09-Twelve Mile Limit (31 page)

I was surprised because I hadn’t ordered a car.

I told her, “Wait here for a second,” then walked to the driver, and said to him in Spanish, “I’m confused. Who sent you?”

He was a stocky man, too wide for his jacket, with a weightlifter’s constrained mobility. “The embassy sent me,” he answered.

I said, “Which embassy?”

“Why, the U.S. Embassy, of course. Your embassy. I have papers if you wish to see.”

He handed me a sealed envelope. Inside was a note with Harrington’s familiar signature. It read, “Doc, welcome back into the business. One of my staff has arranged for you to use my personal driver, Carlos Quasada. You can trust him with anything, including your travel companion. He’ll keep an eye on you while you’re in the city. Carlos was one of the country’s best heavyweight fighters for many years. Match the enclosed photo ID with the ID he is required to carry before you get into the car.”

After I’d checked his papers, the man grinned at me and said in less formal Spanish, “Mr. Harrington has asked that I give you special care, Dr. Ford. I am here to serve as your driver, your bodyguard, your guide. The only exception is that I cannot go with you if you decide to leave our little state of Magdalena. The FARC rebels and their associates know me too well. I would be shot on sight, as would anyone unlucky enough to be with me.”

The man had a grip like a hydraulic clamp, and I liked his easygoing, confident manner. “You must have given them good reason to hate you, Carlos.”

His grin became even wider. “Oh, I have given them many reasons over the years, Dr. Ford. Sometimes, one of them decides to come looking for me to take revenge, and I give them yet another reason to hate Carlos!” Realizing that Amelia was walking toward us, he lowered his voice and said, “Does she understand Spanish?”

“No. A few words, that’s all.”

“Does she know that you are here in your government’s service?”

“Of course not.”

Quasada told me, “In that case, I must speak quickly. Mr. Harrington has supplied you with a special briefcase. It is in the trunk. You must not allow her to see the contents.”

I said, “When we get to the hotel, walk her to the front desk and leave the car keys with me. I’ll find a way to sneak it into our room. Later, I can tell her I bought it here.”

He nodded, fixed the smile on his face again, and began to speak more loudly in a slow and careful English, “I am at your service, Dr. Ford. Anything you require, day or night. I will give you the number of my cell phone. Dial my number and I will appear!”

Sitting in the backseat of the BMW as Carlos sped us through the taxi and donkey-cart traffic of Cartagena, Amelia leaned her shoulder briefly against me and said in a low voice, “Why the special treatment? This guy’s acting like you’re a foreign dignitary and he’s known you for years.”

I cleared my throat before I answered, “I’ve been here a couple of times for conferences, research—things like that.”

She seemed unconvinced. “As a biologist?”

“Yeah. In Latin America marine biologists are highly respected. Seafood. It’s a very important industry here.”

When I opened the briefcase that Harrington had left for me, I stood back and whistled softly, surprised and not a little apprehensive. Mostly surprised.

Did he really think I’d have a use for this kind of firepower?

I left the briefcase open and walked to the window of our third-floor suite. We were staying at the Hotel Santa Clara inside Cartagena’s old walled city. Most of Colombia’s dangers were known to me long before receiving Hal Harrington’s briefing paper. I have tried to lock away a number of bad memories associated with the place. Even so, it is still one of the more interesting countries in the Americas, and Cartagena is my favorite city by far.

Cartagena is a Conquistador village built within a stone fortress six miles in diameter, and that fortress, in turn, is built within a perimeter of forts. The city was founded in the early 1500s. Gold and silver plundered from the Indians were stockpiled here prior to being loaded and shipped back to Madrid.

A city filled with gold attracted the attention of the world’s pirates. French pirates kidnapped the governor and held him for ransom. English pirates such as Hawkens and Drake infiltrated the city under cover of darkness, burned the houses, sacked cathedrals, and sailed away with shiploads of treasure. Spain continued to build the walls around the city higher and thicker, but the pirates still came—just as pirates still continue to come to Colombia today.

