Days of the Dead

Now all they needed was evidence linking this office with the prison on Providencia. Which wouldn’t be easy. Presumably each missive from the island was consigned to the shredder the moment it had been read. He would have to try to set up an intercept of some sort, Americans or no…

As if in answer to a prayer the fax clicked into life. Shepreth stood over it, hoping it wouldn’t be someone trying to sell Bazua double glazing for his prison.

It wasn’t. The fax, emanating from a number which Shepreth recognized as including the prefix for Colombia’s two Caribbean islands, contained the usual list of buyers, together with amounts, beeper numbers and instructions for onward transmission to the organization’s cell head in northern Mexico. The Americans wouldn’t be able to ignore this, Shepreth thought. They would either have to add Bazua to their precious list of kingpins or come up with an honest reason for refusing.

He detached the sheet from the machine, folded it twice and put it in his back pocket, then headed for the door. He listened for a moment before inching it open. The corridor was empty. Relocking the door seemed more difficult than unlocking it had been, and he was still struggling to engage the catch when the lift doors suddenly opened behind him and two men emerged, guns in hand. He had no time to do anything but stare sheepishly at them.

‘Looking for Azul Travel?’ one of the men asked. He was probably in his mid-thirties, with a pencil moustache and uneven teeth.

The other man, who was younger and wearing tinted glasses above his pitted cheeks, sniggered.

They advanced, one man pushing into the unlocked office while the other kept him covered.

Shepreth just stared at him, willing his mind to keep on working through the fear that was threatening to choke it off. If it didn’t his chances of living past midnight were remote. Even if he stayed James Bond-cool they were less than good. The thought plunged him further into shock – in eight years of working for MI6 he had not often found himself at the mercy of people with so little interest in his living and so little fear that they would have to pay for his death.

The one with the moustache pushed Shepreth into the office, closing the door behind himself, and then stood with his gun in the Englishman’s ear while his partner did the frisking. This didn’t take long. Pitted Cheeks stepped back, shoved Shepreth’s automatic into his waistband, unfolded and read the stolen fax, then examined the wallet.

‘You’re a long way from home, English,’ he said in conversational Spanish.

‘So are you,’ Shepreth replied in the same language, recognizing the man’s Colombian accent. He wondered if his voice sounded as brittle to them as it did to him.

‘Panama used to be a part of Colombia,’ Moustache told him.

‘It still is,’ his partner said, and both men laughed.

Shepreth said nothing.

‘You have probably come to Panama to see the Canal, yes?’ Pitted Cheeks asked playfully.

‘I’ve seen it,’ Shepreth said.

‘Not from underwater,’ Moustache said almost perfunctorily, leaving Shepreth with the stomach-sinking realization that the two of them had been through this particular sketch several times before.

Pitted Cheeks, meanwhile, was picking out a number on the phone. ‘I need to speak to the Chief,’ he said when someone answered, and a few moments later, smiling all the while at Shepreth, he was reporting what had happened. He then listened for a while before signing off and putting the phone back down on the carpet. ‘The Chief has a few questions for you,’ he said.

Shepreth found himself taking a deep breath of relief.

‘But not too many,’ Pitted Cheeks added, reading his mind. ‘We’ll probably still have time to show you the Canal tonight.’

The ludicrous thought flashed through Shepreth’s mind that he would never know who won Euro 96. Get a grip, he told himself. This was life and death.

They led him down the deserted stairs and out into an empty alley, and Moustache kept a gun on him while Pitted Cheeks went off, presumably to collect their car. This might be his only chance, Shepreth thought, but really it was no chance at all. Moustache was too far away for a lunge and there was no reason to suppose the Colombian would do anything other than put a bullet in Shepreth’s kneecap if he tried. And then he’d never get another chance.

Despite the training, despite what his head told him, it all seemed unreal somehow, standing there so helplessly in an alley in Panama City, with a man who’d more or less promised that he’d never see another dawn. The sounds of the city were all around them, but strangely distant, as if the alley was enclosed in thick but invisible glass.

