Authors: Russell Blake
The American stooped down, retrieved the Ruger from the floor, and pocketed it. The thickset man stood, transfixed by the sudden violence, his eyes wide with fear, his breathing heavy. The rest of the bar had gone quiet, nobody daring to say a word. The American held up the revolver so everyone could see it.
“I won this pot fair and square. Right?” he said, his voice soft.
Thickset man nodded. “Absolutely.”
“And everyone saw César there go for his gun, and his buddy Jaime pull his – on an unarmed man,
sí
? This was self-defense.”
“Of course.”
The American scooped up the cash, stuffed it into his jacket pocket and then moved to the door. At the threshold he turned to face the room, holding the revolver aloft. “It would be smart if nobody was still here in five minutes. I might come back to check. You” – he waved at the bartender with the gun – “give the police an accurate description of me. A short laborer from the coast – dark skin, black hair. If anyone says different, I’ll hear about it, and you don’t want to invite that into your life.” He stared at the assembled drinkers and then reached into his pocket, tossing a hundred-dollar bill onto the floor. “That’s for the drinks. I mean it about coming back to check,” he said as he tucked the revolver into his waistband. “Five minutes.”
Once on the deserted sidewalk he broke into a jog. When he reached the main drag, he turned the corner and blended into the flow of late-night revelers, confident the bar would be empty by the time the police arrived. Nobody wanted trouble, and the cops in Medellín were as notorious as anywhere in Latin America for extortion and corruption. Being caught up in an investigation would lead nowhere good, especially for the working girls, who’d probably vanished within sixty seconds of his exit, followed closely by anyone with a brain.
That left the bartender who would, if he was smart, claim he didn’t remember anything specific…and César and Jaime. César would be dead within minutes from blood loss, and Jaime wouldn’t be talking to anyone for a long time – eating through a straw tended to dampen the enthusiasm of even the most garrulous – and the American was confident that the police would have better things to do than try to run down a hazy and conflicting description weeks or months after the fact.
Two blocks up he cut over onto another small street, and then he was gone, the echo of his footsteps fading into the night.
Chapter 2
Los Andes, Chile
Jet’s vision was beginning to blur after driving for hours. The change of altitude from the summit and the constant vigilance demanded by the treacherous road were finally taking their toll. The infinite twists and turns had required all her attention, and now, as two a.m. neared, she was fading and knew it. Hannah snoozed cozily in her car seat in the back while Matt did his best to provide quiet moral support from the passenger side, watching the mountain terrain blur by as he fought to keep his eyes open. They needed to get off the road for a while.
They continued toward the town of Los Andes, at the base of the jutting mountains, and then took the exit and entered the city limits. Theirs was the only car on the empty main street, but Jet watched her speed, wary of attracting the attention of any bored or enterprising police eager to shake down tourists.
“How you holding up?” Matt asked.
“Good, although I’m ready for some sleep. How’s the arm?” she asked, eyeing his cast.
“A twinge every now and then. Remind me not to dive off balconies anymore, would you?”
“I didn’t tell you to show off.”
“True. You want to find a motel here?”
She glanced at him. “Too close to the pass. I think I’d rather keep going to San Felipe.”
“How far?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“You’re the boss.”
They rolled through Los Andes and entered an alluvial valley framed by farmland on either side of the two-lane highway, the snowcapped outline of the mountains glowing behind them. The damp breeze was thick with the scent of vineyards, the vista of grapevines a parade of rigid lines stretching to the horizon under a wash of ghostly moonlight. After more or less forever, San Felipe appeared from the darkness like a blatant mirage. One moment they were surrounded by endless farmland, bugs splattering against the windshield, and the next, multistory buildings were rising out of the gloom.
Jet drove slowly along the main road until she saw a small sign with “Hotel” painted on it in red. An unsteady arrow below pointed down a side street. She swung the SUV right and found herself facing a long building constructed of variegated brick, only a few cars in the lot, all with Chilean plates. She pulled to a stop near the office, which was dark except for the soft glow of a low-wattage bulb somewhere in its depths.
“Wait here. I’ll get us a room.”
Matt looked at her. “You sure? I can handle it.”
