Hunting for Caracas

by Anthony Fox

Charlie had enjoyed a lazy morning and only got out of bed an hour before.

  Assia was incapable of lounging in bed these days; another change from her school years. She’d got up early and eaten, run, done a pull-up and press-up workout, read six chapters of her book, and learned how to make a paper swan by using Youtube.

  ‘Well, it’s not like you have work today, and we are on holiday. Don’t look at me like that, you know how long I’ve waited for this.’

  Charlie grimaced with resignation. ‘Two big beers, thank you.’

  The good thing about Charlie was that once he eventually got out of bed, he was a pretty easygoing, active guy. Later in the trip he’d promised Assia they could go in the woods to camp and he’d show her how to build a tent out of branches and trees. Skills Charlie had acquired from a mountaineering father.

  ‘Do you still want the orange juice and water?’ The waitress asked.

  ‘Yeah, may as well bring the lot,’ he sighed.

  The waitress smiled and moved off in a swirl of purple hair.

  ‘You love to bring me down with you, don’t you?’

  Assia smiled in victory. ‘I’ve got a feeling today’s going to be another good day.’

  7

  Innsbruck, Austria.

  Connelly arrived on the flight from Spain with Nina a few hours later and reunited with the team.

  Hotel’s a bit of a dump. But I guess it’ll serve its purpose fine.

  Up to a hundred people a day passing in and out meant faces would be rarely recognised and easily forgotten.

  In Matthews’ room Kemi explained that every second of footage from the cameras at the airport was being recorded and the laptop held enough storage space for just shy of seventy-two hours. After that they could always back it up on to a memory stick and begin recording over.

  Connelly was hoping seventy-two hours would be more than long enough.

  Apparently the other three watched Connelly and Nina’s arrival through the cameras to test the setup, and were able to spot them instantly and follow them as they left the airport together.

  Connelly’s first question was whether Kemi was any further with the line of code found on McAuley’s hard drive.

  Two numbers, three letters, followed by another seven numbers.

  The sequence apparently random.

  Kemi said she had nothing so far.

  Connelly then switched back to the task in hand. He suggested each person take it in turns to do a four-hour watch. Kemi, who’d taken the first watch, handed over to Paxman and the waiting began.

  After months of chasing, was Luque about to walk straight into their trap?

  Connelly felt the fact that Luque managed to keep himself hidden from the authorities all this time was nothing short of a magic trick. This was even more the case because Luque was certainly in the minority when it came to his physical appearance, with few other people like him in everyday life. Or it should be said there were few people as big as him. Luque was six feet eight inches tall and a hundred and fifteen kilos of solid muscle, with a bald head and hands as big as shovels. If he landed here, they were certain to spot him.

  8

  The five members of Operation Matterhorn only had to wait until the next day for Luque’s arrival – and it was Nina Arrow who missed him.

  Matthews thought four hours was far too long a shift for a person with little experience in observation. Real observation.

  We should have kept it simple. One-hour shifts; nice, easy, short.

  Phil Connelly and Bob Paxman were former black ops men. They’d spent many evenings down in the dirt over the years, hour after hour, just watching, waiting, training the mind like you would train any muscle in your body. Even Kemi, the computer expert, would be no stranger to a fourteen-hour stint behind the keyboard, working her way through endless lines of digital information. Nina seemed the least experienced in the field, to judge from what she’d told them.

  Matthews’ past was far darker than any of the team could know. In his previous years he’d learned the true nature of patience, of concentration.

  Early on the morning of the third day, at 2.27am, Matthews sat with earphones, listening to his iPod with a bottle of still water, in black shorts, a grey long-sleeved gym top and bare feet – and then he saw it. The airport was now closed. No private flights were scheduled to land. Matthews was flicking through a recording of the previous day’s footage from the commercial arrivals hall.

