Survival (12 page)

The lock posed no huge hurdle for her, and within ninety seconds she had the ignition bypassed and was pushing the dirt bike away from the house it had been parked in front of. Three minutes later, she started the engine and cut away toward the highway, reasonably secure that she could rely on the motorcycle not being reported stolen until morning.

She twisted the throttle at the on-ramp and whizzed up onto the highway, the helmet masking her gender and rendering her anonymous to any casual observer. Jet pointed the handlebars south, toward Panama City. Her plan was to lose herself in the crowds, the city large enough that she wouldn’t stick out, while she formulated a strategy to evade the manhunt that was sure to follow.

Once over the Panama Canal, she eyed the gas and pulled off at the next filling station – the fuel gauge read empty. A portly attendant filled it for her while she dug in her bag and retrieved her phone. Her breath caught in her throat when she powered it on and saw that she had a message. She paid the attendant and rode to the bathrooms, where she ducked inside and listened to her voice mail.

When she exited the building her face was as placid as a mountain lake at dawn, even as her mind raced furiously at the message from Matt. She glanced around the empty station and pulled up a map on her phone. After a quick calculation she drove back onto the highway, the dirt bike’s exhaust buzzing angrily as she gunned the gas. She’d left Matt a confirmation on his voice mail, and now she had a goal: get somewhere safe by daybreak, and ditch the motorcycle where it would never be found so the police would have no idea where she was.

Jet kept her speed down as she drove through Panama City, where traffic was sparse at the late hour, and didn’t open the motorcycle up again until she was well out of the city limits, on her way to Colón – the far side of the Panama Canal and the most dangerous place in the country. If she was going to figure out a way to make it to Colombia, she’d need to find someone who regularly crossed the border without bothering with documentation, and in her experience that type of person wasn’t to be found in the better neighborhoods. No, she was looking for a cockroach, and cockroaches tended to favor the shadows.

And in Panama it didn’t get any more shadowy than Colón.

Her impression as she rode through the city in the dead of night wasn’t favorable – the streets exuded menace, the danger palpable. Near the eastern reaches of the city the streets degraded further and the buildings with it, the stink of poverty rising from the dwellings like a gas leak.

She spotted her end point for the night near a market that was selling its wares through a barred window. A garish orange hotel’s vacancy sign blinked in the night, the rusting placard in front advertising the cheapest rooms in Colón. After a trip around the block she decided to take a chance. She needed sleep, and she figured the odds that the police had issued a nationwide APB over a waterfront stabbing sixty miles away were virtually nil. Even if they had, this was the kind of place that was off the official map, where nobody asked questions and the police never set foot.

The night clerk appeared to be the proprietor, a sleepy whippet of a man in his seventies, almost completely bald, a huge hearing aid hanging behind his right ear. He showed no interest in anything but her money, and handed her a key on a polystyrene float, in keeping with the place’s nautical theme.

The room was exactly what she expected, slightly better than a prison cell but not nearly as secure. Fortunately the window had bars on it, and she was able to prop the lone wooden chair beneath the doorknob, the lock being a bad joke and the safety chain gone, torn from the wooden jamb.

As she lay on the hard mattress in the tiny room, a creaking ceiling fan the only relief from the heat, she thought about her next move. She’d have to alter her appearance and lay low until evening – the sort of men she was interested in meeting wouldn’t be early risers and would no doubt be found after dark in the seedy waterfront bars lining the port.

Jet stared at the fan orbiting overhead, the ventilation a joke, and formulated a mental list to complete tomorrow. As she drifted off to sleep, the last image in her mind was of her daughter and Matt, somewhere in the Colombian jungle, a world away.

Chapter 17

Colón, Panama

Jet awoke to the sound of a woman screaming at the top of her lungs somewhere in the hall beyond her door. From what Jet could tell, the woman’s husband or boyfriend had just now arrived from an all-night binge, and she was expressing her displeasure in an unmistakable way. A man’s voice screamed back, and then Jet heard a blow, followed by crying.