“You’re a little more memorable with the broken wing and the barbecued head than I am.”
“Not really, but I know better than to argue.”
Inside, she rang a bell on the chipped counter and waited as rustling emanated from the back room. Moments later an ancient man with a prune face shuffled through a doorway and, after a brief discussion, gladly took her American dollars and handed her a key, uninterested in details pertaining to her identity or nationality.
She returned to the car and pulled it around to a spot near the room door before hoisting the still-dozing Hannah and ferrying her as Matt secured their entry.
The room was no worse than countless others she’d laid her head in. She placed Hannah on one of the two twin beds and spent a long moment gazing at her before catching Matt’s eye.
“I’ll be back in a second with the bags,” she said.
“I can help.”
“I don’t need it. Just get ready for bed.”
Jet drove the Explorer off the motel grounds and parked in front of a modest house on a side street. She glanced around, looking for evidence of potential problems. Confident she was alone, Jet popped the glove compartment and removed the Explorer’s owner’s manual. After reading a few pages, she felt around under the dash and quickly located the fuse box, removed the fuel pump relay, and then slipped it into her pocket, ensuring the car wouldn’t be driven off without her during the night. Satisfied that any thieves would be frustrated by her precaution, she retrieved her bags and the various parts of the Glock and headed back to the motel.
Matt was coming out of the bathroom when Jet returned to the room. Jet sat wordlessly at the table near the window and quickly reassembled the pistol to functional order. She chambered a round, set it on the nightstand, unzipped her bag and removed a T-shirt and her hygiene kit.
Matt was already asleep when she emerged from the bathroom, and she only hesitated a second before climbing onto the bed with Hannah, who snuggled next to her with a low mewl and then resumed sleeping, breath soft and moist and sweet against her mother’s neck.
Jet’s last thought as her eyes fluttered shut was that they’d made it, leaving their pursuers with nothing. She smiled at the thought and drifted off to sleep, one of the longest days of her life now drawn to a close.
Chapter 3
Langley, Virginia
The early morning rush hour was just getting underway as Carson Santell entered the cavernous warehouse three miles from CIA headquarters. He’d parked his black Lexus on the far side of the lot well away from the security cameras that monitored the front and rear entrances, and made his way to the side door, where he knew from long experience the feed would have been turned off several minutes earlier.
He strode across the scuffed concrete floor, wending around pallets of oversized wooden crates, a polystyrene cup of coffee in his left hand and a waxed paper bag of donuts in his right. He ducked around a forklift, reached the door to the administrative office, and stepped inside, reassured when he entered that there was only one other person there – Jason McDougal, one of his partners in the international drug trafficking empire Santell operated as a profitable sideline to his day job as a section head with the CIA.
Santell sat across from McDougal, who was studying a computer monitor on his desk, and tossed the donuts to him.
“How long do we have?” Santell asked as he removed the plastic lid from his coffee.
“Half an hour till the first workers show up, but call it fifteen minutes if you want to be safe. What’s up?”
“I’ve been thinking about the Buenos Aires incident – Tara’s remarkable failure and the loss of not only the target, but also the stones.”
“And the entire team. Let’s not forget that.” McDougal had been with the agency for two decades before retiring early and opening an import-export business, the better to facilitate his trips to the heroin production centers in Afghanistan and the Golden Triangle as well as to Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru, where cocaine was the big export.
“How could I? What a disaster. I’ve been running interference for the last two days.”
McDougal checked his watch. “What do you want to talk about? That op’s dead, isn’t it? Time to cut our losses and move on.”
“The bastard still probably has a bunch of our diamonds,” Santell seethed. He took a cautious sip of coffee and winced as he burned the tip of his tongue. “Damn. They superheat this stuff every time.”
McDougal opened the bag and extracted a glistening chocolate-glazed donut. He regarded his paunch with rueful eyes and then took a massive bite out of it. “He might. Or might not. You said Tara was unclear.”
Santell nodded. “I want to send someone in. A freelancer. I can’t have any more agency personnel involved. It’s left too large a trail.” Santell caught the bag McDougal tossed him and removed a cinnamon roll. “Who do you have in that neck of the woods?”
