Rising Phoenix (12 page)

The effect was marginal. Between his European features and accented Spanish, he would pass as a half-breed at best.

His two large black bags had sailed through a disinterested Colombian customs checkpoint without so much as a glance from the officers on duty. He hated leaving things to chance, but sometimes it was unavoidable. Had he been unfortunate enough to have been stopped, the officials would have undoubtedly been very interested in their contents. Fortunately, people were not generally in the practice of smuggling things into Colombia.

The hotel was far worse than the one in Warsaw. Buildings on the Continent aged more gracefully than their counterparts in other parts of the world. Cracked plaster and broken tiles just seemed to add character—a reminder of Europe’s colorful past. In South America, run-down was just that, run-down. The hotel looked like it had been built ready to fall down.

The room was about what he’d expected. A filthy cubicle with no furniture other than a twin bed with a single blanket and a folding chair. A mirror hung across from the bed. Judging from the discoloration on
the wall, it had at one time adorned the top of a bureau.

Hobart shoved his suitcases under the bed and pulled a crumpled street map out of his back pocket. As near as he could tell, the bar that his friend had suggested for their meeting was about twenty blocks from the hotel. He had two hours before they were to meet, so he decided to walk. It would give him a chance to acclimate to his surroundings. The air and exercise would do him good. Bogota’s eighty-seven-hundred-foot altitude was giving him a splitting headache.

It was almost four o’clock by the time he left the hotel, but the winter sun was still powerful. It heated his black T-shirt, making the jacket he was carrying unnecessary. Pulling a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket, he began his hike across town.

Bogotá seemed to be trapped in time. The feeling that he had stepped back to the early eighties grew in him as he walked. The streets were bursting with people in clothes that hadn’t been in style for years. The small houses that lined his route were painted with little thought to the color of the houses next door. Garbage was piled high in the yards of many of the homes that would have looked abandoned had it not been for the people sitting on the porches.

Every few blocks or so a group of dirty children surrounded him, begging for pesos. He noticed that he was one of the few people being mobbed, making him feel self-conscious about his disguise.

Slowly the houses became more and more scarce, appearing only occasionally, sandwiched between colorful shops and bars. Music blared from the small
cantinas, replacing the squeals of children playing in the streets and the cautioning shouts of their mothers. Despite the early hour, drunk patrons stood elbow to elbow in the cramped cantinas, swaying maniacally to the volume-distorted Spanish rhythms. An old man stumbled out of an open door, nearly knocking Hobart over, and finally landing on his back in a pile of bulging garbage bags. He sank deeply into their soft contents, and that, combined with his altered equilibrium, was making it impossible for him to get up. He apparently found his predicament hysterically funny and began a drunken, coughing laugh that could be heard clearly over the noise of the bar ten feet away. Eventually a woman stumbled out of the same door and pulled him to his feet. They walked off, clutching each other for support.

Hobart jogged across to the quieter side of the street, continuing his search for the place where his friend had promised to meet him.

The man that he was in Bogotá to see was Reed Corey. They had been attached to the same Special Forces team in Vietnam, and as far as Hobart was concerned, Corey was one of the finest jungle fighters in the history of the U.S. Army. Since his discharge after the war, Corey had wandered aimlessly through Asia and South America. He seemed unable to assimilate back into polite society. Hobart understood his predicament. After three tours in Vietnam where his team had made its own law, returning to the U.S. had been strangely confining. While Hobart had forced his own personal transition, Cory had resigned himself to living in the less genteel countries of the world.

Corey was prone to excesses. He always had been. Drinking, fighting, sex. One thing Corey could not abide, though, was drugs. Hobart remembered sitting idly one time in a small village not thirty miles from Saigon, watching Corey beat one of his men nearly to death—something that he couldn’t do as an officer. Corey had discovered a stash of heroin in the man’s duffel. He’d never understood other men’s need to occasionally escape the grim reality of the war. The things that drove other men to the edge—the heat, bugs, rain, brutality—all seemed to go unnoticed by him.

Why rot your brain when you could be blowing some gooks out? he used to ask. All in all, a perfect recruit for this operation.

