White Cargo (24 page)

Cat was nearly faint with relief. “Thank you, Mr. Ambassador; I'm very grateful.”

The Ambassador responded with a benevolent nod. “I need hardly say that all parties, especially you, will be happiest if further incidents of this or any other kind are avoided. There is only so much I can do, you understand.”

Cat had the momentary feeling of being a schoolboy in the principal's office. “Yes, sir, I understand completely, and again, let me say how grateful I am for your help.”

The Ambassador stood up and offered his hand. “Then I will return you to the tender mercies of Mr. Hedger and his colleagues.”

Cat shook the man's hand and followed Hedger back to his office.

Hedger waved Cat to a chair, sank into his own, and opened a desk drawer. He tossed Cat a heavy manila envelope. “That's everything the police took off you yesterday except the piece. I'll hang on to that. Count the money.”

Cat slipped on his Rolex and riffled through the bills. “It's all here. Thanks.” He stuffed the money into the shoulder wallet and put it back into the envelope. “Where's my passport and ID?”

“You mean the Ellis junk? I'll hang on to that, too.” He took out a telephone, somewhat larger than the one on his desk, and tapped in a number. “This is Hedger in Bogotá.
Give me Drummond.” He paused. “Good morning, sir, this is Hedger. Yes, sir.” He pushed the telephone across the desk and handed the receiver to Cat.

Puzzled, Cat took the instrument. He didn't know anybody named Drummond. “Hello?”

“Hi, this is Jim. You okay?”

“Oh, hello. Yes, I'm fine. The people here have been very helpful.”

“You making any progress?”

“Yes, a lot.”

“Good. Keep at it. They'll do what they can there, but it may not be a hell of a lot.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that. And listen, I can't tell you how grateful I am to you for confirming the phone call from Jinx. Without that I would have given up.”

“Glad to do it. Has Bluey been a help?”

Cat shrank inside. “I'm sorry, but Bluey was killed in Santa Marta.” He explained what had happened. “I've already made some provision for his child.”

“That was good of you,” Jim said, “but you shouldn't feel too badly about Bluey. He used up all nine lives a long time ago. He had all these pipe dreams about retiring and going into some sort of legitimate business, but believe me, he wouldn't have. It just wasn't in him to lead a quiet life. If he hadn't caught it in Santa Marta, he'd have caught it somewhere else next week or next month. He was a pro, and he knew the risks better than you.”

“Well, thanks for that, anyway.”

“I gotta run. Keep Hedger posted; he'll keep me posted. Anything else?”

“I'd still like to keep the stuff you gave me.”

“Sure. From what I hear, that hasn't been compromised. Give me Hedger. Take care.”

Cat handed the telephone back to Hedger.

“Yes, sir?” He listened for a moment, then hung up, put the instrument back into the drawer, and tossed Cat his Ellis wallet and passport. “How'd you and Drummond get hooked up?” Hedger asked.

“Mutual acquaintance,” Cat replied.

“You know why he's doing this.”

Cat looked at Hedger, puzzled.

“You don't know. His daughter.”

“What about his daughter?”

“He was station head in Paris four years ago. The girl, she was sixteen, was kidnapped on the way to school. They shot the officer who was driving her. Drummond got a note. One of the terrorist organizations.”

“What did they want? Ransom?”

Hedger shook his head. “They wanted Drummond. Said they'd exchange the girl for him. Our people and the French laid on a big operation. It went wrong. They cut four Arabs in a car to pieces. The girl wasn't with them. After that, there was no more communication with the kidnappers. No demands, I mean.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“They mailed her to Drummond in pieces. First, her fingers; then, her ears. It got worse. Went on for days. The police finally found what was left of her body in a raid on a safe house. She'd been alive when they were mutilating her.”

Cat rubbed his forehead. “Jesus Christ.”

“A few days later, the French caught one of the kidnappers. They left Drummond alone with the man, and, eventually, he gave up the three who were still alive. There was a police raid on a Paris apartment. None of the three survived. The French are more efficient about these things than we are.”

Cat couldn't think of anything else to say.

