JET - Sanctuary (12 page)

“We know where they are. We’re calling in reinforcements.” He finished the call and pocketed the cell.

“How do you know their location?” Leonid asked.

“That’s not important. But we will arrange for this to be the last hours of their life.”

“I want to go with you.”

Bastian nodded and looked Leonid and his men over. “Yes, I figured as much. And so you shall.”

“It will be light soon. Time’s wasting.”

“You’re correct, but I have my instructions. I have been told to wait until arrangements have been put into place to ensure that there can be no more mishaps. We will leave at dawn.”

“I don’t see why we’re delaying,” Leonid snapped.

“I understand your impatience, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Best to relax. Come inside – we have everything you could want. We’ll be on the road soon enough.”

Leonid could see there was nothing to be gained by arguing, so he accepted Bastian’s offer of hospitality and followed him into the house, keenly aware of precious minutes ticking by but unable to do anything about it.

~ ~ ~

Franco hung up on Bastian and called Colonel Campos, the number as familiar to him as his own. Campos answered on the fifth ring, his voice gravelly with sleep and a budding hangover. Franco apologized for rousing him and then got to business.

“I need your help, my friend.”

“Of course, whatever you need,” Campos said, his voice cautious.

“The Soto boys are at a mine north of San Felipe.”

“Yes?”

“I need the army to stop the miners from going to work this morning and, if possible, to cordon off the area so nobody can enter or exit it.”

“That could be problematic if the local police want to know why we’re in the region. That’s not our customary turf…”

“I understand. I’ll deal with the police – they’ve had no problem taking my money so far. Look, I’ll only need you there for a few hours. This will be over by breakfast. I’ll send my men in, and they’ll do the dirty work, so your hands will be clean. You just need to ensure they aren’t disturbed.”

“I’ll need to think up a pretense. If my superiors ask why I shipped several truckloads of men there, I need an answer.”

“Tell them you were following up on a tip about weapons smugglers. God knows the Sotos are guilty of that, and more. Whatever you need to do, do it, but I want that road closed down by dawn.”

Campos drew a heavy breath and grunted. “I’ll get dressed.” He didn’t need to say that Franco now owed him big. This went far beyond looking the other way when certain containers entered the port, or rousting unfriendly union workers who were agitating for higher wages from one of the Verdugos’ shipping or loading companies. He was being asked to get his hands dirty, albeit from a distance, and Franco was under no illusions that the price wouldn’t ultimately be high. Then again, so were the stakes. He needed the Sotos dead and would do whatever it took.

Franco returned to the bedroom, removed his black silk bathrobe and smoothed his pajamas. His wife hadn’t awoken, and he looked at her sleeping form with a combination of loathing and resignation. She’d once been a great beauty, courted by rich men, and had chosen him for her husband, to her family’s continued chagrin – beneath her station, as she’d taken to reminding him. But now…years and alcohol had taken their toll, and when he looked at her, it was like a cruel joke that all the mistresses and trysts could never right.

Franco sighed. He was an honorable man, and she’d borne him a son, which had been all he’d really wanted out of the union. It was for that son that he was risking it all to make the bold move against his hated rival – a move that could be either suicide or brilliance. Tomorrow would tell, and Franco, a man who knew no religion other than his own desires, uttered an unfamiliar prayer to a strange God, pleading with him to support his enterprise and bless it with success as he crawled back into bed, his head pounding from a tension headache that all the whiskey in the world couldn’t wash away.

Chapter 17

Mendoza, Argentina

The first rays of dawn marbled the sky with tangerine and pink as the Gulfstream made its final approach over the vineyards surrounding El Plumerillo International Airport. The plane rocked, its tires smoked on the tarmac, and then it stabilized, the updrafts of buffeting wind diminishing at ground level. The sleek aircraft slowed as it neared the end of the runway and made the turn that led to the small terminal. Drago eyed the airport as they rolled to a stop and was relieved to see only one sleepy customs inspector standing near the building.

