“But dangerous,” said Katia. “A lot of drugs.”
“Not so much anymore,” said Daniela. “I’ve been there recently. The city has changed. I take it you have never been there?”
“No. I would like to go sometime.”
“We’ll have to do it. And you must tell your mother to take you so you can visit your grandfather.”
“If that’s who she goes down to see, he doesn’t live in Medellín,” said Katia.
“But you said that’s where she goes?”
“Yes. She flies to Medellín, but she takes a bus from there. I have asked her many times, but she refuses to tell me where she goes. But…” Katia stopped and bit her lower lip a little as she hesitated.
“Yes?”
“Last year I found a bus ticket in her purse for a place called El Chocó. I looked on the Internet, and it is located in the south of Colombia, in a place called Narnio Province.”
“You mean Narińo Province, said Daniela.
Yes, thats it. Do you know it?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been there?”
“No,” Daniela lied.
“That, plus little things my mother has said over the years. I know she stays in a small village near a river. She has talked about the Indians going up and down the river in dugout canoes. So it must be very rural.”
“The Rio Tapaje?” said Daniela.
“Where is that?”
The name sent a chill up Danielas spine. Its one of the main rivers in Narińo Province. Daniela had been on the Rio Tapaje five months earlier. The river flowed into the Pacific Ocean in a remote corner of southwest Colombia. The first few miles were controlled by the Colombian army, but only through the use of high-speed boats with.50-caliber machine guns mounted on the front.
The fleet of boats, called Piranhas, was supplied by the U.S. government in an effort to eradicate the coca trade that thrived in the river basin beyond the village of El Chocó. Beyond that point even the Colombian army was reluctant to venture. This was the land of the FARC. And, if Katia was right, it was the place where her grandfather was holed up with a weapon powerful enough to erase half of Manhattan or Washington, D.C.
This morning the bus was late. Liquida steadied his elbows on the edge of the roof as he struggled to focus the big ten-by-fifty-power field glasses. He scanned the surface streets on the other side of the freeway. Liquida was on top of an abandoned commercial building along the side of Highway 67, less than two miles from the women’s jail in Santee.
The freeway traffic was bumper-to-bumper during the morning rush hour.
Across the way he could see the Prospect Avenue on-ramp. The big box truck, the one the explosives man had rented, was already in place, parked right at the edge of the on-ramp, halfway down the sharp decline to the freeway. On each side of the paved roadway the ramp fell off steeply, on one side into a shallow ravine, and on the other toward the freeway. A man on foot could cross either slope easily, but a heavy vehicle, a bus or a truck, trying to traverse the steep slope would roll.
A hundred feet beyond the on-ramp, on the other side, across the ravine, Liquida had parked the getaway van. He had rented it the previous morning by using a stolen credit card and stolen driver’s license. The van was parked along the side of the road, on North Magnolia Avenue. Liquida had cut a hole in the chain-link fence separating Magnolia from the freeway so the men could quickly pass through in their escape.
A lone figure with a sizable duffel bag at his feet was huddled in the shadows under one of the trees down in the gully of the no-man’s-land between the elevated on-ramp and Magnolia.
Liquida watched as a couple of cars turned down the ramp. They passed the box truck without difficulty and drove onto the freeway where they quickly backed up in traffic. He was beginning to get nervous. If the truck remained stalled on the ramp much longer, some pain-in-the-ass commuter would call it in to the highway patrol. It was the one thing he feared. If they were forced to start the fireworks early, the bus driver would see it. Then, instead of turning right onto the on-ramp he would take the bridge straight ahead, over the top of the freeway. The bus would be gone before his men could move.
This nightmare was still rattling around in Liquida’s brain when a fuzzy green image crept across the round edge on the lens of the field glasses. He adjusted the focus and watched as the sheriff’s bus pulled into the left-hand turn pocket on Magnolia. It nosed to a stop at the traffic light on Prospect.
Liquida grabbed the walkie-talkie from his pocket, pushed the button, and spoke into it. “Está aquí. Aquí. It’s here.”
Before the words were even out of his mouth, the man in the gully was moving at a run, lugging the heavy duffel bag up the steep slope toward the upper end of the on-ramp. When he reached the top, he lay flat on his stomach against the incline and waited.
“What’s the matter?” said Katia.
“Hmm. Oh, nothing,” said Daniela.
“You look worried all of a sudden.”
“No, it’s nothing. I was just wishing the driver would pick up his speed so we could get to the courthouse a little sooner and get off the bus.”
“You don’t like it,” said Katia. “Neither do I, it’s too closed in. You can’t see nothing. They should put in windows.”
Daniela had a different reason for wanting to get off the bus. The minute she was separated from Katia she would fly to a phone and call Thorpe at the bureau headquarters in Washington. She would tell him to gather every resource he could lay his hands on, civilian and military, and throw a wide net over the jungle surrounding the Tapaje River in Colombia. She was praying that it wasn’t too late, that Nitikin and the bomb were still there.
TWENTY-NINE
Liquida watched as the bus made the left turn across four lanes of traffic and slipped into the right lane on Prospect. The lumbering bus moved like a snail. Cars were backed up behind it, trying to make their way toward the ramp, but the bus had them blocked.
“Now comes the tricky part,” said Liquida under his breath, “traffic control.”
As the bus took the tight turn onto the ramp, it nearly came to a complete stop. It eased down the ramp at fifteen miles an hour, and the man with the duffel bag sprang from the grass at the edge of the ramp. With his hand up, he stepped behind the bus as it passed and stopped the line of traffic behind it. Before the driver of the first car realized what was happening, the man with the duffel bag had flung a small satchel. The nylon bag, covered with graphite dust, slid like a hockey puck over the pavement and under the front end of the car. The man with the bag turned and ran in the other direction, down the ramp, toward the bus.
“What the hell?” As the driver started to lift his foot off the brake pedal, the fiery explosion buckled the center of his car and flipped it into the air. The blast ignited the gas in the fuel tank. A half second later the fiery wreck landed on top of the car behind it. A mushroom-shaped bloom of flame leaped thirty feet into the air and engulfed both vehicles.
“Now that’s the way to stop traffic,” said Liquida.
He shifted the field glasses to look down the ramp toward the bus. Sure enough, human nature had done its part. With the blast, the bus driver had looked in his big side-view mirror. He’d seen the flames and the flying car and instinct took over. He hit the brakes. It was only a few seconds, but it was enough. He was barely rolling, still looking in the mirror, when the box truck pulled out in front of him and blocked the ramp.