Guardian of Lies

TWENTY-NINE

Liquida watched as the bus made the left turn across four lanes of traffic and slipped into the right lane on Prospect. The lumbering bus moved like a snail. Cars were backed up behind it, trying to make their way toward the ramp, but the bus had them blocked.

“Now comes the tricky part,” said Liquida under his breath, “traffic control.”

As the bus took the tight turn onto the ramp, it nearly came to a complete stop. It eased down the ramp at fifteen miles an hour, and the man with the duffel bag sprang from the grass at the edge of the ramp. With his hand up, he stepped behind the bus as it passed and stopped the line of traffic behind it. Before the driver of the first car realized what was happening, the man with the duffel bag had flung a small satchel. The nylon bag, covered with graphite dust, slid like a hockey puck over the pavement and under the front end of the car. The man with the bag turned and ran in the other direction, down the ramp, toward the bus.

“What the hell?” As the driver started to lift his foot off the brake pedal, the fiery explosion buckled the center of his car and flipped it into the air. The blast ignited the gas in the fuel tank. A half second later the fiery wreck landed on top of the car behind it. A mushroom-shaped bloom of flame leaped thirty feet into the air and engulfed both vehicles.

“Now that’s the way to stop traffic,” said Liquida.

He shifted the field glasses to look down the ramp toward the bus. Sure enough, human nature had done its part. With the blast, the bus driver had looked in his big side-view mirror. He’d seen the flames and the flying car and instinct took over. He hit the brakes. It was only a few seconds, but it was enough. He was barely rolling, still looking in the mirror, when the box truck pulled out in front of him and blocked the ramp.

“Look out,” said the guard.

By the time the driver looked back to the front and realized what was happening, it was too late, the ramp was blocked and he had no momentum to punch his way through.

Five of the button boys came out of the back of the truck, the other two exited from the cab. All of them were wearing dark glasses, their faces covered with scarves. They carried their assault rifles slung from their shoulders and aimed from the hip as they moved swiftly toward the front of the bus.

The guard unlocked the shotgun from its rack as the driver tried to put the bus in reverse. The explosives man with the duffel bag, running down the ramp behind them, slid another satchel charge under the rear of the bus and flung himself facedown on the ground.

The blast lifted the rear wheels of the bus three feet off the pavement. It shredded all eight rear tires on the double dual axles and blew out the transmission. By the time the rear end landed back on the ground, the bus was a stationary death trap.

Several of the women up front on the bus were screaming.

The explosion lifted both Katia and Daniela off the bench seat. It would have sent them to the ceiling except that the ankle chain and the falling weight of the bus jerked them back down, hard, on the thin seat cushion, jamming their backs.

Katia was dazed. She held her head with her hands, looking up first at the ceiling and then turning her head from side to side to make sure her neck wasn’t hurt. “A-a-a-ah…What happened?”

“I don’t know.” As she said it Daniela heard the hollow ping of metal as the first rounds ripped into the bus, followed half a beat later by the distinctive clatter of Kalashnikovs on full automatic somewhere outside.

“Get down,” she told Katia. Daniela reached for the small Walther under her arm. It was wedged into the tight elastic at the side of her sports bra. “Get down on the floor.”

“How?” said Katia. She was looking at the chain that joined them around their waists. “Where did you get that?” Katia saw the gun in Daniela’s hand.

“Never mind, just get down, as low as you can behind the seat.” Chained at the waist, they had to move together if they were going to find cover. With their ankles locked to the metal bar, they were stuck where they were. Their only protection was the thin pad of upholstery on the back of the seat in front of them and the light-gauge sheet-metal backing that supported it.

The first burst of rounds went high, punching two holes at the top of the windshield and perforating the metal above it. The driver and the guard seemed stunned when they realized that the bulletproof windshield had failed to stop the rounds. The guard punched the button on his shoulder mike and began to call it in.

“Need backup. Shots fired, explosive devices…”

“What’s your location?”

