“Everyone all right?”
There were a few groans, but his men seemed intact, and they were undoing their seat belts when the first bullets from the other side of the road dug into the bottom of the Jeep.
“Charlie, take left low, Rick, left high. Luc, you go bottom right, and I’ll be right above you. Shoot anything that moves!”
Juice moved to his right and stuck the barrel of his M4 over the rear tire well and squeezed off a few rounds. That brought even more action from the other side. He had no idea who was coming for them, but there was no doubt they were meant to be dead. Luckily, he never had the chance to empty his pockets, and he still had three grenades inside. As he dipped his left hand into his pocket, a flame blazed on the other side of the Jeep. The impact must have opened the fuel tank, and someone’s round set it ablaze.
“Fall back!” Juice shouted.
“It’s too open!” Rick shouted. “We’ll be easy targets!”
Juice held up the grenade, the pin nestled between his teeth. “Fall back!” he managed to shout around the pin.
Upon seeing the live grenade, Juice’s men fell in line and backed away from the Jeep. Juice tossed it just over the other side of the Jeep, hoping it would roll right into place. The blast echoed off the buildings. The four of them ran for a restaurant just a hundred feet from them. As they approached the entrance, another SUV slid to a stop and guns were already pointed out the window.
“Get down!” Juice said as he took another grenade in hand. But it was too late for Rick. The gunman in the rear window had honed in on him, and the bullets came too fast for Rick to dodge.
Juice dropped the grenade as he reached for Rick’s leg and yanked him back behind the brick building. He was already dead behind his open eyes.
“No!” Juice shouted.
As Charlie and Luc sprayed some defensive fire, Juice bent down and grabbed the grenade. He pulled the pin and threw a fastball from behind the restaurant, but his adrenaline had made him overshoot the SUV. The grenade sailed over the hood, and after a few bounces it exploded in another business’s parking lot. He quickly returned focus, and as the gunmen in the SUV looked back over their shoulders at the explosion, he sent the last twenty rounds of his magazine into the side of the truck.
Juice tossed Charlie his last grenade and motioned for him to throw it from the other side of the restaurant. He then ejected his mag, slammed a fresh one in, and fired on the two men from the original crash who’d survived his first grenade. Luc fired in the same direction. Between the two of them, they managed to drop both targets. Then the SUV stopped just in front of the restaurant, lifted off the ground, carried by a fireball beneath it. Charlie had opted to roll the grenade instead of throwing it, so it caught the fuel tank first, sending the truck skyward. When it slammed back down to the ground, the remaining men inside were screaming in pain, the fire eating away at their flesh.
“Hold position!” Juice shouted as he ran off to his right. He ran around their overturned Jeep and found the SUV that had derailed them was still intact. His grenade had missed it. He looked down the street to the south—empty—then down the road to the north—nothing in sight. He hurried back to the restaurant, pulled Rick’s body by the hand to a seated position, then squatted him up on his shoulders and began moving back toward the SUV.
“Let’s go, now, before any more of these guys show up!”
Charlie and Luc raced around Juicke, and Luc jumped in behind the wheel. Charlie opened the back door for Juice, and Juice tossed Rick’s lifeless body inside, then followed him in. When Charlie’s door slammed shut on the passenger side, Luc mashed the gas, and they were on their way.
“Where to, Juice? You know there will be more of them coming!”
Juice pulled out his phone and saw he had three missed calls from Kyle. He pressed Kyle’s contact and tried to steady his breathing before—
“Holy shit!” Kyle’s voice was a shout. “Dbie tracked you to see how far you were, and we both just watched that entire thing on the restaurant parking lot camera. I can’t believe you survived that!”
“Where we going, Kyle?” Juice wasn’t amused. “I lost another man, and James, or whoever the hell he is, is not getting out of here alive!”
A female voice came through the phone. Juice hit the speaker button in time for Luc to listen. “Two lights up, make a left. Then go until I say turn right again. But you have got to hurry. They are about to lift off!”
