Court let out a long sigh.
Hanley heard the noise, then looked to Court. “There’s a leak at the CIA. No way Pace is part of it, no way Lacy is part of it, but if you guys are physically interacting with CIA employees, it just puts you at risk. Trust me, Six, we’ll get you the intel you need as fast as we can.”
The meeting broke up after this, and everyone shook hands again.
As the three assets headed out to Hanley’s Suburban for the drive to the airport, Travers shouldered up to Hightower. “You’re seeing a doctor in Colorado?”
“Yeah, man. Best in the country.”
Travers was incredulous. “The best gunshot wound doctor in the country lives in Boulder?”
“Yeah,” Zack answered, but he added nothing more.
Court was walking right behind them, and he picked up on Zack’s sudden discomfort.
Travers, however seemed not to. “Shit. I’d have thought the best doc to treat a gunshot wound would be in Baltimore. Maybe East St. Louis, or Memphis.”
“Nope,” Hightower said, and he climbed in the front passenger seat of the vehicle, leaving Chris and Court to get in behind him.
Court knew exactly why Zack had gone to Colorado. Something Zackhad shared a couple of years back, in a moment of vulnerability, about having a kid in witness protection living there. Court wasn’t going to bring that up, and he knew Zack didn’t want twenty questions from Travers about why he was being treated in Colorado, so Court started chatting away with Travers as Hanley got behind the wheel of the SUV and they began heading to the airport.
Twenty-One
Senior operations officer for Gauntlet Group Inc. Michael Scardino stood on the hot tarmac in western Cuba, looking at a sky speckled with clouds and waiting impatiently for the arrival of the man he’d come all the way from D.C. to pick up this afternoon. Just behind him, one of his company’s three dozen or so unmarked Piper Meridian aircraft had finished refueling and sat at the ready. The Meridians were six-seaters that Gauntlet used around the world to ferry small amounts of men or cargo in locations where a jet would not be economical, feasible, or low-profile enough.
This aircraft was a Miami-based 2006 model with a white fuselage and burgundy accent stripes; like most Gauntlet planes, it had been purchased gently used by a shell corporation, then sold off to another front company in an attempt to hide the fact that it was owned by a private security firm.
The five-bladed propeller on this Meridian spun, and the pilot and copilot remained at their controls. The air stairs, which consisted of only two steps, were in the lowered position, and a man stood next to them wearing a baggy white short-sleeve shirt and cargo pants.
Blanchard was one of Scardino’s security men, a thirty-year-old former Dallas SWAT officer who joined Gauntlet and moved to Miami to support company operations there and in Central America. He carried a pistol in his waistband, which was absolutely verboten here in Cuba, but this wasn’t the only local law that Gauntlet Group was in violation of today. Gauntlethad powerful connections down here, and they’d received approval both for the visit and for the sidearms Scardino and Blanchard were carrying.
Across the runway, a pair of old MiG-21s rested inside two open concrete hangars, reminding Scardino that this was, indeed, a military base and not a regular airport.
Not that he’d needed much reminding.
Base Aérea San Julián was in the far west of Cuba, but still only 150 miles or so from Miami, and there wasn’t much here, not even military activity, although Scardino had been promised that would change at two p.m.
He looked at his watch. It was two thirty-six.
Typical,he thought.
Moments later, however, an old white school bus pulled into view around the side of a hangar, coming from the direction of a side entrance of the base. Behind the bus, a Jeep carried four armed soldiers, and Scardino positioned himself to face the approaching entourage.
The bus parked just twenty meters or so from the nose cone of the Piper; Scardino looked back to Blanchard to ensure he was clocking the activity, and the man just gave a little nod, his eyes hidden behind wraparound Oakleys, the afternoon sun shining off them.
Several men in uniforms climbed out of the bus, and then a bearded man in a white prison jumpsuit emerged, his hands cuffed in front of him, chains binding his legs.
As the man neared, Mike Scardino squinted, looked through the thick haze hanging over the tarmac, and positively identified that the man being brought forward by Cuban prison officials was, in fact, the man he’d flown down here to collect.
Scott Kincaid, code-named Lancer.
One of the top dozen or so freelance hit men on planet Earth.
Kincaid had been arrested for homicide in Havana eight months ago, was tried and convicted in weeks, and then he’d been sent down here to the southwest of the nation to serve out a twenty-six-year sentence at the Prision de Sandino, just a few miles from this military base.
When Kincaid and Scardino were just a few feet apart, a Cuban prison guard stopped Kincaid’s forward movement by grabbing him from behind, and then the prisoner was unshackled. Scardino just looked on; nowords were spoken, and the American in the white jumpsuit just stared blankly ahead.
Scardino noted the man’s apparent calm. If Kincaid was confused, excited, suspicious…if he felt any emotion whatsoever about being plucked from his dark cell and pulled into the sunlight, driven several miles out into the countryside, and then onto a military base, he did not show it.
