Survival Reflex

“Be careful, gentlemen, and shower thoroughly before you start, for God’s sake. I’ll expect good news within…shall we say, forty-eight hours?”

“Yes, sir.” A two-man chorus.

“If you can’t manage that, I suggest you keep going. Find a hole and burrow deep. Pray I don’t find you alive.”

Cuiabá, Brazil

THE RED-HAIRED PILOT beat her own best ETA by forty minutes, even after bucking killer turbulence over the Serra Formosa. Bolan tipped her thirty percent of her fee and got an inkling of a smile in return before she left him to fuel the plane for her return trip to Belém.

When Bolan turned, hefting his bags, he saw Marta Enriquez standing in the shadow of the airstrip’s terminal. She raised a hand and Bolan nodded in return, while scanning left and right for any sign of watchers in the neighborhood. He’d missed them back in San Diego, and he was determined not to make the same mistake again.

This time around, his life depended on it.

Bolan crossed the tarmac and a strip of poorly tended grass to reach the terminal. He didn’t go inside, because the country’s rural landing strips demanded nothing in the way of customs declarations or security procedures. It was why he’d gone the charter route, instead of booking a commercial flight.

Enriquez put on a smile to greet him, saying, “I was worried that you wouldn’t come.”

“I’m here. You have a car?”

“This way.” She eyed his bags. “May I…?”

“No, thanks.”

She led him to the far side of the small building and a bare-dirt parking lot of sorts. Three vehicles stood baking in the sunshine, the woman’s four-door model Bolan didn’t recognize. Something domestic, he decided, patterned on some U.S. model from the 1960s.

Bolan put his bags in the back seat and let himself into the oven on wheels. The sedan’s air-conditioning gave out asthmatic wheezing sounds, and Enriquez left the windows down, raising her voice as she accelerated on the highway to Cuiabá.

“Were there any difficulties on your trip?” she asked.

“I had a welcoming committee in Belém,” Bolan replied.

“Oh, yes?” She sounded nervous.

“A guy from the U.S. embassy. He doesn’t like the company I’m keeping lately.”

“Oh?” Her eyes flicked back and forth between the road and Bolan’s face.

He didn’t feel like tiptoeing around it. “Did you know you had a tail in San Diego?”

“Tail?”

“That you were being shadowed. Watched.”

The horrified expression on her face answered his question well before she found her voice. “I didn’t know. I promise you.”

“You put them onto me, and they were waiting when I touched down in Belém.”

“What did they say?” she asked.

He gambled on the truth. “They called you ‘a subject of interest’ and told me to leave you alone, go back to the States, this and that.”

“But you came anyway.”

“I like to judge things for myself,” Bolan replied.

“Did they say anything about Na—About Dr. Weiss?”

It wasn’t the first time she’d caught herself speaking of Bones in a familiar way. Or was that intimate? Bolan couldn’t swear the question was relevant to his mission, but it might have some bearing on how much he trusted the woman.

“He wasn’t mentioned.”

“Oh? Perhaps they just want me.”

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“I’ve been involved in antigovernment protests since they began to drive my people off the land.”

“That’s a domestic problem,” Bolan said. He guessed the answer to his next question before he spoke, but asked it anyway. “What does it have to do with Washington?”

“Your country has involved itself in Latin American matters for two hundred years, from the Monroe Doctrine and the Panama canal to Noriega and the Contras. Some say Washington supports regimes that favor U.S. businesses.”

“And what do you say?” Bolan prodded.

“Dr. Weiss needs help,” she said. “Soon, it may be too late. If you’re his friend, please help him.”

“First, I have to find him.”

“I will show you where he is,” she said.

“That wasn’t part of the agreement,” he reminded her.

“How else will you locate him?” Enriquez asked.

“Technology. You give me the coordinates and I take it from there.”

“I’m sorry,” she responded with a calculating smile, “but I don’t understand such things. I’ll have to show you where he is. Are we agreed?”

Washington, D.C.

HAL BROGNOLA TOOK the call from California on his private, scrambled line. He recognized the voice at once and asked, “How’s Baja?”

“Hot and dry,” Rosario Blancanales said. “I’ve got another problem, though. You ought to know about it.”

“So, let’s hear it.”

“Toni had two visitors at the home office earlier today. They claimed affiliation with the State Department, but she says they smelled like Company.”

Brognola frowned at that. “How sure is she?”