“One example. You give me a new name, new passport. Even if it’s perfect, NSA will eventually run a face scan, compare the passport photo to its database. They’ll match my new name with my old face. They won’t understand why. They’ll decide they’d better find out. They’ll look for me. And when they look, they find.”
“Plastic surgery. We’ll send you to Thailand. There are ways to change your facial features and beat the software without making you look too strange.”
He wanted to believe that she’d come to him because he had some special skill. But he knew the truth. She’d stumbled across him somehow, realized he was desperate enough to say yes.
“I can’t betray my country. If you’re working for Russia, some enemy of the United States, tell me now so I can walk away.”
She shook her head. “It’s not an enemy. All I can tell you. You want to be reassured like a child, find another job. Or drink yourself to death. It’s no concern to me.”
He closed his eyes, wondered if she’d still be real when he opened them.
She was. “All right.”
She extended a hand. He took it. The gesture somehow felt both absurd and necessary. “You’ll need a new name.”
“Duke. Abraham Duke.”
GUATEMALA CITY
P
ain and consciousness crossed the line nose-to-nose, too close to call. Wells awoke with the uncanny feeling that someone was vacuuming his brain through his right ear. The vacuum quieted to a steady buzz, a Harley engine on a distant highway, and Wells remembered. The gate. The guard.
Montoya.
Wells collected himself. He’d never entirely understood the expression before. Putting together body and mind, making sure every part still worked. No broken bones, though his right hand seemed stuck. He tilted his head slowly down. His forearm was cuffed to the chair where he sat. He had been parked at a long wooden table in the house’s formal dining room. A painting of Montoya and a younger woman filled one wall, a lusty Old Master knockoff. The couple wore modern clothes, a suit and dress, but they bore the self-satisfied smiles of seventeenth-century royalty.
Wells wondered if he ought to tip the chair over, try to free himself, but he had no next move. Better to stay upright. He reached behind his head with his left hand, touched fingertips to skull. Lightly. Blood seeped from his torn scalp. A swollen ridge of bone ran along the side of his head like an old-style three-dimensional plastic topographic map. But no fracture. He had a couple rough days ahead, but unless he had a brain bleed, he’d be fine.
Wells reached down for his knife and flashlight. Both gone. Montoya hadn’t survived so long by making stupid mistakes. Wells wished he understood why the Colombian was treating him this way. He wanted to consider the possibilities, but the buzzing in his ear crowded his thoughts. After a minute, he gave up, closed his eyes.
—
A creaking door woke him. He turned. His brain wasn’t ready for rapid movements. Bile filled his mouth. He choked it down before it seeped from his lips.
“Mr. Wells.” The ceiling lights flicked on. A dog’s nails scrabbled across the floor. Montoya came around, took the chair next to Wells. A Doberman followed, sat at his feet. Montoya carried a plastic gallon jug of water and two cups. He had changed his clothes. Now he wore a polo shirt, jeans, buttery brown loafers. Like an investment banker on Saturday. Wells had seen this stylishness before in men of extreme violence. He disliked it. It was an affectation that didn’t make the torture or murder less real.
Montoya splashed water into the cups, gave Wells one, drank from the other. A simple way of proving the liquid wasn’t drugged. Wells sipped cautiously, knowing he’d vomit if he drank too fast. Head injuries went better on empty stomachs.
“None of this is necessary,” he said. “I’m only here because you called Vinny.”
“The Parque was my little joke. I know who you are, I knew you would have no trouble with those boys. This”—Montoya tapped his head—“I didn’t intend. Pedro, my guard, he saw you come to the gate, he overreacted.”
Wells closed his eyes and marveled at the world’s stupidity. And his own. If he’d only listened to the guards when they told him to wait. But his adrenaline had been shouting too loudly. Or maybe Montoya was lying. Maybe that little love tap had been his way of showing Wells he was in charge. “He didn’t see you reaching to shake my hand?”
“It seems not. No matter. You’re here now.” Montoya’s English carried only a trace of an accent. He must have had a tutor growing up. He pulled a penlight from his pocket. “Open your eyes wide.” He shined the light into Wells’s eyes. The glare was agony, but Wells was glad for the field medicine.
“Your pupils are normal.” Meaning that Wells wasn’t hemorrhaging. “I’m going to uncuff you. I understand if you’re upset, but you should know that Mickey is very loyal.” The dog grunted in agreement as Montoya popped the cuff. “May I tell you why you’re here?”
“Tell me whatever you like.” Wells poured himself a fresh glass of water. He wanted this foolishness over, so he could go back to his hotel and sleep, if the buzz in his ears would let him.
“Your former director and I knew each other in Bogotá. This was late eighties, early nineties. When he was kidnapped.” Duto had been taken hostage for two months while he served as a case officer in Colombia, a fact almost no one outside the agency knew.