Juice did the only thing he could do while he waited for Luc to get them there. He locked in his last full magazine and looked down at his fallen friend. He was ready to die to make sure James didn’t get away.
26
Luc hit all the turns Dbie had told them to take. Juice didn’t need to hear her call out the last turn to know where it would be because he could see the lights of a helicopter atop the fifteen-story building in front of them.
“How’d you know there was a helicopter?” Juice said.
Dbie’s voice came through the phone. “When I watched them turn into the building from the traffic light camera you’re about to pass, I mapped the building and saw a helipad on top. Want me to explain in detail how I hacked the traffic cameras too?”
Juice ended the call. He appreciated their help, but he had no time for a smart-ass remark. Luc swerved right into the building’s parking lot and drove straight toward the entrance. He could see two men with guns outside the entrance door.
Luc hit a button, and the sunroof in the SUV began sliding back. “One of you mates want to move these fellas before they start shooting?”
Juice was bloodthirsty, so he obliged by standing up through the roof, finding the man on his left in his optic, and squeezing until the man fell. The other man guarding the entrance began to fire. He splintered the glass in the windshield, but Juice was able to move his gun over in time to take him down before any of his men were hit. Juice plopped back down in the backseat and held on to the headrest in front of him while Luc slammed on the brakes and stopped at the foot of the building.
Juice was out the door. “Let’s move. We don’t have time to waste.”
The three of them moved toward the entrance. Juice noticed a keypad for entry, so he shot out the glass door. They moved inside. The security guard behind the desk stood and held up his hands.
Juice motioned with his gun toward the elevator. “Get over here and let us up the elevator with your key card, then get the hell out of here.”
The man rushed over as told, swiped his card, and pushed the button. The elevator dinged and the doors opened.
“How long since they went up?”
“No hablo inglés,” the man said with an “I’m sorry, please don’t hurt me” frown.
Juice just nodded toward the keypad inside the elevator. The man swiped, and Juice nudged him back out in the lobby with his foot. Charlie hit the top floor button, and they waited as the door closed.
“Move to the sides of the elevator,” Juice said as he moved down to his stomach on the floor of the middle of the elevator. “I’m shooting as soon as the doors open. You follow up when my mag is empty.”
“We’ll be ready,” Luc said.
A few seconds later the elevator came to a stop. It gave its notifying ding, then opened the path for Juice. There were two men waiting for him, and both men shot where Juice’s chest would have been, if he’d been standing. He held his trigger down, first shooting the man on the left, then the man on the right. They both fell as Juice’s magazine clicked empty. Luc and Charlie stepped out of the elevator and moved forward.
“Stairwell, three o’clock!’ Charlie shouted.
Juice jumped to his feet and pulled his sidearm as he followed behind his men. They opened the door and began moving up the stairs. They could finally hear the helicopter. They still had a chance.
“Both of you go straight through the door and cover me. I’m running right for the helicopter.”
They burst through the door, and about a hundr
ed feet in front of them, the helicopter had just started lifting off the ground. As the wind swirled, Juice sprinted forward. There was no one left on the helipad, so cover fire wasn’t necessary. Juice’s instincts told him to shoot. They told him to reach for his grenade and try everything he could to keep the helicopter from leaving that building. But he had to stop all of those urges and fight all of his training, because even though he wasn’t sure what James had on board with him, Juice was certain it would have blown up a lot more than that helicopter if he’d managed to hit it.
Juice ran out to the middle of the helipad. All he’d managed to do was get a front row seat to watch James get away. The helicopter lifted off into the night, one step closer to whatever sinister thing was being planned. And all Juice had to show for it was an empty bank account and two dead friends.
“Shit!” Charlie shouted from behind him. “We had him!”
Juice pulled his phone and tapped Kyle’s contact.
“Juice! How’d it go?” Kyle answered.
