The man said yes.
The sicario had counted the locks earlier and seen three. The gang member glanced at him, holding his position in front of the peephole and waiting on permission to run. The sicario strained to hear the locks. When he heard the second one click open, he shot wife-beater in the temple, the man crumpling to the concrete without a sound. By the time the third lock had turned he was standing over the body. When the door cracked an inch, he kicked it hard, throwing the man back.
The sicario stepped inside and drilled the guard twice in the face, causing him to slam against the wall and fling the wallet in his hand into the hallway. The sicario moved forward, training the Sig on every crevice. He saw doors to the right and left before the hallway spilled into an open den. He heard someone say something behind the door to the right. He kicked it open and found a man sitting on a toilet, his pants around his ankles. The man uttered something unintelligible, pure astonishment on his face, a newspaper in his hands. He tried to stand and the sicario put two rounds above his nose.
He raced to the den and found it empty but identified the back door in the center of the wall. He went to the cubby used as a kitchen and found it empty as well. He shuffled back to the final door, readied his pistol, and kicked it open.
On the floor was a Caucasian man, bound up like a calf at a rodeo. He held his hands out in front, shouting, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
When the sicario holstered his weapon, the man’s demeanor changed, and tears formed in his eyes. He began to chant, “Thank God… thank God… thank you… they were going to take me to Mexico… thank you.”
10
I rolled the dice and moved my backgammon piece, surprised that I was beating Knuckles, since he’d taught me how to play the game earlier that morning. I’d figured he was an old hand at backgammon and thus a better player, but then again, we were in the middle of a mission. Maybe he couldn’t multitask like a master such as myself.
Or maybe he was still pissed at me. Hard to tell. He’d been plenty mad last night, and I wasn’t sure which piece of anger had lingered: the fact that I’d let Jennifer go home or the fact that he’d figured out where she and I stood with each other.
The team had tracked Jake to a hotel called the President, a gaudy, giant monument of white marble that looked like it belonged more in Las Vegas than it did in Turkmenistan. Of course, it was owned by the president of the country. It was billed as a five-star resort used for dignitaries and diplomats, complete with indoor-outdoor pools, tennis courts, a spa, and a bar on the sixteenth floor, but, like everything else in this strange country, it gave a vibe that was a little off-kilter. Nothing overt. Just small things, like getting your hand shocked when you used the shower, or the maids rolling the dice about whether they’d show up to clean your room on a given day, or seeing the typed piece of paper in a document protector taped to the window telling the occupant not to open the window between certain hours. Strange all the way around.
Because the hotel was located far outside the city center and because of our little altercation last night, we’d decided to jump TOC to its location, reestablishing our operations at the new hotel. We would have had to do it anyway, since it was out all by itself and not within walking distance of anything, precluding conducting operations from our original hotel, but the police fight made it imperative that we get out of the area. It had been too dark in that alley for them to have gleaned any viable description, so they’d fall back on the only thing they had — hotels within walking distance of the scene — and that would have put us in the net.
As I was checking out, Knuckles came into the lobby. He’d already completed reconnaissance of Jake’s room and built a plan of attack. He’d “borrowed” a maid’s uniform and determined the room-cleaning schedule — which is to say there wasn’t one — meaning Jennifer could access it at any time of the day and not look out of place. He wasn’t too happy when I told him that Jennifer was headed to the airport instead of the new hotel. All the flights left at two or three in the morning, and I figured it was better to fly her home in the same cycle of darkness. The police would be looking for a couple, and getting her out would throw off their search. Of course, Knuckles didn’t see it that way.
“What do you mean, she’s leaving? We’re in the middle of a fucking mission.”
“Her brother’s in trouble. He left a voice mail that’s not something to mess around with.”
“So call him and tell him she’ll be home in a day or two. How bad could it be?”
“He won’t answer his phone. It goes straight to voice mail. Look, her brother’s a reporter in Dallas, and she thinks he was working on a story about the drug cartels.”
That gave him pause. We’d both kept up on what was going on in Mexico because of the potential nexus of the cartels and terrorists out to harm the United States.
I continued. “I heard the voice mail, and he was really in fear for his life. It sounded like someone was about to jerk the phone out of his hand.”
He took that in, then said, “You really think this is some type of Sopranos bullshit?”
“I don’t know, but Jennifer’s freaking out about it, and rightly so. She needs to get home.”
He tried to maintain his anger, but it was a losing battle. He knew the decision was correct, and he would have made it himself if it were someone under his command. He just didn’t like the fact that he had no control over our little civilian company. And I understood that. We were still slogging through how such things worked and who was ultimately in charge, because my company was unique. It wasn’t established by the government, but by Jennifer and me through our own seed money, and yet we got a Taskforce paycheck for missions such as this.
On the one hand, we could be kicked to the curb as too much trouble, but on the other, our company allowed penetration of just about any place on earth — like it had here — and it was run by operators. Confusing, but that’s what the world was when you were working outside the traditional intelligence and defense architecture.
With diminishing aggravation, he said, “This damn mission won’t work without her. I’ve already got a maid’s uniform and a plan for entry.”
I smiled at that. A year ago he wouldn’t have used Jennifer at all if he could help it, instead giving her some menial task that wouldn’t affect the outcome of the mission. Now he was building operations that revolved around her participation.
“That’s not true,” I said. “The hard part is gaining entry to the room, and you’ve already cracked that. The rest is just cover development.”
The locks at the President Hotel were made by a company called Onity. They used key-cards just like hotel locks all over the world. The difference was that the Onity lock had a fairly well publicized hack utilizing the DC barrel connector at the base of the casement, whereby a simple tool could trick it into opening. Onity had done nothing about the vulnerability until a rash of robberies in Houston, Texas, prompted an outcry. They’d created a patch, but they had over ten thousand locks in use around the world, and Knuckles figured this backwater country wasn’t high on the list for getting fixed. The hack would still work here.
Knuckles said, “It’s not that simple. We’re going to have to come up with another solution now.”
Jennifer came down to the lobby with her luggage, and he said nothing else about the mission. When she reached us, he said, “Hey, your brother’s going to be okay. It’s probably just a miscommunication.”