Wild Card pp-8 Read online

  Lathrop saw this at the outermost corner of his vision while switching his attention toward the right side of the windshield, moving his SMG around in the same direction. Flamingo Pink had drawn his own weapon from its holster, a big, long-barreled semiautomatic handgun.

  The gun a dark rising blur in his fist, he took hurried aim at the Navigator and triggered off a couple of shots.

  His speed and accuracy were better than Lathrop expected. The first slug punched into the Nav’s hood just below its folded wipers. The next struck the right side of the windshield a millisecond afterward, partially dissolving it, spewing glass into the vehicle this time.

  In the front seat Raul released a panicky scream and ducked under the steering wheel to avoid a storm of jagged, blown-out shards. He dove facedown across the seat and put his hands over his head as the broken glass showered over him, leaving his door ajar, abandoning his decision to cut and run, looking for cover inside the vehicle now.

  Lathrop couldn’t afford to let the kid’s wild thrashing around become a distraction. He focused narrowly on Flamingo Pink, inhaled, and held the breath to steady his aim like a trained sniper. Then he squeezed the trigger of his.45 to take the guard out with a single clean shot to his heart.

  An instant later the guard collapsed in a scattery mist of blood, the front of his shirt billowing out where he’d been hit, his pistol slipping from his fingers.

  Of the gunnies Lathrop had been able to see from the Navigator’s rear section, that left the man in chinos as an immediate concern.

  Raul was another. The kid was out of control. Bleeding from lacerations on his hands, bits and pieces of the shattered windshield pouring from his hair and clothes, he had frantically reached out to shut the door that he’d intended to open moments ago, still hollering at the top of his lungs, repeating a single Spanish phrase as if it were stuck on his tongue: Lo siento, lo siento! He was sorry, sorry, sorry.

  Lathrop had no idea whether he was screaming at him, Armand’s men, or whoever opted to listen amid the surrounding bedlam. Maybe he was apologizing to all of them, and hoping God might have some forgiveness and mercy for him, too. But it didn’t really matter. The kid was useless to anybody within earshot.

  In fact he’d become a liability from Lathrop’s perspective.

  His gun extended in one hand, Lathrop grabbed for the door handle to his left and hurled himself out of the Navigator, landing on the balls of his feet, hunkering there on the driver’s side. He was aware Chinos would be somewhere close, maybe still behind him—

  He looked back over his shoulder just in time to see the guard jogging around from the right side of the cargo hatch, his weapon held level with his hip in one hand. Lathrop could tell at a glance it was an Uzi mini or some close knockoff.

  He thrust himself toward the front end of the Nav, snatched at the outer handle of Raul’s unlatched door, and gave it a hard tug to overcome the kid’s desperate opposition from inside. Pulling the door wide open, he scuffled behind it and squatted down low in the angle between its hinges and the driver’s-side panel, pressing against the vehicle so that he was almost wedged against its wheel well.

  The move would give him cover from Chinos. That was the plus. The bad part was that it meant he’d had to turn his back to the one-way mirror fronting Armand’s office, leaving him vulnerable from behind.

  It also meant Raul had been left suddenly and completely exposed to Chinos, but he had ceased to be Lathrop’s concern.

  The kid jerked upright in his seat as the door was torn from his hand and flung outward, his lips frozen in a breathless grimace of terror, his throat clamping shut around his screams. Then he turned his head to see the guard hasten around the cargo hatch to his side of the vehicle, advancing behind his tiny assault weapon. His eyes bright staring circles, aware his prospects of survival had radically dwindled all in a second, Raul forced his vocal cords to respond to his commands and started shouting out the door in Spanish again, adding vehement denials to his repetitive declarations of regret, insisting that not only was he sorry but things weren’t his fault here. Lo siento, no es mi culpa.

  Chinos gave him just an instant’s notice, scarcely pausing to meet his gaze with his own through the open door. His eyes did not offer the barest hint of whether he considered him a threat, an opportune target of revenge, or both at once. They communicated nothing, nothing whatsoever as they brushed against Raul’s and his compact submachine gun unleashed a burst of fire that ripped into Raul at almost point-blank range, snuffing the life out of him even before his body spilled limp-limbed and shuddering against the steering column.

