The Cartel (A Sarah Roberts Thriller Book 15) Read online

  The familiarity of the voice came to her. But it couldn’t be. All the way from Italy? How did he know where to find her? Why did he come?

  She leaned sideways to pick up the gun and the knife the bartender made her drop, then grabbed the edge of the bar to get to her feet.

  Cautiously, she peeked over the edge of the bar. When she saw who he was, she stood to her full height.

  “Darwin Kostas?” she asked as a warm glow enveloped her. “I don’t understand.”

  He was dumping the contents of a red canister on the floorboards by the front wall. Earlier he’d worn a balaclava. That was when she’d come out of the restroom and shot him twice.

  “The one and only.”

  “But I shot you.”

  “And it still hurts.” He stopped dumping the canister, tossed it aside and met her eyes. “Kevlar.” He smiled. “Do you ever look different as a nun.” He waved a hand for her to join him. “Come on, we have to leave.”

  Sarah clambered over the bar. “Where are we going?”

  Darwin and his wife had virtually saved her life when she was in Italy and then again in Toronto after she’d been shot in the head a while back. To see him here warmed her heart. To show up when she needed him the most was like a gift from God. He was trim, fit and even a little buff. He’d lost weight and appeared to have been working out. Darwin had been through a lot—tortured by two Italian Mafia families and then the Bratva, the Russian Mafia—and had the scars to prove it. But now, in his early thirties, he and his wife had retired to the green hills of Umbria, Italy, where he acted like a one-man NSA, monitoring chatter, gathering data and watching the Mafia in case his name came up. He would not be surprised by them ever again. Sarah was sure if Darwin ever got wind the Mafia was coming for him, he would attack first, swift and hard and in a way that would cripple their efforts and destroy their motivation. It was better if things just stayed quiet. Better for the Mafia.

  “We’re going to my cabin,” Darwin said. “To regroup. To figure things out. Then we pounce and get Aaron.”

  Sarah landed on the floor on the other side of the bar and started toward him. “Okay. But I have, like, a thousand questions.”

  “We’ll have lots of time for that but first we have to raze this place.”

  She ran up and hugged him, a tear in her eye. “I’m so glad to see a friendly face.”

  “Okay, Sarah, we’ll do all this over a glass of fine wine back at the camp.”

  She let go and stepped back, surveying the carnage. “Burn the bastards. Send a message.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “No one lives.”

  Darwin leaned down and applied the flame to the benzene-soaked floorboards, then retreated as flames shot up and licked the walls.

  Sarah followed him outside and stopped when she saw the vehicle he’d arrived in. It was the H2 Hummer that had cruised by the front and later the back of the building before she’d entered.

  “You were following me?”

  “I’ve been watching you since you came to Italy to fight those GMO bastards. I sent that ambulance in Toronto to get you away from that sick woman and her daughter. And I didn’t forget how you treated my friends who volunteered to handle the ambulance.” He walked around the hood of the Hummer and stopped before entering. “And now I fly in from Rome to see if you need help, enter a café shoot out and get shot by you, twice.” He smiled so wide, his teeth showed. “Is there a chance you could stop showing me how much you appreciate my help?”

  He hopped in the Hummer as a smile broke out on Sarah’s face. She got in on her side just as Darwin dropped the transmission into drive and hit the gas. The powerful V-8 shot the beast of a vehicle forward. They didn’t get twenty yards before the windows of the café blew out.

  “How did you shoot the bartender back there? He was crouched behind the bar.”

  “I located him by his voice.”

  Sarah raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Wow, impressive.”

  “Practice.”

  “Why are you here?”

  He glanced sidelong at her. “I hacked EPIC.”

  “EPIC? What’s that?”

  “El Paso Intelligence Center. It’s a database of information that comes from the DEA and Immigration and Customs. According to them, nothing was going to be done about Aaron.”

  Sarah twisted sideways in the passenger seat. “What are you talking about?”

  Darwin stole a glance at her, then back at the road. “There are undercover agents, multiple agencies monitoring the cartels and hundreds of people working a thousand angles on as many cases. They have been ordered to not upset the balance for one man. In this case, that one man is Aaron Stevens.”

  Sarah tightened her fists. “I’m going to kill Casper.”

  “You mean Buck Schaffer?”

  “The same.”

  “He had nothing to do with this. They hadn’t told him yet. As far as I can tell, tonight was your last night in Mexico. You and your team at the hotel were going to be ordered out of Mexico later this morning.” He paused. “Without Aaron. So I got prepared as I didn’t think you would go quietly. I had a feeling Vivian would have something to say about it, too.”

  Sarah looked out and watched the passing landscape. Darwin gave her a moment.

  “You’ll have to tell me how you came to learn all this,” Sarah said. “I’d love to know just half of what you can do.”

