Breakout: A Heart-Pounding Lex Harper Thriller Page 4

  ‘Of all the gin joints in all the world,’ said Standish, stepping forward and giving him a bear hug. ‘Good to see you, Lex. Fuck me, it’s been years.’

  ‘Older but not really any wiser,’ said Harper, patting the man on the back.

  ‘Fancy a drink in the bar?’

  Harper grinned. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

  They went downstairs and sat at a corner table. They both sat with their backs to the wall, creatures of habit. Standish was wearing a crumpled linen suit, his skin was sheened with sweat and it had a faint yellow tinge.

  ‘You okay?’ Harper asked.

  ‘I got a dose of malaria,’ said Standish. ‘Forgot to take the fucking tablets. Actually that’s not true. The tablets made me feel like shit so I stopped taking them. Serves me right.’

  The young woman who had checked Harper in came over, this time without her apron, and they ordered beers from her.

  ‘So you’re in the kidnapping business,’ said Harper as the woman walked away. ‘That Proof Of Life was a great movie.’

  Standish chuckled. ‘It’s not like the movies, mate,’ he said. ‘And I’m no Russell Crowe, obviously. In fact it’s precisely as exciting as being a loss adjuster for an insurance company, which in fact is pretty much all the job entails. Kidnappers open negotiations with a demand for a stupendous sum - $10 or $20 million is not unusual - but the Kidnap and Ransom negotiator’s job is simply to counter first with a demand for a proof of life - the victim holding a copy of that day’s newspaper or something to prove he’s still alive - and then make a minuscule counter-offer. Through long, wearisome weeks or even months of negotiation and haggling, we eventually beat the kidnappers down to a figure that the insurers are willing to pay - usually in the region of $50,000 to $100,000. That K and R strategy invariably means that the victim of the kidnapping spends far longer in captivity, fear and terror than would have been strictly necessary had the insurance company been more concerned with his well-being and less concerned with the bottom line.’

  The two men fell silent as the woman returned with their beers. They clinked glasses and resumed their conversation as she walked away.

  ‘I also have to put up with the negotiators we employ who are often prima donnas, strutting around full of their own self-importance and looking down their noses at the rest of us,’ said Standish. ‘They call us The Dirty Trade, forgetting that without us, they would be permanently out of work. In fact, they’re the perfect example of power without responsibility: if they make errors, someone else dies and they just go on to the next case.’ He flashed an embarrassed smile. ‘Apologies, Lex, I was on a bit of a rant there, wasn’t I? Anyway basically I’m now not much more than a salesman and an office boy. I have to go around the region persuading people to buy goods and services they often can’t afford and don’t really want, so basically I’m just preying on people’s misery in order to keep a load of tossers in company headquarters in their comfortable, well-paid positions.’

  Harper grinned. ‘So just like the Army then.’ He paused. ‘So to business: I don’t know whether Risk Reduction has brought you fully up to speed on why I’m here?’

  Standish nodded. ‘I gather you’re on the trail of Scouse Davies.’

  ‘So what can you tell me about him?’

  ‘Well he turned up here pretty much out of the blue when we were in the middle of a ransom case. We were under pressure to get the money brought out and none of our regulars was available, so our office in Geneva just took pot luck on someone. That was Scouse and when he turned up here, having known him from the Paras, I must confess I had my doubts about whether he was right for the job, but by then I just had to go with what we had. Scouse had clearly not done his due diligence and so seemed to be blissfully unaware of the risks he was running, not only from the forces of law and order in Europe and South America, who are not always well-disposed to men transporting huge amounts of undeclared cash across their national borders, but also the criminal elements - thieves, gangsters and drug cartels - in those regions who would have happily dispatched Scouse from this earth for a lot less than the amount of money he was carrying.’

