TATE
We move in the dark.
Four vehicles, two from each club, anonymous and untraceable, the kind of transport Cable had sourced through channels I don’t ask about and don’t need to. No cuts, no patches, nothing that identifies us as anything other than men moving through the Mexican night toward something that needs doing.
The hacienda sits twenty-five miles outside the city.
Cable is in my ear.
“Three minutes to the perimeter.” His voice is completely calm, the focused stillness of a man doing what he does best from two thousand miles away in a Vegas back room with four screens and a burner phone. “Outer security rotation is at the far east corner. You’ve got the window.”
Quill is in the seat beside me, Hawke behind us, already focused, already reading the dark outside the window the way he reads everything, methodically and without missing anything.
I look at Quill.
He gives me a single nod.
In the vehicle behind us, Rhyder, Torch, and Trigger sit in the focused silence of men who have been waiting for this for a very long time and are done waiting.
“Smoke on my mark. Outer ring goes down first. Quiet.”
I check my weapon.
“Mark.”
The smoke grenades go in through the east wall blind spot, three of them, low and precise, professional grade, and the outer security goes down in under two minutes, some neutralizedcompletely, others zip-tied where they fell, none of them loud about it.
The eleven-minute window.
We move through it.
The north wall blind spot opens onto a service path that runs along the back of the main building, with terracotta tile, low lighting, and the sound of the ocean beyond the rear wall doing its constant thing. Moving with Luke on my left and Flame on my right, Quill two steps behind me and Hawke beside him, the focused calm arrives that always comes when everything planned for months collapses into the single point of right now.
“Main building, second corridor, third door on the left. All three of them. They’ve been in there for forty minutes. Meeting’s still running.”
All three of them, Clemente, Lawrence, and the unknown figure Cable had been tracking for weeks.
What we’re walking toward is still uncertain.
Only that it needs to end.
We split at the corridor junction, Rhyder going right with Torch and Trigger behind him, moving toward the east wing where Cable had tracked Lawrence’s secondary location before the meeting started. The instruction is simple.Find him. Finish it.
Quill and I go left with Luke, Flame, and Hawke, toward the meeting room, toward Clemente.
The door opens fast, one movement, and Luke’s boot and the frame splintering, and then we are inside. The room is exactly what Cable’s intelligence told us it would be. A table, chairs, a laptop open to one side, the ordinariness of a powerful man conducting business in his own home.
Three men.
Clemente is on his feet immediately, that instinct of a man who has survived this long by never being caught sitting downwhen danger arrives, his dark eyes moving fast across the room, calculating and assessing.
Lawrence is beside him, older and heavier than remembered, with the look of a man who has been living well on borrowed time and has just run out of it, his face going white the moment he sees us.
And the third man.
Standing at the far end of the table, with a dark beard, an expensive shirt, and that way of holding himself, contained and controlled, the stillness of someone who has been trained to stay calm in situations that aren’t calm at all.
Something tugs at the edge of recognition, but there is no time for it.