The second burst by all seven button boys instantly transformed the entire windshield, from left to right, into what looked like a lacy pattern of frosted glass, a frozen fog of fractured crystals. The glass stayed in place, it didn’t shatter, but it was no longer transparent. Every one of the fifty or so armor-piercing rounds passed cleanly through and into the interior of the bus.

One of the assault team with his rifle at the ready cautiously stepped to the passenger side of the bus and glanced through the thick glass in the door. The bloody bundle that had been the guard lay crumpled up against the door, on the stairway inside. The back of the driver’s seat looked like Swiss cheese, with tiny strips of foam padding protruding from the back out of each bullet hole. The driver, wet with various shades of crimson, leaned toward the door like a rag doll, his upper body perpendicular to the floor, his arms dangling, as his lower body was held in place by the seat belt.

The button boy slung his weapon over his shoulder and gave the rest of them the all-clear sign. Two of them quickly swapped out clips. They replaced the armor-piercing rounds, to avoid shooting their comrades through the walls of the bus, slapping new clips with hollow points into their rifles. For them, shooting accuracy was no longer an issue. From here on out, everything would be point-blank.

Two of the others quickly took up positions behind the bus, making sure no one came down the ramp behind them. Two others positioned themselves on the freeway side of the bus to watch for any law enforcement that might approach from the highway, while one of them watched Magnolia Avenue from the other side to ensure that their getaway path was clear.

The explosives man took out the shaped charge from his bag. It was a roll of synthetic material that looked and felt like children’s Play-Doh. He had worked it into the shape of a rope about an inch thick and twelve feet long. He started at the foot of the bus door and pressed it against the metal. In less than a minute he’d outlined the entire perimeter of the armored door. He pressed a single detonator cap into the soft plastic and pulled the fuse. As it started to smoke, the men on that side of the bus scattered and took cover. A few seconds later there was a loud explosion and the heavy metal door fell from its frame, the strong inside hinges and all four of the locking bolts severed.

The entry team, the two men with rifles loaded with hollow points, whisked some of the smoke away with a sweep of their hands as they swung the muzzles of their rifles into play once more. One of them grabbed the guard in the stairway and rolled his body out onto the pavement. He reached down to retrieve the officer’s sidearm.

The explosives man asked him for the key to the wire-mesh cage inside.

The kid with the pistol pulled the guard’s keys off his belt. There must have been twenty of them on the ring.

“Forget it,” said the explosives man. He reached into his bag and pulled out another small charge and climbed into the bus. He walked toward the steel-and-wire mesh cage and pressed the malleable explosive charge directly over the round steel disk housing the lock for the gate.

He noticed that the mesh of the cage was severed and mangled, with jagged pieces of wire sticking out in several places directly behind the driver’s seat, where bullets had passed through the cage. The two women in the first seat inside the cage on that side were already dead, their heads thrown back, their eyes and mouths open as blood ran off the seat and covered the rubber floor mat that ran down the aisle. He looked closely through the wire mesh, but neither woman appeared to be either the one in the picture or the other target whose photograph they had memorized.

He worked to flatten the charge against the lock.

There was a lot of crying and whimpering back in the cage. One woman pleaded with him from behind the wire, her hands pressed together in prayer as she begged him not to hurt her.

He finished shaping, pressed a detonator into the charge, and in a fluid motion pulled the fuse.

He stepped off the bus pushing the two button boys ahead of him until they were a few feet away. The sharp crack of the explosion was followed by more screams inside the bus.

The explosives man gestured toward the bus with a wag of his head as he started to close up his bag while smoke billowed from the bus door. “Rápido, huh!”

The two killers waved away the smoke and climbed the bus steps to finish the job. At first they couldn’t see. A gray white mist filled the front of the bus along with the acrid smell of burnt nitrate. As the smoke began to settle, they could see a large hole in the wire mesh on the gate where the lock had been.

They moved quickly, threw the gate open, and started down the aisle.

The women cowered, some of them down on the floor between the seats, crying.

One of the button boys held the photograph while the other grabbed the women by the hair, one at a time, pulling their heads up so the two men could see their faces. They worked from side to side, first checking seats on the right, then the left, moving toward the rear of the bus.

