by Reece Hirsch
A needle.
The insectlike drone descended toward him. Sam backed up, then backed up some more, and then he tripped and staggered over a coffee table. The drone kept advancing.
In an instant Sam knew what was happening. The drone would stab him with its stingerlike needle, injecting him with some undetectable poison that would simulate a heart attack or a seizure. Then it would disappear through the open air-conditioning vent. Nickles would ask the hotel staff to open the room, and they would find him sprawled on the carpet, dead of seemingly natural causes, the flash drive gone.
From his seated position Sam grabbed a room service tray from the coffee table, sending its contents clattering to the floor. He swung the tray at the drone as it drew near. The tray made contact with a metallic smack, smashing the drone into the opposite wall in a jumble of mangled propellers and electronics.
But the buzzing continued.
Sam saw two more drones crawling through the air-conditioning vent, as if a nest of wasps had been disturbed. Sam had to get out of the room and away from that vent. He rose to his feet, and as he did so he picked up the white tablecloth that had been draped over the room service tray. The second drone went directly at Sam, giving him hardly any time to react.
Operating largely on instinct, Sam twirled the tablecloth like a matador and tossed it over the drone, tangling its rotors. It remained aloft under the tablecloth, bobbing briefly up and down like a Halloween ghost until Sam smashed the floating tablecloth with the platter.
The third and final drone remained perched on the wall beneath the vent, apparently watching the proceedings. It alighted from the wall and buzzed slowly toward Sam, seemingly angling for a line of attack.
Before the drone could make a run at him, Sam flung the platter like a Frisbee at the device. The platter clattered against the wall, and Sam thought that he had missed. But then he saw that it had nicked one of the drone’s props, sending it floating to the carpet in slow, fluttering circles. Sam crossed the room and ground the drone under the heel of his shoe. The buzzing stopped, and he heard only the sound of crunching glass.
He looked around every corner of the hotel room until he was sure that there wasn’t another drone. Sam listened for the ominous buzzing and heard nothing.
Sam went to the air-conditioning vent and shoved it shut before another drone could enter, then removed the flash drive from the laptop’s port and left the room.
He was glad that he didn’t encounter Nickles in the hallway, because getting near him would probably only get the journalist killed. Sam took the elevator to the lobby, trying to remain calm, moving quickly but trying not to run.
After exiting the hotel, Sam went directly to the nearby bank of the Vltava. He removed the flash drive from his pocket and hurled it into the green waters that sluiced around the Gothic buttresses of the Charles Bridge as the tourist boats scudded past.
Sam had also hidden copies of the Working Group documents on a secure cloud server. If he was about to be apprehended by the Working Group, he’d prefer that they remain in doubt about the extent of the data that he’d extracted. It was the only leverage Sam would have when he was in custody.
After watching the flash drive disappear into the Vltava, Sam half walked, half ran down the sidewalk, caroming off pedestrians and pushing through the crowds—until his path was blocked by two men who were braced to receive him. They were muscular and boxy in their cheap suits—not criminals but agents of some sort. Without saying a word, they advanced on him, each taking an arm and driving him backward into the open door of a large black sedan. Another man was standing by holding the door open, and he shoved Sam’s head down as he pushed him inside.
As the men climbed in after him and the door of the sedan slammed shut, Sam realized that spending a lifetime in prison for treason was no longer his worst-case scenario.
30
Chris and Ian sat in a small open-air cantina, drinking Tecates at four in the afternoon and watching the lukewarm waters lapping at the dun sands of Playa Zipolite. The beers were sweating only slightly more than they were.
After so much running and desperation, the stillness of sitting in the quiet cantina and watching the blazing sunset felt strange. The place was so still that every fly buzzing around their table sounded like a twin prop, and you could hear the bartender’s rag slosh as he wiped down the bar.
Zipolite was a beach town but not one frequented by tourists, other than a handful of surfers, hippies, New Agers, and nudists. It was too far south in Oaxaca and had no big resorts to draw the gringo hordes. When Chris and Ian emerged from the desert after crossing the border, they spent one night recuperating in a dive hotel in Santa Isabel and then caught a train as far south as they could manage, ending up in Zipolite.
Chris and Ian gazed at the fishing boats returning to the harbor. They’d been there most of the afternoon, and the heat, beer, and tequila had dulled them into silence. Their eyes focused on a lone man walking on the beach at sunset. A lone nude man.
The man turned in profile for a moment, and his great orb of a belly, as well as other features, were limned in sharp relief against the sunset.
“The UV rays are highest at this time of day,” Chris said, sipping his beer. “And that’s some sensitive skin down below.”
“I’ve never gotten a sunburn there. You ever—?”
“No.”
“Nah, me neither. I thought the nudist beach was west of here,” Ian said.
“Looks like we have a roamer.”
Ian placed the bottle to his forehead. He was using the beers to chase shots of tequila, and he’d had a few too many. He was still sunburned from their journey across the border, and his nose was peeling. Ian’s drinking had escalated since they’d gotten to Zipolite, and Chris was concerned that he would be in no shape to run if it came to that.
