Santos laughed. “Just be there when I get there.”
“Aren’t I always there for you when you get yourself in a jam?”
“What do you mean? You owe me big time, bud. Just think back to that time I saved your sorry ass in that hotel in Chiang Rai.”
Now it was time for MacMurphy to laugh. “Okay, okay, you win . . .”
Santos ate very little and drank no alcohol while MacMurphy feasted on pasta, salad, and a half-bottle of Chianti. MacMurphy looked up from his plate. “You’re going to waste away to nothing. You must have lost thirty pounds in that slammer, and now you’re refusing to eat.”
“Twenty-eight pounds actually. I’m down to 180. Lean and mean. I don’t want a belly load of pasta and wine dragging me to the bottom of that bloody river. I’ll take a doggie bag and eat when we’re safely on the other side and cruising down the highway toward Guatemala City.”
CHAPTER 5
It was a little after nine in the evening when they reached the crossing point. The weather was hot and muggy. The sky was alight with stars, but only a quarter-moon illuminated the muddy river. They stood on the riverbank for a few moments reviewing their plan. Finally, MacMurphy said, “Okay, give me your clothes and shoes and I’ll get moving.”
“What do you mean give you my clothes and shoes?”
“Well you’re sure as hell not going to swim across this river in them, are you?”
Santos looked down at the river and across at the landing spot on the other side and then back to MacMurphy. Nodding his head he said, “Always think of everything, don’t you?”
“That’s my job.”
Santos rolled his eyes but stripped down to his boxer shorts and handed the bundle to MacMurphy. Starlight danced on the muddy river but the other bank was a dark blur.
“Okay, Mac, let’s do it.”
MacMurphy glanced down at his watch. “Right. Give me an hour to get into position. I’ll signal with three short blinks from my flashlight. I’ll start blinking at exactly ten fifteen, so just guide on my light.”
“You got it. See you in an hour.”
They shook hands and MacMurphy made his way up the bank and back to his car. Santos sat on a flat rock at the river’s edge and calculated his swim.
MacMurphy drove to the bridge and crossed through the checkpoint. The guard on duty barely glanced at his passport before raising the barrier and waving him through.
It was very dark. This side of the crossing was mostly uninhabited, although he could see the hazy lights of the town a couple of miles to the north. The thick underbrush ran up to the side of the road. MacMurphy began to worry that he might not find a place to park the car and enter the jungle. He drove slowly along the dark road looking for a suitable spot.
Finally, about a quarter-mile down the road he found a good spot and pulled over. It was 9:40 p.m. He had thirty-five minutes to get to the rendezvous point, which he estimated was a quarter-mile away. He pushed through the thick underbrush as quickly as possible but was worried he wouldn’t make it in time.
He was almost there when he heard voices. He stopped, turned off his flashlight and listened, targeting all of his senses on the noises. He concluded the sounds were men’s voices and laughter and estimated the men were fifty meters in front of him—near or at the rendezvous spot.
He quickened his pace without his flashlight, stumbled, and fell noisily. He listened intently again as the voices grew louder. The blood pounded in his ears. This was bad, very bad. Who were these people? What the hell were they doing at the river’s edge at this hour?
Then he saw lights dancing up ahead. The men had flashlights. He moved closer until he could make out three men in the grassy opening they had chosen as their rendezvous. They were aiming their lights out over the water. What in God’s name were they doing? His mind raced. Could they be police? Fishermen?
The only thing he knew for certain was that he had to divert Santos from swimming toward that spot. He retraced his steps for about another fifty meters and headed down to the river’s edge. It wasn’t an ideal spot because there were rocks and trees in the water near the bank, but it would have to do.
He got down on his belly and scanned the top of the water to spot Santos. Too dark. He began blinking his flashlight across the river. Dot-dot-dot. Dot-dot-dot. Over and over again.
Santos sat on the rock watching the river current whip by, ticking off the minutes until he would enter the water. About thirty minutes into his wait, he noticed lights moving through the darkness on the other side of the river.
