by Alex Archer
Two hours later she was roused from reading a geology textbook by the chime announcing she’d received e-mail.
The return address belonged to a Romanian acquaintance of hers in Berlin, although the domain was not a German one. When she saw that she made sure her antivirus library was up-to-date. Just on general principles.
The e-mail had several attachments. Annja ran an antivirus scan on them. When they checked out clean she clicked on the most intriguing, by reason of its extension.
It was a music file, cryptically named “001.mp3.” When her media player came up it started playing a song she recognized as being not that much younger than she was. It was an old Van Halen hit.
The song was “Panama.”
Frowning, she looked at the other attachments. Then she put the notebook computer aside and sat back to digest what she had learned. By habit she clicked her television on to a news channel.
It showed an oblique helicopter shot of a white-and-blue aircraft broken and burning with billowing orange flames in a marshy-looking area. “Near Kearny, New Jersey,” the newsreader was intoning, “where it crashed on takeoff from Newark Liberty International Airport late this afternoon after both engines failed simultaneously. The airplane, a private Gulfstream V jet, was registered to millionaire financier Cedric Millstone of Boston, Massachusetts. The Federal Aviation Administration has just confirmed that Millstone himself was on board the aircraft, as well as an assistant and three flight crew. There were no survivors….”
“HEY, CYRUS! My man,” sang out the deep-tanned man with the aloha shirt open to reveal a chestful of grizzled hair with a gaudy gold medallion in the midst of it. He had a New Jersey accent, a shiny brown bald front to his head and a big, hard paunch. His voice echoed over the slight sloshing of water inside the boathouse. “Do I deliver the goods, or do I deliver the goods?”
The man he had addressed as Cyrus allowed himself a thin smile. “I guess that remains to be seen, doesn’t it, Marty?”
Marty Mehlman had his whole team, a dozen men, gathered together in the boathouse. Windows set high in the wooden walls spilled an olive-oil colored afternoon light across the water, the plank gangway and the big oceangoing yacht moored to the dock with its mast unstepped and made fast to the deck. The water threw back the light in shifts and surges, playing across the features of the men. Cyrus knew them to be a selection of experienced North American and Central American, mostly Panamanian, hoodlums. They were all pros, all intrinsically small-time—competent, but not the hotshots they thought they were. They had been hired to pull a job. They had done so in workmanlike fashion.
Maybe. Cyrus had not gotten where he was by taking things for granted. He happened to be in Panama City, on the Pacific end of the canal.
Marty liked to play up. He made a show of lighting a cigar before answering. Then, puffing a wreath of bluish smoke around his sunburned bean of a face, he said, “What, Cyrus. Don’tcha trust me?”
“You know what they say,” Cyrus said in a cold voice. “Trust, but verify.”
Marty shrugged. Cyrus had him down as a man who didn’t care what you said to him as long as he got paid.
Mehlman circled an upraised finger over his head and whistled to his crew. They used a block-and-tackle arrangement trolleyed from rails along the ceiling of the boathouse to pull a crate from the yacht’s hold. It was a big crate, four feet by four feet by eight. Its proportions were suggestive in a morbid sort of way.
Cyrus stood watching as the crate swayed onto the wharf. He wore a white tropical-weight suit and a white straw Panama hat with a garish fuchsia and neon-green tropical-flower band. It was the only hint of color about him, except for the amber of his aviator-style sunglasses. His hair, cut close to his skull, was light blond. His skin was so pale as to make him seem an albino, which he was not.
He was remarkably thin. He was so thin he looked fragile and looked shorter than his actual height, which was only a couple of inches under six feet without the hat. He was so desiccated that his skin had a parchmentlike texture. The combination of gauntness, pallor and dryness gave him the appearance of being both sickly and elderly—even his thin-lipped mouth was wrinkled like an old man’s.
Although not young, Cyrus wasn’t elderly. As for his skinniness, he had been born with a sense of taste. He simply didn’t care for food, so he ate little. He believed that excessive intake of fluids was bad for one’s health, so he drank little as well.
