AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Conducting a job in the locked-down and oppressive nation of Cuba, even if they didn’t actually understand the job, was more than worth the risk for this group of grizzled dead-enders from the slums of Kingston.
The leader of the group was a thirty-one-year-old named Clifton Lewis, who’d spent six of the last thirteen years in South Camp prison, doing three different stints of two years each for violent crimes. Prior to adulthood, he’d served a year at Hill Top Juvenile Correctional Centre, and when he wasn’t behind bars he’d been on the streets, rising slowly up the ranks of Spangler Posse henchmen.
All five of the other men with him in the tiny Havana safe house had done time, as well, but they’d also committed dozens, in some cases hundreds, of other crimes for which they were never convicted and punished.
Each of their backpacks contained one Taurus G3 pistol, three seventeen-round magazines, a ski mask, food and water, booze, and weed.
They all lit up joints, and then Clifton Lewis checked the time on his phone, and as he slowly got high, he began explaining to the others their exact mission for the evening, as had been explained to him by his cutout back home in Jamaica.
•••
Evening rain poured from the terra-cotta roof of the whitewashed two-story home in the El Batán neighborhood of Bogotá, Colombia, overwhelming the old gutters and dumping in sheets down into the asphalt forecourt of the small property.
At eight thirty p.m. the sky would normally be clear and the stars out, but a storm from the Andes had rolled in over the Eastern Hills and parked itself above the capital, and the clouds showed no hint of moving on before midnight.
The whitewashed house on Calle 122 wasn’t much to look at, virtually indistinguishable from most every other structure on the street, but to the man living inside, it had its perks.
Petty crime was very much a thing in this barrio, so all the homes were constructed with walled and gated forecourts, a secondary gate at the entrance, and a little balcony over the forecourt with a high ironwork railing. The door locks around the two-bedroom residence were strong and numerous, and though the lone security man sitting in his car in the forecourt did not come with the house, at least his position here behind the gate was secure.
Matthew Hanley sat at his kitchen table, gazing absent-mindedly at the rain outside through a window as he polished off the last few swigs of Club Colombia beer from a half-liter bottle, his hands greasy from the highly sauced pan-fried chicken he’d been devouring since getting home from work twenty minutes earlier.
It had been a long day, a drive up to Bucaramanga for a meeting with Venezuelan agents who’d slipped in from over the border, then another six hours in the embassy SCIF sending reports back to Langley before climbing into the back of his Toyota 4Runner while his driver negotiated the return trip so he could read a thick sheaf of démarches from Washington about America’s policy relating to the narcotics trade with Colombia.
It had also been a relatively fruitful day for the deputy chief of station, especially considering he’d only been working at Bogotá station for a little less than five weeks, having been moved out of his chief of station position in Papua New Guinea and into the deputy slot here in Colombia.
Hanley liked to cook, but he didn’t have the time, and he liked to eat even more, so he employed a woman named Tatty who popped in to his apartment during the day to prepare his meals for him while he was at work. Tatty straightened his house, as well, which wasn’t much of a chore because the American was rarely at home, never entertained, and had no pets.
Hanley was single, his one marriage having burned out hard and bright when he was still in his twenties, a Green Beret captain who was not home enough to retain the interest of his young wife.
Since he left U.S. Army Special Forces some thirty years earlier, Hanley had been an Agency man, full stop, and though he bitched and moaned about it most every day, the Agency was all he knew, and the work he bitched and moaned about was his one true love.
The burly blond man finished his chicken and left his plate and his beer bottle at the table as he got up to wash his hands. This task completed, he walked slowly out of his kitchen, into the living room, where he opened the sliding glass door to his front balcony. He stepped outside, careful to remain under the terra-cotta-tiled awning as he watched the rain beat down on the forecourt and the two-lane street beyond it.
Hector, Hanley’s driver and night security officer, sat in his Toyota SUV inside the gate; he was probably asleep but Hanley didn’t care, because the deputy chief of station kept a Colt .45 by his bed, and he carried a Smith and Wesson .40 cal in a shoulder holster even in his house, so he didn’t spend much time worrying about someone blowing open his front gate, killing his armed guard, and kicking in his iron door.
Matt watched the rain a moment, told himself he was ready for bed, but then remembered that Tatty had texted that she’d left him some ice cream in the freezer.
With this revelation he headed back into the kitchen with purpose and opened the cutlery drawer. Whipping out a spoon but ignoring the cabinet with the bowls, he now turned to the freezer.
Immediately, he lurched back and let out a high-pitched gasp, then yelled.
“Jesus Christ!”
A man stood on the far side of his small and dark kitchen, just eight feet away.
His voice was calm. “Don’t blow a gasket, Matt. It’s just me.”
Court Gentry stood in the doorway to the living room, casually leaning against the frame. He wore a black long-sleeved shirt and jeans, and he didn’t appear to be wet from the rain.
Hanley took a moment to compose himself as he leaned back against the sink. Finally he said, “Dammit, Violator. How’d you get in?”
“You left the balcony door open.”
“Like ten seconds ago I did.”
“Plenty of time.”
“Bullshit. You don’t look like you were out in the rain.”
