by Brad Thor
After accepting the two mailers, Gomez handed over a small wheelie bag that had been packed with clothing in Harvath’s size and a small toiletries kit. Traveling from Bilbao to Madrid with a small backpack was one thing, but traveling all the way to Mexico City without any real luggage would definitely arouse suspicion and added scrutiny. Gomez had agreed to supply the bag, probably liberated from the airline’s lost luggage department, as well as to handle Harvath’s FedEx drop-off for an additional fee.
Peio had vouched that Harvath could trust Gomez completely, which was good, since Gomez was the only man who could provide what Harvath needed.
When their business was concluded, the Spaniard wished Harvath a pleasant flight and left the VIP lounge. Harvath finished his coffee and then took his newly acquired luggage into one of the private shower rooms, where he unpacked the entire thing and stripped it all the way down. He wasn’t about to board an international flight and then attempt to clear customs in Mexico, of all places, carrying a bag someone else had given him.
Satisfied that there was nothing in it that could get Harvath in any trouble, he turned on the shower and cleaned himself up.
When his flight to Mexico City was ready to board, he shuffled out of the lounge with a Spanish daily newspaper tucked under his arm and attached himself to a group of businessmen as they made their way to the gate.
Onboard, Harvath studied the passengers around him in the business class section as he stowed his bag. No one appeared the least bit interested in him, which was just the way he liked it. Informing the flight attendants that he didn’t want to be awakened for the meal, he donned the headset from the seat pocket.
He had no idea what awaited him in Mexico, but he knew he needed to be rested for whatever came. It was much easier said than done. As the plane sped down the runway, his mind was overrun by the same questions that had been plaguing him since Paris and which had only been compounded in Spain, foremost among them—who had accused him of treason and why?
And while he didn’t want to believe he might have been betrayed, he had to ask himself how the Old Man was involved. Had he set him up? It seemed almost impossible. There were so many other ways he could have gotten to him if he had wanted. But Carlton was like a father to him. The idea that the Old Man would ever want to “get to” him at all was insane. No matter what charge anyone could ever trump up against him, the Old Man wouldn’t blindly issue a kill order. He knew Harvath too well. They had history together, a bond.
The more he thought about it, the more it pissed him off. None of it made any sense. He couldn’t get a handle on any of it, and each time he tried to fit the pieces together he only got angrier and more confused.
He knew alcohol normally wasn’t the answer, but sometimes it could be. Feigning a fear of flying, he talked a flight attendant into leaving him with several mini bottles and a glass of ice. As the liquid warmth spread through his body, it soon worked its way into his thoughts, disconnecting him from his mind in a dull haze, which allowed him finally to drift off to sleep.
It wasn’t one of the best chunks of sleep Harvath had ever had, but it was better than nothing. He awoke quite a few times, uncomfortable even in the business class seat, but was able to fall back asleep.
An hour before the plane touched down in Mexico City, he awoke again when the lights were brought up and the crew came through to serve a final meal. Harvath was hungry and downed two cups of coffee along with his food.
Despite the fitful sleep, he felt more exhausted when he stepped off the plane than when he had gotten on.
As he moved through the airport, he kept his hat on, his collar up, and his eyes looking down, trying to avoid the cameras as best he could. At least three people knew that he was on his way to Mexico, and that was already three too many.
The customs and immigration agents seemed more interested in one another than in Harvath and his Italian passport. They simply stamped it and waved him on through. He would make his flight to Monterrey, Mexico, with time to spare.
Walking through the terminal, there were countless opportunities to relieve any number of oblivious travelers of a cell phone or a laptop computer, but he resisted the urge. It wasn’t worth the risk while in transit. Staying off the radar meant staying completely off. Hopefully he’d have answers to his questions soon enough.
After getting more coffee, he killed time in an adjacent gate area until the final call came for the flight to Monterrey. He had surveilled all of the passengers on his flight and none of them gave him any pause. Boarding, he found his seat, stowed his bag, and sat down next to an attractive young woman who seemed more interested in her stack of Mexican fashion magazines than in striking up any sort of conversation with the man sitting next to her. They were perfectly suited for each other. An hour and twenty minutes after takeoff, when the plane touched down in Monterrey, the woman was still engrossed in her reading.
Harvath made his way through the drab airport to the transportation counter and purchased a ticket into the city, then exited the terminal and walked over to a cab stand. He counted the number of vehicles in the queue and watched them as he moved forward. At the last minute, he allowed two families to step in front of him and take the awaiting taxis. They thanked him for being such a gentleman, and he smiled. None of them realized that they had done him more of a favor than he had done for them.
After showing his ticket, the driver unlocked the doors and Harvath climbed inside with his bag. Leaning over the seat, he handed the driver the address Peio had given him. The man looked at the slip of paper and then turned and looked at his passenger. “Con permiso, señor,” he said. “Estás seguro de saber lo que haces?”
Even if Harvath didn’t possess a minor grasp of Spanish, he would have understood the question just by the look on the man’s face. Was Harvath sure he really wanted to be taken to that part of town? “Sí,” Harvath replied. “Vámonos.”
