by Harper Lin
“They just stole a fire opal worth more than $1 million. Why should they care?”
“I did a bit of research on the prices of security systems. The system they sold to SerMart was worth just as much as that, or more. They didn’t steal the gem for the money, or at least that wasn’t their primary motivation.”
I blinked. “Oh. Now that you say that it makes sense. They didn’t steal any other gemstones, after all. But in the motel room they were bragging about how they were going to strike it rich.”
“Selling that stone will be a nice bonus, and tax-free, too, I suppose. Panama is a good place to launder money. But they have a midsized, growing business. They won’t pass up an opportunity to expand like I’m going to offer them. In the meantime, maybe we can get close enough to them to figure out why they only stole one gem when they could have stolen a king’s ransom. Money was obviously not their motive.”
I gave him a kiss. “I knew I kept you around for something.”
He smiled and straightened his tie. “I thought it was for my dashing good looks.”
“That too.”
Then I had an idea. “All right, here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll go over to your house—”
“Oh, I like this idea already!”
“Behave. Now let me tell you how this is going to work…”
Later that day, I hid in the front hall closet of Octavian’s house, snuggled among his overcoats as I heard the doorbell ring.
Octavian, the clever dear, had left the closet door ever so slightly ajar so that I could hear better.
“Hello, sir. I’m Juan Pablo Endara. I’m here to look over your house and give you a security assessment.”
“Nice to meet you, young man. As I told your boss on the phone, I’m worried about burglars. I noticed someone had fiddled with the back door the other night. That’s why I called.”
I heard footsteps head to the back of the house. That was my cue to sneak out the front.
They would be occupied for a few minutes in the back. To make Octavian’s story sound plausible, I had tried to pick his back door with a nail file. He had a pretty good lock that couldn’t be picked with a nail file, not even by someone of my abilities, but I gave it a good try. That had left several convincing scratches around the lock and the latch that would have this security expert rubbing his hands with glee and telling his obviously wealthy potential client that someone had tried to break into his house.
Octavian leading him to the back door was his way of signaling that the security man had come alone and the coast was clear. If there had been two of them, or if someone had stayed in the security vehicle, then Octavian would have directed him to the front of the house, where he himself had left footprints in the flower bed next to one of the windows.
If you’re going to lie in a potentially life-threatening situation, it’s best to cover all the angles.
I slipped out of the closet and eased the door closed behind me. Octavian’s voice could still be heard from the back of the house, two rooms away. He would keep the man occupied there for several minutes. After peeking through a window to make sure the coast was clear, I opened the front door as quietly as I could.
The vehicle parked in Octavian’s driveway was not, as I’d hoped, the four-by-four I had followed to the motel. Instead, this was just an ordinary car with the Escudo Security logo emblazoned on the side.
I pulled out a small magnetic radio transmitter from my pocket. I had used these before, and they came in handy. You stuck it on the bottom of a vehicle, and it would transmit the car’s GPS coordinates to a special receiver with a range of ten miles. All I had to do was to fix it to a good spot and sneak away. Easy as pie.
Famous last words.
I went to the back of the car, got on my hands and knees, and reached under to place the GPS locator on the undercarriage just next to the trailer hitch.
And that’s when my back went out.
There was a sharp click—an actual, audible click—and a spike of pain.
And I couldn’t move. I was locked into position. It wasn’t that the pain kept me from moving, although the pain was considerable, but that I literally could not bend my back to get up.
I gritted my teeth and set the GPS. First priority—finish the mission. That was so ingrained in me I didn’t even think about it. Once the little device was safely tucked away out of sight, I gingerly lifted one hand and rubbed my lower back.
Even that light contact made me hiss in pain.
Where had this come from? And why did it have to happen now?
I heard a car approach. I tried to move crabwise out of sight, but the pain stopped me before I got two feet. Heart thudding, I watched as a four-door sedan drove slowly down Octavian’s street. Mother and father in front, looking ahead. Little girl in back, staring at me. I could see her mouth forming words, her finger pointing. The man in the passenger’s seat glanced my way. I grinned at him. He looked uncertainly at me before looking away.
And then they were gone.
That’s the good thing about civilians. Most of the time they don’t want to get involved. They’ll make up a perfectly valid reason in their heads why a little old lady is on her hands and knees in their neighbor’s driveway and then go on with their little lives.
Okay, one problem solved. Now to solve the big problem. I had maybe another minute or two. Again, I rubbed my back, ignoring the pain as I felt the golf ball-sized knot of tension right at the base of the spine.
I crab crawled to the back of the car, trying to get out of sight of the house. I could just barely reach the top of the trunk and tried to lift myself up, only to fall back on my hands and knees as another spike of pain shot through me.
I slowed my breathing. Tried to relax. What had I learned in those three Seniors’ Yoga classes I took with Octavian? Something about focusing on the muscles. Letting go of your worries. I don’t recall them saying much about focusing on a clenched back while worrying about getting spotted by a Panamanian jewel thief.
