Ghost Sniper (21 page)

50

PUERTO VALLARTA, MEXICO

19:00 HOURS

“I have to meet with Fields in Tijuana,” Mariana said to Antonio Castañeda, seated by his pool. The last time she'd seen the pool, she'd watched Crosswhite drown a man in it. To be back there gave her the creeps. “Can you supply me with two men I can trust to watch my back?”

Castañeda sipped from his glass of tequila, his beady eyes glossy—the only outward effect that excessive amounts of alcohol seemed to have on him.

“I'm not sure that's a good idea.”

“You don't have any men you can trust around me?”

“
Pffft!
I have dozens of men I can trust.”

“Then what's the problem?”

“The problem, my beautiful Mariana, is that if Fields or his men see two of
my
men following you around, they'll know exactly who they are and take steps to neutralize them.”

Sometimes Mariana allowed herself to forget that Castañeda was an ex–Special Forces operative. Making it a point never to forget again, she said, “So do you have any suggestions? I can't go up there alone. Fields is too dangerous.” She explained about Fields wanting to use her to get to Jessup.

“I see,” Castañeda said. “He wants you to sleep with him.”

She cocked a dark eyebrow. “He's knows better.”

The drug lord set aside his drink, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “Do you honestly believe that? Tell me how else do you think you will get this man Jessup to talk to you about the gringo sniper? Military men disclose that kind of information only under the most
intimate
of circumstances.”

She immediately thought of Anna Chapman, the Russian spy arrested by the US Justice Department in 2010 and deported back to Russia. Married to a British national, Chapman was purported to have slept with a number of rich and powerful American men during her intelligence gathering operations in the US. Even the thought of being used in that manner was enough to make Mariana bilious.

“I'll think of something.”

Castañeda reached for the glass, resting back in his chair.
“Suerte.”
Good luck.

“About my support?”

He drew a breath, taking time to think it over. Had Mariana been anyone else, he would have left her on her own, but she had earned his admiration somehow. When they'd first met two years earlier, he'd given very serious consideration to abducting her and leashing her to his bedroom wall, but his inclinations had changed over the past eighteen months.

He whistled across the pool to a beautiful young woman in her early twenties who lay naked on a chaise lounge. “Tanya!”

Tanya sat up, her brown skin glistening with oil.
“Sí, papi?”

“Go get your sister, my love.”

Tanya got up, slipped into a silken red robe, and strode into the
house. She had long raven hair to the small of her back, and a perfect physique.

“My God, I love her.” Castañeda chortled happily and took a drink. “Why won't you agree to stay with me for a while?” he asked Mariana. “Give me six months of romance, and you'll never have to work again. You can leave the CIA and live wherever you like in the whole world.”

Though Mariana knew she was pretty, she also knew she did not possess Tanya's stunning beauty or that of her older sister, Lorena. “You only want me because you can't have me,” she said, now accustomed to his gallant overtures.

“You make me burn with desire,” Castañeda said, his throat feeling tight. “And it agitates me very much—because taking you against your will would only spoil it.”

“Then use that,” she said, maneuvering him. “Let me be the one woman you actually respect.”

He smiled. “I must think about this.”

Lorena came from the house wearing skintight jeans and a red-and-white soccer jersey tied in a knot just above her navel. She was so similar in appearance to her younger sister that most people who saw them together believed they were twins.
“Sí, Papi?”

“Mi amor,”
he said, his voice liquid and sweet. “Mariana needs someone to look after her in Tijuana. There is a CIA man up there who might wish to do her harm. I want you and Tanya to go with her and keep her safe for me.”

Lorena glanced at Mariana.
“Sí, papi.”

“You will leave within the hour. Go and tell your sister.”

Lorena went back inside.

Mariana looked at Castañeda. “Are they . . . reliable?”

“If you ever see either of them use a straight razor, there will be no need to ask.”

She felt a chill. Both young women were truly beautiful, but there was an undeniable lifelessness behind their obsidian-colored eyes. “It's smart,” Mariana admitted. “No one will ever see them coming.”

“No one ever does,” he said, taking a drink. “I choose my women very carefully.”

“Like you've chosen me?” she asked, continuing to maneuver him.

“One kiss,” he said, leaning toward her with his beady eyes so unattractive. “Please.”

“I'm a terrible actress, Tony. I promise you'd be disappointed.”

He sat back with a frustrated smile. “I suppose you're right.” He thumped his fist lightly on the arm of his chair.
“Me has embrujado.”
You have bewitched me.

