Mind Bomb

Uribe blinked.

“You are going to pay.” Blancanales set a large tube of personal lubricant next to the bowling pin.

Uribe paled with shock. “No...”

Blancanales reached into his duffel and pulled out a vintage leather bowling bag. He unzipped it to reveal a scratched and ancient eleven-pound bowling ball. Blancanales nodded at Schwarz. “Set up the camera. This goes out live.”

Uribe went white.

Blancanales lifted his chin at Lyons. “Take off his chonies.”

Uribe threw up the churro and pineapple Fanta he had been given. He screamed and gagged at the same time. “No! No! No!”

Lyons ripped off Uribe’s tighty-whiteys with a yank. Schwarz set up a small video camera on a desktop tripod as Blancanales squeezed clear lubricant over the top of the bowling pin like he was topping an ice cream sundae. “Turn him over. Head down, ass up.”

Uribe screamed and kicked. Lyons effortlessly grabbed his ankles and brutally spun him facedown. The killer keened like a rabbit being killed as the Able Team leader kicked him into position. Schwarz scoffed as Uribe was kneeled up into a scary uncle. “Someone’s been in lock-up before.”

“No!” Uribe moaned. “Anything!”

“Any what?” Lyons snarled. “Name anything you can do for me except bleed out from internal injuries!”

“Anything!” Uribe shrieked. “I’ll tell you anything!”

Blancanales stared down at Uribe, as cold as a medieval executioner. “This man is mine.”

The Bowler threw up again. His voice cracked into a ragged soprano range as he shrieked at Lyons. “Anything!”

Lyons kept his face neutral. Playing the “good cop” was an extremely rare experience and he intended to enjoy it. “Why?”

Uribe shuddered. “Why what?”

“Why are you here?”

The whites of Uribe’s eyes were like a deer’s in the headlights. “You brought me!”

“Why did I bring you here! Why am I talking to you! Talk to me or Señor Venganza has his way!”

“I’m just a sicario!”

Sicario was the Latin-American term for cartel muscle and killer. The term was as ancient as the Bible. “You’re a torturer, a disappearer and a learner of secrets.”

“We were paid! Anyone who came asking! About the bombers! To take them! Find out who they were. Who they worked for. Then make them disappear!”

“Who paid you?” Lyons demanded.

“I don’t know. The orders came from the top.”

Lyons believed him. “New Juárez Cartel?”

“Yes!”

“Who gives you orders?”

Uribe shuddered in shame. “El Guillotino.”

“Bowling Ball and the Guillotine...” Schwarz muttered. “Love these Juárez guys.” He picked up the bowling ball. “Give him the ten pin, flip him, spread him and let’s see if I can pick up the split.”

“No!”

Lyons stared implacably at the cowering, naked killer. “What’s El Guillotino’s name?”

“Eladio Manzo!”

“Tell me about the bombers.”

“The bombers!” Uribe wept in fear and confusion. “Fanáticos! Psychos!” The torturer started to rise. “Who knows—”

Lyons drew his Colt Python and cocked it. “Head down, ass up!”

Uribe whimpered and resumed the position.

“You’re saying the bombers weren’t working for the cartels?”

Uribe actually looked shocked.

Lyons considered the quivering waste of skin in front of him. He tended to believe him. Lyons had been on both ends of some very rough interrogations, but he was not a torturer. He suddenly dropped to his heels beside Uribe. BolaBolo shrieked like he no longer had a pair. Lyons deemed his subject ready. “You wanna live?”

“¡Por favor!”

Lyons reholstered his six-gun. He dragged a folding chair over, took a seat and put his shoes up on Uribe’s ass as if it was a footstool. The Able Team leader drew the battered leather notebook from his days as an LAPD detective and clicked open an equally ancient Fisher Space Pen. “Tell me about Manzo...”

Dragonslayer

JACK GRIMALDI GRINNED from the pilot seat. “Guy’s really got his own working guillotine!” Stony Man Farm’s premier helicopter delivery system of man and ordnance was currently configured in civilian white flight camouflage. The ace pilot noted El Guillotino’s close-to-Kennedy-worthy compound.

“You want to do it right?” Blancanales lowered his binoculars. “Hire a Mexican.”

Lyons scowled beneath his optics. The head-chopping Manzo asshole had literally built a guillotine to the original French Revolution specifications. Even with a walled compound Lyons was pretty sure having a French Empire execution machine, gleaming in the sun, twelve feet tall, just off the tennis court, was illegal as hell in Mexico. Mexican bylaw enforcement seemed to be falling down on the job. They had probably fallen over piles of money. “Gadgets?”

Still wearing his telephone lineman’s rig, Schwarz stared at the dial and switch icons on his laptop. “His security is good.”

“Gadgets good?”

“No.” Schwarz snorted. “He’s got way too much stuff attached to his phone lines.” The Guillotine’s computers weren’t Farm good, either. Schwarz knew every nuance of El Guillotino’s defenses. “He’s got a safe room off his bedroom, and the asshole literally has a private elevator off that to his underground garage. Better figure on a private arsenal to go with it. He can hole up for a siege, or he can rabbit. I can disable his sensors and alarms, and we can figure on fifteen minutes max before the federales respond to gunfire this far out in the boondocks.”

Lyons took up the satchel charge at his feet. “Is he still home?”

Schwarz nodded. “He’s still home. He was looking at internet porn five minutes ago on his tablet and no vehicles have left the compound. The heat and the homicide bombings have everyone staying inside.”