The Geronimo Breach (21 page)

“Ah. Hiking. Yessss. I seeeeee.” The man made a show of studying the register. “We have a good room for you, 301, and only $80 for tonight,” the man said, smiling.

Robbery, but Al had no capacity to argue. He was exhausted and in pain.

“Fine. I’ll take it.” He thumbed through his cash below the counter, out of view of the receptionist, and handed him the money. “And like I said, I really need a doctor for my feet. Can you get someone?” he asked.

“
Si
, of course. I’ll make the call right away. Just please sign the register, yes?” the man requested, sliding a key to him.

Al signed unintelligibly. The clerk seemed utterly uninterested in seeing ID or anything besides greenbacks. Which suited Al fine.

A tired looking teenage boy approached from the back office and offered to take his satchel and Ernesto’s bag. Al declined. The boy rolled his eyes, and pointed to the stairs, indicating the direction to take to find his room.

“See if you can find me a bottle of something strong and bring it up to the room along with a package of cigarettes, Marlboro reds if you can. And get the doctor over here as soon as possible,” he instructed, handing the boy a ten dollar bill. The boy stood blinking at him but didn’t move. Al put another ten in his hand, and he nodded and disappeared around a corner.

Al limped up the creaking stairs and found his room. He swung open the door and surveyed the aged interior with a combination of dismay and relief. After tossing his bags on a cane chair he turned on the air conditioner, which worked, to his surprise. Maybe his luck was turning. He debated a shower, but figured he’d wait for the doctor before he did anything else.

After twenty minutes of luxuriating with the AC blowing full blast the doctor knocked at the door. When Al opened it he saw the bellboy standing behind the doctor holding a paper bag.

The doctor came into the room and the boy handed him his bottle and cigarettes. Al told him to keep the change, and he rolled his eyes again.
Big spender.

The doctor did a cursory examination of his shredded and blistered feet and handed him a tube of antibiotic ointment after writing a quick prescription, explaining that the cream should be enough, but to get the oral antibiotics if there was any additional redness or signs of infection. The house call cost $20, which was the first time Al felt anything he’d encountered in Capurgana was even close to reasonably priced.

According to the small menu on the table, the hotel restaurant provided room service, so Al ordered two portions of grilled fish for dinner, along with two cold beers. The fish appeared half an hour later, which he hastily devoured, spitting out the odd stray bone. He’d already started on his bottle of local rum, and that, coupled with a quarter pack of cigarettes, made the pain from his trip recede to a dull ache. By the time he was done with the fish and the beer he was over halfway through the bottle.

Al looked at his watch. If half a bottle of rum had made him feel almost human, then the other half would have him feeling good as Ghandi. He took a few more deep pulls on the bottle before struggling with the ointment, managing to get a glob onto both feet before he fell back onto the bed. He closed his eyes, just for a few moments, to clear his head. The AC felt like heaven, even as the room spun.

He wondered how Ed was faring since the parting of their fellowship. Damned if he didn’t kind of miss the scruffy little burro.

He started snoring.

~

Sam whistled as he entered his office on Tuesday morning. He felt refreshed, had caught up on his sleep and enjoyed a few hours of adult relaxation with his mistress and her sis.

The distinctively strong smell of his private label coffee permeated his office suite; waiting to be poured. Things were back to normal. Thank God. He plopped down in his swivel chair and began sorting through the accumulated pile of paperwork stuffed in his inbox. Reports, advisements, routine forms, and a large manila envelope with his name scrawled on it.

Sam searched his memory and recalled the sketch artist from the other night. He supposed it to be a dead issue but opened the envelope anyway and glanced at the drawing before tossing it into the trash.

He swiveled towards his computer and typed in his password. His screen popped up. He began sorting through his e-mails, when his eyes strayed back to the trash can. There was something odd about the man the sketch artist had drawn. He couldn’t place it, but the guy looked familiar. Sam reached into the can, extracted the wad of crumpled paper and smoothed it out on his desk. He stared at it. The face nagged at his subconscious. Sam supposed that these types of drawings probably looked like a lot of people due to their lack of specificity, but there was something about this one...

