by Peter Nealen
“Not a big town,” Jim said as he scrutinized the map. “River along one edge; that might actually be our best approach, provided there ain’t no piranhas in it. Hopefully the locals will consider it an obstacle and keep security light on that side. Any idea where she stays in town?”
I shook my head. “Not part of the information we got. And yes, that’s a problem. We’re going to have to do some serious reconnaissance to figure out where to hit.”
“Which is going to be a stone bitch in small town Honduras,” Eric said. “Even if we weren’t a bunch of gringos with one black dude, just being newcomers would make us stand out like a turd in a punchbowl.”
Jim was still studying the map and photos as he spoke. “That was probably the plan. The whole town is her early-warning system.”
“So, how do we proceed?” Larry asked, looming at the back of the circle.
I grinned humorlessly. “We find somebody who knows all the details about Señora Olivarez, and has reason to want to see her taken down. By any means necessary.”
Jim squinted at me. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
I nodded. “Sure does. We’ve got to find a bitter, disaffected cop who’s disaffected enough to give information to a bunch of gringo gunfighters who are in his country illegally.”
There were about half a dozen groans. We’d worked with local dissidents and militia forces in Iraq, but finding and working a source was not something any of us were necessarily well-versed in. The only members of the company who were would be Haas and some of his cronies, but Haas had been Middle East focused his entire career; he had no contacts down here. Besides which, he was still in Iraqi Kurdistan. Raoul was better set up, but he’d admitted up-front that his contacts pretty much stopped in Guatemala.
“Settle down, boys,” Mia said as she walked over to join us. The air seemed to change as she approached. It’s hard to describe. It was like at one and the same time everybody was standing a little straighter, trying to look cool and manly, while at the same time bristling at her intrusion. Like I said, the effect she had by her very presence was weird, as hard as she tried to be just another professional, and as hard as we tried to keep her from distracting us. “I’ve got a lead. And I’ll be following up on it before you guys even get close. I’ll have your contact and most of the information sucked out of him in a few days.”
“That easy?” I asked skeptically. Nothing is ever that easy.
“Well, nothing is ever that easy,” she said, echoing what I hadn’t said. “The easy part is having enough Hondurans in the United States who still have family back at home, including some who happen to be on the Honduran anti-narcotics police. It’s actually not that hard to find one with a relative who happens to be a pissed-off anti-narcotics cop if you know where to look.”
“That actually sounds like quite a dragnet,” Larry said. “That doesn’t really sound ‘easy’ at all.”
“It’s easier than spending months or years in-country developing a source in the police,” she pointed out. “In this case, our boy is pissed off enough that he’s even started blogging about what bullshit it is that he can’t seem to go after the big boys, just the minor traffickers. He’s gone so far as to accuse everyone up to the President of collusion with the Zetas, has been disciplined by his unit at least three times, and is presently suspended. He’s still blogging; he’s accused his superiors of trying to shut down his site, but the cyber nerds say that there’s no evidence of anything going on aside from his Internet connection going down from time to time, which happens. The guy’s got a persecution complex a mile wide, from the sounds of it, and he’s extending his hate to his own government.”
“Sounds like a half a million kooks in the States,” Eddie said. “He also sounds kinda unstable. What makes you think we can trust his information?”
“We’re not going to be going off of his word alone,” she said. “And yes, he probably is unstable. We’ll have to verify his information, of course, but we have to do that with any source; there’s nothing unique about that. The point is, the information we’re after has nothing to do with his conspiracy theories about his government and the police. It’s going to be verifiable information about Olivarez’ movements and hideaways. We’ll probably get a lot of static along the way; I’m not expecting this guy to just get to the point. But he’s already publicly stated on more than one occasion that he thinks somebody should just go kill her, so I doubt he’s going to have a problem talking about what he knows about her.”
“That’s assuming he actually has any useful information, and isn’t just an armchair general spouting off about shit he knows fuck-all about,” I pointed out.
“Of course,” she said. “That’s always a risk. But we can sit here and talk over how he might be a dead end, or I can get going and find out if he really is a useful source or not. We’re wasting time. I just wanted to make sure you guys were read in.”
I bristled a little at that, though there wasn’t really any good reason to do so. She was right. If she genuinely had a source that could get us closer to Olivarez without risking compromise in an urban OP in the middle of a Honduran village, so much the better. It would save time and remove one more major point of failure on the entire operation.
“Where is this guy?” Ben asked.
“Tegucigalpa,” she replied. “Until his suspension, he was part of the police special forces, and was working out of the capitol. Now he’s staying in his apartment, except when he goes to a nearby café to update his blog. That’s where I’m going to meet him.”
“Do you need backup?” Ben asked.
She smiled. “I’m a big girl, Ben; I can take care of myself. Besides, I can blend in in Tegucigalpa better than you can.”
“There are black people in Honduras,” he protested.
“Yeah,” I said, “but they aren’t ‘Carlton’ black people.”
“Oh, come on, man,” he started, but got shouted down gleefully.
“Just own it, dude,” Derek said. “You are ‘The Whitest Black Man.’”
