The Devil's Elixir

46

The safe house was a three-bedroom ranch-style house close to the top of the hill in El Cerrito. It was pretty much what I expected. Someone with a more generous predisposition might use the terms minimalist, vintage, or functional to describe it. I’m thinking it came out of the gulag section at Home Depot. I wasn’t exactly expecting Four Seasons–level comfort, but I felt bad for Tess and Alex, more so since I didn’t know how long we’d need to keep them holed up here. The place was just grim.

Still, its living room faced west and afforded a pretty decent view of the city’s skyline and the ocean beyond, especially now, with the sun melting into the horizon. Tenants who weren’t here for the reasons we were would probably find it inspiring or uplifting. I didn’t. I was just standing there, alone, somberly taking in the passing of another day, thinking about Mexico, about Michelle, and about how pulling that trigger had somehow created some kind of cosmic ripple that, five years later, had sent a similar bullet ripping into her.

“Nice view.”

Tess sidled up next to me, looking out, her hand brushing up against my back before snaking around my waist.

“Only the best is good enough for my gal, you know that.”

She smirked. “You spoil me, kind sir.”

I glanced back toward the bedrooms. I could hear Jules and the new guy, Cal Matsuoka, chatting quietly in the kitchen.

“How’s Alex?”

“Not great. He’s still shaken up about what happened,” she told me, her tone dejected. “Moving here wasn’t great for him either.” She cast her eyes across the room. “I don’t know what to tell him anymore.”

I nodded. “We’ll figure some way out of this.”

She shrugged and looked out, her eyes lackluster and failing to mask the frustration and unease that were engulfing her.

“What happens after you get these guys—the ones who got the bikers and the deputy? What happens then? How do we know whoever sent them won’t just send others after us?” She turned to face me, and she really looked spooked. “How do we know it’s ever going to end?”

This was the moment to look squarely into her eyes and say something heroically reassuring and supremely confident like, Don’t worry, we’ll get them. But Tess knew me better than that, and she knew the world didn’t really work like that. The thing is, standing there beside her, I couldn’t imagine not getting these guys. I was going to see to it that they were out of our lives for good. So I actually did say, “We’ll get them. Them, and whoever’s behind them.” And to her credit, she didn’t scoff or even show any hint of doubting it. She just nodded, and her face tightened up with resolve.

She looked out at the sunset again.

“Tell me what happened,” she said. “The guy you shot. The scientist. Tell me about it.”

I’d given her a quick summary of the Eagles’ ties to Navarro and—in broad, intentionally vague strokes—told her how it all linked back to the mission in Mexico. I’d never told her about it, just like I hadn’t told Michelle at the time. And this time around, I hadn’t gone into detail because I didn’t want her to know the whole story.

“Talk to me, Sean,” she pressed, reading my hesitation. “Tell me what happened.”

And something shifted inside me, and I decided I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’d made with Michelle. I should have told her, just like I should have told Tess about this, too, ages ago.

I looked out, the sun no more than a golden sliver getting swallowed up by a ravenous sea, and I could still see those events unfurling in my mind’s eye, like it was yesterday, although you never know, do you? The mind plays tricks. I’ve found that some memories people remember so vividly, the ones we’re sure we know so precisely, are sometimes not as accurate as we think. Over time, the mind massages the truth. It distorts and adjusts and adds in small increments, making it hard to tell what actually happened from what didn’t. But in this case, I think my memory was razor sharp.

I’d have been happier if it wasn’t.

It wasn’t easy to get to him.

Navarro’s lab was in the middle of nowhere, high up in the lawless and impenetrable Sierra Madre Occidental, a volcanic range of tall mountains that were cleaved by steep gorges, ravines, and plunging canyons known as barrancas, some of which were deeper than the Grand Canyon. Neither the Aztec emperors nor the Spanish conquistadors had ever been able to impose their authority on the violent and fiercely independent villagers who lived in the Sierra’s folds, and the Mexican government hadn’t fared any better. The mountains, rife with marijuana and poppy fields, were controlled by regional strongmen and warring drug mafias. Gangs of armed bandits and renegades still roamed around the wild hinterland on horses and mules, like they did a hundred years ago and more. Navarro had chosen his compound’s location well.

