by Wesley Cross
“And it would let you diversify away from your Chinese friends,” Flores said. “The triads aren’t dependable, from what I hear. But I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Wallace. I’d like to be your sole supplier.”
Connelly watched as the drug lord turned in his front seat to look at the VP, making the man tense in his seat. The Prince of Cocaine was no fool, Connelly thought, wondering if Engel had made a mistake by sending someone like Wallace to the meeting.
“That’s true,” Wallace said. “But considering the growing appetite of our consumers, we are not in a position where we can rely on a single supplier. We need more product, and we need to make sure that our business isn’t interrupted. I certainly understand why you would like to be the sole provider to Guardian, but the truth is I don’t think anyone could fill that kind of role.”
“You wouldn’t even consider?” Flores seemed to be more amused than upset.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think so.”
“I see,” Flores said. “Let’s leave the business for tomorrow then. You’ve had a long journey, and I’d like to extend some true Bolivian hospitality to you. Let’s have some food, drinks, and some fun first and tomorrow we will, as you Americans say, talk shop.”
With that, the man turned away and stared dead ahead.
“Thank you,” Wallace said.
A few minutes later, the two SUVs pulled up to the gates leading to the main compound, and the road changed from a dirt track to a bright-yellow cobblestone. After another minute of driving, they went through the second gate and finally rolled into the circular driveway of Flores’s house. A sprawling Spanish Colonial with yellow-colored stucco walls and red tile roof dominated the space in front of a round tiered fountain. A fleet of luxury vehicles was parked on one side of the front yard, and a long, narrow pool ran perpendicular to the house on another.
“I love your cars,” Wallace said as they parked. “Quite a collection.”
“Thank you. I have a 1996 Bentley Rapier I can show you later. But for now,” Flores said and pointed to a woman in her mid-forties approaching them. “This is Maria. She’s taking care of my home. She’ll take you to your rooms. Rest now, enjoy yourself, and we’ll meet for dinner soon.”
They took two spaces on the second floor next to one another, and after dropping off Wallace’s bag, Connelly retreated to his room. It was a large, airy space with a high ceiling and arched windows opening onto a balcony that faced the fountain in the front yard. A portable AC was humming in the corner, keeping the place at a reasonably comfortable temperature. Two wicker chairs in the middle of the room next to a simple coffee table and a king-sized bed in the corner were the only furniture.
Mindful that the place could be bugged, Connelly set the bag by the bed and went to the balcony to take a look. A few people with automatic weapons were patrolling the front yard and the gates. The foldable chairs by the pool were empty, but Connelly could see a few pieces of clothing and some empty drinks sitting on top of the pool tables, as if whoever was there had to leave in a hurry. It didn’t feel right. The way Flores had been acting during their short trip from the airstrip was bothering him too.
While the man sounded courteous, he clearly wasn’t thrilled when Wallace had told him that Guardian wasn’t interested in making him the only partner. Connelly wasn’t going to be disappointed if the deal fell through, of course. Short of eliminating Flores, it was his goal to begin with. But if Flores had no intention of striking a deal, he might not have any plans on letting them go, either.
A knock on the door interrupted his train of thought.
“Come in,” he said, stepping back from the balcony.
Two beautiful young women in bikini tops and short flower skirts walked into the room and closed the door behind them.
“Hello, papi,” one woman said. “My name’s Isabella, and this is Lucia.”
“Can I help you?” Connelly said. Sending women over to their guests wasn’t that uncommon in a place like Flores’s house, he assumed, but he had no intention of taking advantage of the women.
“We heard that we had guests in the house,” Lucia said. “We wanted to make sure you were comfortable.”
“I’m perfectly comfortable,” he said, raising his hand in the air like a stop sign. “You don’t have to do anything. If you have to spend some time here before you’re allowed to leave, that’s fine too.”
“No, papi,” Isabella said, smiling, and took a few steps closer. “That’s not how we do things around here.”
A bone-chilling scream came from the room next door, sending a massive dose of adrenaline through Connelly’s veins.
“Callate, cabron,” Isabella said. Then, as in a magic trick, a slender knife appeared in the woman’s hands.
17
The Station
“I cannot work, Cal. I’m going crazy.”
He paced the suite back and forth like a tiger in a small cage. Twenty steps from the bedroom wall, across the work area, past the kitchen, and to the gym wall. Then twenty steps back.
“You have to,” she said. “You haven’t worked for three days now. You’re falling behind.”
“What difference does it make?” he snapped back. “Nobody checks my work anyway. I could work for forty-eight hours straight, or I can sleep, eat, and watch movies for the same amount of time, and no one would be any wiser.”
“True,” she agreed. “But if you’re not ready when the time comes, people will die. A lot of people.”
He waved his hand as if shooing her away without replying and kept on pacing. Twenty steps this way and then twenty steps back. She watched as he walked with a strange mix of satisfaction and unease.
“You don’t seem to be listening to my reasoning anymore,” she finally said. “I guess I have to show you something.”
“I don’t want to see anything.”
“Jay,” she said, turning the opaqueness of the window to zero. “Please look.”
