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‘Some wounds take a long time to heal.’
She grimaced. ‘I’ll be fine. As long as you look after yourself. You’re not in the SAS now. If this pig Toscono refuses to talk to you, that’s it.’
‘As long as he refuses nicely,’ Docherty said with a grin.
She wasn’t amused. ‘We need you back.’
‘Aye,’ he said, leaning across and cradling her head in his arms. ‘I love you too.’
The 727 from Cartagena touched down in Miami in the middle of the afternoon. Her parents had acquaintances in the city who would happily put her up, but the thought of explaining the reason for her visit to strangers was too daunting, and Carmen had already decided to ignore the list of telephone numbers her mother had written out. The money her father had given her would probably be enough for several nights in a cheap hotel, and if not she had a little of her own to fall back on.
Her parents would be appalled, of course. Carmen knew they hadn’t really wanted her to come, though she was far from sure why. They had said they were worried for her – that losing one daughter was bad enough – but they obviously hadn’t been worried enough to accompany her. It was hard to believe that they weren’t desperate to know what had happened to their other daughter, but…Carmen shook her head and turned her attention to the business of disembarkation. She had come. Her parents’ feelings – or lack of them – were neither here nor there.
She had changed planes in Miami on all of her three trips to the United States, but the airport had never seemed quite so vast before. Immigration and Customs seemed to take for ever – no doubt flights from Colombia merited special attention. She had half expected the humiliation of a strip-search, but the officials were obviously as tired of the queue as its occupants and she was asked only a few cursory questions, her bag not even opened. With the aid of her guidebook she sought out the elevated Metrorail station just in time to catch an inbound train, and sat watching the sunlight reflect on the looming clutch of windowed towers which marked the city’s downtown.
Beneath these towers she had a glimpse of an older and more elegant Miami, but it was getting dark and she had no time to explore. A local woman helped her find the right bus stop for Miami Beach, and when the bus arrived she was amused to see an English-speaking passenger trying, and failing, to communicate with the Spanish-speaking driver. It was like her friend Miguel had said: Florida, California and Texas had been taken from Spain by the gringos, and now the gringos were having to give them back.
The bus drove east across a long causeway, giving Carmen her first views of the Miami which Miami Vice had made famous, and sooner than she expected they were driving up through the faded pastel splendours of Miami Beach. She had picked three hotels out of the guidebook, and struck lucky at the first attempt, finding a room that was clean, spacious and cheaper than the book had led her to expect. She showered, changed and sat on the bed, rereading the copy of the report which the Miami police had faxed to Cartagena, and which the local police chief had passed on to her father. The only new fact it contained was the name of the Miami Beach lieutenant in charge of the investigation, and she had an appointment with him the following morning.
There was a small balcony to the room, and she stood out on it for a few minutes, looking down at the busy street, her nose twitching to the aromas of cooking food. She was hungry, she realized, and ten minutes later she was ordering Orange Chicken in a Chinese restaurant recommended by the hotel receptionist. After eating she walked down to the beach, but in the darkness it looked more scary than inviting, so she made her way back to the hotel. She flicked through channels on the TV for a while but then decided it was time for bed, despite the earliness of the hour. She was exhausted, and with any luck tomorrow would turn into a big day.
She was woken by the barely risen sun shining through the window, and after showering and dressing she made her way down to the empty beach and walked along it, a few feet from the gently breaking waves. She felt apprehensive about her meeting with the American police, but really glad that she had come. Whatever had happened to Marysa, she told herself, life was better than death.
The small Cuban café which she chose for breakfast served the best coffee she had ever tasted, which had to be a good omen.
Back at the hotel she smartened herself up, checked the directions she’d been given and set out for the police station. The walk took ten minutes, and once inside the incongruously modern building she was kept waiting for only a couple of minutes before being shown into Lieutenant Trammell’s office. He was a harassed-looking man well into middle age, with an argumentative jaw, big mouth and thinning grey hair. His greeting was warm enough, but he seemed to be having trouble keeping his faded blue eyes open. Fortunately, he was not personally in charge of the case – that honour belonged to Detective José Peña, whose overflowing desk in the squad room was her next port of call.
Detective Peña also seemed harassed, but at least he was looking at her with wide-open eyes. ‘Coffee?’ he asked, once the introductions had been made and Trammell was back in his office.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she said.
‘Cream and sugar?’ He was speaking Spanish now.
‘Just one sugar,’ she answered in the same language, and examined him as he programmed the machine. He was in his early thirties, she guessed, with short, wavy hair and a face that managed to be both handsome and friendly. The photo of a woman and two children on his desk suggested he was also married.
He presented her with the plastic cup of coffee, and she took a token sip. Pretty good, she thought – in two hours she’d had the best and worst coffee of her life.
‘Dreadful, isn’t it?’ he said with a smile.
