Days of the Dead

by David Monnery

  The fact that the man hadn’t yet produced a weapon suggested he had a knife rather than a gun, so Docherty wasn’t surprised when the hand emerged from the pocket and swung viciously towards him, a long blade glinting in the half-light. He stepped aside in one motion, his right hand clamping down on the plunging wrist as his left delivered a karate chop to the side of his assailant’s neck. The timing wasn’t perfect but the man stumbled on to one knee, giving Docherty the chance to kick him hard in the small of the back. There was a loud grunt, and as the knife span away across the stone floor, the man’s partner suddenly appeared on the stairway.

  He had apparently given up knives in favour of a silenced automatic. Docherty was still bracing himself for the bullet when the man was suddenly catapulted forward. His head hit the roof above the stairway with a crack that seemed to echo round the chamber, his body slumped to the ground like a sack of cement and his gun did a lazy double somersault in mid-air before dropping on to his crotch.

  The first man was raising himself to his knees, apparently oblivious to either his own or his partner’s fate. Docherty hit him across the back of the neck this time, hard enough to knock him out. He looked up to find his saviour clambering over the body at the bottom of the stairs. It was the tall young man with the distinctly English look from the bus. ‘We’d better get out of here,’ Docherty said, and the new arrival nodded.

  Upstairs in the Palacio del Quetzalpapaloti they found several tourists wandering round the courtyard, and it would only be a matter of minutes before someone decided to take a look at the jaguars. The two men walked swiftly back outside and headed across the grass towards the northern parking lot some two hundred metres away.

  ‘There’s usually some taxis waiting for people who can’t be bothered to walk back,’ the MI6 man said. ‘My name’s David Shepreth,’ he added.

  ‘I don’t suppose I need to introduce myself,’ Docherty said drily.

  ‘No,’ Shepreth admitted.

  ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by any chance?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘Something like that.’

  They was indeed a line of waiting taxis. ‘And how did you manage to appear so conveniently?’ Docherty asked as they walked towards the front.

  ‘I followed you from your hotel. Actually I followed your follower.’ He stopped ten metres short of the taxi. ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said, ‘but not in a taxi. Any ideas?’

  Docherty looked at his watch. ‘I need to be at the airport in three hours,’ he said. ‘And first I have to pick up my stuff at the bus terminal.’

  ‘How about Guadalupe?’ Shepreth suggested. ‘We can take the taxi there and walk up the hill.’

  ‘Why not,’ Docherty agreed, pleasantly surprised. He hadn’t often met anyone from Intelligence who’d taken the trouble to find out anything about the culture of the country he or she was working in.

  The taxi driver was pleased with their destination too, even after his first outrageous estimate for the fare was pegged back to something less than a minor fortune. As his two passengers settled back into their seats for the forty-five-minute journey he started off down the road which paralleled the ancient causeway.

  Now that the immediate crisis was over, Docherty found himself feeling angry with Shepreth for leaving his intervention so late. But after a few minutes of staring out at the passing fields he reluctantly admitted to himself that the anger should be self-directed. He had put himself at risk, and for no other reason than overconfidence. His kids might not have any divine right to a living father, but they should be able to expect something better than this sort of carelessness.

  Shepreth, on the other hand, was feeling pleased with himself. He had taken a chance following the youth rather than his fellow-Brit, but it had paid off. The youth had led him to the two sicarios and they had led him back to Docherty, who should now be feeling more than a little in his debt.

  The taxi picked up speed once it reached the main highway, and soon they were passing through the landscape of denuded hills, rubbish mountains and rusting hulks which characterized the capital’s outskirts. The highway arced round the foot of the Virgin’s hill and the giant Basilica came into view. The taxi dropped them outside, but the two men had no interest in entering the already crowded church. Instead they threaded their way through the traffic and started climbing in the footsteps of Juan Diego, the Christianized Indian who had started the whole ball rolling in 1531.

