Hostage in Havana

by Noel Hynd

  He admired the craftsmanship of the interlocking parts. They meshed together as if God had created them. They were that good.

  Perez gazed at the pieces for several seconds, in an almost meditative state. Then he assembled his weapon. When he finished, he buffed the rifle with a chamois cloth to remove any fingerprints. Even though he had been careful not to touch the weapon at any time since he had received it, he also knew that the gunsmith in Cali who had crafted it for him could eventually identify him to police or the military. So he buffed it vigorously, even though he had done this twice before.

  Then he froze. Outside the door he heard voices. Two men were arguing in loud, inarticulate Spanish. One could never be too careful in his line of work, so he set down the rifle, drew a small Chinese-made handgun from his waist, and went to the door. Peering through the eyehole, he studied the scene before him and slowly relaxed.

  He had been in this location for six weeks, waiting. He knew who should be in the building and who shouldn’t. The players in the hall were Suárez, the fat peasant handyman with the cleft palate, and Gómez, his boss, a smelly runt from the Bogotá barrio. Well, Perez reasoned quickly, these two nonentities were just that, nonentities. Nothing to be afraid of with these guys.

  So Perez returned to his work. He had six bullets in a small box. The custom-made magazine of the weapon was designed to hold only three, two of which would be emergency rounds in case the first shot missed. At the fringe of his consciousness, he heard the two disputants in the hall walk away. Perez loaded the three rounds into the weapon and put the others in his pocket.

  The rifle was a fifty-caliber sniping special: the weapon that Soviet snipers had used in Afghanistan and the Americans still used in Iraq. The target that Perez wished to hit moved about Bogotá in an armored sedan with extra-thick bulletproof glass and a bombproof chassis. Perez needed a weapon that could propel an explosive bullet far enough with enough accuracy to hit a vehicle at just the right angle and still maintain enough velocity and impact to break the existing rules of armor penetration.

  It would first need to smash the destruction-proof glass and then become a small fragmentation grenade upon second and final impact. It was no small challenge. But in his hands, he was sure, he had just such an equation.

  Perez laid the weapon on the floor and stepped back. As if by magic, he began to move with an increased dexterity. He went to the window. The building was old, just perfect for his purposes. The old air conditioner churned away. Because of the imperfect fit, Perez had been able to poke a hole into the weather stripping that was supposed to close the gap between the conditioner and the window frame. The hole was just big enough for him to poke the nose of his rifle and the sight through.

  He stood at the window and admired the view. Ten floors below, winding through the center of Bogotá, a highway ran toward his building, then cut close by on the eastern side. The highway was walled off from the city streets and passed under a bridge two hundred yards in front of him. From his contacts in the government, Perez knew that Ramon Inezia, the chief of the national anti-narcotics squad, would pass this way in the middle of a three-car convoy in about forty minutes. Perez had been waiting for this opportunity for weeks.

  He assessed the day. Bright, humid, and hot. Good shooting weather. His bullets would travel two thousand feet per second at a weight of 185 grains. Location, time, distance, temperature, wind direction, mental state of the shooter, everything factored in.

  Perez was anxious to take his shot. Maybe even a second shot if time and logistics permitted. He scanned the highway with his binoculars, mentally picturing the short convoy of official cars that he had been tipped off would pass by this afternoon. He unwrapped some baked chicken and tortillas, ate his lunch, and returned to the window.

  For several minutes, each of which seemed like an hour, he waited, his pulse quickening. Then, at a few minutes before 10:00 a.m., he saw what he was looking for: traffic giving way to a trio of black Mercedes limousines about a mile away, the front car with a small blue beacon. This was his cue. He knew the distance, 1.2 miles. He had sixty-eight seconds to get ready and hit a target moving at a rate of a hundred feet per second.

