Hector said nothing, seemingly satisfied with Gail’s conclusion. A full minute passed as Gail inventoried all the moving parts. A thousand questions remained unanswered, but at least a timeline was forming, and names were being added to the puzzle. She was making forward progress.
“You said your colleagues were part of it all,” Hector said. “Why don’t you already know all of this?”
She allowed herself a bitter chuckle. If only it were anywhere near that simple. “You don’t want to know any more than you already do,” she said. “But I do have one more question.”
Hector shrugged.
“What do you know about the lady named Nicole Alvarez?”
His demeanor changed, and he reflexively looked back out the window. If the previous part of the conversation had triggered sadness, the mention of Nicole Alvarez triggered raw fear.
“Tell me,” Gail pressed.
Hector turned and thrust out a forefinger. “You stay away from her,” he said. “She’s bad, bad news. I know my father was terrified of her, and again, he refused to tell me why. And after he let her name slip, he made me promise that I would never try to track her down on my own.”
Gail grew more convinced that she’d already seen the lady in action.
Hector took a step closer to Gail, and this time, reading his body language, she didn’t resist the urge to stand. She sensed that there was a fight coming, and she shifted her gaze from his eyes to his gun hand.
“Who are you really?” he said.
Gail raised her left hand in a gesture for him to stop. They were still separated by maybe seven feet when he halted. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “We’ve already discussed that.”
“Why didn’t you ask me why my father should be afraid of that lady?”
Hector was a bright guy, she realized, and she was impressed. “Because earlier today, I saw what she is capable of,” she said.
CHAPTER 22
Caves were not created equal. The entrances were actually hard to find until you tuned your eye to look for them, sometimes just an anomaly in the ground cover. To be sure, that big arched opening that was so common in movies and television was like most things in movies and television: nonexistent.
They let the kids lounge and recharge while the adults scoured the area, with Tomás in tow. It took them nearly two hours to find a place that would suit their purposes. Jonathan thought it paradoxical that the caves with the largest openings seemed to have the least room on the interior, and vice versa. He tired quickly of being the primary explorer of these tight spaces, but Gloria and Dawkins both refused, and Boxers was hardly the right gauge for sizing anything.
The spot they settled on was nestled among rocks. The opening itself had an irregular shape that was eight feet at its largest dimension and four feet at its smallest. Jonathan led with his flashlight, praying silently that he wouldn’t scream like a little girl if he dislodged a colony of bats.
Jonathan didn’t know one type of rock from another, but he guessed the geology around him to be granite. While the terrain dropped pretty steeply past the opening, Mother Nature had provided a set of stairs in the form of rough outcroppings that, though covered by slime, were nonetheless navigable. Jonathan followed them all the way down to the main chamber—maybe twenty feet below the surface. Down there, the cave opened wide, with a ceiling that would allow Boxers to stand up straight and a horizontal extension that outstripped the beam of his flashlight.
He extinguished the beam of his light to see just how dark it was down there, and was surprised that after a minute or two, as his eyes adjusted, the light from above was enough to illuminate the major features of the space. Not enough to read by, certainly—barely enough to cast even a dim shadow—but perhaps enough to keep the kids from panicking.
Of course, once night came, this chamber would become the very definition of blackness. He determined to leave a light and spare batteries plus a couple of glow sticks for Gloria and the kids, but only with a stern warning about overusing them. Once night fell in the jungle, the whole world became blacker than black. Even the dimmest glow from belowground would look like a lighthouse from the air. If Gloria’s gang wasn’t careful with their light management, her worst nightmare of the worst luck might just come her way.
Jonathan gave Gloria and Tomás a personal tour of the chamber before he let the kids see what was going on. He showed them what he thought would be the best location for the latrine. More to the point, he told her that the best location for them all to relieve themselves was outside, in the jungle, but he didn’t for a moment think that the kids would go along with that. Truth be told, he anticipated a lot of very stinky kids when he returned to this spot in twelve hours or so—or however long it would take to do what he had to do and get what he had to get.
He left it to Gloria to bring the kids to the spot and show them around. The initial tour brought a shimmer of panic to the general mood, but by the time Jonathan left with his team to move on to the next step, that panic hadn’t bloomed to anything overt.
The kids were still settling in when Jonathan nudged Boxers and tapped Dawkins’s arm. It was time to go. The last step before they set out was an equipment check. Each of them carried four hundred rounds, give or take, for their long guns, and Jonathan carried another two hundred for his MP7, plus five extra mags for his Colt pistol. Boxers’ sidearm of choice was an HK45, a switch from his longtime love affair with Glock products. He didn’t carry a secondary rifle on this op, for reasons known only to him, but he did bear the burden of twenty extra pounds of explosives and initiators.
As they were about to set out, Boxers let out a wolf whistle and pointed to Dawkins. “Well, don’t you look like a tacti-cool geek?” he said. “I love the chicken legs.”
Jonathan didn’t want to laugh, but he couldn’t help himself. Dawkins had added a chest rig of ten M4 mags to the outfit they’d stolen from the dead torturer the night before. The pants legs were too wide and too short, and God had given him some of the skinniest legs Jonathan had ever seen on a grown man. The effect was that from his shoulders down he looked like an arsenal atop two drumsticks.
