by Harper Lin
“People give their consent. It’s in that long user agreement no one reads.”
“Because it’s written in Sumerian. You have to have degrees in law and engineering to understand those things. I suppose it’s the same with those virtual assistants that listen in on your conversations.”
Gary chuckled. “Oh yes, people actually pay to have their homes bugged. That’s something I would have never predicted back in the Cold War.”
“So am I in trouble for acting in an illegal fashion toward the poor, innocent folks of Escudo Security?”
Gary waved a dismissive hand. “This is the CIA, not the Girl Scouts. It’s not like we’re bringing them to trial anyway.”
I put my teacup down. “We’re not?”
“No. This has to be done quietly.”
“So when do the field agents come?”
Gary winced. “They don’t.”
“What? No field agents?”
“No.”
“They’re leaving this to a retired agent and an agent on desk duty.”
“Things are really busy right now with the terrorist threat turned up. The Panamanians are low priority.”
I studied him. “Come on, Junior. I wasn’t born yesterday, as my back keeps reminding me. Does the agency know you’re here?”
He looked away. “I took a couple of personal days.”
I groaned. I knew something was off about this.
“So what’s really going on?”
Gary wouldn’t look at me.
After a long moment, he spoke.
“We messed up,” he said. “And I don’t mean the Agency but the three of us. Remember that little beachside restaurant in La Palma, where we met with some of the family members after they were released?”
I nodded. It had been a beautiful place, looking out at the sea. Golden sands, crystal-clear waters, and me, James, and Gary all hyped up and keeping watch for an ambush. The invasion had happened just a month before, and while some Panamanians loved us, others didn’t. The bombing had been messy in places and, as usual, innocent people had gotten caught in the crossfire.
We had met with the heads of households of some of the families that had been involved in the Commander Pretto coup. We explained how we promised them visas, protection, and that we would trace any stolen property. Then we had handed them over to another set of agents to take care of them. Our job was done, and we were off to the next country and the next assignment.
I never saw those people again, and I had assumed the CIA had kept all its promises. Apparently, it had not.
“So you’re saying they’re angry because we didn’t get them all their property back? Fair enough, but that doesn’t excuse murder.”
“It’s worse than that. Much worse. That second CIA team had different orders than ours and didn’t bother to fill us in.”
“Need-to-know basis again?”
He nodded sadly. “Yeah. I only pieced it together over the years, and only now have I been in a position to help. The Agency decided that they were only going to give visas to the coup members’ direct families, not the extended families like they promised. And to cover their tracks, instead of giving them a direct flight to the United States and a new identity, they made them stay in Mexico for five years. I suppose that was to cover their tracks, deny any involvement in Pretto’s attempted coup. They gave them barely enough to live on. Five years of misery and uncertainty after a spell in Noriega’s dungeon.”
“And they had to leave their extended families behind,” I said. “All the old people and the cousins and aunts and uncles. Oh Junior, you know how families are in Latin America. They don’t distinguish between nuclear and extended family! And with all their portable property gone, they must have been impoverished.”
“Yeah, the Agency stabbed them in the back. They did get U.S. visas five years later, but the bitterness must have already set in.”
“That still doesn’t excuse murder,” I insisted. “What are we going to do about this?”
He raised his hands. “I have no idea.”
“But why isn’t the Agency trying to make good?”
“They want to let the past remain in the past. I can’t.”
“No,” I said and sighed. “I can’t either.”
I checked the GPS tracker.
“Well, whatever we do, we need to do it now,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because that car I put a trace on is heading out of town.”
Gary and I took his car, a late-model sports car that was obviously evidence of a middle-aged man harkening back to his youth. I didn’t rib him about it. He had a heck of a youth, and he was justified in wanting to relive it.
I was getting to relive mine too. As we sped along the main route through town in pursuit of the Escudo Security car, I felt more alive than I had in years.
I had Junior at my side, we were both checking our pistols, and we were tracking a target vehicle. I felt great.
Until the target vehicle moved out of range and disappeared from my GPS locator.
Twelve
“It’s gone! They must have gotten onto the highway and sped up,” I said.
Just then we got stuck at a red light.
“Ugh! They’re probably going to the burial site to retrieve the stone and move it like they said they would. I can’t imagine why else they would be going out of town in that direction. There’s only countryside this way.”
“Hold on.”
Gary glanced either way to make sure no cars were coming and slammed on the gas.
We ran through the intersection and shot through downtown, past the old Colonial church and town commons, and blew a stop sign at the far side.
“Junior, I do believe you’re enjoying this.”
He let out a laugh. “Better than driving a desk in Langley.”
A siren wailed behind us. Red and blue lights flashed in our rearview mirror.
“What a time for the Cheerville police to be doing their job!” I cried.
“Has the car appeared on the trace?”
“No. We have to catch up to them.”
“How good are the local police?”
