On the Loose

by Tara Janzen

  Hans Klechner, her chief of operations, was a former East German intelligence officer, trained by the KGB. At one time, he’d worked for the Serbian government, heading up covert operations opposing the Albanian resistance in Kosovo.

  Ari spoke first. “Patrona, we have received several transmissions from our remaining contact at the joint drug enforcement unit in Lima. Our two assets at the airstrip were identified, but the Peruvians have not succeeded in locating them. Presumably, they successfully entered our underground net and will contact us when they are beyond the reach of the Peruvian authorities. In any case, they are lost to us as informants within the drug enforcement structure.”

  Irena nodded. “Bring them here as soon as they surface,” she said, flicking the ash off her cigarette into a lead crystal ashtray on the table. “We own them now, and they may be of use in deciding how to proceed with damage control in the Cuzco area. Is our remaining contact secure?”

  “He has not been compromised,” Ari assured her.

  “You said several transmissions. What else?”

  “Photographs were taken.”

  She stopped with the cigarette halfway to her lips, her gaze narrowing. “Photographs?”

  “There was a drug enforcement surveillance team watching the Cuzco airstrip.”

  She’d known as much, that the contra - narcotraficantes had been on the hill above the landing strip. They’d been transmitting with an HF radio on the Peruvian Federal Police band, which was how she’d been able to point them out to the local pendejos—rather precisely, she’d thought.

  “I ordered them killed,” Irena said, her voice tight. “So how is it they escaped?”

  Ari knew her well enough to know the question was not rhetorical.

  “By helicopter, with covering fire from an A-10 close support aircraft.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Four dead, eight wounded.”

  “A massacre, the fools.” There would be no more coca coming out of Cuzco for a while, and none that she would be transporting. The Cuzco people had failed to secure the airfield as agreed, and even with intelligence assets inside the Federales’ Joint Ops Central in Lima, they had not predicted a threat.

  Ineptitude of such a high level could not be tolerated. It would not be tolerated, not when it was her life on the line. The Piper had been so low on fuel when they’d made their escape, they’d barely made it to her contingency airfield in Brazil—and now there were these photographs. With that one fact, a “near disaster” had become a total disaster.

  Irena had known there was a good chance that she’d been under video surveillance, but she’d expected the agents to be caught and killed, and their damn cameras destroyed.

  Her men would have gotten the job done.

  “Do you know if the photographs are identifiable?” Any number of things could have gone wrong. The agents’ observation position could have been at too steep of an angle for a full face shot, or her head could have been turned, or their equipment faulty.

  “They’ve already obtained files through INTERPOL on Hans and myself.” Or everything could have worked out perfectly for the police.

  “But you, patrona, they are unsure about,” Ari said, knowing better than to in any way shade a meaning or conceal a fact. “One of the surveil-lance agents identified you, but his superiors in Lima believe he is mistaken, because all the information they have been able to find on Irena Polchenko says she died six years ago in Afghanistan.”

  The sharp, dangerous edge of warning she’d been feeling turned suddenly cold—bitterly cold. And became like a knife in her heart.

  “Who is this agent?” Irena had known dozens of agents in Kabul and other places around the world. When she’d been a pilot for hire, she’d done contract work for any number of agencies in half a dozen different governments.

  “There were two on the hillside yesterday, a Peruvian federal policeman named Rufio Cienfuegos, and an American named”—he consulted his notepad—“Rydell. C. Smith Rydell.”

  The knife in her heart twisted with a sickening lurch, stealing her breath for a moment.

  “We have a file on Cienfuegos,” Ari continued, “but I have no further information on the American. He doesn’t seem to be DEA.”

  Neither was he alive.

  She’d left him bound and gagged at the feet of Jamal Abdurrashid, an Afghan battle lord on the Northwest Frontier. Beaten and bloody, Rydell had fallen next to a crate of surface-to-air missiles, and for the favor of his life and the missiles, Irena had walked away with half a million dollars.

