by Mark Parragh
Then he heard Jessie shout, “Shit!” and whirled around. Directly ahead of them was the afternoon bus to Vizcaino. It filled the windshield as they bore down on it at nearly a hundred miles an hour. Jessie was crossing directly into its path; there was no going back. Instead she hit the gas and sped off the side of the road.
“Brace, brace, brace!” she shouted as they soared off the edge of a small, rock-strewn arroyo. The Raptor’s nose hit the dirt, and the skid plate slammed against a rock with a jarring impact. Crane was thrown forward, and then the seatbelt locked and he stopped hard. Somehow Jessie more or less kept control of the truck as they bounced over the arroyo’s far bank into sandy ground. She spun the wheel and brought the Raptor around as she braked to a stop.
Now Crane pulled himself up through the window and sat on the doorframe. Just as he got into position, he saw the Jeep come off the road after them and sail off the edge of the arroyo. It hit hard and bounced on its large tires. The man standing in back was thrown clear. Crane saw him tumble away and disappear into the Jeep’s dust plume. Crane steadied himself on the roof and drew a bead on the Jeep’s windshield.
The Jeep was up on two wheels as Crane opened up with the Tavor and blew the windshield into a million fragments of safety glass. Steam erupted from the engine. The Jeep careened in an arc and rolled, tumbling toward them. It rolled over twice, finally coming to rest on its side next to a large cardon cactus. Crane watched the Jeep for movement, but saw none. He scanned the ground near where the third man had been thrown free and saw a dark pant leg and boot lying among the rocks. It wasn’t moving, either.
Crane slid back down, and they got out of the truck. Crane checked the Jeep while Jessie drew her own pistol and went to check on the third man. Both men in the Jeep were dead. Crane checked their wallets and found cash but no identification. There was no registration in the Jeep’s glove compartment. The license plate was probably fake. These were cartel soldiers.
Jessie returned and shook her head. “Friends of yours?” she asked.
“Friends of the guy whose boat I blew up, I expect.”
They stood there for a moment, the silence overwhelming after the chaos and noise. The bus was long gone; the driver and passengers wanted nothing to do with whatever was happening behind them.
He’d wanted a reaction, and he’d gotten one.
“I guess we’d better sleep with one eye open,” said Jessie.
Chapter 24
Among the many changes his exile had brought to Jason Tate’s life was a change in hobbies. Here, in the middle of nowhere, he had discovered a strong interest in off-road racing. He’d even put a significant amount of money into building a rally truck and hoped to drive it in the Baja 1000. It was a surprisingly effective way of dealing with stress when he was bored, frustrated, or angry.
Today it was frustration that had put him behind the wheel. There was still no news on John Crane, the man who had sunk his yacht. The cartel had promised action, but so far had delivered nothing. They weren’t the brightest people, the cartel’s thugs. They earned their fearsome reputations through ruthless brutality, not by their cunning or wit. But what had happened to the Gypsy was a humiliation, to him and, by extension, to the cartel itself. He’d expected them to at least understand that and take the matter more seriously.
So today he had taken the truck out and torn his way across the desert for much of the afternoon. Now, strapped into a four-point racing harness, he drifted the truck around a tight curve in the road back to his hacienda. He checked the digital stopwatch clamped to the dash and smiled. He was almost three seconds ahead of his best time up the road. Now he just had to keep it up.
Tate didn’t like his line through the last turn, but he floored it and sped through the open gate. The photocells tripped, his stopwatch beeped, and the Tag Heuer display showed he’d set a new personal best by just under two seconds.
He slapped the steering wheel in triumph and sped past the engineering compound in a cloud of dust. He pulled up at the garage, left the truck in the hands of his mechanic, and headed into the main house.
As he entered the main foyer, one of the servants was waiting with a phone handset on a silver tray. Tate took it. So he’d kept them waiting. Good. Let them wait a little longer. They’d kept him waiting long enough.