A loud cackle was the only answer I could manage.
It told Gary all he needed to know. He hit the gas again and took off down a narrow road past tidy little homes. The police car picked up speed too.
“Watch this,” Gary said. A side street was coming up, way too fast. He’d never be able to make that turn.
He knew it, too, so he cut across the lawn of the house on the corner, tearing up the grass and obliterating a garden gnome.
“Always hated those things,” he muttered, the car jolting as it got back on the pavement and he shot off down the new street.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. The policeman had decided not to risk the wrath of all gnomekind and had slammed on his brakes, screeching to a halt just past the intersection.
“He’ll back up and be on us in a moment,” I said.
“No problem.”
He zigzagged through a residential neighborhood, swerving to avoid cars, taking out a couple of mailboxes, and generally causing havoc. The police siren faded behind us.
“I must say, Junior, your driving is quite good. Have you been practicing?”
“I was a crack driver back in the day too. Don’t you remember how I used to drive a Jeep?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, I was good.”
“If you say so. I don’t recall you killing any gnomes in Panama or Syria.”
“I don’t think they have them over there.”
“Maybe if they did, they’d have more stable governments.”
We got on the highway. Still no sign of the car on my GPS locator.
“Where could they be?” I grumbled.
“There’s an off-ramp coming up. The sign says it leads to a county road. Should we try that?”
I looked over the countryside, a patchwork of woods and fields and the occas
ional large home.
“I think they went further out. Keep driving.”
My phone rang. Albert.
“This isn’t exactly the best time,” I said, glancing at my GPS locator and still seeing nothing.
“I figured out how the murderer managed to dump the body on you and get away without you spotting him.”
“Have you now?”
The doubt in my voice must have been obvious because he said defensively, “I’m not lit. I’m, like, totally sober. Okay, maybe still a bit buzzed from last night, but—”
Big sigh. “Albert, could you please get to the point?”
“Look, you know how Ms. Nightingale found a bar-code sticker on the catwalk and the pigs found one for the same product in the shopping cart?”
“Don’t call them pigs. They’re police officers.”
Gary gave me a questioning look. I waved him off.
“Whatever. The stickers prove the drones did it.”
“You’re high. I’m hanging up now.”
“No, listen! The bar-code stickers are always on the top of the packaging. The drones sense them and then stack the boxes on top of each other. The drone saw the label on the dead dude, saw the label on the shopping cart, and tried to stack the dead dude in the shopping cart.”
“Oh, come on.”
“It totally explains everything!”
“No, it doesn’t. Let me walk you through this. I’ll speak slowly so my words get through the fog. The drones aren’t intelligent. They’re not going to wait for me to pass by before stacking Sir Edmund onto my shopping cart. They can’t lift him anyway. The drones can only carry up to 30 pounds.”
“That’s just the safety limit. They can actually carry, like, 50, but it’s hard on their engines.”
“So a drone still couldn’t lift him.”
“Two drones could. They’re programmed to work together.”
“But how would they know to wait for me to show up? Why not just fly over to the row of shopping carts and drop him there?” The image of Sir Edmund Montalbion flying across the upper reaches of SerMart with a knife through his head flashed through my mind’s eye. That would have been interesting to see in real life.
“They must have got hacked, same as the camera system.”
“Oh.” Well, that made sense, didn’t it? I was impressed. We had explained the whole situation to Albert and everything we knew about the case, but I hadn’t thought that he would actually remember a tenth of it. “So those men from the security company who came last night must have been searching for the tag. They realized it could be a vital clue, and when one of their drones spotted it on the catwalk, they decided to come and retrieve it.”
“Yeah. They were dumb to do that in the first place, but when they saw the tag had come off the body and stuck to the catwalk, they decided to get it. They couldn’t get the drones to grab it because they only have grabbers on the bottom. The drones couldn’t have pulled it off the edge of the catwalk.”
“I must say, Albert, you can be quite intelligent when you want to be. If you stopped smoking, you could go places.”
“That’s what Octavian says. He’s, like, a motivational speaker or something.”
“Perhaps you should listen to him more, and perhaps you should stop lying to him about having quit smoking.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, he’s a good dude.”
I said goodbye and hung up.
“Who was that?” Gary asked.
“A young stoner who’s been helping out with the case. My boyfriend seems to have inherited him.”
He gave me a curious glance. “Inherited from who?”
“Parents who didn’t do their job.”
“Sounds like you’re having an interesting retirement.”
“You might say that. Hey! There they are!”
A red dot had appeared just on the upper right edge of my sensor. They were a good ten miles off, and judging from the location they were already off the highway.
Gary picked up speed, passing by commuter cars and the occasional truck. There was a tense moment as a state highway patrol passed going the other direction on the divided highway, but the trooper didn’t turn around.
The dot kept moving for a few minutes, but much more slowly than we did. I guessed they were on a rural road, maybe an unpaved one. The distance between us narrowed.
