The Cain File (37 page)

But she really didn’t feel much better inside, having to say the words she had to say.

She walked up the dirt street to the girls’ shack, carrying a plastic bag that contained two large Styrofoam containers full of roast chicken and rice. Dogs barked and swarmed around her, hoping for a scrap. A boy ran by with a stick, whipping the air that was alive with music wafting out of open windows. The smell of cooking, stews with meat and spices, made her salivate, taking her back to her own days with her mother in the slums. In a place much like this.

Did she miss it?
This?
Who could say what one missed? One missed what one knew. She missed the innocence of childhood. She missed her
mami
, who kept so many bad things in life away from Maggie as a little girl.

With a heavy heart she stepped up on the rickety porch. She could hear the baby crying, and Kacha’s soft voice, coaxing it back to sleep.

The door opened. Kacha stood there, in a robe, cradling her niece swaddled in a fuzzy blanket. Kacha’s face lit up in a hopeful smile, causing Maggie’s to stiffen before it could crumple. As much as she fought it. Her look immediately alerted Kacha that she wasn’t bringing good tidings.

“Oh,” Kacha said, her smile quickly fading. “You better come in.” She stood back, jiggling the baby.

It was a dismal meeting. The food lay untouched.

“Where is your sister?” Maggie asked, once the news had been delivered. “Suyana?”

“She’s out . . .” Kacha said.

“Turning tricks? Why? Didn’t you get the money I sent?”

“No. The man at the office said there was a delay.”

Maggie saw red. “I’ll take care of it tomorrow.” She dug into her pocket, came out with a wad of bills John Rae had given her. She peeled off several hundred dollars. “Here. No more walking the streets.”

Kacha took the money with a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”

“She’s lucky to have you look after her little girl.”

“I have the easy part,” Kacha said.

“I want you to understand something, Kacha. I’m not going to stop. I’m going to get Tica out. And the rest of the Yasuni Seven.”

Kacha nodded slowly in acknowledgement, but her disbelief in Maggie’s abilities was apparent.

“There’s more to do,” Maggie said, to herself as much as Kacha. “I
will
resolve this.”

“You’ve already done so much.”

Maggie left, walking down the dirt road toward the Plaza San Francisco, her head hung low, full of darkness, like the night. But she wasn’t finished. Not by a long shot.

Down the hill, where the paved streets began, she found a hole-in-the-wall electronics shop wedged between a produce market closed up for the night and a cheap restaurant harshly lit with fluorescent overheads, teeming with diners, heads bent down over steaming bowls. She bought an unlocked moto e phone for less than a hundred U.S. and a prepaid micro SIM card. The clerk had her up and running in minutes. She’d seen techies back home struggle with similar tasks.

In the noisy restaurant, she ordered a bowl of spicy bean soup, which the cook loaded up with cilantro. She spooned a few scoops of bright orange
ají
into it and found a spot at the counter where mountain music screeched from a radio. The aroma of the place had her salivating and the good cheer of the clientele made her homesick once again, even though she
was
home. Technically. But this home was a long time ago.

She didn’t really know where home was.

She ate a mouthful of
locro de habas
, fired up her phone, downloaded a TOR browser for anonymity, then searched and downloaded Phone Tracker Plus. It was installed by the time she was halfway through her soup.

She had a head for numbers and didn’t forget them. Not once she’d committed them to memory.

She turned on GPS and plugged in the number for Abraham’s cell phone, which she’d jammed down the bench seat of Cain’s van. She set her new phone on the counter while she ate more soup. The red pin moved on the map of Quito and settled near the Panecillo. And stopped there. Less than a mile away.

Too excited to finish her soup, she got up, used her phone to call a radio taxi, went out into the cool night air, and waited on the cobblestones.

A tinny Daihatsu soon came whining up the street.

“Stop right here,” Maggie instructed the cab driver, an emotionless young man who wore sunglasses at night and had his radio set on a classical station. The red pin on the map hovered on the phone in her hand, showing this to be the place. And down the end of a dirt cul-de-sac, silhouetted against the deep valley of the city pockmarked by twinkling lights, there it was: Cain’s van. A couple of men in shadows moved around it stealthily. The beam of a flashlight bounced.

“Wait for me and keep an eye out, please,” she said to the driver.

