Breakout: A Heart-Pounding Lex Harper Thriller

by Stephen Leather

  ‘Perfect,’ Harper said. ‘Same price as last time?’

  Randy laughed. ‘Not a chance in hell of that, I’m afraid. Sorry Lex, but for cross border flights, I charge at least treble the regular rates. There’s a lot of risk involved - cartels, customs and border patrols, DEA, yadda, yadda.’

  ‘So we’re talking what? A thousand dollars?’

  Randy laughed again. ‘I guess math wasn’t your strong suit at school, right Lex? I charged you four hundred to fly up to La Paz from Santa Cruz. So treble that is twelve hundred bucks. And the fact that you want me to get you across the border rather than just taking a scheduled flight, makes me think that either the Bolivian authorities or the cartels - and they’re often pretty much the same thing - would like to get their hands on you. So allowing a little more for the extra risk involved in transporting fugitives across a national border, let’s say…’ He paused and exhaled through his teeth, as if pondering a fiendishly complex calculation.

  ‘I’ve got the back of an envelope here, if that would help,’ Harper said.

  ‘Nah, I got it,’ Randy said. ‘Including the extra fuel and a five buck penalty for the sarcasm, shall we say fifteen hundred bucks?’

  ‘Bloody hell, I could get a round the world flight for that.’

  ‘What can I say, Lex?’ Randy said, with a chuckle. ‘It’s a seller’s market.’

  ‘And don’t tell me, you’re just taking care of business, right?’

  ‘Right. So what d’you say? Of course, if it’s too much, you can always see if you can find someone else to fly you out of the country at five minutes notice…’

  ‘Nah, let’s do it,’ Harper said. ‘How early can you get to the pick up place?’

  ‘Flying over the Andes in the dark is not really recommended, so I’ll have to wait for daylight, but I can take off at dawn and be at the same strip, fifteen miles east of La Paz, refuelled and ready to go again by say, ten o’clock.’

  ‘Okay, see you there.’

  Harper broke the connection and went to round up Scouse. Harper took him to the street café for some food and a couple of drinks. There was no sign of Lupa, and after a couple of hours, Harper gave up waiting for her, paid their bill and headed back to the hotel. ‘Set an alarm for five o’clock,’ he said to Scouse as they parted in the lobby, ‘because we need to be out of here before dawn.’

  ‘Sure, whatever,’ Scouse said.

  Harper paid the hotel bill with cash, avoiding any delays in the morning that might merely be irritating but could also put them in danger. He then went up to his room and stretched out on the bed, planning to grab a few more hours’ sleep, before setting out before dawn, but a few minutes later there was a soft knock at the door.

  He was wide awake in an instant. He picked up the Colt .45 from the bedside table and walked warily towards the door, standing to one side of it, in case the visitor was only waiting for him to speak before loosing off a few rounds through the door.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Me.’

  He opened the door. Lupa was standing there, wearing a silk shirt open almost to the waist and a very short skirt, and holding a bottle of champagne in one hand.

  ‘You don’t look much like a Chief Warden,’ Harper said, ‘and you won’t last long as one if you’re already sneaking off on your first night in the job.’

  She gave him a smile that again set his blood pounding. ‘I’ve left Ricardo in charge and told the new guards that anyone who gets drunk or off his head on cocaine while he’s supposed to be on duty, will be back sleeping on the floor of the worst section of the prison by morning. Now the despedida - the farewell - is a Bolivian tradition, usually involving a table full of food and as much beer, Singani and perhaps cocaine, as you can take. But on this occasion, I’m hoping that a bottle of champagne will do instead.’ She paused. ‘So, aren’t you going to invite me in?’

  Harper stepped to one side and she sauntered past him into the room. She glanced at the crumpled bed and said ‘That’s lucky, you were just going to bed anyway.’

  She popped the cork of the champagne, poured some into a glass for Harper and then took a swig from the bottle. Some of it spilled down her chin and ran down her neck. ‘Oops, I’ve spilt some,’ she said with a wicked grin. ‘Want to help me clean it up?’

  Harper tore his eyes away from the trail the champagne was making over her olive skin and the silk of her shirt.

