The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Boxed Set, page 61
part #1 of Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Series
“Ten. Twelve.”
He whistled. “That’s a lot.”
It was. “Anything else?”
“Uh, not inside the drone range.”
“All right. Stay low. Everyone keep calm. Remember the plan.” I waved Ichi out about fifteen feet to my right and slightly forward, then walked Chan back from me about the same distance and a little off to the side. When I returned to my previous position, Huiyin was already about twenty feet off to my left.
We didn’t have to wait much longer: Running lights flared in the sky, followed a few moments later by the deep whine of fans. Floodlights from the bottom of the vehicle lit up the most obvious place for the vehicles to put down, then they descended one at a time. Gull-wing doors rose before the first tire touched the ground, and armored forms with helmets leapt clear. They dashed several feet away from the vehicles and each dropped to a knee before bringing up the carbines I’d seen before.
Ten. That was better than twelve.
Not private security guards. Not small-time operators. Assault personnel. Probably former military—like me.
As the second vehicle powered down, a form stepped out, any hint of femininity lost to what was probably an armored long coat. At least the designer of the coat had attempted to make it stylish—sandy colored in the floodlight. Lilly Duvreau’s dark hair was short, swept back from a face that would never be described as pretty. But it was a face that conveyed intensity and competence, and that was what mattered in her line of work.
She strolled forward, bracketed by two of her armored escorts, clearly giving zero fucks about anything. Closer up, the security team’s environmental gear was clear. They were prepared.
I bowed slowly toward her. “Miss Duvreau. Sorry for the coordinate mix-up.”
She showed no emotion when she said, “Fuck you, Mendoza.”
“Ouch. Are we still good to conclude this business?”
A pause, as if she really might be considering walking away. Or killing us without knowing the details. “You’ve killed a lot of my people. Why shouldn’t I tell my team to just turn you into gooey, unidentifiable puddles?”
“I think this data means more to you than a bunch of unskilled grunts.”
A longer pause, enough to tell me maybe she had a connection to her grunts, even if it was only a matter of pride. “Tell me how this works,” she finally said.
“You have a systems expert?”
Duvreau yelled over her shoulder, “Burkland!”
A woman exited the first limo—short, glasses with thick lenses, feathery pale hair. She seemed like she might be a little chunky beneath a loose-fitting yellow blouse and a long, gray skirt. Even though she appeared to be young, she looked as if life were being drained from her prematurely. Cubicle slave. She rushed forward, handbag banging against her hips, then seemed to remember what she was supposed to do and slowed. She came to a stop beside the guard on Duvreau’s left.
I pivoted to the systems expert. “Burkland? You’re the computer—”
Burkland said, “Sally,” She winced immediately. That hadn’t been part of the coaching.
“All right, Sally. Here’s the plan.” I held up my hands slowly. “I’m going over to my backpack. Duvreau?”
Duvreau called out, “Hold fire unless you see Mendoza do something stupid. Don’t do anything stupid, Mendoza. These people are given a fair bit of latitude in defining the parameters of their assignment.”
“Nothing stupid.” My hands stayed up while I sidled over to the backpack. I shouted, “Lifting the backpack now.” Then I lowered my left hand—slowly—and grabbed the backpack handle. And lifted.
I moved back to my position. “Sally, you have a computing device with you?”
Sally pulled a thick rectangular device from the handbag and flashed the screen toward me. “It’s a Wang-3350. Don’t let the bulk put you off—it’s powerful. And me and Harriet, we always joke that no one likes a small Wang, anyway.” She snorted nervously, then bowed her head slightly. “Sorry.”
“That’s good.” I waved her forward. “Duvreau, I want to pull a storage device out for Sally here to connect to. One. I will power it on and it will prompt Sally for a code, which I will give to her. If she types it in correctly, you’ll get a good look at some of the data. If she types it in incorrectly…well, it takes a while to generate a new code. Sally, take your time and get it right, okay?”
