By a mixture of sign language and his few words of fractured Spanish, Harper managed to establish that when it eventually pulled out, the colectivo would be heading further west towards the town of Puno and not back towards the Bolivian border. With that settled, using US dollars, he paid the fare that the driver asked without quibble and climbed on board the bus. As he did so, he passed an array of medals, artifacts and statuettes arranged like a Nativity scene around the driver’s seat, and that seemed to cover all religious bases, including blood-dripping Catholic sacred hearts and Aymara ritual objects. Harper took a seat at the back and felt a powerful temptation to close his eyes and cat-nap, but he made himself stay alert, keeping watch to make sure the driver did not try to slip away and let anyone know that a strange gringo had just boarded his bus.
Over the next hour, three or four more passengers emerged from the side streets and boarded the colectivo, and then a pair of backpackers - Americans with unnaturally white teeth and booming voices - came running across the square, shouting and waving at the driver in case he was thinking of leaving without them. That was never going to happen, Harper thought, reflecting that the fare paid by the three gringos now on board was probably considerably more than the driver would have charged three dozen Peruvians to make the same journey.
Harper started to relax a little more as the driver evidently decided there were now sufficient paying customers to begin the journey. He stood up, scratched himself and spat in the dust, and then boarded the colectivo and set off with a crash of gears. The bus lurched and rattled its way out of town and carried on to the west. Just beyond the town, the coastal strip narrowed still more, becoming a thin ribbon of land sandwiched between the lake shore and the caldera of the huge extinct volcano that dominated the skyline on the other side of the road. The bus rattled on, with the lake always close by. Sometimes the driver used the tarmac highway, but more often he turned off to go bouncing and jolting over the potholed dirt roads that linked the tiny villages and hamlets flanking the route.
Harper could have driven the eighty miles to the city of Puno in well under two hours, but the colectivo’s meandering journey, stopping and starting at towns and villages so small and nondescript that even Wikipedia had apparently never heard of them, took far longer. It was well after dark when the bus at last wheezed its way under a red banner stretched overhead across the road and proclaiming ‘Bienvenido a Puno’ and headed in towards the city centre.
It didn’t reach it, but came to a final halt, for no reason that Harper could discern, in an apparently random stopping place. In this case the final stop was in a broad street in a deserted, semi-industrial area a couple of miles short of the centre. There were no street lights - or if there were, they had all been smashed - and on this moonless night there was only starlight to guide them, but the Peruvian passengers seemed unfazed both by this and the curious choice of stopping place, and all disembarked and set off down the street, disappearing into the darkness within a few paces. Harper got off too, leaving the American backpackers trying to bribe the driver with a few more dollars to take them right into the town but the driver shook his head emphatically, pushed them off the bus and locked the door.
As Harper glanced back at the colectivo, he saw the driver settling himself down on the back seat, no doubt getting ready for an untroubled night’s sleep. Harper hurried ahead of the disgruntled Americans but then ducked down a side-street and waited until they had passed him and disappeared into the night. He had no desire to share their company since it might have required him to deal with questions that it was much easier to leave unasked and certainly unanswered. When the sound of their voices had faded, he began walking slowly towards the town centre.
He was unworried about being on the streets alone at this time of night, however rough the neighbourhood he might be passing through. If any street criminals had somehow missed the American backpackers but fancied they had found another gringo tourist ripe for mugging and robbing, they would rapidly get a very unpleasant surprise. However he had seen no one when, after walking half a mile further towards the city centre, he came to a good place to lie up for the rest of the night. It was an area of rough grassland fronted by a hoarding announcing in Spanish and English that it was ‘For Sale - Development Opportunity’.
He walked round behind the hoarding and sat down on one of its timber supports. He ate the last of his now stale and crumbling empanadas, then leaned against the back of the hoarding and rested there, cat-napping, until the sky began to lighten towards dawn. He yawned and stretched, then walked back round the hoarding and joined the steadily growing army of people heading into Puno at the start of another working day.
He had chosen Puno because it was a city that had grown mostly by catering to the influx of foreign tourists arriving to tick off Lake Titicaca on their list of ‘Things To Do In Peru’. By dint more of its geographical location than much in the way of tourist promotion, Puno had become an obligatory stop for the organised tours that also took in the ancient Inca capital of Cusco and the spectacular mountain citadel of Machu Picchu further to the north.
As Harper strolled in towards the town centre, he kept glancing at the lake close by on his right hand side. He could see a couple of the traditional boats made of tightly woven bundles of reeds and with elaborate carved figureheads. Beyond them was one of the ‘Floating Islands’ - rafts made of thick, buoyant totora reeds that the indigenous Uros tribes who lived on them, harvested from the shallows of the lake. They kept themselves above water by continually adding fresh layers of reeds to the top surface of their rafts, keeping pace with those slowly rotting and falling away beneath them. The rafts had originally been built by the Uros to give themselves a safe haven from the other hostile tribes on the shores of the lake. Although the need for that was long gone, they still maintained their rafts and their way of life on them. Perhaps that was partly to cash in on the tourist trade, Harper thought with his customary cynicism, but it might also have kept the Uros relatively safe from the worst depredations of Peru’s cocaine cartels.