We didn’t have that much to go on. McKinnon’s position had been pinpointed by homing in on the signal of the cell phone during his call. After that, the mission had been planned hastily, and in the interest of not alerting any bought-and-paid-for Mexican law enforcement personnel in Navarro’s pay, we put together the intel we needed ourselves using one of the Air Force’s Predator drones, without involving the local authorities.

The plan was for us to be choppered in, but the landscape around our target wasn’t doing us any favors. The compound sat on a high mesa, and the terrain around it was too hostile and inhospitable for a ground infiltration. Given its high altitude setting and its commanding allaround views, chopper approaches were also highly vulnerable to detection. The best we could do was land about three miles away and cover the rest of the journey on foot over rough terrain that, we knew, was home to scorpions, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, bears, and weird, mythical mutant cougar-like beasts called onzas to boot.

A cakewalk.

We hit the ground about three hours before sunrise, figuring that would give us enough time to get to the compound under cover of dark - ness, get McKinnon out, and make it back to the chopper by dawn. We moved fast and sleek across steep, rocky slopes and rushing creeks, through pine forests and thickets of oak saplings, juniper, and cactus. There were eight of us in the strike team: me, Munro, a couple of DEA combat troops, and four Special Forces soldiers. We knew we were venturing into a well-guarded compound, so we were armed to the teeth: Heckler and Koch UMPs with sound suppressors, silenced Glocks, Bowie knives, body armor, night vision goggles. We were also wearing head-mounted video minicams that were sending a live feed back to the DEA’s field office inside the embassy in Mexico City, and we had a Predator flying overhead, giving us real-time visuals via the drone’s operators at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. The plan, obviously, was not to engage. We were meant to sneak in and get our man out before they knew we were even there.

Didn’t happen.

Munro and I made it through the sleepy security without too much trouble. There was only one guard we couldn’t get around stealthily, and Munro had used his knife to put him down. We found McKinnon where he said he’d be, in his lab. He looked like he was in his late fifties and was of average height, a bit on the skinny side, with a silvery goatee and clear blue eyes that were shot through with intelligence. He was wearing a white straw cowboy hat with a silver scorpion clipped onto it and a snapbutton Western shirt, and he had a battered old leather satchel on the counter beside him. He seemed scared and thrilled in equal parts to see us there, and was all raring to go. But there was a wrinkle.

He wasn’t alone.

He had a woman with him, someone he hadn’t mentioned in his call, a local who’d been cooking and cleaning for him during his incarceration. A woman he’d bonded with. Deeply, evidently, since she’d risked her life to sneak in a phone to him, the one he’d used to call us. She had a kid with her, her son, a boy of three or four—that thought now made me feel like I was swallowing my fist. She was also pregnant. With McKinnon’s baby. She had a pretty big bump on her.

He wasn’t leaving without her. Or the kid.

Which was a problem.

A huge problem.

We didn’t exactly have a limo waiting outside. We had to get around the guards again. Quietly. Then there was the three-mile trek back to the chopper. Over rough ground. In total darkness.

Munro refused.

He told McKinnon there was no way the woman and the kid would be able to make the trip. Not without seriously slowing us down or unwittingly giving up our presence, which would blow the mission and possibly get us all killed. There was a small army of coke-fueled, trigger-happy pistoleros out there, and the last thing Munro wanted was for them to know we were around.

McKinnon was incensed. He flat out refused to leave without them.

Munro wouldn’t budge and got angry.

Then it got ugly.

McKinnon said it wasn’t negotiable.

Munro told him he wasn’t the one dictating the play and mocked his naïvete, asking him how he even knew the woman’s baby was his and mocking him by saying he’d probably been duped by the woman who saw him as a ticket out of that miserable hellhole and into the United States.

I tried to mediate and interceded on behalf of the woman and her kid, telling Munro we could carry the boy and the woman probably knew the terrain better than we did. Munro turned on me and growled about how this wasn’t a mission to rescue innocent hostages, but rather to bring back a scumbag who was working on new ways to wreck people’s lives. We didn’t owe him anything, Munro hissed. We weren’t rescuing him—we were there to make sure his work never saw the light of day, period.

McKinnon told him to go fuck himself and said he was staying.

And Munro just lost it.

He pulled out his Glock and, without so much as a blink, pumped a bullet into the kid, then another into his mother.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I can still see the shock and horror on the woman’s face for that split second after the bullet hit her kid and the way her head snapped backward like it had been punched by a blast of wind when he shot her before she collapsed onto the floor, already dead.

