"So I don't get a shower."
"How about a bath instead?"
"I have been traveling with you way too long not to think there's going to be a catch."
It was just after sunrise, and they were standing by a branch of the Belize River that was much calmer than its source. The stream had an exposed sandbar along one bank. Welsh dug a large hole in the bar with the machete and lined it with their nylon tarp. He dumped out his pack and used it to fill the tarp with water. Then he tossed Scanlan the bar of soap he'd been hoarding. "Scrub a-dub-dub."
"I knew there was a catch," she said confidently.
"I'm going to go take a walk," said Welsh. "Enjoy."
When he returned, Scanlan was sitting on the sandbar sunning herself in bra and panties. Her clothes were drying on a branch. "God, it feels good to be clean," she exclaimed. "But just look at me. I'm a mass of insect bites, scratches, pimples, and peeling skin."
"You look great," said Welsh.
"I changed the water," she said, motioning toward the tarp. "Twice."
Two hours later they were sitting beside an asphalt highway, waiting for a bus to come along. Welsh was checking down the road with his binoculars.
"Okay," he said. "There's the 7:00 AM bus from Benque Viejo."
"But is it the right one? There's a bunch of different bus lines."
"Belize City, right on the front."
"How do I look?" Scanlan asked.
Welsh's eyes didn't move from his binoculars. "You look great."
"Are you sure I look all right? We want them to stop."
"You look fine," Welsh repeated. "I'm the one who looks like Hogan's goat." He was referring to his shotgun-shredded right sleeve roughly patched and stitched together. He put the binoculars back in his pack. "At least people won't be bailing out the windows at the smell of us."
As the bus wheezed up, Welsh used a little trick he'd picked up trying to hail Tokyo taxi cabs. Simply stand in the middle of the road. It had always worked so far.
Like most buses in South America, it was a former U.S. school bus. It might even have had the original brakes, because when they were applied, the squealing had the same effect as fingernails on a blackboard.
The driver yanked the door open. "What the hell you doin', mon?" he demanded.
"Thanks for stopping, captain," said Welsh, already on the bus. "Visiting some friends, had trouble with their car." He passed the driver a U.S. $20 bill, more than enough for two fares. U.S. dollars were as commonly used in the country as Belize dollars. "Going to Belize City, appreciate you stopping, saved us a walk to the next town. Why don't you hang onto all of that?"
The bill disappeared. Mollified, the driver shrugged his head toward the back of the bus. "Ain' no seats." There were about a hundred people already on the bus.
"No problem," Welsh assured him. He and Scanlan flopped down on their packs, in the aisle.
It was about a three-hour trip to Belize City, and forty minutes before enough people got off so they could sit down. Which was a mixed blessing.
"There was more legroom on the floor," said Welsh, trying to wedge himself into the seat. He leaned forward to examine the metal back of the seat in front of him.
"What are you looking for?" Scanlan asked.
"My initials. Could have sworn I rode this baby to school in 1992."
"I'll just say one thing: It's better than walking."
"I don't know about that," said Welsh, sitting with his knees up around his ears.
On the outskirts of Belize City, Welsh went forward and slipped the driver a couple more bucks to drop them off before the bus station.
That was on the cheerfully named Cemetery Road in western Belize City. They stepped off on the curb, and Welsh did a few knee bends to get the blood back into his legs.
Scanlan took a deep breath of fresh air. "The bath was great, but with all the BO on that bus, I don't think it was necessary."
"Deodorant is a luxury of the rich," Welsh replied. He was looking for a cab, and instead saw two serious locals step from a doorway and head right for them. One had a blade cupped in his hand, but wasn't making a show of it.
"Do you fucking believe this?" Welsh said out loud. He was wearing his pack so it hung under his left armpit. He reached in for the Beretta.
But Scanlan already had her pistol out. "Okay, which one of you wants to die first?" she shouted. "C'mon, raise your hand."
Before she finished the two were running the other way down the street.
