Mind Games

by Laura K. Curtis

  “You know how it goes,” Jake said, as if hearing his thoughts. “With those guys, you cut off one head and two grow back. I’ve been keeping an eye on them in case anyone was out for revenge, but now that the original bloodline is gone, loyalty doesn’t seem to be a high priority. It took several months of feuding and bloodletting, but Enrique Velasquez emerged the victor. He’d been running the organization in everything but name for years anyway, but the challengers thought that without the family backing he might go down. They were wrong. He took out at least a dozen men to get that job and has no compunction in taking out another dozen if it gets him what he wants. We’re not currently on his radar because, frankly, he figures we did him a favor killing his bosses so he could move into place, but the minute we get in his way, that will change.”

  “We need to be ready to move the minute we find out where Dr. Evans is being held,” Nash said. “I’m sending Marco with you. Trey’s already in Mexico City finishing up a short job, so he’ll be available to help any minute. Frankly, I’d prefer you didn’t go at all, but I’ve learned from experience forbidding you guys to do shit like that doesn’t work. So since we don’t know who’s down there and whether they were watching her and saw you, use the time to dye the hair dark and shave the beard. They see you like this in town or whatever, the gig is up.”

  “I know the drill.” Hang on baby, I’m coming. “How do we get to Mexico?”

  “Commercial flight tomorrow morning into Mexico City. Trey’s been working with a contact we have in Mexico, Miguel Perez. He’ll pick you up at the airport and get you settled. We’ll set pickup when we figure out where you’re going to have to leave from.”

  “You trust this guy?” Corruption hung like smog in the Mexican air.

  “He’s solid,” Jake said.

  “He has every reason to hate the cartels,” Nash said. “Trusting him beyond that . . . well, I don’t trust anyone completely.”

  “What the fuck? You expect me to put my life—not to mention Jane’s and Marco’s and Trey’s—in the hands a guy you don’t trust yourself?”

  “Miguel has his own problems,” Nash said. “He has to live in Mexico, which means not making too many waves. But he lost his daughter five years ago when warring cartels took their beef to a club. His seventeen-year-old daughter was out dancing and was shot to death when the place was turned into a battlefield. He’ll help you.”

  Jesus. What a way to live. Of course, it could happen just as easily in the States. Just look at all those kids at Jake and Tara’s place. Every one of them had some horror in their past or they wouldn’t be there.

  “I’ll be driving you to the airport,” Jake said. “I’ll pick you up—” His cell dinged, interrupting him. He dug it out of his pocket and frowned at the screen.

  Now, that took some balls. Eric couldn’t imagine answering a text while in a conference with Nash.

  “Give me a sec,” Jake said, tapping at the screen.

  A few minutes later, he looked up from the phone. “We may know where she is.”

  Chapter 9

  EVERY DAY, JANE interviewed men and watched them train in the morning, while spending her afternoons with the lab rats. When Bryan would ask about sending the group on a mission, she used any excuse to declare them emotionally or physically unfit for the stress.

  She’d learned fairly quickly that documentation was the weakest area for the men in the lab. They preferred to write down the details of each test after they’d performed it rather than before. So one time she’d repeated the wrong numbers back to one guy who’d asked her to look at his results, and, sure enough, those were the numbers he wrote down. When he tried replicating the results, he couldn’t make the experiment work. In another instance, she knocked most of a setup off the table with an elbow. Bryan had screamed about that one, but since the chemicals had yet to be mixed at the time, he let it go. Unfortunately, that one had been too easy to reconstruct, and since then Bryan had been watching her more closely.

  Every morning, Alvaro appeared at the breakfast table flanked by a silent guard. Although his bandage was clean and he appeared well treated, he was becoming more and more sullen, and Jane didn’t know how to help him.

  Twice, Dani had asked her about Eric, and each time Jane’s prevarications weighed on her. She was a bad friend. She should be trying to bolster Dani’s hopes rather than doubting her strength. But under pressure Dani might break and tell Bryan that Eric knew who he was. Or she might trade the information for her brother’s freedom, especially if Bryan took it in his head to threaten the boy further. All she dared ask of Dani—conversing via the pad and pens delivered to their room the second afternoon—was to be on the lookout for any information they could use to get themselves out of trouble, any secret passages in the house or ways off the grounds.

  And truth be told, if she allowed herself to think too hard, her own hopes of rescue slipped away. What if she never got out of here? What would happen to her once she no longer had any value to these men as a scientist? They were damned close to finding their magic supersoldier regimen. A better scientist, a more imaginative crew of researchers would have put the pieces together already and would have begun a fourth group with gene doping and deep hypnosis.

  She figured she had a month at the outside before one of the researchers put together the various pieces of the formula to come up with a pill, hypnotherapy, and electroshock combination that worked. It would require constant monitoring, not what they wanted for a long-term solution, but enough to get a foothold. In a month, they’d have trained a group and be sending them on their first mission. And once they came back from that mission, once the blood and violence didn’t break them, her life was over.

  Tuesday evening, the older man who’d been at dinner the first night showed up again with his entourage. He and Bryan were laughing at something when she and Dani came in, and nerves fired beneath her skin. Why were they so happy? Had Bryan called him because of a breakthrough?

