Beneath a Panamanian Moon (16 page)

“Not that I know of.”

“That's good. If you are invited, it would be wise to decline.”

I thanked her for her advice.

“You are not a believer, are you, Mr. Harper?”

“Maybe a little skeptical.”

“Very wise. Tell me, do you have a dog?”

“No, ma'am, I don't.”

“Hmmm. I see a dog. A dog with a man's head in his mouth.” She stared into the shifting currents of the tumbler.

I asked, “Does this dog bite?”

“He will not bite you. Others will not be as fortunate.” Miss Turando poured more tea. “There is a young woman.” It wasn't a question.

Marilyn smiled and put her hand on my arm.

“Another woman,” the bruja said, and Marilyn took her hand away. “An Anglo woman. American perhaps. Am I right, Mr. Harper?”

“I don't know.”

Marilyn whispered, “La rubia.”

“Yes, she is blond and you have promised to teach her something, but it is you who will be the student.”

Marilyn sank back into the sofa cushions with her arms crossed. “I bet she teaches you something.”

“I'm getting a confusing message here. Someone will be hurt.” Unlike the earlier theatrics, this time she seemed genuinely worried.

“Who?” I asked.

“I don't know.” She looked at us, a frown on her face, her large, magnified eyes darting from me to Marilyn and back again. “I am frightened for both of you.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Mr. Harper, give me your hands.”

She held them in hers and closed her eyes. “I sense music, lots of music, but”—her eyes opened—“you have too many secrets, Mr. Harper. I can't tell what is truth and what is fiction.”

“That's because he's a spy.” Marilyn laughed.

It was a joke to Marilyn, but not to me, and from what I saw in this bruja's eyes, it wasn't a joke to her, either.

“Please, I'm very tired.” Miss Turando stood up. “Please, if you would be so kind.” Her hand was shaking. She stopped us at the door and seemed almost afraid to be near me. “Mr. Harper,” she said, “you would have been wise to stay in the States. Please, please go home as soon as possible. Before the New Year.”

“Why? What's supposed to happen? What is so terrible?” I looked from the witch to Marilyn but both faces were pale with fright. If this was a joke, it was a good one.

Miss Turando shook her head and said, “I'm begging you to go. Please.” Without another word she closed the door and we heard the bolt slide home.

In the car, Marilyn sat for a long time without starting the engine.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“I don't know,” she said, and her voice quavered.

“Hey, it's okay.” I tried to touch her hand but she pulled away. “She's just crazy.”

“Maybe not so crazy,” Marilyn said.

“And there's nothing between me and that girl. Honest.” It was a lie, and shameful, and I wanted to take it back even before it had left my mouth.

Without a word, Marilyn started the car, put it into gear, and drove toward the highway.

I looked back at the house with its raked yard and Christmas lights and heard angry dogs barking in the distant hills.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Marilyn didn't speak the entire trip. I tried joking about psychic hotlines and why if Miss Turando could see the future she couldn't foresee how much more doctors got paid than nurses, but it just steamed her, and she worked her mouth as if she were about to spit. She pulled up to the hotel's front gate and stopped. She wouldn't look at me.

“If Miss Turando can predict the future, why was she surprised when we showed up? Huh? Tell me that?”

She gave me a look that was a mixture of pity and contempt. “Stop it,” she said. “You are just making yourself look foolish. There are things going on here, John, that you don't know anything about.”

“This is about the blond girl. You're jealous.”

“Just shut your stupid mouth.” She twisted the wheel in her hands. “Go on, get out. Now.”

I leaned into the open window. “Look, I'd like to thank you for all the help you've given me.”

She stared at me for a long time but I couldn't read anything in her eyes. Finally, she said, “Don't ever come to see me again, John Harper. Not ever.” Marilyn let out the clutch and took off toward the city, leaving me standing in a circle of light next to Hamster, who was standing guard at the gate.

“Dude,” he said, “that was harsh.”

“Yeah.”

“What did you do?”

“I don't know, Hamster.”

“Sometimes it doesn't take much, you know, to make women angry,” he said.

“You got that right.”

“You two getting it on? Because the word is, you have your eye on Kelly's daughter. Not that I blame you, man, 'cause she's one fine definition of fine.”

“No. Marilyn's just someone I met. And there's nothing going on with Miss Kelly, either. I don't think that's a good idea, do you?”

Hamster nodded. “Yeah, right, I guess not. But you wouldn't be the first guy who thought with his little head, bro.”

“A wise observation, Hamster.”

I walked down the dark road toward the hotel. Lights were on and there were a few people in the bar, but no one stopped me or even looked in my direction. I climbed the stairs and unlocked the door to my room.

There, on my dresser, was my laptop. I opened it and sat on the bed. To anyone tossing my room, and I could tell that someone had tossed it again while I was gone, the computer looked harmless. If you turned it on, the usual window came up and the usual programs ran. But this laptop had been a gift from Smith. This laptop recorded conversations, even when off, that were transmitted by the bugs I'd planted the night before. It couldn't be far away, but two floors, even through this tropical concrete, was close enough.

I listened to Kelly's bug first but, instead of any information about the guests, or what Kelly had planned for New Year's Eve that I could use as my ticket away from this place, all I heard was the stale air of a Sunday afternoon in an empty office.

I switched to the Colonel's frequency and heard the same hush of nothing.

I lay back against the pillow and dozed off, the headphones on, and at some point in the night I was awakened by conversation. At first, still drugged by sleep, I wasn't sure if people were talking in the hallway, or in a dream, and then I realized that the voices were in my ears. The voices were those of the Colonel and the younger man with the accent. They were speaking on the Colonel's phone.

“We are set,” the younger man said.

There was a long pause filled with nothing but breathing and the scratch of static. The Colonel said, “I know it must be done.”

