Red Cell Seven (27 page)

As Maddux began to fit the box around Kaashif’s head, the young man began to struggle violently.

Maddux laughed again, louder. “I got it, didn’t I, you little bastard?”

“Don’t do this!” Kaashif shouted, moving his head about as fast and furiously as he could. “Please, no, no, no!” But he could only resist for so long.

As Maddux snapped the latches at the back of the box tightly shut, Kaashif began to scream much more desperately than he had from any of the five cigarette burns on his shoulders. “Now, tell me what I want to know.”

The muffled, panic-stricken screams went on and on until finally Maddux realized he was only seconds away from all the answers he sought.

“Y
OU
’
RE NOT
touching her,” Troy said firmly as he stood in front of Elaina, who was lying in one corner of the bedroom floor, hog-tied and crying into the gag that had been shoved roughly into her mouth. “I mean it, Agent Walker.” He’d been afraid of this. If only they hadn’t talked about it beforehand, it never would have happened. He’d always been suspicious like that, and he knew how irrational it sounded. But things always seemed to work out more often when he was. “I’m serious.”

“Get out of my way,” Travers ordered gruffly as he moved farther into the room, pistol drawn. “She has to die. We all agreed on this before we came in here.”

Agent Shenandoah stood by the door clutching his MP5, clearly agitated. His black ski mask lay crumpled on the floor beside Elaina.

“Where are the others?” Troy demanded as he brought the barrel of his MP5 up at Travers. Troy had come to respect Travers as much as he could in the short time they’d known each other, and he was not a naturally trusting young man. But he was learning that Travers had a short temper. And he was not a negotiator. “Where are Gadanz, the woman, and the other little girl?”

“They’re tied up in the master bedroom,” Travers answered, raising one eyebrow as he glanced at the gun barrel. “Agent Potomac is watching them.”

“What happened in here?” Troy demanded, gesturing at Agent Shenandoah.

“She was hiding behind the door when I came in,” he answered angrily. “She tried to run, but I caught her. She tore my ski mask off before I could do anything about it. This sucks, but it’s not my fault.”

Debatable, Troy figured, but they didn’t have time to argue about it. He glanced at the nightstand and the cell phone on top of it. “Did you—”

“She didn’t make any outbound calls. I checked. Not since last night, anyway.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Travers spoke up. “We need to get out of here, but we need to take care of this situation first.”

Once again he tried getting at the girl, but once again Troy stepped in front of him. “You’re not killing her,” Troy said firmly. “She’s not a threat to anyone.”

“You don’t know that.”

“And you don’t have to worry about it,” Agent Shenandoah hissed. “She hasn’t seen
your
face.”

Troy pulled the ski mask off his head immediately. “There,” he said, glancing down into Elaina’s petrified eyes. “Now she’s seen me, too. You satisfied?”

“Damn it,” Travers muttered. “That was stupid, Agent Smirnoff.”

“Thanks.”

“I don’t care,” Travers said, taking another step forward, “she’s not getting out of this alive. I won’t risk one of my men for her. These men are like blood to me.”

“No,” Troy shot back. He could hear Elaina whimpering pathetically beneath the gag. She knew her life lay in the balance. She’d heard the conviction in Travers’s voice. “We’re better than this.
You’re
better than this, Agent Walker.”

Pistol still in his right hand, Travers grabbed Troy by the collar. But Troy flipped Travers to the floor, then backed off and swung the barrel of the gun back and forth quickly between Travers and the other agent.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said loudly as Travers scrambled to his feet and looked as if he was going to make another charge. “Give it a chance, Agent Walker. Please.”

J
ACOB
G
ADANZ
groaned as the two men picked him up beneath his arms and dragged him roughly off the floor, sat him on the edge of the bed, and pulled the gag from his mouth. “What’s going on?” He glanced down at Sasha and Sophie, who lay on the carpeted floor where he’d been, wrists and ankles lashed together, gagged and blindfolded. His wrists and ankles were still secured, but not tied together anymore. “Why are you doing this to me and my family?” he demanded.