Chris knew better than to lecture Ian on his drinking. If he did, Ian would respond with some colorfully phrased retort to the effect that Chris was not his dad. And that was fair enough. But Chris had to admit—to himself anyway—that he sometimes looked at Ian and imagined that he could have been the son that he and Tana never had. He was about the right age, if Tana had gotten pregnant soon after they were married. And any son of Chris and Tana would have most likely grown up a first-class geek like Ian. But they’d never had kids, for a host of half reasons that eventually resolved into a choice of sorts. Chris had later decided that it was a good thing they’d never had a child, because he or she would have been far too young to watch Tana lose her battle with breast cancer. All of which left Chris with these vaguely paternal feelings for the neurotic, psychologically fragile, possibly alcoholic ex-hacker Ian.
Ian downed another shot of tequila. “We’re not going to get out of this alive, are we?”
“Of course we are,” Chris said. “We’ve beaten the odds so far, and we still have a few moves left. The key is not beating ourselves first. You with me on this, Ian?”
“I’m just imagining what it would be like to just sit here in this bar and drink until they came for me. By the time they finally got here, I wouldn’t care anymore.”
Chris could only stare at Ian. How was he supposed to give a pep talk to a person already so far gone down the road to despair? Especially when that person was well on his way to a nasty tequila drunk.
“Okay,” Ian said. “You talk about ‘moves.’ What are these moves? Do you have a plan?”
“I’m working on it,” Chris said, pulling out the new laptop that he had purchased soon after arriving in Zipolite.
“You trying to contact Zoey?”
“Yeah, I wanted to see if she’s checked our secure site.”
“You sure that won’t lead someone here?”
“We use strong encryption. It should be safe. Besides, I thought you were ready for them to take you away now.”
“Yeah, maybe, but not right now. Not while there’s still tequila, beer, and a Mexican sunset.”
“Live i
n the moment, huh?”
Eventually, Chris managed to find a Wi-Fi connection and logged on to the secure site. He saw no sign that Zoey had visited. No posting on their bulletin board.
He wondered if she was still alive but quickly banished the thought. He had no reason to think that Damian and his crew would turn on her. After all, Damian had invited her to join them. While that was logical enough, it didn’t assuage his fears.
When Chris looked up from the laptop, he saw Ian studying his face for a sign. “Anything?”
He shook his head.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Ian said. “If she’s with Hull’s crew, they’ll be watching her. She won’t have many opportunities to reach out.”
“You’re probably right.”
The sun dipped into the ocean to test the temperature and, seemingly satisfied, proceeded with a rapid descent until all that remained was a bloody fingernail clinging to the horizon.
“Well, there’s another day that we’ve survived,” Ian said, tipping his bottle to the horizon.
“I’ll drink to that,” Chris said.
“You ever wonder how things got so fucked up?”
“For about six years or so that was pretty much all I did,” Chris said. “Not so much anymore.”
Ian tipped his empty beer bottle over until it fell on the table. “I mean, look at me. I’m still young, just started a successful business, haven’t even met the right girl yet, and here I am with you.”
Chris shrugged and raised his hands in a gesture of What did I do?
“Nah, it’s not you,” Ian said. “You’re okay.”
“Thanks.”
“I just mean that I’m a fugitive from the most powerful, deadly, all-knowing government agency on the planet. They’re like the freakin’ Eye of Sauron. I mean, really—in what scenario does this end well?”
Chris glanced around the bar. “You should keep your voice down.”
By the time they’d finished another round of Tecates, the humid pitch-black night closed in and they could no longer see the harbor from their table. The nude man wandered off into the Mexican night. A few locals drifted in and began drinking without disturbing the quiet.
The laptop pinged.
Chris quickly grabbed it and saw that Zoey had posted on the secure site’s message board.
ZOEY: Anybody home?
Chris’s fingers fumbled over the keyboard as he rushed to respond.
CHRIS: I’m here.
ZOEY: You okay?
CHRIS: Yeah, how about you?
ZOEY: Sort of. I thought for sure you and Ian were dead.
CHRIS: Where are you? What’s wrong?
ZOEY: I’m with Damian’s crew and we’re in Ecuador.
CHRIS: Did they take you in?
ZOEY: Yes, and that’s part of the problem. I had to help them with a new hack. It involved ripping off the Sinaloa Cartel. They pulled it off, but they’ve been found out.
CHRIS: By law enforcement or the cartel?
ZOEY: The cartel.
CHRIS: You have to get out of there.
ZOEY: Exactly. I wanted to let you know that I’m going to try to make a break for it. It’s going to mean leaving Damian’s crew.
CHRIS: Where are you headed?
ZOEY: I’m going to try to make it back to Quito, and from there I’ll get a flight out of the country. If I make it to the airport, I’ll want to catch one of the first flights out. I’m guessing there are a lot of flights to Mexico City, so that’s my goal.
CHRIS: Where are you right now?
ZOEY: I’m in the back bedroom of the house that we all share. They think I’m monitoring our firewall. That’s why I’m not using Skype. It would be too easy for them to tell what I’m really doing.
CHRIS: This isn’t safe then. You need to sign off. I’ll try to meet you in Mexico City.
ZOEY: First, I want to know what’s happening to you. You are safe, right?
