Breakout: A Heart-Pounding Lex Harper Thriller Page 5

  ‘I’m Lex, a friend of Scouse’s,’ he said. ‘Have you heard from him recently?’

  ‘Not for a few months,’ she said. ‘Is he okay?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Harper. ‘I’d like to meet you in Santa Cruz if that’s okay with you.’

  ‘That’s fine. When?’

  ‘Tomorrow. I’m in Colombia at the moment but I’ll be flying in from La Paz. I gather Santa Cruz can be a bit edgy, and I could do with some weapons, if that’s possible.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re definitely a friend of Scouse’s.’ she said. ‘In Santa Cruz anything is possible, at a price.’

  ‘I’ll have money,’ said Harper.

  ‘Shall I meet you at the airport?’

  ‘No,’ said Harper. ‘We need a safe and semi-public meeting place - a hotel, a restaurant, or something like that. Do you have somewhere in mind?’

  ‘Of course,’ Lupa said, giving him the name of a hotel. ‘It’s in downtown Santa Cruz, about a half hour drive from the airport. We can meet in the coffee shop.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Harper said. ‘I’ll call you when I’m en route.’

  Harper used his smart phone to book flights for the following day, then he showered and slept a dreamless sleep.

  He didn’t bother with breakfast the following morning. He paid his bill and had the hotel call a cab for him. The flight to La Paz took four hours. The views of the Andes all the way south must have been breathtaking but like ex-soldiers everywhere, Harper always took any downtime as a chance to catch up on some sleep, so he was dozing well before the plane reached its cruising altitude.

  After they landed at La Paz’s El Alto international airport, he shivered in the cold as he stepped out of the aircraft. The air at this altitude was crystalline, the sky a deep, dark blue and the snow-capped peaks of the high Andes looked so close he almost felt he could have reached out and touched them. He paid very close attention as he went through the formalities at arrivals in the airport, glancing around apparently casually as he waited in line to clear immigration and customs, but closely scrutinising the lay-out of the areas, the personnel on duty, and the glimpses of the secure areas where those suspected of smuggling or other crimes were taken. His practised eye also spotted the security cameras - one over each desk and two high up on the wall, giving general views of the area - and the mirrored glass concealing the observation window where police and customs men could scrutinise passengers for the tells that often gave smugglers and drug mules away.

  Although the policeman on the immigration desk gave him a long look as he compared his face with the passport image, there were no hold-ups and no searches of his case or body before Harper was waved through.

  He checked in for the shuttle to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, then passed through security and after an hour long wait nursing an airport coffee he boarded the plane. The flight was short but spectacular. As the aircraft climbed steeply from the Altiplano and then began to bank around, Harper caught a brief glimpse of light reflecting from Lake Titicaca - the lake, sacred to the Incas, that began thirty miles to the north-west and stretched well beyond the Peruvian border. The jet flew on, making a long turn to the east before passing between the mountains that reached over six thousand metres into the sky. As it did so, a glorious Andean sunrise lit up the heavens, painting the clouds red and gold, and then the aircraft was plunging down the eastern slopes of the mountains towards the vibrant green, tropical rainforest of the Amazon basin that filled the horizon.

  After landing at Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz, Harper strode through the terminal and walked swiftly to the cab rank, where he ignored the first few taxis and got into the fifth one in line. He jumped into the seat alongside the driver, waved a US fifty dollar bill at him and said ‘Vamos!’.

  Without taking his eyes off the $50, the driver let in the clutch and drove off at top speed, much to the consternation of the rank’s security marshal who was busy noting down taxi numbers, destinations and passenger ID’s, but now had no information at all on the gringo passenger who had just jumped the queue and ignored him.

  Harper hunched down in his seat so that he could see out of the rear-view and wing mirrors as the driver pulled away and was amused to note that a small, nondescript and very weather-beaten saloon had tucked into the traffic behind them. The driver was obviously not well used to following a car because, still keeping an eye on the mirrors, Harper could see the red glow of the brake lights flickering on and off as the driver kept accelerating to keep pace with the taxi but then overdid it and had to hit the brakes repeatedly to slow down again.

