The Ninth Day (14 page)

“That was work calling. Something’s happened that requires me to divert from Miami. We won’t be able to fly back together. I’m sorry.” He heard her sigh.

“Actually, that’s better. Your face would be plastered all over the tabloids if you did, and I know enough about you already to know that you’d hate that.”

Banner thought her turning the situation to one that benefitted him was a bit of deft handling on her part. He knew that she had no intention of making their liaison public. She guarded her privacy even more than he did, and, as the president of a contract security company that routinely dealt with classified missions the world over, he kept his private life buried very deep. That she was as fanatical about hers said something.

She was right, of course. He would hate to have the press focus on him. He had dealt with the media often enough to realize that there was no way to appease their insatiable appetite for news. While he found her funny, charming, beautiful, and endowed with a personality that filled a room and a movie screen, he didn’t wish to be sucked into the vortex surrounding her, even had she allowed it. At least not on this short of an acquaintance. If he saw her again, he wanted it to be in private. He knew that she would, as well. He reached for her in the dark.

“Let’s make these last hours count.”

Banner stepped onto the tarmac in Key West and squinted in the bright sunlight and the heat. He spotted Cameron Sumner leaning against a Jeep, with his sunglasses on and his arms folded across his chest. Sumner stood a little over six feet and was lean, with brown hair and a face that was handsome in a masculine, slightly rugged manner. He dressed conservatively in khaki pants that looked well worn and a polo shirt that may once have been navy in color, but was now faded to a softer blue. He looked cool, collected, and calm. In all the time Banner had known Sumner, he had never seen the man react with fear, nervousness, or even extreme anger. Sumner never lost his temper. As Banner walked toward the Jeep, he did notice that Sumner’s mouth was set, and his jaw seemed clenched. Banner had an idea what Emma Caldridge meant to this man, and he admired his composure in the face of this latest bad news. He reached the Jeep and held out his hand.

“Any news?” he said.

Sumner shook his hand. “Nothing. No call, no text, e-mail, nothing.”

Banner thought about that a moment. “Isn’t that a bit unusual?”

“Highly. On average they make contact within twenty-four hours of the event. Assuming the victim is alive, of course.”

Banner frowned. “Any Jane Does been found in the Ciudad Juarez area?”

“You mean other than the four hundred already murdered women?”

Banner grimaced. Sumner was right, of course. Over the last twenty years, hundreds of women had disappeared from Ciudad Juarez. Some believed a serial killer worked the town with impunity. Others thought human trafficking was the cause, but all believed that the perpetrators were known to the police, who turned a blind eye. Sumner pushed off the Jeep.

“No recent bodies. Of course, if she fell afoul of whoever is killing the women of Ciudad, then there is a good chance we’ll never hear from her.” Sumner’s voice sounded harsh as he made this last observation. He waved Banner into the Jeep. “Come on. I’ll take you to the radar center and we can talk there.” Banner threw his bag into the back of the car and slid into the passenger seat. Sumner circled the tarmac and left off a frontage road.

“How’s the drug busting going?”

Sumner worked for a branch of the Southern Hemisphere Defense organization responsible for detecting cartel drug planes that attempted to enter U.S. airspace from the south. His main responsibilities involved the “Air Tunnel Denial” program, a group charged with identifying these low-flying aircraft and intercepting them. Once they pinpointed a target, Sumner’s group had the authority to demand that the intruder identify themselves, scramble their own planes to intercept the suspicious flight in cases where the response is inadequate, and, if required, shoot the foreign aircraft down.

“We’ve intercepted two hundred flights in the last three months. Now the cartels are moving underwater. The Coast Guard is reporting a rash of homemade submarines.”

Banner snorted. “Homemade submarines?” He shook his head. “Never ceases to amaze me how ingenious the cartels can get. Do the subs work?”

Sumner cleared the airport runway and shifted into third. “Pretty well, considering how crude they are. They have fiberglass bodies and use PVC plumbing tubes that they jam into the top. The pipes pierce the surface, providing air. Of course, we have no idea how many sink en route.”

“And the poor mules driving them sink right along with them,” Banner said.

Sumner nodded. “The cartel doesn’t worry too much about losing them. As long as there are broke people desperate to make some cash, the cartel is insured a steady supply.”

Sumner drove along the frontage road to the far tip of the tarmac and slowed in front of a heavy metal gate bearing a sign with P
RIVATE
P
ROPERTY
, K
EEP
O
UT
and the usual picture of a stick figure getting caught in the gate as it closed. Sumner reached up and pressed a door opener, and the gates swung wide.

The Air Tunnel Denial offices were located in a second control tower at the end of the existing airport. The hexagonal building held six employees on an eight-hour shift. Enough people to monitor suspicious flights around the clock. Sumner parked the Jeep in a reserved spot at the base of the tower and waved Banner into it.

“I’ll show you the control center first. That building”—he indicated a low, ranch style structure thirty feet from the tower—“is the main office.”

They took a flight of stairs and entered the control tower, and Banner was struck by the quiet in the room. Three men sat in front of radar screens populated with various dots moving across in formation. None spoke, though all cast a quick glance at Sumner and nodded a greeting before returning their attention to the screens. The third man indicated to Sumner that he should come closer.

“Got something?” Sumner said.

The man pointed at a dot on his screen. “Been watching this one since Colombia. Guys at Apiay told us that it’s likely hauling coke. It’s been flying so low that it drops off the track, but it keeps reappearing, and when it does, it’s clear that it’s on a path here. Maybe not the Keys, but definitely somewhere in Florida.”

Sumner leaned into the screen and watched the dot track along the path. “Did the Colombians hail it?”

The man nodded. “They did, and the guy responded with a dare. Told them they’d never catch him, he was too good. They said he spoke in English with a strange accent. They couldn’t place it. When they addressed him in Spanish, he told them he spoke English only, and they should, too.”