"You get extra points for style on that one," Welsh complimented. He'd almost forgotten she still had her piece. "Just try not to shoot anyone you don't have to."
"I'll see what I can do," she replied.
They only had to walk half a block before a cab happened by. It had the green license plate and driver ID card, as recommended by Welsh's guidebook. There was no meter, so they negotiated the fare before getting in.
"We're looking for lunch," said Welsh. "Not at one of the hotels."
"A big lunch," Scanlan broke in. "A really big lunch."
"Dit's," was all the driver said. And then in that wonderful Belizean lilt, "That's the place for ya."
"Let's roll then," said Welsh, getting in.
Dit's turned out to be the name of the restaurant. The waitress set two colas down on the table, and Welsh and Scanlan contemplated the frosty glasses in respectful silence. Scanlan brought hers up to her mouth, took a sip, and her eyeballs bulged slightly. "It has been a while since I had any sugar, hasn't it?" she said. Then she drained the glass while simultaneously waving for a refill.
Then the waitress delivered two enormous plates of rice and beans with chicken. There was a big lunch crowd, but rising above the din in the direction of Welsh and Scanlan's table was the sound of metal utensils scraping plates at an extremely rapid rate. Very similar to machine-gun fire.
When the waitress ambled back to see if the meals were all right, she was confronted by two immaculately clean plates.
"Hamburger?" Welsh asked Scanlan.
She only nodded, being in the process of finishing up the last of the bread.
"One?" the waitress asked, a little uneasily. "Two, please," said Welsh.
"And some more bread, when you get the chance," Scanlan added politely.
After the hamburger platter, Welsh finished up with a piece of cake, with ice cream, and felt quite full. Scanlan had the same, and a piece of pie on top of that for variety. He had no idea where she put it.
By then they were on a first-name basis—made-up first names on their part—with the restaurant staff and most of the locals having lunch. Getting a little nervous about the attention they'd called to themselves already, Welsh insisted on leaving before anyone could act on the suggestion of having commemorative T-shirts printed up.
"That wasn't so bright," he said when they emerged from the restaurant out on King Street. "We'll be lucky if we don't spend the rest of the afternoon puking it up."
Scanlan startled him by grabbing his arm for support and ripping off a belch that must have registered on the Richter Scale.
"Oh, I beg your pardon!" she exclaimed, a red wave of embarrassment forming around her cheekbones.
"It was the beans," said Welsh. "You would have hurt yourself if you tried to hold that baby in."
"I feel great now. Let's go do some shopping."
On Regent Street they bought clothes, toilet articles, and small duffels to replace their battered and stained packs.
It was not yet 2:00 in the afternoon, and they engaged another cab to drive them to the town of Ladyville, just north of Belize City. After a short wait, the scheduled northbound Batty Company bus pulled up, and they wedged themselves inside. The destination was Chetumal, Mexico.
"After this, I'll never get on another bus in my life," Scanlan announced.
"Just remember the iron rule of South American bus travel," said Welsh. "As long as there aren't any pigs aboard, it's a good trip."
"Pigs? You
mean the four-legged kind? As cargo?"
"Yeah, and you can take my word for it, pigs don't travel well."
The trip north took almost five hours. There were quite a few stops, which wasn't the disadvantage it might have seemed since the unaccustomed quantity of food had put their formerly underworked bowels on overtime. There were no facilities on the bus, and it was an agonizing wait between stops, followed by a hobbling run out the door.
The border guards at Santa Elena, the last stop in Belize, paid no attention to anyone leaving the country, so the absence of a Belize visitor permit stamp in Welsh's and Scanlan's passports was no problem.
Then there was Subteniente Lopez, the Mexican crossing point. And, to Welsh's knowledge, the only place in the world ever named after a second lieutenant.