Could this be MacMurphy? There appeared to be more than one light. Strange. The lights moved through the underbrush to the river’s edge and stayed there, flickering and dancing on the water at the exact spot they had chosen for their rendezvous.
He checked his watch. Ten past ten. Five minutes before he was supposed to start swimming. What the bloody hell was going on?
He waited an extra five minutes and then spotted three short blips from MacMurphy’s flashlight. The blips continued from an area further downstream from their original rendezvous point. That would give him more time to get across the river, but there was no beach there at all. Santos concluded that MacMurphy had to move away from the interlopers, whomever they were.
He stepped off the bank into the warm, muddy water of the Mopan River and was almost immediately knocked off his feet by the swift current. He could feel it grab him as he swam as hard as he could for the other side. By the time he reached the middle of the river, he was fatigued. The current had whisked him downstream faster than he had expected. At this rate, he would pass MacMurphy before reaching the other side. He switched to a breaststroke and continued to pull toward the blink, blink, blink of MacMurphy’s flashlight.
He was now directly in front of their original rendezvous spot, and he could make out the three men scanning the water with their flashlights. Suddenly a shot rang out and he dove beneath the surface, still pulling for the shore. He rolled over on his side and slowly poked his head out of the water to stifle any splashing.
Were they shooting at him? He could see the men on the shore looking in his direction and scanning the water with their flashlights. He continued to swim cautiously downstream in a sidestroke, trying his best not to splash or to raise his head too far out of the water.
His adrenaline pounded and he forgot about being tired. He was making steady but slow progress toward the shore when he realized he was going to overshoot MacMurphy’s location. Santos was about ten meters from the shore when he slipped past MacMurphy. He could see MacMurphy and his flashlight on the bank but was too afraid to call out or signal. Hopefully, MacMurphy would see him. If not, he would find him later. His main concern now was reaching the shore.
He was almost there when he spotted a partially submerged log in the water directly in front of him. Unable to stop, he crashed into it with a thud and held on for dear life. The current pressed him against the log, trying to push him under it, scraping skin from his ribs, and forcing the breath out of him. He clawed his way along the length of the log, to the shore and onto the riverbank. There he lay, exhausted and breathing heavily.
The next thing he saw was MacMurphy standing over him. “You made it!”
Culler Santos moaned, “If it hadn’t been for that fucking log, I’d be in Guatemala City by now.”
Santos dried himself off with his shirt and blotted the blood as best he could. As he painfully got dressed, he guessed he had bruised a couple of ribs but didn’t think anything was broken. They walked quietly back to the car, being careful not to alert the three men upstream.
Santos whispered, “Who the hell were those guys?”
MacMurphy shook his head. “Well, I didn’t see any fishing poles. And they didn’t look like cops. I think they were hunters.”
“Hunters?” Santos blurted, “What the hell would they be hunting out here on the riverbank at night?”
“Crocodiles, probably.”
“Ther
e are crocodiles in these waters?”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Didn’t want to scare you.”
Santos grabbed MacMurphy’s arm and looked him directly in the eyes. “Then they did take a shot at me. They thought I was a fucking crocodile.”
“Yep, that’s probably it.” MacMurphy smiled and patted Santos on the side of the face. “I’m glad you’re okay. I was real worried for a bit there.”
“Holy shit . . .”
They walked the rest of the way back to the car in a silent single file. The two men arrived in Guatemala City in the early morning hours and stopped for breakfast at an all-night café on the outskirts of the city. Feeling well fed yet tired, they followed the signs to the La Aurora International Airport and checked into the nearby Hilton Garden Inn.
Santos crashed in his room while MacMurphy called the United States Embassy to make an appointment with the consular section to pick up a replacement passport for Santos’s “lost” one. He also reserved two seats for them on a flight returning to Miami later that evening.