Time. Maybe all I needed was time. And a hot bath. And a handful of aspirins.
Except I didn’t have any of those things.
Focus on the muscles. I could hear that yoga teacher say in that soothing, somewhat superior voice of hers. Feel the tension slipping away. Imagine a golden ball of warm light passing from the crown of your head to the base of your feet, removing all tensions.
Hey, this was actually beginning to work. The pain was slowly beginning to subside. My muscles relaxed. A feeling of well-being flowed through my body. Why didn’t they tell us about the magic golden ball in basic training?
As the tension falls away from your body—
The front door opened. The golden ball disappeared.
“So, we’ll start planning a security system to suit your needs, sir, and we’ll—”
“Oh! How silly of me! I forgot to show you the back porch. I’m very worried about it.”
Octavian had the foresight to come out first. He spotted me, turned around, and hustled the fellow back inside.
All the tension was back, times two. The golden ball of magic light was nowhere to be seen. I needed to get out of there. Now.
Another attempt at standing told me that wasn’t an option, so I crawled my painful way to some rosebushes at the front of his house and inched behind them, getting pricked and scraped as I got out of sight.
I was still there, on my hands and knees, five minutes later when Octavian and Juan Pablo Endara emerged from the house. Peeking through the rosebushes, some of the thorns adorned with drops of my blood and shreds of my clothing, I watched as the two men shook hands and Juan Pablo got in his car and drove off.
Once he had driven around the corner and out of sight, Octavian looked around, confused.
“Barbara?”
“Right here, dear.”
“Where?”
“Kneeling behind the rosebush.”
“Why are you doing that?” he asked, coming over.
He eventually got me vertical, brought me inside, and put one of those heat packs the athletes use on my back.
“I need them sometimes after a long walk or when the weather turns,” he admitted as he arranged the pillows around me on the sofa.
The heat pack, some aspirin, and a hot tea fixed me up, and in an hour I was mobile again.
Turning on the GPS locator, I found the Escudo Security car was at the same coordinates as the office. Well, that didn’t tell me much. Once it got moving again, I’d keep an eye on it. I’d already rented a car so they wouldn’t be able to spot me by my vehicle, which they might know by sight. It would be nice to know why they were spying on me, but just knowing they were was enough to put me on guard. I felt bad bringing Octavian into this. I didn’t want him in danger, but he had volunteered knowing the risks, and he had proven to be a big help already.
I decided not to put him at any more risk and to go back home until the security car made a move.
When I got there, I got the surprise of my life.
Eleven
It took a minute to recognize the balding middle-aged man standing on my front porch. But then I mentally put back the hair, took away the wrinkles, and exchanged the sweater and slacks for camo.
“Junior! What are you doing here?”
Gary Wycliff limped off my porch with a big grin on his face and gave me a hug.
“Ow! Careful. I threw my back out.”
“Oh, sorry. Let’s go inside and talk.”
We both hobbled into the house.
“Well, don’t we make a pair,” Gary said.
“That we do. Time is not kind. When was the last time we saw each other?”
“At James’s funeral.”
“Oh, yes,” I said quietly. “Yes, that was it.”
I brewed him a tea, lost in thought. I tried to focus on the case and the reason why a fellow agent was sitting in my living room getting mauled by my kitten, but my mind kept casting back to earlier times.
Gary hadn’t been the only agent we had worked with, but he had been one of the best and certainly the best who was still alive. It was a shame that Taliban attack had put him permanently on the disabled list. The nation had lost something that day.
Having him here brought back a whole flood of memories—about being younger, about still having a husband, about still having an exciting career. Fixing the tea in my perfect little kitchen looking out at my lovely little garden, I felt like I had left the best years behind me.
Oh, I know I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself. I have a wonderful family, some nice friends, and a good pension. I had a lot more than most people, and yet I couldn’t help but feel a bit useless. The world had kept on moving, and here I was in Cheerville.
Buck up, Barbara, I told myself. The world has indeed kept on moving, and it’s bringing you along with it. There’s a CIA agent in your living room, and he’s obviously not here to sample your tea. Time to get useful.
I squared my shoulders as much as my sore back would permit and went out to the living room. These little episodes of self-pity had started when James had passed and welled up more and more frequently as the years crept on. I had faced many frightening things in my life and had defeated most of them. I suppose I feared death and aging so much because they were undefeatable.
Stop. You have a mission to do.
“So, what’s next?” I asked as I set the tray down.
Gary laughed. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said as I eased myself into my chair.
He shifted in his seat. “Things have… accelerated. We thought at first that this was a simple revenge killing with a raised middle finger to the CIA in the form of dumping the victim into your shopping cart. Now it looks like a lot more is going on.”
I poured him some tea. “So do I actually get to be filled in now?”
Gary sighed. “You do. To a point. You know how the agency works.”