He carried the phone through the house to his game room and shut the heavy studded oak doors behind him. The room was the color of sand, with exposed dark wooden beams. Tate’s gun case was near the doors, and hunting trophies lined the walls. Per his standing order, there was a glass of tequila waiting on the pool table. Tate knocked it back with his free hand and set the empty glass down on the red felt. He picked up a ball and rolled it the length of the table until it bounced off the far bumper. Then, and only then, he tapped a button on the handset.
“I’m here,” he said. “What can you tell me?”
“Nothing good,” said the voice. It wasn’t Lalo, but one of his underlings. A bad sign. “There was a fight on the highway in Baja. Three of our men are dead.”
Tate sighed. They did nothing for days, and then they screwed it up.
“What do you know about this man?” the voice asked. “Who is he?”
“A private detective. He’s nothing. What is the damn problem here? Get some guys who aren’t idiots—you do have some of those, right? And bring the son of a bitch to me.”
“There’s been a change of plan,” said the voice. “Orders from the top. This vendetta is not doing anybody any good. Whatever your problem with this man is, you need to let it go and move on.”
Tate’s intake of breath was sudden and sharp. “Move on? Move on? What the hell? I’ll move on when the son of a bitch is dead. Just because you can’t deliver.”
“This is a personal thing between the two of you. It has nothing to do with us. Unless there’s something you’re not telling us. Is this perhaps a matter your other friends could take care of?”
Tate fumed and swore, but the man at the other end said nothing. He simply listened, and Tate realized he wasn’t going to change their minds on this. All he was doing was humiliating himself.
After he hung up, he saw the glass on the pool table, snatched it up, and flung it across the room. It shattered against the wall, and Tate followed it with a hurled cue ball. Then he turned away, breathing hard and pacing about the room with nervous bursts of energy.
Who the hell was John Crane?
The man had gone through Arturo and Juan Manuel to sink the Gypsy. Then there had been the motorcycle chase through Bahia Tortugas. And now this. Tate didn’t like it. This didn’t sound like some bottom-feeding private detective eking out a living tracking down straying husbands and runaway rich kids. Not after all that.
Maybe it was a matter for his other friends after all. Whomever Crane really was, he was no match for Turnstone.
He waved off the servant who hurried in in response to the noise. She went back out and closed the door behind her, and Tate retrieved a fresh glass from the bar and poured himself another tequila. He didn’t like calling them, especially with his hat in his hand like this. He knew instinctually that it was a bad idea to show them weakness. If they did something for him, it should be as payment, not a favor.
But there were things they wanted from him. He could let them have something. He’d been ignoring a call from his contact there for some time now. But now, perhaps it was worth doing.
Tate took his phone from his pocket and called up a photo of John Crane that Arturo and Juan Manuel had taken in Bahia Tortugas. He was coming out of La Playa, taking his sunglasses from the placket of his shirt and raising them to his face. It was a clear shot.
He downed the tequila he’d poured and then called up the keypad and dialed a number before he could change his mind. It was a long number with prefixes that didn’t conform to the Mexican numbering system, the North American Numbering Plan, or standard international formats. It was a number that should have gone to an intercept tel
ling him to hang up and try his call again. But it didn’t. It rang exactly twice, and then was picked up.
“May I help you?” said a pleasant female voice.
“This is Jason Tate,” he said. “I’m returning a call from Mr. Keating.”
“Of course, sir. Please hold.”
He heard faint signaling tones for a few seconds, and then, “Good evening, Jason. It’s good to hear from you. Is everything all right? I was worried.”
“Of course, of course. I’m fine. All’s well here. I’m sorry I didn’t get your message earlier. I’ve been unreachable for some days. My staff alerted me as soon as I returned.”
“Well, I’m glad it was nothing more serious.”
Tate laughed politely. “No, no. Your message mentioned you were interested in a meeting with Lalo. Of course I can arrange that for you. Is this a meeting Turnstone will be attending personally?”
