Passenger 19

THIRTY-NINE

“Track them!” said Davis.

“I will,” Jorgensen replied. “But the drone only has enough fuel to stay on station for another twenty minutes. Let’s hope they’re not going far.”

“The guy who just arrived had something in his hand,” said Davis. “Could have been a suitcase.”

“What are the chances of us stumbling onto the payoff?” said a skeptical McBain.

“If the girl who could decide our next presidential election is being held hostage nearby? I’d say the chances are extremely high. We narrowed it down to two airstrips, and then we guessed right. If you think about it, the timing is perfect — a few days for Stuyvesant to worry, come to the right conclusion, and raise a lot of cash. This has payoff written all over it. Those jeeps are going to lead us right to the girls.”

“Hang on,” said McBain. “That little prop job didn’t fly here all the way from the States. If this is the transaction, then the guy carrying the briefcase switched airplanes somewhere — probably right under our noses in Bogotá. If we maneuver the drone and get the tail number of that Cessna we might be able to verify where it came from. I’m thinking a jet landed at the same airport this morning after a long flight from the States.”

“Maybe,” said Davis, “but this is no time to overanalyze. We’re too close, with eyes on target right now — I say we shadow the jeeps and nothing else.”

All three men watched the display. The two vehicles disappeared under the jungle canopy, then reappeared a quarter mile later. The road was no more than a worn path through the forest that was lost occasionally under foliage. The hard part would be forks or intersections — if the jeeps made a turn under cover they could lose contact. Davis kept his eyes locked to the screen, his hands gripping the table every time they lost sight. Passive surveillance required considerable patience — never one of his virtues.

“Do you guys have an airplane?”

Jorgensen looked at him skeptically. “An airplane? We’ve got a fleet, but not in Bogotá.”

“Do you have anything here?”

“Jammer, if you’re thinking about—”

“I’m not thinking, I’m acting. If you don’t have an airplane, I’ll go to the airport and steal one. I only wanted to give you the chance to keep me from embarrassing our country again.”

Jorgensen shook his head dismissively.

McBain smiled. He said, “There’s a Twin Comanche we confiscated, keep it in a hangar we share with the government. It’s nothing tactical, we just use it for shuttling personnel. No surveillance suite in the electronics bay, no hardened floor.”

“Hardened floor?” Davis repeated.

“Certain farmers don’t like airplanes nosing around their crops, for obvious reasons. They have a tendency to take potshots at anything flying low.”

“But it runs?”

“Usually,” Jorgensen said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a pilot. The guy who’s checked out is on temporary duty in Panama.”

“Do you have the keys?”

Jorgensen gave him a look that asked if he was serious.

Davis shot one back that said: Stay out of my way.

McBain broke the impasse. “Jammer’s right, we need to do something. There’s no telling how this will play out. We have to get both girls. They might or might not be released safely in the next hour, but this is our chance to get close, to have some insurance. If the exchange doesn’t go well, this group is going to vaporize into the jungle. We got lucky once, but finding them a second time could prove way harder.” He addressed Davis. “Have you flown a Twin Comanche?”

“Of course.”

“That settles it,” said McBain. “I’ll come with you.”

Both of them looked at Jorgensen, who relented. “All right, it’s your funeral. I’ll stay here and keep the surveillance for as long as I can. But like I said, we have less than twenty minutes of fuel — then the drone goes home.”

McBain was already packing, stuffing a sat-phone and binoculars into a duffel bag.

“How long does it take for the drone to get back to its home station?” Davis asked.

“We fly it out of a remote strip west of Cali — about thirty minutes from where it is now.”

“So you can stay on station for an hour, maybe more. There’s got to be an emergency reserve padded into the fuel numbers.”

Jorgensen, who was legally in charge and therefore responsible for the asset, said, “Are you suggesting we run this bird out of fuel and let it crash?”

“If that’s what it takes to get this mission done,” Davis said, “then, yes, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting.”

“We’re talking about a three-million-dollar aircraft.”

“No, we’re talking about two young girls. Anyway, my boss will cover it.”

McBain went to a closet across the room and pulled out a pair of lethal-looking weapons — black Heckler & Koch MP5s. “You ever used one of these?” he asked Davis.

“Hasn’t everybody?”

McBain reared back and threw one of the guns at him from across the room.

“What the—” Davis reached with a long arm, but the throw was terrible and he barely touched the stock before the gun thudded to the floor. “Is that damned thing loaded?”

McBain laughed. “Easy, big guy. It’s a fac.”

“A what?”

“A facsimile, a training gun. We use them when we run exercises with the police and the army.”

“I don’t suppose you have any real ones?”

“Sure,” said McBain, “in an armory on the other side of town. This time of day it’ll take us an hour to drive there and back.”

Davis picked up the faux MP5. Most of the training guns he’d seen before were blue, but these had the matte-black finish of the real deal — at least from a distance. “I guess it’s better than nothing.”

