Targets of Revenge (6 page)

“And I suppose the guards upstairs are just going to let me walk out of here, that the idea?”

The technician did his best to conjure up a look of abject ignorance, as if the thought of Sandor being apprehended had never crossed his mind. “I have no argument with you.”

“Sure pal, you’re on my side all the way.”

For the first time, the man had a good look into Sandor’s dark, intense eyes. “Please don’t kill me,” he pleaded again.

“I have no interest in killing you,” Sandor said. “What’s your name?”

“Carlos.”

“Well, Carlos, I just want some information about what’s going on down here.”

With this, the man began jabbering away in a mix of English and Spanish until Sandor raised the barrel of his .45 to eye level. That ended the chatter.

Sandor sighed. “If you knock off the bullshit you’ll have a reasonably good chance of living through the night, okay?”

Carlos nodded slowly as he stared at the pistol.

“All you need to do is answer some questions. But you’ve got to answer them honestly. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. So for starters, tell me about the guards.” When the man started to speak Sandor held up his hand. “Remember, honesty is the best policy.”

Carlos responded with another slow nod.

“There are armed guards, yes?”

“Yes. There are armed guards all around us.”

“They’re posted outside the property and upstairs?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“At this time of night, two men outside, two men at the entrance to the lab.”

“What about Adina’s house?”

“Always at least two men on duty.”

“Uh huh. But no security inside this lab? No video? Nothing?”

He shook his head. “No need. They check us when we leave our shift. They also come in and make inspections from time to time. If we ever get caught using or stealing they’ll kill us.”

“A serious deterrent.”

“Deterrent?”

“Disuasivo.”

“Ah, yes.”

“You’re alone here tonight?”

“Another man is coming on soon.”

“How soon?”

“Less than an hour.”

“So what are you doing here by yourself in the middle of the night?”

“I was making arrangements for the new shipment.”

Sandor gestured toward the piles of cloth-wrapped packages. “These being moved out soon?”

Carlos nodded. “This morning.”

“To Mexico?”

“Yes.”

“How do they ship the stuff?”

“Coffee. Inside large sacks of coffee.”

“Throws off the drug-sniffing dogs.”

“Yes,” Carlos agreed. “Difficult to detect and easy to transport.”

“Too much coffee is shipped around the world to check every sack.”

The Venezuelan nodded again.
“Exactamente
.”

“Okay, so other than this little cocaine refinery, what else is being manufactured down here?”

The man’s expression changed from fear to sheer terror.

“Come on, Carlos,” Sandor prodded him.

“Adina will kill me if I say anything.”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t.” For emphasis he waved the barrel of the Smith & Wesson a little closer to the man’s face.

The technician’s shoulders slumped. He said, “Shooting me will be better than what Adina will have them do.”

Sandor shook his head. “You answer the rest of my questions and I’ll make it look like I came to steal cocaine. The guard I left outside already believes that. Just stay with the story and you’ll be all right.”

“No. When they capture you they will make you talk.”

“I won’t be captured, trust me.”

Carlos gave his head a vigorous shake. “You are wrong. They already know you’re here.”

“How would they know that?”

“You breached the perimeter, which means you had to come through the alarm system.”

Sandor gritted his teeth. “What alarm system?” he demanded.

C
ARLOS DESCRIBED THE
laser security system that ringed the perimeter of the property.

“The alarm is silent,” he added. “It registers in the guardhouse above us.”

“Damn,” Sandor said.

The CIA has a device known by various nicknames, but is technically referred to as a specialized electronic pack. About half the size of a pack of cigarettes, it serves various functions including the decoding of keypad locks, reading safe combinations, and detecting laser alarm systems. Unfortunately, Sandor could not risk taking one from the Farm before leaving D.C. Each of them has to be signed for and he feared Byrnes would find out.

“They must be out there looking for you now,” Carlos was saying. “Eventually they will come here and we will both be dead.”

“We’ll see about that,” Sandor replied. Then he had the technician tell him everything he knew about the manpower on hand, the vehicles on the premises, and the road out of there.

“Now you must go,” the man urged him when he answered all of Sandor’s questions. He had a quick look at the hole in the wall where the ventilation grill had been “Get out however you came in. I will say nothing.”

“First I want to know what else is being cooked up in this place.”

The man stared at him without speaking.

“Whatever it is,” Sandor went on, “it’s going on behind that closed door in the other room.”

“Yes. But I am not sure what they are doing in there.”

“You’re a rotten liar, Carlos, not to mention that you must be a senior man here to be alone in the lab in the middle of the night.” Sandor lowered the gun so it was trained on the man’s left kneecap. “I said I had no intention of killing you, but I need some answers and I need them now.”

Carlos gazed down at the lengthened barrel of the automatic, then looked up again. “Anthrax,” he said.

“Anthrax?”

He nodded. “It’s a secure area. Sterile. I don’t even have access without a guard present.”

Sandor thought it over for a moment. “What are they doing with anthrax?”

“Nothing yet.”

“They have plans to ship it somewhere?”

“I am not involved in that part of these operations. I only oversee the extraction and refinement of the coca.”

“You said you’re involved in organizing shipments.”

“Yes, but only from here to the shore,” he replied, nodding toward the bags of cocaine.

Sandor knew the man was lying again, but time was running short. “Tell me about the men from Egypt. Then tell me how the hell people get out of here.”

————

The two men in the guardhouse above the laboratory received the electronic alert that someone breached the perimeter. They expected one of the sentries to report in but too much time had passed as they stared into the darkness, waiting.

“They would never take this long without checking in. Should we report this to Alejandro?” the junior man asked.

“If it turns out to be nothing one of them is going to be in big trouble.”

“Should I go outside and have a look?”

“I’ll go,” the senior guard said. “Give me five minutes, that’s all. If I’m not back in five call the main house.”

