Beneath a Panamanian Moon (26 page)

“This is no help,” I said.

“Get up, let me try,” Cooper said. “This is a PDF file and sometimes”—he brought up another page, this time with the names legible—“you can do this.”

“What did you do?”

“It's in two layers, an image and a text. Sometimes whoever redacts a file only blacks out the image part and you can still get the text file underneath.”

“Wow. You should consider a career as a spy. Now let's see if we can find the names of all the men who have trained here, especially if they still have a Panama address.”

“I don't see anything like that,” Cooper said, scanning the documents. “You want me to print this out?”

“Later,” I said. “I know where it is.”

Phil came back and hovered over my shoulder. “I couldn't find a crowbar, but I think we should look downstairs. There's room to hide all sorts of shit down there.”

I made Phil wait, not an easy thing to do, while Cooper and I searched for the names of the sleeper cells. Without any more luck, we closed out and turned off the computer.

“At least we have the names of the men who are financing the operation.”

“That's something.”

“Are you two finished? Can we break shit now?”

We followed Phil to a locked door inside the kitchen. It was a double-plug Yale cylinder lock, nothing too hard. I took out my picks and scrubbed the pins. One by one, I felt them set. I was tired and all I could think about was Kris and Marilyn and my concentration slipped so it took longer than Phil could stand. “Come on, Harp, open the goddamn door or I'm going to kick it in.”

“Almost done.” The final pin set, the barrel turned, and I opened the door.

“Did they teach you that in music school?” Coop asked.

“I could make a joke about finding the right key, but I'm too tired.”

Cooper produced a penlight and we followed its beam down the stairwell.

Small storage rooms, their doors made of wood and wire mesh, lined the corridor and we stopped to inspect each. The first few were stacked with canned goods and restaurant supplies. We heard a rat scurry in a corner and Coop caught it in the beam of his penlight. Its eyes glowed and its whiskers twitched, checking us out as we checked him out.

At the end of the corridor we found another locked door. This lock was a new one to me, so I used the torque wrench to move the plug clockwise, and then counterclockwise.

“What are you doing?”

“Seeing which way the plug turns. Some turn right and some turn left. If I guess wrong, I'll have to do this twice.”

Cooper held the light for me and asked, “How can you tell which way's the right way?”

“If you turn it in the right direction, the pins stop the plug and it feels mushy. The wrong way and it hits a metal tab and feels solid.”

“Ah,” Coop said.

Phil was so close that I couldn't breathe. “Can I get some room here?”

He backed off with a grumble.

Annoyed, I said, “Phil, do you think you can do this faster?”

“No, but I can kill you with two fingers.”

“Point taken.”

I worked on the lock for ten minutes that felt like ten hours. My fingers were slick with sweat and I was getting a headache. Scrubbing the pins, the fastest way to pick a lock, wasn't working. I tried vibrating the pick against the pins. This requires a feel for the intensity and frequency of the vibration that will sympathetically work the pick against the driver pin. But my frequency was off. Finally, I gave up and did it the slow way, pin by pin. “Can you turn off that light? Sometimes it's easier.”

“Sure,” Coop said, and snapped the light off, leaving us in darkness.

Without my sight I could visualize the inside of the lock and I could concentrate on the pins, each one with its own personality, its own resistance, its own weight, much like piano keys. I worked, pin by pin, until the last pin set and I turned the plug with the torque wrench, slowly, and the bolt snicked back.

The door opened onto a large room, twenty by twenty, three walls lined in metal racks, floor to ceiling. Half of the racks were stacked with plastic cases. Cooper removed one and opened it. Inside were shoulder-fired missiles, each one capable of bringing down a jetliner at five thousand meters.

Phil moved to a stack of wooden crates marked in Chinese calligraphy.

I whispered, “What do you think's in the boxes?”

“It ain't soy sauce,” Phil said. He found a screwdriver and opened one of the crates. Inside were rifles, snug in wooden cradles.

Cooper focused his light. “AKs.”

Phil took one out and worked the action, the butt wedged into his thigh. “Brand-new,” he said.

