Authors: Sara Schoen
“You mean Candice?” I asked with a laugh.
Camden shuddered at the mention of her name before nodding. Candice had been a wonderful young lady, until he got her alone and she had one of three different personalities. The one I had seen the most was her flirting with everyone, and being all over Camden. Most men wouldn’t mind having an attractive lady all over them, but when she did it in excess, anyone would get sick of it. Needless to say, it didn’t last long because everyone gave him shit for it.
“I think I will be with her on my own for a while. I definitely don’t need another Rachel.” Yet another woman who’d been with Camden when she realized he had money and was overly clingy because of it. Those never lasted long for many reasons, but the most common was that he was never there for them, and rarely showed affection. These girls were asking a lot of him. If they only knew who he really was. “So I think I will keep this one to myself, and see how it goes. I’ve met her before, and she seemed better than the others. We will see how the date goes. I’m hoping this girl is the one because I need a wife soon or I can’t take over.”
A girl would never come close to being as important to him as the cartel.
Camden and I were following his father, Miguel Cardoza, around the warehouse once again. With the raid fresh in their minds, Miguel had been making this walk with Camden once every month for the last two months. The guard detail had increased, which included moving me from the shack I’d lived in to Camden’s loft. His father wanted to make sure that he had around the clock protection for him and his son, but Camden thought he was invincible and at first refused the extra time spent with guards unless it was with me.
He was far too trusting, but in the end it worked out for me.
Unfortunately, it also meant I had to go with them on their training runs. I mostly walked and zoned out during each run-through. Sometime near the end of their tour and his father’s explanation of how to run the warehouse, which included what to do in case of an emergency, his father would give him a test to make sure that he was paying attention. Camden rarely passed them. He considered these tours a waste of his time. He claimed he knew how to run the business already, and what he didn’t know how to do he could delegate to someone who did.
Needless to say, he wouldn’t make a great boss, and his father didn’t seem to think so either. Miguel had put off handing over the reins because he saw what I did. Camden wasn’t ready and would probably end up dead. If we were lucky he’d be the only one, but with Camden’s poor planning and lack of hands-on experience, he would be taking a few of his men with him. Better yet, maybe one of his men would grow to hate him for his leadership and kill him. I could name a few of our trading partners who would be all too willing to do it once he took over. Either way, someone would, and after working with him, I would only be upset it wasn’t me.
Over the years Camden had grown closer to me, and I had reveled in his mistake. I had taken the opportunity to mess with a few of the shipments, steal copies of files, take photos of weapon exchanges, and tip off CIRA to all of their actions, hoping to catch them. Unfortunately, none of it was what Sharp Shooter was looking for. Demon never told me exactly what he wanted either. It was a secret to everyone except Sharp Shooter. I just wish I knew what he wanted. Then I could find a way to give it to him. On the bright side, every time I sabotaged their shipments, profits suffered. They were slowed down, and at times put on a full stop because they had to clean it up before someone came snooping. When they rushed to clean up the mess I made, new people made mistakes. They left a trail CIRA would easily be able to pick up and would save it to give to the authorities once the mission was done.
There were records of weapons shipments to enemies across our borders. The drug trails would be enough to put them in jail once those records leaked. A few members had openly admitted to murdering, out of necessity and fun. We should have been able to take them down easily, and in no time at all. Sharp Shooter was looking for something to terminate them instead of cripple them. They were spreading too far, too fast, and soon they would grow too big to contain. If we wanted to send a message to all of them at once, we had to win this fight in order to win all future ones as well. Which meant we had to make sure the Cardozas couldn’t regroup after we finished with them.
“Camden,” Miguel called, trying to regain his son’s attention, who was busy texting someone. I assumed it was whoever he had been dating over the last few months. He still hadn’t said much about her, but I knew it was only a matter of time before I heard something. Camden had a habit of kissing and telling everyone about it. “Have you heard a thing I said?” his father prompted.
