The hotel clerk had a room for the night and accepted my AmEx card, though he wouldn’t give me a cash advance on it. I had enough money for the time being, and I’d be in Kingston tomorrow. I’d have been disappointed with my bare-bones room if I’d squandered all my savings on a two-week vacation there, but it suited the situation. I shoved the aluminum case under the bed, shrugged the backpack onto my shoulders and went out on another errand—camo gear. I broke a U.S. $50 into Jamaican at a money changer, then strolled along the main shopping street until I came to a vendor hawking tourist plumage. Shorts were out of the question for what I had to do, but I bought a loose cotton T-shirt, lemon yellow, lime green sporting a picture of Bob Marley. Also, a crushable Panama hat with a bright red band. Voila! All I needed was a zoom-lens Canon to hang around my neck and a sunburned wife nagging at me. I stuffed the shirt I’d been wearing into the pack and strolled out to blend in with my fellow vacationers. I spotted a pharmacy nearby, picked up basic toiletries. Next stop was a beachfront tiki bar, for a Heineken and a bite to eat. Ochos Rios was a gorgeous spot, all right, that sweeping arc of white sand. A placid bay, ideal for parasailing and windsurfing and general blissing out, but no surf to speak of. Can’t have everything. The bar sat toward the east end of the bay, affording a glimpse of the sunset, always a treat in the tropics. Shore boats were shuttling day-trippers back to a big cruise ship anchored out in the harbor.
So now what? I couldn’t get back in the states without a passport, nor did I dare return to Grand Cayman to retrieve mine. There must be a U.S. Consulate in Kingston that does that sort of thing, so I’d pursue that tomorrow. Maybe the clerk at the hotel desk could advise me. And then lay low until a flight out? How long would that take to arrange? Topping up my cash would be helpful. As best I could tell from the tourist guides I picked up in the hotel lobby, Kingston was about 70 miles over the mountains, several hours by bus. Were I not an international party of interest, the operation would go like Caribbean clockwork. As it was, I had to keep to the shadows and walk with measured step. I nursed a couple after-dinner beers and listened to a steel band until mid-evening. My eyelids went drooping. Time for a much-needed sleep. I hoisted my pack and headed back to the hotel.
As the clerk handed me my room key, he said, “Mr. Fonko, some men came asking after you earlier.”
“Could you describe them?”
“Rough hombres. Latino. Three of them. I, of course, told them nothing, but they were insistent, said they knew you were here. They said they would be back.”
Not the bunch in the BMW. Then who? How did they know to look for me here? “Had you by any chance entered my credit card charge in your system before they showed up?”
“The bookkeeper did before he quit work at 5 p.m.”
They can trace me through credit card transactions? Whoever they are? Because of banking connections with BCCI? Shit. “I’ll bet you twenty dollars American you can’t put me in another room, far away from my present one.”
“Mr. Fonko, I’m sorry to say you lose that bet. I happen to have an available room at the other end of the top floor.”
“I never win anything,” I said, fishing a twenty out of my wallet. “This transfer won’t be recorded in your books, will it?”
“How can it? It never happened. Sleep well.”
My first day in Jamaica and already two packs of punks dogged my trail. Sleep well? Right. “Say, by the way, I need to replace a lost passport. American. Where would I do that?”
“It happens from time to time. The American Consulate in Kingston can help you with that, I think.”
Next morning, I stepped out of the elevator to a hubbub in the hotel lobby. The night clerk had been murdered. A room had been broken into. The one I’d moved out of. Which meant they’d found the empty suitcase. Which meant they knew I still had the stuff, but not the suitcase. I hurried back to my room, assembled my kit, checked out and exited via the back door. I didn’t spot any tails as I hurried to the beachfront. Probably, they didn’t know what I looked like. I found a crowded restaurant to grab breakfast and do some thinking. I couldn’t linger in Ochos Rios, clearly. Getting back to the States was my only hope, but for that I’d need a passport, so my next move must be to hit the American Consulate. I walked to a row of resort hotels along the beach to see about a ride to Kingston. A sleek tourist bus stood at the curb at the entrance to one, boarding sun-broiled vacationers, and I counted too few to fill it. I sidled up to the driver, asked some questions. It was a package tour, heading to the Kingston airport for a flight back to Chicago. He was amenable to a little bribe and welcomed me aboard.
