Silencer (34 page)

I’d seen all that I needed to, but stayed absolutely still for a couple of minutes longer. Movement, even the slightest scuff or clink, was what compromised you. It was human nature to move away from something faster than you’d arrived – and that was when you fucked up.

So the routine was: stop; take a breath; freeze for a couple of minutes; reverse a foot or two. I stayed on elbows and toes. I didn’t turn, just inched backwards.

Once I’d gone six metres, I waited, got up on my hands and knees, turned and crept, Komodo dragon-style, another ten or twelve. Only then did I rise to my feet and walk back to where I’d first encountered the steel mesh.

Once there, I moved back and paralleled it, keeping to the scrub. Whenever I lost sight of it, I angled back in. I had to keep checking. For all I knew, the fence might veer off to the left; I didn’t want suddenly to discover I was a kilometre out.

I did that two or three times before spotting the first of the
CCTV cameras. This was no Mickey Mouse gizmo gaffer-taped to a tree. It was mounted on the kind of fifteen-metre-high steel post that you’d see beside any European motorway.

I carried on uphill, following the liquorice strip as it carved its way through the bush. Only nine kilometres to go. I grabbed the CamelBak tube and gave the mouthpiece a quick suck. The water was warm and tasted of plastic after its hours in the bladder, but you know what? It was more than OK. I really loved doing this shit.

7 September 2011

02.07 hrs

The night sky was crystal clear and peppered with stars.

The range to target from where I was concealed inside the scrub-line was about eight hundred metres. Gentle slopes surrounded the plateau, so although there was a ridge behind me, I wasn’t actually on what Dino had described as high ground. He’d made it sound like I’d be looking down on the
casa
at forty-five degrees, but a head full of crystal meth doesn’t do much for your powers of recall. He had got two things right, though: the Pilgrim’s country seat was set in acres of immaculately cut grass, and it was floodlit.

The irrigation system was kicking off big-time. Jets of spray from a network of pipes buried under the green stuff glittered in the lights that swept across the front of the
casa
. I couldn’t see from this angle, but Dino had said it was the same set-up at the rear.

The lighting was clearly designed to show off the place rather than catch intruders. Its ambient glow had guided me in from more than three Ks away, and made everything in the immediate vicinity of the sprawling hacienda – the terracotta-roofed outbuildings and garages, the fleet of chunky 4x4s – shimmer like a Sunday-supplement spread for an exclusive country hotel. I’d
been expecting major-league bling, but what I saw was fit for a discerning movie star – or a president in the making.

There were horses somewhere; I couldn’t see or hear them, but a white-fenced dressage arena stood this side of the tree-lined drive, and sections of the surrounding field had been corralled.

The She Wolf’s answer to the Lincoln Memorial lay in the dead ground at the rear of the
casa
. The hangar and helipad stood about two hundred metres away to my half-right. A wind-sock hung lifeless nearby, beside a path that curved through the grass towards the light show.

I retreated behind the ridge, shrugged off the CamelBak and grabbed the last can of Monster. I wasn’t too sure what flavour it was – but I was after a caffeine high, not a taste sensation. I knew that the military in Afghanistan had restricted young squaddies to no more than three cans of the stuff a day because armoured-vehicle drivers were getting hyper at the wheel. But after so much travelling and so little sleep, that was the effect I was aiming for. I eased back the ring-pull and it gave a gentle hiss.

Between swigs I fished out the telescopic lens and mini-tripod and used them to transform my iPhone into a night viewing aid. Then I unrolled the freezer bag and bit a hole through its base, big enough to accommodate the lens but small enough to conceal the light from the screen, and poked the tripod legs through its side.

I finished the last of the Monster, carefully squashed the can and tucked it into the CamelBak. I didn’t really have to take it with me – this wasn’t a long-term hide I might need to return to – but old habits die hard.

I scrunched together the open end of the freezer bag and scrambled back to the edge of the scrub. I pressed the tripod into the ground until it was stable, then powered up the phone and got a full signal immediately – of course.