Getting a replacement passport for Santos was easy, but the fact that there was no record of his arrival in Guatemala was problematic. When they passed through customs at the airport later that afternoon, MacMurphy quickly surveyed the four customs booths and selected the one manned by a not-too-unattractive young woman. He presented his passport to her and flashed a flirtatious smile. They exchanged pleasantries while she chopped and returned his passport. He thanked her with a broad smile and hovered at the end of the booth while Santos presented his passport to her.
Santos admitted that he had lost his original passport and that the United States Embassy had provided a new one earlier that day. That explained why there was no entry chop in the passport, but it didn’t explain why there was no record of his entry in her system. When she questioned him about this, he shrugged and said he had entered the country at the exact same time as his friend MacMurphy.
MacMurphy joined Santos at the window, flashed a wide grin filled with perfect white teeth, and confirmed Santos’s story. That was enough to convince her that there had just been an error or a delay in the database’s most recent update. After all, the new passport was clearly authentic. How could it have been issued without the embassy verifying some prior record of an entry chop? She chopped it, sending both men on their way with a big smile.
CHAPTER 6
Back at the Fort Lauderdale offices of Global Strategic Reporting, Maggie Moore was briefing Santos, MacMurphy, and other staff members on the events of the past week. The meeting attendees included GSR’s secretary and receptionist, Christy Wright; the editor of the firm’s weekly CounterThreat publication, Wilber Millstone; and the company’s head researcher and Millstone’s assistant, Jake Bartlett. The group sat around an expensive marble and walnut table in an eighth-floor conference room, which overlooked the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean beyond.
Maggie looked especially disheveled today, having lost sleep last week worrying about “her boys” down in Belize. Her graying, auburn hair framed her face in dangling wisps. Bloodshot, pale blue eyes peered over her ever-present, rimless granny glasses. She looked older today than her sixty-one years.
Maggie Moore was a fiercely loyal former CIA officer. At the time of her retirement, she was the highest-ranking female officer in the Clandestine Service. Early in her career, she married a fellow CIA officer who, shortly after their wedding, was killed in a helicopter crash in Laos. Her grief contributed to a miscarriage, which heightened her depression. She compensated for her loss by throwing herself into her work.
Early in her career, she also caught the eye of Edwin Rothmann, who was then a rising star in the CIA. Rothmann mentored her and brought her along in the slipstream of his own career into the senior ranks. There she did a fair amount of mentoring of her own. One of her favorite mentees was a young former Marine named Harry MacMurphy. She recognized his talents from the outset and protected him from his many detractors, most of whom were simply jealous of the tireless work ethic that helped him rise swiftly through the ranks.
It didn’t hurt that Edwin Rothmann, who by that time had assumed the rank of DDO, the head of the Clandestine Service, was also one of MacMurphy’s biggest supporters.
Maggie reported that GSR revenues were up slightly due in most part to the CounterThreat publication, which was now being distributed to almost ten thousand subscribers worldwide. The popular weekly newsletter kept its subscribers up to date on the status of security, politics, and economics in various hotspots of the world.
But the company had taken a heavy financial hit due to the snafu down in Belize.
GSR had a lot on its plate at the moment. She ticked off the jobs they were working on one by one from her project list: an international due diligence on a company in Saudi Arabia targeted for acquisition by a United States company; two background investigations on potential hires for a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical firm in Dallas, Texas; an internal fraud investigation for a large construction company in Miami, Florida, that suspected its CFO of embezzling funds; locating a deadbeat dad in Minnesota; investigation of a suspected advance-fee schemer in New York; and, of course, the disastrous child recovery operation in Belize.
She moved on to potential cases that were in the discussion phase but not yet contracted. When she mentioned another possible child recovery operation, this one on Roatán, an island off the coast of Honduras, she elicited groans from Santos and MacMurphy.
