Ambush

by Barbara Nickless

  I hoped I wouldn’t regret that decision.

  Restless, and now leery of taking a neighborhood run, I removed the travel pouch hanging around my neck, set it on the bed next to the gun, and dropped to the floor. I did fifty push-ups, better than my Marine days, then started on the crunches. I’d been working hard to heal from the injuries I’d suffered earlier that summer during a hunt for a killer. While my VA counselor focused on my war-related PTSD, I zeroed in on the physical—strength building with weights, bands, and my own body weight. It also included as much cardiovascular as I could handle.

  Throw in the fact that I was still off the drugs, mostly off the cigarettes, and down to a drink or two a day, and that added up to progress, at least in my book.

  I rolled onto my stomach and held my body rigid in a plank. Then side planks. Followed by more crunches.

  Finally, I stood and used a towel to wipe the sweat from my neck and face, then sat on the bed out of Rooftop Thomas’s eyeshot and picked up the travel pouch. Inside were my passport, my phone, a credit card, and some cash. And two pictures I pulled free.

  The first was a photograph of Malik, the child I’d left behind in Habbaniyah. He’d come home late from a soccer game and found his mother murdered. Possibly the assassins had meant to kill Malik, too, and only a game delay saved his life. He’d been taken in by the Marines after Haifa’s death.

  And then he’d disappeared.

  The picture was spiderwebbed with creases and worn to the softness of velvet from my daily obsessive handling of it. It showed Malik standing on our forward operating base, grinning and holding aloft a soccer ball that one of the Marines had given him. He was forever eight years old in this photo, with a shock of black hair and an expression of open innocence that made my heart ache. Only the ugly scar on his arm—a memento from the night’s chaotic aftermath—and a faint panic in his eyes suggested he’d had anything other than a normal childhood.

  The second picture was a sketch created by a woman who specialized in age-progression drawings, which are used to determine what a kidnapped or runaway child might look like months or years later. She had progressed Malik by three years. This Malik was taller, but still lanky and still with the dark shock of hair. But the artist had also flattened his cheeks and nose, enlarged his ears, and added a layer of baby fat that blurred his features. When I’d protested, she’d shrugged.

  “Eleven is not the most attractive age in humans,” she’d explained. “We’re gawky and awkward. In another year or two, he’ll lose the fat and grow into his features. He’ll be quite handsome then, if I’m any judge.”

  I held the pictures next to each other, comparing them. In addition to the facial changes, the artist had done a beautiful job of translating the younger Malik’s bewilderment into the older boy’s anguish.

  Whatever nastiness had gone down in Iraq and was now spilling over in the US, Malik was somehow the key to unlocking that door and fumigating whatever horrors lay beyond. He had something. Or he knew something. I wanted those answers. But more than that, I wanted to find him, extricate him from whatever trap had ensnared him, and wipe away the misery in his eyes. If that was even possible.

  The world is very good at hurting the youngest and least culpable among us. For that, we all bear some responsibility. And an obligation to try and fix it.

  “I’m here, buddy,” I said aloud. In the corner, the spider froze. “Mexico City, same as you. Now how do I find you?”

  Only 573 square miles, twenty million souls, and one eleven-year-old Iraqi boy who looked pretty much like any eleven-year-old Mexican boy. No job too tough.

  Tires squealed at the end of the alleyway. I tucked Malik’s photos back in the pouch and returned to the window. A black SUV rocketed down the cracked pavement, back tires skidding, trash cans clattering in its wake. I flicked my gaze to the rooftop. Thomas was heading toward the stairs, his chair slung over his back. Two floors below, the Mercedes-Benz SUV slowed as it neared the hotel. A door opened, a man tumbled out on the pavement, then the door slammed shut and the SUV roared down the alley to the street, where its brake lights flashed before it bounced and skidded into traffic. Very faintly came the sound of rubber squealing. Was the vehicle peeling out or slamming on the brakes?

  I filed away the question and craned my neck to see who’d been dumped by—I presumed—one of the cartels that operated in the city. I could make out just enough to tell that it was a man. He lay crumpled on his side, facing the hotel, not moving. Light from the lobby spilled across a face that looked like it had been rammed against a propeller.