“Who’s Kaashif?” Travers demanded right back. “Tell me, or your daughter dies.”

At that moment Troy and Agent Shenandoah hustled Elaina into the room. They had put their ski masks back on.

Gadanz gazed at Elaina’s tear-streaked face. Did it really matter if he held out on what he knew? As soon as Daniel realized that they’d fled, he would send killers—irrespective of what was conveyed or not. And maybe, if he played his cards right, he could get protection from these people. As much as anyone could be protected from Daniel Gadanz.

He swallowed hard as he made his decision. The life he’d known for a long time was over forever. “Kaashif is a man who helps my brother.”

Travers snapped his fingers at Troy and the other two agents immediately, then pointed at the doorway. “You guys get the rest of these people out of here. Potomac and Shenandoah, I want you to stay with them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Agent Smirnoff, you come back as soon as you have them in the other bedroom.”

Troy nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“H
EY THERE
,”
Troy called from the doorway.

Jennie glanced up from her book. “Well, hello.”

“How are you feeling?” he asked, moving toward her after shutting the door. She smiled that completely unbelievable smile, and he couldn’t help thinking about Lisa.

“My shoulder’s feeling okay, but that wound in my back is still pretty bad.”

Troy chuckled. “Yeah, well, I know—”

“I know you know,” she interrupted as she put the book down on the hospital bed. “Your father called. So, what are you doing down here?”

When Jacob Gadanz had made his decision to talk and his family was out of the room, the words had gone on uninterrupted for fifteen minutes. They’d learned a great deal very fast, and now they needed to act on it quickly—to determine if Gadanz had told them the truth, and if he had, to jump all over this chance to stop the bloodshed. But the Fairfax County Hospital was close to the townhouse and basically on the way to Dulles Airport, so he’d taken this quick detour. Travers was waiting outside with the Jeep running.

“I came to thank you.”

“For what?”

“You know what, Jennie.”

She reached out and touched his hand when he made it to the bedside. “I hear you thought I was a terrorist.”

He grinned. “I guess I’m getting pretty paranoid in my old age, huh?”

She gave him a coy up-and-down look. “That’s okay. I like older men.”

“I’m sorry I thought that. It’s just the way I’ve been trained.”

“Lisa cared about you very much,” Jennie said after a few moments of silence. “From what she told me, it was a quick romance, but it meant a lot to her. And she was waiting for you. She would have been very devoted.”

Troy exhaled heavily. Those were bittersweet words for him to hear. He hadn’t been so devoted, and it still ate at him. “Well, I’ve gotta go. Like I said, I wanted to come by and thank you. What you did took a lot of guts.”

“I didn’t like the getting shot part. I’m not going to lie to you. But I liked thinking I was making a difference.”

“You definitely did, and you should be proud of that.” He wasn’t sure about this, but what the hell. Sometimes life was all about taking chances. “Um, I was wondering.”

“Oh, yeah, what were you wondering?”

“I was wondering if I could take you to lunch sometime.” That sounded better than dinner, less intrusive somehow.

She nodded. “I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.”

“Good,” he said as he turned to go. “I’ll call you.”

“Troy,” she called.

He stopped and turned around. “Yes?”

“Just so you know.”

He gave her a confused look. “Know what?”

She gave him a great smile. “You were right.”

“What about?”

“If you’d asked me to dinner I would have said no. It would have been too soon for that. But lunch is good.” She hesitated. “Don’t wait too long to call.”

F
ROM HIS
comfortable chair atop the raised platform, Daniel Gadanz watched the two young women please his number three in command, Emilio Vasquez. Vasquez was in charge of all distribution east of the Mississippi River. Since Gadanz had promoted him to that important position two years ago, revenues had skyrocketed in the territory, particularly sales of cocaine and particularly in the small towns. Vasquez was single-minded in his approach to driving revenues higher and higher. Anyone who got in the way was murdered. Competitors, law-enforcement officers, pushers, users—it didn’t matter. It was a bullet to the head and on to the next problem.