He did very little, though, to dispel any impression he might be infirm. He frequently found it useful.
When the long yellow pinewood box thumped on the dock Marty turned and squared himself toward Cyrus. “There,” he said, fists on hips. “The goods.”
“Give me a break, Marty,” Cyrus said. “It’s a box.”
“Okay. Okay. Louie, bust the crate open.”
A big rough-looking American with a broken nose and a blond crew cut came up with a four-foot wrecking bar. “Tell him to be careful,” Cyrus said.
“Be careful,” Marty said, as if translating.
Louie pried the crate with splitting, squeaking sounds. He pulled the lid off and let it slam down onto the dock.
Cyrus winced. He walked up and peered down. Inside was a lot of strawlike plastic packing material. He brushed at it until he saw a hint of dull gray metal. He touched it. It was cool and smooth to his fingertips.
“Clear it away,” he said.
Marty scowled and waved at his men. A couple of dark, spare Panamanians stepped up and scooped handfuls of the packing material out and dropped it on the planks.
“Whoa,” Marty said. “It’s a coffin.”
One of the Panamanians made the sign of the cross.
“Okay,” Marty said, puffing like a steamship on his cigar. “Are these the goods, or are they the goods.”
“They’re the goods,” Cyrus said.
“All right.” Marty slammed his hands together and rubbed his palms.
His lieutenant, Pujols, had light-colored skin and dark blond hair tied in a ponytail. He wore a lightweight white jacket over a black and scarlet shirt. His expression was pinched, his manner nervous. He had been shifting his weight from foot to foot the whole time.
“Just pay us and let us get outta here, okay?” he said in a staccato Puerto Rican accent. His jacket hung open, revealing a big angular hog leg of a government-model Colt autopistol in a holster beneath his left armpit.
Cyrus smiled. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? But don’t you want a look inside?”
Pujols made an unhappy, impatient sound low in his throat. Marty frowned, looking puzzled more than annoyed. “What?”
“Sure,” Cyrus said. “Look inside. You’ve worked hard for your money. Now why not get a look at what all the fuss is about?”
Marty chuckled. “Sure. Since you put it that way, why not?”
His men tried the lid. It wasn’t secured in any way. Though extremely heavy it swung open on hinges that might have been lubricated yesterday, so smooth and soundless were they. A waft of cool air freighted with exotic spices rolled out. Marty and his crew crowded around to peer inside.
Their faces open like flowers of amazement unfolding. “Oh, my God,” Marty breathed.
“Say hi to him for me,” the man he had called Cyrus said.
At both ends of the boathouse, along the landward wall, doors burst open. Men in street clothes stepped inside. They held MP-5 machine pistols with built-in sound-suppressers to their shoulders. The guns fired with little popping barks, like seals who had lost their voices.
Most of the men fell right down, dead in an instant, killed by surgically precise two-shot bursts to the head. Pujols was fast. Marty was faster than he looked. Both men ducked around on the water side of the opened casket. Pujols drew his big .45.
With barely a ripple and no sound beyond the wavelets slogging endlessly against the yacht’s sleek flanks, two heads wearing black wet suits and rebreather masks broke water right behind them. Suppressed MP-5s ro
se with them. They coughed explosively.
Marty and his nervous lieutenant fell backward into the water.
Cyrus gazed impassively at the bodies slumped on the dock in spreading maroon pools, the corpses bobbing slowly in the water.
“Thanks, boys,” he said as the two frogmen clambered up onto the decks and peeled their masks off their heads. The men reloaded their weapons and closed the doors. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind giving me a hand getting this sucker closed and picked up on the loader? We’ve got a boat to get it aboard before it sails,” Cyrus said.
“Who’s taking delivery?” one of the men who had come in from outside asked, strolling up. He had slung his machine pistol muzzle down behind his right shoulder.
Cyrus laughed like a crow cawing. “You should know better than to ask that, Rushton,” he said. “Need to know, amigo. Need to know.”
