Return of the Assassin (Assassin Series 3) (26 page)

How had the assassin been able to compromise CISEN? Cruz knew from experience that he could never underestimate
El Rey
, but if the killer had reach into the nation’s intelligence apparatus at enough of a level to organize an escape from a top security prison…Cruz’s mind reeled at the implications.

He returned his attention to Briones, realizing that he’d gone mute for a few minutes. “Very good, Lieutenant. Leave the records with me. I agree with your private investigator contact. You should drop this, now. I appreciate what you’ve done, but I’ll have to carry the heavy end of the log from here.”

“But I–”

“Lieutenant. Please. Let me tell you that some pieces have just fallen into place for me, and the conclusion isn’t pretty. I don’t want you exposed in any way. Do not pursue this, or tell anyone that you were in any way involved in the research. We are now in a snake pit, and I don’t want you bitten. I need to consider how to proceed from here, and there are some things I’m not authorized to tell you.” Cruz’s tone softened. “It’s for your own good. You don’t want a piece of this. Trust me.”

The two men studied each other.

“What do you plan to do?” Briones finally asked.

Cruz rubbed his face with both hands and shook his head. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

Briones cleared his throat, uncomfortable with the heavy silence. “Well, I’ll be going home, then,” he said tentatively.

Cruz regarded him. “Thank you for doing this. I’m sorry to have to pull it so abruptly.”

Briones nodded, then turned and walked to the door. He stopped as he opened it and turned back to face his superior officer.

“I know you are.”

~

Beams of light played against the vegetation behind Maria and the assassin as they continued to run, now at least a hundred yards on Mexican soil.

A burst of machine gun fire shredded the plants twenty yards to their left.

El Rey
ran towards another small stream, and they splashed down it for several minutes, then scurried up the shallow embankment and continued sprinting away from their pursuers.

Another few shots tore at the leaves further away from them. He grabbed Maria’s hand and pulled her along, forcing her to keep moving, and slowly the sounds of the dogs and the men drifted away. The stream had thrown the hounds, and perhaps the niggling technicality of being on Mexican soil firing at ghosts had given at least one commanding officer pause. Wars had started over less.

Helicopters worked the dark sky behind them, five hundred yards to the rear, where the border officially began.

They had made it.

El Rey
slowed to allow his muscles to recover some of the precious oxygen they’d been starved of during the run, but continued at a trot, unwilling to trust his survival to an arbitrary map point. The soldiers had clearly not cared whether their bullets found a home in Guatemala or Mexico, and he or the girl would be just as dead if a stray hit them, even if they were north of the border.

Maria gasped out a hushed question. “Are we in Mexico now?”

“We have been for about five minutes.”

Maria’s face fell. “Then how can the Guatemalans keep following us and shooting?”

“The world isn’t fair,”
El Rey
reflected.

“That’s it? That’s your answer?” She actually sounded offended.

“Keep moving. Unless you want to prove a political point with your corpse.”

The lights of El Pacayal, Mexico twinkled as
El Rey
and Maria approached from the outskirts. A tiny impoverished farming outpost, it still had enough civilization to feel like the Ritz Carlton after Guatemala. The assassin powered his cell phone on, but there was no signal – apparently the little hamlet didn’t rate its own tower yet, or the service was on the blink – not an unknown occurrence in rural Mexico.

El Rey
walked with Maria to the town square, where there was a corner market featuring, among other things, bottled water, which they both drank eagerly. He had a rapid chat with the shopkeeper, who was closing up for the night, and convinced her to allow him to use her telephone for fifty pesos – a small fortune for a local call. Rudolfo answered on the fifth ring, and the assassin told him where they were. He told
El Rey
to hold the line for a few moments and then returned with the news that he couldn’t get a car there for at least seven hours – around dawn.

