Brad Taylor - The Polaris Protocol

I feigned surprise, saying, “Sorry, we didn’t know.”

The shorter one said, “Papers.”

Must have learned English watching old World War II movies.

Jennifer watched the exchange with wary eyes, listening to her voice mail. The taller one tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Stop phone.”

She complied, shrinking behind me, saying nothing. I pulled out my wallet, letting them see the crisp twenty-dollar bills they could exchange on the black market. I withdrew one and said, “This paper?”

He took it, glancing at his partner, saying again, “Papers.”

Perfect.

His partner tapped Jennifer and said, “Give phone.”

She looked at me, and I held out another twenty, saying, “Here’s more ‘paper.’”

The shorter one took it while the taller one said, “Give phone. Not allowed.”

What the hell is he talking about? I knew the cellular rules, and we were meeting them. We were on their network and paying their taxes. More than likely, he wanted the iPhone lookalike just because he thought he could hold us up. Since it was working in Turkmenistan, he thought it was unlocked and something he could now use for himself. Unfortunately, it was actually a special piece of Taskforce equipment, and I wasn’t going to allow him to have it.

I pulled out another twenty, looking at the smaller man and saying, “Here, go buy your own.” The tall one grabbed Jennifer’s arm that held the phone. She jerked it away and took a step back.

The shorter one took the twenty. The taller one pulled out a baton like he was drawing a sword.

Oh shit.

Jennifer saw the weapon and raised her arms in a defensive stance. She did it out of instinct, but the move amped up everything.

I said, “Whoa, whoa, there’s no need for this. Here, take everything we’ve got.”

The smaller one snatched the money out of my hand while the taller one said, “Give me phone.”

Jennifer said nothing, waiting to see what the taller one would do.

He raised the baton, and I stepped forward. The shorter one shouted and jumped back, pulling his own baton. I held up both hands to him, saying, “Stop, stop.”

The taller one cracked me on the shoulder, and that was it. A perfect little bribery now in the toilet. I knelt down from the blow as if it had really hurt, then went in low on the shorter man, knowing the tall one was no longer a threat.

I used a single-leg takedown, throwing him onto his back, then scrambled on top, pinning his arms and crossing my hands into the collar of his wool uniform. I scissored my hands out, the collar cutting the blood flow to his brain. He was out in seconds. His partner wasn’t as lucky.

I turned around to find Jennifer holding his head low and pistoning her knee into his face, his arms flailing uselessly in the air, the baton long gone. His head snapped back after the contact and he collapsed unnaturally onto the ground.

I was on him immediately, hissing, “Jesus Christ, Jennifer. You might have killed him.”

I checked his pulse and relaxed when I found it strong. His face was a mess, though. I left the twenties on the ground and stood up.

“Can we get to the damn hotel now?”

She was breathing hard, her hair askew, but her eyes were clear. Not even caring about what had just occurred. “Pike, Jack’s in trouble.”

“You mean like a car wreck or something?”

“No, I mean like bad-guy life-or-death trouble.”

7

The sicario watched the mechanics of his work with detached indifference. The suffering of his chosen target didn’t faze him at all. Like a butcher at the slaughterhouse, he had killed so many living things that it no longer registered as a repulsive task. It was simply work. Unlike the butcher, who killed cleanly and with the ultimate goal of creating food, the sicario drew out the death, with no other goal than that which was dictated by his capo. And he could make it last days if he was told to. A bullet to the head was preferable in his mind, as it was much less messy, but that wasn’t his call. Sometimes, the capo wanted to make a point.

Like today.

He listened to the man beg and plead through the gag strapped to his mouth and reflected on how the times were rapidly changing. As early as a year ago, he could have done this work without any fear of interruption—the violence in Ciudad Juárez was so extreme that nobody would even investigate the screams. The battle that raged for control of the Juárez plaza, as the crossing points into the US were called, had been horrific, giving Ciudad Juárez the unenviable title of the most dangerous city on earth. A year ago there had officially been three thousand screams such as this. He knew there had been many, many more that nobody had heard. Bodies that were yet to be found and tabulated.

But that was then. Now it was prudent to prevent the target from alerting anyone, be it the hated Sinaloa cartel, the authorities, or even some splinter from his employer, the fragmented Zetas cartel. So he used the gag as a precaution.

The sicario watched his wild eyes and the drool from his sobs, believing the man could take one more dip before passing out. To his front was a fifty-five-gallon drum sawed in half and filled with water that raged and bubbled like a mountain river, but not from the force of racing downhill. From the propane stove underneath. His target was hung above it on a winch and had already tasted the pain, his feet burned into a mess of molten plasticlike flesh extending to just above the ankles.

The sicario spoke to the man next to him, a doctor who was paid to keep the targets alive. “One more, and he’ll need to be treated.”

“Yes, yes. He is strong. I can treat him. He won’t die.”

The man was obsequious and obviously afraid. The sicario had seen the doctor glance at him repeatedly, then look away, and had noticed how he trembled when they were close together. The sicario understood why. For one, it was simply the job and his reputation for brutality. Coming from the killing fields of Guatemala, he had taught Los Zetas the art of psychological warfare. Had brought the techniques of beheadings and other public displays of death, instilling fear in the enemy. He had achieved a mythical status among all who had heard of him, but more than that, he knew his real-life visage lived up to the legend.

During a battle in the civil war he had been touched by the volcanic flame of a white phosphorous grenade—a grenade thrown by a fellow Kaibil—and had been burned on his head, losing his eyebrows and leaving his forehead looking like melted wax. They had shaved him in the hospital, and he’d kept that discipline ever since, meticulously shaving every bit of hair off his head. The effect was disconcerting, and he liked it that way. Fewer people to test him.

The sicario watched the target violently shake his head left and right, the spittle from his screams dripping down the cloth of the gag onto his chest. Ignoring the pleading, he lowered the man and the sweet/sour odor of boiling meat permeated the room again, reminding him of his mother’s kitchen, of dinners long ago in Guatemala when he was a child. Before he had joined the Guatemalan Kaibiles Special Forces unit. Before he’d had his humanity sucked out of him like life-giving oxygen from a hole in a space suit.

He intently studied the target’s face, and when his eyes rolled back in his head, he hoisted the man up. It did no good to punish him if he couldn’t feel the effects. As two other men lowered the target to the floor, avoiding the destroyed flesh of his lower legs, the doctor went to work, inserting an IV and treating the burns. The back-and-forth of treatment and pain would go on until the heart stopped. Some men lasted longer than others. The record had been three days, but the sicario didn’t feel this one had that sort of stamina. Two days at the most.