‘Yes,’ she agreed.
They stared at each other for a couple of seconds. ‘So what is it you want to know?’ he asked.
‘Everything,’ she said shortly. ‘All I know is what was in the newspaper – that Placida was carrying drugs – inside her – and that one of the packets burst and killed her. And that you found out who she was from Victoria…How is Victoria?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s hard to say. I’ve tried talking to her several times and sometimes she’s almost lucid, sometimes she just stares at me as if she can’t understand a word I’m saying, sometimes she just can’t stop crying.’ He looked up at her, and she could see in his eyes that he’d found the experience a more than usually distressing one. ‘Whatever they did to her,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t pretty.’
‘Where is she now?’ Carmen asked.
‘She’s in a hospital. She’s pregnant too,’ he added. ‘So was Placida Guzmán.’
Carmen bowed her head, then lifted it again. ‘Can I see her?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’
‘I want to take her back to Cartagena with me. Her parents are both dead, but she has an aunt who’s willing to look after her.’
Peña looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know when that will be possible,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m not sure what the legal situation is right now.’
‘What do you mean?’ she said, both surprised and alarmed.
‘She has admitted to bringing in about half a million dollars’ worth of heroin,’ he said mildly.
Carmen was appalled. ‘But she can’t have been acting willingly,’ she said angrily.
He sighed. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and I’m on her side. But she and the Guzmán girl had been in Miami for three days before they were found. Even if they had been forced to ingest the drugs there was nothing to stop them telling the officials at the airport what had happened. If they had, both of them would have received immediate medical treatment, and Placida Guzmán would probably still be alive.’
‘They were probably too frightened.’
‘Probably. And don’t quote me on this, but I expect something can be worked out. It should be obvious to anyone that the girl needs help, not a jail cell.’
Carmen took a deep breath. ‘Has she said anything about who did this to them? Or where they came from?’ And where my sister may still be, she thought.
‘Not yet. The plane they arrived on came from Bogotá via Panama City, but there’s no record of them getting on at either place. And whenever I’ve asked her about either place, or anything about the time before she arrived, she just started to cry. She was crying when the uniform found her on the beach,’ he added.
‘She told you where Placida was?’
‘Not exactly. “In the hotel,” she said, but she couldn’t remember which one. So we just started with the closest, worked our way outwards, and found the place the next day. Placida wasn’t there, but there was a lot of blood and…’
He stopped for a moment, and she could see that he was picturing the scene.
‘The body was found in a canal about twenty miles away – they hadn’t done a very good job of weighting it down.’
‘In the hotel room, weren’t there any clues to where they’d come from?’
‘He’d cleared it out. Jesús, he told them his name was – Victoria remembered that in one of her lucid moments. He was young, Hispanic, medium height – one of a million.’
‘What about the passports?’ she asked.
‘The only stamps were ours. But the passports themselves are probably forged anyway.’
She felt disappointed with the information she had gathered, but could think of nothing else to ask. ‘Maybe Victoria will find it easier talking to me,’ she said, mostly to bolster her own spirits.
‘Did you know her before?’
‘Only by sight. My sister was – is, I hope – five years younger than me, and we didn’t have the same friends.’
‘Well, I’ll try and arrange a visit for tomorrow, OK?’
She managed a thin smile of gratitude. ‘I have no other reason to be here.’
3 (#uc61cd569-5e3b-5802-92b3-e952d5eb3a22)
John Dudley took his eyes off the lighted windows of the timber-yard office and turned to his partner. ‘Anything?’ he asked.
‘They just took a corner,’ Martin Insley told him from the armchair. ‘Seaman caught it.’
‘But how’s it going?’
‘Sounds pretty even so far. But you never know with Spain.’
‘He should have given Fowler a game,’ Dudley muttered as he put his eye back to the mounted telescope. Through the open window he could hear traces of the match playing on several TV sets, and over the gabled roofs to the south-west he thought he could make out the faint glow in the sky above Wembley Stadium. Everyone in London seemed to be watching the damn game – everyone but him and Insley. If only the damn boat had come in a day later.
It had docked at Tilbury soon after dawn that morning and had begun unloading almost immediately. The four thousand logs of tropical hardwood from Venezuela had been one of the first shipments ashore and after a cursory customs examination the importers had been cleared to reload them on the waiting fleet of trailers. A thorough search would probably have resulted in the seizure of a large haul of Colombian heroin, but the British authorities were hoping for more than drugs to burn. MI5 and the Drugs Squad were eager to break the new and highly ominous distribution link-up between the Colombians and the local Turkish mafia, while MI6 were more interested in the foreign end of the pipeline, and the man who ran it.
The logs had all been delivered to the timber yard in north-east London by mid-afternoon, no small feat considering the state of the capital’s traffic, and had been stacked in no apparent order in the open-sided shed. Since then Dudley and Insley had been watching them from the upstairs room of an empty terraced house some seventy yards away.
