Debris Line (Gibson Vaughn)

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  A commotion preceded Luisa’s arrival. Angry, elevated voices echoed out into the warehouse. Gibson got a tingle of anticipation at the base of his neck. It reminded him of the time his squad mates had dragged him along to a WrestleMania event in Charlotte. He’d rolled his eyes at wrestling, but when they’d gotten in there and the music started, with the audience whipped into a frenzy, Gibson had been caught up in the energy and spectacle and screamed along with his squaddies as the wrestlers came out of the tunnel. It felt like that now, although this time he wasn’t safely in the audience; they were all part of this show.

  The two guards reemerged, walking in reverse. Their weapons were down but at the ready. They looked unsure what to do and glanced over to Anibal for direction, who looked to Baltasar. The old man had stopped yelling and stood watching like everyone else.

  Following the guards came Marco Zava, Luisa’s personal tank. He steered a man in a torn, bloodstained T-shirt before him like a shield. The man’s arms were bound behind him, and he looked like he’d been in three different car crashes. His head was battered and misshapen. One eye was swollen shut, the other barely more than a slit.

  Luisa followed after. Grim determination was the only way Gibson could think of to describe her expression. If the apocalypse wore a face, it would look much like that.

  She was flanked by two of the men who had accompanied her to Quarteira. They both had the blank, middle-distance stares of soldiers who’d survived a long night against all odds. Their weapons were also down but ready. Everything seemed to hang in an uneasy balance, but Gibson didn’t like the odds of it staying that way.

  Marco Zava reached Baltasar and yoked back on his prisoner’s arms, bringing him to a clattering stop. With a well-placed boot, he took the man’s legs out from under him, dropping him to his knees. The man grunted but did not cry out or make any other sound. Either he was a tough son of a bitch, or else he’d already absorbed all the pain his body could process for one day.

  “Welcome back, Luisa,” Baltasar said. “No one has heard from you. I’ve been worried.”

  Luisa looked around at the way the men had surrounded her and her team. “Thank you, Tio. What have I missed?”

  Instead of answering, Baltasar asked the name of the bleeding man at his feet. “Who is this man, Luisa?”

  “Constantin Funar.”

  The name meant nothing to Gibson, but judging by Baltasar’s reaction, he knew the man well.

  “Really? I barely recognize him.” Baltasar leaned in for a better look. “Hello, Constantin.”

  The man gave no answer. Gibson guessed that this was a wise move on his part. If things went badly here in the next few minutes, Gibson would be smart to heed the lesson.

  “Why is he here? You were sent to deliver a message to the Romanians, not to take them prisoner.”

  “This one has an interesting story to tell,” Luisa said and looked her cousin dead in the eyes. “Doesn’t he, Fernando?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  In the commotion surrounding Luisa’s arrival, Fernando had been able to steal a moment to compose himself for what would come next. The shock of seeing her alive had badly rattled him and thrown his plans into disarray. He understood now that the text from Constantin Funar’s phone had been a trap to buy Luisa time. In his eagerness for good news, Fernando had stumbled into it like a clumsy child. It also meant that Luisa knew everything—to assume anything less would be suicide. The only question remaining was how to respond to her accusations.

  Fernando drew a deep, turpentine breath, made his face a blank canvas, and considered what to paint on it—indignant and falsely accused? Perplexed and hurt? Dismissive and mocking? Should he play defense or launch an offensive? He tried to gauge his father’s reaction to each tactic. Doubt had already been sown in his father’s mind about Luisa. How best to harvest it? The important thing was to keep his cool. What gave most accused people away was reacting out of character. Who was going to believe righteousness coming from Fernando Alves? Certainly not his father. Besides, Luisa was already white-hot with anger, and Fernando had no prayer of matching it. Contrary to popular opinion, people who fought fire with fire usually wound up with an inferno.

  “Do you want to tell them, or should I?” Luisa asked him, her contempt like salt in the earth.

  Fernando shrugged and made himself comfortable on the edge of the desk. “I do like a good story. Please. Regale us.”

