Fear No Evil

Chapter 58

Mexico City

Later that morning in the Mexican capital, Matthew Butler went to the window on the empty fourth floor of a building at the corner of Calle de Venustiano and José María Pino Suárez. With latex gloves on, he moved the window shade just enough to see diagonally across the intersection to the Mexican National Supreme Court of Justice.

“Highest law in the land,” Butler said.

“Traffic?” M said in his ear.

“No less than any Tuesday when it’s already blistering hot out at seven a.m.”

“Timing has to be perfect for the statement to have impact.”

“It does,” Butler said. “We good?”

“You are go.”

“Roll,” Butler said into his jawbone microphone.

“Rolling,” Vincente said. “Forty seconds out.”

Purdy said, “Walking at my target.”

“Squared up on mine,” Cortland said.

Butler took his eyes off the street and looked over two windows to the profile of his sniper. Cortland held a powerful, accurate, multi-shot air gun attached to a small compressor. He had the barrel and the first two inches of his telescopic sight aimed through slits he’d cut in the blind.

“Thirty seconds, taking a right onto José María Pino Suárez,” Vincente said. “Twenty-five seconds.”

“Got you,” Butler said, seeing the top of the nondescript white cargo van with graffiti on the side coming down the street at him in the far lane along a line of inadequate green traffic barriers. “Twenty seconds. Take him, Cort. Take him, Purdy.”

Butler heard Cortland’s first shot; it sounded like the thud of a beefy paintball gun. The dart whistled across the intersection and struck a federal police officer in the side of his neck. He staggered two feet and dropped.

Cortland changed barrels on his gun. On the far sidewalk, Purdy walked toward the main entrance to the seat of high justice in Mexico, using her skills at being small and going unnoticed, raising a kerchief over her face, just waiting for the first scream.

It came from the far corner of the block.

Purdy slipped diagonally left toward the two armed guards at the entrance to the supreme court. Seeing them strain to look toward the sounds of shouting, she brought out her two small air pistols and shot both guards at close range; it was no more than three feet from her to the sides of their necks, where darts were now embedded.

“Jump to it,” Butler said.

The men dropped in their tracks. Purdy stepped over them a nanosecond before the reinforced-steel bumper of Vincente’s cargo van smashed through the inadequate barrier designed to protect the courthouse and skidded to a stop on the sidewalk a few feet beyond the entrance to the court.

The rear doors flew open. Wearing a black Day of the Dead mask, Big DD leaped out, dragging two corpses by the napes of their necks behind him.

He hauled them up the steps of the courthouse and left them sprawled there, returning to help Vincente with the third and largest of the corpses, the one in the uniform of the Mexican army. They dumped him in the middle.

Purdy unfurled a banner over the three bodies, then ran to the rear of the cargo van and jumped in. Vincente accelerated down the sidewalk, laying on the horn before swinging the bumper at another inadequate steel fence that broke on impact.

“Diversion,” Butler said.

Cortland’s air gun coughed twice, sending a smoke bomb and then the tear gas into the street crossing. Vincente drove through the intersection and out the other side, leaving a curtain of yellow smoke and people coughing behind them.

Butler went to Cortland, grabbed pieces of the air gun as he disassembled it, and put them in his knapsack.

“Get rid of that van, JP, and get to the landing strip,” Butler said as he left. “We have a plane to catch and I can smell the Wyoming high country calling.”