The Cain File

by Max Tomlinson

  One more smash and she was finally clear. Gunning the engine, still turned in her seat, she reversed with alacrity down the row of parked cars.

  The attendant sprang up, came sprinting for her car, shouting.

  She swung the car around in a tight reverse churn, bolted forward, headed for the daylight of the exit.

  A barrier arm on the exit booth blocked the way between her and the street behind the hotel. Maggie stomped the gas pedal. The barrier snapped over the windshield and clattered off behind her. The attendant shouted colorful curses. In the rearview mirror, she saw him, still after her. She jammed the car into second, bumped over a curb, fishtailed out of the hotel, swerving around an Indian family pushing a cart full of melons. She whipped past cars in a direction she’d committed to memory on her way to the hotel, taking a right practically on two wheels. A park lay on the left, the hotel opposite. The Pan-American Highway, which cut through the center of the capital, lay ahead. She shifted into third, swerved around a groaning bus listing to one side, straight into oncoming traffic.

  Horns blared.

  Maggie yanked the car back into the appropriate lane.

  Snaking through traffic, she caught E35—the Pan American Highway—bouncing the little Ford onto the onramp and heading south. Lanes weren’t empty but it was manageable. She stayed to the right where she could exit quickly if need be.

  Lima, Peru: only twenty-fours away. With a pesky little border stop in the middle. She’d figure that out.

  Suddenly, the howl of a siren floated up behind her. Then: a flashing yellow beacon filled the rearview mirror. A white-and-green pickup closing in.

  The tombos. Ed had told her to stay off the highway. But what choice did she have? She jerked the wheel right, pulling off onto the shoulder abruptly, speeding past queued up traffic waiting to get onto the highway.

  The police pickup did the same.

  She banged the car off the shoulder, onto trash-strewn grass, over a curb, thumping the roof of the car with the top of her head, into a rough street jammed full of traffic. She was in a part of town the tourists never saw: cheap ad-hoc construction, ceramic-brick and cinderblock storefronts, garish hand-painted signs. And people everywhere.

  The truck was tight behind her, siren wailing, having negotiated the off-road jaunt better than she with its four-wheel capabilities. A crew cab, multiple occupants. Maggie charged into a log-jammed intersection, horns shrieking all around. At the last possible moment before a collision, she veered around a truck laden down with lumber, leaving the larger police truck stuck in traffic. She shifted down and buzzed up a side road into the hills surrounding Quito. Engine screaming, chickens squawked as they flew aside, on road now made of dirt. Older buildings changed to shacks and shanties. Kids playing. Dogs. She didn’t want to hit one. At the top of a hill, she swung around a corner into a vacant lot where a group of preteen boys were kicking around a soccer ball.

  The ball whacked against the windshield, making Maggie jump, and causing much merriment with the boys.

  “Can you boys park that for me, please? I’ll be right back.” Grabbing the laptop bundle, she leapt from the Ford, left the door open, the engine humming. With any luck, someone would take off with the vehicle and divert the tombos. Maggie raced across the lot, computer swinging in the blanket. Across a narrow dirt street, and a patch of ground to where the ragged neighborhood ended and the steep slopes of the Andes began.

  -5-

  “Very nice, señorita,” the portly woman with a tape measure dangling around her neck said. “Very nice.”

  Maggie admired her new dark purple fedora in the smudged mirror hanging off the stall in the busy street market. Along with the black-leather bomber jacket that was as soft as chamois, she had to admit she looked muy chido. Very cool. She handed over a small wad of dollars. There was no time for haggling and besides, Ulfric could afford it.

  “How far to the bus terminal?” Maggie asked the stall assistant.

  A kilometer. Maybe one and a half.

  Then she was back with la gente—the people—walking through the busy streets on market day, to Quitumbe Bus Terminal with her laptop in a proper shoulder bag now, which also contained a new toothbrush, hair brush, even a clean pair of underwear. The barf blanket had been relegated to the trash, along with Ulfric’s phone. As she strolled, she bought a pair of dark sunglasses and a salchipapas—french fries with a butterflied hot dog on top, onion, and special salsa—from a street vendor, which disappeared in no time. It had been hours—well over a day—since she had last eaten.