  He had been happily crossing these slopes when the Virgin appeared to him with a message for the local bishop – a church was needed on this particular hill. Not surprisingly, the bishop proved sceptical, but a few days later the Virgin popped up again in front of Diego, ordering him to gather roses from the crown of the hill. He found the flowers, wrapped them in his cape and took them to the bishop, only to find that the image of the Virgin had become imprinted on the cloth. More than four and a half centuries later the cape still hung in the church below, attracting thousands of pilgrims every day.

  Docherty and Shepreth had just reached the first of the small chapels built to commemorate the Virgin’s visitations when the Scot broke the silence. ‘So what do you want to talk about?’ he asked.

  Shepreth glanced around. There were pilgrims and tourists both above and below them, but they were about as alone as any two men could hope to be in the world’s most populous city. ‘We’re both interested in Bazua, though presumably for different reasons,’ he said.

  ‘Drugs,’ Docherty murmured. ‘I don’t know anything about the bastard’s current activities. It’s his past I’m interested in.’ He hesitated for a moment, but could think of no reason for keeping the truth from Shepreth. ‘Friends of friends in Argentina are still trying to find out what happened to their son in the Dirty War,’ he explained. ‘Bazua was in charge of the local Nazis, and Toscono was in charge of one of the arrest squads.’

  ‘And he refused to talk to you.’

  ‘The first time he did. I saw him again yesterday.’

  ‘Ah,’ Shepreth said. He’d been wondering why Toscono had sent his goons after someone whom he’d already ejected from his office. ‘And what did he tell you?’ he asked.

  ‘He admitted he arrested my friend’s son, but denied all knowledge of what happened to him after that. He told me that Bazua could fill in the details. The bastard apparently has a complete set of the Army’s records for the period in question, with thousands of names and fates, and probably even a complete list of who got what in the torture chambers.’ He smiled grimly. ‘There was a lot of German and Italian immigration into Argentina, and someone once said the military inherited the German flair for keeping meticulous records and the Italian flair for battle. For a hundred years every cock-up has been brilliantly documented.’

  They walked a few paces in silence.

  ‘So you’re on your way home?’ Shepreth asked at last.

  ‘Aye,’ Docherty said. ‘I have a feeling it wouldn’t be so easy to arrange a private tête-à-tête with Bazua,’ he added wryly.

  ‘A pity,’ Shepreth said noncommittally.

  ‘Tell me about the drug angle,’ Docherty said.

  Shepreth waited until they were past the small crowd which had gathered around another of the chapels, then gave the Scot a brief outline of Bazua’s trafficking business on both sides of the Atlantic and the Americans’ flat refusal to sanction direct action against him. ‘And it’s not just the trafficking,’ he concluded. ‘The bastard’s ploughing at least some of his profits into outfitting another invasion of the Falklands.’

  ‘What?’ Docherty asked disbelievingly.

  ‘He already has a couple of boats, and his friends in Argentina are enrolling volunteers. The idea’s just to establish a presence on the island, dare the British to chuck them off and dare the Argentinian government to abandon them.’

  ‘I thought we still had a fucking great garrison on the island,’ Docherty observed.

  ‘It’s not as big as people think, and it won
’t be there indefinitely. Bazua’s probably willing to wait a few years.’

  ‘Christ,’ Docherty said disgustedly. It wasn’t so much the Falkland Islanders he was worried about – though they deserved to be left alone – as the long-suffering people of Argentina. The thought of psychopaths like Bazua riding to power on the backs of a successful invasion brought a taste of bile to his mouth.

  And then he remembered a conversation he’d had several years ago with Isabel and a couple of her fellow-exiles. ‘The CIA had people in Argentina during the Dirty War,’ he said slowly.

  Shepreth didn’t make the connection.

  ‘Suppose Bazua’s records contain evidence of American corruption,’ Docherty said.

  ‘It’s twenty years ago,’ Shepreth said instinctively, but his face was thoughtful.

  ‘Which would give whoever it was plenty of time to climb the career ladder. They might well be in a position to block action against Bazua.’

  Shepreth nodded. ‘And they probably wouldn’t even have to come up with a reason. Just a hint that Bazua was on the company payroll would be enough.’

