He had to wait until tomorrow during business hours to get in touch with the private detective in Cartagena, so he reasoned he might as well use the time to put distance between himself and Panama. Plus, if Sam was involved, which he believed with one hundred percent certainty now, there was a good likelihood that his call had been traced, which meant that at any point there could be a hit team scouring the town for him, along with stepped up scrutiny by the police. Al was keenly aware that the rules had changed, that he needed to treat everything and everyone as the enemy. One slip and he was dog food.
After what seemed like forever an old bus wheezed to a stop at the curb, where Al had been frantically waving at it. A cardboard sign in the front window announced ‘Monteria’ – Al’s halfway point destination, as there were no direct buses to Cartagena. If he could at least make it to Monteria, an inland city of a quarter million people, he figured the likelihood of being safe was far higher than in Turbo, with a fifth the population and a possible direct hit on a trace to the pay phone. He’d already slipped up by telling Sam he was in Colombia, and there was no way of undoing that, so he had to focus on what he could change. Getting as far from the delights of Turbo as quickly as possible seemed like a reasonable first step.
He mounted the steps to the bus and paid 20,000 pesos to the driver – the market owner had been eager to change a hundred bucks into pesos at 1800 to the dollar, so Al was fat on Colombian currency. The other passengers were definitely on the lower end of the economic scale – the only thing missing was a chicken running up the center aisle.
Oh well. It was all part of the local color. He hoped this bus wouldn’t be one of the many stopped by rebels or robbers at night in the sketchier areas of Colombia, which the road to Turbo definitely was. Then again, at this point he’d almost be safer if he was kidnapped.
Which gave him the germ of an idea, just a flicker, but enough to provide the first hope he’d had since viewing the video.
It would be extremely dangerous, and involve terrorists, drug traffickers, armed insurgents, you name it; but there just might be a way to stay alive.
He chose a seat midway down the length of the bus and closed his eyes, the vague outline of a strategy beginning to form.
The bus was stopped twice over the next four hours by armed Colombian soldiers, who went through luggage at random. Nobody seemed interested in Al’s measly satchel. The soldiers focused mainly on the larger parcels, before waving them on after fifteen minutes or so.
They made it to Monteria around midnight. The night air was deep, dark and muggy enough to convince Al his traveling was done for the day. He felt like crap, and absent a bottle of rum there was no way he’d make it another four or five hours on a night bus through the danger zone. He’d catch the first one out in the morning.
He’d spotted a hotel that looked promising as the old bus had pulled into town and after disembarking he asked one of the waiting taxis to take him to the nearby Hotel Campenario. They pulled up outside the building within five minutes – the drive cost two bucks. Probably robbery, but again, at midnight, Al wasn’t looking for a deal.
The hotel was open and charged him $15 for the night, which seemed fair given that it had AC and appeared at least reasonably clean. The desk clerk gave him a key and offered to accompany him to the second floor, room 204, but Al assured him he could find it on his own.
He did with no trouble, and after turning on the AC, actually took the time to disrobe before collapsing face first onto the bed. He was out cold before the mattress stopped vibrating from his landing.
Chapter 32
Two men waited outside the squalid little hostel in Turbo. One across the street, the other in the rear alley. Both of Latin complexion, they wore light cargo pants and loose shirts – the uniform of the hiking and backpacking community. Other than the fact they were standing on completely empty streets in a dangerous neighborhood at night they might have been tourists from Venezuela or Panama. A third man had paid for a room in the hostel and was currently sitting in hovel number two, listening for any signs of life.
They’d arrived via prop plane as darkness had descended on Turbo and made their way from the airport with the help of a local hired car. Their target hadn’t moved since they’d picked up his signal so they’d come to the tentative conclusion that he was asleep in his cabana. After consulting with Richard, the decision was made to wait for him to wake up and leave, then shoot him with a tranquilizer dart and cart him to the airport.
The Agency didn’t have nearly the sort of infrastructure in Colombia that it did in Panama. The Colombian regime, while friendly on the surface, was in a state of perennial armed conflict with the rebel forces that controlled large swatches of the country. The regime was riddled with conflicting imperatives due to the tremendous amount of drug money floating around – some of which made it to the politicians, ensuring that the objectives of the U.S. war on drugs were not pursued aggressively.
Most of the jungle areas of the country were littered with land-mines, rendering them impenetrable, and so Colombia existed with the dual menaces of sustained civil war and aggressively dangerous criminal syndicates operating freely throughout much of the country.
Panama, on the other hand, used the dollar as its currency, was very favorably disposed towards the U.S. and enjoyed stability and prosperity due to the new canal investment and the daily revenue from the existing canal. The police were cooperative with the U.S. and were sufficiently corrupt to allow the Agency to operate however it liked, provided it didn’t arouse too much attention.
The operational idea was to grab Al when he poked his head out of his quarters, then ship him to Panama and debrief him there.
An initial line of thinking had been that all their problems would disappear if Al simply went skydiving without a parachute over the jungle on the trip north, however that had been dismissed, mainly because they needed to be absolutely sure of how much exposure the camera had gotten. Al could always have a diving accident or fall out of a helicopter later.
