Chapter 121
BEFORE GRABBING COMMANDANT Gomez and Chief Fox, we’d checked into a suite at the Hilton. Mo-bot and Sci rigged a fiber-optic camera at the suite door and linked it to a secure website that we monitored from sixteen blocks away in a shabby house surrounded by a high wall topped with glass shards.
Cordova had rented the house from an old woman who asked no questions when he told her he’d pay five times the going rate if she left us alone.
In shifts we watched the website. For nearly twenty hours after we dropped Gomez and Chief Fox at a hospital, no one entered the Hilton suite except a maid around eleven a.m. on November third.
She looked around, realized no one had used the place, and left.
“You okay?” Justine asked around eight that evening.
I’d been staring obsessively at the screen while everyone ate burritos Cordova had brought in. “I wish you and the others would take my offer.”
“We’re not going to leave you here to deal with de la Vega alone, Jack,” she said. “Just not happening.”
“This was my idea,” I reminded her. “And I’m beginning to think it was a bad one, that de la Vega might go Scarface somehow, and that I may have put us all in his crosshairs unnecessarily.”
Justine laid her hand on my shoulder. “We’re all in this together, Jack. We’re seeing this through together.”
But with every passing minute I was becoming more and more on edge. Time gives an opponent a chance to come up with a countermove. Had I given them too much time?
“Shit,” Mo-bot said.
“Double shit,” Sci said.
I glanced away from the screen. Sci and Mo-bot looked like they were each about to birth a cow. Mo-bot was gesturing wildly at her computer, where bright-orange numbers were blinking—2, 3, and 4—alerting us to the tripping of motion detectors we’d placed inside the wall that surrounded the house and yard.
Someone had found us.
Make that three, maybe four people had found us.
And they had no interest in knocking.