“Scrambled?”
“Yes, damn it, scrambled!”
“They came at us with a small army, M,” Butler said. “Automatic weapons. RPGs. We lost everyone at the ranch. Even the kids. Cortland’s gone too. Purdy’s wounded but will live; we’re getting an IV in her now. We took out most of the cartel’s men before we bugged out.”
There was silence on the line. Then: “How did they find you?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me. They came out of nowhere. We’re lucky to be alive.”
After another long pause, M said, “Cross. Or Mahoney. Or Sampson. The FBI. They must have found something that pointed to you, and Cross told Emmanuella Alejandro about it. Cross didn’t want to be involved in the attack, but he wanted us defeated, so he told her.”
At times, Butler could barely tolerate M’s growing paranoia over Alex Cross.
“Or maybe there was a leak on your end,” Butler offered.
“Don’t you think I’d be in handcuffs if there were?” M roared. “It’s Cross, I’m telling you. He’s out there right now. Mahoney and Sampson too. In Wyoming. On the ranch! They’re…they’re after me!”
“At the moment, they are after the four of us,” Butler snapped. “So why don’t you help us figure out how to get out of here without getting caught.”
M did not reply for several long moments and was much more composed when he did. “You’re right, Butler. I apologize. We’ve got your GPS position and we have been monitoring law enforcement communications out there and know where the sheriff’s roadblocks were as of one hour ago.”
“They going thermal once the weather clears?” Butler asked, fearing a helicopter with a thermal-imaging system picking up the Land Cruiser.
“Not that we’ve heard, but it is the logical next step,” M said. “Start driving as soon as Purdy is stable. We’ll get you out of there long before they put a bird back in the sky.”
“Roger that.”
“And when you get free, Butler, I have decided that we are going to finish Cross. Then we’re going back to Mexico to pay a visit to Emmanuella herself to end this.”
“The Maestro leaves his podium?”
“I’ve waited a long time for a face-to-face, Butler. I want that murdering bitch to know who destroyed her and the cartel her brother built.”
Chapter
76
Raphael Durango and five of his remaining men were holed up in a motor home parked deep in Bureau of Land Management property some forty miles east-northeast of Laramie. They’d been there since before dawn, sleeping, eating, and talking their way through the battle, as warriors do.
Durango’s instincts told him to move on at dark, to head east and then south toward Denver, New Mexico, and the border. But before that, he had to face his half sister.
He gave his men a bottle of tequila and ordered them outside before starting the motor home and booting up the satellite internet base station. When he had a solid feed on his laptop, he routed it through a VPN to give himself partial anonymity and then routed it through a second VPN to assure an untraceable connection.
Durango made the sign of the cross, opened Skype, and called Emmanuella.
Her face soon appeared. Her eyes flashed when she saw him.
“I was worried,” she said in Spanish. “I’ve heard many, many dead. Is this true? Did you wipe them out?”
Durango knew not to sugarcoat anything, not with his half sister. “No.”
“Did you get M?”
“Maybe,” he said. “We shot at least twenty people there. Men, women, kids. You said to kill everyone.”
Emmanuella swallowed hard. “It was the only way. What about this Butler?”
He shook his head. “He and three others, two men, one woman. They were professionals, ex-military, they had to be. They retreated into the mouth of a canyon, took positions where we couldn’t hit them. They had the advantage.”
“Advantage?” she cried angrily. “I sent you with an army and every weapon we could buy!”
“And they killed more than forty of our men before I pulled back.”
Emmanuella blinked. “Forty?”
“And wounded six more, who probably won’t make it,” he said.
The cartel leader went stone-faced for several moments. “What happened to Butler and the other three?”
“Escaped deeper into that canyon behind the ranch,” Durango said.
“I wanted them dead. I still do.”