Shadow War. Don Pendleton

YONS SET A BOTTLE of spring water in front of the silent Gabriel Gonzales. The informant looked grateful and snatched it up. He opened it and chugged down several long swallows. The special-operations medic had left only a few minutes before, leaving behind some white, oblong pills in a paper cup for Gonzales’s pain.

      The medic, dressed in an OD green flight suit bereft of name tag or any identification markers, had done his primary survey, dressed the man’s wound, hooked up a slow IV drip to replace the blood loss and deemed him “fit for questioning” before leaving the pills.

      Having obviously done this before, he addressed Lyons’s primary concern even before the ex-LAPD detective could ask it. “Don’t worry,” he said, after coming out of the room. “The pain meds won’t keep you from questioning him. They may, in fact, help him a little, loosen him up. He won’t be inebriated or too stoned to remember details.”

      The man reached down and picked up his green canvas medic bag and left the building to where an unmarked Ford Explorer was waiting. At no point during his interaction had the medic asked who the hurt man was, or who Lyons and Schwarz were or who they worked for. He’d simply done what was required of him without unnecessary comment and then left. The hard-nosed Lyons was impressed, almost in spite of himself.

      He watched Gonzales take his pills and then wash them down with the water. The informant sat in a straight-backed chair in front of a small metal table in a nondescript room. A black lamp with a flexible neck and a powerful bulb sat turned off on the table. There was a tablet of lined paper and a ballpoint pen on the table in front of the man.

      Lyons reached over and turned on the lamp. Gonzales blinked against the sudden harsh illumination. Then the big ex-cop turned to where Schwarz was waiting beside the door, and nodded once. Schwarz reached over and turned off the overhead lights in the room.

      Now the hard light of the lamp provided the only illumination in the room. It cast a sharp-edged white pool that plunged the rest of the room in deep shadow. Just beyond the reach of the lightbulb Lyons pulled up a chair and sat opposite Gonzales.

      Behind him the door next to where Schwarz was standing swung open, revealing a dark hallway. Hal Brognola, his face cloaked in shadow, entered the room, closed the door behind him and took a seat against the wall.

      â€œGonzales. Excuse the setup,” Lyons said, his voice neutral. “It’s for your own protection.”

      â€œYeah, sure,” Gonzales replied. In his mind’s eye the Mexican informant was seeing the burly blond-headed man sitting across from him as he had been in the New Orleans warehouse—the automatic shotgun booming, Zetas bodies being thrown around by the impact of the 12-gauge rounds. “Where’s my handler?” he asked. “Where’s Hart?”

      â€œYou’ll see him in a bit,” Lyons replied. “He’s taking care of your wife and daughter. I know you’re worried about them, but they’re safe. We pulled you free of that warehouse, and my very good friend took a knife to the stomach to get you out. So, now, in return, you will fill us in on the missing pieces.”

      â€œI don’t know much that I hadn’t already passed on to my handler,” Gonzales replied. “I only knew something big was coming. I thought it was a drug deal.”

      â€œThis Bellicose Dawn,” Brognola said.

      He was a faceless voice in the shadows. Gonzales instinctively looked up toward the sound and was immediately blinded by the glare of the lamp. He held his hand up, blinked, then looked down. He nodded.

      â€œI passed that much on,” he said. “Then I tried to find out more and somehow Lagos knew that information had gotten out. I was supposed to meet them for a dinner. I wound up hanging in that warehouse instead.”

      â€œWhat’d you find out?” Lyons asked.

      â€œI only know bits and pieces. It doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t sound like a drug deal.” Gonzales paused and drank more water. “It sounds like an assault, an attack or something.”