by Todd Merer
“Whatever that means.”
“It means I’ve never stopped loving you. It’s not a girlish infatuation, because I’m no longer ten years old. So store that fact in your hard drive and listen.”
“I’m all big ears. Runs in my family. My pa had ears like an elephant.”
“Listen, you jerk. Richard’s been a traitor to your government since he met Missy Soo. He intends to give her Lucky and receive a fortune from China in return.”
“One part I still don’t get: Why is an old monk so important?”
“At this moment, that old monk is the key to keeping peace on earth. There’s so much more to it, but best you digest things as they come.”
“Sure. If I choose to believe you.” Words of regret even as I spoke them; I had already chosen to believe her, yet a smidgeon of false pride had twisted my tongue.
To my remorse, she winced as if bee-stung and looked away.
For now, our conversation was over.
CHAPTER 46
It was late afternoon when we set down in a city whose modern skyline I recognized: Cartagena, Colombia. I’d had some wild times in the new city’s nightlife, as well as in the adjoining old city’s maze of dark streets.
Dolores continued avoiding my eyes. She was looking out, too. She had her memories as well. Was she now regretting having slept with me? Letting me know it wasn’t going to happen again?
Again, no customs or immigration before we boarded an almost noiseless unmarked copter that immediately rose, tilted, then zipped east, flying low above the Guajira Peninsula’s white-sand beaches and dark, jungled interior. I estimated about another hour before we turned toward what I assumed would be Anawanda—
The copter slowed, hovered, landed on the beach.
The pilot—another Logui—spoke in Anchiga.
Dolores translated. “The Chinese have air cover up now and have installed their top-of-the-line radar. Actually, their top-of-the-line is what they copied from you Americans ten years ago. They’d shit if they knew the stuff your country has now.”
“I’m not ‘you Americans’ anymore.”
“Wrong,” she snapped, “gringo.”
“Very observant, muchacha.”
“Eff you, Benn.”
“Love to.”
For a moment, I thought she was about to laugh. Instead, she turned away. “Let’s get going. I want to make the village by nightfall.”
The hike up the foothills was a more difficult route than the one that had led from the now-Chinese-occupied beach. It was a long, hard trip. Dolores and the Logui walked fast, and keeping up with them was exhausting, but I didn’t want to find myself alone at night. Besides, I liked hiking behind Dolores’s butt, the way it flexed as she moved. A few times we paused for canteen water. Ate energy bars while still walking. Blistered feet, insect bites, scratched faces.
We reached the Logui village at dusk.
Things had changed again. Defense positions were now entrenched in sandbagged bunkers. The population went about their tasks silently, with purpose. A man was videotaping three bullet-riddled bodies. I realized they were Chinese soldiers—
Dolores spoke, and I turned.
A kerchief covered most of Dolores’s face. She was talking to the man’s camera. The videographer was about my age: trimmed beard, silvering at the temples, a distinguished bearing. For a moment I was startled, for he strongly resembled Dolores’s—Sara’s—father, Nacho Barrera. But then I thought, Nah, impossible.
“Good seeing you, my old friend,” he said and winked.
It was his voice that awoke the memory and his beard that had thrown me. I knew this man as “PF”—Benn-speak for Permanent Fugitive. For ten years or more, he’d been my client, a Colombian on the lam from an American extradition warrant. A soul stuck in limbo. His case was a no-win trafficking beef with a mandatory thirty-to-life sentence in the Southern District of Florida. His only out was to cooperate, but the government wanted him to point at heavyweights who were keeping PF’s wife and kids sequestered as a hedge against his ratting. He was well known in Colombia, which fairly crawled with informants who’d give him up for a few pesos; consequently, he’d spent the last decade hiding out in the Central American boonies. PF was an erudite, educated man who loved reading and music, neither of which were available in his moveable abodes. For years he’d been waiting, hoping the witnesses against him—his codefendants, themselves doing long sentences—would die or be deported, and the case against him would fall apart. Once every year or so, he’d satisfy his need for contact with civilization by paying me to go meet him. We’d dine and drink wine from sunset to sunrise in a Honduran shithole named San Pedro Sula, whose sole distinction was being the world’s murder capital. Our last meet had been in Caracas. I remembered it well.
