Something a beach bum should have given more consideration to.
A “source,” which Cooper assumed was dubious at best, had provided Márquez’s weekly schedule to Laramie’s guide. The schedule had apparently been circulated among the various wings of the Salvadoran government. President Márquez had supposedly hosted a Chilean diplomat for dinner at his home five hours ago; he was destined for a session of his cabinet tomorrow, with a press conference to follow, beginning at ten in the morning. The cabinet meeting and press conference were taking place forty-five miles from his residence. Meaning if Cooper was going to nab him under the cover of night, he had until dawn-otherwise he’d be camping in the jungle somewhere near the estate until Márquez returned from his cabinet business and whatever else was on the docket for the day.
It took him three hours to make it over the mountain.
As expected, the perimeter wall was patrolled by an armed military detail. Similar in function and appearance to the exterior fence found at your average prison, the wall included endless coils of razor wire on its crest and a guard tower every two hundred yards or so. The towers were occupied by guards, one man per tower. The men wore brown-paper-bag fatigues and were armed with what looked to be AK-47s. All no surprise. Both the wall itself and the entire stretch of lawn behind it, he saw, were lit like a baseball stadium.
Coming down the last stretch of hill as quietly as he could, Cooper slipped on a mossy boulder and almost crashed headlong into an exterior guard post, which had not been lit on the side that faced the mountain. Even after he caught his balance, he almost walked directly past the open door of the building before realizing there was a light on within, and a pair of guards seated inside.
He peered in from a place a few yards into the trees and observed that the men were playing cards and sipping cups of what might have been coffee. Like the men occupying the towers, these two were armed with AK-47s, plus hip-bound pistols and chunky walkie-talkie units.
Cooper had devised a number of infiltration schemes based on what he’d learned about the facility and its security perimeter, but with these jokers playing cards and probably sipping on spiked coffee while they traded spare change, he thought his life might just get a little easier. He needed the boost, anyway-maybe it had been the ride in the plane, kicking things off with a little airsickness, but he was feeling as though somebody had altered the atmosphere on him and sucked half the available oxygen from the normal mix. He felt like passing out.
The key was to get over the wall. But not here-not where he’d do little but stroll out onto the fucking Best Buy soccer field for all to see. Halfway around the wall, closer to the front of the residence, he knew the sod-moat to be shorter, most notably beside the driveway for the six-car garage, where there was only a few yards of grass behind a series of landscaped foliage beds designed to show visiting dignitaries how immaculate was the home of President Raul Márquez.
The last visible guard tower to the east, he could see-the last one off to his right, where the perimeter wall stretched around the side of the main residence-was close enough to the landscaped driveway to suffice. If I can get up in that tower, he thought, the dash for the shrubs should be easy enough to make without being seen.
This sounded better to him than his original plan A, which involved pulling the shovel from his backpack and commencing to tunnel beneath the section of wall nearest the landscaped driveway. The tunneling strategy, he thought, being the safer of the two-but if I go that route I may die of oxygen debt before I get knee deep in the dirt.
Let’s go, big fella.
He triple-checked his MP5’s screw-on silencer and approached as close as the darkness outside the shack would allow-Cooper thinking maybe he ought to lean right into the doorway just to see whether these poker-playing idiots could spot him. Resisting the impulse, he clicked off two rounds with a one-second gap between shots. He came into the shack immediately, doing his best to catch the guards’ falling bodies before they, along with their chairs, weapons, radios, and thermos crashed to the floor in the wake of his sniper fire.
It occurred to him as he caught the second man’s toppling body that he’d just allowed himself to get caught up in things a bit too fervently. As he’d informed Laramie, he wouldn’t be icing President Márquez before determining whether Márquez was definitely the king of the sleepers-but apparently he was willing to take out random members of Márquez’s guard detail with reckless abandon.
Whatever, he told himself, attempting to buy into his own fairly unconvincing argument: they’re in the military. They get paid to defend their president. They failed.
Trying to avoid thoughts of the families these guys had just widowed, he propped one of the bodies in its seat, doing his best to shield the flow of blood from the hole in the man’s forehead from the view through the open door. He laid the second body on the floor. Then, sequentially dismantling his own array of strapped-on tools and gear, he stripped the guard of his Che Guevara fatigues and stepped into the outfit. He noticed that once he’d buttoned it around his own frame, the guard’s uniform stretched embarrassingly tight-undoubtedly due to the paratrooper suit I’m wearing underneath.
He took the man’s rifle, pistol, and walkie-talkie, reattached his own gear, and got immediately to light-footing his way through the jungle along the exterior of the wall. He managed to traverse the half-mile crescent to the last guard tower without smacking headlong into any other patrol buildings.
The next part, he knew, would get more complicated.
He camped out for a few minutes in the woods near the tower and assessed the feasibility of his scheme. The guard in the tower strolled slowly around his circular platform, eyes active but heavy in the lids. The wall immediately below the tower appeared easily scaled-the stones in the face of the wall were large and held together by mortar or some other substance, the mortared sections full of dugouts that offered plenty of hand-and footholds. Then there was the razor-wire gap: the architects of the perimeter security design hadn’t seen the need to stretch the razor wire across the towers themselves, only along the wall leading up to and away from the places where the towers had been built.
He took as much time as his schedule allowed, watching the routine as performed by the guards in all of the towers until he had the hang of things. There was an irregular but continuing cycle each guard followed: walk over to face the mansion, stare that way for a while, rotate to the other side of the tower, take a look out at the woods. Repeat.
He got his silenced assault rifle set, waited until the men in the two nearest towers reached appropriate and coinciding spots of their observation cycles, then aced the guard in the closest tower with a single, scope-aided shot. As he’d hoped, the guy toppled silently and uneventfully, any sound of his thumping fall, or crashing AK-47, obliterated entirely by the incessant chorus of crickets, frogs, and whatever other creatures were doing their singing from the jungle behind him.
Cooper made sure the guards in the other towers hadn’t come around on their loops. When he saw they hadn’t, he dashed down the hill from his hiding spot, climbed the wall aided by the momentum of his downhill sprint, and rolled himself over the rail and into the tower. He found that he’d lost the hat he’d taken from the shack-guard, so quickly snatched the cap from the tower guard’s body and put it on. He swung the shack-guard’s AK-47 strap into the appropriate place on his shoulder, stood, and started in on what he’d observed to be the guard’s walk-and-look observation routine.