The Laughing Falcon

by William Deverell

  He had to rescue the Australian, he’d spilled when his duckee took the wrong channel, a narrow sluice between two boulders. “Feet first, on your back!” he shouted as the man began to flail, the current carrying him, Slack pursuing, finally hoisting him aboard his boat. Thankfully, this was the end of the white water, all class one from here.

  Tomorrow, in the morning, a copter would take him to San José, a final briefing at the resort where Walker’s entourage was staying. “Friday, usual place, usual time” – that’s what Ham’s tappers heard on the line. Everyone was convinced Elmer meant the Escazú Hills at dusk.

  The river widened as it took a broad turn where a crescent of sand had been deposited, Slack’s staging area near the road. He shepherded his clients to shore. “Watch for the sand fleas, they bite like crazy. Stay out of the grass, there’s chiggers here, too, they lay eggs under your skin.”

  Slack could see Frank Sierra sitting in his rented Suzuki four-wheel, reading a book. Slack catered to his customers, laying out sandwiches and beer and soft drinks, then joined him. He could tell Frank had something, he looked too pleased with himself, twirling an end of his moustache.

  “The property in question,” he said, “extends from the Naranjo River into the mountains across the road, comprising eighty hectares. It was purchased four years ago as raw land for a hundred thousand dollars by one Abner Krock, who built the house. He is shown in government records also to have an address in Denver. His current address, however, and for the next twenty years, is San Quentin, California.”

  Slack watched his kayakers slather on the bug repellent. “Drugs, I’ll bet.”

  “Precisely. He was among three Americans, two Colombians, and a Puerto Rican who were arrested on an airstrip at a cattle ranch not far from here. The cargo of three hundred pounds of cocaine was destined for America, and this was a U.S. Drug Enforcement sting. All were extradited but one, a man who said he was present at the scene merely by happenstance.”

  “Jericho.”

  Frank nodded. “I thought it odd that although the others also claimed to be innocent bystanders, he alone escaped justice. One is prompted to surmise that some quiet intervention was undertaken.”

  “In words of one syllable, Frank.”

  “Friends in high places.”

  “Maybe he just did a deal, rolled over for them.”

  “He incriminated nobody. Any deal, perhaps, was for future favours.”

  “Why wasn’t all this in Jericho’s file?”

  Frank raised a speculative eyebrow. “The same friends in high places? It is indeed odd. The agent who did the initial check on Mr. Jericho felt constrained not to talk to me.”

  “That’s bullshit – who gave that order?”

  “He preferred not to say.”

  Frank wasn’t in the loop. Slack wasn’t in the loop. Whose loop was it, anyway? Whose neck?

  – 3 –

  From the balconies of the senator’s adjoining suites at the Cariari Hotel, Slack could see the volcanic range that guarded the Central Valley, the foothills bare and brown. The golf course, though, was green, a sprinkler system. Walker was about to tackle it, he was practising on the carpet with a putter and a plastic cup. Ham and his tactical team were here, too, counting money, stuffing thick wads of U.S. hundreds into two duffle bags.

  “You’ll be armed, I take it,” Walker said.

  “No guns.” Slack had retrieved his Smith .38 but given it to Frank.

  Walker missed a putt, gave him an exasperated look. “You’re just going to walk in there with our four million dollars and no protection?”

  “I don’t want to see anyone with hardware. I’m going to give them the dough, I’m going to grab the women, and I’m getting out of there, then you guys ask them, nicely, please, to surrender.”

  “I can’t see it being that easy.” Walker gruffly threw his putter into his golf bag. “I recall these characters as being somewhat gun-happy.”

  Slack had let the senator down. “Where am I going to hide a piece? They did a good job feeling me up last time.”

  “We’ll have a tag team behind him this time, senator,” Ham said. “And he’ll also have the little beeper.”

  Slack had been confused when they asked him if he was circumcised, now he wished he had been. An indelicate hiding place, but his objections had been overruled, the tiny capsule with the transmitter would be taped to his glans, his foreskin rolled over it.

  “Think you can avoid getting a bone on?” Ham asked.

  Slack didn’t think he would have that problem.

