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A small gasp came from the Welshman’s mouth, and then, “I hope you don’t mind me saying it, but you aren’t at all what I was expecting.”
“I get that a lot.”
The Welshman recovered quickly. “I would like to talk to you, tonight, about coming to work for my firm.”
“Not if you intend to rebuild your friendship with the British intelligence services, you don’t.”
Tudor’s eyes gleamed at this. “Right. Well…nothing wrong with a few secrets. We don’t have to tell them about you.” Then the Welshman turned to look back to Fitzroy. “I trust I can expect some discretion from you, as well.”
“Mum’s the word. Help us with the Chinese and I’ll be on my way.”
Tudor said, “Fine.” He looked up to Zoya. “And…I’m guessing you’re not just a pretty face yourself. What do you do?”
Court said, “She’s not looking for a job.”
She glanced to Court, then back to the man. Seemingly eager to turn the conversation away from her, she said, “Your woman on the inside. Any chance she might have been exposed?”
“Not on my end. I guess we’ll know if she doesn’t contact me.” He called out in Spanish, and one of Tudor’s many security people appeared up the stairs. “Can you bring us something to eat? And more shot glasses for my two new friends here.”
Looking up at the man and woman by the stairs, the Welshman said, “Let’s all have a drink.”
•••
As a pair of four-legged rifle-wielding robots trotted near-silently towards the hacienda from the southwest, another threat approached stealthily from the east. Three hundred meters out to sea and passing some thirty meters below the two hovering ISR drones, the three hunter/killer hexacopters began slowly drifting forward. As they closed on the beachside hacienda, the Hornets spread apart, one to the south, one to the north, and the third unit continuing on to the west.
On each drone, the processor took in data from onboard sensors, the sensors of the other two hunter/killers, and those on the pair of ISR drones above them. Integrating as a swarm, their buzzing propellers masked by the sound of the crashing waves on the beach, the deadly machines halted their advance just fifty feet above the breakers, where they began hovering in the night air, awaiting orders to attack.
THIRTY-TWO
Court and Zoya declined the invitation to sit on the couch and drink tequila in the massive tiled great room. Both of them had sectors to watch over still, and even more importantly, since they were presently unarmed, both of them wanted to be on their feet in case they needed to cover ground quickly to relieve the two security men in the room of their handguns.
Tudor was a little put out that Court wouldn’t join him to talk about his exploits and the lucrative future the two of them would share once the Welshman began fielding and vetting contracts for him.
“Tell me,” the Welshman said, the energy displayed by his body movements that of a fourteen-year-old boy, “tell me you will come and work with me.”
“I’ll consider it,” Court said, “as soon as I have a little more free time. Right now I’m pretty wrapped up with keeping your employee from murdering me.”
“If he’s still after you, I’ll call him off straightaway. Pay him myself for any wages he’ll miss out on.”
Fitzroy looked down at his watch just after putting his shot glass on the hand-carved coffee table. “If we don’t hear anything within a few minutes, then we will have to assume your asset in Singapore has been compromised, or else she is unable to get away to make the contact. Either way, we will need to speak with Lancer, so if you could go ahead and reach out to him now, we can—”
A loud low report came from outside, towards the front of the large property. Unmistakable to all in the room, the booming crack of a rifle got everyone’s undivided attention.
“Who the fuck is shooting?” Tudor said, putting his full shot glass back on the serving tray in front of him.
A second shot barked outside in the night, and then a third. Tudor looked back to his two men, and they both began reaching for their walkie-talkies to get some information.
Court rushed outside through the back sliding glass door to the balcony, then looked out over the railing towards the rear of the property. A large rectangular swimming pool glowed one story below him, dazzling in emerald green, and beyond this was a simple fence and then the beach, strewn with thick brown sea grasses that had washed in with the tide. He saw no boats on the dark water, but he did spy a pair of Tudor’s men standing in the sand, who’d obviously been tasked with guarding the fence line. One had a subgun at his shoulder, and he waved it around back at the house, and the other had a shotgun up and ready, its powerful undermounted weapon light sweeping the beach back and forth in case whoever was shooting at the front had friends somewhere back here in the darkness.
Finding the rear of the property to be a suitable escape route, Court turned and ran back inside just as two more gunshots cracked at the front of the hacienda.
He closed and locked the glass door, but just as he did so, he heard a new noise. A buzzing sound approached quickly from the rear of the property, as if it had just raced in over the water. Court pegged it instantly as a drone; it sounded like a large one, and it was coming in hot.
He didn’t think they’d been followed all the way to Tulum, so he couldn’t fathom how the enemy had somehow found them yet again.
Court ran up and down the length of the wall of windows facing the ocean, closing the heavy draperies and blocking out any view, but there remained a four-foot gap between the curtains and the edge of the wall on the far side of the windows near the library.
He turned to find the group still standing in the center of the great room, with Zoya appealing to the guards for a weapon. The two security men had surrounded Tudor and, with their pistols out, one covered the stairwell while the other spoke quickly into his walkie-talkie, demanding information from the front guard shack.
