Blood of the Assassin - By Russell Blake Page 0,15
these were strange times.
He resumed walking, slower, lost in thought.
At the elevator, when the door slid open with a soft ping, he hesitated before stepping in, as though any movement might jar the fragile construct of the idea and shatter it before it was fully articulated. He punched his floor button, then stepped back with a sigh. It was crazy. There was no precedent. And it would be wildly unpopular with everyone involved in the scheme. The initial resistance would be immediate and substantial.
But that was the least of his concerns. While Rodriguez was politically sensitive, he was also a brilliant tactician, and once his brain latched onto something it didn’t let go easily. He was already making a mental list of everyone he would need to get involved.
When the door opened again, he stepped out with a sense of urgency and purpose. He would make several phone calls and float it past his trusted advisors before bringing it to the team. But that was almost a formality. The more he thought about it, the more excited he became. It was either completely crazy, or a masterstroke of genius.
Most importantly, it just might work.
Chapter 6
The early morning mist lingered over the canyon north of Urique in Chihuahua, Mexico, the massive excavation of the El Sauzal gold mine a scar on the mountains in the far distance. Dawn had broken an hour earlier, but the morning fog hadn’t yet burned off, and the area was still, the town down by the river in the famous Copper Canyon still slumbering.
A solitary figure stared up at the sheer rock face looming almost a thousand feet overhead, lost in thought, and then moved determinedly towards the daunting monolith and reached towards the sky. Strong hands gripped crevices in the outcropping and used them for holds; powerful legs pushed upwards when crannies presented themselves.
El Rey moved with single-minded concentration, fingers probing for the next niche, completely lost in the moment, the sun warming the glistening skin of his bare shoulders as the muscles bunched under the strain. A dark green bandana tied around his head kept the worst of the sweat out of his eyes, which scoured the unyielding stone, searching for an advantage as he powered up the unscalable cliff, driving himself to the peak now eighty stories above him.
His right foot slipped on a slim ledge and a tumble of small rocks skittered dizzily beneath him, dropping twenty stories before finally coming to rest at the base – a fatal distance. His right hand compensated by taking his full weight as he groped with his left, and for a split second he was hanging in space, holding himself with one arm, the endless repetitions of three hundred chin ups every day since childhood yielding lifesaving dividends, the corded muscles of his bicep rigid as he pulled himself to the relative safety of the next hold.
Foot by foot he continued driving himself upward, the black nylon straps of his backpack biting into his skin as he neared the top. When he finally pulled himself onto the summit his arms were shaking. He flipped over onto his back and stared up at the sky, the beginnings of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Overhead an eagle soared, riding a thermal as it wheeled into the blue, searching for an unlucky snake or chipmunk, the circle of life constant in this remote region of the country. He considered its graceful flight, the perfect symmetry of its purpose in the heavens, and then his ears perked up at an incongruous sound, gradually increasing in volume – a sound that was familiar, but out of place here, in the farthest reaches of the middle of nowhere.
He sat up as the rhythmic clamor grew louder, and watched the ungainly outline of a military Humvee roar up a dirt trail he would have bet was used only by pack mules and an occasional goat. It drew within twenty yards of the assassin, and then the big diesel motor idled, its high-altitude trek over, at least for the present. The passenger door opened and a rangy man in jeans and a black windbreaker leapt out. He did a cursory inspection of the desolate clearing and then jogged to where El Rey sat watching him.
The men’s eyes met as he spoke.
“We need to talk.”
El Rey considered a world of possible responses, then nodded. “How did you find me? Cell phone?”