“Oh, I’m a good typist.” She giggled, but it sounded more anxious than anything else.
I locked eyes with Duvreau. “Are we all clear on this? We’re very close to wrapping this transaction, so everyone should just stay calm.”
Duvreau clenched her jaw. “Hurry up.”
I pressed a button on the device, and pale green lines flickered all around the frame. After a few seconds of the light show, a small display on the front presented twenty characters. “You seeing a connection prompt, Sally?”
“I do!” That was genuine giddiness. Surrounded by imminent death, she was tickled over a computer working the way it was supposed to.
She had to be legit.
I read the code off, slow and loud.
She typed, then read it back.
“That’s good. Go ahead and connect, please.”
Sally bit her lip. “Okay. I’m seeing the device. Storage. Terabytes, partitioned, compressed. Wow. That’s some slick work. Really clean.”
Chan croaked, “Thanks.”
Sally squinted and seemed to spot Chan for the first time, then went back to work. “I want to—”
I cleared my throat. “Just open the file labeled preview, please. It’ll take about five seconds.”
It looked like Sally mouthed okay, and after a bit, she said, “Open. Miss Duvreau, it looks like a header for one of the DA-75 transactions. Wow. Wow. I had no idea this one was in the wild. They’ve got—” She looked up, caught the look on Duvreau’s face, and bowed over the display again. “I-it’s the real data. Ma’am.”
Duvreau gave a curt nod. Part defeated, part satisfied. “What next?”
I waved the storage device. “I’m putting this back in the backpack, then I’m zipping it up. I can hand it over to Sally or to one of your soldiers.”
“Sally.” Duvreau waved the other woman forward.
I put the storage device back into the backpack and zipped it shut. When I handed it over to Sally, I said, “This is all ruggedized, and the storage devices are shielded, but they’re worth millions to me. Please don’t drop them.”
She groaned beneath the weight but nodded, then whispered, “Wow! Must be very ruggedized! You guys thought of everything!”
“It’s what I do.”
She clutched the backpack to her chest and blushed. “This has been the most exciting thing I’ve ever done!”
“I should hope so.” I almost wanted to carry the backpack for her.
Duvreau waited until Sally was back among the security team. “We have the devices with all the data.”
“You do,” I said. “Now we need the money.”
Duvreau smirked. “And I just accept that you haven’t kept a copy or sent the data to the FBI already? There were rumors they were working with the SEC on cases.”
“Consulting with. They offered one-tenth what we agreed upon. Anything more would look like they hired me to steal it, and apparently that’s illegal.”
Duvreau rolled her eyes. “It’s good to know where you draw the line.”
“Well, I have no incentive to give something away. As you know, people died for that data. So what we’re going to do now is you’re going to transfer the money to the account I provided you. When we see the money in the account, we’ll transmit the codes to unlock all the storage.”
“And what if we decided to kill you instead and take the code generator off your corpses?”
I sighed. “That would be very unfortunate for both parties. We had really been looking forward to wrapping this up without more killing, especially of us. But the bigger problem is that you won’t know who has the code generator. I mean the real one. We all have one. Maybe each one of us has one associated with a particular device. And since failures could end up transmitting data to the FBI after all—” I smiled. “Oh, did I forget to mention that?”
Duvreau stuffed her hands inside her coat pockets. “All right. Simultaneous transfer.” She waved, and one of the guards took the backpack from Sally.
Sally pulled her computing device out and said, “Ready!” Strangely nervous.
The guard pulled his mask up, then took one of the devices out.
I turned to Chan. “Check the account.”
The glow of the computing device lit up Chan’s face. “There. Half of it.”
The guard straightened. “Got the code.” He read it out, and Sally repeated, then connected. It took a couple minutes, but they connected to all devices and confirmed the data was present.
Sally let out a laugh that sounded relieved. “It’s all there, Miss Duvreau.”
Duvreau said, “I wish I could say it was good doing business with you, Mendoza.” She turned, and her security team fell back to the air limos.
