The Harbinger of Change Read online

  As Bill cleared the guard shack, he looked to make sure his parking spot was open. Some wise guy had parked there last week, and when he got back from lunch, he had to park in the handicapped spot. Of course, that should never happen again, as Bill had had what could be referred to as a “bitch fit” on his staff.

  It was maybe two football fields to his spot, and he saw it was open, as it should be. He sat and finished the song on volume eight. As Petty was singing the last chorus, Bill felt a major explosion. Simultaneously, he observed a shower of debris blast the zone immediately in front of the fountain plaza. Anyone standing there would have been killed!

  He turned his car off quickly and immediately heard what the blaring Tom Petty song had been drowning out: the Homeland Security alarm was sounding. Leaving his keys in the ignition with his car door open, he ran toward the front of the building, gun drawn. It was a job requirement that he always carry his gun. Having all the defense secrets he did, he could become an easy target for a foreign or domestic enemy. Bill always took the approach that he never knew when he might need it, so why not have it?

  As he approached the blown-out entrance, he looked at the front and saw an employee he recognized stumble out the mutilated glass doorframe. It was Nancy Chavez, and she was barefoot? What in God’s name is going on?

  Chavez staggered out, obviously stunned by the explosion. She looked around, terrified. She seemed to have a thin purse strapped over her shoulder, but other than that, she was displaying only confused behavior. She saw Bill and called his name: “Bill, help me. I’m hurt!”

  He holstered his weapon and immediately ran to her aid, grabbing her, just as she seemed to collapse once he made it there. Bill was holding her close to him, trying to make it to the ornate pool where there were some benches. He started asking, “What happened?” when suddenly, she spun away. She was holding his gun, which was now pointed at him.

  * * *

  Pablo’s office was so huge that it literally took up the whole corner of the second floor. By preference, his office was all glass. Literally everything in his office except the chairs was glass, and his view of the Guaya River was perfect. He loved to watch the moving water of a river, as it took him back to times where his life still held a thread of family, where they were all playing together, ignorant of the vicious world.

  This particular company he owned made ball bearings, and even though he had this office, it was only the second time he had ever been here. The employees were looking terrified upon his arrival, all except his secretary, who really ran the place and was paid handsomely for it. Well, this will certainly remind them that the owner does have a face.

  He looked in the corner at the suitcase he had purchased earlier. They called it a suitcase in the description, anyway, but it looked more like some cocaine-processing equipment than what it was advertised as.

  Pablo’s mind wandered, and his thoughts were soon on the past again. Although he never could have known exactly what transpired with Julio, he recreated his uncle’s life as much as he could in order to get a better understanding of the truth, and through that knowledge, get some kind of closure.

  He let his mind become his uncle’s and he relived that day, a day in which a Manuel was involved in a wholesale slaughter—one that triggered this whole madness. His mind was now completely in the past, fused with all the information he had. He created a matrix in his mind about how that day and the following months went for his uncle. With all the information available to him and his ability to never forget facts, Pablo was able to mentally become Julio and try to sort things out.

  In one of those scenarios, he pictured Julio sitting back and drinking a cerveza (he loved cerveza), while watching Francisco’s men pack. As predicted by his brother, Julio found himself almost immediately in the company of all the wrong people. But he was not a thief or a drug addict, so one day while performing menial work at the local Mercado, a man he had come to know asked if he wanted to make some real money. The job was to take a package to this guy and bring a package back, no questions asked. So he did it. His compadre paid him a month’s salary, and that was it: he was hooked. He suspected that the package was coca, but he really didn’t care.

  One day he was delivering a package, and the customer took the package without making payment. Julio told his employers what had happened, and was afraid they would take it out on him, as he didn’t even fight for it. This particular thief was not the type to tangle with unarmed. They calmly got the story out of him, and he made it to the part he didn’t want to tell. He let them know what the man said, although the words crept out of his mouth with much fear, “You know where to find me, if you have the nerve to try.”

  Amazingly, that was the end of it. Francisco actually apologized to him before he was allowed to leave.

  The next day the news was everywhere he went: some gang in Quito had been wiped out in a military-style raid the night before—all of them! Authorities say the raid looked to be carried out in military fashion, but they could not speculate on suspects. He had heard the name of the gang that ripped him off mentioned as the victims of the attack.

  Julio knew right then that his employers were not just some street thugs who sold coca. They were some very dangerous people. His conviction of this was reinforced when they armed him with a machine gun and trained him how to use it.

  As far as he could tell, their core group was nine people strong. They had many underlings coming and going, but there were nine leaders. And now, all the underlings came to Julio, who they had reassigned. The gang was odd in that they didn’t want a street name or notoriety. All they truly seemed to desire was autonomy.

  They were wise in ways that street gangs usually weren’t. Julio suspected they were all in the military together at one point, especially with the way they saluted their leader occasionally, seemingly without realizing it. It was like a habit one has performed for so long that occasionally, no matter how hard one tries to the contrary, it comes out.

