On the Loose Read online

  Then again, maybe not. Jewel had already called him a head case once today.

  “Where did this come from, Max?” The envelope looked like it had been dragged behind a donkey cart for two days.

  “The back door, patrón, some campesino passing through.” Maximiliano was on the wrong side of seventy, a hundred and thirty-five pounds on a good day, white-haired, and absolutely, completely in charge of the mail. If it had a stamp, it went through Max. He always dressed in black trousers and a pressed white shirt.

  Campos looked at the envelope again. The chicken scratching on the front looked faintly familiar through the mud stains. Holding it up better into the light, he could read his name, but there was no return address and the stamp had not been canceled.

  “The campesino said it was from your sister,” Max added.

  Well, that would be a good trick. Campos didn’t have a sister.

  Then it came to him: Sister Julia, formerly of St. Mary’s parish in San Luis, the angelic nun who’d passed through Morazán with Diego Garcia and his thugs four months ago on her way to St. Joseph. She’d written him twice since then, once to thank him for his hospitality and to solicit a donation for the St. Joseph orphanage, and the second time to request his help in procuring a generator, and to solicit a donation for the St. Joseph orphanage.

  He’d sent her a generator, and both times he’d sent her money for her orphanage. She wasn’t the only nun up in the hills trying to keep St. Joseph up and running as a school and orphan-age. Two other recent arrivals, Sister Rose and Sister Teresa, were doing their best to hold the place together. The headmistress, Sister Bettine, had been up there, mostly on her own, for the last twenty-odd years, and he was being generous. Battle-ax Bettine, the less generous called her, ruling the motherless and abandoned with a palsied, iron hand. For his money, Campos had thought Sister Julia was a huge improvement and exactly what the old place had needed. Other than that, and the occasional solicitation, he had never given the nuns in the hills much thought.

  Until yesterday, when he’d been contacted about a Cessna that had crashed into the Salvadoran hills the day before—into his neck of the woods. During the twelve hours before he learned of the disaster, he had left Morazán to work the Gonzalez deal in Colombia, and the plane had been found by the CNL and stripped. So now they had a full-blown “incident” on their hands, complete with extortion, politicians, rebel forces, the U.S. State Department, and a few secret squirrels from the CIA. It had been the Agency’s plane, and they wanted their stuff back—and they wanted him to grease the wheels that would get their people in and out of Morazán with their mission accomplished.

  It was his specialty—greasing wheels, moving people, contraband, money, influence, whatever the job required, and lately it had required a lot.

  Tonight and tomorrow, it was going to require even more. Sister Julia had a sister, and for reasons that completely escaped Campos no matter how many times he ran the plan through his brain, Diego Garcia wanted Sister Julia’s sister to deliver the money that would buy back the Agency’s diplomatic pouch. To their credit, the State Department had at least given the woman a bodyguard, a PSD specialist they’d pulled out of Lima, Peru, named C. Smith Rydell, and according to the last fax to come over his secure line this evening, the two of them had arrived in San Salvador and were on their way north into Morazán.

  The second page of the fax had been the load manifest of the duo’s cargo, and every time he thought about it, all he could do was shake his head.

  “La vida es tan loca, Sofia,” he said, leaning over in his chair to pick his pants up off the floor. Life is so crazy.

  “You are what’s crazy, Alejandro.” She pulled the last suture tight as she finished it off, and he figured she did it on purpose to make him wince.

  He obliged with appropriate theatrics. “You are a mean, mean woman, chiquita,” he said, rummaging through his pants pockets until he found his folding knife. He took it out and used it to slit open the envelope.

  “I’m not mean. I’m honest.”

  “Mean and honest” was the most he could concede. He snapped open the letter and read the date written at the top. It was a month old.

  “More honest than mean,” she said, taking hold of the top of the letter and pulling it down. She met his gaze squarely over the piece of paper. “And it is time for you to go home, alférez.” Ensign.

