The Geronimo Breach (25 page)

He wrung out his socks once back in his little love shack, and donned Ernesto’s T-shirt. It would be soaked through with sweat within a few minutes outside anyway, so Al wasn’t too concerned with its aesthetic appeal. Even so, he reflected that a canary yellow T stretched across his belly wasn’t a pretty sight. Still, that was the least of his current problems. He’d take time to diet if he was still breathing in another few days.

His satchel packed, he unlatched the window and gave it a good shove. The lower portion slid up, creating a two foot by two foot opening. That would be just enough.

Al leaned out and placed the satchel on the ground and then reversed his position, squeezing his legs and lower torso through the window before dropping the few feet to the ground. He looked around. His eyes met those of a small boy, maybe six years old, staring at him as though he’d just teleported from Mars. Al supposed it wasn’t every day that the local kids saw tall, heavy white men climbing through tenement windows. Al waved at him, and the little boy spun and ran away as fast as his short bow legs would carry him.

He didn’t really blame the kid.

~

Sam’s screen blinked to life as his computer beeped, signaling he’d received a message. He checked it and clicked on the icon. A satellite map of Colombia popped up and a yellow star icon blinked steadily. They’d found the phone.

Sam called Richard.

“We have a lock on him, sir,” Sam reported. “He’s in Turbo, which is a small town on the northern coast. Population fifty thousand.”

Sam heard the rustling of paper in the background.

“I see it,” Richard confirmed. “Looks like it has an airport, but it’s not long enough for this jet. Arrange for a prop plane to be waiting when we touch down in twenty minutes or so, and I’ll put a team on it and hit Turbo. It’s probably a little over an hour by prop.”

“You could put down in Medellin in the jet, and prop plane up to Turbo. Might cut off a few minutes, sir,” Sam suggested.

“Sam. I don’t want to be on record landing an Agency plane in the heart of Colombia and disembarking a team of armed men – might be a little tough to explain to an unfriendly regime, you know? So just do as you’re told and get me a prop plane that can carry six passengers and some gear. I’ll make some calls and arrange for it to be able to get into Colombian airspace and on the ground in Turbo with no hassles.”

“It may take longer to get a plane at this hour. It’s getting dark...” Sam said.

“Thanks for the update on the time, Sam. I can look out my window and see that. How about making the calls and getting it done, and calling me once you have everything in place?”

God Sam hated this man. “I’ll handle it, sir. Are you still coming in to the office or continuing on to Colombia?” Sam asked hopefully.

“I’ll still be in your office within an hour, traffic allowing,” Richard said. “Better get busy on finding a plane. Clock’s ticking.”

Terrific. Sam could already foresee the next few days turning into a slow-mo instant replay of his miserable weekend. His wife was giving him enough shit already for his continual absences – and when she got upset she was meaner than a bag of snakes. He couldn’t tell her anything more than it was embassy business; his usual excuse for staying out and banging his young mistress silly. If he was away from home the better part of the week with no sustentative explanation, his domestic comfort was going to take a pronounced turn for the worse – and even more so if he had to be on call 24/7 for the duration.

Maybe he could convince Richard that he’d be more effective working out of the embassy in Bogota, since his target was no longer anywhere near Panama?

As he dialed for his contact who handled air charters for him, he again wondered what Al could be involved in that would have Richard jetting across the continent with a Citation full of killers. Whatever it was, Sam wanted no piece of it.

Sometimes it was better to be the tiny cog than the big wheel.

The dark of night fell stealthily over the seaport town, giving Al a mild case of the heebie-jeebies as he faltered his way through the deepening shadows of Turbo. He stopped in at a small neighborhood bar and asked about a bus service to Cartagena; only to be told he’d be better off waiting till morning – the buses weren’t safe after dark along that route.

Great. That didn’t really work for him. He asked the bartender about alternative travel options; if that’s what you could call the sweating man watching a small TV and doing his best to ignore the three customers in his establishment. The bored man looked blankly back at him before returning to gawp at the TV.

