Nike's Wings

by Valerie Douglas

Graham eyed them both.

  Ty couldn’t blame Graham for looking at Nike. It was difficult not to look at her. She tended to draw the eye. She was wearing a dress instead of her working leathers, this one in a decidedly military cut except that it came to just above the knee, showing off her shapely legs and was belted around her slender waist. With her red-tinted dark brown hair tumbling across her shoulders and the yellow shooter’s glasses, she looked vaguely like a pin-up for a military magazine.

  The mental image would have been amusing at any other time. Not for the first time he wished he could see what color her eyes were behind the yellow lenses, but she never took the glasses off.

  Graham gestured. “Tom Blanchard, Director of Public Safety, and Tony Alvarez, of the Border Patrol.”

  Blanchard was clearly a career cop, his hair steel gray, a barrel-chested man with sharp brown eyes and a handshake that could crush walnuts. As Nike discovered when he shook her hand.

  She looked at him, lifted an eyebrow and tightened her own hand fractionally despite the discomfort.

  He grinned and nodded appreciatively. “I like a woman with a strong handshake.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing I have one, then,” she answered.

  Alvarez was tall with tousled brownish and hazel eyes. He had a surprisingly easy grin for a man in his job. Still, there was no mistaking that he was law enforcement, even without the uniform.

  “Pleasure,” was all he said, shaking Nike’s hand, then Ty’s and Buck’s.

  “So,” Bill Graham said, “You think the cartels are going to try to make a move into Texas.”

  Blanchard said, emphatically, “It can’t happen here. You’re making a mountain out of molehills, but you’re free to do as you please.”

  “It happened in Mexico, it can happen here the same way,” Ty said, just as firmly. “In fact, I predicted it, warned about it, nearly ten years ago. The signs were already there. We’d shut the Colombians down. There was a vacuum. Someone was going to step into it. It was inevitable. The Colombians had already been using the Mexicans so the cartels had the advantage of learning from their experience. And their mistakes. They also had one other advantage. No one cared. Mexico had nothing to offer the US. Some oil. No coffee, no minerals, no strategic value, an uneducated poverty-stricken population. And land. Lots of land. The cartels didn’t pop up overnight. After 9/11 they also had an open playing field, right on our southern border.”

  “They’ll do here what they did there,” Buck added. “Bribe and otherwise persuade the local authorities to turn a blind eye to their activities. Look at the TSA. It’s simple. Pay a midnight visit to the local sheriff or chief of police. Tell him, ‘We’ll pay you 100 grand to turn a blind eye. In exchange, we won’t turn your life into a living hell. We won’t rape your wife, murder your daughter, and turn your son into an addict. If you don’t cooperate, we’ll kill you, but we’ll kill them first. The bribe is pocket change to the cartel, but it’s the chance for an underpaid cop to buy a decent house for his kids. One of leaders of the cartels is on the Forbes list of multi-millionaires.”

  Nike said, quietly, “It’s a pretty good chance it’s already happened. They’ve already killed a few here. Two sheriffs and a deputy. Clearing their way.”

  There was a sudden silence as Graham and the other two men stared at her.

  Buck said, “Phil Dolan and John Patterson. Both were ruled accidents. Run off some back country roads in their own counties. Niki caught it. We did a little checking. Both vehicles bore traces of black paint from a Dodge Ram. There was a deputy killed in a robbery. A Dodge Ram was seen leaving the scene. I asked them to check to see if the paint is a match. It’ll take a little while for forensics to do the comparisons, but I’m betting they’re the same.”

  “And you think this man Garcia is going to try to assassinate one of us?” Graham asked.

  “That’s what our intel indicates,” Ty said. “We’re been going on the theory there’s more than one purpose to the threat. One, of course, is to eliminate the leader of the opposition. Each of you is a major obstacle to the ability of the cartels to operate successfully in this part of the U.S. You’re the first line of defense in the war on drugs.”

  “And the second reason?” Alvarez asked.

