“Go, go, go! Get out of here. Now,” he screamed.
Panicked, the driver slammed the truck into gear and floored it, fishtailing as the rear window shattered from a burst of gunfire. More slugs thumped against the rear of the vehicle as they sped down the street.
“What the...” the driver yelled.
“Just keep moving. Get us back to base,” the leader moaned. He slumped into the seat, which was already soaked through with blood.
The driver veered around the same corner the pair of men had run down and saw nothing other than deserted buildings and a pair of street dogs nosing through a pile of trash.
He saw tail lights turn onto another street several blocks up, and then disappear.
The driver flipped open his cell phone and hit a speed dial number.
Chapter 11
“Jesus God. What the fuck? I mean, what the fuck!” Al babbled as he swerved down the small streets, racing away from the disaster back at Carmen’s. Ernesto sat silently staring straight ahead, gripping the dashboard with one trembling hand and clutching his backpack with the other, his face ashen with shock.
Al was the polar opposite, animated and hyper from the excitement of the conflict. He hadn’t stopped talking since he’d started the engine. “I mean, did you see that? It was a full scale war in there,” he declared for perhaps the tenth time. “Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable!”
He reached across Ernesto, popped his glove compartment open and withdrew a miniature single-serving size bottle of vodka. He spun the top with his teeth, bottle clenched with his right hand, and then blew the metal cap through his open window. He swallowed the contents in a single gulp. Al winced at the burn, and then burped loudly. The bottle followed the cap into the street.
Ernesto turned, woodenly examining Al’s profile.
“Just my luck,” Al prattled on. “I’m minding my business, just picking you up, and the entire Cali cartel decides to shoot it out a few feet from me. We’re lucky we weren’t killed. Really. It’s a miracle we’re alive to tell about it...”
Maybe that was overstating it, given they’d been two floors above the shooting and the floors and walls were constructed of foot-thick concrete. But still. He hadn’t been near a discharging firearm since his service days, twenty something years ago. He knew the drug gangs routinely butchered each other, scrabbling over territory or routes, but those were usually lurid headlines in the local papers. It was different being proximate to a bloodbath.
Panama suddenly seemed far more ominous than it had a few hours ago.
Ernesto finally spoke, his voice a hoarse whisper. “But we’re sticking to the arrangement, si?”
Al thought about it. Other than the nightmare back at Esperanza, nothing had changed. They’d made it out without a scratch, and he’d already gotten paid, so in the end there was no reason not to go through with it. He toyed with the idea of fanning the entire adventure, dropping the cook off at the nearest bus stop and finding an air-conditioned bar to hide in for the next few days. He quickly dismissed the notion. His bookie needed to get paid and there would be plenty of time for fortification tomorrow, after he’d discharged his obligation.
“Yeah. Of course. Just fill in the last of the blanks on the form I stuffed in my bag and we’re good to go. You’ll need that when the cops do their routine stops on our way south.” Al cranked the AC and rolled up his window – he was soaked through with sweat.
Al patted the breast pocket of his clammy shirt and felt the reassuring bump of his diplomatic passport and the folded envelope of cash. Yeah, he’d go through with the deal. He just hoped Carmen was okay. A massacre would certainly be bad for business, but if anyone could bluster through a difficult situation, Carmen could. She was a survivor, with enough friends and clients in high places to weather any storm.
He recalled her shotgun toting silhouette as she descended the stairs.
Al almost pitied the gunfighters. She’d looked pissed, and an angry Latina brandishing a twelve gauge was nothing to sneer at.
~ ~ ~
“You’re kidding me, right? Is this some kind of fucking joke...?” Sam was irate, yelling into the phone. He’d finally gotten the tracking info on the cook’s cell number and placed it at a known whorehouse.
Then his four hard-case professionals moved in to do a snatch...and wound up butchered?
