Ernest Dempsey
The Mexican Connection
1
Adriana ran harder than she ever had before. While her peripheral vision took note of the other cars and obstacles in the parking lot, her eyes never left her target: three men in windbreakers and ski masks ushering a fourth person toward a white, windowless van. They all carried Heckler & Koch submachine guns. The hostage’s head was covered with a pillowcase. She didn’t need to see the face to know who it was, though. That knowledge forced her to twitch her leg muscles to maximum speed.
She’d drawn her pistol but didn’t have a clear shot. The group was moving fast, dragging the prisoner along with his hands bound behind his back. They were still fifty yards away, and only fifteen from their goal. As if reminding her of that, the driver’s side door slid open, and another masked man popped his head out, ready to receive the cargo.
Adriana rounded the last car in the row and tilted her body forward to increase her velocity. Forty yards and closing. They were still ten from the van. It was going to be close, but she couldn’t ignore the reality. She wasn’t going to make it.
Thirty yards. As the man in the van reached out to seize the prisoner, he saw Adriana sprinting down the straightaway toward them with a pistol in her hand. He pointed and yelled something to the others. The last man of the three carrying the hostage spun around and swung his gun from behind his back. He opened fire from the hip, sending a barrage of hot metal across the breadth of the parking lot.
She’d learned a long time ago not to zigzag when running at a gunman, especially someone who wasn’t a good marksman; the threat of a fearless target running straight at the shooter caused inaccuracy to increase. Running back and forth would slow her down and increase the likelihood of a random round catching her.
One bullet whizzed by her head, sailing safely past to strike an old Toyota compact ten yards behind her.
The other two men threw the prisoner into the van, pulling him to the back and out of view. She pointed her weapon at the shooter, aiming low so as not to accidentally strike the van. The hollow points in her 9mm could easily pierce the vehicle’s thin siding and seriously injure someone on the inside.
Adriana squeezed the trigger, still moving at a rapid pace and only twenty yards from the van. The gun’s barrel burst over and over again. Several rounds missed, striking the concrete with orange flashes of spark. One found the gunman in the thigh, another in his abdomen, and a third in the shoulder. He doubled over and then toppled onto his back. She ignored the dying man, jumping by him in full stride.
The van’s door closed, and the tires squealed, spewing out a pungent white smoke. Adriana took aim and fired her last bullets at the tires. It wobbled left then turned right, out of the parking lot and onto the vacant street. She’d missed.
She stood for a moment in the searing Lebanese sunlight. Her shoulders and chest heaved as she gasped. She holstered her weapon, turned, and walked back over to the twitching body on the concrete. Adriana removed a dagger from her belt as she neared the man. His hands were covered in blood; the right still clung to the wound in his abdomen, but it couldn’t stop the red liquid from seeping out.
She bent down and grabbed his chest, putting the knife close to his neck. “Who are you? Where have they taken him?” She tried English first. She yanked the mask off the man and noted Slavic features to his face: pale, broad, striking, with a thick nose and strong forehead. “Who are you? What do you want with him?” she asked again.
The man winced in pain. A bullet to the gut was an excruciating thing; at least she’d heard it was. There wasn’t much else she could do to torture the man into a confession. She needed information — and fast. He would probably be dead within fifteen to twenty minutes.
Adriana wasn’t too concerned about the police. In a town that had seen its fair share of strife over the decades, a few gunshots in this part of the city would probably go unnoticed.
Blood had started to pool underneath the gunman’s lower back. She realized she was running out of time. If the bullet had nicked the artery, he’d be dead much sooner. He coughed and his body shuddered, but he said nothing.
“Answer me,” she said in French then repeated the order in Spanish and German. Still no response.
He suddenly began to shake violently. His strained breath quickened, and his muscles tensed. The man’s eyes widened as if a train was speeding toward him. Then he went limp. The eyes stayed fixed on a spot in the sky, somewhere beyond Adriana’s head.
She let go of the collar and let the dead man’s head hit the pavement. She stood up straight and looked around. Other than the odd assortment of beat-up old cars, the lot was vacant.
For the moment, Adriana stemmed her frustration and grabbed the man’s collar again. While the local authorities might not respond to the sounds of a few guns going off, they would certainly take an interest in a dead body lying in a parking lot.
Dragging the body off to the side of the lot took a great deal of effort, and while it only required ten minutes, it seemed like an hour. Her eyes flashed back and forth, scanning the area to make sure no one was watching. When she reached a concrete barrier on the side, she yanked the corpse behind a few empty cardboard boxes, effectively concealing it for the time being. By the time it was found, she’d be long gone, without a trace.
She sifted through the man’s pockets and found a wad of cash, a passport, and a hotel key. She recognized the hotel; it wasn’t far from her location. First things first, though. Adriana stuffed the man’s belongings into her back pocket and headed for the side entrance to the dilapidated, tan brick building.
When she reached the door, she found the area around the lock had been incinerated. Black scarring wrapped around a one-foot radius on the door. Whoever had done this knew they would probably be unable to crack the key-coded locking mechanism.
She looked around for any trace of explosives or wiring, anything that could give her an insight as to who the men were, but there was nothing but charred and melted scraps. She put the tip of her dagger into the door’s burned-out crater and swung it open. One of the hinges creaked. Inside, a long hallway stretched a hundred feet to the left. Another door waited at the other end. From the looks of it, the intruders had given it the same treatment. It hung wide open, and sunlight poured through onto the polished concrete floor.
Overhead, cool air pumped into the open space from exposed air ducts that ran from one end of the room to the other, disappearing in a sharp right turn into the next part of the safe house.
She scoffed at the phrase now. Safe house. It hadn’t been safe enough. They’d picked Beirut because of the obscurity and, in no small part, because disappearing there was fairly easy to do.
Some of the buildings were still bombed-out husks of their former selves, remnants of the conflicts that had raged through the better part of the last few decades. Even with intermittent periods of peace, strife always seemed to lurk right around the corner.
Adriana remembered walking into this abandoned building three years before and paying cash for it on the spot. She owned the entire structure, even the empty floors above. The front doors on the main street were barricaded to keep out any curious passersby or the occasional vagrant. Local rumors among the younger populace kept any other curious eyes from taking too much interest in the property.
She’d put security measures in place, measures that would keep out some of the top thieves in the world — and she knew of several. But this wasn’t a thievery operation that had gone down; it was something else. Looking at the burn marks on the second door, whoever had broken in knew what to do, how to take out the alarm system along with the backup, and get in and out in a short amount of time.