Their man in cabana two had signaled that he’d so far heard no movement or snoring that would be consistent with the room being occupied. Nobody had rolled over on the bed or gone to the bathroom in four hours. The man murmured into his cell and awaited instructions. After a few moments he got the go-ahead.
He unpacked his backpack and extracted a telescoping fiber optic lens with an adjustable tip. The cottages had four feet of airspace between them, and no side windows, so it would require a bit of art – but he was an expert at this sort of surveillance, among other things, so would find a way.
He crept out of his little shack and moved close to unit one; finding exactly what he was looking for – a space between the floorboards. Each cottage sat on a series of concrete blocks to prevent flooding during rainy season, so there was about eight inches of air space under the dwellings. He carefully fed the device through the crack and into the room, and rotated it, watching the transmission on a handheld screen. There wasn’t any light in the room, which made it harder, but after a few minutes of looking around, it was obvious the place was unoccupied. He retracted the camera and moved back into his room, then called Richard for instructions.
Richard was livid. How the hell had this guy evaded multiple trained field squads, made it through impassable jungle, and now had apparently ditched them, luring them on some tangent while he slipped away?
The possibility remained he was out drinking and would return later. The phone was obviously still in the room, and there were few reasons Richard could think of for Al leaving it there if he didn’t plan to return – unless he was familiar enough with trade-craft to realize he’d be tracked on the device and had used it as a clever time-wasting decoy. Nothing in his file indicated any clandestine knowledge or background, so it was most likely Al was getting drunk at one of the numerous dive bars peppering the waterfront or possibly spending time with a hooker someplace nearby. The second possibility; that Al had figured out h
e was being monitored, pointed to a far less appealing scenario. That would indicate they had a much bigger problem than anticipated.
Richard weighed his choices and made a decision. The operative again emerged from bungalow two and moved to the entry of number one, expertly jimmying the lock. He quickly opened the door, slid into the room and extracted a penlight flashlight. A quick survey revealed it to be empty, as they’d suspected. Another scan, and he found the pink cell phone on the floor under the bed.
He exited the room and returned to his own, calling Richard even as the door closed.
“It’s empty. The phone was under the bed,” he reported.
“This is bad,” Richard said. “It means he’s on to us. Might have been for some time.”
“What do you want us to do?” the man asked.
“Stay in position,” Richard advised. “You’re already in-country, so let me evaluate our options and get back to you. Try to get some sleep. This could be a long one.”
Back in Sam’s office in Panama, Richard scratched his head and contemplated the air duct on the ceiling. Well shit. Now they had a full-blown crisis. The country was hostile enough to operate in and they were pursuing an obviously skilled target – evading the best they could throw at him. True, they didn’t know if the target had the camera, but Richard couldn’t think of a lot of alternative reasons for the man to be on the run.
Richard called for Sam, who was preparing to leave for the night – he could see him packing his briefcase at the secretary’s station.
“Yes, sir?” Sam said, entering the office.
“Tell me everything you can think of about this Al Ross. Everything,” Richard demanded.
“There’s nothing else to tell, sir. He’s a drunk, is usually either wasted or hung over, has a bad gambling problem, and is a complete write-off as a human being,” Sam summarized. “Oh, and he’s always broke,” Sam added.
“Sam, Sam, Sam. I get the feeling you’re leaving a lot out. His file says he has a purple heart and a bronze star – he’s a decorated combat vet. That’s incongruent with the guy you’re describing,” Richard observed.
“Twenty-something years ago he got into a firefight, walked away with a nick and got honored for it. The guy worked in the mail room, sir. He’s never had a decent explanation for what he was even doing off the base, much less with other armed soldiers. That was a fluke,” Sam insisted.
“I sense we aren’t seeing the big picture here. He may have been working for military intelligence, or an offshoot, even back then. That would explain a mail clerk being in a gun battle with enemy insurgents,” Richard speculated, making a note on the desk pad by his phone.
“Not a chance, sir. The guy has been a loser as long as I’ve known him...”
Richard narrowed his eyes at Sam. “This loser has so far been instrumental in getting the cook out of Panama after evading your team, and escaped being incinerated in the jungle from a surprise aerial attack – assuming he was with the cook then – and has avoided detection for days. Not to mention that he likely crossed an impassable stretch of the most dangerous jungle in the world. He probably has the camera with him, or knows its location – we can’t rule out that he’s stashed it someplace safe, or that the cook did before he fried. And now he’s behaving in a manner that’s consistent with a trained operative. He hid the phone, knowing we would trace it, buying himself enough time to be anywhere in the country by now – if not on a plane to God knows where.” Richard stopped and shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like a stupid man to me.”
“But he called me from a pay phone! Asking for help. Sounded scared and half in the bag...” Sam said.
“He’s been playing us, Sam,” Richard warned. “This guy has far more going on than meets the eye. That’s obvious. We need to get ahead of him or this could blow up.”
“Al’s a sloppy, drunk zero, sir. Really,” Sam tried one last time.
