Survival (29 page)

Matt returned to where Hannah was watching him with wide eyes and sat in front of her.

“You know who’s coming to see you today?” he asked, his tone playful.

She shook her head solemnly. “No.”

“Mommy!”

Her face radiated joy and she squealed with glee and squirmed. “Mama! Mama come!”

“Yes, sweetheart. She’ll be here soon, and then we’ll find someplace quiet so we can all be together again. Would you like that?”

“Mama! Mama!” Hannah cried, her big eyes moistening at the thought.

“So we need to give you a bath and get you cleaned up so you’re not dirty, kid, and maybe brush your hair, and then it’ll be my turn. Then we’ll pick out some clean clothes for you, so we can surprise her with how nice you look.”

Hannah leapt to her feet and ran to the bathroom door, and Matt’s throat tightened at how eager she was to get cleaned up to impress her mother. She’d had such a rough time of it with everything that had happened, yet her capacity for happiness seemed undiminished, and she wanted nothing more than to see her mom again.

Matt glanced at his watch and caught a glimpse of himself in the wall mirror. He rubbed his good hand over the stubble that covered his jaw, acknowledging that Hannah wasn’t the only one who needed some attention. There had been little time recently for niceties like grooming, but with Jet on her way, he’d make the effort to shave and shower so he didn’t look like a jungle fighter coming out of the brush after a two-week campaign. He moved to their bags and extracted his hygiene kit, and then smiled at Hannah. “It won’t be long now.”

“Mama!”

Chapter 41

Armando finished unloading the last chicken coop, its feathered occupant glaring fearfully at him as he set it next to the others, and straightened, one hand on his back, which ached from the effort. His helper was nowhere to be found, which didn’t surprise him – lunch usually took two hours, from two to four o’clock – and upon his arrival back at the depot there had been nobody there, his secretary also gone, the doors locked.

He walked stiffly over to a steel sink and scrubbed his arms and hands with soap, then did the same with his face. The two-day trips were the worst, he thought. The lack of air-conditioning in the ancient truck coupled with the dust from the dirt roads left him with grit in every nook and cranny. He studied his nails and shook his head, and then moved to the office, where a pile of invoices awaited his attention.

Once inside, Armando approached a half-height refrigerator and withdrew an icy cold bottle of Cerveza San Tomás: Dubbel beer. He palmed a bottle opener from a nearby shelf and popped the cap as he carried it to his desk. He’d earned it. His business, his father’s before he took it over, wasn’t going to ever make him rich, but it was a good living, hard but honest work. He took a long pull of beer as he flipped on the ceiling fan and then sat in his swivel chair. Propping his feet up on the desk, he leaned back and closed his eyes, trying to ease the tension in his neck, which was stiff from the hours on the harsh roads.

His eyes popped open and he frowned when a creak from the depot gate echoed through the compound over the squawking of hundreds of chickens. Nobody ever visited his business – he was a delivery wholesaler, supplying chickens to the slaughterhouses that catered to the neighboring restaurants.

Three men entered his office, all hard-looking, and the middle one, dressed in expensive linen trousers and a spotless silk shirt, snapped his fingers. Armando stiffened as the two larger men grabbed him unceremoniously, holding him in the chair, immobilizing his arms as the third one neared.

“Armando. We’ve been waiting for you for some time. Nice to see you made it back safely – you had us worried,” Jaime said.

“I…who are you? What is this?”

“Who I am isn’t important, it’s the problem I have that is. Listen carefully. You picked up a man and a girl from Antonio Salguero and gave them a ride. I want to know where you took them. It’s a simple thing I ask, no?”

“Why? What do you want them for?”

“That’s none of your business. What you should be concerned with right now is telling me where you left them. Be honest, and everything will be fine.”

“I…I dropped them off at the bus stop. They were headed for Cali.”

Jaime shook his head. “You know, I play poker when I have the time. High stakes. I’ve made a hobby out of reading people.” He sat down and inspected the crease of his trousers. After a few moments he picked a piece of lint from his right leg, inspected it, and flicked it away. “You wouldn’t last one hand. You’re a terrible liar.” He fixed Armando with a cold stare, his obsidian eyes flat as a shark’s. “You don’t even know me, and you’re lying to me. How am I supposed to take that?”

