“If it had been up to my father, Hernandez would have been hung out to dry from the first. But CIA trumps armed forces, and they were screaming national security. I never knew why we left Guatemala so quickly. Oh yes, I was here then. That was actually my father’s first overseas position. We were living with my mother’s family. She was Guatemalan.”
As Vicki’s look of astonishment took in his lanky frame, the sun-streaked hair, Joe smiled slightly. “One of the German coffee baron families—and with strong military ties. My grandfather was a high-placed general, my uncles all up to their teeth in local politics. That was why my father put in for this particular post. We’d come down at least once a year to visit my relatives. So it was natural to put in for long-term deployment here.
“Only my father hadn’t been here long when he saw the other side of military rule here. After your parents, he immediately put in for transfer and asked my mother to go with him. She ended up choosing her family over my father. And me. A year or so later she married another coffee baron, some childhood playmate. A few months after both of them were killed when he was drunk and crashed his Ferrari.”
Joe gave Vicki a rueful grin. “Of course, all I saw as a little kid was my grandfather’s estate. I was pretty ticked when my father carried me off, as much for the loss of a luxury lifestyle as losing my mother, to be honest. I knew my nanny better than I did her. Still, she was my mother, and when she didn’t even bother calling after the first couple months . . . well, like I said, I blamed myself for a long time. But I’m glad now she let my father take me, or my life might be right where Alpiro or any of these guys ended up.
“Anyway, Taylor knew my father had a son who was now DEA. He had this idea I could get something moving, if he couldn’t. That’s when I learned about all this—and just why my father had actually left Guatemala and my mother’s family. My father asked me to go for him, felt we somehow owed it as a family. Of course, they were wrong that I could do anything or get the DEA on board—for the same reason as Bill. No concrete evidence. But I took a leave of absence, not totally approved by my supervisor, and came here.”
Vicki listened with growing absorption as Joe quietly, even matter-of-factly, told his own side of the last three months.
“I chose one of the personas I’d used undercover floating back and forth between California and Mexico—the drifting expat surfer.” His hand rose briefly to where his long hair had been. “Since I can’t quite blend in as Hispanic, even if I do speak the language.”
“So are you really Joe Eriksson?” His hesitation back at that airport party when Vicki had made a joke about his name sounding like an alias now made sense, as did so many other small happenings over these last weeks.
Joe grinned. “In a manner of speaking. My father’s name is Eric Thompson, so . . . Ericsson. Or ‘son of Eric.’ A background check would come up with Joe Ericsson, international drifter, a few minor possession priors in Mexico and California. That must be what Camden turned up. But WRC was so desperate for help that no one even asked any questions when Bill hired me.
“Bill figured from the first it had to be drugs. We started by monitoring radio chatter. Raul was still using equipment donated by our training programs, so we were able to home in on their frequency.
“Finding them was another thing. The biosphere is a vast area and hardly on any standard route for small plane traffic. Once I had that radio frequency and heard enough to confirm Bill’s suspicions that
something
was going on, I made myself discreetly known to the country DEA SAC—special agent in charge—over at the embassy, just to let him know I was unofficially in his territory. He was willing to talk a serious op if I could come up with some hard data. What I was specifically after were aerial maps of the biosphere that would detail the valleys and ridges—and any recent clearings and plantings there. DEA had just done a joint op with the locals mapping likely drug-producing areas with SouthCom surveillance planes. The Sierra de las Minas mountains should have been a given, but somehow that entire area of the biosphere had been left off the list. I know now that was Alpiro’s doing.
“Anyway, I talked the SAC into seeing what he could do to schedule me some discreet satellite maps as well as keeping my own unofficial presence covert. Funny thing is, I saw Camden at the embassy that day. The SAC had been telling me about this new UPN unit. I even thought of roping him in, but he was working closely with Alpiro, who was at the top of Bill Taylor’s list of likely suspects, so it seemed prudent to keep those in the know to a minimum. Fortunately, as it turned out.”
“I think I saw you at the embassy,” Vicki put in. “I’d gone there for my parents’ death report.”
“That’s right; you were jumping into a taxi. In any case, there wasn’t much the DEA could do, especially over Alpiro’s head, without concrete proof. But if I could get a visual record and GPS position, he’d bring in the local counternarcotics troops and their US equipment. Problem was, there are so many valleys and ridges out there, and except when the poppies are in bloom, there isn’t much to see. Plus, any serious air search would have roused all kinds of questions, since everyone in these mountains knows Taylor’s Cessna. So we were kind of stuck waiting for those satellite maps.
“Meanwhile, I’d take a swing out over the mountains when flying to and from the city, working my way gradually across the biosphere. In fact, that particular valley was one of the first we’d checked and seen nothing but a few overgrown clearings; the poppies weren’t up yet. But Bill was sure it all had to be related to that massacred village, so he asked me to fly back over those abandoned fields with the de Havilland. With a new plane in tow, Taylor figured it wouldn’t raise any questions—our mistake. I’m just thankful I didn’t get us both killed.
“At least once I spotted these poppy fields from the air, I knew we had them. Except Alpiro put the brakes on air traffic over the biosphere. We still needed visual proof, which meant tracking back to that valley on foot, not so easy when the biosphere was swarming with Camden’s UPN op. I’d talked the DEA into loaning me a couple of their local counter-narcotics team, Guatemalans who’ve been trained, polygraphed, and are paid well enough by us to minimize odds of corruption.”
“Your guards,” Vicki identified.
“Yes, that was their cover.”