  She stopped at an outdoor ATM and withdrew three hundred dollars from Ulfric’s bank account using the pin he had given her. It would leave an electronic trail, but she needed as much cash as she could withdraw while he was still under the influence of the scopolamine and wouldn’t alert his bank.

  In Quitumbre, the airy modern bus terminal, she lined up to buy a bus ticket to Lima, Peru. They wanted a passport. She bought a ticket to Baños instead. Baños was high in the mountains of central Ecuador, near the active volcano Tungurahua. She also picked up tickets to a couple of small jungle towns on the border with Peru. She’d find a way to cross there. While she waited for her bus, she accessed another bank ATM inside the terminal and, under the watchful eye of an armed guard, took a two-hundred-dollar advance on one of Ulfric’s credit cards. She did the same with his American Express.

  She’d have to get rid of the cards, now that she’d exhausted the cash-advance limits.

  She bought a badly needed coffee at a stall and sipped the steaming brew on the way to a restroom, where she left Ulfric’s bankcards by the sink after she washed her hands. The cards would be gone in no time.

  Fedora tilted over her eyes, Maggie slept much of the way up to Baños, despite the blaring Sylvester Stallone movie dubbed in Spanish. She woke to see the jagged Andes twist around her with precarious turns of mountain road. Maggie was pulled back to her childhood, walking along roads just like these, barefoot with her mother, on the way to market, the two of them carrying dishes Mami had made and sliced democratically into even pieces in their dented pie pans, carefully draped with gay red-checked tea towels. The slices of meat pie sold out quickly, because Mami made the dough with cornmeal and lard and fresh butter and the diced beef was carefully trimmed and blended with olives and onions and red peppers. They’d share a bar of chocolate on the way home, sauntering back to their village, Mami rattling coins in a bunched-up tea towel to keep the rhythm as they sang mountain songs.

  Thinking of those days hurt so much sometimes.

  She never spoke of it, but Maggie loathed her father for leaving Mami. And her. She hadn’t talked to him since graduation, five years ago now, and then only barely, when he showed up at Stanford to her ceremony with his pretty, sensible, blonde wife with her freckled inoffensive nose, who probably slept in 600-thread-count sheets that some maid ironed, a maid who looked a lot like Mami, with her copper skin and thick mane of gleaming raven-colored hair and deep-set llama eyes, stopping conversations and turning heads as a matter of course. Father was with the U.S. State department in Ecuador when Maggie was young and Mami was his Indian mistress, and the reason he was sent back home. Not proper. And it wouldn’t have done for him to bring her back. Especially with a child he had spawned. Yes, he provided for them when Maggie was young—small random checks arriving now and then, and he did bring Maggie to the U.S. when Mami died of malaria, and put Maggie through school, but Maggie knew that was gringo guilt at work.

  She wondered if he would chat with the maid in his perfect Spanish, using all the slang to let her know just how much in the know he was. She imagined him flirting with her, maybe more, when his wife wasn’t around.

  Grief was the real reason Mami gave up the fight.

  In Baños’ bus station, a small facility with more dirt than asphalt, Maggie noticed a battered green dump truck with yellow Peruvian commercial plates, parked by a hole-in-the-wall eatery. The driver was an old soul, bad
ly in need of a shave and a comb, wearing sandals and baggy dungarees with his threadbare shirt hanging out, half-buttoned. Leaning against his rig, he scooped his way through a mess of menestra beans in a clear plastic container with a plastic spoon. His table manners left something to be desired but he looked friendly enough. The bleats and grunts of farm animals emanated from the back of his truck.

  “Hola,” Maggie said. “What’s all that racket? Sounds like goats.”

  “Goats it is, pretty one.” He shoveled more beans into his mouth, standing back to drip sauce on the gravel, missing his dusty toes.

  “My mami and I raised a goat or two. Taking them to market, are you?”

  “I am indeed.”

  “And where might that be?”

  “Tarapoto.”

