Lyons wheeled around and saw a rangy-looking dude in jeans and a dark blue T-shirt stalking around the front end of the pickup. The hardman held his pistol on its side and was lining up a shot at the Able Team leader. In better circumstances, Lyons would have called the guy a douche bag for shooting like a Hollywood action star, but time forced him to let the Colt do the talking as it spit a single Magnum slug. The bullet slapped into the man’s forehead. Lyons glimpsed a red hole open in the shooter’s skull before the force of the bullet shoved the corpse to the ground.
Lyons marched back a couple of steps to the SUV’s rear driver’s-side door while he continued to watch for other threats. As he flung open the door, he stowed the Colt inside his jacket. Reaching inside the vehicle, he snatched up an H&K MP-5 that lay on the floor.
Another of Escobar’s men came around the front end of the truck, a shotgun held at waist level. Lyons threw himself forward, grunting as his elbows and knees absorbed the impact of the ground. The shotgun blast cleaved through the air where he’d stood an instant earlier. The guy was working the slide on the shotgun and readjusting his aim when the MP-5 came to life. A quick burst of slugs lashed out from the H&K’s barrel, chewing into the man’s legs and eliciting anguished cries.
His mind overwhelmed with pain, the gunner crashed to the ground, the shotgun barrel smacking against the pavement. A second burst from Lyons’s SMG chewed into the other man’s chest, killing him.
The commando hauled himself to standing and looked around for other adversaries. He barely noticed that his jacket was streaked with dirt. The cracked pavement had ripped one of the elbows of the jacket and also had torn open the skin on his left palm. Instead he looked for Schwarz.
He spotted him taking down another of Escobar’s shotgun-wielding thugs with a burst of full-auto fire from Schwarz’s Glock 18. From Lyons’s vantage point, he also could see another of Escobar’s thugs lining up a shot at Schwarz’s back. Lyons swung the MP-5 in the hardman’s direction and squeezed out a burst from the SMG. The hail of bullets lanced into Escobar’s thug, whose finger squeezed the trigger in a death reflex. The pistol cracked once.
The sudden noise prompted Schwarz to spin around just in time to see the gunner collapse.
Schwarz gave his comrade a tight smile and a short nod, which Lyons returned.
“We’re going to have to ditch the car,” Lyons said. “Grab your gear and let’s go find Pol.”
CHAPTER NINE
Before Blancanales could react to the first men lowering themselves from the rooftop, a bald guy with massive shoulders and arms, thick legs and a paunch sprinted at the Able Team warrior. The guy had an AK-47, probably a knockoff of some kind, with a folding stock, held in both hands. The muzzle was swinging in Blancanales’s direction, but he had no idea whether the thug actually planned to shoot him or just intimidate him into surrendering.
He had no time to figure it out. He raised the Beretta and squeezed off a couple of shots. The reports from the weapon echoed through the alleyway while the bullets lanced into the guy’s torso. Before Blancanales could step out of the way, the massive corpse continued to bear down on him, like a car with a dead man at the steering wheel, and slammed into him.
Blancanales grunted and stumbled backward as his feet went out from under him. Though he willed himself to keep a tight hold on the Beretta, he still lost a moment as he pushed the dead hulk off him and tried to regain his bearings. Two of Escobar’s thugs had scurried down the side of the building, and two more were running at him from the mouth of the alley. All of them were pointing guns at him and screaming in Spanish for him to drop his weapon and stop moving.
Even if Ortega was dead, Escobar probably had tried to quiz the undercover agent about this new arrival who’d appeared out of nowhere, trying to buy guns and other equipment. Blancanales had to assume Ortega had given him up; that Escobar knew Blancanales was a federal agent of some kind. He could try playing stupid and demand to know why they were attacking him, but he guessed it was too late for that routine.
Instead he let the Beretta fall from his hand and rolled away from it, flat on his stomach, the right side of his face pressed against the pavement.