Francisco took his AK-47 and headed to the south end of the compound in search of Manuel. He held the weapon at the ready in case his concerns were justified, but he saw no one else in the darkness.

When he reached the end of the complex he called out Manuel’s name but received no reply.

Warily he stepped into the dimly lighted area beneath the low-register halogens. He called out “Manuel,” again.

Nothing.

Hurrying back into the darkness he reached for his walkie-talkie.

The junior man in the guardhouse picked up immediately.

“Manuel is not here. I’m heading for the other end of the property. Stay alert.”

————

As Carlos explained the routes used to transport the narcotics, Sandor grabbed sacks of the processed cocaine and tossed them into the open vent, where they fell to the ground at the bottom of the shaft. He toppled one of the tall stacks of bags and used his Ka-Bar to rip open a couple of the fallen packages, letting the powder spill onto the floor. Then he returned his attention to the technician.

“I don’t care what you say to them when they come for you,” he told him, “but your best bet of living through this thing is to tell them we never spoke.”

The technician looked at Sandor as if he were insane.

“Listen to me. When I climb back up there I’ll replace the grill. You tell them you heard something in here, you came in and tried to stop me and I hit you.”

“But . . .”

Carlos never got to utter another word. Sandor lashed out with his pistol and smacked him across the side of the head, knocking him to his knees. A second blow, to the back of his neck, rendered him senseless as he collapsed to the ground.

Sandor holstered the S&W, shouldered his M24 rifle and the
MAC 10, then, using the pile of cloth-encased narcotics as a platform, scampered up and into the air duct. Remaining in an awkward crouch he did his best to replace the mesh grill, figuring anything that might buy him a little time would be useful. He stood and, using his feet, did his best to cover the bags of coke he had dumped into the bottom of the shaft with dirt. He wanted to make it appear that some of the drugs had been taken.

Then he began the difficult process of hoisting himself up against the surface of the slick metal cylinder.

There was nothing to grab hold of, but his gloves and boots provided enough surface tension to help him claw his way up. Bracing his back against the shaft he inched his way upward in a painfully slow exercise of arm and leg strength. After a couple of minutes he could finally reach out and hold the sharp edges of the duct. Pulling himself up, he stopped just as he was able to see above the level of the shaft.

It was difficult to make out anything in the darkness, and he could not reach the PNVGs in his pack, but he was certain there was a man running in the distance. Thankfully, he appeared to be rushing away rather than toward Sandor’s position.

Heaving himself over the edge, Sandor rolled onto the ground and came to a stop in a kneeling position, his pistol again in hand.

It was dark and still all around him.

He had a look at his watch. It was nearly 5:00 A.M. Sunrise was not far off.

F
RANCISCO REACHED THE
far end of the compound. Once again he found nothing and no one on the perimeter, and he was not about to move beyond the lighted area into the jungle. It was uncomfortable enough standing near the halogen glare, an easy target for intruders who might be lurking amidst the trees. He was not going to make matters worse by venturing into the darkness.

He turned and took off for the guardhouse, grabbing his radio as he sprinted back across the complex. “Ramon?”

“What have you found?”

“Nothing,” he reported into the mouthpiece as he continued to run. “Alert them at the main house.”

————

Sandor was faced with several problems and little time to solve them. His principal dilemma was how he should respond to what he had discovered in the lab.

Anthrax was frequently threatened as a mode of terrorist attacks, and Sandor had spent time studying its production as well as its lethal effect. It is composed of three proteins, none of them independently dangerous until the ingredients are combined. It is relatively easy to manufacture once you have the components—specific instructions on how to synthesize anthrax are even available on a
jihadi
website—and once they are mixed the resulting exotoxin becomes deadly to the handler as well as the target. Sandor had no way of knowing what
stage of fabrication had been achieved in the sealed-off room below, or how much of the noxious powder might be stockpiled there.

Some of the substances used to refine cocaine can be inflammatory—kerosene, ammonia, other chemicals commonly found in cleaning agents, and different forms of ethyl ether—but if Sandor found a way to destroy the lab by igniting these substances, they could launch a deadly anthrax cloud that would be a catastrophe for the surrounding area and suicide for Sandor.

As if that concern was not enough, Sandor realized that sabotaging the facility would be unlikely to derail Adina’s plans. The operation would quickly be relocated and the trail of narcotics—and, more important, the anthrax—would grow cold.

Sandor reluctantly felt his priorities shifting under the weight of what he had discovered belowground. He had come here to assassinate Adina, but now he had a responsibility to determine where they were taking the toxin and what they were intending to do with it when it got there. And time was running out.

He had already left behind one dead guard and two unconscious men, all of whom were about to be discovered. The man who just ran the length of the complex was evidence of that. To add to his predicament, the sun would be rising soon, increasing the degree of difficulty for his escape.

It was time for him to move out.

————

Sandor’s thoughts were interrupted by the blare of a loud siren that cut through the night like a shrill announcement of danger. That noise was followed by the sudden glare of spotlights from atop the roof of the main house. Through the snakelike vines and branches of the banyan trees, the glare cast long and eerie shadows.

By the time a series of halogen lights outside the laboratory glowed to life, Sandor had already replaced the domed top on the vent and was on the run. He found shelter behind a kapok tree, where he knelt down and took the MAC-10 in hand. The time for silencers was over.

Even after the lights on the main house and laboratory were
switched on, most of the compound remained dark. Adina was obviously taking no chance of illuminating the entire area—it would then be vulnerable to a night sighting by air or satellite. From the looks of things, Adina was relying on his security forces to track him down.

From what the lab technician had described, those security forces were assigned to protect Adina first and the laboratory second. It was a limited contingent of guards according to Carlos, and Sandor had already taken two of them out of play.