It was a bit thin, but the PM didn’t seem to notice. ‘So all you want for now is an official request that this man Docherty be allowed access to their prisoner?’
‘That’s right.’
The PM sighed again. He had the distinct feeling he hadn’t heard the last of this business. ‘Very well,’ he said with a thin smile.
Docherty ordered another glass of mescal and looked out across Oaxaca’s sun-dappled main square. He had been in the south Mexican city for two days now, having taken the overnight train from the capital late in the day of his eventful trip to Teotihuacán. He had been sufficiently intrigued by Shepreth’s plan to delay his return home, but it had not seemed a good idea to stay on in Mexico City, where Toscono’s goons and probably half the police force would be looking for him.
Oaxaca had been his favourite Mexican town in 1977, and it hadn’t changed as much as he’d feared. The town itself was a joy to walk round, the wonderful ruins of Monte Alban were only a hill climb away, and the main square, with its luscious foliage, beautiful cathedral and outdoor restaurants was the perfect place to sit and think. It was at one of these tables, nineteen years before, that Docherty had felt some balance shift inside his soul, as the dominance of his grief felt the first guilt-ridden challenges of a new joy in life.
Ah, Chrissie, he thought now. How different his life would have been if one stupid bastard had known how to drive. He would never have come to Mexico, never acquired the fluency in Spanish which marked him out for the Argentina mission, never met Isabel or adopted this continent so far from his beloved Scotland. It was sobering to think that a split-second decision by a complete stranger could turn your life upside down.
He had phoned Isabel to tell her his change of plan before boarding the train. She had taken the news calmly enough, but he could tell she was worried for him. If Docherty hadn’t known that deep in the recesses of his wife’s soul there lurked an unassuaged thirst for revenge against Bazua and his cronies, he would have felt a lot guiltier about putting her through the anxiety. As it was, maybe this whole business would complete the process of exorcizing her twenty-year-old demons. Or maybe he was kidding himself and Shepreth’s offer had just piqued his curiosity.
He rather liked the young MI6 agent. Shepreth was obviously bright, and unlike most of his colleagues – or at least the ones Docherty had come into contact with – he hadn’t immersed himself in self-serving cynicism.
The Scot looked at his watch – punctuality clearly wasn’t one of Shepreth’s strong suits – then signalled the waiter for a refill, thinking that he should have bought the whole bottle, worm and all. At the table next to his a bunch of English travellers, most of them in their thirties, were telling tales of the six-hour bus ride down to the coast, and he listened in, remembering his own descent of the hair-raising mountain roads in 1977.
The waiter arrived at the same time as Shepreth, who looked like the proverbial cat who’d got the cream. Another glass was requested, and they moved to a more secluded table.
‘The government is asking the Colombians to let you in for a chat with Angel,’ Shepreth told him.
‘Good,’ Docherty said. ‘And what does it want in return?’
‘Your eyes. If you can help us build up a picture of the inside, we’ll be better able to judge the feasibility of an assault from outside by your old regiment.’
Docherty’s eyes widened slightly. ‘That’s really on the cards?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Any time-scale in mind?’
‘The request for the visit was delivered today.’ He shrugged. ‘The Colombians may sit on it, of course.’
Docherty thought for a moment. ‘I think I’d like a good look from the outside before I go in,’ he said. ‘Do we know where this prison is?’
Shepreth pulled a napkin towards him and drew a rough map of the island. ‘It’s here,’ he said, indicating the location with a cross. ‘When I get back to Mexico City I’m going to ask Ted Vaughan if he can sneak out some satellite photos. Don’t worry,’ he added, seeing the look on Docherty’s face, ‘I shall tell him to borrow a lot more than the Providencia shots.’
‘They would be useful,’ Docherty admitted, thinking more of a future SAS operation than his own reconnaissance. He couldn’t quite shake the suspicion that there was more to all this than met the eye, although for the moment he couldn’t see what it could be. But at least there was no doubting that the joint sponsorship of the British and Colombian governments would make his visit to Bazua’s home from home a lot safer than it otherwise might have been.
And safety, he reminded himself, was what family men were supposed to place first on their list of priorities.
8
Carmen woke to her third day on the island feeling decidedly flat. She had ridden round Providencia twice on the previous day, once in each direction, and had seen nothing that might be a prison. She had wandered, with no little trepidation, down each of the two tracks that led into the south-western corner of the island, but found nothing. She had walked up the long path to the three-hundred-metre peak at the island’s heart and seen only trees and colourful birds. And as the days had gone by those twin emotions of fear and hope, which had been her constant companions since setting foot on the island, had slowly dissipated.
Sitting outside the Dutch Inn with her breakfast coffee she asked herself how long she should keep looking. Another couple of days at least, but there would soon come a time when one more circuit of the island, staring at the same houses and beaches, would seem utterly pointless. But what else could she do?
Think, she told herself.
Maybe some sort of bluff…She had seen the military post outside Aguadulce, and for a few seconds had even thought it could have served as a prison, but it was obviously too small for the sort of set-up Victoria had described. The soldiers, though, would obviously know if there was a prison on the island, and if there was, where it was. If she came up with some story about a friend who had been arrested…
It wouldn’t help. No one was going to say, oh yes, the prison’s down the road – just knock on the gate and they’ll let you in.