He heard footsteps and looked up. Blue-jeans-clad legs were in front of him, the feet shod in snakeskin cowboy boots. The foot lashed out and kicked the pistol, sending it skittering across the ground. The creak of the boot leather registered with Blancanales, followed by fingers gathering a handful of his hair and jerking up. The Able Team commando scrambled first to his hands and knees, then just onto his knees, to lessen the pain.
He got a look at his antagonist. The thug didn’t strike Blancanales as especially tall, though he was wide in the chest, shoulders and neck. The guy’s free hand was clenched into a fist and it reminded Blancanales of a cinder block. His head was shaved clean, but a bushy black beard hung to the middle of his chest. A second person, shorter and slimmer, stepped around the big guy. When Blancanales’s eyes drifted in that direction, the big guy rewarded him by releasing his hair and punching him in the jaw.
Blancanales’s head whipped right and a white light flashed behind his eyes. The coppery taste of blood filled his mouth. He spit on the ground and swiveled his head back around.
Vargas stood over him, arms crossed over her chest. Her dark brown eyes, narrowed, studied him. A small pistol lay snug against the curve of her hip.
He thought of the Gerber folding knife in his pocket; figured he could make one final play. The man mountain was close. He could launch himself from the ground, bury the blade in the guy’s solar plexus, give it a twist, grab the woman, take her gun, use her to get Escobar’s men to back down, at least to buy time until Lyons and Schwarz or the local police arrived.
Never work.
She’d put a bullet in him before he could surge up from the ground.
Best to let it play out.
“Where’s Ortega?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
Blancanales forced a smile.
“He wanted you to screw him,” the commando said. “Sounds like you did.”
“Take him,” Vargas said through clenched teeth. Another brief explosion of pain erupted at the rear of Blancanales’s skull and everything turned black.
CHAPTER TEN
Though he hated to admit it, the phone call had left Ortega with a hollow pit in his stomach.
Escobar had called and demanded a last-minute meeting with him. They had business to discuss, Escobar had said, before he would meet with Perez. Ortega had considered calling the guys with the Justice Department to clue them in. His instincts had told him to do just that, but he’d ignored them. Screw them, he decided. That bastard Perez wants to take a swing at me and question every move I make? To hell with him. This is my show. I’ve been running this op for years.
He arrived at the restaurant early. Stepping inside, he saw a couple of Escobar’s thugs sitting at the bar, drinking and watching the door.
One of them slid off his stool, lumbered over to Ortega and greeted him with a curt nod.
“You’re early,” the thug said.
Ortega flashed a wide smile. “Hey, the big boss calls, you don’t want to be late, right? If he asks you to jump, you jump. I figure I should be here as quickly as possible.”
“Yeah, good idea. He seemed like he was in a rush to talk to you.”
“Oh, yeah? What’d he say?”
The man ignored the question and jerked his head toward the back of the restaurant. “C’mon. He told me to escort you to one of the private party rooms. You want something to drink?”
“Hell, yeah, I want something to drink,” Ortega replied, forcing another grin. “What do you think?”
Escorting him to the bar, the bodyguard said, “Wait here.” The hardman walked around to the other side of the bar. Grabbing
two glasses, he set them on top of the bar. With his other hand, he brought out a bottle of Scotch, which Ortega noticed was the most expensive the restaurant carried.
“Boss won’t like it if you give a lowlife like me the best stuff in the house.”
Escobar’s thug shrugged his shoulders. “That’s not what he told me. He said to give you the best stuff we had.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
That only made Ortega more nervous. Downing the whiskey, his thoughts began to whirl. Escobar was a cheap son of a bitch. He usually only served his people good booze if he planned to kill them. What had given him away? It had to be Perez. Damn it! Washington had promised they’d give the guy a bulletproof back-story. How could they screw up something so damned important?
Maybe he should run. The bodyguard was walking ahead of him. He could hit the guy in the back of the head, run out the restaurant’s back door and escape in the car before Escobar became suspicious. And if he had to shoot his way out? Well, he was ready to do that, too.
