I grabbed Navarro’s arm with one hand and stabbed him in his shoulder wound with the other. His grip instantly loosened, and he released Alex’s legs. Then I pulled Alex out of the cabin the way I’d come in and started kicking us upward.
As we ascended to the surface, my eyes drifted back down to Navarro.
He was still in the deep end of the cabin, pushing against the seat, desperately trying to work himself free. And right then, before I turned away, I was treated to a glimpse of a sudden, large cloud of air bubbles that blew out of his mouth. He couldn’t hold his breath anymore, and I knew he was gone.
I kept kicking my way to the surface, pulling Alex up with me, heading for the sunlight with my lungs shrunken inside my chest and every molecule of oxygen squeezed out and devoured—but as I opened my mouth and braced myself for the breath that would mean death, not life, I finally broke through with Alex right beside me.
He shook the water from his eyes as we both gulped down big, grateful lungfuls of air.
I looked toward the shore. We were only a couple of hundred yards away from land, and I knew we’d make it. Even better, I knew it was over, what with Navarro literally sleeping with the fishes underneath us.
Alex and I bobbed up and down in the deceptively peaceful turquoise water, looking at each other, his arms clasped tight around my neck. His eyes were calmer now, and seemed to me to be back to those of a four-year-old boy. Not only that, but they were holding my gaze without any trace of fear in them. And that was a first.
“How did you do that?” he asked, his face all alight with wonder.
I broke out in a big, deeply contented smile.
“I’m your dad, Alex. That’s all. And it’s what any dad would do.”
He thought about this for a moment, and for the first time since I’d met him, he smiled back. Not a huge, big toothy grin. But a smile. And right now, that was plenty.
But I couldn’t enjoy it fully.
A rush of malignant thoughts was poisoning the moment and swooping in and out of my head, echoes of things I’d heard or felt that were now falling into place, and I knew I didn’t yet have all the answers.
70
Tess, Alex, and I hadn’t been back in San Diego more than a few hours, but this couldn’t wait.
Tess was fine. She’d done like I told her and ducked into a safe corner and waited until the firefight had died down. The Special Ops guys had then escorted her out of there and cleaned her wound. Once Alex and I had broken the surface, I’d been worried sick about her, and the smile she gave me when I finally got her back is definitely up there in the top five memories of my life.
After the dust had settled in Merida, I’d been relieved to hear that Jules and the new guy were also okay. I’d been extremely saddened, though, by the news that Villaverde had been found dead at the rented beach house Navarro had used. It was a terrible loss, and I felt gutted. He was a decent, down-to-earth, capable guy who’d really proved himself to be a solid ally when I needed him. I guessed that he and Navarro had had some face time together, which was probably how Navarro’s men got to us at the safe house. And the bastard wasn’t in the business of leaving behind any witnesses.
The hacienda itself had kicked in some decent news. The scientists who’d been kidnapped from Santa Barbara were found in the basement lab complex, along with two others who’d been grabbed previously. They were in as good shape as could be expected for people who’d been held captive like that for months.
Closer to home, Stephenson had offered to work with me and Tess on helping Alex work through everything that had happened.
But I didn’t think the book was yet closed on that front.
A few things were bothering me, starting with the drone.
I knew drones. We’d had one circling over us the night we hit McKinnon’s lab, but more relevantly, I’d made use of a Predator much more recently, in Turkey, in broad daylight, while chasing the sadistic Iranian agent Zahed. I knew what they looked like. And in that perfect azure dome that towered over us down in Merida that morning, I didn’t see a thing. Not a glint, not a spot, nothing. Admittedly, I hadn’t had all the time in the world to sit and stargaze to look for it. But I knew I should have seen it and it really bugged me. It bugged me enough to look into it with the guys over at the 9th Reconnaissance Wing at Beale Air Force Base in California, from where the drones were controlled. I knew it wasn’t easy for the DEA to run a drone over Mexico. They’d done so a couple of times over the last year or so, and it had caused a big stink with the federales. But the guys at Beale confirmed to me that they didn’t have any drones over California or Mexico that day.
Which meant Munro was lying.
Which meant that if Munro didn’t track us that way, he had to have used something else. And the only other way to track us would have been to track something we had on us—specifically, something either Navarro or Alex had on them, given that the tracker on Munro’s screen was showing their live position. It didn’t seem possible he had a tracker on Navarro. If Munro had managed that, he’d have hauled El Brujo’s ass in and sold him out to the narcos before pocketing the cash and retiring into a mojito-fueled, perma-tanned sunset.
Which meant the tracker had to be on Alex.
Which meant Munro somehow knew that Navarro would come after Alex.
Which is where my pesky little rule about coincidences starts doing its thing and turns into a real nag.
Which is why I was now getting out of my car and walking up to a mountain cabin at the edge of the Sequoia National Forest.
Hank Corliss’s cabin.
71
The cabin was a steeply raked oak A-frame that was dwarfed by trees that were more than a hundred feet tall. I found Corliss sitting on the back deck of the split-level cabin, looking out over a fast-flowing creek and mile after mile of dense forest. The loud calls of warblers and swallows filled the air.
Corliss had clearly heard me drive in and pull up to the house, but he hadn’t made any effort to get up and see who it was. I suspected he knew it was me, just as I suspected he’d been expecting me to show up at some point.
He didn’t even look over as I stepped out to join him.
It had just fit too perfectly. Alex happens to be the reincarnation of McKinnon. Munro happens to get wind of that somehow. He then decides to use that to bait Navarro out of hiding—the one thing he knew Navarro couldn’t possibly resist going after.
Like I said, it was a coincidence too far, and although my horizons had broadened about the so-called nonphysical world in the last few days, that was one coincidence I wasn’t prepared to believe. Not when it fit that perfectly.
I’m not into perfect fits.
Life doesn’t work that way.
And if it wasn’t a rare alignment of stars, if it wasn’t serendipity spreading its wings and giving Jesse Munro the gift of a lifetime, then it had to be something else. Something more human. Which then got me wondering about how much Munro could pull off by himself. And that got me wondering about Corliss.
Whoever did this had to know Navarro was obsessed with reincarnation. He also had to know what McKinnon’s drug was all about. And he needed to be, in my eyes anyway, insanely desperate to get Navarro.
Which brought me back to Corliss and to something Munro had said, out in Merida, by the chopper. You think I went through all this bullshit just so some cranky old man could get his revenge?
His words had been rattling inside me ever since he said them.