From the second floor landing, he could see the sedan on the corner. The pair of hard cases in the front seat were watching passing cars. Hugging the wall, Noble crept to the door. The paperclip was on the ground. He heard the sound of a scuffle inside.
Chapter Thirty-Three
NOBLE YANKED THE GUN from his waistband and kicked the door. A pair of thugs had Alejandra pinned to the mattress. One was holding her down while the other tried to inject a syringe full of clear liquid. She was awake and fighting with all the strength she had, flailing her arms and legs, but it was a losing battle.
Noble drilled a pair of rounds through the guy holding the syringe. The bullets slammed him into the wall. The needle hit the carpet. He slid down to a sitting position, leaving a bright red smear on white paint.
The second man pulled a handgun. Alejandra rolled off the bed onto the floor with a thud. Noble sidestepped into the room, swung his sights onto the second killer and they both fired at the same time. A deafening drumroll filled the room. Bullets sizzled past Noble’s ear, ripping chunks from the plaster wall. The side of the thug’s head disappeared in a red mist. He toppled over onto the bed. Brain matter spilled across the mattress.
The whole thing was over in less than five seconds. A cloud of blue smoke hung in the air, filling the room with the cloying stench of cordite. The first man was still alive, sitting with his back to the wall. His eyes were open and fear was written across his face in capital letters. He knew he was dying. One of Noble’s bullets had ripped through his lung. Pink bubbles formed around the wound.
Noble kicked him over onto his side and used his toe to lift the man’s shirt. He found a Glock 19—the weapon of choice for law enforcement agencies the world over—and a shield clipped to the man’s belt. Noble bared his teeth. Killing cops, even dirty cops, is bad business.
Alejandra lay on the floor. Her mouth worked but no words came out. She made sounds like a baby first learning to talk. Noble hauled her up.
“We have to go,” he told her.
Her knees buckled. He looped an arm around her waist to keep her from falling. He had to carry her down the stairs. The sedan with the tinted windows roared into the parking lot as they reached the bottom step. Noble changed directions and ran for an opening in the cinderblock wall surrounding the property.
The driver braked hard. The wheels locked. The passenger’s side door flew open before the car finished its slide. A man leapt out with a pistol in his hand. “Police! Don’t move!”
Noble hustled Alejandra to the gap in the wall. The plain clothes officer snapped off a pair of shots. Bullets impacted the cinderblock with hard thwaks. Noble hunched his shoulders and ducked his head, like a turtle trying to crawl inside his shell.
The opening let onto a weed-choked alley that ran between industrial lots. Chain link fences topped with barbed wire hemmed them in. A pit bull strained at his leash, barking madly. One of the warehouses was still open. The bay door was rolled up. Workers in blue coveralls stood in the delivery bay, smoking cigarettes. Noble couldn’t go over the fence without doing Alejandra serious injury, but he could make it harder for the cops to murder them in cold blood. He tossed his weapon over a fence into the back of a dump truck.
Alejandra’s strength gave out. Her knees buckled. Noble tightened his grip around her narrow waist and stumbled along the alley. They didn’t get far. The unmarked sedan cut off their escape and the plain clothes officer entered the alley behind them with his weapon drawn.
Noble threw one hand up in the air, struggling to hold Alejandra with the other. He yelled loud enough for the factory workers to hear. “Hold your fire. I’m unarmed. We surrender.”
The officers closed in on them, shouting directions. Noble went down to his knees. Alejandra sagged against him. He had to let her go when they ordered his hands behind his head. She fell in the weeds. Noble laced his fingers together behind his head. A weight crashed into him from behind. He let out a breath and went face down in the dirt. A knee pinned Noble’s head to the ground while his hands were wrenched behind his back. Steel cuffs bit into his wrist.
The warehouse workers ventured out to the fence for a better look. One of the cops ordered them back. Noble was hauled to his feet and herded to the waiting car. He allowed himself to be wrestled into the backseat. Alejandra was tossed in beside him. The officers climbed in front and the doors locked with a thump.
