Days of the Dead

DAVID MONNERY

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1996

Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1996

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Cover photographs © MILpictures, Tom Weber/Getty Images (soldier); Shutterstock.com (background, textures)

David Monnery asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008155513

Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008155520

Version: 2015-11-02

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES

About the Publisher

1

Placida Guzmán shifted her swollen body on the twin bed, trying to ease the cramping pain in her lower abdomen. She was dressed only in T-shirt and knickers, but the erratic swish of the air-conditioner seemed devoid of any power to cool, and the heat of the day still clung damply to her skin.

She manoeuvred herself on to her elbows, wincing at the pain. On the street outside the level of conversation seemed to be rising, and in the distance several sources of music were competing for attention. After a few moments she recognized Selena’s voice among the throng.

The patch of sunlight had almost finished its climb up the peeling wall and perhaps a breeze would soon be blowing in from the sea. It would be so nice to go out for a walk on the famous beach, just a simple walk in the sand, just to feel free again.

She sank back on to the bed, knocking a couple of empty laxative packets on to a floor already littered with them, and gently massaged her stomach with her palms. Fifteen months they had been on the island, fifteen months at his beck and call. And the call had come often. He had told her more than once that she was the most beautiful of the five, and it had sounded like a life sentence. She would still be there now if she hadn’t got pregnant.

But that was all in the past. Him, the island, the shame. She just had to get through this, and a new life was waiting.

Another wave of pain ran through her body and for a few seconds she had trouble breathing. Where was Victoria? She’d been gone for what seemed like hours. Placida hoped to God her friend hadn’t got lost in the strange city. It shouldn’t be that difficult to find a drugstore, but something had snapped inside Victoria during one of the nights with Bazua’s men, making her behaviour difficult to predict. Sometimes she seemed just like her old self, but at others it was like talking to a small child.

The first thing they should do after this was over was to get help for her. But how and where? On Providencia all the girls had dreamt of going home, but once off the island, once away from him, Placida had found that the thought of returning to Cartagena, to the familiar streets and familiar faces of family and friends, seemed not only unreal but also, in some strange way, the ultimate surrender. It was as if the past could only be buried as a single entity; if she was ever to be happy again the slate had to be wiped completely clean.

She wondered if they would receive the money they had been promised. The man had been angry last night, and she supposed he would be again if nothing had happened, but what else could she do? If he refused to pay them then who could they complain to?

She grimaced, and felt another knot tightening in her gut.

It was almost dark now, and maybe the air was cooler, but the thought of trying to open the window was too daunting. Victoria could do it when she came back. If she came back.

Where the hell had she got to? Surely the obviousness of her condition would have saved her from being hassled in the street.

Placida thought about the baby growing inside her own belly. For the child’s sake she knew she should go back to Cartagena, where her family could certainly offer him or her a better start in life than she could manage on her own. She herself had been happy enough in the house in La Matuna, and the garden with its sweet-smelling hibiscus flowers. Maybe it had been different at the time but she found it hard to remember having a care in the world as she grew up, at least not until Rogelio came into her life, and her father’s discovery, not that much later, that she was no longer a virgin.

She laughed at the sheer absurdity of it all, and felt something shift inside her. It wasn’t a cramp like the others and for one delightful moment she thought it must be the baby’s first kick, but then a hot white light seemed to explode inside her, so sweet and so painful, and her heart seemed to thunder in her head. Her back arched once, and as she slumped back down on to the bed the darkness fell across her brain like a swirling black sheet.

A couple of blocks down Miami Beach’s Washington Avenue, Victoria Marín was looking in vain for a street sign. It had taken her much longer than she’d expected to find a drugstore and now, clasping the bag containing the new supply of laxatives, she couldn’t seem to find the hotel again. The pavements had seemed to suddenly fill up once the sun went down, and with all the non-stop motion and incessant noise she was finding it hard to think.

It had to be that way, she thought, staring hopefully down the neon-drenched street. That building in the distance might be the hotel. It looked white, and its shape seemed familiar.

As she started to walk a hand suddenly grasped her around the waist. ‘And how much would you be?’ the man asked in Cuban-accented Spanish, his hand working its way up her T-shirt towards a breast.

She stopped and looked at him, tears erupting from her eyes.

His leer gave way to surprise, and then the hand was gone, and she had a fleeting glimpse of his angry face as he turned away. Why was he angry? she wondered. What had she done?

Several people were staring at her, she realized. She hurried on, passing through the aromatic clouds which hung like advertising hoardings outside the restaurants. She was hungry, she thought, and there was only forty cents left in her pocket. They would have to ask the man for some money when he returned that evening.

She reached the building she thought she’d recognized, but even up close she couldn’t be sure – they all looked alike, and she hadn’t thought to check the name when she went out. But the fat woman behind the reception desk was familiar, and so was the look of contempt she threw Victoria’s way.

She thinks we’re whores, Victoria thought, and remembered, clear as if it had been yesterday, Marysa shouting at Placida that ‘whores got paid’, that the five of them were slaves, not whores. ‘Slaves have no choice!’ she had yelled, eyes glittering with angry tears. ‘None of this is our fault! None of it!’

It had been a comforting thought then, and it still was. Victoria started to climb the stairs, taking it slowly. Even though the pellets had all come safely through, her body still felt strange. It was like a country after invaders had been expelled, she thought – it would take time to get back to normal.

She remembered sifting through her shit for the condom-wrapped pellets and shuddered involuntarily, even as her mind thought how strange it was, getting upset about something like that after all they’d been through.

She stopped on a landing, and tried to remember how many flights she’d climbed. Through a window she could see a fat crescent moon setting behind the city, and she stood there for several minutes staring at it, lost in a thoughtless reverie.

Eventually she turned away, and again there were tears in her eyes – these days she couldn’t seem to stop crying. But at least she was on the right floor, and it took only a few moments to reach the door with the badly painted number 314.

‘I’m back,’ she said cheerfully as she walked in, and it was several seconds before her mind accepted the information her eyes were passing on. Placida was lying on her back, one leg raised, its foot twisted inwards. Her eyes were wide open and seemed full of surprise.

Her skin was still warm to the touch, but there was no doubting that she was dead. Victoria sank to her knees, her arms on the bed, like a child about to say her bedtime prayers. This time the tears didn’t come, just a soft mewling sound, which seemed to be seeping out of some crack in the night, but which she knew was emanating from her own mouth.

She would never know how long she stayed in that position. The next thing she remembered she was gathering her few things together and, on a sudden impulse, taking Placida’s passport as well as her own. She crossed her friend’s arms, closed her eyes and mouth, straightened her legs and covered her to the neck with one of the hotel’s grimy sheets. Then, after one long and despairing look back from the doorway, she fled the hotel.

Jesús Barbosa walked jauntily across Washington Avenue and through the front door of the Grant Hotel. He was carrying a calfskin briefcase and wearing an open-necked white shirt, freshly pressed cream chinos and a new pair of alligator-skin shoes. A large gold earring in the shape of a fire-breathing dragon hung from one ear, and the smile he offered the fat lady behind the desk reflected, literally, the fifteen hundred dollars he’d just spent on cosmetic dental work. In the words of the last detective who’d found reason to question him, he gave the impression of someone who’d seen one too many Miami Vice reruns.

He took the stairs two at a time, hoping that the bitch had finally got herself on the pot. He didn’t like making unnecessary journeys, not in heat like this. It was days like these which made him nostalgic for the mountains he had grown up in, where the heat was dry, there was always a breeze and in the evening the temperature dropped more than a couple of degrees. The trouble was, there was nothing to do in those mountains – no music, no cars, not enough women.

Barbosa reached the third floor and walked down the short corridor to the women’s room. Normally he would treat himself to the female mules, but this pair were too obviously pregnant for his taste, though he could see that they’d both been lookers before. He didn’t bother to knock on the door, just turned the handle and stepped inside to find the body laid out beneath its shroud.

‘Shit!’ he muttered angrily, ripping the sheet aside. ‘Shit,’ he repeated with rather less vehemence, and looked at his watch. He was meeting the gringa in an hour and a half, and he didn’t want to turn up smelling of corpses. But there was close to half a million dollars’ worth of heroin inside this one, and no puta was worth that. He sighed, unclipped the mobile from his belt and ordered some transport.

That done, he plucked the six-inch blade from its sheath on his right calf, ripped away the dead girl’s clothes, made a rough twelve-inch slit in her abdomen and began searching through her innards for the sixty-nine pellets of heroin that she had swallowed on Providencia.

Half an hour later he had recovered sixty-six, which, with the one that had burst, left two unaccounted for.

