Killing Time (One-Eyed Jacks) (32 page)

“So,” Mike continued, frowning, “let’s say six decoy pallets—a couple on the back, the others on top, surrounding the boxes of guns.”

Eva started calculating. “One gun per box times twenty boxes per pallet times twenty pallets. That’s four hundred rifles per trailer.”

“I’m betting there’s ammo and mags tucked in here somewhere, too,” Mike added and worked the rest of the math. “So each trailer’s carrying around two hundred thousand dollars wholesale. Easily a half a mil per truck on the open market if they plan to sell them.”

“Wait.” Eva looked at him sharply. “Sell them?”

“Think about it. Lawson’s armory is already overstocked. I saw that firsthand. Even if he planned a siege on a major city, no way would he need this much firepower for an operation. So this isn’t about
waging war. This is about supplying someone who plans to wage a war.”

He saw in her eyes the moment she reached the same conclusion that he had. “Oh, God. The Juarez cartel. La Linea is his buyer.”

“The ‘big deal’ that Lawson was hinting about going down.”

She lifted a hand toward the gun shipment. “So they’re storing them here until they decide it’s safe to truck them south?”

Mike shook his head. “Maybe. But try this out. Million and a half in weapons, right? If you were Lawson, would you risk delivering the goods before you got payment in your hot little fist? No, you wouldn’t. And if you were the badasses on the receiving end, would you fork over the cash before you received the shipment?”

“Whoa. You think the exchange is going to take place here?”

“If it was my deal, that’s what I’d do. It just makes sense. Just like it makes sense that if this is their first business transaction, all the key players are going to show up for the dance. Have a little face-to-face, you know? Cement the new relationship.”

Her eyes had grown wide. “Holy God.”

“And all his angels,” Mike added on a deep breath. “I’m not thinking just cartel members, either. Another big gun might be heading this way, too.”

“Lawson’s partner.”

Mike nodded. The man who had called the shots on OSD. The man who had put a hit out on Eva.

For a moment they both stood there, working through all the revelations. Finally, she looked at him. “We can’t let this exchange happen. We’ve got to call Gabe.”

Shit. She was right. Gabe and Green needed to be stopped so they could regroup.

“They need to contact ATF. Hell, contact DEA, Homeland Security, and the FBI. Get them all down here. We can’t let the cartel get their hands on these guns.”

She was right again. But if they called in the big guns, Mike’s chances of taking out Lawson himself shrank from slim to nonexistent.

His face must have shown his thoughts, because she put her hand on his arm. “Mike. This isn’t just about us anymore. It’s way bigger than that. It’s about national security.”

Life was so un-fucking-fair. “It’s ironic, right? I come back to the States to clear my name, and I end up fighting for the team that benched me.”

“It’s that patriot gene of yours. You can’t help but do the right thing.”

She had a lot more faith in him than he had in himself. And something about that faith made him feel like a better man.

But yeah, this was a game changer. Lawson could no longer be the primary target. Clearing his name, setting things straight for Ramon’s legacy . . . they had to let all that go, and stop the cartel from getting their hands on these guns. With Gabe’s help they just might be able to do it. But they had to reach him first.

Face grim, he shut the gun box, then maneuvered it in behind several others so no one would notice the shipment had been tampered with. “Let’s get out of here. That ticking clock we were working against just turned into a time bomb.”

•   •   •

“Phone.”

Jane’s groggy whisper penetrated his sleep from a distance.

“Your phone is ringing.”

Her hand touching his arm finally roused him.

Shaking himself awake, he groped for the switch on the bedside lamp and flicked it on. Squinting against the sudden glare, he reached past the clock that told him it was three a.m., and fumbled for his phone. The screen showed Barnes’s number.

“What?” he said.

“You said to call, no matter the time, if I had actionable information,” his cyber-security man said.

“Tell me you found them.”

“This is what I can tell you. Whoever is using the Salinas woman’s CIA access codes is not a traceable entity. I’ve tried everything. The system using her codes is hardened against external attacks—firewalls, RSA encryption . . . you name it, they’ve got a safeguard.”

“And this helps me how?”

“This helps because it tells me that whoever it is has major resources if they can protect themselves with this level of sophistication. We’re talking NSA kind of security here.”

He sat up, thought about what Barnes was saying. “So you think we’re dealing with a branch of the government?”

“Or a black ops unit.”

This was not good news.

“While I can’t pinpoint who’s using it or where the activity is based, I was able to capture and trace some of their search threads using a zero-day exploit in their browser.”

“Save the tech talk for someone who appreciates it and cut to the chase.”

“Lawson’s name came up a lot on those search threads. So did Afghanistan and UWD.”

Fuck.

“On a hunch,” Barnes went on, “I started monitoring cell phone transmissions out of the UWD camp.”

“And?”

“There’s been one text per day for the past several days, each time to a new phone number that was disconnected after it was used. Each number appears to have been forwarded to another phone or a series of phones. But the original numbers were all in D.C., and the phone exchange for each call was the Department of Agriculture’s.”

The bastards were real comedians. The Department of Agriculture was a standby beard. But they weren’t as smart as they thought they were.

“Call Lawson. Find out—”

“I just got off the phone with him. He hasn’t contacted anyone in D.C. And control freak that
he is, he’s the only one on base with a cell phone.”

“Then who made the call?”

“This is where it gets interesting. Seems Lawson got a couple new recruits this past week. A man and a woman. What do you want to bet the texts were sent by them?”

His heart rate picked up. “Did you get their physical descriptions from Lawson?”

“I did. It’s them.”

“These beefed-up forces make me nervous,” Mike whispered as they hid from yet another traveling patrol. They’d left the mine nearly two hours ago, tripling their return time because they’d run into double the usual number of security details. In another hour and a half it would be daylight.

