Survival (25 page)

The blood drained from Juan Diego’s face at the mention of Portobelo, and he realized the man was serious about killing him – he knew enough stone-cold murderers to recognize he was dealing with one.

“We dropped her onshore.”

“Where?”

“Capurganá,” Juan Diego lied, naming a town further north just below the Panamanian border.

Igor saw the lie in his eyes and raised the gun. “I told you, you lie to me, you die. I guess you didn’t believe me.”

Juan Diego instantly recognized his mistake – his poker face might have been good enough to fool some half-wit customs officials, but not a professional.

“No. Wait. All right. We just dropped her off in Acandí, the town off our starboard side. My crewman gave her a lift in the dinghy. Please. I don’t know anything about her other than that she wanted a ride south. That’s it. This isn’t my fight. You should be able to find her there – there’s no road out, so she’ll be looking for a boat to take her to a larger town.”

Igor studied Juan Diego’s red eyes and twitching face, and then raised his pistol and shot him between the eyes. The back of the old man’s head blew off as the slug expanded and took a baseball-size chunk of skull with it, and he collapsed forward on the table.

“You know what? I believe you,” Igor said, unable to help his involuntary smile.

Back on deck, the bound crewman was still out cold. Rather than waste a bullet, Igor slipped the pistol into his belt, grabbed the unconscious man’s head with both hands, and snapped his neck with a powerful twist. He was just rising when he heard the skiff pull to the stern of the fishing boat. Gerardo was staring with wide eyes at the cigarette boat alongside it.

Igor moved toward the skiff and drew his pistol. “Where did you drop her off?”

Gerardo stammered his answer. “On the beach.”

Their eyes locked, and Gerardo saw something in the gunman’s that sent him flying over the side of the boat, diving deep into the water before the shooter could kill him. Igor swore and weighed firing at the man, but opted for stealth. The shot inside the boat would have been barely audible in the small town, but a shot out in the open would have half the population reaching for its guns, which he had no doubt a remote Colombian border town would have plenty of.

Igor watched the surface for the man’s head, and when it didn’t appear after twenty seconds, he leapt across to the cigarette boat and pointed to the dark town. “Can you get this thing onto the beach?”

“If there’s no reef, I should be able to,” said the captain, a twenty-something man with slicked-back hair and a scar running down his face. Igor guessed that he was a veteran of the runs from Colombia to Panama that brought much of the locally distributed cocaine into the country. He looked like the stereotypical fast-money player who’d never live to see thirty.

“Then put us there. We’re right behind her and she’s got nowhere to go.”

Igor called Fernanda on his sat phone on the way into the beach and gave her a short report. When he was done, she was equally terse.

“Call once you get her.”

“Absolutely. This will be over within the hour.”

Fernanda hesitated. “Be careful.”

“Always.”

Chapter 35

Acandí, Colombia

Jet heard the muffled pop from the
Providencia
and stopped, instantly recognizing the sound of a handgun inside the boat. She squinted at the pair of vessels in the darkness, but after a few seconds forced her attention back to making her escape. She had to assume that Juan Diego and the crew had told her pursuers where she’d gone, which meant that the relative comfort and safety of a hotel was out of the question. It would be just a matter of time until they came for her, and in a town with no way out but the sea, she didn’t have many options.

She gazed down the sand at the beached pangas tied to coconut palms, their long multicolored hulls gleaming in the moonlight, and debated liberating one, but dismissed the thought when the cigarette boat’s engines revved and its bow light blinked to life. She’d never be able to outrun a vessel like that in one of the pangas, and it had radar, so she’d be a sitting duck. Her only choices were to hide or to lure her pursuers into a trap and ambush them.

Time was working against her, and by morning her pursuers would have been able to call in reinforcements if they hadn’t found her. She had no idea what kinds of connections they had in Colombia, or even who they were, but judging by their ability to mobilize the Panamanian police, she had to assume the worst.