  ‘I’ve got to be honest, Lupa, I make it a rule never to sleep with anybody I’m working with.’

  She smiled, but undid the remaining buttons on her shirt, shrugged it off her shoulders and reached behind her to unhook her bra. ‘But we’re not working together any more now, are we Lex?’ She looked down. ‘And from what I’m seeing, it doesn’t look like you’re feeling like it’s a working relationship either. So - what’s that English saying? - how about making me the exception that proves the rule?’

  He grinned. ‘Okay, I surrender. Whatever you say, Warden, but no handcuffs or truncheons, okay?’

  She was still laughing as he picked her up and carried her to the bed.

  CHAPTER 18

  Harper didn’t get much sleep and he was awake when his phone alarm sounded early the next morning. It was still dark outside, with another hour before dawn broke. Lupa yawned and stretched like a cat, then gave him a sultry smile. ‘I’m glad you broke your rule, Lex, but I hate goodbyes, so I’m not going to prolong this one. Besides it’s my first full day in my new job and I need to make sure my guards are on duty.’ She kissed him, then rolled out of bed and pulled on her skirt and silk shirt. ‘So, how will you and Scouse get out of the country? If Scouse has your passport, what are you going to use?’

  Harper smiled. ‘It’s a fake anyway and I always have a couple of spares, just in case. So Scouse and I’ll be on the same flight, once I’ve worked out where it’s safe for us to fly from.’

  ‘And how will you be sure of that?’

  ‘I’ll use my instincts, but I can also contact Sam at Risk Reduction, who may have heard something from their guys on the ground here.’

  ‘Don’t take any chances, Lex,’ she said. ‘If they don’t kill you, they’ll put you back in jail again, and it won’t be San Pedro the next time, it’ll be Chonchocoro, and no one - not even you - can break out of there.’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.’

  She lingered a moment longer, staring at him as if imprinting his face on her memory, and then she headed for the door.

  ‘Oh and Lupa?’ She paused and looked back at him. ‘You were well worth breaking the rule for.’

  She laughed. ‘Don’t make a habit of it though, will you? Unless it’s with me, of course.’ She blew him a kiss, then closed the door and a moment later he heard her footsteps on the wooden stairs.

  Harper jumped out of bed, and had showered and dressed in five minutes. He gathered up his passport, money, the sat-phone and the remaining ammunition for the Colt .45. He stuck it in his waistband under his jacket and hurried downstairs to collect Scouse. He was not surprised, though a little irritated, to find that despite their conversation the previous evening, Scouse was still fast asleep, and Harper had to pound on the door three times before he woke up.

  ‘Get your shit together and splash some water on your face,’ Harper said, ‘and then let’s get moving. We need to be out of here pronto because once the Brazilian cartel bosses get to know about what happened in San Pedro - and they’ve probably already been told - they’ll be round La Paz like flies on shit looking for some pay-back from us.’

  As Scouse shuffled towards the bathroom and started washing his face and then struggling into his clothes, Harper kept talking to him, as much to hurry him up as to impart any useful information. ‘If I were them,’ he said. ‘I’d be getting my men to screen every hotel, hostel and flophouse in the city, looking for gringos. Once they’ve eliminated the students and backpackers, there won’t be many others, so it’s not going to take them long to disco
ver that two Inglés have been staying at the Pacific Hotel.’ He gave a bleak smile. ‘I’m sure they’ll be very persuasive when talking to the staff. And those cartel guys are perfectly capable of burning the whole place down and killing dozens of others, just to make sure they get us as well.’

  ‘So what do we do then?’ Scouse said, still looking around the room to see if he’d forgotten anything.

  ‘Well first, we get out of the hotel. And when we do, there’s no point in heading for the airport because even if the cartel haven’t got their own sicarios lying in wait for us, they’ll certainly have alerted the people there - the cops, customs men and soldiers - who are on their payroll. So if we’re dumb enough to turn up there, dollars to dimes we’ll be arrested and handed over to the cartel. After that, it’ll be goodbye world but probably with some heavy duty torture first, just for fun. However, I have arranged some alternative transport. I’ve called the Yank pilot who flew me, Lupa and Ricardo up here from Santa Cruz. We’re going to RV with him at a dirt airstrip out on the Altiplano a few miles east of here and he’s going to fly us across the border to a safe location. Then we can get ourselves to the nearest international airport and get a scheduled flight to a place where we can actually speak the language and where people are not trying to kill us.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Well, not that many of the people anyway.’

