Torchwood: Exodus Code

Crash the bus. Give the driver time to get the mark out and turn him (almost always a male) over to her father’s personal security guards, leaving enough doubt among everyone on the bus as to whether or not the mark survived the accident while his ransom was negotiated.
    If the money came through, the mark survived the crash. If not, well it seemed his injuries were more serious than first thought.
    Peering over the edge of the belfry, Isela watched in astonishment as one of the old women draped in a colourful embroidered poncho, who moments before had been lounging on the church steps beneath her, tipped over a vendor’s cart, dived behind it and began shooting at her father’s men, who tipped over tables in front of the restaurant and returned fire. The other women were in fact men, pulling automatic weapons from their baskets, stripping off their shawls and skirts to reveal black special ops uniforms adorned with enough ammunition and grenades to take out the entire piazza , the tower included.
    Stunned, Isela watched as the food vendors pulled guns from inside their steamers and began returning fire. The few real villagers who had been in the market were trying to flee for cover, some inside the café and others out across the airstrip to the cover of the jungle.
    Without warning, a burst of gunfire sprayed the wall of the belfry. Isela threw herself to the ground, covering her head with her arms. Dust and rock rained down on her. After a few beats, she realized that the shots were collateral from the firestorm erupting in the courtyard. Antonio and her father were the only ones who knew she was in the tower. They’d have no reason to fire at her.
    But neither would anyone else. Everyone in the village was in her father’s pocket, which made imprisoning the mark as a doped-up patient in the hacienda one of the more manageable aspects of the plan. As for her role, it was stop the bus, create the diversion, climb down unseen as soon as Antonio extracted the mark, and then get back inside the ranch compound and wait for the ransom.
    After the chalky dust settled around her, Isela watched in confusion and disbelief as Antonio and the mark, a super-wealthy businessman from Brazil, emerged from the bus, kissed… Kissed? She was stunned.
    The pair split up, the mark heading for a car tucked behind the canyon wall. Isela let the scene sink in, pinching herself that she’d really seen what she believed. She slid down the wall. She needed to think. It was bad enough that the bus had flipped more violently than she intended and that she had no idea who the other set of soldiers were in the piazza shooting at her father’s men, but Antonio attracted to men. How could she have missed that detail?
    Isela lifted her binoculars and focused on the hotel compound, scanning the area surrounding the ranch. The doors to the house were closed, the shutters too. The entire house looked deserted. Behind the ranch, she could make out the staff barracks – they too looked empty. All of her father’s men were fighting below her. Where was her father?
    Isela tapped her earpiece. ‘Antonio, what’s going on?’
    No reply.
    After the initial burst of gunfire, the shooting had stopped for a few minutes but, each time anyone moved, a volley of shots sprayed across the piazza. The scene looked and sounded like a battle from
Call of Duty
, but with one disturbing difference. Isela had no idea who the bad guys were and what the goal of the game had become.
    The perimeter of the hotel compound was unprotected although she spotted a couple of bodies lying near the delivery entrance. None of her father’s personal security guards were on the roof and the men who’d been shooting from the walls were dead or had fled. She counted three bodies under the wall and at least three on the ground inside the compound.
    With all the shooters hunkered down behind their crude barricades, the dust from the courtyard was beginning to settle and the reloading and firing of automatic weapons was replaced with the cries and yells from the tourists left trapped inside the café.
    Isela watched as two passengers from the bus crawled through the shattered windscreen, the man tossing backpacks out ahead of him and then helping the woman through. She was cradling her arm and let herself slide down from the smoking, crumpled vehicle. A second man and woman followed them out.
    Isela watched the first couple inch across to the soldier and drag him to the rear