Locked and Loaded (20 page)

Something stabbed into her neck. She whirled on the sensation, her elbow connecting with facial cartilage, as she brought her knee up to a groin and stomped down hard on a kneecap that shattered. Stumbling backward, she yanked the needle out of her neck and grabbed onto a street lamppost. New Orleans was loud and hot and chaotic and confusing and blurry … but someone caught her before she hit the ground.

*   *   *

Agent Alvarez, posing as Rene Santiago, stood beside him, and Anthony kept his eyes forward as Roberto walked along the open truck bays. He’d been introduced to Dominic Reyes, Sammy Garza, and Alfonzo Gutierrez, and he was filling in for Miguel Estevez, who’d been taken into police custody to make room for his entry at the table.

Interestingly enough, Anthony noted, Assad and his men were also here. At this juncture, they were probably only concerned with getting their money, which was to be provided by Alvarez and the four other distributors.

The product checked out and the trucks were loaded. Each distributor had a large black case with a million dollars in it that they slid across the floor to Assad and his three men. Assad picked up two cases and each of his men took one.

“At the casino, we will wait for the word from Aalam Bashir to transfer funds to your man, Charles Wallace … once our weapons are in place.” Assad calmly turned and walked away, each man getting into a nondescript rental car and driving off.

“You have just made a very wise choice to become wealthy men,” Roberto said, smiling. “Each one of these trucks will take a different route with armed guards along the route to your legitimate warehouses, and then in much smaller weight via vans to your processing plants. The hard part is done. Now you just have to sell the goddamned product!”

Laughter rang out in the warehouse. A guard handed Roberto a bottle of chilled Cristal, and then a forklift rolled forward with cases of the bubbly. Guards worked quickly to break open cases and began handing out cold champagne to the distributors and their men.

“A toast,” Roberto said, popping his cork. “To being wealthy motherfuckers and Mardi Gras!”

More laughter rang out as champagne head splashed on the ground and bottles belched open. But Anthony and Alvarez watched as Roberto took a call, his expression darkened, and the bottle he’d been holding slid from his grip to shatter on the cement floor. Silence instantly eclipsed all merrymaking. Roberto held up his hand to keep guards from firing as a car sped up, careening into the driveway, and a bloody, gasping guard jumped out of the BMW.

“She shot Hector! Rico is dead!” he shouted, breathing hard. “Two of our men went after her, Mario and Manuel, and they’re now dead in the street! DEA is all over this. Hector was trying to warn us! This was on his phone, Roberto!”

The distraught guard tossed Roberto the cell phone and he stood motionless, playing back the shaky video. From Anthony’s vantage point, the images were damning. Sage was in the red Mercedes in hot pursuit of the Colombians who had hit Bruno and then fired on her team. Something in the dashboard or mirror of the vehicle had been recording. In the heat of battle, she’d called in to DEA for reinforcement. She did not look like a distraught fiancée or an innocent. She looked like a cop, a badge, law enforcement, and from the look on Roberto’s face, if he found her first, she wouldn’t live long to explain.

“What’s this mean, Roberto?” Alfonzo Gutierrez called out. “We need to move this shit pronto, hombre, if you got a fucking leak. Your woman is DEA? Is that who fucked up a hundred and fifty mil? You stupid—”

Roberto drew on Gutierrez like lightning, but multiple gun clicks from his security and Roberto’s created a temporary standoff.

“Move the trucks and get my product out of here,” another distributor shouted.

The armed driver teams nodded and headed for their trucks. Then all hell broke loose.

CHAPTER 15

Machine-gun fire strafed the trucks’ cabins, shattering windows and instantly killing the drivers. Distributors scattered, shooting out of the truck bays at the loading dock and taking cover, not sure who the enemy was or where they were coming from. Mercenary commandos stormed the building and grabbed a fleeing Roberto, but they didn’t execute him. It wasn’t DELTA, it wasn’t DEA—that much Anthony knew for sure. He hadn’t given the order, nor had Alvarez, but once the shooting started, his unit and Alvarez’s team would drop the hammer.

From Anthony’s vantage point, flattened on the ground beneath a partially raised pallet, he could see that they’d forced Roberto into a van. There was only one group in the equation that had enough reason to do this: Guzman’s men.

