White Cargo

by Stuart Woods

  “Turn right to two four zero degrees and intercept the ILS,” the controller said.

  Cat quickly turned the autopilot control to the correct heading and watched as the airplane turned itself and the vertical needle, which represented the centerline of the runway, moved closer and closer to the center of the dial. He had to do something, abort this approach, land somewhere else. He wasn’t qualified to fly this airplane down to three hundred feet in cloud. He would kill them both. He was about to call the tower and abort when he noticed a button on the autopilot that read “APPR.” It was worth a try. He pushed the button. Immediately, the airplane turned left and the vertical needle centered. They were on the runway centerline, and the autopilot was still flying the airplane.

  “Outer marker in two miles,” the controller said.

  What the hell was the outer marker? Cat, frozen, watched the horizontal needle, the glide slope, move down toward the center of the needle. Suddenly an alarm went off, and a light flashed on the instrument panel. The airplane started to descend again, and both needles were centered. The outer marker must have been where the glide slope began.

  Cat had just breathed a sigh of relief when he noticed that something was wrong. The airspeed had crept into the yellow arc on the dial and was headed for the red. Quickly, he eased the throttle back, and the airspeed returned to the green arc. He put in ten degrees of flaps, and the airplane slowed further. The needles were still centered. The autopilot would fly the approach, but it couldn’t control the throttle.

  Suddenly, they were out of the cloud, and the runway centerline was a mile dead ahead of them. Gratefully, shakily, Cat reduced speed further and came to twenty degrees of flaps. He switched off the autopilot and began flying the airplane himself. A moment later, they were on the ground.

  “Hey, that was a pretty slick approach,” Meg said.

  “Thanks,” Cat managed to reply, between deep breaths. His shirt was wet under the bush jacket. He had just done something very stupid; he had, with no experience at all, risked their lives on a complex procedure. He vowed he would never do anything in an airplane again until he had been thoroughly trained to do it.

  As the airplane rolled down the runway, he saw a hangar with the name “Aeroservice” painted on it. He turned off the runway at the next taxiway and headed toward it. As he approached the hangar, a lineman ran out and directed him to a parking spot. Cat cut the engine and looked up. Ahead of them and to their right, he could see inside the hangar. He tensed.

  “Look,” he said, nodding at the airplane parked inside.

  “Is it a Gulfstream?” Meg asked.

  “Yes. I’ve seen a couple of them at the airport I fly out of in Atlanta. It’s the biggest private jet available.”

  They climbed down from the airplane and unloaded their luggage. Cat asked the lineman for the office, and the man pointed to a glassed-in room inside the hangar. They walked slowly past the big jet, and Cat noted the tail number. It began with an N; that meant it was American registered. On the tail was a much larger version of the drawing of the snake in the tree on the matchbook in his pocket.

  He made arrangements for tie-down and fuel with the young man at the desk, who seemed very friendly. “Say,” he said to the man, “isn’t that a Gulfstream out there?”

  “Yes, señor. It is beautiful, no?”

  “Yes indeed. I’ve never seen one up close. Who owns it?”

  “A local business here in Cali.”

  “But it has an American registration number.”

  “Ah, yes. The company headquarters is in the States, you see.”

  “I wonder if we could have a look inside her? I’ve never been aboard one before.”

  The young man was shaking his head, but he stopped when he saw the hundred-dollar bill Cat was pushing toward him on the desk. “Just a moment, señor.” He left the office and had a careful look outside the hangar, then returned. “You may go aboard her for just a moment, señor,” he said. He led the way out of the office and toward the airplane. The door, incorporating a boarding ladder, was open.

  Showing Meg ahead of him, Cat climbed aboard the jet, followed by the young man. They found themselves in a large cabin decorated in black leather and rosewood. The carpet was thick under their feet.

  “See if you can occupy this guy back here for a moment,” he whispered to Meg.

  She nodded. “Is this the bar?” she asked, pointing to some cupboards.