That wasn’t what he had been hoping to hear, but there wasn’t anything he could do to change it. El Pacayal’s total population was under three thousand, and the village was distant from the rest of the world, nestled as it was in a canyon in the middle of nowhere. He agreed with Rudolfo to meet the car at the church at seven, just to be safe, and then broke the news to Maria.

“Where will we stay?” she asked, as though this was all his fault. “Why don’t we call someone, and they can send a helicopter for us?”

“Your father has enemies, and the men who kidnapped you are not only powerful, but well-connected. If I tell anyone in his cabinet where exactly we are, we’re just as likely to have cartel gunmen shooting at us as the Mexican army rescuing us. No, I want to keep a low profile until I can get you someplace safe and then let your father know personally where you are. Anything else could be suicide,” he explained.

She didn’t question his reasoning. “You still have the other half of the syringe, right? I’ll need that by morning.”

“Of course you will. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

When the cramps hit him again a few hours later, he knew he was in serious trouble. Half the booster may have done something, but it hadn’t prevented the onset of at least a few of the symptoms, and he understood that he was now in a race against the clock to get the antidote. There were no hotels, and even if there had been, he wouldn’t have risked staying in one – he was more than sure that word would have reached Aranas by now of the girl’s escape, and he would have men checking hotels on both sides of the border for anything suspicious. Instead, he had moved with Maria into the jungle, away from the town, to spend what remained of the night in relative safety, but even so, he began feeling anxiety – another byproduct of the neurotoxin slowly breaking down his system.

Tomorrow would be day seven. With a full booster shot, they had said that he’d be good until day ten. As it was, depending upon how rapidly he degraded, he might not make it to day eight.

As first light approached, he took to checking his watch every few minutes – unusual for him; the sort of obsessive action he’d trained out of himself. Compulsions could get you killed. Yet another symptom manifesting itself, he realized.

Hopefully, he’d be able to carry out the rest of his plan before any of the cognitive impairment set in. If not, then he was done for.

As was Maria.

Thankfully, when morning came, the cramping and anxiety abated, as did the twitching in his limbs – almost enough so that he began to believe that perhaps it had all been merely low electrolytes due to the dehydration and over-exertion. Maria came to him like a supplicant at mass once dawn illuminated their clearing, her soft brown eyes imploring him for the shot that would make the pain go away, if only for a short while. Oddly, for a moment he actually felt a kinship. She, too, had been made dependent on a chemical and needed the contents of a slim tube to solve her problems.

He injected her again, and she drifted for a few minutes, then staggered off and threw up before settling under a tree.

She was in bad shape, that much was clear.

As if sensing his thoughts, she gazed up at him from across the little clearing he’d chosen as their resting place.

He rose from where he had been lying.

“We’re almost to the finish line, Maria. I know the drug thing has you upset, but you’ll make it through this,” he said. The effort to comfort her was unfamiliar for him, but he wanted to give her hope so she wouldn’t just fold up. They were still not out of the woods, in spite of his assurances.

“You have no idea what it’s like to be shot up with this…this garbage, and made dependent. They’re fucking animals,” she spat.

“I agree. But as to not knowing how you feel, believe me, you’re wrong. I do.”

Her tone hardened. “How could you? Please. I know you’ve been through a lot, and you’re some kind of super-commando killing machine, but you have no idea what this is like. None at all.”

“You’re wrong.” He debated telling her and then figured that he had nothing to lose – and if she knew the story, perhaps it would help him with her later. “I know, because your father did the same thing to me. I’ve been injected with a toxin that will kill me within a few more days if I don’t get you out of here safely and deliver you back home.”

Her eyes filled with horror, then stubborn disbelief. “No. It’s not true. He would never do that. That’s a lie–”

“I wish it was. Trust me that I wish I was lying. I didn’t want to do this mission, and they forced me. I know you think that can’t happen, but it did. Your father needed my help to find you, and then to rescue you, so he did what any father would do, I suppose. He did the unthinkable to get you back safe.”