The man he knew only as Keating was silent for a long moment, and Tate worried he’d misstepped. But then Keating said, “Someone will need to take that meeting for him. But I know he will appreciate your introduction. Your contacts with the cartel are proving valuable. Shall I make the usual payment to your account?”
“What? Oh, no, no. This is nothing. It’s really no trouble for me at all.” He paused for a moment and then added, as if it were an afterthought, “I suppose there is one thing you could do for me, if you’ve a moment.”
“Of course,” said Keating. “And what is that?”
“I’m going to send you some pictures of a man I ran across in Bahia Tortugas. I was wondering if he’s known to you, and what you can tell me about him. He claims he’s a private detective named John Crane.”
Josh had been at Myria late last night. It had been nearly two in the morning by the time he’d gotten home to grab some sleep. But Josh was used to being up all night in a blaze of creative energy on one project or another. This was like being back in college.
Except for the money, of course. That changes pretty much everything.
He arrived back at Myria before nine. He had meetings for most of the morning, but his first stop was Georges’ hidden lab. There was no music, he noticed when he let himself in this time. The place was quiet. Most of the lights were off.
Josh made his way through the racks of equipment, following the lights, and found himself in a back corner where Georges sat on a metal stool with a tall cup of coffee. A heavily modified espresso machine sat nearby, and his ThinkPad X1 Carbon was open on the table beside it as he studied his RSS feeds.
“Morning,” Josh said as it became clear Georges hadn’t heard him approach. Georges turned rather sluggishly and nearly spilled his coffee.
“Oh, hi, Josh. Good morning.”
“I’ve got people waiting,” Josh said, “but I wanted to check in and see if we got anything last night.”
Georges’ face lit up as he put the coffee down and his fingers flew across the ThinkPad’s keys. “You’re going to love this.”
The speakers played a few seconds of static, and then the distant tones of a modulated signal. It was a lonely, mournful sound, the digital age equivalent of a train whistle in the night.
“Came on at 11:58 last night. Repeated this signal for four minutes, and then went dark again.”
Josh’s heart raced. This was it. They had them!
“Does it parse? Can we read it?”
“Oh yes,” said Georges. “It decodes just fine.”
Holy hell, it actually worked.
Josh let out a breath, and then he held out his palm for a high five.
“What does that make us?”
“Big damn heroes, sir,” Georges said, and they slapped palms.
He finally got that right. This is a day of many great achievements.
Josh tapped his watch and called his office. “Cancel my meetings,” he said. “I didn’t want to sit through them, anyway. And I need you to call some people. Get them here as soon as they can make it.”
Chapter 25
Josh waited in the war room, in a far corner where he had left the lights off. He sat back in a swivel desk chair with his feet up on an empty bookcase. On the far side of the room, there was light and a bustle of activity. He could hear Laura Berdoza on the phone, trying to social engineer her way past receptionists and records clerks. She’d been at it for a while, and Josh could tell that she was good. But it wasn’t getting her much. Apparently what they were looking for was just too sensitive. Whoever had their hooks in the Tate finances was covering their tracks very well.
If you’re bogged down on the eastern front, attack from the west.
Josh tapped his watch. “Tim, I’m in the war room. Can you join me, please?”
By unspoken agreement, Tim tended to give Josh a little more space at Myria on the grounds that he was safer on his own turf. But Tim’s badge would get him into the war room, and he’d been here before.
He arrived within a couple minutes, nodded to the rest of the team, and joined Josh in his dim corner.
“I have to ask you a favor,” Josh began, “and I feel a little awkward about it.”
“Not at all,” said Tim. “What do you need?”
“The meetings I cancelled today, some of them were real, most of them weren’t. I intended to do something with that time, and I was going to take you with me because, based on past experience, I didn’t think you’d let me go without you.”
Tim looked taken aback, but only for a moment. “This is about the doctor? In Bel Marin Keys?”