  “Yes, señora.” The young man opened the doors to display a collection of liquor bottles.

  “And where is the galley?” she asked.

  “Back here, señora,” he said, leading the way.

  Cat walked quickly through the airplane to the cockpit, which was a maze of dials and instruments. Breathing hard, he searched for something he knew must be there. A.R.R.O.W., he told himself. Airworthiness certificate, radio license, registration, Operator’s handbook, and weight and balance restrictions—the documents that had to be aboard every aircraft.

  He found them in a plastic envelope fixed to a bulkhead and quickly went through them.

  “Señor!” The voice was sharp behind him.

  He slipped the documents back into their envelope and turned around.

  The young man was irate. “You must not tamper with the cockpit!”

  “I just wanted to see what it was like up front,” Cat smiled. “Gosh, there sure is a lot of equipment, isn’t there?”

  The young man relaxed a bit. “Yes, I suppose so. We must leave the airplane now. Someone might come, and I would get into trouble.” He led them back down the boarding ladder.

  “I’ve seen this symbol before,” Cat said, pointing to the tail.

  “Yes, señor, the Anaconda Company. It is very big in Cali.”

  “What business is it in?”

  The young man shrugged. “Who knows? Whatever it wants to be in, I think. They own Aeroservice; they own me, you could say. Would you like a taxi?”

  “Yes, thank you. What’s a good hotel?”

  “The Inter-Continental is good. Shall I ring for you?”

  “Yes, please, a suite, if they have it. The name is Ellis.”

  He went to telephone.

  “The airplane is registered to an outfit in Los Angeles, Empire Holdings,” he said to Meg. “Did you see anything else in the airplane that might be helpful?”

  “Nope. Whoever owns it likes the best of everything, though. Do you want to show this guy the picture of Jinx?”

  Cat shook his head. “I think we’re a little too close to the center of things here to start flashing a photograph around. If he has seen her, he might mention us to someone, and we don’t want to attract that sort of attention. Anyway, it seems pretty certain that she came to Cali on this airplane, from what Rodriguez and the flight plan told us. Maybe she’s still here.”

  The young man returned. “Your suite is booked, and your taxi will be here shortly.”

  Cali seemed a large and prosperous city, and the Inter-Continental was large, modern, and comfortable. The suite had a terrace overlooking a large swimming pool, and Cat began to itch for some laps.

  “Listen,” Meg said, reading him easily, “I want to go to the local newspaper’s office and see what I can find out about the Anaconda Company. If they’re as big as they seem to be, there’ll be something in the business pages about them. Why don’t you go for a swim?”

  “Okay, how long will you be?”

  “A couple of hours, maybe.”

  She left, and Cat started to undress, then changed his mind. He felt restless, being in the city where Jinx might be; it didn’t seem the right time for a swim. He called the concierge. “Can you find me a taxi driver who speaks English? I’d like to take a tour of the city.”

  “Of course, señor. You may leave whenever you wish. The doorman will find you the right man.”

  When Cat came downstairs, a man approached him. “You Mr. Ellis, who wanted an English-speaking driver?” He didn’t sound Colombian;
he sounded like a New Yorker.

  “That’s right.”

  “My name’s Bill. I’m your man.”

  They got into the cab and drove away from the hotel.

  “Anything in particular you want to see?” Bill asked.

  “Nope. This is my first time here. Whatever you want to show me. Are you Colombian?”

  “Yeah, I was born here, but I lived in New York for a long time. Pushed a hack there.”

  “What brought you back?”

  “Well, I saved some money, and it goes a lot farther here than it did in New York. Now I own my own cab, and I live pretty good. Say, why don’t we start at the top of the city and work down, okay?”

  “Okay, whatever you like.”

  Bill pushed the taxicab higher and higher into the hills until he came to a large statue of a man looking out over the city. Both men got out of the car.

  “This is the statue of Belalcázar, the guy who founded the city,” Bill explained. “He was a Spanish grandee.”