Santos raised his thick, muscular arms in a gesture of surrender. “Hey, when you count everything up—my bail, the cost of sending Mac down to get me, the fact that the client won’t pay another dime because we failed to get his kid back—we lost about seventy grand on the job. It was a total failure. Blame is everywhere. There are simply too many variables with these types of operations. Sure, our hearts go out to the parents who want their kids back, and we’re on the right side of the law—U.S. law, at least—but they’re just too risky. I vote we get out of the child recovery business entirely.”
MacMurphy turned his chair from Santos to Maggie. “I agree with Culler. We’re all ready to risk life and limb for our country but not for corporate America or for individual clients. It’s hard to say no to some of these people, but these kinds of operations are simply too full of heartache and danger. I say we reserve the heroics for when it’s really needed.”
Maggie said, “Okay, can’t say I don’t agree with you. But let’s just keep an open mind and look at each one individually as they come in. We can’t take another hit like this. That’s for certain.”
When they finished discussing the current and potential cases and some general housekeeping matters, Maggie adjourned the meeting and asked Santos and MacMurphy to remain behind. When the door closed and the three of them were alone, she looked up and said in a low voice, “Edwin Rothmann called. He needs us.”
CHAPTER 7
When MacMurphy was released (okay, fired) by the CIA a little over two years ago, Edwin Rothmann suggested he set up a front company to cover occasional, “off the books” activities for the DDO. He explained, “We’re going to do the things that need to be done: covert action and a whole range of things this great outfit used to do but won’t do anymore. No more timidity. We’ll be bold. Just like in the old days.”
So, MacMurphy set up GSR in Fort Lauderdale with money from the operation that had gotten him booted from the Agency. Santos, who had been an audio tech with the CIA’s Office of Technical Services, joined him after flipping his badge at the director and quitting in protest over MacMurphy’s firing. Maggie had just retired and joined them a few weeks later.
It wasn’t long before Rothmann jokingly dubbed the firm “CIA, Inc.” The only people who were aware of the deeply embedded “CIA, Inc.” were Rothmann, Maggie, Santos, and MacMurphy. They worked in the shadows, financed by millions of dollars from an alias bank account in Switzerla
nd. GSR’s only true client, the only real reason for its existence, was the DDO.
Even though they were alone in the room, MacMurphy, Santos, and Maggie gathered at one end of the conference table and spoke in hushed tones. Maggie said, “While you two were off on your little jaunt in the jungle, Edwin called and invited me to dinner. You know what that means. I flew up to D.C. and met him at that little Turkish restaurant in Vienna off Route 123 he likes so much. He was quite agitated. I think the job is finally getting to him . . .”
“It’s the political correctness of the place these days. I know it’s driving him crazy. They can’t get anything accomplished,” said MacMurphy.
“I can’t imagine why he keeps hanging on,” said Santos.
“Because he cares too much, and he loves sticking his finger in the director’s eye. Plus, they can’t get rid of him. He knows where all the skeletons are buried,” said MacMurphy.
Maggie stopped them. “Let’s get on with it. He’s got a hostage problem and he needs our help.”
“Hostage!” Santos said.
“Yes, hostage, and a bad one.” She looked from one man to the other. “One of ours.”
“Oh shit,” MacMurphy muttered.
“Yes, and she’s an NOC.”
“She?” Santos said.
“Yes, she’s a she . . .”
“Who’s got her?” said MacMurphy. “You said she’s under nonofficial cover?”
“If you guys will stop interrupting me, I’ll give you the whole story.”
They settled into their chairs and waited for her to continue.
“Okay. Where was I? Yes, she’s a female and one of our most promising young officers. She went through the career training program about five or six years ago and is now on her second tour. She’s currently assigned to Cyprus as a counterterrorism officer attached to the counterterrorism center, a CTC officer. She speaks fluent Farsi and Arabic and has a master’s degree in nuclear engineering from Yale. She is—or should I say was—deeply involved in our collection efforts against the Iranian nuclear program. In fact, the human source information she collected made up a good part of what we now know about Iran’s less than honorable conduct.”
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