  She’d heard the shot that had killed him, and been too sentimental to turn and look back—a rare and disturbing weakness, one she believed had been her last.

  But this...

  This was unprecedented, and could not be allowed to stand. She’d left him for dead, and that’s exactly where he needed to be. He knew too much, a secret whispered in the dark of night, a precious confession of love as she’d drifted toward sleep in his arms, a secret it was too dangerous to even think.

  “Where are Cienfuegos and Rydell now?” Irena asked, continuing with the movement of bringing the cigarette to her lips. Inhaling smoothly, steadily, she willed herself into a state of calmness—cold, calculating, venomous calmness. She was a reptile, a predator, and stillness was her ally.

  “Cienfuegos has returned to his field post in Lima,” Ari answered. “And the American...” He turned to Klechner, who picked up the conversation.

  “Rydell was pulled off the joint drug enforcement unit during the night and boarded a plane to Panama. Our contact was able to access the change in tasking, and the American has been assigned to a personal security detail in Panama City by the U.S. State Department for a U.S. citizen, a Ms. Honoria York-Lytton from Washington, D.C.”

  Why? Irena wondered. There were dozens of military people and security consultants already in Panama who could have been tasked with a PSD. It didn’t make sense to drag an operator off a joint mission with a foreign government and all the way out of Peru in the middle of the night to follow a woman around Panama.

  Rydell was alive—a tremor ran through her hand. She hid it by stubbing the cigarette out in the ashtray.

  He had survived.

  “Negotiate a contract for the life of Cienfuegos. Priority immediate. I want him dead yesterday, and if you can’t do that, I want him hit by tonight. We know a number of people in Lima who can accomplish the deed. Call the best we have,” Irena said, and saw the quick exchange of concerned glances between Ari and Hans.

  She understood. Killing a federal agent was sanctioned only rarely, and involved a fair measure of damage control in and of itself.

  But if Cienfuegos had been on that hillside when Rydell had first seen her, it was all too possible Rydell had told the federal agent everything he knew about her—not out of shock, though he had probably been as shocked as she was, but because in tight situations, team members exchanged as much information as possible, talking on the run if necessary, in case one of them didn’t make it.

  “Yes, patrona,” Ari replied.

  “And do whatever is required to get me Rydell’s mission itinerary,” she said, fixing Hans with her gaze. “Activate all of our Panamanian assets. Find out what happened in the U.S. Embassy today, who he talked with, when, and what was said. I want to know everything.”

  “Yes, patrona.” Hans nodded.

  “Ari, you and I are going after this American as soon as we have his location. I’ll take care of preparing the Piper. You prepare field gear for the two of us, including back country supplies, the usual weapons, and a long rifle.”

  Ari nodded in understanding. The two of them had a history of successful assassinations to their credit. They were a good team.

  “Hans, you will remain at the villa as interim director of all other ongoing operations.”

  “Yes, patrona.” Hans nodded, and she made a brief gesture with her hand, dismissing the two men.

  Rydell would ha
ve reported his information during the debriefing in Lima, Irena knew, but he would have been out of danger by then, and he would have had time to think things through, and with those thoughts would have come caution. The most damaging information might have been held back, considered, saved for his own government. With that in mind, it was completely possible he’d been the one to pull himself out of Peru, so he could head for the nearest home base—Panama City.

  Which made the PSD and the woman at best a ruse, and at the least negligible, or perhaps not. If there was even a grain of truth in the assignment, it could be useful.

  Very useful.

  “Hans,” Irena said, stopping the German before he could follow Ari through the French doors. Besides being a field agent and case officer for the East Germans, Hans had been trained by the KGB in a variety of combat-oriented martial arts, hostage rescue, and in the eminently practical skill of kidnapping.

  “Yes, patrona?”

  “I want to know everything about this woman, Honoria York-Lytton...everything.”

  “Jawohl, patrona.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Howard Air Force Base, Panama

  Good God, Honey thought, standing next to Smith and watching wide-eyed from behind her sunglasses as eight beautiful pieces of some of the world’s most expensive luggage were mushed, and smushed, and scrinched, and scrunched under a section of yellow cargo netting.

