what she called it.”

  Jonathan just waited through the preamble, confident that the boy would get to the point.

  Tristan struggled more with this story than he had with the others. “So, there were two of them, so they took her out just like they did Mrs. Blazak. They made her kneel on the ground, but then they made her give both of them a blowjob. In front of everybody. I tried not to watch, but ...”

  There was no reason for a seventeen-year-old boy to finish that sentence.

  Tristan settled himself with a long, deep breath. “And after she’d done them both, they shot her in the fac
e. A third one took videos of the whole thing.”

  Jonathan inhaled forcefully through his nose and held the breath in for a few seconds. There were levels of cruelty that he just could not comprehend. He got the panicked shooting that happened in the bus after the assault started back there at the drop site. He didn’t endorse it, but he understood it as if I’m dying I’m taking you with me. But to humiliate someone in the most brutal way like that made no sense to him at all.

  If nothing else went right with this mission, at least he could rest comfortably that he’d increased the population in Hell.

  “Those are some pretty ugly pictures to have swimming in your head,” Jonathan said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I am,” Jonathan said. “When you get back to the World, people aren’t going to want to hear those stories, but you’re going to need to tell them. Make sure you find yourself a good shrink.”

  Tristan seemed anxious to push that topic aside. “So, how long will it be before I’m home?”

  “A day or two,” Jonathan said. It was a flat-out guess, but he’d have a plan soon, and when that happened—

  His earbud popped. “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”

  “Ten bucks says this isn’t good,” Boxers grumbled.

  Tristan cocked his head. “What are you talking about?”

  Jonathan pointed to his chest so that Tristan could see him press his transmit button. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “I just got an alert from ICIS,” she announced. Jonathan knew that she was referring to the Interstate Crime Information System, pronounced EYE-sis, a post-9/11 invention that tracked criminal investigations in real time, in hopes of encouraging better communications between law enforcement agencies. “You know I always put tracers on your aliases and your real names whenever you go out on an op. If you blow your cover, then I want to be the first to know about it.”

  Boxers grumbled, “Just once in her life, that woman is going to get straight to the point.”

  “Well, that tracer just paid off. Leon Harris and Richard Lerner have both been accused of murder,” she said. Those were Jonathan’s and Boxers’ aliases, respectively. “It says here that the charges were filed by Mexican authorities as a result of thirteen murders you committed today. They even list the names of the victims. Names I don’t recognize—I assume they’re the terrorists—and the dead hostages, too.”

  Boxers said on the air, “That’s not possible. The bodies are still warm.”

  “I’m just reporting what I see, Big Guy,” Venice said. “Interpol is involved. The borders are closed to you. The FBI has pledged to do everything in their power to bring you in. You’ll need to switch to alternative identities.”

  Jonathan and Boxers looked at each other, and in unison they said, “Shit.”

  Jonathan keyed the mike. “That’s a problem, Mother Hen,” Jonathan said.

  “You left them in the captured vehicles, didn’t you?” Venice was very good at connecting those kinds of dots.

  “That’s affirm. We’ll need more to make the crossing.”

  A long silence followed. In his mind, Jonathan could see the concern in her face, the eye creases that always appeared in her flawless chocolate-brown skin when she was worried. Jonathan gave her a lot of cause to worry. “This is really, really bad,” she said.

  How artfully understated. “Thanks, Mother Hen,” he said. “I’ll get back to you. Keep us informed as things change, and find me a good forger in Mexico.”

  “Who’s Mother Hen?” Tristan asked. He leaned forward in the backseat so that his head was closer to theirs.

  “I need you to be quiet for a few minutes,” Jonathan said. To Boxers, he said, “This is a problem.”

  “Yes, it is,” Boxers agreed. “And I have every confidence that you’ll devise the perfect plan.” He waited a beat. “Have I ever told you how much I enjoy our times together?”

  Jonathan looked out his side window at the passing jungle, trying to force the pieces to fit. “Assuming all the names are correct, how did anybody know we were going to kill the guards?” he asked Boxers.

  “Because they forced our hand,” Big Guy replied. Jonathan guessed that they’d been thinking the same thoughts—not an unusual occurrence after the number of years they’d worked side by side.

  “That’s right,” Jonathan agreed. “By firing that first shot and killing the driver, they guaranteed that the guards would have to die. More to the point, they guaranteed that you and I would be the ones to kill them. You can’t pin the title of murderer on somebody without some bodies to point to.”

  “You mean that wasn’t you who shot the driver?” Tristan asked.

  “Yes, that’s what I mean,” Jonathan said, his patience thinning. As a rule, the precious cargo was not a part of strategy sessions.

