Six Minutes To Freedom (7 page)

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Authors: John Gilstrap,Kurt Muse

BOOK: Six Minutes To Freedom
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7
Kurt squirmed in the back of the van, doing his best to overhearwhat lay ahead for his family when the caravan arrived. His parentshad all the money, the business belonged to them. There was the property on Taboga. All of it was in jeopardy now, and it was all becauseof him. Noriega had long established himself as a tyrant who assumedthat everyone’s property was his for the taking. God only knew what he would take from a man whose son worked ceaselessly and effectivelyto make the general look like a fool.
Please get away
, Kurt prayed. It had been nearly six hours since his arrest, plenty of time for word to spread. The uncertainty of it all was killing him.
If Kimberly got in touch with Annie, then everything would turn out fine. Annie could make amazing things happen in no time at all. But if, for some reason, she had not gotten the message ... He refused to think about it. In three minutes, they’d be at the house. There was no stalling anymore.
 
The clock on the dash of the BMW read 1:30 when Papi finally pulled to a stop in front of the La Cresta apartment. Carol had already arrivedfrom her and David’s place across the street, and Kimberly found the atmosphere electric and frightening.
Nana met them before they were halfway to the door. “When Erik gets here, we have to leave,” she said. “The children are in danger. I just spoke with Annie on the phone. She says that we should leave, too. You and I.”
Papi didn’t want to hear it. “That’s ridiculous. This is Kurt’s game, not ours.”
“Mr. Chiang is involved,” Nana elaborated. “That means the CIA is involved.”
This only seemed to make Papi angrier. “Dammit,” he growled. “He swore to me. He
swore
to me that he was not involved with the Agency. I’m not going anywhere.” Papi had roots here that were thirty years old. He had a business to run, a life to lead. He had no desire to get sucked into his son’s suicidal politics.
“We have to,” Nana said. “When Erik gets here, we have to leave. If the PDF gets a hold of them, Annie is convinced—” she cut herself off, as if suddenly aware that Kimberly was listening.
“What about our lives?” Papi demanded.
“Tomorrow,” Nana said. “We’ll get to that tomorrow. For right now, we have to get the children to Mr. Chiang’s house on Clayton. He’s waiting.”
It was an unspeakable betrayal of the family. Papi couldn’t get beyondthe anger. How dare Kurt take such ridiculous chances with his life—with all their lives? His
children’s
lives, for God’s sake. With emotionsboiling this hot, all he could think about was the day of reckoning.Sooner or later, he’d have a chance to speak to Kurt face to face. When that happened—
The thought was cut short by the roar of an approaching engine and the growing glare of headlights.
For a moment, Kimberly thought it was over, that the PDF trucks were arriving, but no sooner had the thought formed than she recognizedthe Prietos’ black Toyota Pathfinder. In the backseat, in the dark, she could just barely discern the outline of her little brother. He looked as if he might be asleep, but when the door finally opened, she saw that he was more than awake. Barely dressed, with his auburn hair on sideways,he seemed to be stranded in a netherworld between anger and fear.
As the Prietos discharged their passenger and his luggage, there was more talk about what her dad had been doing. Why on earth would the DENI be arresting Kurt? He was an American citizen. He had ties to the Defense Department. It was all the same stuff over and over again. This time, though, by eavesdropping, Kimberly learned the additionaldetail that her mother was very distraught over this.
For the first time, Kimberly had a very real sense of the danger that she herself was in. Up till now, her fear had all been about her father. Now it was personal. Now it was about herself, Erik, and her angry grandparents.
Nana cut the discussion short. She thanked the Prietos for their help, but then started herding the family toward the car. Erik was here now, there was no need to wait. If Annie’s suspicions were correct, the goons would be here momentarily, and then all options but surrender would evaporate in a heartbeat.
Kimberly didn’t hesitate. She was ready to be moving. She was ready for the arguments to stop and for life to return to normal. As she sat with the car door open, she listened as an argument erupted between her brother and Papi.
“No!” Papi barked. “Absolutely not. There’s no room for that thing in here.”
Erik had recently taken up skate boarding, and it had become his number-one passion. “I’m not going without it,” the boy said. That kind of recalcitrance in the presence of Papi’s anger could only be explainedby exhaustion.
“Get in the car,” Papi said. Standing nearby, Carol looked ready to throttle the boy.
“Not without my board.”
“Get. In. The. Car.”
Finally, Erik got it. Sanity bloomed like a lifting veil. Realizing that he’d pushed everyone as hard and as far as they would go, he sullenly surrendered and climbed into the back of the BMW while Papi loaded the suitcase he’d packed for his sleepover into the trunk.
One look at his sister frightened him. “What’s happening? Where are we going?” he asked.
Kimberly shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Where’s Dad?”
She hesitated. How much should she share? As the big sister, how much responsibility did she have to keep her worries to herself? “He’ll be fine.”
“Somebody said he was arrested.”
Kimberly looked at him for a long moment and then turned to face front. “He’ll be fine,” she said again. Repeat it often enough and it would come true.
Outside the car, there was more discussion that this was all a waste of time. Carol and David would wait at Nana and Papi’s house until everything blew over and they returned. It couldn’t take more than a few hours, after all.
The whole car shook as Papi closed the door, his ultimate expressionof frustration and anger. “Where are we going?” he asked Nana.
“To Clayton. The back gate.” She pulled the notes she’d taken from her conversation with Annie out of her purse and read them.
“We’re to take the children to Mr. Chiang’s house. He’ll take care of things from there.”
Papi pulled the transmission into gear and grumbled something that Kimberly could not hear, something she probably didn’t want to hear. Slowly, they pulled out of the driveway and headed down the hill for the other side of the world. She settled into the seat and closed her eyes, hoping that rest might settle the awful churning in her stomach.
Two minutes into the trip, something happened to jolt her upright in her seat. Maybe it was a gear change or a subtle jerk of the steering wheel. Or, maybe it was an audible gasp from someone in the front seat. Heading down a long hill, Papi had to pull far over to the right to let the parade of PDF vehicles charge up the hill in the direction they’d just left. They drove fast and aggressively, clearly on an importantmission.
Up in the front seat, Nana and Papi exchanged nervous glances.
 
