by Tom Wood
“Ryan.”
A single groove appeared between her dark brows. “You don’t look like a Ryan to me.”
“I’ll try harder.”
She smiled. “I’ve never known a Ryan with a scar, nor one so good at . . . that.”
“I’m the exception that breaks the rule.”
“Let me think what suits you.” The smile became a pout and she stroked her chin. “Ryan doesn’t suit you at all, in fact. If you’re anything, you’re an anti-Ryan. You’re more of a . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what name suits you.”
Victor raised an eyebrow. “Nor do I.”
“Well,” she continued. “We need to think of a better name for you. I’m just going to point-blank refuse to call you Ryan.”
“What’s wrong with the name Ryan? I’m kind of insulted here.”
She scoffed. “I don’t buy that for a second. You’re not so easily offended. If ever.” She edged closer. “What does it take to offend you, I wonder? Is it even possible?”
He liked the tease in her eyes more than he disliked any intrusion into what lay behind his mask of normalcy. “I’m really not partial to bad language.”
“Do I need to watch my p’s and q’s around you?”
“Most certainly. No blasphemy either.”
She found this amusing, and he expected further teasing, but instead she asked, “Would you like to know my name too?”
“I already know your name.”
“Pretend you don’t. Pretend we’re only introducing ourselves now. So, would you like to know my name?”
“That depends,” he replied. “Does it suit you?”
She approached him. “You’ll have to be the judge of that.” She offered her hand. “I’m Joanna Alamaeda.”
They shook. “Pleasure to meet you, Joanna. I’m Anti-Ryan.”
“I assure you the pleasure was all mine, Anti-Ryan.”
“I think I like that name.”
“Yeah? Great news. Are you going to start introducing yourself that way?”
“I’ll think I’ll stick to Ryan, if it’s all the same.”
“Spoilsport. I’ll have to think of something more suitable to remember you by.”
“Remember me by?”
She shrugged. “I was assuming this was a one-off. I mean, you’re not emigrating here, are you? I’m not about to move to Canada.”
“I could be here for a while.”
He said nothing more. She said nothing.
He turned his palms up. Well?
She laughed. “Is that your way of asking to see me again?”
This was not something he did usually, or even ever. He was more used to call girls than real women. First Poison, and now Joanna. A little reckless, sure, but fun. Lots of fun, and Joanna was different. He wasn’t ready to say good-bye.
“Is that your way of saying yes?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she used the pen and notepad that lay next to the room’s phone to scribble down her number.
“I’m a busy girl, so you’ll almost certainly get my voice mail,” she said. “But I’ll call you back. Although, if you say ‘This is Ryan,’ I won’t know who you’re talking about.”
“Then who should I say is calling?”
She said, “Make something up. Something interesting.” Then she waved with her fingers and left the suite.
• Chapter 18 •
Victor hadn’t felt this kind of freedom in a long time. Years had gone by since he had last been so without reservation, without constraint. It was both an exhilarating new experience and one that caused him concern. Just because he could operate with no oversight didn’t mean he should act as if there was no consequence. He had no CIA or SIS handlers to answer to, but they still existed, and the organizations they worked for, and other agencies like them, could still make his life difficult, most of all by expediting the inevitable conclusion. All existence was temporary—Victor knew that better than most—and his own resurrection would not last long if he took it for granted.
There was always consequence. Consequence followed him around as a shadow. It was unavoidable. Inescapable. Every action had an equal and opposite reaction. Every action could prove a mistake, either in the immediacy or later, and mistakes were to be avoided. He made them from time to time—it was impossible to be infallible—and each time he had walked a little closer to the edge. Once, he had thought himself to be beyond mistakes, to be above error, but that had been arrogance, he now knew. His greatest mistake then had been believing he would never make one.
So, with Joanna, he had to be certain. That she hadn’t killed him while he was asleep and vulnerable was a pretty good sign she wasn’t an assassin chasing one of many contracts on his head, and though she had given him no reason at all to doubt her, Victor doubted everyone. Many years of careful existence had proven he was right not to trust, that it was foolhardy to ever lower his guard. He excelled in his profession because he knew exactly how to wait for such opportunities and how to best exploit them.
He knew Joanna worked for a bank, but not which bank and not in what capacity. She hadn’t wanted to talk shop any more than he had. Guatemala City, like any major metropolis, would have dozens of banks. Maybe more than one hundred, if Alamaeda worked for an investment bank or other financial firm that could be loosely classified as one. Still, it took nothing more than an Internet search for her name followed by “bank” to provide him with her employer, Banco de Guatemala, and even her job title, Client Relations Manager. Her profile on the bank’s Web site mentioned her passion for cementing long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with a broad range of clients, and fondness for white-water rafting. The accompanying portrait photograph was a head-and-shoulders shot, complete with glasses and a polite smile. She looked the same and also dissimilar at the same time.