“I’m watching the ass-end of a helo fly off into the night. With some bad shit inside it. And I’ve lost two of my men. It didn’t go great. Any way you can track that bird?”
Juice knew the helicopter couldn’t be tracked, but Dbie had worked some magic before, so he said it more out of prayer than anything else.
“No, man. It can’t be tracked.”
“Then you have to find Marcus Christian and see if he knows what James has on that helicopter with him, and see if he knows where the hell he’s going.”
“Already on that. He left Turkey on his private plane a while ago. We’re not certain of his exact location.”
“I don’t like this, Kyle.”
Juice walked back inside the stairwell and started down toward the elevators.
“Yeah, no shit.”
“No,” Juice said. “We’re missing something. This whole thing was just too . . . sloppy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean all of it. But mostly, why the hell did Marcus Christian seek me out to run these guns for him? I said no and he offered me double what I charge for private work. And why, when James led me out in the middle of nowhere, wouldn’t he have had his men take whatever he was smuggling off that plane before we got back? They could have easily overrun the men I left back at the plane to stay with the weapons.”
“I’m not following you.”
“It’s like he wanted me to see him take what he was taking. Only I didn’t actually see them put anything in that Hummer. And JJ wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but when given a task, he never messed up. And he was the one in charge of inventorying the weapons. He wouldn’t have missed seeing something that shouldn’t have been there, like whatever James was implying he smuggled in.”
Juice and his men rode the elevator down.
“Juice? Juice, you’re breaking up.”
The elevator reached the lobby and Juice walked out. “I was in the elevator.”
“I hear you now,” Kyle said. “What were you saying?”
“I’m just trying to go through all of this in my head. I—” Something needled at Juice’s brain.
“Juice?”
“Hey, when I came to help you in Germany last year to run down Burian Petrov for building and hiding those mini nuclear warheads, what was the name of the guy working with him that we never found?”
“The guy he was supposed to sell to?”
“Yeah,” Juice said as he walked outside the building. To his left and right lay the dead guards.
“Ho-ly shit, Juice,” Kyle said. “Martinez. Sergio Martinez! I knew that name sounded so familiar!”
“Yeah, why is that sticking in my head?”
“Because you saw a picture of Martinez, but we never caught him. And in that picture he looks exactly like James Carter. Just with a beard and much longer hair.”
“That’s it! I knew James looked familiar—wait, why did you just say you knew Sergio Martinez sounded familiar, we haven’t talked about him before now.”
“You and I haven’t, Juice, but when I was telling Xander and Sam what the facial recognition software brought back, it brought back three names. Two of them were James Carter and Sergio Martinez. James Carter is Sergio Martinez.”
“And the third name, which you told me earlier is his real name, right?”
“Thomas Bishop,” Kyle said.
Juice was quiet for a moment. So was Kyle. Both had their wheels turning.
“So what does this mean?” Juice broke the silence.
“It means I know why you thought things were sloppy. Because they were sloppy on purpose. Thomas Bishop, aka James, wanted you to know what they were pulling out of that plane. Because Thomas Bishop knew that you would tell me because when he was posing as Sergio Martinez in Germany, he knew we were working together.”
“Yeah, okay. But why?”
“So I would tell Xander and Sam to go to Mexico. So we would tell the CIA about a huge threat near the border . . .”
“You think all of this was a decoy?”
“I think you’ve been chasing your tail running after Thomas Bishop.
“You don’t think he ever had any weapons on my plane? But he tried to kill me.”
“Did he?”
“Sure as hell felt like it. Two of my men are dead.”
Then Juice remembered how James had said not to kill him. He’d said it was because Juice would have to live with his entire team dying. Now Juice understood he was going to be spared so he could call Kyle. Whatever Thomas Bishop was up to, he was a step ahead of everyone involved.
“But you’re not dead,” Kyle said. “I think Thomas got exactly what he wanted. All eyes on him. The question is, why?”
