“You have family in the United States, no?”
I conjured up some tears and once again wrapped my arms around myself. “Yes.”
“And they will pay?”
“My daddy. He has money. Please.”
“How much money?”
“He’s a businessman in Houston.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. A lot.”
The men exchanged glances and grins, congratulating themselves. None of them glanced the cartonero’s way, as if he deserved no credit at all.
“You call him? Your papa?”
“I’ll call. Anything you want. Please, don’t shoot me.”
Another chuckle.
“Oh, we won’t shoot.” The one in charge gave me a sly grin and lowered his pistol. “You the goose and the golden egg, American puta.”
The others joined in both a suggestive chuckle and in lowering their guns.
Big mistake.
I brought the Jericho up, going for the leader first. A point-blank squeeze of the trigger and red exploded between his eyes.
To my surprise, the teen reacted faster than the second in command, firing a burst, missing by inches. I whipped back to him, just as he got it under control and the barrel of his AK zeroed in on me.
I kicked his weapon, throwing off his aim, and his shot went wide. Behind me, number two was finally getting his shit together, so I snapped my hips around, aiming a kick at his knee. My heel landed just under the kneecap, and I could feel the joint bend in a way it wasn’t meant to.
“Puta madre!” He collapsed in the dirt, gushing a wave of Spanish obscenities.
Shifting my attention back to the kid, I reached into my tae kwon do arsenal and rotated into a spinning hook kick. My heel connected with his jaw, and he staggered backward but didn’t drop his weapon.
A bullet screamed past my head.
Grabbing the straps of my backpack, I hit the ground and shoulder rolled, flipping my body around the truck’s rear fender.
That last round hadn’t come from the three I’d been dealing with, and in the dark mounds of dirt and garbage I couldn’t immediately spot the shooter. The Jericho and Paragon SEAL knife could only get me so far against a group of well-armed paramilitary drug cartel soldiers wearing body armor.
If I was going to come out of this alive, I needed my shotgun.
More gunfire erupted, pinging off the cartonero’s truck and throwing up dust from the dry earth.
I peered beneath the undercarriage of the truck. Senor Broken Knee levered himself up on an elbow, and squeezed off a few shots in my direction, but the kid was nowhere to be seen.
I heard a sound to the side of the truck, a magazine snicking into place.
Whirling around, I double-tapped, aiming high and ventilating his face with both rounds.
Somewhere in the darkness, an engine revved. Voices barked orders in Spanish. I counted eight, maybe nine.
I had to hurry. Despite the attempts of número dos to make up for his slow start by squeezing off rounds under the truck, I worked my way to the cab and yanked open the door.
The cartonero lay on the floorboards, my shotgun in his hands and aiming my way.
I pulled back just as the fléchette load blasted past me, exploding into the night. Shooting fléchettes, little pointed steel projectiles with veined tails, was akin to shooting a bunch of tiny arrows at a target with superspeed and velocity. I’d avoided being ripped apart, but that didn’t prevent the boom from reverberating through my head and causing the buzzing to resume in my ears.
Damn it. By the time this mess was over, I wouldn’t have any hearing left.
I whipped around with the Jericho, catching the cardboard collector mid-pump. One through the eye, blood spattering through the truck’s cab, then I pulled my shotgun from his dead hands.
Now the odds were a little more even.
Hunkering low, I moved around the truck’s front fender, peering at the spot where the leader’s body lay in the dirt. Número dos stretched on the ground, rifle pointed in my direction. Behind him stood three new additions to the party, matching their compadres in tats, body armor, and weaponry.
They were peering in the other direction, as if watching…
I spun around and fired, the fléchettes tearing through the Kevlar of the first man and sending him stumbling backward. His partner ripped off a shot at me, digging up the dirt inches from my right leg.
I pumped and fired again, aiming higher, separating him from his face. He was dead before he hit the dirt.
Lead rained from the other side of the truck, giving me no choice but to fall back. I left the truck’s shelter and raced for a mound of garbage-filled dirt. A better bullet barrier than the truck, I leaned my back to the mound, scooped in several good breaths, and tried to figure out my next move.
From my count, there were four Zetas still gunning for me, one injured, and a few I hadn’t seen yet. They had vehicles at their disposal, and they knew the terrain.
I unzipped my pack and pulled out the night-vision monocular, slipping the strap over my head and flipping it on. Sight returned, green and hazy, and I reloaded my shotgun with more fléchette shells, then thrust myself upright and moved around the mini hill. A series of holes yawned on this side of the dirt pile, and wilted flowers were scattered over a low mound nearby. I’d heard stories of landfill operators leaving holes open in the garbage for the poor to use to bury their dead, a potter’s field of sorts, but whether the holes were here as an act of charity or for Los Zetas to dispose of those who got in their way, I supposed it didn’t matter.
I would do my best to provide some bodies to fill them.
I’d almost circled the pile when I spotted the pickup, a black Ford F-450 King Ranch with dual wheels in back. One man stood outside the vehicle, smoke from his cigarette drifting in the air, machine gun at the ready.
I took him out with one shot, then took cover at the side of a mound of refuse and waited.
