by Ben Coes
And the prosecutor had been only too happy to listen, glory in his eyes for the prosecution of an angry soldier at a time when the military was unpopular. The police had locked Dewey up a week later.
The D.A. tried him in the local newspaper, on the local television stations, long before any trial. Even all that Dewey didn’t mind. It was his Delta commander he would never forget. He abandoned him. The U.S. military, who he’d given his life to, abandoned him. They refused to help. After so many years of service, of risking his life for country and force, they’d left him to the wolves.
Still, the jury found him not guilty. It took them only half an hour. For his part, Dewey left the courthouse and never looked back. A month in Nepal and Tibet, hiking. Two months later he applied for a job as a roughneck on a Marathon oil derrick off the coast of Scotland. The rest was history.
Dewey stared through the window in front of him, seeing nothing.
He closed his eyes momentarily and forced himself back to the task at hand.
He made himself scan the square again, more slowly this time. There, on a bench in the middle of the square, a large man with reading glasses sat with a book. Mark one. At the back right, the man drinking the cup of coffee turned his head and scoured the scene from behind dark sunglasses. As Dewey watched, he stood up and reached for cash from his pocket to place down on the table. Mark two.
Dewey descended the church stairwell and went through the front door of the church out toward the square. Sunlight filtered through a large oak tree in front of the beautiful façade. Across the square, in the middle of where the children played as their mothers watched, the first Delta, the one on the bench, stood. He made Dewey and their eyes met. Dewey began walking down the slate steps of the church toward him.
From the corner of his eye, Dewey became aware of a third man, a tall man with a dark complexion, baseball cap, shorts, and running shoes. He moved quickly from the sidewalk on the right toward the square. Had they sent three soldiers to meet him? Hadn’t they said two Deltas would be coming?
The tall man moved quickly. The first Delta, coming at Dewey, hadn’t noticed the approaching intruder.
Dewey glanced at mark two, back right, the Delta in sunglasses, who had begun talking with a blond-haired woman. A distraction, Dewey realized, as the long-haired man attempted to brush the woman to the side. A commotion ensued.
Dewey stopped, a cold chill ran through him as he realized it was too late to warn the men who’d come to save him.
A dull, nearly silent thud followed by a pained grunt echoed across the morning air as the blond woman shot the second Delta with a silenced weapon. He crumpled to the ground as the woman darted away from the café down the sidewalk. Dewey looked back to mark one, approaching from the middle of the square. He still didn’t see the tall man approaching, now practically on him. Dewey pulled his Colt from the small of his back and began a sprint toward the center of the square. The Delta followed Dewey’s eyes and turned to his approaching killer but it was too late. The tall killer’s arm shot out and a silenced bullet entered the young Delta’s skull just above his eye socket. His head splattered blood as he collapsed in the middle of the square, just feet from where the children played.
The tall man swiveled to face Dewey, the black steel of his silencer aiming quickly and firing. Dewey lunged to the side and felt nothing, but heard a shatter to his left as the bullet met the glass of the church door behind him. He fired the Colt, the crack of unmuted gunfire shocking in the square. Dewey’s shot caught the tall man in the chest. A second shot and the side of the killer’s head jolted right, blood and skull silhouetting as he fell onto the bright green of the square’s freshly cut grass, his corpse following soon after and striking the ground, rolling over just feet from where a young mother held her baby.
The screams of women and children filled the momentary silence following Dewey’s gunfire, but Dewey was already turned and running away from the square, looking desperately for the second killer, the blond assassin. But she was already gone. Dewey turned, heading as quickly and calmly as he could for his car. At the side of the church he turned left and sprinted up the brick-paved street. In two blocks he spied the shiny black of the Mercedes halfway down the block.
He had to get away, and quickly. But now he also allowed the obvious question to surface in his mind: What had just happened? These were no mere killers. The two who’d just killed the Deltas were not terrorists or mercenaries; they were government-hired, agency-trained operatives. What did it mean? Only one group knew of this exfiltration. He shuddered as he realized the implication of it all: There was a mole.