“What about this?” Cooper stood by the door to a walk-in freezer. “Why would they have a freezer in a place the cooks can't get to?”

“Biological weapons?”

“That's what I'm thinking.”

“Then open the goddamn thing,” Phil said.

“It's locked.”

Phil looked at me. “It's a good thing I like you.”

The padlock was easy after the dead bolt. In ten seconds the three of us were inside; the cold air felt good after the wet Panama heat. The freezer was empty except for a black plastic body bag on a rolling gurney. It looked like someone was home.

“Whoever it is, he's a big one,” Coop said.

Phil gripped the zipper. “Should I?”

“Might as well.” I braced myself, not knowing who our surprise guest would be. Phil zipped the bag open and there, lips blue, frost on his eyelashes, and a bandage across his nose, was the Gorilla. “I know him,” I said. “He works for a Colombian major stationed in Washington.” I told them about the encounter on Christmas Eve inside the Crystal City parking garage. “The last time I saw him he was talking to the Colonel.”

Cooper leaned in close. “Shot behind the ear. Small entry.”

“Twenty-two,” Phil said, “the choice of spooks and assassins the world over.”

“But why would they kill this guy when just a few days ago I heard the Colonel talking to him about righting the wrongs of history.”

“What'd he mean by that?”

“I think they're trying to give Panama back to Colombia.” Phil looked at me like a part of my brain was showing. “To restore Panama to Colombia the way it was before Teddy Roosevelt took it.”

“He did that?”

“Yeah, he did that. That's how we got the Canal.”

“If this major is involved,” Coop said, “why would Kelly have his man killed? It doesn't make sense.”

“And, the bigger question, why would Kelly and the Colonel want to overthrow Panama in the first place? What's in it for them?”

“Power? Money? Both?”

“What the fuck are these guys smokin'? The American government would never let that happen. They'd take control of the Canal in a fucking heartbeat,” Phil said.

“Maybe that's the point,” I said. “There are a hell of a lot of people in Washington who would love an excuse to come down here, kick a little ass, and set up the zone again. Lots of people.” I perched on the gurney and bumped up against the Gorillasicle. I apologized. “Coop, this humping-the-boonies thing, where are the guys going?”

“Darien.”

“I'm guessing that's not Darien, Connecticut.”

Phil rubbed his hands over his shoulders. “I'm getting out of here. I'm freezing my ass off.”

Cooper and I ignored him. Coop said, “It's the Darien Province, on the Colombian border.”

Phil, respect in his voice, said, “A very bad place.
Muy malo
. Headhunters there who'll shrink your
cabeza
down to the size of a mango.”

“You're kidding.”

“They can't finish the Pan-American Highway because they can't pay anyone enough to work there,” Coop added. “It's a scary place.”

Phil flapped his arms. “You throw in the Colombian druggies and all the private security forces these rich assholes have, and you've got a place that doesn't fit very well on the tourist brochures. Now can we get outta here?”

Cooper rubbed his chin. “But if this revolution is happening here in Panama City, why are they sending the team to Darien?”

“Does the team know about this? Are the guys part of this?” I hadn't known them for long, but they didn't strike me as murderers. Killers, yes, but not murderers.

Phil had the same thought. “No way. I know these guys. They wouldn't train people for this shit. Meat, maybe, and Hamster. But most of what you see here is exactly what it's supposed to be, a training facility for private security.”

“But behind that front are a few guys—”

“Like Meat,” I said.

“Yeah, like Meat and Hamster and, I think, Zorro,” Phil said, “until he got scared.”

“And these few work with Kelly on the assault on the Presidential Palace.”

“But why send the team into Darien?” Cooper asked.

“To get them out of the way,” Phil said.

I felt a chill and it wasn't from the freezer fan. “No witnesses.”

Cooper looked shocked. “You mean Kelly would kill every man on the team, all of them?”

“They didn't lose sleep over Rosebud,” I said. “They didn't hesitate to kill Zorro or Ren.”