  “Misdirection,” Ty said bluntly. “Have every cop in the state looking for the assassin. Not at the cartels or what they’re doing. We think they’re going to move on local cops, those they haven’t already bought, take them down and clear the way with the intention of setting up their own distribution centers here as they have in Mexico. As it stands right now, the cartels have a significant presence in most major cities already.”

  “What about the Wall?” Alvarez asked.

  Lifting an eyebrow, Ty looked at him. “How’s that working for you so far? Apparently no one ever checked history before they built that thing. No wall in history’s ever been successful. Just ask the builders of the Berlin Wall, or the Israelis, or even the Chinese who built the Great Wall of China.”

  Buck said, “They’ve got money up the wazoo. C’mon, we’ve all heard the stories. They’re digging tunnels under the wall, flying over it with ultra-lights, going over it with ramps. Hell, someone even stole parts of the fucking thing.”

  “With the pressure on the cartels in Mexico and Arizona and efforts being made to shut down their Atlanta operations, they’re looking for another outlet, another channel, they need to set up new distribution centers, new routes,” Buck added, his Texas drawl thickening, the cadences and rhythms of his home state in his voice.

  “Not to mention the disruption and confusion the assassination of one of you would cause. The outrage…and the fear. It would send a powerful message to every cop in the country. It’s bad enough most cops already feel as if they have a target painted on their backs half the time. It would be like declaring war. Most of the time the bad guys have held back at least partly because they know that to kill a cop in this country was to have every other cop breathing down their necks with nowhere safe to go. The cartels are using that. These guys live in Mexico, surrounded by their own private armies. They don’t give a shit. If it goes wrong, they head back across the border, let their soldiers take the fall. We can’t touch them there, despite their government. What do they care if they kill a cop or two here? It’s nothing to them. They’ve been killing them in Mexico for years.”

  “So,” Ty said, “we think they’ve got something else in mind besides just killing one of you. That’s useful, but the distraction is much more valuable. Every cop in the state will be calling for blood.”

  “Except that you’ve warned us,” Alvarez said.

  “They don’t know that,” Ty said. “And our best chance for shutting them down is for them to continue not knowing. If they find out it won’t stop them, it’ll just slow them down a little. They’ll cover their tracks, go underground for a while. In the meantime, they’ll set up their pipeline, find a way through or around the fence…something. There’s a plan, but we don’t know what it is. Yet. We’re still working on that, and for that we need your help. And we need to find and stop Garcia.”

  Bill Graham leaned over his keyboard, tapped a few keys. He studied the information displayed there.

  “Is this information on Garcia accurate?” he asked.

  An assassin. A professional. He’d been in the business a lot of years, considered a lot of things, but never considered someone sending a professional assassin after him.

  Ty said, “Confirmed by the CIA and the NSA. They believe he’s here.”

  “We’ve got some pretty good cops in this state,” Tom Blanchard said.

  “Your reputation precedes you,” Nike said, with a glance at Ty, “but with all due respect, you’re what people like Daniel Garcia and I made it our business to circumvent. He just took down a top cop in Colombia, one with a full contingent of heavily armed and armored personal guards and an armored car. Garcia might have taken the contract here just for the challeng
e alone.”

  “You?” Tom Blanchard said skeptically.

  “I worked for the CIA for more than seven years, Mr. Blanchard,” she said quietly. She hated adding the next, it revealed too much, but she had to convince these men of the danger they were in. She smiled, grimly. “I was a hunter, an assassin’s assassin. James Bond only needed a single kill to get 007 status. I have thirteen confirmed kills in six years. That’s sanctioned kills. Not collateral deaths.”

  Those other faces haunted her dreams.

  She looked at each Texas lawman in turn.

  “My job was to get inside places no one else could get into, to capture subjects no one else could reach, and to hunt down people like Daniel Garcia. I was very, very good at it. Daniel Garcia has only ever missed one target and that was because of me. Both he and I also share a crucial advantage…we don’t look like killers.”

  Graham looked at her skeptically. “You look like one of my daughter’s college friends.”

