Beneath a Panamanian Moon (30 page)

Kris blinked several times, quickly, and she was no longer looking at me, but at whatever was running through her head. She nodded, having come to some private conclusion, and said, “Okay, what happens now?”

“We were looking for any files he might have. Specifically about his partners in this operation, and what might be planned for tonight.” I looked at my watch. It was nearly nine o'clock. “If something's planned for midnight, we've only got three hours to stop it.”

“Did you check his desk?”

“There's nothing there,” I said.

“Right. Okay. Then they're probably in his safe. Under here.” She pulled back the rug and removed a square section of the hardwood floor. Below the floor was a green safe with a combination lock.

“I can't open that,” I said.

“I can.” Kris got on her knees and elbows and twirled the dial, jerked the handle, and pulled the door open. “There you go.” She sat back.

As Phil reached in I stopped him and said, “Kris, honey, we may find things about your father you don't want to know.”

Kris stared at me as if I were a good but very slow pooch. “There's not much about my father that I don't know, and what I don't know won't surprise me.”

“Okay.” I let Phil's arm go and, with a grunt of pain, he pulled out an accordion file. Inside were manila folders. He opened one.

“Here's a guy, Cuban CIA. Name's Romero, but goes by the name of Morton. There's everything on this guy—schools, friends, countries he's worked in, everything. But no good picture. Just one with his face hidden behind a camera, the spy snapping the spy.”

“Maybe he's the goat fucker,” I said. When Kris gave me a look that suggested I'd lost my mind, I explained the Colonel's conversation.

“So you've been bugging the offices.”

“I have. It's my job. It's why I'm here.”

“I knew you weren't just a piano player,” Kris said. “A spy, I've been fucking a spy.”

Meat mumbled something behind his gag that sounded like “I knew it.”

We sat around the open safe and read quickly through files, all of us adding pieces to the puzzle until a picture emerged. I found the file on the officer who'd been killed the day of the ambush by the river. His name was Ruiz and he was a member of a Colombian paramilitary group.

I sat back on my haunches. “But why kill so many people?”

Kris looked up from one of her father's ledgers. “Will money do?”

“How much money?”

“A lot,” she said. “I can't be sure, but I think these numbers are bank accounts, and next to them are amounts.” She looked at the two columns of numbers and said, “We're talking more than two hundred million dollars.”

“How do you know they're bank accounts?”

Kris laughed. “International finance was just one of my majors. It looks like the only one that's practical. Who knew?”

Meat's eyes were wide open. He was sweating, even in the air-conditioning. “Meat? You know something about this?” I tore the duct tape from his mouth, and after he'd stopped gasping from having his lips waxed, he told me to go fuck myself.

Phil said, “Oh, Meat, don't be like this. You know you want to tell us.”

Meat had more suggestions for Phil.

Phil sighed and said, “If it wasn't for these ribs here, Meat, I'd work you over with my fists.”

Some of the tension went out of Meat's body.

“So, I guess I'll have to use electricity.” Phil pulled a radio off the desk and jerked the power cord from the back, leaving two exposed wires plugged into the wall socket. Phil poured the water from Kris's plant mister into Meat's lap and Meat blurted, “Okay, I'll tell you what I know, but it's not much.”

“I'm not surprised,” Kris said, taking the words right out of my mouth.

“The money was to pay for this, all of this—our salaries, the guns, the hotel, all of it was paid for with money from the Colombians.”

“That's a lot of money to run a hotel, even one training bodyguards.”

“Some of it went to bribe officers in the Panamanian army and some government officials,” Meat said. He'd lightened up on the attitude and was almost pleading for us to believe him. “I don't know anything else. That's just what Helizondo told me.”

Phil held the two exposed wires close to Meat's glistening eyeball. “Do all the men working here know this?”

Meat rolled his head as far from the wires as possible. “No, just me and a couple other guys.”

“Who?”

“Me, that guy Ruiz, Helizondo, Zorro, and another guy, before your time.”

“Winstead?”