“My name is Javier,” he said. In his indictment, the feds had listed him as FNU LNU—First Name Unknown, Last Name Unknown.
“Bennjamin T. Bluestone,” I said formally.
Then we laughed and embraced, kissed cheeks Latin-style, shook each other’s shoulders. In retrospect, despite the scary trips to see him, I’d enjoyed our meetings immensely as well. In the birdcage of my life, Javier was a rara avis: a friend. Not that I trusted him.
“Didn’t recognize me because of the beard?”
That’s when I realized it: Javier was the brother of Nacho I’d never met. Nacho had always worn a beard. Javier’s made the resemblance striking.
“Jesus, you’re practically his twin.”
Dolores hugged him. “My Uncle Javi.” She went on cold-shouldering me, telling Javier, “Let’s get to it.”
Javier pointed his camera at her, and she raised a microphone to her mouth. Her expression projected gravitas, her voice thrummed with fervor, and I thought:
La Pasionara, yes.
She said, “Although Colombian authorities will not publicly comment, informed sources have confirmed these men were Chinese soldiers killed by Colombian Special Forces, following the Chinese kidnapping of an American tourist.”
Colombian Special Forces? Chinese kidnapping a tourist? Stella?
Dolores said, “The Chinese claim the tourist was trespassing on their property. Their? The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta are and always will be part of the Colombian homeland. The Chinese, offered an opportunity to surrender, chose to fight. Our forces shot them dead . . .”
Dolores pointed at the bodies; Javier moved his camera to tape the corpses, this time zooming in on the bullet wounds.
“This is Laura Astorquiza, Radio Free Bogotá, in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Viva, Colombia.”
She made a cutting motion, and Javier stopped taping.
“Release it to the usual media,” she said, then motioned for him to start taping her again. “Wait an hour, then release this.”
When Javier resumed taping, she said, “The identity of the American tourist has just been confirmed. She is a botany student named Stella Maris.”
My heart stopped. The thought of Stella in captivity was sickening.
“This is Laura Astorquiza. Good night, and God bless Colombia.”
She made another cutting motion, and Javier ceased taping. Dolores motioned for us to walk with her. As we passed the corpses, I saw their wounds were the standard 5.62mm rounds of automatic rifles: small, puckered entrance holes, gaping, meaty exit wounds.
But something caught my eye. Only momentarily, but long enough for me to note that each entry hole was rimmed by four symmetrical cuts in the surrounding flesh. I’d seen the Logui arrows: hand-hewn shafts of local wood, steel-tipped blades with steel vanes rather than feathers. The vanes were razor-thin and sharp, and I’d bet my fee they perfectly fit the cut marks around the entry holes . . . as if the killing wounds were made by bow-launched fléchettes; then, after being removed, obscured by bullets fired into the wounds.
Bullets, according to Dolores, fired by a Colombian Special Forces unit. Maybe it was true. Equally possible, Dolores’s claim was one the CS
F unit would hesitate to deny; doing so would indicate they were unable or unwilling to confront the traffickers. Turned out, I was right.
“How the hell did you bring in Special Forces?” Javier asked Dolores.
She shrugged. “I didn’t. But the Colombian populace will approve of their soldiers fighting back. No way will the government deny it.”
The three of us gathered in the stone hut. Cool there. She sat close to Javier, across from me. She said, “How was it being me, Benn?”
I said, “Sorry, am I missing something?”
“Missy Soo doesn’t believe you’re just a messenger. She thinks you’re the decision maker. She thinks you’re me. Sombra.”
“So she told me. Which makes me a disposable cutout.”
“Yes, it does. Missy’s very beautiful, isn’t she?”
“There was a deal. Why’d she grab Stella?”
“Why don’t you ask Stella?” said Javier.
“Wrong time for bad jokes, Javi.”
“I’m not joking,” he said.
