“Why was this operation left open so long?” Wes asked.
“This isn’t a Hollywood film, Mr. Texas Ranger-man,” G snarled. “There are no limits as to how long an undercover operation can go.”
“Yeah, but it shouldn’t take ten years to shut down a cartel with you on the inside like that. That asshole should have been put to ground long before now.” He looked at Cruz. “Unless…”
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
He did not like where this train of thought led.
Wes completed his thought. “There was never a plan for you to leave.”
Snark dripping copiously in her response, she said, “Well, who let the smarty-pants in on the game?”
“Jesus, G,” Triumph breathed out. His fists clenched on the table. “For fuck’s sake, why?”
There was a pause over the line, and along with it, a drastic change in tone. What sounded like a plea for him to understand. “Somebody had to do it, M. They’d been trying for years to get men in at the ground level as soldiers so they could work their way up the ladder, but none made it far enough before being killed in shoot-outs or whatever.
“The bosses decided a different tactic was required. Guillermo has a reputation as a ladies’ man, and none of hiswomen have ever disappeared or been found in a shallow grave somewhere. So when he began to aggressively pursue me and ditched all the other women, my superiors pushed. I was young. Single. I didn’t have family, like some of the other agents did. I wasn’t about to let someone else’s family be torn apart when there was an option that could prevent that.”
He heard a crack in her voice. Family. She had none? If she didn’t have family, how would they be torn apart, something she hoped to prevent for others? Apparently, he’d missed something and would need to do a deeper dive into her background when time permitted.
“I honestly don’t think any of us truly believed it would go on as long as it did.”
Cruz began scribbling furiously on a pad of paper next to him, and Wes took over the questioning while Cruz wrote. “All right, so what was the plan? You just keep reporting information as it came in until you were either made or the relationship ran its course, then you’d slither back to the CIA?”
“Pretty much. My position gave us access to things we never would have been able to get otherwise. It was worth the sacrifice. Or it was at first.”
Triumph wasn’t sure how he felt about her confession. On the one hand, the Colonels were bad news. The original jefe had three sons, two of whom ran his operations. The father, Hector, had been eliminated last summer. That slowed the network briefly, but then the eldest and youngest sons picked up right where dear old dad had left off. They needed to be taken down any way it could be done. The middle brother, Ildefanso, Hector’s bastard? Well… he was a different story altogether and not part of the cartel.
While he understood that undercover operations often required sacrifices from the officers and agents who volunteered, when he finally managed to access some of hertranscripts, they were disturbing, to say the least. They lacked any sort of detail about what she’d done to gain her information. He bet what she had done, however, went far beyond “dating” Guillermo. Drug use, theft, sleeping with a mark, performing an act of loyalty. All pretty much guaranteed. She’d consigned herself to a half-life until she was discarded, or worse, discovered and made an example of. He tried to stamp down the part of him that worried most about her setting herself up for a short life that wasn’t her own.
Wes started to ask another question, but she let out a sharp, inhaled gasp and shushed him. The men stared intently at their screens.
G’s voice whispered through the air, “Someone’s trying to enter my room.”
The connection was cut.
“What the?—?”
“Why did she close the connection?” Cruz asked.
Triumph replied, “She probably wanted to pull the SIM card to destroy it in case whoever is there gets into her room. She’ll call back when she can.”
Twenty-four minutes later, his phone rang with another Caller Unknown number. He opened the connection, patching her back into the chat. There was a grunt of pain, followed by a soft thud and a squeak of springs, as if she’d fallen onto the bed.
“Everything okay, G?” he asked.
“Define ‘okay.’ I’m alive; he’s not, but I’m still on the run.”
“What happened? Who’s dead?” Cruz rushed out.
“One of Guillermo’s goons just tried to supply me with room service. They know where I am. Or an idea of where I am. According to his phone, the last call he made was this morning when I was still in Puente del Inca.” There was a crunching noise in the background.
“Please tell me that was you destroying his phone,” Triumph said.
“Yup.”
“I’m assuming, after this long, you know all his procedures. What kind of time frame do you have?”
