Return of the Assassin (Assassin Series 3) (25 page)

Carlos lowered his voice to a murmur. “How much do you really know about this guy? What do you want him for?”

“I…I can’t tell you. Sorry, Carlos. Security reasons.”

The waitress arrived with their drinks, setting them down on the little table before inquiring whether they wanted anything else. Carlos shook his head, and she moved to the new couple.

“Security,
eh
? Well, let me tell you something, my friend. Security is an interesting word because your man made and received a number of calls in a thirty-six hour period – several numbers that have me puckering. I just hope I haven’t triggered anything by doing the traces,” Carlos revealed quietly.

“What? Who?” he asked as he raised the coffee cup to his lips.

Carlos looked around the café again, then glanced at the waitress’ back as she confirmed the couple’s order.

“CISEN.”

“What?” he choked, sputtering. He sloshed his coffee onto the table and coughed into the small red and white checkered courtesy napkin. The woman glanced at him with curious disapproval, then returned to her partner.

“I printed them out. The ones with stars on them are, well, interesting. You want my advice, drop whatever it is you’re doing. I intend to. I want no part of it. The last thing I need is to get ‘disappeared’ on my way home tonight. Consider my part in this little adventure over.” He slid an envelope onto the table and downed his espresso in one swallow.

“Are you sure about this?” Briones was still trying to absorb the news.

“You have the ability to trace the numbers. Do it. But leave my name out of it. Whatever your altar boy is into, it’s too rich for my blood.” Carlos stood. “You owe me a big one, my friend. Take my advice. Be careful. This is a whole different league.” He turned and quickly weaved his way to the front of the shop, then out the glass doors.

The waitress came by within a few minutes and brought the bill, which Briones couldn’t pay fast enough.

The entire time on the drive in to work, his mind was racing over the implications of what he’d discovered. CISEN, involved with the driver.

What the hell had they stumbled into?

El Rey
jolted awake from the nearby explosive roar. A helicopter was no more than a few hundred yards from them, moving slowly above the hillside. Maria blinked at him in soundless fear. He held his finger to his lips, noting her running nose and shakes. She nodded, and he pulled her to her feet and then over to the tree trunk, the tarp in tow. He draped it over them, leaving only a small section where he could peek out.

The aircraft approached, and the tree tops tore in all directions from the downdraft. This was far too close for comfort. He reached for his pistol, pulling it from the holster and flipping the safety off. If they were fired on from the helicopter, it would be with a large machine gun – probably fifty caliber, spewing forth thousands of rounds per minute. The pistol was a joke against that kind of firepower, but if instead, soldiers dropped from the ship, it might be enough to buy them a few minutes of time so they could run.

The sound was deafening – a Sikorsky, he thought, doing a grid by grid search.

Their advantage was that the army had no idea what it was looking for, or even if whatever it was had gone in the direction of the border.

A major loose end was that he didn’t know who knew what – how far up did the rot go in the Guatemalan military? If they had kaibiles guarding the girl, was that a rogue faction earning extra money or was it a profitable sideline at the cabinet level? He knew that roughly seventy-five percent of the country was under Los Zetas control, with the other twenty-five percent under
Don
Aranas.
El Rey’
s bet was that this was a local commandant making some easy money leasing his soldiers out, who knew little or nothing, but he couldn’t be sure. Otherwise he would have just played the role of a backpacker out with his girlfriend – although the presence of a fresh bullet wound would have rendered that pretense fragile.

Like it or not, he would have to fight his way out, if it came to that.

The noise increased even more, and Maria leaned in close to him. She was trembling, but he wasn’t sure how much was from terror, and how much from the effects of the drug leaving her system. In the end he supposed it didn’t matter.

The trees shook crazily from the turbulence, and then the chopper moved on, having seen nothing. They stood frozen under the tree for a few minutes, until the noise diminished into the distance, and then he lowered the tarp from their heads.

The jungle was still again.

