Plantation A Legal Thriller

by J M S Macfarlane

  Chapter 59

  The two men from the police or security service were heading straight for him. He had to make himself scarce. At the same moment, the swing-door to the kitchen opened and the waiter rushed out with an order. They were calling to him “Senor ! Senor !”

  When they reached the end of the cafe, they couldn’t see him anywhere. “Try in there,” said one of the pursuers who had a scar on his cheek while the other went in a side-door to the gents nearby. Scar-face asked the waiter, “Did you see the man who was sitting here just now ?”

  “I didn’t see anyone. I was serving a customer,” said the waiter.

  The other man came out again and said he’d found no-one. They quickly pushed open the swing-door to the kitchen where the chef was chopping up vegetables.

  “Did a man come in here just now ?” one of them asked while noticing a door on the other side of the kitchen.

  “What man ?” asked the bewildered chef.

  “Never mind. Where does that lead to ?”

  “Into the garden at the back.”

  “Come on.”

  They ran into the garden and down a path leading to the next street.

  “He must have got over the fence. Quick, he can’t have gone far, we can still catch him.”

  After both of them had negotiated the fence with difficulty as they were large and over-weight, when they were in the street, they ran off in different directions.

  Once the noise had died down inside the cafe, the waiter began clearing up behind the bar. Suddenly, he turned to see Ashby who had materialised from nowhere.

  After paying the bill, he calmly walked out of the cafe, looked up and down the road to see that no-one was waiting for him, found his car and took an arterial road out of Buenos Aires, north-west in the direction of Santa Fe province.

  It seemed obvious to him the night before, that meeting her would be unwise. There were two alternatives : either the woman was with the Marxists who were fighting the junta or she was with the right wing military who were planning the invasion.

  From what he’d read, the Marxists had no interest in the claim to the Falklands. They merely repeated the Soviet line that the British were neo-colonialists who should get out of the South Atlantic. No doubt they wanted to embarrass the junta. Somehow, they could have got proof that the regime was going to start a war. Perhaps they would do anything to discredit the army including betraying their country to a perceived enemy.

  The other alternative involved the military. If they were gearing up for an invasion, any Britons entering Argentina would be treated as spies. If a war was about to start, they might want to dispose of him. They knew where to find him. But his connection with Texas Fire meant complications. They needed a pretext. If he failed to report to Houston, the Americans would start asking questions. And the last thing they would want, was to panic their ally at such a delicate moment. The papers could be a way of detaining him until the invasion was complete – or a reason for shooting him as a spy.

  Therefore, if he kept the appointment at the cafe, he’d be playing with fire. But what the girl had told him was impossible to ignore.

  Having thought all of this through, a back-up plan was necessary if his suspicions were correct. An early reconnoitre of the cafe showed that there was limited means of escape. He couldn’t go through the front door as they would be waiting outside and the back door would be covered. There were no side windows. As there was a lot of movement at the end of the cafe, it would be easier to get away from there, rather than at the front. After he sat down at the end booth, he noticed that the seats had a lot of leg-room underneath. By moving his feet around and taking rough measurements, he was able to calculate that the volume area would be large enough to hide in. When the police arrived, he’d merely slipped onto the floor where the visibility was low and they couldn’t see him. At the same moment, the waiter had rushed out of the kitchen, creating the impression that Ashby had gone in there unnoticed and out the back door. Instead, he’d wriggled under the table of the booth to crouch beneath the seat opposite him. Apart from some dust on his clothes, he only had a slight pain in his neck from squeezing under the table.

  Back on the road out of the capital, he realised he was a marked man. The police, internal security and the paramilitary assassins would be after him and they probably knew where he was going, from the information he’d given to customs at the airport.

  Meanwhile, at the army central command, a furious row had erupted.

  A group of officers wanted a quick solution – to arrest him, convict him of spying at a secret trial and execute him. They’d tortured the woman and knew he had the documents on him. When they would eventually find him, he would be in possession of papers stolen from military headquarters. The documents she had given him were supposed to be classified. They had been taken by an officer with leftist sympathies without the knowledge of the generals – and were said to be a complete summary of the invasion plans. In the hands of the British, they could be disastrous.

  At least, this was what the State Security had wanted its enemies to believe. According to their records, lots of different files and documents had been fabricated and planted over several months as a way of tracking down the Montoneros guerrillas and anyone else who was a security risk. While this had worked successfully, some officers still had doubts : there had been so many different versions of the invasion plan produced, that no-one could really say which ones were genuine and which ones were false.

  To make matters worse, all of the details taken by the customs officers at the airport had accidentally been lost or destroyed and no-one could remember what they said. This meant they had no way of finding him.

  The main concern of State Security was to stop the affair getting out of control as it could throw the invasion plan into doubt. There was no accounting for stupidity : the solution was that Ashby had to be disposed of quietly. The generals were informed and the decision was taken that he had to be found, at all costs and silenced as soon as possible.

  To add to the confusion, the CIA station chief in Buenos Aires was also told of the uproar at Argentine State Security and had urged all of his friends in the military to remain calm.

  “Guys, relax. You’re over-reacting. Don’t worry. We’ll find him – and we’ll get your papers back. Leave it all to me,” said the station chief who circulated between Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, Peru and Argentina. He knew all about the ‘clean-up operations’ in those countries to eliminate communist sympathisers and supporters of the left – he’d personally instigated the process back in the sixties which had begun in Guatemala.

  “But how can we track him down ?” asked one of the colonels. “Those fools lost him in the cafe. He didn’t go back to his hotel and we don’t know where he’s gone.”

  “I’ve told you – there’s nothing to worry about – trust me, will ya ? I’ll have the papers back in your hands by tomorrow, I promise you. How’s that ? Now let’s have a drink. I’m thirsty.”

  “But how will you find him ?”

  “Easy – just leave it to me. I’ll ring you. No problem. What’ll you have – how about a scotch on the rocks ?”