The Devil's Elixir

70

Tess, Alex, and I hadn’t been back in San Diego more than a few hours, but this couldn’t wait.

Tess was fine. She’d done like I told her and ducked into a safe corner and waited until the firefight had died down. The Special Ops guys had then escorted her out of there and cleaned her wound. Once Alex and I had broken the surface, I’d been worried sick about her, and the smile she gave me when I finally got her back is definitely up there in the top five memories of my life.

After the dust had settled in Merida, I’d been relieved to hear that Jules and the new guy were also okay. I’d been extremely saddened, though, by the news that Villaverde had been found dead at the rented beach house Navarro had used. It was a terrible loss, and I felt gutted. He was a decent, down-to-earth, capable guy who’d really proved himself to be a solid ally when I needed him. I guessed that he and Navarro had had some face time together, which was probably how Navarro’s men got to us at the safe house. And the bastard wasn’t in the business of leaving behind any witnesses.

The hacienda itself had kicked in some decent news. The scientists who’d been kidnapped from Santa Barbara were found in the basement lab complex, along with two others who’d been grabbed previously. They were in as good shape as could be expected for people who’d been held captive like that for months.

Closer to home, Stephenson had offered to work with me and Tess on helping Alex work through everything that had happened.

But I didn’t think the book was yet closed on that front.

A few things were bothering me, starting with the drone.

I knew drones. We’d had one circling over us the night we hit McKinnon’s lab, but more relevantly, I’d made use of a Predator much more recently, in Turkey, in broad daylight, while chasing the sadistic Iranian agent Zahed. I knew what they looked like. And in that perfect azure dome that towered over us down in Merida that morning, I didn’t see a thing. Not a glint, not a spot, nothing. Admittedly, I hadn’t had all the time in the world to sit and stargaze to look for it. But I knew I should have seen it and it really bugged me. It bugged me enough to look into it with the guys over at the 9th Reconnaissance Wing at Beale Air Force Base in California, from where the drones were controlled. I knew it wasn’t easy for the DEA to run a drone over Mexico. They’d done so a couple of times over the last year or so, and it had caused a big stink with the federales. But the guys at Beale confirmed to me that they didn’t have any drones over California or Mexico that day.

Which meant Munro was lying.

Which meant that if Munro didn’t track us that way, he had to have used something else. And the only other way to track us would have been to track something we had on us—specifically, something either Navarro or Alex had on them, given that the tracker on Munro’s screen was showing their live position. It didn’t seem possible he had a tracker on Navarro. If Munro had managed that, he’d have hauled El Brujo’s ass in and sold him out to the narcos before pocketing the cash and retiring into a mojito-fueled, perma-tanned sunset.

Which meant the tracker had to be on Alex.

Which meant Munro somehow knew that Navarro would come after Alex.

Which is where my pesky little rule about coincidences starts doing its thing and turns into a real nag.

Which is why I was now getting out of my car and walking up to a mountain cabin at the edge of the Sequoia National Forest.

Hank Corliss’s cabin.