“He’s not like that…”

“Maria. Look at me. If he didn’t get me to go along with this, they would never have found you. He did what he had to do. End of story. Believe it or don’t – but that’s the truth.”

She studied his face. “You’re serious about him injecting you…”

“The cramps? The twitching? You noticed them. Those are the first stages. You don’t want to know what the later stages are.”

She glanced around the clearing and stood, staring at him quizzically. “Who are you? Why would he do this to you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.”

El Rey
considered the question, turning it over in his mind, debating the myriad possible answers, none of them complete or particularly helpful. Eventually he settled on the closest to the truth.

“I’m nobody, Maria. Nobody.”

~

As the town came to life, the pair crept along the drab little streets to the center, where the church was located. Life was stirring, and ancient women with stooped backs and leathery skin swept dust off stoops as chickens ran through the roads. The few dogs that slunk along, ribs as exposed as cadavers, cast dull eyes on the meager sacks of garbage lying randomly outside the houses.

This was life in rural Mexico, and it could have been a century earlier. Nothing would have been different. Progress had bypassed the southernmost part of Chiapas, and the government had punished the population for daring to protest their conditions by refusing to invest in infrastructure or basic necessities. Only recently had a truce been established and slim resources been extended, but it was too little, too late. Over half the region couldn’t read or write, and for those lucky few who had gone to school, the average time spent in an educational system that shunned them was five years.

Clouds billowed across the sulking sky, and a brief but fierce downpour left them huddled in a doorway trying to avoid the worst of the rain. Ten minutes after the rain started, it was over, leaving the streets muddy and the town redolent of wet jungle and a pervasive odor of decaying vegetation. Steam rose from the concrete stoops as the prevailing sun scorched the moisture away, reclaiming the precipitous gift before it had a chance to settle in.

They turned the corner near the church, and
El Rey
grabbed Maria’s arm, holding her back. They were so close now, but he didn’t want to let down his guard. He scanned the surrounding homes and shops, all closed, and saw their car waiting for them, the driver lounging behind the wheel of the old Land Cruiser, smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper. Everything looked calm and the area was devoid of life except for their rendezvous.

The assassin took her hand, and they strolled down the road like lovers, for all outward appearances, hippies or backpackers touring the south on the cheap. Maria looked like a truck had hit her, and he supposed he didn’t look much better, with mud caked on his boots and cuffs and his clothing slept in for days. As if reading his mind, she reached up and pulled a bit of dry leaf from his hair.

“We’re filthy,” she observed.

“That’s okay. We’ll have a chance to clean up soon.”

When they reached the truck, the driver grunted and dropped his cigarette in a muddy puddle.

“We’re Rudolfo’s friends,”
El Rey
announced, and the driver nodded.

“Hop in. No point in sticking around here any longer than necessary.”

El Rey
motioned to Maria to take the front seat, and tossed their two bags next to him on the back seat before climbing in. His side hurt from the bullet wound, but that was to be expected. The periodic twitching was more of a problem. He didn’t know if it was his imagination, but he felt like the muscles in his neck were thrumming with spasms, ever so slightly. He rubbed the back of his neck and felt the contractions. It wasn’t imaginary. He was presenting with more symptoms.

“How long to get to the airfield?” he asked.

“Mmmm, maybe an hour, tops. Plane’s standing by, as you instructed.”

“Can you call Rudolfo? I tried, but my cell isn’t working.”

“There’s no cell reception here. We won’t be in range for half an hour. Why?”

“I need to talk to him, that’s all. Let’s go.”

The driver turned the ignition and the old engine belched white smoke before settling to a steady rumble, the muffler long ago having rotted through from corrosion. He dropped the shifter into drive, and they weaved through the streets until they watched the tired village recede in the rearview mirror. Within a few minutes they rolled through another, even smaller, more impoverished group of dwellings and then found themselves on a winding dirt road cutting through the jungle.

“How long have you been waiting?” Maria asked, uncomfortable in the silence.