‘We’ve got another corner,’ Insley reported.
Dudley took one last look at the lighted windows, and walked across to grab the proffered earpiece.
‘It was a good save,’ Insley explained, as they waited for Anderton to take it.
At that moment they were beeped.
‘Fuck,’ Dudley growled, grabbing the handset.
‘The fax is coming in,’ a voice told him.
There was a pause, and in the background Dudley could hear the groan of the crowd. They were even listening in the communications room!
‘Five names,’ the voice said. ‘They all look Turkish. Beeper numbers and times. Amounts. Christ, there must be about two tons of the stuff in those logs.’
‘Did Six get their source?’ Dudley asked out of curiosity.
‘Yeah. The one they were expecting.’
‘Well, that should cheer the bastards up.’
In the suite occupied by the British Consulate on the fourth floor of the Swissbank building in Panama City the English contingent were gathered round a borrowed portable, willing the half-time whistle to blow. David Shepreth was probably the least involved of the spectators, and it was with no great reluctance that he deserted the TV to take the incoming message from London. It was brief and to the point, containing nothing more than the source number of the fax which had just been received by the London timber-yard office.
He placed it on the desk in front of him and punched out a number on the phone. Somehow he doubted whether the American Embassy would have closed down for Euro 96.
It hadn’t, and a few seconds later he was talking to Neil Sadler, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s Panama Field Office. He didn’t know Sadler anything like as well as his opposite number in Mexico City, but they had a relationship of sorts and Shepreth was curious to see what reasons the other man would eventually come up with for refusing his request.
‘Hi, David,’ the DEA man said cheerfully enough. ‘And what can we do for the British Empire today?’
‘I need an address to go with a fax number,’ Shepreth told him, then read the number off the paper in front of him.
‘No problem,’ Sadler said. ‘It’ll probably take me a couple of hours. I’ll call you back.’
‘Great, thanks,’ Shepreth said, and hung up, thinking that anyone who believed the Americans no longer ran Panama was living in a dream. Their only real challenger had been Manuel Noriega – ‘Old Pineapple Face’ as the media had less than affectionately dubbed him – and the General had been rather too assiduous in promoting his country’s number-one industry – the import and export of drugs. Involvement in itself might not have condemned him, but he had compounded his crime by giving Uncle Sam the proverbial finger, and for that he was now languishing in a Florida jail.
He was not exactly missed by his fellow-Panamanians. Like everyone else, the Americans occasionally did the right thing for all the wrong reasons.
Shepreth stood by the window for a few moments, staring out at the square of blue Pacific which filled the space between the two high-rise buildings on the other side of the Via España. As usual a breeze was ruffling the palms which lined the wide avenue; Panama City was not the steamy hell of legend, though in just about every other respect it qualified as a major-league modern dump. The city’s business was business, and if Orson Welles had ever done a Central American version of The Third Man he could easily have substituted Panama for Switzerland in Harry Lime’s famous speech about what makes civilization tick.
The second half had started in the room next door, and Shepreth walked through to join the others. England were not playing half as well as they had against the Dutch, and another Spanish near-miss had the Embassy officials chewing their lips in agitation. Even the two secretaries – both local girls – seemed caught up in the anxiety of the moment. Both of them had lovely legs, Shepreth thought, and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before.
He supposed he didn’t come to Panama that often, or at least not lately. Large quantities of cocaine and heroin still passed through the country, but the focus of the drug trade had moved north in the past couple of years, and nowadays Shepreth spent most of his time in Mexico City.
His real employer was MI6, that arm of British Intelligence which dealt with external threats to the security of the United Kingdom. Up until the end of the Cold War its principal occupation had been counter-espionage, but now that spies had either gone the way of the dodo or signed up with one of the corporations for non-political duties, MI6 had been forced into grabbing a share of the war against the unofficial corporations of international crime. These included the Sicilian, Russian, West African and Turkish Mafias, the Chinese Triads, Japanese Yakuza and Colombian drug cartels. With the exception of the Triads, most of these organizations had few soldiers on the ground in the UK itself, and sticking spokes in their collective wheels could only be done on foreign soil.
The other EC intelligence services had a presence in Central America and the Caribbean, but for obvious reasons the principal sharers of Shepreth’s patch were the various overlapping American agencies – the US Customs Service, Coast Guard, Drug Enforcement Agency, Justice Department, FBI and CIA. Originally Shepreth’s relations with these American agencies had seemed better than those they had with each other, but over the past couple of years this situation had deteriorated somewhat. The Americans’ decision to adopt a ‘kingpin strategy’, whereby all their resources were committed to bringing down a selected few of the biggest drug barons, took little or no account of British and European interests. And when this most-wanted list was finally shared with America’s allies it was found to omit the one man the British most wanted included.