  Once they were clear of the airport, Harper told the taxi driver to head for the city centre, then phoned Lupa. She said she would meet him in the coffee shop of a hotel and Harper relayed the address to the driver.

  Santa Cruz looked to be a big, bustling city, with plenty of luxury car showrooms, high-end clothing and jewellery stores showing the affluence of some of its citizens - just the sort of places favoured by narco-traffickers and gangsters with cash to launder, Harper thought. He paid off the taxi on a downtown street around the corner from the hotel, noting that the same weather-beaten saloon had pulled in to the kerb a short way up the street.

  He waited until the taxi had driven off before walking swiftly up the road towards the hotel. He paused on the corner with a side-street, using the reflections in a shop window to check the pavement behind him and smiled to himself as he noticed a dark-haired young man twenty metres behind him, suddenly become surprisingly interested in the window display of a dress shop. He was wearing a trilby hat with a condor feather stuck in the hat-band, which might have been the sign of a professional; even the most experienced of surveillance operatives was sometimes guilty of following a distinctive hat, rather than the person wearing it, and if the hat was suddenly removed, the person effectively disappeared. However, the body language of the young man and the way he shot a sidelong glance at Harper when he thought he was not being observed, suggested that he was not a professional and the hat was probably being worn out of vanity, not tradecraft. However, he didn’t seem to pose any immediate threat, so Harper turned and carried on, but paused once more a few metres further on, as much for the entertainment value of watching his tail having to stop dead again and back-track to a newspaper stall he’d just passed, as from any sense of danger.

  Harper was early and he took a seat at a corner table in the coffee shop. He put his backpack on the chair next to him. Dead on time Lupa entered and after a brief glance around the room, threaded her way through the tables to where Harper was sitting. She was in her early twenties, with a slim figure and long, jet-black hair. Her eyes were almost as dark as her hair and her beauty was little affected by the thin white line of a scar - the result of a slash from a knife or razor, Harper thought - extending from just below the corner of her eye to her jaw.

  ‘You’re Lex,’ she said, a statement not a question. ‘I’m Lupa.’ She had a large leather bag over her shoulder and was carrying two plastic grocery bags which she unceremoniously dumped on the table in front of him. ‘I hope you’ll be happy with these,’ she said, ‘because we may well be needing them. My brother is watching our backs and will let us know if we have problems, but we’ll be lucky to get out of this area without a fight, because gringos like you are walking million-dollar ransoms, so you will have been noticed and word will have been passed on.’

  An elderly waitress in a black and white uniform came over and Harper ordered a double espresso for himself, figuring he could do with the caffeine jolt. Lupa asked for a mint tea.

  As the waitress walked away, Harper peered into the bags, and found that each of them contained a large pistol. The bluing of the gun-metal had been worn away through so much use and age that the pistols had reverted to the original silver colour. Harper immediately recognised them as old model .45 calibre Colts. They had been used by the US military throughout two world wars and in countless other twentieth century conflicts. The Colt was a s
ingle-action, semi-automatic, magazine-fed and recoil-operated pistol, and the magazine held seven rounds with an additional round in the spout.

  ‘Will they do?’ Lupa said.

  ‘Absolutely. The old ’uns are the best,’ Harper said, unfazed by the age of the weapons. ‘Did you bring any ammo as well?’

  ’Of course, sixteen rounds a gun, two mags of seven and one for the chamber.’

  Once more he was impressed. ‘I can see why Scouse hired you. These are perfect; .45 calibre rounds would stop an elephant.’ He eyed her slim frame and gave her a slightly dubious look. ‘So will you be carrying one of the Colts yourself?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, the kickback on the Colt is too much for my wrist.’ She patted her shoulder bag. ‘I’m carrying a 9 mm Makarov.’

  ‘Good choice. It’s an easy weapon to use, very rarely jams and packs enough punch for most situations. So who’s the other Colt for - your brother?’

  She nodded. ‘He’ll be joining us as soon as he’s worked out what company we have outside.’

  Harper grinned. ‘He’ll be the guy with a Condor feather in his hat then, who followed me in from the airport.’

  She gave a rueful smile. ‘I asked him to ride shotgun on you in case of trouble. Was he really that easy to spot?’

