Page 70 of Our Tricks

As far as apologies go, I’m pretty sure that was the best I was going to get. “That’s all I’m saying. The more we keep each other in the know, the smoother this is going to work. How can we make a plan when the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing? That shit is going to get someone killed.”

“Mag, she’s right,” Jaxson stated, always the peacekeeper, that one. “We need to work as a full unit, the thirteen of us. If the generals don’t know what’s happening in the battle, then how can the soldiers know what to do? Soon enough, we are going to have an army of people we need to worry about above and beyond ourselves. If we can’t manage that with this small group, what does that say about us?”

“You’ve all made your point,” Magnus grumbled, not at all happy about getting ganged up on.

Out of everyone, he was the first to fly off the handle, and it was driving me crazy. Ghost and Jaxson were on board with the whole idea. Why couldn’t he be?

“Alright, since we don’t have Alvaro with us right now, let’s keep a list of the things we need to go over with him. Cognac, can you keep a running tally of what we need answers to?” I asked.

“Already ahead of you, loba,” Cognac answered with a grin and winked. “I’m not just a pretty face, you know.”

“If anyone ever believed that, then it’s their funeral when they underestimate you,” I agreed and turned back to the map. “So we have one possible location that doesn’t make sense based on other information we know. Have we done any satellite searches of the area around the port? With the amount of product I’m assuming he moves based on the information we have from Diego’s files, he’d need a reliable way to get it to the port quietly.”

Ghost flipped around the laptop he’d been working on, showing me detailed satellite images. “The area outside the port is pretty barren, which makes me think it’s perfect for him to set something up. It’s just harder since I’m looking for a needle in a haystack.”

I zoomed out slightly to get a general idea of the area. Then I spotted something that had me grinning. “Do you see this river,” I asked, pointing it out. “Is there any way to tell if it’s a river you could, I don’t know… send a boat of drugs down?”

Chapter 25

Dax

Ghost snatched the computer away from me with a look of deep concentration. Leaving him to answer that question, I turned back to Cam and saw the name of a shipping company on the screen.

“Is that the company Angelina’s family owns?” I asked.

“Yeah, they’re based out of Mexico City, but that isn’t all that surprising,” Cam commented. “What I find interesting, though, is that they have another home in Manzanillo, a town in the state of Colima. It would give another reason why Marco was there. I’m circling this as one of our strike points. It appears they have a stunning home on the peninsula into the bay.”

“While I don’t want to involve people who are innocent in Marco’s plans, I’m not sure these people count. Angelina’s father had to know who he was getting into bed with,” I reasoned.

Cam put an arm around my shoulders and kissed my head. “War is messy, especially these wars. We never know who might be friend or foe.”

“Hey, when do you have to check in with the CIA?” I asked, looking up at him.

He let out a heavy sigh. “Tomorrow, they’re sending a plane to pick me up in the morning.”

“We’re not going with you?” I asked, even though I’m pretty sure I knew the answer.

Cam turned me to look at him and cupped my face with his hands. “There’s no way in hell I’d let them near you until I know what kind of deal I can work out with them. Keep in mind I have incredibly valuable information they want and connections to criminals they’ve been looking for. Many of them are in this room with us.”

That seemed to catch everyone’s attention.

“Relax, you guys, there’s no way I’d turn my father in, and I’ve known Harper long enough to know that selling out her men would be a terrible life choice. Not to mention my wife would skin me alive for turning my back on all of you,” Cam assured everyone. “For better or worse, we are family, and no one fucks with my family, even if they threaten to put me in a deep dark hole where no one will find me.”

Jaxson scoffed at that. “Really, the CIA is the worst at picking covert locations for their prisons. Pretty sure we’ve found almost every one of them by now. Well, all the ones our targets were put into, that is.”

“And just like we found those once we caught a whiff of a lead, I give you Marco Tesoro’s base of operations,” Ghost announced, and with a flourish, projected the image on the wall behind us.

Picasso went to the windows and hit the button to bring down the shades enough for us to see more clearly.

“All I needed was a way to narrow the search, and Dax gave me that when I discovered the river is indeed deep enough to sail a boat down… not all the way but close enough to transfer it into trucks and get it to the docks,” Ghost explained. “Interestingly enough, this blip of a town also carries the same name as the one Mariana grew up in. That way, when he talks about it, the general population would think of the one everyone knows about. This town, if you want to call it that, has a population of two hundred.”

The satellite pictures showed rolling mountain hills with a desert-like feel to it, with cacti, shrubs, and wiry-looking trees that gave little to no shade to the surrounding area. When you got higher in the mountains, it seemed they got more rain and were more flush with plant life. Actual trees with full leaves and grass covered the ground, even if it was fairly sparse.

When Ghost shifted the image to the town, I could see what he meant about that being a questionable term. Instead, it looked like there were roughly twenty houses with solar panels on the peaked roofs. There were also what looked like four metal barns that reflected the sunlight making it hard to tell what they could be used for, which I’m sure was by design. There was no sign of pasture lands or plots growing anything, so I’m not sure what exactly kept this place going. It seemed far more akin to the compound the Phantom Saints had than a real town. A dirt road leads out to the main paved street after you wound your way down the mountain.

“This has to be it,” I said, feeling the rightness of it in my gut. “There’s no other reason for that place to even exist. Have you looked it up to see if it’s a legit town?” I asked Ghost.

“Yeah, it checks out, but there are no pictures or any information. If you try to use the general map search, the whole place is blurred out as they do for government buildings and other things they don’t want people snooping around in,” Ghost informed me. “To me, the most telling feature is the helipad. What podunk town would have one of those? Tells me that Marco doesn’t stay there, but it’s where the goods are kept.”