“Yeah, right, with the lights on day and night and the room temperature moving from the Arctic to the Sahara every half hour,” said Carla.
“What can I say? The world is a dangerous place,” said Rhytag.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Liquida was tired. He had spent nearly a week on the Mexican side of the border assembling the arms and munitions and observing war games in the desert east of Tijuana. He was still picking sand out of his teeth. While the men practiced, Liquida watched from a distance with a pair of field glasses.
There were seven trigger men, the oldest twenty-two, plus an expert with explosives who was in his mid-thirties. They were all handpicked and in good shape.
Only one of them, the demolition guy, knew that Liquida was involved. He and Liquida met each day to discuss how the training and preparations were going. As far as the others knew, it was the explosives man who was hiring them all. In fact, the money for everything, the men, the munitions, and the guns, had come from Liquida’s employer down in Colombia.
The first day of training went fast. Teaching the seven button boys to use the inexpensive Chinese AK-47 knockoffs took less than half a day. The high-velocity Russian rounds of the AK would pass right through anything without ceramic plates behind it. The two, or possibly three, key targets might be wearing Kevlar vests, but they would not have combat armor.
Two days were spent on explosives training. This involved the shaping and placement of small charges, the use of detonators and high-yield detonation cord if it was needed to take off locks or cut through steel hinges. Liquida’s explosives expert would do most of this work, but some familiarity with it by the others was essential in case he was wounded or killed in the early going.
The last day was spent on what high-tech American police called dynamic entry. In the law enforcement world, this type of training took far more time, but Liquida’s small army had a big advantage. Unlike the police, they didn’t have to worry about collateral damage. If they killed a dozen people getting in, it didn’t matter as long as they got the right one before they left.
For training they used an old school bus that Liquida had purchased from a junkyard in Tijuana and had towed out into the desert.
For cover, each man in the assault group was given a photograph. It was a mug shot from the Mexican Judicial Police of one of the female mules who carried drugs across the border for the Tijuana cartel. From all appearances she was small fry, not of sufficient importance or risk to be transported to court in one of the sheriff’s small vans. She was forty-one years old. She had been arrested in San Diego, housed at Las Colinas for seven months, and was now in her second day of a jury trial. For this reason, Liquida knew that she would be on the bus that morning. Whoever got to her first was to eliminate her with two head shots and drop her photograph on the floor by her seat.
The real target, whose face Liquida’s men had all memorized, was to be killed by accident in an apparent cross fire using a gun from one of the dead guards on the bus. While the shooters were doing this, the explosives man was to place three charges connected by det cord along the dash in the front of the bus, from the steering wheel to the passenger door. This would take out the front of the bus and with it the security video recorder, destroying any tape that might have recorded the sequence of events on board.
If all went as planned, they would be off the bus in less than two minutes and on their way to the safe house where they would hide. Once things cooled down, the men could cross the border back into Mexico.
“When do you think we can go?” Katia was talking about the honor farm.
“Maybe as early as next week, maybe sooner,” said Daniela.
Today the bus was more than half empty, not enough for a full load, but too many for the smaller vans. The driver and the guard were still shackling two of the women up front to the foot bar that kept them from moving around inside the bus. There were no windows except for small oblong strips of glass up high, near the ceiling, for light.
Katia, who suffered from claustrophobia, didn’t like it. She sat next to Daniela on the inside of the bench seat, against the wall where the window should have been. They were two rows from the rear of the bus.
Katia didn’t know what she would do if she lost her friend. Before Daniela showed up at the jail, Katia had lived each day in constant fear. Now she faced the prospect of having to deal with it again. Only this time she knew it would be much worse.
This morning she and Daniela were chained together at the waist, each with one ankle also manacled to the metal bar that was welded near the floor to the back of the empty bench seat in front of them.
“You look like this is your first time on the bus,” said Daniela.
Katia nodded. “When they brought me out from the courthouse when I was first arrested and saw the judge downtown, they took me to the jail in the back of a sheriff’s car.”
“We’re lucky,” said Daniela.
“Why do you say that?”
“Male prisoners normally have their hands cuffed and fastened to the waist chain. Sometimes the women too.” Daniela knew this was standard operating procedure. “These two guards are pretty nice. It looks like they’re not going to cuff our hands until we get to the courthouse.”
“We can talk later today, when we get back,” said Katia. “I need to write down everything you need. Maybe you can help me. I’m not good at writing in English. I don’t want you to leave the jail for this other place without me.”
“I won’t.” Daniela could see that Katia was both excited and scared.
“I think I can give you everything you need. My mother, my cousin; my father is dead, so he doesn’t count, is that right?”
“That’s right,” said Daniela, “just surviving relatives. But you have to go back as far as your grandparents.”
“No problem. And I don’t think my lawyers would mind. I’m sure that if they knew you the way I do, they would tell me to go ahead.”
“Yes, but I told you, you can’t discuss it with them,” said Daniela. “You understand?”
“I won’t,” said Katia. “I promise you. I would never do anything to get you in trouble. It is our secret, just you and me.”
“I know. I’m just a little nervous.”
“Are you sure your lawyer can do this? Get us to this honor place, I mean?”
“The honor farm.” Daniela nearly cringed as she said it.
“Yes, that’s what I meant, the honor farm. You think he can do it?”
“I do.” It troubled Daniela to give her such promises. She knew that if Rhytag or Thorpe had Katia alone in a room for ten minutes, they would come to the same realization Daniela had, that Katia Solaz knew nothing about a loose nuke. If you were a terrorist planning an attack you would have to be on drugs to bring her into the loop. Still, it was possible that if her grandfather was alive, Katia might know where he was. “So have you always lived in Costa Rica?” she asked.
“Yes. I was born there.”
The driver settled into his seat as the guard closed and locked the steel-and-wire mesh gate that sealed off the prisoners’ compartment from the driver’s section. The driver pushed a button on the dash and the door up front closed with a hydraulic whoosh. The guard pulled a lever and the four case-hardened steel locking bolts slid into place, securing the heavy steel door.
“And your mother, was she born in Costa Rica as well?”