51

TOLUCA, MEXICO

00:15 HOURS

Rhett Hancock had arrived in Toluca early in the day to begin his reconnaissance of the town, riding in the backseat of a Dodge Charger with darkly tinted windows and two of Ruvalcaba's men riding up front. All three were heavily armed, determined not to be taken alive.

Now it was night, and Hancock sat alone in his room on the north side watching pornography on television with the sound turned down. He was tired of living in motels and hotels, tired of being bored all the time. Nothing pleased him anymore, not even sex. The only thing that excited him was having a target in the crosshairs, and there weren't enough of those to sustain him.

He fumbled with an empty tequila bottle beside him on the bed, tossing it onto the floor without thinking. The bottle shattered against the tile.

“Fuck,” he muttered, making a mental note not to climb out on that side of the bed in his bare feet.

The blond actress on the TV screen was having sex with two men at the same time. She reminded Hancock of his second girlfriend. Her name was Jennifer, the only girl he had ever loved, and he had accidently killed her on his seventeenth birthday.

They'd been driving home on a Saturday night in young Rhett's restored 1977 Pontiac Firebird, having spent the night drinking around a bonfire at a buddy's farm in Kansas. Racing along on a black moon night, they sang aloud to a lonesome Lynyrd Skynyrd tune with the T-top open, the wind blowing through Jennifer's long blond hair. The song began to increase in tempo, and she cranked up the volume as Rhett downshifted into third, gunning it through a wide curve and out onto his favorite stretch of open road.

“Lord, I can't change!” they sang. “Won't you fly . . . high . . . free bird, yeah!”

From the pitch black, a ten-point buck leapt in front of the car.

Rhett hit the brakes, cut the wheel, and promptly lost control. There was only one tree along that stretch of road, a hundred-year-old red oak, and they hit it head-on doing better than seventy-five miles per hour.

He came to in a ditch the next morning, sitting up in the mud with a splitting headache, dried blood caked to his face. The first sight he saw was the Pontiac smashed against the tree. The second sight was Jennifer's mangled body wrapped around the pillar post of the windshield, most of her face sheared off by the glass.

Rhett was put on juvenile probation for a year, working manual labor jobs after school and drinking in secret. He withdrew from his family and hardly ever spoke. At the age of eighteen, he was put on adult probation, where he remained until his twenty-first birthday. At the age of twenty-three, after a brief legal battle to seal his juvenile record, he was able to enlist in the United States Army.

The rest, as they say, was history.

Hancock sat staring at the porn star in his drunken stupor, allowing himself to think of Jennifer for the first time since the morning of the crash. The pain of thinking back on her smile, her voice,
even the smell of her became more than he could stand. He snatched the Sig Sauer from beside him on the bed, thrust it under his chin, and squeezed the trigger.

The hammer dropped with a click, but the gun did not fire.

“What the fuck?” he said in shock, breaking out in a cold sweat and jacking the slide to eject the bullet.

He examined the round to see a perfect pin strike in the center of the silver primer.

“No fuckin' way,” he whispered. Sick to his stomach, he got out of bed and stepped on a shard of the broken tequila bottle. “Motherfucker!” he swore in pain, falling back on the mattress and grabbing his foot to pull out the jagged piece of glass. “Motherfuckin' son of a bitch!”

The cut was not big, but it was deep in the sole of his foot, just forward of the heel. It hurt badly and bled profusely. Hancock glanced at the television. The girl was up on all fours now, her two comrades really going to town on her.

He grabbed the pistol and hurled it at the old television. To his amazement, the weapon bounced off the glass picture tube and clattered across the tile. He sat staring after the gun for a long moment, feeling more hopeless and lost than ever before. Hancock's eyes welled with tears, and he began to sob. He fell over on the mattress and cried himself to sleep.

In the morning, he awoke hung over with a foul taste in his mouth. His foot was throbbing, but the bleeding had stopped. He got out of bed on the safe side and limped over to his rucksack on a chair near the window, digging out a military first aid kit and taking it back to the bed. He filled a syringe with lidocaine and injected the foot near the wound, wincing as he depressed the plunger. Then he injected himself at the ankle. When the entire foot was numb, he pressed his thumbs down hard on either side of the wound to get it bleeding again, squeezing out a pea-size globule of pus. Wiping away the pus with a wad of cotton, he injected five hundred milligrams of amikacin directly into the wound to kill off any remaining infection.

