JET - Escape: (Volume 9)

by Russell Blake

  “They use the river for everything, obviously. Probably not a septic system in the entire place,” he said, and then pointed at the riverbank. “There they are.”

  The fisherman turned out to be a youth of sixteen named Theo who had little to add to his discovery of the boat. Fernanda took him through a series of questions designed to trip him up, in case he’d found something in the craft and pocketed it, but she got nothing for her efforts but the blank stare of a marginal intellect. She was finishing up when the local police chief’s radio erupted in a burst of static and an excited voice came on the air.

  Viega approached her a moment later, his face haggard from lack of sleep. “They found someone in town who might have seen them,” he reported. “A woman who sells meals to migrant workers near the park.”

  “Let’s go talk to her,” Fernanda said. “Tell the locals to cease and desist until I arrive. The more they speak to her, the more likely she is to omit details when I question her – it’s common for those undergoing interrogation to simplify their stories on multiple passes. We don’t want that. You can see how well it served us with this boy.”

  Viega nodded. “I’ll convey your request.”

  Fernanda frowned at him. “It wasn’t a request,” she snapped.

  Ramón and Viega exchanged a glance, and Ramón shrugged before trailing Fernanda back to the Suburban. He started the motor and put the big truck in gear and, as they were bouncing down the rutted track, looked over at her. “Might want to dial back the intensity a little. You’ll find you get more cooperation with a little honey than with vinegar.”

  “Thanks for the advice, but we’re out of time, and I don’t care about anyone’s bruised feelings.”

  Ramón swallowed hard and focused on the road, biting his tongue. The fog was burning off as they re-crossed the bridge, and when they reached the park, Viega and his entourage close behind, the air was clear and already warming.

  Fernanda eyed the gathering of vehicles as they neared the square, mostly geriatric produce trucks parked in the shade. Ramón had barely coasted to a stop when she was out the door and marching to where two uniformed police were talking to an old woman with a tobacco complexion, her food cart already coated with a film of road dust, the caldrons on it steaming atop kerosene burners.

  The taller of the pair of officers stared at her deadpan when she interrupted their discussion with a terse, “I’ll take it from here.” His eyes narrowed and he squared his shoulders, obviously rankling at being talked down to by a woman.

  “And you are?” he snapped.

  “The person taking over,” Fernanda said.

  The cop stiffened and was preparing a harsh response when Viega approached and cut him off. “Officer, I’m Captain Viega, and this is my associate. Thank you for a job well done. I trust you followed orders and didn’t continue with the interrogation?”

  The cop looked at his feet sheepishly, offering the only answer they were likely to get as he and his partner stepped away from the old woman. “She’s all yours. Says she saw a strange woman here yesterday morning, and later, that she joined up with a man and a child.”

  Fernanda took a calming breath and smiled at the food vendor. “Tell me in your own words what you saw. Start at the beginning, slowly, and try to remember everything. We don’t know what might be important, so it’s critical that you search your memory for even the most insignificant details.”

  The woman nodded and began her account. She’d arrived at dawn, as she did each day, having awakened at four in the morning to prepare her food. She’d served three breakfasts and was worrying about how her business would go if it had started that slow when the woman appeared and bought food and started a discussion with one of the truck drivers. She’d thought that strange, and speculated that the woman was a prostitute desperate for drug money – until a few minutes later she and the white man had climbed into the truck with their child. The truck departed, and that’s the last she’d seen of them.

  Fernanda listened attentively, and when the old woman had finished, gently probed her with questions. In five minutes she was done and hurrying back to where Ramón was leaning against the SUV’s fender.

  “They got a ride with the truck driver. And he had Venezuelan plates.” She looked off into the distance. “They’re headed for Venezuela, if they aren’t there already.”

  Ramón shook his head. “There’s no way they could make it across the border. That’s one of the areas where we have a lot of pull, and we circulated her photo and their description to all the border-crossing guards, along with a large financial incentive to anyone who catches them.”

  “I want you to put out the word to everyone in both crossing areas. Police, informers, whoever. At this point we need a wide net. I just hope we aren’t too late.”

  “It takes a good fourteen hours to hit the closest crossing, which is Cúcuta. That’s if everything went well. The likelihood is they got there yesterday evening. Traffic would be extremely light after dark, so they’d have been spotted if they’d tried to make it over.”

  Fernanda nodded. “I hope you’re right. What about the other crossing point?”

  “Maracaibo. Not nearly as heavily traveled, and another three hundred something kilometers north of Cúcuta. If that’s where they’re headed, they probably just got there a couple of hours ago, assuming the driver went all night, which is virtually impossible. Nobody in their right mind drives at night with the robbery situation being what it is.”

  “I want roadblocks there and Cúcuta.”

  Ramón smiled sadly. “There’s a limit to what we can do. As we’ve discussed, that area is controlled by another group – a competitive cartel we’re enemies with. In Cúcuta we’re having to work in their backyard. It makes things more difficult. Not impossible, just difficult.”

  “Then you can’t draw on your military contacts for roadblocks?”