  ‘He was for me, yes, but I’ve had a lot of practice at this. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed, although the hat with the condor feather is a bit too flamboyant if you’re going to do the job properly.’

  The waitress returned with their drinks and placed them on the table. ‘Tell me,’ Harper said, as the waitress moved away, ‘how come you speak such good English? Is one of your parents British or American, or something?’

  ‘No, they’re both Bolivian. I learned English through reading comic books at first, then books, and then TV and films.’ She shrugged. ‘Even when we were young, my brother and I always had our eyes on a bigger world than the small town where we grew up, and learning to speak English was part of the escape plan. We practised on each other, listened to English-language radio and TV shows.’

  ‘And your parents, what did they do?’

  ‘They ran a bar and cantina in our home town, near Trinidad, in Beni state. It’s about 500 kilometres from here.’ She grimaced. ‘Not a place I’d recommend to you. The heat and humidity is hard for native Bolivians to take, let alone pale-skinned gringos, and the wet season runs from December to May, though when you’re in the middle of it, it seems a whole lot longer than that. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the whole area is a swamp. As well as the river that runs through the town, there are half a dozen other tributaries of the Amazon within a few kilometres and the place is so wet that there are water-filled ditches at the side of every street.’ She gave a grim smile. ‘Every building’s drains empty into them as well, so you can imagine what they smell like, and the mosquitoes also love them, as you’d expect. They’ll eat you alive and malaria is rife, and in the wet season you can even find caiman - alligators - and anacondas in the ditches as well.’

  ‘Sounds the perfect spot for a family holiday,’ Harper said with a laugh.

  ‘Most of the people there used to be miners, loggers or farmers, but coca is now one of the main crops around there - but the drug cartels have moved in on Trinidad, just like they have here, and a lot of people work for them, harvesting coca, converting it into cocaine paste, and carrying it to the airstrips or the rivers, or even working as human mules, taking it on foot right through the rainforest into Brazil.’

  ‘I can see why you wanted to get out,’ Harper said. ‘So how did you meet Scouse?’

  ‘He was down here checking security on some of the oil palm plantations. A lot of the owners are gringos but their guards, chauffeurs and servants aren’t. Many of them don’t speak a word of English and the only Spanish word Scouse knew was cerveza - beer.’

  Harper laughed. ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘So he needed an interpreter and I happened to bump into him, in a bar, as it happens.’

  ‘Again, no surprises there.’

  ‘So we started chatting and he hired me to work for him. He paid well and the work was a lot more interesting than showing American tourists around Santa Cruz, not that there have been many of those since the cartels moved in and the drug wars started.’

  ‘And your brother?’

  ‘Like me, Ricardo had no taste for subsistence farming or helping our parents to run the bar and cantina. He was a bit of a wild boy, getting involved in petty theft at first, and then graduating to break-ins, car-jackings and armed robberies. I’d sometimes help him, first just as a look-out, then as a getaway driver, and eventually as his partner in crime. I was good at it too.’ Her look challenged Harper to disapprove. ‘Inevitably he got involved with one of the cartels, and at that point I stepped back. Not for moral reasons - if gringos are stupid enough to pay a fortune to snort white powder or smoke crack, that’s not my problem, and the farmers who grow coca make a better living from that than they do from any other crop. They get three crops a year from coca bushes, and the price they get is far higher than for any alternative crops they could grow. Anyway, I’d seen enough of the cartels to know that the only people who really survive and thrive, the ones living on ranches, driving around in Mercedes with tinted windows and drinking French champagne, are the ones at the very top. The rest: the sicarios - the assassins - the foot-soldiers, the men making the cocaine in the jungle factories and the mules shipping it out, sooner or later, they all end up in jail or dead. So I took a few steps back, but my brother still works for one of the cartels.’ She smiled. ‘So, now you know our criminal background, perhaps you want nothing more to do with us?’

  Harper smiled. ‘If I refused to have anything to do with people just because they had a bit of a criminal background, not only would I have no business associates, I wouldn’t have any friends either. So… let’s get back to Scouse, what can you tell me about his disappearance?’