  He hardened his gaze. She knew better than to call him that out loud.

  But she wasn’t having any of it.

  “Your luck has run out, Zorro.” And she had no business calling him that, either. That was the damn thing with doctors. Sometimes a person got sick, and they’d end up in some doctor’s evil clutches, and if the sick person had some godawful jungle fever that made them spill out their life history with all the damned delirious details, well, then the doctor had them by the balls.

  Sofia’s not-so-gentle talons had been around his cojónes for the last eight years, which was a helluva thing to be thinking when he was sitting at the kitchen table in his boxers.

  “It’s going to run out a lot faster if you keep talking.” He wasn’t having any of it, either.

  “This is the third time this year you’ve gotten hurt badly enough to need me.”

  “I always need you, chica.” He tried to tease her out of the stony look she was giving him.

  But she didn’t relent.

  “You’re going to need me to sign your death certificate, if you don’t stop now, and leave, while you’re still ahead of the game.”

  “I’m always ahead of the game,” he said, and she poked him next to his new stitches. “Dammit.”

  “I love you.” She poked him again.

  “You’re old enough to be my mother.”

  “You never knew your mother.”

  He grabbed her hand before she could poke him again. “And how long have you known that?”

  “Since the fever.”

  He was impressed. She’d actually kept something from him.

  “Sofia, Sofia—” He started to sweet-talk her, but fifty-five-year-old Salvadoran doctors with five kids, twelve grandkids, and one very macho husband had all the sweet talk they needed without his meager offering.

  “Jewel and I talked,” she said.

  Not what he wanted to hear. He let go of her hand and leaned back in his chair. If Sofia and Jewel had been ganging up on him, he wished he was wearing his pants.

  “Jewel doesn’t live here anymore.” She lived with what’s-his-name in Barranquilla.

  “She left you because she loves you.”

  Yes. He remembered hearing words to that effect and wondering what in the hell they meant—I love you so much, I can’t bear to be with you.

  Tricky statements like that were the heart and soul of the war between the sexes.

  “She didn’t want to be here when you died.”

  Coming from a guy’s doctor, those were fairly alarming words.

  “It’s a flesh wound, Sofia. You said so yourself. Eight stitches.”

  “Don’t make light of this, Alejandro.”

  Not very damn likely, not with her practically putting the juju of doom on him.

  “I have to leave,” she said, turning aside to pack her medical kit. “I want to get home before the storm hits. But I want you to think about what I’ve said.”

  Not if he could help it.

  “What storm?”

  “Rain’s coming again tonight, in about an hour. I’m going to leave you some pain medication.”

  “Thank you.” It was always nice to have legal narcotics in the house.

  Pain meds. Christ. Sofia knew what he did.

  “Max,” he said loudly, and waved the letter through the air, hoping to catch the old man’s attention.

  When Max looked up, he directed him toward the door.

  “See Dr. Cristiani out, por favor. Isidora,” he called to his cook. “Bring me food.”

  Yes, he was the badass Alejandro Campos,
eating soup at his kitchen table in his underwear, and reading a letter that did nothing but demoralize the hell out of him and make him lose a little bit more faith in the world. Which was a crying shame, because he didn’t have much faith left in anything, and that was why he needed to leave Morazán. Not because he’d gotten hurt a few times in the last year, but because he was having a hard time believing in what he was doing—and Sofia was right, that would get him killed.

  He folded the letter, put it back in its envelope, and stuck them both in his shirt pocket.

  Hell. Nuns and guerrillas. Now he’d heard everything—except why in the hell Diego Garcia had chosen Honoria York-Lytton to be his designated gofer for tomorrow’s exchange, and why in the world she had agreed. From what he’d been told about the woman, and from the brief dossier he’d been sent, he had not understood why, sister or no sister, the honorable Honoria had allowed herself to be dragged into this mess. Society divas usually avoided jungle guerrillas. They usually chose not to risk their lives in Third World country backwaters. They did not go out of their way to rub shoulders with AK-47–toting gun-slingers who could easily choose to hold them for ransom rather than close their deal. For sheer financial gain, she was probably worth more than the documents she’d been sent to retrieve.

