Collateral Damage (37 page)

“Fidel! Come quickly,” Andreas called.

Fidel hurried into the room and snapped to attention.

“Take them back. They have only upset George! It would serve them right if I just left them for George to play with as he will.” Fidel left with Collins’s rude children.

Andreas went over and picked up his son and caressed his cheek. “It’s all right,
mi hijo
. I will find you some playmates, don’t you worry. Those
chicos
were mean. I had the same problem, but we’ll take care of teaching them some manners very soon. It’s money that made them bad. They had more than others. Just you wait, everyone will have the same and you and your kind will be just as important as everyone else. Even those bad
chicos
. Maybe you’ll be more important.”

George lifted his head and smiled, baring his teeth.

Andreas smiled back. He’d tell Fidel to speed up with the attacks against Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan and he’d make the call to Lauren Collins tonight. The sooner Andreas got what he wanted, the sooner George would too.

The Angel of Mercy was crying and he would be her hero. Conrad went to where Angie had her cheek pressed hard to the door. They’d just pulled the two boys out kicking and screaming with Angie doing her best to disable anything she could reach and now she was alone and defeated.

Conrad set a firm hand on Angie’s shoulder and urged her away from the wall. She needed to have those breasts smashing against him and not cold concrete. “Hey, don’t do this to yourself,” he told her. “It’s going to be all right. We’re going to get out of here. The boys are going to be fine.”

She looked up at him, and damn, why did women cry. It did nothing but mess up good stuff. Her nose was red, her eyes were running, and her skin was blotchy. “I know. I know. It has to work out that way, anything else is unacceptable.”

“Angie. Angie?” The other dude in the other room called out.

Angie snapped her head up and nodded. “You’re right. It’s really going to be okay. Rico is getting better by the hour.” She patted Conrad on the cheek and ran to the other dude.

Jaysus that man had to go. Conrad followed. He needed to make an assessment of the other dude’s condition, so he’d have a good idea of what would be needed to take him out tonight.

Conrad stopped at the doorway. The other dude was sitting up on the side of the bed. His bloody shirt was gone, leaving his torso bare except for Angie’s bra anchoring the man’s broken arm against his chest. The man held his head in his good hand and moaned.

Angie went right up to him and placed her palm lovingly on the man’s cheek. “Oh, Rico. Thank God. You’re fully awake now? You remember what happened?”

“Yeah. How long? How long have I been out?”

“Long enough to have me on my knees begging for a miracle, buddy. Almost twenty-four hours.”

“Where are we?”

“Not sure yet, and don’t know who had kidnapped us, but we are in a Spanish speaking country.”

“Where are the boys?”

Angie drew a deep breath. “They just took them away, Rico. God, I tried to stop the guard, but…I…couldn’t.” She started to cry again.

“Shit.” The man put his good arm around her and hugged him to her, squashing those glorious breasts against him. “Don’t worry. I’ll get to them. Help me get upright so I can start getting my shit together. I’ll— Who the hell is he?”

Conrad smiled as Angie looked up.
Your executioner, asshole
.

Angie smiled. “Conrad, this is Rico. Rico, this is Conrad Gardner, a friend of Bill Collins’s who has been kidnapped too.” She motioned for Conrad to come into the room. “You’re just in time to help.”

“Any way I can.” Conrad moved into the room. It nearly killed him to help the other dude to get upright when all he wanted to do was snuff the life out of the bastard.

The dude wavered wildly, nearly fell back down then forced himself to steady. “I got it now.” The other dude released his hold on Conrad, taking a few steps on his own.

Suddenly loud crying penetrated the room. The brats were back.

“Dear God.” Angie left the other dude and ran.

Rico moved forward, braced his hand on the wall and followed Angie.

Conrad had never heard such a ruckus. He went with everyone into the living room. There wasn’t a scratch on the boys but they were sobbing. Angie had both of them in her arms on her lap. “Tell me what happened, Matt. Please. No matter what just tell me.”

“Mean monkey,” Matt said. “Bad man and mean monkey.”

