Pike was relaxing. It was obvious from his comments that Linders didn't know Pike had been fired. He decided to go for broke. "Well, that's kind of what I'm here to talk to you about."
Linders looked interested. "You going to run Hammer Four on that same target?"
Pike shook his head. "No, that target has been compromised. We're moving on to Hammer Five."
Riley and Westland sat on the edge of the bed watching the Spanish broadcast of the Colombian news on the small TV in their room. The video of the American bodies made the lead story.
Riley watched the screen fill with a slow pan of the bodies of Partusi, Marzan, Holder, and Lane. The camera was obviously handheld and the video was of poor quality, yet there was no denying the identity of the dead. Nor would there be any denying that the four men had been shot up pretty badly. The back half of Lane's head was missing where a round had torn through. The video was about twenty seconds long and showed only the bodies. No sign of Powers, dead or alive.
Riley listened to the comments of the newscaster:
"This video was delivered to El Tiempo yesterday evening. It was accompanied by a letter signed 'Protector of the People.' The text of the letter is: " 'People of Colombia, see what your president has allowed in your country. American soldiers come here and attack our citizens. And President Alegre knew about it! He allows Yankee imperialists to invade our sovereign territory and kill our people. These Americans were killed attacking farmers in the Barranquilla province.
" 'Take these bodies as our warning that we will not accept this situation.' "
The newscaster came back on.
"The office of the president has denied the report that the American soldiers were in Colombian territory at the request of President Alegre.
"The American government claims that the soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash flying out of Panama. The American military maintains that the aircraft was misoriented in flight and the crash in Colombian territory was a result of this navigational error. Washington denies that American forces have been conducting any sort of operations in our country."
Riley turned off the TV as the story shifted. He didn't feel quite so bad about the sicarios he had killed this afternoon.
"Nice wheels." Riley took a walk around the beat-up Ford Pinto. "Your man definitely worked hard to get us something with a lot of power. At least it will fit in with all the other cars we've seen around here, except of course the BMWs and Mercedeses owned by the drug people. I've never seen so many fancy cars in one place before."
Westland laughed as she got in the driver's side. "I think there've been something like ten thousand new millionaires in Colombia over the past ten years, and they all want the good stuff."
Kate cranked the engine. Riley was relieved to hear that the engine sounded in good shape. "Do you know the way?"
"Si, Senor Gonzalo."
As Kate drove, Riley went to work disconnecting the interior dome light. She wound their way out of the city. By the time she cleared the northern limits of Bogota the sun was almost all the way down and night was beginning to blanket the sky. She turned to the north along a highway with the mountains looming in close on the right side.
Riley was sleeping on the passenger side. The lack of sleep and tremendous amounts of adrenaline he'd gone through in the last forty-eight hours had finally caught up with him.
Westland drove slowly along the two-lane road, allowing Riley as much sleep as possible. After twenty minutes she reached over and gently tapped him on the shoulder.
"What's up?" he asked groggily.
Westland pointed up ahead and to the right. "See those lights on the mountainside?"
"Yeah."
"According to the plot on the map, my odometer says that's got to be Ring Man's villa." She pointed as they passed a tar access road on their right. "That must be his driveway. From here it's about three klicks up that road along the mountainside to his place."
Riley watched as the lights grew closer. He rolled down his window and peered out as they passed the site. He could see very little, since the house was almost eight hundred feet above the highway. The glow indicated that the Ring Man probably had the entire grounds illuminated. Riley wasn't sure yet whether that would be an advantage or a disadvantage.
Westland was watching the odometer carefully in the dim dashboard light. She jumped as a vehicle flashed its lights in her rearview mirror and then roared around her. A truck load of drunk farm workers leaned over the railing of the truck bed, screaming at them for going too slow.
Riley reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. "Relax, Kate."
She nodded, still keeping her attention on the odometer. "Anywhere along in here." She pulled over and slowed even further.
He cracked open his door and turned to her. "See you soon." Then he rolled out, throwing the door shut as he went.
Riley hit the ground and rolled into the drainage ditch on the side of the road. He landed in the cold water at the bottom, which seeped into his clothes. Crouching in the ditch, he allowed himself a few seconds to get oriented. Looking to the east, in the dim starlight, he could make out the notch in the mountains ahead that indicated the top of the draw. Down that draw ran the stream he was looking for. He figured the stream must be somewhere off to his left, since they had not crossed it in the car prior to his jumping out.
He took out his compass and shot an azimuth to the notch, rotating the glowing lines in the base of the compass to match the illuminated north arrow on that setting. Then he offset that slightly to the north. He wanted to intersect the stream prior to the waterfall.
Counting every right footfall, Riley headed up the draw. He estimated it was 1.2 kilometers to the waterfall. He knew that his pace count, normally sixty right steps for every hundred meters, would be inaccurate due to the steep terrain. But the pace count and azimuth were really backups. He was counting on running into the left limit of the stream and following that, or hitting the front limit of the steep shelf from which the waterfall dropped, and following that to the left.
It felt good to be back out in the open again. Riley took a deep breath of the cool night air as he strode along. Being alone in the dark might be a terrifying experience for some, but it gave Riley a sense of freedom. There were no distractions, and he was accountable to no one. He always enjoyed the feeling of being out in nature, even if it was during a mission.
After fifteen minutes the noise of falling water became perceptible. He turned his course a little more to the left, hitting thicker vegetation the closer he got to the water. Suddenly he broke through to a slightly overgrown path next to the stream. Riley knelt down and ran his fingers over the dirt at the base of the path, searching for recent footprints. In the dark he couldn't see anything, and his fingers yielded no information. Drawing the knife he had taken from the sicario, he headed up the path.
Riley knew the attaché had most likely used this same path to put in the cache. He just hoped no one else would be on it tonight. He made much better time on the path than he had in the thick brush and was quickly rewarded with the sound of water crashing into a pool ahead. Riley stepped out into the moonlit clearing at the base of the waterfall.
The rock mentioned in the cache report was easy to spot. It stood on the south side of the pool a short hop from the shore. Riley bounded over to the rock and knelt down. He felt along the north edge for a fishing line or anything else that might be connected to the cache. Nothing.
Riley sighed and took his clothes off, shivering in the chill night air. Gripping the knife in his teeth, he held onto the rock with his hands. Damn. He hated cold water. The icy mountain pool made his skin crawl as he slowly lowered himself in, sliding his feet along the side of the rock. Totally immersed, except for his head, he took a deep breath and pushed himself under the water. When his feet hit something, he turned upside down, and swam down the few feet to the bundle. Quickly feeling around, he determined that the cache was buoyant and held in place with an anchor cable. At that point, he ran out of breath and headed back up.