She rolled over and pulled the pillow over her head. It was none of her business. The locals could settle their differences however they wanted, hopefully quietly.

She drifted off again, and then a blaring of car horns outside the window ended any further rest. After eyeing her watch through puffy lids, she grudgingly slid her legs off the bed and stood. She’d gotten a total of five and a half hours of sleep, but it felt more like two as she padded to the bathroom, which not unexpectedly looked like a science experiment in the unforgiving light of day.

A tepid shower partially revived her, and she dug new clothes out of her bag. She paused to inspect herself in the hazy mirror and frowned at the abrasions on her face – scratches left by the branches in her mad dash to freedom. A small price to pay, she thought, pulling on a baseball cap and slipping sunglasses on before grabbing her bag and walking out the door.

She pushed through the hotel entrance and took in the bleak neighborhood. Clumps of youths loitered on the front stoops in their best gangsta attire, a testament to the pervasiveness of American rap culture. She ignored the stares and wolf whistles as she moved to where she’d left the motorcycle around the block, and was unsurprised when it was no longer there. One of the positives about predators was they tended to be predictable, and some enterprising thief had solved her motorcycle problem during the night.

She kept moving until she came to a corner market, where she bought a bottle of water and asked about pharmacies in the area. The woman behind the counter scrunched her brow like Jet had asked her the circumference of Jupiter, and pointed off to her right with a vague assurance that she thought there was one a couple of streets away.

It turned out to be three of the most miserable blocks she’d ever had the misfortune to traverse. Every other storefront had been boarded up, and the pungent stench of garbage and urine filled the air as she passed grungy doorways. Faces watched her from upstairs windows framed by bed sheets or towels for curtains, and she was hard-pressed to think of a worse outing – maybe in Africa when she’d been in Sierra Leone for an assassination mission, but Colón was giving it a serious run for its money.

The pharmacy was bare bones, many of the products of the aged inventory past their expiration dates. She found a home hair dye kit that would work, opting for burgundy, which on the box looked like medium brown to her. She also bought a soda and some cheap makeup and asked about breakfast places, but got another blank stare from a teenage boy who looked like he was working that morning because he’d lost a bet.

She found a café further down the street that looked relatively clean and ordered scrambled eggs and coffee, and was surprised when both were delicious. A toothless newspaper vendor entered and waved his wares at the patrons, and Jet signaled him and bought the morning paper.

A photo of the harbor with a close-up of the
Paloma
roped off with crime scene tape was front and center, the coverage long on speculation but sparse on details. A woman was being sought in the murder of Leon Urubia, twenty-nine, of Panama City, unemployed since a dishonorable discharge in the Panamanian army eight years ago. She read the description of the female perpetrator carefully. Thankfully it could have been any of a quarter of the young females in Panama: slim, dark brown or black hair cropped short, between 5'2" and 5'8", wearing black or gray shorts and a dark top.

The fishermen had obviously taken her advice and seen nothing, so the description was from the man with the gun – one of the bad guys.

The police assured the public that they were tracking down leads and would have more information shortly, which Jet interpreted to mean they had nothing. But that wouldn’t last forever, and when they had connected the car with her it would be a matter of hours before they had the passport photo from her Belgian identity – a photo which admittedly appeared so generic it would be hard to recognize her four years later, especially with the help of a little makeup.

Still, it was clear that her time was running short, and this evening she’d need to find someone in the Panamanian underworld who could get her into Colombia with no questions asked.

She ordered a second cup of coffee, and her thoughts turned to Alejandro. If she wasn’t afraid he’d sold her out, she would have called him and within minutes had a contact who could provide anything she needed. It still seemed implausible that he was the culprit, but given the circumstances, she had to assume so.

The only reason he would still be breathing this time next month was because Hannah and Matt were alive. If they hadn’t made it, there was no corner of the planet safe enough to shield him from her wrath.

