The Excoms Read online

  She was twelve when that day finally came. In the years leading up to that moment, she had obtained a robust self-education that far exceeded the institutional ones kids her age were getting. She’d learned a decent amount of English, mostly from movies and TV, and could write in her native Spanish at a near college level.

  The day prior to escape day, she and the two people everyone called her parents had traveled west to a church in Oaxaca where Morales had been asked to speak. On the afternoon of Rosario’s independence day, Morales had left her and his wife at the home of the preacher who had brought them to town, while Morales went to check out the church in advance of his big sermon that evening.

  Rosario had not known when she’d make her move, only that the trip to Oaxaca would provide the best opportunity she might ever get, so she had come prepared.

  Buried in the bag of clothes Morales had selected for her was a small backpack she had taken from a store two years earlier. In it was the money she had been secretly skimming from the church’s offerings for as long as she could remember—nearly fourteen hundred pesos now, more than enough to get her on a bus out of town. There was also a set of clothes she liked, and a pair of never used sneakers she had stolen the day after she was told about the trip.

  With Morales not planning on returning until after the evening service, she had decided that afternoon would be go time.

  The only obstacle was Rosario’s “mother.” Though the woman was not the tyrant her husband was, Rosario didn’t think she’d just let Rosario walk out the front door. Fortunately, that wasn’t the only exit.

  Most of the time when the two were alone together, they never talked. When they did, it was usually about a task Rosario needed to perform. Rosario decided to use that to her advantage.

  “Father told me I should take some private reflection time before tonight,” Rosario told the woman after they’d been sitting quietly for a few minutes. “I thought I could use the bedroom.”

  With a nod, the preacher’s wife said, “Bless you, child.”

  Rosario wanted to run to the back of the house, but she kept her pace unhurried, like it was just another afternoon in the life of the Morales family. Once she had the door closed, however, she began to shake in excitement. Unless the preacher’s wife became suspicious—and she wouldn’t—Rosario would have at least two hours before anyone knew she was gone. By then, she would already be on a bus heading north.

  She retrieved the book bag, pulled out her never worn jeans and T-shirt, and changed. After she donned the sneakers and tied them up, she allowed herself a moment to enjoy her forbidden wardrobe.

  She briefly considered shoving the clothes she’d taken off into her backpack so she’d have something else to wear, but she wanted no reminders of Morales, so she stuffed them in the big bag she was leaving behind.

  Quietly she opened the window, climbed out, and snuck down the side of the house toward the street. An old sedan that probably hadn’t run for years was parked at the front corner of the house. She figured if she slipped around it, she could get away without anyone in the living room seeing her.

  She began creeping along the car.

  “Rosario,” the preacher’s wife said, right before she rounded the other end of the car.

  Rosario was caught. When Morales found out, the beating would be magnitudes greater than any he’d ever given her. And she might as well kiss the idea of freedom good-bye, because he would never leave her unsupervised again.

  Unless she made a run for it.

  The preacher’s wife was far from athletic, and if Rosario could get past her, the woman would never be able to catch her. What the woman would do was alert her husband, who would then enlist the help of others to track down Rosario.

  The bus station would be the first place they went, which meant it was no longer an option.

  She could either try to hitch a ride out of town, or hide in Oaxaca until Morales and his wife finally went home. Neither was the scenario she’d been planning for, but they were both better than returning to Tuxtla Gutiérrez.

  She rocked forward, about to run.

  “I’m not going to tell him,” the woman said.

  Rosario paused, her brow furrowing.

  “I just…I wanted to give you this.”

  The woman held out an envelope.

  It had to be a trick, Rosario thought. She’d reach for the envelope and the woman would grab her arm.

  As if reading her mind, the preacher’s wife set the envelope on the car and backed away several meters.

  Rosario didn’t move.

  “Please, I’m not going to stop you.”

  Rosario didn’t know what to think. This was the most personal conversation they’d ever had. She decided to risk checking the envelope. She crept forward, ready to spring away if the woman even twitched, and snatched the envelope.

  As she untucked the flap, she kept one eye on the woman to make sure nothing funny happened. But when she saw what was inside, she simply stared at it.

  “It’s not a lot, but maybe it will help,” the woman said.

  Money. At least ten times more than what Rosario had saved up. She looked at the woman again. “Why?”

  Wearing a pained smile, the preacher’s wife said, “I’ll tell him you were ill. He won’t know you’re gone until we come home tonight. Get as far away as you can. Get as far away and never come back.”

  With that, the only mother Rosario had ever known walked back into the house.

  Rosario did exactly as the woman urged, and was three hours into a bus ride north to Mexico City by the time she figured Morales and his wife returned home.

  She never found out if Morales looked for her. When she finally went back to Tuxtla Gutiérrez after she’d become an adult, she discovered his church had been turned into a hardware supply store, and that the apartment above it where they had lived was occupied by a young couple who’d never heard of the Morales family.

