Damage Control

by John Gilstrap

  “No,” Georgen insisted. “We’re talking about the charade of kidnapping. We were told that no one would get hurt.”

  “Think of how terrifying that would have been,” Tammy said. Giving in to the urge to separate from him, she stood.

  “It would be an adventure,” Georgen countered. “They’d be held for a couple of days, and then they’d be let go. No one was going to get hurt.” He pointed to Dom. “I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say they’re dead. I haven’t heard that.”

  “There has to be an easier way to raise money,” Dom said, parrying the question.

  Georgen rose to his feet, and Dom followed him. He wasn’t going to give him a height advantage. “It’s not like we dreamed this up out of the blue,” he insisted. “Abrams came to us with this. And with the details he knew, I actually thought that he was working for the government.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Tammy shouted. “Why would the government want to kidnap missionaries?”

  “It wasn’t about the missionaries!” Georgen said. “It was never about them. That’s why we ultimately agreed. This was about arresting some enemies of the state or some such thing. They didn’t go into a lot of detail, but it was all an elaborate trap for the rescuers.”

  He reached out for Tammy and grasped her shoulders. “Honey, you have to believe that we were told that there was zero chance that anybody would get hurt.”

  “They’re dead, Eric! Didn’t you hear Father?”

  Georgen shot a panicked look to Dom. “What happened?”

  “Either someone lied, or communications broke down.”

  “But why haven’t we heard?”

  “The same reason why none of the families even know that their loved ones were taken captive,” Dom said. He felt his poker face slipping away. “Because this whole thing was designed to thrust all of the danger onto the innocents.”

  “Jesus, Father, do you believe for a moment that I would deliberately endanger children and church volunteers?”

  “I believe that you’re a coward,” Dom said. “And I believe that you had enough shadow of doubt that you pulled your own son off of the trip while you allowed other people’s sons and daughters to be slaughtered.”

  “How dare you speak to me that way?” Georgen boomed.

  Tammy was the first to hear the bullshit bell ringing in the back of her brain. “Why are you here, Father?”

  “Are you even a priest at all?” Georgen asked. He took a threatening step forward.

  Dom stopped him by pointing a finger at a spot above the other man’s nose. If it had been a gun, it would have been a sure kill shot. “Is that really where you want to draw the line for moral indignation?” Dom asked. “Enjoy your eternity in Hell.”

  As he walked back thorough the foyer and out into the night, he heard the Georgens going at it. This would be the fight of fights. And boy, was there a surprise coming their way in a few minutes.

  He’d just turned the corner at the end of the walk when he saw Agent Boersky and his driver striding toward him. “Your assistant called from Virginia,” he said. “She told us that you got everything.”

  Dom pulled the recorder from his pocket and handed it over. “She’s nobody’s assistant,” he said, “and you’d do well not to be caught calling her that.”

  “Give me a heads-up on what I’m going to hear on this,” Boersky said.

  “He confessed to arranging the payoff, and he confessed to the fraud.”

  “What about the government connection?”

  Dom shook his head. “Nothing solid. He alluded to it, but I don’t think he knows those details.”

  “But we got enough to give us cause to dig deeper?”

  “That’s your call, not mine,” Dom said. “Right now, I just want to go and take a long shower.”

  “Thank you, Father,” Boersky said.

  “Let’s not do this again anytime soon,” Dom replied. “Do I have a ride back to the airport over there?” He pointed in the direction of Boersky’s vehicle.

  “Yes, sir. Just wander that way. Agent Palmer is looking for you.”

  Dom tossed off a little wave. Under the circumstances, he wasn’t sure if there was a right thing to say.

  “Um, Father?” Boersky’s demeanor had darkened. “You need to give my boss a call. I believe you call her Wolverine?”

  Dom’s insides tumbled. “Tonight?”

  “She said right away.”

  With an ever-growing sense of dread, Dom pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed the number from memory. He was about to hit Send when the phone buzzed in his hand. The caller ID showed that it Venice calling from the office.

  He answered, “Hello?”

  “Oh, Dom,” she said. She sounded near tears. “I don’t know what Digger is going to do.”

  “What happened?” He asked the question even though he knew the answer.

  “I just got a hit on ICIS. The Phoenix police found a woman’s body an hour ago in a Dumpster behind a bar. Evidence shows that she’d been shot several times. No identification, but the general description matches Gail.”

  Dom stopped walking and sat on the curb.

  Venice continued, “The body had been wrapped in plastic bags, but a homeless woman looking through the Dumpster for food found it and called it in.” Venice snuffled. “Oh, my God, Dom, it’s just so horrible.”

  Dom closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. This was beyond horrible, beyond it on a scale that he didn’t know how to measure.

  In that instant, Dom realized what he had to do. A woman had been murdered and her body disposed of as garbage. Even if it wasn’t Gail, she deserved better than that. She deserved better than to be left alone on a cold gurney in the morgue.

  “Father Dom, are you there?”

  “I’m going to her,” he said. “Can you get me the address for the morgue?”

  Silence. Then Venice said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. This is an active homicide investigation. If you get involved, the questions are—”

  “She was our friend, Venice. That’s really all that matters. Can you give me the address or do I have to look it up on the Internet?”

