Chapter Twenty-One: Part Three
JC rejoined the party after stripping off his camouflage overalls. Dom caught his eye and JC shrugged, folding his hands in a gesture of prayer. Dom nodded and watched Juan-Carlos walk over to his mother. She grinned at him. ‘I think I nearly broke my foot on his nuts.’
He had to give his mother a joyful hug, saying, ‘I am so glad you got to sink it in, Mama Bear. Perfect timing. We’ve done our best. Nat says it’s a six in ten chance that he has the self-preservation to walk.’
The rest of the party was oblivious to the excitement and enjoyed the function, celebrating their new firm and their first large-scale outside contract. Kate noticed McDonough give a nodding smile to Dominique when he saw his project already on a workstation screen. It was clear to her that as well as Douglas’s loyalty, there was another agency at play. Kate thought for a moment before coming to the happy conclusion that it was a good thing. Their connections would help to secure the work. Their talented team would complete it and recruit more.
She sensed Dom and looked up to see him winking at her, almost as if he were acknowledging her conclusions. Get out of my head! she yelled to him in her mind. He looked back at her with his generous smile and winked again, making her shake her head before she burst out laughing. That’s it. Natalie is teaching me how to do that, she decided.
It was almost inevitable that as the late night became early morning, many of the IES staff were too excited by the new project to go home. A certain type of mind thrills to a challenge, and Rick and Kate’s team was made up exclusively of such minds. After the other VIPs and guests had departed, workstations lit up as they made real the thoughts and ideas that had been brewing all evening. Sitting quietly with Dom and Natalie, Douglas McDonough stayed and watched his project reforming before his eyes. They all marvelled at Kate’s memory for details as she explained the finer elements of each aspect of the development’s requirements to the team. At 3:30am, Rick and Kate held a meeting, discussing and assigning jobs for the coming week. Rick then made the executive decision to close for the night, telling everyone there not to come in before midday on Monday. They were reluctant to leave the energy of the room, despite the time, and he knew he was wasting his breath. They’ll probably come in tomorrow, he thought, smiling to himself. We need to add a dorm as soon as possible, with a gym and lounge.
Rick drove the amigas back to their apartment, and all four were asleep within minutes of laying their heads on their pillows.
~~~~~
Juan-Carlos roused to his alarm a little before 5:00am. By quarter past, he was stretched, showered and moving, dressed in very ordinary clothes and looking like any night-shift process worker heading home. He read a message on his phone and started walking. Silvio’s car and briefcase were in a long term parking garage near the airport, but his phone and wallet were in the seedy outskirts of the red-light district. At least he was smart enough not to go home, JC thought.
Using a small direction finder, he was able to approximate the tag in Silvio’s wallet to the third floor, agreeing with Silvio’s phone. Good enough.
He went into a pay-by-the-hour motel opposite, renting a room facing Silvio’s. A scantily clad working girl knocked on his door and joined him soon after. She nodded to him whilst kicking off her ridiculously high platform shoes. Sitting on the only chair in the room, she took a novel from her bag. When the time was right, she would get on the bed and make the appropriate sounds.
Juan-Carlos felt a little surge of righteous satisfaction when Silvio came lurching out a little while later, obviously still in significant pain and moving carefully. Shortly after Silvio left, a greying man with a strong Spanish accent, bad acne scars on his cheeks, and a burn-crippled hand bribed a clerk for a key to Silvio’s room. Discretion had a price in this part of town.
Searching Silvio’s room carefully, JC looked under a bedside table and swore as he removed a hand grenade from its hiding place. It was an ugly and efficiently lethal device. He took a few more minutes to complete his methodical search – there could always be more devices – and then he stopped to analyse Schivello’s psychological profile and what he’d found. Satisfied, JC set to operating on the bomb. He worked carefully for almost fifteen minutes, returning the still-live grenade back into its original hiding place and smiling grimly as he left the room. Juan-Carlos had turned the bomb into one of a soldier’s worst nightmares, a grenade that would detonate almost instantly instead of after its normal four-second delay.
A half hour later, he was back in his room and cleaning off the last of the glue that had puckered his skin so badly to simulate the acne scarring. A few minutes later, the balding night worker with extremely thick glasses and lots of hair in his ears slapped his room key on the front desk and walked on, smacking his prostitute’s bum on the way out. The clerk didn’t even bother to look up. JC rode a bus to a shopping mall, walked through it and got into a car on the other side of the mall without it actually stopping.
Edison looked at his son with a raised eyebrow.
‘M26 in The Prick’s room,’ JC said. ‘I lightened it a bit for him.’
‘Risky. How short?’
‘Real short. Everything in the room says he’s doing a runner but he went out light. Sean is on him.’ His phone vibrated and he looked at the screen. ‘Speak of the devil… Shit-head!’ JC swore.
He looked at the phone again and read the text message aloud for Edison. ‘2 x full 10 litre plastic jerry cans, 2 x duct tape, 1 x takeaway breakfast, 1 x bad walk. Rental car – hybrid, heading back.’
Hitting a speed dial, he said tersely, ‘Action, two fuel cans and an M26 … Thank you.’ The call terminated and he said to his father, ‘You going topside?’
Edison nodded, signalling over his shoulder to indicate JC’s small tactical bag. ‘The other one is in the back. It stinks too much to have in here.’
JC grimaced. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered with the shower.’
Thirty minutes later, another of the city’s drunk and invisible homeless was sleeping his addiction away under a bush in the small park opposite the amiga’s apartment building. A briefing came over the radio an hour later. The girls and Rick were staying put. There were five of them around the building, including JC on the ground and Edison on a nearby roof.
The day passed unremarkably. Late in the afternoon, JC staggered around a bit, relieving himself near a footbridge to the vocal disgust of some joggers. They quickly retreated when he turned to show them a mouth full of rotting teeth, spittle flying as he ranted. A police officer responding to the joggers’ complaint challenged him. The policeman really did not want to touch him, and offered him the option of leaving or going to jail. The drunk staggered off, limping in the general direction of Alberto’s and muttering incoherently to himself. The officer was sure he could still smell the vagrant’s stench in his clothes hours later.
~~~~~