He sprinted down the sidewalk, knowing he had to get away. In the distance, sirens suddenly crossed the warm Cali air. Soon the Madradora would be mayhem. He spotted the Mercedes, parked on the street corner a block ahead. But as he came upon the street corner in front of the car, he noticed something, a reflection in the window of the Mercedes, just an instant, a simple swatch of light, then movement: the blond-haired executioner. She stood in a doorway just beyond the street corner, hiding, waiting, arms raised and weapon trained. The reflection in the car window saved Dewey from what would have been, in five feet or so, a warm bullet in the back of the head.
Dewey stopped just before the corner, feet away from where the blond assassin lurked. He looked behind him, down the block he’d just run down, and saw a Laundromat. He dropped back and entered the Laundromat. He ran through the store, pushing his way past piles of laundry and women folding articles, to the back room, where a man sat, smoking a cigarette in front of a pile of papers.
“Lo siento,” murmured Dewey as he charged through the office toward an alley entrance, gun in hand. The sirens became louder, multiple vehicles joining in the distance.
Out the door and across the alley and through a dented steel door. Inside, stacks of bread loaves, other boxes of food, the smell of meat. He moved through the storage room and entered the back of a bodega. Colt .45 cocked in front of him, he passed a middle-aged woman who fainted as she saw the weapon in his hand. Catching the eye of the man at the cash register, Dewey held a finger to his lips. There, at the side of the entrance, her back to the store, stood the blond assassin.
Suddenly another customer, an elderly woman, screamed as she saw Dewey with gun. The blonde turned abruptly, leveling what he now saw was an HK UMP compact machine gun with a six-inch suppressor on the end. A full auto hail of bullets crashed through the windows as she swept the weapon east-west. The elderly woman’s screams ended abruptly as a bullet ripped through her head and killed her. The assassin’s bullets shattered the storefront’s glass, but Dewey was already down and partially hidden by a chest freezer, which shielded him from the slugs. As soon as the blonde’s gun swept past him, Dewey had a clear sight. He fired twice, two quick shots into the assassin’s neck and chest, flinging her backward onto the brick sidewalk in a shower of blood and glass.
Dewey ran through the open door and stood over the woman, looking for a moment at the young assassin. She could not have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two years old. The fall to the ground had knocked her backward, a blond wig now lay behind her head. Beneath, brown locks framed a tanned, blood-smattered face. She was a gorgeous woman, her sharp nose framed by high cheekbones, a vaguely Mediterranean cast to her smooth skin. Her eyes looked up at Dewey; brown eyes, deep pools that expressed the pain of the bullets now riddling her body. She clung desperately to life as blood coursed from her mouth, nose, and ears. He looked down at her chest. A stylish white leather jacket was now ruined in crimson, a black hole piercing her right breast.
She stared at Dewey as he stood over her. In the distance, the sound of sirens grew louder. The beautiful girl’s lips moved as she tried to say something.
Dewey reached down and grabbed her arms, pulling her up with some effort over his uninjured shoulder. He carried her quickly to the Mercedes as the sirens moved closer to the square. Opening the back door, he laid her down gently on t
he backseat. She would likely be dead within a minute or two, but maybe in her final moments he could make her say something.
He climbed into the front seat of the Mercedes and started the sedan by again crossing the wires that now dangled below the steering column. He glanced over his shoulder at the critically injured woman clinging to life in the backseat. Dewey didn’t care if she lived or died. She had chosen her bloody profession, and like most assassins that had come before her, that decision would soon prove terminal. Still, he couldn’t help noticing her age; he couldn’t help lamenting the misused youth and beauty that would soon be gone from the earth.
He hit the gas and sent the black sedan speeding down the sun-scorched road. Behind him, a green and yellow police cruiser picked up the Mercedes at the block next to the bodega, marked Dewey, took a right and sped toward him, trying to catch up.
Looking in the rearview mirror, his eyes met the young woman’s: still alive. He needed a minute, a quiet place, or she would die before he could try to interrogate her. But the police cruiser was soon joined by another, and he had a situation on his hands.