“I’m chilly,” said Stella.
She’d been in a dim corner all along. Wrapped in a white shawl, face as angelic as ever. She came and sat close to the fire.
“Time for you to earn your fee, Mr. Bluestone,” said Dolores. “The president of Colombia has ordered the military to full alert. They took four of the last cartel bosses yesterday. You and I are going to destroy the remainder.”
“Right,” I said. “Destroy? How?”
“My thought exactly,” added Javi.
Dolores said, “I’m confident Mr. Bluestone will find a way. He has a knack of finding things the way a pig does truffles.”
Javier laughed. “You’re your father’s daughter.”
Dolores shrugged.
“Knack?” I said. “Why am I here?”
She smiled. “The art of the deal.”
CHAPTER 47
That night I lay alone in a hammock in the hut. I tried making sense of things but couldn’t. I closed my eyes and fell into a heavy, dreamless sleep. When I awoke, daylight shafted through the oculus. The faint sound of engines murmured from outside—
As I processed the fact that a helicopter had awakened me, Older Brother entered, motioned me to follow him. In the clearing, a small NOTAR helicopter waited like a resting insect.
Dolores was already inside. To my surprise, she wore a suited skirt, and her hair was neatly pinned up. She pointed at a bag on the floor. I opened it and saw one of my court-going outfits: navy suit, pale-blue shirt, dark-blue silk tie.
Astonished, I said, “How did you get my cloth—”
“Not important. Turn yourself into a lawyer.”
The chopper took off as I changed clothing.
Using a compact, Dolores applied eye shadow. It enhanced her beauty even as my spirits sank. I wanted this unique, incredible woman, but she didn’t want me, at least in the same way.
Our chopper lifted and sped south, away from the Caribbean and toward the interior of the continent—the same route it must have used to reach the mountain stronghold, avoiding Chinese radar and weaponry on the Guajira Peninsula. We threaded between the green, lesser peaks, far beneath the looming snow-tipped cone of Anawanda. Older Brother had become a hell of a pilot.
Dolores’s eyes were closed, but I sensed that she was not asleep. Wide awake, I stared below. Colombia is the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen: snow-topped ranges, long miles of rolling hills dotted by small towns, patched by green fields. Rushing rivers uncoiled below, their white foam visible even from our height. We saw no other aircraft for we remained above the countryside, well away from towns and cities. We crossed the high Cordillera Central, where glaciers shone whitely, then followed the Cauca River valley south between the Central and Cordillera Oriental, and I began glimmering our destination:
Cali.
The city I knew so well: the city where my Colombian adventures had begun long ago. Danger was a constant in Cali, lurking in both its mean streets and grand boulevards. And yet, incredibly, we were off to destroy the worst of it. The cartels.
If I could find a way.
Dolores touched my thigh—intimately, I thought, spirit soaring—but she was just indicating to me to tighten my seat belt, for we were descending.
Below, surrounded by thick jungle, lay an enormous green lawn next to a modern, steel-and-glass building I recognized as the training facilities of America de Cali, the city’s beloved soccer team. It was here that I’d often met with Nacho, when the old Cali cartel owned the franchise.
We landed and exited the copter. Groups of armed men stood in clusters apart from one another. They were armed. Dolores—Sombra—had invited me to a convocation of the remaining cartel bosses.
Like filings drawn to a magnet, the groups converged, circling us. Among them were a few men wearing suits and square-toed shoes: cartel lawyers, a couple of whom I recognized. Others were bandoliered sicarios, the cartel chieftains’ personal Praetorian Guard. I didn’t personally know any of the bosses, but I’d seen their photographs on wanted posters. All in all, a motley crew of desperados, grimly waiting for Dolores to address them.
“Thank you all for coming,” she said. “I invited you here on behalf of Sombra, who wishes to assure you that your losses incurred in the recent ship sinkings are about to be reimbursed.”
There were a few exclamations of approval but more expressions of doubt. Then came a chilling comment:
“I recognize your voice. You’re La Pasionara.”