He dismissed the idea almost immediately. What if he was overreacting? He’d blow his cover; one he’d spent most of his adult life building. Besides, he’d put Perez in danger, too. He didn’t like the bastard or his entourage, especially that blond-haired, perpetually angry prick. But they were working for the same team and he couldn’t imagine selling Perez or the others out. So, hell, he’d play it cool, stay right here and stick his head in the lion’s mouth.
The thug opened the door to Escobar’s private room and stepped aside.
Ortega plastered a smile on his face and peered inside.
He saw Escobar sitting at a large table, leaning back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, his expression inscrutable.
Escobar gestured for Ortega to come inside. Against his better judgment, he did just that. A grim-faced Castillo was seated next to the head man. Castillo’s eyes were narrowed and his lips were pressed together in a thin line. He looked as though he wanted to spring out of the chair at Ortega and was only barely restraining himself from doing so.
Even though the room was air-conditioned, Ortega suddenly felt hot, rivulets of sweat racing along his spine. Fear fluttered in his stomach and an almost overpowering urge to run welled up inside him. He knew he’d been made. Was it Vargas? Had she sold him out? No, he assured himself, she didn’t know. It had to be the other agents. Not that they’d done it on purpose. But their sudden appearance had probably set off alarms and now they were going to take Ortega down, too.
If Escobar knew he was working undercover, Ortega needed to know that. More important, he needed to get out of this alive.
Vargas’s absence only heightened his fear. She was always by Escobar’s side. Well, almost always. Rumor was that when Escobar had to kill someone, he kept her away from it. That always mystified Ortega. Who the hell knew? Maybe it was the one chivalrous act of an utter psychopath. Even after all these years, Ortega couldn’t pretend to understand the snake-eyed psycho who was staring at him.
“Sit,” Escobar said, gesturing at a chair with his chin.
“Sure,” Ortega replied, keeping his voice even. Moving to the table, he settled into one of the wing-backed chairs and unbuttoned his jacket. Resting his left elbow on the table, his forearm pointing straight up, he leaned forward and propped his chin on the notch between his first and second fingers. His right forearm rested on the table, the fingers of that hand hanging off the edge, putting them in reach of the Glock clipped to his belt.
A bottle of bourbon stood on the table near Escobar’s elbow. He grabbed it by the neck and tipped it, splashing some into the bottom of a short glass. When he was finished, he slid the glass across the table to Ortega.
“Glad you could come,” Escobar said. He nodded at the drink. “Help yourself. You’re among friends.”
Ortega forced a smile, lifted the drink and said, “Thanks.” He drained about half of the contents, set the glass on the table and made a satisfied noise.
“You like that?”
“Hell, yeah,” Ortega said.
“That’s expensive shit. I don’t hand it out to just anyone.”
“You’re very generous, sir.”
“Here’s the thing,” Escobar said, “I grew up poor. You know that, right?”
“Yes, sir. I suppose I did.”
“Dirt poor. No clean water. No clean clothes. My mother worked in alleys. She let strangers bang her brains out for money. Sometimes they didn’t pay her. Sometimes they banged her, then hit her and took her money.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“Terrible? Maybe. Maybe it’s just human nature. Hell, I don’t know. You want another drink?”
Ortega nodded and Escobar slid the bottle across the table at him.
“Here’s what I do know,” Escobar said. “When someone took her money, I didn’t eat. So here I was, holes in the roof, holes in my clothes and some prick takes my momma’s last peso after he bangs her.”
“Terrible,” Ortega repeated.
“No,” Escobar said, rising from his seat, “predictable. At the end of the day, people are animals. They speak their peace, love and brotherhood crap all day long. But when it gets right down to it, they’re a bunch of animals. They want to eat, screw and stay warm. That’s all they care about. You agree?”
The agent shrugged. “Sounds pretty close to the truth.”
