The guard is short and stout, almost pudgy. He walks his section of the perimeter carrying an AKM at the ready. He’s walked past this spot twice so far, taking his time, his focus mostly down at the beach. He pauses, straps the AKM to his shoulder, and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He uses a match to light the cigarette, flicks his wrist to extinguish the match, then tosses the spent match aside. He takes a heavy drag off the cigarette, blowing the smoke out through his nose.
I give him the pleasure of one final drag before slipping out of the shadows, a knife in hand. His back is to me, so he doesn’t see me, but he hears me at the last second. He turns, and I plunge the blade repeatedly into his chest.
The cigarette falls from his hand. He tries to reach for his rifle, but by that point it’s useless. My blade has punctured his heart and lungs. Blood instantly stains his shirt. He issues his final breath. Not the noblest way of taking his life, but the quietest I could do under the circumstances.
From the transmitter in my ear, Atticus says, “You have two more heading your way.”
I whisper, “How long?”
“Ten seconds. Fifteen if you’re lucky.”
Right now four quadcopters are quietly buzzing in the air above me, each equipped with an infrared camera, monitoring the area, the feeds bouncing back to Atticus in the States while I’m here on the Mexican coast, twenty miles from Culiacán, on Ernesto Diaz’s compound. I’ve been in Mexico three days now, having done as much surveillance on the compound as could be done in that time. Ernesto Diaz is inside the house, with a bunch of guards. By now Ernesto knows his son is dead. He may not know this for certain—there’s no way Javier’s body has been found—but maybe a gut feeling a father has when his son disappears off the map.
Despite the fact it’s the middle of the night, sunglasses are currently propped on my head. I check to make sure they’re secure and then sheath the knife and grab the guard with both hands, drag him back into the shadows where I’d been hiding. I try to do this as quickly as possible, but my broken rib is causing me pain. I also try to do this as quietly as possible, but the guard’s boots scraping against the ground sound like fireworks in my head. At least there’s the sound of the ocean not too far away to muffle the noise, the surf hitting the sand and rocks.
I slip the man back into the shadows just as the two other men appear around the corner.
In my ear, Atticus says, “The cigarette.”
Shit.
It’s maybe fifty feet away, the cherry still glowing. Maybe by the time the guards get close enough the cherry will be extinguished, but maybe not. I could easily take the guards out with one of my pistols—I have two SIG Sauer P320 TACOPS strapped to my belt, both of them equipped with sound suppressors—but I want to wait as long as possible before I alert the rest of the guards. Because based on what Atticus has seen from the quadcopters, there are at least fourteen in all, counting the guard I just killed. Ten monitoring the outside perimeter, the others inside the house, all heavily armed.
One of the approaching guards whispers, “Hector, we know you have a fresh pack of cigarettes. Don’t hold out on us.”
The two guards move into my line of sight. Both of them are carrying identical AKMs.
I could easily take them out right now, but again, I don’t want to bring attention to myself. The pistols are silenced, but that doesn’t mean the shots would be entirely silent. This isn’t a movie. The shots would still make noise, enough that it might catch the attention of the other guards walking the perimeter. I’m going to have to start shooting at some point—there’s no way I’ll be able to do this without lead—but I want to wait as long as possible.
My left hand touches the stick on my belt. It’s a foot long, black, and looks like a baton. But it’s not a baton.
The same guard who whispered before whispers again.
“Hector, mi amigo, where are you?”
That’s when the other guard spots the fading cherry. He pauses, taps his counterpart on the arm, and points.
Time to work.
I unsheathe the blade again and throw the knife at the closest guard forty feet away. The blade slams into the guard’s back. He grunts, drops the AKM, reaches for the knife stuck between his shoulder blades as he starts to fall to his knees. By that point I’m sprinting forward, the other guard turning toward me and raising his rifle. I throw the baton at him. It strikes him in his throat, stunning him just long enough for me to reach them both.
Swiping the baton off the ground, I use it to smash it against the side of the guard’s face, then twist the baton and pull it apart to reveal its other purpose. I step behind the guard and wrap the garrote wire around his throat. The man struggles, attempting to reach back at me, but the wire is sharp and tears into his skin. Blood squirts out, and in seconds the man stops struggling as the life fades from his body.
The other guard, meanwhile, has stopped trying to extract the knife from his back. For the moment he ignores the AKM lying feet away, and even ignores the gun holstered to his belt. Instead, he reaches for something else clipped to his belt.
His radio.
In an instant, I calculate the distance between us. About twenty feet, but still more than enough space for him to access his radio before I make it over to him. And then what? Pull the knife from his back, slice him across the throat? Won’t matter how I kill him, because by then he’ll have already used the radio. Maybe he won’t be able to alert the other guards to exactly what’s happened, but any slight warning is more than I can allow.
I have no choice, I realize, and pull one of the pistols from my belt.
I place a bullet in the back of his head.
Despite the silencer, the single round shatters the night’s stillness.
For a moment I don’t move, just stand there staring at the dead guard.
Atticus says, “They’re coming for you.”
“How many?”
“All of them.”