‘Because if something goes wrong and I have to pull him out, I need to know who I’m looking for. We’ll let Beckwith worry about getting him across the border afterwards.’
He looked reluctant, but he couldn’t argue with the logic. One of the main points of any operation is having a fall-back plan in case it doesn’t go as expected. Beckwith had talked only of success, not failure, and while we were going to be within a short spit of the US border, I was still thinking about ways out if the balloon went up.
‘He’s a forty-two-year-old runt,’ he said. ‘Skinny, with glasses, and about five-six. A Mexican Woody Allen, but bald as a coot. If he sees you, he’ll run. I ain’t kidding — the guy’s paranoid. Anybody but me and he’ll think it’s the cartel come to waste him.’
‘So he knows what you look like?’
He hesitated. ‘He has a rough idea, sure. He’s been told to take a room in the hotel and wait for me to show up.’
‘What number?’
‘Jesus, you want his inside leg, too?’ He puffed out some air, then said, ‘Thirty-four, on the second floor. But you’re not to go near him, understand? Stay out of it.’
‘Fine. I won’t go near him unless I have to.’
The idea seemed full of holes to me, but I had no way of knowing what stress this Achevar was under, or what hoops he’d had to jump through to come even this far. All I knew was that insiders, especially middle-ranking insiders who knew too much and who decided to rat on organizations like the cartels or the mafia, were treading a fine line between life and death. And that was enough to get to the strongest individuals.
Parillas nodded and drove on in silence.
We reached the border on the I5 and joined a queue at the highway inspection gate. It was hot and dusty and full of noise and the acrid smell of car fumes hanging over us like a thick fog. Some of the vehicles heading south were beyond the low end of road-worthy, packed with families and pumping out carbon monoxide in clouds. The border agents kept us moving, although it was slow enough to make it uncomfortable. Parillas seemed edgier the closer we got, but he probably knew the risks involved more than I did. Eventually we cleared the border control and were on our way.
‘After we pick up the stuff,’ he said, swerving to avoid a beat-up and overloaded truck wallowing in the nearside lane, ‘I’ll drop you off before we get downtown. You head for the hotel and call me when you’re close. I want to know exactly where you are.’
‘What will you be doing?’
‘Checking out the area, watching for Achevar, what do you think?’
I shook my head. He was departing from the plan. ‘No. Checking the perimeter is my job. I’m the escort, you’re running the meet. I’ll scope the area and call you to confirm if it’s safe to go in.’
He was ready for that one. ‘No way, man. I know this place better than you. You’re meant to be in the background, so stay there.’ It was odd, but the more uptight he got, the more a trace of an accent came out, accompanied by a faintly nasal tone.
‘You know the place? How well?’
‘Enough. Believe me.’ He clamped his jaws shut.
‘What if there’s someone there who knows you?’
‘There isn’t. Trust me. It’s been too long.’ He refused to look at me and was gripping the wheel like he didn’t want to let go. The temperature in the car had gone up noticeably in the last few seconds and Parillas was sweating heavily.
Something wasn’t right here. ‘Like how long? Like a lifetime? A couple of vacation trips?’ Then I had it. ‘You used to live here.’
‘No. Yes — when I was a kid. So what? It’s been years.’ He was angry and defensive.
‘Can you guarantee there are no old school friends who never moved on? Neighbours who remember the kid even though he grew up?’
He said nothing and I got the feeling he was wishing he hadn’t started this.
‘You can’t,’ I said calmly. ‘Which means the quicker you get in and out, the less likely you are to be made by a random passer-by, and the sooner we’ll get back on the other side with the information we’ve come for.’
He shook his head, unwilling to give way. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I do.’ I stared hard at him. ‘I’ve done this before — a lot. So how about you trust me?’
He looked resentful, but he must have known it made sense. Random was the biggest enemy of planning; a chance encounter, a face from the past — anything like that could put a bomb under the most carefully thought-out scenarios. I wondered if he simply didn’t like handing over control, in which case he should have come in by himself. It made me wonder whether Beckwith knew what he was doing.
We followed the highway into Tijuana and Parillas took a turning off which dropped us into a residential and commercial district. He pulled into the car park of a mid-size motel and sat waiting, checking out the few cars around us.
‘Our contact will be here soon,’ he said, and checked his watch. He still wasn’t happy.
Moments later, a pickup with tinted windows slid up alongside us and the driver climbed out. He was fat and friendly looking, with a heavy beard, a man in his fifties. He didn’t look at us, but went to the back of the pickup and lifted out a polished wooden box. He placed it on the ground by the back of the truck.
Eight
It took Vale’s researchers less than twenty-four hours to come up with something concrete. Challenor was a cover name, used and discarded after the trip to Bogotá. Vale wasn’t surprised. But luck had been with them. They had picked him up on CCTV going through the airport and tracked him to a New York flight, then got him coming off the other end where he’d stopped at an ATM machine. By then his name had become Marc Portman.
This name had yielded three addresses to which he was connected, one each in New York, London, and Paris. Mr Portman seemed to have international connections.
While Vale was waiting for local assets to run visual checks on the three addresses and find out more about the man, he used every channel he could think of to put a block on Moresby’s plans for the meeting.
As an experienced former field controller, and given his oversight role in SIS, he was granted the courtesy of hearings most other officers would not have had. Hearings where he could voice his misgivings, doubts and concerns about the dangers to the personnel involved. The people he spoke to were senior managers, each capable of stopping an operation in its tracks on the grounds of safety, necessity or national security, and each with considerable experience in seeing officers go out into hostile territories where casualties were not unknown.
They listened, nodded at each point he raised and considered the implications, even his carefully worded suggestions that not only had Moresby frozen him out of the announcement of the plans, but that the officer selected for the operation lacked the required experience. But each had politely and firmly knocked him back. Moresby, they advised him, had presented carefully considered plans with full risk analyses and outcomes, and the dice had fallen squarely in his favour.
With his final meeting over, Vale retreated to his office and shut the door. He felt humiliated. He was in the middle of the world’s most effective intelligence gathering organization and he was powerless to use any of it.
He checked a slim file in his drawer, and scanned the brief report on the man who had saved Nate’s life.
Marc Stuart Portman resides in Paris, London and New York. All address titles are held and dealt with by Belnex, an offshore administration company based in Gibraltar, as are various hotel group account cards. Described variously by neighbours as friendly, aloof, a businessman or job unknown, the subject’s passport details list him as holding joint American and British nationalities, aged 38, with no next-of-kin and no outstanding physical characteristics. He is slim to compact with dark hair cut short and lightly tanned skin. Enquiries at fitness suites near to his homes reveal use on an ad hoc basis under the above name. Suite instructor in London describes him as fit and strong, focussed but not obsessive in his training regime. Instructor in New York (ex-US Marine Corps) believes him to be former military but says he doesn’t talk much and doesn’t answer questions. Each reported no obvious tattoos or other military-related body markings.