The Colombians’ car bumped its way towards them, shattering the spell.

Pitted Cheeks got out and the two of them discussed whether or not to put him in the boot. They decided against, reasoning that if they knocked him out the questioning might be delayed, but if they didn’t he might drum on the lid at the wrong moment. They both clearly enjoyed this discussion – such attention to detail, Shepreth realized, was their proof of professionalism. These men might be lacking in humanity, but not in job satisfaction.

He was ordered into the wide back seat of the car, a black Toyota Camry, and Moustache climbed in beside him, eyes watchful, careful to keep a couple of feet between prisoner and gun.

Pitted Cheeks got in behind the wheel and started the car rolling forward. They turned left out of the alley on to Calle 36 and purred uphill towards Avenida 3, now jostling with people out for their evening stroll through the shopping district. Shepreth thought of lunging for the door, but knew it would be fatal – Moustache’s eyes had not left him for a second since they entered the car.

They crossed Avenida 3 and headed up towards the next big crossroads. In ten minutes they might be out of the city altogether, Shepreth thought. If he was going to do anything, it had to be soon. But what? He felt paralysed. Moustache smirked at him, as if he knew exactly what was going on in his prisoner’s mind.

As Pitted Cheeks waited to turn right on to the busy Avenida 2 a bus first lurched forward and then abruptly pulled up again as the lights changed. This motion not only fooled Pitted Cheeks, who paused for a second before pulling out, but also a taxi coming up on the blind side of the stalled bus, which was through the red light before the driver had realized his mistake. His emergency stop would have pleased his original instructor, but there was no way he could avoid making contact with the side of the Toyota.

The crash was louder than it felt, and Moustache’s gun hardly seemed to waver, but the taxi driver was already out on the street and hundreds of eyes were turned their way. Two of them, Shepreth realized with sudden hope, belonged to a traffic cop who was now walking their way.

Moustache had seen him too, and the gun was now in his pocket, albeit still obviously aimed in Shepreth’s direction.

Pitted Cheeks climbed reluctantly out of the Toyota, just as the cop arrived to take charge. As he looked into the car Shepreth deliberately reached for the door handle, opened the door and climbed out on to the street. No bullets gouged into him.

He smiled at the cop and leant against the car’s roof for a moment until the man’s attention was back on the two drivers. There had to be about two hundred people standing around enjoying the show, and the cop was obviously going to milk the spotlight for all he could. A cacophony of horns was rising from the stranded traffic.

‘I’ll see you later,’ Shepreth told Moustache, and began walking away. Ten steps later he was through the first line of watchers, and looking back he could see that neither of the Colombians was making any attempt to follow him. He walked on along the crowded pavement, his heart thumping in his chest, hardly daring to believe his luck.

From Avenida 2 he took a taxi to his hotel, tipping the driver with a generosity which the man appreciated better than he understood. It took Shepreth three minutes to clear his room and check out; fifteen minutes later he was registering at another hotel under another name, using the alternative identification he carried for such emergencies. He didn’t think the Colombians would come looking for him – the risks seemed to outweigh the potential benefits – but he spent most of the night dozing in a chair, fingers wrapped round the butt of his other gun.

4 (#uc61cd569-5e3b-5802-92b3-e952d5eb3a22)

With an hour-long stopover in Quito, Docherty’s journey from Santiago de Chile to Mexico City took just over ten hours. For almost all of the first flight he was able to stare out of his window at the majestic Andes, but most of the second was over water, and the choice of entertainment came down to either Arnie Schwarzenegger or his own thoughts.

Five days had passed since he and Isabel had visited the Macíases in Devoto, two since their return home from Buenos Aires. He had watched out for signs that his wife was regretting her decision to approve the trip, but, natural anxieties apart, there had been none that he could see, and on the eve of his departure, after they’d made love on a bed still strewn with his packing, she had made her feelings clear. ‘If it wasn’t for the children,’ she had told him, ‘I’d be coming with you. In fact, there’s one voice inside me says I should be going instead of you. These are the people I’ve been fighting all my life. The people who killed my friends.’