“Yeah, he was the other guy. He was killed.”

“What about the team? Did you know they weren't supposed to come back from Darien?”

Meat couldn't have been more shocked if Phil had hit him with the high voltage. “No, I didn't know.”

“Phil warned them about an ambush, but think of that, Meat, out of all those men, do you think Kelly means to keep you, and only you, alive?”

Meat blinked for the first time since Phil had poured water in his lap.

“Kelly and the Colombians are reducing their exposure and that means eliminating everyone, even the Colonel. He's dead, right now, sitting in his office downstairs, a twenty-two-caliber hole right in the middle of his forehead.”

After rolling this around, Meat said, “I hadn't thought of it like that.” Meat's eyes snapped back to the frayed wires in Phil's hand.

Phil said, “The first time I zapped you I'd blow the lights, and I'm afraid of the dark.” He jerked the cord from the wall and said, “But I could still cut your ears off.”

Kris removed another section of files. “This one's got pictures of Panamanian bankers, Guardia officers, government officials. Hell, even a U.S. diplomat. Most of them with their pants down.”

“It happens to the best of us,” I said.

“I'm taking these for Choppo,” Phil said. “I owe him.”

I pulled out half a dozen manila files and opened the first one. “Here's the bartender at the Silver Key.” Phil opened another. “Here's that old guy who runs the hot-sheet hotel. Must be part of Kelly's local network.” Kris opened a third. “John, maybe you'll want to see this.”

She handed me the file. The mug shot didn't capture Marilyn's high cheekbones and beautiful, dark eyes because you couldn't see her eyes. They had both been battered closed and her bottom lip was swollen to twice its size.

Her real name was Rosa Sanchez. She was from El Chorillo, the slum neighborhood burned to its foundations in 1989 by Operation Just Cause. Marilyn's parents were collateral damage, caught in the crossfire, just as she'd said.

Kris, Marilyn, and me. This was a war fought by orphans.

Marilyn, or Rosa, was paid one thousand dollars a month, a fortune to a Panamanian girl. From the accounting, this was just a retainer. She got more when she delivered information. There were many entries, all marked with names and sexual activities. The especially deviant had their own cross-referenced file with places and dates written in Kelly's hand.

Of all the entries in Marilyn's list, the only names I recognized were Winstead's and my own.

Phil handed me a report that detailed every moment I was with Marilyn. Where we had gone, who we had seen, what we had talked about. In the second entry, Kelly had written: “Contact not as easily manipulated through sex as previously suggested. Looks to be turning this operative and may require her elimination along with his.

“She warned me,” I said.

“Hey, recognize this guy?” Phil held out another photo. It was my high school graduation picture. “He's got quite a file on you, Harper. Traffic tickets, high school records, and an interview with the owner of a radio station who says here that you're, quote, ‘a liberal nigger-lover who doesn't deserve to wear a uniform.'”

“I hope her dogs are dead.”

Phil handed me another photo. It was the man who had climbed into the back of Ren's car, several minutes before the Chevy had poured black smoke into the clear blue Panamanian sky.

“Looks like they paid him two thousand dollars to kill you and Ren. But the guy died in a bus accident outside of Colón.”

“I've seen enough,” I said, putting the file back into the folder.

“Looky-looky,” said Phil, reaching into the safe and pulling up a gray metal strongbox. “It's locked.”

“Did you check?”

“Yes, I checked.”

“You got a bobby pin, Kris?”

She ran off and I hollered after her to bring two. When she returned I took one pin and bent it into a tiny L. As a torque wrench, it wouldn't open anything much more sophisticated than a girl's diary, but it was enough for this. I straightened another bobby pin and went to work. Kris whispered, “I guess it's a waste of time locking my bedroom door, huh, Monkeyboy?”

The box popped open. “Whoa, Phil, look at this.” Inside were bundles of brand-new cash, held together with plain paper bands. “They're euros, denominations of five hundred, the new choice of smugglers everywhere. They're not very liquid, but they take up less space than American hundred-dollar bills.” I counted the stacks. “My God, there's five million in here.”