It suddenly occurred to Carmen that there was no reason why this prison would look like a normal prison. Victoria had always talked about ‘him’, as if he was the only one that mattered – maybe this was just a house which had been commandeered to hold one man.
But if it was just a house, how could she hope to find it? It would have to be well guarded, of course, probably with a wall or electric fence, but she had seen a dozen sprawling villas which answered to that description.
There had to be more, and a few moments later she realized what. In Miami Detective Peña had been quite certain that this man Bazua was still running his trafficking operations from the prison, and surely that meant he would need sophisticated communications equipment – a tall radio aerial, for example. She remembered seeing one of those, but where had it been?
It took her only a few seconds to remember. The house – a rather lovely one in Spanish colonial style – was on the seaward side of the road about a kilometre north of San Felipe on the island’s west coast. In her mind’s eye she could see the aerial rising up behind the house.
She gulped down the rest of her coffee, collected her camera and her father’s binoculars from her room, and set off once more on the hotel’s bike. Less than half an hour later she was passing the gates of the house, taking in the palm-lined drive, the house itself, surrounded by woodland, the silver sheen of the high aerial. There was no guardhouse by the gates, nor any sign of human presence – only a high stucco wall topped with three lines of barbed wire.
About twenty metres beyond the gate – out of sight, she prayed, of any surveillance cameras – she stopped, dismounted and made a pantomime of inspecting her back tyre. She took the hand-pump and started inflating the tyre, making sure to keep her face turned in that direction as her eyes behind the dark glasses examined the hill on the opposite side of
the road. It was heavily forested and quite steep, and with any luck she would be able to find a vantage-point which overlooked the house behind her.
Apparently satisfied with her efforts, she climbed back on the bike and resumed her journey. About half a kilometre further on a stream passed under the road in a culvert, and beside it a rough path led up into the trees. That was her way in, she decided. On her way back to the hotel for more jungle-friendly clothes she felt the old knot of hope and fear rising once more in her throat.
Guadencio Santis López was playing eight-ball with one of his bodyguards when Miguel Domínguez tracked him down. As the President of Colombia was currently engaged in lining up a shot his Foreign Minister waited in silence, casting his eye around the newly converted pool room. The last president had used this room of the palace as a TV room and private cinema, watching endless soap operas on an enormous screen far into each night. It had been rumoured that the price of one drug baron’s pardon had been the whole of Dynasty on video, and that the president himself had given up on his re-election campaign after watching the episode in which Fallon was abducted by aliens.
Pool had to be an improvement, Domínguez thought to himself.
‘What is it, Miguel?’ the President asked. He had apparently missed his shot.
‘I’ve just had a visit from the British Ambassador,’ Domínguez began.
Santis López looked at him in disbelief, as if such an event could justify interrupting his game. ‘What did he want?’ he asked, his eyes on the table.
‘He wanted a personal favour. One of their soldiers – one of their heroes, I gather – is married to an Argentinian woman and he’s trying to trace what happened to one of her relations during the Junta years. He wants to talk to Angel Bazua, and the British are asking us to arrange it for him.’
‘Bazua’s in prison on Providencia, right?’
‘If you can call it that. I wish my home was half as comfortable.’
Santis López made a face as the bodyguard sank another ball. ‘That was part of the deal.’ He glanced across at Domínguez. ‘Why are you bothering me with this?’ he asked.
Domínguez chose to take the question literally. ‘Because it doesn’t feel quite right,’ he replied. ‘The British Ambassador even told me he thought the Americans had been stupid to accuse us of not cooperating with their anti-drug campaign.’
‘They were.’
‘I know, but…’
The bodyguard missed. ‘Is there any reason why Bazua should object to seeing this man?’ Santis López asked, measuring his next shot.
‘My sources say he’ll probably consider it entertainment,’ Domínguez replied.
‘Then give the British what they want,’ the President said with a shrug. ‘What can we lose?’
Docherty’s plane from Oaxaca arrived in Mexico City soon after ten in the morning, and he spent most of the three-hour wait between connections reading an historical novel he’d picked up in a secondhand bookshop. Set in twelfth-century England and featuring monks, sociopathic nobles and obsessive cathedral-builders, it was thoroughly enjoyable.
As there was no direct flight to San Andrés from Mexico, he’d have another, albeit shorter, stopover at the airport outside the Costa Rican capital of San Juan. He’d never been there himself, but unfortunately he remembered Isabel’s account of landing there. Apparently, the approach to the airport in question was down a deep valley where the crosswinds were fierce enough to turn even a large airliner into a flying see-saw.
It wasn’t a very exciting prospect, and as the plane began to board he almost found himself hoping that Shepreth had finally graduated from mere unpunctuality to complete non-appearance.
The MI6 man arrived a few moments later, brandishing a large envelope. ‘Copies of the photos,’ he told Docherty. ‘You should probably destroy them before you get to San Andrés.’
‘I’ll eat them on the plane,’ Docherty said with a straight face.
