Camacho nodded calmly. “What about the Chevy?”
“In the underground next to the Porsche.”
“You get the bug on her car?” asked Doyle from the back.
Kim nodded. “No problemo.” She ran her hands through her hair and checked her phone. “Nothing from the Boss.”
Camacho made a friendly nod to show he’d heard her, but no reply. He was too busy watching the entrance to the car park. If Aurora Soto could lead them closer to the Order of the Sixth sun and the rest of Wade’s dark empire then they’d do whatever they had to, and planting a GPS bug under her car was a great start.
Aurora was an unknown quantity. Her background was murky — never part of anything formal, nothing traceable until she arrived on the radar in connection with Silvio Mendoza’s drugs cartel based in Mexico City. She was dangerous and had at least three kills to her name.
Her preferred method of execution was poison delivered by cocktail glass and rumor had it she liked to watch her victims die. Her connection to Wade and the Sixth Sun loons was her occasional lover Silvio Mendoza, whom Wade had hired as a facilitator in Mexico. Up till recently it was just regular criminal enterprise, but now there was talk of weapons of mass destruction and rumors of people disappearing from a coffee plantation he owned. Maybe Aurora could lead them into that particular heart of darkness.
“Check out that moon,” Kim said, glancing through the tinted window. “It’s setting over the ocean.”
Reaper turned to her. “Tonight the moon dreams with more indolence, like a lovely woman on a bed of cushions.”
She gave him an ambiguous look. “I’m sorry?”
“It’s the poem I gave you in Los Angeles. I said I would tell you what the words mean, and there it is.” He gave a Gallic shrug, narrowed his eyes with indifference and dragged on his cigarette again.
“I remember now, thanks Vincent.”
“De rien…”
Camacho sat up in his seat and switched on the ignition. “Here we go — she’s off.”
The hood of a convertible black Porsche Boxster, top down, nosed out of the hotel’s underground car park and sparkled in the bright sunshine. Aurora was at the wheel and after inching the powerful German sport compact into the traffic she turned onto the avenue and pulled away from them with the subdued roar of the turbocharged four-cylinder engine. Moments later the Chevy van pulled out behind the Porsche and followed it up the road.
“It’s alright for some,” Kim said, eyeing the sports car enviously.
Camacho pulled out behind the Chevy and began to tail them. “What do you mean — the Boxster?”
Kim nodded her head. “I guess.”
“An old college buddy of mine had one — terrible problems with the shaft bearing. Plus now they dropped from six to four cylinders. I’d rather get a Lambo for the roar.”
Kim sighed and rolled her eyes to the roof.
“What?” Camacho said, pushing the throttle and pulling closer to the Porsche. He changed up through the gears… second, third, fourth.
“Lambo?” she said, glancing at his biceps. “I don’t think you’d even fit inside one.”
Yes, Camacho considered, she was probably right.
“She’s moving too far ahead, Jack,” Scarlet said.
Camacho’s trip down memory lane was shattered by the no-nonsense Kim, riding shotgun to his right. “So speed things up a bit.”
“Sorry — just a little lost in thought.”
“Well snap out of it — look!”
Aurora was accelerating the Boxster and weaving in and out of the dense traffic up ahead. The Beauville was keeping pace with her. “You think they’ve seen us?”
“No. Just driving like assholes.”
“Excellent analysis,” Lexi said.
“Just don’t lose them,” said Kim, starting to sound anxious.
“Just relax, babe.”
“Don’t call me babe, Camacho.”
“Sorry, babe.”
“You like your nuts where they are, or served up in a bowl with your next beer?”
Camacho suppressed a smile. He liked Kim Taylor.
They followed Soto and the Chevy along the coast road for several blocks and then they turned right and started to climb into the hills south of Acapulco. Kim’s moon was now sinking into the Pacific waves as the sun behind them climbed higher. The beaches were already full of surfers and sunbathers.
“Looks like our cult has some cash,” Camacho said. “This area ain’t cheap.”
With less traffic on the roads they dropped back, but then things changed fast.
Doyle leaned forward and frowned. “Are they slowing down?”
With no warning, the Chevy skidded into the slow lane to reveal the Boxster right in front of them. Aurora turned in the convertible, casually pulled a gun from inside her jacket and fired it at them. The bullet punctured a hole through the windshield and buried itself inside the stuffing of the back seat.
“Fuck me!” Kim said.
“Perhaps later,” said Camacho, crunching the manual gearstick into something approximating third gear and swerving hard into the next lane.
“Know any other tunes?” Kim said sarcastically.
The CIA man stamped on the brakes and pulled back.
“What the buggering hell are you doing?” Scarlet said. “She’s getting away!”
“And I want her to think she’s done just that,” Camacho said. “This isn’t ECHO, Sloane. This is a joint BDS-CIA operation. Our orders are to locate the cult’s HQ and she’s hardly going to lead us there if she knows we’re behind her.”
Kim nodded in agreement. “That’s why we bought our little insurance policy with the GPS bug on the Porsche.”
“So get the tracker fired up, Kim,” Camacho said, and then with a weary glance to Scarlet: “No offense, babe.”
“I had no idea you fancied a career as a castrato, Jack, but that’s what awaits you should you refer to me as babe again.”
He twisted his fat neck and fixed his eyes on her. “I don’t know what that means, but whatever it is, I’d like to see you try it.”
“I don’t think you would, darling.”
“We pull back,” Camacho repeated. “Kim, get on to the Mexicans and see if they can send some backup. She knows we’re on her tail now so we don’t have the element of surprise. In the meantime, we get a plan together, hang back and follow the tracker.”
Less than an hour later, the Explorer easily climbed the hill as the road swept around Acapulco Bay to the south and they made good time on their way to Las Brisas, the up-market suburb where apparently the cult’s HQ was located somewhere in a maze of villas and mansions. The tracker worked well and now they were closing in on their target.
Camacho pulled the SUV off the main road. Now they were driving back down toward the sea again, but this time the concrete crash barriers and telephone polls had changed into manicured lawns of bahia grass and Mexican fan palms swaying lazily in the warm Pacific breeze.
All around them large white mansions and villas nestled behind tropical gardens and expensive cars sat on the driveways.
“That must be it up there,” Scarlet said, raising a finger to point at a sumptuous white and terracotta villa trying to hide behind a ten-foot wall. As she studied the property for an ingress point she noticed a small security camera swivelling around and surveying the street.
“We’re set then,” Camacho said firmly. “We go in as soon as the Mexicans arrive.”
“All right, agreed,” Scarlet said reluctantly. “But pull back a bit. We couldn’t be more obvious if we were standing on their doorstep wearing trilbies and belted raincoats.”
“Oh, you’re real funny,” Camacho said, as he reversed back up the road a few hundred yards. “Now we wait.”