Crisis (Luke Carlton 1) (9 page)

The major waved Luke and the lawyer to the chairs in front of his desk and sat down with a flourish. There was supposed to be an interpreter, since Friend spoke no Spanish, but someone was still looking for her, so the lawyer sat drumming his fingers on his briefcase, understanding not one word.

‘I think we share the same purpose,’ began Luke, diplomatically, in fluent Spanish. ‘We all want to get this cleared up as quickly as possible so we can leave you in peace. I’m sure you have lots to get on with.’ Major Elerzon nodded and frowned, as if weighed down by the heavy burden of responsibility that came with his job and his title. Luke had seen that look on a policeman’s face before and he usually found it to be a façade. The last time he had seen it was in Afghanistan, about five minutes before his patrol had discovered a ten-year-old village boy kept chained and cowering in the police chief’s back room. Still, mustn’t pre-judge Major Elerzon, he thought. ‘Perhaps,’ he continued, ‘we could start with you telling me what is
not
in the coroner’s report.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I’ve read the report,’ replied Luke. ‘We both have. So we know that Señor Benton suffered several stab wounds from a sharp object – let’s assume it was a knife. They caused severe internal bleeding. And he was injected with something before he died. But who do you think did it, and why? Come on, Major, you’ve worked so many cases down here you must be an expert by now. I’d like to know your gut instincts on this case. What’s your professional hunch?’

The major held up his hand as if patting an invisible object. ‘Slow down, my friend,’ he said. ‘
Paciencia
. Let us get to know each other a little. That is how we do things over here. This is your first time in my country, yes?’

‘I grew up here,’ said Luke.

‘I see. Well, I can reveal to you that the men who killed your comrade . . .’ Major Elerzon placed the palms of his hands together as if in prayer. Luke noticed that his nails were bitten to the quick ‘. . . the men who did this will most likely be from one of the two cartels down here, Los Rostrojos or Los Chicos.’

Brilliant. I knew that before I left London, thought Luke.

‘But, to be certain, my men are working on getting the answers now.’

‘Can I ask how?’ said Luke.

‘Of course. We have nearly forty suspects in custody and some of
my best investigators can be . . . how shall I put it? . . . very persuasive.’ The police chief’s stern features broke into a lopsided grin.

Shit, thought Luke. Abort, abort! It was as if a massive alarm bell was going off inside his head. This would be information acquired through torture and he threw a glance at Friend, knowing the lawyer would have had a stroke if he’d understood what was being said. MI6 and MI5 had got themselves into enough of a legal tangle from their work with local partners in places like Pakistan and Libya. If he wasn’t careful on this case, Luke could see himself ending up in the High Court, answering questions from behind a screen. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to have legal counsel along for the ride. He looked again at Friend, who was busy making notes. ‘Are you following any of this?’ he asked.

‘Not a word, I’m afraid. You’ll have to give me the gist when you’re done.’

‘We are done,’ said Luke. He turned back to the police chief. ‘Thank you, Major, for your time. I’ll be in touch. Oh. I nearly forgot, I have something for you. A souvenir from Scotland.’ He reached into his bag and handed over a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

Elerzon’s face lit up, his hands almost caressing the bottle. He opened a drawer in his desk, dropped the bottle into it and took out another. ‘
Aguardiente
,’ he announced proudly, handing Luke what looked very much like a bottle of TCP antiseptic. ‘This is Antioqueño, our most popular brand. Please, it is yours to keep.’

Luke knew all about
aguardiente
: 29 per cent proof, it guaranteed the mother of all hangovers. He handed the bottle to Friend. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You can declare that to Vauxhall in your report!’

‘I hope,’ continued Major Elerzon, ‘that we can provide some entertainment for you here in this town. Perhaps we all drink together. Tonight, if you’re free. I know a good place.’

A glance at Friend, wilting quietly in the heat, the jetlag clearly getting the better of him, told Luke he would be on his own for this one. He forced a smile. ‘Sure, but my friend here needs to rest. It will just be me.’

‘Excellent! I pick you up from your hotel at eight.’

Luke, too, was craving sleep, but back at his hotel he had a visitor. The SIS deputy station chief for Colombia was waiting for him in the lobby. Simon Clements was an unnaturally thin man, and curiously pale for someone living in South America. He and Luke went to sit beside the hotel’s deserted pool on white plastic chairs, with no one to overhear them beneath a sunless sky of unbroken cloud.

