“I thought Donovan said the garrison was six men,” I said as I looked through my binoculars. There were at least six visible right now, and we could only see the front of the house and upper balcony.

  Gregor made a clicking noise while he did the same. “Something must have spooked them.”

  “I wonder what might have done that?” I said sarcastically.

  He looked sideways at me. “Don’t care. Blowing up the barge was still worth it. We’ll just have to revise our plan.”

  “I didn’t realize you had a plan.”

  “Sure I do,” he said, reaching into the duffel bag in the back seat. “I’m not too worried about the strength of the guards. They’ve had relative peace down here for the last 10 years. These guys have never been challenged before. They’re not experienced in any meaningful way. They’re soft. Have you ever watched a little league soccer game?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Stay here and make sure nobody steals the car.”

  “Oh, make sure they don’t steal it. Thank goodness you said something.”

  He flashed a grin and disappeared down the road.

  I smiled to myself as I watched the mansion some more. I liked our playful banter. More than anything it reminded me of being in the Army. Giving each other shit while knowing you had each other’s back.

  The mansion was on a corner lot adjacent to a row of shops and restaurants. A brick wall six feet high surrounded the grounds, which looked vibrantly manicured by gardeners, especially compared to the poor surrounding neighborhood.

  I scanned the upper floor. I could barely see a figure through the window, pacing back and forth. I was fairly certain it was Suarez himself. This guy had the same balding head and fat cheeks as the photo Donovan had sent us. It looked like he was on the phone, gesturing with his hands.

  The guards themselves were nothing special. Most of them remained in stationary positions at doors or balconies, but a few patrolled the exterior wall.

  I was beginning to worry about Gregor when he finally returned 30 minutes later. He tossed a brown paper bag in my lap and said, “See anything good?”

  “I think Suarez is on the second floor. Third window from the left. What the hell is this?” I pulled out the contents of the paper bag: a can of green spray paint.

  “Supplies,” Gregor said, starting the engine. “Let’s get closer.”

  Gregor double-parked in front of a shop next to the mansion wall. There was an entrance gate up ahead with two guards. Gregor pulled some weapons out of the bag, keeping them low so the pedestrians walking along the side couldn’t see. He handed me a pistol.

  “Wish I could take the rifle,” he grumbled. “I should have worn a coat.”

  “A coat in this heat would make you stand out more than a gun,” I said.

  “You’re not wrong. Stay close to me and follow my lead. Ready?”

  I gave a start. “There are still too many guards there. We going to kill them all?”

  “Hell no.” He pulled out the same remote explosive detonator he’d used on the ferry. “We’ve got another distraction.”

  “More explosives?”

  “Don’t fix what ain’t broken, kiddo.”

  “To a man with a hammer, every problem is a nail,” I said. “Alright. I’m ready.”

  Gregor hit the button and an explosion rang out in the distance. The boom crashed against the surrounding buildings like someone banging on a metal trashcan with a baseball bat. Seconds later a cloud of smoke rose into the air deeper in the city.

  “Abandoned building I found,” Gregor said. “Nobody inside, nobody nearby. But, it’s a block away from one of Suarez’s drug distribution operations. So we should see… There we go.”

  The guards began pouring out of the mansion and down the street, shouting at one another as they went. Altogether 13 of them ran down the road toward the explosion.

  “In little league soccer,” Gregor explained, “nobody stays in their position. They don’t have discipline to play as a team. Everyone chases the ball.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  The civilians on the street began murmuring about the explosion and drifting in that direction. Gregor and I exited the car. The area by the gate was crowded with civilians looking at the explosion, so Gregor and I approached the brick wall surrounding the mansion instead. He pulled himself up high enough to peer over, then leaped the rest of the way to the top. I took his hand and let him pull me up, and then we dropped down to the soft grass on the other side.