  The same, of course, could be said about the surprising Sister Julia Ann-Marie, the surprisingly wealthy Sister Julia Ann-Marie—and to think he’d been giving her money.

  He shifted his attention to the windows over-looking the fountain in his courtyard, his gaze drawn by the fast-moving black clouds closing in on the moon. Perfecto. Eight brand-new stitches, a pregnant nun, two hundred and fifty kilos of jacked cocaine he needed to find, and two welcome, but undeniably troublesome visitors and a deluge on their way.

  Make that one deluge arrived, he thought as the sky opened up with a blast of wind and dropped untold buckets of rain in one fell swoosh guaranteed to last for hours.

  Now the night was perfect. The villa was glorious, everything the brochure had promised: hardwood floors, five fireplaces, built-in pizza oven, hot tub, lap pool, seven bathrooms, twenty-two rooms in all, French doors everywhere, and enough elevations on the tile roof to rival Notre Dame—five of which leaked.

  “Buckets,” he hollered, and three of Isidora’s preschool-aged brood took off like shots, laughing and scrambling to get the buckets out of the pantry.

  “Campos.” A dark-haired man in a gray T-shirt and a pair of camo pants came out of the office, carrying a sheet of paper. Jake Williams was a Wyoming cowboy who had opted for a life of adventure and a chance to be all he could be. Campos had been happy to oblige. He always had use for another “security consultant” contracted and paid for by the U.S. government for his convenience, especially one with Jake’s skills. “Panama wants us to pass this intel along to Rydell when he gets here.”

  Campos took the paper and read down the page. Fortunately, he didn’t mind mysteries. He took them as challenges. Obtuse bits of information flying into his life were not avoided. They were accumulated, and without fail, eventually, they made a whole—a whole idea, a whole plan, a whole revelation about how much crap he was seriously sinking into, like a lot.

  Normally, cocaine cartel hits were not his number-one concern. There were simply too many of them to prioritize in a reasonable manner. A lot of people died in his business, usually badly, never in their sleep.

  Normally, a federal policeman in Lima, Peru, getting waxed by a contract killer was not news in Morazán Province, El Salvador. But, when the dead guy’s partner was scheduled to arrive at his villa within the hour, well, Campos figured there was something at stake. He stayed alive by making sure it was never his ass.

  A drop of water hit the fax, and then another one, and another one.

  He swore softly and gave the piece of paper a shake, getting the water off. “Jake, can you...uh”—it was a stream now, splashing onto the table—“get a bucket?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Morazán Province, El Salvador

  The rain, when it hit, caught Lily Robbins off guard. After a week of it, darn near nonstop, she should have been better prepared, but “Be prepared” was a motto she’d lost the option on the day she’d landed in San Salvador with her laptop, her new digital video camera, a rucksack, and enough naïveté to have sunk the Titanic twice.

  Good God, there ought to be a law against people like her, especially against letting them out into the world on their own.

  A gust of wind caught her car broadside and almost blew it off the road—in a manner of speaking. In truth, what she was driving on in no way resembled a road, and it wasn’t her car.

  Lily was on what was euphemistically referred to as a “track,” or possibly a “trail.” Fortunately, the car she’d stolen was often referred to as a “Jeep,” or a “four-wheel drive.” Even more fortunately, the “Jeep” she’d stolen just happened to have a gun in it. The gun—which she couldn’t see well enough in the dark to determine what it was, exactly, other than a “handgun”—was holstered on a belt that had been buckled around the passenger seat in a manner to provide quick and easy access for the driver, should said driver need to defend him- or herself.

  Lily was thinking that was a distinct possibility.

