What’s the Best Way to Watch a Fishing Show? #2
He heard a crack in her voice. Family. She had none? If she didn’t have family, how would they be torn apart, something she hoped to prevent for others? Apparently, he’d missed something and would need to do a deeper dive into her background when time permitted.
“I honestly don’t think any of us truly believed it would go on as long as it did.”
Cruz began scribbling furiously on a pad of paper next to him, and Wes took over the questioning while Cruz wrote. “All right, so what was the plan? You just keep reporting information as it came in until you were either made or the relationship ran its course, then you’d slither back to the CIA?”
“Pretty much. My position gave us access to things we never would have been able to get otherwise. It was worth the sacrifice. Or it was at first.”
Triumph wasn’t sure how he felt about her confession.
On the one hand, the Colonels were bad news.
The original jefe had three sons, two of whom ran his operations.
The father, Hector, had been eliminated last summer.
That slowed the network briefly, but then the eldest and youngest sons picked up right where dear old dad had left off.
They needed to be taken down any way it could be done.
The middle brother, Ildefanso, Hector’s bastard?
Well… he was a different story altogether and not part of the cartel.
While he understood that undercover operations often required sacrifices from the officers and agents who volunteered, when he finally managed to access some of her transcripts, they were disturbing, to say the least. They lacked any sort of detail about what she’d done to gain her information.
He bet what she had done, however, went far beyond “dating” Guillermo.
Drug use, theft, sleeping with a mark, performing an act of loyalty.
All pretty much guaranteed. She’d consigned herself to a half-life until she was discarded, or worse, discovered and made an example of.
He tried to stamp down the part of him that worried most about her setting herself up for a short life that wasn’t her own.
Wes started to ask another question, but she let out a sharp, inhaled gasp and shushed him. The men stared intently at their screens.
G’s voice whispered through the air, “Someone’s trying to enter my room.”
The connection was cut.
“What the—?”
“Why did she close the connection?” Cruz asked.
Triumph replied, “She probably wanted to pull the SIM card to destroy it in case whoever is there gets into her room. She’ll call back when she can.”
Twenty-four minutes later, his phone rang with another Caller Unknown number. He opened the connection, patching her back into the chat. There was a grunt of pain, followed by a soft thud and a squeak of springs, as if she’d fallen onto the bed.
“Everything okay, G?” he asked.
“Define ‘okay.’ I’m alive; he’s not, but I’m still on the run.”
“What happened? Who’s dead?” Cruz rushed out.
“One of Guillermo’s goons just tried to supply me with room service. They know where I am. Or an idea of where I am. According to his phone, the last call he made was this morning when I was still in Puente del Inca.” There was a crunching noise in the background.
“Please tell me that was you destroying his phone,” Triumph said.
“Yup.”
“I’m assuming, after this long, you know all his procedures. What kind of time frame do you have?”
“This was what they referred to as a stalker. His job would be to follow me and report once a day. That means my flight is more of a nuisance to him than a risk.”
“Based on his last phone call, that gives us roughly twelve hours before someone even begins to think something’s wrong when he doesn’t check in,” Wes murmured.
“In theory, yes. Guillermo has two avenues when he’s after someone. This is his soft approach. Hard would be search and kill. So if he wanted me dead, he would have sent his second, Cesar.”
“Wouldn’t getting rid of you be better for him?” Cruz asked.
“Eventually, he’ll make a run at that. For right now, he’s hanging back and watching what I do. He has to be beyond pissed that I fooled him all these years. Multiply that times ten because I managed to escape his original plan for me, whatever that was.
“Fortunately for the CIA, I’ve passed on everything I learned as soon as I learned it. All those avenues of communication are burned.”
“None of that sounds fortunate for you,” Triumph grumbled.
“Nope. When he decides to make a move for me, when he finds me, it will be a long and painful end.”
“He’s not going to find you,” Triumph promised.
Idiot. How the hell could he promise that when he was only as far as Panama, and she was in Argentina? Maybe if he made that statement with enough finality behind it, it would ensure it to be true.
“You can’t guarantee that, M. I’ve been in this game a lot longer than you. I knew what I was getting into when I agreed to this, and I knew my chances of survival were below fifty percent.”
“Nothing like thinking positive,” he grumbled.
“Realistic.” There was a small grunt again, followed by a hiss, then “eww.” Her voice held an odd note in it. “I’ve got the passport. I’ll try to patch myself up and head north. You should steer clear of this now.”
“Patch yourself up?” She killed her visitor. The hisses, the grunts. She hadn’t gotten out of the encounter unscathed. “Fuck, how bad?”
“I’m pretty fucked here. I appreciate you trying to help, but you should abort whatever you were going to try. I’m not going to expire in the next hour or so, but my odds are going to dramatically decrease with each hour.”
Tripoli leaned toward the speaker. “G, my name is Tripoli. I’m a friend of M’s and a former medic. What’s going on?”
She didn’t want to tell him. Her long pause said it all. But then she capitulated, suggesting she really wanted to fight. “Bullet in my right side.”
“What color is the blood?”
“Green.”
“Smart-ass,” Triumph muttered.
Tripoli had a slight quirk to one side of his mouth. “She always that sassy?”
“From what I remember, yes.”
“It’s red, you jackasses, but not arterial, which is what he was asking me. Not my first bullet wound, guys.”
She’d been shot before? When? How? Good God, why?
“Not exactly sure that’s reassuring,” Wes muttered.
“Can you turn on the video feature?” Tripoli asked.
“This phone doesn’t have it.”
“Okay. Bullet still inside?” Tripoli continued, his medic persona back in place.
“No exit wound,” she informed him.
“How’s your breathing?”
“A little elevated, but hey… I just got shot, so it's hardly surprising.”
“Somebody needs a spanking,” Tripoli muttered. “Okay, Miss Smart-ass, I need you to grab a towel from the bathroom. A clean one. Apply pressure as best you can and try to relax. Lie down and put your phone on your chest. No talking until I say otherwise.”
He turned to Francesca. “Time to call in the big guns. I need my cell phone from the safe.”
Not his personal phone, which he’d have on him. He meant his special phone, the one with numbers he never called. At least, not until the murders happened at Elysium.
Francesca left the screen, and the group listened to G’s breathing while they waited.
When she returned, Tripoli signaled to Triumph to mute their end of the conversation.
“I don’t hear anything to suggest severe internal damage, but I can’t see her, so I can’t be one hundred percent accurate.
Does her phone really not have video capability? ”