“That depends on which end you’re looking at,” said Jorgensen. “Down here, sometimes no weapon is better than one that doesn’t work. It’s situational, so be careful where you show them.”

“Situational,” Davis repeated. He slotted the training guns into a nylon bag. “Got any fake hand grenades? Maybe a paper mache howitzer?”

Jorgensen ignored this, and said, “Just so you understand — I’m not actually controlling this drone. I have priority for tactical requests, but that’s it. I’m not sure the operators will give me more than twenty minutes on station.”

“Use your emergency authority,” argued McBain, already heading for the door with Davis behind him. “It’s a legal move. Tell them blue-force lives are at stake and they have to comply.”

“But there aren’t any lives at stake.”

“Not yet…” Davis said over his shoulder as he hit the threshold, “but give us half an hour.”

Kristin Stewart stood in front of the villa where she and Carlos had been staying. Roughly half the soldiers were milling in the courtyard, chain smoking and agitated like expectant fathers. The rest had departed with Carlos to oversee the delivery of their eagerly awaited payday.

The idea that she was to receive a share of the proceeds had once seemed satisfying, a small retaliation against the father who’d abandoned her. Now it seemed more repulsive every moment. Thomas Mulligan was dead, along with an entire planeload of innocent people — all because she had tried to lash out in revenge. Kristin was desperate to bring it all to an end. She wanted only to get home, see her mother, and put this entire horrific week behind her.

God, what have I done?

Pablo Ramirez, Carlos’ second in command, had been left in charge at the compound, and when his handheld radio crackled to life everyone watched him put the receiver to his ear. The message was a quick one-way burst, which, according to Carlos, was all that could be allowed — the government was getting better at homing in on their signals.

Pablo lowered the radio, and said to his men, “The courier is here. They will arrive in fifteen minutes.”

Kristin scanned the courtyard, but didn’t see Jen. She addressed Pablo. “Where is the other girl?”

The rough-hewn sergeant hesitated. She knew she was an enigma to the man, falling somewhere beneath Carlos in the hierarchy but above the rest of the soldiers. Roughly where he himself fit. When Pablo didn’t reply, she decided to press.

“The girl! Go get her, it’s almost time!”

Pablo’s silence turned to confusion. “But… she is not to go, señora.”

Kristin looked at him tentatively. “What do you mean? She’s leaving with me.”

Pablo shook his head.

“Are you saying Carlos’ father is going to demand a separate ransom for her?”

The sergeant shrugged. “I don’t know, you will have to ask him.”

With that, the big man retreated, heading for the warehouse on the far side of the compound. It was one of three buildings on the property, which, according to legend, was a hundred-year-old coffee plantation, some past settler’s dream conquered by the Amazon. Aside from the villa where she and Carlos had stayed, there was a main house whose roof had partially caved in, and a warehouse that drug lords had been intermittently repairing for years as a dry storage place for product. With ample floor space, and the only roof of the three that didn’t leak, the warehouse was where Pablo and his men had bivouacked.

By process of elimination, Kristin realized Jen had to be in one of the two viable rooms of the damaged main house. She made her decision. Once Pablo was out of sight, she would set out to find her. She’d had no contact with her former seatmate since arriving, Carlos insisting all along that Jen remain isolated. Tentatively — and if she were honest, to keep her complicity in the scheme a secret — she had agreed. Now she sensed a mistake.

She was overwhelmed once more by reservations about her lover, not to mention the plot they’d concocted. What began as a backhanded swipe to frighten her father, and perhaps earn a little cash, had morphed into a deadly military campaign. More disturbingly, Carlos seemed perfectly at ease with it all. He had twenty men under his command here, and sufficient connections to deliver a ransom demand to the vice president of the United States. Someone — Carlos? — had even bribed the pilot of the TAC-Air flight to take up their cause. Kristin wondered what had happened to him. Had he perished in the crash? How convenient would that be? Eliminated along with a planeload of witnesses? She shuddered, wondering if Carlos and his father could be that ruthless.

Kristin saw but one certainty. The man next to her last night was not the same college senior who’d seduced her so many months ago. These soldiers were ostensibly part of his father’s army, yet Carlos appeared perfectly at ease commanding them. Just as he was in answering her increasingly awkward questions. She finally relented to the facts: everything about the man was a lie.

Kristin looked over her shoulder, and seeing no sign of Pablo, she approached the remains of the old house. Only a few of the men were in sight, and none paid her any attention. She stepped through a doorless entryway and skirted what had once been a hallway, the outer wall no more than a collapsed heap of burnt brick. She reached the back, where two bedrooms remained largely intact, and found a lone guard posted at a door.

A guard. Something else Carlos had never mentioned.

Kristin steeled herself, and putting as much authority as possible in her voice, said in Spanish, “Open the door! Carlos wants me to question our prisoner.” She held her breath, wondering if she’d gone too far. Our prisoner.

The guard, who was probably two years younger than she was, regarded her uncertainly. When he opened his mouth to speak, Kristin went all-in. “Now!”