Read Online The Counterfeit Agent by Alex Berenson - Free Book Online Page B

prescription to be robbed was hard to imagine.
    —
    The urchins stared as Wells stepped onto the plaza. The nearest were forty feet away, three kids squatting side by side by side. The one in the middle pointed a finger pistol at Wells and said something under his breath. The other boys laughed. The plaza reminded Wells of the sunbaked plains of Kenya. The boys were the hyenas, Wells the lion. In a one-on-one fight, he would dominate. But hyenas ran in packs. And in packs they had been known to run lions off, or even kill them. Already the three kids in the middle were pushing themselves to their feet, looking around for friends.
    Wells decided to bring the fight to them, send the others running. Even if the tactic worked, it would buy him only a few minutes. Then whoever controlled this plaza would hear what had happened. The guys with the AKs would show up. He had to assume Montoya’s men would pick him up before then. If Montoya wanted to get Wells killed, he would have insisted Wells go into a hillside slum at midnight. Instead, Montoya was testing him. Taunting him.
Gringo, are you man enough to be my man?
A stupid game.
    Wells strode toward the three boys. The only real risk was that their leader might have a .22. But these kids looked too broke to own even the cheapest pistols. Their jeans and T-shirts were more holes than fabric. Plus Wells had never seen anyone who was holding make a finger pistol. Wells put them on box cutters, homemade shivs, butterfly knives.
    He was making a lot of assumptions. Wrong one way, he would wind up with a dime-sized slug in his chest. Wrong the other, he would worsen the misery of a bunch of pathetic street kids. He would go with the flashlight first in a fight. Better to break bones than leave these kids bleeding to death. He had no choice but to get in close and let the question answer itself. His biggest advantage was that kids weren’t expecting
him
.
    The boys muttered as he closed the gap. Most of the plaza’s streetlamps had burned out. In the light that remained, Wells saw that the boy in the middle wore a filthy yellow soccer jersey. It hung long and loose over the kid’s jeans, plenty of room to hide a pistol.
    Wells walked straight to him. The kid was both more pathetic and more dangerous up close. In another life he would have been handsome, with brown eyes and jet-black hair and an angular face. But sores marred his lips, and a long white scar crossed his forehead. His head barely reached Wells’s sternum, but he looked up without fear.
    “American?” The word was a curse.
    “Guilty.” Wells waited. Not his normal move. He had stayed alive all these years by striking first. But he had to give this fourteen-year-old a chance to walk away.
    “Want drugs?
Chinga?
”
    The kid’s right hand had been flat on his leg, resting on his jeans. Now he moved it up, slid his index and middle fingers under the edge of the soccer shirt. The kid had a gun tucked into his jeans.
    “Money.” The kid slipped his hand under his shirt—
    Wells shoved the boy backward, his hands side by side on the boy’s chest like a close-grip bench press. Wells had the weight and the leverage. The kid had no chance. He stumbled back and Wells stepped forward with him, pushing him down like an offensive tackle pancaking a linebacker. The boy pulled his hands out and away to brace his fall. The pistol rattled against the cobblestones as he landed on his ass with Wells on top of him.
    The kid tried to reach underneath himself for the gun, but Wells raised his right elbow, cracked it into the boy’s temple. The kid grunted and crumpled against the plaza’s paving stones. Wells flipped him over, pushed up the soccer shirt, found a tiny black pistol—
    As he did, he felt motion from the right. Another boy was coming, right arm cocked, a tiny blade gleaming in his hand, two steps away and closing. Wells was on all fours, no time to get to his feet, no time to shoot, and he wouldn’t have shot