  He shouldered his weapon and went to one knee. He protruded the long nose of the rifle through the hole in the weather stripping and found his bearings on the expressway. Steadying the rifle on his shoulder and on the window sill, he then locked in the laser sight. He wondered if the cortege had any radar detection. But he reasoned that they moved around the city with a confidence bordering on arrogance. Unless he had been betrayed within a small circle of conspirators, he was fine. No way anyone would suspect that this day was different than any other. And anyway, if they did detect sights on them, they would alter their speed and that would tip him off.

  He saw no sign that they were doing that. Thirty seconds passed.

  Squinting, Perez fixed his sight on the first car, then moved it to the second. He had a full profile of the speeding car and locked into the sharp downward angle he wanted. Seconds flew off the clock. The trio of cars hit an area a quarter mile away that was crisscrossed by overpasses. He knew the cars would hurtle out from under the final overpass at about seventy miles an hour. He would have less than two seconds to make a final fix with his sight and fire.

  The vehicles hit the first overpass and disappeared. On instinct, Perez made a final recalculation, spur of the moment, completely reflexive and intuitive.

  He moved his rifle sight into the open area beyond the underpass. He would not track the cars but rather let the motorcade run into his sight lines.

  He looked at the laser dot on the highway a hundred fifty meters away and then saw the first car speed through it. He counted off half a second. When the front bumper of the second Benz streaked into his view he pulled the trigger.

  He saw the rear window of the Benz explode into shards. And within that same breathless moment, he quickly tracked the nose of his rifle along the mid-section of the car. He cheated a hair toward the rear seat and volleyed a second shot, then brilliantly following with the nose of his rifle, a third.

  The vehicle spasmed and swerved in reaction to the explosives that had hit the car and the fragmentation that had detonated within it. Perez thought he saw a nanosecond of reddish mist exploding within the car, which was wonderful. He had been successful! The car erupted in flames. The second bullet, as he had hoped, must have nailed the fuel line. The vehicle fishtailed and spun. It suckered the car behind it into hitting it, then left the asphalt, struck a wall, and went into a violent forward tumble and crashed.

  Manuel Perez had no need to admire the rest. He withdrew his weapon and laid it on the floor. He knelt and broke it down. Within ninety seconds he had wrapped the pieces in a towel and was in the hallway. He held the rifle pieces under one arm, the two canes in the other hand. He let his door lock behind him. He had paid his rent two months in advance. No one would come looking for him.

  The hall was empty. No inconvenient witnesses. He found the cinder block that he had checked earlier. Outside, distantly, he could hear police sirens. He removed the cinder block halfway, then stuffed the pieces of his weapon into the area within the wall. He heard them clatter and fall to an area somewhere below the floor. He dropped the towel in behind the weapon parts. Then he pushed the cinder block back into place. He stepped to the chute of the trash incinerator and threw in his latex gloves. The chances were that no one would ever find this weapon, at least not until many years hence.

  Perez could hear sirens approaching from a distance, but he knew he was already one step ahead of the police and the army. Confusion and panic were his allies.

  He went down the building’s back stairway and stopped on ground level long enough to discard one of his canes. Then he was out on the street within another minute, this time accentuating the limp since it fit so well with the profile of an old man.

  He shuffled along at a steady pace through several crowded city blocks as police began t
o flood into the area. He stooped over a trifle more to give himself an even more ancieno look. In his peripheral vision, he watched the foolish, always-too-late authorities begin to cordon off the neighborhood behind him. But this was already many seconds after he had distanced himself from the area.

  Knowing the airports would be watched, as well as the bus terminals, he had an old car ready and waiting. A second pistol and several rounds of ammunition were in the glove compartment, in case of unforeseen trouble.

  He settled into the car. He kept the cane next to him and drove through city streets until he was outside of Bogotá. Then he accessed the two-lane road that led out of the capital to Villavicencio, an uncontrolled lawless city to the southeast.

  A modern road shortened the driving time to one and a half hours. On the way, he threw his other cane out the car window. He did this while passing through a village where some poor old soul would pick it up and use it. Discarding the cane here, he told himself, was an act of charity, one of which, in a small way, he was proud.