Agent Alvarez covered him as he called in the van tags, yelling over the din. They had to follow the van and not apprehend it.

“Follow the van, tags Victor, Bravo, Charlie, Alpha three eight one five!”

“Get out of there, Captain!”

A spray of machine-gun shells opened up cement bags and splintered building supplies over their heads. Grabbing Alvarez by the back of his suit, Anthony yanked him to safety, yelling as they ran, “Go, go, go, go!”

The moment they rounded the back of the building, Anthony gave the order, “Send in Apaches hot!” Then he began running with Alvarez into the network of buildings.

The concussion from the blast threw them forward on their faces. In the distance, the sound of helicopter blades beat a deadly tempo in the air. Both men covered their heads as the intense heat from two hundred yards away washed over their skins. But there was no time for a full recovery.

Davis pulled Alvarez to his feet and they ran deeper into the warehouses, coming out on the other side of a preplanned escape route building where Captain Davis’s unit was waiting.

“Nothing’s coming out of that warehouse alive, not even cockroaches, sir. All product trucks are destroyed.”

“Good work, Lieutenant Hayes. This is Special Agent Michael Alvarez. Our man on the inside.”

“You guys don’t bullshit with the firepower,” Alvarez said, looking around the camouflaged team and then at the billowing inferno behind them. “Our evidence just went up in smoke, but I guess that’s all right, because other than Roberto Salazar, you just wiped out his inner circle. Hector Salazar may be hanging by a thread in a hospital or dead by now.”

“What’s the word on Special Agent Sage Wagner?” Anthony’s nerves stretched and popped as he looked at Alvarez and then his men.

“I cannot confirm,” Lieutenant Hayes said, glancing at Lieutenant Butcher. “Our post was here, at the docks, and trailing Assad at the casino. DEA had the Salazar compound, where Special Agent Wagner was located.”

Anthony felt the muscle in his jaw pulse as Alvarez called in to his team. While waiting, he kept drilling his men for critical mission information.

“The docks are secure?”

“Affirmative, Captain,” Lieutenant Hayes said quickly. “The freighter was detained, two Kazakhstan nationals and three Colombians were taken into custody, along with a shipment of rocket-propelled grenade launchers, crates of AK-47s, Kevlar vests, C4—we have a full inventory report of what we confiscated. When we opened up the outer crates, all of it had stamps on it from Fort Shevchenko.”

“Assad?”

Lieutenant Butcher stepped up. “Our units headed them off at the main highway, sir. They’re in our custody and the money is, too.”

“Hold them and keep the wire transfer lines open at the casino. Before you do anything, I want to talk to Intelligence about this shipment at the docks. What you confiscated does sound like five or even ten million dollars’ worth of equipment. Something bigger is coming into Canada, either that or something more expensive.”

“We lost her,” Alvarez suddenly announced.

Anthony spun on Alvarez and gripped him by his lapels. “What do you mean you lost her?”

Alvarez placed an easy palm on Anthony’s chest, forcing him to release his hold on his jacket, while the bewildered men in his unit cast confused glances between them. Anthony ran his palms down his face.

“Talk to me, Mike,” Anthony said, beginning to pace.

“Something blew up at the house. You and I both saw from the video on Hector’s phone that her cover was blown. Our agents tailed her out into the Mardi Gras celebrations in the streets. Two guards from the house were on her; we got one and an unknown shooter got the other one. We think it was Colombians. Same mercenaries that strafed the truck bays and took Roberto just now. They hit one of our agents, who was thankfully wearing a vest … Wagner stayed with him and called in man down, but was forced from her position by multiple shooters in hot pursuit. We found her Glock nine-millimeter about two blocks from the Hotel Monteleone, where she must have been going for cover. That was the last known location when our street team lost her.”

“Put a bird up—pull out one of the portables from a truck, Lieutenant.”

“But, sir, our mission is—”

“Do it now!” Anthony shouted. “I’m aware of our mission. Special Agent Wagner has insight to the Canada connection,” he added, embellishing the scenario to get his men to move.

Boots hit the ground as men peeled out of Jeeps to head toward a parked eighteen-wheeler that contained a concealed chopper. Lieutenant Butcher threw Anthony a vest, which he caught with one hand, then tossed back.