It was enough. He wrapped the mutilated body in a sheet, washed his hands and was just looking at his watch when the rap sounded on the door. In the corridor Miguel and Roberto were standing on either side of the small refrigerator, breathing heavily. Once they had carried it into the room he helped them cram the still-flexible body inside – in heat like this rigor mortis took a long time to kick in. Then he followed as they wheezed their way back down to the truck, which was parked in the alley beside the hotel.

They drove off, headed for one of the usual dumping spots in Dade County, and Barbosa, his briefcase now two pounds heavier, hailed a taxi. With any luck he still had time to store the merchandise and take a shower at his fitness centre before his assignation with the Pamela Anderson look-alike.

It was almost midnight when the cops found Victoria Marín on the moonlit beach. At first they assumed she was helplessly drunk, but there was no smell of liquor on her breath. They searched the canvas shopping bag for drugs but found only two Colombian passports and a few cosmetics. She apparently had no money.

Throughout this process Victoria refused to speak, and it was only by exercising enormous will-power that she refrained from screaming when one of the cops took her arm to lead her to the car.

She couldn’t stop herself from crying. She didn’t think she ever would.

2

The road arrowed into the distance across the flat Pampas countryside. Farmland stretched away to either side, the farms themselves mostly pinpoints of light on the low horizon. In the vast sky a full moon was playing hide-and-seek with an armada of clouds.

They couldn’t be much more than forty kilometres from the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Jamie Docherty reckoned, and soon he would be able to see a red glow in the sky above the highway. He remembered nights as a young man driving back down from Loch Lomond to Glasgow – a close friend had always insisted that the glow was nature’s way of warning people that cities were bad for their souls.

Docherty took a glance in the rear-view mirror. Both nine-year-old Marie and seven-year-old Ricardo were fast asleep, which wasn’t exactly surprising. Between them, he and Isabel had driven nearly eight hundred kilometres that day, and over four hundred and fifty the day before. The two children had certainly started out hyperactive, but they just hadn’t been able to stay the course.

Beside him Isabel was also more than half asleep. She was in her mid-forties, a couple of years younger than he was, but she seemed just as beautiful as the day they had met, more than fifteen years ago.

Docherty smiled to himself as he remembered the first time he’d seen her, striding in through the doors of a hotel in the southern Argentinian town of Rio Gallegos. It had been at the height of the Falklands War – in the immediate aftermath of the landing at San Carlos – and Docherty had been leading one of two four-man SAS patrols which had been secretly airlifted on to the Argentinian mainland for the purpose of observing enemy activity at the Rio Gallegos and Rio Grande airfields. Having done everything which was required of it, his patrol had been on the point of heading for the Chilean hills when a complication arose. Two members of the other patrol had been captured, and there were fears that they would be tortured into revealing the name of MI6’s only agent in the area, an Argentinian woman based in Rio Gallegos. So someone had to warn her of the danger.

Docherty had taken the task upon himself, and changed his life in the process. The two of them had ended up escaping together across the mountains and falling in love along the way.

Now here they both were, driving towards Buenos Aires on a warm winter evening. It wasn’t the first time they had been across the Andes since setting up home in Chile two years before, but it still felt vaguely akin to putting their heads in the jaws of a lion. Of course, as far as the Argentinian authorities were concerned, Docherty was just a retired English soldier who happened to be married to an Argentinian national. And though his wife had once been exiled for involvement in terrorist activities, that had been long ago, in the time of the ‘Dirty War’, which nearly everyone but the still-active ‘Mothers of the Disappeared’ was so keen to put behind them. No one in authority had any inkling that husband and wife had met on Argentinian soil, midway through a military action which had probably helped to swing the Falklands War decisively in Britain’s favour.

After Docherty’s retirement from the Army they could even have settled in Argentina if they had wanted, but neither of them had. There were too many painful memories for Isabel, and Docherty preferred Chile. There wasn’t much to choose between the behaviour of the two armies in recent decades, but he found the people west of the Andes more friendly – more Celtic in spirit than the Anglo-German-oriented Argentinians. The climate was better too, and the mountains, lakes and islands of the south were like Scotland revisited.

Isabel still had friends and relations in her homeland. Her father had died during her exile in England, and her mother had cut all ties, but there were a couple of her father’s sisters with whom she still kept in touch and one cousin to whom she had always been close. Rosa lived with her academic husband and three children in a large, rambling house in Recoleta, and it was she who had invited them to the capital. Just for a holiday, she had said, but the two women had known each other a long time and Isabel suspected an ulterior motive. She had told Docherty as much, but neither of them had any idea what it might be.

Maybe she wanted Isabel’s help with her elder daughter, who seemed to have inherited her wider family’s interest in left-wing politics. The country might be run by a president more interested in cars and women than politics, but the same bastards as always lurked in the shadows.

It could be anything, Docherty thought, as a Mendoza bus blared by in the opposite direction. A holiday was a holiday, and any excuse to take time away from the damn word processor and his wretched memoirs was more than welcome. He’d been working on them on and off for over a year, and on a more or less nine-to-five basis for several months, but he didn’t have much more to show for his efforts than a huge pile of handwritten notes. When he tried actually writing it never seemed to come out the way he intended, leaving him to mutter ‘you had to be there’ at the annoyingly unresponsive screen. And when he had finally managed to put together a coherent chapter on the Bosnian business his publishers in London had come back with a long list of suggestions for alterations, most of which seemed designed to either obviate the risk of Her Majesty’s Government taking exception to Docherty’s version of events or to encourage Jean-Claude Van Damme to accept the movie part.

Docherty was well aware that a Van Damme movie might make him rich, but the thought of faking his own life story didn’t sit too well. If he was going to write the damn thing, he wanted it to tell the truth. He wanted his children to see him as a man who knew he had lived and worked on a moral tightrope, not as some glib action hero pumped up with either Hollywood cynicism or gung-ho fascism. A month had passed since Docherty and Isabel had seen Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning Braveheart, and he still felt angry about how bad it was.

Well, at least he didn’t have to think about any of that for another week. And the sky was growing red above the highway ahead. He leant over to nudge his wife awake, as she’d asked him to. ‘Not far now,’ he said.

Isabel yawned and reached for the tube of mints on the dashboard. ‘I wonder what Rosa really wants,’ she murmured.

In the Colombian city of Cartagena it was almost five-thirty in the afternoon and the lengthening shadows were throwing the crenellated walls of the old fortifications into dramatic relief. Carmen Salcedo, who had just finished her spiel on the era of piratical sackings and let her tour party loose to explore the walls on their own, watched the mostly American tourists happily ambling away, camcorders whirring, cameras poised.

It was certainly a beautiful evening. She stood leaning against one of the abutments, enjoying the blues of sea and sky, the gold-flecked waves and the buildings of the old city glowing in the evening sun. For all its problems – which ranged from drug traffickers through political corruption to air pollution – Cartagena was still a magical city.

Carmen had lived there for all of her twenty-six years. Her parents still lived in the hills behind the city, but she now shared a two-bedroom flat with Pinar, a fellow tour guide. They were going to the cinema that evening, she remembered, and looked at her watch. She should have given her charges twenty minutes, not half an hour.

But it was too late to worry about that now, and so far this group had proved more reliable than most. She walked back across to the bus and found Mariano squinting at a sex comic which he was holding only a few inches away from his eyes.

‘Getting short-sighted?’ she asked sweetly, making him almost jump out of his seat.

‘Don’t do that!’ he half shouted, glaring at her.

She didn’t think he had ever quite forgiven her for turning down the offer of a date, but he was a good driver, and on the streets of Cartagena that was no small matter. ‘Sorry,’ she said with a smile.

He huffed and puffed, then went back to the comic.

The Pearsons, an American couple in their sixties who had commandeered the front seats of the minibus on day one and, despite several heavy hints, never surrendered them to anyone else, had left a Miami newspaper to guard their precious space. It was almost a week old, but better than nothing, and Carmen sat down to improve her already near-perfect English.

She read the entertainment section first, hoping for a preview of the films which she would be able to see later that year in Cartagena, but they all seemed to be the same old boring hi-tech thrillers. She hadn’t heard of any of the bands mentioned in the music section, and if their music bore any relationship to the way they looked in their photographs she doubted if she was missing much.

She ignored the sports section, and was just skipping through the local news when she saw the headline ‘COLOMBIAN GIRL KILLED BY DRUGS’. Underneath it the sub-head claimed that ‘Traffickers cut her open to reclaim shipment’. Jesus, she thought, and then the two names stopped her in her tracks, and she could suddenly hear her own heart beating. She read the whole paragraph:

‘Another girl, whose Colombian passport identified her as Victoria Marín, was taken into custody by police last night. She was carrying a second passport, which enabled police to identify the dead girl as Placida Guzmán, but was either unwilling or unable to further help the Miami Beach PD with their investigation.’

She read on, but there was nothing else, no mention of the other three, no mention of her sister.