Next, he took a foil packet of sutures from the aid kit and closed the wound with three stitches. Hancock slapped a patch of sticky black adhesive tape over it and went to take a shower, standing beneath the water for a long time.

By the time he emerged from the bathroom, he'd made an important decision: he would follow Billy Jessup's example and attempt to live a normal life. Maybe he'd move to Thailand. Or maybe he'd stay in Mexico; buy a fishing charter up in Baja. That seemed a relaxing way to live. One thing was sure: he didn't dare go back to the States.

Hancock grabbed his ruck from the chair and pulled out two unopened bottles of tequila, which he took into the bathroom and poured down the toilet. He dropped the caps into the trash and set the empty bottles on the back of the commode.

He was finished drinking, but he wasn't finished killing. Chance Vaught was still loose in Toluca, and Vaught could finger him for the Downly hit. If he was going to have any shot at all of leading a normal life, he'd need a clean slate. Otherwise the stress of watching over his shoulder for the FBI would drive him back to the bottle, and he'd eventually end up right back where he'd been the night before: with a gun stuck up under his chin.

52

BERN, SWITZERLAND

16:10 HOURS

Lena Deiss sat across from Sabastian Blickensderfer at his personal table in Bellevue Palace, the most exclusive restaurant-hotel in the city. Still unable to understand what had happened in China, she had drunk nearly three glasses of wine and barely touched her plate.

After rushing her out of the Zhangjiajie hotel, Gil had almost dragged her around back to the parking lot, where he'd delivered her into the arms of three waiting Chinese men, saying only, “Go with them! I'll meet you in Chongqing.” The men had hidden her in a small van and raced off for the airport. A small plane flew her on to Chongqing, where Nahn had met her to break the news that Gil had crashed off the bridge and was killed.

“He spoke English,” she muttered in the same language.

Blickensderfer looked up from his plate of
rippli
, a smoked pork loin.
“Was hast du gesagt?”
What did you say?

“The Vietnamese guide,” she replied in German. “He spoke En­glish. But Gil always spoke to him in Vietnamese.”

“Well, he didn't want you to know what they were talking about.” He sat chewing. “It's obvious they were using you as cover for a mission of the CIA. I told you, Lena, Americans cannot be trusted.”

She looked at him. “He saved your life.”

The Swiss banker forked more food into his mouth and kept chewing. “To win your confidence, my love. Are you so blind? And now that he's dead, we'll see how long before
Herr
Pope sends another assassin to my door.”

She didn't want to believe she'd been used, but what Sabastian was saying made perfect sense.

He sipped his wine. “Are you coming back to me, or was I simply your easiest way out of Thailand?”

She demurred for a moment. “I need time, Sabastian.”

He reached across to touch her hand. “The American gave you an adventure—an adventure I admit I could never have given you—but such adventure could not have lasted. You know that, my love. The man was a runaway train, and a runaway train will always jump the track sooner or later. I'm just grateful he was decent enough to have you spirited out of China before getting himself killed. It might have taken me months to win your release.”

“Not to mention a great deal of money.”

He put down his fork and looked at her. “When have I ever complained about spending money on you?”

“Never,” she said quietly, averting her eyes. “I shouldn't have said that.”

“I would have spent whatever it took to get you back.” He picked up his fork and began to eat again. “You've embarrassed me, but for me to forgive you is the easiest thing I know how to do.” He paused for a drink of wine, setting down the glass. “By the way, I never got around to canceling our wedding, so . . . well, the plans are still set.”

“If I agree,” she said, “no more dealings with terrorists. I insist.”

“There is no need to insist. The surest way for me to end up dead
at the hands of the CIA would be to resume with those affairs. I've already been to death's door once. I have no intention of going back anytime soon.”

They ate in silence over the next couple of minutes.

“There's something we've never spoken of.” He wiped his mouth. “During our time apart, I realized I would like for us to have a child. How do you feel about that?”

She swallowed, the notion slightly appealing. “I'll consider it.”

During the limousine ride back to his house, he put his hand on her thigh and nuzzled her ear.

Though Lena realized she would never be truly in love with him, Sabastian had always treated her with affection, and she was a woman with needs like anyone else. She put her hand over his and rested her head against his. “Don't cancel the reservations.”

He kissed her hand. “I've missed you.”

I'm sure you have
, she thought to herself, heartbroken with the realization that her only chance for true happiness had crashed off a bridge in Hunan, China.