When Cooper came down the stairs and hit the tarmac beside Borrego, the Polar Bear smiled.
“This is us,” he said, and motioned for Cooper to join him in the Land Rover. As Borrego offered him the passenger seat, Cooper was thinking of shooting for a bout of politeness when he noticed the setup in the rear of the Defender. Beneath the vinyl top, just aft of the jeep’s roll bar, sat a custom-built throne resembling something between a Recaro racing seat and a La-Z-Boy. The seat’s color scheme matched the exterior of the jeep, black and muted yellow, and there were sealed baggage compartments on both sides of the seat, into which Madrid placed the last pieces of luggage. Once the velociraptor locked them, it was hard to tell the compartments were there-they simply appeared to be part of the jeep’s floor, raised as it was to accommodate the special design of the throne. Cooper assumed there were some monster fuel tanks built into the vehicle too.
The three-hundred-plus-pound Borrego hopped over the side of the jeep without opening the driver’s-side door and climbed nimbly into the back, Cooper thinking of The Dukes of Hazzard. He located a cooler, dug out a bottle of Gatorade, and plunked it into the movie-theater-style cup holder built into an armrest in the throne. The Polar Bear seized and buckled his seat belt, took a long pull on the Gatorade, and-once Cooper had clambered into the passenger seat-popped open the cooler and offered him a beverage.
“Why not,” Cooper said, and palmed the cold plastic bottle.
Madrid slid behind the wheel and bounced them out of the airport.
After a pit stop by the Polar Bear at a quasi-governmental building near Belize City’s sprawling container docks, Madrid piloted the Defender through a series of narrow streets and the kind of colorful, worn-out overcrowdedness Cooper had grown accustomed to seeing in the Caribbean and points south. They made their way out of the waterfront district, Cooper turning for one last look out the rear of the Defender at the cool blue Caribbean, obscured somewhat by a forest of industrial piers but still there, making him feel good. The velociraptor sloped them up a highway ramp and Cooper watched the tall cranes of the container terminal fade into the distance.
He asked the enthroned Borrego where they were headed.
“Kind of a laundromat for cars,” Borrego said. This, between chugs of Gatorade. He bent down between bumps in the road, returned his empty bottle to the cooler, brought a new flavor out, twisted off the top with two fingers, and put away half of it. “Belize City’s maybe the third or fourth most corrupt port in the Americas. Maybe every two months or so, a regular shipment of-how does Lexus put it?-‘pre-owned’ cars comes into the docks, probably a couple hundred vehicles in the hold. Comes in at night. The customs agents policing the docks don’t seem to mind as the shipment is divided and loaded aboard six or seven smaller ships. The smaller boats hit a few ports around the region to unload their abbreviated load of Honda Accords, where people like the people we’ll soon be visiting clean off the VINs and send them on their way.”
“And this,” Cooper said, “has what exactly to do with the artifact shipment?”
“The tomb diggers I bought from are all working at the laundromat.”
Cooper considered this.
“Day jobs,” he said.
“Right. I stopped by the port authority first because we need to find out where the laundromat is operating today before we can get there. Normally,” he said, “the port authority personnel taking the payola to keep that sort of information quiet don’t exactly part freely with it.”
Cooper eyed the outskirts of the city as it passed by along the side of the highway.
“But some of those containers back at the shipping terminal,” he said, “are yours?”
“Most.”
Cooper nodded. He didn’t exactly need to whip out a calculator to assess how easily Borrego, as the local shipping kingpin, could glean the whereabouts of the “laundromat” from the “port authority personnel”-each of whom, he supposed, Borrego was probably paying two or three times their salary in cash just to keep them friendly.
After an hour on an increasingly winding, thinly paved, oft-cracked highway, Borrego dug into his cooler and began distributing triple-decker club sandwiches. He explained that the facility they were visiting lay just outside a seaside village called Dangriga, known for its enormous lobster haul.
“Be good to stick around for dinner,” he said, wolfing the sandwich as he spoke. “Nothing like a four-pound Belize lobster.”
Cooper didn’t argue.
A couple miles past the Dangriga town line, Madrid hauled ass onto an un-paved side road that climbed into the hills. Cooper was about to toss his half-digested turkey club on the velociraptor’s lap when a towering, razor-wire-tipped cyclone fence appeared on the right-hand side of the road-along with some buildings, mounds of squashed cars, and a series of other, less identifiable structures, all lurking behind the coiled edge of protective fence.
Not your usual used-car lot, Cooper thought, but maybe a hell of a place to blank-slate some late-model American sedans for redistribution around the globe.
Madrid found the entrance, a gated break in the fence, and pulled the Defender alongside a pole-mounted mesh speaker with a white button on its face. Madrid punched the button with his left hand; Cooper noted the proximity of the velociraptor’s right hand to the holster on his hip.
“Yeah,” came the static-ridden sound of a man’s voice from the speaker.
“We’re here to visit some friends,” the velociraptor said in crisp English.
After a brief silence, the voice said, “Who that?”
Madrid rattled off four names Cooper hadn’t heard before.
A longer silence ensued. When Madrid appeared ready to speak up again, the voice from the box said, “Only one of them here today.”
“Well,” Madrid said, “we’d like to see him.”
“He agree you friends, I ask him?” came the voice.
“Sure,” the velociraptor said. “Just tell him it’s the Polar Bear.”
Another pause. “The Polar Bear.”
“That’s it,” Madrid said.
Cooper had long since caught the security camera peering down at them from the top of the gate. He expected the voice wouldn’t need to ask whether they were cops, since the Land Rover couldn’t really be mistaken for a Belize City PD cruiser.
A click and whine sounded out as the gate swung inward, opening with a jerky but consistent pace, as though it ran on rusty chains. Madrid brought them inside as though he knew where to go, though Cooper suspected he didn’t. A thick-jowled man with deeply brown skin, wearing a pitted-out T-shirt and grubby jeans, emerged from a kind of lean-to not far from the gate. Cooper found it interesting that the man did nothing but stand and observe the Defender’s progress.
Madrid parked in an open patch of dirt beside the junkyard’s main building, a huge prefab corrugated-aluminum structure Cooper figured a strong wind would knock down. He also figured the building could easily be relocated in half a day if you knew how to take it down and had a flatbed truck handy to do it with. A partially shredded blue tarp dangled like a curtain over its main opening, so you couldn’t see inside but could push your way in with a brush of the hand. Madrid led the way in, having a look around before holding the tarp aside to allow Borrego to pass.