‘Look, you probably know all this from the reports he was sending back to VX,’ began the deputy station chief, ‘so I’m not sure I can tell you anything massively new. Jerry Benton was overseeing our work with the Colombian joint units, running agents into the cartels and helping to set up the SIGINT telephone intercepts. Oh, and relaying tip-offs in real time on the bulk coke shipments heading for our ports.’

Luke nodded thoughtfully, doing his best to hide a cavernous yawn. He knew all this and, by God, he was tired. ‘Anything from Fort Meade? From the Americans?’

‘Ah, yes, there is, actually,’ said Clements. He reached down to a flat canvas bag at his feet, the sort of thing one might see at an English county book fair, and took out a slim file of printouts marked with the official classification ‘Strap 2 Secret’. At the request of Vauxhall Cross, America’s giant NSA listening station in Maryland had been on the case since day one, tracking emails, phone calls, text messages and geo-locations of everyone sending them. ‘There’s a fair bit of detail in there,’ said Clements. ‘Hope it helps.’

‘Thanks. And in a nutshell?’

‘Well, you’ll have to read it yourself,’ replied Clements, rather testily, ‘but “in a nutshell”, as you put it, there’s not a lot to go on. Jerry was never much of a one for digital comms – I suppose you could say he was a bit old school. We’ve got his last call in from this very hotel before he set out, but after that, nothing. There’s a bit of chatter from the cartels over the next day or two but, frankly, it’s spread all over Colombia.’

‘So what about the agent?’ persisted Luke. ‘What do you have on Fuentes?’

‘Only what’s on file, I’m afraid. Giraldo Fuentes. Born here in Tumaco, recruited into a criminal
banda
when he was just sixteen. Later arrested for armed robbery, charged, banged up. Jerry went to see him in jail, got to know him, turned him and got him out early. He’s worked for us ever since. He’s trusted, polygraphed, cleared to level three. He and Jerry were working pretty closely by the end, but I’m afraid I’ve been too busy up in Cartagena to get involved. You know how it is.’

‘I can imagine. Any idea where I might find him?’

‘Ha!’ Clements snorted. ‘You’ll be lucky. Fuentes, I fear, has gone to ground. We sent someone round to his family as soon as we heard. You know, see if we could offer any help, get them to a safe place and all that. No joy. Place was deserted. Neighbours say they packed up and left in a hurry. And something quite disturbing too.’

‘Go on,’ urged Luke.

‘Well. Our man said a dead dog was lying on the porch with its stomach slit open and its guts spilling out. I imagine it was some sort of warning.’

You don’t say.
Luke stifled another yawn.

Clements consulted his watch and got up to leave. ‘I’ve got to catch the next flight back up to Bogotá. Ambassador’s been at the Foreign Ministry all day and he wants to confer tonight. I don’t mind telling you there’s still a hell of a stink about what Jerry was up to. Our Colombian friends are peeved and I can’t say I blame them. Let’s just be thankful the UK press haven’t got hold of it.’

HEAVY BROCADE CURTAINS,
dark velvet cushions, and grandiose faux-colonial arches. This was the décor with which Nelson García liked to surround himself. Of course, nobody called him that – in fact, very few people even knew his real name, or that the well-guarded Spanish-style villa up in the hills of Antioquia, where he liked to spend as much of the year as he dared, was his. When you are running a multi-billion-dollar cocaine empire spanning three continents, with a lot of enemies and a price on your head, you tend to sleep around. Both literally and metaphorically. Two days here, three days there, sometimes in the back-street
barrio
where he had grown up, poor and violent, at others on a luxury yacht moored fifteen kilometres off Cartagena, or in a palm-thatch cabin deep in Amazonas province, where the jungle merged with the great rainforests of Brazil.