Then it hit him.

No way. Had to be coincidence.

Sam picked up his telephone handset and dialed Al’s cell. It rang, and went to voice mail.

“Hey buddy. Call me when you get this. Just checking in to see how the weekend went,” Sam said, and hung up.

He next called Al’s little satellite office in Colon. The secretary picked up.

“Is Al there? It’s Sam Wakefield,” he announced.

“Uh, no, I’m afraid Mr. Ross isn’t in at the moment. Can I take a message?” the secretary asked in heavily accented but fluent English.

Sam ignored her question. “Do you expect him in soon?”

“He...I haven’t heard from him yet this morning, Mister Wakefield, so I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Was he in yesterday?” Sam asked, already dreading the answer.

“No, I didn’t see him. Is there a message I can leave for him?” she asked.

“Tell him to call me as soon as he gets in, or gets my message, please.”

“Yes, Mister Wakefield. Will do. Have a nice day,” she said.

So Al had gone AWOL. That wasn’t earth-shatteringly unusual – Al had a habit of being ‘under the weather’ on Mondays, and it was hit-or-miss as to whether he would show up. But today was Tuesday.

Sam was getting a bad feeling about this.

He dialed Al’s home number, which rang four times before going to his answering machine. Sam called the cell again. Voice mail.

“Yo, buddy, it’s me again,” Sam began. “I was just checking in to see if you’re okay. The office says you haven’t been in, and I was hoping to get a hold of you. Could you please call as soon as you can?” Sam left his cell and office numbers.

He stared at the drawing a few more minutes, then shook his head. What the hell had Al gotten involved in this time? The more he looked at it, the more obvious it became to him that it had to be Al.

Sam had long been searching for ways to make Al’s life miserable, and now he finally had something tangible. A delicious wave of elation swept over him. Al was no doubt into all sorts of sketchy shit, and it looked like it had finally caught up with him. Sam could crank up the heat under the pretense he was only doing his job – this might even be a career-ender for Al. He reconsidered the unpleasant days he’d just spent with that asshole, Richard. Perhaps it had all been worth it after all. Fate had suddenly graced him with the ability to become Al’s nemesis – he could inflict maximum damage on the sad fuck, and Sam wasn’t the sort to pass up on that kind of opportunity.

He considered his next step, and with mischief in mind, turned to his monitor and rapidly tapped at his keyboard. Sam would get an all points bulletin out to the police, so whenever and wherever Al surfaced the cops would quickly grab him. He didn’t know why the Agency had wanted to terminate the cook, so he wasn’t exactly sure why Al was relevant, but it wouldn’t hurt to get the word out so Al would get picked up. He was probably drunk somewhere, out on a three day bender, which would make it even better when he got nabbed – even if he denied the drawing was him, being absent and drunk for days would be a body-blow with the State Department. And if the drawing was him, Al would never be able to deny it convincingly – he was barely able to keep a grip from day to day, and had no poker face at all. Sam conjured up a mental image of a bewildered and scared-looking Al sitting handcuffed in a police cruiser. He smiled. Either way, Sam could ensure that Tuesday was a bad day for Al Ross.

He put the finishing touches on the inter-agency advisory that would culminate in a bulletin to the locals, and smiled yet again.

Sam pushed send, and walked out to Melody’s desk. He instructed her to scan and attach the drawing to the memo he’d just created and sent to her. She looked at the crumpled sketch dubiously and nodded. It would be done in a matter of a few minutes.

Sam returned to his office and closed his door. This was turning into a good week already. First they off Bin Laden, then Al steps into poop up to his knees. Sometimes the wind filled your sails and everything flowed effortlessly – after years of tormenting the feckless war hero, Sam finally had a good shot at landing a knockout punch. A killer-punch, even. Take that, mister purple heart.

His phone rang, and he took a call from one of the other department heads; who wanted a meeting to go over some mind-numbingly tedious procedural issues. As the man babbled on and on, Sam felt his will to live being sucked through the phone. He eventually disengaged, and returned to considering the destruction of Al.