“That a problem for the Colombians?” Banner asked.

The man chuckled. “Not at all. We’re all bilingual in the Air Tunnel Denial program. But an exclusively English-speaking cartel pilot is rare. I’ve never heard of it in the five years I’ve been dealing with these cartel flunkies. Have you?” The man directed his question at Sumner, who shook his head.

“Never. Always Spanish-speaking pilots.” Sumner pointed at the dot. “That him?”

The employee took a sip of coffee from a mug. “Yep. And he
is
good. They scrambled Jorge to intercept and he said that they played tag in the air for over fifty minutes before Jorge hit maximum range and had to turn back. He said that the guy flew like a stunt pilot. Jorge was impressed, and you know how hard it is to impress Jorge.”

Sumner straightened. “Keep me posted on this guy. He enters our airspace, I want to hear about it.”

“Will do,” the man said.

Sumner waved Banner back out the door. “Let’s go to my office. We can talk there.”

Sumner’s office was stark white with a black wooden desk in a modern style, a chrome architect’s desk lamp with a bright halogen light and a laptop in a docking station. On the wall behind his desk was a black-and-white photograph of a figure, its body a black smudge surrounded by a dense fog. The tips of trees appeared at various places where the fog thinned, and in one corner Banner could see a lake or pond behind the figure. The scene appeared quiet, eerie, and the image was arresting with its stark beauty. Sumner saw him staring at it.

“That’s a picture I took of my grandfather two months ago as he walked along a lake in Minnesota. We would go there every year, along with my father and uncles to hunt and fish. One morning the fog was so dense that we couldn’t see far enough in front of us to even take out the boats. He went to check on some lines we’d strung by a dock, and I snapped the shot as he walked back toward our cottage.”

“It’s an arresting photo,” Banner said. Sumner appeared pleased. He gazed at the picture a moment before looking back at Banner.

“I checked out the odds of Caldridge being killed prior to being ransomed. It’s an uncommon occurrence. Apparently hostages are rarely killed, though they are tortured. Dead hostages aren’t worth much.”

Banner grimaced. His mind refused to even consider that Caldridge was dead, but he hated the idea of her being tortured.

“I have to think she’s alive, and I also think that she can hold her own in most scenarios. I don’t think she’d lose her cool.”

Sumner sighed. “I agree. Her ultra training is going to come in handy in this instance. You need a strong mind to endure running more than one hundred miles without stopping, but you need an even stronger mind to overcome the despair that comes from torture.” He shook his head. “I just wish they’d contact us, already. Get the ransom ball rolling.”

Banner couldn’t agree more. “I have six operatives in Mexico currently, but they’re in deep cover and hundreds of miles south of Ciudad. I’m considering moving them into position to attempt a rescue.”

“Where are they now?”

“Sinaloa.”

Sumner whistled. “That’s home to the worst of the worst. Weren’t they responsible for the beheadings?”

Banner nodded. “They took the heads to Mexico City and tossed them on a dance floor.”

Sumner tapped on his computer screen. He turned the laptop so that Banner could see the monitor. On it was a picture of a swarthy man with small eyes and thick lips. Sumner pointed to him.

“That’s a guy named Eduardo La Valle. He operates out of Ciudad Juarez. Ever hear of him?”

Banner had. “They call him ‘the Tailor,’ because he is believed to mutilate his victims in strange ways and then stitch up the bodies. There are rumors that he’s behind the hundreds of killings in Ciudad, but it’s never been proven.”

Sumner gazed at the photo. “I intercepted ten of his planes last month alone. Only one landed when we converged on it. The rest flew their equipment right into the water.”

Banner raised an eyebrow. He hadn’t heard a thing about the downed planes. “They commit suicide rather than be arrested? Strange.”

“I thought so, too. The transporters for the other cartels will surrender quickly once they’re on U.S. soil. They know the prisons here are far better than the ones in Mexico. When I interrogated the one that didn’t kill himself, he told me that most of La Valle’s mules would rather die quickly than have to go back and endure torture at La Valle’s hands. He said no one who fails lives longer than twenty-four hours, and those last hours are horrific.”

Banner stood. “I’ll ask Stromeyer to start moving some operatives toward Ciudad. If this La Valle has Caldridge, we’d better be prepared to move quickly.”

“He owns the towns in a one-hundred-mile radius. It’s not going to be easy to infiltrate his organization in the small amount of time we have. And if he doesn’t have her?”

“Then we start searching every house until we find her.”
Or her body
, Banner thought.

Chapter 18

E
mma drove through the darkness, keeping the taillights of Raoul’s BMW in view. Oz sat in the passenger seat next to her, with Carlos and another guard, named Mono, in the back. Mono looked like a small, mean frog, with protruding eyes and ears that bent outward. He had a large, raised slash scar on his neck. Both men smelled of alcohol, sweat, and weed. Emma opened the window to let in some air. She hoped that these two had been enjoying the party along with the other cartel players, and with any luck they’d fall asleep as time wore on. Once they did, she intended to watch for an opportunity to ditch them both.

Oz stared glumly ahead. He, too, looked exhausted, but Emma doubted he would sleep anytime soon. The worry on his face was clear, and his edgy nervousness was palpable. Emma kept her eyes on the road and her attention focused on driving. She was forced to drive at speeds upwards of ninety miles an hour just to keep the BMW in her sights. The ambulance rode behind them, at times tailgating, forcing Emma to increase her speed. The two vehicles effectively sandwiched her, an occurrence that was not a coincidence. It appeared that they had no intention of letting her escape again.

Emma’s mind raced with ideas. One seemed to provide the likeliest chance of both she and Oz escaping from this nightmare, but none would solve the mystery of the decaying shipment.