Jackal: Barrett Mason Book 3

by Stewart Matthews

  “How are you, my friends?”

  The pair of guards eyed Marquez as he approached. He snapped his fingers at one of his men—a guy with a duffel bag full of Mexican porno mags.

  “Do you like girls?” he asked both of them as he dug through the bag. I thought they were going to shoot him for wondering if there was any question. “Because I’m got some real primo stuff here. Brand new, never seen, can’t even get it on the streets yet, and you’re gonna love it.” He took out a stack of four or five DVD cases shrink-wrapped together. “And, hey, if you don’t need it, there’s a real sad-looking kid out on the docks who’d probably trade everything he’s got for one of these.”

  The guard to the door’s left—a guy with a mustache as thick as the jungle brush, took the DVDs from Marquez. Not like he didn’t care for them, or thought they were beneath him, but like he was at a farmers’ market, checking for the best heirloom tomato.

  “How much you want for these?” he asked Marquez.

  Marquez’s neck cocked back. “You serious? Nothing! Those are for you. I wouldn’t charge you two for a thing—that’s not who I am.”

  They all laughed. Marquez included.

  “Alright,” mustache man said. “Throw in a carton of cigarettes and we’re square.”

  Marquez didn’t even have to snap his fingers. One of his guys snatched a carton from his bag and ponied it up.

  The mustached guard checked it over. Clapped the box against his hand, felt it was a solid, full carton—not missing half its packs and resealed. He ripped open a corner with his fingernails and sniffed the box.

  “Alright,” he said. “Go on in.” He put his hand on the steel door’s handle but stopped when something caught his eye.

  My cooler.

  “What’s in there?”

  Shit. I looked at Marquez for help. I didn’t know what was inside. I couldn’t answer the guy if I wanted to—which I was sure I didn’t. I wasn’t gonna be the guy telling him it was a cooler stuffed with drugs.

  “It’s for the general,” Marquez said. “You’ll have to take it up with him.”

  The mustached guard looked at his comrade. He nodded like they shouldn’t press any further. The General probably called the shots here.

  “Go on,” he opened the door. Marquez went first, I followed behind, and the rest of his people stayed outside.

  The door closed behind us. The squat building was an office. A wide-open space with wood-paneled walls, a few steel desks jutting into the room, fake plants, and men in Venezuelan armed forces uniforms. Coming straight out of prison, without a briefing, I couldn’t say which branch of the Venezuelan military they came from.

  I could tell they were officers. Officers had a certain way about them. They were crisp, like the enlisted ranks. Hardened with military discipline and always waiting for the next order like anybody else, but the way they carried themselves always gave off an air like they called the shots—which they all did, up to a point.

  Marquez strode toward the furthest corner of the room. Past a man playing solitaire at his desk, another reading a book, to a gaggle of officers.

  One of them lifted his eyes when he saw Marquez approach. An older man—probably in his late fifties with a gaunt face, broad shoulders, but slim arms hiding under his long-sleeved uniform.

  “General Cruz,” Marquez said, addressing the man. “I’ve come to ask permission to leave the port. And I’ve brought you a gift.”

  He motioned toward me. For a second, I thought Greer had arranged a spot for me with this Venezuelan general, then I remembered the cooler I’d been carting around.

  I dragged it off the dolly and pushed it toward the general and his staff.

  “Open it,” General Cruz said to me.

  I checked with Marquez.

  “Don’t keep the man waiting.”

  Just what I was afraid he’d say. I had a bad feeling about opening up a cooler full of drugs. I wondered if this was the true stinger—the thing that Greer had arranged to get back at me for disobeying him in London all those years ago. A petty thing to do, and a long time to hold a grudge, but I wouldn’t put it past Greer.

  Still, what was I supposed to do? I found a corner of the duct tape and pulled it up. I picked away at it until the seal around the cooler’s lid was completely gone. I tried not to think about Libby and Kejal. About being thrown into a Venezuelan prison, or, more likely, being executed. Of course, I thought about all those things anyway.

