Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(4)

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.

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.