Last time Pablo saw Daniel in person, four months ago, the ANIC case officer called him a national hero, but the days were long past when Daniel could simply talk him up, boost his spirits and keep his mind centered, remind him that he was simply a soldier on a mission. Pablo didn’t feel anything like a hero or a soldier, and he no longer believed a word of Daniel’s bullshit. He cared less and less about the mission. He’d considered so many times cutting off all contact and ties with Daniel, to make his role of deserter turned FARC officer a reality in the interests of ensuring his personal survival.
Pablo checked in at the front desk at the Trump Ocean Club, where he always stayed when he was in Panama. Key card in hand, he carried his own luggage and proceeded directly to his room on the thirty-fourth floor. It was a luxury suite, with full amenities. The Secretariat could afford it. FARC was one of the world’s richest terrorist groups in the world, earning its income, $500 million annually, from the drug trade, kidnappings and ransom, mercenary work for groups in neighboring countries, and enforcing taxes on the drug cartels and mining and gas companies.
Pablo powered up his laptop and connected to the Internet.
Unknown to anyone, even Emilio Reyes, Pablo had acquired the passwords from Reyes’ personal files to the assorted shared e-mail accounts used by senior members of the Secretariat and the Central High Command to communicate amongst themselves and with third parties. A shared e-mail account served as a virtual dead drop, where multiple parties knew the password and left messages saved in the draft folders. Nothing was transmitted, so the messages were completely secure from NSA eavesdropping.
FARC’s senior commanders were hidden in the jungle and often relayed messages by human courier or spoke via satellite phone, but Pablo knew that Andrés Flores often used the virtual dead drop to communicate with Durante, his contact in Venezuela’s intelligence agency.
Even in the remotest stretches of the jungle, far from civilization and cities, it was still possible to connect to the Internet. The easiest way is to tether a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone to a laptop. This method, however, wasn’t secure and had led the army to more than one terrorist camp. It was best to make the connection near villages and hamlets where Internet and cell phone traffic, though sporadic, wasn’t inherently suspicious. Many villages even had wireless broadband base stations, capable of powering multiple devices and becoming Internet hubs for roaming FARC commanders, and the Venezuelans had recently supplied FARC with the equipment to establish encrypted connections.
There were several new messages saved in the drafts folder, dated after the Colombian raid in Venezuela. Reading the first message from Andrés Flores, Pablo’s mind became focused. This looked like it could be significant, something that Daniel needed to know about right away. Pablo thought it could even be his ticket out of here to US citizenship, $100,000, and a new identity.
He continued reading, clicking onto the response from the Venezuelan, and then the final message from Flores, confirming and finalizing the proposal.
It made little sense to Pablo. He thought there was no way the Central High Command or the Secretariat would authorize this, but here it was right in front of his eyes. It had to be some kind of rogue or independent operation, he thought.
Pablo read the other messages and logged out of the account. He laid his suitcase on the bed, opened it, and produced a cell phone from a hidden compartment. It was an encrypted phone provided to him by Daniel. No one in FARC knew he had it. He began to compose a new text message. In his eagerness, his thumb slipped a few times, entering the wrong character, and he’d backspace and correct it.
Someone knocked on the door, and Pablo gave a startled jumped.
He knew it wasn’t hotel staff. He’d left the “do not disturb” card in its slot on the exterior door handle. Only two others knew to find him here, and he knew that Daniel never sent anyone unannounced.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. His sixth sense screamed at him that there was something wrong, but he was trapped. There was no way out of here, except through the sliding glass doors, onto the balcony, and thirty-four floors down.
Pablo heard someone manually working the lock on the door from outside, and quickly composed the text, franticly now, without stopping to correct typos. He heard the door open with a thud when it struck the interior wall. He dropped the phone and snatched the Beretta from his suitcase with a trembling hand. He got onto his feet and stepped out of the bedroom into the living room space and kitchen.
There were three of them coming through the door. Two men armed with pistols. A woman came in behind them, and kicked the door shut.
They shouted at Pablo, commanded him to drop his gun. He hesitated for a second, looked once more at the guns in their hands, and then set the Beretta down on the nearby table and raised his hands in the air.
The intruders converged on him. One of the men landed an uppercut into his solar plexus, knocking the air out of him and bending him forward, opening him up for a punch to the face.
Pablo didn’t struggle. The fight had long since ebbed from him.
From the tattoos on one man’s neck, Pablo recognized them as Los Perros, Panamanian gangbangers.
Although he didn’t recognize the woman offhand, her reputation proceeded her and, from the messages he’d just read between Andrés Flores, he easily surmised that she was the one they called the Viper.
The men hit Pablo more and pushed him down into one of the armchairs. The woman walked past him, her eyes covering every inch of the room, and she stepped into the bedroom. She came out ten seconds later, holding the cell phone, with Pablo’s message still composed on the screen. She smiled with satisfaction, as if this was confirmation she sought and her job suddenly became easier.
Pablo didn’t understand why they would send her here.
As far as he knew, the Viper wasn’t used to ferret out sapos—and why use Los Perros as muscle — but he knew that the past ten years had somehow just caught up with him, and it was finally over. For that, despite the pain he knew he was now set to endure, he was grateful.
A vibrating chirp alerted Daniel to the incoming message from Canastilla. He knew it was the message he’d been waiting for all week. No one else would contact him at this hour, unless it was an emergency, in which case they would have called. His hand snapped out, nearly knocking over the third-full bottle of aguardiente, Colombian liquor derived from sugarcane, and snapped up the phone from the desktop, where it sat near a sticky shot glass and the file folder containing Pablo Muňoz’s dossier.
After Operation Phoenix, Daniel decided to stay on at Palanquero until the business with Canastilla was resolved, rather than shuttle back and forth between here and his home in Chia, a suburb of Bogotá. He stayed in one of the base’s spare civilian apartment units with sparse amenities and just a week’s worth of clothing. He hadn’t turned on the TV or radio once during his two weeks here. He passed the rare downtime, which he sought to avoid at all costs, thinking and drinking.
At least he’d held himself back tonight. It wasn’t uncommon for him to drink himself into a stupor, and then revisit the faces of the dead, those he’d failed, a dozen men and women like Pablo Muňoz, compromised and tortured by FARC or the cartels, or even his own son, another victim of Daniel’s work. The demons were always close, but at least tonight he had managed to keep them from coming too near to the surface.
As his thumb worked the touch screen on the phone, he noted the time. He thought, without animosity or resentment, that his wife was presently fucking one of her colleagues from the National University of Colombia, where she taught biology. Once, coming home early from a trip to Ecuador, he’d walked in on them in his bed. He hadn’t been angry or even surprised, just disappointed, and embarrassed for himself, but he understood and came to terms with it. Now, he didn’t mind what she did as long as he didn’t have to see or hear about it. Nothing had been the same between them since the day, three years ago, when their son, Julian, aged twenty, asphyxiated himself. His son suffered severe depression, enduring a self-imposed hell, and Daniel had never known that anything was wrong. Daniel had been in Washington when he heard the news, and since then he’d taken every opportunity to distance himself from home, but he understood his wife’s needs for love, affection, and physical contact.