Dangerous Connections (Blackthorne, Inc.)

by Odell, Terry

  “Sit. Over there.” She didn’t take her weapon off him, but motioned to the side of the road with her elbow. On the job, he’d be cuffed, but there wasn’t time now. Was there someone else in the passenger seat? Even if there were, that was on Dalton’s side. The man complied with her order. “Tell everyone to do what you did,” she said. She gestured toward the convoy. “All out. No guns. No pistoles.”

  The man shouted in Spanish. She listened for any recognizable words—the sort that might be warnings to his comrades. She thought she recognized “Armas.” Weapons. At least she hoped that’s what he was saying, and not “Shoot!”

  She refocused her attention to the convoy. The second vehicle had rear-ended the leader. Its hood had crumpled, blocking the windshield. But the window rolled down, and another rifle arced to the ground.

  She prodded the man on the ground with the muzzle of her AK-47. “All of them.”

  He leered at her. “Aguilar kills me anyway. Why do I care?”

  “What if I fix it? Get you away from Aguilar? Escape. Comprende?”

  “No escape from Senór Aguilar. I escape, he kill my familia.”

  Elle didn’t have enough patience—or Spanish—to argue. “Let’s see what Senór Aguilar says when he finds out you’re to blame for losing all his senóritas.” She swiveled and sent a burst fire at the vehicles. She kept her barrage low, on the tires, but he didn’t know where she was aiming. She hoped he’d want to absolve himself of blame.

  “No. No. I help.” He shouted more in Spanish. The driver side doors of the last two Wranglers opened. Two more men emerged, rifles above their heads.

  She keyed her mic. “Dalton. Sitrep.”

  Silence.

  She repeated herself.

  More silence.

  Shit. She couldn’t control four men and cover the passenger sides. What if there were two of Aguilar’s men in each Wrangler? Every gut instinct told her to rush into the vehicles and look for Trish. But her training instincts prevailed. Clear the scene. Make sure it’s safe.

  Fozzie was on his way to the airport, but maybe he could still pick up her signal. She made sure the mic was in position. “Jinx. Fozzie. Do you copy?”

  Reception sucked, but Jinx managed to decipher what Zeke was saying. “You have the list,” he repeated. “Roger that. Send it to the helo.”

  He checked the surveillance cameras again, looking for vehicles on the approach road to the airport. The helo tilted under him, and he grabbed the armrest, braced his feet on the floor. The helo dropped, but his stomach didn’t.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “We’re needed,” Fozzie said.

  Jinx’s imagination filled in every possible blank. Elle was in trouble. Which meant Dalton was, too. Captured? Wounded?

  He switched the radio to the frequency Elle and Dalton were using. Boosted the gain on the voice recognition system to max. Adjusted the camera settings. Pushing noon now, and the temperatures in the jungle below were very close to body temperature. It was hard to make out human heat signatures, but he should be able to spot the vehicles—their engines ran plenty hot enough.

  He wished for a giant machete to slice away the damn canopy that seemed to tease him, taunt him with its power of obscuring what lay beneath. He wondered what would happen if Fozzie flipped the helo upside down so it could act like a giant weed-whacker.

  You are way too punchy.

  “Um... how about a sitrep?” he asked Fozzie. He needed facts, not the pictures playing inside his head.

  “The intercept went as planned, but Elle can’t raise Dalton. Neither can I.” Fozzie’s tone was calm, as if this kind of thing happened all the time.

  “How long?” Jinx asked.

  “Get the ants out of your pants. You keep your eyes on those cameras. I’ll do the flying.”

  Jinx aimed the cameras forward, but they were going too fast for him to identify anything but a blur of trees.

  “Back off,” Fozzie said. “You’ll make yourself sick trying to spot anything. Wait until we’re closer.”

  Jinx’s stomach agreed with Fozzie’s advice. He checked the email and found Zeke’s message. A list of women who’d gone missing in Mexico in the last three months, cross-referenced with the list of suspected cartel hostages. He sorted them by date and scanned the last two weeks. Over thirty names, including Trish’s. The question was, was she on the convoy Dalton and Elle were intercepting, one of the others, or had she been transferred somewhere else? And all this assumed she was still alive.