Once just a small Peruvian town, the sprawling city of Puno now completely filled the narrow coastal strip between Lake Titicaca and the wall of the Andes. As the city expanded, the homes of its poorer inhabitants had been pushed further and further up the mountainside, where they had to live in barrios and shanty towns clinging to the slopes, some on streets so steep that cars could not access them, not that that mattered, for no one who lived there would have had the money to buy one anyway. When he reached the city centre, Harper first took a walk around it until he had found the terminus for the tour buses that ran a shuttle service between Puno and the airport at Juliaca, forty miles away. It was the nearest airport capable of handling tourist flights and had accordingly expanded as fast as the city of Puno. He checked the timetable of the shuttle buses, though as always in South America, that was more of a rough guide than a guarantee of punctuality, and then took himself off to a street café for yet more empanadas and a couple of cups of strong black coffee.
When he returned to the square, a tourist bus was already parked at the stand, disgorging its cargo of camera-wielding American and Japanese tourists, who were lining up behind the lurid golf umbrellas of their tour guides, ready for the short walk down to the waterfront and the first of the day’s photo opportunities. The bus was utterly unlike the colectivo he had used to reach Puno. It was shiny and new-looking, contained no adornments other than a small Peruvian flag above the driver’s seat and had comfortable seats, air-conditioning and even a loo at the back of the bus. Despite his night in the open, as he checked his reflection in a shop window, Harper felt he still looked sufficiently presentable to pass as a tourist, and joined the queue of people waiting to board.
When they began to board, the other passengers all had pre-booked tickets, and were waved through by the driver, a pale-skinned Latino who spoke English with a strong American accent. When Harper reached the head of the queue, he pulled a twenty d
ollar bill from his wallet and offered it to the driver. ‘I haven’t booked, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘but unless you’re full?’
‘I’ll probably be able to fit you in,’ the driver said, eyeing the money. ‘No luggage?’
‘No, I’m travelling light. Keep the change,’ Harper said, hurrying down the bus to an empty seat to forestall any further conversation.
He’d planned this way of reaching the airport just because he felt there would be safety in numbers - one more Westerner among the floods of foreign tourists who were by far the bulk of the airport’s customers would be unlikely to attract any particular attention. The dollars, yen and other foreign currencies they brought were a huge boost to the local economy, making it unlikely that the local politicians would tolerate any police or airport officials putting that in jeopardy by any excess of officiousness or any harassment of the precious tourists, so Harper had calculated that this was the safest departure point for him.
The bus set off soon afterwards, and in pleasing contrast to the previous day’s bouncing and bucketing journey, it made smooth and rapid progress along a tarmac highway, pulling in just after midday to the Aeropuerto Internacional Inca Manco Capac at Juliaca, named after the founder of the Inca city of Cuzco. While the tourists lined up to claim their luggage as the driver unloaded it, Harper strolled into the terminal, checked the departures board and then walked over to the LATAM desk and bought a Club Class, one-way ticket to Miami, with a brief stop in Lima.
He checked in using a false passport and strolled through the fast track channel and was on the air-side of the terminal within five minutes. He had another coffee and a second breakfast as he found his appetite returning still more, but saved a celebration drink until he had safely boarded the aircraft and settled in his seat. ‘A glass of champagne señor?’ the stewardess said.
‘Hell yes,’ Harper said, ‘and you know what? Just leave the bottle.’
CHAPTER 25
Harper changed flights in Miami and his first act after disembarking there was to phone Myfanwy. She answered the call and he got straight to the point. ‘I wish I could be telling you this in person, rather than down the phone, but I’m still a long way away and I didn’t want to leave you in suspense any longer than I had to. I did find Scouse but I’m afraid it’s bad news. Do you want to sit down while I tell you?’
‘No, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’d already resigned myself to the fact that he wasn’t going to be coming back to me. Just tell me where he is and what happened to him, would you?’
‘I’m afraid he’s dead.’ He paused, carefully measuring his next words as he heard Myfanwy stifling a sob. In the background he could also hear her baby crying.
‘I found him alive,’ Harper said, ‘but by then he was very ill and weak. Just the same I tried to get him home, but there was some fighting and he was hit by a stray bullet. He wasn’t involved in it, he just happened to have been in the wrong place, at the wrong time. He didn’t die at once and he had time to tell me how much he loved you and your baby, and he asked me to try to help you in any way I could. I couldn’t bring his body home to you, there just wasn’t any way to do it, I’m afraid, but he’s been buried in a really beautiful place, high in the mountains, looking out over a lake.’ He paused again. ‘I know this is going to be absolutely no consolation for your loss, Myfanwy, but the company that Scouse was working for is going to help you financially and I’m sure they’ll be in touch about that, very soon. If there’s anything else I can do, you know how to contact me, and Myfanwy, I’m truly, truly sorry to be the bearer of such terrible news.’
He waited until she broke the connection and then hung up himself. He hadn’t given her the full story, and had glossed over some of the details, but he felt it was the kindest thing to do. Better that she should think Scouse had died in a tragic accident than be burning up with rage and thoughts of revenge against the people who had imprisoned and tortured him, and then had him killed.
