The Cain File (18 page)

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 app. 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 best 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.”

It sent a chill through her. “And Cain is your leader?” she asked.

“
Comrade
Cain.”

“And I’m going to meet him, correct?”

“Enough questions,” the woman said, jamming a sandaled foot down on the gas pedal as they swerved around a broken-down taxi with a driver gesturing wildly to a man in uniform. Some sort of accident.

The car sped away from the city center, onto rough streets, then higher onto dirt roads, into one of the largest slums Maggie had ever seen. She’d seen a few, grew up in one in Guayaquil. But at least fifty thousand people lived in Ciudad Bolívar. Houses built anywhere they’d fit, out of anything available. And people, dogs, pigs, noise, smells. Chaos. Life on the side of a mountain, connected by crooked stairways, dotted by haphazard, intermittent lights.

“Where are we headed?” Maggie said.

“She does ask a lot of questions,” the boy said to the woman driver in Quechua.

“She’s a
norteamericana
,” the woman replied. “They think they own the world. But she’ll learn. She’ll learn.”

High in the hills, the woman in the fedora turned around in her seat, facing Maggie, as she reversed up a narrow dirt road etched out of a steep slope overlooking the city. The car shuddered back toward a large shanty made of cinderblock, plywood, and tin. There was nothing to the left side of the car, just a stark drop-off, and the quivering lights of Bogotá through pollution and mist.

The woman stomped the brakes, twisted the car key, got out, and stood on the ledge where the land fell away. The boy in the passenger seat rolled his window down and climbed out with the gun in one hand. There was no room to open his door.

“Well?” the woman barked at Maggie, hands on her ample hips. “What are you waiting for?”

Maggie eased the door open with a pang, got out onto no more than a foot of dirt cliff. She looked down at a vegetation-lush precipice to corrugated roofs below lit by vaporous moonlight. Slinging her bag over her shoulder, she stepped carefully around to the rear of the car, clinging to the fender. The icy thin air only added to the precariousness.

“What did she expect?” the woman said to the boy in Quechua. “A handrail?”

“I thought
norteamericanos
lived in skyscrapers,” the boy replied, the 45-caliber pistol dangling from his hand.

“They live in mansions, Gabby,” the woman said, spitting over the side. “Come on, princess,” she said to Maggie, switching to Spanish, nodding at the shack at the end of the road. The boy climbed on the bumper and sat on the trunk of the car, presumably to stand guard.

Maggie gazed out over Bogotá, the lights of the capital furry down below. The air was pungent with the smell of burning trash. Dogs barked in the distance.