  He broke off to glower at Scouse, who was still not ready. ‘So, since people really are trying to kill us here, if you’ve finished making sure that you’ve packed your toothbrush and your spare undies, pretty please with sugar on top, how about we get the hell out of here?’

  They went downstairs and crossed the deserted lobby, but Harper made Scouse wait while he scanned the street outside, looking for any sign of a threat or surveillance, or the least thing out of place. After a couple of minutes he gave an abrupt nod. ‘Okay, it’s clear, let’s go.’

  They hurried through the darkened streets to where Harper had left the battered Mercedes and he drove off just as the sky was beginning to lighten towards dawn. They threaded their way through the city and as they swung around the series of hairpin bends climbing the hillside out of La Paz, Harper glanced back and caught a few glimpses of the prison at the heart of the downtown district and the ant-like microcosm of the city within its walls. By now it would be business as usual at the gates except that there was a new governor and new guards in charge, who were probably already flexing their muscles.

  They drove on eastwards through the suburbs, as the buildings slowly became fewer and more widely separated, and then they were out of the city altogether, passing through an area of scattered subsistence farms and the small town where he, Lupa and Ricardo had caught the flota bus what seemed like months ago but was actually only a week before.

  Beyond the town, they reached the dust and desiccated grasslands of the true Altiplano. Harper waited until they had reached a point where they were out of sight of the last building in the town and then took the next turning off the road onto a narrow and clearly little-used track. He drove on, away from the main road for a hundred yards or so, then pulled in behind a low rise building that partly shielded them from the sight of anyone passing along the road and switched off the engine.

  ‘What now?’ Scouse said.

  ‘Now we wait.’

  ‘For what? Christmas? Godot?’

  Harper smiled. ‘No, just until we see a Douglas C-47 Skytrain coming in to land at the dirt strip a mile or two east of here.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘But we’ve got a couple of hours to kill, so you can catch up on some more sleep if you want.’

  ‘I could have done that back at the hotel if we’d set off a bit later.’

  Harper gave him a world-weary look. ‘You could, but then by the time you’d done that, you might have opened your eyes to find yourself squinting down the wrong end of a couple of Kalashnikovs with some more of your friends from the drug cartel that arranged your kidnapping and imprisonment on the trigger end.’

  ‘But we’re safe now, surely. They’re hardly likely to be chasing us across Bolivia.’

  ‘Aren’t they? Well, let’s see. Since I got to this country a week or so ago, and admittedly it was with a little extra help from Ricardo and Lupa, I first killed eight of their guys in Santa Cruz. Then we came up to La Paz and wiped out another ten or so in San Pedro prison, including the man who was running their cocaine operation there and all the muscle who were making sure no-one else could move in on it - oh, and not forgetting your friend, the chief warden of the prison, who no doubt they were paying to make sure their cocaine trade ran smoothly. I’ve also liberated the man they were hoping to sell to a superstitious property developer for a pretty hefty price and, worst of all from their point of view, whether or not they’ve twigged that yet, they’re now in the process of having their very, very lucrative cocaine operation in San Pedro and La Paz as a whole taken over by their most hated rivals, the Colombians. So I’d say they’d have some pretty powerful reasons for wanting to track down and get rid of the man who has caused them all their problems here, wouldn’t you? Hence the need to get the hell out of La Paz before daybreak, and to be lying up here, off the road, just in case our new best friends are out looking for us.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Scouse said. ‘No need to be so arsey, I was just saying.’

  Harper gave a slow shake of his head. ‘Why don’t you rest your eyes and maybe get a little more sleep while I make a phone call?’

  Scouse shrugged, slid down in his seat, tipped the peak of the baseball cap he was wearing forward and closed his eyes.