  They had reached the top of the hill, where the Capilla de las Rosas marked the spot where the miraculous flowers had sprung up. Docherty looked out at the vast city beyond – away to the south-west a plane was gathering height after take-off from the airport. He looked at his watch and turned to Shepreth. ‘Time to go,’ he told the younger man.

  Shepreth didn’t seem to hear him. ‘What if I could get you in to see Bazua?’ he asked.

  Carmen stared out of the aeroplane’s window at the egg-shaped island below. The sea was a patchwork of blues and greens, with the outline of the surrounding reef clearly visible. Most of the coastline seemed to be rocky, but there were a few sand beaches, and behind these the settlements had grown up. A road circled the island, linking these and leaving the mountainous centre to the flora and fauna. According to her guidebook, Providencia was famous for the variety of its lizards.

  She had left Cartagena at ten o’clock that morning, and a good proportion of the intervening five hours had been spent waiting for her connection on the neighbouring island of San Andrés. Most of the other passengers seemed to be foreigners, and once the plane was down she expected a stampede for the tourist office, but in the event only one Japanese couple also needed official help. Listening to the choice of accommodation on offer, Carmen found herself wondering for the umpteenth time what she was doing.

  The Cabanas El Paradiso – ‘they are pretty wooden cabins by the sea’ – sounded nice, especially for only ten thousand pesos, until she started thinking about how vulnerable she would feel alone in a cabin. The Hotel Princesa sounded nice too, and was even cheaper, but she wondered how good the locks would be on the doors of a cheap hotel. In the end she settled for the thrice-as-expensive Dutch Inn, on the dubious grounds that no one ever suspected rich people of criminal intent. Her choice was only about three kilometres to the south, in the hamlet of Aguamansa, and it seemed as if the taxi had hardly had time to get up speed before it was slowing to a halt outside the gabled wooden building.

  The receptionist checked her in and showed her up to a large and lovely room, full of old wooden furniture and with windows overlooking the sea. He seemed to give her a strange look as he left her, causing her to wonder how many single young women came to the island. On the plane it had been all couples and groups as far as she could tell.

  Well, she wouldn’t be spending much time in the discos, always assuming there were any. She looked out of the window at the line of coconut palms waving in the breeze and realized that it was late in the afternoon. There was no point in wasting the last hour or so of light.

  She changed into shorts, halter top and sandals, and went back downstairs. As she’d hoped, the hotel had bicycles for the use of its guests, and after checking the tyres and brakes on several machines she picked one out. A minute later she was setting off, somewhat unsteadily, along the coast road towards the next settlement. By the time she reached it her childhood cycling skills had kicked back in, and she was beginning to enjoy the ride.

  The road turned inland now, cutting off the south-western corner of the island. It didn’t look a likely spot for a prison, but there was no real way of knowing, short of exploring the area on foot. She would do that tomorrow, she told herself, cycling on. There was no shortage of buildings, many of them brightly painted smaller versions of her hotel, more Anglo-Caribbean than Hispanic, but none of them looked in any way official. Behind the ones to the right forested slopes rose up towards the distant peak in the centre, but there were no roads winding up through the trees.

  The sea came back into view and she free-wheeled down the slope to where the road took a tight turn along the rim of some cliffs before running into the small but busy settlement of Aguadulce. Here there were many cheap-looking hotels and restaurants, shops advertising motorbikes and snorkelling gear for hire, and a busy dock at one end of the sandy beach. This might have been a better place to stay, she thought. Or not. Was it easier to escape notice in hordes of people or far away from them? There didn’t seem to be an obvious answer.

  It was getting dark now, but she cycled another kilometre or so beyond the last houses before turning back. By her reckoning she had traversed more than half the circular road since leaving the airport, but had seen nothing which looked anything like a prison. In fact the whole idea was beginning to seem unreal, and as she cycled back towards Aguadulce, intent on dinner, Carmen found herself wondering how many egg-shaped islands there could be in the Caribbean. Had she just jumped to the wrong conclusion? Or had Victoria’s mind short-circuited in some strange way? Maybe the girl had spent a childhood holiday here, and memories from that time had become confused with those of the last year.