Juice motioned for Luc and Charlie to get in the SUV. “Listen, I’m going back to the plane and getting the hell out of Mexico. You tell me where the CIA wants all these weapons and I’ll land them there. And if I can help nail one of the assholes responsible, I’ll be there.”
“I’ll let you know. Right now, I have to call Xander.”
27
Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean
“What are we doing here, Kyle?” King raised his voice. He couldn’t believe what Kyle had just told him. He and Sam had been having the wool pulled over their eyes since the bank.
“We’re doing everything we can to piece together just what in the hell you stepped into in London.”
“And?”
“And, I don’t know! We’re lucky to have this much information.”
Kyle was defensive, and King knew he was taking his frustrations out on the wrong person.
Sam spoke up. “All right, everyone settle down. We are all trying to understand the situation. Let’s all just calm down and start from the very beginning with what we know. Then maybe we can get to work on what we need to know. Because right now, for all of us, this is a confused mess.”
“Kyle, if it starts with you last year in Germany,” King said, “you start it off there and we’ll fill things in.”
“All right, when Juice and I got together in Germany and found Burian Petrov trying to sell the mini nukes he’d made, he was using a black market dealer. We got Petrov to give us the name Sergio Martinez as his dealer. That trail ran cold, and all we had was what looked like an old photo of a man with long dark hair and a thick beard. Okay, you win some, you lose some, right?”
“Right,” Sam said.
“Now the pictures you sent over, Sam, of the man apparently loading up large backpacks—which didn’t show anything incriminating, mind you—the facial recognition brought back the names James Carter and Thomas Bishop, which are the ones we became focused on. So the fact that the third name was Sergio Martinez didn’t hit me until I was talking to Juice about it. And the memory sparked of a man with that name getting away in Germany. And the fact that it was about dealing mini nukes there makes me believe that is exactly what Thomas Bishop wanted us to put together so we would follow him t
o Mexico.”
“All right,” King said. “So before we move on, are you putting Marcus Christian and Thomas Bishop as working together in this?”
“I am. From the very beginning. I’m guessing that Sam’s ex is fully aware of her capabilities, especially since teaming up with you, Xander. You have made headlines several times over the last few years, and I believe that is why you two were targeted in multiple ways. Because they both wanted you out of the way. Marcus’s approach was to literally take you out, and I think that Thomas was counting on you two being hard to kill, so he wanted to make sure you were headed to the wrong place in case you survived Marcus.”
Sam cleared her throat. “Then you think it really was Thomas who left the photo in the safety deposit box and led us to Monte Carlo.”
“Yes,” Kyle said. “I think his hope was to trap you there, but just in case you did what the two of you do best, he created the ultimate backup plan. As Sergio Martinez in Germany, he knew Juice and I were working together. So he had Marcus hire Juice to run weapons to Mexico City. He did this so that if you, Sam, and X survived Marcus’s attempts, you would find the pictures, put the photo of him filling an oversize backpack together with what Juice would describe to me as something worse than explosives. Thomas knew we would run facial recognition and put it all together. He’s too smart not to. And he knew if he let Juice live, eventually he would call me, and then I would call you, sending the ultimate cavalry south of the border.”
“What the actual fu—”
“Wow,” Sam interrupted Omari. “But he’s still turning himself in. Why would he do that?”
Kyle was quiet for a moment. “Sam, I don’t think he’s incriminated himself in anything.”
“Now you’re losing your mind,” King said.
“No,” Kyle said. “Follow me here, X. Thomas left a picture in a safety deposit box. It was Marcus’s men who came after you. He did nothing wrong there. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“The picture had a clue to go to room 323 at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo. There he left you a thumb drive with photos from your honeymoon, including photos of him in a weird room, maybe putting something in a backpack. Zero incriminating evidence there. Right?”
Power Move (Alexander King Book 4) Page 11