The Night Charter

by Sam Hawken

  “It’s going to make me feel better,” Camaro said. “And when I’m ready, I’ll tell you exactly what to do.”

  “I want to talk to Chapado.”

  “No.”

  “I want to know he’s still alive and that you have him,” Matt insisted. “If you don’t prove it to me, then you can go fuck yourself. Do it, or hang up!”

  She didn’t say anything for almost a minute. Matt checked to see that the call was still live. “Just a minute,” she told him.

  Matt strained his ears to hear anything at all in the background that would tell him where Camaro was. He did not hear so much as a television. There was a mumble of quiet voices for a moment and then Chapado spoke. “Mr. Clifford,” he said.

  “Is that you, asshole?”

  “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “I’m gonna find you. I’m gonna kill that bitch. And I’m gonna take you back, and you’ll wish you never saw my face. I’ll cut your whole arm off this time. I’ll peel your skin like a grape.”

  “You will never touch me again,” Chapado said.

  “I will!” Matt said. “I’ll make you suffer! You hear me? You hear me?”

  “He’s gone,” Camaro said.

  “You are so dead,” Matt told her. “You’re dead right now, and you don’t even know it.”

  “I could have sat on Chapado and waited for you to show your sorry ass,” Camaro said. “You’d be dead right now. The only reason you’re still alive is because I allow it.”

  “Do it! Come at me! I’ll show you what I can do.”

  “You’ll hear from me,” Camaro said.

  Matt gripped his phone until his knuckles ached. “You don’t hang up on me! You tell me where I can get Chapado right now, and I’ll be merciful! You understand me? I’ll do you quick!”

  “Good-bye, Matt,” Camaro said.

  The line went dead. Matt moved to dash the phone against the floor but stopped himself. He screamed instead, and his scream echoed in the space. “Bitch!” he bellowed. But there was no one to hear him except the body of Sandro Soto.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  IGNACIO ARRIVED FOR his shift and ate an early lunch of a burger and fries at his desk. He was still clicking his way through his emails when he felt the man at his back. Ignacio pushed the mouse pointer to the corner and the screen saver activated automatically. He turned away from the screen. “Can I help—” he started.

  The man brandished FBI credentials in Ignacio’s face. “I’m Special Agent John Mansfield. We spoke on the phone.”

  “Oh,” Ignacio said.

  “You are Detective Montellano, right?”

  “Yes. It’s only…well, I didn’t expect you to come all the way down here to talk. Another phone call would have been okay.”

  “I like to work face to face,” Mansfield said.

  Mansfield seemed about fifty, his hair completely white. He wore a blue suit and a red tie with a golden tie tack. A large college ring was on his right hand. His left had a simple gold band. Ignacio saw all this in a moment. “Okay, that’s fine with me. Why don’t you pull up a chair?”

  “Actually, it’s better if we had somewhere more private to sit down. Do you have a conference room?”

  “Sure. It’s right over there.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  Ignacio stood up from his desk, abandoning his food, and led Mansfield to the small conference room. It had chairs for six and whiteboards on two walls. A rolling rack with a television on top and a DVD player underneath was crammed into one corner. The whiteboards were both stained with pinks and grays from long use.

  “Close the door, please,” Mansfield said.

  “What’s with all the secrecy?” Ignacio asked.

  “Everything I told you on the phone was pretty general,” Mansfield said. “Now we’re getting into the serious stuff. I’d like to know that we’re keeping this compartmentalized. In fact, I’m going to have to ask you to sign a confidentiality agreement.”

  Mansfield had a briefcase, and he put it on the table. The locks popped open and he lifted the lid. The agent passed a form across to Ignacio and then a pen.

  “What’s in this?” Ignacio asked.

  “It’s a non-disclosure agreement for sensitive, but not classified, information. What I’m going to tell you is background for your investigation, so anything you use will be subject to review by the relevant agencies—in this case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation—before it can be utilized in public documents, such as an indictment.”