  “Miss Evans,” the man said when she and Dani sat down.

  “Doctor. Dr. Evans.”

  He smirked and raised a single eyebrow. “Indeed. My mistake. How goes your work?”

  She considered not answering but settled for asking a question of her own. “Since you know my name, might I know yours?”

  “Ah, of course. Enrique Velasquez. And this”—he indicated the young man with similar features—“this is my nephew Eduardo.”

  Oh, hell. Head of the Hijos cartel himself. This can’t be good.

  “Mr. Velasquez is your employer,” said Bryan.

  Like hell. “No, he’s your employer. I’m not being paid, so I don’t have one.”

  “Watch your fucking mouth, Jane.”

  “No, no,” Velasquez said. “It is better to let her speak her mind for now.” But the eyes he turned on her were flat, as was his voice. There was so little inflection in his words, she almost missed the threat. “Though the time is coming when speaking in such a way will get your tongue cut out.”

  The serving women, who Jane never saw during the day, stood by the kitchen door, watching the whole exchange with fearful eyes. Every night, Jane thanked them. Every night, they nodded but did not speak. Velasquez’s threat put a new, terrifying spin on their actions.

  “She doesn’t need her tongue to work on Warlock,” Bryan pointed out.

  “Ah, but she is of less value without it later. Women always are.”

  Bryan laughed coarsely. “There is that.”

  Velasquez turned his dark eyes on her. “You do not wish to help me, Dr. Evans. I understand that. But you will help me. My preference is to retain you here, working on my projects. But it is not necessary. I cannot sell you to my best American customer, but I have a customer in Thailand who would pay a great deal to break you. A great deal. And the more you fight back, the better he will enjoy it. And once he has finished, once there
is nothing left of you, he will allow you to get pregnant and begin again with the next generation.

  “You think your life here is terrible. You believe I am evil. You have never met evil, never tasted pain. But if you do not perform adequately here, you will.”

  • • •

  ERIC AND MARCO landed in Mexico City at 2:40 in the afternoon. Trey met them outside the baggage area and introduced them to Miguel when they all piled into the man’s Jeep.

  “I went by the place late last night, after Nash called me,” said Miguel. “It is heavily guarded, and word in town is that Velasquez himself has been spending time there of late.”

  “That’s never encouraging,” Trey said.

  “No, but he always brings his own guards, which means the regulars get the night off.”

  And being local, and feeling secure in their environment, they gossiped. It was the kind of intel Eric sought on missions, and the professionalism of the approach allowed a fraction of tension to leach from his body. Whatever personal beef Miguel had with the cartels, he knew how to keep his cool.

  “What have you heard?”

  “I haven’t had much time and did not want to appear anxious, but I gather the men feel Velasquez is becoming impatient.”

  “For fuck’s sake, even if they brought her here by plane, stopping for nothing but refueling, it’s been less than a week!”

  “For you. Velasquez cleared the house last year. They built a new addition, outfitted a lab.”

  Last year. They’d been planning this a damned long time. Way too long for a simple club drug, no matter how much they hoped to make off it.

  “So you’re telling me this isn’t all Bryan Axlerod’s plan? It was in the works before him?”

  “Definitely. There is at least one other American they talk of who came even before the renovation of the house. I could get no details without appearing obvious, but the men are frustrated. That American apparently made promises to them over and above what they get from Velasquez. Now they are wondering whether he will ever return, whether they should ask for better assignments since nothing has happened at the house and they have been given no bonuses.”

  “You got all that in one night?”

  “No. I have been working with Trey on a kidnapping case. He’s been in Mexico City, but I have stayed in Tenancingo, so I’ve been hearing about the house for a couple of weeks now. We thought at first it might be where they were holding the young man they’d kidnapped, but that did not turn out to be the case.

  “Are you certain, as Nash says, that this is about developing a drug?”

  “We’re not certain of anything,” Eric replied.

  “Why?” It was the first thing Marco had said since leaving New York, and his voice sounded almost rusty. Eric hardly ever worked with the guy, a former Marine sniper, but on their few missions together, he’d been a virtual ghost. He followed orders, showed up whenever you needed him, but rarely spoke.

  Miguel shifted in the driver’s seat, glanced at Marco in the rearview, then returned his attention to the rutted road they thumped down.

  “Some of the renovations rumored at that house have less in common with a medical laboratory than with a place of torture.”

  Eric went cold. “Like?”

  “One of the rumors includes a room with electrical chairs and tables. There is also talk of human subjects. Volunteers who are put through testing, though what kind of testing no one ever says.”

  “Jesus.” What the hell was happening to Jane? “How soon do we go in?”

  “We need better information before we can try anything,” Trey said. “The hacienda is enormous, and there are outbuildings, too. We have to suss out where they’re keeping the prisoners. Right now, we’d get ourselves and everyone else killed.”

  Goddammit. He knew it was true, but the thought of waiting . . .

  “I’ll go in alone and scope it out tonight.”

  “No,” Trey said.

