The Laughing Falcon (42 page)

“Listen up,” Ham said. “We’re presuming an identical pattern to the last time. Slack meets them at that lookout point, leaves his motorcycle there, goes off in their van. Meantime, we’ve done a copter drop, Pedersen and Szabo are hiding in the bush there, watching. They get on the radio, tell us what route the targets are taking. There are only five exits from those back roads onto the highways. We’ll have those points covered, it’ll be dark by then. We have five pursuit vehicles, two will overtake the truck, riding point, three stay behind, and I don’t want them seeing the same headlights in the rear view all the time.”

“You forgot me.” The woman beside Slack, lounging back, cowboy boots on the coffee table.

“Slack, I want you to meet Agent Kitty Conroy, twice women’s dirt bike champion in … where?”

“Kentucky.”

Slack eyed her carefully. “A pleasure.”

“Same.”

“Let’s return to go,” Ham said. “Kitty follows Slack out of town. She keeps him in view until she gets to that dinky Kimby Chicken store up there, then calls into control.”

“Why do we need her?” Slack said. “You know where I’m going.”

“You’re carrying four million fucking dollars, that’s why.”

The ransom money was on the bed, in two duffle bags to be strapped to Slack’s
moto
. He’d checked the bills, they weren’t the products of a high-end colour copier, he’d felt them for the familiar crackle of cotton-linen fibre, examined the security threads and watermarks, the details of engraving, randomness of serial numbers.

“Okay, let’s talk about site control,” Ham said. “We need to check out any escape routes so we can seal off the area.”

Slack wondered if he had the skills to shake off the Kentucky dirt bike champion, to enact Plan B, his own precarious plot to effect a rescue unaided by the U.S. State Department. The ominous presence of Walker’s Rangers had firmed up his resolve.

He would just damn well pay Halcón off, it was money well spent, wasted otherwise on the Keep Chuck Running fund. Then he’d ride out of there on his
moto
with Glo behind him and Maggie in front, and call Ham from the nearest pay phone, giving Halcón maybe half an hour.

Op Libertad could lump it. He’d been hired to save those women, that was the deal, nothing in the small print about doing it cheap.

At five o’clock, as the sun was nestling into the southern cordillera, Slack was on the
autopista
, weaving through heavy traffic backed up behind a stalled bus, normal San José rush hour on a Friday The duffle bags were bulky, it was a task to squeeze between the vehicles, but he was making headway. So was Kitty Conroy, fifty yards behind him on a stripped-down racing bike.

They’d had a friendly chat, bike talk, Slack used to ride a big hog in the old days. He’d professed to know only one route to Escazú, through the heart of San José. He had an edge, he knew the city, its busy sections, its maze of one-way streets. There were no dirt bike trails in San José.

“Let’s see how good you are,” he’d said. She’d answered, “Give it your best shot.”

He took to the shoulder, found his way blocked by a bus, wiggled around it, bolted ahead of a grunting van, no problem for Kitty Conroy, slipping right through the tight fit. Now, Sabana Park was stretching off to the right, the Nissan dealership, the art gallery. Traffic was snarled the whole length of Paseo Colón, the wide east-west thoroughfare.

Slack sought an opening, then darted left, an illegal turn onto a wrong-way
calle
, cars braking, horns blaring. Alarmed pedestrians cleared the sidewalk for him, and he made it to the next corner. For an exultant several seconds, he was sure he’d got rid of Kitty, but he turned to see her behind him, frozen on his tail, hunched over her handlebars, determined. He waved.

She kept up with him past the Coca-Cola Station, and almost up to the Central Market, but that’s where he saw his chance, a light was about to turn red. The traditional practice here was to run the change of lights at every opportunity, but Slack braked, came almost to a halt as it went to red. Then he kicked down and went full throttle.

It was like trying to squeak between jaws about to snap shut, crocodile teeth in the form of three cars, a vegetable truck, a bus, and a red taxi with tassels on its windows whose white-faced driver swerved to miss him, his brakes screaming. Slack, his heart pounding, listened for a mighty crunch of fenders as he accelerated past the crosswalk. None came, and when he glanced behind, he saw traffic was again zooming along the
avenida
. No Kitty Conroy.

After several minutes of zigzagging up and down the irregular checkerboard of the northern barrios, he was satisfied Kitty was history. Stage two of Plan B: Dump the beeper before they had a chance to triangulate. He pulled over for a moment by the old Atlantic railway station, unzipped his fly and reached in, disregarding the offended expressions of two
women waiting for a bus. Swinging back into the traffic, he tossed the little bug under the wheels of a passing dump truck. It hadn’t been taped securely enough to his dink, he’d explain, must have fallen down a pant leg.

He pulled over to a pay phone, and dialled the number Frank Sierra had given him, a secure line in Quepos. Slack’s main man had maps, he had instructions. All Slack said was, “Plan B.”

“Claro,”
Frank said.

The sky was turning a burnished copper as he returned to the road, south to Desamparados, to the old highway to Puriscal, to Quepos, to the Darkside of the Moon.

From the window by my hammock, I watch a convoy of egrets, white and silent as angels, in undulating flight through mists golden with the glow of evening. The peace of twilight is broken by Blue-Crowned Parrots settling among the coral blooms of a cassia tree, squabbling for roosts. A Laughing Falcon calls, taunting the prisoner of the Darkside
.

Five days have passed since Halcón bowed out of my life with a kiss and a
ciao,
leaving me feeling emptied, as dry as bleached bones on an alkali lake. He still casts dark shadows; he clouds my view even of these egrets whispering through the sky; beauty is obscured
.

