Operation Chaos (22 page)

What are you doing out here?

She backed up, one arm covering her breasts, the other her eyes, feigning a look of confusion and fright.

Someone emerged from the car’s back door, saying something she couldn’t understand, then something she did understand—the soft, deadly, muffled sound of a silencer.

The man in front of her, in the headlights, partially blinding to her, a mirage, whirled around as he pulled a weapon. He went down.

It all happened so fast, if she wanted to run, dive out of the way, it didn’t matter. It came like a sudden wave of violence and was over.

Someone emerged on one side near the back of the car, then rose from the road itself. Then another.

She backed away and stumbled, hearing Keegan’s muffler voice demanding somebody surrender.

It was over.

No more shots. The lights of the car went off. She heard Keegan giving an order to someone in the car.

Rainee ran back to where her clothes were and struggled to get dressed. No easy task as they were wet and she was streaked with dirt.

When she turned toward the car, she saw that Duran had one man down and was zip-tying his hands behind his back while Metzler was dragging a body off the road and Keegan had a man up against the car and was talking to him in rapid-fire Spanish.

Though she was familiar with the cold, swift ruthlessness of war and combat, it was still shocking how efficient these men were. A friend of hers, not connected to the military, but to PTSD research, had once said, “I really don’t understand the reality of what soldiers go through. I envy you that. You do.”

And Rainee had answered, “No. I only understand what I’ve gone through. And from my perspective. I know only that, and it’s not enough. The rest is what I study.”

Yes, she thought now, in the midst of another violent episode, that’s all I know.

The two captives who’d survived were taken into the woods and bound to trees. And then they all got into the Mercedes.

Metzler had all their cell phones and was looking at what the last calls were.

“This is Armando,” Keegan said. “He says you’re a good-looking woman, but not quite up to his wife.”

“That makes him a very smart man,” Rainee said. “His wife must be a very fine woman.”

Both Keegan and Armando smiled, but the Mexican’s smile was less effusive. He was very nervous. He thought he would soon be dead.

Metzler and Duran sat with her in the back seat of the top-end silver Mercedes. Keegan sat up front with the very nervous driver, Armando.

Duran turned to her. “Good job, Doc.”

“I thought you weren’t peeking.”

Close now, she could see his blush. She smiled and said, “I do good work in or out of clothes.”

He got mocking looks from Keegan and Metzler.

As they headed down the road toward the Facility, it became obvious that Keegan and the driver knew each other well, had a long association at the Facility, and he was assuring Keegan that he had no dog in this fight.

PART FOUR

55

Rainee, having struggled to get back into her wet, dirty running outfit, sat next to Duran in the back seat. “I need a bath,” she said.

He didn’t reply. His shyness is cute, she thought. The driver glanced in the mirror, a quick glance, but she saw the fear in his eyes.

As they drove slowly toward the Facility, Rainee couldn’t help feeling some pride in her role as the helpless drunk and its success in accomplishing their goal, and with such effectiveness when it had looked like a potential disaster. She turned to Duran. “How’d I do?”

“You did real good out there,” Duran said, “though I didn’t have time to witness the performance.”

“Bullshit,” Metzler, sitting on the other side of her, said, looking across Rainee to Duran. He and Keegan both chuckled at Duran’s expense.

“Seriously,” Duran insisted. “I’m kinda shy about taking advantage of situations.”

“You weren’t shy at that Vegas strip club,” Metzler said, getting grunts from both of his colleagues.

“That’s business,” Duran insisted. “You pay, you play.”

Then Rainee said, in a mock serious voice, “You didn’t even peek out of unstoppable male curiosity? I worked hard for this body.”

“Well . . . maybe just a peek against my will.”

Even the driver joined in the laugh.

The joking took the tension down a notch or two as they headed toward the Facility, but it was quickly back to the business.

As they moved slowly down the road, Keegan kept interrogating the driver, calling him Armando, asking how his wife and kids were, his voice quiet yet very intimidating at the same time.