  I jerked back from the window. Even with the damage, I knew him. Angelo Garcia. The man I’d come to see.

  At a faint creak in the hallway, I whirled to face the door, ears straining. There was only silence. I forced aside my horror and considered my next move. Was dumping Angelo a warning? Or an attempt to flush me from the meager safety of my room?

  As if on cue, the ghostly figure of Private First Class Hart, the first Marine I’d processed in Mortuary Affairs when I was in Iraq, appeared in the room, materializing from wherever the dead hang out when they’re not following me.

  Not a dead man, my counselor would say. Not a ghost.

  A manifestation of my fear.

  Reflexively, my hand reached for Clyde’s comforting presence, but my fingers closed on emptiness. Clyde was safe in Denver, probably enjoying filet mignon with Cohen.

  PFC Hart tilted his head toward the window, then the door.

  Right. Get the hell out of here, while you can still do so on your own terms.

  I loaded a cartridge into the stun gun. The logo on the barrel said TASER, and although I figured the gun was a knockoff, it appeared to be in good working order. I’d only been able to get four cartridges from the dealer. I needed to make them count.

  I slid the gun into the pocket of my cargo pants, slung my duffel over my shoulder, and made sure my travel pouch was secure inside my shirt. I wished desperately for Clyde, who would be able to warn me what, if anything, waited on the other side of the door.

  I wasted a moment considering the fire escape before deciding a ladder hanging off the side of a building was unacceptable exposure. I had no idea where Rooftop Thomas had gone.

  Then I eyeballed the phone on the nightstand. I could call the police. I’d be gone long before they arrived, but their presence might serve as a diversion for whoever was after me.

  On the other hand, if things went south, I didn’t want to be involved in any way with the Mexican federales.

  I gripped my duffel. This was one of those moments I’d experienced often in war. That cliff-edge second a pilot must feel just before takeoff when something doesn’t feel quite right, and you have to commit or pull back.

  Whatever. Not making a decision was worse than making the wrong decision.

  I peered through the peephole. Darkness. Someone had unscrewed the bulbs. They’d been burning at forty-watt glory when I arrived. I drew in a breath. No stench of Marlboros seeped through the door, so it wasn’t Rooftop Thomas. Probably someone bigger. Heavier. With good lungs.

  I listened for the sound of a man—it would be a man—in the hallway outside, but heard only the people down below, spilling into the alley, chattering with alarm. I dropped my bag, pulled the gun, and pressed my back against the wall to the right of the door before reaching over to ease off the chain—the only well-constructed item in this hotel—and turn the knob. I cracked the door ajar an inch and waited.

  The door burst open as whoever was waiting on the other side barreled their way in. A man, tall and wide, coming in too hard and too fast; he’d been expecting me to be in his path and must have planned to use his momentum to knock me flat.

  His bad.

  I hit him with twenty thousand volts, holding the gun in place for the minimum five seconds required to truly incapacitate him. I followed him down as his back arced, muscles spasming, and a long, low moan escaped him. I kicked the door closed, rehung
the chain, then a part of me that I resented made me bend and take his pulse. Stun guns weren’t meant to kill, but if you had a weak heart, getting smacked with voltage was a very bad thing.

  He was still breathing. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

  I dropped another cartridge into the gun and studied him—white, midthirties, built like a beast—then searched his pockets while he twitched and drooled. Empty. A guy with a lot of confidence in his hands and a lack of appreciation for women.

  I yanked the cord free from the blinds and trussed him, then glanced toward the spider perched in the middle of its web.

  “He’s all yours,” I said.

  I grabbed my duffel, eased over the twitching man, then pulled the chain and stepped aside. I counted to sixty before I cracked open the door and peered up and down the hallway. No one except PFC Hart, who stood motionless in the hallway, a man of haunting luminescence. He nodded his approval and went ahead of me down the stairs.