Miguel knew his son would only destroy everything he had worked for, and while that was good for
my
mission, everyone in the cartel was worried about Camden taking over. No one dared to say it near him, for fear of being killed on the spot, but they talked to each other. The day was looming over them like a dark cloud, and it was certain to pour.
Camden had the itchiest trigger finger I had ever seen. That’s how I knew when he found out who I was, if he ever did, I’d be dead before another thought could go through his mind. He was someone who reacted first and then thought about it later. Volatile, dangerous. Similar to standing next to a grenade a few seconds from detonating.
“Camden,” Miguel yelled, letting his voice echo off the metal walls of the warehouse for all to hear. “Have you been listening to a thing I’ve said this entire time?”
I didn’t hear Camden’s response, but from how angry the boss looked it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. I assumed it was something along the lines of, ‘No, I wasn’t listening because this is a waste of time.’ His typical response when it came to responsibility. He avoided it, and didn’t want to spend time doing what had to be done.
“I don’t want to do this. I just want to be given control, and I’ll take it from there,” Camden stated. My assumption had been correct.
“This is why I gave you a chance to run
one
base,” he snapped. “You couldn’t handle it. I let you try to run the Maryland base, and look what happened!”
“That’s not fair,” Camden stated. He had only taken control of that base for two weeks, his dad’s first attempt to let Camden see how hard his job would be once he stepped down. It didn’t work out as either had planned it. Camden thought he would take control, productivity would increase, and the base would be in excellent condition to show his father that he was ready.
“Nothing is fair, Camden,” Miguel retorted. “You never take responsibility. I let you run the base and not only did we lose Jax, who ran that base for years, we lost the entire compound. Now I have to rebuild it somewhere else. You’re lucky most of the members moved out to join the base in the Midwest or we would have lost more people. You’re not ready, and you won’t be anytime soon.”
Camden glanced around to see everyone in the warehouse staring at him, even me. He took a deep breath before he excused me from duty for the time being, and then escorted his father to their offices on the top floor over the building. From there, we wouldn’t be able to see them, and they wouldn’t be able to see us. The perfect opportunity to look for any information. Then maybe I could go back and give that recruit a piece of my mind, or find out who killed Ash Crest.
I made sure everyone saw me leave so I wouldn’t be implicated in what was about to happen. Once I was able to sneak back inside, I watched their patterns and made my move toward the file rooms. They wouldn’t know I was behind them until it was too late.
I made my way through, passing those working on the next shipment, which would go out tomorrow, and made my way to the file rooms. CIRA had guaranteed the move of Miguel’s office when the last undercover agent left with a bang. After almost being blown to pieces, Miguel relocated his office to a more hidden area, and moved the files to his old office. To take him out now would require a professional. The files were easier to access, but I could get caught while looking through them.
The old office, windows still shattered from the explosion, had been filled to the brim with boxes and filing cabinets. They were stashed away so no one would have unapproved access to everything the cartel was involved in.
I had already given Demon the other base locations, names of leaders overseeing those compounds, and anything else I could get my hands on at the time. The files were limited on information, at times only giving the state the base was located in and the first name of the person leading the base. Demon said that it took years of research and backtracking, and they hadn’t found it before I had been sent here. They may have never found it.
The only reason we knew about the base in Maryland was because I had overheard Camden talking about it with his father. With that information, I told Demon everything I knew about the base, which sent the first team to Maryland, and to their deaths. I had been crushed to hear that so many agents had lost their lives. I wasn’t sure what really happened. Demon didn’t like to talk about it so the only information I had on that night was what Camden had told me. I tried to remind myself they knew the dangers when they signed up, but that didn’t make the loss any easier. I didn’t see Demon again for months, not until he came by to tell me they had found another recruit to go into the base, the same one who almost got caught and blew the whole thing.
If only the rookie hadn’t been seen by a member of the cartel, and then caught on video. I rolled my eyes, remembering the surveillance video from the compound. The rookie had been lucky to avoid capture, as if someone had been helping. The camera had gone out. I couldn’t tell what their gender was or the color of their hair because the person had been completely hidden in the shadows. Too bad she set off the motion detector. Whoever it was had tried climbing over it, but had miscalculated the sweep. Mistakes could have been avoided if they had taken the time to train the recruit properly, but Demon had claimed there wasn’t time. I didn’t see the promise in the new recruit, even though he did. Instead I saw an agent who would get others killed if she didn’t straighten up.
