He sighed his relief. “Okay. And I’ve got a wig for you...” He pulled it out of a bag he’d retrieved from one of the buses, along with sunglasses and a cloth hat.
“Nice,” she said, putting them on. “Nobody would recognize me in this.”
“Just try to disguise your voice if we go past the border guard you were talking to when we came across the border,” he added. She’d talked so well that the border guard had sensed nothing wrong about Raines and his pretend girlfriend. He’d been very nice.
“Good idea,” she agreed. She looked around. “But where is the product?” she persisted.
“You’ll see.” He looked at his watch. “Time to go. I’ll drive the lead bus, you follow.”
She sighed. “Okay. If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.” He waved her to the bus behind the one he entered.
Josie got behind the wheel and started the bus. She glanced in the rearview mirror at all the worried faces of her passengers. “Que esta pasando aqui?” she asked in Spanish, quickly. When nobody answered to tell her what was happening, she added, “No tengan miedo, soy una amiga. Quiero ayudaros a todos.” She wanted them to know she was a friend.
Finally, a female voice came from just behind her. “Por favor, salvanos,” it whispered. “Estamos en un buen lio...!” It was just as Josie suspected—they were in real trouble.
At that very moment, the burner phone in Josie’s pocket rang. She pulled it out, only then remembering that she’d already given the number to Raines.
“You ready?” he asked curtly.
“Yes. I was just making sure I knew how the controls worked,” she added.
“All right. Keep close. When we get to the border station, let me do the talking.”
“Sure thing,” she said.
He hung up. She looked back at the poor tourists. “No tengan miedo,” she assured the people, who seemed to relax just a little. She started the bus, still confused about the shipment. She wanted to call in local backup, but without knowing where the drugs were located, that was impossible. Even worse, it would take time if she tried to involve the Mexican authorities. She was over here in no official capacity that would help her. She’d managed to find time on the bus to use her burner phone to call her unit and get down to the border crossing where Raines had them flown. They could track her burner phone. But it was going to take time that she didn’t have. It was going to be very, very close. This time, her luck might have run out.
They drove down the dusty dirt road but not toward the border patrol station. Raines went in a totally different direction. This was going to throw Josie’s plans into real disarray, she thought with faint panic. Her team would be near the patrol station that Josie and Raines had come across, and she wouldn’t be able to get through to them in time to change their plan. This seemed as if they were taking a far more eastern route to some unknown crossing. She wondered if this was Raines’s idea or their boss’s. All she could do now was keep her wits and be ready to improvise if she had to.
On and on they drove. They’d arrived in Mexico in late morning, but it was getting on in the afternoon. What if Raines carried on until dark? She had no idea where she was, and she worried that even GPS might have blind areas this far away from any village. It was suddenly the darkest mission she’d ever had to deal with.
Finally, they crossed the river on a rinky-dink bridge that threatened to fall in as the buses clanked across it, and they wereapparently in the States again. She had to find out where they were before she could alert her team, and even before that, she had to find out where the product was hidden. It was going to be a very long day.
Raines stopped suddenly on the side of the road near a large stretch of open land with nothing but scrub and cactus. She was about to get out and ask what he was doing when there were suddenly three huge black vehicles barreling down the road toward them.
Her heart skipped. Just for a moment she thought her team had found her. But that assumption was quickly erased when the vehicles stopped close to the buses. Armed men, obviously Hispanic, jumped out, automatic weapons in hand.
Raines greeted them and indicated the buses. They nodded. The first bus was being unloaded, the “tourists” with arms risen herded to the side of the road.
Josie felt absolute panic. Too many armed men for one woman to fight. And who were these men? They weren’t her boss’s people; she knew that immediately. They wouldn’t have been pointing guns at her as this one big man was suddenly doing.
“Out, with your hands up,” he said curtly, and in English, motioning with a small submachine gun.
She wasn’t stupid enough to disobey. She had to take it step by step and find a way to deal with it.
Raines was grinning from ear to ear as he reached behind her for the pistol in her pancake holster. He tossed it to one of the men. He laughed at Josie’s shock. “These are Vega’s men,” he said proudly. “And that’s Mr. Vega himself.” He indicated a short man holding a pistol on them.
“Velasquez treated me like an idiot, but Vega saw the genius of my plan. What I’ll get for giving him this shipment, plus what I’ll have for the calves I infiltrated with more drugs, will set me up for life! I’m going to be richer than...”
He stopped and looked down at his stomach. He’d heard a shot, but only after the impact, like something hitting his stomach, like a huge fist in his gut.
He looked up, uncomprehending, at the man who’d shot him and at Josie, who was staring with faint horror.
“Traitors can never be trusted,” the man said simply.
Raines dropped to the dirt road, cold dead.