  He raised Zeke on the radio. “Got it. You have any leads as to how many of these are still in Mexico? Which ones might have been shipped out already?”

  “No, and it seems unimportant. Find out who is there and we can deal with the rest later. Be glad the boss is letting you do this at all. We have our target, remember?”

  Zeke was right. Jinx was only trying to keep his mind off what was happening below until they were in a position where he could do something. Where they—Dalton, Fozzie, and Elle—could do something. What the hell did he know about coordinating an op? He fed intel. Someone else did the planning.

  “Should be near the target zone now,” Fozzie said. The helo’s motion slowed and relative silence filled the cockpit.

  Jinx watched the imagery. The vehicles stood out, white on his display, even in the jungle heat. Four of them. Surrounded by smoke. And then, blobs he assumed were human appeared all over the place. Scattering into the jungle. Bad guys? Hostages? Or both?

  “Crap.” Jinx explained what he’d seen to Fozzie.

  “Want me to take over?” Fozzie asked.

  “I’ve got it covered,” Jinx said. “You fly this bird.”

  “We have auto-pilot.”

  “Let me check with our eyes on the ground.” Jinx keyed the radio. “Elle, do you copy? We’re directly above your position.” He hardly breathed waiting for a reply.

  “Copy that.”

  “Report?”

  A chuckle. “It’s a jungle down here.”

  Things couldn’t be too bad if she still had her sense of humor. “Dalton?”

  “I still can’t raise him.”

  Fozzie interrupted. “Take a breath. One step at a time. It’ll all be apples. First, tell me about our scumbags.”

  Jinx listened as Elle described what had happened. Pride swelled in his chest as she explained she had four prisoners.

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure there weren’t more,” she continued. “Dalton had the passenger side of the convoy, and everything was progressing according to plan. I secured the four drivers and went to the other side of the vehicles, but by the time I’d done my part, they were all empty. I think the women decided to take their chances in the jungle.”

  Which confirmed the blobs Jinx had seen.

  “Do you know how many were in the vehicles?” Fozzie asked.

  “Negative. My guess is each vehicle had only the driver, no secondary guard. That way, they’d fit one more woman in each car. Figuring four passengers per car, that could be sixteen women. I’d put the odds of my being right at less than fifty-fifty.”

  “I thought you’d agreed not to tell me the odds,” Jinx said. “Or was it the other way around?”

  Meanwhile, he’d narrowed the search on the voice recognition program to seek only Dalton. But if the man was going cowboy, he knew how to avoid being found.

  “Was Ramon one of the men you captured?” Jinx asked.

  “That’s another negative,” Elle said. “I don’t recognize any of them.”

  Jinx wondered how many people Ramon had working for him. Or had Aguilar pitched in reinforcements? Rivals united against a common enemy—the cops? And Blackthorne, although they might not know it.

  “Elle,” Fozzie said. “Did you do a thorough search of the vehicles? Could you have missed someone? Maybe there are secret compartments.”

  Jinx could imagine Elle’s eyes narrowing at the suggestion she’d shirked her duties.

&
nbsp; “It was crazy down here,” she said. “But yes, I did. I went inside each vehicle, and there were no people inside. No secret compartments. Standard Jeep Wranglers.”

  “Merely confirming,” Fozzie said. “No stones unturned.”

  “Did you find out whether my sister was on the convoy? We never saw the women.”

  Jinx read the list again, in case new information had magically materialized. Nope. “We know she was one of Ramon’s hostages. But all we got was a list of names, not where they’d been taken, or when. Our sources are still digging.”

  “What am I supposed to do now?” Elle asked.

  Damned if he knew.

  “Stay put,” Fozzie said. “We don’t need more than one missing operative. We’re going to zip around for some quick recon.”

  Fozzie took the helo upward a few hundred feet, then re-engaged the autopilot. “You find Dalton’s rucksack?” he asked Jinx.

