by Cherry Adair
She gave him a look, part blank and part hostile.
“They have a website, for God’s sake! They have five times more followers than we do. If we don’t get with the times immediately, in the blink of an eye they’ll own this mountain, Cosio, and everywhere else we do business. When I go to Santa de Porres, I’ll look for a media expert. Better yet, I’ll go to Bogotá and find an expert there.” As powerful as the Abadinista National Liberation Front was, they were in a small, poor country with few sophisticated resources.
Sin absently slapped a buzzing insect on his neck. He should probably have rubbed insect repellent on his prisoner. The bugs were going to feast on her. But if he’d done that, he wouldn’t be standing in the armory fighting with Mama on a subject that was, as far as he was concerned, a done deal. He’d be back there fucking Miss Rimaldi’s brains out.
It had never occurred to him to administer insect repellent to the five other prisoners across the compound, waiting for their ransom demands to be met. Mama had already sent two families a finger apiece.
Her thick eyebrows disappeared incredulously beneath her heavy bangs. “Are you saying you are too weak to beat Escobar Maza away from our door?”
Sin’s jaw clenched as he strapped a hunting knife to his thigh, then reached for a flak vest and pulled it on over his naked chest. “He has more manpower, more fucking firepower, and a larger online footprint than we do. We have to get our shit together. Go global.”
She looked as confrontational as an attack dog, yet not nearly as friendly, and the flare of her nostrils told Sin she was furious. “Our products are global.”
“On a small scale. South and North America, yes. But we need better distribution in Europe. Russia. Asia. That means more people. In the manufacturing plants, in sales, in marketing. Manufacturing employment has fallen as our people go to work for the Sangre Y Puño. Production is critically important if we want to stay competitive in the market. We can’t do that if we’re understaffed and have shit distribution.”
“We made that market and built it up. It’s not going to disappear overnight.”
Sin gathered his shoulder-length hair and tied it with a thin leather cord at his nape to get it off his face. Without ventilation, the room was stifling hot. “No, not overnight, but in six months it might. We’ve lost twenty-six percent of our sales in the five months Maza has been around and the loss is growing exponentially. We can’t afford to lose any more. He’s not going away. He’s here to stay. He wants what we have, and he’ll get it unless we fight back and be smarter about it. And I don’t mean small skirmishes between the fucking trees, or charging less for protection to the miners so they’ll come back to us.
“I mean taking this seriously, and fighting back where it’ll hurt them the most.” He grabbed a box of shells and stuck them in one of the pockets down his pant leg. “Financially. We have to implement global growth with innovation. We have to get on social media at an accelerated rate. We need media experts, public relations and marketing professionals.” None of whom hung thick on jungle vines. He needed to go to a major city to find those resources.
“Who have you been talking to?” She blew a cloud of smoke in his direction. “Where does this nonsense come from?”
Research, but she wouldn’t want to hear that. And for some reason he didn’t want Mama to know he had a computer stashed in one of his hideouts in the jungle. The only computer in the compound was the one she had locked away. Not that it worked due to Maza keeping the signals blocked.
Last time he’d been in Santa de Porres, and right after he’d stopped taking Mama’s powerful headache potion and the fogginess started to dissipate, he’d ZAGed the Sangre Y Puño, The search engine had given him more than he needed to know about his powerful, and savvy, enemy. Enough to chill Sin’s very marrow.
Fighting Escobar Maza was like holding up a paper napkin to staunch a flood. Sin tried to figure out how the hell he’d let things slip out of his fingers for so long? Surely his father must have left the business in good shape prior to his death seven years earlier? Or had he been left with a crumbling business, weak and sickly enough that Maza thought he could just stroll in and administer the death blow?
Still, Sin couldn’t imagine allowing a thriving, multi-billion dollar business fall into ruins. What the fuck had he been doing for the past seven years? Not running the business the way it was supposed to be run, obviously.
