Damage Control

CHAPTER FOUR

With the PC secure in the backseat, Jonathan swung his M27 to his shoulder to cover Boxers as the Big Guy tossed his ruck into the backseat, slid into the driver’s seat, and started the engine. “First thing to break our way,” Boxers announced. “Keys were in the ignition.”

Jonathan opened the door to the shotgun seat, tossed his ruck on top of Boxers’, and they were moving even before he got the door closed. A few seconds later, after a violent J-turn, they were on their way, spewing a rooster tail of dust behind them.

“You okay, Tristan?” Jonathan shouted. When he didn’t get an answer, he looked behind him into the backseat, where the kid sat in a fetal ball on the floor behind Jonathan. Tall and lean to the point of skinny, the kid was all arms and legs. Filthy and sweaty and blood-smeared, Tristan Wagner’s exhausted expression gave him the look of an old man in a teenager’s body. Good thing he was crouched on the right side of the floor. If he’d been on the left, Boxers might have crushed him as he launched his seat back to make room for his legs.

The boy appeared to have slipped into that non-place that so many PCs-precious cargoes-retreated to as they grappled with the challenge of understanding the unthinkable.

“Tristan?”

The boy’s eyes rocked up to meet Jonathan’s. They were a shade of green that Jonathan associated with cats, not people. He looked ready to cry.

“It’s almost over for you, son,” he said. “I’m sorry for your friends.” He hoped that that last part hadn’t sounded like a throwaway line. He truly was sorry that they’d been killed, and he truly felt for the emotional grater that lay ahead for the kid. More than that, though, he wanted to keep the reality first and foremost in Tristan’s mind. Jonathan had seen too many rescued hostages slip into crippling denial. No matter how awful the truth might be, it was Jonathan’s experience that embracing it early on caused far less emotional trauma in the long run than did the slide into delusion.

As Tristan pressed his hands to his eyes and started to cry, Jonathan turned around to face forward.

“You want to tell me what the hell just happened up there?” Boxers said.

“I have no idea,” Jonathan said. “You got eyeballs on the guys who joined us. What did you see?”

“Looked like army to me,” Boxers replied. “Maybe police, I have a hard time telling them apart.”

“They fired the first shot, right?”

“That’s the way I saw it. They took out the driver, and then everything came unzipped from there.”

Jonathan tried to pull the details into some kind of recognizable form. No one was even supposed to know that they were here.

He’d been contacted the usual way, through a blind email address via a reference from another client. After the security checks were completed, and funds had been deposited in Security Solutions’s offshore account, Jonathan had made contact, via an untraceable prepaid phone, with a Beatrice Almont, who turned out to be the lawyer for the Crystal Palace Cathedral in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The name sounded familiar to Jonathan, and a quick Internet search reminded him that the Crystal Palace was spiritual home to Reverend Jackie Mitchell, a fire-and-brimstoner whose preachings were beamed throughout the world to her million-plus-member congregation.

Ms. Almont obviously had no experience in dealing with the likes of Jonathan, whose line of work made most officers of the court pretty damn jumpy. Under the circumstances, though, she didn’t have much choice.

Tristan and his friends were missionaries from the Crystal Palace, sent to Mexico to help with recovery from a recent earthquake. The very thought of it angered Jonathan. These missionary trips with children were just extended photo ops as far as he was concerned. In the grand scheme of things, what could a bunch of kids possibly contribute that would be worth the risk of sending them into the lawless land of diseases and bad medical care? And after doing so, how could the so-called responsible adults claim to be shocked when things go horribly wrong? Dangle a carrot in front of an alligator’s mouth for long enough, and sooner or later it’s going to snap at it.

In the case of the Crystal Palace missionaries, fate struck swiftly. Less than half an hour after the busload of innocents had crossed into Mexico, gunmen stormed aboard as it was waiting at a traffic light in Ciudad Juárez. The speed with which the ransom demand had arrived in Reverend Mitchell’s email told Jonathan that there was nothing random in this human seizure, and the efficiency of the kidnapping and the subsequent extortion left little doubt in Jonathan’s mind that it was a well-planned operation executed by well-trained, well-funded professionals. In that part of Mexico, that meant Felix Hernandez was involved. The fact that the hostages were subsequently transported over a thousand miles to their current location closer to the Guatemalan border than that of the United States hinted at a cooperative deal between drug lords that meant more trouble for the Mexican government.

