White Cargo

by Stuart Woods

  Rodriguez seemed very unhappy to see him. “What is it you want, señor? I must go to a meeting now.”

  “Tell me about the telephone call,” Cat said, pleasantly.

  “I told you, señor, we have no record of such a call.”

  Something snapped in Cat. This man knew something about Jinx, and he wanted to know it. Down a few feet of path from where they stood was a maintenance closet, its door open. A mop and pail were visible inside. Cat grabbed the smaller man by the necktie and hauled him into the closet. Meg was close behind, shutting the door.

  “Tell me,” Cat said, trying not to clench his teeth.

  “There was no phone call!” the man said. Sweat was pouring down his face.

  Cat pulled out the pistol and shoved it hard up under the man’s jaw. “Tell me,” he said.

  “I could be killed for talking to you again,” Rodriguez stammered. “Please, you must go away.”

  “You are about to be killed for not talking to me,” Cat said, cocking the pistol.

  The man’s eyes bulged. “Suite 800,” he said quickly.

  “And who was occupying Suite 800?” Cat asked.

  “Please, señor, I can—” Cat pushed the pistol harder against the man’s neck. “Tell me all of it right now,” he said. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

  “Suite 800 is permanently rented,” Rodriguez managed to say. “Please, señor, you are hurting me.”

  Cat lowered the man from his tiptoes, held him against the wall with one hand, and put the pistol to his forehead. “Go on.”

  “A business rents the suite. I don’t know any names.”

  “What business?”

  “The Anaconda Company.”

  “And what business are they in?”

  “I don’t know, señor, nobody knows for sure.”

  “But you have an idea.”

  “I think, perhaps, an illegal business.”

  “Drugs?”

  “I think, perhaps.”

  “Where is the company located?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are the bills sent? You must know that.”

  “The bills are paid in cash. They come, they go in a jet airplane. They always have much cash.”

  “Who is the head of the company?”

  “I swear to you, señor, I don’t know any names. I don’t deal directly with these people. Not even the manager does. They come, they sit around the pool, they order room service, they pay cash, they go away in their jet.”

  Cat produced the photograph of Jinx. “Did you see this girl?”

  Rodriguez looked fearfully at the photograph.

  “Don’t lie to me, Rodriguez.”

  “Yes, once, when they arrived. She was taken immediately upstairs to the suite. She never came down again. I didn’t see them leave. I think she . . .” He paused.

  “Tell me.”

  “I think she was drugged. She looked . . . sleepy. They took her upstairs very quickly. When they left it was at night. I wasn’t on duty.”

  “How long were they here?”

  “They left on the third of the month. The day after the telephone call.”

  “Who is in the suite now?”

  “No one. No one has been here since the third.”

  “All right, now listen to me carefully, Mr. Rodriguez. You and I and this lady are going up to the eighth floor and have a look around this suite. We’ll use your passkey.”

  “Dios,” the man said, quaking, “I cannot do this. I will be seen. I will lose my job, my life even. You do not know these people, señor.”

  “Give me your passkey,” Cat commanded.

  Rodriguez fumbled in a pocket and produced a key.

  Cat handed Meg the pistol. “Keep him here. I’ll be as quick as I can. If he gives you a problem, kill him.” He winked.

  Meg took the pistol. “Sit down on the floor,” she said to the man, holding the pistol to his temple.

  “Which way?” he asked Rodriguez.

  “In the old part of the hotel,” the man replied, breathing hard. “Into the lobby and turn right to the elevators, the one at the far end. For God’s sake, señor, don’t let anyone see you. It is my life.”

  Cat left the maintenance closet and closed the door behind him. He walked back into the hotel lobby, went to the right-hand elevator, and looked around him. Only one woman was at the desk, and she was dealing with a guest. He pressed the button, and the doors opened immediately. He got in and reached for the button for the eighth floor. There was no button, just a keyhole. “Shit,” he said aloud to himself. He tried the passkey; to his relief, it worked. The elevator rose. The doors opened into a vestibule. Cat strode to the door of the suite and inserted the key. It opened easily. Instinctively, he reached for the pistol, then remembered he had given it to Meg. He entered a large sitting room, decorated, he imagined, to the owner’s taste. It certainly was not standard hotel decor in the tropics. The furniture was well chosen, with some antique pieces, and there were good pictures on the walls. It had the look of the home of an old-line investment banker, he thought.

