Survival (26 page)

She rounded the bow with her pistol clutched in both hands and came face to face with Gerardo, dripping wet, standing over the boat captain’s inert form floating in the surf. His gaze locked with hers and she lowered the weapon.

“He dead?” Jet asked.

“Yes. Nose cartilage through the brain. My days as a marine weren’t completely a waste.”

“What about Juan Diego and your friend?”

Gerardo shook his head.

Jet glanced at the boat. “You want a ride?”

“Where?”

“Other side of the gulf. From there, anywhere you want to go with your new boat.”

His grin was luminescent in the faint light. “Why not?”

She looked at the dead man’s sat phone, which was vibrating again in her hand. With another glance at Gerardo, she pitched it as far as she could into the sea and gestured to him.

“Let’s see what this thing can do.”

Chapter 36

Viterbo, Colombia

Fernanda paced in front of the hotel suite window, pushing the redial button on her cell reflexively, Igor’s phone now saying it was out of service. The call she’d received had thrown her. Igor never did that – called, then didn’t say anything. A sinking feeling in her stomach was spreading to her back, and a headache was building.

She didn’t want to consider the possibility of anything happening to him. He was as good as they got. An experienced player who knew the ropes. And the only man she’d ever had real feelings for.

He couldn’t be dead. It was impossible.

Meeting his fate in some Colombian border town? Where was it he’d said they’d tracked the woman to?

Acandí.

She opened her web browser and searched for it. A fishing hamlet. A dung hole. Literally nothing there.

How could she find out what had happened? Maybe he was injured. They’d both been wounded before during an operation, nothing catastrophic; but in the middle of nowhere, it could be disastrous, especially without backup.

A knock at her door jarred her from her thoughts. She collected herself, took a deep breath, and opened it. Jaime was there, looking dapper and rich.

“Can I interest you in some dinner?”

“I…I don’t have an appetite.”

“What’s wrong?”

She told him about the call and about Igor’s closing in on their target. He listened, his face impassive, and then nodded. “I have a helicopter at my compound on the outskirts of Medellín. I can send a couple of men in to check on the town, if you like. It’s a few hundred kilometers from my place. Let me know if you’d like me to do so.”

Fernanda wanted to fly there herself, but that was impractical, a panic move. If there was a problem in Acandí, a pair of Jaime’s best could learn what it was better than she could, and far sooner. Besides, she was already here and close to finding the man and his daughter.

“Would you do that?” she asked, turning on the charm.

He grinned. “For you? Of course. I’ll put it on your tab. Assuming you join me for dinner, that is.”

“I may not be good company.”

“I suspect the worst dinner with you would be better than the best with anyone else.”

“Please have the helicopter go to Acandí, and I’ll get ready to join you,” she said.

Jaime beamed at her and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He barked orders as Fernanda slipped into the bathroom and rinsed her face with cool water, taking a moment to study her reflection and regain her composure. When she returned, she had a smile on her face that was completely artificial. Jaime hung up and regarded her with a serious expression.

“My men will be in Acandí in a few hours at most. They’ll call when they have something to report.”

“Thank you, Jaime. Maybe I’ll be able to work up an appetite after all. Where are we going?” she asked, doing her best to put a brave face on the anxiety that was gnawing at her.

“There’s an excellent restaurant a few blocks from here. Famous for miles around. Good Colombian country cooking.”

“That sounds great.” She hesitated. “I almost forgot. What happened with the chicken truck driver?”

“No sign of him. But his secretary said that he often does two-day runs – he covers a lot of territory. Worst case, I would expect him to show up tomorrow by close of business. I have a man watching the building in case he arrives earlier. Don’t worry. We’ll find him.”

“This has been very frustrating. Even now they could be escaping,” she complained.

“Well, we aren’t in a huge hurry. We know the woman was in Acandí as recently as an hour ago, right? That’s a long way from here – the other side of the country.”

“So it will take her some time to reach us, if…if my associate failed to terminate her.”

“Exactly.”

A thought occurred to her. “What if she somehow finds a plane to fly her here?”

