On the Loose

by Tara Janzen

  Jesus, what a mess.

  “Sister Julia apparently knew about Garcia and Sister Teresa,” Lily Robbins was still talking, “and of course had been counseling Teresa and trying to bring her back into the fold, if that’s even possible after breaking a vow of celibacy, I don’t know, but—”

  Diego Garcia and a nun. How in the hell did stuff like that even happen? Campos wondered. The man was a Catholic, a murdering rebel bastard of a Catholic, but Campos hadn’t met a criminal or guerrilla in Central or South America yet who didn’t take his religion seriously.

  And he had to negotiate with Garcia tomorrow, with a socialite and her bodyguard in tow.

  “—I think the penance would last a lifetime. The only good thing, the only good thing, was that the children weren’t anywhere near the chapel. Julia confined them to the orphanage the minute the CNL arrived on Tuesday.”

  The woman kept talking, and he didn’t mind. He just wished she’d had the foresight to grab Sister Teresa on her way out the door. If Garcia got it in his head to avenge his honor by killing the nun, too, well, there really was going to be hell to pay.

  Mierda. A grief-stricken, guilt-ridden, and doomed-to-everlasting-fire-and-damnation adversary who had nothing left to lose put Campos in a ridiculously poor bargaining position.

  He was going to have to be good tomorrow. Damn good. He hoped York-Lytton and Rydell had brought the cash he’d been promised. Two million U.S. dollars fresh out of Langley, and Garcia needed it, no matter what he did tonight, or his slice of the rebel pie was going to disappear. Things had been a little lean for the CNL these last couple of months—Campos had made sure of it, cutting into Garcia’s drug trade and doing his best to dry up a lucrative source of funds for the CNL. He was going to press the fact home very hard to get what he wanted—to close the deal on the courier’s pouch for one mil and call it good. The 2GB flash drive hidden in the plane was a different story. If it had survived the crash, and if Garcia’s men hadn’t accidentally tripped the destruct trigger, Rydell and York-Lytton were the ones tasked with its retrieval. No one else was to touch the flash drive. Washington didn’t want any of Campos’s local crew to get their hands on it. His job was to run the negotiations and to find the damn plane for Rydell and York-Lytton, and with the satellite imagery he’d been sent, he didn’t have a doubt about his patrol getting the job done.

  One million free and clear, that’s what he needed tomorrow. If he couldn’t track down the bastards who had jacked his load to Gonzalez, hewas going to have to replace it in order to restore his very damaged reputation and get him back in the international game he and Jewel were trying to play. Cash that had already been accounted for was a good place to start—and it was all the kind of loose and easy, think on your feet, don’t call us, we’ll call you administration of his little bailiwick in Morazán that the Agency counted on.

  Anytime they sent him two million dollars, they could rest assured he was going to milk it for all it was worth to their benefit, not his. That’s what he got paid to do, and he didn’t get paid anywhere near as much as the pendejos he dealt with on a regular basis, day in and day out.

  Loose and easy, yeah, that was him, all right—him and the ulcer he was sure he was working on. He had more loose ends than a fringed coat. He was juggling balls, and connections, and deals, and merchandise, and every other thing he could think of, trying to keep it all in the air—and the gods of war and rain had dropped a peach into his pond.

  He looked her over again, carefully, while she finished up her sordid tale of nuns and murder.

  “Triángulo de amor,” he said with a note of sadness in his voice, when she was done. “These things always end badly.” And very often violently.

  She was still shivering, even worse than before, and he wished he’d thought to have Isidora make something hot for her to drink. He would, in a moment.

  “So now, señorita, tell me about the other man who died at St. Joseph this week.”

  “He was American, a pilot. He died right on the altar, right at Jesus’ feet, and I...I got it all on film.”

  And with those words, she won herself a week’s free lodging, gourmet meals included, personal bodyguard, limo service, unlimited use of the villa’s spa facilities, including Isidora’s massages, and a free ticket home, first class, anything she wanted.