  “On it.” Jinx checked the homing beacon. “It’s about two hundred yards from the convoy.” He fed Fozzie the coordinates.

  “Is it moving?” Fozzie asked, the helo already speeding in that direction.

  “Not at all. You think he’s hurt?”

  “No, I think he’s ditched the damn ruck. You picking up any signals? Two humans is my guess. He’s got a bad habit of expanding the scope of an op when there’s the slightest chance it might lead him to Rafael. Which is the reason we ended up in this mess to begin with.”

  Jinx still shouldered the responsibility. “I thought it was my bad intel.”

  Fozzie snorted. “Quit beating yourself up. Intel is always tempered with what we learn on the fly. I thought Dalton was going to ease up on his obsession now that he’s got someone new in his life, but he’s still determined to put away that drug lord. A longstanding grudge.”

  Jinx tweaked the input, switched cameras, tweaked and switched some more. “He wouldn’t be stupid enough not to call for help if he needed it, would he?”

  “I doubt the word help is in his vocabulary, but he’d give a shout.”

  “If he caught someone, he’d be talking to him, though, wouldn’t he? The computer would hear him.”

  “Probably wouldn’t hurt to run a diagnostic, although even Dalt’s obsession wouldn’t make him crazy enough to disable his lifeline.” Fozzie reached for the laptop.

  Jinx relinquished it, feeling as useless as slippers on a snake.

  Chapter 31

  Elle pointed the Glock at one of her captives, the one who seemed to understand the most English. “You have seen her? Trish. My sister. She looks like me—” Elle pointed to her face.

  The man stared at her. Frowned. Nodded. “I see someone like you. Ramon take her for himself—many days.”

  “When? How many days? Was she in these cars?” She gestured to the stalled convoy.

  He gave her a defiant stare. “I say too much.”

  She stepped into his face and stuck her Glock to his temple. “You say too little.”

  “No, no. I would tell. I know only she was brought to the house maybe—” he paused, as if calculating. “Maybe ten days ago. I do not see all that happens in the house. I remember this because it is another woman, not a man. Women in the house—the fancy ones, not the...” another pause, as if searching for the right word... “the workers, you know—not often do we see them. Maybe two, three times in all my days there.”

  Elle wondered if Trish had made her preferences known, or if Ramon merely assigned the women based on specifications given by the men—or women, apparently—who were being rewarded.

  It didn’t matter. If Trish had been shipped out, Elle had to find her. “If she is not in the house, where did Ramon send her?”

  “I cannot tell you.”

  She pressed the barrel of the gun more firmly against his head. “I have no use for you if you can’t tell me. And if I tell your boss you talked to me, he will have no use for you. As I see it, you’ll be dead either way.” She pulled the KA-BAR from its sheath on her calf and waggled it in the man’s face. His eyes went wide, and color fled from his face.

  “You would not—”

  “Oh, yes I would. Talk to me. Tell me what I need to know—the truth—and I might save your life.” She shifted the knife to the plastic flex cuffs she’d bound his feet with. “What do you say? You talk, and I let you go.”

  He looked toward the other captives. “And them? If they tell Ramon I have talked, he will not stop until he finds me.”

  “What if I let them all go?” She faced them. “What do you say? Any of you know where my sister is? You want to take your chances in the jungle? Or maybe I can tell the police you cooperated.”

  They stared at her warily, eyes on her weapons.

  “They do not have so much of the English,” the first man said.

  “Then translate what I said. The deal. I find my sister, I tell the police you’ll help them shut down Ramon’s operation.”

  He seemed to take a while processing what she’d said—either because he didn’t have a good enough grasp of English, or because he was weighing the options. After a few long, heart-pounding moments, he rattled something off in Spanish. Two of the men shrugged. The third shook his head. More Spanish, and then the third nodded. Then all four were speaking at once. Elle gave up trying to follow, merely concentrated on making sure no one was trying to loosen his bonds. In a demonstration of good faith, she removed the Glock from her captive’s head.