“You need to pay me first. This is not the best part of town.”

She paid him. “I’ll need a ride back to my hotel.”

He nodded, but she wondered how much help he would actually be if she got into a scrape.

She exited the car and walked into the alley. The snort of a pig caught her attention. She stepped back, let it cross her path, to avoid getting her new shoes trampled by hoofs. The pig trotted by.

A couple of kids were playing in the van. The men had the front doors open and were busy removing the dash. She approached. “Excuse me,” she said.

“What do you want?” one man said, one eyebrow higher than the other. A crowbar dangled menacingly from his hand.

“I know who this van belongs to,” she said, getting her money out. “And it doesn’t belong to you.”

“It does now,” the other man said, lighting a cigarette.

She unfolded a U.S. twenty, let Crooked Eyebrow follow it. “But I don’t care. I just want to know what you found inside. That’s all I want to know.” She held the twenty out. It fluttered in the chill night air, then disappeared.

“Not much,” the man said, nodding back at the van. “Just the radio.”

“You’re going to sell the van for parts?”

He shrugged.

“Can I look in the back?”

“Why?”

“I have my reasons. I’m not going to take anything. I promise.”

Cigarette Smoker looked at her bandaged hand, as if waiting for it to produce another bill. It did. Now each man had one.

“Help yourself,” he said. “But if you find anything, it’s ours.”

She went through the van. There was nothing left but an empty cola can, some crumpled napkins. She found Abraham’s broken mobile in its hiding place and left it there. Well, it was worth a shot. She climbed out, stood up, dusted herself off.

“
Bueno
,” she said with a sigh.

She noticed an overweight little boy, a striped shirt stretched over his round belly, standing in the shadows. Something in his hand caught her eye. It looked like a radio.

“What have you got there,
amigo
?”

“It’s mine!” He hid it behind his back.

“I know it’s yours,
chico.
I just want a look. I won’t even touch it. You hold it out in front of you just so I can see it. OK?”

“What will you give me?”

She came over, reaching into the pocket of her jacket, pulling out a ballpoint pen with her hotel’s name on it. She held it up, clicked it, raised her eyebrows.

“OK,” he said, reaching for the pen.

“Ah, ah, ah,” she said, holding it back. “Show me your radio first.”

“Oh, OK.” He held it out with both hands, so she couldn’t take it.

A Motorola Talkabout. Red. Identical to the one John Rae had been using in the plaza waiting on Lita and Beltran. Before Cain had so very uncannily gotten away.

Because Cain had been in on that entire conversation. Listened to everything. Knew it was time to run.

Because John Rae had planned it that way.

“There’s a red-eye to Quito from Houston,” Maggie told Ed on the phone, looking out of her hotel window at the plaza. Night had descended over Old Town and the glistening lights through the mist softened the harshness of life and the reality of what was happening in this city. This country. The country of her birth. “You can grab a flight from SFO and make it by morning. I’ll meet you at the airport.”

“You really sure about all this, Maggs? Because we’re both cutting our careers short. Maybe worse.”

“Yes, Ed,” she said. “Very sure. I need your help on this one. I don’t want to meet John Rae alone.”

“OK,” Ed said. “Are you going to set up the meeting? Or am I?”

“Leave it to me,” Maggie said.

“Fine,” Ed said with a sense of finality in his voice. “See you when I get to Quito.”

She hung up, ran her fingers through her hair, thought about hitting the minibar, decided against it. She was close to exhaustion. She didn’t want alcohol in her system. She didn’t want anything in her system. She wanted to climb into a clean bed, under crisp sheets, and disappear.

She called John Rae’s hotel room, in New Town.

“I was hoping to hear from you,” he said, with that telltale flirtatiousness in his voice. There was a time it would’ve excited her. “I didn’t know where you were staying.”

“I prefer it here in Old Town,” she said. “You can keep your plastic Hilton glitz.”

“Maybe you can show me around. Up for a drink?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m beat.”

“No doubt. Rain check? When we get back home to the U.S.?”

“Sure,” she said. And she wished it could have happened that way.

“I’m heading back first thing in the morning,” he said. “I’ve done all the damage I can do down here. Been called back to D.C. to get my bottom smacked but good. But I’m not hanging my head on this one.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to reschedule your flight, John Rae.”

