The Cain File

by Max Tomlinson

  “Probably drugs,” someone else said.

  “You don’t bring dope into Colombia, knucklehead.”

  While the three officials marched John Rae down a brightly lit hallway off the main corridor that led to baggage claim, Maggie’s agent was still leafing through her passport.

  “Do you know that man?” he asked casually in Spanish.

  “I already told you: no hablo español,” she said with more than a trace of annoyance. “How long is this going to take anyway?”

  “Do you know that man?” he said in English.

  “No. Why? What has he done?”

  “Where are you staying in Bogotá?” the passport agent said in English.

  “Let me just find the name of the place.” Maggie slipped her rucksack off her shoulder. She dug inside, found her copy of Lonely Planet Colombia—complete with a U.S. hundred-dollar bill tucked inside the page listing Bogotá hotels. She handed the book over. “Here it is,” she said, holding the page with her finger. “Casa Dann Carlton. It’s downtown. Nice, is it?”

  “We’re going to be here all night,” someone in line said behind her.

  “Welcome to Latin America,” someone else said.

  The agent examined the guide. He handed it back, sans hundred-dollar bill. He found a page in her passport, stamped with it fanfare, then gestured impatiently for the next person behind the yellow line.

  A simple shakedown. Common in this part of the world. But what about John Rae?

  She dared not make a fuss. She might wind up in the same place.

  “Next!” the passport agent hissed.

  Maggie collected her passport and strolled down the corridor, trying to act casual. Peering down the side passageway where John Rae had been escorted. Nothing but closed doors. She cocked an ear. Nothing. She headed cautiously down the side hallway.

  “Move along,” a woman said in Spanish.

  Maggie turned, saw the female soldier with the machine gun. Where had she come from?

  “Restroom?” Maggie said. “El baño?”

  “There!” the guard snapped in English, jutting her jaw toward the main hallway, where baggage claim was. “Go.”

  Maggie sighed, followed the signs toward baggage claim.

  John Rae was a big boy. If anyone would know a way out of the jam like this, it would be him. This was probably child’s play. But what if someone had been tipped off? Maggie thought it might be a genuine misunderstanding. Or more extortion. More than a few South American passport agents paid a “fee” for their lucrative jobs and were under pressure to produce. But it felt like too much of a coincidence—both of them being hit up.

  At baggage claim, Maggie milled around the carousel, even though she had no checked luggage. The oval machine ground into motion as more travelers arrived. Luggage starting bouncing down a chute. She nonchalantly kept looking back the way she came. With any luck, sooner or later, one of the arriving passengers would be John Rae.

  The guard with the hair bun and submachine gun arrived, along with another guard. The woman scanned the crowd, possibly looking for someone. Maggie turned abruptly and headed toward Customs, keeping her eyes straight ahead as she marched past two soldiers and a German shepherd. It felt like even the dog was staring at her. One soldier gave a low whistle as Maggie walked by.

  At Customs, agents were opening luggage with gusto, burrowing through clothes to the consternation of the travelers. But no one stopped Maggie.

  Crossing the last dozen yards toward the automatic exit door into the airport proper, Maggie knew what No Man’s Land on the Berlin Wall must have felt like. As much as she wanted to, Maggie didn’t turn to see if bun-and-gun and her friend were on her tail. But she acted as if they were, picking up the pace without actually breaking into a run. The electric doors whipped open and she was suddenly immersed in the dissonance of a big South American airport: people holding up cardboard signs with names on them, others barking out offers of taxis and ground transportation, vying for her attention. Maggie burrowed into the crowd, flipping her backpack down, unzipping it, pulling out a floppy beige knit slouch hat and dark sunglasses, quickly donning both and stuffing her long hair up inside the hat as she exited the throng hovering around the doors.

  She passed through a second set of electronic doors, taking her outside, where a line of taxis pumped exhaust into the cool night air. She turned, looking around indifferently. The female guard with the machine gun was still inside, in front of the first set of doors, scanning the crowd.

