Witt’s crackly voice always provided Nena a sense of calm. “Keep it clean, family. In and out.”
She, Alpha, Charlie, and Sierra pulled on the rest of their gear: night vision goggles, black ski masks, thin gloves to hide any identifying marks or their racial makeup.
The team slipped out of the black nondescript van, leaving X-ray behind in the driver’s seat. Covered in darkness, they crouched low, pausing before beginning their hustle toward the entry point. They moved in snakelike tandem through the ornate statues of naked women and cherubs lining the walkways. Each member swept the perimeter with their weapons, checking for guards.
The layout of the mansion and its grounds was burned in Nena’s memory as if she’d lived there all her life. It took them three minutes to cross the lawn using the bushes and palm trees for cover. They were coming up to the house when Nena spied two guards standing atop the low-slung shingled roof. She leveled her semi at her target and squeezed off a shot. Before the man was down, she aimed and shot again, dropping his partner. She’d been dispatching for so long that taking lives, even corrupt ones, elicited no more emotion from her than firing off an email. She didn’t relish killing. Killing just . . . was. It was keeping order and advancing the Tribe’s cause.
The Cuban’s new foray—peddling immigrants through their black-market transit system—jeopardized the Tribe’s business partnership with the organization. The Council wouldn’t allow their funds to support human trafficking. After all, was it not from their lands that so many Africans had been stolen, sold, and shipped to America to be enslaved? They’d never sanction that dark part of their history being revitalized. But Juarez, the Cuban, wasn’t the one who made the decisions. Juarez was only the face of their drug empire. It was his number two, Esteban Ruiz, who was the brains behind the face, marking Ruiz for dispatch. With him gone, the organization would be under the Tribe’s control and their wrongs set right by the Tribe’s standards.
She gave another signal, and her team split up, the other three branching off to their preplanned locations while she located the mark.
She found Ruiz where she’d known he’d be, behind his massive oak desk in his office. His executive chair was turned away, facing a wall of TV monitors, his head back, and at first, Nena thought he might be asleep. Even better.
She shouldered the strap of her rifle, pulling her sidearm and aiming it as she neared him. Her steps faltered when a deep groan emanated from him. That was when she noticed movement beneath him. He had one hand resting on the arm of the chair, the other . . .
She craned her neck, unable to tell where the hand was, only that it was moving. She didn’t even want to guess.
She pushed away the unwanted thoughts and closed in. She put the gun to the back of his head and squeezed the trigger. He was so engrossed he hadn’t noticed her. His head jerked forward, then dropped, chin to chest.
She was leaning over to make sure he was really dead when a dark head of hair popped up from below, in front of Ruiz, like a prairie dog on one of those National Geographic documentaries. She recognized the uniform. He was one of the guards. Couldn’t be more than twenty, if that. She swallowed her surprise with a blink. This information was not in the intel. And she hated surprises.
He looked up, but before the young guard could make sense of his slack-jawed lover, the exit wound between his eyes, or the thick rope of blood forking down both sides of Ruiz’s nose, Nena repositioned her gun and put a bullet in him too. The guard’s head plopped back into the lap he was intimately, and quite recently, familiar with.
Nena swept the room, ensuring there were no more playthings who would pop out at her. Her eyes landed on the array of TV monitors and narrowed, zeroing in on one screen that looked different from all the others. It was a black-and-white video feed of Juarez in his bedroom—and she could see he wasn’t alone. She swallowed, visions of what could have gone very badly running through her mind. How Network had missed this feed, she had no idea. They’d been lucky.
“Dispatch is complete. There’s a separate feed running,” she muttered into her comm device. “Looks like the mark’s been watching number one’s bedroom.”
“We see it,” was the response she received. This time it wasn’t Witt but some member of the Network team she didn’t care to know. “Leave him. Use the flash drive to burn their system and return home.”
“But what if it’s in the cloud?”
A pause. “It’s not. They’re old school.”