He checked his phone and saw a message from the agent, sent twenty minutes earlier. Drago read it with interest and then returned the phone to his jacket pocket as the pilot lowered the fuselage stairs, the din of the engines whining at idle an auditory assault from the rear of the plane.

When he stepped into the morning light, the air felt crisp and clean, as though the nearby Andean peaks had imbued it with an electric vitality. The customs inspector approached and stamped his passport perfunctorily, uninterested in his bag. Drago nodded his appreciation, glad that his agent had been true to his word in eliminating that hurdle.

He made his way to the parking lot, where the text message had promised a Chevrolet sedan would be waiting, the key under the driver’s side floor mat and the door open. Drago found the car and, after orienting himself with the handheld GPS that had been left in the glove box per his request, he pulled out of the dirt lot, his first errand of the morning to check out the two addresses the agent had sourced for the aristocrat who’d arranged the jet that had been blown out of the sky. It was a starting point, even if it was unclear to Drago how it was connected to his concerns, other than a report that a woman had been working with the target in Mendoza and that she’d been on the plane.

A woman. He’d only had the contract for six hours, and there was already a new player in the mix – a mystery woman. Nobody knew anything about her, which caused butterflies to flutter in his stomach.

The connection wasn’t much – wasn’t anything, really, by his standards – but hopefully it would be enough. He’d need to sweat the aristocrat and see what he knew. Beyond that, the trail had gone cold in Buenos Aires three days earlier, which was a lifetime. The target could be in Malaysia by now, but a job was a job, and he hadn’t expected it to be easy given the half-million fee. After all, no contract was ever easy if it required Drago’s special skills.

According to the file, the target was a highly experienced covert operative who’d taken that which didn’t belong to him – diamonds, exact quantity and value unknown. Part of what made the assignment troublesome was that he wasn’t expected to just locate the man and put his lights out, but also to interrogate him and find any diamonds he still had left. Upon reflection, the contract price was fair – finding the target would take some doing, possibly weeks of his time, assuming he was successful at all.

Drago was under no illusions that he’d been brought into this for a simple button job. For all his agent’s assurances, everything in the report had pointed to a black ops mission gone horribly wrong, which meant U.S. government involvement. Reading between the lines, the target had pissed off his employer, who’d ordered him taken out.

Only that apparently hadn’t been as easy as hoped, which was where Drago came in.

The diamond angle had been explained as a simple theft by the target – the property of the contracting client. What a former covert operative had been doing with the property, or how it had come into his possession, was left out of the narrative. Again, this reeked of clandestine involvement: need to know was an obsession for some agencies, the CIA and DOD being two of the biggies.

It didn’t really bother him that he might be doing their dirty work for them, but it did give him pause that they were in such dire straits they’d needed to hire him. His last job for the agency hadn’t gone well. “Too much collateral damage” had been the assessment, meaning that butchering not only the target’s staff of bodyguards but also his family in order to lure him into Drago’s trap had been over the line – this, in a business where no lines existed until after the fact, when armchair quarterbacks bitched about what they would have done differently. It was one of the primary reasons he’d gone independent so many years ago: if a drug lord wanted one of his competitors taken out, there were never any regrets unless Drago failed, which had never happened. Nobody complained about the level of brutality required to accomplish the objective. They merely paid up and said thank you. As it should be.

But get a government involved and look out. Hand wringing, impossible caveats, threats to not pay once he’d performed, worries about some wiseass deciding that the best way for their dirty deeds to never see the light might be to eliminate him…all of these went with that territory, which is why he didn’t like the work, preferring to stay in the private sector.

Having profited handsomely from his decision, he’d made the right choice.

