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“You’ll be dead too. You’ll have nothing left to guard. And if you think they’ll let you watch over the girl, you must have damaged your brain as well as your leg.”
Neither of them says anything. They look at each other and back at me and Oz.
The tension builds in the room until, finally, Dillon speaks. “Why did you mention Alejandro? What does he have to do with this?”
I look at Oz. He nods, so I turn back and give them more. “We were asked to pull Salem out of the cartel, where she had been held captive for months. We were told she was an agent, but we couldn’t find anything to back that up. So we went in assuming she was a ghost.”
“Why would they do that? She’s just one woman.”
I tense at his words, but I don’t outwardly react. In the sandbox, he would have been taught to weigh the lives of one against the lives of many.
“That’s what we wanted to know. I figured she knew something about Alejandro the government wanted, or she had something on some higher-ups in the government.”
“Makes sense. No way they’d get their hands dirty otherwise.” He nods, his hand jerking a little with the motion.
“Seemed like a simple in and out. Only when we got there, all the other prisoners had been killed, along with most of the guards on the far side of the compound. Someone else had cleared the way. And if it wasn’t Uncle Sam, they had an informant in the cartel.”
Oz picks up the rest of the story. “When we got to the plane, we were ambushed. There is no way they should have known our locations. Only my guys and the agents involved knew which airstrip we were going to use.”
“The informant could have been working both sides.”
“Which was my original guess, too,” I admit. “Until I found an FBI badge on one of the men.”
Skinner whistles. “They came to get the girl from you. Why, when you were already in motion?”
“Loses ends. Take the girl and use us as the fall guys. They fucked with our plane, and we crashed into the jungle. What they didn’t bet on was us killing their guy and taking Salem, or for her to go down with us.”
Dillon looks down at Cooper’s now-prone form and kicks his shoulder. “And him. We were told he runs Apex Tactical. We worked for him but answered to his boss.”
“I doubt it since we’re his bosses. Well, technically, our sister is,” Oz muses as I sigh and take over.
“Apex is ours. The so-called boss is some asshole who somehow found out about his wife’s illness and used it to manipulate him. They would have let him think he had all the power down here, calling the shots. But he would have been their fall guy. He’d be blamed for sabotaging our plane and the decimation of the village, despite the orders coming in from someone else. The man pulling his strings dangled Salem in front of him, and he was so blinded by the potential that he missed what was right in front of his face.”
“If that’s true, boss man is gonna be pissed you killed Cooper. He might not have finished playing his role,” Oz points out.
“Fuck you. What’s to stop us from blaming you for his death?” Skinner grins.
“Easy. We’re unarmed.”
He shakes his head, and I can see him trying to figure everything out.
“While you think about that, let’s circle back to Alejandro. What happened to him? Because I can tell you, if he finds out Salem is here, then the boss man and his little team of operatives are fucked. Alejandro is a fucking nutcase, and he’ll stop at nothing to get Salem back.”
“We came on board after you were already missing, so I don’t know what went down. Rumor was that there was some kind of turf war, and most of the Ortiz compound was wiped out. Alejandro was reported to be among them.”
“How convenient.” I look at Oz. I don’t like knowing we’re this close to the cartel, but if the government really were trying to tie up loose ends, surely most people who had seen or knew about Salem would have been killed. That’s been the government’s M.O. so far.
“None of the Alphabet agencies are going to let Salem fall into the cartel’s hands. Not with the hard-on they got getting her in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ortiz being wiped out wasn’t gang warfare but a simple fumigation of rats.” Dillon echoes what I was thinking.
“Yeah, you’d think. And to an extent, I agree. But what I don’t understand is, if she is so damn valuable, why leave her with the cartel for all that time?”
“Maybe they didn’t know about her until Alejandro took over and became reckless.”
“Even if that’s true it took them months to get her out. They had to know he could have snapped and killed her at any time.”
Oz shakes his head. “That’s the part I never understood. Not from the start.”
“What if there was a deal in place, like with Cooper? What if they let Salem stay where she was, doing whatever the fuck they think she could do for a price?” Dillon offers, surprising me.
