We were the last passengers off the plane, having gotten stuck way back in the twenty-fourth row. The few people that had been seated behind us went ahead while Matt, Dallas, and I stayed put, briefly discussing where we should go first from the airport.
After deplaning, we found a semi-private spot near the baggage claim area where we could go over our plan of action. First, we would go down the street to the nearest hotel, gather our wits, and get something to eat – all we'd had all day were those crappy little biscuit-slash-cookie things that flight attendants give out, and my stomach felt like it was doing backflips with hunger. I was glad I hadn't ordered any alcohol on the flight. I'd be downright miserable with acid reflux if I had.
Glancing over one of Bellisario's lists of locations that Santiago frequented, I was tasked with jotting down a shortlist of each place we should hunt for the drug king, while Dallas and Matt scurried off to the men's room to have a "private conversation." I silently prayed that Dallas wasn't about to quietly murder my team leader over how long Matt and I had stayed cooped up in the plane restroom. So much for their "truce" at the motel.
There seemed to be three locations that Santiago spent a great deal of time at. The first was a lavish mansion near the sea that, according to Bellisario's notes, was in Esteban Portillo's name. I assumed that was one of the many fake names Santiago used to throw off the authorities. This was likely his main residence.
The second location was an air conditioned storage facility near Madrid. I was pretty sure that was his main drug housing spot since it was climate controlled. Years of working drug raids had taught me that heat and humidity were hell on drugs, interfering with their chemical makeup. No self-respecting drug lord wouldn't use an air conditioned facility to hold their inventory.
The third spot I circled on the map was a strip club on the north side of Barcelona. If Bellisario was correct, La Vida Loca was the main hangout for Santiago, Bellucci, and several of their cohorts.
I used what was left of my free time to call Alana once I'd finished coming up with the list. The boys were taking their sweet time in the bathroom and I was getting sick of sitting by myself on a rather uncomfortable metal bench. I'd also taken note of an airport security guard who seemed to be a little too interested in what I was doing, glancing my direction every four or five seconds.
"Hey, Tali!" Alana's cheerful voice sounded in my ear. "Did you guys make it to Barcelona alright?"
I started stuffing everything back inside my bag, preparing to leave. I didn't like the way the guard kept eyeing me. Something just didn't feel right.
"You ought to know," I said with a fake laugh, keeping my peripheral attention on the guard. "You're probably tracking our phones everywhere we go."
"Girl, you know me too well!" she laughed wholeheartedly. "I'm your friendly stalker."
"Yeah, and you're not the only one either," I giggled, pretending to be engaged in a fun session of girl talk, acting oblivious to the man who couldn't stop staring at me. "If you know what I mean, girl."
"You're being followed?" Her tone shifted to serious. "What's going on? Can you tell me anything without giving it away to them?"
"Try again."
"Watched?"
I kept my fake smile on and slung my bag over my shoulder. "Yep!"
"Your phones are pinging at the airport. Is it airport security watching you?" Alana asked, and I could hear her fingers tapping away at the computer keyboard.
"Yeah."
I started walking in the direction of the bathrooms, hoping that Matt and Dallas would hurry their asses up and come out. On second thought, I was starting to worry that something might have happened to them.
"Why aren't you all together?" She sounded really worried now. "Where did Dallas and Matt go?"
"To the bathroom. Like twelve years ago." My answer was grumpy and I was sure Alana could tell by that that I'd been waiting on them for quite a while.
She huffed and typed some more. "Well, it looks like their phones are together, wherever they are. I'd have to pull up a diagram of the airport to pinpoint their exact room location."
I kept the girly grin on my face, but lowered my voice to a level I was sure Mr. Creepy Security Guard couldn't hear. "I'm starting to get worried, Alana. This guard keeps watching me like a hawk and they've been in the restroom for like twenty minutes."
"Okay. Keep your cool. I'm going to get you out of this," she said confidently. "I just sent a text to Matt and Dallas. I told them to come out and act like you're all old friends running into each other. Just play it by ear, okay?"
"I don't know what I'd do without you," I smiled genuinely and hung up.
Just as I reached the drinking fountain right outside the restrooms, Dallas and Matt emerged, their body language totally relaxed and their focuses not on me at all, though I knew they'd both spotted me.
I went ahead and used the drinking fountain, pretending I didn't notice them. I could feel the security guard's eyes burning holes into my back. All the sudden, as I turned around, Dallas hollered out my fake Italian name that Rick had put on my I.D.
"Aurora!" he smiled ear-to-ear, stretching his arms out wide.
"Antonio!" I called out his fake name, running into his arms like we were old friends who hadn't seen each other in years.
"Stefano!" Matt exclaimed his own fake name and we all shared a pretty genuine laugh over that, pulling him into the hug, too.
"Why are we doing this?" Matt whispered where only we could hear.
"Security guard at four o'clock. Don't want to look suspicious," I mumbled.
We hugged for just a few seconds, just long enough to reach a quick understanding of the situation, and then separated.
Dallas proceeded to ask me in exceptionally accurate Italian if I'd like to go with them to catch up over drinks, and I happily accepted the offer, playing along perfectly as the guard appeared to listen intently.
We started walking towards the exit, keeping a careful watch on our spectator, who now looked less suspicious of me; and to my surprise, the man didn't attempt to stop us on our way out.
Barcelona was a complete one-eighty from Munich. We'd gone from dark, gloomy weather in Germany, to bright, sunny skies and temperatures comfortably hovering in the low seventies in Spain.