  The man spoke. “You take us to Puerto de Manzanillo. To the ships. We will find work. Go far away.”

  “You know where my sister is? I find her, I will try to help you.”

  The leader said something. All four men glared at her, lips tightly shut.

  Great. What you have here is a genuine Mexican standoff.

  She keyed the radio. “Jinx? Fozzie? I’ve got a lead on Trish. But there’s a catch.”

  “Isn’t there always?” Jinx’s voice was muffled, as if he’d half covered the mic and didn’t want to be heard.

  “I heard that,” she said.

  “What is it?” Fozzie’s voice this time, impatient.

  “The four men I have said they’d tell me where Trish is, but only if we take them to the docks where they can find work and get away from the cartel.” There had to be a way to fix this. She couldn’t abandon Trish. Not now. But they couldn’t abandon Dalton.

  “Bugger,” Fozzie said.

  “My sentiments exactly,” she said. “What can I tell them?”

  “Can you trade some info for a ‘Yes, but it’ll take a while?’ Make them show good faith?” Fozzie said. “They’ve got a lot more to gain by cooperating.”

  “I’ll try.” Elle turned to the men. “My people said yes, but you have to give us something to show we can trust your information.”

  Jinx came back over the radio. “Do these guys have any attachments to each other? Family?”

  “Hold on.” Elle turned to the leader. “Tell me your names.”

  He pointed to himself. “Juan.”

  “Your family name, too,” she said.

  After he’d introduced everyone, she went to the radio. “Two are brothers.”

  “Okay. Hang tight,” Jinx said.

  As if she had anywhere she could go. “Roger that.”

  A short time later, the helo sounded closer. She spotted it hovering above a small opening in the canopy.

  “I’m on my way down,” Jinx said, not sounding very excited about it. “Get one of the brothers and one of the other guys ready. We’re switching positions.”

  Elle prodded the leader and the man who’d first objected to cooperating. “You’re going up.”

  They watched, open-mouthed, as Jinx appeared through the trees. Elle hurried over to help him out of the harness.

  “More fun with you,” he muttered. “Let’s get your guys upstairs. Fozzie will deal with them.”

  “You think the others will cooperate as long as we have their buddies?” Elle asked. She thought abo
ut it. “Could work.” She turned to the men. “Tell me where my sister is, and two of you get out of here. When we find her, we’ll come for the other two. And it better be fast, before Ramon or Aguilar find you.”

  She and Jinx unbound the two lucky winners and helped them into the harness. “Where is my sister?” she asked again. “Otherwise, you might have a big fall.”

  “They go one day a month,” her leader said. “Not always the same day. But between ten and fifteen.”

  “Tenth and fifteenth of every month?” she asked. “Or ten and fifteen women?”

  “Day,” he confirmed.

  Was she too late? With everything hitting the fan, wouldn’t the cartel be rushing to get them out? Or would they wait until things died down? Damn, she couldn’t think straight.

  “Where do they stay?” Jinx asked. “While they wait? And where do they leave from?”

  By now, the leader seemed to be eager to give them information. The sound of the helo above probably meant the sound of freedom to him. He nodded. “I tell you.” But then he smirked and pointed upward. “When I am up there.”

  Elle refused to let him have the upper hand. “No. You tell me now, or you do not go up there.”

  Jinx started unbuckling the harness.

  “Okay, I tell you,” the man said. “Twenty kilometers from here. In Santo Felipe. There is a private... hotel. Ramon owns. The women, they are made pretty before they go. Happy.”

  Elle doubted any of them were particularly happy—but then again, the women at Ramon’s house looked forward to being “chosen” for the small niceties it allowed them.

  “Give me the name of the hotel,” Jinx said.

  “It has no name,” the man said. “Only on the outside, the sign it says hotel. In red letters.”

  “That’s not enough,” Elle said. “What’s the address?”

  “I do not know. It is on Calle Septembre, and there is the cinema nearby, and the restaurant with food from India.”

  “Fozzie, did you copy that?” Jinx asked. “Relay it to Zeke. He should be able to pinpoint it.”