I inserted the ear-plugs, stuck my head and left hand into the bag and tapped the screen to wake it up again. Making sure the lens was still poking through its hole, I adjusted the focus with my right.

I closed my right eye before sparking up the camera app; I wanted to keep some night vision for when I moved in on the target.

Eyes take a long time to adjust to the darkness. The cones inside them – which enable you to see in the daytime, giving colour and perception – are no good at night. The rods at the edge of your irises take over. Because of the convex shape of the eyeball, they’re angled at forty-five degrees, so if you look straight at something at night you don’t really see it: it’s a blur. You have to look above it or around it; that lines up the rods and gives you a clearer picture.

It takes forty minutes or so for them to become fully effective, but you start to see better after five. What you see when you have a light-affected eye, and what you see those five minutes later, are two very different things. Even small amounts of light can wreck your night vision, and the process has to start all over again. That’s why I closed the eye that I aimed with – my ‘master eye’ – and monitored the iPhone screen with the other.

I twisted the lens and the hangar came into sharper focus through the crystalline haze thrown up by the sprinklers. A dark vertical shadow told me that the doors were a metre or so ajar. Dino had said there was always a helicopter docked inside; he just didn’t know what kind it was.

I took a series of pictures and pressed
send
.

I kept checking the target, gently moving the camera left and right. At this distance it didn’t take long to scan the place for signs of life – a light that had just been switched on, maybe, or a
shadow across a window. The more I knew about what lay ahead of me, the better.

My plan was to leg it to the chopper and access the house via the escape tunnel – then get out the same way, with Katya in tow. If I couldn’t get into the tunnel, I’d activate Plan B: another six hundred metres across the open ground to the house, and get on with it. Plan C? I didn’t have a Plan C.

I watched the last of the images being uploaded and waited for the ring tone in my ear. When it came I hit the screen and let Dino do the talking.

‘It’s looking good, Nick. Nothing has changed. There’s a signal in the basement, so I’ll be with you all of the way. If she’s there, we’re going to find her. Eight one eight two eight three – you got that?’

‘Got it.’

As I prepared to close down, Dino’s tone changed. ‘Hey … Nick?’

‘What?’

‘It’s kinda like what we did all those years ago, know what I’m saying? Wish I was there with you, man.’

‘You’d be just as fucking useless.’

Each time he laughed, he sounded ever so slightly more like the Dino I used to know.

I stayed where I was for another ten minutes, right eye still firmly shut, squinting at the image of the hangar, then the house with my left. Tuning in for the insertion, I went through the what-ifs. What if I was spotted halfway across the open ground? What if the hangar doors weren’t really ajar – that what I thought was a gap was just a shadow? Once I had given myself a few answers, I picked up the freezer bag and scrambled three or four metres below the ridge to sort myself out.

My first task was to delete the call log and replace the SIM card. The old one went down my throat and joined the others in the litre or so of Monster seething in my gut. I shovelled the phone rechargers into one of my jeans pockets and slid the cash – both pesos and USD – into the other. I transferred my cards and passport from my neck pouch to the CamelBak, along with the tripod and the folded bag, then looked around for a place to cache them.

Two large boulders close together would be hard to miss, even if I was running fast. I scraped a hole in the dirt and buried the CamelBak between them. All I needed to do now was work out which direction to leg it if the shit hit the fan.

I returned to the ridge to take a fix on the hangar. It was roughly to my half-left; on the way out, I’d reverse the angle and head for the scrub-line. If I was in a flap with an HK spitting 5.56 and a pack of dogs behind me, I wanted to hit the CamelBak first time.

I double-checked the cache site to fix the boulder combo in my head, then went right, towards the rear of the
casa
, for sixty metres behind the ridgeline and left again until I got to the edge of the scrub. I wanted to break cover some distance from where I’d hidden the CamelBak: if I was seen or caught, I didn’t want them rerunning the CCTV footage and zeroing in on my real start point.

I lay there another couple of minutes, made sure that everything in my pockets was secure, and tucked the iPhone, with earphones attached, into the neck pouch.

Then, fuck it.

I launched myself to my feet and started running.