The man in Colombia who manufactured all of that cocaine was impressed with the increased demand, which was a good thing. Daniel Gadanz feared only one person in the world. That man. Few people knew it, but that man was richer than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined—and infinitely more vindictive.

Instead of the wooden chair Daniel had forced Jacob to sit in the other night, there was a comfortable mattress in its place today. Gadanz watched as the two women began to drive Vasquez out of control. They were both voluptuous and absolutely gorgeous with dark features, exactly as Vasquez had requested. In fact, they were sisters, which Gadanz had told Vasquez right before they’d come in here—and that had made the little man with the crooked yellow teeth even happier.

A year ago Gadanz had suffered a terrible injury that had almost killed him. He’d recovered, but the near-death experience had left him physically impotent. So now he took his bitterness out by watching. Perhaps, he mused as Vasquez began to arch his back higher and higher off the mattress, because he subconsciously believed that if he watched enough sex his body might recuperate. Gadanz missed the pleasures of the flesh. It was maddening to have so much money and so much power but be unable to use it on women. The only real pleasure Gadanz took from what was unfolding in front of him involved the fact that Vasquez was married with three children and went to church every Sunday.

He groaned when his cell phone pinged softly. He didn’t want to be interrupted, particularly as Vasquez closed in on the critical moment, but he had to look. Only a few people had this number, so the message was important.

Daniel Gadanz’s eyes narrowed as he read the brief transmission. “Oh my God,” he whispered.

CHAPTER 32

T
ROY AND
Travers knelt side by side beneath a fruit-laden orange tree a short distance inside the eastern border of the sprawling plantation, studying satellite images that were spread out in front of them on the dry ground. It was warm down here in Florida in the middle of the huge orange grove, and the heat was a welcome relief for Troy after the bitter cold he’d been dealing with sixteen hundred klicks north in DC.

He closed his eyes, stretched, and took a deep breath beneath a cloudless sapphire sky and a bright yellow high-noon sun. He loved the outdoors. Especially beneath a sun like this, because nature’s rawest and most compelling scents were so much stronger inside its comforting warmth. The smell of the earth, the plants, the fruit, even the ocean in the distance were all blending into a single amazing aroma. For some reason his love of life and its basic smells right here, right now, seemed more intense than ever before.

“I say we move,” Travers spoke up as he gestured down at the images of the plantation. “It looks pretty straightforward as far as I can tell. We’ve got a few outbuildings and the main house, and we’re done. It’ll take our guys fifteen minutes tops to crash and take control of the buildings, even if they are guarded. No one inside can possibly stand up to what we’re about to throw at them.” Travers tapped the paper on the ground in front of him. “The only thing that could be an issue is a tunnel system. That can always be a problem for an attack like this. But even here in the middle of the state the water table has to be high, just a few feet below the surface, so underground stuff should be a nonissue.” He glanced over at Troy. “We don’t want to give the people in there any chance to spot us and run. It’s time, man.”

“Yup.”

“I mean, it would be better to wait until dark so we’ve got more cover, but that’s six hours off. There could be more attacks, more civilians could die. I couldn’t handle knowing we might have prevented that. We’ve got to go in now.”

“Pull the trigger.”

Travers tapped out a message on his cell. “Here we go,” he muttered as he pressed the send button. “Battle on.”

Multiple personnel carriers were standing by a few miles away, ready to transport two hundred heavily armed special-forces troops to the plantation for the assault—along with three Apache attack helicopters, which would probably break most of any resistance ahead of them before the troops even arrived. The information Jacob Gadanz had provided early this morning in the townhouse, in exchange for his family’s protection by federal authorities, had led Travers and Troy directly to this location. And supposedly to Gadanz’s younger brother, Daniel, who Jacob had sworn was here and was protected by a decent-size force, though he couldn’t give them much on numbers or firepower.

So they weren’t taking any chances. They were going to overwhelm whoever was on the plantation and ask questions later, maybe. This mission was far too crucial to the country not to take that approach, for several reasons, it turned out.