  Hallways led, left and right, off the room. Cat turned right. He came into a comfortable, panelled library, filled with books, many of them leather-bound. There seemed to be nothing in the room of a personal nature.

  He went back to the living room and tried the other hallway. It turned and ran along the rear side of the hotel. Opening doors as he went, he found four large bedrooms, all elegantly decorated, but devoid of anything of interest. At the end of the hall he came to a large door, which was locked. He tried the passkey. It worked. The bedroom inside was as large as the living room and decorated even more richly. There was a large television set, a bar, a couple of sofas, a fireplace, and a huge bed with a canopy. There were closets on either side of the bed. The first held a wardrobe of negligees and expensive dresses. There seemed to be at least three different sizes, and there were labels from Bergdorf Goodman and Bonwit Teller. Shoe racks held at least a couple of dozen pairs of shoes with Charles Jourdan and Ferragamo labels, again in several sizes. A bank of drawers held lacy underwear.

  The closet on the other side of the bed held a dozen men’s suits in tropical fabrics. There were no store labels, so Cat looked for a tailor’s label inside a pocket. They were all from Huntsman, in London, and had been made in the last year, but there was no customer’s name in the usual place on the label. There was a stock of shirts and shoes from London makers as well, and a rack of neckties. In the drawers there were underwear and beach clothes, all custom-made. There was nothing in the closet to reveal the identity of the owner, but on all the shirts, there was a monogram, an A.

  Cat went methodically through the room, looking for anything else with a name, but found nothing. There was a telephone on a desk, with a card describing in English and Spanish how to make an international call. Cat felt he was where Jinx had been. Next to the phone was a large crystal ashtray and two books of matches. One was the hotel’s, the other, different. It was a large matchbook, made of heavy, enameled black paper. Stamped in gold on the front was a rather good drawing, Cat thought, of a large snake dangling from a tree. On the back was a monogram, an A. He slipped the matches into his pocket.

  What else could be in the suite? A kitchen, perhaps. He retraced his steps, and as he entered the sitting room he heard a key scrape in the lock of the front door. Not breaking his stride, he continued straight across the room, down the hall, and into the study. As he ducked into the room, he heard the voices of a man and woman, speaking quietly in Spanish. As far as he knew, there was not another entrance to the suite, but he thought there must be a fire escape. He was about to look for it when a loud noise interrupted the thought. A vacuum cleaner.

  Placing the noise in the living room, he walked in that direction and peeped into the room. A woman was pushing the machine a few feet from him, and a man was dusting furniture. Both had their backs to him. He made quickly for the front door. Then the vacuum clea
ner stopped.

  “Buenos días, señor” a man’s voice said.

  Cat stopped and turned. The man and woman were staring at him. The man spoke again, asking a question in Spanish. Cat had no idea what he was saying.

  “It’s okay,” he said, waving a hand at the room. “Go right ahead. I’m just going out for a while.”

  “Si, señor” the man said, smiling. “Gracias.”

  “De nada” Cat said, smiling back at him. He closed the door behind him. The elevator was waiting, its doors open. He inserted the key, turned it, and the elevator started down. Cat took a deep breath and released it. Sweat stood out on his forehead, and his knees felt weak.

  In the lobby, he made briskly for the rear door. No one seemed to notice him. He walked quickly along the rear of the building to the maintenance closet, looked around, then opened the door. Rodriguez and Meg were gone.

  He swore to himself. If the hotel security people had Meg, the police were already on the way. He left the closet and closed the door behind him, looking desperately about. He hadn’t seen them in the lobby, so he started for the pool. As he came out of the garden, he spotted Rodriguez and Meg across the pool, sitting at a table. Meg had a tall drink, and they were chatting amiably, even smiling. He got there as quickly as he could without running.