  “I’ll ask, but don’t count on it.” He paused, thinking. “We have a decent number of informers in the region, so we should be able to relay the message about a reward to everyone in our network.”

  She exhaled impatiently. “Get the helicopter warmed up. I want to be there as soon as possible.”

  “It’s about five hundred kilometers, but we’ll have to cross the Andes. Figure…three hours?”

  She fought to control her anger at the delay and nodded. “Then let’s get in the air. You finally got the gear I asked for?”

  “It’s on the helicopter.”

  She pulled open the SUV door and climbed into the passenger seat. “Call the helicopter and verify they have sufficient fuel to make it nonstop to Cúcuta. I want to be airborne within minutes.”

  Chapter 13

  Medellín, Colombia

  Drago bolted awake as his phone trilled on the bedside table. He reached for it and thumbed the screen to life, and was instantly alert as he read the incoming text message. They’d found the girl. Or rather, they had a good idea that she was going to cross into Venezuela at any moment.

  Alana stirred next to him and moaned softly. Unlike her prior evening’s exclamations, this one was genuine and sounded pained. Drago ignored her and quickly donned his clothes as she rolled over and watched him in silence. When he was dressed, he fished a wad of pesos from his trouser pocket and peeled off several high-denomination notes. He placed them on the nightstand and offered a perfunctory smile that was as warm as an arctic wind.

  “Thanks for a nice night,” he said.

  “You don’t want…anything else?” she asked, her tone puzzled.

  Drago allowed his eyes to rove over her flawless skin as she reclined on the sheets. He could believe that most were willing to ante up for another round if they stayed through till morning. But he didn’t have the time.

  “Maybe a rain check,” he said. Neither of them believed a syllable of it.

  She shrugged and closed her eyes. “You were the best.”

  He smiled to himself. You have no idea, Alana, or wha
tever your real name is. “So were you,” he replied, and the obligatory lies dispatched, twisted the doorknob and stepped into the hall.

  The bodyguard was still in his chair, snoozing. Drago took great pains to be uninterested in the man as he made his way to the stairs. He’d gotten what he came for, and had no further interest in the cartel or its business. Although he did file away in the back of his mind that the data from the phone might be of considerable value to Renaldo at some later date. Either that, or it could be useful if he ever needed to negotiate with the cartel.

  When he stepped onto the sidewalk, the city was coming awake, early morning pedestrians bustling to work around him as horns sounded from the larger boulevard two blocks away. He hurried to the main street and took a taxi to his apartment. Once there, he called a reliable charter service he’d used before and arranged for a private single-engine Cessna to fly him to Cúcuta, takeoff to occur within the hour.

  He packed a small bag with all the tools of his trade he would need and, after dropping a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills and a fistful of gold coins inside, checked the time. Even with the usual delays that came with doing anything in Colombia, he would be in the air shortly. Judging by the stream of messages going back and forth on Renaldo’s phone, the cartel was pulling out all the stops to find the woman and her family, and he hoped that if the trio were still in Cúcuta, the cartel would be successful.

  Because he’d be right there when they were discovered if it took more than three hours, which it likely would. And then the most difficult assignment of his career would come to an end in a hail of gunfire as he returned the favor for his nocturnal swim and subsequent hospitalization in Chile. His hand instinctively moved to the back of his skull as he held the thought, the stitches a reminder of his brush with death. He had a mental image of the woman firing at him, and he nodded to himself as he surveyed the apartment for a final time.

  He had a lot of catching up to do with her. If he had it his way, he would do so in private, one on one, perhaps as the brat looked on. He could make it last days.

  The thought cheered him. If he played his cards right, anything could happen, even his ideal scenario of killing Matt and taking the woman captive.

  Drago was humming as he made his way back to the ground level, visions of the woman, naked and bound in a cellar somewhere, dancing in his head. Perhaps he’d force her to kill her own daughter, presuming it was hers. That would be a good way to break the ice and get her complete attention.

  By the time he’d flagged down another taxi, his nerves were humming with anticipation, and as the driver negotiated his way through traffic, Drago found that in spite of his fatigue and his performance with Alana, he was aroused at the thought of torturing the woman. He’d long ago learned not to question some of his reactions too closely, and instead sat back in the cab’s bench seat and continued to follow the messages coming and going from Renaldo’s phone.

  There would be time enough once he’d fulfilled his contract to deal with the woman. That would be an unexpected perk.

  He would take his pleasure where he could get it.

  Right now he had to focus on being ready to pounce once the cartel had the charming little family in its crosshairs.

  The plane was older than he would have liked, but after a walk around, he decided it was serviceable, if insanely expensive. He paid the pilot, tossed his bag on the rear seat, and slid into the copilot position as he checked the time. There were no tiresome security checkpoints to clear or demands for documentation, so he could come and go within Colombia unconcerned with his weapons cache being detected as long as he stuck to chartered flights. A few minutes later the Cessna was taxiing toward the far end of the runway, and after a run up on the engine revs, the little prop plane surged forward and lifted into the sky, leaving the cityscape of Medellín beneath its wings.