‘Could you take a picture of us, dear?’ someone asked, disturbing her reverie. It was one of the Englishwomen, with her husband hovering behind her. Carmen nodded dumbly, climbed down from the bus, pointed the camera and pressed the button, still in a state of shock.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ the woman asked, a concerned look on her face.

‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Carmen replied, smiling. ‘It’s been a long day.’

‘Well, you’ll soon be rid of us for the night,’ the woman said with a twinkle.

Carmen smiled again, and looked at her watch. Ten minutes more.

They went slowly, but everyone was on time. On the drive back to the hotel she went through the next day’s itinerary – they were visiting the nearby Corales del Rosario National Park – and then asked the Pearsons if she could borrow their newspaper for the evening to help brush up her English.

Mr Pearson seemed a bit reluctant, but his wife was only too happy, probably seeing it as a down payment on their continued tenure of the best seats. At the hotel she counted them all out, remembered to re-check the next morning’s pick-up time with Mariano, then headed for a phone. Pinar was upset that their evening at the cinema was off, but she could tell from Carmen’s voice that something serious had happened. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Carmen explained, and rang her parents’ home. Her mother answered.

‘I’m coming up,’ Carmen told her. ‘I have to talk to you both.’

‘But we’re going out at eight…’

‘Just wait for me,’ Carmen insisted. ‘It’s about Marysa.’

‘What about her?’ her mother asked, sounding almost angry.

‘I’ll tell you when I get there.’

It was an hour’s journey on the bus, maybe even more at that time of day, so she decided on the luxury of a cab, as much for the privacy as the gain in speed. It had seemed the most natural thing in the world to immediately ring her parents, but the tone of her mother’s voice had given Carmen cause to wonder. Should she have sat on this information for a few hours, thought about what she wanted to do with it, before putting herself at the mercy of her father’s stubbornness and her mother’s selfishness? What were they going to say to this? The last time she’d raised the issue with them they’d both been really angry with her, as if somehow it was her fault that their other daughter had been taken from them.

The trouble was, their instinctive approach to anything potentially disturbing was to ignore it, in the hope that it would go away. And it worked for them, or at least it did in the sense that they managed to avoid most of the disturbance which other people called living. But it had never worked for Carmen.

The traffic seemed worse than ever, but shortly after seven the taxi deposited her at the foot of the bougainvillea-bordered drive. Her parents were fairly rich by legal Colombian standards, her father having inherited the family footwear business. It was the combination of this wealth and the lack of a ransom demand which had eventually convinced them all to accept the police investigator’s conclusion that Marysa was dead.

They had likewise assumed that Placida Guzmán and Victoria Marín were dead. And Irma. And Rosalita.

Carmen let herself in through the front door, and a few moments later found her parents putting the finishing touches to their evening’s apparel in the enormous bedroom.

‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t tie your hair back like that,’ were her mother’s words of greeting. ‘Can’t you afford a proper styling?’

‘I don’t want a proper styling,’ Carmen said, running a hand over her severely pinned black mane.

Her mother just looked at her.

Carmen laid the newspaper out in front of her on the dressing table. ‘Read that,’ she ordered, pointing out the item with a finger.

Her mother sighed and started reading, still fiddling with her earrings as she did so. Then her hand suddenly stilled, leaving the filigree ornament swaying in mid-air. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said softly.

‘What is it?’ her husband asked, leaning over her shoulder to read.

‘Guzmán and Marín are common names,’ Carmen’s mother said in a small voice, as if she was arguing with herself.

‘Not that common,’ Carmen said gently. ‘And Victoria Marín and Placida Guzmán together – it’s too much of a coincidence. It even says that Victoria is twenty-three, which would be right.’ She looked at her parents, both of whom seemed to have been suddenly aged by the news. ‘Don’t you understand?’ she said. ‘This means there’s hope.’

‘We understand,’ her father said, and the look in his eyes seemed to add: we’ve lost her once and now we’ll get the chance to lose her all over again.

Carmen felt like slapping them both. ‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked her father abruptly.

He looked at her for a moment. ‘Talk to the Chief of Police, I suppose, and get him to contact the police in Miami.’

‘Don’t you think you should go there yourself? I’ll come with you,’ she added – his English had never been good.

He shook his head. ‘The police in Miami are more likely to listen to a fellow-officer than a Colombian civilian.’

Which might well be true, she thought. ‘So will you call now?’

He smiled wryly. ‘He won’t be in his office.’

‘His home then.’

‘I don’t have his home number, and even if I did…Carmen, the newspaper article is a week old. Putting the man’s back up to save a few hours is not worth it.’

‘And we’re going to be late,’ his wife added, earrings finally in place.

‘You’re still going out?’

‘What do you expect us to do – spend the evening wringing our hands?’ her mother asked.

‘No, I suppose not, but…You will ring first thing in the morning?’

‘I’ll go and talk to him in person.’

‘Good.’ She felt relieved.

‘There’s food in the kitchen if you want some,’ her mother told her, and once they’d gone she toyed with a plate of warmed-up fish risotto for a while before deciding to head back into town.

On the bus she found her mind running through the events of that fateful August. The five young women, all from good families, all in their last year at college, had taken a picnic a few miles down the coast, in an area which had always hitherto been considered safe. In the early afternoon they had been seen by several other picnickers, as well as joggers and courting couples, but after four o’clock the record of sightings came to an end, and the party had not returned to the college that evening.

No suspicious groups or vehicles had been seen in the area, but when after several days the women had still failed to reappear the assumption had grown that a new guerrilla group must be holding them to ransom. Once two weeks had passed without any demand for money being received, the betting had shifted in favour of either some catastrophic and completely unfathomable accident or what seemed an equally improbable mass rape and murder.

Now it seemed likely that they had been in the hands of drug traffickers all this time. Placida was dead and Victoria was ‘unable to help’, whatever that might mean. Where were the other three, and what had their lives been like for the last two years?

The answer to the last question was too horrific to contemplate.

Victoria would know, Carmen thought, and she was more likely to talk to a friend than a gringo policeman. If her father didn’t get anywhere with his contacts, she decided, then she would go to Miami herself, with or without her parents’ blessing, and find out what had happened to Marysa.

Docherty and Isabel didn’t discover the reason for Rosa’s summons until three days after their arrival in Buenos Aires. On that Tuesday Docherty and Rosa’s husband, Giorgio, a second-generation immigrant of Italian descent, had driven to the university, where the media unit’s satellite link-up was being put to good use, showing England’s final group game against Holland in Euro 96. England outplayed the Dutch and Docherty, a true Scot, duly lamented the Auld Enemy’s victory. But as they drove home to Recoleta he had to admit that England seemed to be playing football these days, rather than just kicking it upfield and running after it like headless chickens.

The two men arrived back to find the children running riot in the house while their wives were preparing the ingredients for a barbecue on the patio. Rosa gave the task of igniting the charcoal to Giorgio, collected a bottle of chilled white wine from the fridge and poured glasses for the four of them on the patio table. ‘A toast,’ she said. ‘The future.’

They all drank. Here it comes, Docherty thought.

‘Though it’s the past I want to talk to you about,’ Rosa began carefully. Behind her the evening sun glinted on the waters of the River Plate estuary, and the panorama of Recoleta’s famous brightly coloured houses seemed like a child’s drawing. ‘I have something to ask you – you, Jamie, though of course it concerns Isabel too.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t even know if I should ask you, but I promised I would. And you can always say no.’

His SAS bosses used to say that, Docherty thought.

‘Do you remember Gustavo and Eva Macías?’ Rosa asked Isabel.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Gustavo was a close friend of my father. He and his family used to visit us quite often when I was a child.’

‘I do remember one friend of your father’s,’ Isabel said. ‘A tall man, stood very straight. He had a beard, I think.’

‘That’s him. He and Eva had three children – two daughters and one son. The son’s name was Guillermo – he was about three years younger than us, I think. I probably didn’t pay much attention to him, but I seem to remember he was nice enough.’ She took another sip of wine. ‘He was arrested by the Army in 1976 – he was a student at the university in Rosario – and never seen again. He wasn’t interested in politics, apparently, and no one knows why they took him away.’

‘Except the Army,’ her husband said drily.

‘True. But I’ll leave Gustavo and Eva to tell you the details, if you’re willing to talk to them.’

‘Why now?’ Docherty asked. ‘After so long.’

‘Two reasons, as far as I can see,’ Rosa said. ‘Are you two aware of what’s been going on here the past couple of years? With the Disappeared, I mean.’

‘Only vaguely.’

