“What’s the security?” I asked.
“Light on the dock side. Two guys watching the container once it’s offloaded, both Rios soldiers. The real security is in the transport after it clears the port. Three SUVs, armed drivers, a route that changes every shipment. But that’s not your window. Your window is the container sitting on the dock between offload and pickup. About a four-hour gap where it’s just two men and a metal box.”
“That’s the window.”
“That’s the window,” Creed confirmed. “You need my people on the ground or you handling this in-house?”
“Prime’s flying back tonight. He’ll handle the execution. I just need your intel to be airtight.”
“It’s airtight. My guy has been watching Solana Import for three months. This isn’t the first shipment but it should be the last.”
“Good. I owe you, Creed.”
“Nah. Somebody tried to kill your brother’s pregnant fiancée. We don’t owe each other shit for handling that. Call me when it’s done.”
He hung up and I sat there in that cafeteria with cold coffee and a container number on a napkin. I felt the machinery of war click into gear. This was how it started. Not with gunshots or threats or dramatic declarations. It started with a spreadsheet and a phone call and a man in a hospital cafeteria doing math on a napkin while his brother’s baby was fighting to breathe two floors above him.
• • •
Prime met with me outside of the hospital where we got fresh air. The stale air of the hospital was starting to weigh on us whilewe waited for the best outcomes for Mehar and Babygirl.
I relayed to him all the info that Creed had just given me. And we agreed that he would blow that shit up.
“Prime, listen. Once that container blows up we’re officially at war. There’s no taking it back. Rodrigo is going to retaliate and he’s going to start with the people closest to us. You need to get Zainab and the twins somewhere safe before you touch that shipment. Move them first, then handle the container.”
Prime was quiet for a second. I could hear him processing, weighing the danger to his family against the necessity of the strike. He didn’t take long.
“I’ll move them to the safe house in upstate NY. Not too far from Riot.”
“Good. Do that tonight. Fly out, move your family, then handle the port. In that order.”
“And Quest?”
“Quest stays here with Mehar and the baby. He’s not leaving this hospital until they’re stable enough to fly. I’m setting up the medevac now. Once they’re stateside and secure, he can join the fight. But right now he needs to be a father, not a general.”
“Got you. Anything else?”
“Yeah. The Kings are working on locating Rodrigo’s family. He’s already moved LaLa and Paco into hiding so they’re off the board for now. But his younger brother Manny is a student at Georgetown. He’s still on campus. He doesn’t know we’re coming.”
“What you want to do with him?”
“I’ll handle Manny myself. He’s not a soldier, he’s a college kid. But he’s leverage and right now leverage is more valuable than another body.”
“You sure you want that on your hands?”
“I’m sure. Quest spared Mateo’s son. Showed mercy. And they answered that mercy by trying to kill a pregnant woman.So no, I’m not feeling charitable. Manny is a chess piece and I’m going to use him.”
“Aight. I’ll hit you when I’m stateside.”
I dapped him goodbye. He left the stairwell to say bye to Quest. In forty-eight hours, forty million dollars of Rios cocaine was going to blow up at a port in Baltimore. Prime was going to move his family into hiding. And I was going to pay a visit to a college kid at Georgetown who had no idea his last name was about to cost him everything.
The war was starting. And the Rios family didn’t know it yet, but they were already losing.
• • •
The medevac was the easy part. I called three air medical transport companies before I found one that could handle a premature infant on a ventilator and a postpartum mother recovering from surgery simultaneously. Global MedFlight out of Miami. Gulfstream IV configured as a flying ICU with a neonatal team and a surgical nurse on board. They could be in Grenada within twenty-four hours of confirmation that Mehar and the baby were stable enough to fly.
I booked them for Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. Best NICU in the region and close enough to DC that the family could be nearby without anyone having to fly. The cost was four hundred thousand dollars for the transport alone. That wasn’t shit for their lives. My brother had been through too much and Mehar and their daughter had to survive. It could’ve cost a billion dollars and we would’ve worked it out.