  Francisco Zeledon was a majestic-looking man, and he often had a pipe in his mouth, which made him look a lot like a puppet dictator in some banana republic, complete with a Castro beard. But that’s where the similarity ended, as he had no designs to run other people’s lives. His dreams simply involved a beach, girls, and an unending stream of money and rum. The only problem was, they couldn’t get a direct buy with the Shimmering Way and therefore, he could not advance in the ranks to obtain that beach dream.

  Quito was becoming more violent, and the government had been under scrutiny to control it. Some of their recent exploits had people talking about a secret army unit. That didn’t help, but Francisco insisted there was no way those little Shimmering Way cockroaches were going to get away with blocking their path to riches.

  The break they were looking for finally came. They got word of a mule-team (both kinds, man and beast) heading to Gualaquiza. With that, Francisco decided they were going to put themselves on the map. He announced to the group, “If the Shimmering Way Zealots won’t sell to us, then we’ll take it from them!”

  Francisco gave the word to pack up for a trip. They were going to start making their futures, rather than waiting for it to happen. Hell, if they’re lucky, maybe they could even blame some of this on their enemies.

  * * *

  “Give me your car keys, Bill!”

  “I don’t know where they are,” he lied. Her reaction was a bullet that ripped Bill Westinghouse’s left knee apart. Not only that, Bill had a.45 caliber weapon, so the impact also threw him to the ground like a linebacker just laid a heavy tackle on him. Lying on the ground, writhing in pain, screaming, he yelled, “What the fuck, Nancy!?”

  Vera yelled, “I will ask you again. Where are your car keys, Bill?”

  His reply was not immediate, but it was truthful, for he could tell another bullet was coming right away for a wrong answer. He yelled over the alarm, “They’re still in my car.”

  Bill’s Hummer was like his ego: overinfla
ted. But right now, she was glad that it was the closest available civilian equivalent to a tank. The person who had designed the guard shack had taken a lot of precautions. As soon as the Homeland Security alarm was triggered, steel poles three feet in diameter shot up out of the exits like the middle blockers on a pinball game. No vehicle of any kind could penetrate it.

  The only thing they had forgotten (and Vera was sure they would be fixing this in future) was that the back side of the guard shack had only the standard steel poles that were used in parking lots everywhere to protect things. That was all that was guarding it, and the engineers had only put four of them in, all toward the center. The front of the shack had no poles, but it did have a massive black marble rock that weighed several tons in front, on the ornate lawn.

  Vera had assessed long ago that a vehicle on a slightly angled trajectory could circumvent the poles and blast right through the shack itself. On the other side there was an angled gap between the steel bumper and the side rampart of the rock. The only difference now was she had worked it out using her SUV as the model, not this tank.

  Plus, in her vehicle, she had her air bags disabled so she could take the impact facing forward. Now she was going to have to do it in reverse in a strange car. Why not? I can’t even see the Grid anymore I’m so far off it!

  She was pretty sure that there was still enough room, even driving this monument to excess. She backed it out and swung it hard toward the entrance, giving it enough gas to get the job done, but not so much as to be out of control, unfortunately for the two guards inside. She lined it up and at the last second shifted her posture correctly to take the impact with her spine straight. There was no time for those inside to react. The Hummer hit the shack at forty miles per hour and vaporized the entire building in an instant. The Hummer swayed and wobbled, but Vera soon righted it. She power-braked and was free after scraping the sides of the known barriers. She left a trail of broken humans and debris as she disappeared into the day.

  Two side air bags went off, and the back window shattered. But the bigger problem currently was that her wig, clothes, and ID’s were all in her car. She didn’t even have shoes!

  * * *

  Gualaquiza was a typical remote South American village. The inhabitants were mostly what Julio called “Indians.” They were simple indigenous people who had learned how to scratch out an existence with what the jungle provided. One of the mules Francisco employed was from this village, and he said that the Shimmering Way used this place as a major hub. No one in this town would speak a word about them though—not only from fear, but also out of respect, for they gave money to schools and orphans.

  The news was that the Shimmering Way’s mule team would be coming in on April 7, 2003. As Julio suspected, the members of his unit were exceptionally trained. They had arrived on the 5th, but not together. They all had different identities and different reasons for being in town. Julio and Francisco were there to buy gold, as Francisco was a jewelry maker in Quito. Once they had made their first purchase of gold from a local vendor, no one had given them a second look.

  Meanwhile, Francisco’s trained recon-men were figuring out the trade routes both in and out of Gualaquiza. Once they found the spot, it was a matter of organizing the rendezvous. Julio studied the map, and Francisco’s men were very systematic. There were dots on the map indicating where each of his men were to be positioned, selected to maximize destruction and take away any possible cover the enemy might try to obtain. There was also an “X” on the map. It was right in middle of the ravine they chose, and it marked the planned spot of attack. Once the mules reached that spot, all hell was going to break loose.

  Francisco’s men found the perfect ravine for the job. It had high jungle on both sides and ran deep from the jungle floor, stopping at a tributary. Anyone coming from Peru to Gualaquiza would have no choice but to take this route. It left little in the way of cover for people who became trapped just inside its maw.

  Once the water was crossed, the Shimmering Way would enter the bottom of the ravine where it was two hundred yards wide, quickly narrowing to two hundred feet wide at the top. That is where Francisco’s unit would attack, some three hundred yards in.