Chan said, “The money! Gone!”
I shook my head. The banking cartel, doing the unthinkable. Apparently, there was no honor among thieves. “Better than being corpses, I guess.”
Duvreau smirked as she took the backpack from the security guard but immediately grunted beneath the weight. “Shit. I guess you really did care about these not breaking.”
“I’m not one to take chances. Except for trusting you, I guess.”
“You didn’t really have a choice, did you? Don’t worry. I don’t need to kill you, Mr. Mendoza.” She slung a strap over a shoulder and climbed into the rear air limo. “You’ve already made more enemies than you could imagine.”
“Yeah,” I whispered. “Why leave loose ends out there, right?”
The doors lowered, then the limo rose into the air with a deafening whine of fans.
Sally shrugged and waved at me. “Sorry about that.” She ducked to enter the other vehicle.
Then Duvreau’s vehicle erupted in a blinding fireball.
Sally and the rest of the security team were thrown to the ground. Bits and pieces of the air limo frame rained down with a fiery clatter.
A rifle crack echoed in the distance, and one of the security team went down.
I ran forward, pistols drawn, and shouted, “Face down! No need for anyone else to die!”
The security guard next to Sally brought his weapon up.
I put a round through his gas mask.
Blood spurted out through the entry hole and Sally shrieked.
The rest of the weapons clattered to the ground.
Huiyin and Ichi ran forward, kicking weapons away.
I offered Sally a hand and said, “I’m really glad you weren’t in the other limo, or it wouldn’t have been as exciting. Explosives can be indiscriminate, but I don’t like loose ends.”
“Oh!” She laughed—nasal, kind of a nervous hysteria—then she doubled over and threw up.
I patted her back. “That’s okay. Get it out of your system. Chan? Can you help her?”
Chan rushed forward, took Sally’s hand, but froze. There was a look—guilt or fear—in the magenta eyes staring at me, as if the realization had just hit that something needed to be said but couldn’t be. Not without help.
I holstered my pistols. “What? Chan, what is it?”
“Jacinto.” Chan shivered, pulled a fountain pen out of the hoodie. The fountain pen from the data center. Pointed toward Huiyin. “She wants Jacinto.”
I spun on Huiyin, who had just tapped her jacket with a wrist.
Another explosion lit up the night. My eyes widened at the fireball rising from the data center rooftop.
Danny.
“Don’t move!” Huiyin. On edge. Like someone whose career was at stake.
I did my best to stand perfectly still. “Should I raise my hands, or is this just about you executing us?”
“Just don’t move.” Her voice shook. “Like you said, that’s enough killing.”
“So we just let you take Jacinto back to China, and that’s it?”
“My country needs this technology to keep up with the changing world. That’s all it has to be. No need for everyone to die.” Stronger now. More confident, more distant. “You’re a mercenary, remember?”
“Yeah. This was never about Dong, was it?”
Booted feet scraped—Huiyin moving toward the air limo. “Chan, bring it to me.”
“She’s just using you, Chan, same as she did all of us.”
Chan took a step, stopped. “No.”
Huiyin sighed. “I could kill you all and take it from you.”
“Would you?” I asked.
“Yes.”
It was the answer I’d always expected. “I’m sorry.”
The distant crack of a rifle filled the night air, and something thudded to the ground.
I bowed my head. “Thanks, Danny. I’m sorry you had to do that.”
He snorted. “She tried to kill me. I think we’re even. Told you she couldn’t be trusted.”
“Yeah.”
Sally whimpered and swooned; I barely caught her. Her eyes rolled around, unfocused, and she mumbled, “So much killing.”
I set her to the ground gently and turned, trying not to see Huiyin’s body. She had been wrong, of course.
There was never enough killing.
