She rose to her feet to find Gonzalez’s desk. Turned toward the door.
“What are you doing?” the girlfriend said anxiously. “He is bleeding heavily, he could bleed out!”
Tracie grunted. “He’s not going to bleed out. The skull is skin and bone and not much else. Any head wound is going to bleed like that. He’ll be fine, believe me.”
“But…you said if I gave you the information you wanted that I could take care of him.”
“No I didn’t,” Tracie said. “I told you that if you gave me what I wanted, I would ensure he got the medical attention he needs, and I’m going to do that. It might not be what you had in mind, but I’m going to keep my word to you, which is more than he did with me.”
“But…what does that mean?”
Tracie ignored the girlfriend and spoke to Gonzalez. “Turn over and sit up,” she said.
Gonzalez chuckled darkly but did as he was told. He rolled onto his back and groaned as he lifted his torso off the floor. His hair was soaked in blood.
She had seen worse. Her own shoulders had bled much more heavily after getting shot atop the Minuteman Insurance Building in D.C. last spring, and she had recovered just fine, although the wounds still ached more often than not.
“Where do you keep your clean clothes?” she asked.
“Why?”
“Because I’m holding a gun and you’re not. Just answer me.”
He nodded his head at a large dresser on the other side of the room, his eyes glazed. He was going into shock.
Trace stepped to the dresser and began opening drawers and rifling through them until finding what she was looking for—a white cotton t-shirt. She lifted the shirt out of the drawer and ripped it in half. Then she knelt and wound the material around Gonzalez’s skull, pressing it firmly against the bleeding wound. She picked up her duct tape and secured the shirt to the injury, forming a makeshift bandage.
Gonzalez winced as she worked. “Bitch,” he muttered under his breath.
“Is that any way to talk to your nurse?”
By now she had finished working. The gash was sealed and the blood flow had stopped. “That’s the best I can do,” she said, “and more than you deserve.”
She stood once more and Gonzalez said, “I am going to kill you,” his voice cold and hard and furious. “I am going to find you, wherever you are, and cut you up into little pieces. Then I am going to pack your dismembered body into a trunk and bring it back to Miami, where I am going to go out in my boat and use every last piece of you as shark bait. I will take great pleasure in doing all of this, do you hear me?”
Tracie smiled sweetly at him, her amusement genuine. “Thank you for the reminder, Juan-Bear, I almost forgot something.”
She bent and lifted her duct tape.
Wound it around Gonzalez’s mouth and then secured it behind his head. Repeated the exercise with his girlfriend, who babbled promises about keeping her mouth shut and not screaming, right up until she could no longer speak.
Tracie slapped the tape down, ensuring solid adhesion, and then winked at the leader of Omega 7. “Thanks for the dance, Big Boy, but I expected more of a challenge out of you. Better luck next time.”
She turned away and took a couple of steps before turning back to him, pretending to think of something. “Oh, wait. That’s right. There won’t be a next time, will there? You’ll be doing hard time in federal prison for terrorism.”
She locked eyes with the furious man, holding his gaze without blinking until he finally looked away. Then she picked up her backpack and walked out of the bedroom.
34
Tracie waited impatiently as the secure telephone installed in Aaron Stallings’s home office rang over and over. He was an early riser, and on most weekdays would have been up and on his way to Langley by now. Today was Saturday, but depending on what was going on in the world of international espionage, he might be working on the weekend as well.
Finally the line was picked up and she breathed a sigh of relief. A short pause was followed by a raspy voice fogged with sleep. “Stallings.”
“Director, I have a situation.”
A short pause. “Of course you do, Tanner. Are you on a secure line?”
“No sir, but I’m alone, at a public telephone. There is virtually no chance this call is being intercepted from my end.”
“What do you want?”
“I have a situation and I need your help.”
“Where are you?”
“South of Miami, in Coral Gables.”
“Gonzalez.”
“That’s right.”
“You haven’t gone and killed him, have you?”
“No, he’s alive, but he’s injured, and I need a team to remove him and two others from his property ASAP. I need him out of commission for awhile.”
“What the hell have you done, Tanner?”
“You said you wanted the NCC killer stopped at all costs. I’m trying to make that happen.”
Stallings sighed more than a thousand miles away, the sound loud and clear through the payphone handset pressed to Tracie’s ear. “How soon do you need these people removed, and why?”
“I have a line on the killer. It’s not a Castro rep at all, rather a member of Omega 7 that went out on her own. She went to—”
“Wait a second. The killer is a woman?”
“Yes. The hooker that Dr. Kiley saw leaving Allan Nesbitt’s Washington Arms hotel room is the mastermind of the whole thing. I’m almost certain she ran the entire op on her own, but I won’t know for sure until I can interrogate her.”
“Maria Carranco.”
Tracie felt her jaw drop. It was an involuntary reaction based on utter shock. “How do you know Maria Carranco?” She spoke the words slowly.
“We’ve worked with Juan Gonzalez in the past, remember? He made very clear to our people that no matter what else happened while he operated as a mole, Maria Carranco was not to be harmed in any way.”
