Lethal Agent (Mitch Rapp #18)(82)
Esparza opened his mouth to respond but Rapp cut him off. “I’ll need a team. Two men should do it. I have people in mind.”
“A team? That comes out of your pocket.”
Rapp smiled and dabbed his mouth with his napkin. “Not how it works, Carlos. Expenses are yours.”
“You’re not the only killer in the world.”
“Then bring in a second-stringer who’ll work on the cheap. But if they screw up—if Damian Losa survives—he’s going to come down on you like the wrath of God. You’ve got one chance at this and you can afford precisely a zero percent chance of failure. I—and only I—can provide that.”
Esparza’s temper flared again and again he managed to control it. The man was in an even tighter box than Rapp had imagined. Losa and the other cartels were breathing down his neck, his marijuana operation had hit serious headwinds, his cocaine cultivation initiative was years from providing any real benefit, and his foray into Middle Eastern heroin was bogging down. The cartel leader was stretched to the breaking point and he knew it.
Before anyone could speak again, the sound of a motor started to separate itself from the hum of the jungle. The guards all straightened and pulled their weapons off their shoulders.
Esparza walked to the edge of the terrace, watching a white panel van approach from the west. It went as far as it could on the worsening road, finally pulling beneath the trees at the edge of the compound. Attia jumped out of the driver’s side and went to the back, opening a set of double doors to let the passengers out.
Rapp took a position next to Esparza and examined them as they began filing up the road. Six in all, no fighters. Two were probably in their mid-fifties, another in his late teens. There was even a woman—hunched as she covered her mouth and tried to suppress a cough. These weren’t people trained to keep tabs on Esparza’s operation. They had been chosen for their ability to blend in—to move through America unchallenged. But to what end? Suicide bombers? That seemed a little mundane after all the trouble Halabi had gone through to hype his biological attack.
“These are the people they sent to spy on your ops?” Rapp said, trying to prompt Esparza to break his silence. When it didn’t work, he pressed a little harder.
“These aren’t traffickers. Look at them. There’s something going on here and we need to figure out what it is.”
“I don’t give a shit what they look like. I just want this deal done.”
“I don’t think—”
“I didn’t ask you what you think!” he shouted. “They told us we’re supposed to keep our distance and that’s what we’re going to do.”
“What do you mean ‘keep our distance’?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they think we’re going to corrupt them. Give them a drink and some pork or something. Either way, no one’s supposed to get any closer than ten meters and they wanted them to be housed as far from the compound as possible. Fuck ’em. I just cleared out the main equipment shed. If they want to sleep on the ground in there, let ’em.”
Just as he finished speaking, one of the older men started coughing. It wasn’t the light hack the woman had displayed a few moments before, though. The convulsions doubled him over. Two men grabbed him by the arms and kept him moving forward as the pieces began clicking together in Rapp’s mind.
Halabi’s men hadn’t killed all the people in that Yemeni village like their propaganda films depicted. They’d taken them and used them to keep the virus alive. And now this innocuous group of people would be smuggled across the border where they’d infiltrate airports and stadiums and restaurants—anywhere people gathered in large numbers.
He remembered the briefing he’d gotten on the YARS virus before he’d gone to that village. The warnings about touching even the charred remains of the buildings. The fear in the voice of the famously unflappable Gary Statham.
“Mitch . . .” Esparza said. “Mitch!”
Rapp finally tore his gaze from the place where the Arabs had disappeared into the jungle, fighting to keep his expression neutral. “What?”
“Forget these pricks. They’re just noise. Losa’s the only thing you need to worry about right now. Once he’s gone, I’ll be back in the driver’s seat.”
CHAPTER 42
A HAND gripped Carlos Esparza’s shoulder and gave it a weak shake. He came out of his light sleep but didn’t bother opening his eyes. He could neither feel the heat of the sun angling through the windows nor hear the sounds of the staff preparing for the new day. It was still the middle of the night.
“Go back to sleep or get out.”
The girl was young, beautiful, and blessed with an unusual level of sexual enthusiasm. Other than that, though, she was a complete pain in the ass. Sleep was hard enough to come by these days without some seventeen-year-old whore jabbing at him.
It seemed that everything that could go wrong had gone wrong over the course of just a few months. On the positive side, though, problems that arose so quickly could recede at a similar pace. He’d get the Arabs and their product into the United States without incident this time and then the heroin profits would start flowing. Rapp would deal with Losa. And then he would deal with Rapp. It would be a shame, but unavoidable. When Christine Barnett became president of the United States, she would make Rapp public enemy number one. It would be too much heat for his organization to bear.