Ballistic

Team Three, with Major Eduardo Gamboa in the lead, kicked in the door of the master suite. They actuated the flashlights attached under the barrels of their submachine guns but found the room already awash with light. The fifty-two-inch plasma in this room was on as well; this screen was broadcasting an interview with Daniel de la Rocha. He spoke to a reporter off camera. Gamboa ignored it and rushed to the king-sized bed. A large lump under the silk sheets was his target.

But before he made it to the bed, his weapon raised to fire, a voice to his right caught his attention.

“Welcome to La Sirena, Major Eduardo Gamboa.” It was de la Rocha’s voice. Gamboa looked up in shock. DLR was on television looking right into Gamboa’s eyes. He appeared to be in a studio, dressed in his impeccable and ubiquitous black Italian-cut suit. “A government assassin, here, to eliminate me. Dios mio!” The handsome face on the screen said it with a slight smile; his slick hair, goatee, and thin mustache gleamed black; his eyes seemingly locked on Gamboa.

Eduardo looked back at the hallway door. Both of his men stared at the television with wide eyes.

Over his earpiece the major heard Team One check in. “All four targets eliminated.”

And then Team Two. “Major . . . most of these bunks are empty. There are only three men up here. No capitan.”

And then, from the television, de la Rocha continued to address the stunned federal officer. “Major Gamboa, let me ask you something. If you work for the federales, and I own the federales, where does that leave you and your men?”

Gamboa looked to the lump in the bed, he lifted back the sheets with a gloved hand.

C4 plastic explosives, easily one hundred pounds in bricks wired together with a red detonator attached. “?Que chingados?” muttered Gamboa. What the fuck?

“Do you have your answer yet? Dead! It leaves you and your fucking team muerto, pendejo!”

Eduardo Gamboa turned away from the bomb, pushed the transmit button on his radio. “It’s a trap! Off the boat!”

Eduardo’s men turned in front of him, began running down the hallway. He sprinted behind them; they had just made it into the saloon, had just passed the television playing the movie exalting the crimes of Daniel Alonzo de la Rocha Alvarez, when a flash erupted from behind them. The hot blast of fire enveloped them, and they died in the spectacular explosion of the thirty-three-million-dollar vessel.

Daniel de la Rocha bobbed in the water, one hundred yards from the wreckage of his beautiful La Sirena. He waited patiently while Emilio and Felipe, his two bodyguards, got the emergency life raft inflated, and then they helped him aboard. Once all three men had climbed onto the tiny dinghy, they tossed away the snorkeling gear they had been wearing since they slipped out of the wooden life raft on the upper deck and into the water of Banderas Bay. They’d managed to swim one hundred yards before the four men left behind on the sundeck were shot, and this told Daniel it was time to press the waterproof remote control that began the sequence both on his DVD player and on his bomb.

Now he and his men watched the flames burning on the water. He hoped it would not be long before the local harbor fire patrol came to rescue the three survivors. Daniel knew he would be a living martyr after this act of aggression by the federales; indeed, he had worked for months so that he could capitalize on this moment.

He would miss La Sirena, without question. But it was insured, his Eurocopter was insured, and a great deal of artwork that was not even on board was insured. It was time for an upgrade anyway. There was a one-hundred-sixty-foot gem that he’d seen a few months earlier in Fort Lauderdale, and he’d have his people begin working immediately on the owner to encourage him to sell it.

Sergeant Martin Orozco Fernandez and Sergeant Ramses Cienfuegos Cortillo bobbed in the black water. Both men were injured: burns to Ramses’s legs that would scream in the salt water as soon as his adrenaline dissipated enough for him to feel them, and a slightly sprained left wrist for Martin that would make seven miles of swimming a special kind of hell. But they were excellent swimmers, and their wetsuits were buoyant. They would not drown.

But that did not make either of them feel much better. Because the rest of their team was dead, and it was obvious to both of them that they had been set up by their leaders, and their leaders were somewhere on the shore they swam towards. Only a few knew of tonight’s attack, and Ramses and Martin knew that at least one of those few had tipped off de la Rocha.

SEVEN

As a general rule, Court liked third-world bus stations. Here he could people-watch with a minimum of return scrutiny, sit by himself in a dark corner, and soak up the experiences of others. His personal predicament, the fact that many highly dangerous people wanted him dead, necessitated a solitary existence, a distance from and a general mistrust of other human beings. For this reason the thirty-seven-year-old American by and large learned about normal everyday life and family and relationships by proxy, often in bus stations. Watching a father scold a misbehaving child, a young couple cuddle and laugh together, an old man eat his dinner alone. Court had been living this way exclusively for five years, the time that the former CIA asset had been on the run from the Central Intelligence Agency, ducking a shoot-on-sight sanction. But to one extreme or another, sitting alone and watching others live their lives had been Court’s life as long as he could remember.

Nine days had passed since Brazil; he’d traveled overland ever since—bicycles and buses and shoe leather into Central America. He hadn’t remained for more than six hours in a single place. He now sat at a bus station in Guatemala City, waiting on a chicken bus that would take him into the northern jungle near the border with Mexico and Belize.

He had a little money now but not much. He’d sold the manhunter’s pistol in El Salvador, and he still had some of the euros he’d pulled from the Dutchman’s wallet. But he’d bought secondhand clothing in Panama and a green canvas gym bag to carry it in. That and food and bus tickets had not been much. Gentry could get by with less than virtually any other American; nevertheless, cash would become an issue before too long.

A black-and-white television hung from a metal pole in a corner of the waiting room. It broadcast a talk show from Mexico City featuring transsexuals shouting at one another over some nonsense. Court didn’t pay much attention to the TV; instead his eyes were fixed on the old man and his plate of rice. It was the man who mopped the dirty floor and perfunctorily wiped the toilets here at the bus station; the American assassin had been sitting here long enough to see the man at work. Now the janitor sat at a table by the cafe and picked at his food, sucked the rice because he did not have enough teeth to do anything else with it. Did he have to work all night? Was there anyone to come home to in the morning?

Court found himself imagining a story for the man, and in many ways it mirrored his own.

Court did not expect to live as long as the old man, and he found perverse comfort in that because he did not want to be both lonely and old.

The village in the Amazon had been an eye opener for him. When Court arrived there, he’d been traveling for five months straight. A couple of weeks in Rio, a couple of weeks in Quito, a few days in two dozen other towns. All that time he thought of stopping; it never left his thoughts. He thought he wanted to find a place to stay, a job to do, people around him who, obviously, would never know his true identity but who would know him as someone, which was quite unlike traveling, where he was neither known nor noticed by those around him.

And the Amazon village had provided all this for him. The people were kind, and they weren’t too inquisitive. The austerity had helped him focus and pushed him further away from the painkiller addiction that he’d left behind him, bit by bit, in each town he’d passed through since Caracas the previous April. He’d been clean for two months by the time he arrived in the Amazon, and the constant exercise and work and danger from nothing more nefarious