He dropped the tarp on the ground and checked his watch. He’d been asleep for three hours. More than sufficient. But the heat of the day was building, and he was parched – probably due to the blood loss from the wound, as well as the near constant perspiration. He moved to their packs and retrieved the two liters of water, offering one to Maria, who accepted it without comment and then drank half of it greedily.

“Careful. That’s all we have. It’s got to last us all day, and probably most of the night,” he cautioned.

She threw him a blank look and took another swig before twisting the cap back on. He shrugged and drank a third of his before forcing himself to stop.

“Conserve your energy, Maria. The worst is yet to come. The heat is going to get miserable within another few hours, and you’ll wish you’d listened to me about the water then,” he warned.

She coughed twice, then threw herself down on the tarp.

“Is it my turn to sleep now?” she asked, and then without waiting for an answer, closed her eyes and tuned him out.

~

The day wore on, and by six thirty Maria was out of water. He’d watched her walk unsteadily to a cluster of bushes and vomit a few hours before and had said nothing. No words of comfort existed that could soften the blows of detoxification, so what was the point?

“Hey. It’s dinner time,” he called to her and tossed two granola bars onto her side of the tarp.

“I’m not hungry,” she snapped.

“You’re going to be hiking five miles through jungle. You’ll need energy,” he advised.

“No. Just the thought makes me want to throw up.”

“That’s the cold turkey. Try one. You’ll be glad you did.”

“No.”

“Suit yourself. We’ll get moving in a few more minutes. I haven’t heard any more helicopters anywhere near for a few hours, so we can probably get going without risk."

“The faster I’m out of here, the better.”

He sat back down and reached for her breakfast bar.

His hand twitched.

Once.

Then again.

The muscles in his forearm began cramping.

He shook it off and then tried again. Nothing. Steady as a rock, although the headache he had started the day with had gotten progressively worse as time wore on. He grabbed the bar and unwrapped it, popped half in his mouth, and then drank a few swallows of water. He was just dehydrated. That was all. Classic symptoms.

Maria watched him and then sprinted a few yards before vomiting again. She continued heaving, dry, the contents of her stomach long ago expelled.

He drank another quarter of his water and then stopped.

“Here. You can have the rest of my water. You’ll need it,” he offered, holding the bottle to her.

She swallowed the remainder greedily and then tossed the bottle aside.

“No. Pick it up. We may need it later. You never know what you’ll need, so you don’t waste anything,” he ordered.

She gave him an indifferent look, but complied.

He busied himself with repacking the backpack and spent a few minutes studying the satellite footage on the tablet.

“We’re less than a mile from the–”

He stopped mid-sentence, cocking his head and gazing at the tree tops.

She stared at him quizzically. “What?”

He didn’t say anything, then held up his index finger.

“Listen. Do you hear it?” he asked, sotto voce.

She listened intently, then shook her head.

“No. What are you talking about?”

He turned his head, first one direction, then the other, and then slid the tablet into his sack before shouldering it.

“Come on. Grab your bag. Move.”

She staggered over to the grenade bag and reluctantly hoisted it.

“I still don’t know what you–”

He cut her off with a curt hand movement, then gestured to her as he glanced at his GPS.

She approached him, and he pointed in the direction they would be moving before saying one syllable that struck terror into her heart and galvanized her into action.

“Dogs.”

El Rey
took off at a moderate paced jog, weaving between the branches, and she struggled to stay with him. Within ten minutes, he was having to slow his pace so she could keep up, as the last of the sun’s rays fought to penetrate the overhead canopy of vegetation.

The distinctive baying of hounds sounded from the east, no more than a thousand yards down the mountain. If they had found the ATV with its bullet scars, El Rey and Maria would be trying to outrun a radio. That was an absolute nightmare.

Now every second counted.

He grabbed her shoulders and shook her roughly.

