Nina Myers hunched down over the steering wheel, trying to see the street sign. Chatsworth lay on the edge of Los Angeles county, in the northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley. It wasn’t the middle of nowhere, but it was rural enough to be zoned for horses. The streetlights were fewer and farther between, and the street signs were hard to read. It was also far enough out that her GPS map didn’t show any roads.
The place she looked for was on a street called Baden, somewhere below the rocky hills that marked the border between Los Angeles and Ventura counties. She was interested in the address because it was associated with a phone number, a number that Marcia Tintfass had called three times immediately after Nina’s visit. She was going to find that house and talk to whoever had received those phone calls.
Hotel security had no interest in dealing with a gunman, but Jack heard them moving around up on the floor. They’d surely found the bodies of Ramirez and Vanowen by now. He heard the fire door to the stairwell open twice, then close quickly after a pause. They’d be startled to see Zapata’s body lying there, with Jack sitting calmly beside it — startled, and none too interested in dealing with it.
Jack felt his eyelids droop. It had been a long night, and the truth was, he hadn’t gotten much sleep in prison for the three previous weeks. He could use a real rest.
When the police finally arrived, they came from above and below, guns drawn. They proned him out and he didn’t resist, letting them cuff him. They led him upstairs to the hallway, now full of emergency personnel, police officers, and one very large man in plain clothes.
“Well, there’s Captain America,” the big man crowed. “You’ve had a busy night.”
Jack looked at the badge on the man’s belt. He was a U.S. Marshal. “I want to talk to Chris Henderson at the Counter Terrorist Unit,” Jack said, “or Ryan Chappelle, if he’s out of the hospital.”
“You can talk all you want once we get you back into jail,” the man said.
Jack nodded. There was no need to put up a fight. Even if it took another day, this whole mess would straighten itself out. In jail, they’d put him in isolation, where he’d be safe from MS–13 and their strange vendetta. The biggest mystery for him now was why Zapata had worn an MS–13 tattoo. He’d had no idea of that connection. It was impossible that Zapata had sent MS–13 after him — absolutely impossible. What was the connection?
Jack mulled this over as the big man — Jack heard someone refer to him as Pascal — and another marshal led him downstairs. Pascal didn’t engage him in conversation, and when Jack asked two more times to talk to someone at CTU, the big marshal repeated his previous statement. On Jack’s third try, Pascal shook his head. “Son, you don’t get me. My job ain’t to accommodate you in any way. My job is to put you back in your hole.”
They reached the hotel’s parking lot, and Pascal guided Jack, still handcuffed, over to a beige Crown Victoria. Jack saw bullet holes in the door and guessed it was the same Crown Vic he’d seen at U-Pack. Pascal tucked Jack in the backseat — although unmarked, the car was all cop, with the plastic shield and no door handles on the backseat interior. Then Pascal maneuvered himself into the driver’s seat with the other marshal riding shotgun. They drove out of the hotel and turned onto the early morning downtown streets.
The other marshal got on his cell phone for a minute, then turned to Pascal. “The victim was DOA.”
Pascal grunted. “Guess you got another one,” he called back to Jack. “You keep busy, that’s for damned sure. Out less than twelve hours and you steal two automobiles and commit a murder. I don’t suppose you’re going to tell us what you had against Mister. What was his name again?”
“Aguillar,” the other marshal said. “Francis Aguillar.” Jack felt the blood freeze in his veins.
Zapata stood in the crowd in the lobby watching the police and paramedics parade in and out. He looked no more or less a part of the crowd than any of the others — an average-sized man with a shaved head, wearing track pants and a zip-up jacket, he passed easily for a guest out for an early morning jog. If anyone asked for his ID, he would have a problem — the Ossipon identity was connected to one of the two rooms. The police would want to know why three men had been killed in or near those rooms, and Zapata had no interest in long conversations with the authorities.
So the Ossipon cover was blown, but Zapata could deal with that. What disturbed him most was how close the authorities had come to him. They had been, literally, within a step or two of catching him. He had not seen the undercover agent himself, but he had known it the minute Vanowen showed up at his door, bloody, with Ramirez, of all people, and saying they had a stranger with them. How obvious. It was a pattern almost too easy to recognize. Did they have so little respect for him that they thought he would not see this pattern? A new element thrown into the middle of his carefully laid plans. Zapata clicked his tongue reproachfully. Would Leonardo fail to notice bird droppings fall on the
This had been a clumsy effort on the part of the government, he thought, a big blunt instrument. Yes, he had to admit it had almost worked. If Aguillar had not been there to delay the agent. Well, the fault was his, in the end. He had fallen into a pattern himself. He should never have allowed Aguillar to use Vanowen again. It had not been enough to cut off Ramirez. He should have removed Vanowen from his list for good.
Well, Zapata thought, slipping on a pair of sunglasses against the rising sun, lesson learned. He slipped out of the hotel and went for a jog.
Francis Aguillar. The name bounced around in Jack’s head obsessively. Francis Aguillar. Not Jorge Rafael Marquez? Maybe it was a mistake, or an alias for Zapata. No, not an alias, Jack thought. Aguillar was a known associate of Zapata’s who had vanished years earlier. Zapata would never take the alias of an associate.
Jack felt the claustrophobic sense he’d experienced in jail when he’d learned that the warden, the corrections officer, and Chappelle had all been disabled. The walls that had seemed so unreal suddenly seemed concrete and dangerous. Now, in the backseat of the cruiser, which a moment ago had seemed such a temporary thing, he felt hemmed in, trapped.
He was in the middle of that thought when Peter Jiminez rammed the Crown Victoria.
11. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 6 A.M. AND 7 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Peter’s car hit the unmarked police cruiser on the driver’s side trunk, spinning it around in the middle of Flower Street, which was still empty at this hour. The force of the crash hurled Jack against the window, where he hit his head with a thud. By the time his vision cleared, someone was opening the driver’s door, and Jack had a blurry vision of someone blasting Pascal in the face with pepper spray. The noxious gas only seemed to make the big man angry. He struggled to get himself out of his seat when the assailant punched him in the jaw.
Jack’s vision had cleared now, although the scene felt unreal. He saw Peter Jiminez handcuff the marshal’s hands to the steering wheel, then rip out the car’s radio.
A moment later the back door flew open and Peter was pulling him out, holding up a handcuff key. A moment later his cuffs were off.
Jack didn’t bother asking Peter where he’d come from. It didn’t matter. He was free, and he still had a job to do. “I need your car,” Jack said. “There are police about three blocks from here. We have to clear this scene.”
“I’m going with you,” Jiminez said.
“Okay,” Jack said, and chopped Peter across the jaw with an elbow. Jiminez sagged like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Jack took the handcuffs and locked Peter to the door of the Crown Victoria, took Peter’s Para Ordinance.45 and his magazines, his car keys, and his telephone, and jumped into his car.
It turned out Baden was an unmarked street that led up into the rocky hills. This was an alien world, a forest of boulders jutting up from the chaparral. One boulder — Stony Point — was so huge and steep that mountain climbers came up here to practice on weekends. The whole area looked like a movie set dropped into the area by Hollywood producers.