  ‘Is that what happened, you think? He was killed for the money he was carrying?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Standish. ‘You’ve got to be brave, foolhardy or suicidal to hijack the ransom money because, no matter who actually carried out the kidnapping, the big boys are always behind it. The reason the cartels don’t do the kidnapping themselves is that it’s a big logistical strain to keep someone alive, fit and healthy over a long period of time. The victim has to be fed, watered, toileted, looked at by a doctor if he becomes ill and kept away from prying eyes, and of course if the victim dies, no one gets paid out. So the organised gangs use low-level criminals to do the kidnappings and keep the victims safe until the money has been paid. And if anyone steals the ransom money, they have the cartel to reckon with.’

  ‘So how is it that the money Scouse was couriering disappeared without trace?’

  ‘Either Scouse himself took it - you’ve known him longer than me, Lex, but we both know that he might just have been dumb enough to think he could get away with it. But if not, then the thief is probably a bent cop or official, or a rival cartel to the one running the kidnap. Whoever took it must be very well connected and protected to run the risk of antagonising a powerful cartel, and that usually means a rival one. In effect all Scouse had to do was sit quietly in his room and keep himself occupied until someone came for the money. We, as a company don’t actually hand the money over, and we don’t speak to the kidnappers direct. Everything is handled by go-betweens, so really it’s just a case of waiting until the victim is released and the money is handed over. The victim is then repatriated and the ransom money is usually divided to an agreed ratio among the people involved, with the big boys taking the major cut. To be fair to Scouse, despite my reservations about him, he did a decent enough job to start with and it did free me up to do other, more important things, so I gave an old Para comrade a helping hand by keeping him on the payroll and sending him off to do a couple of security audits on the companies that run the oil palm plantations - they’ve been clients of ours forever. It’s not a life I’d like, the plantations are usually in cleared areas of jungle, the heat and humidity are awful, the mosquitoes are even worse, and the only towns within a hundred clicks tend to be one horse, one bar, one cantina and one brothel dumps.’

  He finished his beer and waved over at the woman to bring him another. Harper drained his glass and raised it to show her that it was empty. She smiled and nodded.

  ‘The guys who own and run the plantations don’t usually have a lot of security problems,’ said Standish. ‘The cartels don’t interfere with them, partly because shipments of fruit and palm oil can give them useful cover for their own exports. However, because the plantations have flattened large areas of rainforest and replaced it with oil palms, the owners are a bit twitchy and do have occasional spats with displaced indigenous people or local wildcat loggers who are pissed off that they weren’t the ones felling those giant rainforest hardwoods. Anyway, the plantation bosses are mostly expat British and Americans who just need an occasional bit of TLC, so most communications are in English, but when we do need interpreters at the high end of the business, we always use the best that money can buy, university graduates and the like. Lower down the scale, we still expect our consultants - and indeed our couriers - to be able to speak the language of the country in which they’re operating sufficiently well to be able to do their own interpreting and run their own instructional programs.’

  The woman returned with two more beers and Standish waited until she was out of earshot before continuing.

  ‘Scouse had originally persuaded the people at head office that he was fluent in Spanish.’ Standish gave a weary shake of his head. ‘Apparently no one there thought it worth making the effort to check if that was true. Anyway, I explained to Scouse that while he was doing the se
curity audits, he had to use his spare time to learn Spanish, and if he did, I would be able to give him a lot more work in the future, but…’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Scouse being Scouse, instead of doing it the hard way, he found a local girl who had taught herself to speak English to a very decent standard, and used her as a translator. Providing it didn’t pose any threat to the security of our operations, I didn’t object, but I did make it a condition that I would only pay Scouse - at the standard rate - and he then had to pay the girl out of his money. I wasn’t prepared to sign off any extra payments just because he couldn’t be arsed to get his nose into a Teach Yourself Spanish book, or get the Rosetta Stone app.’

  ‘So what was his relationship with this girl?’ Harper said.

  ‘I don’t know if it was sexual, if that’s what you’re getting at,’ Standish said. ‘She’s very good looking but she’s twenty years younger than Scouse, and as you’ll see for yourself if you meet her, she’s a very self-confident, feisty character in her own right, so I think she’d have been much too sassy to have been Scouse’s arm-candy. I guess the arrangement just worked for both of them. With her as his interpreter, I could give him work, but without her I couldn’t; it was as simple as that.’