8
The taxi rolling down the wide toll road called the Corredor Sur from Tocumen International Airport on the city’s eastern edge was white and red faded near pink by the scorching Panamanian sun. It was a Buick, about as old as Annja herself. Its air conditioner wheezed asthmatically and thumped alarmingly without appreciably thinning the humid heat. The cabbie ran it full-on anyway, despite having all the windows rolled down. Its noise and the early-afternoon traffic sounds of downtown Panama City did have the beneficial effect of mostly drowning out the cab’s CD player, which was chugging out terrible mid-nineties studio-gangsta rap at a volume that would’ve rattled the windows had they been up. Annja could feel the beats in her teeth.
They turned off the highway at a downtown exit. As with a lot of Latin American cities everything except the skyscraper-central middle of the business district interspersed shiny looming modern buildings with smaller, more inhabitable-looking older ones. In this case older meant mostly a particularly baroque variant of Spanish Colonial that Annja found especially charming.
Looking out the window at the awning-shaded shops and the crowds Annja was struck by a resemblance to New Orleans’ Latin Quarter. For all its well-publicized French heritage her hometown owed as much cultural debt to its long period of Spanish occupation as to France.
She did find herself wondering, Does archaeology ever happen anywhere it isn’t hot or humid? Although to be fair, she had to admit that she wasn’t exactly there to do archaeology. She had archaeological aims, though—to try to make sure an unknown artifact was properly conserved. So maybe that counted.
Her Romanian contact had used what Annja suspected was pirated NSA image-comparison software to sift through terabytes of raw overhead imaging. She had a feeling not all of it was supposed to be publicly available.
Her hotel, the Executive, stood in the midst of Panama City’s booming financial district. Annja had picked it because it got good reviews online, its rates were reasonable and also because, to her thoroughly irrational delight, it looked like nothing so much as a tower of giant white Lego. She tipped the driver, a dark taciturn man who had spoken English with a Punjabi accent, and wore a maroon turban.
The Executive staff, perhaps having seen American currency changing hands, leapt forward to help Annja with her bags.
Inside the lobby was cool, bright and clean. There was no line. Panama wasn’t exactly a leading summer vacation spot for Northern Hemisphere folk. The neat, compact clerk was cheerful and quite efficient.
Annja walked toward the elevator. A bell-person, a commodore at least, by the splendor of his uniform, trundled a laden luggage cart after her with much creaking of casters. The newspapers for sale in the lobby boxes screamed at her in Spanish and English—Bodies Found in Boathouse.
It was the same message they had imparted with equal stridency at Tocumen, when she had finally cleared customs. It gave her a tight feeling in her gut. She didn’t fail to believe in coincidence, exactly. She’d encountered her share, and several other people’s, too, she judged. Such as when she found the sword. Of course, if she saw the same vehicle or the same face in the crowd, as she went forth about her business this late morning and afternoon, she’d suspect she was being shadowed. She had been before, and was pretty sure she would be again.
She did not believe that arriving in Panama City in pursuit of a white motor-yacht her friends had tracked through the canal from the Netherlands Antilles by sifting satellite photos to discover a whole bunch of guys had just been gunned down in a boathouse in the old harbor district, came anywhere near coincidence.
Her hotel room was clean and fairly comfortable. She clicked on the television, where a local news broadcast quickly confirmed her suspicions. A sixth body had been discovered, bobbing in the harbor. Being Latin American television, it gleefully showed the corpse of a male floating with arms outflung and a seagull perched with its web feet in the salt-and-pepper thatch of his chest.
“And thanks so much for the wonder of zoom lenses,” Annja said. She looked away, but left the sound on while she hung her few changes of clothes in the closet.
The authorities, she learned, blamed the massacre on a drug deal gone bad. Next—the sun is expected to set in the West later today, she thought with a grimace.
Still, she told herself, don’t be an ingrate. Had it not been for the perpetual war on drugs, and the equally smashing success of the war on terror, she would have found herself facing many more uncomfortable questions about a certain propensity she displayed to turn up in proximity of the freshly dead.