  It was too soon to tell, Carmen told herself sternly. She still had the other half of the road to travel, and there was still the forested centre. There might not be any access by road, but prisons could always be supplied by helicopter, so she would have to keep an eye on the skies. This might be what her American tourists called a wild-goose chase, but if it wasn’t, then she was closer to her sister than she had been for over a year.

  The Prime Minister looked even more harassed than usual, as well he might. The nation was bored with him, the anti-European crusade in the name of British beef had proved a predictably damp squib, and his own back-benchers were queuing up to stab him in the back. Even England’s football team had let him down, evoking memories of 1970 and Harold Wilson’s kamikaze election. ‘But what exactly are you advocating?’ he asked Hanson.

  It was late on Sunday evening, and the two men were sitting in shirtsleeves in the PM’s private office, discussing the problem of Angel Bazua. Hanson had just finished his summary of the Argentinian’s criminal and political activities with a recommendation for action of some sort. ‘It’s hard to be specific,’ he said evasively, ‘but I would have thought that at the very least we should aim for the destruction of the two boats. If we could also take out their owner I would be a lot happier.’

  The PM grimaced. ‘The British government doesn’t usually employ assassination as an instrument of foreign policy,’ he said mildly.

  ‘Not lately,’ Hanson agreed. ‘But this is an unusual situation. It sounds ludicrous, but as long as he stays in prison this man is effectively beyond the law. And in the meantime,’ he added, looking the PM straight in the eye, ‘he poses a clear threat to the security of the realm.’

  The PM sighed and examined the bottom of his empty glass. ‘Who would you use?’ he asked.

  ‘The SAS, probably,’ Hanson said, wondering whether he was going to be offered another drink.

  But the PM had other things on his mind. ‘The Colombians will probably break off relations,’ he said gloomily, ‘and I’ll have the Foreign Office and Trade screaming blue murder at me for halving our market share in Latin America. And as for the Americans…’ He trailed off. ‘I don’t think…’

  �
�They’ll all be angry,’ Hanson agreed, ‘but not necessarily at us.’ He bit the bullet and helped himself from the bottle, then started to tell the PM about Docherty’s involvement. ‘He has a completely different reason for wanting to see Bazua, but if he does get inside the prison, he should be able to bring some useful information out. He has trained eyes, he’s an SAS veteran, and whatever he sees should prove invaluable to an assault force. With good inside information the SAS might be able to do the whole thing incognito. They could even leave a few clues to the real culprits – another drug cartel probably.’ Hanson paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘If by some chance they are identified, then Docherty would also serve as a pretty good scapegoat. He lives in Chile, he married an ex-communist, and his SAS record offers ample proof that he’s a born renegade. With that sort of ammunition we might be able to pass the whole thing off as a private affair, a mercenary operation paid for by nobody-knows-who.’

  ‘We’ll hang him out to dry,’ the PM murmured.

  ‘The man’s a survivor,’ Hanson said. He had read Docherty’s file that morning, and felt more than a touch of guilt at what he was proposing, but a lot more lives would be ruined if Bazua wasn’t stopped. ‘He wants to get in to see Bazua, and his chances of coming out again are a lot better if the Colombian government has sanctioned the visit.’

  ‘All right,’ the PM said thoughtfully, ‘we might fool the Colombians, but surely the Americans have the southern Caribbean under more or less continual surveillance. How are an SAS team going to get in and out without them knowing?’

  ‘They aren’t,’ Hanson admitted. ‘But if we bring them a present they won’t be able to go off the deep end.’ He explained about the Dirty War records which Bazua allegedly kept on Providencia, and Shepreth’s suspicion that they were being used to blackmail high-ranking American Intelligence officials. ‘If we can show them how one of their own people has been protecting Bazua then they’ll hardly be in a position to complain,’ he concluded.