“Why did you do that?” Garza asked.
Victor held up his cell phone with his free hand. “I just received word from a contact in Libya. Sadeem was the CIA plant. He was sent here to kill you.”
A sense of relief washed over Garza. Sadeem was a constant source of stress for him, but now he had to consider the reality of Victor’s actions.
Garza took a breath and watched the spy slowly slipping away on the floor of the tunnel. The man lifted his head to say something. He moved his lips, but nothing came out.
Garza looked at Victor. “I appreciate it,” he said. “But now what? We’ve already been paid to have this bomb detonated in the United States. A lot of money, I may add.”
“No,” Victor responded. “We were paid to transfer this man and his bomb across the border. Once he is there, we cannot control what he does.”
“Go ahead,” Garza said, liking what he was hearing so far. “Then what?”
“We drive his body and that bomb out into the desert,” Victor said. “We call our Border Patrol contact and have him send a man out to retrieve the body. While he’s there, he pumps the corpse full of bullets and finds this nuclear weapon in the trunk. The Border Patrol agent is a hero and we did our job. Everyone gets what they want. Back home, Sadeem is declared an incompetent.”
Garza watched the bomb still rolling away from them in the cart and gestured to his men. “Can you please stay with the weapon?” he asked in a fiery tone.
All five men scrambled back down the tunnel to catch up to the bomb.
“Okay,” Garza said to Victor. “Let’s get to work.”
Chapter 28
Sonny Chizek was in the recreation room of the Chizek Mine Company’s main building, walking around the pool table, looking for his next shot. He had his iPod playing on the overhead speakers while he stalked the nine-ball in the corner pocket. He was a heavy man so it allowed him great stability when he leaned over and drew back the pool stick between his large fingers. He hit the cue-ball with such force, it skidded sharply into the nine-ball and knocked it into the pocket so hard, it jumped up an inch before dropping in.
Chizek swaggered around the table, chalking the tip of his pool stick as Aerosmith wailed overhead. The recreation room was an open portion of the bottom floor with a pool table, a couple of vending machines, and a long countertop against a window overlooking Denton. Since the mine sat on a hill, the window offered Chizek a picturesque view of the Denton skyline at night.
Steven Tyler was screaming, “Walk this way,” as Chizek lined up his next shot. He slammed the cue-ball into the five-ball and almost sent it over the lip of the table into the dark fringes of the room. On the opposite wall from the window was a large industrial garage door which gave access to the loading dock just outside.
From a mile away, Chizek could see a truck’s lights coming up the solitary road which led to the mine; the road paralleled the Mexican border by just a few yards. He kept the interior lights low so he could keep an eye on the exterior of the building at all times.
Chizek grabbed his bottle of beer from a tall side table next to him and took a long drink. The truck stopped at the fenced-in entrance and blinked its lights. The lack of moonlight accented the truck’s headlights as Chizek pulled a remote control from his pocket and entered the four digit code. The gate opened and the truck found a parking space just below the window.
Chizek put down his beer and lined up another shot on the pool table. He cracked the six-ball against the cushion for a bank shot and watched it jump into the side pocket with a crisp thump.
A buzzer sounded and Chizek pushed a new set of numbers into the remote and the front door unlocked. Eight of his men came through the door, all smiles and looking for praise.
“Nice work,” Chizek said, giving Carlos Grider a fist bump.
“Edgar took the shot,” Carlos said, as he opened the fridge and handed out beers to the crew.
“Good job, Edgar,” Chizek said, over the sound of Joe Perry’s lead guitar. “Carlos, I need you to be ready for the delivery. The rest of you go scout the perimeter and make sure we remain alone.”
When the men left, Chizek glanced at the clock. “It’s nine thirty. They’re supposed to be here in a half hour.”
Carlos sat on a stool by the window and glowed in the aftermath of his accomplishment. He drank his beer while Chizek lined up another shot.
“How much will it cost me to repair the damage?” Chizek said.
“To the motel?” Carlos asked.
Chizek looked up. “What else did you damage along the way?”
Carlos gave an impish grin and shrugged. “Nothing else, I guess.”
Chizek tried a combination, hitting the three-ball into the eight-ball, but missed the mark. The balls scattered around the table, but didn’t fall in a pocket.
George Thorogood and the Destroyers were now playing “Bad to the Bone,” while Chizek strutted around the table, prowling his next shot and bobbing his round head to the beat of the drums.
“You did good, Carlos,” Chizek said. “We’ll have to get you a nice little bonus once this job is completed.”
“I like the sound of that,” Carlos said, raising his beer bottle up in a mock toast.
Chizek was mentally preparing for a special package. Garza had told him it was a volatile piece of merchandise, not the typical drug shipment. He’d hinted about its explosive nature, so Chizek didn’t have to guess it was a bomb. What bothered him the most was that Garza had paid him five hundred thousand dollars up front for the transfer. Ten times the going rate. It made him wonder how much Garza was making on the deal.
Chizek was lining up his next shot when the music overhead came to an abrupt halt. It left the cavernous room in barren silence. From the darkness came three figures, all dressed in black, with black ski masks covering their faces. They approached the pool table with a calm, unfettered stride. They didn’t wave any weapons. The one on the left had a pistol tucked into his waist, the one on the right had a black bag.
“How the fuck did you get in here?” Chizek snapped.
The one in the middle took off his ski mask.
A beer bottle crashed to the cement floor and echoed throughout the room. Carlos’s eyes widened in terror as he saw the man’s face. “No. . no, this can’t be. You can’t be. .”
Chizek gritted his teeth and glanced outside.
“They’re all dead,” Nick Bracco said.
Chizek gripped his pool stick and whacked Carlos on the side of the head. The guy went down fast; his arms covered his face as Chizek kept swinging the stick and connecting.
Bracco came over and yanked the pool stick from Chizek, getting between the two men.
“It’s not his fault,” Bracco said, throwing the pool stick into the darkness. He pointed to the guy with the black bag removing his mask as well. “That was all Stevie’s doing. He shot a hologram image against the curtain to make it look like we were inside the motel room. He blasted a recorded argument to go with it.”
The third guy removed his mask and Chizek recognized him as Bracco’s partner. The sharpshooter who had messed up his bar. The guy stood with his gun tucked into his waistband, almost daring Chizek to make a wrong move.
“Then Matt here shot his truck with a GPS device wrapped in an adhesive glue-ball,” Bracco added. “You surround yourself with suck-ups and it gives you a false sense of your intelligence.”
Chizek looked at the wall clock. Almost ten. Garza and his men would be arriving soon. He smiled at Bracco. “You have no idea how fucked you are.”
The FBI agent seemed to nod at that. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I know.”
Walt was still pacing with the phone in his hand, his long strides taking him around his office in just three or four seconds. With every minute that passed, he wondered the prudence of his strategy. Was he feeding his best agents to the wolves by letting them operate alone in the hostile environment of Denton, Arizona? Just a couple of miles from Mexico’s deadliest assassin.