“Shit,” I hear Laz say under his breath.
One shot. I watch as the team’s determined, hard faces squirm with worry, their steady breaths deepen. On missions, it’s about watching and waiting for that perfect moment, calculating the right time to attack. Rush a compound too soon or too late and Black Angels come home in body bags. I look out the warehouse windows. The sky is streaked pink as the sun dips into the west; the world is darkening, and with it, our chances of bringing my mom and dad home alive.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Icy goose bumps prick my skin. The truck’s walls are cold and hard but I refuse to dig into my bag to find a sweatshirt. It’s a waste of time to do anything but study these files as we drive to the ranch.
I pull up the map of the property. The red dots represent a guard. One on each side of the barn, eight guards around the house, one patrolling the guest house and pool house. The plan is to hit at 8:30 when most of the guards will have gone inside for dinner. The barn will still be surrounded and the guards will eat with their weapons on their laps, ready for any sign of trouble. If we have any chance of getting everyone out of there alive, we have to be quick and we have to be quiet.
My fingers swipe right across the tablet and into the weaponry file. The guards are carrying Heckler & Koch MP5s. My mind quickly flips through its mental database of guns. MP5 … German, developed in the sixties, the most widely used submachine gun in the world, powerful, but not as accurate as the M4 carbines we carry.
I flip through to Torres’s file; his cold, dark eyes stare back at me and a shiver runs through my freezing body. I scan his profile. Fifty-two years old. Four children. One wife. One mistress. Three brothers. One in jail, one overseeing cartel operations in South America, and one stationed in Central America. Five suspected residences. Billion-dollar drug enterprise. Twenty bodyguards. Six years in the Colombian army.
The next stat stops me cold. I pull the tablet closer to my face and read it over and over again. Am I hallucinating? Every muscle in my body tightens and my head throbs with the implausibility of what I’m reading. But I read it again. Foreign Black Angel agent. Five years.
“What the hell is this?” I ask, my voice on the verge of shaking. I look up from my tablet. Luke and Sam continue working behind their monitors. Laz and Cooper are inspecting each weapon, snapping magazines and ammunition into place.
“What the hell is what?” Sam asks without stopping her typing.
“Foreign Black Angel agent,” I spit out. “Torres was a foreign Black Angel agent? This is a typo, right?”
Cooper and Laz look up from the weapons. Sam and Luke stop typing. Silence expands in huge rings around us until it fills the entire truck. Everyone stares at me, their mouths tight, waiting for someone to explain.
“Someone tell me this is a mistake,” I say, my eyes bouncing from one tense face to the next.
Laz clears his throat and runs his right hand along his long, smooth braid. “It’s true. Seventeen years ago, Torres was a foreign Black Angel agent. Like me. He was one of us.”
His confirmation knocks every last molecule of oxygen from my lungs and sends my entire body backward. I hit my head against the steel wall, shake it out, and breathe again. “Are you serious?” I ask, even though it’s clear from their anxious eyes, they are telling the truth.
Laz slowly nods. “Santino and I were from the same town. Knew each other in school. Rose up the ranks of the Colombian military and were both recruited by the Black Angels in our twenties to be foreign agents. He was my partner for five years. I went on more missions with him than I can count. He was an amazing fighter. One of the best foreign agents they’d ever had. And then one day after a big mission in South America, he just disappeared. Took about half a million dollars’ worth of guns and ammunition and equipment from the agency and went rogue.”
“He went completely underground and didn’t surface for another three years,” Sam continues, biting at her thumbnail between thoughts. “We knew about a rising drug lord in Colombia known as the Hammer, but we had no idea it was him until the National Security Agency put two and two together. We should have killed him then when we still had the chance but he grew too powerful. Took everything he knew from the Black Angels and applied it to his criminal enterprise. He even calls his guards the White Angels, just to rub it in our faces.”
“I don’t understand,” I reply, my voice fighting to rise out of its stunned fog. “How could he have spent all that time as a Black Angel and then turn on everyone?”