The boat picked up speed. At the rate it was cutting through the waves, it would be on the beach in a couple of minutes. She eyed her footprints in the sand and cursed that she didn’t have time to brush them away with a palm frond or to wait for the surf to mask them – they would lead directly to her.

Jet couldn’t do much about that, so she ran to the dirt road that fronted the beach and searched for a good location from where she could watch who disembarked from the boat so she would know how many were after her. She settled for the shelter of a darkened wooden building on the corner of a mud intersection. Once she was out of sight, she peeked around the side and watched as the cigarette boat neared the beach, its approach as subtle as a panzer division charging up the boulevard.

The vessel’s long snout slid onto the sand, and the captain killed the engines. The area plunged into silence, although a few lights flicked on in some of the waterfront dwellings at the unexpected sound of a large go-fast boat beaching itself in the middle of the town.

A man jumped from the bow onto the sand, followed by a second. After a brief conversation, the second man leaned against the boat hull and lit a cigarette as the first made his way up the beach to the road, following her footsteps, the distinctive outline of a gun in his hand obvious to Jet.

So it was only one.

Her spirits rose, although she was a little surprised. Whoever this was had no idea who he was dealing with.

Or he was exceptionally skilled and didn’t think he needed backup.

She watched him lope up the strand, no wasted movement, every step efficient, and her relief evaporated. Overconfidence had killed more adversaries than her bullets, and she wasn’t about to fall prey to that trap.

The challenge was how to dispatch a lone pursuer who was armed and probably more than competent.

Jet decided to draw him off the beach into the snarl of small homes and directionless dirt paths that served as streets. She weighed simply shooting him as he passed her hidden position, but that would wake the entire town. Better to see if she could wound him without firing a shot, and learn who he was and why he was after her.

The gunman looked to be at least six feet tall and athletic. So his physical strength in a direct confrontation would overwhelm her, even if she was adept at a multitude of martial arts. That left the element of surprise and outsmarting him.

Or completely avoiding him and tackling the second man watching the boat.

She froze when the gunman looked directly at her position and began sprinting toward her as though he had laser vision. After a moment’s hesitation she bolted up the muddy street, away from the waterfront, aware that she was leaving footprints that would be easily followed. If she wanted to draw him in, she didn’t have to work too hard.

The dark street lit up like it was daylight for a brief second, and then an earth-shattering explosion rocked her surroundings – lightning and thunder, moving northwest from the mainland. A moment later another flash illuminated the line of shabby buildings, and a massive detonation reverberated off the sea, and then sheets of rain blew across her path as the skies let loose.

That hadn’t been part of the plan, but she was flexible enough to incorporate it. Visibility had just dropped to twenty feet, which would more than work in her favor.

She chanced a look over her shoulder and couldn’t make out the building she’d hidden behind. That would slow the gunman. Or maybe it wouldn’t. She paused and glanced around at her surroundings, and then overhead to the second-story balcony of the half-completed structure she was standing in front of.

A construction area was perfect for her purposes. Jet ducked inside and made her cautious way around a primitive collection of tools before working her way upstairs, snagging a hammer and a length of two-by-four as she went. The outline of a strategy began to form as heavy rain peppered the corrugated metal roof, and by the time her pursuer pounded up the lane, she’d made her decision.

Jet waited until she heard the man’s footsteps splashing in the water outside and tossed the hammer downstairs. It landed with a thump on the hardwood floor. She listened, the sound of rain leaking in streams through the roof the only disturbance in the quiet interior, and then she spotted the gunman creeping back toward the building, stepping carefully, his pistol at the ready.

She clambered up a beam, leaving her bag at the base of a wall, and pulled herself up into the snarl of pipes running across the ceiling. Her abdominal muscles were rigid as she hooked her legs over a beam and pulled herself up, clutching one of the pipes with one hand and the plank in the other. A scrape sounded from the base of the stairway, and then a creak as the gunman ascended the steps, his footfalls silent as he neared where she was waiting, suspended over the doorway. Jet held her breath as she sensed him near. Her perception narrowed to the familiar tunnel vision that always preceded action.