Jaime laughed. “Not likely. Private planes are rare in Colombia, especially outside of the major metropolitan areas. And if I recall, the airstrip at Acandí is gravel, with no facilities like fuel or hangars. Nobody who could afford a plane would want to live anyplace like Acandí, much less keep their aircraft there. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It sounds like your associate can take care of himself. It could be that his phone got wet, or died, or broke, or fell overboard. I wouldn’t assume the worst just yet. There’s likely a reasonable explanation.”

She took Jaime’s arm and allowed him to lead her to the lobby, ignoring the ugly feeling in her stomach. There was no reasonable explanation, she already knew, in spite of Jaime’s assurances. Igor was either wounded or dead. She didn’t know how she knew, but she was sure.

That intuition had rarely failed her throughout her career, and while she would do anything to be wrong this time, she wasn’t banking on it.

If she was right, she’d mourn Igor in her own way, in her own time. For now the only thing she would focus on would be finding the woman and extracting a terrible vengeance. Whereas the contract only required them to execute her, if she’d killed Igor, Fernanda would use every bit of her considerable knowledge of torture to ensure that the woman’s last hours on the planet were the most agonizing possible.

~ ~ ~

SE of Acandí, Colombia

After stopping at the
Providencia
to open the sea cocks, so the fishing boat would sink to the bottom with Juan Diego and the dead crewman, Gerardo retrieved the five grand Jet had paid for her safe passage and pocketed it. He returned to the cigarette boat and secured the tender to the stern as Jet maneuvered the sleek vessel away from the sinking ship, which was already low in the water.

Jet eased the throttles forward and the boat surged ahead as though eager to run wide open. “Are you sure the dinghy’s secure?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder to where the skiff‘s bow line was tied to a cleat.

“Yes. Just don’t try to break any speed records.”

Jet punched up their position on the GPS and zoomed in on the Gulf of Urabá coastline, and studied the two towns that were obvious possible destinations. Turbo was closer to Medellín than Necoclí, but she remembered Juan Diego’s warning about Colombian customs boats at the larger port and the increased risk of scrutiny she’d run.

“I’m going to make for Necoclí. Have you ever been there?” she asked Gerardo.

“Yes. Not much to speak of. There’s no port. Ugly beaches.”

“So no patrols?”

He laughed. “Not likely. Everyone in a town like Necoclí’s trying to get out, not the other way around.”

Jet punched coordinates into the autopilot. The bow swung several degrees to starboard and then steadied. She turned to Gerardo.

“If I leave this boat in your hands, you think you can find a home for it in Colombia so there’s no fallout for you, and no trace of it ever being found?”

Gerardo nodded, his eyes hooded. “Probably. There’s always a demand for fast boats at the right price.”

“Then consider this your retirement fund. I’ll take the dinghy, and you disappear. Deal?”

He smirked. “That would work.” He eyed the GPS. “Forty-five kilometers. We could easily do that in an hour.”

“You’re reading my mind.” Jet didn’t want to be on the boat one second longer than absolutely necessary. She adjusted the trim tabs and goosed the throttles a little more, and then eyed the fuel gauges and did a quick calculation. “You should have another hundred kilometers of range after you drop me off.”

“More than I’ll use. I have a few ideas of where I can find a new home for this thing.”

She appraised him. “I suspected you might.”

They settled in at a thirty-knot cruise, barely testing the big motors. The seas were relatively calm, fortunately, with a swell two to three feet and a mild headwind. Gerardo busied himself below, rummaging through the cabin in search of valuables. Jet watched the radar for any signs of other vessels, but the screen was clear. She closed her eyes as the breeze blew through her hair and drew deep breaths, the salt air fresh in the warm night.

When she opened her eyes, she moved back to the GPS and pulled up the roads around Necoclí so she would know where she was headed when she made landfall. There was a main road marked as a highway that led south from town, through Turbo all the way to Medellín. It looked like no more than two-hundred fifty miles to Santuario from Necoclí, but she had no idea what the road conditions would be like or how fast or often the buses ran. Her instinct was to expect the worst, in which case it could easily take twelve or more hours, which would put her in Santuario by late morning, presuming any buses operated at night. Jet knew that in many rural areas of Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, they didn’t, the danger from bandits being far too great.