  “Peru.”

  “The very same.” He licked the back of his spoon.

  Maggie got out her wad of money, peeled off enough twenty dollar bills to make him lose interest in his beans, then added a couple more, folded the stack in half, and strolled on over, giving him a sly grin.

  “I’m looking to go to Tarapoto myself,” she said.

  ~~~

  Just outside Hurango, inside Peru, past the border stop, the truck pulled over and Maggie climbed out of the back. Reeking of goat, she brushed herself off, clambered back up into the cab, the old driver grinning at her moxie. As suspected, the border guards hadn’t been the slightest bit interested in inspecting goats. She rolled the window down and the warm, moist, jungle air rushed in as the driver ground the rig up to cruising speed, which meant tolerable kidney jarring. The driver flipped on the radio, found a lively cumbia, bouncing accordion and Latin horns over thick African rhythms. It was an old one, played at all the weddings and family gatherings, about taking life as it comes. He started thumping the wheel in time and singing in a raspy voice and Maggie joined him on the second verse.

  ¡Oye!Abre tus ojos. . .

  They didn’t sound half bad singing together.

  In Tarapoto, Maggie scrabbled down from the cab, shifting her bag up on her shoulder. She tilted her fedora back and waved goodbye to her chatty driver.

  At a Movistar shop, she bought a new mobile and a SIM card. She had the clerk, a bookish boy with a serious frown, unlock the phone and replace the card.

  Anonymous. For a little while anyway.

  She rented a room in a cheap hotel, on the second floor, fired up the clattering laptop. Still some battery left. She emailed Ed the phone number. Another GPS ping alert popped up. She hit DENY, powered down. Who—or what—was trying to sniff her out?

  She took a badly needed shower, propping the phone up on the gurgling toilet tank so she could hear it in case it rang. By the time she was toweling off, it did.

  “Did you order a pizza?” She had the receiver cradled to her neck as she pulled on undies.

  “Is your husband home?” Ed said. Safe to talk?

  “Nope.” Yes, it was.

  “How’s your trip?”

  “A few miles from home.” Still a ways. “But I’m in the neighborhood.” She was in Peru.

  “When you get there, call.” Call the embassy when you arrive. Ed hung up. He kept the call short, even though she was supposedly in the clear.

  She thought about that nagging GPS ping again. Who? Or what? Human or digital? Even if it was a bot, a program, behind every automatic crawler was a person. Ed? No. If she couldn’t trust Ed, she couldn’t trust anyone. How about any one of those creatures at that so-called party?

  She ran a brush through her wet hair and finished getting dressed. Then she put her new jacket on, hat, got her laptop in a bag, checked out, walked down to the main drag. A line of beat-up taxis waited in front of a cinema. She strolled up and down and found the friendliest face.

  “Yes, missy?” He was a wiry-looking guy with a bit of a stoop. But he had a nice, dilapidated smile.

  “Do you know the way to Lima?” Maggie said.

  “Lima? You mean the capital? That Lima?”

  “Is there another one I don’t know about?”

  “No, but it’s a good twelve hours. And that’s without stopping.”

  “Will five hundred U.S. dollars get me there in ten?” It was over a month’s salary in this country.

  He cracked a wide grin, made lopsided by a missing tooth. “Only if you wear your seatbelt, missy.” The cabbie came around with alacrity and opened the door for her. “Only if you wear your seatbelt.”

  ~~~

  As the sun rose next morning, the taxi whirred up Avenida Encalada, a stark wide street below the hills in Lima that resembled an office park, its only saving grace being the tall palms swaying in the median of the road. The early light flattened on the U.S. Embassy, big and blunt, the size of a factory, with small square windows and topped with cement. She was finally here. Her driver was happy to get the seemingly never-ending stream of twenty-dollar bills. As soon as Maggie got out of the cab with her shoulder bag, the tall embassy door opened and a lean man in suit and sunglasses came jogging out, talking into a Bluetooth clipped to his ear.

  -6-

  “And what prompted the investigation in the first place?”