Chapter 32
Water lapped against the side of the yacht. It was a steady, gentle beat—not quite enough to really rock something so big. I didn’t own the largest boat in Costa Rica. Hell, I didn’t even own the largest boat in Marina Pez Vela, but the hull had a fresh coat of paint and had been scraped free of barnacles. And I was an hour away from testing the motors I’d finished rebuilding the day before. The boat was a patchwork mess that was probably just dangerous enough to take on the Pacific Ocean. I knew I was.
I padded up to the flying bridge, grinning at the squeak of my deck shoes on the steps. The grin spread more when Ericka headed up to the prow with a bucket. Her caramel skin was warm against a white bikini. She untangled a bright-colored rope wrapped around the handle and lowered the bucket into the water with a soft splash, then breathed in the cool, salty air. Her ample chest expanded. As if psychic, she looked up at me with dark brown eyes.
“Ola!” She chuckled as she raised the bucket. Her voice was raspy and worn as the yacht had been when I’d discovered it, but her accent was manageable, and her personality was a light in my darkness. “You are a dirty old man.”
“How long did it take you to figure that out?” Eight years older. I guess I qualified as old. There was no question about the other charge. I checked the instruments, tapped the fuel gauge, then glanced back down at her. She had a hand cupped over her eyes, still looking up at me. Her dark brown hair whipped lightly in the gentle breeze.
“When did we start sleeping together, huh?” The raspiness in her voice turned into more of a bedroom huskiness,
“Two days after I arrived?”
“In Quepos, that is not so bad.” She waved and took the bucket below, adding an extra sway to hips that were fine without it.
Taking the Margo out for a little shakedown suddenly seemed much less important. In the two months since buying the boat and hooking up with Ericka, I had spent about as much time learning how she worked as I had the boat. She often kidded I had done more for her motor than I ever would the boat’s engines. The truth was, she had helped me forget about a life I never thought I could leave, a life I never wanted to know again.
It was that life that taught me the skills to notice the glint of light off to the north. A small motorbike sped through the town toward the marina, coughing white exhaust into the empty street. I could make out a slender form, dark helmet, and an almost mustard-brown skin.
When the engine grew louder, Ericka came back up. She watched the bike rattle across the pier for a moment, then looked up at me. “You are expecting someone?”
“Go below.”
A troubled look highlighted the scar on her right cheek, a scar left by an automobile accident a few years earlier. Losing her husband in that accident had left worse scarring where no one could see.
The motorbike came to a stop where I was moored. Male, for sure. I dropped down the steps to the deck, sliding down the rails on hands that could crush bone. The rider wore a battered backpack over a light cotton shirt. Mud stained the hems of faded jeans. He pulled the matte black helmet off, revealing a narrow face with long nose. Beady eyes danced from the boat to the surrounding vessels.
Danny.
I felt underdressed in Bermuda shorts and oil-stained T-shirt. “What brings you to Costa Rica?”
Danny shrugged. “Payday.” He unbuckled the backpack and set it on the bike’s gas tank. “Been a while. I wasn’t even sure you were down here anymore.”
“I’ve been a little caught up fixing her up.”
He looked the boat over from stern forward. “Forty feet?”
“Forty-four.”
He turned back to the transom. “Margo? Um, you think that’s going to help you forget?”
“I don’t want to forget.”
“Yeah, okay.” He opened the backpack and papers rustled as he dug around inside. “There are other people who can’t forget, you know. Ichi asked about you. And Chan…”
“How is Chan?”
“Sweating it out. It’s rough. Missing you. Lots of…emotions. We all are. Missing you.” The rustling stopped, then he pulled out a brown envelope, heavily taped. “That’s a mix of cash and cards. Mostly cash. Five thousand. Half as much on the cards. If they take those down here.”
“They do. Running water, electricity…it’s amazing.”
He snorted. It was our joke after Biloxi. “Okay. Well, you went silent.” His eyes drifted down. “You’ve got another fifty in your account. Chan’s still trying to figure out all the connections, how they moved the money around and, um, how you knew.”
“That they’d rip us off? You knew that just as well as I did. The only thing they were going to accept would be us dead or broke.”