  Cat took in the panorama, then his eye came to rest on a modern office tower. At the top was the Anaconda symbol. “Bill, what’s that building? Something to do with the Anaconda Company?”

  “Yeah, that’s their headquarters.”

  “What business is the company in?”

  “Agriculture I think. I don’t know much about it, really. Tell you what, though, there’s a good restaurant at the top of the building. Terrific view of the city at night.”

  “Are there a lot of drugs in Cali, Bill?”

  “There’s a lot of drugs everywhere in Colombia. Listen, if that’s what you’re interested in, you’ve got the wrong guy. I’ll get you another driver if you want.”

  “No, I’m not interested in buying drugs. Just in what goes on in Cali. I’d heard drugs were big here.”

  “Come on,” Bill said, “I’ll show you something.”

  He drove the cab a few blocks from the statue, but not much downhill, then stopped. “The rumor is, the biggest drug dealer in Colombia lives right there,” he said, pointing.

  Cat looked down onto the house, a hundred and fifty yards below them. He couldn’t see much except a lot of roof and trees and the corner of a tennis court. The place seemed to be contained in a walled compound that covered two or three acres. As he watched, a woman with a ponytail in tennis whites chased a ball to the edge of the court, then ran back to the part blocked by the trees. Just for a moment, Cat hoped, but the woman was shorter and stockier than Jinx. Quite masculine in the way she ran. He watched for a couple of minutes, but he could see no other human being. A street seemed to run completely around the house. It sat on a sort of island in a neighborhood of other large houses.

  “Bill, drive me around the house, slowly, will you?”

  “Sure thing,” Bill said, and put the car in gear.

  As the taxi slowly circled the house, Cat rolled down the window and got a good look. It was built considerably above street level, a wall rising up from the streets to be topped by wrought-iron fencing all the way round. There were two gates, and large men in dark suits manned each of them. At one point a large Alsatian dog came to the fence near a gate and snarled loudly at the cab. The houses surrounding the compound all had iron gates, but he saw no guards or dogs at those.

  “Looks like a regular fortress,” Cat said. “Let’s go around again.”

  Bill shook his head. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. A friend of mine, another cab driver, got interested in it once, and they took his number. The cops called on him and gave him a hard time.”

  “Local pull, huh?”

  “You know it. You got the kind of money those guys got, you can buy just about anybody you want in this city.”

  “You know the name of the guy who owns the house?”

  “Nope, and it’s not the sort of thing I’d like to ask too many questions about. I need to stop for some gas. You mind?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Bill pulled into a service station a few blocks down the hill from the big house. As he stopped at the pumps, a large man got into a black Cadillac stretch limousine and drove away.

  “Are there a lot of those in Cali?” Cat asked.

  “Oh, yeah, a lot of Caddies; Rollses, too, but that’s something new, the first stretch job in town. That belongs to the house up the hill.”

  Quickly, Cat memorized the tag number of the limousine and wrote it down in his pocket notebook, next to the tail number of the Gulfstream jet. He didn’t pay a lot of attention to the rest of the tour—the stadium where the Pan-American games were held during the early seventies, the cathedral, the shopping district.

  When he got back to the hotel, Meg was sunning herself on the terrace of their suite. “You’re back early. Any luck?” he asked her.

  “Yeah, they let me into their library, and I talked with the guy on the business desk, too. The Anaconda Company came to Colombia about four years ago and started buying up agribusinesses. They’ve got half a dozen offices around the country. In Cali, they’re big in sugar; in Medellín, they’re into coffee; other places, they’ve got holdings in cattle, bananas and flowers.”

  “Flowers?”

  “Big Colombian export to the States.”

  “Who owns the company?”

  “This guy I talked to looked into it once. There’s no one big name on the corporate roster. Each office has its own manager. Whenever he asked too many questions of the company P.R. guy, he got a runaround. They’ve become a local power in Cali very quickly. Sugar is the big crop here, and they’ve bought a lot of holdings. Been pretty ruthless about it, too. They’re well plugged in with the local politicos, and the guy’s boss at the paper won’t have a bad word written about them.”

