Rising Phoenix Read online

  “Bill Michaels, please.”

  “Bill? It’s Garrett. Please advise the police that Mark Beamon and I are heading up …” he paused and looked to his new ASAC for help. He didn’t get any.

  “Shit, I don’t know. Some road that goes to Limestone.”

  Beamon strained to hear what was being said on the other side of the phone, but it was impossible over the noise of the car. It wasn’t used to being off the asphalt.

  “That’s right. We should hit Limestone in—” he looked at Beamon, who held up six fingers, “—six minutes. I’m driving a blue ’92 Ford Taurus. Tell ’em not to shoot at me.”

  He hung up the receiver.

  The Ford’s suspension did an admirable job on the old road, though the low-slung bottom scraped the ground every few minutes. Each time metal scraped rock, Garrett winced as if he could feel the car’s pain.

  Beamon knew that he wasn’t making points by shaming his new boss into this chase. The thought of a couple of young kids in a squad car coming up against a proven killer didn’t sit well with him, though. And as an added bonus, they’d almost surely miss their meeting.

  “We should be coming up on it pretty soon, so stay sharp. If I remember right, this road’s gonna dead-end into it.”

  Garrett leaned forward slightly, squinting through the dust kicked up by the car’s tires. A low ridge bobbed up and down on their left like a buoy in the ocean. The wail of a siren became barely audible from the north.

  “Shit, it looks like we may be closer than we thought.” Garrett touched the brakes, slowing the car to a little over thirty miles per hour.

  “Sound travels funny out here—that squad car could be anywhere,” Beamon said, trying to sound casual.

  The crossroads appeared in front of them, following a natural gully, and marking the end of the ridge to their left. Garrett pulled the car as far to the left as he could without getting into the rocky soil that guarded the road’s edge, and set up for a hard right turn.

  Just as his hands tightened on the wheel, a dark green car rocketed into their field of vision, heading at a speed that was going to put the front grill of Garrett’s wife’s car into its passenger side door. Beamon’s hands flew instinctively to the dashboard, bracing himself for an impact, as Garrett slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel hard to the right. The tires didn’t bite into the loose dirt and gravel, and the car’s forward momentum continued, back wheels drifting left in a lazy arc.

  It turned out to be just enough to avoid a major collision, and their front bumper only lightly tapped the back of the car in front of them. The impact was enough to send the other car into an exaggerated fishtail, finally slamming its front end into a sturdy rock outcropping along the left side of the road.

  The siren that had seemed to be in front of them turned out to be emanating from a police cruiser coming up quickly behind them. Beamon had been right about sound in the desert—the siren had been reflecting off the low ridge to their left, making it impossible to accurately pinpoint.

  Both men jumped out as the squad car skidded to a stop behind them. Garrett had his FBI credentials held high in the air and was yelling “FBI” at the top of his lungs just in case the police hadn’t gotten the message. He dropped them when a gunshot shattered his wife’s front windshield.

  Beamon jumped for the ditch alongside the road and began crawling toward the police cruiser.

  “Mark, you okay?”

  It was Garrett, yelling through a barrage of gunfire that seemed to be coming solely from the car that they’d just run off the road. Beamon hoped that it was just another acoustic trick, and that the cops hadn’t forgotten their guns too.

  “Yeah. You?” he shouted back.

  “Yeah.”

  By now Beamon was directly below and to the left of the squad car. He could just see the top of its lights from the four-foot-deep ditch that he was lying in.

  “Hey guys,” he shouted to the men above him. “It’s Mark Beamon with the FBI You got a call telling you we were coming, right?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Beamon,” a young voice replied. “You should be okay to come up here.”

  Beamon noted that the shooting had stopped. He struggled to his knees and peeked over the edge of the ditch. As luck would have it, the squad car was turned sideways in the road, and its front fender was only about five feet from his position. The shooter was nowhere in sight, probably huddled behind his car, reloading.

  Beamon jumped out of the ditch and rolled to the squad car, noting sadly that it wasn’t as smooth a ride as it had once been. His headquarters-bred gut caused him to bounce up once every revolution.

  He ended up on his back behind the front wheel of the squad car, looking up into a frightened face.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “So far.” Beamon dragged himself to his knees and began brushing himself off.

  A slightly older cop was peering around the back bumper of the squad car. Beamon’s eyes moved from him to the young cop’s gun.

  The young man followed Beamon’s gaze to his right hand. “Is there something wrong, sir?”

  “Three-fifty-seven with a four-inch barrel,” Beamon observed in a conversational tone that sounded out of place in the eerie silence that had followed the suspect’s initial barrage.

  The young cop didn’t seem to know how to respond to the comment.

  “You know, I only brought an old 38 snubnose with me,” Beamon lied. “I don’t suppose you’d consider lending me yours, and using the shotgun.”

  “No problem, sir” he said, handing the pistol over.

  Beamon .eyed carefully down the sights as the young cop slithered into the car for the shotgun. Early in his career Beamon had been a firearms instructor and one of the best shots in the Bureau. It had been years since he’d spent any meaningful amount of time practicing, but shooting was like riding a bicycle. He figured he’d probably still rank in the top five percent.