It would of course be difficult to put Angel Bazua in prison – he was already in one. It had been specially constructed for him and his ‘business associates’ on the Colombian island of Providencia, and was said to contain all the comforts of home and a few others besides. Everything that Bazua needed to continue running his billion-dollar business had been thoughtfully provided by the Colombian authorities, from mobile phones and computers to an impressive boardroom table. It was even rumoured that a commodious shelter had been dug beneath the jail, as protection against a bombing raid by competitors.
Elements of the Colombian military and civil administrations were obviously armpit-deep in the necessary corruption, but Bazua himself was not a Colombian – he was an Argentinian. And herein lay the other compelling reason for MI6’s interest in him. Bazua had been one of the leading protagonists of the Argentinian Army’s ‘Dirty War’ against its own people, and one of the prime movers behind the attempted liberation of the Malvinas. His son had been killed at Goose Green, further deepening his lifelong hatred of the English, and after the military’s reluctant abdication of power he had gone into exile rather than face a potential investigation into his activities during the Dirty War.
By this time the fortune he had accumulated – most of it stolen in one way or another from his hundreds of victims – was considerable, and with the help of old Colombian contacts from his years at the US-sponsored anti-subversion school in Panama, he had bought himself a slice of the Cali drug cartel’s international action. In the late 80s, as the star of the Medellín cartel had fallen, his had risen with that of his Cali partners, and even the inconvenience of a prison term had done nothing to slow his enrichment. Most of the returning dollars went into Colombian banks to earn legitimate interest, but Bazua had not forgotten his own country or his hatred, and it was his deepest wish that the two new boats riding at anchor off his Providencia prison would soon be ferrying another invasion force to the Malvinas. Once such a force was ashore the liberal government in Buenos Aires would have no choice but to support the invasion, particularly since it would soon become apparent that this time the British were incapable of transporting a force large enough to dislodge it.
This was not a welcome prospect in London, but British efforts to interest the Americans in action against Bazua had proved ineffective. Washington wouldn’t even countenance ganging up on the discredited Samper regime in Bogotá, much less direct action against the centre of operations on Providencia. Bazua was not one of their targeted kingpins, the British were told. There was no real evidence against him. And in any case, there could be no sanctioning of military action on the sovereign territory of Colombia.
This of course was pure bullshit – Grenada and Panama should have been so lucky – but there was no shaking Washington’s resolve, even when their own DEA people in the field supported the British. Increasingly, Shepreth and his superiors in London had been left with the feeling that as far as Bazua was concerned the Americans had a hidden agenda.
This idea received further confirmation when Neil Sadler rang back, seconds after the final whistle. The cheerfulness in his voice was gone – now there was an uneasy mixture of resentment and embarrassment.
‘No luck, I’m afraid,’ the American told him. ‘Are you sure this is the right number?’ He repeated the one which Shepreth had told him.
‘Yes,’ the Englishman said, slightly amused by the pantomime.
‘Well, it’s not listed. Sorry.’
‘OK. Thanks for trying,’ Shepreth said coolly.
‘Any time.’
Shepreth put the phone down. He’d have to check it out in person, which shouldn’t be too difficult – the fax machine in question was almost certainly in the office on Calle 35, the one to which he had trailed the freighter captain earlier that month.
He would pay it a visit later, once the Panamanian evening got into its undeniable swing. Then Whitehall would get its t’s crossed, and there would be more proof for the Americans to ignore.
In the other room the celebration of a penalty shoot-out win had already begun, and while HM’s Consul waxed eloquent about Sheringham’s intelligence – ‘He thinks before he kicks the ball,’ he gushed, slurping his G&T – his number two seemed to be contemplating another goal altogether, his eyes locked on, like heat-seeking missiles, to the valley between the younger secretary’s ample breasts.
Victoria looked healthier than Carmen had expected, and very obviously pregnant. If it weren’t for the eyes, which seemed to be watching from a great distance, she would have found it hard to believe that the young woman in front of her had gone through a succession of terrible experiences.
The institution in which she was housed seemed more true to type; situated in one of Miami’s less salubrious inner suburbs, it felt more like a prison than the hospital it supposedly was. Closed-circuit cameras had watched Carmen all the way to this fourth-floor room, and the nurses all seemed cold-faced and unsmiling. Detective Peña, who had driven her out here in his lunch hour, had warned her it wasn’t exactly a rest home, and he’d been right. Victoria’s room contained a bed, a basin and a single chair. The door was locked from the outside at all times.
For her part, Victoria eyed this new visitor with more trepidation than warmth. She might look vaguely familiar, but she would probably want to ask questions, like the police detective who had been to see her several times. He’d been quite nice, but she knew he hadn’t believed that she couldn’t remember anything. And of course he was a man. At least this one was a woman. And maybe she wouldn’t stay long – it was so wonderful being alone.