Two soldiers came at me, one from the right, one from the left. They moved fast and sure, even though they didn’t have night vision.
I blasted, swiveled and pumped at the same time, then blasted again, relieving them of the burden of breathing. Then I circled the dirt and returned to the cartonero’s pickup.
A shot whizzed past my ear, and I charged, running and gunning. A good marksman could pump and fire six shotgun rounds in less than three seconds. I did it in less than two, the last shot punching into the second-in-command’s stomach.
When the dust cleared, I sized up the massacre through the monocular’s greenish tinge. A slight rustle came from to the left of the cartenaro’s pickup, almost imperceptible under the lingering groans coming from número dos. Spinning toward the sound, I brought my gun up, ready to fire.
And aimed straight into a pair of sad brown eyes.
The boy couldn’t be more than five. Crawling out from a hole covered with cardboard, he was filthy and wore little more than rags. He said nothing, only stared at my shotgun with a resigned look on his face, as if he was fully prepared to die.
I lowered my weapon.
“I won’t hurt you,” I told him in Spanish. “Everything’s OK.”
But of course, everything wasn’t OK. A boy living in a hole. A small army of drug soldiers dead and one dying a stone’s throw away. The threat of Ebola hanging over the people of Mexico City. None of it was OK.
Nausea pressed at the base of my throat. My body trembled, the sudden rush of adrenaline finally catching up with me. I forced my legs to carry me past the boy and in the direction of the trash-strewn dirt pile, controlling my heart rate, my breathing. When I gathered myself and turned back, the boy was gone.
“It’s going to be OK,” I whispered into the night, but this time it wasn’t an empty reassurance. This time I was thinking of the children in Mexico City, and it was a promise I would damn well keep.
Hammett
“Use the downtime well,” The Instructo
r said, “because it won’t last long.”
The stolen credit card was declined at the Target Hammett visited, so she had to use almost all of her remaining cash to buy clothes—panties, a sports bra, gym shoes, jeans, a tee, a windbreaker—and three rolls of ACE bandages.
She’d changed in the bathroom, taping up her broken ribs as tight as she could stand, threw away her old clothes, and had then walked to the Sheraton on Falls Avenue. She wasn’t hungry, but in order to keep her energy up she’d forced down a burger in the Fallsview Restaurant at the top, charging it to a made-up name and room. Then she had gone to the business center and spent an hour researching Canadafest, the big music event happening the next day, and another hour researching the Ebola virus, complete with the requisite pics of people bleeding out of every orifice. Hammett had a stomach made of forged steel, but she winced at some of the images. Happily, though, the virus didn’t kill dogs.
Afterward, the doorman called her a cab, which she’d taken to the Toronto Eaton shopping center and ditched without paying. Then she had cruised the mall for two hours, stealing three wallets from unsuspecting guys, and then trailed a lone woman with a casual resemblance to Hammett out to the parking lot and relieved her of her purse and her car using a well-timed punch to the side of the head.
Then it was on to the Homewood Suites near the airport, using the stolen ID but paying cash. The room wasn’t as nice as the boutique hotel, but it was more than comfortable, and Hammett collapsed into a boiling hot bath while thinking about the best way to kill half a million people.
Ebola was normally spread via blood and other bodily fluids, but Hammett couldn’t fathom how that kind of transmission would be effective at an outdoor music festival. It also would be near impossible to contaminate food or the water supply, because of the many different sources and vendors.
The Instructor had probably weaponized it somehow. There was published research that suggested the possibility the virus could mutate into an airborne pathogen. No evidence existed that it had, of course, but if Hammett were experimenting with turning Ebola into a weapon, she’d make damn sure her research didn’t get out either. Chandler had said Julie’s strain of the virus was already engineered to strike in hours rather than days, so why not take it a step further?
After all, that was the difference between an A and an A+.
So how would they spread it?
An airburst would disperse a good amount of an aerosolized virus but would be loud and attract attention. Maybe during a fireworks display? Or when the headliner took the stage? People would think it was part of the show.
Another possibility was to do something to the ground. Spraying the grass before the concert. People step on the virus and then touch their shoes or bare feet.
No. That wouldn’t be very effective. The more Hammett considered it, the more she liked an airborne approach. Perhaps crop dusters. Or those helicopters used to douse forest fires.
She found the hotel’s business center, got online, and Googled pictures of Canadafest, looking for aircraft. After only a few minutes, Hammett found her answer on YouTube.
She smiled at the genius of it. Say what you would about The Instructor, he was one crafty son of a bitch.
“But I’m craftier.”
Then Hammett began to plot her next moves. And they weren’t moves Fleming and Chandler would approve of.
Isolde
“It often takes time to earn a man’s respect,” The Instructor said. “Killing him is quicker.”
“Tell me about your children,” Izzy said.
The pilot had a bad case of the flop sweats, possibly because of the gun she was holding to his head, possibly because of the razor she pressed to his crotch, possibly because he’d just watched Tristan slit the throat of his copilot. It also might have been a combination of all the above.
“They’re b-babies,” he stuttered. “Two and a half, and seven months.”
“What are their names?”
“Clarissa and Matthew.”
