Nacho was waiting right where Evan expected him, at the top of the scuttle hole in the study, peering down over the barrel of his MP7.
Evan blinked up at him. “Can I come up?”
“Where’s Darling Boy?”
“Helping me finish with the pin cameras,” Evan said. “We just positioned them around the last hatch, so I have to grab an iPad from the van to test the connection. I think we might need a booster, since the signal sucks down there.”
He grabbed the lower rungs to start up but Nacho said, “Don’t fucking move.”
Nacho fished out a phone, dialed a number, waited. “Straight to voice mail.”
“I told you. Shitty signal.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You’re welcome to come down.”
“He didn’t say he would help you.”
“This part requires two men.”
“Hang on.” Nacho placed another call.
Evan waited twenty feet down, soaked in sweat and mud, breathing the dampness. A few moments later, he heard a fleet of footsteps above.
“Show me your hands,” Nacho said. “Okay. Come up slowly. Slower! Up. Up.”
As Evan emerged, Nacho grabbed him by the shirt collar and flung him up against the desk. He hit it hard enough that the blotter skidded beneath the heels of his hands. There were three other men in the study, all toting MP7s, all aimed at him.
Nacho frisked him toe to head and then head to toe. Found nothing on him.
“Get your iPad. Move it.”
He gave Evan a shove toward the door, and Evan hustled out, leaving muddy heel prints.
In every hallway and room, the guards watched him pass, raising their phones to their faces, communicating his progress each step of the way.
In the corridor before the foyer, he hustled up the winding stairs to the second floor.
The guard at the top blocked his path. “What are you doing?”
“Need to check signal up here. See if it’ll reach the second floor. Jefe will need reception in his bedroom.”
The guard protected his weapons and the grenade pouch as Evan slid past him in the narrow hall, heading for Anjelina’s room.
Through a security door into the final hallway. The Montblanc fountain pen Evan had liberated from the desk blotter while being frisked rested comfortingly against the inside of his wrist beneath the cuff.
His one-man raid on the Leones headquarters in San Bernardino had started with a pencil.
The exfil from Montesco’s estate would begin with a pen.
All the complexities Evan had been forging through this mission—fathers and daughters and mothers and babies and birthrights and betrayal—he froze in place, like bugs in amber. Stacked them to the side. Now was the time for action. For moving forward.
For the Ten Commandments and the clarity they brought.
A plug of a guard sat on the chair outside Anjelina’s closed door, Glock 19 resting on his knee. At the sight of Evan, he found his feet.
Without slowing or speeding up, Evan closed on him, letting the pen slide down his sleeve into his palm. A quick twist of thumb and forefinger and the cap came off, bounced at his feet.
Confused, the guard stared at the cap pattering on the floor. As he looked up, Evan sank the fountain pen’s tip into his left ear canal, punching it with his palm to sink the metal shaft deeper. He stripped the Glock from the guard’s hand as he lowered his body silently to the floor.
In through the door.
Anjelina and Reymundo stared at him unblinkingly.
He was covered with grime, the floor behind him wet from the guard’s emptied bladder. The heavy fabric of Evan’s clothes—heavier than usual—was saturated with mud and sweat, tugging at his shoulders.
He dropped the blood-tipped pen, the Glock 19 in his left hand, aimed at the floor.
The Tenth Commandment, Never let an innocent die, and its variant, Never let an innocent kill, demanded that he keep them both out of the fray.
“Follow me,” he said in a low voice, snatching a pillow off the bed. “Follow everything I do. We have to be quiet. Until we don’t.”
Anjelina stared out the window into the front yard. Already guards were running confusedly back and forth, barking into their phones. A half sentence reached them, snatched away by the wind: “—y dónde está Darling Boy?”
Evan said, “Now,” snapping them from their trance.
They stayed at his back, Anjelina gasping as they stepped across the puddle around the fallen guard. Evan’s boots moving up the corridor were sticky, making a moist sound as the soles peeled up. The security measures of the mansion—narrow halls, small doorways, tight staircases—were designed to deter intrusion.
Now Evan could turn every last one of them to his advantage.
Through the security door, the next guard moving toward them on alert, phone at his face, gun gripped loosely in his other hand.
Evan wrapped his fingers over the slide of the Glock, a set of makeshift polymer knuckles, and struck him in the nose with the magazine baseplate. Straddled him on the floor, muzzle to pillow, pillow over face, muffled gunshot to the head. The smell of burned powder mixed with singed down stuffing.
Barely breaking stride to the spiral stairs, Reymundo and Anjelina breathing heavily at his back. Across the cramped landing, the security door to the facing hall flung open. Montesco reared up behind two guards desperately trying to halt, his eyes showing white. They locked on Evan.
A suspended instant as recognition dawned—El Moreno spotting his son and Anjelina at Evan’s back, the depth of treachery hitting him. His expression twisted with outrage.
Evan brought the Glock up, but by the time he fired, the guards had heaved Montesco back, slamming the door, the rounds ricocheting off metal, making Evan’s ears ring.
