Home Invasion (7 page)

“Well, that’s it,” Fargo Ford said as he closed the encrypted cell phone. “Mission over.”

Brad Parker stopped pacing the motel room floor and frowned at his partner. “They’re not even going to let us look for the guy.”

Ford shook his head. “Nope. We’re done. Stick a fork in us.”

“No thanks.”

“We don’t have any choice in the matter,” Ford pointed out. “We’ve been ordered back to Langley for debriefing. We’re supposed to catch a plane out of here tonight for DFW, then switch planes there and proceed straight on to Washington.”

“When does the plane from Corpus Christi leave?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“That gives us several hours,” Parker said.

“Several hours to do what?”

“Go back to that hotel and see if we can pick up the trail of our target.”

Ford shook his head, and yet he knew exactly how Parker was feeling. It was incredibly frustrating to go through everything they had, to survive the dangers that had faced them, and yet in the end everything they’d done had to be considered a failure. They didn’t have the target or the laptop that must have contained vital intel.

“After all that trouble at the hotel, if we go over there don’t you think they might be looking for us?”

“Really? Who got a good look at us?” Parker asked. “The target, and the two guys who were trying to kill him.”

“You’re forgetting about the security cameras,” Ford said. “By now the cops are bound to have studied that footage. They probably have our faces out there. Hell, we may even be on the news, for all I know.”

“If that’s true, don’t you think they’ll be watching for us at the airport?”

Ford’s frown deepened. “You’re right. And yet the orders were to catch that flight this evening.”

“Something’s not right here, Fargo. These people we’re up against… they know too much. They get things done too quickly.”

“Like we’re fighting our own people,” Ford mused.

“You said it, not me. But I can’t help but wonder.”

The two men looked at each other for a long moment, both of them obviously deep in thought. For years they had served their nation, putting their lives in jeopardy again and again with little thought for their own safety, traveling the wild places and the back alleys of the globe in search of America’s enemies. Neither man was the sort to make speeches or wave the flag. They were pragmatists who believed they were doing a job worth doing well.

But in recent years, they had seen unwelcome changes creeping over the country. They had watched as the intelligence community became more and more political, and those politics increasingly leaned to the left. They had seen operations fail because the higher-ups had tied the hands of the men in the field. They had seen important information ignored because it conflicted with some bizarre notion of political correctness, sometimes with tragic results. They had seen power concentrated more and more in an elitist minority centered in Washington, with branches in the national news media in New York and in the entertainment capital of Hollywood. To those people, the honest opinions of the vast majority of Americans just didn’t count anymore.

As much as Ford hated to admit it, he didn’t really know who he was working for anymore … or if he could trust them.

“You’re talking about going off the reservation,” he said now to Parker. “I don’t know if I’m ready to do that.”

“I’m talking about getting to the bottom of this and finding out the truth. If we’re being set up, I want to know about it.”

Ever since Parker had been hurt on that mission several years earlier, he had been more reckless, more of a loose cannon. It was like he knew he was living on borrowed time anyway and didn’t care about his own safety anymore.

But that didn’t mean he was wrong about what was going on here. Something didn’t smell right to Ford, too.

“All right,” Ford said after a moment. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to have a look around the hotel and see if we can find out anything. We’re gonna have to be careful how we do it, though.”

“Whatever you say,” Parker replied with a nod. Ford got to his feet. “I saw a discount store down the road….”

The two men who got out of the pickup in the hotel parking lot an hour later didn’t look much like the Hawaiian shirt-wearing tourists who had been there earlier in the day. Now they wore boots, jeans, shirts with silver snaps instead of buttons, and Stetson hats. The pickup was a plain F-150 with nothing to distinguish it. They had stolen it from the outer reaches of the parking lot at the discount store, the location indicating that it probably belonged to one of the employees there and might not be missed for a while. They had altered the numbers on the license plate with electrical tape, anyway. That wouldn’t stand up to close observation … but most people didn’t pay much attention to anything except their own lives.

The hotel had a small parking lot in front for people who were coming and going, but guests were supposed to park in the attached garage. The first floor of the garage was valet parking. Ford walked in there while Parker stepped into the lobby to talk to the concierge.

In a perfect Texas drawl, Ford asked the Hispanic parking attendant, “I’m lookin’ for a friend of mine, little fella about ’yay tall.” He held out a hand to indicate a man in the range of five feet, four inches. “Kinda long blond hair, little mustache. Y’all happen to have seen him?”

The attendant shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t think so. Have we been parking his car? I wouldn’t have seen him if we haven’t.”

“Well, he usually uses valet parkin’ when it’s available, so I thought there was a chance.”