Armando didn’t say anything. Jaime sighed. One of the toughs squeezed a pressure point on his arm and it went numb. Jaime rose and pulled a knife from his back pocket. The snick of the blade snapping into place froze Armando’s blood, and he shook his head as Jaime approached.

“I’ll start with your ears. Then I’ll begin cutting off other appendages. Every time you lie to me, you’ll lose something vital. Do you understand? So again. The man and the little girl. Where did you take them?”

Armando’s screams rang through the chicken yard, causing the birds to squawk even more, as though accompanying his agonized melody with impromptu harmonies. Jaime exited the office five minutes later, a look of distaste on his face at the odor of chicken excrement that rose from the coop area, his men trailing him as he spoke softly on his phone.

“That’s right. A monastery. No, I have no idea, but he was quite convincing in his belief that they’re still there. Fine. I’ll be back in ten minutes. No, I’ll tell her.”

He hung up and got into the passenger seat of the black Suburban. The driver started the engine as his two enforcers climbed into the rear seat and they roared away, finally with a destination in sight after an interminably long wait. Jaime looked at his men in the rearview mirror and spoke softly. “Jorge, you have blood on your chin.” He tapped his own chin with his finger, and the larger of the two men wiped his face with the back of his arm.

When the big SUV arrived at the hotel, Jaime made his way to Fernanda’s room while the rest of the men gathered by the trucks. He’d called for additional muscle the prior day, and another vehicle with three more toughs had joined the three he’d traveled from Frontino with, bringing his group to a total of nine, including Fernanda. More than ample for the task at hand, he thought as he knocked on the door.

Fernanda opened it, and he was struck again by her odd combination of exotic beauty and deadly intensity – a mixture that he found more than intriguing and hopefully would get the opportunity to explore once their little errand had been attended to. She eyed him expectantly, and he offered a satisfied grin.

“We found them.”

Chapter 42

Santuario, Colombia

The high whitewashed walls surrounding the hilltop complex of buildings glowed in the late afternoon sun. Jaime shifted in his seat as Fernanda studied the monastery through a pair of binoculars. He cleared his throat and eyed her.

“Why don’t we leave one of my men to watch the area, and he’ll call us whenever they come down or your woman shows up? There’s no reason for us to stake the place out and wait in miserable conditions. Come, we can get a coffee,” he suggested, tired of the game after an hour of sitting and doing nothing.

“You can leave if you like. She’s on her way here. That’s why she came to Colombia. I can feel it. I’m not going to trust this to one of your goons – she’s as good as they get, and they’ll tip her off,” Fernanda said. She’d already had Jaime pull his men well back, not wanting a repeat performance of the debacle at the Vacamonte harbor. This was her chance to extract her revenge, and she wasn’t going to allow anyone to blow it for her.

“But there’s only one way up or down. She has to show herself, and when she does, she’s a sitting duck.” He studied Fernanda’s profile. “If they come down to her, same thing. They have to be on the cable car. It’s a simple surveillance job that’s beneath your skills.” What he meant was, beneath his station – but he didn’t say it, preferring to flatter than to complain.

Fernanda twisted and glanced at the AK-47 in the backseat, its curved banana magazine as distinctive as its wooden stock. She checked her watch. “How long do you think it would take to get from up by Acandí to the monastery? Is it possible she’s already come and gone?”

He shrugged. “Anything’s possible, but it’s unlikely. My money says they’re still up there. But if you like, I can take some men and go get them – that might give you more leverage than lying in wait. Depends on how patient you are.”

When she spoke, her voice was barely a whisper. “I’m as patient as I need to be.”

Jaime sighed. “I’m sure that’s true, but I’m afraid I don’t have endless amounts of time to wait. No offense, Fernanda, but I have other demands. If this woman doesn’t show herself by dusk, let me go get the girl and the gringo. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you with a couple of my men while I return to Frontino. We have a small crisis there I’m needed to handle.”