After a couple more miles and times checking the map, I said, “I think this next off-ramp is the right one.”
A police siren wailed in the distance. Far behind, we could see the flash of lights weaving through traffic. Gary got a car between us and them and got down the off-ramp as fast as he could.
“Did we shake them?” he asked.
I checked the rearview mirror. “Not sure. I don’t see anything. They might be trying to cut us off on the access road.”
We got past the access road and onto a narrow county road without seeing our pursuers and breathed a little easier.
But not for long, because now we were closing in on that baleful red dot we had been chasing. It wasn’t moving anymore.
Trees closed in on either side, broken by the occasional field or pond. There were no houses in sight. Gary slowed, peering to the left and right. He put his gun on the dashboard.
“Good place for an ambush,” he muttered.
Oh dear. He was right. I pulled my 9mm out of my purse and held onto it. I slouched down a bit in the seat to make a smaller target, but that sent a twinge along my spine, so I had to sit back up properly. All those lectures about the importance of posture I had given Martin, and Frederick when he was a boy, came back to me. What goes around comes around.
The car we were tracking was a mile ahead and a bit to the left. We found a rutted old dirt road bypassing a dilapidated and obviously abandoned farm. The road ran off into the woods.
“They’re down there,” he said, slowing to a stop. “We should probably walk so they don’t hear us.”
I checked the sensor. Still nearly a mile. I thought about my back and Gary’s leg and said, “Let’s take it slow and go another half mile. They won’t hear us, and we’ll be closer to the car if we have to make an escape.”
Gary only nodded. He had probably been thinking of his knee and my back too. Driving closer was risky, but us ending up more disabled than we already were before we even got to the scene might prove even riskier.
The path got more rutted as we continued, Gary’s car trundling along and splashing through some puddles. We could see several fresh tracks. At least a couple of vehicles. I didn’t dare get out and take a closer look. Instead I darted glances at the trees to either side, expecting an ambush at any second.
“At least we’ll block their way out of here,” Gary whispered.
That was true. The road didn’t widen at any spot, so they wouldn’t be able to get around us.
That also meant we wouldn’t be able to turn around.
After half a mile, Gary parked and cut the engine. Taking a deep breath, we both took the safeties off our guns and got out. I put on my reading glasses. Gary gave me a curious look but said nothing.
He took the left side of the road and I took the right, getting into the underbrush and moving along a few yards in from the road. Luckily, the forest was thin. Probably a century ago, it had been farmland that had been abandoned and later reclaimed by nature.
Even so, it was slow going for the both of us. I remembered a time when he and I and my late husband, James, had to sprint down the tarmac of a rural air base to catch a military transport plane that was just taking off. We were late because of some trouble with the local militia, and the pilot had received orders to leave. Just as he taxied down the runway, we appeared behind him.
There was no chance for the pilot to stop, so we had no choice but to run with our sixty-pound packs after him. The copilot got to the back and opened the door for us, waving us on.
We all mad
e it. Barely, but we made it. I jumped in first, then Junior leapt in and landed right on top of me, and then just as the plane lost contact with the ground, James vaulted in, landing on both of us. As the plane flew into the air, taking fire from enemies on the ground, we all lay in a cackling sweaty heap, joking about our narrow escape.
Ah, those were the days!
And now they were back, albeit in a slower, more arthritic form.
I saw a clearing up ahead. I peeked through the underbrush, caught Gary’s attention, and signaled that we should withdraw.
Once we got a hundred yards back, he crossed the road and joined me. Then we moved ahead together.
Soon the clearing came into view. We peered through the trees and bushes, trying to make out details without getting too close.
The clearing was the remnant of another old farm. The farmhouse had collapsed to its foundations, but the yard was on rocky ground and still reasonably clear of undergrowth. The car we had been following was parked next to the four-by-four. Several men stood near the ruined old house. I recognized Ricardo Morales, really Ricardo Pretto, president of Escudo Security and son of the man who had died trying to help the United States and his own nation.
Around him stood four younger men and a man who must have been in his eighties. They were all looking at something in a small tin box that Ricardo was holding.
I motioned to Gary that we should move forward, but slowly. I wanted to see what was in that box. It had me curious, because they looked like they weren’t looking at a gemstone. They all had their heads cocked in the same direction, and Ricardo was holding the box out so they could all see clearly inside. It was like they were reading or looking at a picture.
We crept forward, taking each step with care and watching where we placed our feet. One step. Another. I glanced up. Was that the corner of a piece of paper sticking out of the box? Another step. Another.
I don’t know what I did, whether I turned in an odd way or I tensed up too much or my muscles finally decided to call it a day, but a lance of pain jabbed me in the lower back.
I managed not to cry out, but I did stagger to the side, and before I could right myself, I had rustled the bush next to me.