He went and splashed some water on his face, then squared his shoulders and went to buy a ticket for his connecting flight. He was desperate to get home to Pattaya but there was something else he needed to do first, and so his next destination was not to be Bangkok, but Geneva.
His flight arrived there too late for him to turn up at Risk Reduction’s corporate headquarters that evening, so he booked into a hotel for the night and took an evening stroll round the city and along the shore of the lake. It was an abrupt, strange and unsettling change of scene for him, from the colourful, vibrant street life of the South American towns and cities he had just been experiencing, with all their attendant noise, dirt, crime and corruption, to the genteel, pristine and rather sterile streets of the Swiss capital. In Geneva even a raised voice was likely to attract some disapproving looks and a carelessly discarded cigarette butt or sweet wrapper was liable to land you in jail. For all their flaws, Harper reflected, he far preferred the cities of the Third World to a safe but bland and oh so boring First World city like Geneva.
First thing the next morning, Harper turned up at the glass and stainless-steel offices of Risk Reduction. He passed the uniformed, armed guards patrolling the entrance, and waited in the airlock with its bullet proof glass while the automatic sensors tested the air for any traces of firearms or explosives, until finally it hissed open to admit him to the inner lobby.
He admitted he had no appointment but told the receptionist his name and said ‘I have to see the chairman on a matter of the utmost importance, concerning the company’s South American operations. Tell his PA that and I’m sure he’ll see me.’
‘Then take a seat and I’ll pass the message on to his PA,’ the receptionist said, ‘but he’s a very busy man, so I can’t promise he’ll be able to make time for you.’
‘Understood,’ Harper said, ‘but I’m not leaving here until he does.’
After being kept waiting in the lobby for over an hour, he was given a visitor’s security pass, and the same blonde and mini-skirted PA he had seen on his last visit eventually appeared and escorted him to the lifts. Her glance took in his still crumpled and dirty clothes, and she raised a disapproving eyebrow but remained silent as the lift climbed to the top floor. She led him past the room filled with employees staring at computer screens, and the glass-walled conference room, to the chairman’s corner suite with its spectacular views over the city and the lake.
The chairman stood up and came round his desk, extending a hand to greet him. ‘Mr Harper,’ he said. ‘What a pleasure it is to see you again.’ He turned to his PA. ‘Some coffee for our guest, please.’ When she had brought it and left the office, the chairman studied Harper over the rim of his cup for a moment and then asked him how he could help.
‘It concerns my friend and your former employee, Scouse Davies, who was illegally imprisoned, tortured and then murdered in Bolivia while carrying out his duties on your behalf. Furthermore,…’
The chairman held up a hand. ‘If you will forgive the interruption, Mr Davies was in fact a self-employed contractor, not an employee.’
‘And with respect,’ Harper said, ‘that’s the sort of crap that PR flacks and faceless corporate spokespersons come up with to hide the reality of what their paymasters are actually doing. Of course you prefer to describe Scouse and the other guys who do the same kind of work for you as self-employed contractors because that way, not only can your company dodge any tax, social security payments, pension contributions, and sickness and holiday payments that you would otherwise have to make, but you can also shirk your responsibilities towards them, including avoiding paying them compensation for any injury, incapacity or death that they might suffer. However, in every other way except the surface appearance and the - I’m sure - very careful wording on his contract, Scouse Davies was your employee.’
The chairman remained silent and Harper studied his expression carefully before continuing. ‘So my only question is: are you going to do the right and honourable thing and take care
of his widow, or will I be forced to put the word out on the Circuit that if any of the guys get into trouble while on a job for you, Risk Reduction will just abandon its self-employed contractors without a backward glance, and will make no effort at all to rescue them or compensate their families if they’re badly injured, crippled or killed. And if they need proof of that, I can just tell them what happened to Scouse.’ He paused. ‘Doesn’t paint a very appetising picture, does it? And I’m sure it wouldn’t be good for your Kidnap and Rescue business if the guys who actually do the dirty work for you got word of Scouse’s fate, let alone what the media would make of it, if I were to spread the word to them too.’
The chairman’s normally urbane smile had now completely disappeared. ‘Are you trying to blackmail me?’
‘No, not really, though you can choose to look at it that way if you want. Actually, I’m just trying to state the reality without the PR gloss, and I’m trying to get you to do the right thing by someone who lost his life while working on your behalf, without having to be forced to do it. Your company made 120 million dollars profit last year, I’m only asking you to devote about a tenth of one per cent of that to compensate a woman who has lost her husband and the father of her child, because of the work he was doing for you. I don’t know if we’re talking a seven figure sum here, but I think we’re certainly in the ball park of a pretty substantial six figure one, don’t you? Even that seems scant compensation for his poor widow, who’s lost her man and her provider, and will now have to bring up their child as a solo parent.’ Harper waited, watching the chairman’s fingers drumming on the desk. ‘So, do we see eye to eye on this?’
Breakout: A Heart-Pounding Lex Harper Thriller Page 24