  ‘Only what I already told Sam in my statement to Risk Reduction, and I’m sure you’ve already read that. He was flying into La Paz and we’d arranged to meet later that day, but he never showed up at the rendezvous and when I called his mobile phone, it was switched off. Risk Reduction said they could only track it as far as the airport at La Paz and no further, so it had evidently been destroyed almost at once, either by Scouse himself or by whoever had taken him prisoner.’

  ‘What do you think happened?’

  She shrugged. ‘He always seemed a little careless to me. He’d talk about things he shouldn’t have in places where you needed to watch your words. I don’t know if he let something slip and was overheard or if he didn’t follow the right procedures and strayed into an area he shouldn’t have been in, or was betrayed, or was just unlucky and caught the wrong taxi - if he even got that far. I know Risk Reduction bribes the customs and police officers to look the other way when their couriers are passing through the airport, but they certainly aren’t the only organisations doing that. In Bolivia, you can buy everyone from the lowliest policeman to the President - the only thing that varies is the price you have to pay.’

  Harper had been keeping half an eye on the door of the coffee shop, and when it opened he saw the now familiar condor feather in the new arrival’s hat. Lupa’s brother looked around for a moment before spotting them. He walked over to them, winked at Lupa and nodded to Harper. ‘Nice hat,’ Harper said. ‘I was admiring it when we were out in the street.’

  Ricardo gave an uncertain smile.

  ‘My brother doesn’t really do irony,’ Lupa said. ‘Ricardo, Lex means he spotted you following him.’

  Harper smiled. ‘If you’re going to do surveillance on someone, you need to be a grey man, Ricardo, melting into the crowds, not standing out from them.’ He saw Ricardo’s crestfallen expression and sugared the pill a little. ‘But that aside, you were pretty good at it. I do this kind of stuff for a living, so it’s second nature to watch my back, but most p
eople wouldn’t have noticed you.’

  ‘So, what’s the situation, brother?’ Lupa said.

  ‘We seem to be surrounded,’ he said. ‘But meanwhile, if you’re buying, señor Lex, mine’s a latte.’ He sat down opposite Harper.

  ‘Surrounded by who and how many of them are there?’

  ‘Cartel guys and not ones I’m friendly with. There are about sixty gangs in Santa Cruz, but only two that matter. The Santa Cruz cartel is run by a mixture of Colombians and Bolivians. They are my guys. The ones outside are our enemies - Brazilians from the Comando Vermelho - the Red Command. They were originally just one of the big prison gangs in Brazil, but they now control the cocaine trade in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and have spread into Bolivia as well. I reckon there are eight of them outside altogether: two at the back, four in a car at the front, and another couple in shop doorways on the other side of the street.’

  ‘Are they after me or you?’ asked Harper.

  Ricardo laughed. ‘It was you they were looking at. But they’re no friends of mine.’ He looked around. ‘You’re buying me a coffee, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Harper. He waved the elderly waitress over and ordered a latte.

  ‘Okay, once we’ve got our present situation sorted, I’d like the two of you to come to La Paz with me and see if we can find Scouse.’ He nodded at the bag. ‘I’m assuming we can’t take them in our hand luggage, but can we check them in a suitcase?’

  Lupa shook her head. ‘They X-ray bags for drugs and guns will show up. But I have a way to get us and the guns to La Paz, don’t worry.’

  Harper sat back in his chair. ‘So I know a bit about Lupa now, Ricardo, but what about you? Tell me about how you came to get involved in a life of crime?’ He winked to show he wasn’t bothered by it.

  Ricardo shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, to be honest, it’s all I’ve ever known. It was certainly easier money than farming or working in the bar with my parents, but I was never interested in that anyway. I wanted to be one of the guys I used to see who could walk into the bar, buy drinks para todos - for everyone - and pay for them by pulling out a fat roll of bills from their pocket and peeling off a couple. So I hung around those guys, got to know a few of them and, as well as a few crimes of my own - mostly robberies - I started getting involved with some of theirs. There was sometimes a price to pay of course; I did my first jail time when I was fourteen. I’m thirty now and I’ve been inside five times altogether, once in Trinidad, once in Cochabamba, twice here in Santa Cruz and once in La Paz. It’s not such a big problem, if you have money or friends with money, life inside can be quite comfortable and you’re not there for long.’