“This is pretty amazing,” Travers said.

“If what Jacob told us is accurate, I’m with you.”

“He was feeding us straight dope,” Travers said confidently, checking the satellite images once more.

“Maybe.” Some guy who was desperately bargaining for his life and his family’s well-being didn’t seem like a candidate for a have-faith award.

“I spoke to a friend of mine at the DEA on our flight down here.”

“And?”

Travers’s phone pinged softly—he had the volume turned way down. “Here they come,” he muttered, reading the return text. “Cavalry’s inbound.”

“And?” Troy asked again, louder this time.

“And my guy at the agency said they’ve been trying hard to crack a cocaine distribution syndicate that’s gone viral recently, particularly in small and medium-size towns east of the Mississippi. He said the ring was already a force in the major cities. But according to a few low-level dealers they’ve pinched off the streets, and at least one mid-level associate who cooperated in order to reduce a major felony possession charge, the man at the top put a Brazilian guy named Emilio Vasquez in charge of the eastern half of the country about two years ago, and he’s tripled revenues in the territory since then. My guy said Vasquez is as vicious as they come and leaves dead bodies wherever he goes. But despite the blood trail they can’t catch up to him. He always seems to be one step ahead of them.”

“You think Daniel Gadanz is really the head of the syndicate?”

Travers shrugged. “The DEA guy told me a story about a son taking over a Miami drug-smuggling operation from his father back in the early nineties. It sounded very similar to what Jacob told us this morning about Daniel taking over for their father. The names are different, but the city and the years are the same. My guy said it was a small-time operation in Miami back then, just like Jacob told us their father’s was. But the son blew it out, made it into a huge deal, just like Jacob told us Daniel did.”

“Jacob didn’t tell us anything about Daniel and him changing their last name.”

“We didn’t ask,” Travers reminded Troy. “And that’s exactly what you and I would have done.”

“I guess.”

“Here’s the most important thing about it. Here’s the name that does match. Senior people at DEA believe the man who took over that Miami operation back in the early nineties is now the number-one distributor in the United States for Carlos Molina.” Travers paused. “And that was the name Jacob mentioned. Carlos Molina is—”

“I know who Carlos Molina is,” Troy cut in. “He’s the biggest cocaine producer in all of South America. He wouldn’t join any of the cartels down there a decade ago, and now he rules. Everybody else in the blow business is terrified of him at this point. I get it.”

“Even the Mexicans,” Travers said in a hushed voice. “That’s something that ought to make the little hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up.”

That
was
an eye-catcher. For a lot of Mexican dealers, beheading rival faction members who they’d captured was SOP. But Molina’s people in Mexico were rarely touched. And when they were, hell rained down swiftly on the guilty party.

“I can’t wrap my mind around why Daniel would fund these death squads,” Troy said. “For me, that’s the major disconnect about this whole thing.”

“Revenge for his father,” Travers answered. “Isn’t that what Jacob said? The Feds grabbed his father off the street in Miami one afternoon twenty years ago during a thunderstorm, and the family hasn’t heard from him since. Daniel never got over it. It happened right in front of him as the rain was coming down, and the Feds laughed at him as they were driving his father off. He saw what the Feds did to his father, and he feels like he’s getting back at them now. He’s making them look like idiots because they can’t do anything about the Holiday Mall Attacks or all the subsequent shootings.”

“Yeah, but I can’t believe Carlos Molina would be happy about Gadanz doing that. Ultimately, it brings attention to the syndicate when it’s uncovered, even to Molina’s operation in South America. I mean, that’s exactly why we’re here. Attention’s the last thing Molina wants. Why would Daniel Gadanz want to piss off his biggest supplier like that, especially a guy like Molina?”