  “Rosina is still back in Italy at the house. She’s our liaison on this. She’s feeding me intel. I was watching the hotel and saw you run down the back in the dark. Infrared glasses, although they’re green, not red. Anyway, I watched you enter the church, then saw a nun leave. I quickly surmised it was you, but you’d found a hiding spot near the café so I drove around trying to reacquire you. By the time you were being attacked in the bathroom, I had to take out the men in the front room.” He shrugged one shoulder. “I couldn’t let them harm you, now could I?” He cleared his throat. “It was pretty easy as they were all aiming their attention at the back of the café. And you know I have no compunction with that kind of wholesale murder providing it’s mafia or cartel men.”

  Sarah nodded her understanding. She had been followed by a fucking Hummer and didn’t catch it. Was she losing some of her edge?

  “Sarah, you were being lied to,” Darwin added. “They’re going to leave Aaron here. I couldn’t let that happen.” He reached across and tapped her shoulder with his palm. “We’ll find him. We’ll get him out.”

  “Where are we going first?” Sarah asked.

  “The hotel. Talk to Casper. Get your things. Then I’m taking you to a safe house just outside Tijuana. A cabin. I have wine. You’ll have your own room and bathroom. It’ll be our retreat until this is over.”

  “Good, because even if Casper didn’t know they were pulling the rug out on this, he should have.”

  “Don’t hurt him too bad.”

  “I won’t. Not too bad.” She glanced at Darwin. “But just a little.”

  Darwin dropped the pedal further and the Hummer shot forward with great speed, bouncing along the Mexican road, making her bladder scream.

  She still had to pee.

  Chapter 4

  Parkman stood in the kitchen of the safe house and looked around with a blank stare, dismayed at his position.

  There were no fucking toothpicks to be had anywhere. Even after he’d specifically requested they be brought in. Not a single piece of shit toothpick.

  He rifled through the drawers, going through utensils, forks, knives, spoons, shoving oven mitts, scissors and plastic wrap out of the way but to no avail. No toothpicks.

  Until he found wooden skewer sticks.

  Triumphant, he stood with them in his hand, slipped one out and snapped it in half.

  From somewhere in the house he heard a heavy groan. Then nothing.

  Parkman looked down the hallway toward the living room where the TV played a car commercial. Fred King was the agent in
side the house, Kira Junod outside. The third agent remained on the other side of the perimeter, watching from afar. Parkman remembered her name as Special Agent Ellen Burns. A strong woman who spoke little.

  Was it the TV that had emitted that moan? Or Fred?

  He slipped the skewer piece between his lips and started down the hall to where he’d left Fred not five minutes ago in search of toothpicks.

  A new commercial blasted out of the TV speakers talking about panty liners with wings and how they were super absorbent.

  With instincts honed after years of police work and now detective work, Parkman’s radar began pinging. He calculated that something was wrong in a matter of seconds because Fred hated commercials. Fred complained that the Hollywood People—as he put it—had found a way to raise the volume when commercials came on the screen, so Fred muted every commercial. But these weren’t muted. Fred King would never let that happen. If Fred was anything, he was disciplined and commercials had no place in his life. The fact that they were on meant Fred was incapacitated in some way or not in the living room any longer.

  But if he’d left the room, why? To go where? Agent Junod was outside and Agent Burns farther still. Shift change was set for seven in the morning, not one in the morning.

  Parkman waited at the alcove that led into the living room, took a few deep breaths and listened to the house. He was rewarded with nothing. Slipping the skewer from one side of his mouth to the other, he turned and glanced into the living room.

  Agent King, or Fred as he had ordered Parkman to call him, sat in his armchair, head back, snoring.

  He’d fallen asleep? On the job?

  Parkman examined the room with a trained eye. Nothing appeared disturbed. The coffee table was as he’d left it, a mess. The remote was still in Fred’s hand. There were no depressions in the carpet, no marks. Nothing to suggest someone had entered the house.

  Then Fred snored a short, sharp grunt.

  That was probably what Parkman had heard moments before.

  He moved closer to Fred, still examining the room for anything untoward. Then he eased the remote out of Fred’s grip and muted the TV.

  A radio emitted a female voice. Fred’s radio.

  Parkman found the radio inside Fred’s duffel bag. He brought it to his ear and listened. It was Agent Burns. She was running, her breath coming in and out in gasps.

  And she was calling for Fred to respond.

  Parkman depressed the button. “Parkman here,” he whispered. “What’s your twenty?”

  “Ten seconds out.”

  “What happened?”

  “Shadowy figures approached the house. I almost didn’t see them. Two, three, maybe more. Where’s Agent King?”

  “Asleep in the armchair.”

  “Shit!”

  “What?”

  “He’s not asleep. King never sleeps. Too disciplined.”