Even if she was no killer, he needed to be sure she was who she was supposed to be, so he found a pay phone and called the client-services number and asked, speaking Spanish with a Catalan accent, to speak with Joanna Alamaeda. He had spent enough time in Barcelona to pass as a local. He was told by a polite receptionist that Miss Alamaeda was in a meeting and wouldn’t be available for another hour. Victor said he would call back, but was glad she was busy. He didn’t want to speak to her if he didn’t have to, and he didn’t want to lie to her any more than necessary. When everything she would ever know about him was a lie, adding others seemed cruel.
Hanging up the phone, content she was indeed a banker, Victor felt a curious sense of disappointment. It would have made things easier to discover it had all been an act, albeit an elaborate one with motives he didn’t understand. He would have known exactly what to do if he had discovered anything to be suspicious about. Simple. Easy. Problem solved.
What did he do now?
There was an operational benefit to seeing Joanna that needed to be considered. He would be in Guatemala for an extended duration, and the more complete his life in the city, the more integrated he would appear. He had meetings scheduled with small businesses, producers, and distributors, transportation firms and various specialists in the commodities and coffee trade. If he came to anyone’s attention, law enforcement or otherwise, he would need more than just a clean passport to avert any suspicion. Similarly, he wasn’t prepared to violate such a cast-iron rule without being certain he wasn’t exposing himself any more than necessary.
Besides, he wanted to see her again. His well of humanity was empty, but not yet arid. He recognized this as both blessing and curse. If he had the choice, he would erase that thin connection in order to better survive, but he was also glad he was denied that particular choice.
He had no experience on how to proceed. He understood human courtship rituals in the same way he understood how to kill. But in the same way that he had never died himself, he had never been in this situation. He
had never wanted to see someone again who wanted to see him in return. Protocol had always solved this for him. Had he wanted to see someone again, then he made sure not to see them. There had been a few exceptions, of course, but not like this. Nothing like this.
He was making it up as he went along. Which gave him same exhilaration he had felt being free for the first time he could remember, but something else too. A sensation that could only be fear. Which made no sense to him. He had stared down the barrel of many guns with his heart rate barely elevated. The unknown, then. He knew everything there was to know about his profession, about killing, about violence. There were no surprises for him there. This was a surprise. This was unknown.
Victor decided to meet it head-on. There was a risk, because every day carried risk for him, but no greater risk. Either he would complete his job and leave, or else he would be killed in the process. He couldn’t know Joanna for long. What would it be? An affair? A romance? A mistake?
He would find out, he supposed. The only absolute was that it couldn’t interfere with his work.
• Chapter 19 •
Through a shell company registered in the Channel Islands he had hired a local real-estate agent, who rented an office in downtown Guatemala City on Victor’s behalf. It was a small building that he paid above-market rates for, but he wanted a short lease and he wanted an entire building. He didn’t want neighbors and he didn’t want to tie himself to the city any longer than necessary. He never met the agent in person or spoke to him on the phone. Communication was done electronically, and keys to the building were left for Victor at his hotel.
The office provided several benefits. It gave him the ability to expand his cover and also provided him with a safe house in which to prepare and plan and store the tools of his trade. He couldn’t keep a rifle in his hotel room without upsetting the maid.
It helped that the office was once owned by a foreign coffee exporter. Such a history wouldn’t halt any determined investigation, but it might help avoid one in the first place. If the job went as planned, Maria’s death would be put down as an inevitable conclusion to the cartel war, perpetrated by Heloise’s people. The authorities wouldn’t be looking at outside involvement, if they looked at all. Still, it was always better to be overprepared and overprotected, than under-.
The building was nestled in the shadow of an elevated highway, with sleek office towers gleaming in the sunlight to the west, while south lay a run-down neighborhood of shanties. A chain-link fence surrounded the building and an open expanse of concrete that could be used for parking spaces or deliveries. There were cracks in the concrete and vegetation pushing through.
The real-estate agent had stated that the offices had been unoccupied for some time. Inside, it smelled musty and the air was cool. He looked for subtle clues that anyone had been here in the previous hours or days, but the dust was even and undisturbed; the sinks were dry and without water marks. There was an alarm system, for which Victor had the code, and he used a knuckle to enter it and stop the unit’s light from flashing. He would keep it disabled. If someone broke in, the last thing he wanted was for the alarm to be set off and the police to respond.
There were CCTV cameras placed around the outside of the building to discourage opportunists, but the image quality was terrible. They were for show, not for catching thieves. A closet-sized room on the ground floor housed monitors and recording equipment. Footage was recorded and saved on a hard-disk array and then recorded over after a week. Victor scrolled through the footage from the previous week, seeing nothing but the real-estate agent arrive and remove the sign advertising the building’s availability. Victor would have preferred it left in place—the fewer people who knew it was leased, the better—but there was no way to have asked for it to remain without arousing suspicion. He could steal a sign or have one made up to give the appearance that the building was unoccupied, but the biggest danger he had was from the real-estate agent. Perhaps the agent passed the building from time to time. If he saw a sign for another company or for a bogus number, he would start to ask questions about who had rented the office.
All the blinds were already down, and Victor checked each window in turn, making sure they were secure and locked, and taking a mental note of those that opened. He found a room without windows to set up his base of operations. There were better rooms, but he didn’t want interior light escaping through the windows to alert anyone outside to his presence.