Entering a country by bus through a sleepy border post could be easier than arriving at an international airport, if a few simple rules were observed. It was not a good idea to wear cut-off jeans or a Grateful Dead T-shirt, or carry a backpack with peace signs and marijuana leaf patches sewed onto it. And if retaining a jungle beard for purposes of disguise, as was Welsh, it needed to be well-trimmed.
And when handing over your money for a visitor's card, it helped if a larger-denomination banknote was inserted into the first page of your passport.
"That always pisses me off," Scanlan said after they got back on the bus. "I hate getting held up like that."
"Think of it as a simple service gratuity," Welsh said calmly. The bus had to wait while two righteously principled German tourists had their belongings ripped apart and faced the prospect of flashlights shined up their colons before finally coughing up a contribution to the Border Police retirement fund. "You paid to avoid a lot of time-consuming formalities."
"I still don't like it. The corruption is what's holding these countries down."
Welsh laughed loudly.
"What's so funny?" she demanded.
"Just a memory from my college days. I went to school in Philadelphia. One day a guy I played rugby with asked me to fill in for him at a local bar, checking IDs at the door. Back then Pennsylvania was the only state with a drinking age of twenty one. But to get into this bar all you had to show was college ID. They always knew in advance when the inspectors would show up, and on those nights everyone had to be twenty one.
"My first night, after last call, one of the bartenders gives me a big paper bag and tells me to take it outside. There's at least a case of beer in the bag. I ask what's going on, and he smiles and tells me I'll know when I get outside. It's after two in the morning, I go out on the street, and I swear to God there were four police cruisers and a van lined up.
"Well, I may be a hick but I'm not that slow, so I walk up to me first cruiser. The window rolls down, I hand over the bag, and start walking back. This hardass cop voice goes, 'Hey, kid.' I turn around, very polite, and say, 'Yes, sir?' because in those days in Philly it didn't take much lip for the cops to haul out their nightsticks and give you the old wood shampoo. Anyway, the cop hands me back the bag and says, 'It's not cold enough.'"
"I don't believe it!" Scanlan exclaimed.
"I take the bag back into the bar, and the bartender says, 'Are you some kind of retard?' I tell him, he gets pissed and says, 'For Christ's sake, we had a busy night, we don't have anything colder.' He went out to explain it personally."
Scanlan shook her head.
"So much for a middle-class upbringing and all those 'Policeman Bill' booklets," said Welsh.
"And the moral of the story is?"
Welsh thought about that before answering. "The more you're told about the way things are supposed to be, the more you can be sure they're not. And for most people, why they do what they do is pretty simple. Good, evil, right, and wrong are just words. When push comes to shove, they act according to their desires and what they perceive to be their own self-interest."
"Do I act that way?" she asked, an edge to her voice.
"Well, I haven't known you all that long," Welsh said reasonably. "So far, taking your revenge and getting out of Guatemala alive has been in your own self-interest."
Scanlan was looking at him through narrowed eyes. "You're a...you're a very unsettling person, Welsh. You certainly haven't acted in your own self-interest."
"And you can just see what kind of trouble it's gotten me into so far," he said ruefully.
It was getting dark as the bus arrived in Chetumal, on the southwestern edge of the Yucatan Peninsula. Scanlan had been reading Welsh's guidebook for diversion, and it provoked a small disagreement.
"There's an airport here, she sajd. "As much as I'd like to go to Cancun, I'd rather fly out of here than spend seven more hours on a bus."
"Let me ask you this," he said. "Would you rather be one of the few well-remembered gringos to fly out of the little airport at Chetumal, and maybe have a Guatemalan or two waiting when we get off the plane, or be one of the thousands of tourists to fly out of Cancun on a given day?"
"Welsh, this whole 'being right' thing is getting old."
"I'll just have to live with your resentment somehow. We've done well so far, be a shame to screw it up now."