“You need to give this everything you’ve got. Now. We have maybe nine hundred yards to go and we’ll be in Mexico. But with the dogs having picked up a scent, every helicopter and patrol within twenty miles is going to be on top of us, and this will all have been for nothing.” He looked into her eyes and saw understanding, but also resignation. The withdrawals had sapped too much out of her. They were never going to make it.

He made a snap decision and then dropped his backpack on the ground and retrieved the first aid kit. He pulled out an alcohol pad and grabbed her arm, then wiped off the vein at the crook of her wrist. She pulled it away from him.

“What the–”

He extracted a syringe from the kit and popped the top off, then held the needle up, a fine squirt of liquid shooting out of it.

“This will blunt the worst of it, for a while,” he said, pulling her wrist closer to him and studying the surface of the skin, looking for the vein. It would be hard – she was dehydrated too, so her veins had constricted.

“What is it?” she asked. She’d stopped struggling.

“Morphine. Not heroin, but close enough to blunt the worst of the symptoms until we can get you fixed up.”

Her eyes widened. “Are you sure about this?”

“Yes. I was hoping we wouldn’t need to shoot any more crap into you, but you need it. Now hold still. We’re out of time.”

He lowered the needle to her wrist and then drove it softly into the vein, depressing the plunger halfway.

The drug hit her within seconds, and her eyes became distant, glassy. He withdrew the needle and capped it, then dropped it back into the sack.

“No time for dreamland. I need you to run your ass off. Come on. Move it.”

He grabbed her arm and jerked her along, trotting west. She dragged to begin with, but picked up her pace after a few minutes.

The dogs sounded like they were getting closer.

They trudged silently through the underbrush, following a faint game trail,
El Rey
watching the compass and coordinates as they moved. It was getting so dark he was having a hard time seeing, so he paused again and extracted the night vision goggles from the bag and pulled them over his head. When he switched them on, the low battery indicator blinked in the corner of the field of vision. He didn’t know how much more time they would operate for, but the GPS said they were now only four hundred yards from the border, if that.

Whether the Guatemalan military would observe the technical nicety of an invisible line of demarcation remained to be seen.

He resumed his jog, but was suddenly seized by a dizzy spell and staggered to a halt.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Maria hissed.

He nodded.

“Is it the bullet wound?”

“Something like that. I’m fine. Let’s go.”

He forced himself to put one foot in front of the other, doggedly, driven by determination to survive. The sound of the dogs seemed almost as close as the border now was, but he hoped that was an illusion.

Faintly, from behind them, he could hear men shouting.

He pushed himself from a plod back to a jog. Maria moved alongside of him, now no longer the laggard. His stomach cramped, but he ignored it. He could deal with the discomfort later.

They zigzagged down the hill, and then Maria whispered in alarm.

“They have lights. I just saw one. They’re close.”

He didn’t waste energy commenting.

They were only fifty yards from the border.

Now forty.

Thirty.

In the distance, he could hear the helicopters coming.

It wouldn’t be long.

They splashed through a small stream, and he made a turn. They ran down the creek. Maybe it would throw the dogs off.

And then they were in Mexico. Just like that, his GPS blinked at him.

“Keep moving. We’re not out of the woods yet,” he said, driving her on.

He could hear crashing behind them in the brush. No more than a few hundred yards.

The cramping eased, and he felt a surge of adrenaline now that they were on Mexican soil. He strengthened and pulled at Maria.

“Run. This is it. As fast as you ever have,” he urged, then ran down the smuggling trail as hard as he was able, their pursuers only seconds behind.

~

“CISEN? You’re sure about this?” Cruz demanded.

Briones had spent much of the day checking the numbers, which at first came up blank, but after considerable digging it transpired they were indeed part of CISEN’s assigned trunks.

“There’s no doubt. Whatever his game is, it is somehow connected to CISEN. Look, there are three calls the day before the breakout, and then one the morning of the escape,” Briones highlighted.

Cruz sat back in his chair, his face drawn in a frown. This was unexpected, but made a kind of sense.