When we stepped out of the airport onto the sidewalk, a gust of warm spring air washed over me, and I was reminded of a vacation I'd once taken to the Florida Keys. I inhaled deeply, enjoying the sweet smell of a salty mist carried inland from the Balearic Sea.
Alana had been right when she'd told me Barcelona was a gem. I could tell already that I was going to love this city.
"Where do we begin?" asked Matt, still using his Italian accent.
Dallas pointed to the parking lot across the street and I knew what he was thinking. We were going to steal another vehicle.
Once the traffic cleared for a moment, the three of us trekked across the road and hunkered down behind a little black sedan where no one could see us.
"Alright," Dallas cleared his throat. "We're going to get an SUV and we're going to go to the hotel. We'll take a breather there and come up with a plan for tonight. Everybody onboard?"
Matt and I nodded and Dallas instructed us to stay put while he broke into the silver SUV to our right. Only about a minute later, he'd successfully scored us a ride.
We piled into the vehicle with Dallas behind the wheel. He carefully surveilled the parking lot for any un-friendlies, and then pulled out, headed towards the nearby stoplight.
We successfully made it down the street to the Salles Hotel Ciutat del Prat, one of the nicest looking hotels on the block, and Dallas drove us into the parking garage, concealing the stolen vehicle way in the back where it wouldn't be easily spotted.
While we retrieved our gear, I made another quick call to Alana, asking her to make us a reservation for three nights at the hotel. I doubted we'd even need that long, actually, but three sounded like a reasonable number of nights.
Once the reservation was made, we took the elevator from the garage to the main lobby, which was decked out in standing posters and various types of advertisements for a medical conference that was being held there. We were in luck. With so many people flooding the hotel for the conference, Matt, Dallas, and I would blend into the crowd easily.
"Hey." I pulled Matt aside by his shirt sleeve while Dallas checked us in. "What on fucking earth were you two doing in the airport bathroom that took so long?"
He seemed surprised by my question at first, but answered me without hesitation.
"We were talking about you, Tali," he said softly, brushing his short, unruly hair back with his fingertips.
I scrunched up my nose in confusion. "Me? What about me?"
Matt chuckled, slinging an arm over my shoulders while we stood there, waiting. "About you and me, and you and him. He wanted to know what we were doing on the plane. I decided I may as well be honest with the guy, so I told him everything."
I hiked a brow at the mention of 'everything'. "Everything?"
Matt shrugged. "I figured I owed him that much. He deserved to know how I feel about you, Tali. And he deserved to know that you and I worked it out, and that I'm not a threat to him or to your relationship."
A million things were running through my mind as I imagined how Dallas must have reacted to the things Matt had told him.
"And what did he say about all that?" I dared ask, unsure of whether or not I really wanted to know the answer.
Matt gave another shrug, playing it off coolly. "We're good, Tali. We talked everything out. He told me how he felt about you and me being so close. I apologized for crossing a few lines here and there. And we worked it all out. We're good now. Seriously."
Before I could respond, Dallas sauntered back to us with three key cards and a proud look on his face. He handed us both a card and told us what floor our room was on. I took note of the fact that he didn't seem unhappy with the reservation being for one room rather than two. Maybe Matt was right. Maybe Dallas really was cool with everything now...
We piled into an elevator down the hall from the front desk and Dallas pressed the button to take us to the fourth floor. Once we reached our room, I started unloading Bellisario's records onto one of the beds. I pulled out the paper with Santiago's most frequented hangouts on it, along with my notes of the three places we should search for him at.
"This is what I came up with." I held my notes out to Matt and Dallas. "I narrowed it down to his top three hangouts."
After a minute of scanning over Bellisario's list and my notes, both men nodded in agreement.
"Sounds good to me," Dallas said, laying the pages back on the bed. "Which one do we want to start with?"
"Well, this mansion is probably overloaded with armed guards of his," I said, pointing to the first place. "I think I'd prefer to avoid that shootout."
Matt agreed. "Yeah, and given the time of year it is, with the weather nice and all, I'm sure Santiago is moving shipments as we speak. He's probably spending a lot of time at that storage facility, don't you think?"
"Probably," Dallas chimed in, tapping his thumbs against his jeans, his hands shoved in his pockets. "But you've got to keep in mind that where there's a hoard of drugs, there's a hoard of minions ready to kill any trespassers."
His words brought with them a brief flashback to that horrible night in Washington, D.C. I pictured the small army of Enrique Bellucci's guards dashing through the warehouse, guns blazing. I didn't want to take a chance on reliving that experience. The storage facility was a no-go unless it was the very last option.
"Sounds like the best place to try to catch him is this strip club." I gestured to my notes. "Surely, there's numerous bad guys hanging out there at any given time. If Santiago hangs out there, I'm sure several of his buddies do, too. And-"
"And where there's buddies, there's armed guards," Dallas cut me off, finishing my thought.
"True." I raised my pointer finger. "However, with the amount of people that'll be partying there tonight, we can split up and blend right in – use the crowd as a cover. They're probably expecting us by now, but they're probably expecting us to show up and break the front door down, guns drawn like Charlie's Angels. Instead, we'll give them the element of surprise."
I paused a moment, watching Dallas and Matt's expressions and waiting for either of them to tell me I was crazy, but they both nodded and agreed to my plan.
"Sounds good. We'll get something to eat, prep all of our gear, and get ready for a wild ride." Matt clapped his hands as if to say "let's get to it."
Dallas and I shared a devilish, confident smirk.
"Tonight's the night?" I grinned to both of them.
Dallas flashed me the hottest cocky smile I'd seen from him in... well... years, and I nearly melted on the spot.
"Tonight's the night."