  Harper picked up the sat phone and called Standish. ‘Sam,’ Harper said. ‘Job done. I’m getting ready to move on but I wanted to tell you that I found Scouse. Alive. I’m telling you because I want to be sure that the company knows that he didn’t take the money, and there won’t be any come-back on him.’

  Scouse had now re-opened his eyes and was sitting up in the passenger seat and paying close attention to the conversation.

  Harper winked at him. ‘When Scouse flew in to Bolivia, he was arrested in the Customs Hall by a bent customs officer and a couple of cops, working for one of the cartels. They took the ransom money, beat the piss out of him and then dumped him in an isolation cell in San Pedro prison. And had we not found him, he would have been wearing a concrete overcoat by now. So he’s blameless and the only reason Risk Reduction should be contacting him from now on is to give him the back-pay you owe him. Okay?’

  ‘Thanks Lex, good to know that you got him out of there. I’ll pass that on,’ Standish said. ‘Funnily enough, I got a bit of a garbled version about some strange goings on in San Pedro from our go-between in La Paz. He called me up this morning to say there were reports of explosions, gunshots and gang fights from inside the jail, and quite a few guards and inmates were rumoured to have disappeared.’ He paused. ‘I don’t suppose that has any connection to you getting Scouse out of there, does it?’

  ‘You know me, Sam,’ Harper said. ‘I go out of my way to avoid trouble like that.’

  Standish laughed. ‘It’s because I know you, Lex, that I know the opposite is true. If any trouble is kicking off, you’re usually not far away from it. Anyway, that’s none of my business, but if you were involved, my advice would be to find a covert way out of Bolivia - and quick. I don’t know if you already know this, but the chief warden you killed…’

  ‘Technically, I didn’t,’ Harper interrupted, ‘but I’ll let that go for now.’

  ‘Well, he was not only being bribed by a Brazilian cartel, the most vicious one in Bolivia - and that’s saying something, believe me - but he was also the brother of the gang boss’s chief sicario, and they’re not the sort of people to bother about technicalities like who actually pulled the trigger, or wielded the knife, or whatever it was that you or your friends did to him. So my guess is that there is now a price on both your heads. In which case, don’t even think about attempting to fly out from La Paz, because they’ll b
e watching the airport and the roads and, as Scouse has already discovered by the sound of it, the cartels have more inside men at the airport than we do, and they’re higher up the food chain. I’ll give you any help I can, but to be honest, I’m afraid there’s not much I can do from here, even if we weren’t in the middle of another ransom negotiation.’

  ‘Forget about it,’ Harper said. ‘Thanks for the tip-off, but we’ve no intention of flying out from the airport anyway.’

  ‘And don’t delay getting out of the city. The cartel has informers everywhere. The word will have gone out that two gringos are wanted by them. There’ll be a reward for any info about you and a warning that anyone who helps you will meet the same fate as you. Sorry, but that’s the way it is here; your own grandmother would give you up if the cartel got hold of her.’

  ‘Mate, we’re already out of the city and barring any mishaps, we’ll also be out of the country by the time you’re settling down to your lunch today. So all good. I’ll ship this sat-phone back to you when I get to a safe place to do so.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ Standish said. ‘Either keep it if you can use it, or destroy it.’

  ‘Okay, if you’re sure and thanks for everything, Scouse and I are both really grateful to you.’

  ‘No thanks needed. Be safe and the beers are on you the next time our paths cross.’

  ‘You can count on it,’ Harper said and broke the connection.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Scouse said.

  ‘Sounds like half the country’s out looking for us, but apart from that, yeah, all good.’

  Scouse tipped his cap back over his eyes and reclined his seat a bit more, but Harper kept alert, watching the traffic passing along the main road, a couple of hundred yards away. Most of the vehicles were trucks, grinding their way to and from the outlying towns, but there were a handful of cars and two Toyota Landcruisers also passed, driving fast and with men clustered in the open back of each one. Harper tried to tell himself that they were probably just peasant farmers on their way out to the fields, and attempted to ignore the inner voice pointing out that there didn’t really seem to be any fields worth the name out here on the Altiplano and anyway, farmers tended to be earlier risers than this. He hesitated, then shrugged, deciding he was probably just being paranoid. There were a million reasons why people would be driving along this road.