“It was. He told me of how you helped him, even though he was very sick.”
“So you knew about his cancer.”
“I was the only one he personally told. Few others knew. And you, of course.”
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sp; Hunter pulled a notepad and paper to her, “Where are you calling from?”
“I am in Mexico, as you guessed.”
“Want to tell me exactly where?”
Leandro chuckled, “Not at this moment. What I want to tell you is this: For the help you gave my brother in his last moments, I owe you.”
Hunter didn’t expect that. “So you and your Cowboys are going to go legit.” She heard his soft laugh again.
“No, Ms. Kincaid. May I call you Hunter?”
Hunter didn’t answer.
“Know this: I keep my word. Someday, I hope to repay you.” Something caught Leandro’s eye in the far distance beyond the lodge. It moved and swirled like he’d seen the small flocks of dark birds do when he was a child in the fields. He said, “What do you call the flocks of birds that fly in wonderful formations, like moving art, do you know?”
“We call them blackbirds, but I think they’re really starlings. I’ve seen them do that. Why are you asking?”
The flock came toward the lodge, bunching like some rolling, floating ball, then spreading into an undulating line, and back into the ball again. He said, “I’m watching a group now, but I didn’t think they were so high in the mountains.”
Something clicked in Hunter’s mind, something Pasqual told her about a meeting at a hunter’s lodge in the mountains, and Hiyoki’s plan. She gripped the phone, “Leandro, are you at a meeting, at a hunting lodge?”
“How do you know that?”
“You need to leave. Right now.”
“Is the DEA attacking us? Who?”
“Leave. The attack is with drones, and I think that may be what you see. They’re not birds. Hurry, I don’t have time to explain.”
Leandro hung up and put the phone in his pocket, took one more look at the approaching flock, then walked across the courtyard, through the kitchen and out the front doors.
All the vehicles were parked farther down the hill in a separate area and as he glanced at the sky, he saw there was no time to reach them.
He could tell now that the flock was not made of birds. The hairs on his neck prickled, and Leandro hurried into the mountain forest thirty yards from the lodge.
He trotted along a small path among the large tree trunks, pushing through patches of brush in places, going uphill so he was above the lodge. He stopped in a spot with a good view and took out his phone, flipped on the video and began recording. He could see into the courtyard where people sat at long tables covered in white cloth as the flock of drones seemed to bunch and rise up in the air like the head of a cobra, then it dropped from the sky like poured oil as the drones formed a thin line and swept into the open courtyard.
Leandro wasn’t aware he didn’t breathe as the bird-sized aircraft flew in tight flowing patterns over and around the people, spewing puffs of yellowish vapor close to their faces.
Men yelled and screamed, then began coughing. The four rifle-carrying bodyguards managed to stand before they caught several blasts of gas in the face, which dropped them to the grass in spasms.
Several people scrambled from the table and made it into a room, closing the door behind them. The drones buzzed like angry wasps, going into the kitchen and lobby, leaving trails of pale gas drifting out the open doors into the courtyard to join the thickening cloud there.
It lasted only minutes. All the bodies in the courtyard were down, immobile. The only survivors were the few who made it into the one room and closed the doors. Leandro almost turned off the video when he saw two more odd-shaped drones coming toward the lodge.
They looked like vertical wings, one edge turned toward the sky, with four propellers spaced evenly on that edge. Leandro filmed them, using the zoom feature to see more details.
They were eight feet in length, maybe two-plus feet in width and looked like something off a plane from the thirties, with rounded edges.
They reached the lodge and stopped to hover in the air, then they rotated so the blades were in front, like on a normal airplane and they flew through the air. Leandro thought they looked and flew like the aircraft called Hunter-Killers in the first Terminator movie.