Izzy ran the back of the blade up his jawline, collecting a bead of sweat. “I bet, more than anything, you want to see them grow up. Am I right?”
He nodded.
“And it would be such a tragedy if they grew up without a father, don’t you think?”
“I’ll do anything you want.”
Of course he would. They always did. “Do you have life insurance? To take care of Clarissa and Matthew if something bad happens to Daddy?”
Another nod, sweat dripping off his chin.
“That’s very responsible of you. Because bad things do happen. I bet, when you got up this morning, you didn’t imagine this scenario here. But it is happening. Now reach into your pocket, give me your wallet. Move slowly, because this razor is really sharp.”
He adjusted his hips in the chair he sat in, and gingerly removed the wallet from the back of his slacks.
“Take out your driver’s license. Read me your address.”
His voice was faint, but he followed orders.
“Now I know where Clarissa and Matthew live. And let me share something with you. I really, really hate small children. You see these black marks on my arms? The full-length lines are people I’ve killed. The ones half the length are preteens. So I’m going to give you a chance to show me how much you love your babies.”
She pressed the razor’s handle in the pilot’s hand. “Slit your own throat, or I’m going to visit your house, tie up your children, and set them on fire.”
“Oh…Jesus…please…”
“Don’t pray. That pisses me off. You have five seconds to do it. And let me tell you, I really enjoy a good marshmallow roast over screaming babies. Five…”
“I have money. Stocks and some CDs.”
“Four…”
“I’ll do anything you want. Please.”
“Three…”
He raised the razor to his Adam’s apple, his hand shaking so bad he nicked himself in several places.
“Two…”
“You…you promise you won’t hurt them?”
“You have my word.”
The pilot closed his eyes, then dug the razor into his own neck.
Izzy stepped away, impressed. In her experience, less than ten percent of the people she tried that on actually went through with it, and the majority of those were mothers. Most fathers usually tried to lunge at her with the razor.
He began to choke and gag, coughing blood through the new hole in his neck, aspirating it, eyes wide with panic and disbelief.
Izzy took a step back and raised her hand, the one not holding the gun.
“Fingers crossed,” she said, showing him. “I lied to you. I’m going to kill your kids, and your wife.”
His eyes got really wide, and he finally swung at her with the blade, but she easily dodged it, lashing out with her combat boot and breaking his knee, then watching as he flopped around on the floor like a landed fish. When he finally stopped moving, Izzy took the razor from his bloody hand, went to the sink next to the coffee machine, then carefully cleaned it off. She added one more cut to her arm, shuddering from the sensation. Then she dabbed on some ink and peered out the window of the office.
They were in one of the giant hangars at Downsview Airport, adjacent to the park where Canadafest was being held. Even though it was barely six a.m., there were already tens of thousands of people milling about among the great expanse of food tents and Porta-Johns. Izzy could see the stage in the distance where more than a dozen bands, including several she liked, would be playing later that day. Hopefully they were doing live recordings, because it would be the last performance for all of them.
Tristan began the process of dragging the pilots back to the truck. They’d be disposed of later. Before coming to the airport, they had dropped the Ebola-decimated corpse they’d had on ice in the parking lot of a local hospital. The autopsy report—already completed—would be leaked later that morning. As soon as Izzy and Tristan sprayed the crowd, they
would drive back to the United States, the president would close the borders, and it would be mission accomplished. This strain of Ebola, enhanced by scientific tinkering, was incredibly hot. First exposure to hemorrhaging took hours rather than days, and the fatality rate was over ninety percent.
Canada was screwed.
Izzy planned to celebrate the mission’s success by forcing herself to eat a cracker. Maybe she’d even put some cheese on it.
In the hangar, there was a man atop the aircraft, doing some patchwork. Izzy climbed the rope ladder hanging off the side, and snuck up on him without being noticed. Her balance was excellent, but her hand-to-hand combat skills were mediocre, so she ended him with a suppressed shot to the back of the head, taking careful aim so she didn’t breach the aircraft’s shell.
At the same time, Tristan crept up on the driver of the movable mooring tower and snapped his neck with less effort than it took Izzy to remove a screwtop beer bottle cap. That put the current death toll at eight, counting two crew members in the rear part of the hangar, and the two guards they’d shot by the fence. You’d think, with a festival so large, there would be better security.
Then again, this was Canada, one of the safest countries in the world. Izzy planned to move here one day, after the virus killed forty percent of the population and housing was cheap.
It took a half hour to rig the aerosol tank beneath the craft with heavy-duty chains, which Tristan did while Izzy familiarized herself with the cockpit and began the preflight check. There were more switches and knobs than in the simulator, but everything was clearly marked. She quickly located the throttle, the prop pitch and reverse levers, elevator wheel, and rudder pedals. Then she began going over the gauges, memorizing the layout.
Tristan opened the massive hangar doors, letting in the morning sun, which hit Izzy in the face and made her squint. She fished out her Ray-Bans, stuck them on her face, and watched her partner climb into the mooring tower vehicle.
Easiest op ever. Izzy could almost taste her victory cracker.
The thought of it made her stomach turn.
Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels) Page 88