“So that’s what you were doing in the biosphere when I saw you that day and earlier on the mountain,” Vicki said sadly. “No wonder you were so furious about me coming here. I messed up your entire investigation.”
“No, don’t think that way,” Joe countered swiftly. “I’ll admit I wasn’t too happy about you poking around—if nothing else, for your own safety. But in the end that little side trip after Alicia and Gabriela was what nailed Hernandez’s position for us and broke the whole thing wide open.
“When I was in town that morning picking up supplies, I’d also finally picked up those aerial maps, along with a GPS tracker, night vision goggles, and a couple of mountain bikes. You actually gave me that idea. The maps confirmed the coordinates of the poppy fields, but of course they didn’t give us the opium lab or those running it, which is what we really wanted. Our plan was to wait till dark, when the UPN op would be out of the biosphere, and use the bikes and NVGs to track down those coordinates and hopefully come up with something more concrete than just a few poppy fields.
“Then came that search for the girls. Bill was furious at my getting involved—especially when Alpiro told him he’d just arrested his gringo employee—until I told him about that Jeep and transport truck appearing out of nowhere and who was driving the Jeep. I immediately recognized Raul Hernandez from his photos. We knew then who was responsible for the opium—and that massacre.
“After I left you that night, Ramirez, one of our counter-narcotics loaners, and I were getting ready to follow that track back into the biosphere when we saw Hernandez show up with his goons to burn the church. It was the hardest thing I’ve done in a long time not to interfere. But there was nothing I could do except follow them back when they returned to base. That saved us any search time by leading us right to the encampment. All we had to do was hole up till morning to get some visual proof. My binoculars have some special high-tech options, including digital video.”
Joe had called in to Bill that they had their visual proof but that the opium lab was being dismantled. Counternarcotics would have to move fast if any evidence was to be recovered. A call to the DEA had scheduled a strike for that afternoon, the same forces Michael had believed were safely in the Petén. Joe had stayed in the woods to guide them to target—until Vicki’s arrival threw the op into chaos.
“When you saw us, Ramirez had just managed to filter through camp as one of their own sentries and slap a GPS tracker on that Jeep for the strike team to follow in. I had just finished filming the loading of the dope when I heard you, then saw you.”
It was an explanation, not an apology. Vicki didn’t need to explain her own role. Joe had been there for both her English and Spanish statements.
Joe didn’t pause or look at her as he went on. With the biosphere and plateau boiling over with armed search parties and Raul’s men scrambling to dismantle their camp, Joe and Ramirez had been forced to retreat. It had been to meet Joe that Bill had abandoned his coffee. With the element of surprise gone, they had to get the DHC-2 off the ground and call in the Black Hawks immediately. Joe might not have cared for Michael’s politics, but he’d still no reason to suspect his involvement, though Bill had grown suspicious of his frequent presence in the biosphere the last weeks.
But even if Michael was just a little too bonded with Alpiro to be objective, Joe and Bill couldn’t trust Michael not to blow the operation to his local colleagues, especially after his ardent support of Alpiro the night before and his only too patent antipathy toward Joe himself. So they couldn’t afford to let him get wind of what was going down until it was all over. Only when their rescrambled strategy had been set in motion and the DHC-2 was in the air had Bill radioed for Garcia, the veranda “guard” and another counternarcotics loaner, to head back in the pickup and check on Vicki. The small plane was monitoring from a safe height that last liftoff of opium from the encampment, Joe impatiently calling for counternarcotics to move in before it was gone, when Garcia reported Vicki’s breakout. The guard was driving the pickup toward Verapaz to search for her when he’d seen the UPN helicopter landing at the biosphere
garita
. When he informed Bill and Joe the UPN gringo advisor had taken Vicki aboard, they’d known just what Michael had to be.
Joe glanced sideways again at Vicki. “And you know the rest.”
Yes, Vicki knew the rest. “Joe, all those terrible things I said—”
He cut her off. “Don’t! Yes, I do remember what you said: that you believed I was special, more than a beach bum or drifter. The rest . . . well, I’d have made the same intel assumption on the data you had. Besides, I could have handled things differently myself. I could’ve at least tried to say something to dispel your misconceptions, maybe even spared you a terrible ordeal. I admit I was ticked off that you could believe I’d hurt Holly. I guess I thought—hoped—you knew me better than that.”
“Well, you had Holly’s PDA, something only the killer was supposed to have. I’d known for some time you were hiding something, even when I wanted to believe in you. And all those things Bill said about you. When I saw you out in that camp talking to one of their guards—I . . . I really did hope I was wrong until I saw the PDA.”
“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know where the PDA was when you asked me about it, but I knew Holly’d brought it into town because she had it on the plane. She wouldn’t have been carrying it around, but she was flying back out with us the next day to the center. The instant it didn’t turn up in her stuff at the children’s home, I guessed where she’d have stashed it. Bill had this small hidden compartment in the Cessna for valuables. When I cleaned out the Cessna to turn it over to the new owners, I found it right where I’d expected.
“When I saw her pictures and downloads, I knew you were right—Holly’s death was no random mugging but connected to our investigation. Holly must have recognized Alpiro and Raul as the men she’d seen in the poppy fields. She’d recognized Bill in that photo too, which explains why she didn’t come to him for help, though neither Holly nor Bill and I at that point had any idea you two sisters were connected to that past massacre. Either way, I couldn’t exactly explain that PDA to you without blowing my cover. The best option was to convince you to go home and get in touch when this was all over and we had Holly’s killer in hand. Only you don’t convince too easily.”