Tracie worked to recover her bearings. “Well, sir, she’s a mass murderer of American citizens. Are you telling me to back off? Because I have a real problem with that if you are.”
“Goddammit, Tanner, be quiet for a second and let me think.”
Tracie bit back the reply she wanted very badly to make and waited. Finally the CIA director spoke. “No, your mission has not changed. Make every effort to bring Carranco in alive, though. Gonzalez has a lot of followers in Omega 7, and we don’t need to make an enemy of him any more than you already have.”
“Frankly, sir, I’m not terribly concerned about the feelings of a terrorist and murderer.”
“Frankly, Agent Tanner, I’m not terribly concerned about your opinion. Just get out there and do your job.”
She swallowed heavily, choking back the rising tide of anger that threatened to blow the top of her head off. “Yes, sir,” she said tightly.
“Now, give me the details on what you need out of the cleanup team, starting with how soon you need them at Gonzalez’s home.”
“I need them at his house ASAP. If Gonzalez’s staff start showing up in the morning and find him before our people are able to get him out of there, the first thing he’s going to do is warn Carranco I’m coming for her. She’ll disappear and I’ll never find her. At least not until she’s killed who knows how many more innocent people.”
“Fine,” Stallings said.
“His street address is—”
“I already have it.”
Again Tracie fought to control her temper. If Stallings had simply given her Gonzalez’s home address, she could have saved a lot of time and trouble. And if she had known about “Juan-Bear’s” position in Omega 7, she might have approached her whole assignment differently, too. That was probably why Stallings had kept the information to himself, she realized.
The CIA director continued. “How exactly is Gonzalez injured, and is he the only injured party?”
“More or less.” She gave a quick rundown of the in
jury to the Omega 7 leader’s head, as well as the girlfriend’s broken finger and the fact that a security guard had been left trussed up in the woods next to the property with a likely concussion. “Oh, yeah,” she added. “Gonzalez probably has a concussion as well, now that I think about it. I hit him pretty hard.”
“Jesus Christ, Tanner, you’re like a bull in a china shop, you know that?”
“You told me you wanted results, and I’m trying to get them for you.”
Stallings sighed. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. I’ll have a team dispatched to the Gonzalez house immediately. They should be there within half an hour and all trace of the subjects will be gone before sunup. How long are we going to have to hold them?”
Tracie considered the question. “I believe the information I was given about Maria Carranco’s whereabouts to be accurate, but there’s no way of knowing whether she’s going to be there when I arrive. My guess is that she will. It seems unlikely she’s had time to plan another attack yet, so she’ll probably be holed up doing exactly that.”
“And?”
“And I hope to have her within twenty-four hours. If that changes I’ll let you know.”
“Wonderful.” The insincerity of the word came across the phone line loud and clear. “Now, if there’s nothing else, it’s the middle of the night and I’d like to get back to sleep before dawn.”
“Yes, sir.”
She prepared to disconnect the call and Stallings’s voice came through the earpiece as she lifted the handset to hang it up. His voice sounded tinny and insubstantial but strident. “Oh, and Tanner?” he said.
She brought the phone back to her ear. “Yes, sir?”
“Try not to fuck this up any more than you already have.”
She started to answer but he was gone. She sighed deeply and replaced the handset on its cradle.
35
Tracie was stunned at how fast the geography changed once she had left the Miami area behind and begun moving west on the Tamiami Trail in her newly rented four-wheel drive truck. The densely populated urban sprawl gave way to wet flatlands as if someone had flipped a switch, with more than a million and a half acres of swampland and subtropical wilderness ahead. Virtually all of South Central Florida, between Miami on one coast and Tampa on the other, was nothing more than uninhabitable jungle.
The truck droned along the pavement, one lane of traffic moving east and one moving west. The abundance of wildlife was breathtaking. Colorful birds soared in massive, complex formations high above huge crocodiles sunning themselves on the side of the road.
It was all she could do to keep her attention on the traffic and on the job that lay ahead.
It was a job she was ill prepared for; she knew that.
The mass murderer Maria Carranco had been raised in this area. Had been using the vast wilderness of the Everglades as her own personal retreat for virtually her entire adult life.
She was undoubtedly armed, likely possessing firepower far in excess of the 9mm Beretta, backup gun and combat knife Tracie sported. But Tracie possessed one advantage that she hoped would trump all of Carranco’s: surprise.
Juan Gonzalez and his broken-fingered girlfriend were the only people alive besides Aaron Stallings who knew Tracie was coming for Carranco, and within an hour after Tracie’s phone call yesterday, the two of them would have been swept into custody by a CIA cleanup crew.
Tracie eased down on the accelerator and drove on.
Forty minutes after leaving the Miami city limits behind, Tracie spotted her first marker: a wooden sign on the right side of the road bearing the words CRYSTAL LAKE CAMPGROUND. The sign had been professionally carved, the lettering painted white against the redwood background. Crystal Lake Campground was clearly part of the National Park system.