When Miguel had gotten the call about an intruder, Jax handled it. The reports were still scattered, with no clear indication what happened. We didn’t hear back from Jax after spotting two men with a young woman on the camera, before the feed was cut off. The intruders escaped. The girl, whoever she was, must have gotten the rookie out. No wonder they left her outside. They knew the new agent would need help. I’d like to have a word with that recruit when I got out of here.
Anyone who risked the lives of others didn’t deserve to be on a team. They should only risk their life.
I heard a crunching sound, as if someone had stepped on the glass that had yet to be swept up. I didn’t turn around to see who it was. I couldn’t get caught. I dropped to the ground, my hand firmly on my concealed gun. There was no way to tell who it was unless I looked over the stacks, but if I did and they hadn’t seen me I’d blow my cover in more ways than one. I’d have to explain myself to multiple people, then somehow ensure Camden and his father believed whatever lie I told them. If all of that failed…well, I didn’t want to think about it.
I listened closely as someone took a few tentative footsteps toward me. My breath slowed drastically as I tried to make as little sound as possible. They stopped after a few steps, presumably looking around for whatever had caught their attention. After a few moments they turned around and left, leaving me to make my escape before they called for help. I headed toward the back exit and snaked between the stacks of boxes. I walked along the back wall once I was out of the offices in order to keep a safe distance from those on the floor as I went to a few shipments and cut the plastic wrap around the boxes before leaving out the back door.
I waited until I heard the crash of the shipment boxes breaking on the floor before I ran back inside and asked what happened. Everyone had seen my reentry, so it would keep me out of suspicion. No one took blame, and they wouldn’t because none of them caused it. All that really mattered was that Miguel and Camden had come out just in time to see me questioning a few people, so they would never suspect me. They trusted me.
I would destroy them, and their cartel.
“I can’t believe this happened,” Camden said as he raked his hands through his dark hair. “There’s just no way that we would lose this much from a simple accident.” He sighed as he voiced his worry to me once again. I had become his soundboard for everything over the last few months. We were close in age, but I also spent all day protecting him, and I was his only friend. Most of the time, I wished he had someone else to talk to, but sometimes the information came in handy so I made sure to keep in his good graces.
“What do you mean?” I questioned as I took my usual seat at his desk. “It was an accident. There’s no way to know how much we could lose if something different had happened. What if all the boxes broke? We’d have nothing to send out. At least we have something left over. Only a few opened and let the product onto the floor.”
“Too many shipments have been ruined recently,” Camden mused, seemingly to himself, but I assumed he wanted to hear my thoughts. “They can’t
all
be accidents.”
I tried to look unaffected by his statement because I knew none of them were accidents. I had done them all on purpose, but they were typically spread out, with minimal damage. This one had ruined most of the shipment because three-fourths of the product had ended up on the floor when the boxes shattered, and now we wouldn’t be able to send it anymore. Cuba wouldn’t be getting the cocaine. Maybe we’d send it to our friends in Mexico, as they’d pay for what little we would have left if Cuba didn’t want it. It wasn’t much, but it’d be the best we could do.
I doubted Cuba would turn it down; for them, a gram of coke was like winning the lottery. They would pay for whatever we managed to scrape together, once the shipment was cleaned up off the floor. I would have to start questioning members to find out what had destroyed the shipment, because Miguel wanted to know why this kept happening. Camden was right, we had lost a lot recently, but it was because I was growing impatient waiting for them to mess up. I wanted to speed up the process, and I found it enjoyable to mess with them a little. I may have gone too far this time. Miguel wanted me on post as often as possible to keep an eye on as many people as I could.