At Chetumal they changed over to a Mexican bus line, and it was quite a change for the better. The Mexicans took their bus travel seriously. First-class bus travel in Mexico left the big U.S. lines in the dust. And no livestock allowed.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Welsh glanced over at the clock radio. It looked as though Scanlan was going to be spending the rest of the night in the shower. He flicked through the TV channels, but after ten days in the jungle the Latin soaps and screeching game shows were unbearable.
Their Cancun hotel was right across the street from the bus station. Which was just as well, since they hadn't been in the mood for much more traveling.
Welsh clicked off the TV and began thumbing through the newspaper he'd snagged in the lobby, pausing occasionally to scratch the chigger bites on his ankles.
Scanlan finally emerged from the shower wearing a hotel bathrobe and vigorously toweling her hair. "I never thought I'd be clean again," she said. "I almost started crying."
"Nothing like a little hardship to make you appreciate all the basic comforts you used to take for granted."
She was smiling at him.
"What?" Welsh asked.
"Why are we still whispering?"
He chuckled. "Hard to break those jungle habits."
Before he went into the shower Scanlan insisted on examining his wounded arm. "Healing nicely," she said, "but it looks like you got branded with a waffle iron."
"It'll make a good conversation piece."
"Your beard covers the bruise and scratches pretty well."
"Itches like crazy. I can wait for this to be over so I can shave."
"It doesn't look that bad," she said appraisingly.
Welsh just grinned foolishly and headed into the bathroom. But he stopped abruptly when something occurred to him. "Maggie, don't make any phone calls."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I'd like to let my mom know I'm alive too. But we have to worry about my crooked CIA buddy Thomas Kohl and an organization called the National Security Agency."
"What about them?"
"What if I told you they can intercept any telephone call made anywhere in the world?"
"I'd say that was a little hard to believe. Not to mention physically impossible."
"Believe it. There are satellites orbiting the planet vacuuming up phone calls twenty-four hours a day. Listening posts all over the world doing the same thing. Everything they pick up is downlinked through other satellites to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. And there it's run through supercomputers, which NSA has more of than any other organization or country on earth."
"But I thought computers had trouble recognizing and interpreting human speech. How could they handle telephone conversations, not to mention trillions of calls every day?"
"The NSA u
ses the same basic technology as a digital phone to convert a recording of the human voice to computer language: ones and zeros. And speech in numerical form can be scanned at supercomputer speeds. All they do is program the computer to identify trigger words or phrases, like Rich, Richard, Maggie, Margaret, Welsh, and Scanlan. Whenever the computer runs across one of them, it spits out the complete transcript of the call for a human being to evaluate."
"So the only limitation on what they can listen to is the capacity of the computers?"
"Exactly. In the old days the NSA could only target a limited amount of voice communication, because no matter what all the antennas were able to suck in, someone still had to physically listen to the tape and type out a transcript. Now computers can scan every phone conversation in an entire country and pick out the ones you might be interested in. Ironically enough, because of advances in cryptography, most governments, terrorists, and criminals have access to unbreakable code systems. Just like Corporal Richardson provided for the Guatemalans. Nowadays the NSA mostly listens in to regular Joes talking on the phone."
"I know I sound like a real innocent, but isn't any of that against the law?"
"After 9/11, nothing is against the law."
"And Thomas Kohl can get all this information just by asking for it?"
"He can put us on what's called a watch list, but that would mean going on record with his interest in us. But he won't have to do that. By now Senator Anderson wants to know what's going on, and probably asked the intelligence community to help out. So the NSA will be listening for any mention of us."
"And if we make any phone calls, they find us. And that means Thomas Kohl knows where we are. And he calls the Guatemalans and lets them know. And they try to kill us."
"I think that pretty well sums it up. Oh, and the same goes for credit cards. Even easier to trace. Cash only."
"That's a problem. Not money, but cash."
"I think we can squeak by. I took advances on my credit cards before all this started."
"Being prepared again?"
"I enjoy it. And my two visitors back at the hotel in Santa Elena made a donation to our escape fund."
William Christie 02 - Mercy Mission Page 23