The passenger took out a phone and dialed. “We have them in custody.”
They either didn’t know or didn’t care that Noble spoke Spanish. He could hear someone on the other end, yelling into the phone.
“There were witnesses,” the officer said. He listened in silence, then he said, “Understood.”
He put the cell away and gave his partner a significant look. The driver put the car in gear. They drove through the heart of the city, past ramshackle neighborhoods. Fifteen minutes later, they were rumbling over an unpaved road through barren desert, a plume of dust trailing the car.
Chapter Thirty-Four
NOBLE SAT IN THE BACKSEAT of the squad car, his hands cuffed behind him, listening to the tires on hard-packed earth. Mexico City was a pale glow in the rear view. The headlights picked out a rutted dirt lane cutting through scrub brush. A few stars struggled to shine through layers of smog. The rest was darkness.
The cop riding shotgun kept turning to leer at Alejandra.
Noble said, “Don’t even think about it.”
He thrust his service pistol over the back of the seat. “Worry about your own skin, gringo.”
They rode another ten minutes in silence.
The driver pulled off the dirt road and shifted into park. The headlights blazed across a barren patch of sand and thorny bushes. Both officers got out, left the engine running, and opened the back doors. The driver put his gun under Noble’s chin. “Slowly.”
Noble obeyed. The driver gripped his elbow and marched him to the back bumper. “On your knees.”
Dying on his knees was out of the question. Noble turned his head and spat. The cop hammered a blow to Noble’s solar plexus. Pain lit up his brain like a Christmas tree. All the air went out of his lungs. His legs folded. Gravel bit into his knees. He gasped for breath.
While Noble tried to get his lungs working again, the lead officer pulled out his cell and dialed. The cops spent the next several minutes trying to figure out how to initiate video chat. Noble, still on his knees with his back against the bumper, rolled his eyes. “Hey, you guys need help with that?”
They finally figured out Skype and then Noble was looking at a roided-up Mexican. It didn’t take a genius to put a name to the face. “Hello, Mr. Noble,” Machado said. “You have something of mine. I would like it back.”
“Are you with the library?” Noble said. “Is this about my overdue books—”
The partner cracked Noble across the face. Knuckles connected with the side of his head. His vision scrambled. He pitched over into the dirt. The officer took a fistful of hair and hauled him back to his knees. Noble’s temple throbbed from the impact. He forced his eyelids open. For a second, he was looking at three Machados. He blinked and the images merged into one.
“I am not a man for games, Mr. Noble. Your friend Diaz took something from me. Either you have it, in which case we can come to some arrangement for its safe return, or you do not. In which case these men will kill you.”
Noble clamped his teeth together. The muscle at the corner of his jaw bunched. His silence earned him another punch to the side of his head. A buzzer went off inside his skull.
“Nothing to say?” Machado asked. “Why are you in Mexico, Mr. Noble? The CIA did not send you. Did come to avenge the death of your friend?”
Machado’s words hit him like another sucker punch. Any hope that Torres was still alive winked out. A loss so deep it was a physical pain assailed him. His throat clamped shut.
“He died like a coward,” Machado said, “begging for mercy.”
One of t
he cops snorted.
Noble’s voice came out raw. “I’m going to kill you.”
Machado laughed. “A threat I have heard hundreds of times before, Mr. Noble. Yet here I am. I will ask you one more time. Do you have what I want?”
“That depends.”
“On?” Machado asked.
“Whether you want an ass whooping.”
Machado took a breath, closed his eyes and held it. He let it out slowly. “Show me the girl.”
The officer holding the phone said, “She’s half dead, el Jefe.”
“Do as you are told!”
The cop turned the phone on Alejandra, who was still sprawled naked in the dirt.
“Anna, my dear, can you hear me?” Machado said. “Or should I call you Alejandra. That is your real name. Alejandra Domingo. I had a very interesting discussion with your boss, Señor Esparza.”
Her face pinched in pain. She let out a low moan.