Miguel was being more cautious since the raid in Maryland, increasing security, preparing for something. The security required me to be more careful. This compound was larger than the one in Maryland, taking up as many acres as a small town, and with more buildings than my hometown, and that meant he needed a lot of help. The guards couldn’t keep an eye on everyone, and soon cameras would be in place, and monitors so he could check on things like shipments getting ruined. Camden was breaking under the pressure of it all.
“Maybe they’re just accidents,” I suggested, hoping he would accept that as an answer and drop it. He liked to have someone to blame, though. “We did recruit a lot of new people, and bring in some from Maryland. That means there are more people stepping over one another, and causing more accidents.”
Camden scoffed at the idea. “They can’t all be accidents. Someone is doing this on purpose, and I want to know who.”
“You sound like your father,” I said, knowing Camden hated being compared to him. He had a deep desire to not be like his dad, because he wanted to be better. “Overly cautious and over-analyzing everything. We have a lot of new people. If you start to attack them for something like this, then what will happen if one of them messes up a trade deal? Are you going to kill them?”
Camden thought carefully for a moment, as if he had taken a mental step back to avoid jumping to conclusions. “How many accidents could they possibly have, though? When will they stop? It used to be occasional that someone messed up a shipment, but I think something is going on. There have been too many of them recently, Marco.”
I swallowed my anxiety and tried to think of an easy way to end this conversation. I had rushed things too much, and made it obvious someone had tampered with shipments on purpose. If I didn’t stop, they would start a search to find out who messed everything up, and that would eventually lead to me. I shook my head. I had to play it cool if I wanted to stay alive. Getting him to relax a little bit could delay the hunt he wanted to start.
“Give them a few more weeks,” I suggested. “There’s no reason to get worked up about this. You’re worrying over nothing when you should be worried about how that date went a few nights ago. I haven’t heard anything about it, and you’ve been going out with her for a few months now. Two months, and nothing to say? I don’t believe that,” I said, effectively changing the subject to get his mind off the ruined shipments.
“That’s because it didn’t happen. I haven’t had a chance to get to know her,” Camden said, looking down at his papers, as if embarrassed to talk about it.
“You’ve been seeing each other for months. How do you not know her? Hell, you were on the phone with her earlier.”
“I had to have a meeting. A few meetings, actually,” he growled. “I had gotten to the restaurant, and was waiting for her when I got the call from my father about the girl who’s looking for her brother, and he told me she wanted a meeting.”
“You mean the one who gave the flyer you showed me a while back?”
“Yes, she was bothering us for a meeting so I had to cancel the date. She didn’t show up, and then I had to cancel subsequent dates with the girl to meet with this client.” He took a deep breath to calm himself before he spoke again. “I’m seeing her tonight to make up for it, and hopefully she’ll understand.”
“I’m sure she will,” I said before curiosity ate away at me and I just had to ask what Danielle wanted. “What did the girl want, the one who’s looking for her brother?”
“She wanted to know if we found anything. Apparently, Dad took the case without telling me so I had to pull some information out of my ass. I told her we were just scraping the surface, and would need more time since we had to go through his military files.”
“How did you know he was in the military?” I questioned, suddenly fearful they would be able to track it back to me no matter what CIRA did to make it look like I died or vanished overseas. I knew that if Camden wanted it badly enough, he would find someone to track me down.
“She told me, and I just went with it to be honest.” Camden sighed and rubbed his temples, as if to relax. “I have to find something on that guy before I see her again, or this could fall to pieces. I might have to cancel the date again, and I’m sure this girl wouldn’t like that. She won’t believe twice in a row that I had to help a client.”
“She knows the job, well…the one you claim to have, anyway. I’m sure she understands you’re trying to find someone and that takes time,” I replied, noticing his groan and slouched posture. He must be stressed out over this. It was taking him a long time to find the girl he could tolerate to be with for the rest of his life, yet he was forced to focus on the cartel more than dating. I wanted him distracted, and getting him on a date was just the way to do that. What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t offer to help him out? “If it would help, I would be happy to do some of the searching. That way, you wouldn’t have to cancel on the girl again.”