“There's a little more. As a result of all this, Drummond's wife is permanently institutionalized. The girl was their only child. All Drummond does is work and visit her.”

“That's the worst story I ever heard,” Cat said. “Yours is almost as bad, and it could get worse.”

Cat looked at him. “Is that why you're telling me all this? To prepare me for the worst?”

“Yeah. I think you ought to know that your chances of finding the girl alive are almost nil. You're looking for a miracle, and it probably isn't going to happen.”

“The miracle has already happened,” Cat said. “When I heard her voice on the telephone, when I knew she was alive, that was the miracle.”

“I hope your luck holds,” Hedger said. “You're not improving the odds by running around with that Communist, either.”

Cat sat up. “Communist?”

“Your Señorita Greville. Don't you know who she is?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Remember Charles Adam Greville?”

The name sounded familiar, but Cat couldn't place it.

“The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, in the fifties?”

It was coming back to him. “You mean the guy who was hounded out of the State Department?”

“Hounded, my ass. The guy was a Russian agent.”

“Come on, Hedger, that was never proved.”

“He did time for it.”

“No, I remember, he was jailed for contempt of Congress. He was a hero to a lot of people. Still is.”

Hedger snorted. “Hero! He was booted out of State,
never held a job again, died in disgrace. Of course the girl was just a kid at the time, but she followed in his footsteps. Half the reporting she's done has been inside stuff on Communist insurgents around the world. In Vietnam, she took the Vietcong side of things, went to Hanoi with Jane Fonda for Christ's sake. Since then she's been in Nicaragua, the Philippines, Cuba, and right here, in Colombia. She's plugged into the M 19 guerrilla organization, a very bad bunch.”

“I don't believe that for a moment.”

“No? We damn near got her citizenship revoked last year. Her old man married her mother, a Bolivian woman, when he was serving in the embassy in La Paz, and Immigration and Naturalization grabbed the girl's passport until she could prove her father had registered her as a citizen at birth, which he had, the crafty old bastard. She's managed to maintain dual citizenship and travel on a Bolivian passport when it suited her, using her mother's maiden name, Garcia. We didn't know about that for a long time. That's how she got into the Philippines. Marcos's people would have greased her if they'd caught her. After her stuff on the Communist guerrillas there ran on American TV, Imelda took to calling her the Red Reporter, the correspondent from
Pravda.”

Cat said nothing.

Hedger looked at his wristwatch. “I've got a series of meetings that are going to run until four o'clock. Go back to your hotel and get some rest, then meet me back here. I want to hear everything, and then we'll see what we can put together.”

Cat rose. “All right.” He turned for the door, then stopped. “Listen, there's one thing I hope you can check on right away. A Gulfstream jet left Eldorado Airport yesterday,
probably right after I was arrested. Can you find out where it went?”

He led Cat into an adjoining office, where Candis Leigh was working at a desk. “Get hold of the Air Attaché and see if he has a source in the air traffic system who can tell us where a Gulfstream jet went from Bogotá yesterday. I want to know where it filed for and if it landed there.”

Cat wrote down the airplane's tail number and gave it to the woman.

Hedger showed him to the elevator. “When you come back, don't bring Garcia-Greville with you. I don't want her on the premises.”

“Whatever you say, Hedger,” Cat said, wearily, punching the elevator button. Downstairs, he turned in his visitor's pass and was let through the embassy gate by a Marine guard. A long line of Latinos stretched from the gate to the front door of the building, waiting to apply for visas, Cat supposed. He found a taxi, and on the ride to the hotel, took time to look at Bogotá. He had been too preoccupied to notice much of it yesterday. He tried to put Hedger's ranting about Meg out of his mind.

The city was a jumble of the modern and the decrepit. Traffic was heavy and noisy, with gaily painted schoolbuses, like those in Santa Marta, jammed with passengers. Green mountaintops hung about the city, occasionally obscured by clouds. The day was gray and cool, and there was a feeling of rain in the air.