  At the bottom, I turned right to avoid the lobby and race-walked down a corridor toward the emergency door I’d scoped out earlier, guessing that the sign warning of an alarm was only there for show. Sure enough, the door yielded with nothing more ominous than a creak of hinges.

  It opened onto a narrow lane that dead-ended thirty feet to my right. On my left, it formed a T intersection with the alley where the bastards had dumped Angelo.

  I retreated back into the hallway and yanked out my cell phone.

  “Were you telling the truth?” I asked when Jesús López picked up. “Are you really at a bar two blocks from my hotel?”

  Jesús laughed. “Aún más cerca. Solo una cuadra.” In English he said, “I am one block away. Pretty señorita like you buys a gun, I figure she might need me. A man has his dreams.”

  “I do need you. But it’s dangerous.”

  “Ah, señorita, you make me blush. Whips and chains?”

  “Bullets and blades. You up for it?”

  “Am I not a Marine?”

  I told him what I needed. He assured me it was no problem. “Cinco minutos.”

  I counted to sixty again, then went through the door and turned left. At the intersection, I pressed flat against the hotel wall. I drew a breath and peered around the corner.

  Angelo lay near a side entrance to the hotel. The people who had surrounded him only a moment earlier had retreated back into the lobby. Afraid of being found near the body, probably. By the police or by the cartels, whichever they figured was responsible. Always a guess in Mexico.

  By now, three minutes had elapsed since my call to Jesús. I wanted more than anything to run to Angelo. To take his pulse and—if he still breathed—to offer care and learn what had happened. But if I walked into the alley, the bad guys would have the perfect opportunity to pop me. There would be thirty witnesses to my death, and not one of them would be able to say what had happened.

  Chances were, Angelo was already dead. By now, he’d been in the alley a good ten minutes. Better to wait for Jesús.

  Then Angelo groaned. A gut-wrenching moan of the kind you would expect from a man whose face had been used as a whetting stone.

  And still no sign of Jesús.

  I bent my head, a form of surrender. Sometimes you have to trust the universe.

  With another quick glance around, I ran to Angelo and dropped beside him. Light from the lobby revealed a face that would never be as it had been—even if he survived. Iraq reached out its claws, and for a moment I caught the heat and smell of the desert—sand and sewage and wind—and saw my lover’s own broken body as it lay on a gurney.

  “Stay here,” I told myself, and pushed away the memory.

  I gripped Angelo’s shoulder. “Angelo!”

  He didn’t stir. His left arm was stretched out in the filth of the alley, his palm turned up toward the smog-smeared night. Three of his fingers were gone, the wounds cauterized. Gently, my own hand now bloody, I picked up his arm and laid it across his chest. I took his pulse—thready and weak.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the hotel lobby, at the faces pressed to the glass.

  “¡Una ambulancia!” I screamed. “¡Llame a una ambulancia!”

  They stared at me as I mimed putting a phone to my ear.

  “Hazlo,” I yelled. Do it.

  A woman nodded and disappeared. I turned back to Angelo. From somewhere, a dog began to bark, a grating, repetitive sound.

  “Angelo, it’s Sydney. Stay with me, buddy.”

  A violent tremor ripped through his body. His remaining eye scraped open, and his gaze locked on my face.

  “Go,” he whispered, his voice clotted with blood. “Run.”

  “They’re gone,” I said, knowing the lie. “Help is on the way.”

  “They . . .” Angelo’s right hand floated up, found my shirt, and gripped it. “They asked about the boy. About you.”

  “Who, Angelo? Give me names. Who did this to you?”

  He loosed my shirt, and I caught his hand.

  “They . . .” He coughed, and a fresh swell of blood leaked through his lips. “Dalton. They wanted to know . . . about him. I . . . know nothing. Why . . . do they ask?”

  Dalton. It was a name I recognized. Richard Dalton was a CIA guy who’d been on our base in Iraq. The first I’d known about him was when he showed up in a photograph I found of Malik. The picture showed Malik, Dalton, and a third man—Max Udell, a.k.a. Sarge. All looking as happy together as bugs in a rug.

