“Thanks,” Tracie said, ignoring his comment and turning toward the door. There wasn’t time for petty games. She had a lot of work to do.
26
The drive north to Miami took a little over an hour and a half. Although she had slept much of the day away and then wasted more time buying new clothes, Tracie didn’t feel as though there was any real reason to hurry, other than her burning desire to reintroduce herself to Juan Gonzalez.
The trip was uneventful, and by seven-thirty Tracie found herself back in front of Santa Barbara Old Catholic Church, a stone’s throw from Noches Habaña. She cruised the neighborhood in her new rental, waiting for a parking spot to open up on the street. It had to be the right location: close enough to afford her a clear view of the bar’s front entrance, but far enough away so Gonzalez—or anyone providing security for him—would not take notice of her.
After several minutes spent cruising Little Havana, Tracie watched as a rusted-out Honda Accord with a hideous lime-green paint job and fat whitewall tires pulled away from the curb in the perfect location. The Honda had been parked on a corner next to an alleyway, a couple of dozen feet away from the entrance to a mom and pop convenience store.
She spun the wheel and hit the gas and aced out a man in a massive pickup truck who had been gunning for the same spot. The driver stopped in traffic to glare at her but then drove away when the driver behind him honked at the delay.
Tracie smiled, pleased her patience had paid off. She settled into her seat, prepared for a long—and possibly fruitless—stakeout. Gonzalez might already have gone home, or he might never have been here at all today.
She didn’t care. This was Juan Gonzalez’s base of operations for Omega 7, she was sure of it. If he didn’t show himself tonight he would do so tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that.
It really didn’t matter to Tracie how long it took.
She had a score to settle.
***
As it turned out, she didn’t have to wait until tomorrow or the next day. She only had to wait a few hours.
The stakeout was boring, as stakeouts tended to be, and with nobody to share the duty it was mentally and physical tiring as well. Maintaining focus was critical, since diverting her attention, even for a moment, from Noches Habaña would mean risking missing Gonzalez if he exited.
Of course, there was always the possibility she would miss him anyway—Tracie assumed the club must have a rear entrance, if only for deliveries and to satisfy fire regulations. But she doubted the big boss would use such an entrance. From her vantage point, she could see there was nothing back there but a narrow, trash-strewn alleyway just wide enough to accommodate a delivery truck.
And Gonzalez would have no reason to feel anything was amiss, which would be the only reason Tracie could think of why he would consider entering or leaving his business through a rear door. There was no way he could know Tracie was back in Miami. Undoubtedly he thought she was stuck in Cuba, either desperately running for her life or, more likely, being interrogated and tortured by Castro’s thugs.
She felt her anger and resentment rising and tried to tamp it down. She’d been played for a fool by Juan Gonzalez; that much was true. The evidence was indisputable and obvious.
But that wasn’t his fault; it was hers. She had taken unverified intelligence from an unreliable source—Juan Gonzalez—at face value. For that matter, she should have known better than to blindly trust Aaron Stallings’s information as well. She had accepted intel from both men without seriously questioning its authenticity, even in the face of her own nagging suspicion that something was off about it.
And it had nearly gotten her killed.
That will not happen again.
***
The sidewalks remained crowded with pedestrians well into the evening. Almost no one took notice of the young woman sitting alone in her car with the windows down. The sweltering Miami heat began gradually leaching away after sunset but the inside of the car remained uncomfortably warm.
One thing became evident quickly: Noches Habaña was not a popular destination for Little Havana drinkers. Very few passersby paid any attention to the bar, most not giving it a second glance.
Seems odd, Tracie thought, given that this is a Friday night.
But maybe it wasn’t so odd, after all. Maybe most of the locals knew what she had guessed shortly after entering the bar yesterday: Noches Habaña wasn’t a business in any traditional sense. It was little more than a front for Juan Gonzalez’s Omega 7. The few drinkers she had seen during her visit inside the tavern yesterday were likely all organization members, and any strangers to make the mistake—tonight or any other night—of strolling into the place in search of a cold Cuban beer would be treated as rudely as Tracie had been, encouraged to leave, and then physically forced out if the slightly subtler initial message wasn’t received.
After midnight, the crowds in Little Havana began to thin, and by the time one a.m. rolled around, they had dried up considerably. Tracie began to feel more conspicuous as the numbers of pedestrians diminished, but she was determined to continue her surveillance at least until closing time. She was far enough away from the bar that she felt reasonably confident she hadn’t yet been made.
No one had exited and locked the doors, so Noches Habaña was technically still open for business, although she would never have known it from the lack of activity. By one-thirty, Tracie was yawning constantly, and when two a.m. came and went with the lights still on inside Noches Habaña and the neon sign advertising Bucañero Beer still flickering in the grimy window, she rubbed her eyes and decided that maybe the damned place was never going to close, maybe it was just going to stay open all night in defiance of Miami’s liquor laws.
Two-fifteen.
Time to call it quits for the night.
She reached for the ignition to turn the key when two men trudged out of Noches Habaña and began walking away from Tracie along the sidewalk. One of them she didn’t recognize, but the other was the bartender she had tricked yesterday into bringing her to see Gonzalez.