“Fuck all you guys,” Ben said finally. The jeering laughter only got louder. You’ve got to have a thick skin in this business.
Mia just shook her head and smiled, before turning away to leave. She had her mission. I turned my attention back to the maps. We had to prepare for ours. Regardless of where Olivarez’ hole turned out to be, familiarizing ourselves with the layout of the town and the routes in and out was going to be time well spent.
As we turned back to the planning Eric said, “I’m starting to like this ‘invading sovereign countries’ gig.”
Of course, our oft-repeated prediction came true. Nothing ever goes according to plan, and when you’re relying on a potentially unstable personality for your information, things are definitely going to go sideways at some point. Mia’s disgruntled cop was no exception. In fact, he was a fucking poster child for the phenomenon.
“He wants to know more about what we’re going to do with the information,” Mia told me over the sat phone. She sounded tired and frustrated. “In fact, he’s not talking unless he’s convinced that talking is going to mean Olivarez winds up dead or in a deep, dark hole. He says he’s tired of people like us leading him along, that he’s been wasting his time, and unless we can prove to him that we’re different from the cops and politicians who have assured him over and over that they’re doing everything they can, he won’t give me the time of day.”
“So convince him,” I said.
“You think I haven’t tried, Jeff?” she demanded. “I’ve been talking at this asshole for probably about fifteen hours over the last five days. He’s more stubborn than you are.”
I blew out a breath. “What does he want in the way of proof?”
She hesitated. This wasn’t going to be good. I could almost see her wince when she finally spoke. “He hasn’t said as much, but I get the impression that he wants to come along on the op.”
“Oh, fuck no,” I said i
mmediately. “Not in a million fucking years. This isn’t fucking Task Force; we do not have the manpower to spare to babysit a source on target.”
“Well, we’ve got to do something to earn his trust to get the information,” she said, exasperated. “And I can see the glint in your eye even over the phone, Jeff. No, we are not rolling him up and breaking his fingers until he gives up what he knows about Olivarez. He’s a source, not a target.”
I grimaced. My dark side might have briefly suggested the idea, but I’d seen too many innocent people hurt or killed to want to go that far. If he was dirty, I’d be more inclined to cross the line, but there wasn’t any indication that he was. “I said no such thing, and you can’t prove I thought it,” I said.
She sighed unhappily. “There are a few other ways that I might get him to let his guard down if he was a normal guy,” she said, “but he’s really paranoid. He’s going to consider any of it an attempt to suborn him in order to discredit what he's been saying.”
“Is this just a wild goose chase?” I asked. “If this guy really is just a Honduran Alex Jones, how reliable is his information really going to be? Can he really lead us to Olivarez, or does he have an entire basement full of newspaper clippings with bits of red yarn making connections that he’s been told about by the voices in his head?”
“He’s not that crazy,” she said. “He’s got a persecution complex, yeah, and he tends to see helplessness as collusion. Think of him like one of the Facebook pundits back in the States yelling constantly about ‘somebody should do something!’ He’s one of the perpetually outraged, and when he’s got a chance to actually put his money where his mouth is, he’s not sure it isn’t a trap.”
“So, aside from bringing him along as a strap-hanger, which is not going to happen, how can we get this guy to open up?” I asked.
She hesitated again. Damn it. “I think if you and Raoul came to meet him, you might be able to help convince him we’re serious,” she said.
“Where?”
“Here in Tegucigalpa,” she said. “It’s pretty permissive at the moment; you shouldn’t have any trouble. Low-profile, of course; you should look as non-threatening as possible. I’m not talking about giving him any operational details, but you might be able to present yourself as a member of a top-secret task force a little better than I can; he doesn’t have a terribly high opinion of women, I’m afraid. If he genuinely thinks that this time is going to be different, he might just open up.”
I thought about it for a moment. Tegucigalpa wasn’t familiar ground, but it would put us closer to the target than Managua. “We’ll need some groundwork done first,” I said. “Safehouses, fallback points.”
“I can get you a small initial safehouse,” she said. “It’s actually where I’m staying; a small rental house in Colonia Loarque. I can get you the directions. Bring a couple others with you as advance party, and they can start laying more groundwork while we meet with the contact. Like I said, it’s pretty permissive. They should be able to rent a couple of houses as tourists.”
It took a moment to think over. It was sound, except for one point. “How tight are they about visas there?”
“Not very,” she said. “As long as they’ve got passports, they’ll be fine. Visas aren’t required, at least for Americans.”
We all had passports—several each, in fact. None of the ones we were carrying had our real names on them, either.
“All right,” I said, after another moment’s consideration. “Give us a couple days; I’ll be up there with Raoul and a small advance party.”
“Looking forward to it,” she said, a note of relief in her voice that I’d agreed. “I’ll let our contact know, and I’ll see you soon.”