I find it hard to conceive that I cracked so completely when the truth came home to me, that I am capable of such frenzied madness. My quest has borne bitter fruit. I have learned that love, too, has a dark side. I have learned too much about love, its wounding truth …

M
aggie lay her pad down and sagged back into her hammock, feeling lonely, defeated, and anxious. Wait two or three days, Halcón had said, then he would alert rescuers. But five days had passed without contact from them, and she was undergoing episodes of foreboding. Had Halcón decided not to tell where he had hidden Maggie and her ever-complaining housemate?

Halcón has no morals, Benito Madrigal would shout; he’s a thief; the two of them had been left to rot here. She tried
soothing him with reason: they were not about to starve; canned and dried food was in sufficient supply, as was water, gravity-fed from the river. Of course Halcón would make that anonymous phone call; rescue would probably come tonight – tomorrow at the latest. But then she remembered how he had lied to her: his doubtless fanciful sagas of heroism, his unlikely tale of childhood trauma, entertainments for a writer.

She watched Benito prowl about, grumbling. He had been searching for a pry bar, something to wrench the grillwork apart or bend up a corner of the metal roof, but the commando had left them only kitchen tools. He had even tried burning the front door, but it was of a thick, dense wood that resisted flame.

“This is a betrayal of all we have fought for. They are not comrades, but pirates. The swine, they have left us here to die.” Now he was trying to pick at the front door lock with the bent tines of a dessert fork.

“No one’s going to die. Take one of your pills.”

“No, my brain must be sharp. They will come with
asesinos
. That is how we are going to die.”

Such talk disturbed Maggie because she almost believed that Benito was, as he put it, cursed with a mystical third eye. With some misgivings, she had agreed to move into Glo’s former bedroom; Benito had requested the front-facing room so he could see the invaders coming.

“Madre de Dios.”
That remark was directed at the fork; one of the tines had broken off and jammed in the keyhole.

Daylight was fading and Maggie’s bed beckoning; there seemed no point in staying up and wasting candles, and she was tired. She had been tossing restlessly at night.

Benito was now searching the closet, which had been left unlocked, his hands probing the high shelves where the guns had been stored. “There is only one man who can save us, the big gringo, Jacques. But he has been betrayed, too.”

“Why do you say that?”

“They think he is
estúpido
, that they can use him like a pawn.”

Did she dare pass on Halcón’s message without being satisfied Slack could be trusted? Limón, Sloth Park, nine o’clock, Saturday night: that was tomorrow, and time was running out.

“Caramba!”
Benito was shaking with excitement. “They have left this behind!”

He had reached high into the back of the top shelf and pulled out a long weapon wrapped in the burlap sacking of an old rice bag; he peeled the covering away and triumphantly drew out a submachine gun.

“This is a gift from the hand of fate. Before, we were defenceless targets. Now we are an armed force.”

“Is that thing loaded? Let me have it.”

He held the weapon away from her, retreating toward the stairs, clutching the gun like a baby. That weapon had a clip in it, doubtless with live ammunition; Benito was not of right mind, and the implications were frightful. She could only assume that Gordo, charged with retrieving the guns, had been too lazy to have compiled a checklist of firearms and too short to see to the back of the top shelf.

“Where are you going with that?” She followed him up the stairs.

“I know what I am doing. My life will cost them dearly.”

“Benito! No one’s trying to hurt you!”

“We are no longer lambs for their slaughter. It will be a famous last stand. Future generations will build a monument here to honour those who held high the banner of freedom.”

He slammed the bedroom door and his shouts faded. She tried to open it, but he had turned the deadbolt. She called to him, entreated him, but was answered only with ravings: Senator Walker wants to take over the world from his secret army base; to do so, he must eliminate Benito Madrigal. “Because I am the only one who knows their plan.”

“Benito, we can use the gun to shoot out the locks on the door.”

“Are you crazy?” he called back. “That would warn them. Also, we must make every bullet count.”

In the gloom of falling night, she entered the back bedroom and locked herself in; she would wait out the night and pray that the rescue team would react cautiously. She crawled under the mosquito netting, and wiggled out of her shorts. It was only six o’clock, but she planned to rise early, before Benito, make coffee for him, grind up several of his pills with the beans, and secure that submachine gun.

Clouds had gathered, promising a sticky overcast night. From the wall of forest outside her window came the call of the Laughing Falcon, increasing in cadence, the full
guaco
.

She awoke to the sound of feet crunching on dead leaves, and she held her breath. Then she heard a twig snap and a voice, hoarse and low: “Johnny, you there?”

The glowing dial of her watch read twelve minutes to ten. Benito must have fallen asleep; she prayed he was sufficiently exhausted to remain in that state. She rose quietly and tiptoed to the window.

“Hey, man,
qué pasa?
Where the fuck is everyone?”

She could make out Elmer Jericho now, smell his cigarette; he was shining a flashlight into the house. Why was he expecting Halcón to be in the house? Extending the courtesy of announcing herself seemed fraught with risk.

The only sounds now from Elmer were grunts of displeasure as he continued to circle the house, looking through every downstairs window. She ducked as the flashlight beam curled toward the second floor, and when she next looked out he had vanished.

She hoped he would leave when he was satisfied the house was deserted, and she strained to listen for an engine
starting. But she hadn’t heard his vehicle arrive; its sounds might not carry well to this side of the house. She could hear only the deep drumming of the river, punctuated by the chirp of crickets. Then came the song of the pootoo:
Woe-
woe-woe-woe.

After descending from the cordillera, Slack held to the back roads of the coastal plain, between the perfect checkerboard rows of African palms, trees like soldiers at attention, nature in fascist uniform. He bypassed the large towns, Parrita and Quepos, though he couldn’t avoid smaller communities, townsfolk staring at him, a hulking gringo on a
moto
with two great sacks.