“He said you were one of his agents.”
“I was in the army. We traded information about the FARC. I called him
comandante
as a joke
.
He didn’t run me any more than I ran him. In fact, I helped find him when he was taken.”
“Thought that was an SF job.”
“Without us, they’d never have found him.”
A bit of revisionist history that might even be true. “What about you?” Though Wells hardly needed to ask. Montoya’s smooth English and white skin marked him as Colombian aristocracy.
“I grew up in Bogotá. All I wanted to do my whole life was fight the scum.”
“The guerrillas trying to keep their families alive, you mean.”
“Communist filth who think stealing is easier than working.”
Mickey the Doberman sensed his master’s irritation and growled. Time to move to safer conversational ground. In truth, Wells knew little about the Colombian civil war.
“How long were you in the army?”
“I resigned in ’93. Not my choice.”
“You have aspirin, Juan Pablo? Advil?”
Montoya rose. Mickey stood to follow, but Montoya grunted in Spanish, and the dog sat down. No wonder Montoya hadn’t worried about taking off the handcuffs. Wells was a prisoner here with or without them. He stared at the painting of Montoya until the man himself came back. “Ibuprofen or Vicodin?” Montoya rattled the pills like a game-show host offering a deal.
Wells dry-swallowed four Advil. “You were telling me why you called Duto.”
“I was telling you about 1993. My nickname.” Montoya didn’t wait for an answer. “Diecisiete
.
Means seventeen. I was leading a company, chasing a FARC platoon that had hit one of our patrols. The village was called Buenaventura. The peasants there, they sympathized with the scum. Wouldn’t tell us anything. I knew they were lying, but I decided not to hurt them.”
Wells held his head very still.
“A kilometer after we left, an ambush. Bombs, sniper, multiple fields of fire. Very professional. They knew we were coming. No question they set up while we were inside the village. It took three hours to run them off. I lost four men, five more wounded, eight minor injuries. Seventeen. I turned around, brought my company back to Buenaventura.”
Montoya poured himself a glass of water. Wells saw that he’d told this story before. That he enjoyed it, wanted Wells to ask questions, play a role. Wells didn’t speak. Finally, Montoya drank his water and went on.
“This was about ten p.m. We went into seventeen houses, told the fathers, you or your oldest son. Only one tried to give us his son. Of course, we didn’t take the boy. I lined those seventeen lying bastards up in the square, the middle of town. The plaza. I brought out the whole village. I told them, these soldiers are my family. My family dies, your families die. At midnight we lined them up, shot them all. Except the one coward. Him I beat to death myself. He cried for mercy all the way down.”
“You showed him.”
“Word got out and the human-rights
coños
made a fuss. They called me Diecisiete. My colonel made me resign. I was kind. I should have burned the whole village. They set us up, they knew it.”
“I hope you don’t stay up late waiting for your Peace Prize.”
“Afterwards, a friend of a friend came calling. From Medellín. He told me he wanted me to work for him, he needed men like me. I decided if the army wouldn’t have me, I might as well. This was before the Mexicans got in the way, all the money came to Colombia. You can’t imagine. This man had a room in his basement filled with pallets of bills. Waist-high, hundreds of millions of dollars waiting to be laundered.”
Again Montoya stopped, waiting for Wells to ask about the life. Give him a chance to brag about the hookers, the cars, the parties, Pablo Escobar
.
“Then the Mexicans took over. Meth got popular—they didn’t need us for that, they made it themselves in the desert. Plus we made a mistake and let them into our networks. Another mistake, we paid with product rather than cash. And, the truth, they were harder than we were. For us, the violence was part of business. The Mexicans liked killing. I saw the future. In 1999 I hooked up with the Sinaloas.”
“And stayed in touch with Vinny.”
“Every so often, he had a question for me. Mainly political. Which generals were the greediest, which ones we couldn’t buy. After September eleventh, he asked me to tell him if the Muslims paid the cartels to sneak anyone over the border. Though the cartels would never have agreed. They had way more money than those crazy Arabs, and they didn’t want war with the United States.”
“In return.”
“Three times the narcos came close, three times Vinny made sure I knew.”
An answer that explained why Wells was here. Montoya wasn’t just another agent whom Duto had run twenty years before. He was a contract killer whom Duto had kept as an off-the-books source. And Duto had blown three federal drug investigations to protect him.
Inside Langley, no one cared about the drug war. It was viewed as a nuisance at best, a threat to regional stability at worst. But senators couldn’t work with cocaine traffickers. Montoya was a piece of Duto’s past, and Duto had expected he’d stay there. His phone call had no doubt come as an unpleasant surprise. Duto needed to know what Montoya wanted, whether he was trying a backdoor blackmail scheme, but he couldn’t meet Montoya in person. Thus Wells was beating up kids in Guatemala City.
