On the Loose (16 page)

She stared at him, taken aback by his generosity.

“Your compliments?” She wasn't sure she quite understood.

“The tape out of your camera, of course, will not be going with you,” he said, rising from his chair and walking back over to his desk. “Other than that, you may avail yourself of the amenities, and by this time tomorrow night, you will be back in New Mexico, if you wish.”

If she wished. New Mexico. Oh, God, she was so ready to go home. The week had been bizarrely wild, so totally unexpected, and completely out of her control. She swore to God, if she could just get home, she would never, ever...ever...

Except that was her film on that tape, her Cannes entry.

“Don't overthink it, Ms. Robbins. Go home,” Campos said, popping the tape out of her camera and dropping it into his pocket. “And now if you'll excuse me.”

She was going to overthink it, she thought, watching him leave. She overthought everything.

He walked out the door and was back on the phone before he reached the stairs. She heard him talking to someone in the kitchen, and within minutes of his departure, the woman, Isidora, brought a tray holding hot coffee, hot soup, and a small basket of hot bread smelling fresh out of the oven.

She took a bite of a soft, buttery slice, then dipped it in the soup and took another bite—and she wondered, could she be bought off with incredible food and safe passage?

The smart answer was an unequivocal yes.

So why was she equivocating?

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

Standing in the middle of his main warehouse, Campos looked down at the pallet full of weapons and the suitcases his men had un-loaded from the Salvadoran army's deuce-and-a-half.

“What do you mean Honoria York-Lytton and her bodyguard are missing?”

“They didn't show up with the convoy,” Jake repeated, smoothing his hand over the map he had laid out on top of one of the rifle crates. “I went over every inch of the route with the Salvadoran captain, and he thinks York-Lytton and Rydell wound up here.” He put his finger on a section of tight turns on the map.

“And what in the hell are they doing there?” Campos asked, putting his finger on the map three inches below Jake's. “When they are supposed to be here?”

“The captain thinks they missed the turn we called in for the detour. There are two side roads coming off the main road in that area. In the kind of rain we're having tonight, it would be easy to take the first turn instead of the second. The turns are less than twenty meters apart.”

Campos knew that. He knew everything about Morazán Province, especially the roads. The track above the streambed was dangerous, even in dry weather. Rydell would be lucky not to end up at the bottom of a ravine.

Goddammit.

York-Lytton and her bodyguard had disappeared—with his goddamn briefcase. It was the first thing he'd asked for, and the only thing no one had been able to produce.

“What about all this?” he asked, gesturing at the Louis Vuitton luggage piled off to one side of the pallet. “What in the hell is all this?”

The whole damn pallet was nothing short of alarming, the last kind of cargo anyone wanted showing up in their backyard—but he'd expected LAWs and cases of ammunition. He had not expected five extra-large Louis Vuitton suitcases.

“They all have Honoria York-Lytton's name on them,” Jake said.

“They weren't on the manifest.” And unless the woman was moving her whole damn household to Morazán, he didn't know what in the hell could be in them, and that was unacceptable.

“Open them up.”

“They're locked,” Jake said. “And she's here as an agent of the U.S. State Department, not some tourist.”

“I don't give a damn.”

“Then they're open,” Jake said, pulling a small set of bolt cutters out of his pocket.

Which was as it should be. Jake had known exactly what they were going to do with any locked suitcases. The only concession the State Department connection had bought Ms. York-Lytton was the care Jake was taking to get into the damn things. If she'd been a tourist, he'd have taken a knife to Vuitton's finest, before he let any damned mystery luggage lie around in one of his buildings.

While Jake cut locks down the line, Campos unzipped the first suitcase.

And then he stood back and stared.

Holy shit.

The night had been full of amazing things: Sister Julia's letter, Diego Garcia's pistol, Lily Robbins's camera, Honoria York-Lytton and her bodyguard's disappearance off the face of the earth with his two million dollars, and Ms. York-Lytton's suitcases.

Good God.

“It's cocaine,” he said.

“It sure as hell is,” Jake confirmed, zipping open the second suitcase. “Here, too.”

Campos was looking down at fifty kilos of cocaine carefully packed in a large piece of luggage—his cocaine—It was a miracle, a god-blessed miracle on a night full of amazing things.