Like so many men at the top of their game in the
narcotraficante
world, García had grown up with nothing and now he had everything. With an acquired taste for the finer things in life, it was to this house in the hills, close to the pretty Spanish colonial town of Ituango, that he liked to return most often. Known simply as La Casa, it was built in the classic hacienda style, with whitewashed walls, wrought-iron balconies and handmade roof tiles. It had its own kitchen garden, and for 365 days a year its fridges were kept stocked. Every night, without
fail, the crisp bedlinen was turned down by maids in old-fashioned black-and-white uniforms trimmed with lace. Yet weeks and months might go by without a visit from the man the drug world had nicknamed El Pobrecito. Usually the first anyone would know of his arrival was the mounting clatter of rotor blades as he helicoptered down from the skies to a nearby field. Or a convoy snaking up the road from the village in a procession of black GMC Suburbans, gun-toting goons leaning out of the windows, yelling and waving at people to get out of the way.

As Luke was sitting with Clements on the coast, Nelson García was very much in residence at his hillside hacienda. In fact, he was holding court with his most trusted people at the head of a long, highly polished table. The blinds were closed, the heat of the day shut out, and in the lamp-lit gloom of the interior the air was thick with the smoke from countless packets of Pielrojas, loose-packed black cigarettes, not good for the lungs. Every one of the men around that table – there were no women in the cartel’s top tier – pulled the strings of international operations that stretched right around the world, into the tattooed gangs of California’s Folsom State Prison and San Quentin, into the digital address books of dock workers from Antwerp to the Port Authority of New Jersey, to Customs and coastguard officials from Nassau to Macau.

Today García’s instructions were clear: Fuentes, the informant, was now a dead man walking. It had taken less than two minutes for Benton to give up his name once the cartel had got to work on him in that jungle clearing. Benton was no hero: he had told them everything they had asked, but it still hadn’t saved him. So now Fuentes was to be hunted down, along with his family. An example should be made of them, said García, and no time was to be wasted in finding them. But their deaths should be . . . how should he put it? . . . recreational.

García looked around the room, waiting for suggestions, his great bull-like head swivelling from one man to the next. He was looking for ideas, something original that would serve as a
warning. Do whatever it takes, he told them, whatever it costs. He didn’t care if they had to be traced to LA, Miami or London: the account had to be settled. That was just the way the clan did business.

But now El Pobrecito had more pressing business to discuss. He needed to know: had the project been compromised? That dumbfuck Englishman, that
espion
, who had blundered into his people’s jungle rendezvous down in Tumaco, what had he learned?

As always, the words he wanted to hear came from Alfonso Suarez, the head of security, soothing him like a balm. ‘
El inglés
knew nothing of importance,’ he said. Heads turned towards the grim-faced Colombian-American, whose suave good looks had earned him the nickname El Guapo, ‘the handsome one’. His track record for getting information out of people was well known within the cartel, and in his younger days his methods had not always involved violence: it was remarkable how much some people’s wives and daughters were prepared to reveal between the sheets. But now his jet-black hair was starting to grey at the temples and he had no time to play games. Suarez would issue an order, on behalf of his boss, and others far further down the food chain would carry it out. He rarely spoke, and when he did it was mostly to whisper something darkly into the ear of his boss, who liked it that way: it kept everyone on their toes.

‘We questioned him. Extensively,’ said Suarez. They all knew what that meant. ‘He gave us some names, including that piece of
mierda
, Fuentes.’ He paused to spit theatrically on the marble floor. A maid dashed forward, like a ball-girl on Wimbledon Centre Court, mopped up the spot and retreated to the shadows.

‘We have, however, taken some precautions,’ continued Suarez. ‘We will be putting the word out that the target is . . . Manchester. Only you in this room know the true destination for our gift. So relax, my friends, the project has not been compromised. Everything is still on track.’

El Pobrecito grunted. Now he had another concern. ‘There is
this other man, this one you say looks like
un
soldado
, the Englishman who just landed in Tumaco. Follow him, watch him closely, and if you think he knows anything, deal with him.’ He gave a brief, joyless chuckle. His mouth was smiling but his eyes were serious and everyone at the table knew better than to laugh.

‘Of course, Patrón,’ replied his head of security. ‘We already have a team on the case.’

WHAT, WONDERED LUKE,
do you wear for a night on the town in Colombia with a dodgy provincial police chief? Not that he had brought an extensive wardrobe, what with all the survival kit he was hefting around in his rucksack. Tonight it would have to be the chinos, Timberlands and a dark blue polo shirt, nothing flash.