Neither man bothered to stop and lock up the club, which meant there was at least one more person inside. Tracie guessed that person would be Juan Gonzalez. She breathed a sigh of relief that she hadn’t yet abandoned her post, and resumed the stakeout. Her previous exhaustion was now just a memory, gone in a rush of adrenaline.
Moments later out came Gonzalez. He was dressed in a three-piece vested blue suit, the creases in his trousers sharp enough to slice paper. He looked like a banker leaving work after a long day at the office, not a Cuban revolutionary whose people Tracie theorized had been responsible for blowing up the entire executive structure of a small American corporation.
Juan Gonzalez turned a key in the lock, jiggled the knob, and then started off along the sidewalk in the same direction his compadres had gone just moments ago.
Tracie tracked his progress closely while gripping the key in the ignition. She had a decision to make: pull out onto the street and risk alerting Gonzalez to her presence—vehicular traffic was extremely light now and there would be no way to tail a pedestrian for more than a few dozen feet in a car without him becoming aware of her—or exit the rental and follow on foot and thus risk losing him if he climbed into a car and drove away.
She made her decision in a split second. The way Gonzalez was dressed, it was hard to imagine him living in this decidedly urban, lower-middle-class section of Miami. He struck her as a South Beach guy and if that was the case, his home would be too far from Little Havana to walk.
Plus, among the cars she had been watching throughout her surveillance was a black Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible parked half a block north of Noches Habaña that had sat empty and untouched since her arrival. It looked exactly like the kind of car Gonzalez might drive, and she was willing to bet it was his.
She turned the key and waited as the engine sputtered to life. Decided that if he continued past the Caddy and walked an
other block she would ease onto the street and attempt to follow by moving to the next cross street and turning, driving a block along Eleventh Avenue and then backtracking to Twelfth and—hopefully—reacquiring Gonzalez.
None of it was necessary. The man she suspected as being the leader of Omega 7 walked straight to the convertible. He veered off the sidewalk and passed behind the Caddy before stepping to the driver’s side door. Slid a key into the door and dropped into the front seat. Then he started the car and pulled onto the now nearly empty Twelfth Avenue.
Tracie waited until Gonzalez had passed three city blocks. Then she eased away from the sidewalk and followed.
27
Tracie was wrong about Gonzalez. He didn’t live in South Beach.
But he didn’t live in Little Havana either, and she tailed the Cadillac carefully as it left Miami and headed south on I-95, merging onto the South Dixie Highway and then cruising into Coral Gables. Gonzalez exited the highway just north of the University of Miami and turned southeast toward the ocean.
Tracie was thankful the suspected Omega 7 leader was unaware of her escape from Cuba, because keeping him in sight if he was concerned about being followed would have been a tall order at this time of night and with this amount of traffic.
She was reasonably sure she hadn’t been detected, though, because Gonzalez was not behaving like a man trying to lose a tail. He drove straight and true, maintaining a steady speed, not making any abrupt maneuvers nor attempting to backtrack. He was driving exactly like what he undoubtedly was: a tired man with nothing more on his mind than getting home and falling into bed.
The idea held some appeal to Tracie. The initial rush of adrenaline that swept over her when Gonzalez left Noches Habaña had long since subsided and she found herself yawning and rubbing her eyes as she followed the Cadillac. Not knowing how long it would be before the man decided to stop wasn’t helping, either.
The urban sprawl of Coral Gables began to thin and she was forced to drop back even farther to avoid detection. Losing Gonzalez was becoming a distinct possibility, and she almost missed it when he hit the brakes and turned, seeming to disappear into thin air.
Even from as far behind the Caddy as she was, Tracie knew immediately he hadn’t turned onto another road. This section of Coral Gables, a wide, well-maintained stretch of pavement paralleling the shoreline, featured massive mansions set back from the road, accessed by serpentine driveways, most protected from the rest of civilization by fences, walls and gates.
Gonzalez was home. Tracie would have bet money on it.
She slowed and pulled onto the sandy verge. Squinted into the darkness and tried to determine exactly where the car had disappeared. Waited to see if Gonzalez would reverse course and appear again. It didn’t seem likely, but there was no reason to risk detection now.
One minute went by, and then two, and Tracie began to feel exposed sitting in an idling car on the side of a deserted road at nearly three a.m. If a police cruiser should come along it would result in a lot of questions she wouldn’t—and probably couldn’t—answer. She killed the headlights and eased down on the gas and the car crept forward until reaching the spot where Gonzalez had turned.
Her guess had been right. It was a driveway. But it was easy to miss unless you were looking for it, and she assumed that was by design. A man in Juan Gonzalez’s position undoubtedly had enemies, both inside and outside the United States. He wouldn’t want to make it too easy for those enemies to find him.
Like most of the other homes in this area, the massive structure was separated from its neighbors by acres of dense woodland surrounding acres of lush, emerald-green lawn so lovingly maintained it looked exactly like felt covering the world’s largest pool table.