Sam slammed down the handset in frustration. How could grabbing a stupid cook and a pilfered camera turn into Shootout at the Okay Corral? It was a whorehouse, for Christ’s sake. The most dangerous part of this exercise should have been avoiding catching the clap. Now he had three dead men, a fourth in intensive care at the offices of the Agency’s pet doctor, a driver with a head laceration, but no cook, no camera, and no explanation of how it all got botched. That, and a whole lot of ‘splaining to do to the local cops – who were understandably curious as to how three Gringos with no IDs but identical military-grade weapons had come to wind up deceased in a gunfight with Colombian narcotics smugglers – all of whom were also dead.
And the Colombians hadn’t gone easy – one of them had actually chased Sam’s surviving man out of the brothel and single-handedly destroyed the vehicle with small arms fire. The only thing that had stopped him from tearing the truck apart with his teeth had been the Madame, who’d fired a shotgun blast through him as he emptied his clip into the departing Suburban.
This shit wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t Beirut – it was frigging Panama. Nothing happened in Panama. It was a stinking swamp.
Sam’s fury was modified by some particularly disquieting thoughts. Had the drug dealers been part of something he was unaware of involving the cook? Were they protecting him? Was this about to get much worse?
There were far too many unanswered questions. This had quickly degraded from a search for a mystery camera to an international incident with a bunch of body bags. And he still had no idea why the camera was so critically important to recover. Nothing made any sense. He paced his office, calculating how to frame his report to HQ.
A sharp knock interrupted his reverie.
“What? This better be good...” he yelled at the door.
A tall grey-haired man in his late fifties wearing a dark blue Tommy Bahama shirt entered. He placed his briefcase on Sam’s desk, and faced him. “Oh, it is good, Mr. Wakefield. It is,” he declared.
“And just who the hell are you, and how did you get into this classified area?” Sam snarled, instantly regretting his harsh words.
The man smiled at him, but in a way that made Sam want to crawl under the covers and beg for Mommy. “Why, Mr. Wakefield – or shall I call you Sam?” The man paused. “Sam, I have a feeling I’m your worst nightmare,” the man stated reasonably.
“Uh...err...” was all Sam could muster. He knew this was bad.
“I’m eagerly awaiting your next monosyllabic utterance, Sam. Given how you’ve attended to your duties so far today, I’m sure it will be a doozy.” The man smiled again, enjoying his little funny.
Sam swallowed audibly. He tried again. “Look...I don’t know what...” he croaked.
“No, you really don’t, do you? Let me offer you a clue. I’m from Langley, my name’s Richard Salero, and you’re completely fucked,” Richard said, deadpan. He smiled again.
“I...I see, sir.”
“Yes, I believe you finally do.” Richard nodded. “On the way in from the airport, I got an update on the situation. I understand you managed to get most of your working assets slaughtered this evening, in addition to failing to secure the missing item or the thief who took it? What do you do for an encore? Set fire to the flag and pass nuclear secrets to the Chinese?”
Sam wanted to punch the prick in his bony face but he choked down his rage, waiting to hear what came next. He’d never been spoken to like this in all his years with the Agency but something told him that now wasn’t the time to defend his insulted pride.
“Cat got your tongue?” Richard asked. “Hmmm. Well,
fortunately, Langley decided to send in adult supervision before this could get screwed up any worse – and I’m the new hall monitor. Effective immediately, you’ll be reporting to me, Sam. And maybe if you’re extremely lucky – and so far I see no evidence of that being the case – maybe, just maybe, by the time this is over, you’ll still have a job.” Richard gave Sam a searching look. “Now why don’t you tell me in your own words how this turned into a complete clusterfuck during the few hours I was in the air, and then maybe we can be friends, okay?”
Sam stammered out his summary of what they knew so far, and waited for a response.
Richard stared at him as the office clock audibly marked the passage of time; seconds turned into minutes until Richard finally broke the silence. “So the driver got a good look at the cook and the man who helped him escape?” Richard asked.