The bus followed the coast, passed resorts along the shoreline and veered inland through forests and plantations, as pretty a roadside as I’d ever seen. The driver pointed out Ian Fleming’s cliffside house, to the delight of the James Bond fans (Octopussy was a big film hit that year). Jamaican countryside driving was a stop-and-start blood sport. When the traffic moved, it defied death. Beat-up cars passed on blind curves, darting back in between trucks and school buses the last split second before a head-on collision with a taxicab. Dreadlocked men on Japanese motorbikes whipped around the bus, banking and weaving through shoulder-width spaces between lines of speeding traffic in opposing lanes. Then the whole mess came to a halt as opposing drivers faced off over the right of way on a narrow bridge. During one delay, I went up the aisle and asked the bus driver about the American Consulate. He told me we’d pass close by, and he agreed to drop me off on a nearby cross street. At Port Maria, we swung inland and commenced a headlong ride over the Blue Mountains that had the terrified Midwesterners all but praying for deliverance. After the driver rampaged us through a stretch of twists and curves that would baffle a pretzel maker, the road leveled off, calmed down and straightened out. The driver brought the bus to a stop and motioned me forward. “Just a little ways down Oxford Road here,” he said, pointing. “You can’t miss it.” I thanked him and debarked.
On the flat in a nice area of town, Oxford Road comprised a commercial district of hotels, restaurants, office buildings, diplomatic outposts and the New Kingston Shopping Mall, interspersed with palms, lawns and hedges. Having the address of the Consulate would have made it easier not to miss. A single story stand-alone office building with a discreet nameplate, it took me a while to locate. Not many people walked the street in the midday sun, no crowd to blend into, so I sort of stood out. I wasn’t garbed for a diplomatic reception, but I was an American in need of a temporary passport. Thanks to my night in the hotel, I was at least cleaned up and presentable, and they probably had to deal with bewildered tourists in Bob Marley T-shirts three times every day. I walked through the entrance into the lobby. The clerk on duty greeted me and asked how he could help me.
“I need a temporary passport, or possibly a replacement.”
“You already have an American passport?”
“Yes, but not with me.”
“You have a passport, but not with you? Why do you need a new passport? How did you get into Jamaica with no passport?”
Oops. “Oh, I had it when I left the States, but I lost it.”
“Where did you lose it? Was it stolen?”
“No, I lost it on the cruise ship. Had a few drinks, got a little frisky on the afterdeck and it blew overboard.”
“I see. What cruise ship is that?”
“The one at Ochos Rios. It’s anchored in the harbor. I came into town about the passport. Have to have a replacement, or at least temporary documents, before the ship leaves tomorrow morning.”
“And what cruise line would that be?” He was taking notes. This was not going where I wanted it to.
“Carnival. Carnival Cruises.” I’d seen their ads somewhere—Fun Ship Cruises. Did they do them in the Caribbean? I had a feeling I’d soon find out.
“Have you any American identification?”
“I have a California
driver’s license in my wallet, if that will help.”
“It would. Could I take a look?” I took it out of my wallet and passed it to him. He examined it, took some more notes and handed it back.
“Okay. American tourists lose passports all the time. I’ll take your information to our passport desk; we’ll fix you up with something and get you back to your cruise ship, don’t worry. Can you come back here a little later in the day, say around 3 p.m.?”
“Sure. I’ll be here.” I went back outside wondering if I’d screwed myself with my phony yarn. But the truth—that I’d crash landed in a chopper flying out of Cuba with the proceeds of a bloody bank robbery on Grand Cayman—would that have been better? Everything depended on how diligently they checked out the tale I told. I had a few hours to kill—what to do but wait and see and hope for the best?