There’s no clever way of crossing open ground apart from putting one foot in front of the other as fast as you possibly can. And that was all I could do now, apart from keeping the hangar as much as I could between me and the target.

It wasn’t long before the sprinklers were giving me the good news. My shirt and jeans got wetter and wetter as I legged it past the dressage arena. When I hit the grey concrete helipad I slowed to a walk, eyes on the hangar entrance, hands checking my pocket and pouch. If anything had fallen out I’d have to go back.

I reached the steel sliding doors and swivelled so that my back was against the right side of the gap between them. I held my breath. All I could hear was the hiss of the water being forced out of the irrigation pipes. As I listened, I scanned my escape route back to the CamelBak. Once I’d made sure I had it fixed, I dropped to the ground and poked my head into the darkness of the hangar.

Small pools of light spilled from various bits of machinery but there was no sound; no TV, no snoring or talking. If I’d missed anything I was about to find out.

I slipped through the gap and jinked immediately to the right. It was second nature, making entry into a building. I couldn’t see why people got nervous or anticipated a drama the other side – or were sometimes just plain scared. It seemed very simple to me: the less you flapped about what might be on the other side,
the quicker you were going to get in there and find out. If there was a drama to deal with, the sooner you gripped it, the better.

The building was empty, apart from the chopper and its support kit. I scanned the silhouette of rotor blades, nose and tail-plane and breathed in the distinctive aroma – not the oily-rag-in-a-workshop smell, more hint-of-avgas-spilled-in-a-clinic. These places are always immaculate, every tool and component precisely where it should be.

I pulled the iPhone from the pouch, powered up the torch beam app and swept it around the large open space in search of the tunnel door. It wasn’t hard to find, between two chest-high multi-drawer toolboxes.

The keys bleeped as I punched in the digits. The 818283 code was designed to be used in a panic, in darkness or in smoke: start at the centre of the bottom row of keys then hit the top three in sequence, alternating with the 8.

The steel-plated door opened with the gentle electronic whine of a hotel safe. The other side of it was solid wood, with a metal bar like you’d find on a fire exit. I wheeled one of the toolboxes across to keep it ajar and ran through its drawers for some heavy-duty pliers. Then I headed to the chopper.

As I got closer I could see it was a Bell 430; it said so on the fuselage. Any president worth his salt would want to be seen climbing aboard one of these four-rotor monsters and settling into one of its six leather seats.

I slid my hand behind the instrument console, grabbed a fistful of wires and chopped at them in a frenzy. If I was running around in the scrub at first light because it had been a total fuck-up, I didn’t want this thing hovering overhead, loaded with lads gripping HK machine-guns.

I severed seven or eight cables. That had to be enough to keep the fucker grounded; I didn’t want to be here playing aircraft vandal all night. I still had to get in, find Katya, and maybe do a favour or two for Dino.

He’d told me the location of Peregrino’s and Liseth’s apartments within the
casa
, and where they put their guests. But what
if Katya wasn’t in any of those places? I needed to crack on before everybody started tucking into their cornflakes and Peregrino wanted to kill someone because he hadn’t got a free toy.

The tunnel had been constructed from sewage pipes, with a steel walkway running along the floor. I closed the door behind me and heard the lock whine back into position. I didn’t want anyone popping into the hangar and thinking they might help themselves to a Christmas bonus.

I pushed the bar to check the exit mechanism and the door whined open again. I closed it once more and set off along the walkway. I took my time to keep the noise down, but the sound of my footsteps still echoed in the space ahead of me.

I caught sight of a chamber, three or four metres up to my right, as I moved through the gloom. I sparked up the iPhone beam and pinged a row of large black nylon sail-bags. Liseth didn’t sound like running away was her thing, but planning ahead obviously was.

I unzipped the nearest. It was filled with banded bundles of hundred-dollar bills. I grabbed it by the handles and lifted. Whatever the denomination, a US dollar bill weighs a fraction under a gram, so ten thousand hundred-dollar bills hits the scales at about ten kilos. This thing felt like it weighed thirty. I’d learned shit like that over the years.