The Accountant's Story (19 page)

My second wife went with our ten-year-old son, José Roberto, to the beautiful vacation city of Cartagena. We owned a home there and a boat. Many members of our family were there, so my wife gave the house to some of them and stayed at a nearby hotel. One morning she said she wasn’t feeling well because she had a fever and sent José Roberto with his aunts to cruise on the boat. José Roberto was a fine boy and didn’t want to leave his mother alone, so when they reached the boat he started crying and complaining he wanted to go home. His aunts were insistent but finally he ran back to the hotel. He knocked hard on the door to her room but nobody opened it. He called down to the reception and made everybody worry: “I’m the son of Roberto Escobar and my mother is in this room and she isn’t answering. This morning she had a fever and I’m worried she is dying.” Deep inside, though, he wanted to find out the truth of a feeling he had.

When the security received no response to knocking they opened the door with the master key. Nobody was there. José Roberto told them that his aunt was staying in another room and thought, “Maybe my mother is there.”

And again, they knocked, and again no answer. They opened the door and my wife was in the Jacuzzi with another man. José Roberto was stunned. She said to him, “Please don’t say anything to your father. You don’t understand.”

José Roberto was a pretty smart kid, and kept quiet. But instead he sent me a letter telling me this whole story. I was hurt terribly when I received this letter but there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing. I thought women were just like money; neither can truly belong to you. If I said anything against her she might call the police and tell them where we were staying. She had access to much of the money. She knew the bank accounts, she knew the safe combinations. She had our son with her. So I had to lie there at night wondering what was going on and being able to do nothing about it. She was a beautiful woman, but the love and compassion I had for her quickly disappeared. Still, though, to this day, it remains unclear to me why she did that. I was a formidable husband to her, she had love, money, and everything necessary for happiness.

This was part of our lives as fugitives. There were so many feelings about being out of touch with the rest of the world and helpless to change our situation. We got our news from the television or during phone calls with our families. Our relatives would read the newspapers to us, which sometimes told us where the government thought we were staying, or where they were searching for us. Every day, every minute, our lives were up for grabs. Every time we heard an airplane approach we stopped and waited. We lived our lives ready to leave instantly.

About three months after this escape we were staying in an old house at the top of a mountain. And it happened once again. I lay down to sleep and the small priest visited me. This time I told Pablo, “I got that strange feeling again. I think they are going to be here tomorrow.”

After our last experience Pablo believed my warning. He ordered our people to pack the mules with food and water, the guns were made ready, and we all slept lightly. In the morning we got a call from a contact in the police. “The police know where you are,” he said. “They are going to come up there.” We got up on the mules and climbed into the mountains. Several of our employees stayed behind and were there when the police arrived shooting. The police killed the groundskeepers and the farmers.

I am not usually a person who believes in the mystical world, but I have experienced the warnings of this priest. I don’t know why he comes to me. He doesn’t come each time my life is in danger. There have been very bad situations that have happened with no warning. But when he does come danger follows him. So I’ve learned to listen to his warnings.

Our most difficult escape took place in 1990. This time I got the greatest warning of all from the priest that danger was coming. We were at a farm called Aquitania with about forty people. It was about a hundred miles from Medellín, in the jungle. About four in the morning we got notice from the outer security that the police were about six miles away and coming fast. Because there were so many of us, instead of a hideout, we had built a house underground about two miles away, deeper in the jungle.

An employee of Pablo’s named Godoy lived in the jungle and people believed he sold wood to earn his living, but for his real job he would build hiding places for us and guide us through the jungle. The underground house he had built was amazing. People could hide there for days if needed. The moment we got the word we ran for this shelter. Godoy took us there. We could hear the helicopters behind us shooting at the place we had abandoned. At those times you never stop to wonder how they could find you, but it was clear we had a traitor in the organization. With the rewards for Pablo and myself it’s not surprising. We reached the underground house and secreted ourselves there for the rest of the night. The next afternoon Pablo sent Godoy to his own house, which was not too far from our hiding spot, to find out as much as possible. Godoy looked like a simple workingman so he could move about without being suspect. The police had passed the whole day searching the area without finding much. About 6
P.M.
the police showed up at Godoy’s farm and asked him questions. “I live here with my family,” he told them. “I work with wood. I produce a little coffee to sell to the city.” The police looked around for an hour but left when he told them he wanted to have dinner with his wife and his kids. He was not suspected.