  From the balcony, Slack watched Walker tee off, good form, a long, looping slice but still on the fairway. His companions took their turns, Schumenbacker, a couple of agents, plus the gorillas who were at Bar Balboa the other night.

  Slack called Ham away from his tactical team. “Those four aren’t campaign workers.”

  Ham squinted through his dense cigar fog. “The senator said he was bringing in some extra help. I told him we don’t need it, we don’t want it.”

  “I think you better start thinking of putting a lid on the senator from the great state of Nicaragua.”

  “He’s been warned.”

  “I’d like to see those guys picked up and held.”

  “You tell me what law they’re breaking.”

  “Those are some mean mother-fuckers, Ham. They kill innocent people.” Including journalists, Chuck’s Rangers had engineered a bombing near the Costa Rica border, a political assassination gone awry. “Chuck doesn’t trust me to waste the bad guys, so he’s signed up psychopaths to do the job. You getting the picture, Ham?”

  “I’m directing the fucking movie. On a warrant from the U.S. president. Walker ain’t calling any shots.”

  Slack would just have to watch his back and do things differently. Plan A was to follow Bakerfield’s book. Plan B allowed personal initiative. “What about the Ticos?”

  Minister Castillo had gone on air, outing Johnny Diego, despite Ham Bakerfield’s roundly stated objections. Now Castillo was licking his wounds, the White House had phoned the Costa Rica president, told him to butt out or they’d buy no more bananas.

  “They’ll get briefed when it’s over. One of the networks has been greasing Castillo’s people for advance tips, they’re liable to have the press swarming around us like fish flies. Your fan, the poetry lover, he’s not gonna know. Okay?”

  “Sure.” Slack tried to look grave and innocent.

  “A dozen people know, and they’re all in this room.”

  Slack slouched onto a couch beside a member of the pursuit team, a young woman in bike leather, a Harley jacket, a cocky smirk.

  “Listen up,” Ham said. “We’re presuming an identical pattern to the last time. Slack meets them at that lookout point, leaves his motorcycle there, goes off in their van. Meantime, we’ve done a copter drop, Pedersen and Szabo are hiding in the bush there, watching. They get on the radio, tell us what route the targets are taking. There are only five exits from those back roads onto the highways. We’ll have those points covered, it’ll be dark by then. We have five pursuit vehicles, two will overtake the truck, riding point, three stay behind, and I don’t want them seeing the same headlights in the rear view all the time.”

  “You forgot me.” The woman beside Slack, lounging back, cowboy boots on the coffee table.

  “Slack, I want you to meet Agent Kitty Conroy, twice women’s dirt bike champion in … where?”

  “Kentucky.”

  Slack eyed her carefully. “A pleasure.”

  “Same.”

  “Let’s return to go,” Ham said. “Kitty follows Slack out of town. She keeps him in view until she gets to that dinky Kimby Chicken store up there, then calls into control.”

  “Why do we need her?” Slack said. “You know where I’m going.”

  “You’re carrying four million fucking dollars, that’s why.”

  The ransom money was on the bed, in two duffle bags to be strapped to
Slack’s moto. He’d checked the bills, they weren’t the products of a high-end colour copier, he’d felt them for the familiar crackle of cotton-linen fibre, examined the security threads and watermarks, the details of engraving, randomness of serial numbers.

  “Okay, let’s talk about site control,” Ham said. “We need to check out any escape routes so we can seal off the area.”

  Slack wondered if he had the skills to shake off the Kentucky dirt bike champion, to enact Plan B, his own precarious plot to effect a rescue unaided by the U.S. State Department. The ominous presence of Walker’s Rangers had firmed up his resolve.

  He would just damn well pay Halcón off, it was money well spent, wasted otherwise on the Keep Chuck Running fund. Then he’d ride out of there on his moto with Glo behind him and Maggie in front, and call Ham from the nearest pay phone, giving Halcón maybe half an hour.

  Op Libertad could lump it. He’d been hired to save those women, that was the deal, nothing in the small print about doing it cheap.

