Consent to Kill (44 page)

C
astillo stood near the edge of the porch with a man on each side. He was getting more frustrated by the second. This was supposed to be easy. Slam a couple of RPGs through the front door, rush the house, and let loose with the machine guns. Just like
Scarface.
That’s what he’d told his posse. There wasn’t a guy in the gang who hadn’t seen the movie at least ten times. “Shoot anything that moves,” he’d told them, “other than each other.” That had been his only real worry—that and getting back to the city without the cops stopping them. The tricked-up Suburbans would take care of that, though. They’d already deceived the stupid guards. The one dumb son of a bitch was so fooled he hadn’t even drawn his weapon. Castillo realized that was about all that had gone right so far. They were supposed to have been inside the house almost five minutes ago. The boys had been pumped. He’d told them they’d all get $10,000 cash for a night’s work, and get to kill a bunch of feds in the process.

One minute into the operation Castillo had been counting his money, and now things weren’t looking so easy. Having given up on the door after four shots, he fired his last RPG round through the window. It created a nice clean hole, but other than that the window was still intact.

Castillo pointed his Uzi at the window and asked, “Are you guys ready?”

The two men raised their Car 15s and nodded. Castillo opened fire and the other two did the same. In less than five seconds they’d drained their magazines. Castillo yelled for them to reload as he inspected the pockmarked and spider-veined glass. When everyone had reloaded, they unleashed another volley at the window. Shell casings littered the porch along with chunks of plaster that had fallen from above. The men themselves were sprayed with tiny shards of glass that had chipped under the deluge of bullets. There wasn’t an unblemished spot left on the window, but it was still intact.

“Goddammit,” Castillo screamed. His Uzi was jammed. “Where in the hell are those two idiots?” Castillo had sent two of his men around back to get a couple of RPG rounds. He had five and the team around back had five. He couldn’t be sure with all the noise, but he swore he’d heard only one explosion from the back of the house. “Give me that crowbar!” he yelled to one of his men.

Castillo set his Uzi down on a chair and grabbed the three-foot steel bar with both hands. He took a couple of huge swipes at the window. The glass made a cracking noise. Castillo redoubled his effort and put all of his weight into it. The upper left corner began to peel away and he was finally making some real progress when one of his men started screaming obscenities. Castillo turned around to see what the man was so exercised about and saw one of his guys lying on the ground with a pool of blood growing around his head.

“What the fuck?” Castillo barked.

“I think you guys killed him.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“The bullets! They bounced off the window.”

Castillo actually considered this for a second, and then he saw the boots of another one of his guys. The man was lying in the bushes with a hole where one of his eyes used to be. Castillo’s ears were ringing from all the gunfire, and his head was starting to hurt. He moaned out loud and wondered where in the hell his luck had gone. Leaving them here would be stupid. Their bodies were covered with MS-13 tattoos. He looked up toward the vehicles to tell Hernandez to load the bodies into his truck, and that was when he saw two more of his men laying down on the job. The very next thing that popped into his head was a vision of $500,000 vanishing into thin air.

“Fuck.” He pointed to the two dead men on the ground next to the Suburbans. “I suppose they were killed by ricochets too.” Castillo tossed the crowbar to the man and said, “Open that window.” Looking back at the other two guys he said, “One of the guards must still be alive.” He was looking one of his men straight in the eye when the guy’s face literally exploded, showering Castillo with blood and chunks of brain and skull. Castillo froze, his eyes trying to comprehend what had just happened, everything slowing down for a second or two, and then suddenly he snapped out of it and lurched for his Uzi, which was resting on a chair only a few feet away. He almost had his hand on the grip when he remembered the thing was still jammed. He kept reaching and then something slapped his hand away. Castillo looked down in shock, his brain not yet registering that a bullet had torn through his hand. To his left and right he noted two more of his men falling to the ground as he clutched his shattered hand. By the time he looked up a man was already coming at him from the far end of the porch, his gun extended. Castillo recognized the eyes. They belonged to the man he’d been sent to kill.

Z
IHUATANEJO
, M
EXICO

T
he moon floated over the Pacific Ocean casting a shimmering wake that danced straight across the bay to her balcony. The hotel was beautiful, only thirty-six rooms, almost all of them suites, each with its own private gravity pool and unobstructed view of the tranquil bay. Under normal circumstances the setting would have been extremely romantic. The humid tropical air, the waves lapping at the cliff beneath her balcony, a gentle breeze blowing in off the salty water, a small cluster of sailboats anchored for the night rocking gently in the water. Down on the beach couples were out walking in the surf.

Claudia had never been to this particular hotel before, but she had been to many others like it, and always with Louie. The mere thought of him, the man she thought she knew, brought the tears back. How she had gotten to this point in her life, she wasn’t sure, but she knew she had never felt so alone, and so utterly disgusted with herself. She looked back on the last six years with a clarity that can be reached only when the journey is over. When you have told yourself there is no going back. It was resolution inspired by pain, the type of thing that steeled the psyche against future assaults. What had caused her to reach this tipping point, she hadn’t been sure of when she arrived at the hotel a day and a half ago. The reflective solitude of the place coupled with her own isolation left memories and aspirations to battle it out in her mind, debating her possible salvation, and whether or not she ever deserved it.

