The Sam Gunn Omnibus (20 page)

that this is a
high-priority matter, and it has the backing of the highest levels of
authority.”

“Highest levels?” I asked. “Like the White House?”

She didn’t answer.

“The Oval Office? The President himself?”

Jones remained as silent and still as the Sphinx.

I heard myself say, “Not good enough, Ms. Jones. Anybody can claim they’re
working on orders from the White House. I’ve heard even fancier stories, in my
line of work. What’s going on?”

She merely shook her head, just the slightest of motions but clearly a
negative.

“Okay then.” I got up from my chair. “I’m catching the next flight to
Miami and going straight to the news media. They’ll be really interested to
hear that the CIA is backing a fraudulent tourist operation in Panama.”

“I wouldn’t try that if I were you,” Jones said.

Hector stood up beside me. “You threaten her, you’ve got to go through me.”

I gaped at him. “You don’t have to protect me. I can take care of myself.”

“I’m in this, too,” he insisted. “We’re partners.”

Jones threw her head back and laughed. “What you two are,” she said, “is a
couple of babes in the woods. And if you don’t start behaving yourselves, you’re
going to end up as babes in a swamp, feeding alligators.”

I unzipped my belly bag and pulled out my cellphone. “CNN, Atlanta, USA,”
I said to the phone system’s computer. “News desk.”

“Put it down,” Jones said.

I kept the phone pressed against my ear, listening to the computer chatter
as the system made the connection.

“Put it down,” she repeated. Her voice was flat, calm, yet menacing. I realized
that her black leather shoulder bag was big enough to hold a small arsenal.

“News,” I heard a tired voice answer.

Jones said, “We can cut a deal, if you’re reasonable.”

“News desk,” the voice repeated, a little irked.

I put the phone down and clicked it off. “What kind of a deal?”

Jones gestured with both her hands; she had long, graceful fingers, I noticed.
I sat down, then Hector took his seat beside me.

“God spare me the righteous amateurs,” Jones muttered. “You two have no
idea of what you’re messing with.”

“Then tell us,” I said.

“I can’t tell you,” she replied. “But if you want to, you can come back to
Colon with me and watch it happen.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Jones misinterpreted my silence as reluctance, so she went on, “You give me
your word you won’t go blowing off to the media or anybody else and you can
come with me and see what this is all about. After it’s over you can go back
home, safe and sound. Deal?”

I’d seen enough drug deals to know that she was showing us only the tip of
the iceberg. But I was curious, and—to tell the absolute truth—I was wondering
how Sam got himself mixed up with the CIA and whether he was in danger or not.

So I glanced at Hector, who remained silent, suspicious. But he looked at
me and his expression said that he’d back whatever move I made. So I said, “Deal.”

We couldn’t squeeze a third body into Hector’s training jet, and Jones
didn’t trust us out of her sight, so we flew back to Col6n again in her plane:
a twin-engined executive jet. I was beginning to feel like a Ping-Pong ball,
bouncing from Colon to Panama city and back again.

Hector was impressed with the plane’s luxurious interior. “Like a movie,”
he said, awed. Instead of sitting beside me, he asked to go up into the
cockpit. Jones gave him a friendly smile and said okay. I didn’t see him again
until we landed.

An unmarked Mercedes four-door sedan was waiting for us at the runway
ramp, the kind of luxury car the drug dealers call a “cocaine Ford.” Two men in
dark suits bustled Hector and me into the rear seat. Jones sat up front with
the driver. The other man followed us in another unmarked Mercedes. I felt
distinctly nervous.

But all we did is drive across the airport to Sam’s converted blimp
hangar.

“Mr. Gunn is doing a special flight this afternoon,” Jones told us
cryptically, half turned in her seat to face us. “Once it’s finished, you two
can go back to the States—
if
you promise not
to blow the whistle on Space Adventure Tours.”

“And if we don’t promise?” I asked. Instead of strong and forceful, my
voice came out as a little girl’s squeak, which made me disgusted with myself.

Jones didn’t answer; she merely reverted to her cobra-type smile.

We pulled up outside the hangar. Inside, I could see the big 747 with the
orbiter clamped atop it. Technicians were swarming all over it.

“Sam had his regular flight this morning,” I muttered to Hector. “Now they’re
getting the plane ready for another flight.”

Hector nodded. “Looks like.”

We sat and watched, while our Mercedes’s engine purred away so the car’s
air conditioning could stay on. Sam came out of an office up on the catwalk
above the hangar floor, with two slick-looking lawyerly types flanking him. He
was grinning and gabbing away a mile a minute, happy as a kid in a candy store.
Or so it seemed from this distance.

Jones opened her door. “You stay here,” she said—as much to the driver as
to us, I thought. “Don’t leave this car.”

So we sat in the car with the afternoon sun beating down on us and the air
conditioner laboring to keep the interior cool. Our driver was old enough to be
gray at the temples; solidly built, and I guessed that he was carrying a
nine-millimeter automatic in a shoulder holster under his dark suit jacket. He
looked perfectly comfortable and prepared to sit and watch over us for hours
and hours.

I was bursting to find out what was going on. There were more technicians
clambering over the ladders and scaffolds surrounding the piggyback planes than
I had ever seen in Sam’s employ. Most of them must be Jones’s people, I thought.
Something very special is being cooked up here.

Then a fleet of limousines drove into view, coming slowly across the
concrete rampway until they stopped in front of the hangar. Eleven limos, I counted.
One of them had stiff little flags attached to its front fenders: blue with
some kind of shield or seal in the middle, surrounded by six five-pointed white
stars.