  Louis Vuitton had to be rolling over in his grave.

  “Does everything have to be so tight?” she asked, trying to act more nonchalant than she felt, which wasn’t very damn nonchalant with the five big Vuittons getting the stuffing crushed out of them.

  “Yes,” Smith said, one word, very curt.

  Okay. Fine. Honey repressed a sigh and tucked a loose strand of hair back up into her twist.

  It was very gloomy inside the cavernous hangar, and very hot, and she really wanted one of those little Cuban cigarillos she’d bought at the Blake, but from the smell of the hangar, and the contents of the pallet, and given her luck, she figured that’s about all it would take to blow them all to hell—her lighting up.

  God.

  The Air Force ground crew cinched the netting one final time before securing it, and Honey told herself not to panic, it was Vuitton, it would hold—and then they were finished. There it was, the whole thing: a pallet of death and destruction topped off with haute couture, secure and ready to go to Ilopango.

  Unless one of the suitcases didn’t hold together and split a gut and something, anything, spilled out—oh, and then this party was going to come to a real quick end. Talk about getting “blown” to hell. What was it Smith had said that night in San Luis? Something about watching a cockroach drag half a plantain across a jail cell floor in San Salvador?

  Honey had thought about that cockroach a couple of times since that night, and a couple of hundred dozen times since she’d looked in the five big suitcases that had been waiting in the garden bungalow when she’d arrived at the Blake, the ones she’d never seen before with her name written on the luggage tags. By then, Jenkins had already gone over the “coffee plantation tour” itinerary with her, and handed her a sealed envelope with the lading forms documenting the rest of the cargo she was supposed to sign off on. Gestures of goodwill for Honey to dispense at her own discretion, he’d said with a slightly put-upon air of noblesse oblige, tokens of the U.S. government’s appreciation for the hard work of the noble Salvadoran farmers.

  Not quite.

  One quick read of the lading documents after Jenkins had left had made Honey wonder if it might be in her best interest to jimmy the locks on the suitcases. The “gestures of goodwill” were nothing short of a death sentence, and she doubted if there was an ounce of her discretion involved in their dispensation. They were all going to the CNL rebels. God only knew what else her “handlers” in Washington were trying to pawn off on her.

  Fortunately, she’d had a bit of experience in jimmying Vuitton luggage locks, and one look inside the first suitcase had made her wonder what her chances might actually be against the treason charge, if she had a really good lawyer—or a dozen of them.

  Because this was bad, very bad.

  And it had already been bad enough. Dammit.

  A beast, Smith had called the cockroach, and Honey didn’t doubt it for a second. Neither did she doubt that the Panamanian cockroaches could be equally beastly, or that she was hauling enough contraband to get her locked away in a Central American prison for the rest of her life, and when that sentence ran out, they’d put her in Leavenworth for the rest of her next life.

  Oh, yes. This was bad karmic energy of a cosmic nature, the kind that followed souls through countless reincarnations—and she was a Protestant.

  Honey took a breath and tried to steady her nerves. She was “in” this thing. She’d made her decision before she’d ever gotten on the plane to Panama, and she was going to be “in,” until she was “out,” on her terms. She’d made it to the air base, and that was a good thing, even if it was all downhill and straight to hell from here. Once she got on the plane to El Salvador, there was no turning back, no escape. It was forward, into the breach, and hope for the best. Her job was clear: Deliver the Vuittons, the briefcase, and the “war in a box” detailed in the lading document to the Campos plantation in Morazán Province. Then, that accomplished, she had to retrieve the courier’s pouch, the 2GB flash drive, and do God knew what to convince the CNL not to trample Alejandro Campos’s coffee bushes.

  Yes. There was something wrong with the picture, like why in the hell she was in it—and yes, there were moments in a woman’s life when she simply had to wonder what in the hell she’d done to get herself into so much trouble.

  This was one of them.