But Phil wasn't looking, he had both arms inside the safe, pulling at something. “I can't get this,” he said, and grunted with effort. “My fingers are too fat. You try.”

I stretched out on my stomach and put both hands inside the safe. My fingers ran along the edge and I felt it move. “It's a false bottom,” I said.

“He's the smart one,” Phil said.

I worked my fingertips into the space, got a thin hold, and tugged. The floor came up. I hauled a green duffel bag onto the floor. Its lock was even less of a challenge than the cash box, a sign that Kelly never expected anyone to get this far. When I opened the duffel, stacks of cash spilled out, and Phil whispered, “Holy sweet Mother of God.”

These were more bundles of euros, and from the weight of the bag I estimated an easy four million. I said, “I think I'm about to wet myself.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Phil was taking the money. I knew that. And even though Kris was the only one entitled to it, she shook her head and said, “I don't want it. I just want to get out of here.”

“Phil, can you drive?”

He said he could. “Good, I want you to take these files—”

“And the money.”

“and the money, to Choppo's. Lauren will get this stuff into the right hands.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I have to take care of some business,” I said, and walked around behind Meat's chair.

Meat looked as if he were tied to a quickly sinking ship. “Please don't leave me with him.”

“Kris, why don't you help Phil with this stuff?”

She hesitated, but only for a moment, and then she helped Phil carry the files and the duffel down to the Colonel's car. When we were alone, I said to Meat, “Was there someone here recently, someone who would have killed Eubanks and the Colonel?”

“Are you going to let me go?”

“If you tell me what you know.”

Meat's eyes rolled around in their sockets. “Okay. It was Helizondo. He was the only one here. It had to be him.”

“Where did he go?”

Meat hesitated and a ripple of panic shimmered across my skin. “Marilyn,” he said. “He went to kill Marilyn.”

Helizondo. The man who'd hit me at the range.

I opened the desk drawer and took out Kelly's GI .45. Meat watched as I ejected the magazine, checked to see that it was loaded, slid it back into the pistol's grip, racked the slide, and aimed the big pistol at Meat's head.

“Where did they go? If you know, now's the time to tell me.”

Meat was too afraid to speak.

“You tell me and I'll cut you loose.”

Kris appeared in the doorway. “Phil's on his way. He's in pretty bad shape, John.”

“You should have gone with him.”

Kris shook her head. “Oh, no. I'm with you to the end, John Harper.”

I knew better than to argue with her.

“So, where are we going?”

“Meat was just about to tell me. Where did Helizondo go, Meat?”

“To the Pinga. That's where he takes them.”

“Takes who?”

“Whoever he's supposed to kill.”

“Where is this place?”

“I know it,” Kris said. “The real name's La Piña, pineapple, but when the GIs were here they called it ‘La Pinga' and the name stuck.”

“Ah, imperialist wit,” I said.

“All men are just pingas with ears, John, you should know that.”

“We can argue about that later. Right now, what do you think we should do with Meat?”

Kris shrugged. “Shoot him.”

Meat nearly brought the chair off the floor. “You said you'd let me go.”

“Yeah, I did.” I taped his mouth shut, and while Kris was getting the car, I rolled Meat down the steps, through the kitchen, and into the basement.

“I have just the place for you, Meat. With any luck, someone will find you before you freeze.” I rolled him next to the Major's dead Gorilla and closed the door.

As we were driving through the gate, Kris said, “I would have shot him.”

“I know. And I might have let you.”

We drove into town, across the bridge that had sent Ren and Zorro airborne on that evening a long time ago. We crossed the larger bridge, the bridge where students died in protest over its name and its flag. We drove into the slum where so many Panamanians, both soldier and civilian, were killed when the first President Bush had waded through the place like an angry giant, kicking over homes, scattering families, looking for the dictator Noriega.

Kris pulled up to the Silver Key. I jumped out. “Wait here.”