On his second pass down the street, Hobart found what he was looking for. He turned off the sidewalk and hurried through the thickening traffic. The entrance to the Piñata Verde was doorless, basically a hole cut in a galvanized metal wall. He stepped through and scanned the room. It was nearly empty. A few tired-looking patrons sat alone at tables with lines of empty shot glasses extending in front of them. The bartender sat on a stool behind a plywood bar, concentrating on an American game show dubbed in Spanish—Hobart couldn’t place which one. No one acknowledged his arrival. The only sound in the room came from the television and the bartender trying to beat the game show contestants to their answers.

Hobart padded quietly to the back of the bar, keeping his eyes on the booths to his left as he passed them. He slid into the last booth, and began reading the
graffiti carved into the cheap wood table. It looked like Corey would be a little late.

A lone figure at the bar came to life. Ordering two drinks, he jumped unsteadily off his bar stool and started to make his way to the corner booth where Hobart sat. The man was clearly not native. His matted light brown hair came down straight onto his shoulders, framing a tangled full beard. The tie-dyed shirt, baggy shorts, and Birkenstocks completed the effect of a hippie-era throwback. Hobart studied him as he approached.

The man slid into the booth and pushed a full shot glass across the table to Hobart. His ample belly brushed the table.

“Almost didn’t recognize you, John. You look like a fucking spic.” Reed Corey lit a cigarette, cupping his hand needlessly in the stagnant air. As the flame briefly illuminated his face, Hobart recognized his eyes. They were watery and red-rimmed, where they had once been clear and sharp, but there was no mistaking them. He stared quietly at what was left of his old army buddy, and Corey stared back. “It’s good to see you, John. Been a long time.” He wiped at his nose with the back of his hand and sniffed loudly.

“It’s good to see you too, Reed…. You’ve changed.”

Corey laughed at the comment, patting his round stomach. “Yeah, a little too much of the good life.” He went through his nose-wiping ritual again.

It was clearly time to switch to plan B. Hobart had come to Colombia expecting to convince Corey to hit the drugs. His training, talent, and knowledge of the area made him the perfect candidate for the operation.
Or so he had thought The man in front of him looked like he’d have a hard time getting up two flights of stairs. Hobart hoped Corey had enough of his faculties left to at least provide some information.

“So what are you doing in Bogotá? And why the getup?” Corey asked, turning sideways and putting his feet up on the bench. He sniffed deeply.

“Working on a little operation,” Hobart replied hesitantly. His old friend could no longer be trusted. Corey’s condition screamed drug habit, and while that could work in his favor for getting information, it would work against him in trying to coerce Corey to keep his mouth shut. Addicts tended to quickly forget past promises and fears in their eagerness for their next fix.

On the other hand, he was the only game in town.

“I could use a little information and you came to mind.”

“What kind of information?”

Hobart scooted closer and lowered his voice. “Information on cocaine manufacturing.”

Corey looked surprised. He took a long drag on his cigarette. “I heard you got booted out of the DEA. They decide to take you back?”

“Nope. Working for myself.”

Corey scooted even closer and craned his neck unnaturally. His position obscured his mouth from the other people in the bar. Hobart wondered if lip-reading eavesdroppers were common in Bogotá’s seedier bars.

“So what do you want to know exactly?”

“I’m looking for a large coke manufacturing plant
that supplies the U.S. I need to know its exact location, who runs it, and where they get the chemicals they use for processing.”

“Which one?”

Hobart shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter.”

Corey laughed quietly and scooted back to his side of the booth. “What’re you up to?” He lit a new cigarette with the waning embers of the old one.

“What’s the difference?”

“None, I guess.”

“I could use a
.22
pistol, too.”

“Jesus, John. Anything else? Maybe a fucking invitation to Luis Colombar’s birthday party?”

Hobart recognized the name. Colombar was the most powerful of Colombia’s cartel leaders. “I don’t think that will be necessary.”

“Pretty tall order—and it’s gonna cost me to fill it. I don’t have to tell you that asking those kinds of questions can get you killed. You know what I mean?” His expression was vaguely hopeful.