Sitting in the plane, Docherty could see her face on the pillow, the same mingling of determination and anxiety in her dark eyes, and he could remember that moment in the car outside Rio Gallegos in 1982, when the rest of the SAS patrol had been captured and she’d refused to head for the border alone. ‘I could cross ten borders and never leave this war behind,’ she had said at the time.

But what was his excuse? Terrible things had been done in Argentina, but the same could be said of many other countries, and though he had more than a vague attachment to old-fashioned notions of justice, Docherty had no desire to take on the mantle of a one-man crusade. The money would be nice, of course, but that wasn’t the reason for his presence on this flight either – in fact he wasn’t at all sure what his motivation was. He hoped it was more than an older man’s attempt to relive his youth. ‘But I wouldn’t bet money on it,’ he murmured to himself.

He shook the doubts aside, and picked up the guide to Mexico City which Isabel had bought for him the previous day. In his two stays there in 1977 he had found the place oppressive, but that was hardly surprising – during the first he had still been crazy with grief and by the time of the second he had the rest of the country to compare it with. In nearly five months of travelling he had fallen in love with Mexico, its people and its churches, its mountains and its beaches.

A part of him had always meant to go back, but another part had feared that for him the country would always be entangled with memories of Chrissie. It was her senseless death on a zebra crossing just six months after their marriage which had driven him abroad in the first place, and fate had decreed that Mexico should be the place which brought him back to life. The life he had given to the SAS and his family, and not necessarily in that order.

He turned his attention to the present. If Gustavo Macías was right, and Lazaro Toscono’s business in Mexico City was just a drug-trade front, then he would have to be careful about how he approached the man. It would not do to start hammering on the bastard’s front door before he found out what was behind it. As one of his old SAS instructors had put it: a few hours of observation is worth a thousand stun grenades.

It was a pity he had no local contacts – he’d made friends in Mexico, but none in the capital. It suddenly occurred to Docherty that he might be able to pick up some intelligence from the Embassy if he used his contacts in Hereford, but then he remembered that Barney Davies had finally stepped down as SAS CO, and been replaced by someone whom he barely knew.

In any case, he thought, that would be like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Or a general to run a country, as they said in Chile.

The plane was losing altitude now, and he spent the next fifteen minutes yawning to unblock his ears, watching as the yellow-browns and greens of the central plateau grew more distinct. Then they were flying down through either thin clouds or dense smog, re-emerging less than a kilometre above an overcrowded multi-lane highway that was snaking its way through shanty-covered hills.

The airport seemed three times as big as he remembered it, but he had no trouble getting through Immigration or Customs. Noticing the Hertz sign, he thought about hiring a car, but decided against it – there was no point in leaving such an obvious trail for an enemy. Instead he fought his way on to the modern Metro, remembering as he did so a recent traveller’s comment that its off-peak crowds would pass for a rush hour anywhere else. Two changes and several buffetings later, he emerged from the Zócalo station, no more than a stone’s throw away from the great square at the heart of the old city.

This seemed unchanged from nearly twenty years before, and he realized with a grin that he had arrived just in time to witness the six o’clock flag-changing ceremony – one of the world’s longest-running farces. The troop of a dozen soldiers was already halfway from the Palacio Nacional to the flagpole in the centre of the square, and by the time Docherty had joined the circle of spectators the drums were echoing, the national colours on their way down. A kind of baroque minuet followed, whereby the huge flag was folded to the size of a small tablecloth and then carried, with stunning reverence, back into the palace.

The crowd was now filtering away, the sun almost gone, its rays touching only the highest reaches of the cathedral on the square’s northern side. The sound of more drumming – rhythmic, distinctly unmilitary drumming – was coming from the corner to the right, and he walked across to find a circle of dancers whirling around a single drummer. They looked like Indians, and their speed and agility were amazing.

This was Mexico, Docherty thought. Mayan feet on Spanish stone, the past entwined with the present, drunkenness and death, farce and tragedy. After Chrissie’s death everything had seemed grey, but this country kept hitting you in the face with the whole damn palette.