  We were in the middle of an exterior courtyard filled with bushes and flowers. The guards on the front of the house were all looking to our right in the direction of the explosion, unsure of what to do. I followed Gregor as he ran across the courtyard, keeping low to stay hidden behind the bushes. We reached the house next to a side entrance, which Gregor opened. He ran inside without hesitation.

  Gun held tight, I followed him.

  The kitchen was completely empty, though a pot of something delicious-smelling bubbled on the stove. We knew the schematics of the building from Donovan’s intel, which made our hurried entry easy. Through the left door into the smoking parlor. Then around the next corner to the staircase. Gregor took the steps two at a time, gun held out in front of him in case anyone appeared ahead of us. No one did.

  We turned right at the top of the stairs and slid along the wall slowly. We came to an open doorway where voices drifted out, frantic and panicked.

  I leaned around the corner.

  The room was an office with bookcases built into the outer walls and plush carpets on the floor. Suarez was a plump man in dress pants and suspenders, his white shirt stained yellow with old sweat. He looked like the kind of man who got winded walking up the stairs. His pudgy hand clutched a cell phone against his red face as he yelled in rapid-fire Spanish. A guard stared out the window next to him, a gun on his hip but nothing in his hands.

  Stalking forward, Gregor was on them within seconds. He grabbed hold of the guard’s head and snapped his neck with a quick jerk. At the same time, I ran forward and stole the phone from Suarez, turning it off and pressing the barrel of my gun against his neck. Instantly he froze.

  Gregor ran to the doorway leading to the adjacent room, then relaxed when he found it empty. “Computer in there,” he told me. “See what you can find, kiddo. Clock’s ticking.”

  Suarez began pleading with Gregor in Spanish as I walked away.

  It was a plain Dell laptop on an expensive mahogany desk. It was already unlocked, making my job easy. While Suarez cried out in pain and begged for his life in the other room I scrolled through the open tabs on the computer. He had Protonmail, an encrypted email service. But encryption only protected traffic in transit. It didn’t help if you left your client unlocked on one side.

  He had tons of spam emails. Lots of porn, mostly in Spanish. 250 emails currently unread from the last 10 minutes alone. I winced at some of the more violent pornographic headlines I recognized in English and scrolled through to the older emails. There was so much here.

  “Fuck you!” Gregor shouted in the other room, punctuated by the sound of a fist hitting flesh. “Tell us where Blanco is!”

  I spent maybe 30 seconds looking through emails before switching over to the file system. I did a quick search for the most commonly accessed files, and then most recently accessed. One file was on both lists: a map of the Amazon region of Colombia marked with cities. I plugged in my flash drive and quickly copied the file down.

  Gregor dragged Suarez into my room. “He says el compuesto. That’s where JGB is.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s Spanish for the compound.”

  I searched the email for that keyword. 17 emails popped up, the most recent from two days ago. “What’s this say?”

  Gregor gestured for us to switch places. I went over to Suarez and put my gun against his temple, which only made the terrified man whimper even louder. His face was smeared with tears and his eyes were bloodshot as he mumbled what I could only assume were pleas for mercy.

  You helped kill my father, was all I could think. You share a percentage of the blame. You’re a bad guy.

  Gregor tapped the keys on the laptop. “El compuesto. They’re talking about JGB bringing a new lieutenant there two days from now. Fuck, this is a map! Get him over here.”

  I dragged him up to his knees and he crawled the rest of the way to the computer. “Show us,” I said, pushing the gun harder into the back of his head.

  “Dime donde esta!” Gregor demanded.

  The very sweaty man pointed on the map with a trembling finger. A marked location in the very south-east part of Colombia, deep in the Amazon rainforest. It was simply marked: compuesto cuatro. Compound four.

  “Are you lying?” Gregor asked. “If you’re lying we’re going to kill you.”

  Suarez may not have spoken English, but he knew what that phrase meant. He turned into a weeping puddle of a man, nodding as rapidly as he could. He was so pathetic I almost felt sorry for him.

  Gregor looked at me. “Grab whatever else you can off this.”