“Why should that surprise you? You gentlemen and I want the same thing . . . the complete and utter withdrawal of foreign soldiers from Colombia. Not only the Chinese, but the Americans.”
“Sombra keeps assuring us, but nothing happens,” said a boss known as el Carnicero—the Butcher. “Now Sombra sends a woman. We want to speak to Sombra. We want to hear it from him. We want proof.”
There was a grumble of assent. This wasn’t going well.
“Here is your proof,” said Dolores, turning to me. “This man is the American lawyer who was a go-between for Nacho Barrera and the Escobar family during the Cali-Medellín war. He was trusted by both sides with good reason, for he speaks the truth, whether it is good or bad.”
All eyes turned to me.
I hadn’t the faintest idea of what to say. Yet Dolores had gambled our lives based on her confidence in me. Uplifting.
Oh, baby, you know me so well.
Much as I’d done countless times in court, I conjured up a compelling untruth, then improvised from there.
I said, “My clients are a conglomerate of the insurance companies that insured the sunken ships. I am authorized to reimburse you for their losses.”
“Is this a joke?” said a burly man whose wanted poster referred to his nickname: el Diablo, kingpin of the murderous combined Colombian-Venezuelan Cartel de los Soles. “The damn ships were worth a fraction of the lost product.”
“I assure you my employers are well aware of that,” I said. “That is why Sombra has added significant monies to the insurance settlement, a sum that will provide you complete reimbursement.”
“When do we get it?” asked a man I knew ran the Pacific cartel.
“As I’m sure you can understand,” I said, “the insurance companies need time to, ah, justify the reimbursements on their ledgers—”
“How much longer?” said another boss.
Bad question. If my reply was soon, they might keep us here until they were paid. If my reply was vague or too long, they might keep us here permanently, maybe six feet beneath the soccer field.
Hmm . . .
As if there were no problem, I looked around the circle, smiling. Briefly, my gaze paused on a man among the Cartel de los Soles. Strangely, his features seemed to have an Asian cast, but I decided he must be part indigenous Colombian.
“When, woman?” asked another boss.
“When, Doctor?” he asked, using the Colombian term for lawyer.
&n
bsp; Good question, no answer. But then an idea blossomed: Duke had created a timetable, one that Dolores had bought into. Today was what, L-Day minus three? Dolores was operating according to it, so I assumed three days was enough time for Dolores to keep Richard at bay. I added another couple of days, just in case.
“Six days.”
They grumbled among themselves, then the man from the Pacific cartel said, “Five days and not one second more.”
El Diablo added, “Until then, you shall remain here.”
“Impossible. I must be in New York to finalize the transaction.”
“Then the woman remains,” said the Pacific Coast boss.
“Unacceptable. She must return with me. The reason is rather . . . delicate. She has, let me put it this way, a close personal relationship with the head of the insurance conglomerate.”
For a moment, there was silence. Then one man laughed, and the rest joined in. They were shrewd negotiators, but all Colombian men understood one thing:
The spellbinding power of a woman.
“All right,” said Diablo. “But should you fail, we will find you. The woman will be passed around. You, Doctor, will be spread-eagled between four horses and pulled apart. Maybe you’ll be lucky and before your limbs are yanked, you’ll choke on your cock and balls.”
“Thank you for your time and consideration,” I said.
The cartel circle opened, and we returned to the helicopter. My mouth was dry as alkali, but Dolores was fairly spitting anger.
“Maricones,” she cursed. “Cabrones. They won’t see a peso.”
I like a woman who curses. What I didn’t like was that for a brief moment, I’d thought she’d exchanged knowing glances with the sicario who looked to be of Indian blood. What means that? And now, as the copter lifted, the man doffed his fatigue cap—a silent signal?—and as his jet hair shone in the sun, his eyes appeared dark and narrow above prominent cheekbones.
He was not a Colombian native. He was Chinese.
What had passed between them?
More important were the consequences of the events we’d set in motion. When Sombra disappeared, a new round of cartel wars would result, which would trigger the reemergence of anticartel paramilitaries, sparking a new war for control of the drug trade.