Time to change things up.
“We run a business,” he reminded Mama, squeezing the bridge of his nose. “We have to treat it as such. Tomorrow I’m heading to Santa de Porres to hire the people we need. I’m done talking. We have to take action or be prepared to lose, and/or die. Andrés is waiting outside. I have to go. It’ll be light soon.”
He opened the steel door, but Mama halted him by grabbing his forearm, short sharp nails digging into his skin. “You won’t do anything until we’ve discussed this, Sin!”
“We just did.” He shook off her tight grip. “Now it’s time for action.”
Riva had easily read Diaz’s microexpressions, even in the flickering light. It’s what had made her an invaluable juror selector, which was what she’d been doing when she’d been recruited by T-FLAC six years ago. The face had the most complex system of muscles in the body, making it almost impossible to hide micro changes if one was looking for them. And since Riva’s life depended on her reading both body language and facial expressions before she ended up with a machete bisecting her skull, or a bullet in the back of her head, she read him.
The human face was capable of displaying tens of thousands of different expressions without the person even being aware of them. Riva read Sin Diaz’s face like an open book.
Desire had dilated his pupils and tightened the muscles around his eyes and mouth. Anger was responsible for the tightness around his jaw, and lowered eyebrows…
He wanted her. He was conflicted. And he was pissed.
The conflicted was intriguing. When push came to shove, she could use her knowledge to her advantage. But she’d be even happier with the weight of her SIG in her hand. Her boot knife was, of course, gone with her boots. The small boot knife on a cord around her neck had been taken, too.
Hands, teeth, feet, smarts, and her special skills. That was it for weapons. For now. That should be enough.
He’d touched her with callused, warrior hands, and she’d reacted like a girl, not a fellow warrior. She even forgot to act scared. A man like him would expect a bound and naked woman to be terrified out of her mind. Riva wasn’t terrified out of her mind. But she had a healthy respect for the danger she was in. At least she’d made sure he thought that she didn’t speak the language. Pretending not to speak Spanish might very well save her life. The less the enemy thought she knew, the better her advantage.
Tied up like a sacrificial lamb, she tested the hemp binding her wrists over her head the moment she heard his footsteps crunch on the vegetation outside. Everything hurt as though a herd of elephants had used her body as a trampoline. Or she’d done a long free fall out of the sky.
The aches and pains she’d work out once she was free, but right now there was no use dwelling on them. She’d learned early that no one was going to kiss her booboos better. That no one, in actual fact, gave a flying fuck about her physical well-being. It made life a whole lot simpler when her expectations were zero. The only place left to go from ground zero was up.
She liked being on her own. She played just fine with others, but she preferred depending on herself, her own unique skill set. Add a detonator or an AK-47, and she was happy as a clam.
Ignoring the fire of the rope burn around her wrists, and the incredible discomfort of having her arms cruelly twisted above her head, Riva swiped her cheek against her upper arm as sweat trickled down her temple. Time was of the essence.
Pulling her knees up to her chest, she twisted and turned until she was on her knees, practically dislocating her shoulders in the process. Excruciating enough
to make her eyes sting, but it made things easier and took some of the torque off her wrists. Panting, she had to pause a moment to catch her breath. The heat and humidity of the jungle combined with the high altitude made breathing feel more like sucking air through a wet blanket.
Go. Go. Go.
The hemp was heavy and thick. The only thing she had to slice through her bindings were her teeth. She got started.
The rough rope tore into her lips, shredding the tender membrane of her inner lips and tongue, and dug into the side of her mouth. Since there was no alternative, she continued gnawing, letting her mind drift as she worked. She needed the distraction so as not to focus on the pain. Concentrating on the mission and what she had to do was better.
One unraveled strand scratched her cheek, and she lifted her head to try and lubricate her dry mouth, but there was no moisture to be found; the taste of that Tic Tac was a distant memory. One down, and God only knew how many to go. Bending her head, she went back to work.