  I closed my eyes and lifted the lid of the cooler.

  “Twenty-five kilos,” Marquez said. “Fresh from the Yucatan Peninsula’s premier cattle farm.”

  Cattle farm? I opened my eyes and looked at the cooler.

  It was packed with beef. Rib-eye, ground chuck, New York strip, and more—every cut I knew.

  I was so caught out, I had to stand up and lean against one of the desks or risk falling over and cracking my head open.

  “What the hell’s wrong with him?” General Cruz squinted at me.

  “He hasn’t eaten his breakfast,” Marquez said, grinning and slapping my shoulder. “He’ll be fine. Don’t let a strange white man ruin all this wonderful meat. Please, take it all, General.”

  “I will,” General Cruz said. “You can take your crew and enter the city.”

  So, that’s what Marquez did. We went back outside. One of the guards moved the gate separating the port from Caracas, and we all went through.

  It wasn’t until all his men had split off, going toward a strip club about a block to my right, that I got my head around what had happened.

  “You paid off a General with beef?” A dumb question. I didn’t mean for it to come out that way, but I couldn’t understand.

  “Yes,” Marquez dug the last carton of cigarettes from his duffel bag, ripped it open, then clapped a pack against his palm. “People here are starving, Mason. I doubt the General and his staff have had fresh beef in the better part of a year. Spoiled beef, possibly. But not fresh. All they’ve probably had to eat are rationed beans and rice, and maybe some fish.”

  I thought on that point. People starving in Caracas. A smuggler like Marquez, with all his cigarettes and booze and whatever else he got his hands on, probably made a mint. If there was anything to be had at all. I’m guessing Greer paid him well, at least.

  “Don’t forget that,” he said. “People here are hungry. People get crazy when they’re this hungry. They’ll do things you’d never expect.”

  Marquez untucked the back of his shirt. He pulled something out. On reflex, I expected a gun, but it wouldn’t make any sense for him to kill me now.

  Instead, he handed me a sealed, letter-sized envelope with an address I didn’t recognize scrawled on the front.

  “Your friend wanted you to have this. He mailed it to me weeks ago. He said you’d know what to do with it.”

  I did. Without having to open it, I already knew what waited inside. I’d received envelopes like this dozens of times. There’d be a key and the address of a local bank. The key would open a lockbox, and my orders would be inside.

  Caracas made a poor first impression on me. But as bad as the city looked now, I knew whatever assignment I’d have to do inside it would be that much worse.

  Chapter 15

  I TOOK A CAB TO A BANK about six blocks away from the docks. On the ride over, the streets were eerily empty. The pit of my stomach tingled like I was about to come over the top of a roller-coaster and hit that first big dive, only the cars would break off the track and leave me in a pile of steel and guts on the thoroughfare.

  Danger felt like it was behind every trashcan, behind the jagged glass of every broken storefront, or maybe in the car itself, with the way the driver jerked around corners and came to a bouncing stop outside the bank.

  He drove like he wanted me out of the car ASAP. I obliged him.

  “Stay safe,” the driver said to me as I got out. And he didn’t say it lightly. I knew he meant it in a deadly serious way.
/>   “Thanks.” I closed the door. Didn’t want to dwell on his advice or I might lose my nerve.

  I barreled inside the bank, keeping my momentum going. I walked across a marble-tiled floor, the high ceilings wrapped in white crown molding which browned at the edges under the sticky Venezuelan air.

  At the counter, a balding man with hunched shoulders and liver spots on the crown of his head watched me approach. The brass rims of his glasses cut across the whites of his eyes, but his pupils remained fixed on me.

  “Stop there,” he finally said. I was half a dozen steps from the counter. “Show me your hands.”

  I did what the man said. His hands were beneath the top of the counter. I didn’t know if that meant was going to hit a police call button or if he was going to blow my face through the back of my head. No part of me wanted to find out.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” I said. “I just want to get into my lockbox.”

  “Give me the number.”

  He wasn’t going to like my answer.

