“Not funny.” She looked at the white building and the surroundings. “Scott… maybe we should stake out the place and see if he enters, then wait for him to leave and take him on the street.”
“You mean follow standard procedure? That’s boring.” He added, “I want to drag his ass out of there.”
She looked at him.
“I want him to remember how he was taken down.”
She kept looking at him. “If you go in there, I go in there.”
Brodie made eye contact with her. Maggie Taylor was not into macho bullshit as he was; she said what she meant and meant what she said. “We’ll play it by ear.”
She reminded him, “The mission comes first. The mission is to apprehend Kyle Mercer. We don’t need a barroom shoot-out to satisfy your ego.”
“You take the fun out of everything.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“Who squealed?” He assured her, “We’ll consider all scenarios and methods tonight.”
They got back into the car, and Brodie again took the back seat with Taylor. Luis, without comment, hit the gas and headed out of Petare.
Taylor said to Luis, “Tonight is optional.”
Luis did not reply, but nodded.
She told him, “You did a good job today.”
“Gracias.”
Brodie said to him, “If all goes well tonight, you and your family will get tourist visas from the embassy and tickets to anyplace in the U.S. Once you are there, you can request political asylum.” He added, “The embassy will back you on that.”
Again, Luis nodded.
The flip side of all going well was probably not worth mentioning.
Taylor leaned toward Brodie and whispered in his ear, “It’s not fair to ask him to risk his life for the promise of a new life.”
“Sure it is. We are offering salvation.” He reminded her, “Do what has to be done.”
She nodded. “You’re the officer in charge.”
“Indeed I am.”
How many times had he heard the standard Army lecture on responsibility, authority, and power? If you are given the responsibility, you must be given the authority to match the responsibility. Power was something else. Power came out of the muzzle of a gun. Power was what Kyle Mercer had in the bordello, and Brodie’s authority to make an arrest wasn’t worth shit there. Therefore Brodie needed the power to enforce his authority and to fulfill his responsibility to bring Captain Mercer to justice. And that power came from his gun and his guts.
“What are you thinking about?”
“A cold beer.”
“That’s easy.” She put her hand on his, which surprised him. She said, “I trust you.”
“Good.” He added, “But don’t hesitate to tell me when you don’t.”
She squeezed his hand.
They rode in silence, down from the once-pristine hills of Petare, through the man-made squalor that scarred the breast of the New World, now grown old and ugly. Poverty sucks, thought Brodie. But it was more than financial poverty here; it was a poverty of the soul, a culture that had gone terribly wrong. He suddenly thought of Kyle Mercer as a maggot, living off the rotting carcass of a dying nation. “Why is he here?”
“Ask him.”
Brodie nodded. He thought about Worley, and what Dombroski had said, and what General Hackett had not said, and he knew instinctively that he wasn’t going to like Captain Mercer’s answer.
CHAPTER 24
Luis continued along the winding roads leading out of Petare, and in fifteen minutes they were out of the barrio and back on Autopista Francisco Fajardo, heading west toward Altamira and the El Dorado Hotel.
Brodie looked in the side mirror as Petare receded in the distance. It was striking how prominent a part of the cityscape these slums which ringed the Caracas Valley were. Luis had said, You see them so much you don’t see them anymore.
Well, they’d seen them from the belly of the beast itself. And they would see them again, after sundown, which definitely went against the advice of Brodie’s guide book.
Taylor said, “When we get back to the hotel, we need to update the boss.”
“There’s nothing to report,” said Brodie.
“We found the brothel.”
Well, they thought they had found the brothel. Brodie liked to hold off on his sit-reps until he had something of substance to share, like, for instance, “Kyle Mercer is hog-tied in the trunk.” Dombroski was consistently annoyed by Brodie’s infrequent updates while on assignment, but Brodie saw no reason to change his MO. “Let’s see how tonight goes.”
“You have an unhealthy disrespect for authority. I really can’t picture you as a soldier taking orders.”