The gunman stepped into the room, leading with his weapon, and she waited, completely still. A tarp protecting some cabinets near the terrace flapped in the wind, drawing his attention. He flinched and took a step toward it, his gun trained on the undulating fabric.

Thunder boomed and the room lit up in a flash as Jet swung down, hanging upside down by her knees, and slammed the wooden beam into the gunman’s skull as hard as she could. He grunted, and his pistol clattered across the floor as his knees buckled. Jet dropped the plank and swung down, landing in a crouch as her assailant pitched face forward onto the hardwood floor.

Another flash of lightning preceded a rumbling explosion of thunder. The man’s head was bleeding where the wood had struck his skull. She gripped his shoulder and flipped him over. She could barely make out his face in the gloom, but noted the right side was covered with wet blood.

His eyes flittered open a few moments later, and he found himself staring down the barrel of Jet’s Glock. He appeared dazed, and she waited until he seemed able to focus before she spoke.

“Who are you, and why are you after me?” she asked in Spanish. Her voice was calm, her tone even.

No answer.

She reached down and picked up the plank. “One final time and then I start breaking bones. Who are you, and why are you after me?”

The man glared at her but didn’t say anything.

His tibia cracked like a matchstick when she swung the edge of the two-by-four against his shin, and he cried out in agony. He gasped for breath and she gave him time to recover, and then asked her question again. “Who are you?”

The man gritted his teeth and wheezed a response, forcing her closer to hear him. As she neared she caught the movement of his left hand just in time to avoid the slash of a razor-sharp stiletto blade. Jet slammed the plank against his head with a wet thud and he shuddered, spasming for ten seconds before falling still. The groaning rattle of his last breath was unmistakable in its finality. The blade dropped from his still fingers, and she kicked it to the side, and then felt his carotid artery for a pulse.

Nothing.

Jet swore to herself for reacting instinctively with a death blow instead of breaking his arms. Now she knew nothing more than when he’d entered the building. She glanced at her watch – only a few minutes had passed since he’d followed her from the main street, but time wasn’t her friend with an accomplice waiting for him at the boat. She searched the man’s pockets and retrieved a fat wad of hundred-dollar bills and a satellite phone. No identification. He’d obviously been a pro. But not quite good enough, she thought, as she retrieved his gun.

Jet carried the phone and money to her bag and stashed the bundle in a side pocket with her own cash. She checked the pistol magazine, confirmed that it was loaded with 9mm cartridges, and emptied it, stuffing the bullets into her pocket for future use. She eyed the phone and thumbed the screen to life, then recorded the numbers in the call log into her phone.

Jet collected her bag and returned to the rainy street. The cloudburst ended as abruptly as it had begun, leaving only mud and small streams coursing down the lane on either side. At the waterfront road she peered around the corner of the building and confirmed that the captain was in the boat, taking shelter from the storm. She remained motionless as he emerged from the cabin and looked around, then hopped off the bow onto the beach and lit another cigarette.

Watching the smoking captain, she pressed redial on the dead man’s phone and listened as it rang. A woman’s voice answered.

“Well, is it over?” the voice asked.

Jet didn’t recognize the language. Portuguese? She listened, saying nothing, and then a peal of thunder roared overhead. The voice spoke again. “Igor?”

Jet hung up. A woman, speaking a foreign tongue that sounded like a romance language but wasn’t Italian or Spanish, had called the dead man Igor. Jet searched her memory for any Mossad assignment that had involved Portugal or Brazil, but there were none.

The sat phone vibrated as a call came in. Jet debated answering, but decided that there was nothing more to learn. If the woman was also a professional, Jet would be giving her information by saying anything. She let the call go to voice mail.

The captain walked a few feet from the boat on the wet sand, blowing a puff of cancer at the clouds, and Jet began her approach down the dark street, running in a crouch, her Glock out. She made it past the side of the boat where the smoking man was standing and crept along the water’s edge, intending to surprise him. As she neared the hull, she heard the clear sounds of a struggle and then a loud splash as a body dropped into the sea.