The Colombian Rogue Read online

  The formative years of living in Getsemaní had taught Juan many important lessons. Back then it wasn’t the hipster paradise it was today. Living among the drugs and gang violence littering the streets, Juan had to learn to talk smoothly and how to fight—often with cheap shots or preemptive strikes. It was also where he’d learned to hide a razor blade under his belt. Back then, only the toughest and smartest survived. Being only seventeen at the time, he eventually had to join a gang for protection and a place to sleep. There were many gangs then, and they were oftentimes in disagreement over turf and girls and products.

  He pulled up Gabella’s mugshot on his computer and read through her rather long file before searching the police database for other names he’d known back then. Gabella had once been in his gang, but she was known to jump from gang to gang. The rest of his former gang members were either in prison or dead, including the ambitious Ezequiel “Zeke” Sabate.

  Zeke was a smart, skinny guy who had been light on his feet and possessed a sense of ambition rivaling Juan’s. He served as a constant challenge to Juan, both physically and mentally; he could climb a tree quicker than Juan, and bested him in several footraces as well. In order to survive on the streets, you had to be quick on your feet and always know the exits and how to turn even the worst situations to your advantage. The thing was, Zeke always seemed to find himself in fights with other gang members.

  One of the unique characteristics about Zeke Sabate, aside from his nimble mobility, was the genetic defect that prevented hair growth. Others laughed at Zeke, but Juan never had; Juan knew firsthand how cruel kids and adults alike could be, and on several occasions, he and Zeke had teamed up and fought their ways out of hostile confrontations. In one such fight, a rival gang member had smashed Zeke’s nose into a bloody mess. Juan beat the attacker senseless after that, but Zeke would always have a scarred and broken nose.

  Juan thought back to the confident, fluid movements of the yoga instructor as he had stepped around the mats in the yoga studio. The man’s nose was elegant and definitely not broken, and he had a healthy mane of blonde hair on his head. It wasn’t the same guy.

  It couldn’t be.

  Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.

  Well, it was worth a try, Juan thought.

  He thanked CG and went back to his cubicle. After tapping his fingers and toes for a few minutes, he got up and walked to Rockwell’s office. It was still dark inside. Cursing to himself, he walked to the break room to get some water.

  “Looks like you were right,” Sam’s voice said from the doorway.

  Juan turned away from the water cooler and a computer tech who was microwaving some tuna casserole. “About what?”

  Sam made a gesture to follow him back to their cubicles.

  When CG saw the two men sitting down, he got up and crossed the office space to join the conversation, a taco in his hand, hot sauce dripping to the carpeted floor.

  “Vaquero didn’t strike the convoy,” Sam said.

  “That’s good,” CG said.

  Sam shrugged. “You won’t guess where they took the witness, though.”

  “The jungle safehouse,” Cali said as she walked by, her gym bag slung across her back.

  Sam looked up. “How’d you know?”

  “I overheard Aguilar discussing alternate safehouse locations earlier this week.”

  “Wait. Where?” Juan said.

  Sam looked him in the eyes. “The safehouse they used when you were just out of the hospital. When Serrao was trying to kill you.”

  Juan blinked.

  “Get out,” CG said. “I hope it’s actually safe this time.”

  Juan’s heart started to beat irregularly. That safehouse was one place he never wanted to see again. He’d lost too much there.

  “We’ll see,” Sam said. “You got any more tacos?”

  “Yeah, Paul brought back enough for all of us,” CG said, and handed over the taco bag.

  “Thanks.” Sam started to unwrap a taco. “I stopped by Rockwell’s place on my way back here. From what I can tell, Rockwell went home yesterday afternoon. Neighbors said they heard his motorcycle pull out shortly after. He can’t be far—I say we call around and try to find him. Think bars, shooting ranges, and liquor stores. See if we can have a line on him by 5 p.m.”