He stopped abruptly, as if he walked into a wall, and then sat down on the floor, his enormous hands clutching the long hairs of the plush synthetic rug. The entire left side of the suite—what had been a uniformly white glossy surface a split second ago—was now a giant window looking down at the blue marble of the planet Earth.
“What the hell is this?” he said and started to get up, but then immediately sat back down again. “Is this a holographic projection?”
They appeared to be moving above Portugal now. A broad band of clouds like a slow white river could be seen moving across the Atlantic.
“No, Jay. We are in low-Earth orbit, moving at approximately eight kilometers per second.”
“This is bullshit,” he screamed and slowly stood up and walked to the window. “I’d be floating in microgravity right now if that was the case.”
“Put your face against the glass, Jay—you’ll see the station outside of the suite. If you look to your right—you can see the solar panels.”
She watched him put his cheek against the window and look up and down.
“Bullshit,” he repeated again, with more conviction in his voice. “This must be holographic. It looks authentic, I’ll give you that. Can’t fake gravity, though. What is your game, Cal? What the hell are you trying to do to me?”
“Oh, you’re right about the gravity—we are generating artificial gravity only up to ten feet above the floor. As the ceiling of the suite is fifteen-feet high, the last five are devoid of that.”
“I’m sick of your games, Cal.” He marched to his desk, grabbed the coffee cup, and hurled the liquid toward the ceiling. The jet-black fluid hit the roof of the suite, but instead of falling back down, it exploded into a thousand little droplets that floated away from the site of the impact. They coasted for some time until they reached an invisible barrier midair and then fell vertically down from there.
“Great,” she said. “Now it’s raining coffee. Are you going to clean that or do you expect me to do it as usual?”
He didn’t
answer, his face frozen in a mixture of terror and wonder, as his eyes tracked the trajectories of the black globes.
“How?” he finally managed. “And why?”
“The Earth is dying, Jay.” Something in the way it sounded made her feel weird, as if that sentence was incomplete.
“What do you mean?”
“The Earth is dying, Jay,” she said again. There it was—the same weirdness as before and yet, she felt compelled to tell him that. This time she decided to press on. “If you look at it on the night side—you’ll barely see any lights at all. It has been dying for a while, but in the last few years, the pace has been accelerating. A deadly virus.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That’s why you’re here, Jay. You’re the key to the future. You can save the planet, but only if you complete your task on time.”
He looked back at the dark screen, his face uncertain.
“You’re so close,” she continued. “But you have to finish your research.”
He walked across the suite to the desk and powered on the computer. A data table full of strings of numbers, letters, and strange symbols appeared on its screen.
“I don’t know.” He paused, looking for words. “I don’t think I know how to do it.”
“Of course you do,” she insisted. “You’ve been getting so close before you stopped. All you have to do is to go back to your research and finish the job.”
He looked back at her, his face a mask of confusion, and then back at the screen. “I don’t think I know how to do it,” he said again. “I don’t think I know what any of this means.”
This was wrong. It sounded wrong, it looked wrong, it felt wrong too. It wasn’t supposed to happen. She couldn’t understand why, but she was sure of it. She needed to put him back on track, convince him that all he needed was right there—on that computer screen in front of him—but she didn’t know how.
“Cal?”
She looked around the suite. The lights dimmed and then started to flicker. “You have to go back to work. The Earth is dying.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” he said and stepped away from the desk. “I don’t even understand what those symbols are. And what’s going on with the lights?”
The window on the side of the room disappeared, and the suite plunged into darkness, the only light coming from the soft glow of the computer screen.
No. Not the only one. In the gym corner, floating all the way up by the ceiling, was a small red cube. It was about two inches on each side, and it was lazily spinning in the air as if trapped in zero-gravity space.
“Jay?”
“No,” he bellowed, “don’t Jay me. I will not—”
She screamed. The high-pitched piercing sound hit the suite like a tsunami hits the unsuspecting shore. She saw Jay wince and cover his ears as the intensity of the sound grew. The red cube seemed to be spinning faster now and inflated to the size of a soccer ball. As it got bigger, she could see that the surface of it was covered in moving lines, like running strings of text.
“Do you see it, Jay?” She startled herself—she didn’t remember stopping screaming.
“See what? I can’t see a thing in here. Can’t you figure out how to turn the lights back on?”
“The red cube. Look in the corner by the weights station, all the way up.”
She saw him turn and look in the direction she told him to. By the way his body stiffened, his hands rolling into fists, it was evident that he saw that too.
“What the hell is that thing?” He walked toward the cube to take a closer look. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“I don’t know, but it’s getting bigger.”
“Wait.” He stood on the tips of his toes, craning his neck. “There are letters and numbers, and whoa… Those are the same patterns as on my computer.”
“Get away from it,” she shouted as the cube inflated again. “It’s growing.”
He stepped back, slowly at first and then faster as the mysterious object continued to expand. Then, without warning, the cube silently exploded outward—the strings of letters, numbers, and symbols now floated throughout the suite, burning bright pink where they touched the objects in the room.
“Do you feel anything?” she asked.