  THREE

  My mid-afternoon Alex had returned to her office and had begun to unwind from the morning briefing, which had been followed by a private teleconference with various national police agencies up and down the hemisphere.

  At her desk, she felt at ease. She had risen early that morning, after working late the night before, a pattern she had fallen into in recent weeks. She had been living in New York, at her new job, for fewer than six months now. At the end of the previous year, Alex had been promoted from her old position in Washington, D.C. Her job was now more hands-on. Fluent in Spanish as well as Italian, French, and Russian, she headed her own investigations into various financial schemes that emanated from Central and South America, schemes that targeted American victims, both corporate and individual.

  She did a quick scan of her emails to see if anything was blowing up in any of her operations worldwide. The internet seas seemed calm. Maybe too calm, she thought to herself. She flicked through the message slips that Stacey, her assistant, had left on her desk, the personal mingling with the professional. Two names she didn’t know. There were messages from a district attorney in Illinois, her friend Ben in D.C., another friend from college, and a final one from a name that looked familiar but took a split second to remember.

  Paul Guarneri. No message. Just the name and a phone number on Long Island. She had known Guarneri only fleetingly. He was a suburban real estate entrepreneur who had done business with Yuri Federov, the recently deceased Russian racketeer whom Alex had professionally tracked the year before.

  As for Guarneri, he enjoyed better fortune than Federov — at least he was still alive. Or at least he was when he made the phone call. Who knew what could have happened in the past hour?

  Guarneri’s father, she recalled, had organized-crime connections in Cuba, where his family had lived. So what, Alex wondered as she stared at the slip, did Paul Guarneri want with her? Not having time to agonize over it right now, she zipped through a half dozen emails and arranged the call slips on her desk.

  Then she spotted a sealed envelope delivered by private courier. It was from the office of Joshua Silverman, a New York attorney of either renown or notoriety, depending on one’s point of view, who had the reputation as a mob lawyer, as well as the mouthpiece for some white-collar sleaze balls. Humanitarian issues were not his thing.

  She tossed his envelope aside. She would get to it later and pass it up the Fin Cen food chain as needed. Chances were that Silverman was using her as a contact, and Alex would end up directing him to the department lawyers anyway. They deserved each other.

  She looked at the final message. This one was friendlier. It was from Ben, a close friend of hers who lived in Washington. He was completing his second year of law school at Georgetown and was looking to intern in New York over the summer. He was lining up interviews. He had called a week ago to say that he would be in town this coming week for a short time. Did she know any reasonable place to stay?

  She did indeed. She invited Ben to crash at her place for two or three nights. She had a sofa bed in her extra bedroom for just such occasions. Today was Monday and she expected him on the weekend. He was phoning to reconfirm.

  Ben was a U.S. Marine veteran who had lost part of his leg in Iraq. After Alex’s fiancé’s death in Ukraine sixteen months ago, she and Ben, together, had learned how to walk again, she emotionally and he physically. She enjoyed his company. They had played in pickup basketball games together at the YMCA in D.C., which was where they’d met. Ben was a good man and a good friend.

  Right now, however, that was all. Just a good friend. The loss of her fiancé, Robert, still weighed heavily upon her. The desire to move on, as well as the pain of clinging to the past, to what had been a nearly perfect relationship, pulled at her almost every day. She was ready for a new romance — but then again, she wasn’t.

  She returned Ben’s call. They chatted. When she returned to the challenges on her desk, she glanced again at the envelope from Silverman, Ashkenazy & DeLauro. Might as well get this over with, she decided as she tore it open.

  The letter was from the founding partner, Joshua Silverman. Alex had been named in a legal proceeding, the letter announced, and she was asked to schedule an appointment so she and Silverman could discuss it further.

  Alex phoned Silverman. A receptionist put her through. A few seconds of small talk followed, then, “Just tell me this,” Alex asked. “Is this request personal or professional?”

