DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) (22 page)

Chapter 31

From the time it stopped raining until shortly before sunset, Leticia Ortiz had gone out to scout the surroundings and see what she could find. Per Martin's request, she sought to find any signs of who the four dead gunmen had been shooting at before Martin and Sasha set up their ambush. Martin thought maybe they were shooting at whoever blew the horn, or maybe in the direction of the horn.

“Didn’t find anything solid except some bullet holes on a couple of trees,” Leticia said upon her return. “Maybe they got spooked when they heard the horn, like you said Martin, thought they saw something in the forest and took a couple of shots.”

Leticia took off a heavy backpack and set it on the counter. “I went down to the trailhead, found lots of ammo in their Jeep. We’ll have to figure out what goes with what, but I bet it will be useful if we need their weapons, or maybe we can even use it in some of ours if it’s the right caliber.”

Ochoa nodded approvingly. “Good job.”

Leticia continued her report. “I also found a side trail, starting just north of the cabin. It weaves down a bit. I didn’t follow it all the way, but I found a cliff where I could look out, and it looked like a plot of some sort.”

“Pot,” Martin put in.

“That would be my guess, but even through my binoculars, I couldn’t tell for sure.”

“I bet those goons were looking for that plot,” Ochoa said.

“That’s one possibility,” Cynthia said. “Or part of one.”

“Meaning?” Ochoa said.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the briefings,” Martin said. “Mexican cartels partnering with middle-eastern operatives?”

Ochoa looked uncomfortable. “We’re not in a vault, team,” he said. He pointed at Sasha, who was sleeping comfortably.

Martin grinned. “She’s forgotten more intelligence than you’ll ever know. She’s been living here twelve years. Don’t you think she spots all the landmines?”

“Did she tell you that?” Ochoa asked. “In fact, what exactly has she told you about all this in the last few days?”

Martin returned to Sasha’s side and knelt by her. “She seems to be doing much better.”

Ochoa seemed to weigh his response for a minute. “She’s not totally out of the woods yet,” he said. “We’ll have to watch for infection, but I think we’re mostly over the hump now.” He pulled a chair and sat at the foot of Sasha’s bed. “You didn’t answer my question.”

Martin looked at him and said, “When she wakes up, you’ll get it from the horse’s mouth. If the horse likes you.” He looked at Sasha, then back up at Ochoa. “Look, I don’t want to be a jerk. Thank you for what you did for her. Thank you for everything. I’ll always have nothing but respect for what you did today.”

Ochoa smiled. “What I did? Man, what you did on that rock, that’s the stuff dudes tell their grandchildren.”

Cynthia watched Martin and Ochoa shake hands, and she felt relief. If they were going to survive, they were going to have to start trusting one another. She looked over at Leticia, who at the moment kept herself busy sorting ammunition and re-organizing the guns when she found a match. Cynthia was glad to have her here, too. Maybe Sasha remained a question mark, and a big one, but Cynthia hoped Leticia more than evened the balance.

“I haven’t put in this many medical shift hours since med school,” Ochoa said. “I think I’m due for my non-union break. Someone mind escorting me to the outhouse?”

“I got it,” Cynthia said. She went over to the counter to grab a gun. She stuffed it in the small of her back. At her side, she still had her Uzi. “Let’s go,” she said to Ochoa.

Halfway up the trail to the outhouse, Ochoa said, “I guess I’m still a prisoner?”

“That’s up for discussion. Do your thing and we’ll chat.”

She let him go on to the outhouse while she waited for him. No sense in smelling or hearing stuff, she told herself.

When he came back, she handed him the pistol. “I believe this one belongs to you.”

He checked it and said, “Yes, this is one of my guns. My backup piece.”

“It shoots just the same. You wanted to chat?”

“I’ve been at this for days now, reviewed tons of classified files and reports, been here all day, and I’m still feeling like I have a big doughnut hole of understanding.”

“Like the one about your mission?” she asked.

“I was pressing to see what buttons I found,” he said. “You know how it’s done, or have you forgotten? Of course I understand that Martin is not the whole point, that we need his technical assistance, not just him.”

“So what buttons were you hoping to find?”

“The ones that start with ‘I’ and end in ‘ranian’,” he said. “Sleeping beauty is our biggest enigma. And she obviously has quite a pull on Martin, enough to get an unqualified, physically out-of-shape, untrained computer programmer to do what jarheads would shrink from.”

“Yes, she has quite a hold on him,” Cynthia said. “If she scares you, rest assured that on that point you and I are in complete sync.”

“What have you learned about her?”