“The others?” he asked Jake, who was opening suitcases as quickly as he cut the locks off.

“Fifty keys apiece, boss, for the full load of two hundred and fifty not-so-jacked kilos of coke. We're back in business.”

Now if he only had his frigging two million dollars, life would be good.

“So what do you think happened here?” It wasn't often that goods stolen in Colombia were hand-delivered to his front door in Morazán by the Salvadoran army, especially illegal stolen goods.

“I think Dobbs's guys jumped the gun and had this load intercepted ahead of schedule. Dobbs got wind of it and was smart enough to know he needed to get it back in the pipeline ASAP, before Langley found out he'd fucked up, and there was this York-Lytton woman with a C-130 authorized out of State, coming through Panama with a load of weapons with just enough room left on the pallet to top it off with two hundred and fifty keys of cocaine.”

Yes, that's what Campos figured, too. None of the cocaine he dealt with ever actually made it to the streets of the United States, but the Agency usually let it get a helluva lot farther away from him than Exaltación, before things went wrong. That's how he stayed alive.

“We're having a lucky day, Campos.”

Lucky, lucky day. Eight stitches, fricasseed Mercedes, dead pilot, lost briefcase, and epic rain stacked up against the return of his load and the unexpected arrival of Lily Robbins—he thought Jake was being overly optimistic.

“We're still missing two million dollars.”

“The night's young.”

Not that young.

Campos checked his watch. It was ten o'clock. If his two million dollars showed up before sun-rise, he'd have to start believing in miracles, and that was really going to go against the grain.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

Carolina, Morazán Province, El Salvador

“I hate the fucking rain.”

Irena glanced over at Ari where he was standing by the window of their room in the Hotel Grande and silently agreed. They'd barely made it to the small town closest to Campos's plantation before a literal wall of water had dropped out of the sky and forced them to halt.

If they'd been caught in flight, it could have been a disaster. The storm was freakish, much worse than Hans had predicted with his weather report.

An hour earlier, from Sona, Hans had given them a confirmation on Rydell's destination: Alejandro Campos's plantation south of the Torola River. She and Ari both had the location locked into their GPS devices, along with maps of their objective area. Hans had found a landing site for the Hughes near the town of Carolina, and the farmer who owned the field had brought them into town. Ari and she had planned on picking up their rental car at the hotel and immediately leaving again.

The rain had changed everything, and she was not pleased. She'd come all this way for the shot, one shot, only to be stopped cold short of her objective.

She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray and threaded another oiled patch through her cleaning rod. She'd finished going over her M4 and set it back in its case. Her 1911 was perfectly clean and maintained as well, but the familiar routine of running patches kept her focused on the job, kept her thoughts from straying too far, kept her fears at bay.

Anastasia.

Irena spoiled the child. Ari said so, the only one who dared, the only one who knew, other than Anastasia's caretakers. But Ari spoiled her as well.

“It's time to go to Paris,” she said.

After a moment of silence, she looked up and found him watching her, his gaze considering, his posture very quiet where he stood by the window, very still.

“Is that what this is all about?” he asked. “Is Rydell her father?”

She shook her head and went back to cleaning her pistol.

“I knew him at the time, after Anastasia's father left Afghanistan. Rydell knew I was pregnant. It is enough reason to kill him.”

“Maybe,” Ari said, the ambivalence in his tone drawing her attention.

He was looking back out the window.

“We're a long way from home, Irena, calling in every favor we have, spending tens of thousands of dollars and the goodwill of our partners for one unimportant American to die?”

“He's important to me.”

“Precisely my point,” he said, turning and meeting her gaze again. “Your involvement with this man is clouding your objectivity.”

“No, Ari,” she said sharply. “You're wrong.”

One shot, one kill—that's the only reason she was here. No question.

She could see it in her mind, Rydell's head in her scope, her reticle superimposed on his face or the back of his neck—her breath softening, then stopping for the length of a heartbeat, the pad of her trigger finger pressing against the small, sweet curve of metal, then her breath continuing, and Rydell's stopping for all time, his medulla severed by her shot, resulting in instant destruction of his central nervous system.