‘Well, basically, when Menem became President he made a few noises and sat back to wait for the whole business to just fade away. But it didn’t, the Mothers were still at his gates, and then for reasons best known to themselves, a few of the beasts broke ranks and started talking. The old Navy commander not only admitted that up to two thousand people had been dropped in the Atlantic, but even went into details – how those who’d been weakened by torture had to be helped on to the aircraft, and were then given sedatives by Navy doctors before being stripped and thrown out. A little while later the Head of the Armed Forces actually admitted responsibility for human rights abuses in the late 70s and early 80s, although of course no individuals were called to account, and the files have still not been produced.’

‘They’ve probably lost them,’ Isabel said scornfully.

‘I doubt it,’ Giorgio said. ‘They may not be very good at fighting other soldiers, but they know how to keep records.’

‘The Eichmann syndrome,’ Docherty murmured.

‘Something like that. A lot of people have claimed that the military kept meticulous records of each and every person they tortured and killed.’

They all sat silent for a few seconds. All these years on, it was still hard to accept the enormity of what had happened.

‘Anyway,’ Rosa said, ‘the other thing that happened was that the graves started coming to light. A group of young people calling themselves forensic anthropologists have started digging in many of the rumoured locations, and they’ve already found several mass graves. One of them was outside Rosario, and I think that was what set Gustavo off. From what I can gather, both he and Eva have been busy pretending that they never had a son for most of the past twenty years, but the discovery of that grave…’ She sighed. ‘And then there’s the fact that he’s dying himself. Some sort of cancer, and I don’t think he’s expected to last many more months.’ She ran a hand through her hair. ‘But whatever his reasons – mostly guilt, I suppose – he seems hell bent on making up for lost time. Over the last year – and much to his daughters’ annoyance, I might add – he’s spent a small fortune trying to find out why Guillermo was arrested and what happened to him. It’s become an obsession. He has to know.’

Docherty looked at Isabel, whose face in the shadows seemed drawn with pain, and he knew that she was reliving the traumas of her own arrest and torture, the loss of so many friends. For her sake he wanted to leave the surface of the past undisturbed. ‘Death will heal the man’s need to know,’ he said, the words sounding harsher than he intended.

Isabel looked up at him. ‘What does he want from Jamie?’ she asked.

‘I think he has the name of a man, an Argentinian living in Mexico. I’m not sure, but I think he wants someone to go and talk to this man.’

‘Why Jamie?’ Isabel persisted.

‘Gustavo is convinced this man will not talk to another Argentinian. But Jamie – he is both a foreigner and a soldier, someone both safe and simpático, yes? This man might be willing to talk to him, just man to man.’

‘Macho to macho,’ Docherty murmured.

Rosa rolled her eyes in exasperation.

‘We should at least talk to Gustavo,’ Isabel interjected.

It was Docherty’s turn to look at her. The word ‘Mexico’ had taken him back to a buried chapter of his own life, one that came before Isabel. ‘OK,’ he said quietly. ‘But no promises.’ He knew Isabel still had nightmares about her time in the Naval Mechanical School – he had been shot into wakefulness on enough occasions by her sudden screams – and if it looked like this was going to upset her, there was no way he was touching it.

But there was always the chance it might have the opposite effect, he realized. Maybe something like this would help Isabel to finally exorcize her past.

He was probably grasping at straws, rationalizing his own desire to see Mexico again. Or even worse, just grabbing at any excuse to leave the cursed word processor behind.

The following morning, once Rosa had rung to make certain that Gustavo was well enough to receive them, Isabel and Docherty took the long drive across the city to the Macíases’ house in Devoto. ‘House’ was actually something of a misnomer – ‘mansion’ would have been a better choice. There was obviously quite a lot left for the daughters to inherit.

Eva Macías, a handsome, white-haired woman in her seventies, greeted them and led them out to the conservatory, where her husband was soaking up the tropical humidity, rather like General Sternwood in the opening chapter of Chandler’s The Big Sleep. The General had also wanted to know the fate of a missing young man, though in his case the man in question was assumed to be still in the land of the living.

Gustavo Macías was obviously not long for this world himself, but there was still life in the eyes and in the force with which he clenched his gnarled hands. It had taken him a year and a half, he told them, but he now had two names. Major Lazaro Toscono had supervised the operations of the arrest squads in Rosario for all of 1976 and most of 1977. Colonel Angel Bazua had commanded the Army base just outside the city, which served as both detention centre and place of executions, from late 1975 to mid-1978.

Bazua was two years into a five-year prison term for drug trafficking, and would probably be impossible to reach, but Toscono was now an ostensibly legitimate businessman in Mexico City. His business was doubtless a front, but there was nothing to stop anyone knocking on his office door, and Docherty could name his price for doing so. ‘Just go and see him,’ the old man said. ‘Ask him about my son. He will remember. They always remember the names, because they know no other way of telling people apart.’

Docherty looked at Isabel, then at Macías. ‘He may just refuse to speak to me, and you will have paid my fare for nothing.’

‘When I started this,’ the old man said, ‘I put half my wealth to one side for Eva – more than she could ever spend. Now money means nothing to me. I will pay you twenty thousand US dollars to make the journey, a hundred thousand if you bring me back the answer. And, of course, any expenses you incur. If you need more, just tell me.’

Docherty was silent for a moment. They didn’t exactly need the money, but twenty thousand dollars would certainly come in handy, and all he had to do was travel to a country already etched deep in his heart and ask someone for a consequence-free conversation. It seemed a no-brainer, but…

‘He’ll go,’ Isabel answered for him.

Docherty shrugged his acquiescence.

In the car outside, still sweating from their immersion in the conservatory steam bath, Docherty and Isabel sat in silence for a few moments. The quiet street, with its luxurious mansions, perfectly coiffured lawns and ornamental palms, seemed far removed from torture chambers and mass graves, but both knew it for the illusion it was. The torturers might have come from all sections of Argentinian society, but the men who had delivered up their victims had come from streets like this one.

‘You’re not doing this for my sake, are you?’ Isabel asked.

‘No. And if this is going to be hard for you I won’t do it. We don’t need the money that much.’

‘I know.’ She sighed. ‘Sometimes it seems so long ago,’ she murmured. And sometimes it seems like yesterday, she thought.

‘Some wounds take a long time to heal.’

She grimaced. ‘I’ll be fine. As long as you look after yourself. You’re not in the SAS now. If this pig Toscono refuses to talk to you, that’s it.’

‘As long as he refuses nicely,’ Docherty said with a grin.

She wasn’t amused. ‘We need you back.’

‘Aye,’ he said, leaning across and cradling her head in his arms. ‘I love you too.’

The 727 from Cartagena touched down in Miami in the middle of the afternoon. Her parents had acquaintances in the city who would happily put her up, but the thought of explaining the reason for her visit to strangers was too daunting, and Carmen had already decided to ignore the list of telephone numbers her mother had written out. The money her father had given her would probably be enough for several nights in a cheap hotel, and if not she had a little of her own to fall back on.

Her parents would be appalled, of course. Carmen knew they hadn’t really wanted her to come, though she was far from sure why. They had said they were worried for her – that losing one daughter was bad enough – but they obviously hadn’t been worried enough to accompany her. It was hard to believe that they weren’t desperate to know what had happened to their other daughter, but…Carmen shook her head and turned her attention to the business of disembarkation. She had come. Her parents’ feelings – or lack of them – were neither here nor there.

She had changed planes in Miami on all of her three trips to the United States, but the airport had never seemed quite so vast before. Immigration and Customs seemed to take for ever – no doubt flights from Colombia merited special attention. She had half expected the humiliation of a strip-search, but the officials were obviously as tired of the queue as its occupants and she was asked only a few cursory questions, her bag not even opened. With the aid of her guidebook she sought out the elevated Metrorail station just in time to catch an inbound train, and sat watching the sunlight reflect on the looming clutch of windowed towers which marked the city’s downtown.

Beneath these towers she had a glimpse of an older and more elegant Miami, but it was getting dark and she had no time to explore. A local woman helped her find the right bus stop for Miami Beach, and when the bus arrived she was amused to see an English-speaking passenger trying, and failing, to communicate with the Spanish-speaking driver. It was like her friend Miguel had said: Florida, California and Texas had been taken from Spain by the gringos, and now the gringos were having to give them back.

The bus drove east across a long causeway, giving Carmen her first views of the Miami which Miami Vice had made famous, and sooner than she expected they were driving up through the faded pastel splendours of Miami Beach. She had picked three hotels out of the guidebook, and struck lucky at the first attempt, finding a room that was clean, spacious and cheaper than the book had led her to expect. She showered, changed and sat on the bed, rereading the copy of the report which the Miami police had faxed to Cartagena, and which the local police chief had passed on to her father. The only new fact it contained was the name of the Miami Beach lieutenant in charge of the investigation, and she had an appointment with him the following morning.

