The hotel was owned by the Colombian armed forces. While Escobar's wife, Maria Victoria, and their children had been under the protection of Colombia's top federal prosecutor, it had been unlikely that the Search Bloc or Los Pepes (which Escobar considered one and the same) would harm them. It was the fear that the prosecutor was going to drop his protection that had prompted the family's futile flight to Frankfurt, Germany, earlier in November.
Now Escobar's wife and children were in the hands of the police, which meant their safety depended on nothing more than the goodwill of the men who were hunting him down.
Col. Hugo Martinez, commander of the Search Bloc and father to Hugo, took steps of his own to make the most of this moment. Unsure of his own colleagues in Bogota, the colonel had someone he trusted assigned to the hotel complex switchboard - an officer who had been a friend of Hugo's in the intelligence branch and had lived for a time at the Tequendama.
They devised a system to tip off Hugo immediately each time Escobar phoned. All calls to the hotel came through the switchboard, so if a call sounded like Escobar, they would delay making the connection to the family's apartment upstairs until Hugo had been alerted. That way, his unit's monitors in the air and on the ground could start tracing the call before the conversation even started.
Escobar gave them plenty of chances. Over the next four days, he would call six times. Even though the first few conversations were very short - Escobar checking to see how the family was holding up and urging his son to continue doing everything possible to get out of Colombia - Centra Spike was able to get a precise fix on his location. It was a middle-class neighborhood in Medellin called Los Olivos, a sector that included blocks of two-story rowhouses and some office buildings.
For his part, Escobar tried to confuse his pursuers, who he knew were listening, by speaking from the backseat of a moving taxi, using a high-powered radio phone that was linked to a larger transmitter that his men constantly moved from place to place. Escobar himself had moved into a rowhouse on street 79-A, house number 45D-94, in the third week of November 1993, more than a month after he had narrowly escaped a Search Bloc raid of his hideout in Aguas Frias, a Medellin suburb.
He was constantly moving, buying houses throughout the city and surrounding area he knew so well, for Medellin was his hometown. He carried dozens of newspaper ads for real estate with his notebooks, and was always buying and selling hideouts. That way, he was always home, even though he had no home.
He moved with his collection of wireless phones. It didn't trouble him to know that the authorities listened whenever he spoke on the phone. It had been that way for years. He used the knowledge to feed disinformation, to keep his pursuers running in every direction but the right one. The game wasn't to avoid being overheard, which was impossible, but to avoid being targeted.
It was evident from Escobar's phone conversations and letters he had written over the previous months how infuriated he was with his reduced circumstances, but clearly he also felt some pride. The same man who had posed dressed as Pancho Villa and Al Capone had been the most wanted fugitive in the world for 15 months - for more than three years if you counted his first war with the government.
After so much carnage, so many millions spent to hunt him down, he was still alive, and still at large. Many people wanted him dead: the Americans, his rivals in the Cali cocaine cartel and their government lackeys, the Search Bloc and Los Pepes, whom he was convinced were really just Search Bloc forces in league with his other enemies.
As he moved from place to place in Medellin, he took comfort in all the simple people of his home city who still believed in him, who still called him El Doctor or El Patron. They remembered the housing projects he had bankrolled, the soccer pitches, the donations to church and charity, and they had little affection for the government forces closing in on him.
And even though Escobar's organization had been taken apart, so many of his friends killed or in jail, he believed he could still right things. Then there would be many, many scores to settle. As his son, Juan Pablo, had sneered to a representative from the prosecutor's office a few months before: "My dad is also searching for everyone who is after him, and destiny will say who finds who first."
But Maria Victoria (he called her "Tata") and the children had to be moved out of the way. Escobar believed his family was in terrible danger. Any harm that came to his family would cause him great pain, but would also be the greatest insult. If he could not protect his own family, his enemies and his friends would know he was finished.
Escobar hadn't seen his wife and children in more than a year and a half. He clearly admired the way Juan Pablo had stepped forward in this crisis, and he was relying on his son more and more to protect Maria Victoria and Manuela.
He had to get his family out of Colombia, not just for their protection, but to free his hands. With Maria Victoria and the children safe, he could turn on his enemies full-force, unleash a bombing and assassination campaign that would bring the government to its knees and send his would-be rivals in the Cali cartel scurrying for cover.
He would give them a war they had no stomach for - he knew that much from past experience. They would beg him to stop, offering him anything he wanted in return for his token surrender, just like the last time, in 1991. That was the road back.
Hugo Martinez got an incorrect fix on the source of the first call Pablo Escobar made to his family at the Tequendama Hotel in Bogota on a Tuesday in late November 1993.
But by the next day, the American surveillance experts at Centra Spike and the Search Bloc's own fixed surveillance teams in the hills over Medellin had pinpointed Escobar's location in the neighborhood called Los Olivos.
Hugo's father, Col. Hugo Martinez, knew they were very close. At first, he asked permission to cordon off the entire 15-block neighborhood and begin going door-to-door, but that was rejected - in part because a Delta Force commander and others at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota advised against it.
Escobar was an expert at escaping such dragnets. Closing down the neighborhood would just let him know they were on to him. Instead, the colonel began quietly infiltrating hundreds of his men into Los Olivos. His son, Hugo, stayed with a group of 35 in a parking lot enclosed by high walls, where the men and vehicles could not be seen from the street.
Similar squads of men were sequestered at other lots in the neighborhood. They stayed through Tuesday night until Wednesday, the first day of December. Food was brought in. There was only one portable toilet for all the men.
Hugo spent virtually all this time in his car, waiting for Escobar's voice to come up on his mobile surveillance equipment. He ate and slept in the car.
Later on Wednesday, Escobar spoke on the phone with his son, wife and daughter as they wished him a happy birthday. He was 44 years old that day. He celebrated with marijuana, a birthday cake and some wine.
Hugo raced out of the lot in pursuit of this signal, tracing it to a spot in the middle of the street near a traffic circle just after the conversation ended. No one was there. Hugo was convinced his scanner was right. Escobar evidently had been speaking from a moving car. Hugo returned to the parking lot discouraged, and the men camped out there were again disappointed.
Hugo waited until about 8 on Thursday morning before Col. Martinez gave the men permission to come back to base, clean up and rest. Hugo drove back to his apartment in Medellin, took a shower, and then fell asleep.
On this day, Thursday, Dec. 2, 1992, Pablo Escobar awakened shortly before noon, as was his habit, and ate a plate of spaghetti before easing his widening bulk back into bed with his wireless phone. Always a heavy man, he had put on about 20 pounds while living on the run, most of it in his belly.