  “Oh, there you are,” Meg said gaily, then under her breath, “What the fuck took you so long?”

  “Sorry, it couldn’t have been done any faster.”

  “Mr. Rodriguez and I have just been having a chat,” she said.

  He noticed that her hand was in her pocketbook. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” He turned to Rodriguez and shook his hand, pressing five hundred dollars into it.

  “Now listen,” he said, smiling, “we’re going to leave quietly, and I don’t want any fuss from you. If we have any problems about this, I’ll simply tell them I bribed you for your passkey, understand?”

  Rodriguez smiled weakly and nodded. “Of course, señor, I do not wish to make problems for you. Please, please do not let anyone know how you got this information.”

  “I have no intention of telling anyone,” Cat said, handing the grateful man his passkey. “Let’s go,” he said to Meg.

  They walked quickly from the pool, through the hotel lobby, and asked for their car, waiting nervously for it to arrive. He had visions of security guards pouring out of the hotel, with Rodriguez screaming and pointing. The car came, and they drove away.

  “I believe this is yours,” Meg said, handing him the pistol. It was still cocked. “If I had any doubts about how serious you were, I don’t anymore.”

  Cat eased the hammer down and engaged the safety. “I wasn’t going to shoot the guy, but I didn’t want him to know it. Why did you leave the closet?”

  “A maintenance man came back for his mop. I just barely managed to get the gun into my handbag. Rodriguez talked us out of there. I thought we were better off in the open. What did you find out?”

  “Not a hell of a lot. The place looks like William F. Buckley, Jr. lives there, except for the master bedroom, which looks like Hugh Hefner lives there. There were a man’s suits—on the small side—and clothes for several women. Looks like an assortment to handle whoever’s in residence. The man’s stuff had a monogram, A. And there was this.” He handed her the matchbook.

  “A for Anaconda,” she said.

  “Right. When we were in Riohacha, Bluey and I had a meeting with a local drug dealer. We were pretending to be buyers. He mentioned something called Anaconda Pure, a sort of brand-name cocaine, I guess. He spoke of it almost reverently. Where are we going?” She had turned along the sea, past the old city.

  “To the airport. We know the jet left on the third of the month. Let’s see if we can find out where it went. There isn’t all that much traffic out of there. Somebody might remember it.”

  “You have to file a flight plan in this country,” Cat said. “I wonder how long they keep them on file.”

  • • •

  At the airport, it took Meg fifteen minutes and a hundred-dollar bill to get copies of flight plans of the only two jets that had left Cartagena on the third of the month. “There was a Lear for Bogotá and a Gulfstream for Cali,” she said, translating the papers. “There’s no information about who owns the planes, just the pilot’s name and a phone number.”

  They drove back to Meg’s house.

  “Okay,” she said, sitting down at the phone. “Which one is it going to be?”

  “Well, from the looks of the hotel suite, they like the best of everything. A Lear is a comparatively cheap jet. A Gulfstream costs twelve or fifteen million dollars. Let’s try Cali first.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, dialling. “Cali has a reputation as a center for the drug trade, too.” The number answered, and she spoke in rapid Spanish for a couple of minutes, then hung up. “Bingo, maybe,” she said. “The number is the service company that hangars and maintains the jet. I pretended to be a girlfriend of the pilot, and I think they bought that. When I asked them for the name of the company that owns the plane so I could call him, they got cagey, said I could leave my number. Let’s try Bogotá.”

  She went through the same routine with the Bogotá number, then hung up. “The airplane is owned by a construction company that does a lot of government work—roads, bridges, that sort of thing. Doesn’t sound nearly as likely. Looks like we’re off to Cali.”

  “I’m glad you said ‘we.’”

  “You’re not going anywhere without me and my camera,” she said, kissing him. “I got the whole scene in the maintenance closet.”

  “What?”