He flipped the cell phone open and dialed Anson Energy. When the woman answered he asked to be connected again with Terry Savoy. After a brief pause, he heard Savoy’s voice.
“Dewey? Where are you?”
“They were waiting for me,” said Dewey. “They killed the Deltas. They assassinated American soldiers in cold blood. They knew I was coming. These weren’t terrorists. These were professionals. We’re talking operatives.”
“Hold on, I’m going to patch in Jessica.”
“No, you’re fucking not. Someone in that room is involved. Listen to what I’m saying: You have a mole.”
“All right, all right. Are you okay? Where are you going?”
“I’m getting out of Colombia before someone puts a bullet in my head. I need the location of the Cali airport.”
“Why the airport?”
“Terry, you can help me right now or I can hang up. Your call.”
“Are you still near the pickup site?”
“Yeah, heading west on Granada.”
“Hold on.” The phone clicked as Dewey kept the accelerator pressed to the ground. Dust from the dry Cali road shot up from behind the speeding car, clouding the air between the Mercedes and the first police cruiser, now less than twenty feet behind him.
The phone clicked again.
“You need to head east. Granada will take you away from where you want to go. In a few miles there’s a small highway, Route twenty-three, Autopista del Sur. Take it north to Highway Twenty-five. Aragón International is about five miles from there.”
“Thanks.”
“You must know something. Or at least they think you do.”
“Yeah, that occurred to me.”
“We need to exfiltrate you.”
“Exfiltrate me? I’m being hunted in the streets of Cali. I have two police cruisers on my back bumper. I’ll be lucky if I’m alive in ten minutes. I called to tell you you have a rat. You got some serious problems to solve on your end before we talk again.”
He flipped the phone shut and pushed the sedan’s gas pedal to the ground, sending the black car lurching even faster along the crowded city streets. He was a block in front of the first police cruiser, whose siren pierced the air. He ran the Mercedes in and out of traffic, weaving into the oncoming lane as he tried unsuccessfully to build distance between himself and the police cruisers.
At the next street he swerved left. He had a clear lane for a block and he turned and looked at the woman as he kept the car speeding forward. Dewey reached his right hand back and cupped the young assassin’s hand. It was a small hand, cold, and he held it in his own. He could see her eyes beginning to flutter as death approached. At this point, force would not elicit the words he needed. Only one thing would: Dewey held her hand, comforting the woman who’d been sent to terminate him.
Looking up at Dewey from the backseat, the woman’s eyes found his and she again attempted to move her lips. Blood oozed from the small of her neck as she exerted herself, dark red pouring down over a silver pendant that hung from a necklace at the nape of her tanned neck. She tried desperately to say something, at first softly, then louder, until Dewey could understand.
“Padre,” she whispered. “Me perdóne por la vida que he vivido.”
Prayer. Through clotted throat, now filled with blood, she was praying, asking for forgiveness. But it was not the words she said that sparked something in Dewey’s memory, rather the way she said them. He recognized something. It was the stilted, short, harsh imprint of the word perdóne. The peculiar accent to her Spanish triggered a recollection from long ago. Noriega. The endless weeks in the sweltering, dirty city, waiting for the order to move in and kill the dictator. He would never forget the way the locals spoke.
Panama.
24
FORTUNA’S APARTMENT
Fortuna kept an eye on the television in the bedroom, set now to Fox News, though the news had broken on every network. Fox showed a split screen, with live images of Capitana Territory on one side of the screen, and an eerie nighttime scene of Ted Marks’s ski house in Aspen, still smoldering, on the other side. Fortuna stared for several minutes at the screen, with the volume down. The Aspen footage gave way to the site of the destroyed Savage Island dam.
Across the top of the screen, the banner read: AMERICA UNDER ATTACK.
In his hand, Fortuna held a small green book with Arabic writing embossed into the leather cover. He opened the book up and removed a small photograph. It was a color photo of Esco and him, taken at the Crimea camps.
Fortuna felt the pain of Esco’s death more than he ever would have anticipated. When you share a tent with someone for a year, when you learn to plan, to fight, to kill together, when you share so much, you can never remove that bond.