McDougal sighed. “South America? Boy, it’s not like the good old days. Most of the best are long dead. And the newbies are lazy and sloppy. Butchers. If Tara couldn’t pull this off, sending any of them in is a waste of time.”
“I’m not asking you what won’t work. I’d say I already have a pretty clear idea of what not to do,” Santell snapped.
“The best freelancer on that continent is a name you’re not going to like. We decided to never use him again after the slaughter in Honduras, remember?”
Santell’s face fell. “You don’t mean…”
McDougal nodded. “I do. Drago.”
Santell stared at the cinnamon roll like it had turned into feces, and set it on the table, his expression pained. “Shit. Who else is there?”
“Who’s reliable and won’t just disappear if they locate the stones? Nobody. If he’s still got some, we’re talking millions. Tens of millions.” McDougal paused and munched on another chunk of doughnut. “Drago’s the best, and he’s rigorous.”
“Drago’s a walking wrecking machine. He’s got all the subtlety of a bulldozer. And he enjoys carnage a little too much for my liking.”
“Hey, you asked. I’d just as soon let it go. Like I said, that’s already played.”
Santell shook his head. “It’s more than just the money. Matt knows too much. And he’s just the kind who’ll surface a year from now, or five, and pull a Snowden.”
“Nobody would believe him.”
“We have no idea how much he knows.”
“Pretty fair bet he’s got the Laos details at the very least.”
“Of course.” Santell’s eyes locked on a calendar mounted on the wall behind McDougal that featured colorful hot air balloons soaring over Albuquerque, New Mexico, at dawn. He took another pull on his coffee, ignoring the pain as his tongue protested the scalding.
McDougal folded his hands and leaned forward. “If it’s not the money, what’s really eating at you? We’re almost out of time. Spit it out.”
Santell’s attention returned to McDougal. “The Russians. If Matt approached them with all the data he’s carrying around in his head, they could prove we’re responsible for the huge upturn in heroin consumption in Russia as well as most of Europe. Let’s just say that if a nation with that many nukes starts rattling its saber, any story they tell will get a whole different kind of scrutiny from the Justice Department. We don’t need that kind of heat.”
McDougal stuffed the remainder of his doughnut into his mouth and chewed appreciatively, lost in thought. He glanced at his watch again and stood. “Come on. I’ll walk you out.”
The pair moved unhurriedly through the warehouse. When they reached the side door, Santell paused and turned to McDougal. “How much do you think Drago would want to do this?”
“Probably half a mil before it was done. He’ll need travel expenses, documents, spread it around money…it could go north of that depending on what he finds.”
Santell scowled and then nodded. “Budget a mil. But don’t let on how much is in the kitty. No point in being foolish with our cash.”
“Of course. How much do you want me to tell him?”
“You really trust him?”
“As much as any of these freelancers.”
“Tell him the minimum he needs to know. Don’t let on about any agency connection. And don’t get too specific about the amount of diamonds we’re looking for.”
A flock of seagulls screeched overhead, wings stretched wide against the cold gray sky, wheeling over the industrial park on their way to the Potomac as Santell plodded back to his car. He tried to ignore the nagging feeling of dread that had lingered just beneath the surface of his every waking moment since he’d gotten the news about Tara, but it was no use. He slipped behind the wheel of the car and shook a small white oval pill from a prescription bottle with a trembling hand and dry swallowed it.
The motor started with a purr, and Santell took several deep breaths before putting the transmission in gear. He was one of the most powerful men in the American intelligence community – a veteran of countless black ops and deniable missions, even if he’d largely directed them from the safety of a corner office. He didn’t run scared. Santell was one of the predators in the clandestine jungle, one of the hunters. Matt was a nuisance, an irritant, nothing more. He’d be squashed like a bug eventually – and while Santell didn’t like the idea of unleashing a psychopath like the contract killer known as Drago into the world, he was out of options. McDougal had been around long enough to know how to launder the funds and avoid any trail leading back to them, a prudent step. Drago’s MO was to leave a trail of bodies in his wake, drawing too much attention for Santell’s professional liking.