  “We can just take the whole laptop.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  I didn’t understand why we couldn’t do that but I didn’t feel like arguing. We switched places and I scraped all the other recent documents and emails from the machine, copying them to my flash drive before sticking it back in my pocket.

  “We’re done,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yep.”

  Gregor shoved Suarez to the ground then walked over to the wall of the office. With the can of spray paint he wrote on the wall in big, hasty letters:

  V I V A

  L O P E Z

  He returned and put his gun to the back of Suarez’s head. The man trembled violently. Gregor hesitated.

  “You want to leave the room?” he asked.

  I steeled myself and met Suarez’s watery gaze. “No.”

  The gunshot was instantaneous and painful in the enclosed room. Suarez slumped forward. Blood so dark it looked black pooled around his body, staining his white shirt worse than the sweat.

  “Let’s go,” Gregor said.

  We fled the mansion before the other soldiers could return.

  *

  Puerto Carreño had a reasonably-sized airport, but it wasn’t safe to fly out of the city after assassinating the mayor. Instead, Gregor drove north, back into Venezuela toward a city called San Fernando de Apure. When we were 10 clicks outside of Puerto Carreño he pulled over into a secluded riverbank below the main road where nobody could see us. He turned off the car, sighed back in his seat, and then glanced at me.

  “You okay, kiddo?”

  It was the question I’d been asking myself since getting in the car and driving away from the mansion. I tried to examine my emotions, like using your tongue to probe at a sore spot in your mouth, but I wasn’t sure if I felt anything at all.

  “Totally fine.” I pulled out my laptop and connected the flash drive, then opened the map file. “Think Suarez was telling the truth?”

  “I don’t have the elite interrogation background Michael has, but I’m fairly certain Suarez wasn’t lying,” Gregor said. He pointed at the map. “That’s our spot. And JGB will be there in two days.”

  “The middle of the jungle. I’m looking at Google Maps and there’s nothing around it for hundreds of clicks.”

  “We could have searched for decades and never have found it.”

  “We did it,” I said in disbelief. “We got the information we needed.”

  Gregor leaned across the seat and kissed me on the lips. I could feel the excitement trying to bubble up out of him.

  “What if Blanco gets spooked?” I asked. “Surely killing Suarez will tip him off.”

  “That’s what the spray paint was for,” Gregor said. “Political executions are common in Colombia. Lopez was Suarez’s opponent. That’s why I didn’t want you to take the laptop. They would have guessed it was something else. Now? They’ll think it was unrelated to the drugs.”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “You sure you’re okay?” he asked, gazing at me with concern. “Watching someone be killed in cold blood isn’t easy, even when it’s someone who deserves it.”

  “Honestly? I’m totally fine.”

  “It’s okay if you’re not…”

  “I’m glad he’s dead,” I said. “I’m happy to see that piece of shit exterminated. It makes me hungry to see the same thing done to Blanco himself. We’re so close, Gregor. We have his location on a frickin’ map! I want to take the car and drive straight there right now. I don’t want to waste any time going home first. I’m ready to do this.”

  He studied me to see if I was telling the truth. “If you say so. Watching a death isn’t the same as causing it, though.”

  “You know what I want?” I said, changing the subject.

  “What?”

  I spread my legs a few degrees. “I want you to take me into the back seat and fuck me so hard that Suarez’s corpse hears me.”

  His eyes sparkled. “We’ve got a long way to go before I feel safe.”

  I spread my legs even farther. “Then you’d better stop wasting time.”

  We climbed into the back seat and fucked like two high schoolers who were trying to get home before curfew, hard and fast and frantic, and when Gregor moaned and tensed I took him in the mouth and swallowed every drop of his seed.

  When we were done, Gregor took out his phone and called Donovan. After a quick back-and-forth he turned to me and said, “You’re getting your wish. We’re not going home. We’re meeting the others in Quito.”

  31

  Donovan

  I couldn’t wait to get off the plane. And it had nothing to do with the climax of our mission.