  Consciousness came slowly to Trevor Munro. The phone call came in the deepest phase of his REM sleep.

  This particular ringtone—“Ride of the Valkyries”—belonged exclusively to one person.

  With the lights still off and his eyes still closed, he slid the phone open and brought it to his head.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Jesus, Trev,” the big voice boomed. “Where the hell—”

  “Call me back in three minutes,” Munro said. He clicked off.

  These were delicate times. He wanted to be one hundred percent sure that he was awake and fully functional, if only as a hedge against saying something stupid. He kicked off the covers, padded to the bathroom to urinate, and then soaked a washcloth with cold water and scrubbed his face with it. Just to be sure that he was completely lucid, he recited the alphabet aloud—backwards.

  He’d timed it all perfectly. He was back at his bedside table exactly two minutes and forty-five seconds after he’d hung up. Sjogren was not quite as punctual. It took him three and a half minutes to call back. The time on the clock read 2:37.

  “Okay, speak to me,” he answered when the Valkyries started singing again.

  “Jesus, Trev,” Sjogren said through the thick Boston brogue. “This is my third call to you. What the hell have you been doin’?”

  “It’s called sleep,” Munro said. “Among life’s most important activities.”

  “I guess you get to do that if you’re the one paying the bills. Me, I work around the clock.”

  “For what you get paid, that’s the least I would expect,” Munro said. “The fact of your call must mean that you have a name for me.”

  “I do,” Sjogren said. “And let me tell you, it took some doing to get it, too.”

  Munro waited for it.
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  “It’s a babe,” Sjogren said. “A chick named Maria Elizondo.”

  Munro jotted the name onto the pad he kept on his night stand. The name rang a distant bell, though he didn’t know why.

  “And listen to me, Trev,” Sjogren went on. “I deeply don’t give a shit what happens to you, but I warn you to be prepared for a really bad reaction to this. Elizondo is this loon’s main squeeze. He thinks they’re in love.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Munro said. He remembered now that he’d actually met this treasonous bitch. During one of his meetings with Hernandez, she’d been in the car.

  “How certain are you of the identity?” Munro asked. He didn’t care all that much, but passing this news along was tantamount to issuing a death warrant. It seemed reasonable to want to be sure.

  “I can’t speak to that personally,” Sjogren said. “But my guy in Justice says it’s a sure thing.”

  “And what’s your level of confidence in him?”

  Sjogren laughed. “What the hell do you want from me, Trev? You hire me for my sources, and I give you what I’ve got. You want two-hundred-percent certainty, you need to hire somebody else.”

  Munro forgave the attitude because the underlying message was spot-on. “Maria Elizondo,” he said, repeating the name aloud to make sure he had it right.

  “That’s it,” Sjogren said. “Now it’s my turn to go to sleep.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Jonathan hated flying. Airplanes were orders of magnitude better than boats, but given all the years of parachute jumps, fast-roping, and landings-cum-crashes in bullet-riddled aircraft, he worried that he’d made God grow weary of pulling his ass out of trouble.

  Now he was in a single-engine airplane that had been officially out of gas for the last ten minutes, flying fifty feet above the rooftops in the dark, hoping that they’d be able to trick the laws of physics one more time. Jonathan forced himself not to dwell on the depressing details, and instead scoured his map of Ciudad Juarez for a suitable place to land the Cessna.

  Airfields were out because they would be guarded, which left them with the option of landing on a field somewhere, or maybe on a highway. Either of those scenarios would alert the authorities, but at least Jonathan and his team would have a head start and some tactical flexibility. Problem was, they’d already crossed into Ciudad Juarez, and the urban landscape provided precious few fields. Exactly zero, in fact, by Jonathan’s reckoning.

  It had become clear quite some time ago that a soft landing was not in their future—perhaps it had never been—and to prepare, they’d secured all their weapons, and tied down as many potential projectiles as possible.

  “How flexible is the fifteen hundred feet of landing space?” he asked Boxers. Jonathan tried to keep his voice low so as not to spin Tristan up. The kid had good ears though, and issued a dreadful groan.

  “Depends on how much of the airplane you want to be left when we’re done,” Boxers said. “Nose-first, we don’t need any space at all.”

  Tristan said, “Oh, shit,” and Boxers laughed.

  “That’s not as helpful as you might think, Big Guy,” Jonathan said. It was a quirk of Boxers’ personality that his lighthearted banter ran inversely proportional to the seriousness of the moment.

  “Okay, serious answer,” Boxers said. “If I can slow it to nearly stall speed and we don’t care about breaking some stuff underneath, then five, six hundred feet should do.” The engine coughed. “It’d be good to decide quickly, though.”

  A solution materialized in Jonathan’s head. He triangulated between where they were and where they wanted to be. “Does this beast have five miles left in her?” he asked.

  “She’s got what she’s got,” Boxers said. “Give me a strategy.”

  Jonathan glanced at the compass on the control panel and verified that they were traveling north. “Okay, the north–south streets are pretty narrow, but the east–west streets are wide. This Elizondo chick lives about five miles northeast of our current position. She lives on Calle de Oro, one of the wider streets.”