There was a small balcony to the room, and she stood out on it for a few minutes, looking down at the busy street, her nose twitching to the aromas of cooking food. She was hungry, she realized, and ten minutes later she was ordering Orange Chicken in a Chinese restaurant recommended by the hotel receptionist. After eating she walked down to the beach, but in the darkness it looked more scary than inviting, so she made her way back to the hotel. She flicked through channels on the TV for a while but then decided it was time for bed, despite the earliness of the hour. She was exhausted, and with any luck tomorrow would turn into a big day.

She was woken by the barely risen sun shining through the window, and after showering and dressing she made her way down to the empty beach and walked along it, a few feet from the gently breaking waves. She felt apprehensive about her meeting with the American police, but really glad that she had come. Whatever had happened to Marysa, she told herself, life was better than death.

The small Cuban café which she chose for breakfast served the best coffee she had ever tasted, which had to be a good omen.

Back at the hotel she smartened herself up, checked the directions she’d been given and set out for the police station. The walk took ten minutes, and once inside the incongruously modern building she was kept waiting for only a couple of minutes before being shown into Lieutenant Trammell’s office. He was a harassed-looking man well into middle age, with an argumentative jaw, big mouth and thinning grey hair. His greeting was warm enough, but he seemed to be having trouble keeping his faded blue eyes open. Fortunately, he was not personally in charge of the case – that honour belonged to Detective José Peña, whose overflowing desk in the squad room was her next port of call.

Detective Peña also seemed harassed, but at least he was looking at her with wide-open eyes. ‘Coffee?’ he asked, once the introductions had been made and Trammell was back in his office.

‘Yes, thank you,’ she said.

‘Cream and sugar?’ He was speaking Spanish now.

‘Just one sugar,’ she answered in the same language, and examined him as he programmed the machine. He was in his early thirties, she guessed, with short, wavy hair and a face that managed to be both handsome and friendly. The photo of a woman and two children on his desk suggested he was also married.

He presented her with the plastic cup of coffee, and she took a token sip. Pretty good, she thought – in two hours she’d had the best and worst coffee of her life.

‘Dreadful, isn’t it?’ he said with a smile.

‘Yes,’ she agreed.

They stared at each other for a couple of seconds. ‘So what is it you want to know?’ he asked.

‘Everything,’ she said shortly. ‘All I know is what was in the newspaper – that Placida was carrying drugs – inside her – and that one of the packets burst and killed her. And that you found out who she was from Victoria…How is Victoria?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s hard to say. I’ve tried talking to her several times and sometimes she’s almost lucid, sometimes she just stares at me as if she can’t understand a word I’m saying, sometimes she just can’t stop crying.’ He looked up at her, and she could see in his eyes that he’d found the experience a more than usually distressing one. ‘Whatever they did to her,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t pretty.’

‘Where is she now?’ Carmen asked.

‘She’s in a hospital. She’s pregnant too,’ he added. ‘So was Placida Guzmán.’

Carmen bowed her head, then lifted it again. ‘Can I see her?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t see why not.’

‘I want to take her back to Cartagena with me. Her parents are both dead, but she has an aunt who’s willing to look after her.’

Peña looked doubtful. ‘I don’t know when that will be possible,’ he said slowly. ‘I’m not sure what the legal situation is right now.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said, both surprised and alarmed.

‘She has admitted to bringing in about half a million dollars’ worth of heroin,’ he said mildly.

Carmen was appalled. ‘But she can’t have been acting willingly,’ she said angrily.

He sighed. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and I’m on her side. But she and the Guzmán girl had been in Miami for three days before they were found. Even if they had been forced to ingest the drugs there was nothing to stop them telling the officials at the airport what had happened. If they had, both of them would have received immediate medical treatment, and Placida Guzmán would probably still be alive.’

‘They were probably too frightened.’

‘Probably. And don’t quote me on this, but I expect something can be worked out. It should be obvious to anyone that the girl needs help, not a jail cell.’

Carmen took a deep breath. ‘Has she said anything about who did this to them? Or where they came from?’ And where my sister may still be, she thought.

‘Not yet. The plane they arrived on came from Bogotá via Panama City, but there’s no record of them getting on at either place. And whenever I’ve asked her about either place, or anything about the time before she arrived, she just started to cry. She was crying when the uniform found her on the beach,’ he added.

‘She told you where Placida was?’

‘Not exactly. “In the hotel,” she said, but she couldn’t remember which one. So we just started with the closest, worked our way outwards, and found the place the next day. Placida wasn’t there, but there was a lot of blood and…’

He stopped for a moment, and she could see that he was picturing the scene.

‘The body was found in a canal about twenty miles away – they hadn’t done a very good job of weighting it down.’

‘In the hotel room, weren’t there any clues to where they’d come from?’

‘He’d cleared it out. Jesús, he told them his name was – Victoria remembered that in one of her lucid moments. He was young, Hispanic, medium height – one of a million.’

‘What about the passports?’ she asked.

‘The only stamps were ours. But the passports themselves are probably forged anyway.’

She felt disappointed with the information she had gathered, but could think of nothing else to ask. ‘Maybe Victoria will find it easier talking to me,’ she said, mostly to bolster her own spirits.

‘Did you know her before?’

‘Only by sight. My sister was – is, I hope – five years younger than me, and we didn’t have the same friends.’

‘Well, I’ll try and arrange a visit for tomorrow, OK?’

She managed a thin smile of gratitude. ‘I have no other reason to be here.’

3

John Dudley took his eyes off the lighted windows of the timber-yard office and turned to his partner. ‘Anything?’ he asked.

‘They just took a corner,’ Martin Insley told him from the armchair. ‘Seaman caught it.’

‘But how’s it going?’

‘Sounds pretty even so far. But you never know with Spain.’

‘He should have given Fowler a game,’ Dudley muttered as he put his eye back to the mounted telescope. Through the open window he could hear traces of the match playing on several TV sets, and over the gabled roofs to the south-west he thought he could make out the faint glow in the sky above Wembley Stadium. Everyone in London seemed to be watching the damn game – everyone but him and Insley. If only the damn boat had come in a day later.

It had docked at Tilbury soon after dawn that morning and had begun unloading almost immediately. The four thousand logs of tropical hardwood from Venezuela had been one of the first shipments ashore and after a cursory customs examination the importers had been cleared to reload them on the waiting fleet of trailers. A thorough search would probably have resulted in the seizure of a large haul of Colombian heroin, but the British authorities were hoping for more than drugs to burn. MI5 and the Drugs Squad were eager to break the new and highly ominous distribution link-up between the Colombians and the local Turkish mafia, while MI6 were more interested in the foreign end of the pipeline, and the man who ran it.

The logs had all been delivered to the timber yard in north-east London by mid-afternoon, no small feat considering the state of the capital’s traffic, and had been stacked in no apparent order in the open-sided shed. Since then Dudley and Insley had been watching them from the upstairs room of an empty terraced house some seventy yards away.

‘We’ve got another corner,’ Insley reported.

Dudley took one last look at the lighted windows, and walked across to grab the proffered earpiece.

‘It was a good save,’ Insley explained, as they waited for Anderton to take it.

At that moment they were beeped.

‘Fuck,’ Dudley growled, grabbing the handset.

‘The fax is coming in,’ a voice told him.

There was a pause, and in the background Dudley could hear the groan of the crowd. They were even listening in the communications room!

‘Five names,’ the voice said. ‘They all look Turkish. Beeper numbers and times. Amounts. Christ, there must be about two tons of the stuff in those logs.’

‘Did Six get their source?’ Dudley asked out of curiosity.

‘Yeah. The one they were expecting.’

‘Well, that should cheer the bastards up.’

In the suite occupied by the British Consulate on the fourth floor of the Swissbank building in Panama City the English contingent were gathered round a borrowed portable, willing the half-time whistle to blow. David Shepreth was probably the least involved of the spectators, and it was with no great reluctance that he deserted the TV to take the incoming message from London. It was brief and to the point, containing nothing more than the source number of the fax which had just been received by the London timber-yard office.

He placed it on the desk in front of him and punched out a number on the phone. Somehow he doubted whether the American Embassy would have closed down for Euro 96.

It hadn’t, and a few seconds later he was talking to Neil Sadler, the head of the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s Panama Field Office. He didn’t know Sadler anything like as well as his opposite number in Mexico City, but they had a relationship of sorts and Shepreth was curious to see what reasons the other man would eventually come up with for refusing his request.

‘Hi, David,’ the DEA man said cheerfully enough. ‘And what can we do for the British Empire today?’

‘I need an address to go with a fax number,’ Shepreth told him, then read the number off the paper in front of him.

‘No problem,’ Sadler said. ‘It’ll probably take me a couple of hours. I’ll call you back.’