At the Tequendama, he asked for his key. There were no messages. He let himself into the suite. “Meg?” he called out. He was greeted with silence. He went into the bedroom. His bags lay open on the bed, just as he had left them the day before. Meg's bags were gone; nothing of hers was in the room.

He looked around for a note, but there was none. He called the hotel operator and asked her to double-check for messages. There were none.

He sat down wearily on the bed and tried to think where she might be. Had she gone back to her house near Cartagena? He suddenly missed her terribly, wanted her. Why would she simply walk out, leaving no message? Was what Hedger had said about her true? Did it matter? Not to him, not really. She must have known that Hedger would tell him about her father. He wanted to hear her side of it.

He lay back on the bed and gave way to soreness and fatigue. He thought about Drummond and what had happened to his family. They had a lot in common, the Drummonds and the Catledges.

A
T FOUR O'CLOCK
C
AT PRESENTED HIMSELF AT THE EMBASSY
gates, identified himself with his passport, and was searched and admitted.

A few minutes later Hedger showed him to a chair and picked up a telephone. “Both of you come in here when you're finished with your meeting.” He hung up and was silent, apparently waiting for some others to join them.

“How'd you get into this line of work?” Cat asked, curious about Hedger's career since Quantico.

“I worked with these people a lot in Vietnam. When I got back, I had an invitation. It was a good offer.”

Cat still didn't know exactly who Hedger worked for, but it wasn't hard to guess. He looked for confirmation. “You were working with the CIA in Vietnam? I'd have thought you'd have had a battalion by then.” He couldn't help needling.

Hedger shook his head. “I only made light colonel. They found other uses for me.”

He hadn't denied the CIA, and it seemed obvious that he had been passed over for promotion. If an Academy man couldn't make bird colonel in a war, he was going nowhere. Cat let it pass. He was going to need Hedger's help.

“I hear you did okay for yourself,” Hedger said, sourly.

“Yeah, not bad. I had a good idea and a brother-in-law who was a good businessman.”

Hedger nodded as if he had known all along that Cat's success was the result of somebody else's work. “We've got a bunch of your printers around the embassy. Pretty slick.”

“Thanks.” Cat wished that whoever was joining them would do so. Hedger had always been difficult to make small talk with.

As if in answer to his prayer, the office door opened and Candis Leigh and a young man came in.

“You've met Leigh,” Hedger said. He nodded at the young man. “This is Sawyer.”

Cat shook the man's hand.

“Okay, bring us up to date,” Hedger said.

Cat hesitated. He didn't trust Hedger, and he wasn't sure whether it was simply a hangover from their old relationship or something more. “As Drummond may have told you, my daughter's telephone call was confirmed as having been dialled from a hotel in Cartagena. I went there and traced her to Cali, and maybe to Bogotá. I think she may have been on the Gulfstream jet I mentioned to you.”

Candis Leigh spoke up. “We checked on the airplane. The pilot filed for Cali, then, as soon as he took off, re-filed for Leticia. The airplane has an American registration number; Langley is checking ownership now.”

Hedger looked annoyed at her for having spoken up. “Who does the airplane belong to?” he asked Cat. “Or do you know?”

“A drug dealer, I think. A big one.”

“No shortage of those down here,” Hedger snorted. “What else can you tell us?”

“That's about it,” Cat replied.

“Well, guys,” Hedger said to his two colleagues, “I think Mr. Catledge had better meet Buzz Bergman.” He turned back to Cat. “My people don't get all that involved in the drug stuff,” he said. “Our mission here is the political side, the guerrillas. That keeps us pretty busy.” He picked up the phone and tapped in an extension number. “Buzz? Barry. There's somebody I'd like you to talk to. Got a minute? Yeah, right now.” He hung up the phone and started for the door. “Come on, I'll introduce you to the head of the Narcotics Assistance Unit.”

Cat followed him out of the office and down the hallway. Candis Leigh and Sawyer hung back. Hedger led the way through another reception area into a large office. The walls were covered with maps and photographs. A short, thick man walked from behind his desk.

“This is Buzz Bergman; Buzz, Wendell Catledge. I expect you've read about what happened to Catledge and his family, Buzz.”