As soon as the police cleared the area Godoy called me on the radio. “They left my place ten minutes ago. Be careful. They are very close.” Even though the hiding place was not visible from the ground, because we did not know who had betrayed us we didn’t know how much information the police had gotten. Only a very few people knew about this underground house, but if one of them had talked to the police we would be trapped with no way to run. We knew that it was better to have a chance to get away than to be trapped underground. We moved outside and gathered our supplies. While Pablo was deciding when to go we heard a helicopter flying nearby and looked up at it through the trees. There we saw a terrible sight.

One of our security people, El Negro, was hanging by his feet out the door of the helicopter. When we saw El Negro flying from his feet we knew we had to run, because he had helped Godoy build the hideout. Later we found out what had happened. El Negro had been captured by the police at a farm about a mile below us. They tied his legs and took him up in the helicopter and hung him outside, telling him, “If you don’t tell us where Pablo is we will drop you right now, motherfucker.”

El Negro screamed that he would talk and they saved him. He wasn’t a traitor but they were going to kill him. When they landed on the ground he started walking with them toward the underground place. But there was a miscommunication between the police walking with El Negro and the army searching for us. The army in the helicopters started shooting at the police on the ground, because they thought it was Pablo and his crew. The police on the ground started firing back. Everybody was shooting at everybody, and we took advantage of the gunfight and fled to the deepness of the jungle. El Negro also escaped, and made it to a nearby town where no one knew who he was, and the town’s priest hid him in his residence so he wouldn’t get murdered. It was twenty days later that El Negro made it back to Medellín.

Godoy led our escape. Among the forty people who ran with us were our loyal and trusted friend Otto, our cook named Gordo, and a very good soccer player we gave the name of a great Argentine soccer player. We didn’t follow an established path because, as Godoy told us, “The police won’t come this way.” It was tougher, though, climbing up a mountain covered with trees and bushes. We walked for about five hours in the night until we got into guerrilla territory. That first night about twenty of our people got separated and lost, so we arrived at a small house with the remaining twenty fighting people. We believed some of the others would find us there. A few did as the hours went by. This house was lived in by an older woman whose son was a guerrilla. At first they got scared because they thought we were the police, but when they were introduced to Pablo they relaxed. The message was simple: Many Colombians had great reason to fear the police more than drug traffickers.

Our clothes had been ripped badly by the underbrush we’d run through. This woman gave me a uniform from her son, who must have been at least six and a half feet tall. It was so big over me that I had to tie it at the ankles and use rope around the waist to hold it up.

I was carrying with me as much as $500,000 cash. I always carried money, knowing that in many situations it is much more valuable than weapons. As we sat eating the soup made for us a campesino showed up. We paid him $100,000 to lead us out of the jungle. But when we finally got ready to go Pablo realized that Otto, our loyal trusted friend, was still lost. In our escape Otto had been next to Pablo much of the time, ready to protect him, but had disappeared in the night jungle. “I know there are a lot of guys missing,” Pablo said. “But I won’t leave this jungle without Otto.” Pablo didn’t care if the police were coming; he wasn’t going to leave Otto behind. So Pablo and I, one other person, and the campesino agreed to go back and search for him. We took gas lamps with us and walked in a straight line, one behind the other. In the distance we could hear the helicopters shooting blindly into the jungle. The bullets zipping through the leaves made a snapping sound. Every few minutes we would yell for Otto. Finally we heard him answer back, saying he was hurt. I was learning the jungle; I found out that sound travels so well it’s hard to know where it is coming from. The peasant told us to be silent and led the search. It took almost an hour to climb through the vines to find Otto. He’d tripped and fallen into a deep hole. His face was cut up and we thought his arm was broken. It took us all working together another hour to cut him free from the grip of the jungle.