  Good God. She’d gotten the Cessna pilot’s death on film. He hadn’t died at the crash site.

  Neither Diego Garcia nor San Miguel would be getting Ms. Lily Robbins tonight.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  San Miguel, El Salvador

  Federico Perez defined the word “obsequious,” coming damn close to actually groveling at Irena’s feet where he and she stood next to her Piper—the slight dip of his shoulder in her direction, the clasping of his hands, the smile fading in and out depending on her reaction to his nonstop stream of flattery and chatter.

  She approved.

  All was as it should be. She’d made Perez a rich man, and she could just as easily strip him to the bone.

  Next to Federico, the aircraft company representative who had flown the Hughes 500 to San Miguel was standing by with the helicopter’s log-book. The Hughes was parked near a hangar on the other side of the airstrip.

  Irena held out her hand for the book, ignoring Federico and letting him chatter on to Ari. The company rep, an older pilot with a strong build and dark hair sprinkled with gray, had a very orderly appearance, his uniform neat, his boots shined.

  “Has there been any deferred maintenance on the aircraft?” she asked, flipping the logbook open when the pilot handed it over.

  “None,” the man said.

  “And how many flight hours since its last scheduled maintenance?” The night was cool and smelled of the rain moving across Morazán farther to the north, the direction they were heading. According to her latest weather report, the storm was supposed to worsen for the next hour, but then wear itself out to an intermittent drizzle.

  “Twelve.”

  Irena ran her gaze across the page in the logbook and confirmed his answer. Good. She didn’t like dealing with people who didn’t know their business.

  “Any unusual flight characteristics for this particular aircraft?”

  “No,” the man said. “And I had the fuel topped off when I got here.”

  She gave him a more careful look, impressed.

  “Thank you.” She liked efficiency. “We’ll take it from here.”

  It was a dismissal, and the pilot took it as such, with a short formal nod of his head. She would let Federico know when she was finished with the helicopter, and he could arrange with the aircraft company for its return to San Salvador.

  While she’d been talking with the company rep, and with Federico chattering at him non-stop, Ari had unloaded the gear he’d packed for the business at hand: the assassination of C. Smith Rydell. With luck, they’d find Rydell in a matter of hours, not days. The hit itself would be quick and clean, with no luck involved. All they needed was the target.

  “Did you bring drum magazines for the G36?” she asked, when Ari had pulled the last rucksack out of the plane. The H&K 5.56mm assault rifle was selectable for semi or fully automatic fire, with its own integral bipod. The hundred-round drums turned the weapon into a light machine gun, and were a relatively easy way to take a lot of firepower to a party.

  “Yes, patrona,” he said, handing the rucksack to her.

  Good, she thought, and lifted the pack onto her back, shrugging into it. There was no sure way to know what they were going to run into up in Morazán, not with CNL rebels involved.

  After Ari closed the hatch, they grabbed the rest of their gear and cased weapons and started across the airstrip with Federico in tow, still talking. Irena’s weapon for the mission was an ACOG-sighted M4. Ari carried the G36 in one hand and had the case for their long rifle, a Steyer bolt action .308 with a fixed 20-power Zeiss daylight scope, in the other. The night optics for the rifle were in their kit. />
  They were each easily hauling over eighty pounds of gear from where they’d parked the Piper to where the Hughes 500 awaited them. Perez was only hauling himself, and was barely keeping up.

  “You need to work out, Federico,” she told him.

  “Yes, yes. Sí. This is very true.”

  “And not over a plate of pupusas.”

  Federico’s taste for fried food was one of his more benign addictions.

  “Sí, patrona, es verdad.”

  “And not over that stable of whores you keep in San Salvador.”

  “No, no, patrona, no con mis mujeres.”

  “You don’t feed them my cocaine on the side, do you? A little off the top here and there?”

  “No, patrona.” He was vehement. “No. Never.” He was lying.