  Chapter 14

  Cúcuta, Colombia

  A pall of smoke from wood fires and exhaust from poorly muffled vehicles hung over Cúcuta like a beige blanket as Jet emerged from the bathroom with dripping hair and moved to where Hannah lay sleeping on the bed. Matt looked up at Jet from his position beside the little girl with worry creasing his face. Jet held her hand against her daughter’s cheek and shook her head.

  “Time to find a doctor.”

  Matt nodded. “Agreed. She’s not getting any better.”

  “Your turn for the bathroom.”

  “I only need a few minutes.”

  Jet eyed her daughter with concern. “I’ll get her ready to go.”

  Matt was true to his word, and soon they had slipped out of the hotel unseen by the desk clerk and were at the clinic, where they encountered the first stumbling block of the day: a nearly packed waiting room filled with coughing, sniffling children and their parents. Jet dutifully completed the paperwork she was handed with invented data and asked the reception nurse how long she thought it would take to see a doctor.

  “Oh, about an hour. Maybe less. We have two physicians working this morning. There’s a lot of this bug going around.”

  “Is there another place where we can be seen quicker?” Jet tried as she fingered a wad of cash in her hand, hoping the woman might appear interested in an exchange of some pesos in order to move them up in line, but she wasn’t biting.

  “This is it. You can try your luck at the hospital or a private office, but most pediatricians won’t even start work until ten or so.”

  Jet returned to where Matt had found seats and did her best to comfort Hannah, who was trying to put a brave face on, but having a hard time. When prompted, the little girl opened her mouth, and Jet confirmed that her throat was bright red, her tonsils on fire.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. The doctor will give you some medicine and you’ll be better in no time,” Jet said, hugging her close.

  Minutes dragged by and the waiting room slowly cycled into the rear of the clinic where the doctors were doing their best to hurry the patients through. After forty-five minutes there were still six children ahead of them, and doing a quick calculation, Jet guessed that it would be at least that long again before Hannah was seen.

  She turned to Matt and whispered, “I have to call Carl. And we’re running low on money. I’m thinking I should try to sell one of the smallest diamonds to a jeweler here.”

  “You should be able to,” Matt said. “It’s a pretty large city, and a border town at that. It seems quite prosperous. Lot of new cars, so money’s circulating.”

  “Can you stay with Hannah while I find an Internet café and a jeweler? It looks like it’s going to be a while.”

  “Sure. No problem. You sure you don’t want me to go?”

  “No, if the police put out a bulletin for us, front and center will be a male Caucasian with a cast on his hand. I’d rather not risk anything this close to the finish line. With my complexion I kind of fit in here, but you stick out.”

  “Have I mentioned how attractive that complexion is?”

  Jet kissed Hannah and rose. “Just make sure she’s okay.”

  “You can take that to the bank.”

  Jet found her way outside, where the relatively low altitude conspired with the latitude to create a stifling environment. Now that the sun was ascending into the morning sky, the temperature was almost overwhelming, the heat waves rising off the parking lot asphalt distorting the perimeter trees as she walked toward the main street.

  She passed a string of shops and cafés and found an office supply store that had two computers for rent, as well as a voiceover IP phone booth. After paying the clerk the minimum deposit, she dialed Carl’s number and waited as it rang. When he answered, he sounded as grumpy as the prior day, if not grumpier.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Victoria.”

  “About time. I thought you’d call yesterday evening,” he chided.

  “I got tied up.”

  He paused for a beat. “I checked around. If you can get from Venezuela to Cuba, I can have
new documentation for all three of you.”

  “What about some help traveling from Venezuela?”

  “No love there. Five years ago I could have easily arranged it, but all my contacts have dried up, and nobody reliable is operating out of there because of the political situation. All the reputable smugglers avoid it like the plague. Too much risk of the military stepping in and grabbing your cargo. So I’m afraid you’ll have to find your own way. Shouldn’t be too bad if you’re on the ground there. Same as anywhere. Find the crooks, cut a deal, watch your ass. Few people are trying to sneak into Cuba, so that part should be a piece of cake. Everyone’s trying to get out, not in.”

  “You have anyone who can convert diamonds into cash?”

  “What kind of weight are we talking?”

  “Enough to pay you.”

  “I should be able to handle that. But I have a guy who knows stones like his children’s smiles, so they have to be worth what you say, or no deal.”

  “No problem there.”

  “Then come to Cuba and we’ll do some business.” Carl paused. “You sure you need all three of you papered? The Victor I know would have…other options.”

  “We want a coherent set of docs. It’s tough crossing international borders with a kid if everyone’s got a different last name.”

  “Ah. Good point. I didn’t think of that.” Carl hesitated. “Where are you now?”

  “En route,” Jet said, unwilling to divulge any further information. “I’ll contact you once we have transportation to your lovely island.”

  “I’ll be standing by. Nothing gets started until I see money. No offense, but a lot can happen en route, and I don’t front for anyone. Even Victor.”

  “I understand. Once we get there, how long to get the documents?”

  “Figure two full days. We need to take photos, and then it’s all just a matter of walking it through. Hope you have no problem being Cuban. The passport department will issue genuine documents that will hold up under scrutiny. They’re a hundred percent legit.”