The Cain File (7 page)

“I’d sure like to know,” Maggie said.

“I thought I said to steer clear of the embassy.”

“Well, that’s not what the driver thought. How did he know the
check
passphrase?”

“We don’t have a profile on him yet. The local police won’t let us near. He wasn’t one of us. And whoever he was, he’s dead.”

“Yes, I know.” She had never been responsible for the death of another human. She could argue it was in self-defense, but it didn’t make her feel any better.

“The guy who was supposed to pick you up just missed you.”

“Minister Beltran thought he could get over on us, Ed. He stopped the arrest. Who alerted him?”

There was a pause while traffic honked in San Francisco. “All good questions.”

“Sounds like we got a mole.”

“Maybe.”

“Who else knew about the passphrase?”

“The usual channels. But we’ll have to deal with that later. Right now, there’s an alert out for you. Everybody and anybody is searching.”

“What about John Rae?”

“He made it out.”

“The guy is good.”

“He’s a field op. That’s what he’s paid to do. Unlike you. I was nuts to let you go on that.”

“I badgered the hell out of you,” she said. “I wanted to play op.” Truth was, she needed to switch her career path in order to survive in the Agency. “Where is John Rae?”

“We don’t know exactly where. Yet. But he’ll be fine. I’m not worried about John Rae. He’s not my department. You are.”

“I’ve accessed some funds. A German passport. I can try to find someone, get it cobbled. With a U.S. visa. But it might take a day or two. I’ll use the name Melanie Kirsch. Can you get me papers and a flight to the States?”

“No, it’s too hot there. Get out of Quito. Get out of Ecuador. Can you get to Lima?”

“Peru?”

“I have a person there in the embassy I trust implicitly.”

“Less than a thousand miles,” she said. “OK. Next stop, Lima.”

“He’ll get you to the U.S.,” Ed said, puffing on a cigarette. “Email contact info when you get there. Leave now. And I mean
now.
Stay off the main roads.”

“OK,” she said. “Wish me luck.”

“Good luck. Leave.” Ed hung up.

Maggie steered Ulfric into the bathroom.

She slung her MacBook over her shoulder in the smelly blue
lliq
blanket, gathered up Ulfric’s credit cards and pile of cash, the list of pin numbers and access codes, and nabbed the keys to Ulfric’s rental car on her way out the door. She left the passport. She wouldn’t need it. But she took his phone, since there was a call from Ed on it. She’d dump it in the trash somewhere. She headed out into the hall, pulled the door shut.

Down the hall the elevator dinged. Two men in suits appeared and marched her way—Ulfric’s business associates no doubt, wondering where he had gotten to. He was supposed to give some talk. Well, it was going to be an incoherent one now. Maggie kept her head down as the men passed, one man’s eyes hard upon her. She pushed open a stairwell door, stealing a glance before she entered.

The other man knocked on the door. “Ulfric? Are you there? We’re waiting for you downstairs. I hope you haven’t forgotten about your presentation.”

Maggie entered the stairwell and took the stairs two at a time. In the parking garage, she located Ulfric’s white Ford Fiesta wedged up against a cement wall, blocked in by a grey sedan on the left. The only way out was a narrow L of space behind her to her left. A hunter-green Jag was nosed in to her rear, on the other side of the L. She’d have to reverse out, cut it tight. She eyed the clearance. Not much. But the Ford was a compact and she could make it. Maybe.

Unlocking the car, she squeezed herself in, inadvertently dinging the gray sedan. She threw her laptop in its blanket onto the passenger seat and wrapped the shawl around her shoulders, so she didn’t look like such a hussy. Fumbling the electronic key into the slot, she started up the Fiesta with a rattle and whine.

She put the car into first, tapped the car’s bumper in front. Hand on the wheel, she turned in her seat, gauging the room between her and the Jag again. Like getting ten pounds of potatoes into a five-pound bag. Someone was going to get a bit of a repair bill.

“Excuse me?” A voice echoed through the garage in heavily accented English. A rapid clip of heels followed and she saw the tall dark-skinned attendant who had parked Ulfric’s car when they arrived an hour ago, running up, his tie flapping. He stopped in the space behind her.

“Let me do it, please!” But his smile disappeared when he saw that the driver was not the German guest he obviously expected, but the young woman the man had snuck into the hotel. “Yes?” His eyes narrowed as he scanned Maggie’s face. “This is not your car?”

