by Ward Larsen
“As for the airplane,” he called out, “I can’t tell you what happened. The passengers must have been frightened. Perhaps they attacked poor Blas, our pilot. What more is there to say? It is a tragedy, but I told you from the beginning—there is always risk involved when one reaches for great things.”
“I know,” she said, “but I thought the risk was on our part. I never realized others would be put in harm’s way.”
He finished, but left the bathroom light on. Kristin heard his naked footsteps pad across the stone floor, then the mattress shifted as he sat on the bed behind her. “It is almost over. The money is on its way, and in a few hours everything will be done. Your father will have paid a steep price for abandoning you, and mine will have the means to better the lives of many Colombians, good people who the government has cast aside. Schools and clinics will be built, children will be saved.” His hand was on her again, this time finding a hip. “Soon you and I will be together again in Charlottesville, two poor college students attending class when we’re in the mood and making love when we’re not.”
She turned back and met his eyes directly. “How long will we keep it up before taking our share?”
Carlos shrugged. “Maybe we should graduate—a year, perhaps two. Long enough for everyone to forget these unfortunate troubles. Long enough for the trails to go cold. The money will wait for us, and one day we will go where we please, raise children, and teach them the right way to live.” He stood and pulled on his pants.
“What about my father—you don’t think he’ll pursue it? Won’t he try to find out who was behind my abduction?”
“Your father will soon be president, my love. He will have far more important things to do than to turn over old rocks in search of dangerous things. He of all people will keep our little adventure a secret.” Carlos reached down and kissed her on the forehead. “When this is done, it is done. It will be in everyone’s best interest to leave the past alone.”
“Won’t I be asked about what happened when I get back?”
“By who? The police are not involved, nor is the FBI.”
“The Secret Service? They lost a man in the line of duty—surely they’ll want to find out who was responsible for his death.”
“Their agent died in a plane crash. That will be the story, and if other ideas arise my father has sufficient connections in the Colombian government to make them disappear.”
“When can I meet your father?” she said.
“Today. He will come for the exchange.”
“What’s he like?”
“He is a bastard, but unlike your father he puts it to good use.”
“You said he helps people—I haven’t seen that. Most of the soldiers outside are younger than us, and they don’t strike me as very ideological. They act like thugs, smoking and drinking when Pablo isn’t there to slap them around.”
Carlos chuckled. “Pablo is my father’s sergeant. He is a real soldier who does what he must to keep the men in line.”
“He frightens me.”
“He is big and ugly, yes, but Pablo understands who is in command. He has fought at my father’s side for twenty years—I trust no one more.”
Kristin closed her eyes. Trust on her part was an increasingly open question. She looked at the scratched dresser where she had, days earlier, discovered a passport while searching for scissors. Carlos’ picture was inside, but the last name on the document was not Duran. So who was he really, this student-lover she thought she knew so well?
The fanciful plan they’d hatched over beer and wings in a Charlottesville pub bore little resemblance to what had played out. It had turned violent and dangerous. Innocent people had died, and she doubted very much that any of the ransom money would find its way to the underprivileged of the nearby villages, save perhaps for a handful of smiling barkeepers and prostitutes.
“What will I tell my mother?” she asked.
“Tell her the truth, that you were treated well.” He slapped her naked haunch and laughed, then pulled on his boots. “I have to go outside and check on things. My father will arrive soon.”
As he moved to the door, she said, “Carlos—there’s one thing I want.”
“What is it?”
“Let me see Jen Davis.”
His head slumped lower. “We have been over this,” he said, terseness in his voice. “It can only complicate things if you—”
“No,” she said, standing her ground, “I want to see her!”
In the dim light she saw a stony expression come over his face. An expression she had never seen before. “You will see her in the morning. After the money comes, she can go back to America with you if that’s what you want.”
“What about you?”
“I told you earlier—I must join my father’s little band of brothers when they vaporize into the jungle, but it won’t be for long. Only until things are safe. For now we must keep Jen isolated. The less she sees and knows, the better it is for everyone.”
“No, Carlos. I—”
“Enough!” he said harshly. Carlos took two strides toward her and spoke in a whisper, his words taking a slow cadence. “She should never have been part of this. I still don’t understand why you told her to claim your identity on the airplane.”
“I was frightened. I expected you to be there, and they’d just killed Thomas. I didn’t know any of those men, and everything happened so quickly.”
He heaved a sigh of exasperation. “All right, let’s put it behind us. But this is a problem of your creation. I will deal with it as I see fit.”
“If I hadn’t gotten Jen off that airplane she’d be dead.”