Hobart looked on with a bored expression. He was being buttered up for the price tag. He knew damn well that the information he needed was already locked in Corey’s coke-addled brain. He decided to move things along.

“How much?”

Corey made a show of calculating the amount. “I can probably get you the information for, say, five thousand dollars. The gun will cost you another thousand. That’s cost, John. I’m not making anything on the deal.”

“I can trust your information, right?”

He looked insulted. “Have I ever steered you wrong?”

He hadn’t. Hobart hoped that the drugs and years had left just a fraction of the unfailing reliability that he’d counted on in Vietnam.

“Six thousand it is. When?”

Corey thought for a moment. “Wednesday. I’ll meet you at the bar directly across the street at eleven-thirty.”

Hobart scowled. He wasn’t looking forward to spending nearly a week idle in Bogotá.

Changing the subject, Corey held up his shot glass. “To old times.”

Hobart picked up the glass in front of him and gulped back the cheap tequila.

Corey stumbled out of the Piñata Verde at two-thirty a.m. Hobart watched him from the garbage-strewn alley where he’d been standing motionless for the last six and a half hours. He let the drunken man get a fifty-yard lead, and walked quietly out onto the street after him. Corey took him straight north for almost a half an hour, though his weaving gait didn’t get them very far in that time. Finally he turned east through a narrow alley, exiting onto an empty four-lane road. About half a block from the alley, he turned again and made his way up a set of stairs to a white house with a sagging roof. It took him almost a minute to find the lock with the key.

Hobart watched until he disappeared into the house. Shivering slightly, he turned and walked back the way he came. Five minutes of vigorous waving found him a cab that took him back to his hotel.

He lay awake on the hard mattress until the sun appeared in his window and the light began inching across the stained vinyl floor. Unexpected changes in plans always made him nervous. There were so many angles to consider. But he had five days until their next meeting and nothing to do but think.

Hobart paced slowly across the small room that had been his home for almost a week. It was ten o’clock Wednesday night. Almost time.

The week hadn’t been wasted. He had had time to explore Bogotá and many of the surrounding mountain roads. Talking with everyone who would listen, he had also managed to put a little polish on his rusty Spanish. On the whole, though, he had felt like a horse stuck in the starting gate of a race. But the gun was finally about to go off.

With his newly acquired knowledge of the city, Hobart maneuvered his rented car through the back streets and alleys of Bogotá, ending up in a parking space three blocks from his final destination. It was 11:28. He hurried up the well-lit street and entered the bar across from the one he and Corey had met in almost a week ago. There was no name on it, only a hand-painted sign welcoming its patrons. The bar was wall to wall with sweat-drenched revelers, grinding and shaking to an ear-splitting disco song. Hobart couldn’t remember the artist, but he remembered the yean 1977.

He paused in the doorway. There was no way to easily circle the crowd. All of the tables had been
moved to the sides of the large room, and patrons had spilled from the dance floor and were gyrating in every open space they could find. Light was supplied almost exclusively by a spotlighted disco ball.

Hobart took his last gulp of fresh air and began pushing his way methodically through the crowd. He started at the left. When he hit the back wall, he moved a few feet to his right and plunged in again. Wet bodies ground against him, and disgruntled dancers mouthed silent insults as he pushed by. An elbow, inadvertently thrown by a large man with a gold tooth, dazed him. Hobart wondered angrily why Corey would choose this place to meet. It seemed that anonymity could be found in more convenient locales.

Finally, a lone brown head bobbed up in the sea of black. It was less than ten feet away; and Hobart adjusted his trajectory accordingly. It took a full five minutes, but he finally found himself standing alongside his old friend. He felt conspicuous when he stopped and began swaying to the rhythms in an effort not to stand out. Corey glanced at him and twirled around. For a moment he thought that his old friend hadn’t recognized him, and pulled a hand back to give him a sharp jab in the ribs. Before he could, though, he felt a large padded envelope being pressed into his stomach. He grabbed the heavy package, and pulled an envelope with six thousand dollars in cash from his waistband. Corey took it and disappeared, deftly swinging a rather overweight woman between them. By the time Hobart was able to work his way around her, Corey was gone.