“Are you sure he’s registered here?”

Ford rubbed his jaw and grimaced. “I
thought
this was the place he said, but could be I’m wrong about that.”

The attendant pointed to a side door leading into the hotel. “Why don’t you go inside and ask at the desk? I’m sure they can help you.”

“Thanks. I’ll do that.” Ford nodded and headed for the door. He paused and looked back. “Say, I heard there was some sort of big trouble here earlier today.”

The attendant rolled his eyes and shook his head. “I never saw so many cops and ambulances in all my life. Somebody fell from a sixth-floor balcony and splattered himself all over the concrete next to the pool.”

Ford winced. “Man. That’s a bad way to go.”

“Yeah, well, this guy was dead when he hit, they say. He’d been shot.”

“That’s terrible. I didn’t know things like that happened in a place like this.”

“They never have before now.” The attendant shook his head again. “I’m thinkin’ about quitting.

But I need the job, so I probably won’t.”

“I hear you, brother,” Ford said. “I don’t like my job, either, but everybody’s got to do something, right?"

He grinned, waved, and went on into the hotel, through the side door into a corridor that led past several meeting rooms to the lobby.

Parker was coming down that same corridor toward Ford, evidently looking for him. Parker wasn’t moving fast, but Ford saw the glitter of excitement in his eyes.

“You got something?” Ford asked in a low voice as they met.

“The concierge thought she remembered a guy matching the target’s description getting into a cab earlier this afternoon, right around the same time all the trouble happened upstairs.”

“That must’ve been him,” Ford breathed. “The concierge didn’t remember the number of the cab, did she?”

“No,” Parker said, and Ford wasn’t particularly disappointed. That would have been too much luck to hope for. “But there are only two cab companies in town.”

“Then that’s our next stop,” Ford said.

And now that they had the scent, he wasn’t even thinking anymore about how they weren’t exactly following orders.

It took a while and several bribes, but eventually Ford and Parker had the address where a cab driver named Mamoud Hajabanian had dropped off a fare he’d picked up at the hotel at approximately the right time that afternoon. Mamoud didn’t remember what the guy had looked like, though. All Americans were the same anyway, according to him.

Mamoud had driven over the bay bridge and delivered the fare to a motel in a strip of low-rent motels, sleazy dive bars, and tourist trap restaurants practically in the shadow of the
Lexington.
The motel had cabins painted pink, each with a plastic flamingo stuck in the ground just outside the door. Swamp coolers chugged in the windows. The place looked like it had been built in 1947 and hadn’t been remodeled or updated since, although the coat of pink paint appeared to be relatively fresh.

The office was an eight-by-eight cubicle with a sand-gritty linoleum floor and a counter topped by a sheet of bulletproof glass that had an opening at the bottom where credit cards or cash could be slid through. Ford would have been willing to bet that most of the place’s business was done in cash.

On the other side of the glass was an old black man with a stringy neck. He wore a polo shirt and was texting somebody on a cell phone. Without looking up from what he was doing, he said to the agents, “No vacancies. I don’t care what the sign outside says. The NO part is burned out.”

The old man’s voice was muffled by the glass. Ford raised his own voice and said, “We’re meeting a friend here.”

“No, you’re not,” the old man said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“This ain’t that kind of place. We got a respectable trade. If you’re lookin’ for dope or hookers, go somewheres else.”

“Dope and hookers are the last things we’re looking for,” Ford said. “Really, we’re just looking for our friend.” He slid a fifty through the opening in the glass. A few years earlier, it would have been a twenty, but the cost of everything just kept going up.

The old man didn’t take the bill, but at least he set the phone aside. “What’s this friend of yours look like?”

He didn’t ask for a name. Names in a place like this would most likely be phonies anyway.

Ford held out his hand. “About this tall, blond hair, mustache. He’s not very old. Not much more than a kid.”

The old man’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What do you want with him? I don’t need no trouble here. Last time I had to call the cops, they told me they didn’t want to have to keep on comin’ out here.”

“No trouble at all,” Ford assured him. “We’re just supposed to meet him, take him around and show him some of the night life. He’s from out of town, you know.”

“The cousin of a friend of ours,” Parker added over Ford’s shoulder.

“Uh-huh,” the old man said. Clearly, he didn’t believe a word they had told him, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off that fifty now. His gnarled hand suddenly made it disappear with surprising dexterity. “Cabin Twelve,” he said. “But you best not be lyin’ to me about that trouble.”

“Don’t worry,” Ford said. “You won’t even know we’re down there.”

As they left the tiny office, Parker said, “What are the odds he was telling us the truth?”

“Pretty good, I think. He was practically drooling over that fifty.”

