“He might recognize Aaron. The only reason he’s not running right now is you. He doesn’t know you, so he’s thinking he might be wrong about me, but you’re burned now too.”
I said, “Let me call Knuckles forward. Get his team in play. Let’s go to the far side and get eyes on him from across the lake. Make him feel good about staying.”
She said, “He just answered his phone. He’s on the move.”
Chapter 56
Khalil saw the woman embrace a rough-looking man, then kiss him on the lips. Maybe he was wrong, and he was growing paranoid—but that weird alert in the van had been real. Either way, he decided to test his theory. He’d walk deeper into the park and see what they did. If they followed, he’d know for sure.
He felt his phone vibrate and saw it was Omar. He stood up and answered, glancing back at the couple, relieved to see they were paying no attention to him. He started walking, saying, “Hello?”
He saw a wooden causeway split off from the concrete path, going out over the lake before circling back to the path in the wooded area again. It was the perfect way to see if the two people behind him were following him.
Omar said, “I’m ready for pickup. Everything’s complete here.”
Khalil said, “I might have a tail. I’m checking now.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“There’s a woman here who resembles someone I saw in Iguazú, first at the falls and then later, at the Islamic center when you guys arrived. They’re both tourist sites, so I put it down to coincidence, but if she’s now here, in Buenos Aires, it could be trouble.”
“Are you sure about this? Why would they be following you instead of arresting you? They can’t know who you are, or you wouldn’t be walking around.”
He kept walking, quickly turning around to see behind him. The couple was no longer visible on the walkway, but they also weren’t walking behindhim on the wooden path. He said, “Didn’t the Ghost tell you that the people who attacked the drug dealer’s men were women? Women skilled in fighting?”
“He did, but we don’t know what’s actually true. If the women were so skilled in fighting, how did he escape, and why did the police come raid the hotel? Why wasn’t it a bunch of killer females?”
Khalil thought,That’s true. It was the police who came for them, wearing uniforms, not secret Mossad agents wearing skirts.
He reached the apex of the causeway and started heading back towards land, saying, “You’re probably right, but the screen in the van did some weird stuff right before she appeared. Its computer did some initialization I haven’t seen before. Look, just hold what you have there for a little bit. Eat the free food they provide like an expensive businessman. I’ll circle the park and come get you.”
He exited the glade, leaving the foliage behind. He turned on the path and saw two uniformed policemen standing not more than twenty feet away, both staring at him. Into the phone he said, “They’re here. The police!”
Omar shouted, “What? The police arewhere?”
Khalil dropped the phone and threw back his jacket, grabbing the grip of his pistol.
Shoshana said, “He’s on the wooden walkway, headed away from us and still talking on the phone.”
I let her go and turned around, seeing his back disappear around the apex of the causeway, heading back towards land. I said, “Come on. We can catch up to him on the brick path. Let him get off the causeway and see what he does.”
We started moving as fast as we could without causing any undue scrutiny from other passersby, following the path deeper into a grove of trees and losing sight of the causeway. We reached what I judged to be close towhere the causeway met land again, and I slowed, putting my hand on Shoshana’s arm.
I said, “Careful now. We don’t want to run him over.”
I heard a woman scream something in Spanish, then saw a couple running towards us with fear on their faces. They reached us and the man pointed behind him, blathering something I didn’t understand. I heard a gunshot split the air, the sound like a crack of a whip. Another came, and I started running, Shoshana right beside me. We rounded a bend and saw the target crouched over aiming a pistol, a policeman on the ground and another one hiding behind a tree, his own gun out.
They both began firing, a rapid string of bullets, and Shoshana dove into the earth. I followed her to get out of the crossfire, each man shooting wildly. I saw the other policeman’s head snap back and his body collapse to the ground. I drew my pistol and rolled over, firing a double tap from the prone.
Both rounds struck the target in the chest, and I knew they were killing shots. He screamed, staggered back, and tried to turn towards me. Shoshana broke her trigger and his head snapped back, his body falling like a tree to the earth.
The glade grew silent, the smell of gunpowder wafting through the air like a child had set off firecrackers. I scanned for other targets, then leapt up, rushing to the downed men. I shouted to Shoshana, “Search him! Get what you can!”
I checked the first policeman and found no pulse. I ran to the second, took one look at the crack in his skull, his eyes open, and didn’t even bother with the pulse check. Shoshana reached me, saying, “I have a hotel key card, his passport, and the cell.”
I said, “We need to go, right now.”
We took off running back the way we’d come, hopefully acting like the other scared tourists, and she said, “The phone was still connected when I picked it up. Whoever was on the other end heard the fight.”