She left the TV running when she cruised out the door. It was a minor security measure to discourage the amateurs—this was the Third World and hence thick with them.
SEVEN HOT, FRUSTRATING, increasingly waterlogged hours after setting forth, Annja shoved her weary, footsore way back through the revolving door into the hotel lobby. She had negotiated the Panama City public transit system, labyrinthine and irrational even by Latin American standards, with a combination explorer’s instinct and hard-won experience. The sun had dropped into the Pacific in the alarmingly abrupt way it did in the lower latitudes, so that you almost expected it to send a vast boiling tsunami hurtling toward shore, or at the very minimum to make a loud splash. It had left the downtown streets to the neon lights, taillights and loud music and at least as many acres of suntanned skin as there was asphalt.
Annja hadn’t found any answers.
She hit the bar in the hotel. She needed to recharge and to come up with a new plan since no one she’d encountered on the waterfront would admit to knowing anything about the mysterious yacht or the bloody massacre.
Her attention was drawn to one end of the bar. Loudly cursing his fate and the television over the bar, a man grumbled to himself about the current newscast and the “nobody-heard-nothin’ boathouse massacre.”
9
He was a young man, Annja’s age, maybe a bit younger. He looked as if he might be older. But that was because he was definitely the worse for wear. As was his dark suit and rumpled white shirt, whose collar lay open, like a slack noose. If he had worn a tie it had vanished, like the old-time pirates of the Spanish main. Except it wasn’t near as likely to turn up again, either as a signature Disney attraction or in speedboats.
“Damn you,” he moaned in Spanish at the devastatingly beautiful female newsreader in the red dress. “Tell the truth for once, can’t you?”
“Mind if I sit down?” Annja asked.
He blinked eyes like cocktail onions at her. He had olive skin, light for a local. She guessed he wore a hat and lots of sunscreen outside. He had longish dark hair, almost down to his collar, and a longish sort of face, with brown eyes and charcoal-smudge eyebrows.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” she said.
“Why not?” he said. “I may despair, but I am neither dead yet, nor blind.”
Switching to English, he said, “I am Guillermo Miller. I am a reporter. For a newspaper—a real reporter. I don’t just play one on TV.”
His smile was even briefer than the joke called for. His lips were loose and purple and
moist. They suggested he’d been drinking many beers, as did the array of bottles on the bar before him. The eyes suggested he’d cried into them all.
Annja settled on a stool beside him. They had that end of the bar to themselves. The lounge wasn’t particularly crowded. And apparently the existing customers didn’t want to listen to his heartfelt moans and groans.
“Why do you bemoan your fate so?” she asked in Spanish.
But he wanted to speak English. He did so with complete fluency, albeit a distinct accent.
“I might, if I were a cautious man,” he said, speaking with the exaggerated precision of the well and truly drunk, “suspect you to be from the authorities, come to test my discretion. But I have no such fear. Do you know why?”
“Why?” Annja asked.
“Because I see you are clearly an American. Oh, not by the lightness of your skin—there are Latin women lighter even than you.” He turned back to curse the newscast.
Annja could see from watching him that the young Panamanian showed many clear symptoms of being someone who cared, way too deeply, and was wounded by the gashing realization that the world, by and large, didn’t.
“Well,” she said, a little shakily, “I’m a pretty skeptical person myself.”
“Ahhh,” he said, drawing it out. “That’s too bad.”
She felt cold, as if the air-conditioning had suddenly been cranked to rapid glaciation. She was losing him suddenly. What did I say? she wondered.
“It is too bad,” Guillermo continued, taking his time until she had to step hard on the impulse to grab him by the throat and shake a few words out of him. “Because people like us, we skeptical rationalists, are prone to disbelieve in conspiracy theory.”
He raised a bottle of beer that he almost certainly thought of as half-empty, scrutinized it, then drained it. “Because if we actually look closely at the world, we see that conspiracies do not simply exist, they abound. They’re all around us.”