Damage Control

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jackie filled Abrams in on the details of the cyber attack, pausing every few sentences to let the raucous boor vent his derisive laughter.

When she was done, Abrams said, “Holy hell, Madre. Your shit pile just keeps getting deeper and deeper, doesn’t it?” And then he laughed again. Everything Jackie said was a giant joke to him. “How the hell am I going to keep your ass off the gurney in the lethal injection room if you keep screwing up like this?”

In her mind, she could see his big frame with his gray hair and his bushy mustache. That threatening air about him that permeated everything he did and every word he spoke.

“It’s your own fault, you know,” Abrams pressed. “I told Mr. Hainsley just this afternoon that it was a mistake for you to overreach. It’s not enough for you to be three-million greedy, you needed to be six-million greedy. How many friggin’ pink limousines do you need, anyways?”

Never in her adult life had anyone spoken to her as Abrams did, and never before would she have tolerated it. She’d learned, though, that she needed to endure, because Abrams was her connection to the practicalities that governed the dark side of humanity.

And he wasn’t done. “I hope that sixteen-year-old was hung like a stallion, lady, and sent you to the moon with orgasms. Otherwise, I can’t imagine how all of this was worth it.”

“He was seventeen!” she snapped. “And he said he was eighteen. I am not a pedophile.” And he had indeed been hung like a stallion, and a more tender, sensitive soul never walked the earth. But no one cared about such details.

“Tomato, tomahto,” Abrams said. “It’s still a stinkin’ shit pile.”

“Enough, Mr. Abrams,” she snapped. “Must you take such pleasure in your work?”

“You can’t even call it work if you have fun at it, Madre. But let’s talk about what kind of special shovel we can build to make that pile smaller.”

The scatological metaphors had long ago grown tiresome. “First tell me what you think it all means,” Jackie said.

“I can’t say for sure, but there’s a good chance it means that somebody is putting the right pieces together. That’s bad for you and your board members.”

“It’s bad for you, too, Mr. Abrams.”

“Probably not, actually. You must have figured out by now that my name’s not really Abrams. My client isn’t really Dennis Hainsley, either. They can trace all that to ground, and they got nothing. What are the chances that somebody called the cops on you?”

Jackie switched to her wireless headset and paced her office as she spoke. When she got to the window, she traced the pleats of the Belgian linen drapes with her finger. “I can’t imagine who,” she said. “Outside of a very small group, no one even knows that the children were taken.” A thought flashed through her mind, triggering a gasp. “Oh, my goodness. When the bodies were found, were the families notified?”

“Negative,” Abrams said. “The bodies were found by the right people. Nobody’s gonna know anything about them.”

She stopped pacing. “You’re planning to repatriate the remains, aren’t you?”

“Repatriate!” Abrams laughed. “Who the hell uses words like that? What, you walk around with a friggin’ dictionary? No, we’re not going to repatriate the bodies. We’re not even gonna return them. We’re gonna burn them so no one will ever know they were there.”

“But you can’t,” Jackie declared. “The families!”

“Are you friggin’ kidding me? Now you’re worried about the families? Holy shit, Madre, you really are a piece of work.” Another long laugh.

Jackie Mitchell hated this man. Hated everything he stood for, and hated herself for ever being persuaded to go along. She was tempted to remind him of his promises that no one would be harmed, but she knew that her words would be met with more laughter. She was tired of the laughter. And the thought of those young men and women’s bodies being burned, no doubt without even rudimentary Christian services, made her stomach churn. It just got worse and worse.

Abrams regained control. “I gotta tell you, then, if it ain’t the cops that are comin’ at you, then chances are it’s the targets that are on the way. I don’t really know who these guys are, but I know people who’ve crossed them in the past, and frankly, Madre, you’d be better off if it was the cops. Give me a second to think this through.”

Again, she could see his face in her mind. He had a tendency to rub his mouth with his fingers when he was steeped in thought.

“Okay, here’s what I’m gonna do,” Abrams said. “I’m gonna lean on a friend to beef up your security forces there. Give you some real professional talent.”

“We have a security force,” Jackie said.

“No, you don’t. You’ve got rent-a-cops who hang out in your lobby and look important. The guys I’m sending over actually know what they’re doing.”

“What are they going to do when they get here?” Jackie asked. “I mean, what will they, you know, do?”

A beat passed in silence. “My God, Madre, you really don’t get it, do you? You helped us try to kill two very, very dangerous men. Only it didn’t work. The fat lady hasn’t sung yet, but if we don’t stop them, these very dangerous men are gonna declare war. If they’ve figured out that you’re connected to it all-and I’m guessing that if they’ve followed the trail to the donors, then they’ve figured it out-your Crystal Palace is gonna be like the modern-day Omaha Beach. Are you following me?”

Again, it was important to make sure that all terms were properly defined. “You’re saying that they’re going to seek revenge.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Abrams said. “Only last time I saw these guys seek revenge, they burned close to a hundred acres and killed a couple dozen people. That’s more than your standard revenge, don’t you think?”

As her knees went weak, Jackie sat on the edge of her desk, in the process knocking over three pictures of her standing with as many presidents of the United States. “Oh my good Lord,” she said.

“Well, he’d be good to have on your side,” Abrams mocked, “but I’m betting He’s gonna let you ride this one out without Him. If these folks bring you a war, I think you should have some soldiers to fight back with. That’s what I’m gonna send you. They should be there in the morning.”

It was all more than Jackie could process. Might there be violence here? In this holy place? Surely not.

“You still there, Madre?”