  Parkman looked back at Fred. Slight discoloration had formed at the base of his neck. Someone had choked him, knocked him out. They probably stopped when Parkman approached from the kitchen. Probably choked Fred as Parkman made all that noise with the utensils looking for toothpicks. Parkman wouldn’t have heard a damn thing.

  “You’re right. He’s been strangled by the looks of it, but he’s alive.”

  “Shit!”

  “What now?” Parkman asked as he lowered himself to the carpet, removed Fred’s ankle holstered gun and moved to the wall to offer less of a target of himself to the intruders.

  “Agent Junod is out cold,” Burns whispered into the radio.

  Parkman took this information in stride. Whoever was attacking the safe house was good, efficient and meant to take him. But for some reason they weren’t killing the federal agents, which was a good thing. He’d hate to have their lives on his hands.

  “Agent Burns, watch your back. I’m covered. I’m safe. Take care of yourself.”

  There was no response.

  “Agent Burns? Come in.”

  Nothing.

  A weapon fired outside the front window. He wondered if she had already called for backup and how long backup would take at one in the morning. Calling backup to a house that by definition is secret is always challenging. Local authorities never know how to respond to a suburban house that has suddenly become a hot spot for guns. They never know who the bad guys are because everyone has weapons.

  Another weapon discharged outside, this time beside the house, right behind the wall where Parkman rested his back.

  He placed an ear against the drywall and listened. A male voice mumbled something. Another male answered. It sounded like he said he was happy to have finished off the last bitch with so many bullets.

  Parkman’s stomach dropped and his bowels loosened in fear and anticipation. Could this be it? Trapped in a plastic house without toothpicks, three agents down? Attacked by a rogue gang, an extension of the Enzo Cartel that was hunting Sarah? A cold sweat broke out on his forehead and the back of his neck. The hand that held Fred’s gun shook, but not enough that he’d miss what he shot at. Professional or not, fear of the unknown still shook him up.

  He pushed his ear into the wall harder, trying to catch anything they said. He waited, listening.

  The floor creaked beside him. Before he turned, before he responded, his gun hand was rising, then it was knocked sideways with such extreme violence, Fred’s gun was torn from his grasp.

  He swung his head around, gasped at the pain in his hand and locked in on the man in black standing over him.

  Fred’s gun had sailed over the TV and was too far to get to. Parkman was unarmed unless he could use the skewer to jab the guy to death.

  “On your feet, Parkman,” the black figure shouted. “We’re taking you to Mexico.”

  Chapter 5

  When Casper woke, his head was splitting with a migraine from hell. He winced, squeezed his eyes closed, and rested his head back down. Something rough like straw or scattered hay was his bed. As his stomach threatened to clench and dislodge its contents, Casper tried to remember and categorize his last thoughts. What led him here, wherever here was? He took a mental inventory of his body and discovered it to be intact. Nothing ached but his head.

  The hotel. The waiting. He tried to raise Sarah on the phone. Her room was empty. The guard by the elevator was dead. The tranquilizer. The cartel.

  They had him.

  If it was the cartel who had him, he was as good as dead. There was no way they’d let a federal agent live. He’d be tortured for information, used for negotiation, maybe even a prisoner-for-ransom scheme, then killed, his body dumped on a roadside somewhere.

  He had failed. He had failed Sarah. Had he been overconfident? Was his mistake arrogance? Who tipped off the cartel? Someone in the hotel? The Federales? Was there no justice, no laws, no respect for authority in Mexico? He should’ve known better. A whole week in the hotel made them sitting targets. Of course the Enzo Cartel would learn of their presence soon enough. That many rooms taken up by the American authorities was like a large marquee sign announcing their presence.

  It was all for show. The Mexican government allowed it and kept them waiting. That had to be it. Otherwise why not wait for the red tape to be cleared on American soil in San Diego? It would’ve been safer on the American side. How many agents were lost? All of them?

  A tear crested his eyelid and slid down into his ear. What now, he thought as the tear cooled in his ear. How long did he have to live? How long did Sarah have to live?

  “You awake?” a man asked.

  Casper started and tried to open his eyes. “Who’s there?”

  “You first.”

  “Special Agent Buck Schaffer, also known as Casper. You?”

  “Casper, eh? You supposed to be a ghost?”

  The accent wasn’t American. But it wasn’t Mexican either. It sounded Canadian. In all likelihood, he was talking to Aaron.

  Casper finally got his eyes open to slits and turned toward the voice. Aaron Steve
ns sat in the corner of a small room, legs drawn up to his chest, hands wrapped around his legs. His right hand had a large, bloodstained bandage wrapped around it.

  Casper eased his head back and shut his eyes. “I’m sorry, Aaron.”

  Sudden movement in the corner. “You know me?”

  “I’m the one in charge of locating and extracting you.”

  The scrambling stopped. It sounded like Aaron settled back down.