  Crouched on his haunches behind the door, aware of that mirror at his back, Lathrop did not miss his chance to exploit the moment Chinos had wasted taking out Raul. Shoving his pistol into its holster, he grabbed the foregrip of his MP7, braced its extended rifle stock against his shoulder, and pushed its bore around the edge of the door.

  Chinos was quick to catch sight of it. He whirled toward the door seemingly on reflex and rattled off an arcing volley, smashing the driver’s side window from its frame… a reaction that might have done even more damage if Lathrop hadn’t gotten the jump on him by a slender hair, drawing an accurate bead, catching him in his midsection with a tight salvo. The guard pivoted drunkenly on his feet, his gun hand convulsing to trigger an ineffectual spray of ammunition at the walls and ceiling, his other hand clutching his stomach, blood dribbling between his fingers from multiple bullet wounds.

  Lathrop was up from his crouch before he dropped, his MP7 poised.

  He looked from side to side. Two of the three mechs that had approached the Nav’s tail section were gone, but it was hard to tell where. The bays over to his right were occupied by cars, vans, pickups, and SUVs in various stages of being stripped. Some of the vehicles were on hoists, the heavy-duty kind that were built into the floor. There was an open service pit in the bay closest to Lathrop, a large Cadillac sedan pulled almost up to it. A small crew of grease monkeys stood among the different vehicles, staring at him, looking scared stiff. A couple of them might have been the same men whose legs had entered the rearview video image. Or not. Next to the open bay entrance behind the Nav, another mech had sunk down into a corner and was cowering there with his hands on his head in submission. Lathrop figured him for one of the first three. His friends could have cleared out through the door — or not.

  Lathrop reached a hand into his jacket, flashed the special agent badge around his neck, motioned toward the entrance with his subgun.

  “DEA!” he said. “Vaya, go!”

  His face streaked with perspiration, the mech nodded and slowly rose off the floor.

  Lathrop snapped the gun toward his head to hustle him along. “Ahora!”

  The mech nodded more vigorously, sprang the rest of the way up to his feet, turned, and fled the garage.

  Lathrop saw him bowl into a cluster of lookouts still lingering in the lot outside the entrance, then push past them to disappear in the night. They all seemed like versions of Pedro with their head wraps or Under Armour skullcaps, their basketball warm-ups, their hoodies and low-waisted baggy pants. And the conspicuously identical gumstick MP3s on their arms.

  They looked at him. He looked at them. The thing about the loose-fitting ghetto wear was that it could be a bluff or conceal a small arsenal.

  Lathrop fired a burst out the door, his aim intentionally high, displaying his shield so they could see it, hopeful they would get the message that he was giving them a pass. He had not forgotten about the one-way mirror behind him — and whoever might be behind it. Any time he spent worrying about this bunch was too long.

  They took his warning and scattered from the lights of the garage, losing themselves on the mechanic’s heels.

  Lathrop thought about the mirror at his unprotected back and started to turn.

  That was when he heard the rev of an engine inside the garage to his right. He glanced toward the sound, saw that the mechs who’d been
staring from over by the vehicles were heading for the entrance… all except one, and he’d gotten into the Caddy sedan. Almost simultaneously the office door crashed open and a tight knot of three or four men in street clothes broke from it. They held submachine guns of the same sort Chinos had carried and were assembled around another man who could barely be seen through their flanking bodies.

  Several of them were rattling fire at Lathrop as they moved toward the auto bays in hurried unison.

  He took cover behind the Nav, glanced over at the sedan he’d assumed was their escape vehicle, and realized that assumption was wrong. The gunmen had reached the space between the Caddy and service pit and veered toward the pit instead of the idling sedan. A couple of them paused at its edge, still firing at him. The rest separated from the others, backed toward the pit, and then followed the man they were escorting down into it.