“Oh, this is going to be a fun hike, isn’t it?” Dawkins said. His smile said that he didn’t take himself too seriously.
“Hey, Dawkins,” Boxers said as he reached into the flap pocket of his pants. “I’ve got a present for you.” He handed over a flashlight that was about an inch and a half in diameter and about as long as Dawkins’s fist was wide. “Since Scorpion gave his light over to the chilluns, I thought I’d will mine over to you.”
Jonathan explained, “We’ll have night vision after the sun goes down in a couple of hours. That’s got a red filter on it that will keep you from crashing into trees.”
Boxers added, “And lessen the chances of that guilty feeling I get when I leave PCs in the jungle to die and rot because they can’t keep up.”
“How much water do you have?” Jonathan asked Dawkins.
“Just what you see,” he replied, indicating the two bottles that hung from his chest rig. “Two liters. Down from three this morning.”
“Should be enough if you conserve,” Jonathan said.
“What’s a little dehydration among friends, right?” Dawkins said.
And then it was time to go.
* * *
Gail Bonneville drove her newly acquired car into a Walmart parking lot and picked a space that was away from others, giving her the widest possible view of the area. She had no reason to expect anything untoward, but there was never a bad time for careful habits. She pressed a speed dial on her cell phone and was not at all surprised when Venice picked up on the third ring.
“Hello, Gunslinger,” she said. “Your deliveryman friend is quite the hottie.” She was referring, of course, to John Sacco, who must have delivered the money with the fingerprints.
Words could not express how much Gail detested her radio handle. Not because it hadn’t been earned—God knew she had
done that in spades—but because it focused on the one part of this business that she detested: the killing that was so often necessary. Nothing related to Digger Grave was simple. He liked to tell people that he was on the side of the angels, but what he failed to mention was that the angels he hung out with were of the sword-swinging archangel variety.
“That gentleman is not really my type,” Gail lied. She took care not to use names over the cell phone, even though the call was encrypted.
“Then you need to have your eyes examined. Bulldog is a good man.”
Good Lord, Gail thought. Does everyone have an avatar? And why are they all better than mine?
“Did you have a chance to review the gift he brought to you?”
“Checking money for meaningful fingerprints makes that needle-in-a-haystack thing look easy.”
“I realize that, but it’s the only way I could think of to identify PsychoBitch. I took control of her code name.”
Venice laughed. “PsychoBitch it is. As you might expect, the bills themselves had one-point-three bazillion prints and fragments, but . . .”
It was Venice’s way to build suspense into her explanations of things. Because Gail was in a parking lot, with no next steps without Mother Hen’s input, she rose to the bait. “But what?”
“The bills were banded. But they weren’t bank banded, if you remember.”
Gail did remember. The bands were generic, the color of butcher paper. And hand labeled. “Were you able to lift prints off of the bands?”
“I was,” Venice said. “Unfortunately, one of the prints belongs to one Randy Goodman. Or did, I should say—”
“I’m pretty sure he’s still got his fingerprints,” Gail said. “They’re just not worth a lot to him anymore.”
Venice continued speaking, as if she hadn’t been interrupted. “But I got three partials that are common to all the bands. I think there’s a good chance they belong to PsychoBitch. The prints came back as belonging to Yolanda Cantata. She lives in Falls Church and works for a company called Barker and Barker, which is listed as a K Street lobbying outfit. Literally on K Street.”
“What does lobbying have to do with murder and mayhem?”
Another laugh. “I don’t believe you just asked that question without irony,” Venice said. “My research on Barker and Barker shows that they’re sort of a boutique firm that specializes in Latin American affairs.”
Gail’s interest in Barker and Barker piqued in the space of a heartbeat.
“If I dig a little deeper into the darker side of the Internet, I find chatter from both State and Justice that questions the legitimacy of Barker and Barker’s activities. Nothing indictable yet, but that’s not for lack of sniffing.”
“What does ‘questioning legitimacy’ mean?” Gail asked.
“Now, remember, I’ve only been working this problem for an hour or so, so not all the connective tissue is in place here.”
“I’m not building a case, Mother Hen. I’m just looking for a probable identity.”
“I understand that,” Venice said. “But the stakes are pretty high. In this case, ‘questionable legitimacy’ means doing political dirty work. They’re suspected of being the go-to firm for settling differences between parties who need to keep looking legitimate.”
“What kind of differences?”
“The feds suspect that they’ve done some wet work, but all of it was on the other side of the border and out of their reach. Plus, the evidence they have is less than strong. Under the circumstances, though, this seems like a pretty strong connection. Now, care to guess who Barker and Barker lists as being among their clients?”
Just from the way Venice asked the question, Gail knew the answer right away. “Senator Charles Clark from Nevada.”
“One and the same,” Venice said. “Check your phone. I already sent you her address.”