  “Then who?” Tristan pressed. He retreated, though, from whatever flashed behind Jonathan’s eyes.

  “They haven’t even had time to find the bodies,” Boxers said. “This whole thing has been a setup.”

  Jonathan closed a loop in his mind. “What do you bet that the second ambush—the one we didn’t walk into—was all about taking us into custody?”

  “And how the hell did they know about Leon Harris and Richard Lerner?” Boxers pressed. He gave a bitter laugh. “I almost admire the guy who set it up. I’ll be sure to tell him when I blow his brains out.”

  Jonathan didn’t respond to that. He wished sometimes that the Big Guy would be less harsh in the presence of others.

  “What about the PC?” Boxers asked, tossing a glance back at Tristan. “We gonna drag him along to a forger? Seems like a lot of extra exposure.”

  Jonathan winced. Big Guy had a point. The mission was to repatriate the hostage—the one who still lived—with his family. For whatever reason, it appeared that Mexico had declared war on Jonathan’s and Boxers’ aliases. The shortest distance between right now and repatriation couldn’t possibly include a side trip to some forger’s outfit.

  “Maybe we can find a church somewhere,” Jonathan said. “With the ransom money, we can make a hell of a donation. Maybe big enough to handle the repatriation.”

  But man, oh man, he didn’t like the thought of it. When the stakes were this high, delegation to others always felt like a mistake.

  “I think you might want to think that through a little more thoroughly,” Big Guy said. Clearly, he didn’t delegate well, either.

  “I’m not getting handed off to anybody,” Tristan said. “I’m only hearing a little bit of this stuff, but if I just heard something about handing me over to a church, I’ll tell you right now that that’s not happening.”

  “Look, kid—” Boxers said.

  “The name’s Tristan. T-R-I-S-T-A-N. And from this point on, I’m hanging with you guys—the people who have at least as many guns as the terrorists do. You just need to know that.”

  Jonathan smiled. He admired attitude from people in general, and hearing it vented against Boxers was doubly entertaining. The kid—Tristan—felt exactly the way Jonathan would have if he’d been in that position.

  “There are a lot of decisions that lie between here and there,” Jonathan said in an attempt to defuse things.

  Where the hell had the authorities gotten ahold of their aliases? Add that to the fact that the bad guys had known exactly where the drop-off was going to be made, and it all became very perplexing.

  Was it possible that Reverend Jackie Mitchell was somehow in on this? Was there any conceivable reason why she would jam him up? Could that even make sense? No, he decided, it couldn’t. Jonathan wasn’t so naïve as to think that members of the clergy were beyond heartless schemes to collect money or gather power—the Crusades, anyone?—but the risk to the children, and the deaths of the chaperones was beyond the pale, even for the worst. Even Jonathan’s cynicism had its limits.

  If not the Crystal Palace, then who? If he hadn’t been betrayed by the good guys, then by process of elimination, he’d been betraye
d by the bad guys. They were the only other people who knew the details of the ransom exchange. He still couldn’t imagine how they’d known his alias, but at least the location part was plausible. And the bad guys would certainly know the names of the hostage takers. Just as they would know the names of the hostages.

  “Uh-oh,” he said aloud, drawing a look from Boxers.

  He keyed his mike again and got Mother Hen’s attention. “Do you still have ICIS up?” he asked.

  “Affirmative.”

  “Do me a favor and run the names of our intended PCs.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Whatever pops up.”

  It only took thirty seconds or so. “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “I ran your guy Tristan and he comes up as an accomplice to murder. Same victims.” A pause. “What’s happening here?”

  “I’m thinking big-time conspiracy,” Boxers said. “Too many moving parts to be the work of some drug lord.”

  Jonathan agreed, but only to a point. The way this operation was playing out—with lies planted about not just him and Boxers, but about Tristan, too—the police had to be a part of it. If not the police, then the people the police reported to, which would be the Mexican government. By extension, the Mexican government meant the controlling drug lords.

  “Is Gunslinger there?” Jonathan asked over the radio.

  Gail’s voice chirped in his ear. “It’s Lady Justice now, remember?”

  Of course. She’d specifically rejected the handle Jonathan had assigned to her after that unpleasantness in West Virginia. She’d chosen the new nickname herself, and while Jonathan thought it sounded stupid, he wasn’t going to fight that battle.

  Jonathan said, “I need you both to start asking the right people the right questions and see how we can undo this nonsense before it spins out of control.”

  As if it weren’t out of control already.

  He went on, “In case we can’t clear the record in time, we’re going to need papers for our PC, too, so the quicker you can find me a reliable craftsman, the better off we’re going to be. Advise when you have an answer. Meanwhile, have our Special Friend contact Wolverine and see what he can dig up.”