King of Swords (Assassin series #1) (34 page)

Casting aside his doubts, he set off in pursuit, cautiously, so as not to arouse suspicion or create a scene if he was wrong yet again. The soldier was three-quarters of the way to the vehicle now, so Briones picked up his pace to a fast walk. As he closed on the man, he called out to him, his hand on his holstered pistol, ready to draw, but not doing so yet, remembering the admonition from Cruz. The man didn’t hear him, so he called out louder.

“
Oye
. You. Wait up.
Federales
. Just a second,” he yelled now that they were far enough from the stage he wouldn’t disrupt anything with his exclamation.

The soldier turned, gun pointed at the ground, his posture relaxed. Briones got within twenty feet of him, then saw the man’s eyes. It was the vagrant – but his face was different somehow, fatter and heavier. He jerked his pistol free and prepared to fire.

Chapter 22

El Rey
heard the call from behind him but ignored it. Every foot closer to the vehicle was a foot closer to safety, so he kept moving, subtly increasing his speed by lengthening his stride. The call came again, and he turned, resigned that the game was up. There was only one reason someone would be following him, and it couldn’t be good.

He watched as the man in the distinctive blue uniform strode towards him, and then their eyes locked, and he watched the man pull his gun.

Two shots exploded out of his combat jacket pocket, catching the cop in the chest and the shoulder, knocking him off his feet, his gun clattering uselessly beside him. The silenced compact automatic pistol was almost soundless, and he turned and trotted the remaining twenty yards to the two soldiers by the vehicle – thankfully, both privates, and both relatively green.

“Men. Quick. Over there. That man – the Federal Policeman. He’s down. Help him. I’ll get the truck. We need to get him to a hospital.”
El Rey
saw the confusion in their eyes. “Now!” he bawled at them. “That’s an order. He’s been hit. Get a move on!” They sprang into action, and jogged over to where Briones lay.

El Rey
climbed into the driver’s seat and cranked the engine, jamming it into gear and tearing straight to the hills. He only needed a half minute head start, and he’d be golden. It would be just like if he’d been successful, only with more pursuit. The wind dried the sweat on his face as he bounced along, the massive four wheel vehicle’s heavily knobbed tires gripping the steep slope as it climbed towards the peak above.

~ ~ ~

The soldiers made it to Briones, who was bleeding heavily from his shoulder. His vest had stopped the shot to the chest, and though there would be a painful bruise, it wasn’t a deal breaker – but the arm was: the bullet had nicked an artery, and blood spurted freely from the wound. He tried to speak, but found himself disoriented and momentarily unable to do so. Cruz, having noticed the downed man, came running with a lopsided gait. He leaned over him, putting his head close to his ear.

Briones struggled to talk.

“
El Rey
. There…”

He used the remains of his energy to point in the direction of the Humvee, now three quarters up the hill and throwing out a cloud of dust. Cruz looked back down at him, and Briones’ eyes rolled back into his head as it fell limp against the pavement.

“Get an ambulance. Run. Hurry. Where’s your commanding officer?” Cruz demanded.

“Over there.” the soldier pointed to the group of soldiers in front of them, thirty yards away.

Cruz debated for a split second, and then abandoned his initial instinct, which was to commandeer one of the other Humvees and give chase. He moved to the officers, and quickly explained what had happened.

“He’s out of range, and I don’t think we want to shoot up the hills and cause an international incident. Get the helicopters loaded with some crack shots, and take off. I’ll go after him with some men in one of the trucks,” Cruz directed.

The officers were taken aback for a few seconds, gawping at the blood surrounding the fallen policeman before snapping into action. The general trotted over to a man holding the rank of major, and gave him direction. The major quickly held his radio to his mouth and barked a sequence of orders.

They were losing time. It would take several more minutes to get the choppers into the air, best case. That was too long.

Cruz limped over to the nearest Humvee and slung his rifle next to him, calling to the three soldiers who had approached him.

“Get in. Now.”

They exchanged furtive glances, then hopped aboard. Cruz roared pell-mell up the hill in full-on pursuit.

