Warner dismissed him with a nod, probably having no intention of going up to the house, not if he could get what he wanted any other way, and he was a man used to getting his way.
It was all a moot point. The line of sight from the house to the boat was a straight shot at seventy yards. Conroy Farrel didn’t give a damn about the money or the Sphinx, and Warner didn’t have to leave the boat. All he needed to do was move about four feet, and he’d be dead, and something was telling Dax that Conroy had a plan to get Warner to move four lousy feet.
And he did.
The collective murmur of awe running through twenty calloused drug runners made Dax look up toward the house, and he wondered how in the world Erich Warner was going to resist.
Farrel had sent Suzi out onto his deck, obviously unarmed, the radio in her one hand, held up to her ear, and in the other, the Memphis Sphinx, held up high into the fading light of the late afternoon sun. The Sphinx did not fail, not in any way. The light falling on the crystal eyes shattered into a dazzling, glittering spectrum of color and brilliance. The body of the statue was luminous in sunlight, supple. It was as if Suzi were holding an incandescent creature, a living thing that was warming in her hand.
An illusion, of course, but a damned effective one.
Anthropologists had a term they used when trying to get close to indigenous peoples who had never before been contacted by the outside world-“lure and attraction.” They would set glittery pieces of modern junk along riverbanks, where the tribes-people were known to come for water or to fish, and that’s what Conroy was doing, luring old Warner in with a show-a beautiful woman, a stunning artifact, and lots of flash and dazzle to catch the German’s eye.
Dax wouldn’t have fallen for it, but he knew how little exposure was necessary for a sniper’s shot to hit home. All a sniper needed was to see part of a man’s head, just enough to get on target, and if Dax had been responsible for Erich Warner’s safety, he would have made damn sure the German didn’t go poking his head out of the boat.
Warner was doomed. Dax’s problem was Suzi. When Conroy killed Warner, all those twenty drug runners could easily have a knee-jerk reaction and open fire. Or possibly, Conroy wouldn’t be content with just killing Warner. Maybe he would open fire on all of them, and then it was going to be mayhem, with Suzi exposed for as long as it took her to get back in the house-a few seconds at most. But it took far less than one second to die.
So Dax made his way back down the dock, through all the armed men, and when he heard the shot, he knew Warner was already dead, that the man had stepped out of concealment to get a better look at the amazing sight of immortality blazing away in the sunlight.
Stupid bastard.
The thought was fleeting, cut short by a screeching wail of some unspeakable emotion coming out of Shoko. For a second, the twenty men on the dock were held in check by the awful, wrenching sound.
Not Dax, he was moving, breaking into a run, heading for cover, and planning his assault on the house.
Orders-Creed loved them. They gave his life a certain dimension. Performing them superbly well gave him a lot of satisfaction.
The boss had said to tranquilize Conroy Farrel if the man set one foot onto the deck, if he exposed himself for even the barest instant of time-and Creed did. He’d been watching the doorway like a hawk, and almost at the same time as Creed heard the shot, Conroy stepped out, and Creed put pressure on his trigger, darting the man.
To Creed’s amazement, the guy did not go down. He kept moving.
“Tough bastard,” Zach said, obviously impressed, with good reason.
“Suzi?”
“Farrel grabbed her on her way in-geezus.”
A screeching, banshee wail tore through the air.
“Boss?” Creed said into his radio.
“Close on the house,” Dylan said. “Get Suzi and Farrel out of there.”
“Geezus. You seeing that?” Zach said next to him.
“Christ.” He heard Dylan in his ear.
“Who is that woman?” he said, but didn’t get an answer. Down on the dock, the Asian woman had drawn a knife and already cut three of the soldiers trying to get back on the boat. They all had blood on their shirts. One of them had dropped to his knees, his hand holding his throat. Creed could have given him the odds on that move working out for him-zip.
The Asian woman moved like lightning-like Red Dog, was what he actually thought, sleek and smooth, and lethally efficient.
He didn’t know what kind of knife the woman was wielding, but he wanted one. Hell, he wanted a dozen. Three guys sliced and diced and it still cut through the mooring rope like butter. Once she’d freed the boat, in one smooth move, she swung around and had her knife at the captain’s throat.
“She’s gonna…” Zach said.
“Oh, yeah,” Creed agreed, and then it was over. A long arc of blood shot out of the captain’s neck, and he crumpled to the deck as the woman started the gunboat’s engine and headed up the Tambo River.
And so she could have had her little river cruise. She’d done SDF a favor, two dead cartel cowboys and two probably mortally wounded, and the odds were now down to about three to one.
But the girl didn’t stop. She went for the.50-caliber gun mounted on the boat, and Dylan made his call.
“Take her out.”
“No shot.” He hated saying it, but he couldn’t see her. In another two seconds, he and Zach weren’t going to be able to see the boat either. She was moving upstream, past the house, and it was blocking her from their line of sight.
“Maybe you better go get one,” Dylan suggested.
“Roger.” He and Zach were already on the move. They knew what needed to be done.
The first guy to get hit by one of her.50-caliber rounds ended up in pieces. The same with the second, and then she started in on the house.
Ba-bam. Ba-bam.
And the whole compound turned into a melee.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Suzi had a plan, and it was called “get the hell out of Dodge.”
She had the Sphinx. Dax was somewhere close by. Conroy Farrel was-well, she didn’t know what Conroy Farrel was, except that it was awful. All she and Dax needed was to rendevous and find some transportation out of this place.
Conroy Farrel needed something else. She didn’t know what, but he was writhing on the floor, almost convulsive. She’d seen the dart he’d pulled out of his neck, and she didn’t understand, except to think that Dylan knew who he was and hadn’t wanted him dead.
She was smart enough to figure out that Conroy Farrel was SDF’s Paraguayan mission.
None of which mattered if she couldn’t get away from here.
Someone was shooting the house, breaking windows, rocking it with blast after blast. Shards of rock and shingles were raining down all around, turning the place into a war zone.
Conroy Farrel still had her fanny pack with her phone and her gun, but she didn’t dare get close enough to him to take her pack back. She did grab the carbine he’d dropped and moved toward the door to the deck, hoping to locate Dax.
Looking out over the deck to the river, there were men running everywhere, a lot of them shooting toward the house, some of them shooting toward the river, but she didn’t see Dax. Dammit. Racing back to the dining room table, she felt a percussive thump-thump-thump shaking the house from below. Then it stopped.
Just one more damn thing.
Moving quickly, she put the Sphinx inside the gray pack, then slipped the straps onto her shoulders. She wasn’t going to lose the statue. If she got out of here, she wanted to get out with her mission completed.
Chances were, though, that she wasn’t going to get out of here. She checked the magazine on the carbine and headed back to the door that was still open onto the deck. Using as much cover as she could, she sidled up to the wall, raised the weapon and settled her cheek onto the stock, and then she found a target and squeezed the trigger.