  “Well, I find it hard to believe that the local manager has a Gulfstream at his disposal. Only a chief executive officer rates that kind of transportation. Maybe the big man is in town at the moment.”

  He told her about his tour of the city and about the house and limousine he’d seen. “Anaconda has a big office building here, too. The cab driver says there’s a good restaurant on top of it. Why don’t we try it tonight?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  He called the concierge and asked him to make reservations.

  • • •

  Bill drove them to the Anaconda building and agreed to pick them up in a couple of hours. There were four elevators in the marble lobby, but three of them were roped off, and a sign indicated the fourth was to be used to reach Le Caprice, as the restaurant was called. At the top of the building they entered a plush vestibule and walked to an equally plush dining room. They were shown to a small table by a large window and given menus. Cat ordered drinks for them and turned his attention to the view. Cali was spread out beneath them, a carpet of lights, and above them, the Belalcázar statue, spotlighted, gazed down. The menu was in French, and there seemed to be few Colombian favorites among the dishes. The wine list was outstanding, Cat thought, if extremely expensive. Most of the wines were French, and he ordered a good claret with their dinner.

  They were on their first course when a large party entered the restaurant and were shown to a huge round table in a nearby corner. Cat counted twelve, and two of them were Anglo-looking women, elegantly dressed. The men seemed a mixture of Anglo and Latino, and all wore sober business suits. One of them interested Cat more than the others. He seemed to be in his mid-thirties, and, in spite of his conservative suit, his hair was long, worn in a ponytail.

  Cat nodded toward the table. “I have the oddest feeling that the man with the ponytail is the woman I saw playing tennis at the drug dealer’s house this afternoon.”

  “Are you sure?” Meg asked.

  “No, but I remember she ran in a masculine way. I think the hairdo may have clouded my judgment.”

  Cat glanced frequently at the table. No menus were offered, but food and wine appeared as if the host had ordered everything in advance. As Cat and Meg were finishing, and as waiters
were clearing away the dishes from the first course at the large table, the man with the ponytail rose and walked in the direction of the men’s room. Cat got up and followed him for a better look.

  The man was smaller than Cat, and his pin-striped suit was closely cut, with double vents, a full skirt, and pinched at the waist. Cat had been buying clothes in London long enough to know a Savile Row suit when he saw one. He was about to follow the man into the rest room, when another, larger man stepped in front of him and said something in Spanish.

  Cat shrugged. “I just want the men’s room,” he said.

  “One moment, please,” the man said in heavily accented English.

  Cat waited a couple of minutes, then the ponytailed man came out and walked past him back to his table, without so much as a glance at Cat. The larger man indicated that Cat could now enter the men’s room. He did so, etching into his mind the memory of the ponytailed man. He was small, five-seven or so, well-built, athletic-looking, fair skin, light brown hair, an intelligent face, with a wide, vaguely cruel mouth. Cat had never seen him before, but he would never forget him, he was sure of that.

  Back at the table, Cat lingered over coffee and dessert, trying vainly to pick up snatches of conversation from the larger table. At one point the two women went to the ladies’ room and the bodyguard, who had been hovering nearby, followed them there and back.

  Cat and Meg finished their dinner and left the restaurant. As they came out of the building, Cat saw the stretch Cadillac limousine waiting at the curb, and a few yards away, Bill’s taxi.

  “Bill,” Cat said, as they got into the cab, “drive around the block and park where we can see the building entrance.” Bill did as he was told.

  “What are you going to do?” Meg asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” Cat answered. “I just want to see where they go. As he spoke two other, shorter, limousines drove up and parked at the building’s entrance. A few minutes later the party of twelve came down from the restaurant and spent a moment saying goodbyes out front. Two men got out of either side of the stretch limousine and waited as the ponytailed man got into the back seat. The others entered the smaller cars, and all three drove away in tandem.