But this home was different from all the others. First, the exterior grounds were lit up brighter than Tracie’s old high school football field for a Friday night game. Floodlights and spotlights were omnipresent, leaving not a single spot uncovered.
The glare was unrelenting, and her first thought was to wonder how the neighbors felt about it. Then it occurred to her that the Juan Gonzalez she had met, the man who had sent her to Cuba and then abandoned her to a horrific fate without so much as a second thought, wouldn’t likely waste much time worrying about the opinions of his neighbors.
The other difference between this home and the surrounding ones was that while Gonzalez had constructed a fence around his property like nearly all of the other homeowners, his looked more like what might encircle a maximum-security prison than a decorative but useful security measure.
Where the other properties featured brick or granite fences designed to appear unobtrusive and to blend into the surroundings as much as possible, Gonzalez’s looked stark and intimidating: ten-foot-high reinforced chain link fencing, complete with a remotely operated steel rollaway gate preventing unwanted entry to anyone not in possession of a tank.
Anyone expecting access would have to enter a code on a keypad mounted next to the gate, or pick up a handset mounted next to the keypad and request to be buzzed in from the mansion.
But Tracie wasn’t worried about entering access codes, and she wasn’t expecting to be buzzed in, either. During her shopping spree earlier this afternoon, she had purchased a number of items with the potential to be useful. One of those items was a sturdy bolt cutter, which she had stashed away in the trunk of the car and which she knew would be more than sufficient to snip through the chain links when she was ready to enter the property.
She checked the road ahead through the windshield and behind through the mirror. It was dark and empty in both directions. She spun the wheel and made the ninety-degree turn onto Gonzalez’s property, pulling just far enough ahead to render her car nearly invisible from the road.
Then she shut it down and left it blocking the drive. This would serve a dual purpose: preventing her prey from leaving by car until she decided he could leave, and giving her at least the possibility of making a quick exit should she need to. If all went according to plan, she would not be here very long, hopefully returning before the rental was towed away by Coral Gables police.
And if things didn’t go according to plan, Tracie had the feeling a car blocking Gonzalez’s driveway was going to be the least of her problems.
She picked up her backpack and padded behind the car to the trunk. Lifted the lid and felt around in the dark until locating the bolt cutters. She eased the trunk lid closed and disappeared into the brush, following the chain-link fence along the edge of the road until reaching the point where it turned ninety degrees and proceeded east, presumably along the edge of Gonzalez’s property. As she moved she kept a close eye on the mansion, whose interior seemed mostly dark, in stark contrast to the searing brightness of the exterior grounds.
As she picked her way along the fencing, moving away from the road and toward the shoreline, Tracie contemplated the likelihood that Gonzalez maintained an alarm system or employed armed security. It would seem prudent for a man in his position, and she slowed her already cautious pace to a near crawl, observing as much as she could about the property while she moved forward.
The prospect of breaking into the man’s home cold, with no backup and no preparation, was not a comforting one. Soaking in every detail she could manage might spell the difference between surviving the night and ending up chopped into shark bait and tossed into the Atlantic.
Plus, she wanted to allow Gonzalez time to fall asleep. An exhausted man awakened from a deep sleep, disoriented and afraid, would be much easier to control than a fully alert one, and Juan Gonzalez had already proven himself a clever and capable opponent.
By now, she had reached a point she guessed to be roughly halfway between the roadway and the southeastern edge of Gonzalez’s property, which terminated at a small sandy beach. Tracie could hear waves crashing in the distance with hypnotic repetition. The palm grove separating Gonzalez’s property from his neighbor’s was thick and the brush heavy, and she thought this wo
uld be as a good a place to breech the fence as she was likely to find.
She slipped her backpack off her shoulder and placed it quietly onto the ground. She worked quickly, slipping a pair of surgical gloves out of the backpack and pulling them on. Any fingerprints she inadvertently left behind would lead nowhere—she was unidentifiable through standard fingerprinting methods by law enforcement or other government agencies—but Tracie didn’t believe in taking unnecessary risks. Leaving no fingerprints behind was a far better option than leaving them behind and assuming they could never be traced to her.
Gloves on, she lifted the bolt cutters and snipped through the chain links, moving from the ground up, one after the other, grateful for the roar of the waves, which almost totally overwhelmed the metallic ting, ting, ting.
In less than a minute, she had opened up a gash in the fence big enough to slip through. She wiped down the bolt cutters and placed them on the ground, reluctant to leave them behind but mindful of the need for speed and agility. The tool was big and heavy and would only slow her down if she brought it along. Hopefully she wouldn’t need it later.
Once inside the fence, she pulled the links back together as carefully as she could. The hole would be obvious to anyone patrolling the fence line, but hidden as the fence was in the middle of the trees, she guessed such a patrol would not take place until daylight, as even the megawatt brilliance of the lighting on Gonzalez’s grounds mostly failed to penetrate these woods.
She eased toward the lawn. As she moved, Tracie reviewed the basics of her plan, such as it was. She assumed the bedrooms were on the second floor of the mansion—it was a little disconcerting how much the house resembled General Polanco’s—but before moving upstairs she wanted to enter the house on the ground floor and clear every room.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 64