  Boxers grinned beneath his night vision array. “You telling me you want to park in the driveway?”

  “At the curb, actually.”

  The engine coughed again.

  “Sure,” Boxers said. “Why the hell not? We’ve done crazier shit than that.” He banked the plane slightly to the right. “I’m gonna have trouble reading street signs from up here, though.”

  Below them, the city was mostly bathed in darkness, save for the rows of streetlights.

  “You can line up with any of these. We’re still fifteen, sixteen blocks south, but better to get lined up than be forced to crash into buildings.”

  “I thought we were going to be able to land the airplane,” Tristan said from the back.

  “I already told you,” Boxers quipped. “Landings are mandatory. They’re just not all created equal.”

  “Make sure your seat belt is tight,” Jonathan said. “And when I tell you, press yourself as far back into the seat as possible. Let the ratchet in your shoulder strap go as tight as possible.”

  “Should I take the vest off?”

  “Negative,” Jonathan said. “If we hit really hard, that vest will distribute the impact from the belt. Might save your collarbone.” He had no idea if that was really true, but it sounded right. “And lock your jaw tight. It’ll keep you from biting through your tongue.”

  Boxers being Boxers, he flew a few blocks farther north before finishing the turn and lining up with an east–west boulevard. According to Jonathan’s GPS, they’d lined up with Calle Norte Americano. That put Maria Elizondo’s house four blocks north and three quarters of a mile east of their current location. Every additional second in the air brought them that much closer.

  The engine noise pitched down dramatically, startling Jonathan.

  “That’s me,” Boxers said, defusing the concern. “I want to get this baby slowed down.” When he lowered the wing flaps, the aircraft slowed even more. To Jonathan, it felt like a walking pace, but he knew that they had no choice. At this low altitude, when the engine died, they would fall like a rock, with virtually no opportunity to react. There’d be nothing they could do about the speed of the fall, but the lower their forward speed when it happened, the more survivable the crash would be.

  Now that they were close, Jonathan realized the limitations of his GPS map. While the map images were pristine, the real street was dotted with vehicles, and the occasional trash can, and all manner of urban stuff that you’d never encounter on an airfield. Any kind of obstruction was a huge hazard, but there was something else that posed special hazards.

  “Those are power lines, aren’t they?” he asked, noting the strings of wire that connected the poles.

  “Yup.”

  “Can you avoid them?”

  “I’m gonna try.”

  As they chugged along as nearly stall speed, Boxers brought the aircraft lower and lower. On either side, the occasional building was actually taller than they were high, and this was not a city of skyscrapers. Up ahead, a car pulled onto the boulevard from a side street, and then careened onto the sidewalk when the driver saw the looming aircraft.

  “That guy just got religion,” Boxers said through a smile.

  Again, Jonathan chose to concentrate on his map. “We’re closing to within a half mile.”

  As if on cue, the Cessna’s engine died. No cough this time, no warning at all. Just a sudden silence where there’d been the steady drone of the engine and the rush of the propeller.

  The Cessna became a brick with wings, falling with all the grace of an anvil.

  “Brace!” Boxers yelled. He pulled back hard on the yoke, but there just wasn’t enough speed for the control surfaces to do their job.

  Jonathan pressed himself into his seat, locked his jaw, and waited for it. They hit flat and they hit hard. A jolt of pain as old back injuries reawakened, and Jonathan smelled blood in his sinuses. His belts
held, though, and the aircraft stayed upright, even as the landing gear bent and broke beneath them. He more sensed than felt the wheel pylon on the starboard side penetrate the underside of the fuselage and jut through like a giant spike. The fact that he was realizing these things meant that he hadn’t been skewered. He didn’t hear a scream of agony, so he had to assume that Tristan was okay as well.

  He’d know soon enough, one way or the other.

  Within seconds, a gray-white cloud filled the interior, but Jonathan’s initial burst of fear dimmed in seconds when he recognized the smell of steam, not smoke.

  Then they were still. Total elapsed time from engine failure to dead stop: probably less than five seconds. They listed to the right, but there was no flicker of fire. Chalk up one advantage to running out of fuel.

  “Tristan!” Jonathan yelled. “Are you okay?” He turned in his seat to see the kid’s wide eyes.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was a fair enough answer. It’d take a minute to take inventory.

  “I’m fine, too,” Boxers said. “Thanks for asking.”

  “You don’t get hurt,” Jonathan said. “You make dents.” As he spoke, he thumbed the release on his seat belt and shrugged free. “Gather your weapons and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Hey, Boss,” Boxers said, pointing out the front windscreen. “We’re attracting locals.”

  Of course they were. A plane crashes in the street in the middle of the night, people are going to be curious. Jonathan assessed the threat as low—these people were running to help, not to do harm—but among them, someone was calling the police, and that wouldn’t help them a bit.

  “What’s your status, Tristan?” Jonathan said. “Hurt or unhurt?”

  “Bruised,” he said. “But I don’t think I’m bleeding, and I don’t think anything’s broken.”

  “Then grab your shit and get that door open.”

  “There’s a big post sticking up through the floor,” Tristan said.