twenty-seven

Grant jerked his head towards the sound, and the world spun into oblivion. He pushed back from the edge of the walkway and braced himself against the wall. His hands came up, ready to fend off the attack, and his knees screamed as he prepared to push upwards. He turned towards the shouted warning. To his right, the voice shouted again—from the glass and wood office at the end of the walkway.

“I said, watch your back!”

There was a loud bang and a yell from the factory floor. Metal clattered across the concrete, and there was a rending crack as wood splintered. Confusion reigned. There were more shouts—from the factory floor this time—and everybody stopped work as they dashed to help the stricken man.

The forklift truck had reversed away from the jaws of the furnace just as two workers were wheeling a wooden crate across the floor. Their attention had been on the conversation they were having instead of what they were doing. They didn’t hear the warning beep as the motor went into reverse.

Crash.

The foreman dashed to the nearest stairs at the far end of the walkway on the other side of the office. Using both hands on the railings he slid down, his feet barely touching the steps on the way. Another man jogged towards the accident carrying a first-aid box. The other workers formed a circle around the crash site, all facing inwards towards the injured man.

Grant’s head continued to spin. He felt nauseous but managed to fight off the stomach cramp that threatened to double him over. This was an opportunity too good to miss, but he was almost too ill to take advantage of it. He glanced towards the office—the place where any documentation would be kept. Invoices, transport orders, and cargo manifests; the place to look for evidence of Macready’s activities. That’s if Grant was looking for evidence. For now, all he wanted to know was what the Texan was bringing in from Mexico. This wasn’t going to court.

Manifests and transport orders were the sort of things a legitimate enterprise would require. The army convoy across the border wasn’t a legitimate enterprise. Any paperwork filed for tax purposes would be false and misleading. The real evidence was on the factory floor in the crates being emptied into the furnace. Grant ignored the office and went in the opposite direction.

The walkway tracked the back wall around the factory. Metal handrails gave some cover but not much. Grant stayed low despite his screaming knees and kept his back to the wall. His head was just above the angle of the walkway’s edge, giving him a view down into the gathered workforce. He passed the nearest set of stairs and continued to the end nearest the furnace. From the outside, the inverted L shape looked like two separate wings, the storage units and the factory. Inside, it was all one big workspace: the smelting works at one end and the factory floor at the other. The roller shutter doors were simply delivery bays with loading docks for the trucks. Most of the wooden crates were stacked at the loading docks.

Most but not all.

Grant paused at the top of the stairs. Down on the factory floor, the circle had widened so the injured man could be treated. The first aider was examining the man’s extremities while talking to keep him calm. Grant wondered how Doc Cruz would have handled the situation. He remembered how he’d dealt with the frightened boy at the Terlingua medical center. He doubted the foreman would be giving out sweets. With the examination over, the first aider opened the box and began to splint the man’s leg. Another helper unfurled a folding stretcher. This was going to take a bit of time. Grant took advantage of the distraction.

The steps were metal, like the fire escape. Heavy footsteps would sound the alarm. Grant tiptoed down one step at a time, keeping balanced and light and aware of the group in the middle of the floor. He reached the bottom without incident and quickly sidled behind the walkway supports. One final glance at the gathered workforce, then he turned his attention to the furnace.

It wasn’t Sheffield steelworks, but it was big enough. The door was large and circular. Whatever they were feeding it was poured in through the door. Whatever was coming out ran in a glittering stream of liquid metal. The narrow trough split into rectangular casts about six inches by three. Ingot size. Smaller than the ones Auric Goldfinger had been making out of the metal parts of his Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. Same principal.

Gold ingots. Made in Texas. Stolen from Mexico.

That was obvious the moment Grant saw the molten stream. What wasn’t clear was just what kind of gold they were smelting. It wasn’t body parts from a Rolls Royce, that was for sure. The broken crate was too far away for Grant to risk taking a look. The spillage was too indistinct to identify: small stuff, certainly, and some bigger pieces, all glittering in the overhead lights.

The furnace door was closed, but the next mouthful was waiting at the side. A sturdy wooden crate with the lid off, ready to be emptied. Grant checked the crowd. They were in the middle of the floor on the other side of the spillage. The forklift truck blocked Grant’s view. Good. That meant it blocked theirs as well. The furnace was in a darkened corner of the factory, a rough-hewn alcove of dirt and grime. The shadows highlighted the sparks and molten metal. The sparks didn’t light the corner Grant was hiding in or the crate he wanted to check.

One final glance, then Grant walked to the crate. Upright and steady. Not rushing, not crouching; looking for all the world like he belonged there. Nothing to draw attention to himself. He reached the crate in four easy strides, then bent to look inside.

The world spun again. Not because he felt dizzy but because of the brilliance of what he saw before him. Light danced off the contents, and he thought he understood the reason Humphrey Bogart had gone gold crazy in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He dipped a hand into the crate to make sure it was real. Then a door opened behind him and he heard the flush of a toilet.