“Do not think about it. Are we ready for the new year?”

“Yes. The General's yacht is due in port Wednesday morning.”

“Good. I will be in touch. Until then, please try and not fuck up any more than you already have. Explaining the loss of one of Major Cruz's men has already taken up too much of my morning,” the young man said, and hung up.

The Colonel said to his empty office, “Goddamn little goat fucker.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was three days to New Year's. Three days to find out who was here and what they were up to. What could be easier?

Phil knocked once and pushed open my door. “C'mon, partner, time to run.”

“It's got to be Monday,” I said. “Monday in hell.”

“Isn't there someplace we have to check out?”

“You mean the place in the bush?”

“Yeah. Kelly went into the city for something, which means we've got the morning to ourselves. You're supposed to be the smart one, what do you think?”

“I'm the smart one, huh?”

“That's what I've been told.” Phil yawned, letting me see his molars. “So far, I haven't seen it myself.”

I didn't bring up that first-night drunk, or that maybe I was as skeptical about my intelligence as anyone. But I did bring up Cooper. “I know I asked you this before, but how well do you know him?”

“I'd trust him with my life,” Phil said, “which is more than I can say for you. All I know about you is you're good at picking up women.”

“Fair enough.”

Cooper was already on the beach, stretching his hamstrings and delts and traps and whatever else he felt a need to stretch. I blinked a few times in the bright dawn, stretching my eyelids for a hard day's labor. Every other muscle in my body hurt too much to move, and what didn't ache burned, itched, or throbbed. I was enduring, as stoically as I could, the scratches, welts, and stings of the natural world, as well as the drubbing I'd been given by Panama's finest and the right cross I'd been too slow to duck. I was beginning to think I wouldn't get out of this place alive.

Cooper looked up from his leg stretches. “What's eating you?”

“I want to run another route today, is that all right?”

Phil was impatient and in a bad mood. “Let's get moving. Another minute of this and I'm going to kill somebody.”

“Lead on, Monkeyman,” Cooper said.

The three of us took off at an easy pace. I knew the direction I had to go and, with the sun in its spot, and whatever magnetic magic there is in our human skulls that give some of us a sense of direction, I knew we would soon intersect with a path that would take us to a road, across a river, and on to the urban warfare site the satellite had picked up in the jungle. And, of course, I got lost.

After going in the wrong direction for twenty minutes, I stopped and took my bearings again.

Cooper raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything.

Phil and I argued about where we were, where we were going, and how best to get there. I studied the map in my head, then the sunlight, and then the map again. While Phil was kneeling by a slow-moving stream, a long-legged rodent emerged from the underbrush, stopped, and looked at us. Satisfied we were either harmless or that he could outrun us, the creature sipped water from the stream. He was so close Phil could have swallowed him.

When he was gone, Phil said, “What the fuck was that?”

“It was an agouti,” I said, “a member of the guinea pig family.”

“An agouti? How did you know that?”

“I read a book, Phil.”

“Maybe I'll give that a try,” he said.

“I have an idea,” I said. “If we're looking for a river, we should be able to find it if we follow this stream.”

“That's your idea?”

“Yeah. What do you think?”

Phil looked unimpressed. “What? You read that in a book, too?”

“What's so important about this place you're trying to get to?” Cooper asked.

“I won't know until I get there.”

“I hope they have a Starbucks,” he said, and started off along the stream. Phil and I followed. It wasn't easy, and there were times we had to detour around a thick tangle of vine, but we kept going in its general direction until it joined a river so muddy it looked thick enough to plow.

“Which way?” Coop said.

I looked up and down stream, trying to match the twists in the river to the bends recorded by the satellite. I took a guess. “This way,” I said, and pointed upstream.

We hadn't gone more than a mile when we saw the footbridge, one rope strung across the current, with two other ropes, shoulder high, strung for balance. We crossed over, carefully, the bridge bobbing and swaying under our weight. The river below us was swift and carried trees and bushes torn roughly from an upstream bank.

The path was easy to follow now, and clear. Five- and six-feet wide in places, and well used, it made the next three miles an easy run compared to the struggle of crashing through the foliage alongside the stream. Near the crest of a hill the path widened and spread into what looked like a staging area, with a helicopter LZ among the ruts and the tire tracks of large trucks. Beyond the LZ, streets ran through the first plywood-and-cement buildings of an empty village. The three of us walked down what looked like the main street, wide enough for parades. The buildings on either side were just plywood fronts, like a Hollywood set. The deeper we went, the more detailed the buildings got, with doors and window frames.

“What the hell is this?”

“What's it look like, Coop?”

“It looks like an urban assault course.”

Phil bent down and picked up a spent brass casing. “We got live fire.” He tossed it to Coop.

“AKs. We don't train with AKs.”

“Maybe we don't,” I said, “but maybe the students from the hotel do.”

“Why would they train with different weapons than the ones we use at the range?”

“I don't know.”

Cooper chewed on the inside of his lip, turning the brass casing around in his hand. He looked up and said, “Something doesn't smell right.”

It was time to give Cooper a way out. “That's why we're here,” I said. “Whatever it is stinks all the way up to Washington.”

Cooper looked from me to Phil and back to me again. “Both of you?”

Phil nodded.

“Anyone else at the hotel besides you two?”

“There were. They're both dead,” I said. I explained about the satellite photos and the anonymous guests, and how something big was set to go down on New Year's Eve. “I'm supposed to learn who is staying at the hotel, if they're bankrolling something bigger than just training their own personal security forces, and what they're using this place for, a place that even most of the American instructors don't know about. Once I know these things, I can go home,” I said. “The question for you is, do you want a piece of this, because if you don't, Phil and I will understand.”

Phil said, “That's right, Coop. You can go back to the hotel and nobody will say shit about it.”