“The increased patrols have got to be because of the guns,” she whispered as they crouched low behind the food storage building and waited for the four-man patrol to pass. “I’d be nervous, too, if I was sitting on that many dollars’ worth of weapons.”

Mike placed a finger to his lips as the men grew closer, then faded away into the night. Several seconds passed before he tapped her shoulder—time to take off again.

They darted between the shadows and finally reached the rear of the cabin. With Mike taking the lead, they circled around to the front and crept up onto the porch. Eva kept seeing those semis loaded with weapons. She’d never seen so many fricking guns in her life.

The cabin was dark. Eva silently slipped inside and sprinted across the room. She only had one goal—get to the hidden cell phone—but she’d no sooner opened the closet door than a burst of light flooded the room.

She spun around, ready to rail at Mike, but the words died on her tongue.

They weren’t alone—and neither was the man who held the monster flashlight that lit up the room and half blinded her.

Three other men stood just inside the doorway, all of them with rifles shouldered and pointed at them.

Mike looked from Simmons to the other three and slowly lifted his hands in the air. “Look who’s here. The Welcome Wagon committee. Nice to see you again, fellas.”

Simmons ignored him. “Looking for this?” He held up their cell phone, then dropped it to the floor and stomped it with his boot heel. “Whoops. Guess it’s broken.”

Eva glanced at Mike, who gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
Say nothing,
his eyes said.

“I always knew there was something off about you, Walker. Oh, wait. Make that Brown.” Simmons walked up to Mike, a self-important sneer on his face. “Not as smart as you thought you were, huh, asshole?”

Mike gave the big man a huge, fake smile and Eva knew he was about to say something that was really going to piss Simmons off.

No,
she mouthed.

“And yet, you’re the dumb fuck letting a loser like Lawson run your life. What’s that say about you . . .
asshole
?”

Red-hot rage spread up Simmons’s neck, over his face, and mottled the top of his bald head.

“If he fights back”—Simmons handed Bryant his rifle and the flashlight—“shoot her.”

Then he slammed a closed fist into Mike’s gut with a force that doubled him over.

Mike landed on the floor, folded in on himself, gasping for breath. “That . . . the best you got . . . pussy?”

Eva screamed when Simmons hauled back and kicked him in the ribs. “Mike, shut up! For God’s sake, shut up!”

But it was too late. Simmons unloaded on him like a bull, blinded by rage and seeing red. By the time Wagoner pulled Simmons off, Eva wasn’t even sure if Mike was breathing.

•   •   •

When Mike came to, it was to screaming pain, a hard floor, a hot, dark room, and a soft woman cradling his head in her lap. “What’d I . . . miss?”

“Oh, God. Thank God. You’re conscious.”

Even though she kept her voice low to keep from being overheard, Mike heard the fear and the tears. And he hated that he’d put her through it.

“Unfortunately. Yeah. I am.” Everything hurt. Breathing. Talking. Blinking. But most of all, it hurt to know he’d scared her.

“How long?” he whispered, lifted his hand to her face and discovered his wrists were flex-cuffed together in front of him. Bastards had tied her up, too.

“How long have you been out? Hours. Many, many
fucking
hours. It must be close to noon.”

Okay. Pissed off had officially muscled out worried and scared.

“So what was the plan, Brown? Was there a reason you invited Simmons to beat the snot out of you?”

How one small woman could pack so much venom into a whisper was beyond him.

“Yeah . . . sure.” He struggled to sit up, sucked in a breath when fire shot through his ribs. “Damned if I can remember why, but I must have thought it was a good idea at the time.”

Actually, he’d wanted Simmons’s focus on him. The big man had been working his way into a mean, dark snit, and rather than take a chance of him going off on Eva, he made sure Simmons unleashed on him.

“He could have killed you.”

Because he heard more regret in her voice than anger now, he figured she’d forgiven him. “But he didn’t. At least not yet.”

“Because Lawson wants you alive.”

He grunted, then regretted it. “For the time being. No doubt he’s got big plans for us. We’ve got to get out of here before that happens. More to the point . . . we need to head off Gabe and Green.”

The two men would be arriving anytime, unaware
that they’d been found out. He couldn’t let them walk into an ambush.

With Eva’s help, he staggered to his feet. Through swollen eyes and a blinding headache, he checked out their prison. Slivers of daylight filtered in through windows that were boarded shut. July heat seeped through the walls, searing and suffocating in the stagnant air. The main light source was from a triangular ventilation grate like the one in the armory, where the back wall met the peaked ceiling. The room was approximately twelve by twelve. Bare-bones construction. Plywood floor, open rafters, and wall studs.

“Do you know where we are?” he asked.

She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her bound hands. “It’s the overflow food storage shed—empty now, but I’m guessing it’s where they keep their winter supplies. Why wouldn’t they have a jail or a brig like any other military operation, since Lawson fancies himself a general?”

He hadn’t wanted to tell her this before, but there didn’t seem to be much point withholding it now. He shuffled over to a wall, leaned against it to keep from keeling over. “Remember my buddy, Bucky? He made it pretty clear one day that I needed to keep my nose clean. You break a rule around here? You cross the boss? One shot. Back of the head. The coyotes eat well that night. There is no discipline. Just death.”

“Well. It’s efficient, I’ll give him that.”

No whimpering. No hand wringing.
Way to take it on the chin, Eva
. God, he loved this woman.

“How many guards?” he asked.

“I counted six—three at the door and three more stationed around the perimeter of the building. Inside? It’s just you and me and the mice.”

“So . . . thoughts?” God, his head hurt.