‘Great, thanks,’ Shepreth said, and hung up, thinking that anyone who believed the Americans no longer ran Panama was living in a dream. Their only real challenger had been Manuel Noriega – ‘Old Pineapple Face’ as the media had less than affectionately dubbed him – and the General had been rather too assiduous in promoting his country’s number-one industry – the import and export of drugs. Involvement in itself might not have condemned him, but he had compounded his crime by giving Uncle Sam the proverbial finger, and for that he was now languishing in a Florida jail.

He was not exactly missed by his fellow-Panamanians. Like everyone else, the Americans occasionally did the right thing for all the wrong reasons.

Shepreth stood by the window for a few moments, staring out at the square of blue Pacific which filled the space between the two high-rise buildings on the other side of the Via España. As usual a breeze was ruffling the palms which lined the wide avenue; Panama City was not the steamy hell of legend, though in just about every other respect it qualified as a major-league modern dump. The city’s business was business, and if Orson Welles had ever done a Central American version of The Third Man he could easily have substituted Panama for Switzerland in Harry Lime’s famous speech about what makes civilization tick.

The second half had started in the room next door, and Shepreth walked through to join the others. England were not playing half as well as they had against the Dutch, and another Spanish near-miss had the Embassy officials chewing their lips in agitation. Even the two secretaries – both local girls – seemed caught up in the anxiety of the moment. Both of them had lovely legs, Shepreth thought, and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before.

He supposed he didn’t come to Panama that often, or at least not lately. Large quantities of cocaine and heroin still passed through the country, but the focus of the drug trade had moved north in the past couple of years, and nowadays Shepreth spent most of his time in Mexico City.

His real employer was MI6, that arm of British Intelligence which dealt with external threats to the security of the United Kingdom. Up until the end of the Cold War its principal occupation had been counter-espionage, but now that spies had either gone the way of the dodo or signed up with one of the corporations for non-political duties, MI6 had been forced into grabbing a share of the war against the unofficial corporations of international crime. These included the Sicilian, Russian, West African and Turkish Mafias, the Chinese Triads, Japanese Yakuza and Colombian drug cartels. With the exception of the Triads, most of these organizations had few soldiers on the ground in the UK itself, and sticking spokes in their collective wheels could only be done on foreign soil.

The other EC intelligence services had a presence in Central America and the Caribbean, but for obvious reasons the principal sharers of Shepreth’s patch were the various overlapping American agencies – the US Customs Service, Coast Guard, Drug Enforcement Agency, Justice Department, FBI and CIA. Originally Shepreth’s relations with these American agencies had seemed better than those they had with each other, but over the past couple of years this situation had deteriorated somewhat. The Americans’ decision to adopt a ‘kingpin strategy’, whereby all their resources were committed to bringing down a selected few of the biggest drug barons, took little or no account of British and European interests. And when this most-wanted list was finally shared with America’s allies it was found to omit the one man the British most wanted included.

It would of course be difficult to put Angel Bazua in prison – he was already in one. It had been specially constructed for him and his ‘business associates’ on the Colombian island of Providencia, and was said to contain all the comforts of home and a few others besides. Everything that Bazua needed to continue running his billion-dollar business had been thoughtfully provided by the Colombian authorities, from mobile phones and computers to an impressive boardroom table. It was even rumoured that a commodious shelter had been dug beneath the jail, as protection against a bombing raid by competitors.

Elements of the Colombian military and civil administrations were obviously armpit-deep in the necessary corruption, but Bazua himself was not a Colombian – he was an Argentinian. And herein lay the other compelling reason for MI6’s interest in him. Bazua had been one of the leading protagonists of the Argentinian Army’s ‘Dirty War’ against its own people, and one of the prime movers behind the attempted liberation of the Malvinas. His son had been killed at Goose Green, further deepening his lifelong hatred of the English, and after the military’s reluctant abdication of power he had gone into exile rather than face a potential investigation into his activities during the Dirty War.

By this time the fortune he had accumulated – most of it stolen in one way or another from his hundreds of victims – was considerable, and with the help of old Colombian contacts from his years at the US-sponsored anti-subversion school in Panama, he had bought himself a slice of the Cali drug cartel’s international action. In the late 80s, as the star of the Medellín cartel had fallen, his had risen with that of his Cali partners, and even the inconvenience of a prison term had done nothing to slow his enrichment. Most of the returning dollars went into Colombian banks to earn legitimate interest, but Bazua had not forgotten his own country or his hatred, and it was his deepest wish that the two new boats riding at anchor off his Providencia prison would soon be ferrying another invasion force to the Malvinas. Once such a force was ashore the liberal government in Buenos Aires would have no choice but to support the invasion, particularly since it would soon become apparent that this time the British were incapable of transporting a force large enough to dislodge it.

This was not a welcome prospect in London, but British efforts to interest the Americans in action against Bazua had proved ineffective. Washington wouldn’t even countenance ganging up on the discredited Samper regime in Bogotá, much less direct action against the centre of operations on Providencia. Bazua was not one of their targeted kingpins, the British were told. There was no real evidence against him. And in any case, there could be no sanctioning of military action on the sovereign territory of Colombia.

This of course was pure bullshit – Grenada and Panama should have been so lucky – but there was no shaking Washington’s resolve, even when their own DEA people in the field supported the British. Increasingly, Shepreth and his superiors in London had been left with the feeling that as far as Bazua was concerned the Americans had a hidden agenda.

This idea received further confirmation when Neil Sadler rang back, seconds after the final whistle. The cheerfulness in his voice was gone – now there was an uneasy mixture of resentment and embarrassment.

‘No luck, I’m afraid,’ the American told him. ‘Are you sure this is the right number?’ He repeated the one which Shepreth had told him.

‘Yes,’ the Englishman said, slightly amused by the pantomime.

‘Well, it’s not listed. Sorry.’

‘OK. Thanks for trying,’ Shepreth said coolly.

‘Any time.’

Shepreth put the phone down. He’d have to check it out in person, which shouldn’t be too difficult – the fax machine in question was almost certainly in the office on Calle 35, the one to which he had trailed the freighter captain earlier that month.

He would pay it a visit later, once the Panamanian evening got into its undeniable swing. Then Whitehall would get its t’s crossed, and there would be more proof for the Americans to ignore.

In the other room the celebration of a penalty shoot-out win had already begun, and while HM’s Consul waxed eloquent about Sheringham’s intelligence – ‘He thinks before he kicks the ball,’ he gushed, slurping his G&T – his number two seemed to be contemplating another goal altogether, his eyes locked on, like heat-seeking missiles, to the valley between the younger secretary’s ample breasts.

Victoria looked healthier than Carmen had expected, and very obviously pregnant. If it weren’t for the eyes, which seemed to be watching from a great distance, she would have found it hard to believe that the young woman in front of her had gone through a succession of terrible experiences.

The institution in which she was housed seemed more true to type; situated in one of Miami’s less salubrious inner suburbs, it felt more like a prison than the hospital it supposedly was. Closed-circuit cameras had watched Carmen all the way to this fourth-floor room, and the nurses all seemed cold-faced and unsmiling. Detective Peña, who had driven her out here in his lunch hour, had warned her it wasn’t exactly a rest home, and he’d been right. Victoria’s room contained a bed, a basin and a single chair. The door was locked from the outside at all times.

For her part, Victoria eyed this new visitor with more trepidation than warmth. She might look vaguely familiar, but she would probably want to ask questions, like the police detective who had been to see her several times. He’d been quite nice, but she knew he hadn’t believed that she couldn’t remember anything. And of course he was a man. At least this one was a woman. And maybe she wouldn’t stay long – it was so wonderful being alone.

‘Victoria, do you remember me?’ Carmen asked her, and could tell from the look of alarm that she didn’t. ‘I’m Carmen, Marysa’s sister.’

Tears formed in Victoria’s eyes and started rolling down her cheek. She was beginning to think she would dehydrate herself.

‘How are you?’ Carmen asked. ‘How do you feel? Are the people here good to you?’

‘Oh yes. They’re good to me. They leave me alone.’

Carmen ignored the reproachful look which went with the last statement, and sat down on the bed beside the other woman. ‘Do you remember Cartagena?’ she asked gently, half expecting the flow of tears to increase. ‘The college?’

Victoria gave her a strange look. ‘What does it look like?’ she asked.

‘The college?’ Carmen asked, surprised. ‘It’s a park full of white buildings, with a hill behind it. There…’

‘Can you see the sea from it?’ Victoria asked.

‘Yes, you remember…’

Victoria shook her head. ‘No, but I have dreamt about this place.’

Carmen waited for her to continue but she didn’t. ‘Do you remember the dream?’ she asked.

‘Oh yes.’

‘What happens?’

Victoria tilted her head to one side, and Carmen could see what Detective Peña had meant about a six-year-old. ‘Nothing happens really,’ she said. ‘I am eating and walking and reading a book and looking at the sea – things like that.’

‘Are you alone?’

