White Cargo (20 page)

In the lobby, he made briskly for the rear door. No one seemed to notice him. He walked quickly along the rear of the building to the maintenance closet, looked around, then opened the door. Rodriguez and Meg were gone.

He swore to himself. If the hotel security people had Meg, the police were already on the way. He left the closet and closed the door behind him, looking desperately about. He hadn't seen them in the lobby, so he started for the pool. As he came out of the garden, he spotted Rodriguez and Meg across the pool, sitting at a table. Meg had a tall drink, and they were chatting amiably, even smiling. He got there as quickly as he could without running.

“Oh, there you are,” Meg said gaily, then under her breath, “What the fuck took you so long?”

“Sorry, it couldn't have been done any faster.”

“Mr. Rodriguez and I have just been having a chat,” she said.

He noticed that her hand was in her pocketbook. “Fine,” he said. “Let's get out of here.” He turned to Rodriguez and shook his hand, pressing five hundred dollars into it.

“Now listen,” he said, smiling, “we're going to leave quietly, and I don't want any fuss from you. If we have any problems about this, I'll simply tell them I bribed you for your passkey, understand?”

Rodriguez smiled weakly and nodded. “Of course, señor, I do not wish to make problems for you. Please, please do not let anyone know how you got this information.”

“I have no intention of telling anyone,” Cat said, handing the grateful man his passkey. “Let's go,” he said to Meg.

They walked quickly from the pool, through the hotel lobby, and asked for their car, waiting nervously for it to arrive. He had visions of security guards pouring out of the hotel, with Rodriguez screaming and pointing. The car came, and they drove away.

“I believe this is yours,” Meg said, handing him the pistol. It was still cocked. “If I had any doubts about how serious you were, I don't anymore.”

Cat eased the hammer down and engaged the safety. “I wasn't going to shoot the guy, but I didn't want him to know it. Why did you leave the closet?”

“A maintenance man came back for his mop. I just barely managed to get the gun into my handbag. Rodriguez
talked us out of there. I thought we were better off in the open. What did you find out?”

“Not a hell of a lot. The place looks like William F. Buckley, Jr. lives there, except for the master bedroom, which looks like Hugh Hefner lives there. There were a man's suits—on the small side—and clothes for several women. Looks like an assortment to handle whoever's in residence. The man's stuff had a monogram, A. And there was this.” He handed her the matchbook.

“A for Anaconda,” she said.

“Right. When we were in Riohacha, Bluey and I had a meeting with a local drug dealer. We were pretending to be buyers. He mentioned something called Anaconda Pure, a sort of brand-name cocaine, I guess. He spoke of it almost reverently. Where are we going?” She had turned along the sea, past the old city.

“To the airport. We know the jet left on the third of the month. Let's see if we can find out where it went. There isn't all that much traffic out of there. Somebody might remember it.”

“You have to file a flight plan in this country,” Cat said. “I wonder how long they keep them on file.”

•   •   •

At the airport, it took Meg fifteen minutes and a hundred-dollar bill to get copies of flight plans of the only two jets that had left Cartagena on the third of the month. “There was a Lear for Bogotá and a Gulfstream for Cali,” she said, translating the papers. “There's no information about who owns the planes, just the pilot's name and a phone number.”

They drove back to Meg's house.

“Okay,” she said, sitting down at the phone. “Which one is it going to be?”

“Well, from the looks of the hotel suite, they like the best of everything. A Lear is a comparatively cheap jet. A Gulfstream costs twelve or fifteen million dollars. Let's try Cali first.”

“Sounds good,” she said, dialling. “Cali has a reputation as a center for the drug trade, too.” The number answered, and she spoke in rapid Spanish for a couple of minutes, then hung up. “Bingo, maybe,” she said. “The number is the service company that hangars and maintains the jet. I pretended to be a girlfriend of the pilot, and I think they bought that. When I asked them for the name of the company that owns the plane so I could call him, they got cagey, said I could leave my number. Let's try Bogotá.”