Halfway down, they stopped. The one holding the photograph held it out right next to the woman’s face. The guy holding her by the hair shook his head.

“Es ella,” said the one holding the photo.

“No.” The other one shook his head.

Before he could say another word, the man holding the photograph raised the guard’s pistol and fired a round into the woman’s head. Her blood sprayed the prisoner sitting next to her and the wall of the bus behind her.

The sound of the shot and the arbitrary manner in which it happened took Daniela by surprise.

“What’s happening?” Katia was glued to Daniela by the waist chain that bound them together.

“Just stay down and be quiet.” Daniela pulled the slide back on the Walther and chambered the first round as quietly as she could. The small pistol carried only six shots in the clip. She would have to make them count.

She wanted to try and get the two men closer before she fired. If she could drop them in the aisle a few feet away, she might be able to reach one of the assault rifles slung from their shoulders and fish for extra clips before any of the rest of them could board the bus.

Somewhere off in the distance she could hear the sounds of sirens punctuated by the bleep and blare of their electronics as the police maneuvered through traffic.

After killing the woman, the two button boys continued the process, pulling hair and quickly moving down the aisle. When Daniela peeked around the edge of the seat in front of her, they were just six rows away. Three or four more and she would show them the muzzle of the pistol and take her chances.

Suddenly she heard them talking again. One of them was dressing down the other in street Spanish; “pendejo,” calling him a “dumbass.”

Daniela peeked around the edge of the seat again. They had another woman by the hair and were holding the picture up to her face.

“I told you the other one wasn’t her. Pero usted tiene que ser el hombre. But you have to be the man.”

“Okay. Enough!” The other guy, who was closest to Daniela, standing sideways in the aisle, started to raise the pistol toward the woman’s head. In a fluid motion Daniela leaned into the aisle, dragging Katia with her. She raised the Walther in one hand, braced it with the other, and pulled off a round. It caught the man with the pistol in the left temple. His knees buckled and he went to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

As his buddy fell, the other one still had the woman by her hair. His head and eyes snapped toward Daniela. He let go of the hair. The woman started screaming instantly.

The man tried to swing the AK-47, its muzzle hanging down from the sling over his shoulder, up into firing position. His finger had just reached the trigger guard when Daniela fired the second round.

The sound of the shot was swallowed in the frantic screeches of the woman. A tiny speck of red the size of a pinprick appeared on the man’s forehead, above his frozen gaze. An instant later the spot spread to the diameter of a pencil. He toppled over backward, hitting the tubular steel along the top of one of the bench seats. His body spun as he slammed facedown onto the hard steel floor of the aisle.

The woman was still screaming at the top of her lungs, hyperventilating with hysteria and expelling everything.

“Move with me,” Daniela told Katia.

She tried. Katia pulled herself out into the aisle as her foot tugged and strained at the end of the ankle chain.

Daniela crawled forward down the aisle. She gained two or three feet, threw her body flat out on the floor dragging Katia with her. She stretched, reaching for the rifle on the first dead man. But the slack on the chain wasn’t enough. She needed at least another foot. She yanked frantically on the waist chain as Katia tried desperately to pull herself farther out.

The woman continued to scream.

“Shut up.” Daniela looked up at her. “Get the rifle. You can reach it,” said Daniela. “Just hand it to me. That’s all you have to do.”

The woman didn’t look at her. She stared out at nothing. Her face was being scratched by the frantic action of her own grasping finger as her frenzied screams reached fever pitch.

“Please!” cried Daniela. “Just lean over and hand me the gun. You’ll be fine. I can keep them away from us if I have the gun,” she pleaded.

One of the other women ten or twelve rows up crawled out from between the seats, looked back at Daniela, and then reached out and grabbed the assault rifle on the other dead man. She grasped it with one hand.

Daniela looked at her and smiled. “Good! Now pass it to me.”

The woman carefully slid the shoulder strap off the dead man.

“See if you can reach the bag on his other shoulder. It should have loaded clips,” said Daniela.

The woman reached out and got the bag. She looked inside, reached in and pulled out one of the clips, holding it up for Daniela to see.