“I’m going in light, just need artillery, grenades, and a sniper rifle.”

His men nodded.

“We’re going to get her back,” Alvarez said. “Wherever they took Roberto is when you’ll find her. It’s the Colombian way to show a man his sins before executing him … at least at that level. They know his fiancée was DEA now. That’s gonna call for a brief review before they torture him.”

Anthony looked at Agent Alvarez hard. “Yes … and how do you rub a man’s nose in his own stupidity—you torture what he loved if front of him. Even after the betrayal, you desecrate it while he watches helplessly.”

*   *   *

She woke up tied to a chair in an abandoned building. Mosquitoes feasted on her through the open windows. Moonlight showed nothing around the small building but junglelike flora. A tree actually grew up from under the house, through the floor, and up and out of the roof. Something skittered by in the corner. The stench of mold and mildew filled her nostrils. Feral animals made the tall grass rustle. Wild pigs and river rats, scrawny dogs and pathetic cats made their home here. As the haze left her mind, the lower Ninth Ward snapped into focus. Like a war-torn land, there were blocks and blocks of uninhabited houses. Her screams would go unheard and her body was unlikely to be found for days … months … years … if at all, once the animals had their way.

Struggling against her bindings, she tried to no avail to break off the wood or use it to saw against the ties. But all she managed to do was make the bindings cut deeper into her wrists.

The sound of a vehicle approaching, first one then another, stilled her. A door opened and she could tell it was a van of some sort because of the way the metal made a sliding sound before it slammed shut again. Multiple footfalls hit rotten wood steps, and the rickety door busted off its hinges. Then another door opened, and it had a different sound, like the vacuum-sealed closure of a very expensive sedan. A pair of slow, heavy footfalls followed that, along with the slight scent of an aromatic cigar.

Through the receding drug haze, Sage clung to every impression she could, then suddenly, a blinding light shined on her. A body was shoved forward and the light moved from her to Roberto. Men surrounded them as she looked from him to the lights. An older man whose face she could not fully see stood in the shadows smoking a cigar.

“I am so disappointed, Roberto,” the old man murmured. “You made me come down from my meetings in Washington, DC, to have this distasteful conversation.”

Roberto sprang forward and grabbed her by the throat, toppling the chair as he strangled her.

“How could you do this to me?” he shouted. “You betrayed me! Hector—”

“Betrayed you and is dead,” the old man said coolly as three guards wrested Roberto’s hands from around Sage’s throat and lifted his body away from her.

Gasping and coughing and sucking in dust from the floor, she tried to keep her face away from Roberto’s flailing feet. And to think she’d momentarily felt sorry for the bastard.

“Cut her loose,” the old man said. “I should enjoy this match. Roberto has caught the tiger by the tail.” He took a long drag on his cigar and blew it toward Roberto. “Your problems began with you not honoring me and betraying me … and just as the son betrays the father, so the brother betrays the elder brother, and the wife betrays the husband. If you build your house on lies, Roberto, the sin will follow you … you should go to church to learn these things. It is God’s way.”

“My brother is dead,” he said in an angry whisper, glaring at Sage as she was released from the chair and stood slowly. “She killed him. He bled to death on the way to the hospital.”

“But not before he called me, Roberto—
weeks
ago.”

Strangled silence made the Adam’s apple bob in Roberto’s throat as he strained against the hold of Guzman’s men.

“Yes. Believe it. Hector had let me know about this long before we learned of her betrayal … which was really the hand of God. You see, I know you, my son. You don’t trust unless you verify. I knew you would have her car fitted with a camera, maybe her room, anywhere she might be. So we swept the car and brought your little video back and it produced additional gold.”

Roberto’s eyes held Sage’s as contempt glimmered in them. “Why?”

“Because you killed my family,” she said flatly, and then spit on the ground. “You’ll never know which ones or remember … how many street corners did you spray on your way up? How many innocent people who weren’t even involved in your drug trade bled to death on their way to the hospital? How many old women, little kids, young boys … Do you even fucking remember!”

“I didn’t know those people, and in every war there is collateral damage. I didn’t know them, Camille … but you
knew
me and I knew you. That is
different
. That is different!”