She went through the same routine with the Bogotá number, then hung up. “The airplane is owned by a construction company that does a lot of government work—roads, bridges, that sort of thing. Doesn't sound nearly as likely. Looks like we're off to Cali.”

“I'm glad you said ‘we.'”

“You're not going anywhere without me and my camera,” she said, kissing him. “I got the whole scene in the maintenance closet.”

“What?”

She reached into her handbag and pulled out something the size of a large paperback book. “The latest in Japanese technology,” she said. “I try new stuff out for them occasionally.” She led him to the tape machines, popped out a tiny cassette, and shoved it into a machine. A moment later, Cat watched himself, from a low angle, terrify Rodriguez. The sound was hollow, but every word came through.

“Gosh,” he said, “I never knew I did such a good George Raft.”

C
AT SPENT CONSIDERABLE TIME ON HIS FLIGHT PLANNING THAT
evening. The longest nonstop flight he had ever made as pilot-in-command had been a little over a hundred miles, a solo cross-country during his flight training. Cali was south, in the western part of the country, some five hundred nautical miles from Cartagena.

He checked the range of the aircraft in the owner's manual and satisfied himself that the wing tanks held more than sufficient fuel for the trip. Using Bluey's charts and books, he determined that Cali was in the mountains, and all he knew about mountain flying was what he had read during his training. He satisfied himself that he could find the city, in decent weather, simply by following the Rio Cauca upstream from where it branched off the Rio Magdalena all the way to Cali, should his radio navigation equipment fail.

He calmed his nervousness about the flight with attention to detail. He had been taught all the essentials of flight planning; all he had to do was to remember it and do it right. And he was not about to fly commercial. The airlines had metal detectors, and he wanted the weapons with him more than ever.

Meg called the airport for a weather forecast. “Good,” she said. “Only scattered high clouds at twenty thousand feet en route. Cali ceiling should be unlimited. We'll have a ten-knot tail wind. Could hardly be better.” Looking over his shoulder, she pointed to the airport guide, open to Cali. “Here, this is the company I called to find out about the Gulfstream jet. Aeroservice. It says they have fuel, engine, and airframe repairs for Piper and Cessna aircraft and Lycoming, and Continental engines. It seems to be the only service for private aircraft on the field.”

“Well, at least we have someplace to start, and a legitimate reason for being there,” he said.

•   •   •

They took off at nine the following morning, into sunny skies and unlimited visibility. Minutes after departing Cartagena, they picked up the Rio Magdalena, Colombia's principal river, which divides a wide, green plain that is swampy in many places. Cat was beginning to feel quite confident as pilot-in-command. He thought Bluey would be proud of him. In less than an hour they had found where the Cauca branched off. Cat climbed to ten thousand five hundred feet in order to have plenty of altitude when the mountains presented themselves. The land rose to meet them as they approached and passed Medellín, Colombia's second largest city, and after Medellín, a railway ran alongside the Cauca and further confirmed their position. Piece of cake.

Cat had calculated a time en route of just less than four hours. They were less than an hour out of Cali when the first clouds appeared. They were in and out of them, which, technically, was illegal when flying under visual flight rules, or VFR, but Cat pressed on. He had no intention
of landing at some other airport, not when Jinx might be waiting in Cali.

When they were handed off from the Center radio operator to Cali Approach, the operator said, “Call is three hundred overcast, wind two six zero at six. Expect the ILS for two seven zero.”

Cat froze. ILS was an instrument approach. He had never flown an instrument approach and knew little about how to do it. He racked his brain for what his instructor might have told him.

“Turn right to zero nine zero,” the controller said suddenly. “Vectors for the ILS.”

Cat acknowledged the transmission. The controller was going to put him onto the approach. Now he remembered. The ILS was the instrument landing system, the one where you used two needles, one vertical and one horizontal, to stay on the approach. He tried to be calm. The autopilot was keeping the airplane straight and level in the cloud. He was all right for the moment, but he needed a radio frequency. He turned to Meg, trying to stay as calm as possible. “Say, look in that airport directory, will you, and give me the frequency for the ILS.”