  Julio had never killed anyone before, and the thought weighed on him. Sure, he’d been in fights, but carrying tiles up and down ladders all day gave one a certain strength that others might not possess. So all of his fights were short with him ending as the winner, but with fists, not bullets. This was happening way too fast, and he knew this type of behavior wasn’t him. He was not a killer.

  Sure enough, on April 7, just as their intelligence report indicated, the mule team approached with ten mules and ten men, all with AK-47s slung over their shoulders. They were hard men, as Julio could detect through his field glasses. They were men for hire, mercenaries, and soldiers of fortune. They certainly meant business by the looks of them, but so did Francisco’s men. The fight was to be short and sweet, just as anticipated.

  Once their enemy entered the bottleneck and arrived at the attack point, Francisco’s men attacked with everything they had and wiped them out quickly, allowing no reaction time. It wasn’t like the movies at all. From their ten vantage points (nine really as Julio refused to kill), they opened-fire simultaneously. The traffickers never knew what hit them. The men were all dead along with half the mules, in a matter of twenty-five seconds. The other were animals unable to flee, for lack of ability to drag off their dead and tethered brethren, and just belted out a sickening sound that Julio never knew such beasts could make. He found it creepy.

  He never fired a shot from his position, and he stayed put when it was time to get down to the bottom of the ravine to reap the rewards. It was better than they could have ever hoped for. The street value of the haul was over “ten million U.S.,” he heard Francisco yell.

  The mules’ bags were emptied and a Hummer was brought in to haul it all away. As they were nearly done loading it, one of the men dropped a bag a little too hard. Francisco called out to “be careful!” He was in the middle of saying that the bags could rupture when half of his head disappeared. A sniper’s bullet had ended his sentence, causing an explosion of head mass that drenched the four people in Francisco’s immediate vicinity.

  After a moment of shock, they all drew their weapons and started to fire into the tree line where they believed the shot came from.

  Suddenly, there was another shot, and another head exploded. Actually, not in that order Julio realized, but it just seemed that way, as everything was happening so quickly. Yet, when his mind broke it down, the head actually went first, before the sound.

  “Sniper!” yelled a man known as Hector before he made a break for it, up and out of the bottleneck. Another shot rang out, and another red explosion erupted. It appeared that Francisco’s men were caught in their own trap. None of them knew where Julio was or that he was even missing. He just had a perfect catbird’s seat to the slaughter—twice in one day.

  One round after another, there was a shot, a red explosion, and retaliatory fire where the suspected shot came from. Their unit was down to three men. They had been taking cover around the Hummer, but Julio could see that the sniper was moving, simply by the angle of the shots, which meant they were sitting ducks, regardless. Julio wanted to remain a live duck, so he stayed out of the fray.

  He could see a plan forming as he observed all three men were talking together. Suddenly, two men ran in different directions. The third man aimed his rifle into the tree line on the ridge. There was a shot, and for the first time, Julio saw someone fall from a non-head shot. It was a kill shot nonetheless, blowing a sickening red spray out the target’s chest, leaving a hole that was visible from the back.

  The second shot caught the other runner at the top of the bottleneck, a good fifty yards from where he had started, the red splash of the headshot punctuating the kill. The third man had seen the shots. After the second one, he had taken careful aim and smoked out the area of the sniper shot
with military expertise, tearing the jungle to pieces with a fusillade of hot metal.

  Julio was fairly sure Francisco’s man had succeeded in killing the sniper. For five tense minutes, time passed without a shot. The last surviving member of his team appeared to be weighing his options. Julio didn’t know who the man was trapped in the ravine, since he was wearing camouflaged face-mesh. But the man had apparently had enough of waiting, and he started to make a crouched move around the front of the Hummer. Then unbelievably, smoke shot out of the bush right in front of Julio. The last man’s head exploded.

  Out of pure survival instinct, Julio raised his rifle and blew the shit out of the bush with the entire clip on his AKS-762 Chinese assault rifle. The bush fell over the ridge crest and into the ravine. Julio had undoubtedly killed the insurance policy the Shimmering Way put on their shipment. I guess that never occurred to Francisco, thought Julio. Pretty costly oversight, he thought as he wretched uncontrollably.

  3—Repercussions

  Vera careened out of the remains of the guard shack with a purpose and made her way east. That was just a scent to throw off pursuers though. Her true path was north. She got on Central Expressway and headed toward San Francisco, a place full of mass transit and mass people. It was easier to hide in a place like San Francisco where even the most outrageous disguise would not draw a second look. They also had a drop car there.

  There were four “drop cars” stored in different locations. Each was either in a twenty-four hour storage unit or a rent-a-shed. All of them had special safe boxes welded in that contained $50,000 in cash, a credit card, a fake passport, a fake ID, and a gun.

  One was in San Francisco, one was in Stockton, one was in San Jose, and the last one was in Santa Cruz. That one was her idea, and it was a crazy, last-chance kind of deal that involved her going through some heavily wooded areas, and then hiking through the backcountry to get to Santa Cruz.