  He wasn’t alone. Nike saw the looks and sighed.

  “You haven’t seen her in action, what she’s capable of,” Ty interjected. “We have. You might have heard of that situation in New York a few months ago – with the Chechens?”

  Slowly, Graham and Blanchard nodded. “It was on the news.”

  “Nike got us in.”

  Buck couldn’t blame them. After all he’d been skeptical, too, at the time, but he couldn’t do what she had done that night or earlier, in Qatar, and so quietly. She’d sworn that Ty wouldn’t die in that place, that she’d get him out.

  And she had.

  He said quietly, “I watched her go, alone, into the middle of a city in the Mideast filled with militants and Islamic terrorists and come out alive.”

  With Ty. But he didn’t say that

  Qatar. It couldn’t be anything else. Remembering, inwardly Ty flinched at the reminder.

  Nike, though, showed nothing.

  All of them - tough Texans all - looked at her doubtfully, but with some degree of confidence that they could handle anything that came at them.

  Nike sighed.

  “Damn cowboys. You still don’t get it, do you?” she said, in frustration, shaking her head.

  Bill Graham looked at her. “We take threats against our lives very seriously.”

  It was in his eyes, though, that confidence, the sureness that he could handle anything, see and defeat any threat.

  “Right,” she said, sharply. “You do and you don’t.”

  She looked at them in disgust, in helpless frustration.

  “You don’t get it, do you? Garcia is a ghost. You won’t even see him coming. He’s a little over average height, a good-looking man, but unremarkable. Non-threatening. He doesn’t look ‘ethnic’. He looks like the dad to the soccer mom you’re talking to at a DARE meeting. He may even have struck up her acquaintance just for access to you. Even with the description you won’t recognize him. You’re looking for a bad guy, someone with a hard face and hard eyes.”

  She looked at each of them.

  “He’s not that man. He’s the man the rep from the local Chamber of Commerce wants you to meet. A big supporter of law enforcement, the C of C man says. Looking at Garcia, you’ll think he’s hardly a threat, the same way you do me. He’ll shake your hand, firmly…” She gave a pointed look to Blanchard, “and ask to pose for a picture with you. Clap you on the back. He’s killed at least three of his victims that way and nearly killed another. For close work he prefers knives or hypodermic needles. He has special, spring-loaded ones that look like expensive fountain pens. You know how it is with paper cuts…you only know you’ve been cut when the pain hits… By the time it does, he’s already gone. It’s too late. You’re dying.”

  She stopped, looked at each of them.

  “Unlike many assassins, his methods change, that’s why it was hard to peg him.”

  Now she had their attention.

  All of them could see it. How many events did they attend where something like that happened at least once or twice an hour?

  “I knew what he looked like. I knew what he was capable of, and I was careful. I’d been very well trained.”

  There was a pause.

  “He still got me.”

  She could see it again, as real as if it were happening in front of her. Her eyes went to each of them, but all she saw was sunshine…and Daniel Garcia.

  “I was standing in the middle of a plaza in Prague, out in the open. Safe. Suddenly he was there. Right there. I looked right at him. He’d been walking with a woman as if they were a couple. He called to me as if I were a long lost friend.”

  Except she’d had no friends, long lost or otherwise. She remembered the pain, the fear, but she didn’t let it show.

  “Standing there in the middle of the square with people all around, he stuck a knife in me so quickly, so smoothly I didn’t realize it until the pain hit. No one around even noticed something was wrong. Then he disappeared into the crowd like the invisible man.”

  It was the starkness of her words – the bluntness of them – that made them hard to deny. Her voice was flat, even. Unemotional. And utterly convincing.

  Ty felt the punch of her words, too. It was too easy for him to picture her standing alone in the square, her hair blowing in the light breeze, the sun sparking flame from it. He was too familiar with that particularly piercing and exquisite agony, the feel of a knife slicing through your skin.

  She looked at them all steadily. “I can show you the scars.”

