Ambush Page 2

  Kane swiped away the beads of sweat on his forehead and nodded at Mills, another security officer, who was headed in the opposite direction.

  “It’s a sauna,” Mills said. “Ninety-four degrees at effing 1800 hours.”

  Kane grinned and leaned in as they passed. “Try Iraq, you pussy. A hundred and twenty in the shade.”

  Mills laughed and moved on.

  Kane spun on his heel and headed toward the hallway leading to the north end of the station. Some part of his brain registered himself in this space—the pain in his leg from years-old shrapnel, the trickle of sweat between his shoulder blades, the weight of his utility belt, and the faint burn in his right deltoid where he’d tweaked it lifting weights.

  But most of his attention stayed on his surroundings.

  A scrawny teenager with a backpack and beanie studied a bus map. An elderly couple came out of the Tattered Cover Book Store, the woman’s arm laced through her husband’s, his free hand clutching a bag of books. Nearby, two twenty-somethings sat at a table in the bar, their heads tipped back as they laughed. A line cook slipped outside with a pack of cigarettes.

  My people, Kane thought. Mine to protect and defend.

  He turned away from the octogenarians making their unhurried way across the floor. His right hand skimmed the butt of his gun as his gaze sought the far corners. The National Terrorism Advisory System was comfortably quiet tonight. Nothing had appeared in the bulletins he’d scanned before his shift. His friend in the Department of Homeland Security hadn’t heard so much as a whisper of trouble.

  Kane returned to the center of the building and pushed out through the west-side doors beneath the red neon TERMINAL sign. He walked out onto the platform, where six sets of recessed train tracks stretched under banks of silvery-cool LED lights.

  Most of the people standing on the platform were waiting for the local commuter trains to take them to clubs or shows. The Saturday-night revelers wore hipster clothes or urban chic or God knew what else, most of them scrolling on their phones or taking selfies. A group of white suburban teenage boys in Thrasher hoodies and Vans high-tops hung out on the south end of the platform. They loped back and forth, sometimes goading each other into dropping to the ground and knocking out twenty push-ups before springing back to their feet with the lightness of gazelles. They reminded Kane of his own privileged upbringing before the war rewired his thinking about self-worth and what one human being owes another.

  A mechanized voice announced that the next train was due in seven minutes. Kane looked north along the platform, the overhead lights throwing the tracks into high relief and casting shadows between the support columns. He narrowed his eyes. Maybe twenty yards farther down, a pile of what looked like brown rags twitched against one of the columns. Kane shoved away his immediate, war-honed reaction that a pile of unidentifiable anything meant an IED and pushed through the crowd toward what he was sure would turn out to be a transient, hunkering down for the night. Denver had its share of the homeless, and Union Station was a magnet for many of them—a place to panhandle, to find shelter, to clean up in the public bathrooms, and maybe to score a half-eaten sandwich from one of the trash bins. On bad days, it seemed like half of Kane’s shift was spent rousting vagrants. He hated that part of the job—sending the most desperate people away from a place where they might find something to ease their lives.

  Sure enough, as he approached, he caught the stench of days’-old sweat, and then the stinking bundle of rags morphed into a man curled beneath a weight of blankets—a full-on crazy move in the heat. Kane could make out a knot of frizzy dreads at one end of the pile and, at the other, shoeless feet so encrusted with dirt that the white skin looked gray. The rest of the man was invisible.

  “Hey, man,” Kane said. “You can’t hang here.”

  The rags stirred. A head shot out, and one bleary eye opened.

  “Go ’way.” The eye closed.

  “Come on, man,” Kane said. “Get moving. Don’t make me write you up.”

  More mumbling. The blankets shook as the man hauled himself to his knees, swayed for a moment, then bounced onto his feet with surprising agility, tossing off the blankets. He was compact and wiry, his shoulders bunched, his forearms muscular in a way you didn’t often see in a vagrant. Kane’s hand went to his gun before his mind followed, and he forced his fingers toward the pepper spray instead; the spray was a particularly potent blend intended to be his first line of defense.