  ‘And how did Scouse come to meet her?’

  ‘He met her in Bolivia when he went there on a job that should have lasted a day or so but eventually ran into several weeks. When he came back to Bogotá, he had the girl - she’s called Lupa, by the way - in tow. It was mutually beneficial; he was able to make some sort of a living and no doubt she did quite well out of it, at least by local standards.’

  ‘What happened on Scouse’s last job for you then? Was Lupa with him? And how did it go wrong?’

  ‘She wasn’t with him, she was due to meet him later that day in La Paz in Bolivia, where the ransom drop was supposed to take place. He was flying in on a flight from Geneva with a change of aircraft at Madrid, carrying a $50,000 ransom payment in cash. Our man in Madrid observed him boarding the flight to La Paz without incident and although it’s routed via Lima in Peru, the same aircraft completes the journey, so there’s no need to disembark. As far as we know, Scouse followed all the usual SOPs, and he certainly arrived at the airport in La Paz, according to the airline’s records, but there the trail goes cold. We don’t even know how he left the airport, if he did, and we’ve not seen hide nor hair of him since.’

  ‘Was there no CCTV?’

  ‘There should have been, but either the cameras in immigration and arrivals were malfunctioning or the tapes have gone missing.’ Standish spread his hands, palms up. ‘That’s not necessarily significant; shit like that happens all the time over here, as much from incompetence as corruption. We have two customs officers and a supervisor on retainers…’

  ‘Or bribes, as we say in English,’ Harper interrupted.

  ‘Indeed, but as our CEO always likes to remark, we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we might prefer it to be. So… Scouse’s SOP was to go to a customs desk manned by one of our men, but when we spoke to the one who was on duty that day, he told us that he’d not seen Scouse at all, so either he’d gone to one of the other desks or he’d been intercepted before he’d even got that far.’

  ‘And do you believe your pet customs guy?’

  Standish shrugged. ‘By Bolivian standards he earns good money from us, so he’d be unlikely to jeopardise that.’

  ‘So do you think Scouse stole the money?’

  ‘I’d say it was unlikely. He’s carried far larger amounts than that for us before. And if you were going to steal it, why wouldn’t you take a ransom of $500,000 rather than settle for $50,000? In any case he’d know that wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to pay for a new identity and a safe house for the rest of his life, in case someone came after him. And as you’re in a related line of work yourself, you’ll know we have ways of finding even those who go to great lengths to try and remain hidden.’

  ‘So if not theft by Scouse, a double-cross then. By who?’

  ‘You pay your money and take your pick: the kidnappers, the cops, customs men, rival gangs, cartels, chancers, hustlers. We did talk to a couple of air stewardesses on the flights he caught. He’d apparently been drinking quite a lot on the plane flying him from Madrid to La Paz but so what? Whatever, Scouse disappeared at some point after disembarking from La Paz. So either he found a way to dodge our employee waiting for him in the Arrivals Hall, or he didn’t get that far.’

  ‘And what do you think has happened to him?’

  ‘Probably dead or maybe, if he’s very lucky, in jail.’

  ‘You’ve made no further effort to trace him?’

  ‘We’ve tried the usual channels, but came up with nothing, and there’s only so much time, energy and resources I can persuade the company to devote to it. The loss was only $50,000 and that’s small change in this line of work.’

  ‘But it’s not just about the $50,000, is it? It’s for someone who was employed by Risk Reduction and went missing in the line of duty on a job for the company.’

  Standish shrugged. ‘I made the same argument to Geneva, but you know the answer I got? Those are the risks our men take. The rewards are high for a good reason.’

  Harper shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter where you go in the world, does it? If there’s cash on one side of the equation and human decency on the other, the cash will always win out. So…’ He straightened his shoulders. ‘Let’s get moving. Can I have the name of the customs guy?’