  A considerable line of people waiting for cabs greeted Maggie. A man with a paunch and cap was deciding who went where.

  “Wait there,” he instructed Maggie, pointing her to the end of a long queue of people herding luggage.

  She moved in close, slipped a folded U.S. twenty-dollar bill into his rough hand. “My mother’s in the hospital, amigo,” she said in Spanish. “Her second stroke. I haven’t slept a wink for days, just getting here.” She dropped her tone to unabashed helpless female. “I’d be so grateful.”

  The money disappeared. “Right this way, miss.”

  “Her mother’s in the hospital!” the man said as he pushed the businessman aside who was just getting into a rumbling little Daihatsu at the front of the line. Maggie dived into the back seat, yanked the door shut, handed another twenty to the stout driver in front.

  “As fast as this fine vehicle will take us, uncle. Burn rubber, if you please.”

  Bald tires squealed on asphalt as the taxi peeled out of the clogged lane in front of the airport.

  -15-

  “You want to get out here?” the taxi driver said, blinking at Maggie in dismay from the rearview mirror. The rosary beads hanging from it vibrated with the uneven pinging of the tinny engine. They were on the outskirts of Bogotá, stars twinkling on a deserted stretch of country road. The perpetual coldness of the Andes blew steadily.

  “I do,” she said, peeling off bills, handing them over the seat. “Muchas gracias.”

  The taxista took the money. “But it’s not safe here, señorita. It is the middle of nowhere.”

  “I’m fine.” She got out, waited for him to turn around and head back into the capital. He did, finally, giving a reluctant shrug before carving a tight 180 in the two-lane road, and setting off, the engine whining. She watched the red taillights disappear.

  The sounds of night began to take over. Crickets. Wind. She was back in the world of her birth. An ancient world. Despite the bad turn things had taken, she felt its power.

  She was safe enough to catch her breath and decide what to do next.

  She recalled her cozy lavatory chat with John Rae. If something went wrong, he said, she was to get out of town, then Colombia, in that order. No hanging around. Something funny, run like a bunny.

  She looked off into the distance, away from the lights of Bogotá. Get out of Denver, John Rae had said, pressed up against her in the airplane WC.

  And that’s what she’d been doing.

  But now . . .

  She had come too far to simply cut and run, based on John Rae’s overprotective instincts. She knew her way around this part of world. Better than he, truth be told.

  John Rae could have been stopped at the airport for no reason beyond the fact that the authorities just did that sometimes. They were tombos—cops—and that’s the way they were. Maggie’s harassment was your standard hit-up for cash. John Rae might even be out by now. An experienced operative, he’d know how to get out of most fixes.

  Hitching her backpack up on a shoulder, she hiked off the main road, onto rocky ground, watching her step in the darkness. She headed up the hillside where she could watch the road and satellite access would be unrestricted.

  Sitting on a rock, Maggie extracted the MacBook and fired it up, dialing into the Agency’s IKON global network with the high-power network card plugged into a USB port. In the night gloom, the screen glowed blue. Up the hill, a lone bird gave a series of shrieks. Maggie clicked on her IP-masker ap
p. A good surveillance tracker would get past that, but it would take longer and she wouldn’t be online long. Long enough to call the emergency number. She pulled her headphones out of her knapsack and plugged them in as she started up Skype.

  She dialed the contact number Sinclair Michaels had given her in his instructions, using the country code 57. It would appear to be an out-of-country call. Again, that could be unraveled, but it would take whoever might be watching more time.

  The call droned on for several rings. A small beast shot out of the shadows from behind a rock, scampered down the hill toward the road, taking a few of her nerves along with it.

  Her heart settled as the call finally connected.

  The buzz of a call center filled the night air around her, surreal with the lonely hillside darkness.

  “Authentication, please,” a voice said.

  “Solar Solar One,” she said.

  “And your password.”

  “Ivory nation.”

  “Turn off your IP masker. We need to verify your machine and GPS.”