  “Officer Kane,” the man said in a slurred voice.

  He startled, then realized the man was staring at his name tape above his uniform pocket. Kane frowned. “You got some ID?”

  The bum shook his head and spat. “Stinking pig,” he said. “You all should die.”

  Something coiled in Kane’s gut that was neither fear nor rage. It was more like the disembodied feeling he used to get heading out on patrol, when sometimes trash was just trash and sometimes it was a bomb, and you never knew which card fate would deal that day.

  “You’ve got to move along,” he said.

  The man turned away and began to gather his belongings, muttering words to the effect that Kane was a son of a bitch and a mother-effing pig.

  Kane let it slide.

  He backed away a few steps and took his eyes off the guy to make a quick scan. A few people were standing nearby, busy with their phones or their friends. But most had seen the bum and moved farther down the platform. He swept his gaze along the far side of the tracks and stiffened. Standing directly across the tracks was a woman in black slacks and a plain white blouse. Her face was unmade, her haircut simple, her expression flat.

  Her eyes met his.

  What the hell was she doing here?

  Certainty rang through his mind like the lid closing on a coffin. They knew. Somehow, they knew.

  Which meant he was a dead man. Still breathing for the moment. But dead, for all that.

  “Asshole,” the vagrant muttered, still rattling through his things. A pot clanged on the cement. “Where’m I supposed to go?”

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Kane said to the vagrant, not breaking his gaze on the woman. “I’ll give you directions to a shelter.”

  The pot clanged again, and the vagrant said, clear as a bell, “Jeremiah Kane.”

  Kane whirled around.

  He was suddenly sure what hand he’d been dealt.

  The bum was already leaping for him. A knife flashed in the man’s hand—Kane caught the glint of steel in the overhead lights. With his left arm, he reached out fast to knock his attacker’s hand aside, stepping into the motion with all his weight to make sure the knife went wide. His right hand scrabbled for his gun. But the man moved even faster. He grabbed Kane’s arm with his free hand and thrust with the knife, an underhand jab.

  Pain exploded through Kane’s body as all four inches of steel slid through the gap below his vest and into his stomach. The knife went in cold and hard and without so much as a whisper.

  The man jerked it free and jumped back. Kane’s blood poured out hot.

  From somewhere, as if in another county, a woman screamed.

  The man advanced again, swinging the knife in a low arc. Kane scrabbled away, clawing for his gun. He willed his legs to stand firm, his body to stay upright. But the body is a weak thing. The man caught him as his knees buckled. The knife went into his hip. Kane cried out.

  “I got a little secret for you,” the man whispered in his ear, his voice soft and close, as if it belonged to a lover. “It was us, the Americans, who did it. We killed Resenko. We killed the woman. We’ll find the boy.”

  For a moment, the man held him, the two of them caught in a bizarre waltz, gliding toward the tracks, the train closing in, its brakes grinding, almost right there.

  The train operator stood on the horn. The woman screamed again.

  The man gave a little shove, and Kane dropped over the edge onto the tracks, the train ten seconds out. The headlamps flared over him. Brakes shrieked.
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br />   Kane’s last thought was that the monster was very much alive.

  It was the hero who wasn’t coming back.

  MEXICO CITY

  THE SAME DAY

  CHAPTER 1

  Harder to find than the man who hides himself is the man who is truly lost.

  —David Fuller. The Hope Project.

  I arrived in Mexico City at 2:00 p.m. on a blazing August day with a toothbrush and a change of clothes—a lowly railroad cop and former Marine searching for a lost child.

  By early evening I’d picked up a tail. A wiry man with tattoos and a chain-smoking habit had taken up residence on the roof across the alley from my hotel. In addition to an apparently endless supply of cigarettes, he’d brought a nylon folding chair, binoculars, a flask, a penlight, and a tattered copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, which he traded for the binoculars every time I twitched a muscle.

  Just what I liked. An educated spy. Or pervert. Or whatever.