  She said nothing, striding the last few yards to the helicopter. She and Ari loaded their gear into the back, and she started her preflight check, beginning with a walk around the outside of the craft.

  Moving clockwise and popping access hatches as she went, she checked fuel lines and reservoirs, and looked for any visible damage on the fuselage.

  “The Hughes is good, mi amigo,” she said to Federico, pleased with the condition of the helicopter. He’d obviously dealt with a first-class company, which was as she expected. “You did very well to get it here on such short notice.”

  “For you, patrona, anything.” He stayed by her side all the way to the tail rotor, where she checked to make sure the bearings were greased.

  “I’m glad to hear you say so.” She kept moving, doing a visual check of the main rotor. “This will wipe the slate clean between us, Federico, unless...” She stopped and met his gaze, letting the statement hang in the air, unfinished.

  “A menos que, patrona?” he repeated, his smile turning unsure.

  “Unless another one of my loads out of San Salvador comes up short. Klechner is watching you, mi amigo, and you know how unpleasant he can get.”

  Federico’s smile disappeared completely, and the color drained from his face.

  “There will be no shortages, patrona. I will check every kilo myself. Please, por favor, tell Señor Klechner that nothing will get by me and my men. If there is a problema, we will take care of it, before it touches the coca.”

  She looked at him for a long time, holding his gaze, her face expressionless, her eyes giving away nothing. At the exact moment when he started to physically squirm, she released him with a short nod. The shortages had been minor, and had actually proven quite useful. Better to put Federico on his guard, than to let him think she was in his debt for the Hughes. She’d paid cash for its use. Nothing else was being offered.

  Yet she’d seen it in his eyes, his clever little mind trying to figure out how to extract some kind of concession from her, some extra favor, or even better, to add a layer of intimacy between them—all in return for a job simply well done.

  Federico Perez should thank her for keeping him in his place, which was far from her. For all his machismo, he did not have the heart or the stomach for the level at which she played the game—and he certainly didn’t have the brains.

  “I will call and warn you when we are headed back to San Miguel. Have the Piper serviced and fueled in my absence.”

  “Sí, patrona.” He took a step back, and when she turned to climb into the helicopter, she heard him break into a trot.

  Inside the Hughes, Ari was grinning.

  She smiled back. “Some things are too easy, aren’t they?”

  “For you, Irena, yes. But you have nothing you haven’t earned, including your reputation.” In Sona, she was patrona, always. But in the field, or when they were alone, the two of them reverted to the familiarity of years of friendship.

  “What have you got for us?” she asked, noticing the SAT phone in his hand.

  The base station in Sona was only one satellite hop away from anywhere in El Salvador. Any information Hans acquired was being fed to them via the SAT phone, be it voice, text, or images, and he had been acquiring intelligence in a constant stream since before she and Ari had left Colombia. It was Hans’s specialty, finding people, making connections, putting on pressure, calling in debts, and offering incentives or threats, the latter of which everyone in their underworld knew to be promises. Nothing less allowed them the means to accomplish their missions with the speed and efficiency that was her trademark, and considering the stakes, she was demanding his best for the job at hand.

  “Our Lima contact at the joint drug enforcement unit has reported the death of the federal policeman.”

  “Good.” At least part of the problem had been taken care of satisfactorily.

  “And Cali sent the report on Garcia and the CNL,” Ari continued. “The information is guaranteed correct up to noon today and does a good job of tying the current sequence of events together.”

  She gave him a questioning glance.

  “Garcia’s men shot down a plane two days ago,” he said. “A Cessna in transit from Panama to Washington, D.C.”

  “The cargo?” She buckled into the restraints in the pilot’s seat.

  “No confirmation yet, but something’s got everybody from Washington to Lima jumping through hoops.”

  “Whose plane?” she asked. “CIA? DEA? DOS? Or military?”