“And the odds that he’s already calling the guy in Cabin Twelve to warn him we’re coming?”

Ford saw the door of the cabin in question jerk open. “Even better.”

They started to run as the young man they had seen at the hotel across the bay that afternoon darted outside. He spotted them, stopped short, and stood there for a second with his head twitching back and forth as he looked for a way to escape.

While he was doing that, a car careened into the motel parking lot with a screech of tires and headed straight for the seemingly immobilized young man.

“Damn it!” Ford said. He knew that he and Parker had unintentionally led the killers right to their quarry.

Parker put on an extra burst of speed while Ford reached under the cowboy shirt and pulled out his gun. He started firing at the driver’s window of the speeding car, but the way the glass merely starred a little under the slugs’ impact told him it was bulletproof. The car never slowed down.

Parker left his feet in a dive that sent him crashing into the blond man. His momentum carried both of them out of the car’s path as it missed them by inches. A second later, with an explosion of glass and pink stucco, the car slammed into the front of the cabin.

Both front doors popped open. The two men in the car had to struggle a little to get out past the air bags that had deployed because of the collision. That slowed them down just enough to give Ford a chance to aim.

He figured they were both wearing bulletproof vests, so he drew a bead on the driver’s head and squeezed off two swift shots. The gun in the man’s hand went off, firing wildly as Ford’s bullets drilled through his brain and flung him back over the vehicle’s crumpled hood.

The wrecked car gave the passenger some cover. He was on the same side as Parker and the target. Ford couldn’t get a shot from where he was, and as he sprinted toward the back of the car, he didn’t know if he could get around there in time to save his partner. The killer wouldn’t get away, he vowed, but obviously the men who were after the blond kid were willing to give up their own lives to get rid of him.

Parker wasn’t defenseless, though. He rolled, braced himself on his hands, and swept both legs against the side of the would-be assassin’s left leg. That knocked the man’s feet out from under him. He sat down hard beside the car. His gun went off as he fell, but it was pointed into the air, not at Parker or the blond man.

Ford pounded around the back of the wrecked car. He fired again, a double tap that turned the second killer’s face into an ugly crimson smear.

Parker scrambled to his feet. He had hold of the blond man’s arm and dragged him upright, too.

“Let me go, let me go!” the man babbled. “I won’t tell, I swear! I swear!”

Ford and Parker ignored his plea. Ford grabbed the blond man’s other arm. He was small enough and the two agents were big enough so that when they took off running, his feet lifted from the ground and he dangled between them like a child.

“Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God!” he screamed.

People in the other motel cabins pushed curtains aside and looked out the windows to see what all the commotion was about, but they didn’t emerge from the cabins.

The elderly clerk tottered out of the office, though, holding a sawed-off shotgun. “I told you I didn’t want no trouble!” he yelled at Ford and Parker as they fled past him with their prisoner. He swung the sawed-off after them but pulled the triggers too soon. The weapon went off with a thunderous roar and pelted some parked cars with its double load of buckshot.

The recoil was powerful enough to throw the feeble old man backward, through the open door into the tiny office.

The agents reached the pickup. Parker jerked the driver’s door open and practically threw the blond man into the cab. He went in next, sliding behind the wheel. Ford’s long legs carried him around the F-150 as the prisoner tried to open the passenger door and escape. Ford was right there to stop him, shoving him back against Parker. Ford jumped in and slammed the door. The kid was pinned between them now.

Ford had been driving before. He’d left the keys in the ignition, so all Parker had to do was twist the switch, throw the pickup into gear when the engine started, and tromp the gas. A shower of gravel spurted from under the wheels as the pickup took off. It skidded out of the parking lot onto the street. The freeway was a couple of blocks away. Parker headed for it, knowing they had to put some distance between themselves and this latest scene of violence.

Then they would have to steal another vehicle. This one would be too hot, too fast.

The prisoner was blubbering by now as he huddled between the two big men. “Don’t kill me, please don’t kill me,” he said in a voice choked by terror. “I won’t tell anybody what I know. I’ll never say anything about Casa del Diablo!”

Ford and Parker exchanged a glance over the prisoner’s head as the pickup rocketed along the surface streets, squealing around corners and jumping red lights. The same thought went through their heads.
Casa del Diablo … CDD.
It seemed like a safe bet that whatever was in that protected file on the laptop had something to do with a place called in Spanish, “House of the Devil.”

“You’ll tell somebody, all right, my little friend, “Ford said as he laid the barrel of his gun against the prisoner’s cheek and made the man quiver and cry even more. It was a shame to scare him that way, but it had to be done. “You’re going to tell us everything you know.”