The man was rubbing his hands together as he came out of the darkened corner. A stenciled sign above the door read restrooms. It didn’t specify gender. Judging from the workforce, this was an all-male environment. The man wore grease-stained overalls and heavy work boots. He paused mid wipe and performed a comedic double-take.

Grant held an intricate gold medallion in one hand and stood still. He felt like a naughty boy caught with his hands in the cookie jar. For a split second. Then he moved fast. Three strides towards the restrooms as he dropped the medallion into his pocket. He walked right up to the worker and didn’t slow down, driving the heel of one hand into the man’s throat, then grabbing him under the arms as he collapsed, gasping for breath. He walked the man backwards under the stairs and laid him gently on the ground.

“Sshhh. Take it easy. Breathe slowly.”

He remembered that Doc Cruz hadn’t done anything apart from reassure the Mexican wife beater until he’d got his breathing regulated, and Grant hadn’t hit this fella anywhere near as hard. He was a factory worker, not a wife beater. Not one of the bad guys, just a bad guy’s employee. He patted him on the shoulder—“You’ll be fine in a couple of minutes”—then walked to the nearest fire exit before the other workers noticed their friend was taking a long time in the restroom. The ground floor fire door was open like the others for fresh air. Grant was through the door and scrambling down the dry creek bed before the strain caught up with him.

Lights blinked in his eyes again.

His head felt like it didn’t belong to him.

His stomach most definitely did. It cramped fit to cut him in two. Despite having nothing on his stomach, he doubled over and threw up. Dry heaves brought acid phlegm up his throat. Sweat stung his eyes and ran down his neck. His entire body shivered despite the heat. His face felt like it was burning up.

There was no time for this. He forced himself to keep moving even though he couldn’t stand upright. That was a good thing because the gully wasn’t deep enough for him to stand up straight and remain hidden. He shuffled and walked past the bottom of the inverted L. Past the enclosed yard where the trucks had parked. He could smell petrol fumes and almost threw up again.

He risked a quick look over the top of the embankment. Both jeeps were still at the pumps, but only one was being refueled. The last patch of sunlight from the hillside lit the filling station and the guard hut. A golden haze to end the day. The rest of the factory was in shade. Nobody came running out. Not yet.

Grant kept low and crabbed his way along the gully. The first driver was still arguing with the security guard while he struggled with the filler cap. Fumes drifted around him like a heat haze on the highway. The second driver ignored the discussion and simply worked the pump. The soft ding, ding, ding came down the embankment. Grant was level with the filling station. He kept going. Fifty yards ahead, the gully swung to the right around the bottom of the hill. Not far to go before he could collapse into Doc Cruz’s car and listen to his “I told you so.”

He didn’t get fifty yards, just ten before the factory siren broke the silence. Three men came dashing out of the fire exit and around the side of the storage wing, shouting and screaming. They waved to catch the guard’s attention, then pointed along the gully.

Grant tried to move faster but that only made his head spin worse and his eyes go out of focus. Running blind and dizzy on a rock-strewn riverbed was a recipe for disaster. Disaster was coming for him anyway.

The guard saw him first and yelled for him to stop. He didn’t draw his gun. In that regard he showed more sense than the two drivers, who were also armed. The first man abandoned the filler cap and stepped into the cloud of vapors. The second left the pump nozzle in the side of his jeep and drew his weapon. Both took a two-handed firing stance like they must have seen Dirty Harry do.

Grant kept going.

The guard waved for the drivers to lower their weapons.

The first driver had had enough of the guard pulling rank. He racked the slide to chamber a round. His partner did the same. Grant wondered if Texas filling stations had warning signs at the pumps—the ones that said not to use your cell phone when filling up or the ones about not smoking. He was pretty sure there weren’t any signs about discharging a firearm while standing in a cloud of petrol fumes, it being the fumes that ignited more than the petrol itself.

Grant tried to zigzag to throw off their aim. It didn’t matter. The delay between petrol fumes igniting and the petrol catching fire became a moot point. Both drivers fired simultaneously; the muzzle flash was like striking a match. The ball of flame engulfed them, then immediately flashed back to the source: the gas pumps. The nearest pump blasted apart, sending a fireball and shrapnel flying into the air. The second pump took a second longer. A moot point because both drivers were out of action and the security guard was diving for cover.

The fireballs combined. The pumps disintegrated, leaving two holes in the ground gushing flames. The guard hut was a scorched remnant. The guard was afire, patting himself furiously to put out the flames. Nobody was interested in the intruder. Nobody was going to be driving through the only exit from the factory.

Grant slowed to catch his breath. He could barely see the bend in the river. He could hardly walk without falling over. He didn’t hear the car come round the corner or see it skid to a stop. His vision was so blurred by the time he got in the car he didn’t even know it wasn’t Eduardo Cruz picking him up. Five minutes later he didn’t know anything at all.