Free Committed by Sidney Bristol

himself will be meeting with Emilio.”
    “We want Aarón Valdez alive.” Cooper pointed at the photograph.
    Gio pinned a third photograph to the board and took a moment to stare at the faces that had haunted them, ignoring the director’s comment. Damien glared at the picture of Aarón Valdez. The man had killed at least two DEA agents stationed in Mexico, simply because he could. Damien couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Matías to be embedded with the man for months. Damien had only worked briefly with the undercover officer, but he was a damn good man, and a fantastic undercover agent.
    “All right. Our main objective is to snatch Aarón Valdez, José Morales, and Emilio Molina, in that order. We know there will be others with them, but at this time our undercover personnel can’t communicate who that will be, for obvious reasons. I don’t think I need to remind anyone of Douglas Marlowe’s death.”
    The room grew still as officers gritted their teeth or clenched their fists, each wanting a piece of the man who had committed such atrocities. They’d never recovered all of Douglas’s body.
    Aarón Valdez was a man who combined the early violence of the Columbian cartels with the smooth efficiency of more modern operations. It was Damien’s assumption that the man was a sociopath, but they’d know more once they had him in custody. His subordinates, like Emilio, weren’t much better. In Emilio’s case, they were worse. He was a magnet for every serial killer and gangbanging thug who liked to deal out pain and death. Emilio’s name had become synonymous with the bogeyman in the lower-income areas of Chicago, used to scare misbehaving children, or as a curse upon your enemies.
    For Damien, though, getting Emilio was a personal matter.
    Three years prior, Damien had been responsible for field training a handful of recruits. They’d gone on a normal buy bust operation. An agent posed as a customer, and once they had confirmation that a sale of drugs had taken place, the team would swoop in and arrest whoever was there.
    It had gone horribly wrong in a hail of gunfire, and Damien had lost a fresh-faced new recruit named Kimberly Wendell in the parking lot of a laundromat. He’d only known her for a few days while they put the mission together, but she’d been one of those people whose smile sparked something inside of everyone she met. Damien had looked at her and seen someone who would rise far in the DEA and change things.
    Kimberly Wendell was an agent Damien would never forget.
    Getting rid of this scum would do the world a hell of a lot of good.
    “José Morales, the accountant, never meets with their people in the same place. He always chooses a remote area away from the city, preferably early in the morning, and someplace where the terrain is flat. This location is all of that.”
    Gio turned to the board and began explaining how they would use two ditches and a large culvert to hide the heavily armored SWAT officers. They would coordinate the attack so that six vehicles packed with the rest of the joint task force would drive in and they would exit from moving vehicles. It wasn’t ideal, but they couldn’t be certain about the exit route any of the suspects would be taking, so they had to catch them together.
    Damien knew this part by heart. Gio and he had rehashed it many times in the weeks leading up to this operation, back when it was going to be a simple sting to grab Emilio and the accountant.
    Now it was much more. They could potentially cut the head off the snake, eliminating a large portion of the drug trade in the Chicago area.
    Gio fielded questions from the other agents, officers, and suits who weren’t from theChicago DEA office. Their team already knew the whole mission inside out.
    It was a crap deal that the mission wouldn’t happen as planned. While Damien was more than happy with the team they had, the rushed timetable made errors more likely.
    And it had cost him the