  Rosario found only one person who remembered the “crazy” preacher. The man couldn’t recall the specifics of what had happened to him, something about a falling out with his flock but the man wasn’t sure.

  The discovery was disappointing. Rosario had really hoped to tear Morales’s church apart herself. In the end, though, the only thing that mattered was the new life she’d created in Mexico City.

  When she first arrived in the capital, she shed the Morales name and began calling herself Rosario Blanca. To survive, she began executing petty crimes for people older and bigger than she was, and found she had a special talent for it. She obtained whatever her “clients” asked for, and they gave her the protection she needed as she matured. By the time she was sixteen, she had taught herself how to use computers, and had moved on to doing regular work for investigators, both private and governmental. Her clients never knew how old she was, of course. All contact was conducted via the Internet, where the only qualification that mattered was her reputation for finding things.

  Her ability to obtain items was not confined to the Web.

  Since she’d basically been putting on an act since the first time she felt the sting of Morales’s switch, she could now easily transform herself into anyone she wanted at the spur of the moment. One of her favorite personas was a cute and naïve young woman. It was amazing what she could get others to say in front of her, and she had a dozen other personalities she could call on, depending on the situation.

  And when neither computer expertise nor acting was called for, she was damn good at getting inside places where she shouldn’t be, and finding papers and flash drives and photographs and whatever else a client might be looking for. It didn’t matter if the items were in secure desks, padlocked cabinets, or even safes. With a little preparation, she could get into almost anything and be gone without anyone knowing she’d been there.

  When she was nineteen, she took on a job for a new client. The company tried to hide its true identity from her, but it had no idea who it was dealing with. Turned o
ut it was an organization known as TPG, an intelligence-gathering service based in the Czech Republic. Her successful completion of the assigned task opened a whole new market for her, and within a year all her clients were intelligence based.

  They paid better.

  And on time. She appreciated that.

  Her current gig involved obtaining three software dongles from a safe in the Mexico City branch of a well-known chemical company. For this operation, she had transformed herself into a research assistant named Ivonne Perez, visiting from the company’s facility in Monterrey. She’d created a working ID badge and planted the appropriate information in the corporate database. Unsurprisingly, it worked like a charm when she passed through security upon entering the building.

  The research and development lab she wanted was on the fourth floor, in the southeast corner. Having memorized the floor plans, she navigated her way to her destination like she’d been there a million times, and tapped her badge against the reader outside the door.

  A green light and a beep signaled the card had worked again.

  The safe was in the lab director’s office, along the back wall of the lab. Standing between her and it were more than two dozen occupied workstations, not to mention the director himself at his desk.

  She garnered a few curious looks as she worked her way through the room, but no one tried to stop her or question her presence. Right before she reached the door to the director’s office, she slipped her hand in her pocket and pushed the side button on her phone to start the countdown.

  She knocked on the door and stepped inside. “Dr. Ruiz?”

  He glanced up from his computer screen, clearly not pleased to be interrupted. “What is it?”

  “I was sent by human resources. I understand you requested help with a documentation project.”

  “Documentation project? I don’t know anything about a documentation project.”

  “That’s all I was told.”

  “Obviously you’ve been sent to the wrong place. Now, if you don’t mind, I am rather busy at the moment.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry to have—”

  The main power cut off and the fire alarm started blaring.

  Panicked voices rose from the lab.

  “What the hell?” Dr. Ruiz said, rising.

  “That’s the fire alarm,” Rosario said. “We should probably…”

  There was no reason for her to finish as Ruiz was already hurrying toward the door.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Out. Out.”

  He ushered her into the lab, where the others were filing into the hallway in the dim light of two battery-operated lamps. Rosario made her way to the back end of the crowd, with Ruiz right behind her. Then, in the confusion at the doorway, she allowed the director to scoot by her. The moment he crossed the threshold and the door swung shut, she hurried to one of the workstations and ducked beneath it, waiting in case the director sent someone back in to look for her.

  When a minute had passed and no one returned, she scooted out and hurried over to the director’s office.

  The safe was embedded in the floor next to a metal cabinet. She turned on the flashlight function of her phone and mounted it on a stack of books so that it pointed at the safe. The first combination she tried was the one installed by the safe’s maker. It didn’t work.

  She let out a soft hmm of appreciation. It was refreshing to see Ruiz had enough sense to assign a number of his own choosing.

  She had an electric device in her pocket that could determine the new combination, but it took a few minutes to work. She decided to try the list of potential combinations she’d come up with based on an analysis of the director’s life. The fourth set of numbers was the winner.

  So, one credit to the director for not sticking with the factory-issued combo, and a demerit for using a mix of his daughter’s birthday and the date he received his doctorate.

  A good portion of the safe’s interior was occupied by files. Shoved in among them were portable hard drives and a clear plastic box containing the three dongles. She removed the three items and put them in an empty pocket, then replaced them with fake dongles given to her by her client.

  Forty-five seconds after the safe was closed again, she was heading down the stairs at the tail end of a group from one of the upper floors.