But far worse was Fortuna’s fear of what Esco might have told Dewey Andreas. Esco knew all. That’s what really ate at Fortuna now. They’d both learned to endure interrogation, but Fortuna knew that ultimately the one doing the torturing would always win out. And an ex-Delta could win more quickly than most.
If Esco were tortured, he could have revealed the full breadth of Fortuna’s plan, plus laid a trail leading directly back to him.
Fortuna replaced the photo and put the book back on the shelf. He turned the television off.
It was almost 9:00 P.M. Buck should have succeeded in taking out Andreas by now. When Buck would be at liberty to call Fortuna with an update, Fortuna had no idea.
He went into the bathroom and showered, then put on a pair of jeans, loafers, and a plain white button-down. He put a gray sweater on over that. He walked down the hallway toward the elevator.
“Tell Jean to bring the car around,” he said to Karim.
“You’re going out? What about dinner?”
“I’ll be back later. Keep an eye on the news. TiVo anything on the rig or the dam.”
Karim handed Fortuna a dark gray overcoat with black velvet lapels.
The car, a Mercedes S600, glided peacefully down Fifth Avenue. At Twenty-first Street, the car turned right and drove for several blocks. It stopped in front of a large brick building, in front of a line of waiting limousines and sports cars.
It was an old warehouse that had once served as a meatpacking plant. For more than a century, the building housed a factory that took large pieces of cow and turned them into steak and hamburger that was packaged up and delivered to restaurants in lower Manhattan. Today, $365 million worth of renovations later, the building housed expensive loft condominiums and on the first floor an exclusive, members-only nightclub called “11.”
Fortuna climbed out of the car and walked to the door. A large doorman opened the door for him.
“Good evening, sir.”
“Hi, Jack. How are you tonight?”
“Great, Mr. Fortuna.”
“How’s the crowd?”
“Not bad for a Thursda
y. I did notice Miss Haviland is here.”
Fortuna smiled and handed him a wad of bills, a couple hundred dollars in twenties.
“Thanks, Mr. Fortuna.”
“No problem. Stay warm.”
Fortuna walked down a hallway, then went through another set of doors, also opened by a large doorman. He handed the doorman his overcoat, along with another wad of bills.
The club looked more like a large, dimly lit living room than a nightclub. Smoke filled the air. To the right, a small alcove housed a wall of liquor bottles. Fortuna walked to the bar. Behind a large block of highly polished wood, a young, pretty brunette stood, smiling.
“Good evening,” she said.
“Hi,” Fortuna said. “What’s special tonight?”
“We’re having a Screaming Eagle tasting,” she said in an Irish accent. She raised a large wineglass and poured a glass of dark maroon Cabernet into it.
Fortuna took the glass and sipped.
“That’s nice,” he said, smiling. He took another sip. He stared for a moment at the bartender. She had large green eyes. Her nose was slightly long, sharp. Her brown hair was combed back neatly.
He looked down her body, at her tight black blouse, full breasts pressing underneath. She let him look, unapologetically, appreciatively.
“I’m Alex,” he said after another sip. “Are you new?”
“I’m Darien.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“You too. Have you been a member here for a long time?”
“A couple of years.” He took another sip. “This is nice. I think I’ll trade it in though. I need something to pep me up. Would you mind pouring me a vodka and Red Bull.”
“Sure. What kind of vodka would you like?”
“Jean-Marc, if you have it. Otherwise, Grey Goose.”
She mixed him the drink and poured it into a heavy crystal glass. Fortuna sipped it and looked around the room.
“11” was a series of informal rooms, seating areas, large sprawling leather couches surrounding massive low-rising tables. Music filled the room, but it wasn’t so loud that you couldn’t talk. Groups of people spread throughout the large room, sitting in the different areas, smoking. In a few areas, large plates of cocaine were passed around like hors d’oeuvres. Fortuna saw many people he knew; models, a few hedge fund types, the art community, actors and actresses, but mostly old-line New York City socialites.