  Luisa turned to Baltasar. “The Romanians have been smuggling enslaved refugee children into the Algarve. Almost from the instant you rejected their offer two years ago. Selling them to the highest bidder and transporting them north. This Romanian dog admitted everything.”

  “Yes, we know,” Baltasar said.

  That caught Luisa off guard. “How?”

  Baltasar gestured dismissively toward Gibson Vaughn and Dan Hendricks. Luisa looked over as if seeing them there for the first time, pieces falling into place. “Then you know that our network has been compromised? That the auctions have been conducted from our servers so that if the authorities ever discovered it, everything would point back to you.”

  Fernando saw his father’s anger building as the old man realized the degree of the betrayal. Now, with the shipment safe, his normal focus had returned.

  “Say what you mean to say,” Baltasar said, his voice glacial and unyielding.

  “Fernando’s their partner. It was his brainchild.”

  Fernando laughed and pointed at Zava. “How long did your psychopath torture the Romanian before he agreed to tell that story?”

  For a moment Fernando thought Luisa might lunge for him. Zava too; hatred burned in his eyes like two incandescent bulbs. How perfect that would be. Growing up, all their arguments had ended with her losing her temper. The less he gave a damn, the angrier it made her. Fernando rolled his eyes and puffed out his cheeks dismissively. Luisa teetered on the edge but checked herself, cursed him, and spat on the ground. Baltasar hadn’t moved a muscle.

  Fernando broke the silence. “What are you going to do? Beat me like you did him? Until I confess to whatever you want? We all know your methods, cousin.”

  Luisa smiled then, a cruel, knowing smile. In her hand was a phone that she held out to Baltasar. Fernando’s confidence fell away. Even before she spoke, he knew what she would say.

  “I don’t need your confession, cousin,” Luisa said. “I already have it.”

  “What is this?” Baltasar asked, taking the phone reluctantly.

  “It belongs to Constantin Funar. His text messages with Fernando will tell you everything you need to know. They go back years.”

  Fernando felt the brass ring slipping from his fingers and a bottomless pit opening up beneath him. He had thought to get another phone, one that didn’t trace back to him, but carrying two phones had felt excessive. He didn’t even like to carry the one since it ruined the lines of his clothes. It had seemed sufficient to delete his texts to and from the Romanians. He’d reassured himself that no one would ever see Constantin Funar’s phone. Watching his father scroll through the text messages, he thought of all the ways this moment should have been impossible.

  “Anibal already told us about the warehouse,” Fernando told his father in desperation, even as he saw how flimsy his framing of Luisa looked now. “You must be desperate to go to such lengths to pin this on me,” he said to Luisa, then looked to Anibal for support, but the man didn’t leap to his defense. Didn’t he realize that his neck was on the block as well? Anibal had lied to Baltasar’s face to help frame Luisa.

  “There was never any attack at the hotel,” Luisa said. “Not from the outside anyway. That was Fernando covering his tracks. Dani Coelho has been in his pocket for two years, ripping holes in our security for Fernando to exploit. That’s probably why it was so easy for the hijackers to compromise our network—Fernando had already done it. He couldn’t risk the Americans finding out, so he murdered four of our men to silence Coelho. The Romanians were never th
ere.”

  “You expect anyone to believe I killed five men single-handedly?” Fernando scoffed at the idea. “It’s absurd.”

  “We all underestimated you,” Luisa replied. “No one more than me.” A gun appeared in her hand.

  “You’re pathetic,” Fernando said, hoping to transmute fear to exasperation. It didn’t sound convincing, even to him. His mouth was as dry as a Portuguese summer.

  At last, Baltasar looked up at his son. His face was heartbroken and scored with deep lines that Fernando had never seen before. Looking from Luisa to Fernando and back again to his niece, Baltasar let his gaze fall to the gun she held. He crossed the space between himself and his son—slowly, like a man approaching the open casket of a dear friend. When they stood eye to eye, Baltasar took his son’s shoulders in his hands, turning him this way and that as if studying him for defects. Then he took Constantin Funar’s phone in one hand and typed a simple text message. Hit send. Fernando’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

  “Pai . . .” Fernando said and trailed off, his gift for words failing him.