  No sooner had the last of them dropped over its side than the Caddy throbbed into gear, screeched a half dozen feet forward, and just as abruptly came to a halt right over the pit.

  Lathrop knew that first man into it had been Armand Quiros. He’d caught a glimpse of him when the group left the office and gotten a slightly longer look as he descended the rail or ladder on the side of the pit. But it was really simpler than that. Armand’s office plus Armand’s bodyguards equaled Armand.

  What Lathrop wondered about for a brief instant was Armand racing into that hole. Why would he box himself in while a charged-up getaway car was waiting for him? If that was really what he’d done. A man like Armand would be prepared for somebody to make a move on him sooner or later. Whether it was the competition or a takedown by the law, he would anticipate more than a solitary attacker… Lathrop had in fact banked on his turn-tail worker ants sharing that same belief. Armand would expect his enemies to be waiting along the mesa road toward Devoción and probably to the south of town as well. In his mind a frontal escape from the garage would leave him open to being followed or caught in a net of barriers, and that meant he would want a less obvious exit through the pit. Want to be sure there was another car ready on the other side of it.

  Lathrop ejected his subgun’s half-empty magazine, got a fresh forty-round clip from a pouch on his trousers, and jammed it into the weapon with the heel of his palm. Then he reached under his jacket and produced one of three cylindrical flashbangs he’d brought with him in a nylon web belt rig. About a minute had gone by since Armand emerged from his office, too long, giving him more than enough time to rabbit. But the guy who’d driven the Caddy into position had drawn a nine-mil from inside his jumpsuit and was taking shots at him out his lowered window — no mechanic, that ace, it didn’t matter how he was dressed — and there was gunfire coming from underneath the Caddy, a shooter in the pit. Lathrop saw him poking his head out of it like an infantryman in a foxhole, his weapon in one hand, no way he could grip it with both of them. The pit had to be eight or nine feet deep and he’d need to cling to the rail with his other hand to fire over its top.

  Staying low behind the Nav, Lathrop shuffled left around its rear fender and then forward along its flank, past the still-open driver’s door where the body of Raul was thrown back against the steering column. His MP7 on its sling at his side, he leaned around the front of the vehicle and pulled the arming pin from the steel grenade canister with his fist clenched around its flyoff lever. Then he tossed the canister across the garage floor with an easy underhand lob and saw the released lever twirl away as it rolled under the Caddy and into the pit.

  The grenade detonated before he could count out two full seconds, the walls of the pit muffling its blast of light and sound in the garage above. Lathrop sprang to his feet and darted toward the Caddy, his gun spitting as thin white smoke came up from the pit to ribbon out between its wheels. He could see the guy in the mech suit through the driver’s side window, sprawled back in the front seat with the nine slipped from his fingers, looking disoriented from the concussion.

  Lathrop pressed the snout of his MP7 between his dazed eyes, shot him, and pushed his corpse toward the passenger door. Then he leaned in and put the Caddy into reverse to get it rolling backward. As it moved off the service pit, he tossed a second flashbang down inside.

  He gave the smoke a moment to clear, rushed to the edge of the pit, thumbed on the slimline tac light mounted to his weapon. Almost directly below him at its bottom the shooter had fallen in a heap and was struggling up onto his hands and knees. Lathrop ripped into him with a volley and sprayed more fire through what was left of the smoke to take out the other men sprawled around him. Grabbing the rail’s handhold, he swung a leg over the side of the pit and dropped into it.

  There was plenty of light from glowing tube fixtures on the walls of the little space, rendering the flashlight inessential. Lathrop looked around, took a quick count of the bloodied men on the floor. He’d killed most of them. A couple of them stirred, trying to gather themselves. One was slouched back against the wall spitting up blood and mucous.

  Lathrop finished off the survivors and cut his eyes over to a door on his left. It was plain steel with a push bar and had been shoved wide open. On the other side was a lighted, cement-walled underground passage that ran out of the pit. There was a man kneeling in the doorway, blinking and groaning, his stooped form blocking the narrow passage. Armand Quiros was moving unsteadily forward just beyond him.