Back at the stage, the kids were still whacking at the
piñata
with all their might, the drama taking place on the perimeter off to the rear side of the building invisible to the attendees. The roar of the diesel motors was muffled by the linen shade element and the blaring fiesta horns blaring from the speakers.

When the two large military helicopters lifted off, the
piñata
festivities had grown tiresome, and the dignitaries were restless and hot. When the infernal creature hadn’t fallen apart after ten minutes of determined swatting, that part of the summit entertainment was concluded by the Mayor, and the assembled attendees moved gratefully into the building interior, where refreshments and arctic air-conditioning waited to greet them.

El Rey
’s Humvee slid to a stop by an old shed two hills away from the conference center. He studied the dust cloud from a pursuit vehicle, and calculated that it had to be several minutes off. He tossed his helmet into the truck and shrugged out of the uniform, beneath which he wore black cargo shorts and a T-shirt.

He hurried to the shed and disappeared inside the abandoned structure. Emerging a few seconds later, he pushed a heavy-duty off road motorcycle to the side of the Humvee and jumped on the kick start. The motor roared to life. He kicked the gear selector and tore down the slope into an even more remote area of uninhabited brush.

Cruz came over the hill and saw the motorcycle leap into the air, landing with a puff of dirt as it raced into the wilds.

“Shit. We’ll never get him in this,” Cruz lamented. “How does this radio work? We need to let the helicopters know what direction he’s headed, and that he’s on a bike.”

One of the soldiers jabbed at a button and turned a dial – within moments a voice crackled over the air. Cruz grabbed the microphone from him and barked directions to the pursuers before stomping on the gas and rocking down the hill, past the shed, to the arroyo down which the assassin had disappeared.

El Rey
was enjoying the pursuit. The men in the Humvee had to be hating life right now, as they fought a losing battle to keep up with the nimble motorcycle. They didn’t stand a chance.

He sped along the dry wash for several minutes and then swung up a tributary gulch that led to the uninhabited mountains that bisected the peninsula. Part of him wondered what had gone wrong with the bull. Everything had been so perfectly planned, and then it didn’t explode.
What the fuck
. It was his first failure ever, which annoyed him more than being pursued by half the Mexican army.

Spotting the cactus with the streak of yellow paint on it, he made another right turn, and thirty yards farther, pulled to a stop. All the planning was worth it, he reasoned with satisfaction. They’d never catch him, and even though he hadn’t succeeded in his attempt to kill the two presidents, this escape would be spoken of in hushed awe by police for generations.

He killed the motorcycle engine, dropped his mount and walked into a small cave that had been eroded by centuries of flash floods from the mountains. He couldn’t help but grin at the thought of his pursuers’ plight.

Cruz saw the motorcycle tire tracks careen off to the left, and he spun the wheel, nearly flipping the burly vehicle. As they tore up the arroyo, they heard a sound from above. Cruz slowed, and the men searched the sky for the source of the clamor.

An ultra-light flew off into the distance, a single man at the controls. It was already five hundred yards away, so out of rifle range, leaving Cruz and the soldiers to gape at it in disbelief.

It banked over San José, and made for the coast and the sparsely inhabited East Cape area.

Cruz watched it disappearing from view as he radioed to the pursuing choppers. A few minutes later they
chucked
by overhead, a pair of gunships after little more than a kite with a lawnmower-sized engine propelling it.

A large part of him wanted to celebrate at the prospect of nailing the son of a bitch, but a tiny voice inside him countered that they wouldn’t.
El Rey
may be a homicidal psychopath, but stupid or careless he obviously wasn’t. Cruz watched the helicopters disappear in pursuit, and then, finding himself suddenly purposeless, turned the wheel and headed back to the convention center, his part in the chase over.

El Rey
soared over the highway and then banked again, heading in the direction of the coast. He was looking for a very specific area and knew he was on borrowed time. The search team would now be looking for an ultra-light, so he’d need to ditch soon. Fortunately, everything was still going according to plan. He fished a cell phone from the knit bag suspended from the chassis and pushed redial even as he rapidly trimmed altitude.