“Good,” said Daniela. “Toss the bag first. Then the gun.”

The woman looked at her as the other one continued to scream. “How does it work? Do I just pull the trigger?”

“No, don’t do that,” said Daniela. “See the lever on the right, on the side above the trigger? Push it all the way up until it’s pointing in the same direction as the barrel. That will put the safety on.”

The woman found the lever and pushed it up.

“Good. Now throw the rifle back here.”

“No,” said the woman. “You’re too far back. You can’t protect us from there.”

“I can,” said Daniela.

“Vamos. Apresurar. Hurry up. What’s all the noise in there?” One of the men pounded on the outside of the bus two or three times. He was running, moving forward toward the open door of the bus.

The woman stopped screaming.

“We don’t have all day,” said the man.

“Throw it to me,” said Daniela.

The woman holding the rifle looked frantically back toward her. As she turned back toward the door, she seemed to freeze.

“The police will be here any minute.”

The man bounded up the steps and into the bus. “What’s taking so long? Let’s move.” He looked through the cage door down the aisle. The first thing he saw were the two dead button boys lying on the floor. Next he saw the muzzle of the rifle aimed at his chest.

For an instant she hesitated. Then she pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. She had forgotten to flip the safety lever down.

Daniela reached back on the floor behind her for the Walther, but it was too late. She touched the handle of the gun just as the ear-splitting sound of the man’s Kalashnikov and the odor of burnt nitrates from the gunpowder filled the bus.

Daniela got only a glimpse as the opening spray of bullets caught the woman holding the rifle full in the chest. It lifted her off the floor, leaving the rifle in midair, as if it were wired in place, for a full second before it fell. The impact threw her lifeless body across the seat and she collided with the wall of the bus.

Daniela hugged the floor, Katia right behind her, their heads down as the guy emptied the full banana clip into the passenger section of the bus. One of the rounds ricocheted off steel and caromed off the floor.

Katia flinched as she felt something hit Daniela.

It caught her at the top of the shoulder, snapping bone and missing her head by inches. She winced in pain as she heard the quick screams and the dull thud of bullets as they made their marks on others.

When the firing stopped Daniela lifted her head. The woman who had been screaming was sitting straight up in her seat, staring off into the distance. The wall of the bus behind her had more holes than a saltshaker, but the woman hadn’t been touched. It is true what they say, thought Daniela, God protects those who are crazy.

The shooter stepped back, away from the cage. Daniela saw him slip down behind the metal partition and into the well of the stairs. Then she heard the click of metal as he changed out clips. He called out to his friends outside and told them to come. There was trouble in the bus.

“If we want to live, we have to move,” she told Katia. They crawled on their knees back between the seats, dragging the clinking ankle chains with them. “Whatever you do, stay down,” said Daniela, “as close to the floor as you can.”

“You’re bleeding,” said Katia.

“I know.” Daniela’s right arm hung limp. The right shoulder and chest area of her jail jumpsuit were already soaked with blood.

The sirens were now closer than before. From the direction of the sound, they might be approaching on the freeway.

“We’ll be okay,” said Katia. “I know we will.”

They could hear the muted voices of the men as they talked just outside the door to the bus. They were frenzied, in a hurry. They had to know they were running out of time. Katia and Daniela could hear shooting in the distance, somewhere behind the bus.

“If they come again they will come very quickly,” said Daniela. “There may be explosions in the bus. It’s very important to stay down low, as close to the floor as you can get. In the confusion and smoke they may not see you. If you can survive for the next five minutes, you’ll be okay.”

Katia looked at her. Her friend’s eyes had a distant, glazed look to them. The blood from her shoulder had soaked much of the top of her blue jail jumpsuit. Katia reached down to the bottom of her own pants leg and pulled hard at the stitching on the inseam until the threads holding it together ripped. She quickly opened eight inches of the seam and then was tearing the fabric from around the bottom of her leg until the cloth came free. She folded it into a compress.

“Daniela, we have to stop the bleeding.”

“Katia, you need to know. My name is not Daniela. It’s Carla Mederios…”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Katia. “What I know is that you are my friend. The only friend I have.”