Claudia Morrell had been raised a devout Catholic, by a beautiful, gentle, and traditional mother. Her father, a lifelong military man, was a ruggedly handsome soldier who had barely enough time for his wife let alone his children. Claudia knew now why she had chosen this drastic course. Ten years ago she would have laughed at any shrink if they’d told her she had been lashing out at her father—making him pay for his years of neglect. Looking back on it now it was obvious. She got back at him by dating one of his junior officers. She saw her father in Louie, there was no denying it. When her father tried to sabotage their relationship by having Louie transferred, that was the beginning of the end. It was the catalyst that had set things in motion. That much she understood.

He had driven her away, but it was she who had chosen this morally corrupt life. The transformation from a God-fearing Catholic to this wasteland of ethical ambiguity did not take place overnight. It was, like most lives of crime, one that had started off small. At first her role in the partnership was nothing more than moving money around to make sure it wasn’t tracked, and that it was tucked away in a place where certain governments couldn’t get their hands on it.

Sure enough, though, it progressed. She’d begun to guess what Louie was up to. All of the secrecy, and his vigilant, almost paranoid behavior, was not without reason. When she’d discovered that Louie was a contract killer, she had been surprisingly unaffected by the revelation. She supposed it had its roots in the fact that her father had killed men in battle. In Louie’s case, it was not a stretch to feel ambiguous about him killing sociopaths, capitalist pigs, corrupt politicians, and unethical businessmen. But this Mitch Rapp was a different story. She had felt it was wrong from the moment she heard his name, but she had not protested enough.

Alone, looking back on her decisions with a healthy dose of self-loathing and maturity, she knew that the simple embarrassing truth was that she had been raised better. She had been given the tools to know right from wrong and she had consciously chosen not to use them—to ignore that little voice that told her every step of the way what she was doing was wrong. She’d used her own issues with her father as an excuse to discard the moral compass she’d been given as a child. And her lame excuse was that her father had not given her enough attention.

Claudia looked up at the moon and wiped the tears from her face. She was filled with self-loathing. Her childhood had been good. Her parents had taken good care of her. They had never hit her or screamed at her. They were still married, and they still loved each other. Claudia had no excuse for why she had allowed herself to sink so low. She had rationalized condoning Louie’s actions for a very long time but no longer. The moment she’d met with the German, she did not trust him. She’d known it was wrong to target Rapp. The undeniable, harsh truth was that she had allowed herself to sell every ounce of her morality, everything her parents had taught her about right and wrong, for ten million dollars.

That was her price tag, and now she found herself embroiled in this Greek tragedy, bloodstained hands and all, a life growing inside her, sired by a man who had just killed a pregnant woman and had not shown an ounce of remorse. Louie’s complete lack of shame, or even regret, had been the thing that woke her up from this bad dream. She understood that mistakes were made, but to be so headstrong as to not even acknowledge them was repulsive. For the first time in all the years she’d loved him she did not like what she saw. In her eyes Louie had turned into a monster.

What the gods had in store for her and her unborn child she was too afraid to even consider. Somehow, though, she knew she needed to make things right. There was the past, and there was nothing she could do about that, but she could try to make amends. She doubted she could redeem herself, but maybe she could make things right for her baby. She could not bring Anna Rielly and the beating heart of her baby back, but she could repent and do her best to make things right. Claudia now knew with complete conviction what she must do.

Wiping the tears from her face she stood and walked into the living room. She hit the space bar on her laptop to bring it out of sleep mode and then logged onto the Internet. There were two more messages from the German. She read them quickly. They were essentially angrier versions of ones he’d already sent. Abel wanted the money back or the job finished. If they didn’t comply he was going to hunt them to the ends of the earth. The German was lucky Louie wasn’t here to read them, because if he had, he’d get on the next plane to Europe and Abel would be dead before Monday morning arrived. Claudia had already decided he wasn’t going to get the money back. In fact, Abel was about to have much bigger problems.

Claudia had found the person’s e-mail account earlier in the day. It had not been difficult. She simply punched in the person’s name and then added @cia.gov. The initial try didn’t work, so she added a period between the first and last names and sent it again. This time it went through. With her fingers poised above the keyboard she took a deep breath and began typing. Claudia worked on the message for nearly an hour, and then deleted nearly everything she had written. There was too much. She would have to start out slow, with a simple apology, and see where it went from there.

Claudia maneuvered the arrow until it rested on the send tab. Her finger remained poised above the pad ready to tap it and send the message on its way. Claudia hesitated a moment, and then the little voice in the back of her head, the one she had ignored for the last six years, told her to do it. Claudia tapped the mouse pad, and the laptop beeped. The words
MESSAGE SENT
popped up on the screen, and she knew there was no turning back.