“I’ll be arriving in two minutes. Have everyone suited up and ready to go,” he instructed into the phone, which he then dropped; watching as it fell two hundred feet to the ground. He was deliberately flying as low as possible, so as to avoid possible radar hits, but there was always a chance, so he’d taken an extra precaution.

He rolled onto a dirt road by a large cement factory and braked to a stop, shutting off the ultra-light motor before climbing to his feet. Three men, all dressed exactly like
El Rey
, stood by four All Terrain Vehicles, their engines putting in harmony.
El Rey
nodded to them, and slipped on a waiting helmet. Now all four were indistinguishable. He had paid each ten thousand dollars to participate in a race, over alternative trails, to a common destination ten miles beyond the airport, halfway between that landmark and the coast. Every contestant had a route charted for him, and all had gotten half their money in advance, the rest to be settled when they arrived.

“Good luck, gentlemen. On your mark, get set…go!” He gunned the throttle and took off, as did the rest, each in a slightly different direction.

As he rode towards the coast, he heard the choppers overhead. They’d managed to track the ultra-light, as he’d feared. Oh well. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that there were only two helicopters. One peeled off after the pair of racers who had gone via an inland dirt track, and the other stuck with
El Rey
and his partner, who were taking the shore route. They cut back and forth, and then his partner shot up another dirt path to his left, and now it was just
El Rey
moving along the dirt road that followed the coast.

He glanced down at his speedometer; he was doing fifty miles per hour – dangerously fast on that stretch of marginal track. The helicopter, uncertain which rider to go after, had gained altitude, the better to follow them both. He knew, and had anticipated that as he rounded the point and made it to the small beach outpost of Zacatitos. The other rider would branch even further inland, forcing his pursuer to make a decision. That would be in about three minutes at the rate he was traveling. He could see the other ATV’s dust cloud to his left as they diverged.

El Rey
was fairly confident that the soldiers wouldn’t shoot at four ATV riders out for a good time. Even if they suspected one of being him, no officer would give the order to start shooting, especially absent any assassination. So far, the only crime had been shooting the cop, which while serious, wouldn’t justify gunning down a group of unarmed riders. He hoped he had called that one right, as otherwise at any moment he’d have fifty caliber slugs ripping through his back – assuming the Mexican soldiers could hit a fast moving small target from an airborne helicopter, which wasn’t a given.

He still liked his odds.

As he rounded the point, the helicopter faced the expected moment of truth. He’d know soon enough which rider the pilot had decided to follow, so he slowed a little as he passed the houses in Zacatitos. He pricked his muffled ears for the chopper and heard it heading north, after the other man. His luck had held.

He continued up the coast road for another few minutes – not so much a road as a single lane, badly-rutted dirt track. The ATV was the perfect vehicle for such terrain, and he wondered how the residents got their cars over the ruts, especially during the brief, intense rainy season.

A green beachfront house on his right sat atop a bluff, the ocean crashing below the gentle seaside slope. He turned down the drive and pulled into the courtyard, taking care to close the gate after him. The house was vacant, the owners having left it empty during the unbearable summer months, which he’d gleaned from talking to a real estate agent who’d shown him the property two weeks earlier. He’d broken in last week and made the meticulous preparations for his escape.

The serenity was broken by the shuddering
whump
of rotors, as the helicopter followed the road, three hundred feet above the ground.
El Rey
glanced at it and figured he had about twenty to thirty seconds. That would be more than enough time. He opened the garage, stepped inside and hefted his insurance policy to his shoulder. He was hoping they might miss the ATV out front, but wasn’t betting on it. Fifteen seconds later, the chopper was hovering fifty feet from the house, slowly dropping in altitude in preparation to land. When it was a hundred feet off the ground, the aircraft exploded in a molten orange fireball, dropping and crashing into the rocky soil beyond the road. A second explosion of the fuel tanks rattled the house windows, and then all that remained was an inky-black column of oily smoke rising from the wreckage.