Meg consulted the book. “It's one, one, zero, point one.”

“Descend to seven thousand feet,” the controller said.

Cat started a descent with the autopilot, fighting panic. He dialed in the frequency for the ILS. As he did so he watched the instrument before him. The vertical needle swung sharply to the right, and the horizontal needle rose to the top of the dial.

“Turn right to two four zero degrees and intercept the ILS,” the controller said.

Cat quickly turned the autopilot control to the correct
heading and watched as the airplane turned itself and the vertical needle, which represented the centerline of the runway, moved closer and closer to the center of the dial. He had to do something, abort this approach, land somewhere else. He wasn't qualified to fly this airplane down to three hundred feet in cloud. He would kill them both. He was about to call the tower and abort when he noticed a button on the autopilot that read “APPR.” It was worth a try. He pushed the button. Immediately, the airplane turned left and the vertical needle centered. They were on the runway centerline, and the autopilot was still flying the airplane.

“Outer marker in two miles,” the controller said.

What the hell was the outer marker? Cat, frozen, watched the horizontal needle, the glide slope, move down toward the center of the needle. Suddenly an alarm went off, and a light flashed on the instrument panel. The airplane started to descend again, and both needles were centered. The outer marker must have been where the glide slope began.

Cat had just breathed a sigh of relief when he noticed that something was wrong. The airspeed had crept into the yellow arc on the dial and was headed for the red. Quickly, he eased the throttle back, and the airspeed returned to the green arc. He put in ten degrees of flaps, and the airplane slowed further. The needles were still centered. The autopilot would fly the approach, but it couldn't control the throttle.

Suddenly, they were out of the cloud, and the runway centerline was a mile dead ahead of them. Gratefully, shakily, Cat reduced speed further and came to twenty degrees of flaps. He switched off the autopilot and began flying the airplane himself. A moment later, they were on the ground.

“Hey, that was a pretty slick approach,” Meg said.

“Thanks,” Cat managed to reply, between deep breaths. His shirt was wet under the bush jacket. He had just done something very stupid; he had, with no experience at all, risked their lives on a complex procedure. He vowed he would never do anything in an airplane again until he had been thoroughly trained to do it.

As the airplane rolled down the runway, he saw a hangar with the name “Aeroservice” painted on it. He turned off the runway at the next taxiway and headed toward it. As he approached the hangar, a lineman ran out and directed him to a parking spot. Cat cut the engine and looked up. Ahead of them and to their right, he could see inside the hangar. He tensed.

“Look,” he said, nodding at the airplane parked inside.

“Is it a Gulfstream?” Meg asked.

“Yes. I've seen a couple of them at the airport I fly out of in Atlanta. It's the biggest private jet available.”

They climbed down from the airplane and unloaded their luggage. Cat asked the lineman for the office, and the man pointed to a glassed-in room inside the hangar. They walked slowly past the big jet, and Cat noted the tail number. It began with an N; that meant it was American registered. On the tail was a much larger version of the drawing of the snake in the tree on the matchbook in his pocket.

He made arrangements for tie-down and fuel with the young man at the desk, who seemed very friendly. “Say,” he said to the man, “isn't that a Gulfstream out there?”

“Yes, señor. It is beautiful, no?”

“Yes indeed. I've never seen one up close. Who owns it?”

“A local business here in Cali.”

“But it has an American registration number.”

“Ah, yes. The company headquarters is in the States, you see.”

“I wonder if we could have a look inside her? I've never been aboard one before.”

The young man was shaking his head, but he stopped when he saw the hundred-dollar bill Cat was pushing toward him on the desk. “Just a moment, señor.” He left the office and had a careful look outside the hangar, then returned. “You may go aboard her for just a moment, señor,” he said. He led the way out of the office and toward the airplane. The door, incorporating a boarding ladder, was open.

Showing Meg ahead of him, Cat climbed aboard the jet, followed by the young man. They found themselves in a large cabin decorated in black leather and rosewood. The carpet was thick under their feet.