There was no intelligence like that he acquired himself, so he took the time to explore the city. He couldn’t operate somewhere without first understanding it. He wasn’t going to be around long enough to know it like a native, but he didn’t need that level of insight. He needed to ensure he knew his way around the public transport system; he needed to know what time the stores closed and which hotels were best for his purposes; he needed to understand the influence of the cartels.
It was no surprise that crime was a problem in Guatemala City, as it was in almost every city in Central America, as well as in the world as a whole, to a lesser extent. Victor had been the target of petty criminals before, both in Europe and farther afield. He was not a small man, but he projected an unthreatening persona. Sometimes that could be mistaken for weakness. He knew enough about posture, body language, and psychology to display himself in a dominant way, which would discourage pickpockets and muggers, but in return would only make him stand out more to the kind of threats he was actually concerned about. He would prefer to encourage a mugger to see him as a potential victim rather than make himself recognizable to another killer. As an outsider, he made himself more obvious not only to other professionals but to petty criminals too.
The main tourist areas were guarded by armed security. There were exposed firearms everywhere. Not police, but private guards hired by stores and restaurants to protect themselves and their customers. In the more exclusive and wealthier areas, these were well trained and experienced. Elsewhere, they looked out of their depth. For show, to make patrons comfortable, more than anything else. Some were little older than kids. They paid no particular attention to Victor because he was a foreigner and because he looked respectable and wealthy and acted in an unthreatening manner. Police officers he saw looked for longer. He knew corruption was endemic. Many officers worked for cartels, sometimes indirectly, sometimes overtly. Foreigners were the victims of police shakedowns on a regular basis.
For the first time in a long time a suit was not his primary attire. Elsewhere, it helped him blend into the urban population. Here, it was the opposite. People were neat, they were smart, but suits were uncommon. He opted for tourist attire—walking shoes, khaki trousers, and a casual shirt with long sleeves. Victor disliked short-sleeve shirts even before it became impossible for him to wear them. He wore a suit only in specific circumstances—when it was necessary, when it wouldn’t draw attention.
Victor had been to many beautiful cities. Guatemala City was not one of them, but when the sun was setting and the concrete buildings and characterless streets were in a wash of blood-orange light, the city gained a certain composure, a certain poise.
A week turned out to be enough time to get a feel for the city and the people. He found the many markets were ideal places to help him learn, as he made a pretense of being a tourist browsing the wares on offer and sampling street cuisine. In particular, Guatemalan-style hot dogs that came with guacamole. He preferred onions, mustard, and ketchup—perfection couldn’t be beaten, after all—but the local variation wasn’t bad. The best one he tasted was bought for him by a generous fixer who helped him source a Glock handgun and other contraband he would need to complete his assignment.
He found that Guatemalans haggled more than bartered like it was a sport, wanting to win more than to get the best deal. The men were happy to engage in conversation about their homeland, which Victor inevitably steered toward acquiring knowledge of the cartels. But the Mayan women avoided eye contact
and rarely spoke unless to answer a direct question, and then it was with as few words as possible.
Plenty of civilians knew about the war between Heloise and Maria, or the Devil Sisters, as Victor heard more than once. With so much infamy, it was no surprise to Victor that the war was a stalemate. Both Heloise and Maria kept their best people close at all times while their untrained sicarios battled on the streets. That Heloise had been first to look outside the country for assistance suggested she was the smarter sister, or perhaps the more scared, the more desperate, but her motives were only a curiosity to Victor.
He was paid to kill, not to understand.
• Chapter 20 •
Finding Maria Salvatierra wasn’t the problem. She owned a horse ranch far outside of the city, nestled in a rural valley, out of sight but not hiding. The ranch occupied three thousand acres of pastures. It even had its own lake. At the center of the land was a beautiful two-story mansion, two guest houses, stables, a garage, and several outbuildings. According to the dossier, Maria spent the majority of her time here. Like Heloise, she had advisers and lieutenants to do the heavy lifting. She spent most of her days riding and swimming. She made the decisions, and was in all ways the head of her cartel, but no one liked to work any harder than necessary.
The problems of getting to Maria at the ranch would be many. Though Lavandier had not been able to provide specifics, there would be dozens of heavily armed gunmen guarding Maria’s home and surrounding land. There would be further security provided by alarms, lights, motion sensors, and dogs, but again no specifics. The dossier told Victor that Maria had another layer of protection: private security guys who operated throughout the country.
After his week familiarizing himself with Guatemala City, he took a bus excursion to the countryside. Public transport was Victor’s preferred method of travel for many reasons, and it was increasingly hard to find cars that were worth the risk of stealing. Sophisticated alarms, locks, and tracking systems were improving all the time, and with them the pool of vehicles that could be safely stolen was diminishing. It was easier to hop on a bus or take a cab. There were many other benefits too. He was able to keep his senses focused on possible threats instead of diverted to driving. Ramming a bus off the road was a lot harder too, as was pulling off a successful drive-by attack.