Armando seemed to have no interest in opposing or irritating Keegan. He talked fast and didn’t hide his fears, chattering in a chopped mix of English and Spanish. He asked Keegan several times not to kill him for the sake of his family.

Keegan, one hand gripping the driver’s shoulder, the other hand resting his weapon on the dash, assured Armando he had no intention of killing him.

“My friend, you will live to see your kids and your wife. Unless, that is, you attempt to send some secret signal when we enter the Facility. That will get you killed.”

Armando assured him there was no chance of that. He insisted he was neutral. “I’m just a driver, ” he insisted. Once he got them in, all he wanted to do was go back to his family.

Keegan said, “When we’re in and the Facility has been secured, you will go home to your loving family, my friend. How many armed men are still there?”

“Important guests leave. Only four security. House staff, two.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. The special detail protect important guests no longer here when the generals go back to States.”

“Raab’s chopper there?”

“Yes.” Armando shot a quick glance in the rearview mirror. “He wait for Doctor Hall. Keep clinic open.”

One of the cell phones Metzler had from the ambush rang. “It’s your commanding officer, Eagle himself,” Metzler said with a note of contempt, handing the phone to Keegan.

Keegan held the phone in front of Armando. “Tell Colonel Tessler that your boss is dead drunk, sick, and asleep. Don’t get into a conversation.” He put it on speakerphone so they all could hear.

Armando did as he was told.

Colonel Tessler voiced his outrage:
“When you get the fool awake, have him call the head of coastal patrol and the Baja command center and patch me in. Put that bastard under cold water and wake his ass up.”

“Yes, sir,” Armando said. “I wake him.”

Keegan didn’t give them a chance to talk more. He hung the phone up.

Then Keegan turned to the three in the back seat and said, “We have a short window to get this done. Metzler and Duran, clean out security. Doc and I will go after Raab, get what we came for, and go. We’ll pick up Mora and head out to sea. Rainee will contact her people and we’ll go from there. And it all has to happen before Colonel Tessler decides to come in and take a look and see why nobody is contacting him.”

It sounded so simple. All great plans . . .

Everybody tended to their weapons, checking clips, getting ready.

Keegan told Armando again, to reassure him, that once inside, he could leave. Go home to his family.

As they crawled along the hillside toward the Facility, it all looked quiet, with some low light, probably Malibu type, behind the walls.

“The big party was for the new mayor?” Keegan asked.

“Party for governor of Baja. The man they are going to make president,” Armando said. “He stop many places. He very popular.”

They drew closer to the twelve-foot walls topped with barbed wire. Armando said two security guards would be somewhere near the house making rounds. When they came in, they’d check them out. The rest of the compound security detail would be in the outbuilding behind the main house.

“Doc,” Keegan said, turning to Rainee. “You’re about to meet your nemesis. You ready?”

“As I can be.” In truth, she was very excited at the prospect of facing the man who’d stolen much of her work, kidnapped her patients, and turned them into weapons against their own country.

She still had some concern about Keegan, though she felt that was unwarranted. Still, in spite of the logic, she needed final confirmation.

56

The car, driven as carefully by Armando as if he was worried about landmines, rolled through a gauntlet of palms, the road curling up over a rise to the knoll where the Facility was perched.

Both Duran and Metzler, on either side of Rainee, had their weapons on their laps, the silencer of one touching her left leg, the butt of the other near her right knee.

Her weapon remained for the moment in the side holster her uncle had given her.

They slowed as they approached the entrance of high, barbed-wire-topped walls.

She spotted the rotor blades of a helicopter on the roof, partially visible under the moon, sitting like a giant mosquito. He’s home. The bastard is home. She felt a deep satisfaction that they might yet have a chance, that is, if Keegan wasn’t gaming them. No way, she thought. She went over everything from the moment he kidnapped her and wanted to think that she and Duran were just being a little over the top paranoid, but that wasn’t enough to put to rest her apprehensions. There was a logic to it. The deaths at the Vereen compound, on the road, were all unavoidable and, maybe to Keegan, irrelevant. Collateral damage.