Undeterred, Al repeated the question, eating into the bartender’s viewing time, until he finally suggested there was an airport he could try the next day. Al told him he really needed to get to Cartegena immediately. The man shrugged and turned back to the program.

Al wasn’t getting anywhere.

He returned to the black of night, headed towards the waterfront and found another bar, where he asked the same set of questions. This barkeep, a woman, also advised him the buses weren’t safe at night, but conceded that one did stop within the hour at some incomprehensible place in town. Al asked if she knew anyone who could show him the way. She screamed for someone in the back room. A ten year old boy emerged, and the woman issued a rapid-fire set of instructions in a Spanish patois of some sort. Al ordered a beer while this went on, and discovered that he got change back from a dollar on a bar beer in Turbo. At least there was a positive to his little odyssey.

The boy motioned to him. Al swiftly downed the beer and followed him out of the depressing and humid drinking house.

They walked in silence for about fifteen minutes before the boy stopped and told him he should wait just here and wave at the bus when it came by ‘in a while’. Al offered him the change from the beer. The little boy snatched it from his hand and ran off laughing.

It was almost pitch black now, with only slim illumination from a bulb at the entry of a questionable edifice across the street. A car slowed as it pulled past him, and then sped up. Al had a distinctly unsafe feeling.

He had to wait until tomorrow during business hours to get in touch with the private detective in Cartagena, so he reasoned he might as well use the time to put distance between himself and Panama. Plus, if Sam was involved, which he believed with one hundred percent certainty now, there was a good likelihood that his call had been traced, which meant that at any point there could be a hit team scouring the town for him, along with stepped up scrutiny by the police. Al was keenly aware that the rules had changed, that he needed to treat everything and everyone as the enemy. One slip and he was dog food.

After what seemed like forever an old bus wheezed to a stop at the curb, where Al had been frantically waving at it. A cardboard sign in the front window announced ‘Monteria’ – Al’s halfway point destination, as there were no direct buses to Cartagena. If he could at least make it to Monteria, an inland city of a quarter million people, he figured the likelihood of being safe was far higher than in Turbo, with a fifth the population and a possible direct hit on a trace to the pay phone. He’d already slipped up by telling Sam he was in Colombia, and there was no way of undoing that, so he had to focus on what he could change. Getting as far from the delights of Turbo as quickly as possible seemed like a reasonable first step.

He mounted the steps to the bus and paid 20,000 pesos to the driver – the market owner had been eager to change a hundred bucks into pesos at 1800 to the dollar, so Al was fat on Colombian currency. The other passengers were definitely on the lower end of the economic scale – the only thing missing was a chicken running up the center aisle.

Oh well. It was all part of the local color. He hoped this bus wouldn’t be one of the many stopped by rebels or robbers at night in the sketchier areas of Colombia, which the road to Turbo definitely was. Then again, at this point he’d almost be safer if he was kidnapped.

Which gave him the germ of an idea, just a flicker, but enough to provide the first hope he’d had since viewing the video.

It would be extremely dangerous, and involve terrorists, drug traffickers, armed insurgents, you name it; but there just might be a way to stay alive.

He chose a seat midway down the length of the bus and closed his eyes, the vague outline of a strategy beginning to form.

The bus was stopped twice over the next four hours by armed Colombian soldiers, who went through luggage at random. Nobody seemed interested in Al’s measly satchel. The soldiers focused mainly on the larger parcels, before waving them on after fifteen minutes or so.

They made it to Monteria around midnight. The night air was deep, dark and muggy enough to convince Al his traveling was done for the day. He felt like crap, and absent a bottle of rum there was no way he’d make it another four or five hours on a night bus through the danger zone. He’d catch the first one out in the morning.

He’d spotted a hotel that looked promising as the old bus had pulled into town and after disembarking he asked one of the waiting taxis to take him to the nearby Hotel Campenario. They pulled up outside the building within five minutes – the drive cost two bucks. Probably robbery, but again, at midnight, Al wasn’t looking for a deal.

The hotel was open and charged him $15 for the night, which seemed fair given that it had AC and appeared at least reasonably clean. The desk clerk gave him a key and offered to accompany him to the second floor, room 204, but Al assured him he could find it on his own.