“When was the last time you talked to Duto?”
“Two thousand seven. By then, the Zetas had taken over. The worst of all. Near the border, they had ranches where they dissolved corpses in acid. Not always corpses, either. Sometimes the men were still alive.”
Listening to Montoya, Wells felt like a coral reef in a befouled sea, the world’s ugliness covering him, seeping through him. “So you ran.”
“The Zetas told us, disappear or die. The men I worked for had no choice. They had nowhere to go, and they were too proud anyway. I had money, a passport. I didn’t care about a narco ballad for my glorious death. I went to Cuba, ended up here.”
“You’re not on anybody’s list?”
“Everyone I worked for is dead. I didn’t snitch and I didn’t kill anyone’s family, except once. Maybe one day someone’s cousin will come for me. We’re only two hundred kilometers from Mexico. Meantime, I enjoy my life. I have a new wife.” He nodded at the painting. “We just found out she’s pregnant. Twins.”
“Congratulations.” Wells almost envied Montoya his psychopathy. The Colombian had tossed his crimes aside as easily as a bag of garbage. Or leftover bones. Wells wondered if Montoya’s dreams were as pallid as Wells’s own. He wouldn’t ask. He wanted nothing in common with this man. “So you hadn’t talked to Duto in all these years—why call him now?”
“In Mexico, I worked with a man named Eduardo Nuñez. Peruvian. When I left, he decided to disappear also. We only saw each other once more. But we trusted each other. We stayed in touch, knew how to find each other. A while ago, he told me he had something. That an American named Hank had put a group together, and Eduardo had told him about me. I wasn’t interested, but I wanted to see this guy, if he was any threat. I said okay, if he comes to Guatemala we can meet. A couple weeks later, he called me.”
“You make him go to the Parque Central?”
Montoya smiled. “He was smarter than you. We met in the Radisson
.
He was in his early forties, I think. Medium height, medium weight. Horn-rim glasses and a baseball cap. Nothing in his face to remember.”
“A good spy.”
“We met in his suite. Straightaway he showed me two passports, U.S. and Australian. He wanted me to see the quality. They were good. Better than any I’d seen.
The people I work for make your friends in Mexico look poor. I need professionals for a professional operation, and I’d like you involved.
”
“He said
people
? Not agency, not government,
people
.” The choice of word didn’t necessarily mean anything, but Wells wanted to be sure.
“Yes.
People.
I asked for specifics. He said we could talk about money, but that he couldn’t tell me about his group. Not who was financing it. Not who or what they might be targeting, not unless I agreed.”
“Timing?”
“He was vague. Said they’d been running for a while, but now they were shifting gears. I asked if it would be one operation. He said no, several, different levels of complexity. I asked him what he wanted me to do and he said the work would be familiar. I told him I couldn’t do anything in Mexico or Central America or Colombia, I was too well known, and he said that wouldn’t be a problem.”
“But no hint to the targets. Or type of ops.”
Montoya shook his head. “I’ll admit, I was intrigued.”
“Assuming it was real.”
“Eduardo had known Hank before, and he wasn’t the type to fall for a scam. And Hank looked real to me. Agency or ex. I saw case officers in Colombia, not just Duto, and he had the same air.”
“Which is what, in your opinion? Like he was dangerous?”
“No. In my experience, very few CIA are personally dangerous. Or brave. The
comandante
was an exception. He went on raids with us, and after the Special Forces rescued him, the first thing he said to them was—”
“What took you pricks so long?” Shafer had told Wells the story.
Montoya smiled, his first real smile of the night. “
Sí.
No, what all CIA have in common is this attitude that you’re in control. You make me an offer, you don’t care whether I take it. I don’t, someone else will. And if it all blows up in the end, you go to another city, at another station. It’s my life, my country. For you, it’s a game, a job.”
The description had been more true before September 11, Wells thought. The stakes were higher now, and case officers faced more personal danger. But let Montoya think what he liked. “That’s how this man Hank came across?”
“Yes. One more reason I didn’t think he was faking. The simplest of all. He had to know that if he tried to take advantage of me, I’d make him pay. I told him I’d think it over, the next day I told him I wasn’t interested. That was it. He didn’t push. Never contacted me again. Then, two weeks ago, Eduardo called. He said, Juan Pablo, you won’t believe this. The American wants us to kill a station chief. I said,
Don’t. If you do this, the CIA, they chase you forever.
He wanted to talk about it. I told him not over the phone. He was supposed to come to Guatemala last week. He didn’t show up, didn’t call. I don’t know if he’s dead, or still on the operation, or he ran.”