Twenty feet away he heard scuffing. He hunkered down into a squatting position, his hand moving to the butt of his SIG Sauer 226. A Mexican male in his early forties sauntered around the corner, an AK47 hanging as casually from a leather strap at his side as if it was a man-bag. Lock could track his progress by the glowing red tip of his cigarillo. He was carrying about fifty extra pounds and was clearly relying on his weapon to get him out of any trouble.
He wandered over to the edge of the pool, unzipped his trousers and proceeded to urinate into the shallow end. He sighed with satisfaction, zipped up, wiped his hands on his shirt and continued his patrol.
There was more good news. Neither of what Lock had suspected were motion-activated lights had switched on.
He waited a few more minutes, then broke cover, moving slowly towards the rear of the house, careful to skirt the area covered by the fixed security camera. From its height, the lens and the angle it was sitting at, he had estimated its coverage — and peeing in the pool was an off-camera activity.
The up-lighters at the bottom of the pool were bright enough for Lock to take a closer look at the frames surrounding the windows. The depth and composition of the glass told him it was blast-proof. He kept moving, staying close to the building out of the camera’s range. At the doors, he cupped his hands over his eyes and peered inside. There was a large living area, with a drop-down viewing screen. The remnants of a party — empty glasses, bottles and drug paraphernalia — covered a low wooden coffee-table.
From nowhere, a light snapped on. He hugged the wall beside the windows, pulled out his gun, and held it by his side. Seconds passed before he realized that what he had thought was a motion-activated external light was in fact the main light in the living room. If whoever had switched it on hadn’t seen him, it was by pure dumb luck. Or they had seen him and were raising the alarm. He risked taking a peek, craning his neck to the window and looking inside.
Separated by a few inches of bomb-proof glass and less than fifteen feet of carpet, he found himself staring straight at the missing girl. She was wearing a long floral dress and looked drained but in reasonable shape. Better yet, standing behind her, weatherbeaten but still clearly recognizable, stood Charlie Mendez. Between them was the bodyguard.
Lock ducked out of sight, a shiver of excitement running through him, like an electric current. He got it now. He understood why Brady had risked everything. There was no feeling like this.
He keyed his radio and spoke to Ty. ‘I got them both inside.’
Forty-six
Back in the apartment, Lock weighed the options. A hostile extraction, where you take someone who is either unwilling to leave or being prevented from doing so, is hard to pull off and it sure as hell required more than two bodies. But that was all they had — three, if they counted Rafaela — and Lock was a firm believer in working with the tools at your disposal rather than cursing your ill-fortune. Under normal circumstances, a task of this nature would require ten times the resources if it was to be carefully and safely executed. The surveillance and intelligence team would be one component, the extraction team another. There would be a quartermaster, a transport coordinator and all manner of other personnel.
Complicating matters even further, they had two targets. One would, Lock hoped, go willingly, although that couldn’t be guaranteed when you were dealing with someone already traumatized by an abduction and who might have begun to identify with her captors. Mendez, on the other hand, would go kicking and screaming.
As they gathered together their gear, Rafaela on her way to them, Lock looked at his partner. ‘We’re going to have to forget Mendez. We take the girl, get her out of there, and deal with him later.’
He could tell that Ty didn’t like the idea of giving up on the fugitive they had come to collect. ‘We can’t take ’em both?’ Ty asked.
Lock tucked a spare clip into his jacket. ‘We could try, but it halves our chances and right now they’re pretty slim as it goes.’
‘So he gets off again?’
‘Maybe we can come back for him,’ said Lock.
‘That ain’t gonna happen. You and me both know it.’
‘If he’s implicated in kidnapping the girl the State Department will have to get off their fat ass and put pressure on the Mexicans to get him back.’
‘Or he floats on down to Venezuela or catches a slow boat to Cuba,’ said Ty.
Lock zipped up a bag. ‘What do you want me to tell you here, Ty? It sucks, but taking them both is too risky.’
‘What about Melissa and what she wanted?’
There was a long silence. Lock flushed and his jaw tightened. He advanced on Ty, fists clenched. ‘Melissa’s dead. Carrie’s dead. When they’re gone, they’re gone. The girl’s alive. We can get her home. There’s no debate.’
They froze as the apartment door opened and Rafaela walked in. ‘Am I interrupting something?’
‘No, we’re good,’ said Ty, breaking eye contact with Lock. ‘Just talking things over.’
‘Now what?’ Rafaela asked.
Lock looked at Ty.
‘We go get the girl,’ Ty said.
Lock gave Rafaela a grim smile. ‘You’re the cop in charge of finding her. Should be straightforward, right?’
She smiled back, all three knowing that for Rafaela to knock at the door and demand they hand over the girl was about as likely as building a snowman in Palm Springs in June. Of course, they might hand her over, and that would be it, until a bomb turned up under Rafaela’s car or someone arrived at her apartment to kill her. But, Lock thought, there might be a way for them to extract the girl while everyone saved face. In him and Ty, Rafaela might not have two accomplices so much as two scapegoats.
‘Sure,’ Rafaela said. ‘Piece of cake.’
Forty-seven
Lock had already run through the choices in his head, dismissing most of them out of hand. They could try a covert entry, breaking in without anyone noticing and taking the girl out. That was Fantasy Land, the domain of movies. Even if they could sneak in, which in itself was unlikely, getting out unnoticed with the girl was pushing the boundaries of possibility.
The second approach was a dynamic, and therefore overt, entry. In other words, forcing their way in. From the cursory glance he’d had of the location that, too, was unlikely. They would almost certainly have something akin to a panic room. The girl, Mendez or both would be put there and then it was a siege, with plenty of reinforcements to hand.
Their only real shot at this was if the girl left the house, and there was no way of knowing if that would happen. And even if it did she might not necessarily leave alive. If she had been retained for Mendez’s amusement, then history suggested he would tire of her — there had been no sequels in his date-rape movie collection — and she was far too risky to keep. She would be killed, dumped, and Rafaela would be handed a prime suspect. The case would be closed, and Lock would find himself a lone voice trying to persuade people that Mendez had been involved in her disappearance.
No, the only real shot they had was if she was moved — and that would have to be prompted. They would have to find a way of dictating the kidnapper’s next play.
He wrote out what he needed and handed it to Ty. Ty looked at the list and his eyes widened a little. ‘You sure about this?’ he asked.
‘That’s Plan B.’
‘And Plan A?’ Rafaela asked.
‘Once Ty’s got what we need and it’s all in place I want you to call your boss and tell him you have a lead. Give him this address. They’ll have to move her and that’ll give us a shot.’
Rafaela looked unconvinced. ‘And what if they decide to kill her, then move her? You might be better going with your second plan first. That way they won’t have time to think, just to react.’