  Walking away from the building was a snap. Many who had been driven outside by the alarm were heading toward one of the local shops, so she looked like just another employee taking advantage of the down time.

  The moment she was out of sight of the building, she retrieved her phone and opened an app she’d named Chaos. From the OPERATIONS RUNNING list, she selected the entry that had killed the building’s power and set off the alarm, and pressed COMPLETE. In ten minutes, power would “miraculously” cycle back on.

  Next, she checked the app labeled MAKEUP and selected the section called CONCEALER. Under this, she verified that the worm she had planted within the building’s security system had destroyed video footage from all the cameras for the last thirty minutes.

  See, not a challenge at all.

  As she neared the car she’d parked four blocks from the job site, an older woman with a weather-worn face, dressed in clothes that had seen far better days, limped out of a doorway in front of Rosario.

  Being raised by a mental abuser did not mean Rosario was without manners. She slowed, giving the woman the right of way, but the woman staggered to a stop as soon as she noticed Rosario.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. She waved a hand in front of her. “After you.”

  “It’s all right. Go ahead.”

  But the woman waved her hand again and didn’t move.

  With a mental shrug, Rosario started walking again, curving her path around the woman. As she went by, the woman took a step but stumbled and grabbed Rosario.

  “I’m so sorry,” the woman said.

  Before Rosario could respond, something stung her arm.

  9

  AVANTI’S OFFICE

  WARREN FOUND HIS boss standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city. He stopped a dozen feet behind the man and waited.

  Three full minutes passed before Avanti turned around.

  “Report,” the man said.

  “They’ve begun the recruitment.”

  “Good. Have we stuck our foot in their way yet?”

  “We’re about to.”

  “Even better.”

  10

  LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  LIESEL KESSLER STUDIED the crowd, wishing her boss had listened to her and skipped the fundraiser’s red carpet entrance in favor of slipping in through the back door.

  That, of course, was not the way Hans Wolf did things. His brand was built on grand displays of his toothy smile, chiseled jaw, and perfectly coiffed salt-and-pepper hair. The public had come to expect it, and more importantly, so had his investors. He often said his first hundred million had been made off his hard work, but the two billion after that was all due to his boyish charm.

  Wolf held controlling interests in, among other things, two large-project construction firms, a high-volume cargo shipping company, several electronics manufacturing facilities, a dozen casinos located around the world—including the one Liesel and Wolf were about to enter—and was also the chairman of a professional football team in Germany.

  All of which meant that though many people enjoyed his antics, even worshiped the man, not everyone held the same warm, fuzzy feelings for him. Hence the reason Liesel and the rest of the security team accompanied him everywhere he went.

  Tonight he was attending a fundraiser hosted by perennial Las Vegas headliner and world renowned performer Kevin Larson. Liesel had heard of Larson, of course, but couldn’t name one song he was famous for. His last big hit had been in the 1980s, so probably something her parents would have liked—if Larson’s music had been allowed into East Germany back then.

  Liesel kept five paces behind her boss as he made his way
along the carpet, his model of the week draped on his arm. The crowd was a mix of professional photographers covering the event, attendees too common to walk the star route, and tourists who were drawn to the Wolf Hotel and Casino by the klieg lights and flashing cameras.

  In other words, an unsecured situation.

  Liesel didn’t like unsecured situations.

  So far, the crowd looked tame enough—tourists smiling and pointing at people they recognized, and photogs shouting for the famous to look their way. Here and there video camera crews were set up so celebrities could stop for a few quick words with wannabe Ryan Seacrests before continuing on.

  A wrangler for one of the American networks approached Wolf, but Liesel stepped in the way before the man could get there.

  Flustered, the man said, “I’m with Glitz. We’d love a moment with Mr. Wolf.”

  Liesel stared at him for a second, then looked over her shoulder at her boss and raised an eyebrow.

  He gave her the slightest of nods before putting on a big smile and walking over to the man. “It would be my pleasure.”

  Liesel followed them to the cameras, stopping a few feet outside the bright lights so she could keep an eye on the crowd.

  The interview was as inane as these interviews always were—a non-funny joke to start, a comment about Mr. Wolf’s suit, an inquiry about his date’s dress, and a softball question about the charity the event was supporting.

  Liesel had heard all the answers, or ones like them, so many times, she could have done the interview herself. But she was glad she didn’t have to. The fewer words she had to speak on any given day, the better.

  Once they resumed walking down the carpet, she scanned the waist-high divider ahead that separated the crowd from the famous attendees. That’s when a blond woman wearing sunglasses caught her eye. There was something familiar about her.

  Not wanting to scare her off and risk losing track of where the woman went, Liesel swept her gaze through the crowd while keeping the blond in her peripheral vision. Finally, recognition came to her. The lips. Liesel was used to seeing those lips smeared with bright pink lipstick, not unadorned as they were now. But they were the right shape, as was the woman’s nose and the line of her jaw.