  His father slapped him hard across the face. Fernando stumbled, his knees buckling as the hope drained out of him. His father caught his son and hugged him fiercely. “Goddamn you for what you make me do,” he whispered in his ear.

  Turning back to face Luisa, Baltasar positioned himself between his niece and his son. “You and your men, lay your weapons on the ground,” he said to Luisa.

  She looked at Baltasar in disbelief. “You can’t mean it.”

  “Do as I say, Luisa.”

  “You saw the texts. How can you not believe me?” The gun in Luisa’s hand inched upward.

  “I do believe you, but he is my son. Tell your men to put down their weapons. No one has to die.”

  When Luisa didn’t do as she was ordered, Baltasar spoke directly to the men, urging them to listen to reason. To think of their families. Fernando could see the many competing loyalties on their faces. Baltasar was the boss, yes, but Luisa had been running things for four years. And then there were the local ties some shared with Anibal; they considered the men who had died in the hotel brothers. The two men behind Luisa fingered their weapons nervously before unslinging them and placing them carefully at their feet. They stepped away from Luisa, hands raised. Only Zava stood by her. He never wavered.

  The smart move here would be for Luisa to follow the example of her men. Allow herself to be disarmed and give Baltasar time to think. Fernando saw a dozen ways that this could all still work out in her favor. Her problem was that she was a true believer. So blindly loyal to Baltasar and the Algarve that her outrage at what Fernando had done made it impossible for her to be pragmatic. If Fernando had told her once, he’d told her a thousand times—caring would be the death of her.

  “Your son,” she began, the words dripping with disdain, “has betrayed us. Threatened everything you’ve built.” In her fury, she raised her gun in Fernando’s direction, and unfortunately, Baltasar Alves himself. Shouts and warnings echoed through the warehouse as weapons rose in a flurry, like a flock of birds taking to the sky.

  Zava reacted first, drawing his own weapon and stepping in front of Luisa. A single, booming shot. Fernando couldn’t tell who had pulled the trigger or whether it had been intentional or the inevitable outcome of so many anxious fingers on so many triggers. It made no difference to Zava now. He died midstep and pitched forward, deadweight, only his face there to break his fall.

  Luisa screamed in rage and pain. She knelt beside the body of the man known as the Beast and placed a hand on Zava’s shoulder. The silence stretched out in every direction. Fernando marveled at the true chaos inherent in a moment like this. All the possible outcomes. So many factors no one could control. Luisa looked around, realizing how alone she really was. To his surprise, he didn’t see any fear in her eyes, only resignation. He thought for a moment that she was about to choose the most violent outcome at her disposal.

  Then Anibal pressed a gun to her ear. It snapped her out of whatever fugue state she had fallen into. She froze in place and let the gun fall from her hand. Anibal forced her down onto her stomach and knelt on her back. They both looked up at Baltasar questioningly. Ironically, it was the same question.

  Baltasar shook his head. “No, not here. Not like this. She deserves better.”

  Fernando felt a wave of disappointment. Not that he particularly wanted to witness her death, but this needed to be over and done with. It never would be so long as Luisa still breathed. Two of Anibal’s men rushed forward and pulled her aside to where her men were kneeling.

  “And get that out of here,” Baltasar said, meaning Constantin Funar.

  Anibal ran a thumb across his own throat, asking an ancient question. Baltasar inclined his head, and the Romanian was hauled unceremoniously to his feet and led away. Marco Zava’s body was dragged by the ankles toward the exit, leaving a wide, greasy smear in its wake. Fernando watched it with morbid fascination. It was only the sixth dead body that he had ever seen. All in the last twenty-four hours. He wondered if it would be his last.

  Baltasar turned his attention back to Gibson Vaughn and Dan Hendricks, who still sat in their seats like good students waiting for teacher to return. Fernando trailed after his father, but Baltasar stopped and cast a disgusted look at him.