“For all we know,” Richard mused, “he wanted to lead us to Turbo for some as-yet unknown reason. He could easily have paid someone to ditch the phone in the room, and we have to expect he’s conversant enough with technology and infrastructure to know that calls from Colombian pay phones wouldn’t be traceable to a specific location. He could have made the call from Medellin, for all we know – this could be a brilliant bit of deception to have us chasing our tails.” Richard’s face darkened. “I’m thinking it’s possible he’s working with another intelligence service – presumably hostile. Who’s the most active in Panama? Chinese? Russians? Mossad?” Richard asked.
“Uh, the Chinese definitely have a large presence, sir, but not so much the Russians. Mossad is more Costa Rica, I think...” Sam answered, doubtfully.
“I want everything you have on all three,” Richard ordered, “as well as any other potentially hostile groups in the area. Just assume Al has been playing you for years and is a double agent, if not a triple. Maybe I’m wrong, but there are way too many coincidences.”
“Okay, but I think you’re barking up the wrong tree, sir,” Sam warned.
“And let’s get the Madame back in and grill her,” Richard instructed. “She’s our only connection to Al now, and probably knows more than we first thought.”
“What about the field team?” Sam asked.
Richard looked at him oddly.
“That’s need to know. I want the intel on the Chinese within the hour, Sam,” Richard ordered.
It looked like another long, sleepless night. All because of Al.
Sam’s hatred of Richard was ballooning to monumental proportions but Al was running a close second. He’d be comfortably home in bed or rolling around with the sisters if it wasn’t for these two shit-grubs.
He threw his briefcase onto his secretary’s desk and settled in for more thankless hours of honest work.
Chapter 33
Al woke to the sound of a loud conversation and laughing outside his room. Evidently the service staff enjoyed storytelling at an early hour, and every other comment elicited howls of laughter from the gathered maids.
Normally, Al would have been furious, but this morning he wasn’t nursing a hangover, and he remembered he was on a short timetable – so he was actually glad to be awake. His watch said nine o’clock, so it wasn’t that early, anyway.
He quickly showered, laundering his socks yet again while making the mental note that he had to get new ones today, and checked his appearance in the mirror. Sort of an ageing Rob Halford look, with a lot more padding though. Oh well, he wasn’t getting any calls from GQ to be their cover model, so he wasn’t that worried about a couple extra pounds.
Packing his satchel, he made a mental note that the first order of business would have to be getting on the internet to find the name of the PI he’d used to locate Mari. There weren’t many private investigators in Cartagena and he’d located this one on the web, so it should be simple enough. He figured he’d call the man, get the address, and then...
And then…precisely what?
That was the hole in the short term logistical plan so far. But he’d figure it out. His gut leaned to calling Mari and feeling her out before he barged into her life begging for help – again. He had no idea what she’d been up to for three years; and a thousand days was a long time. Al hoped she wasn’t married, but you never knew – he couldn’t blame her if she was. He’d completely dropped the ball so it was Mari’s prerogative to replace him however she saw fit.
Al checked out of the hotel and crossed the street to an internet cafe that served coffee and non-specific bits of fried, sugary dough. He ordered one of each and settled behind a monitor. His coffee arrived within moments and he savored the strong, rich Colombian roast as he munched on his health nuggets.
After ten minutes of searching the web he had the PI’s information. He used the voice-over-IP phone in the corner to call him. After some back and forth, the man remembered Al and looked up the number and address he’d filed away for Mari. Al scribbled away frantically, repe
ating the information back to him to ensure he’d gotten it right before he hung up.
He had the lady at the cafe call him a taxi and soon arrived at the seedy downtown bus terminal’s ticket window. Still, compared to Turbo this was Club Med. The roads were paved and there were actually relatively new cars on the streets, and stores that looked as though they stocked reasonable goods. The next bus to Cartagena left at eleven a.m. and arrived at three. Al bought a ticket and went across the street to a store that featured mannequins posed in jeans and T-shirts in the window display. He bought another shirt, a pair of underwear and a package of three pairs of white athletic socks. Satisfied with his shopping expedition, he returned to the station and sat in the waiting area, prepared to board when they announced his bus.
A group of soldiers carrying machine-guns and accompanied by a tired-looking beagle walked through the terminal, eyeing everyone suspiciously. Al was relieved that they gave him no more scrutiny than anyone else. He supposed that given the country abounded with armed homicidal factions intent upon inflicting as much chaos as possible, a nearly-bald Gringo with flamboyant facial hair didn’t really rate a second glance.
The bus was three quarters full but in better shape than the one from Turbo – this one had leather seats and appeared to be only a decade old. When the driver started the engine, meager air conditioning even wafted down from the broken overhead vent – an unexpected luxury.
He busied himself with applying ointment to his feet and changing his socks, to the considerable disgust of the woman across the aisle from him, and then reclined his seat to watch the scenery go by. From what he could make out, Colombia, like Panama, mainly consisted of tropical jungle punctuated by large cleared farm tracts and the occasional city. The road wasn’t terrible, and aside from several more inspection stops by armed soldiers the trip was uneventful.
The Geronimo Breach Page 20