  She had a knack, only one: for orienteering, for reading maps and for knowing where she was on the planet, almost anywhere on the planet, give or take a second of latitude or longitude here and there. She was good in European subways. Train stations held no fear for her. Mountain trails were her best friends. As long as there was a road, Lily Robbins was not lost, and tonight, even without a road, she wasn’t lost. She had a map, and she knew exactly where she was: hell-bent-and-gone from St. Joseph School and Orphanage, and please-dear-God-more-than-half-way to the Campos plantation.

  Alejandro Campos was her only hope—and given that he was the biggest drug dealer in Morazán, Lily figured she was in way more trouble than she’d ever bargained for when she’d decided a sabbatical and a few months abroad in the world were a good idea.

  Take a trip, she’d thought.

  See Central America.

  Bring home real-life experiences to share in your classroom.

  Make that intensely compassionate documentary film you’ve been secretly dreaming about for years, the one that wins you an Academy Award for “Most Intensely Compassionate Documentary Film of the Year.”

  She was so full of it.

  Her compassion had taken a hike two days ago, approximately five minutes after the Cuerpo Nacional de Libertad had burst into St. Joseph School and Orphanage. They’d had a man with them, an American, and he’d been badly hurt.

  And then they’d asked the American some questions, which he hadn’t precisely answered.

  And then he’d died.

  End of story.

  Except she’d be damned if she let them get ahold of her and ask her any questions. Though God only knew what she might know that could possibly be of interest to a group of Central American guerrillas.

  Can you explain the difference between centrifugal and centripetal forces in human geography?

  Yes. Yes, she could.

  Give us the names of the three most important cultural groups in Nigeria.

  Hausa, Yoruba, and Ibo.

  What’s the official language of the southern region of Belgium?

  French.

  No doubt about it. She was ready to be interrogated by anyone. Unless they were Third World rebels, and unless they asked her for her camera.

  The left front tire of the Jeep slipped into a muddy rut, giving her a quick tossing-about, and for the next few seconds, she kept her foot off the gas and let the wheel slide through her hands while the car jostled from side to side. When the rut played out, she pressed her foot down and grasped the wheel more firmly, and continued fighting to keep the vehicle on the track.

  She was going too fast. She knew it. She’d jammed the Jeep into fourth gear and had the pedal back to the metal. A cou
ple of times, she’d out-and-out careened around a turn or over a bump, but she wasn’t slowing down.

  She didn’t dare.

  There were lights behind her, flashing through the rain. Sometimes she lost them, but never for long.

  Today was Thursday.

  She had arrived at St. Joseph the previous Friday, camera and notebook in hand, to begin documenting the work of a small group of nuns standing strong against an oppressive government buckling under the demands of capitalist corporations out to monopolize the Salvadoran coffee industry. The good sisters’ own church had abandoned their cause, but they were un-daunted, fighting side by side with the CNL for the independent farmer and the future of those farmers’ children. Or so they believed.

  So that was Friday, an acclimation to the situation and the gathering of preliminary data.

  Saturday had gone pretty well. Lily had gotten some good footage and conducted two interviews.

  On Sunday, Sister Bettine had died, and quite unexpectedly Lily had gotten her last words, a prayer for the faithful, on film.

  On Monday, during matins, Sister Teresa had broken down and confessed to carnal knowledge of a CNL rebel soldier and that she was pregnant. Everyone present, including Lily, who had been filming, had been terribly relieved that Sister Bettine had been spared both the confession and the sordid details, which they had all listened to verily on the edge of their pews.

  The American had died on Tuesday, on the altar, at Jesus’ feet, and Lily, from the safety and secrecy of the sacristy, had gotten it on film.

  On Wednesday, it had been revealed that Sister Teresa’s carnal knowledge had included more than one rebel soldier, but the child, she swore, could only be the Capitán’s, an older man named Diego Garcia. Another nun, Sister Julia, swore also that this was true, having been Teresa’s sole confidante during the love affair—the initial love affair. Sister Julia had been as shocked and dismayed as the rest of them about the other, younger rebel soldier.