  Beamon turned to the cop at the rear bumper. “Can you see anything?”

  “Not really, sir. The suspect’s car is sideways to us with its back wheels in a ditch. It’s about thirty-five yards from us and about fifteen from your car. He must just be sitting behind it. Can’t really go anywhere without walking right out into the open.” The cop moved back to let Beamon take a look. The name tag on his uniform read O’ROURKE.

  Peering around the back bumper, Beamon could see Garrett about forty feet in front of him, back pressed against a rock outcropping. He didn’t look happy as he stared back, arms crossed in front of him.

  “You okay there, Steve?”

  His boss replied with an obscene gesture.

  Beamon leaned back against the tire of the car and took a deep breath. The two police officers looked hopefully at him, obviously grateful to relinquish command of the situation.

  “What’re you hearing about backup, guys?”

  “Ten or fifteen minutes,” O’Rourke replied.

  Beamon grimaced. The smart move, he knew, would be to just wait for the troops. That plan of action had one rather serious flaw, though. He wasn’t looking forward to being found covered in dirt and hiding behind the tire of a squad car. All in all, that would be only marginally better than being shot in the ass.

  “Look, Bud,” he yelled in the general direction of the suspect’s car, “it’s four against one now and the odds aren’t gonna get any better for you. Why don’t you just come out from behind the car with your hands on your head, and we’ll put an end to this before they bring in those fucking SWAT prima donnas.”

  He peeked back around the bumper to see if his speech had any effect. For a moment there was nothing. Then a single shot rang out. Beamon whipped his head back behind the car. The two cops looked disappointed.

  When his heart slowed down enough for his brain to start functioning again, Beamon realized that the suspect had never appeared from behind the car. What was he shooting at? He let that compute for a minute.

  “I do believe t
hat man just shot himself,” he said finally, mostly to himself. Expressions of disappointment were replaced by expressions of hope on the faces in front of him.

  “Why don’t one of you guys go check it out.”

  O’Rourke adjusted his gun in his hand and began to make his way toward the back of the car. Beamon stuck a foot out, blocking his path.

  “That was a joke, son. Geez, you guys need to lighten up.”

  “I’d be happy to go, sir.”

  Beamon believed him.

  “Nah, it was my play. I’ll go. You guys cover me.”

  He poked his head out one last time, and seeing that it was clear, ran to Garrett’s position behind the rock.

  “What do you think?” Garrett asked, arms still folded. He looked like he was getting ready for a siesta.

  “I think the guy might have shot himself, actually.”

  “Great! When’s our backup getting here?”

  “Ten minutes or something. I think I’m gonna go around and take a look, though.”

  Garrett didn’t seem excited about that strategy. “You really think that’s smart, Mark?”

  The truth was that he didn’t, but he’d never let that stop him before. “No fucking way I’m gonna be found hiding from a corpse.”

  With that, he began moving slowly away from the rock, eyes focused intently on the car in front of him. In his peripheral vision, he could see that the two policemen had their guns out over the hood of their car.

  He gave the suspect’s Buick a wide berth, moving silently around it. When the area behind the car started to come into view, he wanted to have at least thirty yards between him and the shooter. He may be a touch rusty, but there still weren’t that many people who could outshoot him at that distance.

  The dirt road behind the suspect’s car slowly came into view as Beamon continued circling to the left. He concentrated on staying relaxed and breathing evenly.

  A motionless foot appeared and Beamon froze. He waited for a couple of minutes, watching for movement. Satisfied that there was none, he began edging left again, keeping his eyes locked on the leg that was slowly appearing. Even from this distance, it was obvious that the dirt next to the man was discolored and slightly reflective. Beamon quickened his pace, bringing the man into full view. He was dead.

  He relaxed his grip on the .357 and walked up to the car. The top of the suspect’s head was missing, and a 9mm pistol had been dropped in the dust next to a still-smoking crack pipe. Beamon ignored the pistol, focusing on the man’s right leg. Everything below the knee was missing.

  “He’s dead!”

  Garrett appeared from behind his rock. O’Rourke and his partner stood up from behind the car, still pointing their guns in the general direction of the Buick.

  Beamon continued to stare at the suspect’s stump of a right leg. “Uh, was there anything unusual about the description of this guy when it came over the radio?”

  They two policemen looked at each other as they followed Garrett toward the car. “Not really. Male Caucasian, mid-thirties, about six feet.”

  “Is that it?” The front page of a newspaper appeared suddenly in Beamon’s mind, complete with a large unflattering picture of his face. The headline read:

  FBI CHASE CAUSES INNOCENT MAN TO

  COMMIT SUICIDE

  “No, wait a minute. They did say he had a real bad limp.”

  Beamon rushed to the car and dove into the open passenger side door. The front seat was empty. He crawled in, leaning over the seat into the back. He exhaled violently enough to blow the thin layer of dust off the seat in front of him. A paper bag full of cash had been knocked onto the floor between the seats. On top of it sat a prosthetic leg.