We left the farmhouse the next night. I left the people $50,000. They had never seen American dollars before and I had to explain to them what they were. I warned them to wait a couple of months, then go to town and exchange it a little at a time. I explained that if they exchanged too much they would attract attention, and if the police found out where they got the money they could be killed. Before leaving, we had radioed ahead to one of our people to meet us at a place with the supplies we would need. He told us that the army and the police were everywhere, it was a major search, and it would be better to stay hiding in the jungle for a while. We were led through the jungle for several days to a dirt road, then handed a map that would take us to a bridge that crossed over the River Samaná to a safe place.

At that road our people met us with those supplies we needed to stay safely in the jungle—food, clothing, sleeping bags, and medicine, all those tools of survival. Then we started walking again. My life on the bicycle had given me strong legs and good energy, but it was a hard walk. Some of our people struggled keeping up with us. In two days we found another small house and approached it. A man and a woman lived there with their two grown sons. Pablo told those people we were part of the guerrillas. No, the man said, “I know who you guys are because they’re talking about you everywhere.” These people didn’t have electricity; they had only a battery-run radio, and no TV. On their radio they heard the news that Pablo Escobar and his brother were in the jungle and that the government was offering a $10 million reward for each of us. “Don’t worry,” they told us. “We’re not interested in anything to do with the government.” They invited us to stay at their house and the woman cooked a meal for all of us on wood. We agreed to spend the night there.

I woke about four in the morning and watched silently as one of the sons left and walked into the jungle. I woke Pablo and told him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Wait until a more normal hour and we’ll ask where he went.”

Before everybody woke up I felt restless. I couldn’t wait. An hour later I got up and started making noise, waking everyone. I said casually to the couple, “Oh, where’s your other son?”

The father said that he’d gone to the nearest neighbor to get an ax to chop the wood needed for cooking. “We want to make you a nice lunch so we need more wood to cook for all of you.”

In the position we were in we couldn’t trust people we didn’t know. There was a lake close by and we went there to wash up. As we went back toward the house I saw a big pile of cut wood stacked up high. So I knew then that this man was lying.

Pablo said to me, “Don’t show worry.” To everyone else he said nonchalantly, “Let’s have something to eat. Then we can move.” That was typical Pablo calm. But while we were eating a plane flew high up above us, way off the usual route. I believed it was from the army but Pablo questioned that. “It’s so high, how can you think that?”

But I did. “You know me, man. Sometimes I feel things.” This was different. But still I had that bad feeling. A little bit later there was a helicopter flying nearby. We heard it, but didn’t see it. When I asked the father about the son, he said he would return that night. That was curious, I thought. Before he said that the son would be back with an ax to make lunch and now he’s saying he’ll come back at night? I told Pablo, “We gotta go. I don’t want to make a big deal, but I think the son left and went to the next town to talk to the people who are looking for us.”

I was ready to go but still Pablo preferred to wait. I decided to start walking with the few people who wanted to walk with me. Pablo stayed and we agreed to keep close contact on the radios. We had been walking about an hour when we saw another helicopter coming near us. We hid. This was an army helicopter and it was flying so low I could see the people inside—and one of them was the son. I called Pablo and told him to get out right away. “I saw the son riding in the helicopter. They’re coming.”

Pablo and our men ran into the jungle. The helicopter approached but didn’t see them. The police helicopters would randomly shoot all the time at anything, but the army only fired at targets they could see. We met up with Pablo and the rest of the group at the River Samaná bridge. There were twelve of us. As we were about to go over it we saw army guys coming from the other side. They didn’t see us so we moved away quietly. We couldn’t use the bridge so we had to swim across the river about a mile away. It was very difficult to get across carrying all our supplies. The river was wild. It carried us along for about three miles. One of our men with the nickname Ears, because he had big ears, almost drowned. Pablo was a very good swimmer and went to save him. Ears grabbed Pablo around his neck and almost dragged him under, but Pablo was able to save himself and Ears, but just.