Payback (20 page)

Far
more likely was another human. Banto himself may have turned and come looking for him. He would have heard the chopper, and must have figured out that he was being tracked. Bolitho cursed himself for lighting the fire. That and the aroma of the coffee and his cheroot would pin-point him to any halfway decent tracker within a few miles. Had not his own field instructor in Vietnam taught him to respect the skills of Vietcong trackers? Anyone in the bush who so much as used soap, deodorant, hair cream, toothpaste, boot polish, smoked or chewed gum, he had stressed, might as well stand up, yell and wave a flashlight to these people. And if not Banto, there could be local drug runners, heading for the back door to Guatemala. They would have taken the chopper’s long hover over them to be the security forces...

He
screamed inwardly at himself. Despite all his experience, he had acted like a rookie. All because he was still treating natives like dumb gooks.

Then
he heard it. The sound of something big and confident moving through the jungle towards him. This was no human, he now knew. It was one of the big cats.

A
jaguar. Or a puma.

Bolitho
felt a claustrophobic panic rising in him. He was trussed up in his sleeping bag and strung up in his damned hammock. Very slowly he eased out both his hands and peeled back the net. Next he began to shimmy free, out of the constricting strait-jacket bag and to the ground. Then he froze, making far too much noise as his feet sank into the fern forest bed. Both hands now on the Beretta, he opened his eyes wide, willing his pupils to open even more to help his night vision. There was a sudden crashing sound as the animal leapt forward in attack on the small clearing. A big shape flew at his T-shirt, still staked out by the fire’s dying embers. It shook it violently for a while, knocked over the billy can, then disappeared again into the blackness.

Bolitho
grimly recognised it as a puma, one of the world’s natural killers. Known also as the mountain lion, cougar or panther, it is the Americas’ answer to Africa’s leopard. Just like the leopard it kills many more animals than it devours, to slake a desire for warm blood and its instinct to destroy. Not for nothing had major South American ranch owners each employed one or two lion-hunters,
leoneros
, until laws came in to protect the endangered beasts.

His
mind racing, Bolitho forced a calm on himself as he planned the best form of defence against the animal. It was still near by. The strange purr-like growl seemed to be resonating all around him, from no one direction he could identify. The beast had seemed fairly average size, from what he knew of them: about 150 pounds, three foot high, and a body of some four feet, not counting the thick, long tail. One thing was clear though. It knew all about him. And exactly where he was.

There
was something that he had read or been told that he needed to remember. He knew it was important. Something about a situation just like this...But all he could remember was that he had something to remember, Goddamnn it! And then suddenly it came back from his distant memory. It had been in a book about one of his military heroes, an expert jungle fighter in the Second World War. John Hedley had been in the British special services in the East. One night, behind Japanese lines, he had been sleeping when his native guides saw a tiger stalking him, just three yards away. They had guns, but knew they stood a high chance of just wounding the animal, making it even more dangerous for being the more unpredictable. Also, of course, they did not want to advertise their whereabouts to the enemy. Instead one of them shone a torch directly at the animal’s face. And, in Hedley’s own words, ‘he beat it’; adding that it was ‘a trick worth remembering’.

If
he could have got to his shotgun, it would have been different, but Bolitho decided to put his life in Hedley’s hands. His Beretta, not a great stopper, was accurate, at best, to around thirty yards. And a fast moving cat—at night?

The
deep-throated, terrifying purr-roar seemed to be getting louder, the puma becoming angrier, when, unexpectedly, it stopped—and there was an uncanny silence. The whole noisy forest was holding its breath, waiting, watching...

The
attack came from his right; Bolitho’s only warning the three or four crashing bounds as the puma raced at him. Rolling over, he grabbed the powerful, high-intensity lamp and shone it at the beast, now just feet away. He saw with pin-sharp clarity its four dagger canines bared, its ears perked, its head perfectly still as it flew forward, accelerating beyond twenty miles an hour from its standing start, its huge paws flaring. Bolitho screamed and screamed at it, the lamp in his left hand, the shaking Beretta in his right. He prepared to fire now, panicking that the torch was not going to work, when suddenly the puma straightened its front legs. It dug them in, throwing up debris, and shook its head as its back half skidded round like a car in a drift. Then, regaining its poise, it darted off into the forest and was gone.

Bolitho
remained immobile for minutes as he strained his senses again to be sure he was safe. And slowly, progressively, the jungle noises started up again as this little world within the great forest closed over the threat like quicksand.

*

Elkins woke to the phone ringing. For a while he was completely disoriented, unsure of where he was. It was a feeling he knew well, and waited the few seconds it always took to get his brain in gear.

Then
the bitter-sweet memories came flooding back, and he closed his eyes again. The lids felt like sandpaper, and made his eyes smart. Squinting at the clock-alarm he grabbed the phone to kill the noise, his head pounding.

‘
Welcome to sunny Miami!’ Tom said with a disc jockey’s forced cheerfulness. ‘It’s seventy degrees on the beach today. That’s Fahrenheit, for any Limeys out there.’

‘
Morning, Tom,’ Elkins croaked, sitting up very carefully. His back and genitalia were stinging sore. The guys had been into a heavy pain and humiliation trip. Not his normal scene. But he had enjoyed great sex, a revelation which had challenged all his old prejudices and fears about S&M. Nothing could change the fact, however, that it would simply never an option for him to go home to his wife with a body covered in marks like these. Neither was all the body-piercing. Rubber and plastic was his favourite scene in London, and he had found a couple of clubs in Soho and Charing Cross that suited him well enough. But the rough-trade treatment meted out to him until early that morning had been his best session ever. They had a fully equipped ‘cell’ at some apartment they had taken him to, and at the time—his senses heightened by the coke and amyl nitrate poppers—he would happily have died at their hands.