“Really?” Camden asked, seeming shocked. I rarely offered to help him look for people. I normally passed it off to someone else, because I didn’t want to waste my time. I liked knowing that when I left the compound for the day, it meant I got to sit in the loft off-duty, away from prying eyes.
Normally, Camden would leave and take another person with him for the night. I was able to go for a run, enjoy the alone time, and think about what life would be like once this mission was over. I couldn’t wait to leave the cartel, knowing each and every member would get what they deserved. Maybe Sharp Shooter would let me go home to see my sister, or at least let me meet some of the other agents. I hadn’t met many agents since I first joined, only a few on our occasional private meetings, including Demon and Whip Lash. No one else communicated with me, and they wouldn’t until I was able to shed my disguise.
“Yeah, I don’t do much after we leave here anyway,” I said with a shrug. “There’s no need for you to stress over it. It’s time you start delegating like you will when you take over. Just don’t delegate to me too often, because it’s not my job,” I joked. He laughed and offered me a smile before I continued. “I will do some preliminary searching tonight, give you something to talk about if she calls sooner than you expect. I think André has another case on his desk anyway, with that family looking for their missing daughter in Virginia. That could take a while,” I said, remembering that I had placed the file on his desk when it came in. André was the one who did all the research for our cases to keep appearances up. This time he would be waist deep looking for information on that girl from Virginia.
I had looked over the file of the missing girl while waiting in André’s office to pass along more files. I could tell by looking through the minimal information that this would be a dead end. There wasn’t even a photo of the person he’d been looking for. How could the family have no pictures of their own daughter? She was in high school, so they had to at least have a school photo of her. She hadn’t just appeared into their lives. Though, even with a photo, it would have been difficult to find anything on the girl. She had vanished from school in the middle of the day. The teacher claimed she went to the bathroom and never came back. The cameras had caught nothing because half of them had been vandalized and the other half were dummy cameras. André had his work cut out for him on that one, but whenever that happened and he didn’t get leads, he would come up with an excuse to close the case.
I didn’t want that to happen to Danielle. I needed some way to end this so she could move on. If she had continued to search for me all these years, I could only imagine how much it consumed her. Had she never moved on after the crash? How was this affecting her? It couldn’t be good, but either way I needed answers, and I knew just where to find them. If I could get Camden out of the house tonight, even if it just meant coming back to this office, then I could look into her life since the crash. I could forge photos and documents as a paper trail, then maybe find a way to end this. She’d get her closure so she could move on. It was time for her to start her own life instead of waiting for me to come back.
“That would be great, Marco,” Camden said, smiling in relief. “That could work. I’d really appreciate it, actually. That will be a load off my mind, but what about this shipment problem? I can’t keep telling my father the deal fell through.”
I flinched as Camden brought up the shipment problem again. I guess I couldn’t expect him to forget about it, since he would be the one getting in trouble for it. “Let me deal with it. Tell him you’re dealing with this case and finding a girl,” I instructed, getting up from the chair in front of his desk. “He will understand you’re trying to settle this business before you take control, and that you’re worried about keeping up the appearance. I will take care of the preliminary research and keep tabs on André to see when he’s done with the other case. I’ll talk to Miguel about the shipment loss, so don’t even worry about it.”
Camden agreed, and I left his office before he could change his mind. I didn’t want to make it obvious I was trying to keep him off the case, and preventing him from pursuing whoever had caused trouble with the shipments. It would only lead to trouble for me.
I walked down the hall, passing off the guard duty to one of the others. I waited for him to go inside Camden’s office before I left. With no one else in the small building, it would seem unimportant if another group were watching us. This was just another one of Miguel’s changes after the attack on Sandtown’s base. They hoped that with only Camden’s office in this building, and as few people around him as possible, that if someone attacked this base they wouldn’t know where to strike. I was one of the few, and could tell CIRA where to strike, but every day when I left I stopped in front of the mirror someone had placed at the end of the hall, and realized I wasn’t so sure who I was anymore. I looked different. I was different. The man Danielle had been searching for didn’t exist anymore, and I stood in his place, a shell of someone who no longer existed.