She slowed and continued past the campground. Immediately after passing a large body of freestanding water—Crystal Lake, presumably—she slowed even more, grateful for the lack of traffic on this side of the Tamiami Trail. A hundred yards later another wooden sign told her it was time to leave civilization—what was left of it—behind.
SLOUGH ROAD, this sign said, and it was notable for its contrast with Crystal Lake Campground’s. The Slough Road sign was weathered and battered and looked as though it had been handmade and erected by a hermit, which, given the history of the Everglades, may have been the case.
Tracie had spent a couple of hours this morning sitting in a carrel at the Main Branch of the Miami-Dade Public Library, doing as much as she could to prepare for what was coming. Her knowledge of Everglades National Park was practically nil, and in the world of covert ops, ignorance would get you killed faster than anything else.
So she had studied and scanned books, magazines and newspaper articles relating to the Everglades. She learned that despite the forbidding nature of Everglades National Park, over the decades a number of hermits had made the desolate area their home.
She strongly suspected the cabin Carranco was using as her retreat was the abandoned home of one of those hermits. Tucked away inside the map book she had taken from Juan Gonzalez’s desk outlining the travel route to the shack were a couple of photos. They were yellowed with age, but showed a tiny log cabin in the middle of a small clearing that had been hacked out of the thick, jungle-like vegetation. The cabin was perched atop a foundation of cement blocks.
The purpose of the blocks was obviously to keep the rest of the structure elevated off the spongy ground, preventing—or at least slowing—the inevitable wood rot that the area’s moist, humid subtropical climate promoted.
The photos were clearly old and even at the time they were snapped it was obvious the cabin had been in its location for a long time. If Maria Carranco was in her mid-twenties, there was simply no way she could have built it herself. She had appropriated it after the hermit living in it had passed away or moved on or disappeared.
Or had come to his senses and gotten the hell out, Tracie thought to herself uneasily. She continued slowing, and then turned onto Slough Road and began moving north. Another thing she had learned from her research was that Carranco’s cabin wasn’t technically located in the Everglades; it was sitting on the marginally drier land of Big Cypress National Preserve.
Every bit as wild and subtropical as Everglades National Park, Big Cypress National Preserve consisted of nearly three-quarters of a million acres that had been set aside and given protected status by President Gerald Ford thirteen years ago, in 1974. When added to the 1.5 million protected acres of Everglades National Park, which had been established nearly a half-century earlier, a vast swath of well over two million acres of South Central Florida was now untouchable by developers and the protected habitat of thousands of birds, animals and insects.
And Tracie was driving into the middle of that wilderness.
Alone.
To flush out a mass murderer.
And nobody knew where she was.
If she wasn’t on top of her game, she knew she would disappear and her body would never be found.
She checked her map and kept going.
36
The condition of Slough Road deteriorated as she drove, until within five miles of leaving the Tamiami Trail even the most optimistic of souls couldn’t have classified it as “paved.” Probably not even as a road.
Tracie didn’t consider herself as being even close to the most optimistic of souls, especially right now. The vegetation crowded in on her rental truck, slowly but surely overtaking Slough Road. Massive weeds grew through cracks and holes in the pavement, vines and tree branches scraped the sides of the truck, deep potholes—most filled with water—pocked the trail.
Perhaps the occasional hunter came up here, or poacher, or terrorist. But whatever Slough Road’s original purpose had been, it was plain to see that the road was now nothing more than a forgotten relic that would be completely reclaimed by Big Cypress in just a few more years.
She slowed and stopped, leaving the truck in the middle of the “road.�
� Pulling to the side would be impossible, given the thickness of the vegetation. And it would be pointless as well, since the likelihood of another vehicle coming along out here was about as great as of Tracie Tanner being elected to Congress.
She wiped the sweat off her face and swatted at a swarm of mosquitoes that had appeared the moment her forward progress stopped. She considered rolling up the windows and maxing out the truck’s air conditioning but nixed the idea immediately. It was critical she acclimate herself to her surroundings.
She consulted her map and then shifted the vehicle into four-wheel drive. The paved portion of Slough Road was now little more than a pleasant memory, and the potholes had continued to develop until now it was virtually impossible to find more than a couple of feet of flat driving surface anywhere.
She waved her hands in a fruitless attempt to scatter the mosquitoes and hit the gas, plunging deeper into Big Cypress National Preserve.
***
Tracie squinted and concentrated on the map. If it was accurate, Maria Carranco’s cabin should be located approximately four miles northwest of her current position. She had cut the engine and finally rolled up the windows, raising the white flag in her losing battle against the onslaught of mosquitoes.
Now, sweat rolled off her in waves and the insects trapped inside the cab were feasting on her with enthusiasm. She slapped at them and tried to concentrate, cursing Maria Carranco and questioning her own choice of careers.
After shifting the truck into four-wheel drive, she had followed the steadily deteriorating Slough Road for another four to five miles, occasionally losing all sight of it before eventually picking up the faint trail again. The only reason she was even able to find it was because Slough Road ran straight as an arrow. Why anyone would have constructed it and what its original purpose may have been was a mystery.
Tracie Tanner Thrillers Box Set Page 68