  “Look, Godwin, I know you’re used to being in charge, but this is my mission. Jane was my responsibility from day one. I go in by myself, I have a lot better chance of not getting caught. And if, by chance, I figure out where they are being held, I’m the one she won’t freak out over seeing. She’s never met the rest of you.”

  “It’s a good plan,” Marco grated in that rusty voice. “I’ll tag along, scope out an aerie. Miguel, you’re recognized in town already anyway, so you’ll have better luck getting people to talk to you.”

  Trey gritted his teeth. Even from the backseat, Eric could see the tendons in his neck tense, but he capitulated. They pulled up to a rundown apartment building, and Trey led them to a second-floor apartment. “

  Mi casa es su casa,” he said.

  “Casa my assa,” Eric grumbled. “How many roaches you share this place with?”

  “You know how it is.”

  And he did. Kidnap and ransom could go south fast. You wanted a hidey-hole no one would consider worth a rich man’s attention. This place definitely qualified.

  “How far are we from the lab?”

  “Twenty kilometers, more or less.”

  “And from there to the nearest landing zone?”

  “Twenty-two, twenty-three.”

  “Terrain?”

  “Inhospitable. Start with your basic jungle with all the attendant vicious and poisonous critters. Add in the fact that this particular jungle is Hijos territory and smack in the middle of one of the heaviest human-trafficking zones in the world. Makes for a rough landscape to traverse.”

  “Fuck.” The distance was doable—in training, he could run thirteen miles in his sleep, and probably had. But with two women and a young man, one or all possibly injured, through hostile territory . . . it would be tough.

  “It’s going to be a long night,” Trey said, pulling food out of the refrigerator. “Eat, then get some sleep. Everyone knows I was the designated American ransom coordinator for the last drop, so I’m no good in town. I’ll leave early, head out to the property, and start tracking guard movements.”

  Miguel opened a closet, then pried the back wall off, revealing an entrance to the apartment next door. Furnished more nicely, the second apartment had a heavy wooden dining table with wrought-iron detailing. Putting his shoulder beneath the overhang of the top, Miguel lifted it to reveal a large cache of weapons.

  “Batcave. Nice,” said Eric, picking up a Glock and feeling the weight. It wasn’t his favorite weapon, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

  “I do my best. I own the building but don’t live in it. It suits my cover to be what you would call a slumlord. People I know one way or another stay here when they are between jobs, between apartments, between wives. When Nash needs someone like Trey to stay in one, I make certain these apartments are vacant.”

  Eric and Marco loaded themselves up; then they went back to the rat’s nest next door and Miguel replaced the false wall in the closet and rehung the umbrellas and clothes that hid it. They ate sandwiches and talked over logistics for a few minutes before crashing.

  • • •

  MIDNIGHT. TIME TO go. Miguel had taken Trey out just after seven as the sun began to set, then left for town himself at ten to hang out in a bar and see what intel he could pick up. Eric wouldn’t even consider approaching the actual house before two or three, but he wanted plenty of time to scout through the area first. Miguel had supplied them with a Jeep, and he and Marco parked it deep in the woods about two miles from Velasquez’s property. No point in announcing their presence.

  Eric’s backpack held climbing equipment, and the Glock rode at his hip in a quick-draw holster. Night-vision goggles turned the world to shades of eerie, electric green. He hated NVGs. They screwed up his depth perception, but they were a necessary evil.

  He and Marco made a full circuit of the property. A nice, thick stone wall wi
th plenty of handholds and a beautiful flat top encircled it. The lack of electricity or barbed wire surprised Eric, but he supposed few would dare attempt an assault on a home owned by the newest, most brutal leader of the Hijos.

  On the northwest side of the property, Trey dropped from a tree as they passed.

  “My guess is they’re keeping the women up there,” he said, gesturing to a third-floor window. “I saw them pass by a few times before they turned out the lights. Not sure if they’re both in one room or what.”

  “No sign of Alvaro?”

  Trey shook his head. “I can’t say for certain that he’s not in the same room, but I didn’t see him near the window.”

  “And the guards?”

  “Lax. They wander around on no particular schedule, which complicates planning, but they smoke and talk to each other. Bringing a large force in would be a big problem, but a few of us should be able to slip through.”

  Eric studied the building. He’d have to climb, but the window Trey had pointed out was at least near a corner, which would make the process easier. He could rappel. . . .

  “Did you see anyone else on the third floor? If I shoot a line up onto the roof, are they apt to hear the hook landing and come running?”

  “The other rooms have been dark. A few of the second-floor rooms have had lights on all night. One still does. I’d guess that’s where the more important guests stay. Keeping the women upstairs means they can’t get out without passing by the men.”

  “That’ll work, then.”

  Eric switched out his boots for climbing shoes, leaving the boots with Trey. Marco high-fived him for luck, slipped in the earpiece that would allow them all to talk to each other, then disappeared into the jungle, a deadly shadow with a rifle slung over his back.

  It took only seconds to scale the wall.

  “You’ve got two guards coming from the left,” said Trey’s voice in his ear. Sure enough, a moment later two men appeared, talking and smoking. One looked up at the window Trey had pointed out. Eric could guess what he said by the coarse laugh it elicited from his companion.