  She did so. Green flickers lit up her network card as her machine was verified.

  “One moment, please.” Maggie was transferred to a quieter office somewhere in Langley.

  “All in one piece?” Sinclair Michaels said.

  “Yes. But I can’t say the same for Jack Warren.” She used John Rae’s code name on this op.

  “Don’t worry about him. A momentary hiccup. Nothing a little payola won’t take care of.”

  “So you’re aware of what happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps you can clue me in?”

  “Nothing serious. Where are you? Your GPS shows you’re out of Bogotá.”

  “Just on the outskirts,” she said, embarrassed for running. “So, what next?”

  “Call Cain’s people and let them know there’s been a delay. Get things rolling. Jack Warren will join you in a few hours. He may even be out by now.”

  “You want me to call these people myself?”

  “Yes. We need to keep them calm. I’ve dealt with Grim Harvest before and they can get antsy. We don’t want them to take off on us.”

  Maggie and Grim Harvest. All by herself. “I’ll need the number.”

  Sinclair Michaels gave it to her. Maggie repeated it back, making a quick rhyme out it in her head.

  “I’m going to give you my direct Skype number,” he said. “Just in case.”

  She committed that to memory as well.

  “Just remember,” Sinclair Michaels said. “This op is a textbook PE—” by which he meant prisoner-exchange— “No need to let it cause stress.”

  Undue stress, she thought. “I won’t.”

  “Turn your IP masker back on,” he said, hanging up.

  Maggie turned the masker back on. Then she Skyped the number Sinclair Michaels had given her, adjusting her headphones. She realized that she was managing an op in her father’s old stomping ground. What would he think, having been pulled from the action in the prime of his career?

  Why did she care so much what that man thought?

  “Dígame,” a woman’s raspy voice said in a flurry of static as the call picked up. Horns honking. The woman was most likely on a cell phone outdoors in downtown Bogotá.

  “I’m Alice Mendes,” Maggie said in Spanish.

  The woman spoke in a rough indigenous accent. “Where’s your jefe?”

  “Running late,” she said. “Clearing customs. He had a wristwatch that caught the eye of one of the agents. You know how that goes.”

  “How late?”

  “An hour or two at most.”

  The woman on the other end swore.

  “We’re still on to meet for a drink, though,” Maggie said. “Where?”

  She heard the woman take a deep breath before she responded using a dialect that had surfaced during the dirty war in Peru. Some words used reversed syllables. Others used heavy vernacular. It was the Latin version of Cockney rhyming slang, not understandable to most ears. The woman gave Maggie a location in central Bogotá, by the cathedral.

  “I’ll see you Monday,” Maggie said. Monday meant one hour from now. Tuesday, two hours. “But it might be Tuesday.”

  “Tuesday is out of the question.”

  “Monday it is.”

  Maggie hung up, dialed into Frenesi, the online dating site that served as the secret rendezvous venue for her and John Rae. PerroRabioso had sent her a message a few hours ago, back when they were still airborne: If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me? John Rae confirming his screen handle. But nothing since. He might not be in a position to call yet. She sent a message back. You bet. In fact, I’m going downtown to hang around with your thrill-seeker buddies and wait to hear you say it in person . . .

  That should be clear enough that she wasn’t going anywhere and moving ahead with the op, in case communications with Sinclair Michaels were fouled up.

  An ICE ping alert window popped up on the shimmering laptop screen in the darkness. Someone watching. Maggie closed the application and hit the MacBook’s shutdown button, pulling the headphones and network card. She stuffed the laptop and accessories into the protected slot of her bag while it was still powering down. Then she stood up, dusting herself off.

  A milk run, she reminded herself.

  Sinclair Michaels had said all was settling into place. Just a delay.

  And in the back of her mind was Tica, sitting in some godforsaken cell or worse; she wondered about the “medical emergency”.

  From the west a pair of headlights broke the darkness like flickering cat’s eyes. A truck heading toward Bogotá. The groan of its engine drifted down the road.

