False Flag

by F. W. Rustmann Jr.

  Santos walked to the center of the cell, looked around at the inmates surrounding him and addressed the motionless, gawking group. “I had nothing to do with this, get it? These guys got into a fight and beat the crap out of each other. Understand? That’s your story when the guards get here.” He glared around the room, locking eyes with each one of them in turn.

  The shocked inmates nodded in agreement, some muttering in approval and awe of what had just occurred. Santos then walked over to the nearest lower bunk, pushed aside two inmates standing in front of it, and plopped himself down.

  Lying on the bunk with his legs crossed and his hands behind his head, he said, “And this is where I will spend the rest of my time here, right on this bunk. Does anyone have any objections to that?”

  There were none.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sometimes things don’t go exactly as planned. Other times nothing goes as planned. This was one of those times.

  MacMurphy was known as a meticulous planner of operations. It was one of his strengths and was well documented during his almost fifteen years with the CIA. He had the uncanny ability to see all possible outcomes for his operational moves and adapt accordingly to ensure operational success.

  In this case, Murphy’s Law was written all over the operation.

  His colleague, Culler Santos, had been arrested and was being held in a steamy prison in the jungle on the outskirts of Belmopan, Belize. At first glance, though, the operation had been promising.

  The child’s Belizean mother, a tall, thin, pale woman with stringy, waist-length brown hair named Elmira Minita, had abducted the six-year-old girl and taken the child to live with her parents in Belize. She had secured a job as an administrative assistant for the Belizean Tourism Authority.

  The father, an American citizen living in St. Augustine, Florida, had legal custody of the child. The girl was a United States citizen by birth and the mother, a cocaine addict and convicted felon, was deemed unfit by the United States courts. The father had exhausted all legal efforts to get the child returned to him. Belize, despite being a signatory of the Hague Convention—which was established to ensure that the best interests of the child were paramount in international abduction cases—refused to order Elmira to return the child to her American father.

  So he turned to Global Strategic Reporting, a business intelligence and investigation firm located just down the Florida coast in Fort Lauderdale. The firm had a reputation for “getting things done” in all manner of unusual cases. The father wanted GSR to help him re-abduct the child and return her safely to the United States. And, at first, the operation went smoothly.

  Santos set up his cover as a point man for a large United States developer exploring tourism opportunities in Belize. That justified his request to meet with the head of the Belizean tourism director in the government office building where the mother worked. Santos bluffed his way into the American embassy to discuss his Belizean development plans with the embassy’s economic officer. The economic officer was helpful and offered to call the Belizean tourism director to set up a meeting for Santos.

  The following day Santos drove his rental car to his meeting with the director. Santos was ushered into the director’s office by his assistant, Elmira, who occupied a desk outside of the director’s office. When his meeting was over, Santos stopped at Elmira’s desk, exchanged some pleasantries, and engaged the woman in conversation, asking what she liked to do for entertainment in Belmopan, what the best restaurants were and what hotel she would recommend. His questions about her marital status and whether she had children were deftly evaded.

  Elmira was polite but did not pick up on any of his veiled efforts to get her to show him around town. Finally, Santos just came out and asked her to have dinner with him. She politely refused, saying that she was seeing someone who worked in the building and that he would not take too kindly to her having dinner with another man.

  Disappointed and wishing he possessed the good looks and easy charm of his partner, MacMurphy, Santos returned to his hotel to mull things over and eat dinner alone. His goal had been to learn more about Elmira Minita—where she lived, what her personal circumstances were, how the child was doing and what the kid’s daily routine was—but he had failed miserably.

  MacMurphy shouldn’t have chosen him for this task. He wasn’t the cool, suave type who could easily pick up women. Just the opposite actually. He was direct and forceful and sometimes women were put off by his looks. Santos was built like a tree trunk, with a face scarred by many battles.

  He needed to gather enough information about the mother’s lifestyle to figure out how the child and father could meet with enough privacy and time for the exfiltration team to spirit them out of the country and back to the United States. The exfiltration route had been outlined, but the plan lacked very important details about how they would get the child away from the mother and safely into the arms of the father and the exfiltration team.

  Santos concluded that if he couldn’t gather the information he needed the easy way, through direct contact with the mother, he would have to get it the hard way, through surveillance.

  That’s where things started to unravel.

  The one thing that Santos was not aware of—and that Elmira had not revealed during their conversation—was that the mother’s current paramour, the one who occupied the other corner office just down the hall, was the country’s solicitor general.

  He also was unaware that as soon as he left Elmira’s office, she walked down the hall to the office of Shankar Gandhi, the solicitor general of Belize, and told him all about the rugged American with the Kennedyesque-Bostonian accent who had tried to pick her up and had asked too many questions about her and her daughter.

  She was aware that her husband wanted the child back in America and thought there was a connection.

  As she was relating the story to Gandhi, they walked over to the office windows overlooking the parking lot and watched Santos walk across the lot, get into his black Chevy rental car and drive away.