“That’s because it is the truth.” Escobar shrugged his jacket from his shoulders, revealing a leather shoulder harness. “Take this, shithead,” he said, tossing the jacket to Castillo, who snatched it from the air and busied himself folding it.
“Where was I? Oh, yeah. See, animals are hungry and you take their food, what do they do?”
Ortega shrugged.
Escobar unbuttoned the cuff of his left shirtsleeve and rolled it up once.
“You don’t know what animals do?” he asked, voice incredulous. “Of course, you don’t know. Or maybe you’re just pretending. You’re good at that.”
“What? What the hell...”
“Shut up. I’m getting there.”
“But...”
Escobar pinned Ortega with his stare. The latter man felt his stomach plummet and he moved his hand just slightly, putting it closer to his gun. Calm down, he told himself. You still can get control of this. Keep the guy talking so you can figure this out. Maybe he figured out Perez is a Fed and he’d just pissed at me for introducing them.
“Anyway,” Escobar continued, “I watched this happen maybe a half dozen times, these bastards hitting my mom, taking her money. I’m hungry and these bastards are taking our money. That means no food for me. You know what I did?”
Ortega shrugged again.
“Of course you don’t know, you little pussy. You grew up in a nice suburb. What was it? Upstate New York? Daddy was a doctor?”
“I don’t know—”
“Shut up.” By now Escobar had rolled up his other sleeve. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared past Ortega, eyes fixed on a spot on the wall. “I’m trying to talk. Anyway, my mother comes home, crying, lip split open, eye swollen shut. She says she has no money. I’m a kid, but I’m furious, right?”
Ortega nodded, but was only half listening. He was running the numbers. If he shot Escobar, he had maybe a second to whip around and blast Castillo, who carried a nickel-plated Colt revolver in the small of his back, before Castillo shot him. Chances were Castillo would shoot him the second he put a bullet in Escobar. But at least Escobar would be dead. In some way, he would have accomplished his mission. He just needed to get his gun. That meant he needed Escobar to keep talking.
“Furious,” he said.
“Furious. So I tell my mother... I say, ‘Don’t worry, Mama. I’ll take care of this. Where did it happen? Who did this to
you?’ After a while, she told me. My father, he was gone. He’d disappeared before I was born. But he left us one thing. A .38 revolver. He knew Tijuana was a shithole and he was leaving his wife and kid there. Maybe giving her the gun made him feel better. Maybe he knew he’d never get through customs with it. Who the hell knows? I knew where it was, though. My mother had showed it to me a couple of times, told me if one of her ‘friends’—that’s what she called her tricks—came to the house, got rough with her, I should grab the gun and threaten to shoot him.”
The corner of his lip twitched at the memory.
“Tell him what you did,” Castillo said.
“The gun was in a shoe box under her bed, along with a box of shells and a switchblade. I took out the gun, loaded it. Then I grabbed the knife and went down to the bar where all this shit had happened. I was too young to go in, so I just waited outside for the son of a bitch to stagger out. When he did, I followed him home.”
He still wasn’t looking directly at Ortega. But the undercover agent felt as though Escobar could see his every move. He shifted a bit in his chair, moving his hand an inch or so closer to his gun, probably close enough for him to make a quick draw.
“Where’s Perez?” Ortega asked.
Escobar flicked his eyes in Ortega’s direction.
“You don’t ask the questions here. I do.” He turned his gaze away from Ortega and studied the nails of his left hand. “So I follow this guy home and while he’s unlocking the door, I call his name. He turns around, all bug-eyed until he sees it’s just a kid. Then he waves his arm and tells me to get off his property. Says he’ll kill me if I don’t leave.
“I just stood there and waited, said nothing. The drunk bastard started screaming at me, but I just stared at him. Finally he lost it and charged at me. I’d never shot a gun before, but it was easy. He was so close, I just emptied it into his chest. Six shots. Dead before he hit the ground. Then I went through his pockets and took what money I could and left.”
Revolution Device Page 9