“I’m Herr Müller’s secretary,” she said in English, smiling wonderfully. “He needs overhead transparencies for his presentation.” She had a ten-dollar bill ready and held it up between her index and middle finger. “Can you move that Jag, please? Thank you so much.”

The attendant smiled as he squeezed in and the bill disappeared into his pocket. Then a flicker of recognition crossed his face. “Wait! I know
you
. You’re the one on the news. The one wanted by the
tombos
. Stop the car. Get out. Now!”

“Sorry,
amigo
.
No hablo español
.”

“Don’t give me that!” he shouted in Spanish. “Out of the car!” He reached for the door handle.

“Best get out of the way,
cabrón
.” She threw the little car into reverse as he pressed himself back against the gray sedan. She cut back around the L in an attempt to miss the Jaguar. Unsuccessful.  The long scrape resonated through the garage as she left a pricy white graze along the driver’s side of the Jag, setting off a piercing auto alarm. Her tall attendant crouched down fearfully. Tires burning, she fought the little car out.

One more
smash
and she was finally clear. Gunning the engine, still turned in her seat, she reversed with alacrity down the row of parked cars.

The attendant sprang up, came sprinting for her car, shouting.

She swung the car around in a tight reverse churn, bolted forward, headed for the daylight of the exit.

A barrier arm on the exit booth blocked the way between her and the street behind the hotel. Maggie stomped the gas pedal. The barrier snapped over the windshield and clattered off behind her. The attendant shouted colorful curses. In the rearview mirror, she saw him, still after her. She jammed the car into second, bumped over a curb, fishtailed out of the hotel, swerving around an Indian family pushing a cart full of melons. She whipped past cars in a direction she’d committed to memory on her way to the hotel, taking a right practically on two wheels. A park lay on the left, the hotel opposite. The Pan-American Highway, which cut through the center of the capital, lay ahead. She shifted into third, swerved around a groaning bus listing to one side, straight into oncoming traffic.

Horns blared.

Maggie yanked the car back into the appropriate lane.

Snaking through traffic, she caught E35—the Pan American Highway—bouncing the little Ford onto the onramp and heading south. Lanes weren’t empty but it was manageable. She stayed to the right where she could exit quickly if need be.

Lima, Peru: only twenty-fours away. With a pesky little border stop in the middle. She’d figure that out.

Suddenly, the howl of a siren floated up behind her. Then: a flashing yellow beacon filled the rearview mirror. A white-and-green pickup closing in.

The
tombos
. Ed had told her to stay off the highway. But what choice did she have? She jerked the wheel right, pulling off onto the shoulder abruptly, speeding past queued up traffic waiting to get onto the highway.

The police pickup did the same.

She banged the car off the shoulder, onto trash-strewn grass, over a curb, thumping the roof of the car with the top of her head, into a rough street jammed full of traffic. She was in a part of town the tourists never saw: cheap ad-hoc construction, ceramic-brick and cinderblock storefronts, garish hand-painted signs. And people everywhere.

The truck was tight behind her, siren wailing, having negotiated the off-road jaunt better than she with its four-wheel capabilities. A crew cab, multiple occupants. Maggie charged into a log-jammed intersection, horns shrieking all around. At the last possible moment before a collision, she veered around a truck laden down with lumber, leaving the larger police truck stuck in traffic. She shifted down and buzzed up a side road into the hills surrounding Quito. Engine screaming, chickens squawked as they flew aside, on road now made of dirt. Older buildings changed to shacks and shanties. Kids playing. Dogs. She didn’t want to hit one. At the top of a hill, she swung around a corner into a vacant lot where a group of preteen boys were kicking around a soccer ball.

The ball whacked against the windshield, making Maggie jump, and causing much merriment with the boys.

“Can you boys park that for me, please? I’ll be right back.” Grabbing the laptop bundle, she leapt from the Ford, left the door open, the engine humming. With any luck, someone would take off with the vehicle and divert the
tombos
. Maggie raced across the lot, computer swinging in the blanket. Across a narrow dirt street, and a patch of ground to where the ragged neighborhood ended and the steep slopes of the Andes began.

“Very nice,
señorita,
” the portly woman with a tape measure dangling around her neck said. “
Very
nice.”