  Gandhi was one of the many Indian functionaries who remained behind when, in 1981, British Honduras obtained its independence from the United Kingdom and was renamed Belize. Now in his sixties, the bespectacled little man had reached the pinnacle of his career and felt all-powerful. Moreover, he carried a strong grudge against those colonial powers that had once lorded over him.

  He had also fallen in love with the tall, willowy, fair-skinned drug addict and had vowed to protect her and her child. So, when Culler Santos showed up late the following afternoon in his black rental car and took up a surveillance position in a shaded corner of the parking lot, Gandhi called the police.

  Elmira and Gandhi watched from his office window as the police arrived, checked Santos’s identification papers, cuffed him and took him away in a patrol car. On Gandhi’s instructions, the police charged Santos with conspiracy to commit kidnapping—specifically, Elmira Minita’s six-year-old daughter.

  CHAPTER 3

  The gang at GSR had not heard from Santos for three days and was becoming increasingly concerned. Calls to his cell phone and hotel room went unanswered. The staff at the small El Rey Hotel where he was staying said they had not seen him since the day after he had checked in.

  This was not like Santos. He usually called MacMurphy every evening to discuss progress.

  When a call finally came, it was collect from the jail in downtown Belmopan. “It looks like we’ve been blindsided, Mac. Our client never told us he brought his sailboat down here a couple of months ago and tried to grab the kid. He was caught in the act and thrown in the slammer. They let him go after paying a big fine and kicked him out of the country. They’ve been on high alert ever since then. Mom’s boyfriend, who just happens to be the solicitor general of this godforsaken country, handled everything for her.”

  “Good god! Now what? What are they planning for you? What are the charges?”

  “Conspiracy to commit kidnapping. It carri
es a fifteen-year sentence and a $250,000 fine. I’m being transferred tomorrow to the central prison in Hattieville. It’s a nasty place from what I hear. I’m in deep kimchi, Mac.”

  “We’ll get you out of there. I’ll get you a good lawyer. Do they have any evidence to back up this conspiracy charge?”

  “No, but from what I understand they don’t need any. Their law is based on old English law. They can lock me up while they conduct an investigation to gather the evidence they need. Not like the good ole U.S. of A. at all.”

  MacMurphy grimaced. “Okay, okay, we’ll get working on it. Call me again tomorrow evening, same time. Hang in there. If we can’t bail you out, we’ll bust you out . . .”

  Maggie Moore was the “mother hen” of the GSR and was used to handling senior case officers during her thirty-plus years at the agency. She had quickly risen through its ranks, starting as a GS-5 secretary to the senior intelligence service and retiring with flag rank. She was now the de facto manager of GSR, although MacMurphy retained full ownership of the company.

  She sat at the foot of the conference table in the GSR conference room while MacMurphy finished his call with Santos. “How could this happen, Mac?” she asked, glaring at him over her rimless granny glasses.

  MacMurphy ran fingers through his prematurely gray hair and shook his head. “We weren’t given the full story. That’s what happened. They were waiting for us. Now we just have to deal with the hand we’ve been dealt and get on with it.”

  He was in no mood for recriminations. He wanted to get his friend back as soon as possible. Then he would think about what went wrong and who would pay for it.

  Maggie pulled a yellow pencil out of her graying, red, washwoman bun and began ticking off a list of lawyers she had found in Belize. She briefly described them to MacMurphy before recommending a firm headed by a recently retired Supreme Court justice named Dean Lindo. It was likely he would have the best chance of influencing the court in Santos’s favor.

  “Okay, call him back, engage his firm and wire him a retainer. Send him whatever he wants. Just get him on it immediately. I don’t want Culler sitting in that hellhole for any longer than necessary. And I’m sure that Gandhi bastard is going to play hardball with us.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The next few days were hard on Maggie and MacMurphy and the rest of the GSR team. They worked tirelessly contacting congressmen and other influential government officials to pressure the United States ambassador to make a démarche to the Belizean government to release Santos. Unfortunately, the United States Embassy refused to take any action on Santos’s behalf. The petty ambassador was angry that Santos had manipulated the embassy with a phony “tourist development” cover story.

  More bad news came when Dean Lindo reported that Gandhi was indeed digging his heals in and refused to budge regarding Santos’s release. He was dragging out the court process to punish Santos as much as possible.

  Finally, a full month after Santos’s arrest, Gandhi could delay the bail hearing no longer. That was the good news. The bad news was that he had set the usual $5,000 bail at $50,000. During the bail hearing, Dean Lindo argued forcefully that the lack of evidence did not justify the treatment Santos was receiving by the court. But Gandhi stood firm, stating that there was plenty of evidence for the conspiracy out there and that he simply needed more time to gather it for the trial.

  This is how things work in third-world countries like Belize; a person can be held indefinitely while evidence is gathered for conviction. So much for due process.

  Thus, bail was set at $50,000, which was paid immediately by Lindo per MacMurphy’s instructions. Santos was forbidden to leave the country pending trial and his passport was confiscated.

  Santos returned to the El Rey Hotel where he showered, put on clean clothes, ate an enormous steak dinner, got totally smashed, and passed out on a real bed for the first time in over a month.

