Moore and Towers had dropped some three meters onto the lawn, hitting the grass and rolling as the chopper had come spinning erratically behind them. They buried their heads as the helo hit the ground, and the explosion ripped across the gardens, flames shooting from the helo’s fuel tanks, the heat billowing in greater waves, the bird’s engines still wailing as the fires began to engulf the chopper.
“Oh my God,” Towers said over the radio, and groaned. “Soto and the rest of them.”
Gunfire boomed from inside the house, multiple weapons, Soto’s men, and an AK-47, at least one.
Moore cursed. “We need to move!” He bolted to his feet, bringing his rifle around. “Now!”
Towers fell in behind him, rifle at the ready. Still fighting for breath, they charged toward the sliding glass doors, which had already been blown in by the first assault team, whose job was to secure the first floor.
Moore didn’t see him at first, only heard the rat-tat-tat of his rifle, and when he turned in that direction, he spotted the bare-chested figure wearing a gas mask and driving the stock of an AK-47 into his shoulder. Moore wasn’t certain, but he thought he saw an eye patch, and if so, then this was Fernando Castillo, Rojas’s head of security.
In that instant, as Moore was about to return fire, Towers cried out and fell to the carpet near Moore’s boot.
Repressing the desire to look down toward his fallen boss, Moore fired, his salvo piercing the air where their assailant had been.
Leaping on top of a coffee table, then throwing himself toward the sofa, Moore opened fire again, believing the man had ducked down behind the sofa, but as he hit the carpet there, he saw the guy was already darting down the adjoining hall.
“Max,” Towers called over the radio. “Max …”
As if on cue, automatic-weapons fire echoed loudly throughout the house, coming from the front. Glass shattered. Unfamiliar voices lifted, punctuating the rounds with curses in Spanish.
As Rojas rushed into the basement, breathing steadily through the gas mask, he spotted a soldier leaning over his fallen comrade in the living room. And then, beyond them, past the blown-out back doors, he saw more gunmen rushing toward the house. Who were these bastards? And why had no one called to warn him? Heads were going to roll.
4 °CHANGE OF PLANS
Towers had been shot in the right biceps and had taken a round in the shoulder that had pierced his Kevlar vest.
The shot in the arm had grazed him, but the round to his shoulder had left a nasty exit wound.
“If he gets away now, we’ll lose him forever,” said Towers. “Get moving!”
“Not before I get you a medic.” Moore reached down and tapped the remote on his belt. “Marina-Two, this is J-Two, over?”
Moore’s earpiece crackled with static, then a voice came through, “J-One, J-Two? This is Marina-Two. Lost contact with Marina-One. Are you there, over?”
It was Soto’s lieutenant on the ground, a guy named Morales.
“Marina-Two, this is Moore. I need a medic in the living room for Towers. We lost Soto in the crash, over.”
“Roger, J-Two. Medic on the way.”
Moore sighed in relief as from the corner of his eye he spotted movement near a pair of doors on the other side of the living room. One door was wide open, revealing a broad stairwell beyond. A figure wearing a gas mask and trench coat raced into the stairwell, setting Moore’s feet in motion. He wasn’t sure, but the height, hair, and build were similar to Rojas’s.
Somewhere on the second floor, Soto’s men traded fire with at least two more of Rojas’s guards as Moore hit the stairwell and charged down across thick carpet, his M4 at the ready.
The lights clicked on as Rojas sprinted across the tile and not two seconds later an explosion from behind sent drywall, beams, and concrete dropping into the subterranean garage where he stored his antique cars. It took him but a single glance to assess what was happening: His attackers had blown a hole in the ceiling and a rope appeared. They were coming down.
Rojas hustled over to the vault on the left side of the basement and got to work on the access panel, struggling for breath. He typed in the code, did the fingerprint scan, then realized he had to remove his mask for the retinal scan. He took a deep breath, held it, then tugged up the mask and placed his eye in the correct spot. The laser flashed. Then he inserted his finger in the tube for the blood sample.
As the first soldier appeared on the rope, Rojas withdrew a pistol from his trench coat pocket and fired, causing the soldier to drop to the floor and seek cover behind Rojas’s vintage Ferrari 166 Inter.
A second soldier started down, and Rojas shifted away from the panel and waited as the vault door thumped and hissed open. He hustled into the vault, then took a breath, figuring the air inside might be clean. It was. But he couldn’t close the door — a fail-safe prevented him from being locked inside.
He rushed on through the hundreds of pieces of art, rows of furniture, cases of books, and boxes and display cases of firearms, along with a vinyl record collection numbering 10,000 that had each album stored in its own plastic case. Sofia had loved that collection and sometimes spent hours leafing through it. He reached the back wall, where stood two large racks from which hung more of his Turkish rugs, along with a Persian silk piece from the sixteenth century that he’d bought from Christie’s for 4.45 million U.S. dollars, making it one of the most expensive rugs in the world.
He shifted the racks aside to reveal a metal door set into the wall with a rotary combination lock. He rolled the dial. The combination was set to the date of his wedding anniversary. The lock thumped, and he lifted the small handle, tugging the door toward him.
He was beginning to panic now, to envision himself being caught and having to explain it all to Miguel. He’d never told Miguel how his brother Esteban had been killed, how that shotgun had felt in his hands, and how desperately he’d wanted revenge; he had never told him how hard he’d struggled to build his businesses, how many risks he’d taken, never told him about how many sleepless nights he’d endured so that he could give the boy anything he dreamed of, anything. But it wouldn’t matter. All the time in the world, all the explaining, and all the apologies wouldn’t change the fact that the lie was death.
And a piece of Jorge Rojas would die this evening.
Gunfire from just outside the vault chilled him back to the moment.
Then it struck him: Where was Alexsi? Had they already captured her?
The lights switched on as Rojas pushed into the rectangular room, no wider than three meters and about fifteen meters long. On both sides stood boltless steel shelving racks buckling under the weight of cash, American dollars, millions and millions of American dollars, perhaps five hundred million or more — Rojas wasn’t even sure himself.
Glimpsing that much money in one place was enough to strike anyone inert, the cash bundled and stacked faceup to form brick-and-mortar walls of mottled green. Rojas had once mused that the bills were the pages of some spectacularly long narrative chronicling his life and that no, they were not tainted by blood. At the far end of the vault were more racks loaded with crates of firearms and more ammunition — not antiques or collectibles like those found in the outer vaults, but police killers and the IEDs given to him by Samad’s people, which had been smuggled up from Colombia. A concrete archway lay at the very end, and beyond it, the tunnel leading out toward the garage on the hillside. The tunnel’s walls had been reinforced with pressure-treated wood, then filled in with cinder blocks, rebar, and concrete. It was the kind of passageway Rojas wished he could build between Juárez and the United States, even more sophisticated than the one Castillo had been forced to destroy.