When Carol saw the headlights at the end of the street, her first thought was that Nana and Papi must have forgotten something. They hadn’t been gone two minutes. Then, when the vehicles kept coming, she realizedwho it was. The hunters had missed their prey by mere moments.They must have passed each other on the street, she thought.
The vehicles took up the entire street, some of them parking close to the house and others parking farther away. At this hour, crowd controlcouldn’t possibly be a problem, but they seemed to be taking no chances. Carol retreated to the doorway of her parents’ home and waited for the lead soldier to approach her. There were no uniforms, she noted, but there was no way to miss the way they swaggered when the moved.
“I am Captain Cortizo,” the soldier said. “Please step aside.”
“What do you want?” Carol asked.
“Are you Mrs. Muse?”
“I am her daughter. We live across the street.”
“And where are your mother and father?”
Cortizo could not have been more polite, yet his questions could not have been more piercing. “I don’t know,” she said. The transparencyof the lie was obvious, yet what else could she say?
The captain’s eyes narrowed as he jerked his head for Carol to move aside. She complied as they filed into the house, then followed them inside.
They worked with the zeal of a hungry hoard, spreading quickly throughout the apartment as they searched every corner for something of interest to them.
“What exactly are you looking for?” Carol asked, but no one would answer her. She jumped when the phone rang. Carol picked it up beforethe second ring.
“Mom?” said the voice on the other end. It was her daughter, Joanna—Joey—and her fear was palpable even through the phone line. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing, honey. Stay home.”
“It looks like the police.”
Shocked that no one had yanked the phone from her hand, Carol tried to speak as cryptically as possible. “That’s right.”
“I’m coming over.”
“No, you’re not. Stay where you are.”
A soldier had finally taken notice of what Carol was doing and started her way. Carol quickly hung up the phone and tried to look innocentas she smiled at the guard.
“Who was that?” the soldier asked.
“My daughter,” she answered, honestly enough. “We live across the street and she saw the commotion.”
The soldier gave her a hard look and extended a threatening finger. “Stay off the phone.”
Carol nodded, trying to choke down the fear that invaded her chest and throat. From across the room, her gaze found David, who was already looking in her direction, trying to get her attention. With arched eyes and a nod, he asked her silently if she was all right.
She wanted to say yes, but she could feel the tears pressing.
 
Tomás tried not to think about all that he was leaving behind: his business,his house, his fortune, such as it was. He had his family, and when all was said and done, a man couldn’t ask for much more than that. When they reached Fort Clayton, they would be safe; after that, there would be time to manage the other problems. It was all in God’s hands anyway, and to date the Creator had never let him down.
Harder to press out of his mind than the personal losses was the terribledread of lost opportunity. They’d been so close. Just one month before all planning and sacrifices would have been worth it. If they could have continued for just four weeks more, Noriega would have been gone, ousted from power by a liberated citizenry. He couldn’t be sure, of course, but that didn’t stop him from
being
sure. The seeds of bitterness began to take root in his belly, and he tried to smother them. This was not the time. The Lord had led him and his compatriots down this path for a reason, and a good Christian did not question the unspoken plan of the Almighty.
“Shopette” called for everyone to drive to the back gate at Clayton, and from there to seek asylum. They’d assumed that it would be that easy, but when Tomás and Helena finally arrived, pulling their car off to the side of the road, they found a number of their friends clustered at the outside of the gate, the fear and frustration plainly evident on their faces.
“They won’t let us in,” Coronado said as Tomás approached. “We asked for asylum, but they won’t let us in.”
Tomás scowled. Truth be told, no one had thought “Shopette” through to this point; the escape plan had been in place for months, but not one of them had actually considered that they might one day launch it. Surely, if the right people found out that they needed help, then help would come, but that begged a question that now seemed so horribly obvious that he felt embarrassed that neither he nor Kurt had ever thought to ask: Who, in fact, were the right people? And how, precisely, were they to contact them at this hour?
The first name that came to mind was Father Frank—the mysteriousoperative with whom he and Kurt had met a dozen times to exchange information or to pick up equipment—but that seemed impossible.First of all, Father Frank had no real name as far as they knew, and he seemed to come and go with all the speed and mystery of a ghost.
Tomás did his best to calm Coronado with a hand on his shoulder. “Let me see what I can do.” Behind him on the road, he saw another set of headlights bloom and watched as Antonio pulled his car to the side of the road and exited to join his compatriots. Yet another car was close behind. If Tomás couldn’t get things straightened out quickly, there was going to be one heck of a traffic jam out here.
As the MP at the gate stepped forward to greet him, Tomás noticed that the second guard was Panamanian, a member of the PDF. It was common for the Americans and the indigenous military to stand guard together at check points, but the second soldier put Tomás in the positionof choosing his words very carefully.
“I need to speak to you,” Tomás said in perfect, unaccented English.
“So speak,” the MP said.

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