  A flicker on the recording suddenly made him reach out and hit the pause button. He pulled the earphones out and tossed his iPod onto the bed. He was watching at five times the normal speed so that he could compress twenty hours of footage from when the airport was open into the four hours when the airport was closed.

  The image jumped forward a few frames before he could hit the pause button. At first it was nothing more than a hint of something, a suspicion, perhaps just a feeling, as likely to be his own mind playing tricks on him as anything concrete.

  Matthews played the section of tape again. It only lasted eleven seconds. He watched in absolute silence, his breathing gentle, his body still as stone. Only he could hear the rhythmic elation of his own heartbeat, drumming in his ears. He paused the recording and sat back on the bed with his left hand covering his mouth.

  Eleven seconds.

  How easy is that to miss in a four-hour shift?

  He watched it again as his left hand drifted from his mouth around to the long scar on his neck. He started to rub his fingers along where the healed skin puckered up from the rest. He must keep himself level, yet he couldn’t shake the shadow of Rudy. His mentor. The man that saved his life as a child, taught him everything he knew, and who’d been brutally murdered.

  He considered what he’d just watched.

  Oh boy, Luque was good.

  Matthews rose from the bed and left the room.

  ‘You missed him,’ he said in a harsh whisper as Nina rubbed her eyes open.

  ‘What? What time is it?’ she asked, standing in the doorway to her room.

  ‘This afternoon. You missed him.’ Matthews’ tone wasn’t aggressive. He was more disappointed at an opportunity missed than any feeling towards Nina herself.

  Kemi arrived in the doorway, looking far more alert than her roommate.

  ‘What’s up?’

  Matthews faced her. ‘He’s here. He left the airport this afternoon. Quick, wake the other two.’

  Kemi reinforced her alert appearance by taking in his words, immediately moving past him to Connelly and Paxman’s room, and knocking on the door.

  ‘OK. Watch closely,’ instructed Matthews once they were together and gathered around the screen. He hit the play button.

  ‘What? I don’t see anything,’ said Nina when the eleven seconds were up. Without waiting for anyone else to answer Matthews rewound the tape and played it back again.

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ Nina said after it had run through a second time.

  Matthews replayed the tape one last time and walked them all through it. To hide Luque’s enormous size as best he could the arms dealer arrived in a wheelchair being pushed by an airport employee. Two woman walking out into the bus queue obscured his arrival from anybody watching outside the airport, and he could only be picked up by the camera at the last moment as the women broke off to join the queue. Luque was wheeled to the camera’s right to where a cab was waiting and he quickly left his wheelchair and, stooping as much as he could, opened the rear right door of the cab and vanished inside.

  ‘Then what’re we saying,’ Paxman asked after a moments reflective silence, ‘that Luque knows we’re watching him?’

  ‘Wouldn’t think that. I mean, how could he?’ Connelly said.

  ‘The accountant?’ Nina asked.

  ‘No chance, the break-in was clean.’

  ‘Why else would Luque arrive like this?’ asked Paxman.

  ‘No,’ interjected Matthews. ‘He’s not on to us. Otherwise he wouldn’t come here.’


  ‘Maybe he absolutely has to come to Austria?’ Paxman suggested.

  ‘Other ways into Austria,’ said Matthews. ‘Even other ways into Innsbruck. But this is by far the easiest.’ Matthews shifted his weight and rubbed his fingers, his enthusiasm subsiding, suddenly feeling awkward at addressing the whole group.

  To his relief, Connelly took up the dialogue. ‘Luque is wanted in several countries; it only seems right he’d take these types of precautions. How else d’you expect him to remain free? No, he ain’t on to us, but he did take a big risk in coming here. Which means he’s a very important reason, and we’ve got to find out what that reason is.’

  Paxman looked to Matthews as if he was slowly being persuaded. Kemi was keeping quiet as she always did when the team weren’t discussing anything technological. She seemed to quite firmly consider this their area of expertise, and not hers. The truth was Matthews didn’t care if anybody agreed with him. He was focused purely on the fact he’d finally pinpointed Luque’s location. But they were twelve hours behind him now. So Matthews was glad to see Connelly stepped forward and quickly took up the lead, so he wouldn’t have to.