  “Look at us,” CG said, another squirt of hot sauce falling to the floor as he took a bite of taco. “A bunch of amateur detectives.”

  It was just before 5 p.m. when Sam cleared his throat and called for a meeting. No one had found any trace of Rockwell anywhere in the city. As they stood around Juan’s desk, other people in the joint ops center started turning out lights and wishing each other a happy weekend.

  “Well now that we know where he isn’t, I think I might know where he went,” Sam said.

  “Where?” CG said.

  “If he’s not in the city, he was probably in danger and wanted to draw the threat away. Maybe deal with it on his own. If I know the man, I bet he set a trap, and there’s only one place he’d choose for that.”

  Cali snapped her fingers. “The Shed.”

  Sam nodded.

  “Let’s go,” Juan said.

  “You going?” Cali asked CG.

  He shrugged. “You promise I won’t get shot at?”

  “No promises,” Sam said. “But if Rockwell headed there last night, I’d say any action would be long over by now.”

  “Okay,” CG said. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  As Paul’s team left the building, Captain Aguilar pulled Agostino aside.

  “Look. I have no clue where Rockwell is, but it can’t be a coincidence the man disappears the day the witness is supposed to take the stand. I think those four know something they aren’t telling me about.” He flipped through some papers. “You’ve been doing an excellent job of tailing them and infiltrating their little circle. You up for spending your Friday night figuring out where they’re going?”

  Agostino looked at his captain. “Sure. I’ll do it. If they’ve got something to hide, I’ll find it. And don’t worry, they won’t even know I’m there.”

  “Thanks. I thought I could trust you,” Aguilar said, and placed a hand on the man’s shoulder.

  31

  Blood Trail

  The Shed was a private pole barn in the jungle near Matuya that Rockwell had purchased for cheap after a drug seizure some years back. It was more than a two-hour drive from the joint ops center over bumpy dirt roads that often flooded during the rainy season. Rockwell occasionally came out to the Shed to relax over the weekend, and had spent a lot of time and money fortifying the walls and stocking the interior with obscene amounts of guns, ammo, and foodstuffs in case he had to weather a storm or an army.

  They arrived around dusk in Sam’s raised, armored black truck. After waiting a few minutes to see if anyone had followed them, they climbed out to the muddy ground below. The car that Sam had been sure was tailing them must have turned off onto a side road. Even though the moon was quite full, it was a cloudy night, and they needed flashlights to punch through a slight fog that had started to creep up from the ground and surrounding trees.

  Juan searched near the building and suggested CG keep watch on the dirt lane leading to the road. Since the computer tech looked scared, Cali said she’d go with him so that they could observe the road from both directions. If they saw a vehicle coming, they’d send a text.

  Sam came out of the Shed with a blue light which would make it easier to spot blood against grass if necessary. “Looks like tracks leading in,” Sam said. “Single tire marks. A motorcycle.”

  They followed the tracks around the side of the pole barn, where they found Rockwell’s motorcycle leaning against it.

  “He’d have locked this up,” Sam said. “No way he’d have left it out in the open in case scavengers came by.”

  They searched the saddlebag for any further clues, but it contained only riding gear. It was muddy all around t
he motorcycle, and while there were boot prints, Sam hadn’t seen any muddy prints inside the Shed. Following the tracks to the door, they realized the prints simply vanished.

  Sam crouched in the grass by the door. “Give me the blue light,” he said, and Juan handed it to him. Then Sam rubbed his fingers on a blade of grass. “There’s blood here.”

  Juan squatted there in the darkness and looked at the dark-stained grass. It wasn’t much blood—without the light, it would almost have been impossible to spot. “So someone ambushed him.”

  “Or it’s not Rockwell’s blood,” Sam said.

  “Why wouldn’t he have gone in the Shed, then?”

  They re-examined the muddy driveway and discovered a set of tire tracks farther back alongside the motorcycle tracks. Juan kicked about in the grass and reached down, picking up a small, diamondlike particle of glass.

