“No! Wait,” Muňoz pleaded. “There’s something you need to know.”
“Tell me later. We’re leaving now.”
“No, you don’t understand. I’m already a dead man, but if I go with you, and disobey their instructions, they’ll kill my family, too. They’re watching us. They’re already on their way here.”
Avery’s eyes narrowed as his mind processed a half dozen things at once.
He threw all of the locks on the door, and hit the push-to-talk clipped beneath his jacket and said into the throat mike, “Carnivore to all units, I have the package, but we’re held up at Objective Charlie. We’re going to have company. Blueshift hold your position. Stalker, you got my six? Acknowledge.”
Avery heard Aguilar’s voice in his earpiece. “Blueshift for Carnivore, copy that, holding position.”
“Stalker, do you copy?” Avery said.
“You have to listen to me!” Muňoz shouted. Without looking at him, Avery held up a hand to silence him, but the Colombian kept yelling. “This information needs to reach Daniel.”
“I said, shut up.” Avery tilted his chin toward the throat mike. “Stalker, are you there!”
No response from Castillo.
Avery swore and stepped back, away from the door, weighing his options. He wanted to grab the package and split, but if the opposition already hit Castillo, that meant they were real close and getting closer by the second.
He tapped the push-to-talk again. “Carnivore for Blueshift, belay last message. Get your ass up here now and watch your back!”
“Hold tight. I’m my on my way, Carnivore.”
Avery holstered the Glock. He grabbed onto the medium-sized refrigerator and tugged on it, dragged it inch by inch across the floor, scratching floor tiles and rattling its contents. He left the fridge in front of the door. Then he took four steps back and moved behind the thick granite island in the center of the kitchen.
Avery drew the Glock once more and held the weapon firmly in the isosceles stance over the top of the island, aiming toward the entry way to the suite.
Christ, he thought. This could be a fucking massacre.
As he voiced his response to Avery’s last transmission, Aguilar was already in the process of jumping up from his seat and taking wide strides across the foyer. Seeing his urgency and the expression on his face, people hurried out of his way, and a doorman yelled after him. At first Aguilar maneuvered around people, but as his patience wore out, he simply pushed them aside, ignoring their protests. There were at least two dozen people, many with luggage, waiting for the elevators. As one elevator opened, Aguilar pushed ahead through the line, shouldering people out of the way. He shoved over a tanned blonde, prompting an outraged man in a Hawaiian shirt with sunglasses and gelled hair to yell something out and start after Aguilar in an effort to play hero. As Aguilar reached the elevator, he felt a hand grab onto his shoulder from behind. Aguilar, sighed, turned, and delivered a right hook to the man’s jaw and shoved the slack body back out of the elevator as the doors shut.
From her observation post, the Viper heard every word spoken in Muňoz’s suite, which was wired for sound. She swore out loud. Then she grabbed her cell phone and hit a number programmed into the speed dial. It rang twice before a male voice answered in Spanish. She cut him off and ordered, “Move in now. I want the American alive if possible. If not, make him suffer.” She ended the call and rolled her chair across the carpet to the bi-pod-mounted VSS sniper rifle positioned on the table near the sliding glass doors, the tip of the suppressor pointing through the drawn shades. She leaned into the scope. She had partial line of sight right into Muňoz’s suite from here. Her own suite was on the thirty-fifth floor of the twin parallel tower, and allowed her to see a little less than halfway into the target area. Carnivore and Muňoz were presently out of sight, but she had caught a brief glimpse of the American’s back earlier when he searched the suite. She grew anxious, eager to match a face with the voice.
“How many are coming?”Avery thought it couldn’t be more than three or four shooters — not that that was by any means a small number — but Muňoz didn’t provide an answer. “How many, goddamn it?”
“I don’t know! I am not a part of this, I swear! They trapped me. This was the only I could save my family.”
“How did you know to ask for Carnivore?”
“I never heard that name before. She prepared the message.”
“Who?”
“Please, listen to me. I have to tell you something important.”
“I’m all ears in the ten seconds we’ve got left before someone knocks that door down, so start fucking talking, and you better make it interesting.”
“If you make it out of this, tell Daniel that the Viper has hijacked Plan Estragos. I have access to General Flores’ files. I saw it for myself. They caught me, interrogated me, and threatened my family. I had to do this. I am so sorry.”
“Made you do what?”
“She made me bring Carnivore here,” Muňoz said. “Tell Daniel the Viper is taking Plan Estragos to the United States.”
“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Avery shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. Either we make it out of here or we’re both dead. We’re in this together.”
There were voices on the other side of the door speaking Spanish.
“They’re here,” Avery said quietly.
Someone tried pushing on the door and worked the handle.
“I was supposed to leave the door ajar,” Muňoz said. “They will know that something is wrong.”
Avery’s finger tightened around the trigger. He focused on his breathing, in and out, keeping a steady flow of oxygen to his blood. “You got a weapon?”
“It’s in the bedroom.”
“Get it!”
Muňoz scrambled across the floor.
A second later, Avery heard glass crack behind him, followed by a grunt from Muňoz and then something heavy hitting the floor. He started to turn his head to look, but then a new sound demanded his attention.
“Are you in there, Avery?”
Avery relaxed and eased up on the trigger at the sound of Castillo’s voice coming from the hallway on the other side of the door.
But the relief lasted only a second.
Fuck. This was worse than he’d thought.
“Who else do you have out there, Jon?”
In response, a double burst of automatic fire blasted the lock and drilled through the door, pelting the fridge directly on the other side. Avery recognized the sharp clattering sound of an Uzi. This was followed by a shout in Spanish and then the sound of the door being kicked in, but the door stopped short after barely a foot, banging against the back of the fridge, which was six feet in front of Avery.
Going in from the hallway, the door opened to the left side, so the assaulters would have to squeeze through on their right, Avery’s left. They’d have to either push the fridge over or squeeze through the narrow gap in the doorway one at a time. Either way, it slowed them down, and presented Avery a small advantage.
A shadow spilled into the room and splayed over the floor off the left side of the fridge.
Avery held his aim to what he thought would be about chest level. He saw the barrel of an FMK-3, a small, Argentinean-made submachine gun, poke around from behind the fridge. The FMK-3 was quickly followed by a man with Latin complexion, compact, muscular build, and gang tattoos adorning his arms and neck.
Avery sighted on him center mass and tapped the trigger twice.
The intruder grunted in surprise when the first bullet struck his sternum and tunneled through his chest. The second bullet laid him out on the floor with blood pooling beneath his body. As he moaned and squirmed on the carpet, bleeding out, Avery lowered his aim several degrees and put the kill shot through the back of the man’s skull.