The Laughing Falcon (24 page)

At sunset, scratched by spines and thorns, his hand bleeding where he’d stumbled against a saw-toothed bromeliad, his bones aching from cold and exhaustion, his back throbbing, Slack climbed above timberline. He was in the high
páramo
now, he realized dully, bunch grasses, flat-topped shrubs sculpted by the wind, branches like grasping hands, all forming a thick, sticky net that seemed to grab at him, he was moving about thirty yards a minute. Once, he almost stumbled over a coral snake, bands of yellow, red, and black slithering past his boots. The ghosts of the granite sphere had lured him here, were laughing at him.

The sky had begun to glow fiercely, pink and russet. What a fool — if he survived this, Ham would be on him like a bulldozer. He had heard helicopters, they’d probably been searching for him, and he’d be blamed for losing precious time better reserved for Op Libertad.

Stop, reconnoitre. That windswept peak to the left, that had to be Cerro de la Muerte, the mountain of death. Oddly, despite its ill-boding name, the ancient volcano’s closeness gave him renewed hope, Slack had once climbed it, a clear summer day when both oceans were in view. Somewhere near was the highway, and a path from it to the peak. He took a deep breath and made his way through the elfin forest and foot-sucking bog
of the páramo
. As the sun vanished he felt the first drops of rain.

Two hours later, he staggered onto the road, guided by a cacophony of horns, and now, as about fifty people stared down at him from a Tica line bus, he was squatting on the road, regaining strength, wondering why vehicles were backed up for miles down the road, why their drivers were honking and cursing.

A hundred yards up the hill, where the road curved back into view, he saw lights, a barricade, people toiling around it, a helicopter behind it. He had no alternative but to go up there and face the music.

Ham started in as soon as they dragged Slack up into the big Kawasaki, scorning his explanations, raking him over for fifteen minutes as he shivered, wet and chilled and gashed, under a pile of blankets. Brittlewaite was here, too, they’d reached the highway three hours ago, while the sun was up. Outside, the traffic was moving again, vehicles being waved through, one lane at a time.

“He goes la-la’ing off up the primrose path alone, what a horse’s ass. We work as a
team
, that way you don’t get lost for seven hours up your own rectum.”

“Look at it as a test of young manhood,” Slack mumbled. He’d followed his nose right into Gloria-May Walker’s panties, found the trail, give him some credit.

Ham turned to one of his minions. “Get him a fucking change of clothing. The guy starts following a bleeping
bird.”

As Slack was thinking how a beer would go down just fine,
he noticed Joe Borbón watching him from the back of the aircraft, waiting for a good excuse to off him. Slack might even welcome that right now, the way his spine was torturing him. He was bent like a pretzel as he struggled into a dry shirt and pants.

“We must have gone past you while you were bird-watching,” Brittlewaite said, grinning at him. “Thought you were ahead of us.”

Brittlewaite had found another campsite near the road, called into head office, blocked the highway, and searched it for exit points. About a mile and a half downhill, in an area where some small farms had been hacked out of the shrub, they’d found tracks leading to a ramshackle farmhouse, abandoned, falling down.

That’s where they’d found a Christmas present. “BOTH OK,” Maggie Schneider’s note said. “NOT HURT.” Slack had felt relief when he’d read that. But then she’d written: “Chirripó, Talamanca.” Something she’d overheard? Maggie Schneider had spunk, somehow she had wheedled pencil and paper from them. But if they had gone into the vast wilderness of the Talamanca, the search would be immensely difficult.

“Injured man,” she’d also written, “short, fat, San Isidro Hospital.” About thirty miles away, in the valley of El General, the town was its commercial centre.

Ham’s pitch descended to a mere grumble. “What were those assholes at that hospital doing, they couldn’t report a wounded man. Okay, let’s get down there so Slack can get those cuts treated before we lose him to gangrene, we should be so lucky.”

Slack could tell Ham was feeling better, he’d probably even enjoyed his tirade. No harm had been done but to Slack’s body, his pride, and his already damaged sense of accomplishment.

“Just get me a chiropractor, I’ll be all right.”

“You need a head doctor.”