Somewhere in that wreckage was her backpack, with everything she needed for the op. She’d have to figure out where the chopper had gone down, get to that location, retrieve her bag, then find Maza. If Diaz hadn’t blown the chopper to hell, it would probably have fallen out of the sky at some point. It had just been a matter of time. She’d kinda hoped it would be on some other flight.
It was only the weight of the cargo, which had forced them to fly low, that had saved her bacon. She’d escaped certain death-miraculously somehow managing to autorotate to the ground, forcing herself to stay limp as she went, so that her body absorbed the impact from the branches she hit, instead of being broken by them. It had all passed in a blur of fear and motion. There were several blank spots, and then she’d woken, tied and alive, to find the tall, half-naked tango watching her as if she held the secrets to the universe.
She’d been trained to outwit the bad guys, tangle with terrorists and win, and survive in nearly any environment, and T-FLAC had given her the tools to resist just about anything. No one had anticipated that Maza’s enemy would shoot down the damn chopper, though. So much for Plan A.
In spite of the tragic deaths of fellow operatives Sanchez and Castro, Riva still had her mission to complete. Connect with Escobar Maza. If he needed reassurance to do whatever the hell he planned for the summit, then she had nine days. Eight, really; surely it was past midnight. She was losing time, dammit.
If what he had planned had nothing to do with the summit, then she had no damn idea how long she had to make contact. That was if she’d only been out of commission for a day. In truth, she didn’t know how much time had passed since the chopper dropped out of the sky, or how long they’d had her tied up in this hovel in the middle of jungle hell. Her usually reliable inner clock had been shaken up by the crash.
Shitcrapdamn.
For all she knew, they could have drugged her for days and whatever Maza had planned might have already happened. The ANLF was famous, or infamous, worldwide for El aliento de demonio, Demon’s Breath, their brand of the drug Scopolamine. Being both colorless and odorless, they could’ve fed it to her, or even blown it in her face while she lay unconscious. The drug acted on the brain, blocking the formation of memories. The chilling thought that they could’ve done anything, made her do anything, while she was unaware gave her impetus to chew a whole hell of a lot faster.
Riva put an eight-day time clock in her mind, determined to think positively. She was a pro, and she had work to do.
But first she had to get the hell out of Diaz’s compound.
Tasting blood from her abraded lips and tongue, she paused, breathing hard. Two twisted threads waved triumphantly inches from her nose. All right! Licking her lips to get the stinging sweat-salt out of the multiple small cuts, she went back to work.
One more twist gnawed free. Her lips were numb, which was a blessing.
Being in a dangerous situation like this was both terrifying and exhilarating. She had all the skill, all the experience necessary for this mission, she just lacked some critical pieces of information. And for all intents and purposes, she lacked backup. Control had been tracking her via satellite, until the crash.
Now? Hell if she knew what they knew. Did they have even a clue where she was? They knew where the chopper went down and that was all. She thought again about the locator signal on her molar, about the signal jamming that she’d been briefed on, about being a needle in a very, very large haystack.
Sweat trickled down the side of her neck to soak into her hair. Her breathing became so labored she was afraid she’d pass out, and she stopped gnawing for a second or two to regulate her breath and slow down her heartbeat. Passing out from lack of oxygen would be a rookie mistake. And a rookie mistake out here would be deadly.
Closing her eyes, she imagined cool lake water swirling around her heated body in a soothing caress. But that soothing caress turned into the rough, hot stroke of Sin Diaz’s hands on her. Every cell in her body went on red alert.
Not just no. But hell no.
A quick glance at the window set into the thick cement block wall showed nothing but darkness; no hint of exterior lights. She took stock of her situation as she gathered herself for the next round of gnawing on the damned rope.