  I missed Juliana.

  Our on-and-off relationship was leaving me wanting more. We were together, then she flew off to Switzerland with Michael. Then she was back again for a day… Then off to Venezuela with Gregor she went.

  But now we knew where Juan Gonzalo Blanco was. All of us were finally meeting up to work together rather than piecemeal. A team of four ready to complete our mission.

  Granted, it was the most difficult part of the entire thing. But I was eager to complete it. And not just because of the payday.

  El compuesto. The compound. JGB had multiple compounds scattered through the Amazon, but this was the biggest one. Compound four. Where everything was stored.

  “Hey,” I said to Michael in the seat next to me on the plane. “You up?”

  “I am now,” he said, wincing.

  “Think we should tell Juliana the rest of it? Or is it too late?”

  Michael sighed, then shrugged. “She will not care so long as we get to JGB. Yes?”

  “Maybe,” I said. I hoped he was right.

  I hoped we got to JGB.

  We landed and went through customs. Juliana and Gregor were waiting for us on the other side. “Donatello!” she waved.

  “Jules!” I dropped my bag and wrapped her in a big hug. I was happy to see that she greeted me first, and Michael second, though she gave both of us a brief kiss. Gregor was looking at her strangely while she kissed Michael and hugged him extra long. Had he and Juliana…?

  “Help me understand something,” she said as we walked toward the rental cars. “We were in Venezuela.”

  “Right.”

  “And the compound is in Colombia,” she whispered.

  “Also right,” I said.

  “Then why are we way over here in Quito, Ecuador?”

  I unlocked our car and popped the trunk. We were alone out here in the parking lot but you never knew who might be listening. When we were all inside the car I said, “We can’t trust Colombian pilots. They’re all loyal to JGB or the other cartels. We can’t trust Ecuadorian ones either, for that matter. Except for the guy we’re meeting.”

  Juliana looked around, confused. “How do you know you can trust him?”

  The three of us chuckled. “You will see,” Michael said.

  Quito was nestled in the foothills of the Andes mountains. We drove east through the valley for an hour on a small, winding road before reaching a secluded airfield with a single corrugated metal building and a pill-shaped fuel container. As we parked in front of the building, a man in jean shorts and an American flag t-shirt with the sleeves cut off came out to greet us. His brown mullet blew sideways in the wind.

  “Hola amigos!” he said with his arms spread wide. “Oh. And amiga. Sorry, ma’am. Name’s Ernest Parton. No relation to Miss Dolly in spite of my boyish good looks.”

  “Juliana Ellersby,” she said, shaking his hand.

  “Don’t let his redneck exterior fool you,” I explained. “Ernie is an old CIA buddy of mine. Best pilot in the Western Hemisphere.”

  “Woah there hombre, don’t go limiting me to just half the world. That business in Tehran wasn’t my fault, no sir.”

  “My mistake.” I grinned at my old friend. Ernest was like a can of Budweiser that had come to life and grown a mullet, and he never failed to put a smile on my face.

  “Y’all are fixin’ to go jungle-huntin’, I hear?”

  “You bet,” I said, pulling out the map we’d printed. “This area here. Low drop in the dark. Gear too.”

  “Mmm hmm,” Ernest chewed on his lip. “Extraction?”

  “We ain’t sticking around,” Gregor laughed. “You know us better’n that, buddy.”

  “We’re flexible,” I said. “We know it’s not the easiest place to land.”

  Ernest barked a laugh. “That’s like sayin’ the north pole ain’t the warmest place. Y’all come inside my humble abode and we’ll see what ol’ Ernest can do for ya.”

  The interior of his metal shack was like the condensed environment of every bachelor in the world. Bowls caked with food lay all over the coffee table and couch. Beer bottles were everywhere, along with a sour, grainy smell. Swimsuit pin-ups from the 1980s were taped on every wall.

  Juliana approached one and snickered. “Look at those hips. The 80s were a weird time for fashion.”

 

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