  He stood and addressed the team.

  ‘Important thing right now is first off we all agree the person on the recording is Luque. Agreed?’

  They all agreed it was Luque.

  ‘He’s alone,’ observed Nina. ‘I mean, the guy used to be El Patron of an empire and now he’s travelling around alone.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why he hasn’t been caught?’ Kemi suggested. ‘Everyone’s been looking for a man cruising on private jets surrounded by bodyguards and an entourage.’

  ‘Just because he arrived alone, we shouldn’t assume he is alone,’ added Paxman.

  Matthews saw Connelly check his watch. ‘OK, that recording was made at 14.17 and the time is now 02.41. Gives Luque over twelve hours on us. We need to find that cab. I didn’t see if we could get a licence plate off the recording so, Kemi, that’s job number one. Also try and get a clear shot of the driver. Pull off the clearest shot you can get of Luque and we’ll send it to the White Wolf. There’s not much else we can do until the airport opens at five so why don’t the rest of us try and get a little more sleep and then shower, change and meet back in this room, ready to rock?’

  With that Paxman and Connelly went back to their rooms. Kemi quickly checked her decryption program to see if it’d made any progress on the accountant’s code – it hadn’t – then set to work trying to bring up the licence plate from the tape. Nina stayed to assist. Matthews, as this was his room, gave them space to work and sat back against the bed’s headboard. He reached over and took his iPod from where he’d thrown it on the bed earlier. He caught the glances from the two woman as Matthews put the earphones in. They probably thought he was obsessed with music, seeing how much he listened to the iPod.

  But all he could think about was Rudy.

  He just pressed play and closed his eyes.

  9

  Unable to sleep, Paxman sat at the desk in his room and again flicked through the complete file on one Alexis Luque Sanchez Pedro, or Luque as he was known. Thick and full of heavy detail, official wording and detailed analysis, the file was accompanied by a second one that was much thinner, and acted as an easy-to-read summation of the thicker file.

  The summary began with Luque’s birth in Venezuela, South America. He was raised in the small town of Maracay by his uncle, a notorious pimp and drug dealer. Luque joined his uncle when he was just four months old after his parents were gunned down in front of him.

  He was raised by his uncle along with another cousin of the same age, a boy named Cassio, reputedly with an even darker and more twisted past than Luque.

  Many in the local religious community reported that the boys were cruel and calculating far beyond their years. As Luque and the cousin grew, despite Luque’s superior size and strength, it seemed Cassio developed as the alpha male of the two. He led them to street violence and run-ins with local gangs. Then suddenly one day, when the boys were fourteen, Luque’s abusive uncle was found dead in his sleep and the cousin vanished, never to be seen again. Paxman knew the last news of Cassio came a few years later. He’d joined the French Foreign Legion and been killed by his own men whilst hiking in the Aures mountains in Algeria. After the uncle’s death Luque was taken in by the corrupt local church, to be educated there until he came of age.

  Luque’s first official involvement in the illegal arms trade was report in the file as early as 1991, at the tail end of the first Persian Gulf war. Since then Luque was not only listed by government agencies as an associate of the all-conquering Jean Papin-Blanc, he was referred to as his protégé.

  Initially Luque was hired as part of a private security team working out of Kuwait. It was widely known that the security team’s real mandate was kidnapping and torture. The then young Venezuelan man named Luque came to the fore, as he was regularly used when the outfit wanted to send a particularly strong message to their rivals.

  A person would simply vanish from the streets, only for their body to reappear a day or two later, murdered. Their skulls fractured. At first, speculation bounced around that the offenders were using a vice or dropping a heavy object on the victims. Then rumours quickly circulated that the astounding, true cause was nothing more than a pair of enormous hands belonging to the giant Venezuelan.