  It had been long over a week since Swenson left for Mexico. To relieve the boredom, Hobart had set to updating his financial records and reestablishing contact with his operatives. Unfortunately, after three solid days of-work he’d run out of things to do. After that, the days seemed to last forever.

  The fact that he couldn’t go home, and felt uncomfortable going to places he had regularly frequented before, magnified his idleness. The tastefully decorated walls were beginning to close in on him as he sat in the office, watching CNN and playing chess against the computer.

  When his mind wasn’t fully occupied, he tended to worry. Every day, his thoughts worked through what had occurred thus far. He began with his individual operatives spread out across the U.S. Would they get caught? If they did, would they give him up? It was true that none of them knew where he was or how to contact him, but the loss of his anonymity would sure as hell give the FBI an edge. And what about the FBI? He had worked with them long enough to foster a grudging respect for their tenacity and intelligence.

  Finally his thoughts would turn to Reed Corey. He was finding it difficult not to replay Corey’s escape over and over again in his head. How could he have made such a stupid mistake? He’d gone to Colombia specifically to recruit one of the best military men he’d ever known, and then after meeting with him, had dismissed him as some kind of brain-dead coke fiend.

  What was the old saying? Hindsight is twenty/twenty.

  On the other hand, Hobart didn’t have much respect for the intelligence or professionalism of drug dealers—even the top men sitting in their fortresses in the mountains of Colombia. As far as he was concerned, they were just a bunch of children. Having said that, though, he wasn’t anxious to have them gunning for him.

  And then there was the future. An operation of this scale was bound to have screwups. What would they be?

  Hobart turned back to the chess game glowing on the computer screen. He knew better than to sit around and run endless doomsday scenarios. Pretty soon there would be FBI agents and cartel thugs behind every telephone pole. He tried to focus on his game, but it was becoming more and more difficult.

  It was almost three o’clock when the sound of the telephone broke through the drone of CNN. He snatched it off the desk before the first ring faded. “Clipper City Antiques and Oddities.”

  Swenson’s voice cut through the static of a marginal connection. “How are things going?”

  Hobart glanced at a VU meter next to the phone. It indicated that the line was free of bugs. “Question is, how are things going with you? Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I think so.”

  Hobart frowned deeply. “What do you mean, you think so?”

  “Well, actually I’m ninety-nine percent sure, but it’s all based on circumstantial evidence. Penna gave me a general location for the refinery and told me it was disguised as a private airfield. I found the strip pretty much where he said it’d be, but I can’t get very close ’cause it’s clear-cut. I’m working from about a hundred and fifty yards with a spotting scope—can’t hear any conversations. There’s a pretty big hangar on the property, bigger than they need. No planes ever go into it. Every couple of days, a plane lands. They load it up with a few boxes and off it goes again.”

  “Sounds like what we’re looking for.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it is. They also bring a lot of supplies into the hangar, though they don’t seem to be on as tight a schedule as your friends in South America. Also, I can’t tell how much stuff they’ve got stockpiled ’cause it’s all stored inside.”

  “So are we a go?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve tracked the, uh, items in question to their suppliers, and shouldn’t have a whole lot of problems with access. Their security just doesn’t anticipate this kind of thing. You’d need an army to steal a fucking peso from these bastards, though.”

  That was one of the things they had working for them this early in the game. Drug dealer security was set up to prevent someone from stealing finished product—not to stop someone from introducing something new into the production line.

  “The problem I’m gonna have down here is with timing. I can, uh, do what we proposed within, say, four days of your go-ahead. But I don’t know when it will affect America, if you kno
w what I mean.”

  Hobart smiled. The doomsday scenarios that he’d been creating over the last week didn’t seem to have materialized. At least not yet.

  “That’s not a problem. I should be able to get my timing down to somewhere between five and ten days, so we’ll make the notification coincide with that. You just do the best you can to work within that time frame. If your product is a few weeks late, it’s a few weeks late. Where can I reach you?”

  Swenson gave him the number.

  “I’ll call you on the twenty-second, at three o’clock your time. Stay on top of what’s going on down there.”

  “Don’t worry,” Swenson replied. “Talk to you next week.”

  12

  Bogotá, Colombia,

  January, 22

  Hobart tempered his need for anonymity with his need for sleep and compromised on a slightly nicer hotel this time through Bogotá. While the employees were less forgetful when it came to faces, the bed was a lump-free queen, and the bathroom wasn’t down the hall. Correcting another mistake, he rented a sturdy four-wheel drive at about five times the cost of the puny economy car he had subjected himself to the month before.

  It was 3:55 P.M. Bogotá time, and would be approaching three o’clock in Mexico. He picked up the phone next to the bed—another amenity he was grateful for—and dialed the number Swenson had given him. It was picked up on the second ring.

  “Hello.”

  The combination of street noise floating through his open window and the static on the line made it difficult to hear. “How are things going over there?” he asked in a loud voice.

  “Real good. Just waiting for the go-ahead.”

  “You’ve got it. I’m going tomorrow night. I should be back home sometime the day after.”

  It was difficult to tell if the sound coming through the line was a heavy sigh or just another wave of static.

  “It’ll be good to get this over with and get home. I’ll see you in a couple of days.”