He did with no trouble, and after turning on the AC, actually took the time to disrobe before collapsing face first onto the bed. He was out cold before the mattress stopped vibrating from his landing.

Two men waited outside the squalid little hostel in Turbo. One across the street, the other in the rear alley. Both of Latin complexion, they wore light cargo pants and loose shirts – the uniform of the hiking and backpacking community. Other than the fact they were standing on completely empty streets in a dangerous neighborhood at night they might have been tourists from Venezuela or Panama. A third man had paid for a room in the hostel and was currently sitting in hovel number two, listening for any signs of life.

They’d arrived via prop plane as darkness had descended on Turbo and made their way from the airport with the help of a local hired car. Their target hadn’t moved since they’d picked up his signal so they’d come to the tentative conclusion that he was asleep in his
cabana
. After consulting with Richard, the decision was made to wait for him to wake up and leave, then shoot him with a tranquilizer dart and cart him to the airport.

The Agency didn’t have nearly the sort of infrastructure in Colombia that it did in Panama. The Colombian regime, while friendly on the surface, was in a state of perennial armed conflict with the rebel forces that controlled large swatches of the country. The regime was riddled with conflicting imperatives due to the tremendous amount of drug money floating around – some of which made it to the politicians, ensuring that the objectives of the U.S. war on drugs were not pursued aggressively.

Most of the jungle areas of the country were littered with land-mines, rendering them impenetrable, and so Colombia existed with the dual menaces of sustained civil war and aggressively dangerous criminal syndicates operating freely throughout much of the country.

Panama, on the other hand, used the dollar as its currency, was very favorably disposed towards the U.S. and enjoyed stability and prosperity due to the new canal investment and the daily revenue from the existing canal. The police were cooperative with the U.S. and were sufficiently corrupt to allow the Agency to operate however it liked, provided it didn’t arouse too much attention.

The operational idea was to grab Al when he poked his head out of his quarters, then ship him to Panama and debrief him there.

An initial line of thinking had been that all their problems would disappear if Al simply went skydiving without a parachute over the jungle on the trip north, however that had been dismissed, mainly because they needed to be absolutely sure of how much exposure the camera had gotten. Al could always have a diving accident or fall out of a helicopter later.

Their man in
cabana
two had signaled that he’d so far heard no movement or snoring that would be consistent with the room being occupied. Nobody had rolled over on the bed or gone to the bathroom in four hours. The man murmured into his cell and awaited instructions. After a few moments he got the go-ahead.

He unpacked his backpack and extracted a telescoping fiber optic lens with an adjustable tip. The cottages had four feet of airspace between them, and no side windows, so it would require a bit of art – but he was an expert at this sort of surveillance, among other things, so would find a way.

He crept out of his little shack and moved close to unit one; finding exactly what he was looking for – a space between the floorboards. Each cottage sat on a series of concrete blocks to prevent flooding during rainy season, so there was about eight inches of air space under the dwellings. He carefully fed the device through the crack and into the room, and rotated it, watching the transmission on a handheld screen. There wasn’t any light in the room, which made it harder, but after a few minutes of looking around, it was obvious the place was unoccupied. He retracted the camera and moved back into his room, then called Richard for instructions.

Richard was livid. How the hell had this guy evaded multiple trained field squads, made it through impassable jungle, and now had apparently ditched them, luring them on some tangent while he slipped away?

The possibility remained he was out drinking and would return later. The phone was obviously still in the room, and there were few reasons Richard could think of for Al leaving it there if he didn’t plan to return – unless he was familiar enough with trade-craft to realize he’d be tracked on the device and had used it as a clever time-wasting decoy. Nothing in his file indicated any clandestine knowledge or background, so it was most likely Al was getting drunk at one of the numerous dive bars peppering the waterfront or possibly spending time with a hooker someplace nearby. The second possibility; that Al had figured out he was being monitored, pointed to a far less appealing scenario. That would indicate they had a much bigger problem than anticipated.