Records in the admitting office of San Isidro Hospital revealed that the likely suspect was one Herman Rebozo, at least that was the name on the
cédula
he’d produced. He’d come in four days ago, apparently after flagging a bus, and left the next day with a cast on his foot. A nurse remembered him leaving in a taxi with a young man and woman, accomplices maybe, members of the Eco-Rico raiding party.

Slack and Ham waited in an examining room until the surgeon who’d seen to Rebozo was fetched from his home. He was surprised to learn he’d been gulled by a kidnapper, who was in his estimation dull-witted,
un hombre muy estúpido
. He had repaired a bone splinter in Rebozo’s left foot, a bullet wound. The patient didn’t have much to say except that he’d accidentally pulled the trigger of his .22 rifle.

“He told me a hunting accident. These happen all the time.”

Ham snorted. “Yeah, right. Well, three characters including a little fat guy with a cast on his foot shouldn’t be hard to track down, so we’ll do the rounds of all the taxi drivers in this burg, also the hotels.”

The doctor looked after Slack’s cuts, then examined his back. As his fingers probed Slack’s spinal cord, he yelped.

“I believe what you have, señor, is a slight spinal misalignment.”

Slack was taken to a private ward, where he lay down heavily on the bed, depleted.

“You and your spine are having breakfast tomorrow with Benito Madrigal,” Bakerfield said.

“Hey, Christ, I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“You’re not getting paid to sleep. We want you to get onside with him, persuade him to broadcast a message to his comrades not to harm the women.” He handed Slack a battery-powered tape recorder. “You going to be able to relate to this psychotic?”

“For me it’ll be a piece of cake.”

“Don’t fuck up.”

Slack had the look of a bent octogenarian as he followed Bakerfield out the door of a Cessna at San Jose’s Pavas airport. Though exhausted, he hadn’t slept well, his brain replaying that moronic rollick through the jungle, now everyone in the operation was laughing at him.

Slack was displeased to see Chuck Walker seated in the waiting van, he wished he’d go away somewhere, let the real cops do their job. “Contact has been made,” Walker said. “Envelope intercepted at the post office, addressed to the embassy. This was in it.” He held up a gold hoop earring. “It’s Glo’s. Goddamn, let’s get on this. Next time it could be an ear.”

He handed Slack the envelope and a lined sheet of paper, both darkened with fingerprint dust. The postmark was San José. In Spanish, penned in block capital letters, were greetings from Comando Cinco de Mayo. Four choppy sentences: “Our demands remain firm. We will not negotiate. Lives of political prisoners are at risk. We will meet with Archbishop Mora when we are ready.”

“We will not negotiate” — a standard negotiating ploy. Halcón was just being a good businessman, not in a hurry. Totally in control. Doubtless, the wounded foot-soldier, Rebozo, had put it in the mail. Last night, investigators had traced him to a San Isidro bus station, where a cab driver had dropped him off. Now he was probably somewhere in the crowded Central Valley, among millions of people.

“We’re not negotiating either,” Walker said. “Let’s figure out a way to dump this interfering cleric.”

They were taken first to the sprawling compound of the U.S. Embassy, where Ambassador Higgins, after some effusive greetings, began fawning over the senator, congratulating him for a “great jump-start” toward the Republican nomination. A
Newsweek
poll had him number four with a bullet.

The embassy’s press attaché was hanging around, so Walker provided a sound bite: “I think Americans know I am down here fighting a more important war than an election campaign, however high the office.”

In the eyes of the great American public, he was a hero, he’d offered himself to the guerrillas, pleaded with them to take him hostage in place of his wife. Slack found it hard to digest, a guy reputed to be a sure loser had announced he was no longer campaigning, and now he was accelerating through the pack.

They were ushered into a swank office where Slack was introduced to the head psychiatrist at the Psiquiatrico, Dr. Ignacio Bleyer, a jowly gentleman with a Sigmund Freud beard.

“The man you are about to talk to is a particular favourite of mine,” he said. “It is not often one sees so much varied delusional material of a persecutory nature. He sees plots everywhere.”

Slack nodded. He had some first-hand experience, his mother, neurotic, refusing to leave her house, everyone a threat, she had suffered an abnormal fear of authority. “All right, he’s bonkers.”

Bleyer looked down at Slack with an expression of professional disapproval. “I would prefer to term his condition as a borderline psychosis of the paranoid type.”