  Ignacio sat down and looked at the form. It was dense, but it was at least only a single page. “I feel like we’re getting into some James Bond stuff here.”

  “It’s nothing like that. But it is the sort of thing we don’t talk about on the nightly news. Please sign.”

  He signed and let Mansfield take the form back. It went into the briefcase, and then Mansfield sat down opposite him. “Now what?” Ignacio asked.

  “Now we talk about Alpha 66.”

  “We already talked about Alpha 66. They’re a Cuban militant group. They’re small. They don’t do a whole lot. The FBI isn’t interested in them.”

  “Some of that’s true, and some of it’s not,” Mansfield said. “They are a militant group, and they are small, but they do carry out operations, and the FBI is interested in them. We’ve been interested in them since 1961. They’re an intriguing bunch of reactionary zealots.”

  Ignacio watched as Mansfield brought out a file. From inside the manila folder, Mansfield produced a series of black-and-white and color photographs, which he laid side by side on the table. Most of the men in the pictures were old, but some of them were young. Ignacio recognized one of them immediately. “That’s Pablo Marquez. He was murdered last night.”

  “Right. And over here is a man named Hugo Echave. He’s the nominal head of Alpha 66 these days, along with Carlos Molina. And this is Álvaro Sotelo and his son, Ulises. The rest of them you can see for yourself, but here’s the core of the organization, minus Marquez.”

  “Five guys?”

  “Ulises is new to the inner circle, we think. Total membership in Alpha 66 is something less than a hundred. Maybe below seventy-five. Not many, and most of those people are simply fundraisers or the kind who give speeches in front of special-interest groups. The hardest of the hard core, though…they’re still dangerous and are very active.”

  “What do these guys do? Are they still training out in the Everglades?”

  “Sometimes. The younger ones like to play soldier. But for the most part Alpha 66 funds radical action inside Cuba. And when I say ‘radical,’ that’s what I mean. We’re talking about murders, bombings, and things like that. They’ll put money into protest signs, but they’re more interested in racking up the bodies of dead communists.”

  Ignacio picked up Hugo Echave’s picture. The man was distinguished looking, like a wise family patriarch with many, many grandchildren. “I read that they’re terrorists.”

  “They are.”

  “If they’re terrorists, then why aren’t they in prison?”

  “Because their targets are overseas. Let me give you an example. In 1976, a pair of timed explosives took down Cubana de Aviación flight 455. They were traveling from Barbados to Jamaica. Alpha 66 was involved, along with another group called Omega 7 and a few other violent factions operating under the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations. The bombing killed seventy-eight people. For a long time it was the worst airborne terrorist attack in the western hemisphere.

  “Now, some people went to prison for it, but that was only outside the country. In 2005, one of the Alpha 66 bombers reentered the United States illegally. He was caught. Would you like to know what happened to him?”

  “He got deported?”

  “No. He went right back to his life. Pressure came down all the way from the president to make sure he skated on everything he might have been charged with.”

  “How? Why?”


  “Alpha 66 and the other American groups in CORU are our pet terrorists. They attack targets we don’t give a damn about. Or targets we don’t mind seeing taken out. Cuban functionaries? Who cares? A cop or two in Havana? So what? Don’t let the kind face the president put on the situation fool you. We may trade bananas with these people, but Cuba’s still not our ally. And as far as certain elements in the United States are concerned, the enemy of our enemy is our friend.”

  Ignacio sat back. “That’s screwed up.”

  “So the question is, what’s going on with your investigation. Shoot-outs? Throats cut? Are they cleaning house internally, or is someone picking them off from the outside?”

  “I don’t care about all that Cold War crap,” Ignacio said. “I want to clear murder cases.”

  “These are your people,” Mansfield said. “The roots of this go deep.”

  “I’m Puerto Rican,” Ignacio said. “I was raised in the Bronx.”