  ‘Sure,’ Standish said. ‘Alvaro Lopez. I can give you a photograph too.’

  ‘And, like Scouse, my Spanish is pretty much non-existent, so I’ll need a translator. Is Lupa contactable?’

  ‘She should be. Scouse used to leave messages for her at a hotel in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, which were passed on to her. Lupa would then make contact and fly here to Bogotá or to La Paz, or wherever the job was to be carried out. After it was done, Scouse would pay her and she’d fly back home until the next time. Want me to get her up here, if she’s still around?’

  ‘No thanks. I’ll make contact with her and if necessary I can take a trip down to Santa Cruz to meet her.’

  Standish frowned. ’Take a tip from me, Lex, and meet Lupa here in Bogotá or in La Paz, not in Santa Cruz. There are a lot of cartel gangs operating there and large parts of the city, even including the business district, are bandit country. We have put it out of bounds for all our people because the risks there are too high. Anyone who looks like a businessman or an American is at risk, either of kidnap for ransom, or murder if suspected of being an undercover cop. And since most cartel gangs are paranoid - and the cocaine that they use themselves as well as selling it to others makes their paranoia even worse - they kill an awful lot of people. So those who really do have to go to Santa Cruz tend to just take a flight down there, meet their contacts at the airport, settle their business and fly back before nightfall the same day. No one even stays overnight because it’s too dangerous.’

  ‘I hear what you’re saying, but the only way I’m going to find Scouse or discover what happened to him is by retracing his steps. So I need to meet this Lupa, and I need to see the places he worked, maybe including the palm oil plantations. You can help me with some background, though, like what comms I should be using?’

  ‘Well, as you know, South America covers a vast geographical area and the cell phone coverage is very patchy. In the cities it’s fine but as soon as you get a couple of miles out in the countryside, the mobile coverage is largely non-existent. That applies in spades in Bolivia, but unlike mobiles, sat phones will work almost anywhere. We have a relay system up on the roof here which automatically works between sat phone and cell phone, saving us having to chop and change. So just let me know what you want and I’ll make sure you’ve got it.’

  ‘A sat phone definitely sounds the way to go, if you’ve got one I can borrow.’

  ‘Sure. I’ve got a spare in the car, just wait for a minute.’ He sto
od up and headed out. On the way he waved at the woman and asked for two more beers.

  When he returned after a couple of minutes, the beers were on the table, along with a plate of tortilla chips and a bowl of salsa. He sat down and gave Harper a charger and a sat phone that was not much bigger than a regular mobile. ‘These are the business,’ Standish said. ‘As you remember, I’m sure, the traditional sat phones, work off single, hugely powerful, geo-synchronous satellites. They orbit up to twenty thousand miles above the earth, so they can provide coverage over a vast area, but there’s a noticeable delay in transmission because of the distance the signal has to travel. The sat phone you need to use with them is also a pretty chunky item, about the same size and weight as a laptop. Now these little beauties are very different.’ He held up the sat phone he’d brought. ‘They look just like an ordinary mobile, but they work off a series of less powerful but far more numerous satellites than the earth-synchronous ones. They fly in low-earth orbit, about 400-700 miles above the ground, orbiting the earth every sixty to ninety minutes, and the network we use has enough of them to give blanket coverage wherever you happen to be. So you can get enough reception to make a call from almost anywhere on earth.’ He grinned. ‘Even including the North and South Poles apparently, though I don’t have any personal experience of that.’

  ‘You’re a star, Sass, much appreciated.’

  ‘So when do you think you’ll head to Bolivia?’

  ‘First thing tomorrow,’ said Harper. ‘The trail’s cold enough already, and the longer I leave it the colder it gets.’

  ‘But time for a few more beers,’ said Standish.

  Harper grinned. ‘Hell, yeah.’

  CHAPTER 6

  After he and Standish had drunk the best part of a dozen beers between them, Harper said goodnight and went up to his room. He called Lupa on the number Standish had given him but it went through to voicemail. He left a message and she called back within the hour.