  “That looks like a piece of a car window,” Sam said. “Here’s what I think happened. Rockwell was followed here by a car, and someone got the jump on him. He fired back at the car and hit a window, shattering it. Then one of them shot him, and they took him away in the car.”

  Sam continued looking at the ground with his flashlight. With his knife, he dug out a flattened piece of metal from the mud.

  “Shit, a hollow-point,” Juan said.

  Sam held the spent bullet in his palm. “These people mean business. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  Their phones beeped, and they each checked them. CG had sent them both a text message.

  Lone man walking up road. Suspicious. We are hidden.

  “So yeah, let’s go on inside and get some food going,” Juan said in an overly loud voice.

  Sam gave him a questioning look and then nodded, answering in an equally loud voice as they opened the door and walked inside the shed. “Yeah, I’m starved.” Sam stifled a fake yawn and closed the door. He then moved quickly to a cabinet and opened the doors, turning on some TV monitors inside.

  The screens showed green-tinted views of the fog-covered property: the front and back of the Shed, the tree line out back, the decrepit farmhouse twenty yards over, the ruins of the greenhouse and ruined pot fields behind the house, and the dirt lane. The images were fuzzy, with lines of static shifting like an electronic storm, but the resolution was good enough to see the outlines of objects and people—at least until the fog grew too thick.

  In the screen showing the lane, they could see CG huddled against a tree, his face glowing faintly from the screen of his phone. Far behind CG but closing steadily, a man in fatigues slowly and methodically picked his way through the tall grass and weeds of the tree line. He must have climbed up the ditch and snuck along the tree line toward CG.

  We’ll have to work on his tradecraft, Juan thought as he brought his phone up. Then his jaw clenched. Something unnerved him about the figure making his way toward CG. Something about the man’s dark balaclava facemask.

  A moment later, he knew why.

  When the man tilted his head a certain way, the camera caught a fluorescent stripe over the man’s ear.

  It looked like a slanting snake eye.

  Juan had started tapping back a text when the man in the greenish screen broke from cover and made swiftly for CG, a fat blade glinting in his gloved hand.

  CG looked down at his phone. Even though he had night mode enabled on his phone, he wondered if perhaps it was still giving off too much light.

  He held the phone with the screen facing his leg as he watched the guy on the dirt road walking toward the lane. It was eerie how silently the man could move. CG had seen from the ride over that the dirt road was littered with fallen tree branches, yet the man seemed not to step on anything that would give away his presence. The man moved like the warm breeze that blew against CG’s sweaty forehead.

  CG was used to sweating in front of a computer screen—not out in the field. There’s not supposed to be any bad guys here, he thought.

  He had plenty of experience competing in high-stakes video game tournaments as well as assisting with live missions while sitting in a van or steel cargo container outfitted with computer equipment. What he didn’t have was much experience out in the field.

  I should have known something like this was going to happen . . .

  He was not supposed to be on the front lines or “in the shit,” as he had heard in some World War I movie featuring a band of men surviving trench warfare.

  I’m not a trencher. I’m a computer nerd with a small gambling debt who isn’t good with girls.

  His phone vibrated against his palm, and he flipped it over to see it. The screen’s brightness was turned down so low he could barely read the text.

  Juan: Behind you get to shed

  “What?” he said to himself, and then he thought he heard movement behind him. He figured it was just the breeze blowing the tall weeds, but he turned anyway just in case.

  He gave a startled cry as the shadow rushed toward him.

  He fell backward, and the figure fell on top of him, the white moon peeking from the clouds reflecting off the wide knife plunging downward.

  With eyes closed, CG waited for his life to end.

  It didn’t end, though. The assailant grunted, and someone brushed against CG’s shoulder. The man grabbed at his own throat and hacked the air with his knife while CG scrambled just out of the knife’s reach. When CG turned, Cali kicked the knife from the man’s hand and placed one hand over the man’s mouth. Her other hand was tight around her SOG knife, embedded in the man’s chest.

