“And?” Gant pushed, earning a hard glance from Golden.
“It was a stupid and naïve plan,” Roberts said.
“Of course it was,” Gant agreed. “Taking out the warlord would only delay the inevitable. But you didn’t care about that. What did you care about?”
“We had a deep cover agent,” Roberts said. “It’s like—“ he paused as he tried to think—“like a damn wedding cake.” He used his hands as he described. “Layers. Big on the bottom, lots of bottom feeders. Getting narrower as you go up. The warlord was like layer three up. But the agent, he was getting close to the, you know, the little statue of the couple on top. The key players. There are two people who run it all down there and we’d been after both of them for a very long time. And our agent was close to one of them.
“Took him three years. Three years deep under cover. Working from Miami down south, through the food chain of traffickers. Selling his fucking soul to go up the bad guy feeding chain. Selling his God-damn soul.”
Roberts was breathing hard and Gant looked over once more at Golden. She was perfectly still, watching. He turned back as Roberts continued.
“He was my older brother. Served in the Marines. We went through the Agency course together. I got promoted faster than him. He didn’t care. He wanted to be in the field. I wanted to be in charge.
“He left everything behind. His life. His wife divorced him after a year of only seeing him once and took the kid. He stayed on the job. He went under deeper than anyone we ever had. He was like one of those fucking people in a National Geographic show breathing God-damn special liquid mixture in their lungs so they could go deeper into the ocean depths than anyone else ever went before.
“There were times he was out of contact for so long, we figured he’d been discovered and killed. He went three months once without making contact. He couldn’t take the chance, he told me when he finally made a meet. And he had to do things, bad things, to prove his cover.”
“Like go to a village in the company of a warlord?” Gant asked, confused about why an undercover agent would be carrying a badge.
Roberts shook his head. “No.” He sighed. “That was me.”
Emily lifted her head, cocking it to one side to try to listen better. There was a distant sound, one she couldn’t quite make out yet. It was late afternoon to judge by the shadow that had climbed up the eastern side of the wood.
Distant thunder? But it was steady and getting closer.
Emily got to her feet and went toward the side of the enclosure that seemed to be closest to the approaching rumble. The entire wood structure began to vibrate.
Earthquake? Emily had never experienced one. But it seemed to steady and non-stop. And it was moving, coming closer, getting louder. There was another sound now, underlying the rumble, almost like metal on metal. Getting hearer at a rapid pace. It was indeed metal on metal she suddenly realized.
The blast of the train’s whistle caused her to jump, it was so close and unexpected.
“Help!” Emily screamed. “Help me!”
Utter frustration blanketed her as the train rumbled by, very close by the sound, yet she knew her yells were drowned out by the roar of the train’s engine and the rattle of its wheels on the metal tracks.
Emily pounded her fists on the wooden panel as the train went by. People were so close, yet they might as well have been a hundred miles away. The train must have been a long one because it sounded like it was right next to her for over five minutes, then finally the sound began to recede. Emily listened, ears straining, until finally silence ruled once more.
Emily shook her head as she walked back to the center and sat down. She couldn’t let it get to her. She had a feeling the bad man had specifically picked this location so that she could hear the train come by so close — suddenly she realized what she was enclosed in. A water tower from the old days, when trains needed water for their steam engines.
Emily took several deep breaths. If she could get out of this, she could be rescued. She was close to people. At least there were people when a train passed. She looked at the bolt, the chain, the shackle and the lock. As before, the weakest part was the lock. And she still had one under-wire left. Emily stretched her hands out, feeling the pain from the still un-healed cuts she’d inflicted on herself with her last attempt.
She didn’t care. She had to do something.
There was another bright side to her current location, she realized as she pulled the remains of her bra off and began working the other wire free. She wasn’t being watched.
“What happened?” Gant asked.
Roberts ran a hand across his forehead, the fingers shaking ever so slightly. “Mike — my brother — had a line on one of the two top Cartel leaders in Colombia. He’d been going after him for three years, like I told you. I mean, these guys are like ghosts. They let others stand out in front and take the public heat and the hits. These guys are the real power and to get to meet one of them, well, it’s damn near impossible if you hadn’t been in their inner circle for decades. And Mike had a meeting scheduled with one of them. You have no idea what he had to do in order to get that meeting set up.”
“Actually, I probably do,” Gant said. “He had to prove himself and the only way to do that is with blood.”
Roberts looked startled, then nodded. His eyes shifted back and forth and Gant knew what he was about to hear would haunt Roberts until the day he died, but Gant didn’t care. Whatever had been done had most likely gone wrong and now a lot of other people were paying the price.
“We knew going in it was going to get dirty. We had to weigh things. It was already nasty on the street level with the drugs and the money getting channeled to terrorists. Most people don’t know it, but there is a definite link between drug money and terrorists.”
Gant noted the tone of justification that was creeping into Roberts’ voice. The man was going to spend many sleepless nights trying to convince himself of what he was trying to convince them of right now. Gant also knew that there had been definite links between the US government and drug money when it had been expedient. Money was money was the feeling at times.
“For the greater good,” Gant said. He kept his tone level. In reality, he didn’t condemn Roberts. He knew Nero had often made very hard decisions, always for the greater good of the country. And Gant had been on some missions where the price paid had been very high, beyond what was acceptable in the ‘normal’ world. He had long ago left the normal world behind. For the first time, Gant realized with a degree of surprise, he was almost happy that the targets had kidnapped Emily Cranston. It made the ethics of the current Sanction very cut and dry.
“Yes,” Roberts said, anxious for any sign of empathy. “We actually held a meeting. Myself, the Director of Operations and the Chief of Direct Action. To decide how much we were willing to give up to get Mike in place.”
“So how many lives did you decide it was worth?” Gant asked. He could see Golden taking this in, her eyes wide. Time for her to grow up, Gant thought.
“We knew it would take at least one,” Roberts said. “We were willing to go as high as three.”
Golden couldn’t remain silent. “What is wrong with you people?”
“It’s the way the real world works,” Roberts said. “You want another nine-eleven?” He didn’t wait for an answer. Now that it was out on the table, he seemed anxious to be done with talking about it. “It wasn’t going to be random and we agreed that whoever we gave up was going to be dirty. Someone who was already betraying us. So Mike gave up a dirty DEA agent to the Cartel.”