“The monkey did tricks and the man wanted us to laugh,” Mitch said. “Then the monkey got mad. I thought he was going to bite me. He’s bad.”

“What man?” Rico asked. “Describe him. Did he say his name?”

The boys shook their heads. “He was just a bad man,” Matt said. “He called his monkey George. He said the monkey was his son.”

Angie gasped. “You’re sure, Matt? You’re very sure.”

“Of course he’s sure,” said Mitch. “I’m sure too. We give our solid oak, Aunt Angie.”

Angie looked at Rico, her eyes wide with shock and confusion. “I know where we—”

Rico pressed his finger to Angie’s mouth, a mouth made for bigger and better things, Conrad thought. The man looked around the room. “Hold that thought. The walls have eyes and ears,” he whispered.

Well, damn. Conrad hadn’t thought about that. He couldn’t afford to have a tape of anything untoward surface. He’d have to wait to off the other dude. But that was all right. He had plenty of time, and he still had a chance at the five million jackpot.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Loaded, ready to rock and riding in style, Jack swept his gaze over the occupants of the stretch Hummer then made one last check on the demeanor of the guards in the guard house. The two men were relaxed and joking and had only given the contents of the news van a cursory glance. They never even questioned the people in the luxury SUV. The infiltration was proceeding well. It was the ex-filtration he was worried about.

Besides him, Weston, Beck and Lauren, the only other person with them who knew exactly who they were and why they were here was Candace Latimoor. Everyone else believed they were a wildlife photography unit here to take additional footage of Andreas Miles’s Primate Reserve.

All elements of the operation had seamlessly coalesced except for the one thing they needed the most and had the least amount of control over. They had no satellite photos. No proof that the hostages were with Menendez. He never landed at the airport cited in the flight plan they’d filed after leaving Orlando, where surveillance agents had waited. Once reaching Brazilian airspace, Menendez’s Airbus A 380 diverted to a private airstrip, which given the size of the plane had to be one hell of a private facility. Heavy cloud cover made photos of that airstrip sketchy, but a humongous hanger was apparently the Airbus’s parking garage. All loading and unloading had been done beneath its steel walls and all trucks had been driven through the dense tropical foliage to somewhere inside this compound.

From what he could tell, the visible security fence and gate had all the bells and whistles of a maximum security prison. If they were forced to get past it to escape, it wouldn’t be a piece of cake but was within the team’s capabilities.

It had been raining since their early morning arrival to the rustic capital of Puerto Maldonado, but as ill luck would have it, the afternoon had cleared, adding to the biggest negative of the operation—daylight. But between rainforest vegetation and their camera props, the team should be able to maneuver around enough to scope out the area and hopefully locate Matt, Mitch, Angie, and Rico—at least Jack was praying so. Rico’s body had yet to turn up in Orlando.

Jack had been to the Brazilian Amazon rainforest before, but hadn’t realized just how vast and virgin the Peruvian side was. On the drive he’d seen several scarlet macaws, their blue, red and yellow coloring unmistakable amid the lush green forest.

Lauren was with them. He still wasn’t sure how it had happened, but had finally come to grips that it was the right thing to have happen despite his fears for her. She’d stay with the camera crew and he’d contact her when he’d hopefully located her sons. From that point, it would be decided if the live camera feed would continue to film Menendez’s interview, or if they’d be able to capture the rescue of the hostages on tape. That would be sure proof of Menendez’s involvement with Bill Collins. Besides, live TV would be a pretty big deterrent against a show of violent force on Menendez’s part in stopping their escape from the compound.

The choppy black wig Lauren had on had changed her general looks from golden and angelic to a sophisticated, sexy goth that would fit right in with New York’s trendy fashion and just what a hungry reporter in training would look like. She sat next to Candace Latimoor. The silver haired, tanned and lively, fifty-something woman had a deep voice and a direct humorous manner that hit somewhere between Larry King and Jay Leno.

When the driver rounded the bend, a collective gasp rose from Latimoor’s crew. Jack had been semi-prepared for the massive size and space-aged architecture of Menendez’s facilities from grainy satellite images. Still the scene was like driving up to a James Bond movie set. The look he shared with Weston and Beck said they thought the same thing.