The man shrugged, put his cab in gear, and pulled out into evening traffic.
It was a twenty-minute drive from the airport into the city, one of the largest in Mexico. It was hard to believe that in 2005 it was ranked the safest city in all of Latin America. Now it was wracked with cartel violence and incredibly dangerous, each year bloodier than the one before.
Harvath had no idea where the address was that the taxi driver was taking him to, but he had a feeling it wasn’t one of the city’s garden spots. By the same token, Harvath hadn’t expected it to be anything spectacular. Orphanages didn’t usually occupy prime real estate.
He had to hand it to Nicholas, though. Being plugged into a worldwide network of orphanages was very much akin to how intelligence agencies used NGOs. They provided a certain amount of cover at ground level and allowed you to tap into what was happening “on the street” better than at almost any other level save for narcotics or law enforcement organizations. Orphanages often had a religious affiliation that put them above reproach and scrutiny. On top of that, if they had been treated well, former charges who were now adults could be incredibly loyal and prove extremely helpful in certain situations.
Harvath didn’t doubt Nicholas’s sincerity, but he also didn’t doubt that Nicholas structured many of his relationships with a secondary benefit in mind.
Nearing the city, the driver—who had wisely stayed off the highways because they were controlled by the drug cartels—began taking narrower side streets. Many of the buildings were dilapidated and covered with graffiti. At the next stoplight, a street vendor appeared and the driver double-clicked the cab’s door locks. It was the man’s subtle way of giving his passenger a heads-up. It happened again two blocks later as a motorcycle came up from behind and slowed down next to them, its rider taking a particularly long look at Harvath before moving on.
Five minutes later, the cab came to a stop not outside an orphanage, but a dimly lit tavern. Sensing his passenger’s confusion, the driver read the address aloud from the slip of paper as if to say, “This is where you asked to
be taken,” and handed it back to him. Harvath turned over the fare ticket along with a U.S. twenty dollar bill as a tip, grabbed his suitcase, and got out.
He looked up at the battered colonial façade and checked the address himself. Sure enough, it was the one Peio had given him. The cab idled as Harvath stood on the sidewalk studying the tavern. The sound of Mexican pop music could be heard from inside. A bad feeling began to overtake him. He couldn’t help but wonder if he was walking into an ambush.
The longer he stood waiting outside, the more attention he was going to draw to himself, so he decided to walk in. As he moved toward the door, he heard the cabdriver put the taxi in gear and drive away.
Harvath was now totally on his own.
CHAPTER 27
Calling the tavern a hole in the wall would have been a compliment. The place was an absolute dump. Faded 1960s reprints of Mexican artwork adorned the worn plaster walls, which had been stained brown over the decades, like the ceiling, by a patina of cigarette smoke. A string of red, Italian-style Christmas lights looked like it was left up year-round, adorning the dirty mirror behind the bar.
Tables of men conversed as waitresses carried drinks from the bar and plates of food from the kitchen. A bouncer at the door looked up as Harvath walked in but went back to the paperback he was reading, as if tourists with wheelie bags were their bread-and-butter customers. Judging from the neighborhood and the cabdriver’s reaction, Harvath was pretty sure no gringos had seen the inside of this joint in a long time, if ever.
He picked a table off to the side, away from the majority of customers, where he could watch the door.
A couple of minutes later, a waitress came over to take his order. Just like the bouncer, she didn’t seem to be the least bit surprised to see him there. “Cerveza, señor?”
What he wanted was a coffee, but having a beer bottle in front of him at the moment was appealing on several different levels. He saw that they served Bohemia in the bottle and asked for one.
As the waitress left to get his beer, he could see beyond the bar and into the kitchen, where some sort of meat was being roasted on a spit over hot coals, probably cabrito, young goat. It was a popular dish in this area of northern Mexico, as was something called discada, a combination of meats cooked in beer inside a plow disc that’s been welded shut.
Harvath must have been paying a little too much attention to the kitchen. After dropping off his bottle of beer, the waitress returned with a plate of meat, accompanied by onions and fresh salsa, and a container with hot tortillas. Though he tried to explain to her that he hadn’t ordered it, she simply told him to eat and walked away to see to another table of customers.
Not knowing when he’d be able to eat again, Harvath spooned some meat into one of the tortillas, added some onion and salsa, and dug in.
It was cabrito, and having eaten as much goat as he had in his day, most of it lousy, he knew good goat when he tasted it. This was very good goat.
When he was done, the waitress returned with some sort of custard for dessert, which Harvath politely declined. She asked if he wanted any coffee and though he was still slowly sipping at his beer, he said yes. She returned with café de olla, a rustic style of coffee brewed with cinnamon, and cleared his dinner dishes. Missing, though, was the steak knife Harvath had tucked carefully beneath his leg.
An hour later, there were only two other tables of customers left in the place. Harvath declined a third cup of coffee and watched as the bartender waved the bouncer over and handed him two pieces of paper.
The bouncer delivered one to each table and stood there as the groups of disgruntled patrons were forced to pay up. Harvath waited for his bill to come, but it didn’t. Instead the bouncer saw the last of the customers out and then bolted the door.