  “I don’t know the number,” I said. “I’ve got the key in an envelope in my pocket.”

  His expression soured on me. I wasn’t winning him over. In his spot, I’d probably feel the same way. The city was overrun with rioters. People breaking into stores, and houses, and cars, looting, robbing and stealing. Suddenly some guy I’ve never seen says he has the key to a lockbox that belonged to his friend, but doesn’t know what the number is.

  If our positions were reversed, I might just blow that guy away. I figure the cops are busy enough, they’d thank me for going through the trouble.

  “Look,” I said, “I know it sounds like a story, but it’s not. You can check me over—I’m not armed. I don’t want any trouble. I just want to get in my friend’s lockbox. That’s all.”

  He scratched his bald head. The skin flushed red under his nails. He never took his eyes off me.

  “Where’s the key?” he asked.

  “It’s in my pocket, in an envelope.” My eyes darted toward it. “I’ll keep my hands up while you get it.”

  That seemed good enough for him. He slowly sidestepped to his right, making sure to watch me standing in the middle of the lobby. The tips of my fingers started to fall asleep, but I didn’t dare bring my hands down. I waited patiently as he came out from behind the counter, shotgun in his hands.

  “I figured you had a friend back there,” I said.

  “Smart of you.” He approached cautiously. “I’ll warn you, if you make a move I don’t like, I will fire.”

  “And I won’t like what happens,” I said. “I know. And I don’t blame you. The city’s getting pretty rough out there.”

  I thought I saw him crack a hint of a smile, but I didn’t have the mental space to think on it too long. My attention was locked on the shotgun.

  “Which pocket?” he asked.

  “Front pocket. My right hip.”

  His fingers drummed the pump on his shotgun. He was working up the nerve to let go of his weapon.

  “I can throw it on the floor in front of you,” I said. “I’m not picky. Just want to get to the lockbox.”

  “No,” he snapped. “No, you stay as you are.”

  He looked away from me, at my pocket. Then, quick as a rattlesnake, his hand lunged forward. He grabbed the corner of the envelope sticking out and scrambled backward.

  Then, keeping the shotgun in the crooks of both elbows, he ripped the envelope open. The key bounced across the tile floor.

  He checked me again with his eyes.

  “I’m keeping them up,” I said, stretching my arms further. “I didn’t come all this way to eat buckshot.”

  I don’t know why, but that seemed to finally get through to him. He relaxed a little. Put the butt of the shotgun against the floor, then slowly bent down, and picked the key up.

  Never became apparent to me until now, but this fella was old. Much older than I thought. Close to eighty, probably. I saw every one of those years in his gnarled fingers and the hunch in his lower back.

  “You came a long way, did you?” he said as he straightened out. He held the key flat in his palm and turned it over with his other hand.

  “From America.” I didn’t think that was too much to giveaway. Hell, if his glasses worked, he probably figured out that much by looking at me.

  “Must be something important in that lockbox if you didn’t turn around as soon as you saw Caracas,” he said. “How’d you get here? By boat?”

  I nodded.

  “Smugglers?”

  Wasn’t sure how to answer that. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  He smiled at me, the bags under his eyes looking a little lighter than they had a moment ago. “Only makes sense, I suppose,” he said. “Airport shut down months ago, and no cruise line would come here now. Must be something important in that lockbox.”

  “You could say that.” I didn’t want to get any more into it than that, and I think he understood.

  “None of my business anyway.” He held the key out for me. “I’ll go open the vault.”

  I reached out and took the key from his hand. Then, I stayed right where I was while he tottered behind the counter. He stooped down and opened something up that I couldn’t see. There was a click like a lock being opened, and the quiet screech of a steel hinge.

  Then, he closed it up and motioned for me to follow.

  I met him at the left-most side of the counter. He led me to an ordinary looking door.

  “When you’re done, just knock twice, and I’ll return your box to its spot. I’ll ask that you not mess with any of the other lockboxes while you’re in there.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  He seemed satisfied with that. He pushed a key into what looked like a deadbolt lock on the door, but when he turned it, sounded to me like a hell of a lot more than a deadbolt clicked out of place—like the whole wall was sliding away from the door.