It was past noon, so I picked out a restaurant up the road and sat down to an American lunch. Out the window I noticed three shabby men, seemed to be blind, tapping slowly along the sidewalk with white sticks. They appeared mixed-race, bulky, bowed over as they shuffled along. The first one wore blue glasses and held a tin cup against the crook of his white stick. The others’ eyes were squinted shut. The right hand of the second man was on the first man’s shoulder and the right hand of the third man on the second’s. A dingy black motor hearse with black plumes on the corners of the roof came slowly up the street and stopped beside them, the driver conferring with the man in the lead. Then a strange thing, the three blind men looked up at the restaurant as though they could see it. The hearse pulled back into traffic, and the three men went tap-tap-tapping away along the walkway. They were looking for me? How would they know? Somebody questioned the bus driver, maybe?
I still had some time before 3 p.m. A low profile being advisable, I found an out of the way spot in an alleyway behind the Pegasus Hotel where I could sit in the shade and plot some strategy. If the passport desk put any effort into verifying my story I wouldn’t be getting a new one any time soon. Worse than that, what would they do after I’d showed up after spinning a fancy yarn? How much of the true story was circulating? How much of it would reach the Consulate? Obviously, some people already knew more than was healthy for me.
Should I get stuck here, my cash wouldn’t last much longer. I wondered if a local bank would let me tap my AmEx card, or maybe an American bank would be a better bet? I verged on getting up and searching for a bank when I heard tap-tap-tapping drawing nearer around the building’s corner. I rose to my feet with my backpack in my hand, edged closer to the corner and waited in the shadow. The three blind men I’d seen on the street suddenly surged around the corner, looking for me and reaching inside their coats. They spotted me and drew silenced pistols. Unfortunately for them, they’d stayed bunched together, and I stood closer than they’d anticipated. Street-fight rule of thumb: run from a knife but charge a gun. Figuring them as sneaks, not warriors, I took a big lunge forward and with a swift, two-hand basketball pass thrust my heavy backpack in the face of the man in the middle, sending him staggering backwards and flat on his ass. I distracted the one on the left with a sharp jab to the solar plexus, leaving him gasping. The one on my right couldn’t line up a shot into the swirling action. I swiveled, grabbed his gun arm with both hands, twisted it up behind his back until his shoulder dislocated, then pitched him to the ground. I turned and fell on the one struggling under the backpack. I wrenched his pistol out of his grasp and turned it on him, shot him in the temple. His suppressor was a good one, emitting a modest “thwip”— wouldn’t draw a crowd. I put the other two out of their misery with it as well.
Ranger training in jungle warfare comes in handy from time to time.
They’d staged their assault when nobody was close by, but somebody would surely soon happen along. In my current circumstances, a silenced pistol would be more useful than the one I’d taken out of the chopper. I wasn’t familiar with the guns my assailants carried, but they’d do. I slipped the one in my hand into my backpack and added the clips from the other two, wiped fingerprints off the guns. I straightened my shirt, dusted off my pants, slid my arms through the pack straps, put my hat back on and strolled out to Oxford Road. The black hearse sat parked a few yards down the street, motor running in readiness to scoot up the alley for a pickup—my corpse. When the driver saw me emerge he put it in gear and sped away.
Now what? Would the hearse come charging back with reinforcements? Would the police nab me on suspicion when they showed up? Hang around until 3 o’clock to find out whether my yarn fooled the passport desk? No way. Time to haul ass. I looked up and down the road, located a taxi sitting by a Texaco gas station down the street and headed for it. The driver was in the shade of his vehicle, sipping a Coke. “Is there an American bank in town?” I asked him.
“Yes sah, de Citibank,” he said.
“Take me there,” I said.
“Yas sah.” We headed down toward the center of town. He took me through a district where the streets jammed up with honking cars and shouting drivers. People—preponderantly black and poor-looking— thronged the sidewalks. The scene rang with reggae, throbbed lively, sultry, colorful. Presently the cabbie swung into a more well-appointed business district, contained and quieter. We passed down an avenue lined by office buildings and came to a stop. “Here de Citibank,” he announced.