“Stand up, please,” the bartender said in English as he joined the bouncer at Harvath’s table. “You can leave the knife on your chair.”
The bartender was a barrel-chested man in his late fifties. He wasn’t as big as the doorman, but he looked like he could hold his own and had done so on many occasions. Harvath didn’t want to take on either of them, much less both, but he could if he had to. Have a smile for everyone you meet, along with a plan to kill them, had long been one of the mantras that had kept him alive.
Harvath removed the knife from beneath his leg, set it on the table, and stood up. If he needed it, he wanted it close.
The bartender took two steps back and beckoned Harvath forward. “Over here, please.”
Harvath stepped around the table and walked toward the man.
“That’s far enough. Hands on your head, please.”
“What’s this all about?” asked Harvath.
“It’s just a formality. Hands up, please.”
Harvath did as he was told and was given a thorough pat-down by the bouncer.
When he was finished the bartender told Harvath he could lower his arms and added, “Norberto is going to look through your luggage now. Okay?”
It sounded like a question, but Harvath knew better and simply nodded.
As the doorman did his due diligence, the bartender continued talking. “As best we can tell, no one followed you from the airport.”
“Who’s we?”
“My name is Guillermo,” said the bartender. “But beyond that, I don’t think we want to know much more about each other. Correct?”
“Probably not,” replied Harvath as he watched the bouncer going through his bag. “Are things this dangerous now in Monterrey?”
“Things are this dangerous everywhere now, señor.”
True, thought Harvath. “Interesting orphanage you’re running here.”
The bartender smiled and gave a slight bow of his head. “Consider this a portal. You can’t get there without going through here.”
Harvath wondered what Nicholas had gotten him into. “Your devotion to protecting children is admirable.”
“Let’s just say that I have a personal interest in making sure nothing happens.”
He wasn’t surprised. If there really was an orphanage and Nicholas was somehow using it for his own ends, why shouldn’t other shady characters be doing so as well?
He was about to ask the bartender a question when the bouncer zipped up his wheelie bag and nodded.
“It looks like you’re ready to go,” Guillermo stated.
“What do I owe you for the food?”
“It’s on the house.”
Harvath pulled out another twenty-dollar bill, left it on the table for the waitress, and followed the bartender out the back of the tavern.
CHAPTER 28
A block over, they came to a three-story building surrounded by a high concrete wall with a heavy wooden door that looked like it could be a couple of hundred years old. Guillermo produced a ring of keys from his pocket while the bouncer, Norberto, watched the street.
The bartender located the proper key, inserted it into the old iron lock, and turned. There was a loud click and then the door swung open. Harvath followed the man inside, and Norberto brought up the rear.
They had entered a wide rectangular courtyard. A jungle gym a stone’s throw from a statue of the Virgin Mary was all he needed to see to tell them where they were.
The walls were covered with murals of children playing interspersed with stories from the lives of the saints. Above the entryway was an inscription in Latin: ALERE FLAMMAM VERITATIS—Let the flame of truth shine. It was an interesting motto for an orphanage, but it resonated with Harvath. If anyone needed the flame of truth right now, it was he.
Beneath the inscription, Guillermo produced another key, opened the door, and shuttled his party through. “Wait here,” he said, once they were inside. “I will find Sister Marta.”
The interior reminded Harvath a lot of his grade school—the linoleum floors, the wooden lockers, the black-and-white photographs along the walls, even the faint scent of disinfectant—were almost identical. With all the similarities, and remembering how
so many of the nuns had looked alike to him back then, he wouldn’t have been surprised if Sister Marta had been a dead ringer for the principal of his school, Sister McKenna. Sister Marta, though, turned out to be nothing like Sister McKenna.
When she appeared, she was wearing blue jeans and a Rutgers sweatshirt. She was in her late thirties with dark chin-length hair and, despite not wearing any makeup, was quite pretty.
The bartender said something in rapid Spanish to her that Harvath didn’t catch. All he was able to understand was how he addressed her. It wasn’t as “Sister Marta” but rather Martita, adding -ita to her name as a form of endearment. The young nun, in kind, referred to Guillermo as Momo and gave him a kiss on the cheek before he and the bouncer turned to leave.
As the door closed behind them, Sister Marta welcomed Harvath and extended her hand. “I’m Sister Marta.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Sister,” said Harvath, trying to figure out what her relationship with the bartender was.
“You may call me Marta if you like. We’re not very formal around here.”
“Is that why Guillermo called you Martita?”
The nun laughed. “We may be informal, but we’re not that informal. Only family call me Martita. Guillermo—Momo, as I call him—is my uncle.”
“Your English is very good. Did you go to school there?” Harvath asked, indicating the university on her sweatshirt.
“No. We get lots of clothing donations here. The items that are too big for the children, we pass on to the poor. Occasionally, the staff will find something that they think will fit me and they set it aside. That’s where this came from.”
“What about your English?” Harvath asked, intrigued. There was an aura of instant likability about her. She was strong and, like most nuns he’d known, could probably be quite strict when she had to be, but she was also very personable.