Dozens of men jumped out of the limos, about half of them in olive-green
army fatigues. They didn’t look like Americans. Each soldier carried a
wicked-looking assault rifle with a curved magazine. The rest of the men wore
business suits that bulged beneath their armpits and the kind of dark sunglasses
that just screamed “bodyguard.”

They spread out, poking their noses—and rifle muzzles—into every corner of
the hangar. A couple of the suits came up to our car, where the glamorous Ms.
Jones greeted them with a big toothy smile. I couldn’t make out what she was
saying to them, but it sounded like she was speaking in Spanish.

Sam came bubbling over, practically drooling once he feasted his eyes on
Jones. He didn’t notice us inside the car, behind the heavily tinted windows.

At last, the leader of the suits turned to the team of soldiers
surrounding the beflagged limo and gave a curt nod. They opened the rear door
and out stepped a little girl, with big dark eyes and long hair that just had
to be naturally curly. She couldn’t have been more than ten years old. She
smiled at the soldiers, as if she knew them by name. She was very nicely
dressed in a one-piece jumpsuit of butter yellow.

She turned back and said
something to someone who was still inside the limo. She reached her hand in to
whoever it was. A tall, lean man of about fifty came out of the limo and
stretched to his full height. He was wearing army fatigues and smoking an
immense cigar.

My jaw fell open. “That’s
the president of Cuba!” I gasped. “The man who took over when Castro died.”

“No,” Hector corrected me.
“He’s the man who took over after the bloodbath in Havana when Castro died.”

“That must be his
daughter.”

“What’re they doing
here?” Hector wondered.

“Taking one of Sam’s
phony rides into space,” I said. “I wonder if they know it’s a phony?”

Hector turned to face me.
“Maybe it’s not.”

“Not what?”

“Not a phony,” he said
grimly. “Maybe they’re going to have an accident up there. On purpose.”

It hit me like a shot of
pure heroin. “They’re going to assassinate the president of Cuba!”

“And make it look like
an accident.”

“Oh my god!”

The driver turned
slightly to tell us, “Don’t get any crazy ideas—”

He never got any
further. I jammed my thumbs into his carotids and held on. In a few seconds he
was unconscious.

“Where’d you learn that?”
Hector asked, his tone somewhere between amazement and admiration.

“South Philadelphia,” I answered
as I yanked the nine-millimeter from the driver’s holster. “Come on.”

Hector grasped my
shoulder. “You’re not going to get far in a shoot-out.”

He was right, dammit. I had
to think fast. Outside, I could see Jones leading the president of Cuba and his
daughter toward the plane. Half the Cuban security force walked a respectful
distance behind them, the other half was deployed on either side of them.

“Most of those ground
crew personnel must be security guys from the

States,” Hector pointed
out. “Must be enough firepower out there to start World War III.”

My eye lit on Sam. He
was still standing in the sunshine of the ramp, outside the hangar, hardly more
than ten meters from our car.

“Come on,” I said,
leaning past the unconscious driver to pop the door lock.

I stuffed the pistol in
my belly bag, keeping the bag unzippered so I could grab the gun quickly if I needed
to.

Sam turned as we
approached him. He looked surprised, then delighted.

“Ramona!” he said with a
big grin. “I thought you two had gone back to the States.”

“Not yet,” I said
grimly. “We’re taking this flight with you.”

For an instant Sam
looked puzzled, but then he said, “Great. Come on, you can ride in the 747 with
me.”

“You’re not going aboard
the orbiter?”

“Not this flight,” Sam
said easily.

Of course not, I thought.
On this flight the orbiter’s really going to be released from the 747. Instead
of going into space, as Sam promised, it was going to crash into the Caribbean.
With the president of Cuba aboard. And his ten-year-old daughter.

“Sam, how could you do
this?” I asked as we walked into the hangar.

“Listen, I was just as
surprised as you would be when the State Department asked me to do it.”

“With his little
daughter, too.”

We reached the ladder. “It
was his daughter’s idea,” Sam said. “She wanted to take the space ride. Poppa’s
only doing this to please his little girl—and for the international publicity,
of course.”

With Sam leading the way
we climbed up the ladder into the 747. Its interior was strictly utilitarian:
no fancy decor. Most of the cavernous passenger cabin was empty. There were
only seats up in the first-class section, below the cockpit. Sam, Hector and I went
up the spiral stairs and entered the cockpit, where a young woman in a pilot’s
uniform was already sitting in the right-hand seat.

“Can you fly this plane?”
I asked Hector.

He stared at the control
panels; the gauges and buttons and keypads seemed to stretch for miles. Looking
out the windshield, I saw we were already so high up we might as well have been
on oxygen.

“I’ve got a multiengine
license,” Hector muttered.

“But can you fly
this
plane?” I insisted.

He nodded tightly. “I can fly
anything.”

Sam put on a quizzical look. “Why
should he have to fly? I’m going to pilot this mission myself and I’ve got a
qualified copilot here.”

I
pulled the pistol
from my belly bag and pointed it at the copilot. “Get out,” I said. “Hector,
you take her place.”

She stared at me, wide-eyed,
frozen.

“Vamos,” Sam said, in the most
un-Spanish accent I’d ever heard. The woman slipped out of the copilot’s chair.

“What’s this all about?” Sam asked,
more intrigued than scared. “Why the toy cannon?”

I
pointed the gun
at him. “Sam, you’re going to fly this plane just the way you would for any of
your tourist flights. No more and no less.”

He gave me one of his lopsided
grins. “Sure. What else?”

There
were two jump seats behind the pilots’ chairs. I took one and Sam’s erstwhile
copilot the other. I kept the pistol in my hand as we rolled out of the hangar,
lit up the engines, and taxied to the runway.