Maggie admired her new dark purple fedora in the smudged mirror hanging off the stall in the busy street market. Along with the black-leather bomber jacket that was as soft as chamois, she had to admit she looked
muy chido
. Very cool. She handed over a small wad of dollars. There was no time for haggling and besides, Ulfric could afford it.

“How far to the bus terminal?” Maggie asked the stall assistant.

A kilometer. Maybe one and a half.

Then she was back with
la gente
—the people—walking through the busy streets on market day, to Quitumbe Bus Terminal with her laptop in a proper shoulder bag now, which also contained a new toothbrush, hair brush, even a clean pair of underwear. The barf blanket had been relegated to the trash, along with Ulfric’s phone. As she strolled, she bought a pair of dark sunglasses and a
salchipapas—
french fries with a butterflied hot dog on top, onion, and special salsa—from a street vendor, which disappeared in no time. It had been hours—well over a day—since she had last eaten.

She stopped at an outdoor ATM and withdrew three hundred dollars from Ulfric’s bank account using the pin he had given her. It would leave an electronic trail, but she needed as much cash as she could withdraw while he was still under the influence of the scopolamine and wouldn’t alert his bank.

In Quitumbre, the airy modern bus terminal, she lined up to buy a bus ticket to Lima, Peru. They wanted a passport. She bought a ticket to Baños instead. Baños was high in the mountains of central Ecuador, near the active volcano Tungurahua. She also picked up tickets to a couple of small jungle towns on the border with Peru. She’d find a way to cross there. While she waited for her bus, she accessed another bank ATM inside the terminal and, under the watchful eye of an armed guard, took a two-hundred-dollar advance on one of Ulfric’s credit cards. She did the same with his American Express.

She’d have to get rid of the cards, now that she’d exhausted the cash-advance limits.

She bought a badly needed coffee at a stall and sipped the steaming brew on the way to a restroom, where she left Ulfric’s bankcards by the sink after she washed her hands. The cards would be gone in no time.

Fedora tilted over her eyes, Maggie slept much of the way up to Baños, despite the blaring Sylvester Stallone movie dubbed in Spanish. She woke to see the jagged Andes twist around her with precarious turns of mountain road. Maggie was pulled back to her childhood, walking along roads just like these, barefoot with her mother, on the way to market, the two of them carrying dishes
Mami
had made and sliced democratically into even pieces in their dented pie pans, carefully draped with gay red-checked tea towels. The slices of meat pie sold out quickly, because
Mami
made the dough with cornmeal and lard and fresh butter and the diced beef was carefully trimmed and blended with olives and onions and red peppers. They’d share a bar of chocolate on the way home, sauntering back to their village,
Mami
rattling coins in a bunched-up tea towel to keep the rhythm as they sang mountain songs.

Thinking of those days hurt so much sometimes.

She never spoke of it, but Maggie loathed her father for leaving
Mami
. And her. She hadn’t talked to him since graduation, five years ago now, and then only barely, when he showed up at Stanford to her ceremony with his pretty, sensible, blonde wife with her freckled inoffensive nose, who probably slept in 600-thread-count sheets that some maid ironed, a maid who looked a lot like
Mami
, with her copper skin and thick mane of gleaming raven-colored hair and deep-set llama eyes, stopping conversations and turning heads as a matter of course. Father was with the U.S. State department in Ecuador when Maggie was young and
Mami
was his Indian mistress, and the reason he was sent back home. Not proper. And it wouldn’t have done for him to bring her back. Especially with a child he had spawned. Yes, he provided for them when Maggie was young—small random checks arriving now and then, and he did bring Maggie to the U.S. when
Mami
died of malaria, and put Maggie through school, but Maggie knew that was gringo guilt at work.

She wondered if he would chat with the maid in his perfect Spanish, using all the slang to let her know just how much in the know he was. She imagined him flirting with her, maybe more, when his wife wasn’t around.

Grief was the real reason
Mami
gave up the fight.

In Baños’ bus station, a small facility with more dirt than asphalt, Maggie noticed a battered green dump truck with yellow Peruvian commercial plates, parked by a hole-in-the-wall eatery. The driver was an old soul, badly in need of a shave and a comb, wearing sandals and baggy dungarees with his threadbare shirt hanging out, half-buttoned. Leaning against his rig, he scooped his way through a mess of
menestra
beans in a clear plastic container with a plastic spoon. His table manners left something to be desired but he looked friendly enough. The bleats and grunts of farm animals emanated from the back of his truck.