“I would kill your family for this betrayal,” Machado said, “but I already did that.”
Her lips moved. No sound came out. She swallowed and tried again. “Go to hell.”
His lips peeled back in a humorless grin. “I’m going to show you hell, Alejandra.”
She whimpered in fear.
Machado said, “Kill the Americano. Bring the girl to me.”
“Sí, el Jefe.” The officer pocketed his phone. “Time to die, American.”
Noble was hauled to his feet and herded deeper into the desert, high-stepping over thorny underbrush. He said, “You know who I am? I’m CIA. Think you can kill a CIA officer and they aren’t going to notice? There won’t be anywhere for you to run. Nowhere to hide. They’ll kill you.”
The cop gave him a shove. “Shut up.”
Noble stumbled but managed to keep his feet. “Listen, we can make a deal. Let me go and I’ll disappear. No one has to know.”
He wanted to sound like a man begging for his life. It didn’t take much acting.
“Too late for that, gringo.”
The cop grabbed his shirt collar, like a man yanking a dog’s leash.
Noble stopped. He felt the muzzle against the back of his head. “Wait a minute,” he said. It was an effort to keep his voice steady. “Don’t shoot me in the back. I want to die like a man. At least give me that dignity.”
The cop snorted. “Have it your way, Americano.”
He grabbed Noble’s arm and turned him around. Noble used the momentum to drive his shoulder into the cop’s abdomen. The attack knocked the air from the officer’s lungs. The pistol slipped from his fingers. Noble followed up with a kick to his kneecap. The cop’s leg bent the wrong way with a snap. He opened his mouth to scream.
With his hands cuffed behind his back, Noble looped an arm over the officer’s head, putting him in a choke hold, and they both went to the ground. The officer struggled to pry himself loose. When that didn’t work, he groped around for his fallen pistol. Noble increased the pressure. The cop’s face turned purple. His fingers clawed the sand. One finger touched the pistol grip and slipped off. Noble rolled over, pulling the cop away from the Glock and wrenching his head to one side. His eyes bulged. His heels beat out a tattoo on the desert sand. Noble rolled again and heard vertebrae pop. The cop went limp. His eyes rolled up. Noble held him another sixty seconds to be sure he was dead, then sat up and looped his wrists down under his shoes.
With his hands now in front of him, Noble crawled through the sand to the Glock and did a press check to be sure it had a round in the chamber. In the light from the car’s headlamps, he saw the copper gleam of a hollow-point bullet.
The second officer had Alejandra pinned to the trunk of the idling police cruiser. He held her wrists together over her head with one hand and worked his zipper with the other. She kicked and shrieked, but she didn’t have the strength to throw him off. Noble walked up behind him, leveled the pistol at the back of his head and pulled the trigger. Thunder rolled across the barren landscape and echoed off distant mountains. The officer pitched over into the dirt with his eyes open and half of his face missing.
Alejandra tried to push herself up but slithered down off the car. Silent sobs shook her naked shoulders.
Noble asked, “You okay?”
She spat in the dead cop’s face and cursed.
He knelt and relieved the dead man of his service pistol and spare magazines. “Every cop and criminal in Mexico is looking for us,” Noble said more to himself than Alejandra. “We need a place to lay low. Some place no one would think to look.”
She pushed hair out of her face with one trembling hand. “I know a place.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
BURKE SWITCHED OFF the headlamps before pulling into the driveway. All the windows in his two-story brownstone were dark. Stars winked overhead. He parked, got out and closed the driver’s side door gently, before climbing the steps. He fumbled his house keys. They hit the step. Burke winced at the sound. He scooped them up with a muttered curse and fitted the door key silently into the lock.
His eyes were still adjusting to the dark when a lamp clicked on in the living room. Burke’s right hand moved to the small of his back. The reaction was hardwired from thirty years in Special Forces and counterespionage. He managed to check the motion halfway. He hadn’t worn a gun in over fifteen years.