He continued with a dissertation to the effect that Benito Madrigal had been suffering a mild form of paranoid schizophrenia long before he was jailed. He was charismatic enough to have gathered some ingenuous followers into his People’s Vanguard for his quixotic run for the Costa Rican presidency.

“Clearly, he was in an extreme paranoid phase when he held the judges hostage. Regrettably, following his incarceration, the symptoms have not lessened. Señor Madrigal does, however, enter periods in which he is able to reason and to relate to others. The use of Clozaril enhances such occasions.”

“Okay, you keep him doped up. What state is he in now?”

“Reasonably stable. Unfortunately, he has been rejecting his medication, claiming we are trying to poison him.”

“Will he know who I am?”

“He has been following events carefully and has seen you many times on television, we have arranged that. We can only hope he will not reject you as he has others who have tried to help him.”

On the way out, Slack gulped down a couple of muscle relaxants. A neurotic and a psychotic, how was this going to work out? Head-to-head combat, Slack’s shaky reality against the multi-faceted world of the imprisoned martyr of his own failed revolution.

As they were about to leave the embassy, Walker drew him aside. “If you find your way into this nest of terrorists, Slack, I want you to do what you have to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do I have to be specific?” An impatient tone.

“I’m afraid so, senator.”

He went close to Slack’s ear. “Waste them. I want them dead. Every one of those bastards. It’s the only way we deter this kind of crap. You won’t need much of an excuse. We can put whatever spin on it we want.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see what goes down.” Slack felt a bilious lump in the pit of his stomach.

Benito Madrigal was sequestered in a house in the upscale Los Yoses area, eastern San José. Slack’s driver pointed to a substantial brick home set behind a vine-entangled wall. It served well as a prison, like most fine houses in San José it was barred against thieves. The curiosity seekers hanging around out front probably included media, so Slack was taken immediately into the garage, which connected to the house.

An OIJota was waiting for him just inside, two others in the kitchen, playing dominoes, one of them with a headset, so
Slack assumed Benito’s room was wired. The other cop pointed to the living room door.

Slack unlocked it and quietly peeked in. The room was fairly dark, the front-facing windows shuttered, though a floor lamp was on. The walls weren’t padded, but the furniture was, a sofa, a few armchairs, a deep-pile carpet. A console TV sat in the corner, a stereo on a shelf. It all looked homey, unthreatening.

Benito Madrigal was seated on the sofa, reading a book. He seemed thinner than in the photos Slack had seen, umber-skinned, a Lenin-esque smoothness of scalp with a fringe around the edges. In his pressed trousers, white shirt, red-patterned tie, and glasses, he still looked like the high-ranking bureaucrat he once was.

Slack brewed up two mugs of coffee, then entered cautiously, placed them on the table before Madrigal, who immediately jumped up, as if frightened.

He said, in Spanish, “Who sent you?”

“You did. My name is Jacques Cardinal, Señor Madrigal.”

Benito studied him for a long time. “Cardinal. Yes. I am aware of you. If it is you. One has to be careful, there are many spies and pretenders.”

“I’m real, Don Benito.”

After he studied Slack’s
cédula
, the creases of doubt disappeared from his thin face, and he gripped his hand with unexpected fierceness. “The one who supports the cause of Cinco de Mayo, and has been arrested for it. I didn’t believe they would allow you to see me — I suspect their motives.”

“They say you will not speak to anyone else. I think I know what their motives are, they want to do a prisoner exchange.” Slack was going at this carefully, sizing him up. He didn’t seem so bad, a little paranoia is a healthy thing.

“They will never let me go. They consider me dangerous. I have evidence of corruption in the highest places. I am a prisoner, yes, Cardinal, but a prisoner of war — the great war of
ideas and beliefs.” He had a sonorous voice with good carry, he’d been a forceful orator.

Slack produced his tape recorder. “They gave me this. They want you to record a message for your comrades in the field.”

Benito checked to make sure the door was firmly closed, then spoke in a low, urgent voice. “Be careful. They can hear everything.” He was right about that, maybe he wasn’t so crazy. “In the hospital, they connected my head to a machine, that is how they do their brainwashing. Do you know how to disconnect the wires?”

Slack wasn’t sure, did he mean wires in his brain? He went to the stereo, examined a suspicious lead into the wall, then yanked it out. “That should do the trick.”