Ballistic

Four sets of well-practiced hands went to work on him immediately as the van drove off to the south towards Paseo de la Reforma. His briefcase was taken and searched, he was hooded and frisked, his wallet was pulled from his poplin pants, and his white button-down shirt was lifted up to check for a wire.

The hands that felt him up, he knew, would also be the hands that killed him if they were so instructed by their masters.

The van turned left, which the CIA man noted from under his blindfold, but he really did not expect to be able to discern where he was being taken.

He’d been to Mexico City before, yes, but this was not his turf.

He sat quietly between his minders as they drove through traffic; he’d ridden hooded in vans, surrounded by a local gun crew, more times that he cared to remember. In Beirut, in Kosovo, in Thailand, in Somalia, in other shit- splattered dumps around this godforsaken planet.

Usually, he was bundled like laundry into a car or van to be hauled to some secret location to meet with a contact. But this was different. He was here, in Mexico, and not some other poor agency sap, for one reason and one reason only.

He had an ability that very few others possessed.

He had the ability to positively identify Courtland Gentry, code name Violator, call sign Sierra Six, nickname the Gray Man, in one second flat.

And why not? They had worked together for five years.

The thick CIA man had spent the last two days in Puerto Vallarta, waiting for word from local case officers that the target had been found. He suspected a wet team from the Special Activities Division had moved into the theater as well, but they wouldn’t have any contact with him, nor he with them. Yesterday morning he flew to Mexico City to wait at the embassy for a sighting of the man Langley suspected to be their number one persona non grata ex-employee. The embassy was papered with photos of the guy sliding on the telephone lines above the shoot-out in PV. From just the picture, the thick CIA man in the van honestly had no idea if it was his former colleague or not, but the stunt sure sounded like something Violator would have tried, and like something he could have pulled off.

Hell, the CIA man knew better than to ever bet against Courtland Gentry. When it came to close-quarters battle, when it came to kicking in a door and taking out the bad guys in the room, when it came to sending in a small covert unit against a larger enemy and longer odds, Sierra Six had been the best.

So, the CIA man suspected it was Court; he was here, and he was shooting it out with the narcos.

Lord have mercy on the narcos.

A connection had been made between Gentry and the leader of the GOPES team blown up on the boat as well. Eduardo Gamboa had worked in the DEA for years, and Violator and he had shared a Laotian prison cell for a few weeks more than a decade prior.

Tenuous. Tenuous at best, but not too tenuous for Langley to call the thick CIA man, roust him from his bed and shove him on a Company Lear, race him to Mexico and plop him on his fat ass to wait for a chance to positively identify the target.

So now he rocked back and forth, shoulder to shoulder with a vanload of goons from the Daniel de la Rocha organization, the Black Suits, some seriously bad motherfuckers who claimed to be holding Violator, or somebody who looks a lot like him, somewhere in Mexico City. These pricks didn’t need money, so it wasn’t the reward they were after. It was some quid pro quo worked out high above the CIA man’s pay grade. It bothered him that Langley would play ball with these guys, but Denny Carmichael, current head of the National Clandestine Service, had a boner for Violator, so God only knew how Denny would scratch DLR’s back if he gave up Court.

The CIA man pondered it all.

Court. Violator. Sierra Six. The Gray Man.

The asshole who ruined my life.

The van stopped for a moment. The American thought this was the end of the road, but no, they moved forward again and made a right turn; he swayed along with the men sandwiching him.

If the Agency’s assessment was correct, if this was, in fact, Violator, in a few minutes the American would have the chance to let Gentry know how much trouble he’d caused.

And the CIA man had his orders. He had been ordered to identify Violator, yes, but that was not all.

He’d also been ordered, if allowed by Los Trajes Negros, to stick around and watch Court Gentry die.

For a time Court realized that he missed the full-body electric shocks provided by the car battery. Twice during a ten-minute zapping by the Little Butcher and his device of misery, Court had blown a breaker switch on the console. The old contraption used fuses that had shorted, and they had been replaced, but the American was able to endure more punishment than anyone that had ever been wired to the fence. So the machine had been put to the side so that a new method could be used on him.

The donkey prod.

At first el Carnicerito had just touched the two sharp prongs to Gentry’s bloody chest. The shock was more acute than the all-over electricity he’d been receiving from the shock machine. The prod created a sting and a burn, and it was god-awful but not as bad as the musclewrenching misery of the car battery juice sent through the fence. Then the Little Butcher used the donkey prod in more and more painful locations on Gentry’s body, inevitably focusing his attention on his prisoner’s genitals. Twice he’d shocked him there. The first time he didn’t have the prongs seated correctly, and the gadget just buzzed.

But the second time he rammed the pincers hard against the American’s balls, pressed the button, and Court had spewed vomit nearly six feet into the room.

The five Mexicans burst into laughter.

The gringo soon fainted, but smelling salts returned him to his torture session, lest he miss any of the good parts.

Jerry Pfleger stood against the wall to the side; he’d turned away from the cruelty long ago, and he just stared at the moldy bricks in front of him. His body shook; he told himself it was the cold, morguelike air in the basement dungeon, but that wasn’t it at all.

He was scared.

He wondered if this was all worth one million dollars.

Jerry looked back over his shoulder when the torturer waddled over to a rubber bucket on the floor against the wall and retrieved a well-soaked iron rod from it. Jerry winced again and turned his head back into the corner. Listened as the dungeon master spoke to his prisoner softly as he prepared the device. “You have suffered much already, amigo, and the only way to prevent more suffering is to tell me where we can find Senora Gamboa.”

The long device dripped black oil, and the Little Butcher held it up like it was some sort of prize.

Court’s head hung low, but still he looked at it. Pfleger watched the muscles of the man’s body tighten in revulsion.

He knew where that thing was going.

The elevator again came to life, and the car began to lower slowly.

The rod went back into the bucket, but the torturer said, “We will get back to our fun in a moment, my friend. You now have some time to think about things.”

The freight door opened, and a large, hooded man in a tropicweight poplin suit was led in by the two men in federale uniforms. The large man’s arms were not bound. He was put directly under the light at the center of the room, and then his hood was removed. He recoiled at the bare bulb and then focused on the scene before him.

The nude prisoner, bloody and wet, chained to the metal fence that was bolted into the wall and fixed to iron posts in the cement floor. The wires running to the rolling cart, then on to the battery on the dolly.

The blond man took a few more moments to look around, to size up the six other men in the room with him, and to sniff the air. He took in the odor of decaying human flesh. He looked around impassively for a few seconds more, seemingly unfazed by all in view, as if torture chambers were nothing much to see.