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THREE

      The Safe House

      The Guillotine and “El Roble” sat bound to folding chairs. Enrico “the Oak” Olivar was a low-level thug in the scheme of things.

      When Arnold Schwarzenegger had been the top bodybuilder in the world, his nickname was the “Austrian Oak.” Enrico had taken up the El Roble sobriquet in homage to his hero. He was small-time cartel-wise, and apparently not particularly bright. Everything the Farm could dig up on Olivar indicated he was kept around for intimidation purposes and low-level collection services. The charges against him, all of which had been dropped, were simple assault and battery.

      Bowling Ball was still in his underwear and still handcuffed to the pipe. Guillotine glared bloody murder at him. Uribe stared at the floor between his feet unhappily and refused to make eye contact. All three criminals wore duct tape over their mouths. The Oak stared at Manzo, then at Lyons and then back again. He did this for long seconds as if he was doing Chinese algebra. The Oak flexed his mighty muscles against his shackles and started doing the math again. He’d been performing this cycle like a broken record since his blindfold had been removed. Lyons didn’t care for it all. Back at the Guillotine’s mansion Olivar had not displayed roid-rage aggression or pit-bull loyalty to his master. He’d kept going for his gun like an automaton.

      Schwarz had been forced to light him up twice in the car and to put a replacement power module in his CEW. Lyons had even dug out his own TEK-12 flashlight/stun gun and armed it.

      He strode over to Manzo and ripped off his gag. Lyons jerked his head at Olivar. “Is he always like this?”

      “Bastard!” Manzo screamed. He was screaming at Uribe. “Dead! You are dead!”

      Bowling Ball cringed.

      Lyons shook his head. “I asked you a question.”

      “Screw you!” Manzo spat. “I’ll kill you all! Your wives! Your whore mothers! I’ll kill your—”

      Lyons snapped off a drill-sergeant-worthy hand-cut motion. “Gas them. Gas them all. Close the cellar door and I’ll ask again in half an hour. And shoot him in his other hand.” Lyons spun on his heel. Schwarz gave Manzo a shit-eating grin as he took out a grenade and pulled the pin. Blancanales racked the action on his modular shotgun.

      Manzo shrieked. “No! No! No! No! No more gas!”

      Lyons shot a glance at the Oak. Olivar’s muscles twisted and flexed like pythons in his restraints. Manzo’s speaking seemed to have put Olivar into an even more extreme state of agitation. “Is he always like this?” Lyons reiterated.

      “No?” Manzo spoke nervously. “And it is kind of freaking me out.”

      Lyons addressed the Oak. “Dude, what is your malfunction?”

      Blancanales mirrored in Spanish. “¿Cuál es su fun-cionamiento defectuoso, hombre?”

      El Roble began shaking as though someone had put a quarter in him again. Lyons glared at Schwarz, who threw up his spare hand. “It’s been half an hour since I juiced him!”

      Manzo leaned away from Olivar in alarm. “What did you freaks do to him?”

      Lyons read Manzo like a book. This was not Oaken normal and the Guillotine was genuinely freaked out by what he saw. The Able Team leader decided to work with Manzo’s shaken state. “So what’s with you and suicide bombing? Is Mr. Most Muscular here one of your strap-on psychos?”

      Manzo gaped. Not like a man caught with his pants down, but like a man who was nonplussed. Lyons might as well have asked him the circumference of a moose. “What?”

      Lyons pressed Guillotino anyway to gauge his reactions. “The bombs, asshole. The shit going on in this town, that has it on lockdown. Why are you pulling security detail for terrorists?”

      Manzo’s jaw dropped. “Why would I do that? No one needs that shit!”

      Lyons loomed. Manzo cringed. Lyons thundered. “Why are you batting cleanup for terrorists?”

      “¡Madre de Dios! The terrorists are you! You CIA pricks! We were told to capture or kill any of you yanqui assholes who came trying to clean up your mess! Messing with La Raza? Starting your fake terrorist shit war on the border? Furthering your norteamericano conquistador agenda?” Manzo managed some spine. “Screw you and your black ops shit!”

      “I believe you.” Lyons smiled a winning smile. “Now who gave you these reconquista bullshit manifesto talking points?”

      Enrico “the Oak” Olivar snapped his handcuffs and shot to his feet. He immediately tripped over the leg irons fastening him to the chair. He fell on Manzo and toppled him over. His jaw distended like a snake trying to eat prey bigger than its head.

      Lyons snarled. “Not today, Sparky!” Lyons lunged and vised Olivar’s ear between his thumb and forefinger and yanked back. Olivar reared and snapped his head to the side. Lyons stood by his nickname and neither moved nor let go. The Oak’s ear tore off in Lyons’s hand.

      Olivar snapped his head down and sank his teeth into Manzo’s neck. Manzo keened like an animal. Uribe screamed in captive horror. Schwarz and Blancanales charged. Lyons took his TEK-12 in an ice-pick grip, jammed the electrodes between Olivar’s shoulder blades and hit the red button. Lyons felt the jitters from their body contact and smelled ozone as volts with six zeros behind them were delivered. Lyons’s eyes flared as Olivar rose up like a cobra and seized Lyons’s throat with spastic strength. The Oak’s lips skinned back from bloody teeth. On a good day Olivar could bench-press five hundred pounds. Now that steroid-built gym-strength was wedded to insanity. Lyons was borne over against his will.

      The Able Team leader shot one hand into Olivar’s throat and squeezed off his trachea. The Oak didn’t seem to care. He grabbed Lyons’s hair and pulled himself down toward Lyons’s face, baring his teeth and drooling like a rabid dog. Lyons pulled a sacrifice and let Olivar pull him in with both hands.

      He shoved his stun gun between Olivar’s teeth and hit the button.

      Any electrician would tell you that electricity was a wily and uncertain thing. In Lyons’s own experience some people, dependent on drugs or willpower, could shrug off a stun gun’s effects. The TEK-12 didn’t have to meet the resistance of clothing or human skin. Olivar’s mouth was an optimal cavern of wet conductive-pathway mucous membranes. Tongue and gums burned. Mucous membranes led down his throat to his stomach and bowels, branched out into his lungs and spread up through the sinus cavities into the optic nerves and brain.

      Enrico “the Oak” Olivar lit up internally like the Fourth of July.

      Lyons shuddered as he took the secondary conduction but he held the button down. Olivar collapsed like 220 pounds of dressed beef, and Lyons let go of the shock switch. Olivar threw up all over Lyons’s chest. “Son of a bitch...”

      Blancanales packed a field dressing against Manzo’s ripped right carotid. “He needs a hospital.”

      Lyons shoved his CEW into Roble’s emasculated ear hole in case he turned froggy again. El Roble softly shuddered and drooled bile and blood on Lyons’s collarbone. Lyons kept his thumb on the red button and stared at the cellar ceiling. “I need a vacation...”

      Safe House, El Paso, United States of America

      LYONS GLARED INTO the middle distance. They had gotten out of Mexico but the whole situation was FUBAR. Aaron “the Bear” Kurtzman, the Stony Man computer genius, shook his head in the window on Lyons’s laptop. “Things go bad. We’ve been here before.”

      Lyons wished he had a churro and a café con leche. Old Mexico always managed to convert him to her ways for a few days after he’d visited. He horked down a Krispy Kreme maple-iced glazed and Starbucks Americano. “We’re going back in. We start from scratch.”

      Kurtzman didn’t like it. “Bowling Ball is useless. I say let him

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