“But tomorrow—”

Phil looked at his watch. “You mean later today.”

“—they could be heading into an ambush.”

My finger stroked the swelling under my eye the way a tongue explores the empty socket of a pulled tooth. “Is there some way we can ground the Huey? Something we can do to sabotage her?”

Cooper nodded. “Yeah, sure. I guess we could cause a fuel leak without too much work. That'd do it.”

“They'd just use the new Black Hawk,” Phil said. “Fly the Colombians out and then come back for the team.”

“Phil, you know some of these guys from Afghanistan. Who do you trust?”

“Hog,” Phil said, without hesitation. “And Ice.”

“Do you think they'd mutiny, I mean, would they take control of the chopper and land it somewhere else?”

Phil shook his head. “No, man, not without some hard evidence. I mean, I'm beginning to think we're crazy myself. Look at us, standing in a deep freeze with a dead man.”

“Then what if you give them a heads-up? Warn them about a possible ambush?”

“Then I'd feel sorry for the other guys. But not too sorry.”

“Okay. Set that up. In the meantime, if I can find the list of the sleeper cells, we can stop this thing before the first shooter climbs into his body armor. And I'd like to know who that other guy is, the guy the Colonel thinks is a goat fucker.”

“Can we go now?”

“Yeah, Phil, we can go now.”

Cooper pushed the latch, but it didn't turn. “It's stuck.”

Phil said, “It's probably just frozen. Let me try.” He gripped the latch in both hands and pushed down, putting the weight of his shoulders into it. He strained and the back of his neck darkened. The handle snapped and Phil fell to the floor, cutting a gash deep into his upper arm.

“Now you've done it,” I said. Phil looked at me one-eyed, and I shut up.

“Someone's locked it from the other side,” Coop said.

I looked at Phil's arm, reopened the body bag and stripped off the dead man's guayabera. I didn't think he'd miss it.

“Ah, shit,” Phil said, “Now I'm going to bleed to death in this fucking ice chest.”

“No you won't,” I said, tearing strips of cloth from the shirt. “We'll freeze long before that happens.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“So, what do we do now?” Cooper said.

The ceiling and rear wall were solid reinforced concrete. The other three walls were made of insulated sheet metal. “Take the Gorilla off that gurney,” I said.

“You going to use him to batter down the door?”

“I'm glad you can make jokes, Coop.”

“I wasn't joking.”

“Phil, you're the strongest one here. How's your arm?”

“Okay,” Phil said, and flexed.

“Can you break off one of those legs so we can use it to pry loose this sheet metal?”

Phil and Coop took the Gorilla off the gurney and placed him on the floor. Phil looked at the steel legs and said, “I think I can break one off, but it's going to take a while.”

“You have an appointment?”

At last, Phil got his wish to break things. Phil took an active, and serendipitous, approach to the destruction, flinging the gurney against the floor until one leg snapped free. When he was done he was sweating.

“Wrap yourself in that body bag,” Coop said, “or you'll catch cold.”

With the Gorilla on the floor and Phil wrapped in plastic, I beat the jagged end of the leg into a seam until it opened enough to pry it back. Rivets popped. The sheet metal came loose, slowly, and then the leg bent. “I need another one,” I said, and Phil went to work on the remaining three legs, hurling and thrashing the gurney around the small space until another piece of aluminum broke free.

Cooper's lips were blue. “W-w-what if someone hears us?”

“Gee, Coop, that'd be awful. They might even let us out.”

“I hadn't thought of that. Goddamn, I'm cold.”

“Maybe you should get inside that bag with Phil.”

I jammed the new leg into the space. More rivets popped. The three of us got our hands inside and pulled the sheet metal away from the studs. Pink insulation filled the interior and I yanked long pieces of it free to get to the outside wall. When I had room, I kicked at the outside panel. It didn't budge. Coop got on his back and kicked with me. The exterior steel still didn't move.

“Let me try,” Phil said.

Coop and I stood. Phil got down on his back and kicked with both feet. The wall seemed to move. He kicked again and the panel cracked open.