“And why is that?”

“Because we need to meet.”

“Sounding pretty final there, darlin’.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess you could say that.”

“I don’t think so,” John Rae said. “I’ve had about enough of South America for the time being.”

“You’re not getting a choice.” She eyed the red Motorola walkie-talkie on her nightstand she’d paid the chubby boy twenty dollars for. “I’ve got you, John Rae. I know what you did. And you owe me.”

There was a pause. “So what is this all about?”

“I think you know,” she said. “I’ll leave directions to the meeting place at the front desk of your hotel in the morning. Don’t you dare stand me up, John Rae. Not unless you want to be on the wrong end of an investigation. And no funny stuff. Got it?”

There was a pause. “Got it,” he said quietly.

She clicked off her phone and undressed, hanging her new slacks up on a wooden hanger, smoothing them out. She still had the .38 she’d taken from the safe house. She clicked the latch, opened the cylinder, checked for rounds. One left.

She set the alarm for three a.m. so she could get up to meet Ed’s flight. It would be another night with little sleep, but in the grand scheme of things that was nothing. Kacha was sleeping in a slum. Tica was sleeping on the floor of a cell, if she was sleeping at all. Maggie engaged the security bolt on the hotel room door, climbed into bed, put the pistol on the bedside stand. She left the light on so that she could see the gun as she drifted off.

To say that the view of early morning Quito from the top of the Basilica was stunning was an understatement. Fog drifted through the long narrow valley nestled in the Andes that held a city of two million at an altitude of close to two miles.

Ed was still gasping for air as he hung over a stone parapet, the gargoyles practically mocking him. A severe drop to the slates of the church’s roof lay far below. The steep iron ladder they’d climbed was almost vertical. They couldn’t get any higher.

“How do you ever get used to this damn altitude?” Ed said.

“Takes time. Did you remember to take that medication I told you about?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he panted. “But it still feels like I’m going to have a heart attack.”

“With all due respect, dear boss, you need to drop a few pounds.”

“What I need is a bottle of oxygen.”

Maggie patted him on the back. “Climbing up here didn’t help.” But she needed somewhere safe to meet, where she could see whoever was coming from a distance. When you were dealing with Field Ops, anything was possible.

“Where the hell is John Rae?” Ed wheezed. “He’s late.”

Maggie checked the time on the twin clock towers opposite. “He’ll be here,” she said.

“You better hope he’s not on that flight back to Houston. Setting us up.”

“He’ll be here.”

Ed caught his breath as best he could as the wind whipped through the tower. “I’ve got some bad news,” he said.

Maggie’s stomach dropped, as much as she might have been expecting it. “Director Walder is going for the gusto? I’m facing legal sanctions?”

“Not quite,” Ed rasped. “Not if you agree to one concession.”

“Ah,” she said. “There’s always a concession.”

“Lucky for you there is.”

“And what is it?”

“The two million you so valiantly saved the department?”

“Twice now,” she said. “Money destined for Beltran. Then Cain. Does that make it four million I saved?”

“Not in this case,” Ed said. “Because if you’d handed it over in the first place, the second might not have happened.”

“Debatable,” Maggie said. “But what about it?” As soon as she said it, she realized. “No. Don’t tell me we’re giving it to that bum anyway. Not after we just saved his worthless skin without paying off the ransom.”

“Afraid so, Maggs.”

“And why on earth are we doing this?”

“Because Beltran is valuable to us,” Ed said, pulling out a pack of Winstons from his jacket pocket, shaking one out.

Maggie laughed through her nose, still stuffed on one side, then shook her head.

Ed placed the cigarette between his lips. “And because we need to placate the Ecuadorian government. After two lopsided missions.”

“You mean Beltran is valuable to Commerce Oil, and Commerce Oil wants to placate the Ecuadorian government. So they can drill in the Yasuni. And this is how they do it—with taxpayers’ money.”

Ed found a book of matches, lit one up, but it blew out in the breeze. “As I said before, Maggs, half of Washington is getting their pockets lined by Commerce Oil.” He tore off another paper match. “The other half are waiting their turn. We’re in hot water—meaning Forensic Accounting is on the chopping block. They don’t like the way we play with their best buddies.”