  When he pulled the door open, another waited behind it, made from ballistic glass set in a steel frame.

  He jingled around in his pocket until he found a second key, which unlocked this door. The old man went in first, and I followed.

  The room inside was about twice my wingspan in either direction. The walls were lined with lockboxes from corner to corner, floor to ceiling. And there was a cluster of lockboxes at the center of the room, topped with a butcher block counter.

  And he found mine straight away. He reached up over his head, stuck a third key into a lock on near left edge of a small, steel box about the size of a shoebox, and turned it.

  “And your key goes there.” He pointed to a second lock near the right edge of the box. I inserted my key and turned.

  “There you are, sir,” he said, moving for the exit. Then he stopped and faced me. “My sincerest apologies for pointing my shotgun at you.”

  “Don’t worry about it. All in a day’s work.”

  He looked at me strangely, then left.

  I slid the lockbox out of its spot, then sat it on the counter at the center of the room. When I lifted the lid, I found exactly what I expected: a Glock 17 handgun, with two extra magazines of 9mm ammo, two stacks of cash bound by rubber bands, one stack American dollars, and the other Venezuelan bolivars, and, finally a cell phone.

  I turned the phone on. When it asked me for a four-digit PIN number, I punched in the month and year of my birthdate—0680.

  The phone booted up. Since there wasn’t a dossier in the lockbox, I knew the phone held the info I needed.

  Sure enough, I found the information. Pictures of a dossier, likely taken by Greer. The first picture contained my mission objective: elimination of a high-value target.

  Chapter 16

  SHIT. EXACTLY WHAT I was afraid of. Greer sent me on a kill mission in a highly volatile country. No wonder he had to dig me out of prison—nobody with a future would accept a mission like this.

  I flipped to the next page. On it, I saw a picture of my target and h
er bio. A young Venezuelan woman name Carolina Ortiz, twenty-seven years old.

  But as I skimmed over her bio, none of the stuff I saw seemed to warrant a kill order. She wasn’t tied to any terrorist organizations. She didn’t have a military background. She didn’t seem to be a threat to anyone at all, but still, the dossier said I should consider her extremely dangerous.

  Now, I was as cynical of the CIA as anybody, but even I knew they didn’t put kill orders on targets that hadn’t done something to deserve it. Hell, even when a guy blew up our embassy in Yemen, I was still tasked with observation of him, and strictly forbidden from using lethal force, as much as I wanted to put two in his head.

  My order to kill this girl, Carolina Ortiz, who looked every bit like a civilian to me, wasn’t adding up.

  I wouldn’t kill her without a damned good reason. But then, I had a good reason, didn’t I? My chance to see my wife and daughter again?

  I stuck the Glock in the back of my pants and covered it with my shirt. The two extra magazines went into my pocket, and the wads of cash fit decently well in either cargo pocket of the pants Marquez gave me.

  The phone stayed in my hand as I walked out of the lockbox room.

  “Know of a cheap hotel around here?” I asked the old teller.

  He looked up from his shotgun and chewing the air while he thought of an answer.

  “There’s one a block south of here that’s usually clean, I’m told. Never been, myself, and I couldn’t promise you it’s still there today, but that’s a place to start.”

  Worked for me.

  “Thanks,” I said as I headed for the door.

  When I came out on the sidewalk, Caracas was as deadly calm as ever. If the mountains to the east were a dusty shade of brown, instead of their deep, forest green, and the city streets around me were packed with low, long buildings, I might’ve thought I was back in Afghanistan.

  People went to ground in a place like this. That was the natural thing to do: hide. Stay inside. Lock the doors. Try your best to keep the outside out.

  But experience told me that as soon as the sun went down, it’d be a different story. The streets would turn wild again. Fires would sprout up from pure concrete and asphalt. Screams would echo down the blocks. People would get killed, doubtless.