Gerardo headed back to the helm and watched the bow make short work of the waves. The drone of the motors drowned out the beeping of the radar and whining adjustments of the autopilot. Before long they were nearing Necoclí, the GPS blinking their proximity as they approached. Jet pointed to a number of large blips on the radar.

“Should I be concerned?” she asked.

“No. Those are navy ships and cargo boats moored for the night. Just give them a wide berth, go dark and slow, and we should be fine.”

She switched off the running lights and backed off the throttles. The cigarette boat glided between the large ships like a ghost, its underwater exhausts a muted burble at barely idle speed. The glow of the town lights appeared out of a fine mist dead ahead, and she handed the wheel over to Gerardo.

“Get me within a few hundred meters and then take off,” she said as she hoisted her bag.

“You got it.”

As they approached the coastline, Gerardo shifted the transmissions into neutral, and the boat slowly drifted to a stop. Jet climbed into the dinghy and started the outboard, and then gave Gerardo a thumbs-up. He untied the skiff’s bow line, rolled it into a bundle, tossed it into the tender, and then Jet was pulling away into the night, the only evidence of her passage the hum of the small motor as she made for shore.

Jet beached the boat a few minutes later on a dark stretch of gray sand. She removed her bag and hopped onto the beach. After placing it safely away from the water, she returned to the dinghy and unscrewed the drain plug in the bottom, and then pushed it out into the mild surf as it began to fill with water. She watched as the waves pulled the hardy little boat out to sea, and turned as it drifted out of sight, already half full of water and not long for this world.

Jet made for what appeared to be a path through the jungle dead ahead. When she arrived at the opening, she saw that it led toward a row of houses down the beach, but looked like it let out beyond them. She worked her way along, staying low and avoiding making any noise. The clamor of radios playing and car motors revving from town gave the only evidence of civilization in the dense underbrush.

The trail connected to a road. She followed it past a cluster of houses that framed it, most dark now at ten p.m. She spotted a bicycle leaning up against the porch of a small house next to a postage-stamp-sized church. After glancing around to confirm she was alone, she darted over and wheeled it away.

A minute later she was pedaling easily toward the highway she knew lay on the other side of the hospital that lit up the night ahead of her. When she arrived at the parking lot, she asked a teenage security guard whether there were any buses running to Medellín at that hour.

He shook his head. “No. At night they stop at Turbo and don’t come this far. I think the last one to Medellín leaves there in about an hour, then nothing until morning.”

Jet frowned. “How far is Turbo?”

“Maybe thirty kilometers.”

She quickly did the math. If she could average a little more than a half kilometer per minute on the tired bike, she could just make it.

“Where do the buses stop?”

“There’s a place next to a market on the main road. You can’t miss it. It’s the only thing open after dark near the highway. That’s its last stop on the way out of town.” He looked at Jet. “It can be dangerous on the bus at night. You might want to wait until morning.”

“Thanks. I’ll do that,” she said, and then rode off into the night, forcing her legs to pump as fast as they would go and hoping that the bus would, like most things in Latin America, run late rather than early.

Chapter 37

Santiago, Chile

Alejandro yawned, another long day of stress finally at an end. Now that he was the head of the family business, he was working twelve to fourteen hours a day trying to integrate the Verdugo family’s infrastructure into the Soto’s, and it was wearing at him. He’d always had tremendous respect for his father’s stamina and vision in creating the criminal organization that now controlled all of Chile, but now that he was walking in his father’s shoes, he had even more.

The afternoon had been spent negotiating with elements of the military that were responsible for security at the ports – Valparaíso and San Antonio – to ensure that their shipments of cocaine to North America weren’t discovered by prying eyes, and that their containers of cash and gold made it through without inspection. Of course, everybody wanted to test the new boss’ authority, grind him for more, try to carve out a bigger piece of the same pie. It was perennial, and he didn’t take it personally, although he’d singled out two especially avaricious officers who would meet with ugly accidents over the next week. Their untimely demises would send a necessary message to the others, and he suspected that within a day of the discovery of their mangled bodies the others would see the wisdom of settling for what he’d proposed, rather than lacing their demands with veiled threats.