“Think about this, Troy. The death squads are distracting local cops all around the country, not to mention keeping the Feds completely busy, too. It’s a huge business opportunity for these blow cowboys. It’s an opening that’s getting wider and wider the longer it goes on. Street dealers are free to trade, domestic trafficking is easy, even shipments from south of the border are probably being mostly ignored because manpower’s been moved away. The death squads are creating a massive distraction all the way around, and the syndicate’s taking advantage of it. Think about all the nose candy Molina can skate across the borders with no problem while the good guys are trying to find the death squads.”

Troy nodded. “Maybe it is a good idea from their standpoint.”

“Good? Are you kidding me? It’s brilliant. Gadanz finds and recruits terrorists who are devoted to destroying this country but lack the money and hardware to make any real difference. He brings them into the States on the sly and trains them while he gets everything ready, while he arranges places for them to live, multiple getaway vehicles for them to use, and a way to get them cash, which turns out to be Jacob’s company in Virginia. Daniel takes his time so nobody gets suspicious, and he’s got plenty of money from the drug business to fund these guys. Then, when everything’s set, he gives the order and turns them loose. Eleven super malls are attacked within minutes of each other in big cities across the country. The population is petrified, and the economy grinds to a halt. And the death squads keep attacking, so civilians go deeper and deeper underground. Nobody shops, parents keep kids home from school, workers even stop going in.” Travers gestured ahead of them through the orange grove, toward the complex in the middle of the thousands of acres of fruit trees. “Maybe this is where he brought the terrorists initially. Maybe this is where they trained.”

Everything Travers had said made perfect sense, Troy had to admit.

“The squads completely distract law-enforcement from whatever else they’re doing, so the syndicate makes more money. And if the distribution syndicate makes more money, so does the producer. That’s why Molina loves it.”

“I hear you,” Troy agreed.

“Jacob told us this morning that Kaashif is a front man for some very nasty factions in Syria and Afghanistan, some real hard-line extremists who are ultimately committed to destroying the United States. They’d make perfect partners for Daniel because—”

Travers was interrupted by the sound of engines firing up somewhere in the distance ahead of them.

They were jet engines, Troy realized as he rose from his knees, quickly climbed the tree they were beneath, and peered through the branches at the top. He recognized the sound instantly.

“What you got?” Travers called up.

“About five hundred yards west of us, there’s a Learjet coming out of a barn with guards all around it.” He recognized the distinctive shape of the aircraft’s sleek design immediately. “Somebody’s getting out of here.”

Travers scanned the satellite images quickly. “There’s what looks like a runway on here. Maybe whoever it is got a heads-up about us. We’ve got to stop them.”

Troy dropped to the ground, grabbed the MP5 leaning against the base of the tree, and the two of them took off together.

“I saw at least five guys with guns around the plane as it was coming out of the barn. There were probably more. And it looked like they were carrying automatic weapons.”

Travers nodded to Troy as they ran through the tightly spaced trees, raising their arms to protect their faces from low hanging branches. He was calling the special-forces commander, who was already heading their way. “Get the choppers in here fast,” he ordered as soon as the man at the other end picked up. “And come straight through the main gate with the troops. No need for anything but a direct assault at this point. We’re already headed at them. They’re pulling a plane out of a barn. What? No, we didn’t see it on the satellite pics because it was hidden in a barn. Look, I’m worried somebody important is hightailing it out of here. I know you got those Apaches inbound, but can you get someone else in the air fast who can keep up with a Learjet? Maybe somebody from MacDill or Patrick with an F-16 they can spare for a little while. Huh? Well, try, damn it. Okay, thanks. And hurry up with those choppers!”

“How long?” Troy asked as Travers slipped the phone back into his pocket.

“Six to seven minutes for the troops, two for the choppers.”

“That might still be too late,” Troy muttered.

As the barn took shape between the trees, a burst of automatic gunfire rang out, and bullets shredded branches and leaves around them. Both men tumbled to the ground and quickly crawled behind the narrow trunks of different trees for at least some protection.

Troy glanced around, spotted the shooter, who was a hundred feet away along the same line of trees, and fired back as the man aimed. The guy tumbled backward violently before he could fire again.