Shepreth didn’t seem to hear him. ‘The Colombians have agreed to your visit,’ he said. ‘You’re to present yourself to the military post on the island – it’s just outside Aguadulce – at ten a.m. on Friday morning.’ He looked at the Scot. ‘I think that’s it.’
‘When are you coming over?’ Docherty asked him.
‘Tomorrow. Providencia’s a small place and I didn’t think it would be such a good idea for us both to arrive on the same day. I’ll meet you on or near the dock at eight tomorrow evening, OK?’
‘Aye,’ Docherty said. He was pleased the Colombians had agreed to the visit and given him the chance to see a devil in the flesh.
Carmen reached back to scratch her right calf, wondering what had bitten her this time. As far as she knew, there were no poisonous reptiles on the island, but there were certainly plenty of biting insects. She had now spent most of two days lying face down on the ground, peering over a rotting fallen tree at the compound below.
She had no cast-iron evidence to show for it, but she was certain that this was the prison in which Victoria had been held captive. For one thing, the house had twice received visits from the military – on the first occasion it had been a lone officer in a jeep, on the second two other officers in a car. For another, there was the layout, which was more than twice as extensive as it appeared from the road. Behind the two-storey main house, facing each other across an open space, there were two barrack-shaped single-storey buildings, each about thirty metres long. In the space between them there seemed to be a swimming pool. Carmen couldn’t actually see it, but the shimmering reflections on one of the gutters certainly suggested the presence of water.
In front of the house there was a short, palm-lined drive, which ended in a turning circle beside a double garage. The high stucco wall which fronted the road did not extend around the entire circumference – from the corner of the property which Carmen could see a high wire fence ran off through the trees in the direction of the sea. Unusually for a prison, the overhanging coils of razor wire had been arranged to keep people out rather than in.
Beyond the buildings and the probable swimming pool she thought she could see the beginning of a path, which would presumably lead down through the trees to the nearby shore.
But nobody had used it since she started watching, and nobody had conveniently appeared in a window. The previous afternoon, soon after the arrival of the two officers, she had heard shouts and what sounded like a bouncing ball, and for a few seconds a figure had come into view close to the beginning of the distant path. He had probably been collecting a stray basketball, but she hadn’t actually seen a ball.
A couple of hours later, with darkness beginning to fall, she had had a fleeting glimpse of someone’s head above the roofline, and though she couldn’t put her finger on exactly why, she had been convinced that it was a woman. But there had been no time to take a picture – she would have needed a continually rolling camcorder to catch either of the human sightings.
A higher position might provide a view of the space between the buildings, but above her the slope of the hill flattened out for quite a way before resuming its climb. She had tried shinning up a couple of the trees, but in both cases it had proved a difficult, noisy and overly visible activity, and had offered nothing more than a better view of the surrounding foliage.
She needed better binoculars, she decided, or maybe just some old-fashioned luck. As another member of the insect kingdom drilled her ankle for blood she told herself not to get discouraged. If she stuck at it long enough she was bound to see something.
Docherty walked past the entrance to Bazua’s place of detention, noting the electronically operated gates and the lens of the surveillance camera peeping out through the palm fronds. A few minutes later he reached the spot from which the path led up through the trees and, after a few moments’ hesitation, started up it. He had decided that morning that there was really no need for the recce he had mentioned to Shepreth, but the path was there for the taking, so why not satisfy his own curios
ity?
The going was easy enough for the first hundred metres or so, but then the path abruptly petered out, as if it had realized there was nowhere to go. This didn’t surprise Docherty, but the discovery a few minutes later of a reasonably new bicycle did. The cyclist had dragged his machine a good thirty metres through the undergrowth before leaving it under some trailing fronds, which suggested an unusually determined attempt at concealment.
There was a metal tag attached to the handlebars claiming ownership on behalf of the Dutch Inn, Providencia.
Docherty squatted down, then rubbed some of the damp soil between his hands and applied a few streaks to his face. It wasn’t an SAS make-up kit, but it would have to do.
The trail of the cyclist wasn’t hard to follow through the heavy undergrowth. The footprints themselves suggested a small man, and the direction in which they headed implied an interest similar to Docherty’s own. He moved forward as silently as the terrain allowed, remembering his days at the SAS Jungle Training School in Brunei almost a quarter of a century ago. ‘I can hear you, Docherty!’ the instructor had screamed, ‘you sound like fucking Pan’s People!’
What happened to them? Docherty wondered. He supposed most of them were grandmothers by now, which was a depressing thought.
He could catch glimpses of the road now, way below and to his right. And then he saw her.
She was about forty metres further down the shallow slope, just behind what looked like the rim of a ridge. Docherty steadied himself and trained the collapsible telescope on her. She was lying on her front, studying the view ahead with her own binoculars over a fallen tree. He couldn’t see her face, but she had shiny black hair beyond shoulder length, a trim waist, nicely rounded behind and long legs. She was wearing a black, long-sleeved shirt, blue jeans and black boots. There was a camera on the ground beside her, but it didn’t seem to be fitted with a telephoto lens.
‘What the hell?’ he murmured to himself. Why would a young woman be watching Bazua’s prison?
Days of the Dead Page 12