He would drop like a stone, and her secret would be safe.

Maybe.

Her only surety had been stolen the moment he'd escaped off the mountain in Peru. But his death still served a purpose, closure if nothing else, and probably more. No one else except Ari had known her as well since their time together in Afghanistan. No one other than Ari had even the slightest knowledge of even the possibility of her having a child. She'd gone underground in Paris, after selling Rydell out to the warlord and faking her death by sabotaging her own plane. The pilot she'd sold the Piper to had thought he'd gotten such a good deal, and so he had, up until his maiden flight.

She'd left Afghanistan with money, connections, and a bright future in the underworld. Her months in Paris had been spent alone, hidden in plain sight, living on the Left Bank. A childless couple named Deschamps had befriended her, dear people, never knowing she had been the one to choose them after weeks of investigation. Educated, middle-class, she had elevated them to a life of luxury in return for their loyalty to her. Their love for Anastasia had been natural and was without question. Perhaps such love would become a problem someday. For their sake, she hoped not.

“Call Hans again,” she said to Ari. “I want to know when this storm will pass.”

She held the barrel of her 1911 into the light and looked down the bore—so clean it gleamed. With a new patch, she wiped the guide rod, did a final check on the slide and frame, and brushed a coat of oil on the weapon's components.

“We're drowning here, Hans,” she heard Ari say into the satellite phone. “How much longer is this going to last?”

She slid the barrel into place.

“Another hour,” Ari said into the phone, looking at his watch. “I hope to hell you're right.”

Piece by piece, she put her pistol back together, staying quiet, remaining self-contained.

Possibly, they would be in place by midnight, if the weather broke. Carolina was only twenty minutes from Campos's estate. She and Ari planned on parking a couple of kilometers away and going in on foot, carrying their gear.

Logistics were the heart and soul of smooth operations. For a lightning-quick hit across international borders, there was no room for errors. Ari was correct, to a point. The assassination of C. Smith Rydell was putting all her years of experience, all her communication lines, and all her assets in Central America to the test, and so far, every phase of the mission had been performed to the expected standard—excellence.

All she needed was Rydell's head on a platter.

“Sixty-six millimeter light anti-tank weapons?” Ari said, and she looked up from pressing the barrel bushing into place.

Finishing the assembly, she rose to her feet and crossed the room to the window.

“Rifles,” he said, lifting an eyebrow in her direction. “Grenade launchers, small arms, ammunition, MREs, and a lot of very big suitcases...yes...yes, that's very interesting...yes, I'll tell her.”

He signed off and met her gaze.

“The C-130 cargo,” she said, and he nodded.

“One of Federico's men leaned on a soldier who was at Ilopango when the transport aircraft arrived from Howard Air Force Base this afternoon.”

“Weapons.”

“A full pallet of them from the U.S. government going into El Salvador and heading into the mountains of Morazán. I'd say we've got some sort of very international incident brewing here.”

“And some very strange bedfellows.” She performed a quick function check on her pistol, running the slide, checking the safety, and releasing the trigger, before loading a magazine.

“The woman, Honoria York-Lytton, had a black briefcase handcuffed to her wrist.”

Irena glanced up again, a smile curving her mouth.

“Perfecto.”
She chambered a round, then flipped on the safety and holstered the pistol. “We've got guns and money.”

“All we need are drugs and secrets.”

“There weren't any drugs on the Cessna.” A Cessna full of cocaine didn't get anybody other than the seller, the buyer, and maybe a few policemen excited.

“No,” Ari agreed. “So that leaves secrets.” He was grinning, too. “Very expensive secrets to get all this going in less than two days.”

“Politically vital secrets,” Irena said. “The U.S. State Department, the CIA chief of station in Panama, ex-DEA agents getting pulled off missions, and a rich
gringa
in the middle of it, cuffed to a black briefcase.”

“We don't change our mission.”

“No.” She shook her head. “But we can do our Cali friend a favor and let him know he needs to shorten his leash on Diego Garcia and the CNL. Raise Hans again. Tell him to relay all the information we've gotten today to Miguel Carranza. If the cartel wants to tighten its hold on northern El Salvador, today is a good day to do it.”