  “Personal for you, professional for me,” Silverman said. “I can confirm that it’s a financial matter. But I’m under instructions from my client to discuss things with you face-to-face or not at all. You’re free to bring your own counsel, obviously, if you wish.”

  “Is there a time element involved?”

  “The sooner the better,” Silverman said, “… for you.”

  Alex looked at her calendar. “What about tomorrow morning? Can we get it done in half an hour? What if I’m there at 7:45?”

  “That’d work.”

  Alex clicked off. Then, as long as she was dealing with pests, she thought she might as well deal with another. She input the number for Paul Guarneri.

  He had been first introduced to her by the late Russian mobster, Yuri Federov, and Guarneri had also protected a young female witness for Alex the previous year. Alex owed him a dinner engagement, a marker that, she supposed, he now wished to call in.

  Very well. She would go and listen.

  On the phone they arranged to meet for dinner in two days. She set down the phone and marked the new appointments on her calendar: Silverman and Guarneri, with Ben visiting on the weekend.

  So much for personal distractions. She clicked into her email again and caught up on what had recently transpired as the Operation Párajo strikes continued. Within the last half hour, she noted with satisfaction, Panamanian authorities had arrested three Mexicans and one Colombian-born Panamanian while driving a truck loaded with 511 kilograms of cocaine. Authorities concluded the cocaine was to be transported overland to Mexico. At the same time, a Panamanian Army helicopter crew identified a Colombian go-fast boat at a pier in Panama’s Bocas del Toro island archipelago near the Costa Rican border. The Panamanian navy intercepted the watercraft and seized more than two tons of cocaine, presumed to be on its way to Florida by way of the Dominican Republic.

  Alex was pleased. She was scoring major points against the opposition. But one thing worried her. Señor and Señora Dosi — the enemy king and queen on her chessboard. No confirmation of where they were, no hint that they would be in custody anytime soon.

  As long as the Dosis were out there, the battle continued.

  FOUR

  In Villavicencio that evening, Manuel Perez shaved. With the help of heavy soap and cleaning solvents, he washed the gray dye out of his shaggy hair, and a local barber trimmed it. His hair regained its natural dark brown color.

  The assassin now looked twenty years younger th
an the old Argentine whom his neighbors had known in the Colombian capital. Before the mirror that night, a man of forty-one emerged, handsome, muscular, and striking. El Viejo Porteño had disappeared.

  Perez was happy this evening. Word came from Bogotá that both the justice minister and the driver-bodyguard had been killed in a sniper attack. Rebels connected with the cocaine traders were suspected.

  The minister and his bodyguard: two for one. Good news indeed. So Perez relaxed and breathed easier. While political murders were common in Colombia, this one had a particularly high profile. Perez reasoned — correctly — that the airport and even the bus terminals would be saturated with police and army. But he also knew that these things blow over quickly. Among friends and allies, he had good reason to spend the next few evenings in the sleazy bordellos of Villavicencio and celebrate. So he settled in, planning to remain for several days.

  FIVE

  Early the next morning, Alex arrived in the reception area of the New York law firm Silverman, Ashkenazy & DeLauro. After being summoned by a sleepy receptionist, Joshua Silverman greeted Alex personally.

  Silverman’s office was a vast space, twenty-five by twenty feet, with two plate-glass windows that looked northward onto Park Avenue toward the Graybar building and Grand Central. Thick pile carpeting covered the floor, and there were several leather chairs and a matching sofa. The walls were done in Asian art, Chinese mostly, which seemed contemporary and for which Silverman had probably paid a good price.

  The dark green walls gave the cherry legal cabinets some pizzazz, while antique Tiffany lamps dotted the end tables. Silverman’s desk, which dominated the chamber, was the size of a small Buick. It was dark and expansive and featured inlays of cherry and mahogany. Lion heads were carved on the legs.

  “May we get you some coffee? Water?” Silverman asked.