Madeline was sitting on the sofa, wrapped in a cornflower blue dressing gown. Her legs were folded beneath her. Her eyes were flat, emotionless orbs, masking the hurt below the surface. “Where you been, Matt?”
“Work.” The excuse sounded hollow even to him.
A tear welled up in the corner of one eye. Madeline dashed it away. “Don’t lie to me, Matt. I want the truth. You owe me that much.”
He hitched up his shoulders. “What do you want me to say, Maddie?”
“What’s her name?”
“Dana.”
Madeline nodded slowly. “How long?”
“This was the first time,” Burke told her. “I swear.”
Her face pinched. She covered her mouth with one hand.
“Maddie, I’m sorry—”
“Don’t.” She shook her head.
Burke inspected the floor. The silence stretched out and Burke didn’t know what the hell to do with himself.
“We used to be happy once,” Madeline said. “What happened? When did it all go bad?”
“Thing haven’t been good for a while,” Burke said.
“No,” she agreed. She stared at the lamp so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “So it’s come to this?”
He stood there, not sure what to say. His legs felt disconnected from his body. His brain was stuck. In the end, Madeline decided for him.
She said, “Find someplace else tonight.”
“Maddie—”
She held up a hand. “Just go.”
Burke’s feet finally reconnected with the rest of his body. He turned, took his keys and walked out of the house. He wasn’t sure where he was going and he suddenly wasn’t sure he wanted his marriage to be over. For months he had been looking for a solution, praying for something to put an end to the charade. Now it had finally happened and Burke couldn’t shake the feeling that something precious had been destroyed forever.
Chapter Thirty-Six
THE CRUMBLING VILLA hunkered in the shadow of the Sierra Madre Oriental range. A crumbling stone wall overgrown with ivy surrounded the property. There was a dry fountain full of dead leaves in the courtyard. Weeds grew up between the paving stones. The house was two floors with arched windows and a red-shingled roof that had been bleached by the sun.
Fire had gutted one entire wing of the villa. The walls were blackened timbers. The roof had collapsed. The rest of the place was untouched. Clothes still hung in closets and the furniture was collecting dust. Cobwebs hung in the doorframes.
Noble spent the first few days on high alert, only allowing himself a few hours of sleep each night. If Alejandra knew about this place, there was a good chance
someone else did too. But three days had passed without incident and Noble told himself to relax. The nearest town was seven miles away. It was a one-stoplight village called Tolantongo where he went for food and supplies.
Alejandra was recovering with the help of the antibiotics. Yesterday she had managed to sit up and eat solid food.
Now, four days after their escape from the mission, Noble climbed the stairs to the master bedroom with a tray of food, bottled water, and pills. Alejandra stood on the balcony, wrapped in a sheet, staring across the neglected garden to the tropical forest looming beyond a crumbling stone wall.
He put the tray of food on a dresser furred with dust, took the antibiotic and a bottle of water and joined her on the balcony. The air was still and oppressively hot. Mosquitoes buzzed around their ears.
Noble handed her the pill and the bottle.
She chased the antibiotic with a long swallow and handed the bottle back.
He took a swig. “What is this place?”
“Home.” She pulled the sheet tight around her shoulders.
“Machado killed your parents?”
“My father was a judge. Machado tried to buy him off. When he would not be bribed, Machado sent his butchers. They killed my father and my mother and set fire to the house. I was fourteen.”
A pack of bloodthirsty killers and a fourteen-year-old girl. Noble didn’t need details. It was bad. He leaned on the stone balustrade. “How did you link up with Torres?”
“Who?”
“Diaz.”
A shadow of pain crossed her face. “I’m Policia Federal Ministerial. Diaz contacted me nine months ago. He already had an information pipeline in place. All he needed was someone willing to climb into Machado’s bed.”
“So you slept with the man who killed your parents.” It was more statement than question.
“You must think that’s strange.”
Noble shook his head. “You’ve got nerves of steel.”
“I had tried all the legal channels,” she said. “Machado is untouchable. He owns half the police force and kills anyone he can’t bribe.”
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