“Yeah,” Josh admitted. “Dabrowski.” The casualness of his position suddenly struck him as disrespectful under the circumstances. He took his feet down from the bookshelf and turned to face Tim. “I was going to go out to Bel Marin Keys and see what I could find out. But something important’s come up. I have to be here.”
“So you want me to go,” said Tim. He paused for a moment.
Well, this is a test of your budding friendship, isn’t it? Hey, you want to go risk jail for me while I stay here and have a meeting?
“Yeah, I can do that,” said Tim.
Josh sighed. “Before you answer, I’m not asking you to drive by and see if the lights are on. Some of this will be illegal.”
Tim smiled. “If I do this right, it sounds like there’s going to be at least some breaking and entering.”
“Thank you, Tim. I mean it.” He gestured to the team working across the room. “We need to know all there is to know about this guy. We’re spinning our wheels here, and I feel like time’s slipping away from us.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Take the Mercedes up there. It’s a gated community, but you’re on the visitor’s list for today.”
Tim huffed in surprise. “How’d you handle that?”
“João did it. The plate’s on their list, under the name Noah Spenser.”
Josh bent down and retrieved a leather satchel from the bottom shelf of the bookcase. “Georges pulled together some gear for me. It’s the same stuff we give Crane. GPS tracer, goes on the underside of the Cadillac, if you can find it. Lockpick gun. Camera—leave your phone here, by the way. If you find a computer, just power it up. You don’t need a login. Just plug this into a USB port to download a drive image and leave some malware behind.”
Tim let out a low whistle. “The rich really are different.”
“Most important thing, don’t get arrested. I already feel bad about sending you.”
“Piece of cake,” said Tim.
They sorted a few final details. As Josh watched Tim walk away across the war room, he hoped he wasn’t making a mistake someone else would have to pay for.
Among the toys Josh had sent down with Jessie Diamond was a radio bug that listened to the relay they’d planted in the desert. The previous night, just before midnight, it had started to blink. That meant it had picked up a transmission from the relay. Crane had switched on the audio and listened to its plaintive wail through the static. Then he’d knocke
d on Jessie’s door and let her hear it. An hour later, they were flying north in Jessie’s Short. After some sleep, and a shower and breakfast, Crane arrived at Myria just before eleven.
Entering the war room, Crane saw Josh had been busy since the last time he’d been here. There were more desks, with more computers, and several large flat-screen monitors on the wall. On one side were four people Crane took to be Josh’s new support team. Josh was at the far end of the room, talking to Georges. Then the door opened behind him, and Jessie entered with a middle-aged man in a suit with cowboy boots and a bolo tie. Jessie introduced him as Sawyer Cottrell. When they joined Josh and Georges, there was another round of introductions.
“You found them?” Cottrell asked. Crane thought he looked like he hadn’t slept well.
“We have,” said Josh. “Georges has pulled the data. I wanted all of you to hear it so we can decide what to do next.”
“It says there are six of them,” said Georges.
“Is my son there?” Cottrell asked.
“I’m sorry, it doesn’t give any names,” Josh answered, and Crane watched Cottrell’s face fall. “It just says six men.”
Georges typed a command, and a wall screen flickered to life with a map of Mexico. A pulsing dot appeared on the mainland, near what looked like the middle of the country.
“There are the coordinates,” said Josh. “It’s in the state of Durango, in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains. It’s remote. Nearest town is Santa Catarina de Tepehuanes, over here.”
The satellite view zoomed in, and Crane made out the town to the southeast of the marker. It kept zooming in on what looked like empty wooded mountains until it framed a compound on a mountain ridge. Crane saw walls and several detached structures. There were two gravel roads out of the compound. One twisted its way down through the mountains for several miles until it reached a paved highway. The other ran across the ridge for what looked like about three miles to an airstrip with several low buildings clustered at one end. They might be hangars or warehouses. Either way, Crane thought, there are more than one would expect at a remote dirt airstrip in the middle of nowhere. It looked like a cartel shipping depot.