‘No, I have friends. Marysa is there,’ she said, and smiled at Carmen, as if she had finally realized who her visitor was.

Carmen took a chance. ‘Do you ever dream of going on a picnic?’

Victoria’s eyes first widened with surprise and then darkened. ‘That’s a bad dream. How did you know about it?’

‘I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me about it? Then maybe it won’t seem so bad.’ Victoria looked at her – almost hopefully, Carmen thought. ‘Tell me what happens,’ she said again.

‘It’s a bad dream,’ Victoria repeated. ‘We’re having a lovely time, swimming and sunbathing and talking. We have some wine and Placida is pouring it into the paper cups and the men come out of the trees and they have guns. We have to go with them in their cars and then the car turns into a plane and we’re in the sky above this island, looking down. And the plane comes down to land and the wheels hit the runway and there’s a big jolt which wakes me up. It always wake me up, and then I feel better, knowing it’s just a dream.’

As if in contradiction of the words, the tears were flowing once more.

Carmen wanted to take the other woman in her arms, but she pressed on relentlessly. ‘The island in your dream – is it big?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not small. There’s a mountain in the middle and little towns by the sea. It’s shaped like an egg. And there’s another island – much smaller – at one end, with a bridge between them.’

It was a good description, Carmen thought triumphantly. There couldn’t be many islands in the Caribbean which fitted it. Victoria was looking at her expectantly, but Carmen had no idea what she was expecting. ‘Do you remember any other dreams?’ she asked.

Victoria seemed to retract her limbs, to pull her body closer together. ‘Yes, but they are evil dreams.’

‘Evil…You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

Her voice apart, Victoria seemed turned to stone. ‘I am with men. They are doing things to me.’

‘Who are they?’

‘They’re his men.’

‘Who is he?’

She looked straight at Carmen. ‘He told me he was the Angel of Death, but he laughed when he said it.’

‘Is he the father of your child?’

It was the wrong question. Victoria shook her head violently, and started crying again. Carmen took her in her arms, held her close, and slowly felt the tension in the younger woman’s body begin to lessen.

‘Is Marysa in these evil dreams?’ Carmen asked after a while.

‘Sometimes,’ Victoria admitted. ‘But I don’t want to talk about my dreams any more,’ she added.

‘All right,’ Carmen agreed. She’d thought she was ready to hear the worst, but she’d been wrong. ‘So what shall we talk about?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ the other woman said. ‘Let’s just be quiet together.’

And for the next twenty minutes they sat next to each other on the bed, with Victoria’s head cradled on Carmen’s shoulder. At the end of that time the younger woman made no attempt to deter Carmen from leaving, but she did seem at least slightly pleased by the prospect of another visit the following day.

Carmen had intended to talk to the doctor in charge about Victoria’s prospects, but decided to leave that until her next visit – she felt too distressed herself to fight for her sister’s friend. Instead she just stumbled out on to the street and started walking, and it was only after a couple of cruising drivers had slowed to offer her remuneration for services to be rendered that she realized what sort of neighbourhood she was in. Luckily a crowded bus stop soon presented itself, and half an hour later she was back downtown. There she walked into the first bar she came to, stonewalled the hopeful greetings of the male clientele and ordered a large tequila.

In a dimly lit booth she thought about what Victoria had told her.

An island. A recognizable island.

Her drink finished, she asked the barman directions to the nearest bookshop. He looked at her blankly, as if the idea of buying a book had not occurred to him before, and she had to be rescued by one of the men she had ignored. He gave her directions to a shop two blocks distant.

She walked down the palm-lined street and found it. An assistant showed her the atlases and hovered beside her until another customer pulled him away. She found the right page, and pushed her finger northwards across the blue Caribbean from the Colombian coast. The first island it reached was San Andrés, the second Providencia – both of them Colombian. The former was long and thin, the latter could have been egg-shaped. She needed a bigger map, and found it in a guidebook to her native country. Providencia was egg-shaped, with a mountain at its heart. And, she noticed triumphantly, there was a small adjoining island at its northern end. A bridge ran between them.

At around a quarter to nine the taxi deposited Shepreth by the sea-front monument to Balboa, and after a few minutes’ contemplation of the dark ocean he crossed the busy main road and headed inland up Calle 35. The building he wanted was a couple of hundred metres up on the left – a nondescript modern construction, six storeys of steel and glass. Through the glass doors he could see a liveried guard reading something at his otherwise bare desk.

It was a porn comic – Shepreth had a fleeting glimpse of the usual giantess straddling the usual giant before the guard innocently slipped it under the desk.

‘I’ve got an appointment with someone at Azul Travel,’ Shepreth told him. ‘My name’s Bates,’ he added.

The guard picked up his phone to confirm it, and after a few words with someone nodded Shepreth in the direction of the lift. ‘Fifth floor,’ he said grudgingly, reaching for his comic.

It seemed unlikely that he’d be watching the lighted floor numbers above the lift, but Shepreth went all the way to five just in case. On his way to the stairs he passed the door of the travel agency, with whom he had earlier arranged the necessary appointment. He hoped they would wait at least ten minutes before phoning down to find out what had happened to him.

The office he was interested in was on the third floor. There was no writing on the glass door, and he didn’t expect to find a happy bunch of workers inside. Certainly, whoever was renting the space hadn’t taken much trouble to protect any contents – the door yielded to Shepreth’s lock-picking expertise with almost insulting ease.

The room proved even emptier than he had expected. The fluorescent light revealed no desk, no chairs, no filing cabinets – just a fax machine and a shredder floating on an ocean of burgundy-coloured carpet. ‘Snap,’ Shepreth murmured as he read the fax’s number.

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

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.

He smiled to himself and resumed walking, heading up Cinco de Mayo towards the hotel he had stayed in nineteen years before. It was still there, but either his standards had risen or the hotel’s had dropped, and a cursory look at one room was enough to send him back on to the street. A few yards further on he found one of the places the guidebook recommended. The room he was shown seemed clean and the hotel itself seemed suitably anonymous. He checked in, left his bag in the room and continued on up Cinco de Mayo in search of something to eat.

The old city seemed seedier than he remembered, and not so lively; he supposed a lot of the night-life must have moved to the Zona Rosa a couple of miles to the east, where the streets would doubtless look much like modern streets did everywhere else. No matter, he told himself – he’d get the business with Toscono out of the way and then spend a few days in the real Mexico. He’d take the overnight train to Oaxaca, drink mescal sours in the main square, and see the world spread out beneath his feet on Monte Alban.

Sir Christopher Hanson was only a few minutes late arriving at his club for lunch, but his guest was already there, skimming through one of the hunting magazines with an amused expression on his face.

‘These’ll be like porn soon,’ Manny Salewicz said as he got up, flourishing the magazine.

‘What?’ Hanson asked, taken aback.

‘The way we hear it,’ the American said, ‘banning blood sports will be the only thing a new Labour government can give its activists which doesn’t cost anything. And then the nobility will have to hide magazines like this under their four-posters.’

The MI6 chief smiled despite himself. Since their first meeting a couple of years earlier Salewicz’s observations had often had that effect – the CIA man had a refreshing, and sometimes alarming, habit of cutting gleefully through the crap. The last time they’d had lunch together Hanson had been requesting American help for an SBS mission to Azerbaijan, and Salewicz had taken great pleasure in pointing out all the potential pitfalls before agreeing to provide it.

Now, as then, they spent the actual lunch in small talk. Salewicz was fascinated by Euro 96, mainly because the game itself left him completely cold. ‘What’s so great about a sport where you can’t use your hands?’ he demanded of Hanson, who could only shrug sympathetically. They then talked about President Clinton’s problems with Whitewater, the Queen’s with her children, and the Russian election. ‘You know what they say about globalization?’ Salewicz asked between mouthfuls of roast lamb and mint sauce. ‘The only thing worse than its failure would be its success.’

It was only when they were nursing large glasses of port in the members’ lounge that Hanson brought up business. ‘I want to talk to you about Angel Bazua,’ he told the American.

Salewicz raised a quizzical eyebrow.

‘In the last week we’ve connected him to a large heroin shipment,’ Hanson went on. He told the American about the timber yard, the hollowed-out logs packed with the stuff, the arrests of the local wholesalers and their Turkish distribution ring. ‘We traced the list of buyers back to a fax machine in a Panama City office, and in that office one of our people intercepted an incoming fax from Providencia. There’s no room for doubt here,’ Hanson said, pulling a file from his briefcase and handing it to the CIA man, ‘the trail leads right to Bazua’s door. His prison door,’ he added with evident disgust.

Salewicz was rifling through the file, playing for time. He’d suspected that Bazua would come up, but his bosses in Washington hadn’t given him many cards to play. ‘There’s no copy of a fax from Providencia here,’ he said, looking up.

‘It was taken from him.’

