THE JAILERS WERE RUNNING DOWN THE corridor toward Damon Lynch’s cell.
Will was at the barred window of the metal door, yelling for the them to come immediately.
They unlocked the door and swung it open.
The attorney pointed at Damon Lynch’s body slumped on the floor.
“Your prisoner—he’s having a hard time breathing.”
The two jailers glanced down at Lynch and then looked at Will suspiciously. Slumped against the wall, Lynch was slowly raising his head with one hand stanching the blood from his nose, with the other rubbing his neck, choking and coughing.
“Stop him…he tried to choke me…tried to kill me,” he croaked.
Will pushed his way past the two jailers and then said, “Excuse me, I have a plane to catch.”
As the attorney walked away, Damon Lynch was struggling to his feet. And then the yelling began.
“You punk…you wimp…that was nothing but a sucker punch…come back here and try that again…you really blew it, man, blew it big-time. You’ll be so sorry. You’re a dead man!”
Lynch’s hoarse, screamed threats were reverberating down the corridor as Will walked grimly, stone-faced, toward the stairwell and out of the building.
Pancho was waiting half a block away, and he quickly pulled his blue taxicab up when he saw the lawyer. The other man was still seated in the back.
“Get me to the airport,” Will said in a low voice.
Pancho turned around and smiled, but his smile faded as he studied his passenger’s expression.
The man next to Will leaned over.
“How did it go? Did you get the information? Have you got it set up?”
Will didn’t turn to look at him, but stared out the window of the cab as it threaded its way through the jammed traffic of Mexico City. It was hot—actually sweltering—but Will didn’t feel the heat. He didn’t care about where he was or where he was going.
There was only one thing that he did care about right now.
He fished his cell phone out of his briefcase and dialed the number to connect with the Washington, DC, police department.
“Is Captain Jenkins in?” he asked.
The man sitting next to him in the taxicab breathed in heavily and shook his head. Whatever hopes he and his agency had had for the retrieval of information from Damon Lynch, aka Rusty Black, now appeared to be dashed.
The agent knew, as did Pancho, the other intelligence operative, that they could simply wait for the drug dealer’s release from the Mexican jail, kidnap him, and secretly remove him to the United States for interrogation. But that would take days, even weeks. And Lynch would play games, legal and otherwise, before releasing any valuable data. Even then, coercive interrogation techniques might not retrieve information that was reliable.
They had pinned their hopes on Will cutting a deal—offering not to report Lynch to the authorities for his involvement in Audra’s murder—in return for a full statement about the Mexican connection to the Chacmool incident, hopefully in the context of a sworn deposition. In the small scope of things, that would assist Colonel Marlowe in his defense before the ICC—and on the big scale, it would provide substantial information about a potentially catastrophic threat.
But as Will’s fellow passenger watched the lawyer on his cell phone, waiting to talk to Captain Jenkins—and ready to announce Damon Lynch’s location and availability for extradition to the U.S. on murder charges in the District of Columbia—he knew that Plan A was definitely collapsing.
“Mr. Chambers?” The special assistant to Captain Jenkins came on the line. “I’m sorry to keep you holding. The captain is out in the field. I don’t expect him back for the rest of the day. Is there a message I can give him?”
Will fell silent and considered his options. Then he replied, “No. I’ll get ahold of him later myself.”
He clicked off the phone. Then he noticed that the man in the backseat was staring at him.
“Sorry,” Will said. And that was all he said.
“Which airline?” Pancho asked over his shoulder as he was driving.
“Just get me to the airport,” the attorney answered. “I’m going to find the quickest flight I can back to Dulles airport, and to my home. And my wife.”
The occupants of the taxicab were all quiet until they pulled up to the terminal. Before Will climbed out, the man in the backseat reached out a big hand, thrust it into Will’s, and squeezed hard.
“Just remember something, Will. It’s not too late. We can still turn this thing around—if you’re willing to play ball with us.” Then he handed him a white card. It bore only one item—a telephone number with an international exchange for Mexico City.
“Only one thing, Will. If you ever call this number, in order that I know it’s you and that you’re in a safe environment when you’re speaking—secure surroundings—you’ve got to use a word, the code word. And I don’t want you to share this with anybody. Not your wife. Nobody.”
Will fingered the card in his hand.
“Why should I keep this? Tell me why I ought to get this code word from you. Why should I have anything to do with you people?”
“Because,” the man said quietly, “there are lives at stake in this. Something really bad is being planned. That’s all I can tell you. Something evil is going to come down unless you keep working with us.”
Will had the door open and was halfway out, mulling over what the agent had just told him.
“Okay,” he said, putting the card in his top pocket, “what’s the code word?”
“Coral.”
“That’s all?”
The man nodded.
Will slid out of the taxicab, closed the door, and then hurried into the building to try to find the quickest flight back to the Washington, DC.
As he disappeared into the busy terminal Pancho and his passenger looked at each other, but said nothing. Now, all they could do was wait.