  At five o’clock, as the sun was nestling into the southern cordillera, Slack was on the autopista, weaving through heavy traffic backed up behind a stalled bus, normal San José rush hour on a Friday The duffle bags were bulky, it was a task to squeeze between the vehicles, but he was making headway. So was Kitty Conroy, fifty yards behind him on a stripped-down racing bike.

  They’d had a friendly chat, bike talk, Slack used to ride a big hog in the old days. He’d professed to know only one route to Escazú, through the heart of San José. He had an edge, he knew the city, its busy sections, its maze of one-way streets. There were no dirt bike trails in San José.

  “Let’s see how good you are,” he’d said. She’d answered, “Give it your best shot.”

  He took to the shoulder, found his way blocked by a bus, wiggled around it, bolted ahead of a grunting van, no problem for Kitty Conroy, slipping right through the tight fit. Now, Sabana Park was stretching off to the right, the Nissan dealership, the art gallery. Traffic was snarled the whole length of Paseo Colón, the wide east-west thoroughfare.

  Slack sought an opening, then darted left, an illegal turn onto a wrong-way calle, cars braking, horns blaring. Alarmed pedestrians cleared the sidewalk for him, and he made it to the next corner. For an exultant several seconds, he was sure he’d got rid of Kitty, but he turned to see her behind him, frozen on his tail, hunched over her handlebars, determined. He waved.

  She kept up with him past the Coca-Cola Station, and almost up to the Central Market, but that’s where he saw his chance, a light was about to turn red. The traditional practice here was to run the change of lights at every opportunity, but Slack braked, came almost to a halt as it went to red. Then he kicked down and went full throttle.

  It was like trying to squeak between jaws about to snap shut, crocodile teeth in the form of three cars, a vegetable truck, a bus, and a red taxi with tassels on its windows whose white-faced driver swerved to miss him, his brakes screaming. Slack, his heart pounding, listened for a mighty crunch of fenders as he accelerated past the crosswalk. None came, and when he glanced behind, he saw traffic was again zooming along the avenida. No Kitty Conroy.

  After several minutes of zigzagging up and down the irregular checkerboard of the northern barrios, he was satisfied Kitty was history. Stage two of Plan B: Dump the beeper before they had a chance to triangulate. He pulled over for a moment by the old Atlantic railway station, unzipped his fly and reached in, disregarding the offended expressions of two women waiting for a bus. Swinging back into the traffic, he tossed the little bug under the wheels of a passing dump truck. It hadn’t been taped securely enough to his dink, he’d explain, must have fallen down a pant leg.

  He pulled over to a pay phone, and dialled the number Frank Sierra had given him, a secure line in Quepos. Slack’s main man had maps, he had instructions. All Slack said was, “Plan B.”

  “Claro,” Frank said.

  The sky was turning a burnished copper as he returned to the road, south to Desamparados, to the old highway to Puriscal, to Quepos, to the Darkside of the Moon.

  THE FULL GUACO

  – 1 –

  From the window by my hammock, I watch a convoy of egrets, white and silent as angels, in undulating flight through mists golden with the glow of evening. The peace of twilight is broken by Blue-Crowned Parrots settling among the coral blooms of a cassia tree, squabbling for roosts. A Laughing Falcon calls, taunting the prisoner of the Darkside.

  Five days have passed since Halcón bowed out of my life with a kiss and a ciao, leaving me feeling emptied, as dry as bleached bones on an alkali lake. He still casts dark shadows; he clouds my view even of these egrets whispering through the sky; beauty is obscured.

  I find it hard to conceive that I cracked so completely when the truth came home to me, that I am capable of such frenzied madness. My quest has borne bitter fruit. I have learned that love, too, has a dark side. I have learned too much about love, its wounding truth …

  Maggie lay her pad down and sagged back into her hammock, feeling lonely, defeated, and anxious. Wait two or three days, Halcón had said, then he would alert rescuers. But five days had passed without contact from them, and she was undergoing episodes of foreboding. Had Halcón decided not to tell where he had hidden Maggie and her ever-complaining housemate?