Which was all fine, but vows of revenge were no substitute for having a plan. Right now Matt and her daughter were in the middle of a rainforest, doing their best to make it to civilization. Matt was smart and resourceful, and Jet had no doubt he’d lead them to safety. But what then? Where could they go that their pursuers couldn’t find them?

Jet turned to more immediate matters. She had money, a gun, and was in the clear, having left no trail for those hunting her to follow. She’d been in far more dire straits at other points in her life and survived, and she had no doubt that she’d live to tell about this one, too. But a part of her was beyond exhausted at constantly having to be on the run, and she promised herself that wherever she and Matt went, this time it would be somewhere safe, beyond the reach of the ghosts of their pasts.

She paid the bill using American dollars, which were interchangeable with Panamanian balboas and accepted everywhere, and began her trek back to the hotel for a makeover. On the way she spotted another hotel, equally suspect, and made a mental note to check into that one for her second night in beautiful Colón.

Jet stopped at a boutique and bought a pair of knockoff fashion jeans and a neon top she’d ordinarily have avoided like the plague, and a pair of kicky heels that would make her taller. She was getting a feel for how the local women dressed, and they didn’t appear to be shy about their fashion sensibilities, which seemed to run anywhere from risqué to outright prostitute. If she was going to blend in tonight, like it or not she needed to walk the walk, and if that meant looking like something out of the red light district, so be it. The blouse’s only saving grace was that it hung over the waist of her belt, so if she wanted to bring the Glock, she could.

Back in her room she unpacked her purchases and set about dying her hair. An hour later the woman in the mirror had brassy medium-brown locks and looked even less like the passport photo, in which her hair had been long and black. An application of darker base took her skin tone to a light caramel, more like a local, with a racial mix of indeterminate lineage.

She tried on her new outfit and inspected herself, and then shook her head as she grumbled at the mirror. “
Hey, sailor. Twenty dollars makes your dreams come true!
” Her reflection made her laugh, and she sat on the edge of the bed, letting some of the accumulated tension drift away. She was talking to herself and, even worse, cracking herself up. She attributed it to the fatigue and changed back into less attention-getting clothes, preferring not to dote on her little detour from sanity, a pressure relief valve best not examined too closely.

~ ~ ~

Igor paced in his Panama City hotel room, staring through the window at a sliver of Pacific Ocean blue between the skyscrapers on every side. He was on the phone with Fernanda, wearing only his underwear, his body chiseled from countless hours of rigorous training.

“No. They haven’t got any leads. She got past everyone somehow,” he reported.

“How? I thought you said the police had the road blocked and patrols closing off the jungle.”

“They did. I don’t understand it either. But she’s gone.”

“The Panamanian says that they have an APB out on her, and her picture’s been circulated with customs. He says with that, the country’s locked down. There’s no way she can get out.”

Igor eyed the buildings and the jungle beyond. “If someone wanted to hide in Panama, it could take decades to find them. It’s three-quarters jungle, and Panama City has almost two million people. This is anything but a lock, Fernanda.”

“I know. They’re doing everything they can.”

His tone softened. “How’s Colombia? Any progress on that end?”

“I met the gangster who runs the place, and he’s got his people looking for the man and girl, but it’s kind of the same situation as you’re facing. That’s a huge slice of jungle, and they could be anywhere.”

“You don’t sound optimistic.”

“Because I’m not,” she admitted.

“Did the client okay all this? The expenditures?”

“So far. The instructions were clear: find her and terminate her at all costs. But I get the sense there are limits even to their means.” She hesitated. “We’d be better off performing than having to tell them we were unsuccessful.”

“You know these are both long shots,” Igor said.

“Of course. But what else can we do? We’ve never failed yet. I don’t want this to be the first time. Not with this client. And not with this kind of money involved.”

“I’ll stay here until I hear otherwise, then,” Igor said.

“And I’ll remain in Colombia. The gangster has me staying at his compound.”