McKinnon just lost it.

He started shouting, hurling abuse at us, moving around frantically, just incensed and raging and out of control. Munro was yelling back at him, ordering him to shut up while jabbing his gun angrily at his face. I tried to calm them both down, but they were beyond that. McKinnon started throwing things at us, lab equipment, stools, anything he could get his hands on.

Then he ran.

We scambled after him, but he was at the lab’s door before we could get to him, flinging it open and storming out while screaming from the top of his voice.

And everything went haywire.

I was on him first and just managed to grab him when the first shots crackled in the night. Shouting echoed in the darkness around me, the guards snapped to attention at his outburst and rushed out from all directions. Bullets ate up the timber walls around me as I dragged McKinnon back inside, wild, nonsilenced bursts from the Mexicans’ AK-47s flying all over the place while, from beyond the perimeter of the compound, short, three-bullet snaps were coming in from our guys who were positioned in various spots to cover our exit, the whole chaotic mess mixed in with urgent, clipped commentary coming through the earpiece of my comms set.

Between the weed, the lechuguilla bootleg tequila, and the coke, the pistoleros weren’t thinking straight, and it went manic. I was hustling McKinnon back through the lab, my left arm around his neck, the other leveling the snub-nosed UMP at the door way, when the first guards burst through, three of them. I cut one of them down and saw another get hit by Munro’s fire, but the third took cover behind a counter and started spraying gunfire recklessly from behind it.

I pulled McKinnon and we both dove for cover behind another cabinet, landing heavily under a shower of debris from the torrent of bullets blasting everything around us, while Munro slipped out of sight, his voice in my earpiece telling me he was going to secure McKinnon’s files, which were farther back, at the very back of the lab. Then another pistolero charged in, laying down more gunfire randomly, firing at everything that moved, tacking left, away from his compadre, snaking his way farther down the lab, and before I knew it I was separated from Munro and pinned down by the two gunmen.

Then I heard McKinnon curse and groan, and noticed his thigh.

He’d taken a slug there, right through the middle of it halfway up from his knee. I couldn’t see if it had gone through, and while it didn’t look good, at least blood wasn’t gushing out, which meant maybe his femoral arteries had been spared. His face was taut with pain, his eyes bristling with fury, his hands covered with blood, and I immediately knew there was no way he was going to make it back to the chopper. I wasn’t sure I was either—not with the two shooters doing a pincer move on me.

Munro was in a bind of his own, cornered by more shooters, and I heard him growl through my earpiece that he was pulling out and heading for cover.

I was left alone with McKinnon, pinned down, with the scientist cowering next to me and two half-crazed Mexicans closing in.

Outside, the battle was raging. Life was cheap down here, and Navarro had a small army based in the compound, a small army that was now coming out of the woodwork, full force, guns blazing. Our guys were racking up the kills, but the sheer number facing them meant that we were taking losses, too. I heard one, then two of them get hit—and knew I had to pull out, too, and fast.

I wasn’t sure I could get out of there in one piece, but if I managed it, I sure as hell couldn’t do it with McKinnon in tow. Even if I cut down the pistoleros, I couldn’t take him with me, not in the shape he was in.

But I couldn’t leave him there either.

Not with what he knew.

Munro was in my ear, haranguing me, pushing me to do what needed doing.

I can still hear his words, crackling in my head. “Just cap the sonofabitch, Reilly. Do it. You heard what he’s done. ‘It’ll make meth seem as boring as aspirin,’ remember? That’s the scumbag you’re worried about wasting? You happy to let him loose, is that gonna be your contribution to making this world a better place? I don’t think so. You don’t want that on your conscience, and I don’t either. We came here to do a job. We have our orders. We’re at war, and he’s the enemy. So stop with the righteous bullshit, pop the bastard, and get your ass out here. I ain’t waiting any longer.”

I was running out of time. Fast.

And maybe it was a horrible mistake, maybe it was an inexcusable murder of an innocent civilian, or maybe it was the only thing to do—I really don’t know which one it was anymore—but, either way, I turned my gun on McKinnon and put a bullet through his brain. Then I lobbed a couple of incendiary grenades at the banditos and got out of there just as the whole place went up in flames.