“Need-to-know basis. I’m surprised they didn’t make us tattoo the words on our forehead. Well, go on.”
Gary gently removed Dandelion from his pants leg, where she was busy fraying the fabric of his slacks.
“It all goes back to when we were agents down there, when General Noriega was in power. We and other teams were busy trying to take down the drug barons to remove his financial base.”
“That didn’t work too well,” I said. It’s hard to arrest criminals when the government is complicit. Even those we got rid of in more, ahem, direct ways, only ended up getting replaced that same week.
“Nor did the coups we arranged.”
We had arranged three different coup attempts led by various disaffected officers in the police and military. You can read all about them in some good history books published since the war. Well, two of them. The third coup attempt was crushed so quickly it never even made the news.
And that’s the one Gary started talking about.
“After our first two coup attempts failed, Noriega was getting paranoid and was watching his forces like a hawk. We had a hard time organizing a third, remember? But we thought we had a good one.”
“I remember.”
The leader, Carlos Pretto, was the head of a rural police district that had been left impoverished by the regime. The narcos ran the area and had brought a lot of ill will onto themselves by killing off anyone they didn’t like. Pretto was unusual among the police commanders in that he wasn’t corrupt. He tried to do his job, but with the current regime he could barely keep his job, let alone do it. And he had survived at least one assassination attempt by the narcos.
People feared the narcos but also hated them. If the police could throw off Noriega’s corruption and take a stand against the drug barons, the people might rise up. Commander Pretto also had allies in several other district stations and among the military. If he showed the nation that his police district wasn’t corrupt and got rid of the local drug barons, he could create a power base that would have a ripple effect in the other districts. Noriega would be faced with a revolt in the countryside and international embarrassment for having his drug connections proven once and for all, and he’d have his main money supply dry up. The rebels, on the other hand, would get U.S. government funding plus all the weapons they could take from local armories and from the drug militias, which were considerable. Noriega would be overthrown.
At least, that was the theory.
The reality didn’t work out so well.
Commander Pretto had been careful. In the middle of the night, he personally led a group of trusted officers into the police barracks and arrested everyone he suspected of being a Noriega spy. Then he had taken his men and swooped down on the local drug baron’s ranch.
They moved in, guns blazing, taking the drug baron’s hacienda and the drug baron himself and securing the cocaine-processing lab and a storehouse full of cocaine ready for the marketplace.
What they didn’t know was that an army patrol was coming to pick up the cocaine that very night. Just as his lightly armed police officers were celebrating an easy victory, several armored cars armed with machine guns drove onto the ranch. A fierce gunfight ensued with Pretto and his men holed up in the hacienda and the soldiers picking them off. The troops radioed for backup in the form of a couple of tanks. When Pretto saw these behemoths rumbling up the driveway, they surrendered. Pretto and his officers were summarily executed, and his men were thrown into prison, as were Pretto’s and the officers’ families. They were later saved by the U.S. troops during the invasion.
The whole thing had been hushed up. Noriega didn’t want to tell the press, which he tightly controlled, because it put him on the side of the narcos. The U.S. didn’t want to talk about it because it had been such an abysmal failure and they would have had to admit they were trying to overthrow Noriega.
“When we released the coup leaders’ families from that stinking hole they had been locke
d in, we offered them visas,” Gary said. “Sort of an apology. Most took them. Noriega had confiscated all of their property, and while they got their homes and land back, all other portable wealth was gone. Commander Pretto had come from one of the region’s leading families, which was probably why he had been able to keep his job despite pressure from Noriega and the narcos. His father had owned some mines, and one of his discoveries was the Volcano Stone of Panama. That got confiscated along with the rest of the family’s wealth.”
“Oh dear. And the president of Escudo Security is… ”
“Ricardo Pretto, the police commander’s son, now going under the name of Ricardo Morales. He is the oldest surviving member of the family and is the rightful heir of all that stolen property. Everyone in the company is related to one of the coup officers. We’ve known about them for years, and they’ve kept quiet until now.”
“Until Sir Edmund bought the Volcano Stone of Panama.”
Gary nodded, his mouth set in a grim line. “Montalbion didn’t know it had been stolen. The Noriega regime had faked a legal bill of sale signed by old man Pretto at gunpoint and sold it to an international dealer. From there, it passed through several private hands before being bought quite publicly by Montalbion.”
“That must have seemed like a godsend to the folks at Escudo Security.”
“Indeed. And instead of trying to fight a long legal battle with someone who could afford top lawyers, they decided to take what they felt was truly theirs.”
“That doesn’t forgive murder.”
“No. They’ve gone way out of line. We need to reel them in. What have you found out since we talked last?”
I told him everything I had learned so far, finishing with the planting of the GPS device on the car just an hour before.
He smiled at that and took a sip of tea. “You do know it’s illegal to plant a location device on someone without their written consent?”
“Cell phones are location devices. No one kicks up a fuss about that.”