She saw a flicker of something in his eyes, but it dissipated quickly. She’d seen it once before, in Virginia, when the meth-head who lived above his apartment came to the door with a gun in the middle of the night and accused Carlos of stealing his stash. She’d sensed a menace in Carlos’ gaze that night, and gone quickly to call 911. While she was in a back room retrieving her phone, the situation had defused, ending uneventfully. Carlos assured her there was no need to call the police after all. And there wasn’t—not until two nights later when the addict’s drug-infused body was found on the concrete sidewalk beneath his fourth-floor balcony. It was the kind of accident that surprised no one, least of all the Charlottesville police whose detectives never so much as knocked on their door.
As she looked at him now, his features seemed to soften.
She said, “Jen will come with me tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
A kiss on her cheek, and Carlos disappeared.
She fell back and put her head on the pillow. Or so he said. She took a deep breath, sensing vestiges of his musky odor. A scent she had once savored now struck differently, activating new synapses.
Much had changed in eight months, since that day during Christmas break when her mother had confessed, divulging the identity of her father. It explained the new house in Raleigh, and the sudden lack of handwringing over out-of-state tuition. Her mother had made a deal with the devil, a binding agreement that would guarantee them a comfortable life. All we have to do is keep quiet. That had become her mother’s mantra. Kristin’s own response, however, had been very different.
Why doesn’t he want to see me?
That was the question she’d never been able to shake, ringing as loudly now as it had when she’d first put it to her mother on Christmas Eve. Her father had always been characterized by her mother as an irresponsible drifter, a romantic mistake named Carl whose last name she’d never known. That blank slate in Kristin’s mind, held lifelessly in place by a token name, had turned out to be something very different indeed—a man destined to be president of the United States. A man whose telegenic face was on the news every night, and whose eloquent words were quoted each day in the papers. A man featured on the cover of Time and Rolling Stone in the same month. A man whose campaign called their house asking for contributions.
All we have
to do is keep quiet. How could anyone be quiet in the face of such lies?
There were times Kristin wished it had been the drifter. A vagabond ne’er-do-well would have been far preferable to a man who knew full well of his daughter’s existence, yet who ignored her in the advancement of his own glory. Irresponsible she could understand. Ignoble she could not. She had cried herself to sleep time and again. It was some months later, when her fitful nights came to be spent aside the dashing young Colombian, that she sought solace in a wine-laden confession. She said nothing about who her father was—not then—but through welling tears Kristin explained her feelings of pain and abandonment.
Carlos had never been more caring or tender.
The next week he began asking questions. He took particular interest in the ever-present men who stood discreetly at the back of lecture halls, watchful and quiet. The following weekend, in the wake of a bleak sorority party and far too many margaritas, Kristin had told him who her father was. Carlos, thoughtful as ever, gave new insights, putting into words what she knew but had tried to ignore—that her mother’s new home and car were a payoff for silence, even a contract of sorts, allowing her father to cling forever to his desertion. For Kristin, the pain was excruciating, but her lover understood. A man who listened and, unlike her father, who was there when she needed him.
It was a night soon after that Carlos had made his own confession. His father was the leader of the Fuerzas Amazonas, a peasant militia fighting the Colombian government from the jungles. Carlos described his father as a tough but fair-minded man, a commander who had sent his only son to America for an education, quietly hoping he would return one day to carry on the struggle at his side. At the age of twenty, Carlos had but one desire—to escape the misery of war. Six years later, high on marijuana in a quiet and comfortable townhouse near the University of Virginia, the insurrectionist’s son confided that the only product of his education had been guilt, a sense that he had abandoned his family and people.
It was Kristin’s turn to comfort her soulmate, to arrest his shame and kiss his face. If there was any redemption in his years in America, a tearful Carlos had told her, it was that he had found her. More kisses were exchanged, and in the small hours of that morning, so many months ago, the young revolutionary had given rise to an idea.
An idea that had now gone terribly wrong.
THIRTY-SEVEN
No government organization on Earth, including those residing in Colombia, knows the jagged topography of the northern Andes as well as the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. The War on Drugs, advanced in earnest during the Reagan administration, had ushered in a new era in law enforcement, throwing the weight of the United States DOD, CIA, and State Department behind escalating drug interdiction efforts. High-tech surveillance, low-tech informants, and the aerial spraying of herbicides all became part of a master plan whose long-term results, when it came to supply-side interruption, were decidedly mixed. Less equivocal was the expertise gained by operators in the field.
While Jorgensen worked a computer, McBain gave Davis a briefing on the composition of Colombian rebel forces, some element of which would invariably prove to be their target.
“FARC used to pretty much own the jungle, everything south of Bogotá and east of Cali, which is the area we’re talking about. It began during the sixties, and at their high point they controlled roughly one third of Colombia. Over the last decade they’ve morphed. The government came down hard a few years back, and FARC went into decline. They’ve made a recent comeback in the form of small cells—pisa suaves, which translates to tread lightly. These are company-sized units, about thirty men each, and they move constantly. Of course, it’s not just FARC we have to consider. You’ve got your right-wing paramilitaries and fringe groups. They all make their living in roughly the same way—abductions, extortion, and acting as middlemen in the drug trade.”