The terms of the ransom could not have been simpler: Pay the money, get the hostages back. Done and done. Any attempt to involve the police or the army or the United States government would result in the summary execution of every hostage.

In his initial conversation with lawyer Almont, Jonathan had felt compelled to be blunt, lest she not understand the seriousness of the hostages’ plight. “There’s good news and bad news when dealing with the Mexicans,” he’d said. “The good news is, the drug cartels have reduced kidnapping to a business. They don’t bluff, and they don’t jerk you around. You give the bad guys the cash, and they let their hostages go. If they didn’t, people would stop negotiating with them, and they’d lose a major revenue stream.”

“You’re assuming that this is drug related,” Ms. Almont said. “That isn’t necessarily the case.”

Jonathan’s research showed that she was a corporate lawyer, more used to negotiating lease terms than ransom payments. Her voice didn’t exactly tremble, but the stress was plain. “They were taken in Ciudad Juárez,” Jonathan explained. “If it’s violent, and it’s in Ciudad Juárez, the drug cartels are involved.”

“You sound experienced in these things.”

“I’m assuming that’s why you called me.”

He sensed that she was marking time in the conversation, perhaps to wrap her head around it all. “You said there’s good news and bad news,” she said after a few seconds of silence.

Jonathan thought it was obvious, but apparently not. “Like I said, it’s a business for them. For the intimidation side of the equation to work, they have to show no mercy when the ransom fails to appear.”

“You mean they kill the hostages.”

“I mean, they make a show of killing them as violently and with as much gore as possible before dumping the bodies in a public place in plain sight of dozens of witnesses who know better than to have seen anything. Ciudad Juárez saw four thousand murders last year, all of them carried out by the cartels.”

“Four thousand! Why haven’t I heard about these?” Ms. Almont asked.

“The newspapers won’t write about them,” Jonathan said. “A few of the stories get printed, but mostly they get quashed by the editorial boards.”

“I guess they don’t want to scare off all the tourists,” she guessed.

Jonathan laughed. “Clearly you’ve never been to Ciudad Juárez. No, that’s why they quash the stories about the growing number of murders in Aruba and the Mexican Riviera. Bloodbaths and spring break make bad partners. The reason they suppress the stories in the northern areas is to keep their own families from being targeted.”

He could hear the shock in the lawyer’s voice. “Is it really that bad? The cartels are running the newspapers?”

“And the television stations and the police force and the army. Well-orchestrated intimidation is a powerful weapon, Counselor.”

“So, are you suggesting that we pay the ransom? I thought you specialized in hostage rescue.”

“I specialize in returning hostages to their loved ones,” Jonathan corrected. “If I can accomplish that by paying off the bad guys and not get shot at, I’m happy.”

“And you think that will work?”

“I think we need to plan that it will,” Jonathan hedged. “But we prepare for the possibility that it won’t. They may be businessmen, but they’re also murderers.”

“That’s why we need you,” she said.

“Whether you need me or not is your decision. I’m telling you what we bring to the table.”

“And I’m just supposed to trust you with three million dollars? I don’t even know who you are.”

While Jonathan understood her hesitation, he didn’t have patience for it. “You called me, Counselor,” he said. “Not the other way around. Hire me or don’t hire me. Just don’t waste my time.” One fewer opportunity to put his life on the line for strangers wouldn’t bring a tear to his eye.

Almont said, “I’ve never been in a position like this before. Everything I know tells me that this is a matter for the State Department and the Mexican police.”

“And I’m telling you that’s the biggest mistake you can make. Word travels at the speed of light, and bullets aren’t a whole lot slower. Do not expect hesitation from these people, and don’t expect mercy.”

The lawyer took her time weighing options. “How do I know you’re really the best?”

“You’ve seen my fee,” Jonathan said, “and I assume you heard about me from someone you trust. The fact that I’m still alive to be talking to you must say something.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“Sure you do.”

“Scorpion is not a name. It’s a cartoon character. You could be anybody.”

Jonathan reached the end of his patience. “Okay, Ms. Almont, I’m done with you. If I get word in the next two hours that my fee has been deposited in my account, I’ll get back in touch with you. If I don’t, so be it. Either way, best of luck.”

Then he hung up. Twenty minutes later, he heard from his bank. Four days after that, here they were on the tail end of it all, and the kidnappers had won on every count.

And now this.

“You know, we’ve still got a perfect record,” Boxers said. “For rescues.”

Jonathan appreciated the effort to make today’s outcome somehow less shitty than it really was, but he wasn’t buying.