  With this Luque gained a fearsome reputation and was swiftly moved to Iraq and promoted to become Blanc’s own personal bodyguard. In his new role Luque was placed in a unique position to learn all that was involved in the running of Blanc’s empire.

  It was quoted in the file by other members of the entourage, later arrested, that Blanc seemed to take an instant liking to Luque, which was unusual for a man who exuded mistrust and had few, if any, friends.

  ‘Sentimentality is the biggest of all weaknesses,’ was Blanc’s favourite phrase.

  As befits a personal guard, Luque was with Blanc at all times during his spell in Baghdad, sleeping in the room next to his boss at the Grand Hotel where Blanc spent the majority of the Gulf War, and from where he almost single-handedly ran the arms trade in Iraq. Luque accompanied Blanc to all his meetings. There he could observe and would later question his boss on the finer points of the industry.

  And it stayed that way for years. Luque watching and listening and learning.

  Jean-Papin Blanc was captured in 2003, which coincided with the launch of a joint invasion of USA and UK forces into Iraq. The Iraq War landed in Luque’s lap like a giant birthday present with a big red bow around it. Free from the constraints of Jean-Papin Blanc, who later that year would be assassinated in his cell, Luque was able to break out and after spending the last twelve years building connections and learning everything Blanc knew, he soon set up on his own and the money started to flow.

  In 2009 Luque became so notorious an article was written about him in The Times, entitled ‘Hunting the World’s Most Wanted Weapons Trafficker’. The journalist wrote about the rapid rise to power of a South American named Alexis Luque Sanchez Pedro. Rumour has it the heat that came from this article is what finally lead to Luque leaving the Middle East and going underground later that year, taking with him a huge personal fortune. The trouble the newspaper is said to have caused various government agencies by printing the piece is another story.

  Throughout his life Luque managed to transition seamlessly from being a muscleman to a businessman to being El Patron and running his own empire. It is speculated that at one time as many as two thousand people were on his payroll across the Middle East, Europe and South, Central and North America. Then all of a sudden he just upped and vanished.

  Known to have filtered money through the tax havens of Switzerland and more recently Monaco, the latter also being his last known place of residence up until 2015, Luque hasn’t been sighted since. There were no recent reports of his activities in the Middle East and no photographs surfaced. It seemed he’d left his empire
behind.

  Turning his back on his illegal empire also resulted in Luque’s most-wanted status fading down an ever-revolving list. New, more active criminals took precedence, and after more and more investigators failed to locate the former ruler of the arms trafficking underworld, it was as if they stopped caring.

  Then one day three months ago a man known as the White Wolf put a team of five strangers together, completely out of the blue, with the sole purpose of hunting down and capturing Luque.

  Until the recent sighting at Innsbruck airport, his official whereabouts had remained completely unknown.

  10

  Zurich, Switzerland.

  ‘So how long have you two been together?’

  ‘We aren’t a couple,’ replied Assia.

  ‘Oh, sorry.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Assia, be nice,’ Charlie said softly next to her. He spoke in a playful manner, which made the Irish couple opposite smile.

  As everyone else around the table remained silent, Charlie started them off.

  ‘After school Assia travelled in Thailand for a year before going back to England a few months ago.’

  Assia didn’t need to glare at Charlie to stop him from revealing any more details about Thailand. He knew it was something never to be talked about.

  Everyone was now looking at her around the table in the hostel’s communal kitchen, including Charlie.

  Assia sighed. ‘I moved in with my brother after Thailand, but still wanted to travel. Charlie was interested as the restaurant he’d worked in closed down, and I’d been given some money from my parents…’

  Theresa, a Canadian who’d been staying in the hostel for two weeks, interrupted. ‘Don’t your parents miss you, being away all the time?’

  Assia glared at her. But she remembered Charlie’s words:

  Be nice!

  ‘Not really. We, me and my brother, aren’t that close with our parents.’