They passed a small cemetery, lonely, stark under the gossamer moonlight.

“That’s a weird place for a cemetery,” Duran remarked.

“That’s where those who don’t make it through the operations end up buried,” Keegan said matter-of-factly. Vereen handled that.

It was a small cemetery with crosses above each grave. Her men? The sight of those graves sent a chill through her, as she had probably worked with every one of them.

“How many graves are there?” she asked.

“Maybe eighteen, nineteen,” Keegan said. “They were buried with honors.”

Rainee, angry, flared. “Men who were kidnapped, underwent experiment operations like guinea pigs, then died can’t be buried by their killers with honors. There’s no honor.”

“They were educated about the risks and then volunteered,” Keegan said.

Keegan turned to look back at her. The skin of his angular face stretched tight across his granite features. She’d gotten very used to the look of his face. He said nothing more, which she appreciated. Just gave her a nod, as if acknowledging her point, then turned around.

It was a very strained moment inside the car.

After a minute, Keegan asked her, almost as if to get away from that conversation and back to what they were doing, “When was the last time you saw Raab? At the hearings?”

She glanced at Duran, who made a little shrugging gesture, like this was all bizarre.

“A week before he was due to testify. I remember he had some meetings with—I thought at the time—his attorneys. Now I think they might have been his friends in the military. This was always the backup?”

“They’d been planning a long time for what happened here,” Keegan said. “The generals and contractors who backed him had no intention of letting anyone stop the progress of the research.”

“Apparently,” she said.

“We’re here to end it,” Metzler said. “Let’s concentrate on that.”

She thought about Raab and all his fantasies and rages against the deplorable state of America. Her colleagues used to joke about him. Called him Doctor No.

But Raab turned out to be no joke. He was at the center of something serious and dangerous. She remembered his taking leaves from work. Was he coming here to build his secret research clinic?

She stared at the back of Keegan’s head, the titanium skull plate covered by hair. What is your mindset? You got us here. You can still fulfill your mission.

People make radical reversals, but not often and only under the influence of an extreme revelation that contradicts their beliefs. She didn’t know if that was the case with this man.

They approached the Facility gate—massive, medieval-looking metal doors at least fifteen feet across and equally as high.

“Just go about it as you would normally,” Keegan told Armando. “Be calm. Take some deep breaths. Those sensors can detect unusual neural activity like intense nervousness.”

“Yes, I know them well and they know me well. No problem,” Armando replied with a hint of soft sarcasm. “I do many times.”

There were sensors on the wall. A roundish steel box at the end of a metal arm now rising at their approach, turning and tracking them as they came forward. It had different-sized apertures and looked like the head of a space alien.

“I tell robot man what he wants to hear,” Armando said. “We have—what you say—friendship.”

For all they knew, there could be a hundred Mexican Special Forces waiting for them. It could end very quickly and violently.

The pulled up to the extended arm.

Lowering the driver’s side window, Armando turned his face to the arm. It moved toward him with multiple apertures with different forms of biometric readers.

Armando reached out, extended a finger, and one of the eyes came down. A sleeve emerged and took in the extended finger, then released it. She’d seen DNA readers like this one. Another probe went up and studied his face and his eyes. And while this was going on, another arm like an appendage came down like a live vine and went under the vehicle. A bomb sniffer.

When the quick processing was done, a green light came on, followed by a robotic voice: “Welcome, Armando. You have successfully completed initial surveillance. Please enter with caution.”

Armando glanced at Keegan, nodded, then turned and chuckled and answered in vulgar Spanish:
“Vete a hacer punetas!”

Which, Rainee thought, was some version of fuck off.

The robot replied in its metallic voice, “Yes, thank you.”

The massive gates opened.

“The robot joke with me,” Armando said.

Rainee wasn’t amused. She feared what lay beyond the walls.