“Do they actually grow coca?” Davis asked.
“Not enough manpower. They let the peasants run the farms, and do like any legitimate government—tax the grower, tax the guy who harvests the leaves, tax the guy who processes it into powder, and finally tax the drug lord who hauls the final product through their territory to reach the market.”
“Like we do with corn, but without the subsidies.”
“Pretty much,” said McBain. “Like most organized crime, these paramilitary groups have adopted a business plan based on multiple income streams, and kidnapping is high on the list. We’re usually talking about the wives and kids of prominent businessmen, though—nothing like the victim you’re trying to recover.”
“These company-sized units—do they operate independently?”
“These days, yeah, most do.”
“So if we can figure out which one is responsible, we’ll have a good idea of the size of the force we’re up against.”
McBain raised an eyebrow. “We?”
“Well … I’m just sayin’ …”
“Right. Let’s see if we can find them first.”
* * *
They worked through the night. Davis helped where he could, but mostly stayed out of the way. Just after sunrise he was dispatched on a mission to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts shop, which seemed more prevalent here than in Boston. Davis returned with an assorted dozen donuts in a box and a tray of coffee. With an order like that, he decided this particular DEA safe house was not intended for deep cover work.
“I count fourteen airstrips in the area we’ve identified,” said McBain, referring to a desktop computer display with exactly that many yellow circles. “A long time ago the big drug cartels were awash in cash. They flew in processing material and shipped out product using small twin-engine aircraft, so runways had to be cleared. Some were fairly long, because the guys in charge liked the convenience of flying in to visit their operations from villas in places like the Caymans and Panama.”
“When you’re grossing fifty million a month,” expanded Jorgensen, “who wants to live in a tent in the jungle?”
McBain picked up, “Over the years we’ve surveyed every grass and dirt clearing in the jungle that could support an airplane. These airstrips come and go—a new one will get bulldozed now and again, while others are abandoned and the jungle takes over. There are only two official airports in this region, one in Neiva and one in San José del Guaviare. Both have asphalt runways, and at least a minimal degree of government oversight.”
“No,” said Davis, using a wrist to wipe glazed sugar off his chin. “Rule those out. I saw the landing gear—that airplane definitely landed on a soft field.”
Jorgensen made the deletion on his keyboard, and two of the yellow circles disappeared. “How much runway would this jet have needed?” he asked.
“I’ve already talked to an engineer about some basic numbers. Landing is easy enough—the grass helps you stop. But our jet took off again, and that’s more limiting. Let’s say thirty-two hundred feet. That’s conservative, the real number is probably higher.”
Jorgensen did his magic and seven more circles disappeared. “Okay, we’re making some headway. We have five unimproved strips that are at least thirty-two hundred feet long.”
They all stared at the screen. It was a manageable number, but still too big.
“Where do we go from here?” McBain asked.
“Elevation? If any of these small strips are at high altitude there would be a performance penalty—jet engines put out less thrust when they run a mile above sea level.”
“One’s at six thousand feet.”
“Strike it,” said Davis.
Four circles stared back.
Davis lifted his coffee and took a long draw through the plastic lid. “Let’s draw a line. Take the last known position of the jet before air traffic control lost contact, then connect it to the crash.” Davis pointed to both spots on the map, and Jorgensen drew a magenta line from one to the other. Two circles touched the line. The other two lay over fifty miles east.
“Our
criteria are getting a little iffy,” said McBain.
“Yeah, I know,” replied Davis. “Fifty miles. The jet could easily have traveled that far in our time frame.”
Everyone was silent until Davis said, “No, I think we’re right. It’s one of these. We need a way to take a closer look.”
“What time is it?” McBain asked.
“Seven thirty,” answered Jorgensen.
The DEA agents exchanged a knowing look.
“What?” Davis asked.
“You’re gonna like this,” said Jorgensen. “We have a drone that operates from a remote pad near Cali. It makes a run each night over the FARC National Wildlife Refuge, a preprogrammed route to log comparative imagery. Basically we look for changes—roads that have been traveled overnight, vehicles that have moved. This time of day the drone is nearly done, but there’s a window for special requests before it gets low on fuel.”
“So the drone can get us pictures of these two sites?”
“Even better—if we get it approved, we can watch them in real time.”
“Who approves it?” Davis asked.
“The DEA regional manager for Colombia and Peru,” said Jorgensen, his voice garbled as he bit into a vanilla-frosted with sprinkles. “Bert Collimore is his name, a real jerk. He works out of an office in Cali. Or at least he used to. Bert was fired last week, which means the decision goes to the acting manager, the regional chief operations officer.”