She weighed the wisdom of allowing Jaime to go charging into the monastery versus taking a stealth approach. If she was simply taking forever to arrive, the woman would have no way of knowing that they had been captured, so she’d still have to make a play for the cable car. The trail that had at one point run alongside had long ago been closed as too dangerous after a local child had broken his spine in a fall, and the entry point had been walled off at the base near the docking station.

Fernanda looked at Jaime and reminded herself that she still needed his cooperation; this wasn’t over yet. Now that they’d located their quarry, he was tiring of the hunt, and he obviously wasn’t prepared to play a game of cat and mouse for hours or days. While she was laser-focused on taking the woman down, she also wanted to remain in Jaime’s good graces, and he was becoming petulant as they sat in the SUV, three hundred meters from the cable car, hidden in the shade of a massive oak on a small opposing hill.

She’d picked the spot because the woman would no doubt reconnoiter the area, which ruled out any of the closer surrounding buildings. Fernanda had slowly walked by the cable car station doing exactly that, and had picked out all of the natural surveillance spots a pro would monitor. It was a difficult location, but nothing was impossible, and even at that distance, with the assault rifle she would be able to pick the woman off when she appeared.

What Fernanda really wanted to do was stick an ice pick into her eye after skinning her alive and boiling her appendages, but that wasn’t practical, given the layout she had to work with.

“Look, taking them is a good idea,” Jaime pressed. “They may have talked already and have made plans to meet the woman somewhere else, in which case we’d be at a disadvantage because she would be staking that spot out just as we are this one. Our edge is that we know they’re up there. But we have no guarantee she’ll show, and if we have to follow them, we run the risk of losing them or that she’ll be tipped off.”

Fernanda realized he was probably right. She was sure that the woman would show up, but that was a gut feeling, not a certainty. Even now the gringo might be preparing to rendezvous with the woman miles from this spot, somewhere secluded where getting a clean shot might be impossible.
Was her rage over Igor’s death clouding her judgment?
The smart play was to have Jaime’s men capture the pair in the monastery and see what they knew, while Fernanda lay in wait near the cable car.

She nodded and forced a wan smile. “You’re right. It’ll be dark in an hour. If she hasn’t shown herself by then, go up and bring them down. I’ll stay here watching for her.”

He studied her profile. “You don’t want to come with us?” He sounded surprised.

“No. Your men are more than capable of handling a simple snatch, aren’t they?”

“Of course,” he said, in an offended tone. “I’ll go up myself to ensure it is dealt with effectively.”

“I can’t ask you to do that, Jaime. Your time’s too valuable to bother with something minor like this,” she said, pouring on the flattery, just the right amount of respect and awe in her voice. Jaime sat up straighter and moved his hand to hers, patting it like a doting parent.

“We’ve come this far together. Might as well see it through.”

The minutes ticked by, with no sign of life on the street other than a skinny stray dog loping down the sidewalk, followed by an old woman shuffling along with a shopping bag, a scarf over her head. Jaime held a muted conversation on his cell phone as they waited, issuing instructions to his group in preparation for their ascent. When the shadows lengthened and the sky faded to gray, Jaime looked to her.

“It will be dark soon. Time to do this.”

“All right. Remember, I want them alive. They’re of no use to me as bargaining chips if they’re dead, and I can’t interrogate a corpse.”

“I promise I won’t harm a hair on their heads,” Jaime said with a malevolent grin.

“Send the cable car back down once you’re up there, so everything looks normal while you’re looking for them. It’s a big place.”

“Of course.”

Jaime started the SUV, and Fernanda stepped out clutching the assault rifle, nearly invisible in the approaching gloom beneath the tree. She took up position with her binoculars and continued to scan the area as the Suburban’s brake lights faded down the hill and disappeared into the tangle of buildings near the base of the mountain.

Minutes later, Jaime jogged to the cable car followed by five of his men, their rifles left in the trucks in favor of more discreet handguns. She watched as they slid open the cable car door and trooped inside, and then the tram began its crawl up the hill to the monastery four hundred meters above.

It passed the towers that supported the steel cables that led to the monastery docking area, and then Jaime was leading his men to the main building as the car headed back to the base, silhouetted against the steep slope in dusk’s dim glow.