  Halcón has no morals, Benito Madrigal would shout; he’s a thief; the two of them had been left to rot here. She tried soothing him with reason: they were not about to starve; canned and dried food was in sufficient supply, as was water, gravity-fed from the river. Of course Halcón would make that anonymous phone call; rescue would probably come tonight – tomorrow at the latest. But then she remembered how he had lied to her: his doubtless fanciful sagas of heroism, his unlikely tale of childhood trauma, entertainments for a writer.

  She watched Benito prowl about, grumbling. He had been searching for a pry bar, something to wrench the grillwork apart or bend up a corner of the metal roof, but the commando had left them only kitchen tools. He had even tried burning the front door, but it was of a thick, dense wood that resisted flame.

  “This is a betrayal of all we have fought for. They are not comrades, but pirates. The swine, they have left us here to die.” Now he was trying to pick at the front door lock with the bent tines of a dessert fork.

  “No one’s going to die. Take one of your pills.”

  “No, my brain must be sharp. They will come with asesinos. That is how we are going to die.”

  Such talk disturbed Maggie because she almost believed that Benito was, as he put it, cursed with a mystical third eye. With some misgivings, she had agreed to move into Glo’s former bedroom; Benito had requested the front-facing room so he could see the invaders coming.

  “Madre de Dios.” That remark was directed at the fork; one of the tines had broken off and jammed in the keyhole.

  Daylight was fading and Maggie’s bed beckoning; there seemed no point in staying up and wasting candles, and she was tired. She had been tossing restlessly at night.

  Benito was now searching the closet, which had been left unlocked, his hands probing the high shelves where the guns had been stored. “There is only one man who can save us, the big gringo, Jacques. But he has been betrayed, too.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They think he is estúpido, that they can use him like a pawn.”

  Did she dare pass on Halcón’s message without being satisfied Slack could be trusted? Limón, Sloth Park, nine o’clock, Saturday night: that was tomorrow, and time was running out.

  “Caramba!” Benito was shaking with excitement. “They have left this behind!”

  He had reached high into the back of the top shelf and pulled out a long weapon wrapped in the burlap sacking of an old rice bag; he peeled the covering away and triumphantly drew out a submachine gun.

  “This is a gift from the hand of fate. Before, we were defenceless targets. Now we are an armed force.”

  “Is that thi
ng loaded? Let me have it.”

  He held the weapon away from her, retreating toward the stairs, clutching the gun like a baby. That weapon had a clip in it, doubtless with live ammunition; Benito was not of right mind, and the implications were frightful. She could only assume that Gordo, charged with retrieving the guns, had been too lazy to have compiled a checklist of firearms and too short to see to the back of the top shelf.

  “Where are you going with that?” She followed him up the stairs.

  “I know what I am doing. My life will cost them dearly.”

  “Benito! No one’s trying to hurt you!”

  “We are no longer lambs for their slaughter. It will be a famous last stand. Future generations will build a monument here to honour those who held high the banner of freedom.”

  He slammed the bedroom door and his shouts faded. She tried to open it, but he had turned the deadbolt. She called to him, entreated him, but was answered only with ravings: Senator Walker wants to take over the world from his secret army base; to do so, he must eliminate Benito Madrigal. “Because I am the only one who knows their plan.”

  “Benito, we can use the gun to shoot out the locks on the door.”

  “Are you crazy?” he called back. “That would warn them. Also, we must make every bullet count.”

  In the gloom of falling night, she entered the back bedroom and locked herself in; she would wait out the night and pray that the rescue team would react cautiously. She crawled under the mosquito netting, and wiggled out of her shorts. It was only six o’clock, but she planned to rise early, before Benito, make coffee for him, grind up several of his pills with the beans, and secure that submachine gun.

  Clouds had gathered, promising a sticky overcast night. From the wall of forest outside her window came the call of the Laughing Falcon, increasing in cadence, the full guaco.

  She awoke to the sound of feet crunching on dead leaves, and she held her breath. Then she heard a twig snap and a voice, hoarse and low: “Johnny, you there?”

  The glowing dial of her watch read twelve minutes to ten. Benito must have fallen asleep; she prayed he was sufficiently exhausted to remain in that state. She rose quietly and tiptoed to the window.