  Lathrop plunged toward the entrance, triggering his weapon at the back of the kneeling man’s head as he ran through. Armand staggered on a few feet before he caught up, grabbed him by the back of his shirt, and drove him face-first against the wall.

  “Que desa?” Armand said. “What you fucking want from me?”

  Lathrop shoved his gun barrel between Armand’s ear and the hinge of his jaw, pressing his face into the wall.

  “One good woman,” he said.

  THREE

  VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 2006

  BOCA DEL SIERPE, TERRITORIAL TRINIDAD

  “Can you believe that airport down there?” Annie said from her window seat.

  Belted in for landing, Nimec hadn’t noticed the view. A stickler for punctuality, he was checking the time on his WristLink.

  “Mhmm,” he said. He’d taken an aisle seat aboard their Continental Airbus flight out of San Francisco, which, according to the analog watch display he’d selected, was right on the mark for its scheduled noon arrival.

  Annie turned to him.

  “Dear me, such enthusiasm,” she said. “How will I ever manage to keep up?”

  Nimec felt like a killjoy. He supposed Annie would agree that he ought to.

  “It’s nice,” he said a touch guiltily, looking past her out the window. “I think it’s a very nice airport.”

  “Pete, when you told me Los Rayos was a bona fide destination for international passenger flights, I wasn’t sure what to expect,” she said. “But this just knocks me out… I’ve been to cities back home with fields that aren’t anywhere close to its size.”

  Nimec scanned the rows of interconnected terminal buildings and warehouses, the sometimes parallel, sometimes converging bands of service roads and runways below. An airport, and a largish one, yup. Nice, nice, very impressive, and yet he couldn’t muster too much excitement. Still, he should have figured it was the sort of thing Annie would be keen on. Between her dad having been a pilot, and all those years she’d spent with the Air Force and NASA, she’d been around planes and runways forever. Earned a license to fly when she was, what, seventeen or eighteen? Whatever the minimum legal age might have been in Kansas. Hard to fathom, but she was a special case. He’d been different. The opposite, really — a slow starter. The highest Nimec had gotten off the ground before leaving South Philly to enlist in the service was a tenement rooftop, and he supposed the pigeons he’d flown out of the coop up above Boylston Street might have had a broader outlook on the world than he could have formed at the time.

  Now he felt the thump of the Airbus’s deploying wheels, quietly sat back
for its descent, and five minutes afterward was on the taxiway waiting for the call to disembark, along with the handful of other passengers bound for Los Rayos. The rest would presumably fly on to Piarco in the Trinididian capital, the plane’s final destination.

  Annie leaned down and slid her carry-on from under her seat. It was an old — she proudly called it vintage — Samsonite leather train case her mother had brought to San Jose with her, passing it on to Annie as a functional keepsake.

  She snapped open its lid.

  “Here,” she said, reaching inside. “You might want to stuff this into your computer bag.”

  Nimec glanced over at her, happily saw that she’d fished out his Seattle Mariners baseball cap.

  “Hey, thanks.” He snatched the cap from her hand. “Guess I forgot to pack it.”

  Annie nodded.

  “That’s how come I remembered,” she said, and shut her case with authority.

  The cabin intercom crackled out a pleasant thank-you-and-enjoy-your-stay, and then they were shuffling past the air crew and flight attendants into the jetway.

  Nimec had expected to be met at the arrivals lounge by Henri Beauchart, the director of resort security, but they were instead received by his subordinate while looking for someone that matched the ex — GIGN chief’s description. A slight, dark-haired, olive-complected man who spoke with a faint British accent, he introduced himself as Kalidas Murthy (“Please feel free to call me Kal.”), and explained that his boss had gotten unavoidably detained at the last minute.

  Nimec found this annoyed him, and got the sense Murthy had picked up on it.

  “I offer a sincere apology on Mr. Beauchart’s behalf, madam and sir, and convey his desire that you might be his personal guests at dinner tonight,” he said, looking straight at Nimec as he addressed them. “Meanwhile, you must be eager to settle into your villa after what I hope was a good trip.”