  He had the sudden strong urge to take her in his arms and hold her. It was heartbreaking to consider it, to listen to her. The flatness of her voice concealed everything from those who didn’t know her, and nothing from those who did. Now he understood Mitch’s protectiveness. Outwardly she was as tough as nails. Inside…inside something had been broken, badly.

  That, too, he understood.

  It was, however, completely and utterly convincing.

  He could see all three men take a mental step backward, reevaluating their vulnerability.

  “Can you find him again?” Tony Alvarez asked.

  Nike looked at him, shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know, but I’ll try. We’ll try. It was easier in Prague, when he was a foreigner. Here? With a last name like Garcia?”

  “A needle in a haystack,” Alvarez said.

  She nodded.

  Taking a breath, Bill Graham asked, “So, what next?”

  Bill had been willing to let the others take point on this, but that flat look in Nike Tallent’s eyes, after the information he’d read, the dossier on Garcia…

  “Next,” Ty said. “It goes without saying that all of you should beef up your guard details. We need copies of your next few months’ schedules so Nike can go over them for the most likely events where Garcia might choose to strike. We need to find out what the cartels are up to, what they’re trying to hide. So we need a contact who knows the ground. We need access to public records. There’s a chance they’ve purchased property, that they’re already building their distribution centers. We know you gentlemen are busy, but we don’t know how much time we have. Or how much time we’ve lost. If you could arrange for some assistance, we’ll appreciate it.”

  Grimly, Blanchard said, “I’ll take care of it. Jake Aragon is one of my best people. He’s a good man, you’ll like him. He’ll be your liaison to this office and through him to Tony and Tom. I’ll have my secretary get my schedule to you. Whatever you need, talk to Jake, he’ll get it for you.”

  “Thanks,” Ty said, offering his hand again. “We appreciate it.”

  “Is there anything else?” Bill asked.

  Ty though about it, shook his head. “No, I think that covers it.”

  “I’ll have Jake meet you in the morning, give you a little time to settle in,” Bill said. “We’ve set up quarters for you. Your team should already be there. A car is waiting for you downstairs.”

  Chapter Twenty One

  Walking
into Byron’s office Anita said, “Here’s the information you requested, Byron. Nike might be right, there certainly seems to be an indication the cartels might be making more of a move into Texas.”

  Byron didn’t know how much it grated on her to say that and Anita was careful not to let any of it show on her face or in her voice. Beneath her resentment though, was triumph and a certain bitter pleasure.

  “I’ll pass the information on to Ty,” Byron said. “Don’t feel bad, Anita. This is why we have field agents reading the same information. They have a different perspective. Only someone like Nike would have known about Daniel Garcia.”

  Very carefully, Anita hesitated, as if torn. It was all for show.

  Unlike Ty, who seemed warily skeptical of her, or some of the others, Byron hadn’t noticed how much she hated Nike Tallent. Purely and simply hated her for the way the men hung around her, talked to her, laughed and joked with her as if she were one of them. And she with them.

  Suddenly some of those guys wouldn’t give Anita the time of day anymore. They didn’t even look at her. She was relegated to her job, to information gathering. Even that long tall drink of water Jerry danced attendance on Nike and his eyes laughed at Anita’s frustration. He’d never liked her, never trusted her. She hated that, hated that he laughed at her.

  This was her place, Anita’s. Her turf.

  If Byron had spent more time with women instead of men, if he’d had sisters and daughters he might have recognized the glitter in Anita’s eyes, but he didn’t.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “About Nike,” she said, feigning discomfort.

  Byron looked at her. His tone was chiding. “Anita.”

  So he had heard something.

  She sighed, playing the misunderstood martyr. “You asked me to look at her…”

  Byron frowned a little. He had. There was also that file, that too-thin personnel file. The hints Nike had given at that last meeting…

  “And…” he prompted, a little impatiently, giving her a look.

  “Based on the information the C.I.A. gave us, she never attended the grade school in the town she claims to have lived in,” Anita said, her eyes averted. “Most people trying to hide their identities don’t go back that far thinking no one will check.”