  “Stay there,” Baltasar muttered. “Say nothing while I clean up your mess.”

  “Yes, Pai,” Fernando said as dutifully as he could manage.

  Baltasar started to say more, but then thought better of it and turned his back on his son. He switched to English and spoke directly to Gibson.

  “I’ve had time to think. Mr. Hendricks will die first. Since he’s right here. I will use a knife so you can listen to him being gutted. Smell it. Then I will move on to George and finish with Jenn Charles. Unless you give me back control of my shipment. Now.”

  Gibson paled. “If I do . . . what happens after?”

  “After is an eternity from now. Let’s take this one thing at a time.”

  “All right,” Gibson said. Seeing Marco Zava die appeared to have finally knocked some sense into him. He seemed to understand that he didn’t have a choice.

  “Perhaps you would like to see the knife?”

  “No, I don’t need to see the goddamn knife,” Gibson said angrily. “You don’t have to do any of that.”

  “Good. So get to it.”

  “Whatever you want,” Gibson said. “I just need my laptop.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Pacemakers were remarkable devices when you really stopped to think about it. Fortunately, as a healthy thirty-one-year-old, Gibson had never had any reason to. In his head, pacemakers were grotesque Frankenstein boxes of wires and dials jutting out of your chest. But after his unscheduled summit with Dol5 early this morning, he’d taken time to read up on the principles behind them. Gibson had been impressed. Modern pacemakers were miniature technological marvels.

  Take Baltasar Alves, for instance. His coronary five years ago had left his heart severely weakened and vulnerable. Without the surgically implanted pacemaker, there would be no prayer of him surviving all the stress and strain he had been under the past two days. It monitored Baltasar’s breathing, sinus node rate, and blood temperature to determine his activity level and then set his heart rate accordingly. Even more remarkably, his pacemaker was remote manageable so that his doctor could monitor his history and, if necessary, tweak the settings—no password, no firewall, nothing. Whose bright idea was that? Gibson wondered.

  He opened his laptop on the desk, conscious of Anibal looming over his shoulder and of the gun in his hand. The odds were small that Anibal was secretly tech savvy, but to be safe, Gibson opened four or five programs that all looked important but mostly monitored the laptop’s background processes. All he needed was to create enough clutter on his desktop to distract and confuse Anibal should he get overly curious. In actuality, shutting down the defenses around the shipment could be accom
plished with a few keystrokes, but Gibson needed to play for time. He didn’t know how long it would take for Dol5’s exploit to take effect. It wasn’t like he had ever hacked anyone’s heart before. Not literally anyway.

  “I need the Wi-Fi password,” Gibson said.

  “Why?” Baltasar asked.

  “Well, the explosives don’t respond to voice commands.”

  Grudgingly, Baltasar agreed. Anibal leaned in to enter the password, shielding his hands. Gibson didn’t know what that was supposed to accomplish.

  An interesting tidbit that Dol5 had shared last night was that Fresco Mar and Baltasar’s home were both part of the same network and relied on the same Wi-Fi credentials. That way the senior team and their devices could move from location to location seamlessly. Not an uncommon design, although extending it to multiple sites was a foolish measure in Gibson’s estimation, one that emphasized convenience over network security. It also meant that Baltasar’s pacemaker had connected to the Fresco Mar Wi-Fi the moment he entered the warehouse. Gibson saw it listed now on his network mapper among all the other connected devices.

  “How long is this going to take?” Baltasar demanded, taking his seat across the desk and pulling his coat tight around him.

  “A few minutes,” Gibson said. “It has to be shut down in the correct sequence, or we’ll get a cascading kernel failure, and then, you know . . . boom.”

  Gibson was afraid that might be laying it on a bit thick, but Baltasar nodded in agreement as though “cascading kernel failure” wasn’t utter gibberish. If there were a single rule of human nature that Gibson could depend on, it was that people would rather bluff than admit ignorance.