There was a downside to all this he hadn’t immediately considered. It was possible Al had been killed when Richard’s team had terminated the cook. Sam doubted Al would have been trekking through the Darien Gap, but you couldn’t second-guess what a drunken idiot would do. That’s what made idiots dangerous. With smart people, you could calculate their next steps by discarding behavior that would be obviously harmful to them. Smart people avoided self-destruction whenever possible. But idiots were too stupid to compute how their actions might be dangerous to themselves, so they were far harder to predict.

Sam thought it through. If the drawing was Al, which he now believed it was, and if Al had lost his mind and decided to play Tarzan with the cook, then he was as dead as Bin Laden by now. If he hadn’t been with the cook, then he was probably holed up in some gin joint or whorehouse on a bender, in which case he would turn up shortly and Sam would have someone question him.

There was always the possibility that he was into something sinister and had gone to ground, but Sam couldn’t believe Al would be any part of a scheme that involved him as anything other than a mere pawn – the man was a zero, a zombie. He couldn’t be trusted to tie his own shoes.

No, either the resemblance to the drawing was an eerie fluke, in which case Al would still catch shit for dereliction of duty over the last two days, or it
was
him, in which case he was intoxicated somewhere after collecting money for whatever he was involved in – or at the most remote end of the spectrum, he was blown to pieces in the Darien.

But now Sam had another problem, and this one gave him pause. If Al was involved in whatever the cook had been involved in, then Richard would need to be informed, which would re-introduce a massive irritant back into Sam’s life. That was to be avoided if at all possible. Sam weighed his possible responses.

What he’d do is wait and see what the police dragged in. If, as he suspected, Al was drunk out of his mind then Sam could get him into a cell at the embassy, and
then
he would call Richard, who could do his worst. That actually had some appeal for Sam. But if Al was dead, then there was no point in inviting Richard back into his life. Dead men stayed dead, and their secrets with them. In which case, Al would never be heard from again, Richard would never have any reason to look Sam’s way, and the world would continue to turn for Sam in peaceful rotation.

As with most decisions, self-interest ruled the day for Sam.

He’d wait and see before kicking the hornet’s nest.

No matter what, though, Al was going to find himself in the middle of a shit-storm, unless he was already playing pat-a-cake with Satan in the seventh circle of hell.

A loud banging at the hotel door woke Al. He bolted upright, startled by the clamor, unsure of his surroundings. Then it all came back to him. Colombia. Gun battles. Grenade attacks. Burros.

He padded gingerly over to the door and cautiously opened it. A maid, all of five feet tall, stood defiantly at the door, mop in hand. She pointed at her watch and looked around Al and into the room. Disapproval was evident on her face.

Al told her he would be staying one more day, and to go away, please. His Spanish was adequate for the job – she apparently understood. She glanced one last time into Al’s lodgings and then moved down the hall to the next room. He closed the door and surveyed his surroundings.

He’d obviously slept in his clothes. Again. That was evident from the smell, as well as the fact he was wearing them. The rum bottle rested on the small hotel table with a few fingers remaining in the bottom. That explained why his head felt like he’d gone ten rounds with Tyson.

Al stumbled into the bathroom and turned on the shower, emptying his pockets onto the small glass shelf above the sink. He entered the hissing stream of water fully clothed. He soaped his shirt, then his pants, and after removing them, did the same for his underwear. The process took ten minutes. His feet felt like he’d been dancing on razor blades.

He dried off and set about washing his socks in the sink; noting that they were good for maybe one more wearing before it was time for new ones. Al ruefully studied his reflection – not only did he have the trademark bloodshot hangover eyes, but he was almost beet red from sunburn and sported three days of stubbly growth on his face. He’d seen homeless men who looked better, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it right now. Al considered shaving, then dismissed it, choosing to instead splash water on his cheeks and call it a day.

Morning ablutions over, he donned his wet underwear, wrung out his clothes, and set them out on the little porch facing the beach, spread on his chair. They’d dry in a matter of minutes in the harsh tropical sun.