  Maggie hoisted up her knapsack, huffed it down to the road, crossed over. She stuck her thumb out as the truck came up behind.

  The motor ground down a gear, the truck preparing to stop.

  ~~~

  Cold night air whipped across the wide expanse of Plaza Bolívar as Maggie stood in front of the austere block-shaped Palace of Justice. Waiting. To her left, the cathedral’s huge doors were closing for the night, tons of age-old wood groaning. A trickle of people had filtered out and were fanning across the broad stone plaza. Maggie fought the urge to check the time again. It wouldn’t make anybody get here any quicker.

  She scanned every car that went by, wondering what had happened to John Rae. Was he on his way? She’d feel a whole lot better when they rejoined forces.

  A beat-up red Toyota with a gray-primered fender pulled over on Carrera 8, halfway up the plaza. Two people sat in the front. The driver wore a hat.

  Maggie strode over. The car window rolled down.

  The driver was a woman, wedge-shaped, wearing a fedora. Typical Quechua body type and garb. Maggie drew closer and looked inside the car. The woman wore a handmade cardigan, heavy Indian skirt, wool leggings that hugged her thick calves. She’d spent most of her life outdoors at high altitudes, judging by the deep wrinkles in her copper-colored skin. Her nose had the sharp profile of people who predated the Inca. She looked as if smiling was an extravagance.

  “You must be Alice,” she said in guttural Spanish.

  Maggie dipped down to get a look at the woman’s companion: a skinny Indian teenager not old enough for military service. He wore a faded black sleeveless Metallica T-shirt despite the cold. His head had been shaved a week or so back, but he had a sensitive-looking mouth with soft lips and a jacket over his lap, which concealed a pistol, but not very well.

  “He can’t be the person I’m supposed to meet,” Maggie said in Spanish, meaning Cain. She didn’t let on that she spoke Quechua. It could be an advantage.

  “He’s not,” the woman said. “We’re taking you to him.”

  “And Beltran too?”

  “Yes.”

  “What guarantee do I have?”

  “None at all,” the woman said, looking straight ahead as she tapped the steering wheel. “But if that’s a concern, you be
st leave now. You called us—remember? Now we’re running late, thanks to you. And if we stay here much longer, we risk being stopped by the tombos. Now get in the car or be on your way, princesa.”

  With a squeal of rusty door hinge Maggie climbed in the back on a seat covered with a rough Indian blanket. The car lurched into traffic before she had time to pull the door completely shut.

  The woman spoke to the boy in Quechua. “Check her bag. Make sure she doesn’t have a pieza.”

  The boy turned around as the car barreled through an intersection, cutting off a bus, the woman leaning into the horn. Maggie’s nerves responded appropriately.

  “Bag,” the boy mumbled in Spanish, gesturing with an impatient hand, which sported a death’s-head skull ring and studded-leather wristband. Maggie handed him her knapsack as the woman maneuvered through traffic like a rally-car driver.

  “What’s your name?” Maggie asked the boy.

  He ignored her and pulled out the laptop, seemed satisfied, put it back, then went through her undies and things with a blush on his face and his eyes down. He had delicate lashes. He put her things back carefully.

  “Unarmed,” he said to the woman driver in Quechua.

  “She’s a fool,” the woman replied. “What about her papers?”

  “There’s a passport.” He was leafing through it now. “Estados Unidos.”

  The woman reached a hand out as she drove. The boy handed her the passport. She slipped it in the pocket of her cardigan. The boy returned Maggie’s bag to her.

  “I need my passport back,” Maggie said in Spanish.

  “Yes, yes,” the woman said.

  “Now.”

  “Later.”

  What choice did she have? “No word from my companion yet?”

  “No.” The woman yanked the car around a horse and cart laden down with flattened cardboard boxes.

  “You two are with Cosecha Severa?”

  The radical group holding Beltran was one of many that popped up in this part of the world like pampas grass.

  The boy made a fist and pounded his skinny chest with it. “Vengeance,” he said, “is justice.”