It didn’t take a couple of days; by sundown the next day, Raoul, Derek, Eric, and I were approaching Tegucigalpa from the southeast, weaving through the pine-clad hills in a green Nissan that we’d bought for a pittance from a Nicaraguan dealer. I didn’t want to cross into Honduras through a border checkpoint with one of the vehicles we’d gotten from the crooked cop in Managua. I was probably being overcautious, but it didn’t pay to take chances this far out in the wind. The rest of the teams would be coming in surreptitiously, thanks to the contract helicopter company out of Belize that Renton had gotten two Mi-8s from, after I’d leaned on him. I hadn’t seen the birds, but the message I got over the satellite link as we passed through Danli didn’t sound like Eddie was all that impressed. As long as they flew, though, we’d use them, at least until the Frontier Rose got up to us with our company birds. Even if something went wrong, old, run-down Russian birds with Belizean pilots provided one more layer of deniability between us and Renton’s Network. Granted, that didn’t do us a damned bit of good if we augured in, but that was the game.
I had kind of expected Tegucigalpa to be nestled in jungle, like Managua, but it was a lot more like Southern California. The city was sprawled across a high valley, surrounded by pine and fir-clad hills. It was hot and dry, with plenty of yucca and a few palm trees among the evergreens.
We didn’t have to go through the city center to get to Mia’s safehouse; Colonia Loarque was on the southern edge, and we were able to mostly skirt around the city to get to it. For the most part, what I saw was a lot more modern and affluent than Managua had seemed. The roads were decent, the buildings were pretty well kept up, and there was a fair bit of landscaping in the residential and industrial parts of town. The architecture, at least where we were going, was fairly modern, with a lot of brightly-painted plaster and red Spanish tile roofs. The only thing that kind of said “Third World” was the often enormous tangle of power and telephone lines weighing down the poles.
The houses were tightly packed together in Loarque; I don’t think they knew what a yard was. There were small, landscaped courtyards in front of the buildings, but that was about it. It made it all too easy to drive right past the blue-and-white house that Mia had described to us. We had to loop around before parking there. I dialed Mia’s sat phone.
“We’re out front,” I said when she answered.
“Come on in,” she replied. “The door’s open.” While the satellite phones were supposed to be secure, we’d still worked out a set of bona fides, so that we could be sure that everything was kosher on both sides. If she’d said, “I’ll meet you at the door,” then she wasn’t alone, and we had to be prepared to bust her out. I checked that my HiPower was secure inside my waistband anyway. We’d hidden the pistols when we’d crossed the border at Los Manos, though it had ultimately been unnecessary—we hadn’t been searched. But I wasn’t willing to go anywhere unarmed that I didn’t have to, and Eric and Derek were of the same mind. Raoul kept his own counsel, but had a Glock 19 on his person anyway.
Mia did meet us at the door, her blouse pulled up to expose the grip of her S&W Shield. She was being careful, positive ID or not. “Any news?” I asked, as the rest of us came inside and she closed the door.
She shook her head. “As soon as you messaged me that you’d hit town, I got in touch with Angel, and the meeting’s still on. But there hasn’t been a peep from him otherwise.”
“Did he sound like he was getting cold feet?” I asked.
“No, he’s just as cautious and standoffish as ever, that’s all.” She led the way into the common area. The house was a nice one, with tile floors, white-painted walls, and wood accents. It would have cost a lot to rent back in the States, even then, but she’d rented it for a song. As bad off as the US was, Honduras was still poorer.
There were several rental property fliers in Spanish and English laid on the kitchen table. “These are mostly tourist properties,” she admitted, “but they’re some of the most readily available, particularly on short notice. With some care, it should be possible to move in and out of them, even with your gear, relatively unnoticed.”
Derek picked up one of the fliers and thumbed through it. “These are probably going to end up being the most high-class safehouses we’ve ever
been in,” he commented. “Living in style down here!”
“When is the meet?” I asked Mia.
“This evening, at Criollos,” she said. “It’s a restaurant over by the airport. You’ve got time to shower and change; I know it was a long drive here from Managua.”
I just nodded, grabbed my go bag, and headed for what I took to be the bedrooms. It was a living room instead, and Mia pointed me toward the bedrooms, in the other direction, with a smile. I just scowled and went to get cleaned up.
Criollos was a nice place, and we were led to a table on the open-air balcony. Mia was wearing jeans and a white blouse, that fell just right to conceal her appendix-carry Shield, while I was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, with my HiPower in the small of my back. Raoul had settled on slacks and a polo shirt.
Mia had grabbed my arm as we got out of the car in front of the restaurant. Apparently we were back to that cover again; either that or she was just trying to tweak me. We walked inside arm-in-arm and stayed that way until we approached the table where Angel Alvarado was waiting for us.
Alvarado was short, skinny, and dark, with an intense, almost feverish, look on his face. As we approached the table, Mia took her hand off my arm, and became the cold professional again. She and I sat down across from Alvarado, while Raoul took the end of the table. It wasn’t an ideal position; Alvarado was the only one with a direct line of sight to the entrance, at least until I turned my chair sideways, sitting with my back to the low wall around the balcony, facing most of the rest of the restaurant proper. I made a show of slouching, but by the flicker in Alvarado’s expression, I could tell that he’d noticed.
“Thank you for meeting us again, Angel,” Mia said in English.
“I still have some hope that you are sincere, and not simply wasting my time,” Alvarado said. He was a blunt motherfucker, that was for sure. “These are the men you told me about?”