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His phone rang on the table only seconds later. He picked it up, his eyes a little wide. “Yes?”
“Zero One? This is Cyrus.” It was English, an American accent, male, clipped, curt, and businesslike.
He’d assumed the Chinese were behind this entire operation. But this man was clearly American, or possibly Canadian, and he sounded like he could be a military officer from his authoritative tone of voice.
“How can I help you, sir?”
“Proceed to the airport. You are looking for a Cessna SkyCourier, tail number November, seven, eight, one, Foxtrot, Echo.”
Contreras wrote down the tail number on a notepad app on his laptop, more than curious as to why the person in charge of all the assassinations was calling to tell him this. “What is my mission?”
“Your mission will be relayed to you when you are in the air.”
“Okay. What about my controller at Gama OC?”
There was a pause, and then the man on the other end of the line replied. There was little emotion in the voice, but the words seemed carefully considered and thoughtful. “You will communicate directly with me for the time being. I have been following your work over the past forty-eight hours. You have shown great initiative, with limited resources and support. I need someone for a surveillance mission, outside of Gama’s visibility.”
This concerned Contreras. “Is there a compromise with Gama?”
“Possibly. You will help me determine this.”
“Understood…but, as far as my pay. I think—”
“You will be compensated at two hundred percent of your original salary.”
Contreras raised his eyebrows. “Okay, I accept.”
“There will be new equipment for you on the aircraft arriving tomorrow afternoon.”
And with that, the line went dead.
Contreras put down his phone and went back to work recovering his drones.
TWENTY-ONE
Court Gentry put his arm around Zoya’s shoulder, then looked out the rain-streaked window of the sixteen-passenger minivan. Flat corn and bean fields had given way to flat jungle in the past half-hour ride along Western Highway in northern Guatemala. The squeaky suspension of the van made more noise now as they bounced along an increasingly bumpy road under a low canopy of gray mist and heavy clouds.
An Ice Cube song from the nineties blared from the front of the van.
Court had offered the bus driver, a young man named Javi, three thousand quetzals, a little less than four hundred U.S. dollars, to transport them from Flores to a border crossing into Belize. It was a three-hour round trip; the young man had calculated he would make by the end of the evening what took him a week and a half to make running fares from Flores up to the Mayan ruins in Tikal.
Court glanced down at his watch and saw that it was four p.m. The two-lane road they traveled on bottomed out here and there, and the van had to slow to negotiate the pools that had formed, but otherwise Court felt like they were making good time.
Rain began to fall heavier outside.
He and Zoya began talking about how they would organize their personal security when they found a hotel in Belize, but they did not discuss this for long, because they stopped talking and looked up as the music was turned down and off and the van began to slow.
They came to a halt on the jungle road as a steady rain beat down on the roof of the minivan. The driver called back to them in English. “Police checkpoint, amigos. You will need your passports, but it will not take any time.”
When they did not reply, Javi said, “It is not a problem. This happens.”
Neither Court nor Zoya was particularly worried. They’d both spent enough time in Central America to realize police and military control stops were common enough. Plus, their documents were good, and whoever it was who had tried to kill them the other night, it was definitely not the Guatemalan cops in the northern Petén district.
That said, the two of them both eyed the checkpoint just in front of them and saw three blue-and-white pickup trucks with the world “Policía” on the side, and at least a half-dozen armed police standing in the road in the rain, their vehicles parked on the foliage-covered curbside.
Court recognized the uniforms and vehicles of the PNC, the National Civil Police of Guatemala, and he clocked the expressions on the men’s faces as they neared. These cops didn’t seem in any way amped up or agitated; they just wore the regular bored checkpoint demeanor that Court had encountered hundreds of times in his life.
A gravel road ran off the highway to the left next to where the men stood and the pickups were parked, and Court looked down the road to see a few hovels and smoking cooking fires, and several chickens milling about, but no other activity before the path turned off deeper into the jungle.