  In another picture, Dalton had been standing with Doug Ayers—Dougie. The man I’d loved who was tortured and killed by terrorists. In the photo, Richard and Dougie had been wearing native dress. Working together, I presumed. Or at least on friendly terms.

  Angelo’s voice brought me back.

  “I have heard . . . you cannot resist pain.” His one eye, filled with pleading, found mine. “I am sorry.”

  I squeezed his uninjured fingers as if my hold was the only thing keeping him here, the string to a balloon caught in a windstorm. Grief and fury quaked through me. For Angelo. For his children, who wouldn’t go with him to any more soccer games. And for the fact that my only link to Malik lay dying in a filthy back lane.

  Urgency throbbed behind my eyes, pounding out a rhythm that warned me to flee. The space between my shoulder blades itched. I glanced up and down the alley, taking in windows and doorways. I looked at the shadowed places where no light reached. I listened for the sound of men approaching, but the night fell oddly quiet, as if the universe had drawn a breath. The dog had stopped barking. The sounds of traffic were a dull, faraway buzz. The people in the lobby were voiceless. No one spoke at all.

  “Where’s that ambulance!” I shouted into the silence. My voice echoed off the walls.

  “La ambulancia está viniendo,” said a woman in the hotel, her voice muffled through the glass. “It comes.”

  “Sydney.” Angelo groaned.

  “Stay with me, mi querido amigo,” I said. “You’re going to be all right.”

  His gaze drifted. He gaped at the night sky, his expression one of confusion. As if he wondered how a man who volunteered to find people now found himself in such a mess.

  At the north end of the alley, men’s voices rose, a few in anger, most in drunken enthusiasm. Jesús López’s cavalry had arrived. A car horn blared, drowning out everything else. I waited for the flare of headlights, but then the horn fell silent, and a man shouted in English, “Move along! No cars here, no cars.”

  I knew that accent. As Boston as the Red Sox. It looked like my fears about the Alpha had been right.

  “¡Vete a la mierda!” shouted a second man.

  “Y el burro en el que cabalgaste,” cried a third.

  A foul-mouthed cavalry. From the darkness on the alley’s north end emerged a crowd of staggering, wheeling men who came at me with remarkable speed, given their apparent drunkenness. As they drew near, I counted eight men. Some of them sported Mexican eagle tattoos on their biceps, and several wore T-shirts with MARINA
spelled out in white block letters.

  The infantería.

  I turned back to Angelo. His single eye was still open, but now it served only as a mirror to the night, flat and lifeless as an icy pond.

  “Angelo!”

  I touched my fingers to his neck—the weak pulse had vanished. I tilted his forehead back and lifted his chin, then pinched his nose closed and clamped my mouth over his, breathing into his lungs. Then again. When his chest didn’t rise, I rose to my knees and began chest compressions. Thirty compressions, two breaths. Thirty compressions, two breaths.

  Angelo remained motionless. Thirty compressions . . .

  “Sydney!”

  Jesús’s voice penetrated the haze, and I became aware that he was crouched next to me. His men eddied around us, human shields. I checked Angelo’s neck again for a pulse.

  Nothing. I tilted his head back, breathed into his mouth. Tasted his blood.

  Jesús placed his hand on my shoulder.

  “We must go, Sydney.”

  I shrugged him off. Placed the heel of my hand on Angelo’s breastbone.

  “Now,” Jesús said. “Your enemies won’t wait much longer.”

  An approaching siren sounded, too late to offer Angelo anything more than transportation to a steel table and the coroner’s scalpel. I rocked back on my heels and stared at his corpse, my eyes wide and painful in sockets as dry as old bones.

  “He’s gone,” Jesús said. “Come. We must be gone as well.”

  At last I looked at him. “Where’s your car?”

  “The Americans blocked off both ends of the alley. We have had to improvise. And we cannot hold them off forever. Even the infantería know when to retreat. So come. I think you were right in saying this is dangerous.”

  I looked at him dully. “Come where?”

  He rose and pulled me with him. “Follow me.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Trust in God, but tether your camel well.

  —Arabic saying.