Power and Empire

42

Ding Chavez and Adara Sherman sat at a sidewalk café nursing cold bottles of Quilmes Patagonia beer while they listened intently to the drama playing across their earpieces. They were too far away to hear the report of the blast, but they’d been able to tell something was up from the alarmed reactions of Midas and Jack. Ding stifled the human urge to ask questions and give advice. He wasn’t on scene, and Jack was doing a good job of keeping him up to speed as things went down. It was best to keep his mouth shut and let the operators do what they did best — operate. And anyway, things were about to get interesting here. At eight blocks away, the brunette would be there in minutes.

Adara suddenly tipped the neck of her beer toward the Italian restaurant two businesses to the east. “Chen’s moving. Looks like he just put one cell phone in his pocket and took out a second. He’s in comms with somebody.”

Chen put the second phone away and walked to the street with another Asian male. Both men looked up and down the wide sidewalk before trotting diagonally across Junín and turning left to walk briskly along the fifteen-foot brick wall surrounding the cemetery.

Chavez peeled a couple hundred-peso notes off the roll in his pocket and left them on the table. Tipping was outside the norm in Argentina. The waitress would think him an idiot turista for leaving the equivalent of twelve bucks for two beers that cost half that, but it was better than her chasing them down street for leaving too little.

Chavez pushed away from the table and held up the flat of his hand, signaling for Adara to hang back while he took the first eyeball on Chen. She nodded and crossed the street directly while he took a more diagonal route to intercept Chen’s trail immediately. She’d follow at a respectable distance and the two would leapfrog, so as to give a fresh face to the follow. Chavez slowed a half-step when Chen and the other man hung a right at the end of the block, still following the cemetery wall. Chavez continued across the street and then turned right himself so as not to round the corner where Chen had gone without checking it out first from a different vantage point. The two Asians were still moving steadily, not quite trotting, halfway down the block now.

“Got your right,” Adara said, letting Chavez know she’d seen the turn.

Ryan and Midas were still giving a play-by-play of their individual pursuits. Chavez waited for them to pause, then claimed the airspace.

“Listen up,” he said. “We got a lot going on. Keep the bullshit to a minimum. Necessary traffic only. Speed, direction, and any threats. Got it?”

Ryan responded with “North on Callao.”

“North… Rodríguez Peña… behind the shooter,” Midas said, still running.

“I’m right behind you, Ding,” Adara said, for Midas and Jack’s benefit.

Chavez started to give his location when the two men ahead of him broke into a run, taking another right at the end of the block.

Adara picked up her pace. “They see you?”

“I don’t think so,” Chavez said.

He called out the location, following his own orders so Jack and Midas could keep up with the common operating picture. He trotted now, again swinging wide around the corner to avoid an ambush. He made it around in time to see the second Asian scale a construction fence behind Chen. Both men scrambled up some scaffolding to the top of a construction trailer, and then bounded over the cemetery wall and out of sight.

Adara ran up behind Chavez, turning to check behind herself as she came to a stop. It was long past the time to try to stay covert if anyone was trailing them down the dark street.

“You sure they didn’t see you?” Adara said again. Both she and Chavez cupped their hands over their chests, blocking the neck mics so they didn’t clutter the radio net.

Chavez said, “They never looked behind them.”

“Cemetery gates are locked up for the night,” Adara said. “We’ll have to go in the same way they did.”

Chavez rubbed his face and studied the construction trailer, his mind racing. He’d been in leadership positions in the past two decades. Hell, he’d led a team of some of the most elite operators with Rainbow. But life was so much easier when he’d been an impetuous troop and could let the bosses worry about the magnet in his ass that pulled him, without thinking, toward danger. He’d never been very good about aborting a pursuit, but he reminded himself that he had the entire team to consider. Like a good leader, he made the decision look as though it was second nature.

“First rule of following someone blind into a dark alley?”

“Is not to follow someone blind into a dark alley,” Adara finished his mantra. It was one of many, and she knew it well. “You gotta admit, the cemetery is a heck of a good SDR. It’s a maze in there. They’d know for sure if we followed them in.”

“The problem with an alley,” Ding said, toying with the beginnings of a plan, “is that you’re walking into a fatal funnel — that is, the way you’re expected to walk in. We just need to find a different way than the one they used.”

Hellooo, Midas,” Jack hailed his fellow operator, once he’d learned Chen had gone over the cemetery wall. “What’s your position?”

“Rodríguez Peñ—” he said, cutting out, still breathless.

“You’re moving parallel to us,” Ryan said.

The brunette moved more quickly now, still walking, but much faster than the rest of the crowd. She touched her ear as she jigged around a bus-stop shelter, in comms with somebody. Looking right at the next intersection, she paused for a split second, then ran across the street to her left.

“She’s coming toward you, Ding,” Jack said.

With his eyes on the brunette, he didn’t see the oncoming Japanese woman until it was too late, and the two ran headlong into each other. The woman bounced away, falling sideways, spitting like an angry cat. Ryan was stunned from the impact but able to remain standing. He reached down to offer the woman a hand, but she slapped it away, springing to her feet, ready to run again. Midas had caught up by now and grabbed a handful of her collar, giving it a yank, lifting the sputtering woman off her feet. She’d been holding a cell phone when they collided and it now lay on the ground with a badly damaged screen.

People on the street were still stampeding away from the bomb blast around the corner, and ran by without interfering.

“Let. Me. Go.” The woman said it through a clenched jaw. Her English was accented English but very good. “She is… escaping.”

Ryan turned to watch the brunette disappear into the darkness at the other end of the block, then turned back to Midas, both hands up, as if to say What gives?

Midas knew exactly what he meant. “You can’t hear me, can you?”

Ryan shook his head.

Midas raised his eyebrows. “Then my radio’s tits-up. I tried to tell you we were coming. Took me a half a block to realize I wasn’t hearing my own voice.”

Chavez came across the net, unaware of this new development.

“We’re walking toward you on south side of the cemetery,” he said. “We’re trying to find a way in that won’t get our asses handed to us.”

“Copy,” Ryan said. “Midas is with me, but his comms are down. I’ve lost sight of the brunette. We’re having a talk with our Japanese friend.”

Chavez’s dismay was apparent. “You made contact?”

Ryan rubbed his aching ribs, injured for a second time by a female hurtling through space. We sure did, he thought. He said, “I’ll explain later.”

He relayed Chavez’s situation and location to Midas.

The Japanese woman reached for the shattered phone, but Midas wrenched her arm back with the hand that wasn’t holding her neck. She was shorter than Jack by seven or eight inches, fit, built like a runner. Even restrained, her chin tilted upward slightly — a match to the defiant glint in her eyes.

She tried to jerk away and, when she found that was impossible, turned her glare on Jack. “You are wasting time.”

“I’ll take care of this,” Jack said, scooping up the broken phone. Close enough to study now, the scratches down the left side of her face looked like they were maybe a week old. Healing, but still pink and quite deep, probably caused by a very determined set of fingernails. “Who are you?”

She scoffed, then mocked his tone. “Who are you?”

Ryan feigned an unconcerned shrug. The truth was this woman was beginning to piss him off. He needed to get this done and catch up with the brunette. “You might reconsider that attitude since we just saw you shoot someone in the head.”

The Japanese woman’s eyes went momentarily wide, but she regained her composure quickly.

“Have it your way,” Midas said, increasing his grip on her arm until she winced. “I guess you’d rather talk to the police.”

“Bakayaro!” she spat. “You fools! I am the police.”