  Mansfield smiled. He gathered up the photographs. “Well. I’m authorized to give you the information you need to locate and question the members of Alpha 66, including those that have stayed mostly off the radar. But I’ll tell you, investigator to investigator, that your best bet is to go straight to the top.”

  “Hugo Echave.”

  “He’s visible in his community; he’s politically active; he’s everything that says fine, upstanding American. Which means that if he’s mixed up in something bad, he’s going to want it put behind him as quickly and as neatly as possible. Go to him. He’ll crack.”

  “What if I find out this is some kind of terrorist thing?” Ignacio said. “What do I do then?”

  “Then you come back to me, and we make it a Bureau matter. It’ll be off your hands.”

  “Or swept under the carpet. If people find out there’s still spying and killing going on, they’re not going to think making nice with Cuba was such a great idea. It’ll be a scandal.”

  “Maybe,” Mansfield said. He slipped a sheet of neatly typed names, addresses, and phone numbers out of the file folder and gave it to Ignacio. “So make sure you don’t have to call me.”

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  MATT SAT IN the chair where Chapado had been held and rocked back and forth with his head in his hands. His mind raced ahead of him, skipping across ideas and plans and discarding them almost as soon as they occurred to him. He kept coming back to the knowledge that he had nothing and Camaro Espinoza had everything.

  After he had run through every permutation of rape, torture, and murder that he could imagine, he was forced to turn toward more feasible ends. The corpse of Sandro Soto wasn’t getting any fresher. Neither was the situation. He had to settle on something concrete and follow through on it. Otherwise he was lost completely.

  Slowly his mind settled. He breathed more easily. The nervous sweat was gone, replaced with the simple perspiration of being in the hotbox interior of the warehouse without so much as a fan to stir the air. He took out his phone and dialed.

  “Mr. Clifford,” Hugo Echave said when he answered. Matt heard the barely contained rage once more. “What do you want?”

  “There’s been a change of plans,” Matt said.

  “What change of plans? You assured me last night that the exchange would go ahead on the schedule you set. This is what you said, Mr. Clifford! And now you call to play more games!”

  “It’s not like that,” Matt said. “I’m calling because the place where I was going to set the meet is no good. We can’t go there. There will be cops all over. I have to find somewhere new, or we’re both gonna get caught up in something.”

  “This cannot go on forever, Mr. Clifford. We must come to a conclusion. You’ve killed eight of us and one innocent. We believe you will harm Señor Chapado if we push you. We’re ready to deal. All you must do is agree to make the exchange.”

  Matt cursed silently. “I need another day or two.”

  “No! We must move forward. Or are you going to commit another murder?”

  “I didn’t kill that guy and his wife!” Matt said. “How many times do I have to tell you that? It’s got nothing to do with me. Believe me, all I want is Chapado off my hands and the money in my bag. It’s just going to take a little longer than I thought. It’s not the end of the world.”

  He could feel Echave seething. “Señor Chapado is dead,” the man said finally.

  “What? No, he’s not dead!”

  “Let me speak to him.”

  “No. No, you can’t talk to him. He’s asleep.”

  “Wake him up!”

  “I’m not letting you talk to him, okay? I have him and he’s fine. You don’t have to worry about anything. We’re going to do this in a few days. Everybody will be happy.”

  “I want a photograph of Señor Chapado—alive—with a copy of the Herald. A current copy. You have twenty-four hours to produce this photograph, or we will consider Señor Chapado dead and our deal at an end. You won’t get a single day to enjoy your money before we find you and kill you.”

  “You were going to kill me anyway,” Matt said. “You said so yourself.”

  “Yes. You are going to die, Mr. Clifford.”

  “Then screw you. I’m not sending you any picture. You will wait for me to set a place and a time, and you will bring me my money. And maybe in the meantime you can get your shit straight and stop blaming me for killing people I didn’t kill. If I did it, you would know.”