Still, a half million dollars didn’t fall into his lap every day, and it was easily five contracts’ worth of profit when the expense provision was taken into account. Three years’ pay at his going rate for one assignment. Whoever had picked the number had done so knowing there was no way he would turn it down. That made him feel like he was being played, but to what end, he wasn’t sure. What he was sure about was that after this job, he’d be taking a nice year or two of vacation somewhere he couldn’t be tracked – maybe somewhere like the beach towns of Venezuela. A man could do a lot of good living for that kind of money anywhere in that region.

He followed the frontage road to the highway that led south of town, keeping his speed at the limit. Twenty minutes later he spotted the exit that led to the first address. He took the turn, the gleaming contemporary white of a large winery, Bodega Norton, on the right, at the bottom of the small town of Luján de Cuyo. Crossing the overpass, he headed east through endless vineyards, civilization slipping away with each meter. An ancient tractor lumbered along in front of him, its exhaust pipe belching blue smoke, the old man driving it unbothered that he might be holding up traffic. Drago waited until the road widened enough to pass, and the man waved at him as he did so, his leathery face as lined as a Shar Pei’s, his skin the color of burnished bronze.

A sign appeared on the right, and the GPS informed him that the turnoff leading to his first address was thirty more meters up, somewhere a half kilometer off the road, in the middle of the vineyards. Drago slowed as he neared what turned out to be a gravel track that stretched through the vines, and pointed the car down the gray strip, moving cautiously so as not to throw a dust cloud.

To his left rose a walled compound, the iron gates open, the large main house easily visible. Workers were already on scaffolds at the early hour, repairing what looked like bullet holes in the mortar – enough to suggest that a major battle had taken place. He sat watching the men and was startled by a polite honk from behind him; a glass truck was waiting for him to move so it could enter the grounds, presumably to replace the windows that yawned empty in the front façade.

Drago pulled forward and waved at the truck, his mind working furiously. There had been no mention online of an epic shootout in Mendoza, which was the only thing that could have caused the damage he’d seen. He’d done enough of it himself to recognize the signs, but it made no sense. And it gave him pause. How much clout did you have to have to keep something like that hushed up in a country with a supposedly free press?

Another truck approached from down the trail, and Drago rolled down his window and extended his hand, signaling for the driver to stop. The man obliged and leaned over to see what Drago wanted. Drago affected a bemused expression and grinned.

“Is the owner around, you think?” he asked.

“You one of the vendors?”

“That’s right.”

“Talk to Juan. He’s handling all the buys. The owner’s not here, which isn’t surprising given all the damage.”

“I’ll say. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I know. They say there were over three hundred bullet holes inside the house. It’ll take weeks to fix everything. What a mess, eh?”

“Still, good for business.”

“That’s right.” The driver waved and proceeded through the gate. Drago had seen enough and used the drive to turn around and make himself scarce before anyone got too curious. The owner wasn’t there, which left one other possible address.

Drago passed the tractor again as he returned to the highway and offered a salute to the old farm hand, who’d no doubt been working the land his entire life as his father had worked it before him. There must be a certain peace in knowing your place in the universe, Drago mused, your lot in life clearly defined, with the only uncertainty how many summers you had before the ground reclaimed you. He shook off maudlin thoughts and tapped in the second address. The GPS blinked and displayed the new coordinates – also rural, and what looked like a good half hour from the shot-up compound.

His stomach growled, and he realized he hadn’t eaten. He glanced at the screen again and pulled back onto the freeway, resolved to finding someplace for breakfast before paying his next visit, which would hopefully be more productive than his last. Aconcagua’s snow-capped peak thrust into the cobalt sky to the west, reaching to the heavens for as far as he could see, and he mentally filed the area away as a possible destination once he was done with the contract.

He was humming as he drove back toward the city, its buildings gleaming in the sun, an interloper in God’s country, man’s puny outpost insignificant when framed against the majesty of the mountains and the endless azure sky. The beauty of the area notwithstanding, the contractor’s comment about the number of bullet holes inside the house gave Drago serious pause, and he wondered, not for the first time, what he’d gotten into.