‘
We don’t have too much time, I’m afraid. Can you make it down here, packed to leave in an hour?’

‘
No problem.’

‘
Shall I have some coffee and juice sent up?’

‘
Throw in some paracetamol and I might just survive the day,’ he said. Hearing Tom chuckle, he hung up and cautiously eased himself out of bed. Catching sight of himself in a mirror, he went over to open the curtains. In the strong light, the weals and clamp marks looked horrific. Then, seeing his suit and clothes on the floor, he realised that the last part of the night was a mental blank. He had no memory of leaving the cell, and none of how he had got back to the hotel. Suddenly sick with shock and terror, he went over and picked up his jacket, convinced that he had been professionally rolled. Had to be. Stupid! Hadn’t they seemed like professionals from the moment they picked him up here in the hotel bar? His money and charge cards were sure to be missing. How could he have been so gullible, so bloody naïve, at his age...?

But
no...there they were. His Cartier Tank watch was also safely in his side pocket. Relief washed over him, soothing away the worst of his fears, and turning it inwards to his familiar feelings of self-loathing and contrition. Flicking through his wallet, he checked the cash and his collection of charge cards. All there. Including the photograph he carried of his wife and two children. But underneath he noticed a new photograph. One he had never seen before.

There
he was. His stupid, reddened head and hands thrust through the stocks. Sweating, eyes rolling, naked, his lacerated back bloodied...He no longer needed his memory to remind him of what they had done to him. He stared at the Polaroid briefly before dropping it and running to the bathroom to throw up.

*

It had been a long way and eaten into a lot of Mitchell’s time. At least the Service’s front tour operator company, still working out of the last vestige of their old offices in Vauxhall Bridge Road, had kept the cost down. They had got him a trade AD75 air ticket and rack rates at a decent downtown hotel.

Had
it been worth it? He could have sent someone else out, or got one of their own people down there to meet Bates. But no. It was all too damned important and had to be got right. And he knew that he personally had broken through to the man at their last meeting. By flying out personally, he had begun to create that all-important bonding with him that was going to be necessary if things got hot. His flight back from Miami was still four hours away, and he opened his briefcase in the small private office the British Consulate had made available to him.

Taking
out his Service-issue laptop, he logged on first to his recruitment agency address and answered a few routine e-mails, to show willing. Then he logged on to the highly secure, encrypted SIS address using the temporary password Gaylord had given him, to check for anything new he should know. There was just one, about the firebombing at the Temple Bio-Laboratories plant. He read it grimly, whilst marvelling at how easy computer access now was to headquarters. So much better than the ill-fated, painfully slow ATHS system introduced at Century House. The Automated Telegram Handling System had been tailored for SIS use at huge cost.
Telegram
Handling. The clue even back then was in the name. Next he filed a brief CX report on his own news to date with Bates.

He
had decamped the hotel for the Service’s sometime outpost in the region, the British Consulate’s suite of offices on Brickell Bay Drive. In part it was to find somewhere private to draft his field agency report, never trusting hotel rooms. But Mitchell was also there as an old hand to cement FCO relations. He had spent a lifetime forwarding reports from embassies and consulates, and he knew that some of the personal relationships developed during these times often proved invaluable later. The middle-aged Consul General had certainly been pleased to welcome him for the morning. Mitchell’s considerable reputation in King Charles Street went before him, and a spot of SIS business made a welcome change for him from helping out sunburned, inebriated Brits.

‘
Thanks for finding me a corner,’ Mitchell said.

‘
Always happy to help a Box 850 friend,’ he replied, using some old FCO jargon for MI6 to show he was in the know.

‘
You’re kept pretty busy here, I imagine, with the Mouse pilgrims.’

‘
It’s a popular place. And not just for Disney and the other parks. We’re getting over a million British tourists a year to Florida,’ the Consul smiled. ‘And we see a fair percentage of them, one way or the other. People who have lost their passports, or been robbed. Tourists
still
insist on believing that we’ll lend them money. It’s one of those great urban myths. There are also Brits to visit who’ve got themselves arrested—mostly for drink or drugs offences. More seriously, we also get involved with some victims of rape, serious assault, even murder.’ He explained how he had over recent weeks become a highly reluctant TV face, following the murder of two British tourists. ‘Terrible for the families, of course, but also for the State. Miami in particular gets an unfair press for these things. They’ve really cleaned up their act for tourists. Hard to see what more they can do, really.’

They
gossiped for a while longer, Mitchell envying him rather. An interesting, important job, but with some good lifestyle compensations for all the pressure.

When
alone again, he accessed the latest report submitted to the Cabinet Office Assessments Staff by the CIG – the Current Intelligence Group of experts on Russia. The news was all bad. Their worst fears had been confirmed by an asset being run by Moscow Station in the Sluzhba Vneshnoi Razvedki, Russia’s overseas intelligence service, which was to the FSB what MI6 was to MI5. She had reported that it was Andrei Viktor Rybinski, one of several Deputy Directors of Volchov, the country’s leading biotech research facility, who had been recruited some months earlier by Barton to work alongside Blacher at the Oeiras Temple Bio-Laboratories plant.

To
refresh his memory, Mitchell did a search on Volchov. Seconds later his screen was filled with referenced source options, much of it from hard intelligence obtained from inside the Research Institute for Especially Pure Bio-logical Preparations in Leningrad. The Institute had been one of four satellites in the powerful Volchov empire in the old Soviet days. From all he read, it was alleged that work had continued in those days, despite the USSR’s signature on the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. The most sensitive research revolved around growing bacteria and viruses at the highly secret labs at Obolensk.