  “We do know, Mr. Clifford.”

  “Whatever. See you around, Hugo.”

  Matt hung up the phone. His body trembled all over. He clasped his hands around the phone to still himself.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  CAMARO SLEPT, AND in the bathroom the man was also sleeping in his spot beneath the sink. Lauren was thirsty, but she didn’t want to disturb either of them with the sound of the water. So she sat and watched the clock count away the minutes until she decided it was late enough.

  Before she went, she took one of Camaro’s phones, the cheap-looking one, and some of the cash left on the nightstand. Lauren didn’t know how much these things would cost, so she took a hundred dollars. That should be more than enough, with more left over for something to eat and drink.

  She let herself out of the room quietly and walked down the length of the motel to stay out of the sun for as long as possible. Mosquitoes and flies buzzed around, the former lighting on Lauren briefly before she flicked them away. She’d read somewhere that mosquitoes liked the smell of feet, so she expected there would be bites around her ankles by the time she got back.

  Away from the motel, she stayed to the grass and gravel at the edge of the road. Eventually, she walked far enough that the motel disappeared, but other shapes were coming into view ahead of her. It occurred to her that all she had to do was keep going, that it would be as easy as calling 911 and asking to be taken away from here, but she did neither of these things. The police were the first step toward foster care, and she did not want to go back to that.

  Thoughts of foster care returned her to memories of her dad. The pain was still raw and fresh and would be that way for a long time. At least now she didn’t cry uncontrollably whenever his face appeared to her. Even now she had only a single tear, and she wiped it away. She sniffed a little, but kept the rest inside. That was where it had to stay for now, until she was gone from this place and somewhere the system could not lay its hands on her.

  Lauren tried to imagine her dad and Camaro together, but she couldn’t. They were completely different. Her father had always had an air of defeat around him, a sadness no amount of hugs could lift. Camaro was like a wall, with everything she felt hidden behind it. Lauren knew no one could touch Camaro through that wall if she didn’t allow it. At some point she must have let Lauren’s dad have that access, and this was the end result. Lauren was aware that in the end Camaro would kill the man she once called Uncle Matt. This did not bother her at all. And in the meantime, she would be like Camaro and build a wall of her o
wn.

  The drugstore was next to an auto parts store that was next to a hardware store that was next to a small family grocery. Lauren went to the drugstore first, exactly as Camaro instructed her, and took a handbasket to carry her things. She went down the short list, browsing the aisles until she found everything, and then she took it all to the cashier.

  The man behind the register was old, and he smiled at her as he rang up her purchase. “Keep cool now,” he admonished her when she walked away.

  The grocery was compact and nothing like a grand supermarket, but it had things to take the edge of hunger off. Lauren bought a few pieces of fruit—oranges and apples and bananas—and a two-liter bottle of Coke. She lingered awhile in the bread section, thinking about making sandwiches, but there was no cool place in the motel room to keep the baloney and cheese safe to eat. Eventually, she settled on a box of cookies and some saltines.

  The woman who rang her up bagged her purchases in paper and made change. Lauren thanked her but got no reply. She headed outside again.

  An awning stretched out along the front of the hardware store and provided some shade. Lauren put her bags down and looked at the phone. From her other pocket she took a crumpled sheet of paper with Richard Story’s information on it and called the phone number.

  At first she thought he wouldn’t answer, but finally he did. He sounded out of breath, as if he had been running or lifting heavy things. It was the middle of the day. He was probably working. “Hello?” he asked.

  “Is this Richard Story?”

  “Yes, speaking. Who is this?”

  “I’m your niece. Lauren.”

  Richard was quiet for a long moment, and then he said, “Lauren? How did you get my number?”

  “I looked it up on the Internet.”

  “I haven’t seen you since you were about four or five. How old are you now?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “Wow, fourteen. How’s your dad?”

  Lauren hesitated. There was no other way to say it. “He’s dead.”