  Maggie took a deep breath and considered her response as she looked around the SCIF—Sensitive Compartmental Information Facility—a lead-lined conference room in the Agency’s San Francisco headquarters on Golden Gate Avenue. Two of the Agency higher-ups, flown in from D.C., sat at the far end of the long, polished, conference table, along with several local Agency executives. A woman with heavily sprayed hair, wearing a red polyester pantsuit that fit better ten pounds ago, typed meeting notes into a laptop. As if to complete the post mortem on the failed Quito operation, the more prominent U.S. presidents stared down impassively at Maggie from the walls in the despondency of fluorescent light.

  The man asking the question was Robert Houseman, deputy director of West Coast Operations, even though he was based in D.C. He wore a gray suit, white shirt, and dark blue striped tie, along with a severe glower. His distrust of the fledgling Forensic Accounting team Ed had forged was no secret; he saw it as a threat to his control. He brushed his thinning brown comb-over into place.

  Sitting next to Maggie was Ed, her boss, gulping from a twenty-ounce Starbucks cup. A brown splash already decorated his blue shirt, first thing in the morning. His wide yellow tie was loosened down his substantial neck and his brown-bear beard needed trimming. He looked like an unmade bed. But behind Ed’s horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes were sharp and focused.

  And he was the only one taking Maggie’s side.

  Straightening the mandarin collar of her royal-blue suit jacket, which matched her nail polish, Maggie said, “As I detailed in my initial report—over a year ago—I discovered suspicious payments into an offshore account belonging to a foreman at one of Five Fortunes’s exploration sites in northern Ecuador.”

  Houseman frowned. “And why were you focusing on the bank account of an employee of a foreign oil company in the first place?”

  “Because that employee was getting kickbacks from an American corporation,” Maggie said. “Five Fortunes received those funds directly from Commerce Oil, an American . . .”

  “Everyone knows what Commerce Oil is, Agent de la Cruz.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you on some kind of crusade? Against Commerce Oil?”

  Maggie glanced over at Ed. On the phone, before she’d left her apartment in the Mission this morning, Ed had instructed her to keep her comments to one of two options: yes or no.

  “I work on the accounting side,” she said. “I’m not concerned with what an American company actually does—until it breaks the law.” She looked around the room at the impassive faces.

  The next to speak was Eric Walder, director of the clandestine Field Operations, a slender man with frizzy hair. His face was cradled in one hand propped up on the arm of his swivel chair. He’d been taking everything in with half-lidded eyes. “Two men were killed,” he said in
a New York accent. “Two of our people wounded.”

  Maggie thought of Achic, out of the hospital now, thank God. John Rae had yet to surface. Two people had been killed: one guard and the mysterious driver Maggie had encountered. “I’m aware of that. One of the deaths was related to the fact that I was almost killed myself.” She was still coming to terms with that.

  “Yes, you were. And none of it was warranted.”

  Maggie folded her hands in front of her on the conference table and made a conscious decision to control her words. She was furious. But she was lucky to be alive. She’d spent the last three days getting back from South America. She was exhausted and her body hurt. “It was deemed justified when I first submitted my report, showing Five Fortunes, a Chinese company, to be a front for Commerce Oil and that political manipulation was taking place in Ecuador. The operation was approved by the Agency. Signed off, funded, and Field Ops-supported. And it wasn’t until the very last minute at the meeting with Beltran, Velox, and Li that I found out Ecuador’s National Vice Squad had been compromised. It looked like we were going to simply give away two million dollars. I just couldn’t see doing that. And I still haven’t been given an explanation—”

  “An explanation? You’re an employee of the Agency. You follow orders. And your orders were to continue with the transfer.”

  Ed was next to speak: “Sir, under the circumstances, it made sense for Agent de la Cruz to stall the transaction, as it was clear that Minister Beltran had gained prior knowledge of the sting and manipulated the police. His men drew weapons on our agents.”

  Walder stared at Ed. “It was your responsibility to make sure your agent did as she was told.”

  There was a pause. “Yes, sir,” Ed said.

  Maggie cleared her throat. “I take full responsibility for . . .”