Boxers read his expression for what it was. “I’m serious. They executed the hostages before we were even part of the game. That’s not on us.”

Then Jonathan understood that the Big Guy wasn’t trying to make Jonathan feel better; he was trying to make himself feel better.

“Something to talk about over some scotch when we get back to the World,” Jonathan said.

“Can’t happen fast enough for me,” Boxers growled.

Jonathan’s earbud popped, startling him. “Scorpion, this is Mother Hen. There’s a problem. A big one.”

Jonathan exchanged looks with Boxers, whose radio carried the same traffic as his. The law of averages mandated that something start going his way. He pressed his transmit button. “Go ahead.”

“SkysEye is picking up heat signatures from people gathered around your first-stage exfil site.”

A big problem indeed. “I need more than that, Mother Hen. What are you telling me?”

From the backseat: “Mother Hen? Who the hell is that?”

“I think I count ten people,” she replied. “Maybe eight, maybe twelve. With the four-minute refresh rate, it’s hard to tell. It looks like they’re setting up an ambush around the vehicles.”

Boxers brought the Toyota to an abrupt halt. “We’re less than half a mile away,” he said, answering Jonathan’s unasked question.

“Less than half a mile from what?” asked Tristan. “What’s happening?” He couldn’t hear the radio traffic, but apparently he could read body language.

It was official now: everything about this mission had come unzipped. And whoever was pulling on the zipper was damn good at his job.

Jonathan said, “Stand by, Mother Hen.” To Tristan, he said, “Stay put. Big Guy, let’s chat outside.”

They exited their respective doors and joined up behind the trunk. “Somebody’s gonna die,” Boxers said. “A trap? Somebody set a trap? Actually, that’s two traps. In less than a half hour. What the hell’s goin’ on, Dig?”

Jonathan’s mind screamed to find an answer. Whatever was going on, the perpetrators had jammed them up big time. Jonathan and Boxers had no legal authority to be where they were in the first place, and they’d just left a field littered with bodies. That in itself wasn’t a big deal, provided they could get out of the country quickly. They’d stashed a Gulfstream G550 corporate jet at the hacienda of Rudolfo Gutierrez for just that purpose, but to use it, they had to get to it, and for that they needed the stashed SUV.

“They knew that we’d need the vehicles,” Jonathan said, “and they knew precisely where we’d stashed them. How is that possible?”

“There’s only one way,” Boxers said. “Somebody sold us out. What do you bet I can talk one of the trap-layers into telling us who?”

“We’re not engaging them.”

Boxers recoiled. “Come again?”

“I said we’re not going to engage. Not with those odds, and not with the PC in tow.”

“Who said I was goin’ to tow him along?”

Jonathan knew that Boxers was just blowing off steam. Their mission began and ended with protecting the PCs and returning them to their homes. This wasn’t the time to pick a fight, even if the fight had been picked for them first.

“We don’t need the vehicles anymore,” Jonathan said. “When we planned this, we thought we were going to have a bunch of PCs. Now we’re down to one, and we’ve already got a vehicle. That’ll be fine.”

Boxers dropped his voice to a whisper. “No, it won’t. Our supplies are all there. Our IDs. Shit, half our ammo. We can’t just leave all of that.”

“We’ll have to,” Jonathan said. There was no sense arguing the point. No way was he going to lead a party this size into a dozen guns. Certainly not when they were already lying in wait. Suicide was not on the agenda.

“I don’t think this piece of shit has enough fuel to get us to Gutierrez’s place,” Boxers said. “And I’m guessing that gas stations will be hard to come by.”

“We can’t use the Gulfstream anymore, either,” Jonathan said. The depth and desperateness of the situation was just beginning to hit him. “If they know about the ransom drop, and they know about the first-stage exfil site, we have to assume that they’ll know about the Gulfstream. We can’t risk it.”

Boxers’ eyes narrowed as he processed the ramifications. “Look, Dig-Scorpion-let me put something on the record here. I am not retiring in Mexico. This place is a cesspool.”

“I agree on both counts,” Jonathan said. “But I’m not dying here, either. We have to figure out another way.”

“It’s a thousand friggin’ miles,” Boxers said.

“So, clearly, we’re not walking. We need to think of something else.” He pressed his mike button. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”

“I’m here.”

“We’ve got a pretty significant change of plans here.” As he detailed all of the careful planning that now was meaningless, Jonathan tried to shake away the growing sense of dread that blossomed in his belly.