“Yes, Mr. Abrams, I’m still here.”

“Good, ’cause I got one more bit of advice for you: If this shit doesn’t get straightened out, it’s time to have a rearview mirror installed on your forehead.”

The church kept its truck in a makeshift garage-a cross between a barn and a shed-in the far northwest corner of the property. Boxers had moved the rickety Toyota to the yard next to the barn, and Jonathan worked with him to transfer their gear from the Toyota to the Pathfinder. The jerricans of gasoline took up far more room than anything else. Tristan was off with his host family, and while that instilled some element of unease in Jonathan, it was nice to be shed of the kid for a while.

“Okay, Boss,” Boxers said, “so now we’ve got a new vehicle. What are we going to do with it?” He carried two fifty-pound rucksacks as if they were briefcases.

Jonathan laughed. “Here’s where the plan gets a little fuzzy.”

“You don’t have a clue, do you?” Boxers joined him in the laughter.

“We actually have a contact now. In Ciudad Juárez. Her name is Maria Elizondo.”

“Where does this name come from?” Big Guy asked.

“Wolverine via Special Friend via Mother Hen.”

Boxers laughed louder. “One day, I want to see a transcript of my life. Even I am shocked that all this shit makes sense to me. Who, pray tell, is Maria Elizondo?”

Jonathan filled him in on the details relayed from Irene Rivers.

Boxers threw the rucks onto the backseat, leaving just enough room for their PC’s narrow ass. “Does Ms. Elizondo know we’re coming?” he asked.

“Probably not. But we bring the offer of asylum if she shows us the way to the secret tunnels she claims to know about.”

“Wonderful. So all we have to do is convince her to believe a couple of random gringos. What could possibly go wrong?”

“Suppose I promise to let you shoot someone?” Jonathan quipped. “Will that make you feel better?”

“Don’t tease me,” Boxers joked back. “What about new IDs?”

Jonathan shrugged. “If this works, we won’t need them. And if it doesn’t work, we really won’t need them.”

Boxers turned serious as he dumped the last of the duffels onto the floor of the Pathfinder. “We’re putting a lot of faith in someone we’ve never heard of.”

“No,” Jonathan corrected. “We’re putting a lot of faith in Wolverine, who’s never let us down.” It was a statement of fact, but Boxers’ larger point was undeniable. Trust did not come easily to either one of them. After the events of today, it was an especially rare commodity.

“So, all we have to do is cross a thousand miles of jungle and desert,” Boxers said. “And after that, we get to the hard part.” The center of Mexico was much like the center of Nevada-a lot of hot, sandy rolling nothingness.

“Something like that,” Jonathan agreed. Boxers sounded cranky, but Jonathan knew that he loved a good adventure. “It’ll be dark in twenty or thirty minutes. We’ll give Tristan an hour or two to clean up and grab some food, then we’ll head out.”

Boxers scowled as he ran numbers through his head. “You know that’s thirty or forty hours of driving time, right? Divided by ten hours of darkness each night, that’s four days, Dig. That’s a lot of time for the bad guys to get their shit together. The last five hundred miles or so will be through the desert. That means we’ll be really exposed.”

Jonathan wasn’t hearing anything he didn’t already know. “I thought about going to the coast and finding a boat, but once we get close to the U.S. shore, the Coasties will be all over us.”

“How’s that different from a land crossing? I mean if Maria What’s-her-face turns out to be a bust?”

“Uncle Sam doesn’t have radar deployed along land. Terra firma leaves us with more options to duck and dodge. And if Maria Elizondo turns out to be a dead end, we’ll have to go back to the original plan and find us a forger.”

Boxers crossed his arms and leaned back against the side of the truck, his legs crossed in front of him. “You figuring to drive at night and hunker down during the day?”

“Exactly,” Jonathan said. “I think it’s foolish to assume that someone in this village isn’t going to turn us in. We took out their ability to make a landline call, and I don’t think there’s a useable cell tower within twenty miles, but there’s still shortwave and God knows what else. Father Perón made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t think that we’re safe here, and that the longer we’re around, the more danger we pose to the villagers. I want to be well-gone before any of that happens.”

Boxers shrugged. “Maybe we should just plow straight through and take our chances. The less time in country, the better our chances, right?”

“Depends. There are a lot of moving parts to this thing. The closer we get to the border, the more surveillance there is. I’m not sure it’s in our best interests to get there before Mother Hen and Lady Justice have had a chance to work out what’s really going on here. I know that you won’t go to jail without a fight-”

“Got that right.”

“-and I know that Wolverine doesn’t want us in custody, either. Meanwhile, we’ve got to assume that there’s a shoot-on-sight order out there for us here in Mexico.”

“So let’s just plow through and take our chances,” Boxers said.

It was a fair argument, Jonathan thought. The toughest roads were going to be through the jungle. Once they hit the desert stretches of Chihuahua they’d be able to haul ass. Using night vision, they could haul ass invisibly. “Okay,” he said. “I say we drive hard and long to put as much space as possible between us and this place. Under the cover of the jungle, I don’t see a problem driving in the daytime. When we get to the desert, we pull out all the stops. That’ll give the home team two days to untie the other end of the knot.”

Boxers sealed the deal with a nod. “Done,” he said. Then: “Who do you think is trying to screw us?”

“According to Mother Hen, Wolverine thinks she knows.” He caught Boxers up on all that he had learned through Dom’s chat with Irene.

“Unbelievable,” the Big Guy said when he was done. “So that asshole Ponder is diddling me from the grave. Man, I knew I should have killed him twice.”