“Works for me,” Ross replied as he continued to fiddle with his Scrabble tiles, rearranging them on his tile holder and plotting his next move.
Morales got up and walked to the phone hanging from the kitchen wall to put in their order. “Si… si… A que tiempo?… si… Gracias.” As she returned to join Ross, she passed in front of one of the windows. From across the street and unseen, a camera clicked. As she passed in front of the second window, a camera clicked again.
“So how long?” Ross asked as Morales sat down again on the loveseat in front of the Scrabble board.
“A half hour. I know, I know, you get it much faster in the States.”
Ross grinned. “What would I know about ordering Chinese in the States? Listen,” he continued, lowering his voice, “we got a response from our last cable to the embassy.” He was referring obliquely to his reporting senior in Mexico City. “We’re still waiting for the Chief of Mission to finalize an updated list of requirements for you. Apparently one of the operations types had some additional questions. We should have it for you in a couple of days.”
Morales merely shrugged on hearing this and laid down her tiles. “ ‘Broken’… that’s twenty-one points.”
“Y’know,” Ross said almost to himself, “I’ll never understand why good old boys from Princeton, who haven’t been in the field since Nixon was in the White House, are the ones who control our playbook.” He stared at the board and put down three of his tiles. “Double-word score. Eighteen points.”
“ ‘Dumb,’ ” Morales replied, shaking her head. “Easy word, good score.”
“Read it and weep.”
“I’m trying not to,” Morales replied.
The game and their banter continued, mixing Scrabble challenges with quiet shoptalk. It was familiar and comfortable. They were intelligence operatives, even though Morales was more informant than agent. They were both, as Robert Heinlein would say, strangers in a strange land. The game progressed, and as the board became a tiled mosaic, they continued to discuss ways their seniors could act more quickly on the information they were providing. Ross, the senior spook, easily shared his experience and his ideas with Morales. And while there was no sexual tension between them, he couldn’t help but embellish on his espionage exploits. For her, it was a cause; for him, it was a way of life.
Morales looked up at Ross and smiled as she put all her tiles on the board. “Thirty-four points!”
“ ‘Adumbrating’? That’s not a word!” Ross exclaimed.
They both paused a moment as the doorbell rang.
“Finally!” Ross said. “I’ll get it.”
“Here,” Morales replied as she threw a dictionary at him. “It’s pronounced ADAM-brating. It means ‘portending’ or ‘foreshadowing.’ You’re buying dinner.”
Ross fumbled with the dictionary, looking for Morales’s word as he ambled toward the front door. “Nice,” he said. “Most case officers get tactical partners. Langley sets me up with some kind of Scrabble hustler.”
“Scrabble Yoda,” Morales replied, leaning back on the loveseat and kicking off her shoes.
Ross looked through the peephole and saw the delivery boy holding their Chinese takeout. He undid the security chain, opened the double bolt, and turned the doorknob to the right. As he swung the door open, he reached into his back pocket for his wallet.
“How much do I owe…”
PSSST! PSST! There was only the metallic clatter that followed the muted explosions as the suppressed automatic chambered new rounds. The silencer and the downloaded rounds did their work as two 9mm hollow points slammed into Ross’s forehead.
Morales looked up just in time to see the back of Ross’s head expel a curtain of red mist that dusted the entryway walls.
Tommy and two of his men charged through the door, stepping over Ross’s lifeless body. Morales froze for just an instant, then rolled off the loveseat and dived for her weapon. Tommy and the two men charged directly at her.
The Agency firearms training Morales received at the Farm served her well. She moved instinctively and managed to double-tap the man closest to her. The explosion inside the small apartment was deafening. He went down hard, but she stayed with her first target a fraction of a second too long. As she pivoted to take aim, Tommy elbowed her square in the face, knocking her gun away.
Momentarily stunned, Morales was helpless as Tommy picked her up and slammed her through the coffee table, shattering the glass. Snarling, the enforcer picked her up and again threw her to the floor, knocking the wind out of her. Gasping, she came to her knees when the third man kicked her in the ribs. Fighting back and on an adrenaline high, she somehow struggled off the floor and was almost standing when Tommy took a sap from his back pocket and neatly clipped her on the back of the head. This time, she melted to the floor like a wet towel and did not move.
Tommy and his man quickly duct-taped her arms and legs, and shoved a cloth into her mouth. Then, as Tommy knelt over Morales’s hog-tied body, his man used a razor-sharp carpet knife to cut a section of the dung-colored carpet from around Morales’s bound body. The two men rolled Morales up like a tortilla in the section of carpet. The two hoisted her onto their shoulders and, half stumbling over the inert form of Ross, quickly left the apartment. They dashed down the single flight of stairs to the back alley and threw the carpet holding Morales into the ba Cs iuickly lefck of a battered pickup truck.
The entire operation had taken less than two minutes. Only the two shots from Morales’s pistol and the roar of the speeding pickup disturbed the still evening. When the police finally arrived, they asked few questions. And if any of the neighboring residents saw anything, they were not talking, nor did the Barranca police expect them to.
They began to arrive at Gator Beach just after 5:00 P.M., and by 5:30 there were kids racing between the picnic shelters and the water, often with mothers chasing close behind. Two of the younger platoon SEALs had arrived earlier and had three of the beach fire pits burning gently with a nice bed of coals. A platoon family outing was a logistically intensive affair, and there were coolers, beach bags, food containers, diaper bags, and paper dinnerware stacked on the picnic tables. The beach toys, including boogie boards, soccer balls, paddle balls, and a Nerf football, were soon fully deployed. The platoon was at full strength with sixteen SEAL operators — two platoon officers and fourteen enlisted SEALs. A few single men had their girlfriends in tow, but most of the men were married with kids. The average age of the Bandito Platoon SEALs was just under thirty. When Roark and Jackie Engel arrived, the gathering had swelled close to fifty. The surf was low and the water chilly, about 62 degrees, but that did not deter the kids or the dads — the former too excited at the prospect of playing in the water and the latter professionally immune to cold water. So the women organized and talked, while the kids and SEALs splashed about. The kids outlasted the SEALs in the water.
Jackie Engel moved easily among the other SEAL wives. She came from a prominent family in Indianapolis, and her father was a senior executive at Eli Lilly. She had met Roark during his junior year at Notre Dame while she was a freshman. They dated for two years and became engaged when he graduated. It was a long-distance engagement while she finished college and he completed SEAL training. She would have left school to be with him, but he insisted she stay and graduate. “We’ll have a lifetime together,” he told her, “so stay and get your degree.” They’d talked about her finishing at San Diego State or USD, but neither offered a degree in her field — microbiology. When she offered to switch majors to be near him, he again rejected it. “I plan to be in a dangerous line of work for quite some time,” the ever-practical Roark had told her. “You have to be prepared to step up and be the breadwinner.” He also knew that a SEAL officer in training was seldom home. So they were together for part of the summers and during Christmas and Easter breaks, and they were on Skype nearly every night. It was good training for marriage to a deploying Navy SEAL.