Before they could regroup, he had to get his charges to the ground floor. His shouted command—“Go, go, go!—” spurred them to action as he leapt onto the stairs, taking the lead.
Skittering down, boots moving almost too fast for purchase. The foyer guard came visible, charging into the fray, MP7 at the ready.
Whipping through the last curve of the stairs, Evan shot him twice in the chest, once in the face for good measure. The man jellied as Evan spun down onto the tile, catching the submachine gun and stripping it from the man as he collapsed out of the rifle sling.
Evan got off a three-round burst at the front door to give the outside guards something to think about, then glanced back at the stairs. Anjelina and Reymundo cowered several steps up. The security door above, leading to Montesco’s wing, was still shut, but not for long.
Evan said, “Move.”
Vectoring toward the kitchen, incoming rounds already clipping the threshold. Evan sliced the pie, leading with the muzzle, ripping bullets through the chests of the two guards in the conversation pit. They jerked back onto the cushions, bodies dancing, weapons dropping.
Five down, thirty-three to go.
And the Dark Man himself.
Evan had taken splinters in the side of his neck from the frayed doorjamb. He noted the burn, gauged it nonessential, turned down the volume of the pain.
Pounding footsteps, shouts from above, outside.
Evan hadn’t slowed. He cut straight through the sunken pit, grabbing grenades and spare magazines from the dead men’s pouches, another battlefield pickup as he headed to the rear of the mansion.
Pulling pins, bouncing the frag grenades ahead of him through the intersecting back hallways. A wall-shuddering explosion, two more guards eating shrapnel, the overpressure sending one flying up to strike the low ceiling.
Confused sounds upstairs, yelling for El Moreno, shouted orders. Evan glanced back, caught Reymundo staring wide-eyed at the damage, Grabbing the young man by the sleeve, Evan yanked him forward, Anjelina tripping to keep up.
“Stay on my back.”
Montesco’s men hadn’t counted on a raid starting from within. The very architecture of the mansion prevented their mustering a mass response. Every hall was a fatal funnel, every door sized to accommodate one man at a time. Excellent safeguards if that one man weren’t Evan.
And for the moment Evan had a second advantage. They had to wait for target acquisition so they wouldn’t fire at their colleagues or the Jefe himself, whereas Evan could kill anyone who crossed his sights. But soon enough they’d figure out his location and close in with numbers; he had to get belowground as quickly as possible.
Anjelina stumbled along, eyes glazed with shock. Reymundo was breathing hard enough to hyperventilate. Shouldering to the wall before the next corridor, Evan used one arm to press them flat beside him.
Then he came around the next corner, MP7 raised. Down at the end, a trio of frozen men stared at him—burst, burst—the manpower count dropping to twenty-eight. Hot brass bounced off the wall and stuck to his neck, a quick sting and then the smell of his own skin burning. He swept the scalding metal off, the wounds already cauterized.
Barreling toward the study now, MP7 tight against his chest, muzzle pointed forty-five degrees off his right foot, the couple at his back.
Nacho’s voice issued through the doorway, a desperate cell-phone query: “—es Jefe en camino al túnel?”
Evan turned to Reymundo and Anjelina, finger across his lips. Easing forward, heel to toe, heel to toe, the noise of his approach covered by sounds of screaming throughout the mansion.
Next to the threshold, he raised the MP7 to his shoulder, barrel horizontal, then rolled past the doorway, sending a steady stream of rounds across the rear wall.
The aquarium glass gave way with a whoosh, a tonnage of water sheeting through the study, smashing the desk and couches to the walls and knocking the men off their feet. It roiled through the room, sloshing through the doorway, nearly sweeping Anjelina and Reymundo down the hall.
Once the initial torrent slowed, Evan spun back through the doorway from the far side. One of the guards lay facedown in the pooled water, floating beside the wing chair, his skull staved in at the temple from a collision with the overturned desk.
Another pulled his head up, gasping and choking. Evan shot him through the neck and then waded in, stock seated at his shoulder, sighting down the top of the MP7. The third man had racked up against the wall, face studded with slivers of glass. Evan hit his torso with a three-round burst.
The tree trimmer’s waterlogged corpse bucked and flopped in the far corner. Evan stared at it curiously until Nacho rolled out from beneath and heaved himself to his feet, sputtering and yelling. He’d lost his weapons in the deluge. Nacho panted, mouth agape, teeth protruding. His eyes were weary, resigned.
The desk drifted past, sliding on a skein of water, an MP7 tangled on the corner. Nacho lunged for it, and Evan shot him through the chest. Nacho tumbled back to sit on the ledge of the aquarium, splayed awkwardly as if balanced on a swing, legs dangling. His bottom lip turned down, wet and fat. His foot jiggled twice. His eyes had depth in them, and then they did not.
Evan pivoted back to the open door.
Anjelina and Reymundo stared inside with crazed expressions.
“What do we do now?” Anjelina cried. “Where do we go?”
The scuttle hatch was open, water draining through the hole.
Evan pointed. “Down.”