“Yes, sir. He confirmed it was our target. But he didn’t recognize the other man.”
“What kind of shape is he in?” Richard inquired, almost as if he cared.
“The driver? He’s got a minor head wound where he got nicked by some glass. Nothing serious. He lost a lot of blood, though. Head wounds bleed like a bitch. He’s still in shock – he’s just a local Panamanian asset, a reliable and discreet driver we’ve used before. Not a black ops guy or anything like that. He’s pretty shaken up.”
“Uh huh.” Richard considered his options. “What about the cook’s cell phone?”
“It’s being tracked,” Sam said. “Right now he’s moving down the highway, headed south. I was just about to notify the local police to stop and hold him until we can get there...”
“That would be an extremely poor call. We can’t have the locals involved from here on out. We’ll handle everything internally.” Richard saw the look of confusion in Sam’s eyes. His tone softened slightly. “Look, Sam, headquarters flew me in on an Agency jet specifically to deal with this, and I brought some field specialists with me. We’ll need to monitor the location of the phone real-time, and I’ll handle the mission from here. I don’t want the police involved any more than they already are.”
Sam cleared his throat. “May I ask what’s so important about a cook and a stolen camera that warrants your commandeering a jet and flying in a wet team at a few hours’ notice?” He had to ask – couldn’t help himself. What had been going on in his backyard, unbeknownst to him? What or who had been running an op without the local station chief being alerted? That was completely against all protocols.
“No, you can’t ask,” Richard answered.
“But...”
Richard’s demeanor hardened again. “Here’s what I want you to do, Sam. Don’t think, and don’t second guess me. I want you to find a sketch artist and get him to the clinic. Have him sit down with your driver and draw the mystery man. He’s an unknown variable and I want him identified so we understand what we’re dealing with. Do you think you can do that?”
“Uh, sure. But it’s midnight. It’ll take some time to find someone and get them out of bed on a Saturday night to do a sketch...” Sam thought aloud.
“Sunday. It’s Sunday morning now, Sam. Saturday ended a few minutes ago. And yes, it will take some time. Which is why you should get on this instead of complaining about how difficult it will be,” Richard said. “And I want you to run interference with the police and get the brothel Madame sequestered for us to question. I have a feeling we’re not seeing all the pieces here. We need more intel. Do you think you can handle all that?”
“Of course. I’ll get right on it, sir. But I still think we should notify the cops...”
Richard glared at him, what little patience he had swiftly dissipating. “Sam. I’ll say this one more time, really slowly, so there’s no mistake. I want to limit exposure on the recovery effort to just my group. Which means I need to figure out where the target’s going and take effective countermeasures. I don’t want local cops in the loop. I don’t want to have to explain anything to them, and I certainly don’t want to have to listen to your ideas about how I should or shouldn’t proceed from here. Is that clear enough? As in, crystal clear?”
Sam’s blood boiled again at the dismissive insult, but he said nothing – merely nodded assent. Which was hard, as he’d now been up almost 24 straight hours dealing with this mess, with no chance for rest in sight. But his instinct for self-preservation told him to bite his tongue and follow instructions without hesitation. He didn’t know what he was involved in, but this Richard A-hole was obviously a senior field director, and they didn’t fly those halfway across the world for amusement value. Sam completely believed him when he said his career was hanging by a thread.
That was one data point Sam knew he’d gotten completely right.
Chapter 12
Inspector Javier Peralta of the Panamanian National Police was far from happy. Then again, he was rarely happy on weekends – when the lion’s share of violent crimes occurred in Panama City and the surrounding colonias. Every Friday and Saturday night there would invariably be stabbings, shootings, robberies gone horribly wrong, grotesque crimes of passion, and every imaginable sort of retribution or vengeance killing. Following up on those was the workload and he was accustomed to his evenings being a parade of death.