I scoped out the street. People here dressed for business. My Marley Tee wouldn’t play well. “Take me where they sell clothes,” I said.
“Yas sah.” He drove to another street where vendors of clothing, hats, doo-dads, knick-knacks, most everything else, hawked their goods. Climbing out, I gave him enough U.S. dollars to put a smile on his lips. I found a stand with dress-style shirts, picked out a conservative design in my size. I bought a subdued baseball cap and stowed the panama. I donned the dress shirt on over my Tee and tucked both in, ready for business. Too warm for the day, but presentable. And different enough from whatever description of me might have spread. That done, I walked the few blocks back to Citibank.
The teller said she was not able to advance cash against my MasterCard on the strength of my California driver’s license. She thought the American Express office would be a better bet. I followed her directions and arrived there a half hour before closing time. The clerk ran my card, read the screen and told me there was a problem with my account. She’d have to see if it covered overseas cash advances. She told me to take a seat in the lobby while she checked it out, then disappeared through a door. What gives with this?
Rather than establish myself as a sitting duck, I hoisted my backpack, ducked outside, crossed the street and took a table by the window inside a little café down the way from the AmEx office. I ordered a cup of coffee and watched the AmEx entrance. It wasn’t long before a pair of sharply dressed, swarthy men showed up, scanned the street and went in. They came out quickly, looked both ways and separated hurriedly to cover both directions. The hell? Just from running my card?
This was getting disturbing. People saw me tear out of Grand Cayman with Driffter. I’m still checked in at the hotel, and they have my stuff. Vesco sounded the alarm, no telling how widely. A ton of people saw me with the aluminum suitcase, all the way to Ochos Rios. They’re tracking me through my credit cards. The Feds had me in their sights. I felt like a stalked teenager in Friday the 13th Part XVI. Jason’s after me! How do I get away? Where can I turn? I could surrender the BCCI stuff to the U.S. Embassy here, but then I’d have to explain how I came by it and how I got it here. And it wouldn’t surprise me if I’d broken a few laws in the process—transporting stolen goods, shooting down a Cuban fighter jet, spraying a U.S. chopper with gunfire, entering Jamaica illegally, greasing three assassins—just for starters. I could just ditch it somewhere, but people would still be coming after me to locate it, and I had no doubt they’d work me over rather than settling for “I dunno” as my answer. Plus the BCCI swag could give me bargaining powe
r, which I might sorely need. I was stuck with it for the time being.
Time for an identity switch. The AmEx clerk had seen me in a dress shirt, so I peeled it off and stuffed it in the pack. Switch hats. Back to Joe Tourist in a Marley Tee, just arrived in Kingston town. Then I noticed the headline on the Daily Gleaner at the corner news stand:
Murder at Ochos Rios Hotel: Missing American Suspect at Large
Shit.
Forget passports and pocket money. Now my priority was to get the hell out of Jamaica. Too many people were onto me. The airport was no-go: they’d have that staked out for sure, and anyhow I couldn’t exit without a passport. Only one other option for leaving an island—by boat. Of course, they’d be looking for me there too, so booking any ordinary boat ride was risky. Then, what other kind of boat? Kingston had a big, busy harbor. Cruise ships, tankers, freighters, what else?
Better take a look. I went out on the street, flagged a taxi, aimed him at the harbor. I told him to drive along the shoreline slowly. The modern, industrialized part of the harbor offered no help. Tankers and ore freighters had destinations far removed from my desires. We rolled by an older, shabbier section of the harbor that seemed more promising, with several boats that looked like local haulers. We passed a small, beat-up old freight boat, the John B, tied wharfside where trucks full of green bananas were congregating. A half mile down the way we came to a café shack, and I had the driver let me off there. After he’d driven out of sight, I shrugged into my pack and walked back to the banana boat. A man who seemed to be the captain was directing banana trucks as they gathered on the dock.
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6 Page 6