  She reached into her handbag and pulled out something the size of a large paperback book. “The latest in Japanese technology,” she said. “I try new stuff out for them occasionally.” She led him to the tape machines, popped out a tiny cassette, and shoved it into a machine. A moment later, Cat watched himself, from a low angle, terrify Rodriguez. The sound was hollow, but every word came through.

  “Gosh,” he said, “I never knew I did such a good George Raft.”

  18

  CAT SPENT CONSIDERABLE TIME ON HIS FLIGHT PLANNING THAT evening. The longest nonstop flight he had ever made as pilot-in-command had been a little over a hundred miles, a solo cross-country during his flight training. Cali was south, in the western part of the country, some five hundred nautical miles from Cartagena.

  He checked the range of the aircraft in the owner’s manual and satisfied himself that the wing tanks held more than sufficient fuel for the trip. Using Bluey’s charts and books, he determined that Cali was in the mountains, and all he knew about mountain flying was what he had read during his training. He satisfied himself that he could find the city, in decent weather, simply by following the Rio Cauca upstream from where it branched off the Rio Magdalena all the way to Cali, should his radio navigation equipment fail.

  He calmed his nervousness about the flight with attention to detail. He had been taught all the essentials of flight planning; all he had to do was to remember it and do it right. And he was not about to fly commercial. The airlines had metal detectors, and he wanted the weapons with him more than ever.

  Meg called the airport for a weather forecast. “Good,” she said. “Only scattered high clouds at twenty thousand feet en route. Cali ceiling should be unlimited. We’ll have a ten-knot tail wind. Could hardly be better.” Looking over his shoulder, she pointed to the airport guide, open to Cali. “Here, this is the company I called to find out about the Gulfstream jet. Aeroservice. It says they have fuel, engine, and airframe repairs for Piper and Cessna aircraft and Lycoming, and Continental engines. It seems to be the only service for private aircraft on the field.”

  “Well, at least we have someplace to start, and a legitimate reason for being there,” he said.

  • • •

  They took off at nine the following morning, into sunny skies and unlimited visibility. Minutes after departing Cartagena,
they picked up the Rio Magdalena, Colombia’s principal river, which divides a wide, green plain that is swampy in many places. Cat was beginning to feel quite confident as pilot-in-command. He thought Bluey would be proud of him. In less than an hour they had found where the Cauca branched off. Cat climbed to ten thousand five hundred feet in order to have plenty of altitude when the mountains presented themselves. The land rose to meet them as they approached and passed Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, and after Medellín, a railway ran alongside the Cauca and further confirmed their position. Piece of cake.

  Cat had calculated a time en route of just less than four hours. They were less than an hour out of Cali when the first clouds appeared. They were in and out of them, which, technically, was illegal when flying under visual flight rules, or VFR, but Cat pressed on. He had no intention of landing at some other airport, not when Jinx might be waiting in Cali.

  When they were handed off from the Center radio operator to Cali Approach, the operator said, “Call is three hundred overcast, wind two six zero at six. Expect the ILS for two seven zero.”

  Cat froze. ILS was an instrument approach. He had never flown an instrument approach and knew little about how to do it. He racked his brain for what his instructor might have told him.

  “Turn right to zero nine zero,” the controller said suddenly. “Vectors for the ILS.”

  Cat acknowledged the transmission. The controller was going to put him onto the approach. Now he remembered. The ILS was the instrument landing system, the one where you used two needles, one vertical and one horizontal, to stay on the approach. He tried to be calm. The autopilot was keeping the airplane straight and level in the cloud. He was all right for the moment, but he needed a radio frequency. He turned to Meg, trying to stay as calm as possible. “Say, look in that airport directory, will you, and give me the frequency for the ILS.”

  Meg consulted the book. “It’s one, one, zero, point one.”

  “Descend to seven thousand feet,” the controller said.

  Cat started a descent with the autopilot, fighting panic. He dialed in the frequency for the ILS. As he did so he watched the instrument before him. The vertical needle swung sharply to the right, and the horizontal needle rose to the top of the dial.