Still, even by his standards the bloodbath at the Esperanza was gruesome. Nine people killed and six injured in one of the most savage episodes of his career; and of course, nobody knew anything. It was all shrouded in mystery. The few conscious witnesses had described an almost surrealistic sequence of events – armed men forcing their way inside, and within moments several of the customers who’d been quietly sipping their drinks blasting away at them. There was neither rhyme nor reason to any of it; unless it was one of the most indiscriminate drug-related execution attempts in Panamanian history.
That hypothesis seemed reasonable at first, given that three of the dead gunfighters had been known Colombian cocaine traffickers, in the country illegally. It would be easy to write a report that concluded their rivals had learned of their presence at the whorehouse and seized the opportunity to eliminate them. Though the niggling problem remained that their assailants were Gringos; none of whom had any identification on them, and all of whom were obviously athletic, in their late twenties and early thirties, with matching weapons. Standard characteristics for a team of professionals who knew what the hell they were doing.
Inspector Javier, known to the press and his subordinates as ‘The Bulldog’ knew from harsh experience that the drug trade attracted an international smorgasbord of criminal elements, but this was a first for him. His lieutenant had opined the Gringos could have been Slavic – the Russian mob had been attempting to gain a foothold in Panama for some time – however a cursory inspection of their teeth, combined with a conspicuous absence of the ubiquitous gang tattoos, quickly sank that theory. The few Russians they’d arrested or found dead invariably had distinctively horrible dental work and were covered with dubious body art.
No, these men looked like NorteAmericanos. And that introduced a whole new set of complications for Javier.
The scene at Esperanza was chaotic. Police and emergency vehicles lined the block, which had been sealed off at both ends of the street. Floodlights illuminated the curb in front of Carmen’s building and crime unit crews were photographing the area around the corpse lying on the sidewalk, as well as the glass trail from the vehicle that had been hit.
Carmen’s customers had all prudently exited the area once the gun battle had obviously ended, as had many of the working girls. Nobody wanted to spend the night explaining their presence to the police. Many of the patrons were involved in questionable activities of one sort or another so they were naturally reluctant to being questioned by the cops for any reason, much less about being at a brothel during a shootout.
The foyer reeked with the distinct metallic odor of blood combined with the sulfur stink of cordite. Mosquitoes and other flying insects swarmed the area. The corpses of the Gringos were blanketed wi
th flies, to the point that their buzzing was audible even out on the sidewalk. The crime scene technicians had their work cut out for them, in terms of securing any evidence that would amount to anything, due to the amount of traffic that had moved through the foyer after the shootout. Dozens of departing people had fouled the floor, tracking rust colored footprints everywhere. The entrance looked like a Jackson Pollack painting, the walls pocked with bullet holes and spattered with congealed blood.
While the devastation of the crime scene annoyed Javier, a large part of him didn’t particularly care, as there was no question as to how the victims had died. Gunshot wounds were a pretty obvious cause of death, especially in the lounge area, where it looked like at least fifty rounds had hacked people apart indiscriminately. Good old machine-guns...
He didn’t need a roadmap to guess how the Gringos had bought it, given the profusion of slugs in the walls behind their bodies.
The whole episode had lasted just a minute or two – at most – per the statements of the few witnesses. As the Gringos entered, two had been cut down almost instantly, with the remaining pair spraying the lounge with lead until the upstairs Colombian had opened up on them. One had been killed by him and another wounded, but had escaped, judging by the blood trailing out of the building and down the street.
That left the obvious questions of where the survivor had fled to, given that he would need serious medical attention, and the whereabouts of the vehicle or vehicles that had been hit by the Colombian. Javier knew the wounded man had made it to a vehicle because the blood trail continued far past where the dealer on the sidewalk had fallen, not to mention the glass littering the street. The police also knew for certain that the sidewalk shooter had been firing at vehicle or vehicles unknown – due to the eight shell casings surrounding his corpse; obviously ejected as he shot at a getaway car.
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