In those years, some say that what is now the Hotel Santa Clara was a convent—a treasure trove of a different sort. So it too has walls as thick as those of a fort, four stories high, raspberry-colored, and impenetrable from the outside. But step through the hotel’s double doors, and you enter a Castilian world that vanished three hundred years ago.

The ceilings are twenty feet high with rafters of black mahogany. There are gardens with palms, rare flowers, toucans, parrots, and fountains. The courtyards are tiled with bricks made by Indian slaves long dead. Today, the hybrid progeny of those dead, a hundred generations removed, wait and serve the descendants of the Castilians who enslaved their relatives. The hotel is built around a great plaza, and now there is a modern swimming pool in the middle of that plaza.

Amelia lay on a lounge chair by the pool, dozing in the afternoon sun. The garland sparkle of Christmas decorations seemed incongruous in the palms. She wore a green two-piece swimsuit, very modest. When I saw her naked for the first time, I’d realized that she was the type of redhead who tans.

She was out there tanning herself now. Which is why I could take my time with the briefcase, and its contents.

I turned back to the bed where the briefcase lay open and removed from it a small submachine gun. The weapon had a very fine balance and weight.

I have little personal interest in firearms, though I admire any kind of fine machinery. I’ve never been an outstanding marksman, and I seldom do much shooting anymore. However, because there was a time in my life when firearms were necessary tools of my trade, I possess a certain level of expertise.

The submachine gun I held was very familiar to me. It was, in the opinion of many, the most efficient and lethal hand weapon ever created. It was a Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun, a lightweight, air-cooled, magazine-fed weapon that, on full automatic, fires thirteen rounds per second with extraordinary accuracy. Ever needing to fire thirteen rounds per second accurately is an unimaginable situation.

Yet the weapon was tiny: only thirteen inches long, weighing slightly more than four pounds. You could hide it in the pocket of a trenchcoat, then clear an auditorium with it.

The H&K MP5 systems are modular, which means you can mix and match accessories for almost any need. Harrington had included a couple of interesting options. From the briefcase, I now removed a length of beautifully machined aluminum stock—an integrally threaded sound suppressor. Fire the weapon next to someone’s ear, he would hear a blowgun sound: Phutt! People fifteen meters away would hear nothing. There were also dual magazines that looked like twin twenty-eight-round magazines clamped together. But these would hold over two hundred cartridges. Squeeze the trigger on full auto and you could cut down a good-sized tree before having to reload.

Did the man think I was going into a war zone?

Perhaps that’s exactly what he was arming me for.

Finally, the briefcase itself was an option: Made out of some space-age polymer, you could clamp the little sub gun into position, close the cover, walk it down the street, squeeze the trigger built into the handle, and fire through a hole in the side of the case.

I got no delight in seeing the weapon, felt no illusion of authority because I now had that firepower in my possession. From the look and weight of the thing, I got only a sense of loathing, and of dread.

There is an implicit dirtiness to machinery designed to maim and kill. Participate even once, and that dirt can never be washed away.

Harrington had included a couple of more conventional weapons as well, pistols. There was a Colt .380 semiauto Mustang, which was featherlight and smaller than the palm of my hand. It was a very easy weapon to hide in a boot or under a ball cap. There was also a much larger and more lethal SIG Sauer P226 9mm—exactly like the one I kept stored away in my old fish house back on Sanibel and had used over so many years.

It was no coincidence. Years ago, Harrington and I had been trained by the same people, on the same weaponry, and in the same way. Maybe he considered it a nostalgic touch.

I checked the magazine of each weapon. All were fully loaded. Inside the briefcase, I also found a “drop” weapon. A drop weapon is usually something silent and sharp that can be used in crowds. Walk up to your target, make the hit, and walk away, leaving the weapon behind.

There was a small plastic cylinder in which there were a dozen or more Fukumi bari needles. Ninja warriors would hide the needles on their tongues and blow them into the eyes of their enemy. I am no Ninja, so judging from the tiny skull and crossbones on the cylinder, these needles were dipped in something poisonous.