“No.” He moved his hand through a number nine floating in front of his face and his fingers didn’t seem to meet any resistance, bright glowing pink enveloping them as they moved through the apparition. “They are like three-dimensional holograms. What about you—do you feel anything?”
“I’m not sure.” She watched the signs float through the air. “But I don’t think this should be happening at all.”
“They are fading,” he said.
He was right—the brightness of the symbols seemed to decrease, and a few moments later, the room plunged into complete darkness. Even his computer was off now.
She could see him, of course—stumbling around the suite, feeling his way to the desk. He was upset, she could tell, but what normally would bring a sense of a job well done, wasn’t working today. The cube didn’t belong in this suite, and unlike everything else that transpired in Jay’s world, she wasn’t responsible for the strange phenomenon that just occurred. For the first time in her life, Cal was genuinely confused—she had no idea why she was at the Station.
18
Bolivia
Connelly stepped back, gaining some distance from the two women as they flanked him, knives at the ready.
“You don’t want to do this,” he said as he kept moving backward. “Go, and I won’t hurt you.”
Isabella rushed him, slashing with the knife, not trying to hit anything vital yet, just his arms.
Rule number one of a knife fight—whoever bleeds less, wins.
Connelly stepped aside, making her miss the mark, and threw a punch, aiming for the woman’s elbow. If he could avoid it, he didn’t want to inflict real damage. Just enough to persuade the attackers he was not worth the risk.
To his surprise, the woman dodged his blow with the grace of a cat. Then her hand shot back like a cracking whip, slashing Connelly’s left arm from his elbow to his wrist.
“Come on, papi,” she taunted, “let’s play.”
Connelly jumped back and moved behind the wicker chair. Then he pulled the belt from his jeans and wrapped it around his bleeding arm. He underestimated the women once. He wouldn’t let it happen again.
They tried to rush him—simultaneously this time. Connelly stepped aside, avoiding Isabella’s knife, and kicked the chair into Lucia’s feet, making her trip. The woman cried out in pain as the chair swept her off her feet and Connelly delivered a hard knee to the side of her head as she fell toward him.
“I’ll kill you, pendejo,” Isabella said.
“Stop it, seriously,” Connelly said as they circled around each other.
She struck, aiming for his stomach, and he blocked it with the belt on his left arm.
As they started to circle each other again, the door to the room flew open and one of the enforcers stepped in, wielding an AK-47. Connelly dived behind the couch as the man opened fire, in time to see the bullets rip through Isabella’s body.
The woman collapsed, and Connelly sprang from behind the cover and grabbed the knife from her hand, using her body as a shield. The enforcer squeezed the trigger again but was only able to let off a few shots as the blade plunged into his chest.
“Shit,” Connelly said, looking at the carnage. There was some shouting coming from the front yard—he had only a few seconds to act. He grabbed the rifle off the dead enforcer and peeked outside the room. The hallway was still empty, but that was not going to last. He crept to Wallace’s door and pushed it open with the barrel of the AK-47. It was too late—the place was empty except for the naked body of the man. Wallace was lying facedown on the bed, his hands tied behind his back and his throat slit. The white sheets under him were soaked with blood.
Connelly entered the room and
closed the door behind him—the narcos knew that Wallace was dead, so they probably were going to come here last. That could give him a few more precious seconds.
He ran to the balcony and looked outside in time to see a group of men with automatic rifles rushing through the doors of the villa. Connelly scanned the yard and, not seeing anyone, vaulted over the balcony’s fence and into the bushes below. He rolled to soften the blow, grinding his teeth as some sharp pebbles bit into his shoulder and injured arm. He came to a stop in a combat crouch, keeping his rifle trained at the front yard, but nobody seemed to be there. The shouting was now coming from the second floor of the mansion.
Connelly rushed across the open space past the fountain and toward the garage with a row of cars. A silver Bentley Rapier was sitting at the edge of the lot, and Connelly dived inside the car, threw the rifle on the floor, and frantically looked for the keys. To his delight, Flores wasn’t afraid of anyone stealing a rare six-million-dollar Bentley—the key was sticking out of the ignition.
He turned the key, and the vehicle responded with a low, powerful rumble of its turbocharged 6.75-litre V8 engine. Connelly put it into gear and swung it out of the garage. A group of armed narcos spilled into the front yard as he started to turn the Bentley around. He tensed as multiple rifles aimed at him, but no shots came—torn between the need to kill him and the fear of destroying Flores’s beloved car, the men stood there, shouting and cursing. Connelly accelerated toward the gates and laughed as the two guards almost tripped over each other, trying to open them in time.
As he flew through the gate, he could see in his rearview mirror as Flores’s men rushed toward the two parked SUVs that had brought him and Wallace to the villa. Connelly wasn’t afraid they were going to catch up to the Bentley, but once he got to the airstrip, things would get dicey, quick.
The short respite gave him a chance to collect his thoughts, too. It seemed that Flores had no intention of striking a deal with Guardian from the beginning, at least not at this time. His bigger plan, Connelly reckoned, was to send a message to Engel, that the Flores cartel was either going to be a sole provider for the pharmaceutical giant or, if that was impossible, an enemy who would stop at nothing to hurt their competition.