  I’d noticed him earlier, in line behind me at the airport’s taxi kiosk. He’d been smoking Marlboros and standing too close, the Gabriel García Márquez novel stuffed into the pocket of his carry-on. When I finished buying a ticket, he’d thrust out his tongue in a lewd gesture as I walked away. In return, I’d shot him the finger behind my back.

  Now here he was.

  Call it a draw.

  I stood near the window, just far enough back in the shadows that he had to strain to see me. In the alley two floors below, a man careened from one side of the lane to the other like a billiard ball, his voice raised in a slurred melody of love.

  “Encontraré a mi amor esta noche,” he sang. “Y la tomaré en mis brazos.”

  I smiled. Good luck with that, my drunken friend.

  Odors wafted in—rotting garbage, the acrid bite of pollution, roasting meat from a nearby taco stand, and the stink of the spy’s cigarettes that made me wish I hadn’t sworn off tobacco. Close by, horns blared, traffic droned, and sirens wailed. Even closer, someone yelled, and someone else laughed. Metal grinders whirred, and a hammer rang against steel—in la ciudad de México, people not only drove on the streets, they used them as open-air body shops.

  Welcome to one of the largest metropolitan areas in the western hemisphere.

  A rush of longing filled me for my own city of Denver. For my man, Cohen, and my Belgian Malinois partner, Clyde. What the hell was I doing here, almost two thousand miles away from all that I loved, searching for a needle in a haystack?

  Because you love Malik, too, whispered a voice in my head. The orphan you promised to care for.

  I bounced on the balls of my feet. Across the alleyway, the man on the rooftop raised his binoculars.

  His presence forced me to rethink how I’d work my time here. Only three people knew I hadn’t come to Mexico to soak up some culture and tequila.

  The first was David Fuller. David ran the Hope Project, a nonprofit that helped Iraqis displaced by war. He had given me the tip that brought me here and was one of the most sincere people I knew.

  The second was Angelo Garcia, a local postal clerk. Angelo volunteered for the Hope Project and was one of a handful of contacts Fuller trusted enough to enlist in the search for Malik. A week ago, Angelo had spotted a boy matching Malik’s description in a local mosque. He’d notified Fuller, who passed the information along to me. A friend in the FBI’s Denver field office informed me that Angelo was thirty-two years old, no criminal history, married with two young children. His only apparent vice was that he sometimes slipped out early from work to take his kids to a Cruz Azul soccer match.

  As a potential risk, Angelo pinged my radar in the slim-to-none category. Plus, he had no reason to put a tail on me. He knew exactly where I was because he’d arranged the hotel.

  The third person who knew I was here was Detective Mike Cohen of the Denver PD. While I trusted Fuller and even Angelo with my life, I trusted Cohen with far more.

  So maybe the guy was a random thief or kidnapper who had spotted me at the airport and pigeonholed me as an easy mark. Or he was a Mexican Peeping Tom who parked himself on the roof every night in the hope of getting lucky, voyeuristically speaking. Which would make our presence together in this corner of the universe mere coincidence.

  I didn’t believe in coincidence.

  There was a third option, one that made me feel like a bug under a magnifying lens on a sunny day.

  Three years earlier, something terrible had happened in Iraq. Something outside even the so-called normal atrocities of war. I hadn’t figured out the details. But whatever went down, it had resulted in the murder of Malik’s mother—an interpreter for the Marines—and the deaths of several Americans. Now an unknown someone was working a cleanup operation to erase the past. I dubbed this person the Alpha. The Alpha was a man without a name or a face—a bogeyman I could not find or label. I didn’t know who he was, what he looked like, or where his loyalties lay.

  I knew only two things. That he would kill to keep the world from learning the truth. And that he believed I had something he wanted. I didn’t. But this confusion, near as I could tell, was the only reason I still had a pulse.

  So maybe the man on the roof meant that someone on the Alpha’s team—or the Alpha himself—had figured out that a war was on, and I’d fired the first volley by coming to Mexico to look for Malik. The Alpha had been after the boy for a long time—Malik was part of what needed to be buried.

