By 6:15PM, Aguilar and Castillo checked into their room, and then joined Avery in his.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon after you flew out of Tolemaida in such a hurry,” Castillo said, grinning. “Maybe I can make good on that beer I owe you while we’re here. I know a few good places here. Get you laid, too, while we’re at it.”
“Sure,” Avery said dismissively. “But let’s focus on one cluster fuck at a time, yeah?”
Castillo laughed, and Avery left it at that, wondering why the Colombian was in such a good mood today.
“You too, boss,” Castillo told Aguilar. “I know you’re not getting prepagos anymore with Maria out of the picture.”
Avery noticed that Aguilar shot Castillo a stern look indicating he was broaching on a topic not open for discussion. Castillo took the hint and said, “Sorry, boss.”
Last year, Aguilar’s wife, Maria, gave him the choice of the army or her. It wasn’t a difficult decision. He picked the army, unwilling to abandon the men who were closer to him than brothers during what was still a time of war. Maria left with the children. He hadn’t spoken to her in over a year, and occasionally his oldest son, fourteen, called him, against his mother’s wishes.
Avery turned to Aguilar and said, “Thanks for coming, Felix.”
“When Daniel contacted us, we didn’t think twice about it.”
Unlike Castillo, Felix Aguilar was soft-spoken and introverted, but it was his authoritative, commanding demeanor and intense, thoughtful eyes that people noticed. When he wasn’t training in counterinsurgency and jungle warfare, while the other men let loose, got drunk, and chased women, Aguilar was known to read philosophy and poetry and study history.
“No worries, we’ve got your back, hombre,” Castillo told Avery. “Besides, this beats the hell out of another night at Tolemaida, humping a sixty pound pack through the jungle.”
“Has Daniel briefed you?” Avery asked.
Aguilar shook his head. “He was vague on details, and I got the hint that questions weren’t welcome.”
After Avery brought them up to speed, Castillo’s enthusiasm quickly waned.
“We could be walking into a fucking ambush,” he observed. “Figures; that’s the kind of fuck-up you get working with CIA.”
Avery silently agreed, but this time it was a Colombian operation, not CIA. He supposed it was all the same shit, didn’t matter whose Agency it was.
“Do we have the kit we requested?” Aguilar asked.
“It’s not exactly what we asked for,” said Avery, “but it’s the best my people could put together on such short notice.”
“It’ll have to do then.”
Avery distributed the weapons, and they tested their radios, with Avery having re-programmed them after the discovery of the CIA’s tracking device and the missing firing pin. He sure as hell didn’t want Panama station listening in on their comms. Avery took the Glock, Aguilar the SP-21, and Castillo the mini-Uzi. They didn’t have silencers and weren’t concerned about stealth. They’d be operating in a very public place. If they needed to draw weapons, then it was already too late to worry about stealth, and the only priority was survival and a fast getaway.
They intentionally carried no American-made gear. In case somebody had to leave something behind that would later be recovered by police, most of the kit was Israeli-made. Israeli weapons and equipment were widely proliferated in South America and wouldn’t tell Panamanian police anything about the identities or nationalities of Avery’s team.
“This might be a stupid question, but how we do know Canastilla is still on site?” Aguilar asked.
“I suppose we don’t for sure,” Avery acknowledged. “But we do know his phone’s there. Plus NSA’s been sifting through the hotel’s security cameras, and they identified Canastilla entering the hotel yesterday, and heading to the elevators. Facial recognition software confirms it’s him, and they haven’t seen him leave, not even through non-public service or maintenance doors, all of which are covered by camera.”
“Maybe he walked out, but nobody caught it,” Castillo said. “He could have put a fucking hat on or something. Maybe one of your NSA guys blinked and missed him.”
“Maybe,” Avery said. “Either way, we know he’s been there. It looks like he entered alone, but cameras don’t show you everything. Several hundred people have come through that entrance. Any one of them could be a FARC or cartel hit man. My support at Palanquero is monitoring the live feed from the front entrance. The facial recognition software will spike if Canastilla shows up, and Palanquero will alert me immediately.”
“So what’s the plan?” Aguilar asked.
“We don’t know the name Canastilla has used to check-in, so we can’t learn anything from the front desk,” said Avery. “We’ll go to his room and see if he’s there. If he’s not, we’ll break in and do a sweep, try to pick up his trail. Or we might go in and find a corpse.”
“Sounds simple enough,” Aguilar said.
But all three men knew from experience that in reality these things rarely went as smoothly as on paper. Cars or aircraft broke down. Local police interfered for entirely unrelated reasons. Innocent bystanders stumbled in the way in a case of wrong place, wrong time. The defector became difficult or had a last minute change of heart. Assets were delayed and missed the rendezvous time. Someone in an office in Washington or Bogotá decided to abort mid-operation, often due to bullshit political considerations, or received an urgent bit of intelligence that changed everything. Some politician or bureaucrat with a dueling agenda caught wind of an active op and leaked it to the media. There was penetration by a hostile intelligence service.
The FUBAR potential was nearly limitless.
SIX
At 7:30PM, after checking the cameras again to make sure there’d been no sighting of Canastilla leaving the hotel, Aguilar entered the Trump Ocean Club and took up position in the lobby, while Avery and Castillo swept the exterior perimeter streets, looking for signs of surveillance or an ambush. They dressed in loose-fitting layers to conceal their weapons, vests, and radios.
At seventy stories, over nine hundred feet tall, the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower is the tallest building in Panama, and, at almost half a billion dollars, the most expensive. The hotel’s predominant features are its two parallel, sail-shaped structures. Each of these extended from a narrow tower jutting out of the low, square-shaped base of the main building, and they were each connected by a glass skywalk corridor. The entire complex occupies two and a half million square feet on Panama Bay, and includes private beach and yacht clubs with piers, a casino, rooftop swimming pools, and numerous retail outlets. Perfectly manicured grass and swaying palm trees decorated the exterior grounds, with sailboats, yachts, and tour boats floating in the bay.
At 7:47PM, Avery and Castillo linked up outside, after finding no indicators of surveillance or anything else to raise alarm. They strode through the wide entrance of the Trump tower, receiving no attention from the doormen and valets, who were preoccupied with hotel guests.
The hotel’s interior was as ornately and prestigiously furnished as one would expect from the opulent exterior, with impressive and elegant visual aesthetics, enhanced by carefully crafted lighting, and adorned with high end chairs and sofas. Soft music played in the main concourse. Scents of freshly brewed coffee, along with perfume and a subtle, pleasant vanilla aroma that was perpetually pumped into the public spaces, wafted in the cool, climate controlled air.
In addition to the lines of guests waiting to check in or out, there were shoppers pouring in and out of the assorted shops, plus diners packing the restaurants. Everyone was here; businessmen, travelers, tourists, and families.