CHRIS: Yeah, safer than we’ve been in a week. Don’t worry about us. Just take care of yourself, okay?
Chris waited for a response, but there was none. He waited for one minute, then two, then three.
CHRIS: Zoey?
For the next two hours Chris left the laptop on, connected to the secure site, and waited in vain for something more from Zoey. While he waited, he went to a hidden section of the site and clicked on a video that he had stored there. Chris had served as a bartender at a charity fund-raiser once, and he’d asked Zoey for some bartending tips beforehand. She’d recorded Chris’s private lesson on her iPhone.
In the video Zoey was making a vodka martini, and Chris enjoyed listening to the sound of her voice, watching her graceful hands move through a routine that she had perfected in her years behind the bar at the Bottom of the Hill.
“I don’t care what James Bond says, you never shake the vodka. You stir it with a spoon like this. Otherwise, it dilutes the alcohol. It’s called bruising the spirit. Since you work in a law firm, I know you can relate to that.” Knowing she’d gotten off a good one, Zoey tried unsuccessfully to keep a straight face and sell the line. The corner of her mouth tilted up in a wiseass smile.
Ian saw what he was watching and closed the laptop.
“You’ve got it bad, man. C’mon, you’re not going to hear from her tonight. She probably just heard someone coming and needed to shut down.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Chris said, though he knew that what had happened could have been far worse. Until he was able to reestablish a connection with Zoey, all he could do was head for Mexico City and hope Zoey made it too.
Anton Corbin despised Tijuana, and he knew he wasn’t alone in that opinion. Border towns brought out a country’s worst qualities. He was staying in a huge, modern, and nearly empty resort hotel at Rosarito Beach, just south of Tijuana. While the physical facility was impressive, the place was understaffed, poorly maintained, and nearly unoccupied. He felt as if he were in one of those dystopian postapocalyptic movies, the last man on earth attempting to enjoy the luxurious spoils of a dead world but without any of the customer service.
“Have you got it?” Corbin asked, staring out at the glittering Pacific from his eighteenth-floor room.
Rajiv Gupta responded from the hotel phone’s speaker. “Getting close. We’re running it through the Skeleton Key program. Should be able to send you the decrypted text in just a minute.”
Gupta was working from the Working Group’s headquarters in rural South Carolina, linked to Corbin via his secure laptop.
“Here it comes,” Gupta said. “You got it?”
“Got it.” A file appeared, and Corbin quickly skimmed through every unencrypted word of the exchange between Bruen and Doucet. He couldn’t believe that they had both managed to survive so long at large. He also marveled at the nerve of Doucet and Hull’s crew in stealing from the Sinaloa Cartel and wondered how that was going to complicate his endgame.
“Is there anything else I can do for you?” Gupta asked.
“Stay on that secure site and let me know if they communicate again. And get me Sigrid. We’re going to need to send agents to cover all flights from Quito to Mexico City, with teams in both airports.”
It was frustrating that neither Bruen nor Doucet had revealed their exact location. He assumed that Bruen remained somewhere in Mexico, but he hadn’t been helpful enough to mention a city or town. At least Corbin knew that Doucet would draw Bruen out of hiding. If he were lucky, he’d get Ayres too while they waited for her.
Corbin sighed, stretched his back, and shook out the tension in his arms. Everything was finally coming together. He felt like a pitcher who had just picked off a runner leaning too far off the base—the rundown was about to begin.
31
One advantage of the fugitive lifestyle is that it’s not hard to pick up and run. In less than a half hour, Damian and Roland had the crew packed and ready to leave the house in Loja. The celebratory tequila high of the theft had long since deteriora
ted into a collective hangover.
Zoey went through the motions of packing, but she was actually watching for an opportunity to use her laptop to connect with Chris using their secure site. She realized that if the crew went on the run together, she might not have an opportunity to make contact for a while, and she needed to know that Chris was still alive.
“There’s nothing you have here that can’t be replaced,” Damian said as he loaded a suitcase into the black SUV. “They might already have our physical location. You really want to be here when they come through that door?”
Maria scowled. “Of course not. But there’s no reason why we should leave things behind that are going to help them track us.” She held up a handful of papers. “Look, I found these receipts in a drawer. How easy do you want to make it for them?”
“Fifteen more minutes and we’re out of here, no matter what,” Roland said. “If you’re not in the SUV in fifteen minutes, you’re going to be left behind. Right after I shoot you.”
“Is that your response to everything—a threat?” Maria asked, taking a step in Roland’s direction.
“If you’re not in the SUV in fifteen minutes, you’ll find out.”
Zoey had already tossed all of her scant belongings in a backpack. She agonized over whether this was the time to make her break from the crew. They would be so preoccupied with running from the cartel that they might not pursue her. However, in the flurry of activity they would also realize immediately that she had gone missing, and they would kill her on the spot if she gave them the chance.
While everyone was loading the SUV, Zoey drifted back into the bedroom at the rear of the house and picked up her laptop. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville was playing softly from a CD boom box.
She dialed up the secure site and to her surprise and relief found Chris waiting for her on the message board. He and Ian had made it to Mexico, and they were still alive.