Once the cars rolled to a stop the situation started moving fast. Outside humidity heavily weighed down everything. The muggy temperature was ninety-degrees and stayed that way year round in the Amazon Region, great for rainforest vegetation, hell for everything else.

Lauren found him in the chaos of unloading equipment. Their hands met and held as did their gazes. All their hopes and fears lay bare between them and he had to swallow hard and slice into his own gut to stop from tossing her back into the limo and send her to safety.

“No matter what happens from this point on, thank you,” she whispered and brushed his lips with hers and left him. It was then that Jack finally realized the biggest determent in having a personal connection to the mission. It wasn’t necessarily because emotion might cloud a decision. He’d trained for so many years that most of the right moves were instinctual and instantaneous. No, the reason any warrior should stay the hell away from a personal mission was because of what Jack was feeling at that moment. If he failed, he doubted he’d be able to live with himself.

Lauren went with the Latimoor crew and all of their equipment inside to set up for the show. Jack, Weston and Beck went to the supply van, pulled out an official-looking large HD video camera, one that had a few little features tapped onto it. One called the Big Easy, a listening device that picked up the faintest of sounds, displayed them on a screen, and identified them. The other was a Thermal Imaging Camera. All of them wore ear devices for communication and were armed to the max now that they had their camera bags in hand.

Beck wore the big camera on his shoulder. Hopefully they’d only use the non-lethal weapons, stun guns and tear gas. The bullet proof vests they wore beneath their oversized Ts would be their only tactical protection and it was weird as shit to be tackling a mission with nothing more on their side. So not their typical blast in and blast out style.

CNN press badges in hand, they set out on foot to give the perimeter of the facility and any outlying buildings a once over. Their plan was to check them first for Matt and Mitch, and Jack prayed, Angie and Rico, before moving to the main facility.

Even though it was strange walking into a situation without being fully decked out, it still was damn good to be active again. He didn’t know what his future held, but he wasn’t completely out of fighting the battle against the evils rampant within the world.

Pegging the security barracks was easy. Muscle sat on the porch smoking. The team moved on doing their best to attract as little attention as possible. Jack snapped pictures with a hand-held Sony and Beck used the monitoring equipment. The thermal camera enabled him to pick out guards in the shadows and in the foliage.

“What are you doing?” one armed guard shouted at them in Spanish.

Jack, Weston and Beck stopped but pretended not to understand. They showed them their CNN badges and mimed that they’d like to get the men’s picture. Several nearby men posed.

Jack thought they were home free until the guard insisted they go to the main building. Change of plan, but they’d deal by doing inside first then move outside. Going in through the service entrance, they were placed in a waiting area until the guard could contact someone named Fidel.
Damn
. Jack would give the situation three minutes then they’d go rogue.

Lauren wanted to stand in the middle of the floor and scream to the world on live TV that the SOB smiling so benevolently and doting on his chimpanzee was a horrendous, mass-murdering terrorist who’d kidnapped her children.

Instead she bit her lip, clenched her jaw, and walked along with the
Latimoor Live
crew. She had to hand it to Candace, the woman was a master of maneuvering. Menendez/Miles had wanted to take everyone to the GXP plant that adjoined his private compound, but Candace had talked him into showing them his private quarters first, emphasizing just how much more human and real and empathetic the viewers would be if they got to know the real Andreas Miles before they learned about his ingenious biofuel invention, GXP.

Menendez had fluffed like a peacock and began leading them around, explaining all of the green technology built into his facilities. He rarely had to use a generator between solar, wind and hydraulic power.

He led them to his energy control panel room and the engineer in charge. The man began explaining how power for the entire compound was regulated. While they were being lectured to, Lauren saw a man approach Menendez. Menendez immediately left the room, looking alarmed.

Lauren hesitated only a split second before following. One of Latimoor’s crewmen with a small video camera followed her.

“Want to tell me what’s up?” the guy whispered. A partially opened door indicated the way Menendez and his man had gone.

“Just follow and film,” she said. “And whatever you do don’t let them hear us.”