“That she can slice one man’s throat like a loaf of bread, and a minute later use that same knife to bring down another with the ease of a darts champion hitting the bull’s eye. I tried to get Martin to realize she didn’t learn that during her ITAA training, but he just let it glance off.”

“I see,” he said.

“On the flip side, she did risk her life to protect Martin. And if she’s been living here for twelve years and wanted to co-opt him for who we suspect she might be working for, well, she had lots of time to drive down a few hours and grab him, or to entice him with sweet love notes. She did neither.”

“You seem pretty sure about that.”

“I have no evidence to the contrary. Do you?” Cynthia waited a a moment. “Didn't think so. On the other hand,  when Martin showed up here on his own, I see no indication she sold him out. In fact, Martin told me a few minutes ago she helped him to fix the L.A. grid.”

“Do you trust her?”

“At the moment, a little more than I trust you,” she said with a grin. “But that’s due to her current state of health. When she comes to, I’ll give you the edge. I sure wouldn’t want to be giving her any guns, and a knife in her hand should soften your stool.”

“My concern is Martin. He trusts her implicitly. And I’m afraid right now, he’s alpha in this group. What he says goes, and if he wants to give her a rocket launcher, she’ll get it.”

“Again, you and I are in sync on that point,” she said. “Though I think you may be underselling yourself on the alpha point.”

Ochoa seemed to weigh his next words. “I know you may not feel it, but I think you still have some pull on him.”

“I think you have that backwards,” Cynthia said, feeling at once she’d shared too much.

“I get that. But I also see that he respects you. He listens to you.”

“Ironic, isn't it? You wanted to bring me along because you thought I could still influence Martin. I refused, came on my own, and here we are nonetheless.”

“I’m not complaining,” he said.

“Neither am I. It seems to be an in-the-stars thing.” She smiled, slapped him on the shoulder, and they headed back.

As they approached the cabin, she said, “You have to understand something about influencing Martin. There are two things that rule him absolutely and exclusively: love and logic. And they best be working in complete harmony. I think you saw that when the out-of-shape, untrained, unqualified, and even a little scared master hacker rode that rock like he owned it.”

“I see,” Ochoa said. “How about Leticia Ortiz? Another love and logic connection?”

Cynthia stopped just short of the porch. “We go way back,” she said.

“We,” Ochoa said.

“Leticia, or Leti, as Martin calls her, is the real thing. A tough operator.”

“I saw that on the rock.”

“Long before that, Martin saw her sprinting toward him in a hail of bullets, two of which ripped her left shoulder to shreds. She still managed to grab him and winch him up to the helo, getting him out of a bind in a dusty town around the Iraq-Iran border.”

“During the Iranian op?”

“The one and only,” Cynthia said. “They had to hold her back from coming back down to get me. I managed to catch the hook and winched myself up.”

“That was not in the report,” Ochoa noted.

“Count it among the little things that get omitted when people want to stop talking about a failed op — though if I recall correctly, the report dared to call it ‘marginally successful’.” Cynthia looked him in the eye. “You know that girl never got a Purple Heart? Ask her to show you her shoulder sometime, or take her to the beach. She earned three for one in my book.”

“She moves pretty well for someone with a busted shoulder.”

“The shoulder moves well enough,” Cythia said. “The nerves in there have other ideas. She lives in pain every day of her life.”

“We can trust her, then.”

“Yes.”

“I still sense something a little deeper between them,” Ochoa said. “Please don’t take that personally.”

“Why would I?” Cynthia said. “And yes, there’s more. Martin personally found a medical expert in the field and paid him to put her shoulder back together. When Leti was ready, Martin made sure she had a nice, low-stress job working government security for InfoStream. When her little girl came down with Leukemia, and her medical plan wouldn’t pay for doctors who knew or gave a hoot, he personally paid the bulk of the medical expenses. Her girl died last night, in L.A., during the blackout. And Leti volunteered to be on your commando team. Hope that last bit makes it into your report.”

“Does she have a husband? Boyfriend?” Ochoa asked.

“Husband died in Afghanistan, on an attack in a pile of rocks of a village whose name will be forever lost to the American A.D.D. psyche. Luz, her little girl, was 10 weeks old. Never saw her father. He saw a picture or maybe a video before he gave his all for his country. So yeah, you can trust Leti, and you’ll be glad you did.”

Cynthia hesitated for a moment, then added, “I’m sure tickled pink and purple and every color in the rainbow she’s here because I finally have someone I know I can rely on. No offense.”

“None taken.”

Upon entering the cabin, they found Martin and Stan at the computers. Martin said he was checking on stuff. Stan was reading a news story on CNN that he wanted the team to see.