  Cali looked at CG. “Run!”

  CG got to his feet just as gunfire opened up from the direction of the Shed, and Cali shoved him down and to the side, where he rolled like a bewildered seal. He tried to get up, and she pushed him down hard, saying, “Stay low. Crawl!”

  The whole scene was a nightmare. Why were they crawling toward the Shed where two separate flashes of gunfire had just erupted? Bullets that couldn’t have been more than a few inches over the back of CG’s neck cut through the air as they tittered and tangled against the side of the structure directly in front of them.

  Cali turned and raised her gun as she maintained a semi-crouch, firing back at the lane they had just fled from. “Go! Get to the door.” She fired again and then rolled to the side, seeking refuge amid the tall weeds.

  CG, meanwhile, scrambled toward the door of the Shed, and Sam grabbed him by the scruff of his collar and tossed him through the open doorway.

  “Get in,” Sam called to Juan.

  “Cali’s still out here,” Juan said as he ejected an empty magazine and slid a fresh one up into the stock of his handgun. He fired off four rounds and then threw himself to the ground, shimmying like a snake away from his previous position as gunfire shredded the weeds he had previously fired from.

  Cali opened up on the men from her position and dove to the side farther back and closer to the Shed. Juan fired again and hoped to hell the attackers didn’t have grenades. Suddenly, Sam was yelling to stand clear, and the furious roar of a machine gun split the night air, masking the petty sounds of everyone else’s guns. Leaves and bark spit up into the foggy air.

  Cali and Juan dashed past Sam through the open doorway, their shoulders colliding as they entered at the same time, their sides scraping both sides of the door frame. Juan immediately spun toward Sam, who was still firing the machine gun, and tugged backward on the man’s belt, urging Sam reluctantly back inside the door.

  As he stepped behind the door’s threshold, the machine gun expended the last of its rounds, hot metal casings pouring like water onto the Shed’s floor as the hammer click-clicked. Sam lowered his shoulder and rammed the reinforced door shut, throwing bolts and latches to secure it.

  While the door didn’t look reinforced from the outside, the simple wooden exterior of the door was just window dressing for the thick steel skeleton behind it. The hinges on the interior were as thick as they made them; the door could easily withstand a high-blast explosion.r />
  Juan turned his head. Off to the side, CG was retching on the concrete floor. He looked up at them and saw Cali cleaning her knife on her pants leg and began to retch again in sad, violent pitches like a piston.

  “How many of them were there?” Juan said.

  “One walking on the road. Then I happened to see a second one sneaking up on CG’s side. So at least two, but I think more judging from the muzzle blasts coming from the fog.”

  CG looked up, his face white, watery vomit trailing down the side of his mouth. “How can you people do this? How can you be so calm?” He retched again.

  Sam gave him a pitiable look and then, seeing nothing that needed killing, turned back to the monitors in the cabinet.

  Juan leaned over and put a hand on CG’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t do us any good to hyperventilate or question the reality of the situation,” he said. “It is what it is, and we have to stay calm so we can think, and so we can get out of this in one piece. Your body’s response is natural—we just have a lot more experience than you.”

  “You all make it look . . . so easy . . .”

  Sam pointed at the screens, where figures darted and weaved among the fog. “I don’t think we got any of them except the one Cali took down. So we have four, maybe five guys out there with guns.”

  “We need to call for backup,” Cali said as she drew out her phone. “Shit, they must be blocking the signal.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Sam said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. We’d be dead before anyone reached us.”

  “Not again . . . Not again . . .” CG was saying over and over.

  “They’re circling the building,” Sam said as he pointed at a screen. They were watching a man moving around the Shed when the picture went black. Then another screen disappeared. “Shit, they’re taking out the cameras.” He stepped over to a workbench next to the wall where another drum magazine for his machine gun lay. He released the old drum and inserted the new one.