CHAPTER 23
Well , that was a first for Jesse Montgomery—a four-hour flight in a private jet. He had no idea how much it cost or who paid for it—or who the jet belonged to, for that matter—but as he prepared to disembark, he decided that he aspired to this as his regular travel mode. The flight and everything associated with it, from the departure location to his passport to his permission to leave the country, all came via someone named Mother Hen. Judging from her obsession over the details, he understood where her avatar came from. There’d been a little pushback when Jesse mentioned that Davey was part of the deal, but everybody got over it.
The interior of the plane was walnut and leather and could have seated another six people comfortably. Jesse felt like a naughty little boy as he played with the switches and knobs that controlled everything from the reading light to the automatic window shades. Davey, meanwhile, mostly swilled bourbon, worked a crossword puzzle magazine, and slept.
And now they were on the ground in Veracruz, Mexico. Their flight steward—that’s what he insisted he be called—was a linebacker-looking dude named Thurgood. His trimmed Afro brushed the ceiling of the compartment as he tended to their in-flight needs, and now that the fuselage door was open and the humidity was dislodging the perfect atmosphere of the luxurious tube, Thurgood seemed anxious for them to leave. Jesse noted that the steward never asked them what their business was, and seemed not the least bit curious that they had no luggage.
Jesse stood from his seat and gestured for Davey to go first. “Age before beauty,” he said.
Davey chuckled. “You’re just afraid I’ll push you down the stairs.” As he passed the galley, he reached for the carefully arranged airline bottles of booze. “Mind if I take some for the road?” he asked Thurgood.
“I’d mind very much, actually,” Thurgood replied. Thurgood’s training regimen in steward school apparently had included sections that were never addressed by the major airlines. How to tear a man’s arm off and beat him to death with it, as an example.
“Thanks for taking good care of us,” Jesse said to Thurgood. “This was a first for me.”
He got a thin-lipped smile in return.
“I don’t suppose you know what our next step is supposed to be, do you?”
Thurgood said, “No, sir, I don’t. But the unknown is what makes life such an exciting adventure.” Another smile, but Jesse couldn’t tell if it was genuine or mocking. The smart money went to mocking.
The sun rested only a foot or two above the horizon, but the longer shadows did nothing to alleviate the heat. On the other hand, Jesse told himself, he had no way of knowing whether the heat was alleviated or not, because he was only just arriving. For all he knew, the day had been a scorcher, and—
“Stop it,” he told himself aloud.
Davey paused in the middle of the airstairs and looked back at him. “Stop what?”
“That wasn’t for you,” Jesse said. “That was for me.”
“Ah,” Davey said. “Still doing that, eh?”
Jesse let it go. His father had never understood Jesse’s propensity to talk to himself—and had always been mildly ashamed of it. It wasn’t something he did on purpose, but sometimes thoughts leaked out. More often than not, it happened during what he thought of as one of his OCD chains. When the overanalysis started, with one observation racing to the next without a check, he needed to take overt action to stop it, or he could lose whole minutes—and occasionally days—to tracing his thoughts to ground. He explained it to people as being akin to what happened to normal people when they started chasing links on the Internet, and they found that their initial question about an actor’s name had led them to a five-thousand-word article on the history of volcanoes.
Or something like that.
The closer Jesse got to the bottom of the plane’s stairs, the hotter the air became, and he forced himself not to enter the world of the Inverse Square Law.
Davey stopped at the bottom and waited. As soon as Jesse’s feet hit the tarmac, the stairs started retracting themselves into the fuselage.
“Jesus, they never even stopp
ed the engines,” Davey said.
“Must be in a hurry to get home.”
“The correct observation is that they’re in a hurry to get away from us,” Davey said. He planted his fists on his hips and pivoted his whole body as he took in his surroundings. “Same shit hole as it used to be,” he said.
“I think it’s pretty,” Jesse argued. “A little hot, but you can almost smell the ocean.”
“That’s petrochemicals and dead fish,” Davey replied. “Wait till you see the Garden of Eden that lies beyond the airport fence.”
“Really?”
“No. Not unless your idea of Eden has a Dantesque spin.”
“So, you’ve been here before.”
“Kid, I’ve been everywhere before. I used to have a buddy who settled here a while back. Eddie Barone. But he went to the dark side.”
“The cartels,” Jesse guessed.
“The government,” Davey corrected. “Speaking of which, what did your highly placed government sources tell you was our next step?”
They’d already discussed this, but Davey could never walk away from an opportunity to take a jab. “Mother Hen said to wait, and that the next step would come to us.”
As if on cue, a red-and-black checkered vehicle crossed the tarmac, headed straight for them.
“I think this must be that next step,” Jesse said.
“Or the execution squad.”
Jesse didn’t rise to the bait this time. “Are you going to be this pleasant the whole trip?”
“Can’t say for sure,” Davey said through a hint of a smile. “You know I can get cranky when I haven’t gotten laid in a while.”
“Jesus.”
The checkered vehicle slowed as it approached, and stopped adjacent to them, maybe five feet away. The driver rolled down his window. “Torpedo and Bomber?” he asked. He was no older than Jesse and was a living testament to the lack of skin care and dental health in this part of the world. Neil Armstrong might have studied the pockmarks on his face to practice his moon landing.
Final Target Page 24