The alive part was good. The impending arrival of Mama was extremely motivational. How the hell was she going to get from Diaz’s hideout to Maza’s camp when she had no clue where she was? And she desperately wanted to get away from Diaz. While Maza was the target, Diaz wasn’t far behind. In some ways, he was considered a much more dangerous adversary than Maza.
Ruthless, relentless, and vengeful. And those were his good qualities.
How many miles would she have to travel, through dense jungle, without so much as a compass, weapon, or clothes, at night? Would she be able to find Maza in thousands of miles of jungle, in the eight-day time frame? If she truly still had eight days.
Because if she didn’t find him, what and when he was doing whatever would be moot because he’d still be very much alive. And that was assuming he hadn’t already carried out whatever the hell he was planning.
Dammit.
She had to get the hell out of here. Now!
No weapon, but she’d improvise until she found something. A gun would fit the bill, but in a pinch anything she found lying around could be used as a weapon.
T-FLAC had coordinates for some of ANLF’s various jungle locations. They not only picked up and moved camp regularly, from satellite images they appeared to have structures deep within the jungle. Safe houses, they suspected. Made sense. Now she suspected that many of those locations actually belonged to the SYP.
Damn jungle was riddled with tangos. They’d always be fighting. Always in hiding from each other and the authorities. They’d have bolt holes. She mentally brought up a map of the terrain and pinpointed as many of those locations as she could remember from the briefing.
Those caches of weapons and provisions could save her ass if she could find them. Fine and dandy, once she ascertained just where the hell she was now.
She needed a plan.
First. Get free.
Second. Obtain a weapon.
Third. Clothes.
Fourth. Figure out her exact location and how much time she had left on the clock until Maza acted.
Another strand popped free. Great. Progress. Only about thirty more to go.
She licked blood off her upper lip, ignoring the sting in the abrasions. Almost home free. Riva went back to gnawing on the thick hemp rope tethering her to the bed. Her heartbeat picked up the rapid beat of the countdown timer in her head.
“If Loza is correct, Maza is here now,” Andrés whispered. They’d taken a small group, Cesar, Vincente, and Giosue, letting the others go a different route up the mountain to the crash site.
“He’s correct, what? Forty percent of the time?” Sin scanned the small enclave with the NV scope on his rifle. Six men in varying stages of undress, with bottles of booze in h
and, were gathered around a small fire. Three naked women writhed on a blanket, putting on a show for the men as they toyed with each other’s breasts, lolled their heads back, and spread their legs in open invitation. There was laughter, giggles, and, from the men, sensuous groans. All the eyes of the men and women were glazed, due no doubt to booze and pot. None of the men were familiar to Sin, and he didn’t expect to recognize the women.
As he watched, one of the women reached between her legs, moaning as she slid her fingers through her folds. One of the men dropped to his knees on the blanket, unzipped the fly on his fatigues, and mounted her. Another man approached the blanket, eyeing one of the other of the women. Unbuckling his belt, he dropped his trousers as he walked.
Sin turned his back on the group. “Maza’s not here.”
“Loza—”
“Was mistaken. His men wouldn’t be smoking mota and having an orgy if Maza was in camp. Let’s go.”
“We take out the men who are here, then. You know it’s what we do.”
“Not when the men are stoned out of their minds and unarmed. Not when innocent women are present and all they’re doing is fucking each other. Nothing feels right about this.”
“Nothing seems right with you lately, tio. You got a headache? Take Mama’s bug juice for crapsake! It’ll get rid of that headache and with it your sudden burst of morals. These are our enemies. We eliminate our enemies, right?”
“Not tonight. I have a prisoner to interrogate. No point alerting Maza to us when there’s no need. We head back.”
Andrés glanced at the other two men, who nodded in agreement. He turned his head to look at Sin. “We kill them before we go.”
It was, Sin, thought, murder. The people in the clearing were having a good time. There wasn’t a weapon in sight, and they were too impaired to use one even if it was close at hand. Maza wasn’t anywhere near. He stood his ground. “You coming?”