  The next morning he collected his car from the police impound lot, purchased a new pre-paid cell phone and called MacMurphy to plan his exfiltration. There was no way he was going to hang around Belize for a rigged trial that would almost certainly convict him.

  MacMurphy and Santos agreed on a simple plan to get Santos safely out of Belize and set a date for the exfiltration one week later. That would allow Santos time to give any hostile surveillance the feeling that he was settling in to await trial.

  He prepaid his hotel for another month, took several trips to Belize City to visit his attorneys, drove around the country sightseeing and generally played his role to a T. It wasn’t difficult. The court had his passport and he couldn’t leave the country without that travel document.

  Exactly seven days after his phone conversation with MacMurphy, Santos put the “Do Not Disturb” sign on his door and left the hotel unnoticed in the early morning hours. He carried all his belongings in a small suitcase and a backpack.

  Santos drove west on the two-lane George Price Highway toward the Guatemala border and pulled off to the side of the road at a secluded spot about ten miles out of Belmopan. There he cached his suitcase and backpack in the underbrush, took one more look around to memorize the spot and then headed back to his car. It would not look good if someone spotted him getting into MacMurphy’s car with bags in his hands. Not after receiving a court order forbidding him to leave town.

  After driving back to Belmopan, he parked his car in a lot near the center of town and paid for a full day. Stomach rumbling and in need of caffeine, he walked to a nearby café where he indulged in a large breakfast of ham, eggs, pancakes, and several cups of strong, black coffee. He spent about an hour and a half there, sitting on the restaurant porch, eating while leisurely reading a newspaper.

  He had noticed no surveillance since leaving his hotel in the morning and felt confident he was clean. But just to make sure, he left the restaurant and took a long, slow stroll through the center of town, visiting shops along the way and checking for surveillance at various spots along the route. After conducting this final surveillance detection route, he was certain he was alone.

  He timed his arrival at the town square at exactly 10:15 a.m. The air was heavy with humidity and the sun bore down like a space heater. He was already sweating through his shirt when a white Ford Mustang with Guatemala tags approached. A grinning MacMurphy leaned his gray head out of the window and called, “Need a lift?”

  The white Mustang circled the town square’s center fountain and headed west toward the George Price Highway and the Guatemalan border. They stopped long enough to retrieve Santos’s bags at the roadside cache and continued toward the border. Santos was happy to see Belize disappear in his rearview mirror.

  Four hours later, they reached the sleepy border town of Melchor de Mencos. On the southern edge of the town was a two-lane bridge over the Mopan River that divided Guatemala and Belize. The Guatemalan customs and immigration office—little more than a one-man border-crossing checkpoint—was located on the Guatemalan side of the river.

  MacMurphy pulled the Mustang off the road onto the gravel on the Belize side of the bridge. The two men got out of the car and walked the short distance to the riverbank. They surveyed the area and Santos, looking down at the river in disbelief, said, “Holy crap, Mac. You don’t expect me to swim across that, do you?”

  The river was about one hundred meters wide, not a bad swim, but the muddy water was gushing under the bridge in a torrent. “Maybe it’s better a little further upstream,” said MacMurphy. “You can handle it.”

  “I sink like a rock in the water. You know that.”

  Although it was clear MacMurphy was worried, he said, “It’s those big bones of yours. Don’t worry. We’ll find a spot upstream where the current will help carry you across. And we’ll buy you one of those little kiddy tubes you can hang on to during your crossing. How’s that?”

  Santos rolled his eyes. “Sheesh . . .”

  They drove about a half-mile upstream until they reached a small dirt road that ra
n into the riverbank. They parked at the end of the road, which was nothing more than a trail at that point, and once again surveyed the river. It was wider and the current was not quite as swift, but it would still be a risky swim.

  MacMurphy turned to Santos. “Whaddaya think?”

  Serious now, Santos walked down the bank until he reached the water’s edge and surveyed the rushing water. “If I enter here and swim hard with the current, I should hit the other side about there. Just before the river bends to the left.” He indicated a grassy spot on the bank about two hundred meters downstream. “How deep do you think the damn thing is?”

  “Probably pretty deep in the middle judging from the current. At least there aren’t any rapids. I’d hate to see you careening downstream, bouncing from rock to rock.”

  “Sure you would. Okay, that’s the plan. You drop me off here and pick me up over there on the other side after you go through the checkpoint. Let’s go get some dinner and wait till it gets dark.”

  They found a small, family-run Italian restaurant near the center of town overlooking the Mopan River and settled into a booth with a river view. Santos couldn’t take his eyes off the swiftly flowing current. The engineer with two advanced degrees from MIT was calculating speed and distance. The river was wider and deeper here, so it was a bit slower than where the river narrowed near the bridge downstream.

  MacMurphy asked, “Do you want to look for another crossing place further upstream?”

  “No, I think we’re okay. You’re going to have to trek back through the jungle on the other side to reach the pickup spot. That’s not going to be fun or easy. Let’s keep it as close to the bridge as we can or we’ll be out here all night long.”

  “Hmmmm. What’s with all of the sudden concern? Now you’re making me feel bad about making you swim across this bitch.”