  Now it was a race to the finish line.

  I tugged on the cord to the window blinds, but the broken slats refused to unfurl. I stepped backward into the arms of a dusk fading into night and resisted the desire to turn on the lamp. Shadows stretched and lengthened across my room like athletes warming up for a game. Across the alley, Rooftop Thomas’s cigarette flared, and I cursed the desk clerk who’d told me in broken English that there were no rooms available on the first floor. The first floor meant an easier escape, if it came to that.

  Just because you were paranoid didn’t mean they weren’t out to get you.

  I considered my options as a single woman alone in a foreign country without a pistol or my K9 partner. I could change hotels, but if Rooftop Thomas worked for the Alpha, he would follow me anywhere I could afford. I could call the police, but according to everything I’d heard, they’d probably join my admirer on the roof. Or I could go on the rooftop myself and confront him.

  Tempting. But I suspected he had a gun in his backpack. And I doubted he was alone.

  The best option seemed to be to stay up all night, then have Angelo get me somewhere safe tomorrow.

  Semper Gumby. Marine-speak for always flexible.

  The good news was that if they intended to hurt me, they wouldn’t have set up a tail. They’d have snatched me at the airport by using a fake cab, or grabbed me during my earlier detour to the crime-infested barrio of Tepito. If it was the Alpha, I figured he was just drawing a line in the sand, letting me know he was onto me.

  Across the alleyway, Rooftop Thomas flicked on the penlight and turned a page in Márquez’s epic.

  I was beginning to regret my decision to stay in what was probably the cheapest hotel in the city—cheapest where a white girl would be safe, anyway. I was here courtesy of Angelo’s generosity—the hotel was owned by the sister of a friend of his second cousin, or some such relation.

  You’ll be safest around my family, he’d told me.

  Plus, another friend of mine lived in the area. Jesús López, a Mexican Marine I could call on if things got dicey.

  But my room on the second floor of the Hotel Fiesta was about as cheery and welcoming as a roach motel. Which might explain the roaches. A hard, narrow bed. An equally hard concrete floor. The porcelain sink in the bathroom was cracked, and the toilet leaked at the base. A broken ceiling fan left the room in a stifling heat that raised a sheen of sweat on my skin. The slit of a window looked across an alleyway to a two-story building that hosted not just Rooftop Thomas but also a tattoo parlor that looked li
ke it hadn’t seen a paying client since the time of Pancho Villa.

  The Hotel Fiesta was some party.

  But the toilet flushed if you jiggled the handle, a tired stream of cold water came from the faucet, the cockroaches mostly left me alone, and the immense spider tucked behind the single chair was doing a good job of taking care of any insects smaller than a pigeon.

  Count your blessings.

  I reached in my duffel for the stun gun I’d bought an hour ago during a detour between the airport and the hotel and placed it on the bed. Bringing a weapon into Mexico was illegal, so I’d gone straight from Terminal 1 to the Tepito market, escorted by a man who looked like he could arm-wrestle Satan and then spit in his eye for good measure. Jesús López was infantería, a former Mexican Marine I’d first vetted then chatted with over Skype before I left the States. I’d told him I was in need of a few days of sun and fun, but the prospect of being unarmed made my reptilian brain itch.

  No hay problema, he’d said. In Tepito, you can buy anything. Just as long as you leave your dignity at the door.

  No hay problema, I’d answered. Dignity wasn’t one of my stronger points.

  Jesús had met me outside the barrio, then stayed by my side as we small-talked our way through the so-called ‘fierce neighborhood,’ edging past gang members and drug dealers and God knew what else until we reached a man who sold items que se cayeron del camión—things that fell off the truck. Give him your money, Jesús said, and don’t ask questions.

  For two thousand pesos, the dealer had sold me a “conducted energy weapon,” then asked if I wanted to throw in an assault rifle—a cuerno de chivo—for forty thousand more. I’d told him I wanted to defend myself, not start a war.