The CIA man gave Hanson a hurt look. ‘No proof?’ he asked.

‘He saw it. He’ll tell the President he saw it if you like.’

Salewicz shook his head. ‘If you want us to get heavy with the Colombians we need real proof, cast-iron, irrefutable, on-paper proof.’

Hanson took a deep breath. ‘In there,’ he said, indicating the file, ‘you’ll find documented evidence that Bazua is stockpiling weapons. In a prison! He already has two boats, both of which could transport a couple of hundred men. In Argentina his people are openly advertising for “patriotic soldiers of the motherland”.’

‘We know. But two boats? Give me a break.’

‘When Castro and Guevara set out from Mexico in 1957 they only had eighty men in one boat, and by the time they reached the mountains there were only twelve of them. Who’s ruling Cuba now?’

‘It’s not the same.’

‘No, but it’s not that different either. We can’t afford to leave our garrison on the Falklands for ever, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a Labour government doesn’t bring it home sooner rather than later. A force of highly motivated mercenaries would be hard to dislodge with what’s there now, and who knows? – if Bazua picks his moment the government in Buenos Aires may find it easier to back him up than wash their hands of him. The man has to be stopped.’

Salewicz raised both hands in surrender. ‘OK, I get it – he’s one of the bad guys. But what can we actually do – invade Colombia?’

‘You’ve used special forces against the drug labs on the mainland.’

‘Maybe, but not against a prison.’

‘It’s not a prison – it’s a luxury fortress. And if your people don’t do something, then I’m afraid we shall have to.’

‘All that beef’s gone to your head,’ Salewicz said jokingly, but he could see that Hanson wasn’t amused. The English were certainly in a kick-ass mood these days, what with beef and their goddam football tournament. Even the reference to Cuba had probably been deliberate – all the Europeans were pissed off about Washington trying to tell them who to trade with. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘just hold your horses for a few days. I’ll let Langley know how strong your feelings are on this one, OK? I can’t promise anything, but…’ He raised his hands again.

Hanson smiled at him. ‘That would be most useful,’ he said.

I doubt it, Salewicz thought, taking another sip of port. But maybe he’d find out what his own people’s aversion to taking on Bazua was based on, and then convince the Brits accordingly. He certainly couldn’t see Washington giving the Brits a green light to go rampaging in the Caribbean.

Docherty woke up feeling good, without any real idea why. Don’t fight it, he told himself, and after winning a long battle with a recalcitrant shower, he felt even better. A café a few doors down supplied a Mexican egg sandwich – complete with avocados, onions and peppers – a papaya shake and coffee, and for the first time in several years he had a hankering for a cigarette. It was the city, he decided. It remembered that he used to smoke.

The streets were a lot fuller than the night before, and not only with milling pedestrians and honking traffic – goods for sale now seemed to cover most of the pavements. He walked back to the hotel intending to call one of the car-hire firms, but decided to ask the receptionist instead. And yes, of course he could get their English guest a car, especially if cash or traveller’s cheques were involved. A short phone call to a relative confirmed as much – a brand-new VW Golf would be there in half an hour.

Docherty then spent a couple of minutes with the hotel’s city directory, which confirmed the two numbers Gustavo Macías had given him. Toscono’s business address was on Balderas, a street running south from the Paseo de la Reforma; his home was in the rich man’s suburb of Las Lomas de Chapultepec. Docherty returned the directory to the receptionist, walked out to the bank of public phones he had noticed on his way back from breakfast, and called the home address.

A woman answered, which surprised him. ‘Can I speak to Señor Toscono?’ he asked.

‘He is not here,’ she said, and if the tone of her voice was any clue she didn’t seem too upset by the fact. ‘Who is this?’ she asked, as if she’d suddenly remembered the correct procedure.

Docherty hung up and walked back across the street to the hotel. By the time he’d returned from his room the hire car was waiting for him. ‘Brand-new’ was perhaps something of an exaggeration but at least it started, and the furry breasts hanging alongside the Virgin Mary seemed a typically local touch. He drove west until he reached the Paseo, then turned south down the wide boulevard with its towering palms, over-the-top monuments and modern skyscrapers. One new building which caught his eye looked like a giant Stanley knife, the tip of its blade poised to scratch the low-hanging smog.

In 1977 it had nearly always been possible to see Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, the two volcanoes which loomed over the city, but Docherty sensed that such clarity was gone for ever. ‘Progress,’ he murmured to himself.

He followed the Paseo as it swung west along the northern edge of the vast Chapultepec Park, and five minutes later he was entering the suburb from which the park derived its name. ‘Hill of the locust’ was the translation, he remembered, and the name seemed appropriate enough – the people who lived around here probably hadn’t noticed Mexico’s economic crisis, much less suffered from it.

Las Lomas de Chapultepec, a few kilometres further out, seemed even richer, and its shady avenues seemed depressingly free of traffic. He was going to stick out like a sore thumb, Docherty thought, not least because nearly every car he saw seemed to be a BMW or a Mercedes.

He found Toscono’s house without difficulty and immediately noticed the coils of razor wire interwoven with the tumbling bougainvillea. Driving on up the hill, he found a small park, and from this relatively innocent vantage-point he was able to get a good idea of the compound’s layout and take a sneak shot with his Polaroid. The camera’s definition might not be that good, but it was quick, and there was no need to involve a processing firm.

The place didn’t look any more inviting on the way down. He had seen no sign of dogs but that didn’t mean much; the wire was crossable but the neighbourhood was far too quiet, and probably well watched – in countries like Mexico the police had a clearer idea of who paid their wages. There had to be better ways of getting to Toscono than over that wall.

Docherty drove thoughtfully back into the centre of the city, trying to ignore the rattling noise somewhere beneath him. On the edge of the Zona Rosa he found an outdoor café which put together a passable chicken torta, and then sat in La Ciudadela square for an hour or more by way of a siesta. At about three he walked up Balderas to Toscono’s office address, which turned out to be a ten-storey glass tower. He waited outside until the lobby receptionist was busy with someone else’s query, then walked in and examined the plaques on the wall behind him. As far as he could tell, Malvinas Import-Export was the sole occupant of the fifth floor.

He walked back outside and circled the building, noting the entrance to the underground car park. A car was just going in, and it seemed that the only entry requirement was money. Docherty strolled down Balderas, collected the Golf and drove back to the office building. The man in the booth at the entrance to the underground park took his pesos without even looking up from his newspaper, and he was in.

There were two levels and he examined them both before parking on the upper, along one of the side walls with a good view of the lift doors. Then he settled down to wait, wishing he’d had the sense to bring a magazine or book with them. The car’s radio worked after a fashion, but there seemed to be only an unrelenting diet of Latino pop on offer, and he would rather have listened to country music. Well, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration.

Between four-thirty and five the car park began to empty, and Docherty became worried that only his and Toscono’s cars would be left, always assuming that the Argentinian was in his office. After all, he could be at the races, at a casino, or even, to judge from the tone of the woman on the telephone, in the arms of a mistress.

And then there he was – the slightly plump, slightly balding, impeccably dressed man from Gustavo’s photograph. The man with him looked and acted like a bodyguard, and as they walked straight towards the Golf, Docherty slowly lowered his head below the level of the dashboard.

He didn’t lift it again until he heard the sound of a car starting up. It was the big white BMW about twenty metres to his left, and Toscono himself was in the driving seat, looking pleased with himself. The other man, who was almost a head taller, seemed to be scowling at the world. It was probably something he had picked up at bodyguard school.

Carmen was a few minutes late arriving at the restaurant, but Detective Peña had phoned to say he would be later still. The table he had booked was beside a window, and she sat there with a glass of chilled white wine, thinking about him. In other circumstances, she thought, it was possible that something might have happened between them. Possible but not probable; he might be attracted to her but he was also happily enough married not to act on the attraction.

She had visited Victoria four times now, and each time it had been painful for both of them. Victoria might seem the less affected on the surface, but the fact that she was still hiding in the fiction of dreams suggested a degree of psychological damage which Carmen found almost as distressing as the story which was emerging between the lines of those dreams.

No real names had emerged, either of the people concerned or the place of the girls’ imprisonment. ‘He’ was the ‘Angel of Death’, the men were ‘his men’, the island was just that. The details that emerged – the squelch of a water-bed, the stuttering fan, birdsong through a window – seemed rooted in evasion; they were like a condemned man’s musings on the beauty of rope.

And yet sometimes there was clarity. ‘We all used to play cards in our room,’ Victoria suddenly said in one of their sessions. ‘I can remember Marysa making a joke about him and we all laughed so much…’

Obviously not every moment had been nightmarish, but then they never were. Marysa had always made good jokes, Carmen thought, and found a tear rolling down her own cheek. Seeing Detective Peña zigzagging through the table towards her, she quickly dabbed it away.

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