  Even if she knew very damn well what she’d done and very damn well why she’d let herself be railroaded into El Salvador.

  “MRE,” Honey said, reading the letters stenciled on the side of one of the cardboard containers on the pallet, while tucking another loose strand up into her hairdo. She was coming apart in the heat, and she really needed to hold together. “What does MRE stand for?”

  “Meal, Ready to Eat,” Smith said, and if she wasn’t mistaken, he almost said it with a grin. “Three lies in one, but for all the complaining about the quality of the rations, I’ve never seen a hungry soldier refuse to eat one.”

  Okay, this is good, she thought. Food. She could live with that—food for the hungry guerrillas; there were a lot of cardboard containers stamped with MRE. It was the other boxes shredding her nerves. Seeing them written on a lading form was one thing. Seeing the wooden containers stacked on a pallet and knowing she was responsible for them was another. Her gaze went over the containers, reading the stenciled markings on their sides: AMMUNITION, SMALL ARMS, 5.56MM BALL, and AMMUNITION, SMALL ARMS, 9MM BALL, so yes, there was plenty of ammo headed up into the hills; PISTOL, BERETTA MODEL 92 9MM; RIFLE, M16A2, and there were plenty of those, including the ones marked RIFLE, M16A2 W/40MM LAUNCHER, M203, which she knew from the lading forms meant grenades, and yes, she could see how being able to launch a grenade from a rifle would come in real handy.

  Her favorite, though, was WEAPON, ANTI-TANK, 66MM.

  She doubted if there were many tanks rolling around the Torola River, but she was guessing a 66mm anti-tank weapon could blow a big hole in about anything it hit.

  Guerrillas in the mountains, grenades on the pallet, trouble in the suitcases, the CIA and a very stately, white-haired man in the State Department named Mr. Cassle pulling all the strings, and not a word from Julia in four months, not a single word since she’d boarded a truck outside St.

  Mary’s and headed off into the Salvadoran countryside.

  The truth was, Mr. Cassle and the grim-faced CIA man in his grim black suit hadn’t had to threaten her even half as much to get her on board for a top-secret mission into El Salvador to parley with the rebels who had been driving the truck that had taken her sister away, especially when
the government guys were supplying all the trade goods.

  Damn good trade goods. Top-notch.

  Did grenades and “WEAPONS, ANTI-TANK, 66MM” scare the holy crap out of her? Yes. But Honey was pretty damn sure Diego Garcia wasn’t in the market for a year’s supply of Estee Lauder, and Garcia was the only connection she had left to Julia. She just prayed the connection wasn’t too terribly close. In a sudden turn to the right, the Catholic Church had abandoned its dissident policies in El Salvador. Most of the clergy had fallen in line, except for a small group of nuns at an isolated outpost in the hills above Cristobal who ran a school and orphanage out of a former coffee plantation. The good sisters of St. Joseph had refused to change course. According to Father Bartolo, whom Honey found alarmist at best, and deranged at worst, there were four—Sister Bettine, Sister Rose, Sister Teresa, and Sister Julia Ann-Marie—none of whom had been seen or heard from by the St. Mary’s priest in over twelve weeks.

  Except for one outrageous rumor coming out of Morazán that Father Bartolo, for one, refused to believe, even for a second, and would not repeat for even a million dollars, but would apparently shout about for free until he’d worked himself into such a lather that he’d hung up in her face.

  Honey hadn’t been the same since.

  So yes, Mr. Cassle’s threats had almost been superfluous. As for the rest of it—hell, Washington, D.C., was full of strings and the people who pulled them, but only a fool thought the strings only went one way, and Honey was no fool. In the District, the strings always went both ways, and she had her fingers wrapped around more than a few—enough to see her through this mess, if push came to shove.

  At least she hoped she did, and if push came to shove back and shoot—well, that was why she had C. Smith Rydell.

  At least she hoped she did.

  She slid a glance in his direction, which did nothing to reassure her. The man did not look happy. Neither did he look like the elegantly dressed bodyguard who had shown up at the Blake.