  “The CIA briefed Rydell, pulling him off a DEA mission, but the woman was run through State, DOS. It was the embassy who made her reservation in Panama City.”

  “So we don’t know.”

  “We don’t know who was making the run, and we don’t know exactly what was on the plane, but we do know what makes the world go round.”

  She let out a short laugh. Ari was right. They did know what made the world go round.

  “Guns, drugs, and other people’s secrets,” she said, and his smile broadened.

  “One of those is creating a lot of excitement in Morazán.”

  “Or maybe all three,” she said, opening the logbook to the preflight checklist.

  “Or maybe all three,” he agreed. “Which means something, possibly a lot of money, is going to change hands, and soon, given the timing of Rydell’s arrival in San Salvador.”

  “The Americans aren’t going to let him walk into a CNL camp cold. They’ll use a broker, find a local negotiator, a go-between to set things up. There’s always somebody on the ground. Who is that going to be?”

  “In Morazán, according to our Cali friend, there is only one man. Nobody trusts him, but everybody uses him, including the Americans, when they need somebody. His name is Alejandro Campos.”

  Campos. Alejandro. She’d heard the name before, but she couldn’t remember where.

  “Alejandro Campos sounds familiar,” she said. “Why?”

  “He’s been on the edge of a couple of big deals originating in Exaltación, Colombia, over the last few months. Ray Gonzalez’s deals.”

  “Ah, Gonzalez.” He was a definite up-and-comer, one of those men who thought he should have what was hers. “Call Hans. Have him find this Campos for us. Then get Federico back on the horn and tell him I need a name, some farmer in Morazán, close to wherever Campos is, who wants to get rich tonight. And ask Hans if he found out what was on the C-130 that delivered Rydell and this York-Lytton woman to San Salvador.” She reached forward and started flipping switches and checking dials on the instrument panel. “Somebody at Ilopango got a look at that cargo, and I want to know what they saw.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Morazán Province, El Salvador

  It was a dark and stormy night—the words went through Honey’s mind and stuck. Very dark, she silently added, very stormy. They’d gone beyond rain in the last half hour, way beyond, straight into a tropical deluge—most of it, as far as she could tell, dropping right on top of the Land Cruiser.

  Unless Smith had accidentally driven them straight into a waterfall.

  Which she wouldn’t put past him.

  “We’re lost.” The words slipped out of her. She hadn�
�t meant to say them out loud, but there they were, lying in the air between them now, the truth.

  Just as well. He needed to know.

  “No, we’re not,” he said.

  Yes, they were.

  “I have a GPS and a map, and we’re on a road,” he said calmly.

  No, they weren’t.

  “This isn’t a road.” It was a streambed, or a river, or a flooded rut. She could hear the water rushing by the tires, and yes, she could see the GPS in his hand, and the map in his lap, and the flashlight in his other hand, and even with all that, they were still lost. The radio was out and the phone didn’t work, basically, she knew, because they were stopped under a waterfall, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, with not a damn thing anywhere in sight.

  “We have a break in contact with the convoy,” Smith conceded, “but we are not lost.”

  Yes, they were, with the nose of their vehicle noticeably lower than the tail end of their vehicle, which meant they were headed downhill—which pretty much summed up her take on the situation as well.

  Great. She and the Land Cruiser were in agreement. Only Smith was in denial.

  Honey liked adventure, to a point. She loved traveling with Thomas, had loved the trip to Nepal, and had been to Antarctica and the Sahara with him, exploring and investigating all sorts of scientific phenomena—without ever getting lost. She’d gone adventuring with Haydon and his inevitable film crews to Alaska, the Amazon, and Borneo, documenting environmental disasters—without ever getting lost. With Gerald and William, she’d survived countless clubs from Saint-Tropez to Monte Carlo, and with her mother, she’d personally conquered the rarefied shopping districts of Dupont Circle, Georgetown, and Upper Northwest near Friendship Heights, not to mention Fifth Avenue and every boutique in Manhattan.