I broke the cylinder’s seal and sniffed. The needles had a fruity, vinegar odor. Probably sodium morphate. Attach the cylinder to the tip of an umbrella, touch the needles to the leg of your target as you pass, and within thirty minutes or so, he will begin to feel a terrifying anxiety, then cramps, and soon will collapse with all the symptoms of both a heart attack and a brain aneurysm. A very nasty weapon and also illegal, according to the Geneva Protocol of 1927.

“This is a dirty war!” Bernie Yeager had told me.

I had no doubt of that now.

Finally, there was a military SATCOM telephone. SATCOM is a satellite-based, global wireless personal communications network designed to permit easy phone access from nearly anywhere on earth. Sixty-six satellites, evenly spaced four hundred miles high, made it possible. The phone was compatible with cellular systems worldwide, if the phone being called was equipped with a cellular cassette.

Hal Harrington’s phone undoubtedly was.

I had to pace around the room a couple of times before I could bring myself to read the accompanying note from Harrington:

Commander F., Our intelligence now confirms that Hassan Atwa Kazan has financial links with terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, whom the Israelis consider a clinical psychopath. It was Mughniyeh who kidnapped Beirut’s CIA chief William Buckley, videotaped his torture, then killed Buckley with his own hands. The tape was later sent anonymously to CIA headquarters.Kazan works through terrorist cells in the Colombian city of Maicao, which is near Barranquilla on the Caribbean. Maicao is a Muslim extremist stronghold. Our government has yet to deal with anti-American organizations here, but it is time we started. Kazan is a low-echelon soldier, a freelance money raiser probably in business strictly for personal profit, but he may lead you to more prominent members.When and if you conclude your private business with him, we urge you to take executive action against Kazan. If you have assembled sufficient evidence, you may also take executive action against any of his associates you deem an enemy of our government.You have already been briefed on the restraints and limitations, and you are not authorized to exceed those limitations under penalty of military prosecution. We have no interest in Earl E. E. Stallings, and leave his dispensation to you.As a personal favor, and with the help of our friend BY, we are hereby supplying additional classified information concerning your own private business in Colombia.According to satellite imagery, as of yesterday’s date, 15 December, 9:45 P.M. EST, nine women and two men were photographed in what appeared to be a wire-fenced area within a walled courtyard in the Colombian state of Amazonia, outside the village of Remanso. The fenced area was west of a large house, the entire compound four miles south of the village. Five of the women and both men appeared to be Caucasian. Good hunting, HH I read the note a second time before tearing it into pieces and flushing it down the toilet. Then I went and sat heavily on the bed. I remembered obsessive Bernie Yeager saying to me, “Ours is a dangerous world. It would be good to have you back working with us again. We need you!” Remembered Hal Harrington once telling me, “I wish we could find a way to get you to come back.”

I felt like vomiting, like running out of the room, jumping into a cab, and heading for the airport. I’d already done my duty; I’d served my time. My life was my own now. I was content to live quietly and alone on Sanibel Island, content to spend quiet, peaceful nights in my lab, doing my work. I didn’t want to come back and participate in a dirty war.

But they’d found a way. I’d opened the door for them with my requests for help, baited my own trap. When I’d asked Bernie for information, was he already aware that these terrorist groups were involved in smuggling drugs, people, and weapons to finance their cause?

Of course. He had to know that the odds were good that the men running the Nan-Shan had at least indirect ties with enemies of our government.

Had Harrington known?

Certainly. He was an expert on South America. He knew who was doing what and where they were doing it. And the two of them had been in contact, obviously sharing information. They’d been smart enough to wait until I was already in Colombia to finally formalize the assignment. The obligation was implied but understood: They’d helped me. Now I was expected to help them.

“Dear God …” I said softly.

My voice sounded unusually hoarse in the silence of the air-conditioned suite. I stood, looked out the window, and saw that Amelia was no longer by the pool.

I rushed to the briefcase and began to pack the weaponry. I’d just gotten the thing locked and under the bed when I heard the door open and she came into the bedroom. Her skin was the color of fresh cinnamon, and there was a bawdy smile on her face that quickly faded. “Hey … Doc? What’s wrong, you’re so pale. You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

I said, “I think I’m just thirsty. Let’s go down to the bar and get a drink.”