She didn’t look like a diplomat. Adrienne Jones—if that was really her name—was a tall, sleek, leggy African-American whose skin was the color of polished ebony. She had a fashion model’s figure and face: high cheekbones, almond eyes, and a tousled, careless hairdo that must have cost a fortune. Her clothes were expensive, too.
Hector stared at her, too stunned to speak. I felt dismal and threadbare beside her in my shapeless slacks and blouse, with a belly bag strapped around my middle.
I hated her immediately.
“If you’re really with the State Department.” I said as she snapped her ID closed and put it back in her capacious shoulder bag, “then I’m from Disney World.”
She smiled at me the way a snake does. “That’s the one in Florida, isn’t it?”
Hector found his voice. “CIA, right? You’ve got to be with the CIA.”
Jones ignored his guess. “You both have been informed that you are to cooperate with me, correct?”
“I was told to listen to what you have to say,” I said.
“Me too,” said Hector.
“Very well, then. Here’s what I have to say: Leave Sam Gunn alone. Let him continue to operate. Do not interfere with him in any way.”
What kind of strings had Sam pulled? He had come across to me as the little guy struggling against the big boys, but here was the State Department or the CIA—or some federal agency—ordering me to keep my hands off.
“Why?” I asked.
“You don’t have to know,” said Jones. “Just leave Sam be. No interference with his operation.”
Hector scratched his head and glanced at me. He was an Air Force officer, I realized, and had to follow orders. His career depended on it. Me, I had a career, too. But I wasn’t going to let this fashion-model stranger order me around, no matter what my boss said.
“OK,” I told her, “I’ve listened to what you have to say. That doesn’t mean I’m going to do what you’re asking me to do.”
Jones smiled again, venomously. “I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.”
“You can tell me whatever you like. I’m not going to go along with it unless I know the whys and wherefors.”
Her smile faded into grimness. “Look, Ms. Perkins, your superior at DEA has been briefed and he agreed to cooperate. He’s told you to cooperate, and that’s what you’d better do, if you know what’s good for you.”
“You briefed him? Then brief me.”
She snorted through her finely-chiseled nostrils. “All I can tell you is that this is a high-priority matter, and it has the backing of the highest levels of authority.”
“Highest levels?” I asked. “Like the White House?”
She didn’t answer.
“The Oval Office? The President himself?”
Jones remained as silent and still as the Sphinx.
I heard myself say, “Not good enough, Ms. Jones. Anybody can claim they’re working on orders from the White House. I’ve heard even fancier stories, in my line of work. What’s going on?”
She merely shook her head, just the slightest of motions, but clearly a negative.
“OK then.” I got up from my chair. “I’m catching the next flight to Miami and going straight to the news media. They’ll be really interested to hear that the CIA is backing a fraudulent tourist operation in Panama.”
“I wouldn’t try that if I were you,” Jones said.
Hector stood up beside me. “You threaten her, you’ve got to go through me.”
I gaped at him. “You don’t have to protect me. I can take care of myself.”
“I’m in this, too,” he insisted. “We’re partners.”
Jones threw her head back and laughed. “What you two are,” she said, “is a couple of babes in the woods. And if you don’t start behaving yourselves, you’re going to end up as babes in a swamp, feeding alligators.”
I unzipped my belly bag and pulled out my cellphone. “CNN, Atlanta, USA,” I said to the phone system’s computer. “News desk.”
“Put it down,” Jones said.
I kept the phone pressed against my ear, listening to the computer chatter as the system made the connection.
“Put it down,” she repeated. Her voice was flat, calm, yet menacing. I realized that her black leather shoulder bag was big enough to hold a small arsenal.
“News,” I heard a tired voice answer.
Jones said, “We can cut a deal, if you’re reasonable.”
“News desk,” the voice repeated, a little irked.
I put the phone down and clicked it off. “What kind of a deal?”
Jones gestured with both her hands; she had long, graceful fingers, I noticed. I sat down, then Hector took his seat beside me.
“God spare me the righteous amateurs,” Jones muttered. “You two have no idea of what you’re messing with.”
“Then tell us,” I said.
“I can’t tell you,” she replied. “But if you want to, you can come back to Colon with me and watch it happen.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Jones misinterpreted my silence as reluctance, so she went on, “You give me your word you won’t go blowing off to the media or anybody else, and you can come with me and see what this is all about. After it’s over you can go back home, safe and sound. Deal?”
I’d seen enough drug deals to know that she was showing us only the tip of the iceberg. But I was curious, and—to tell the absolute truth—I was wondering how Sam got himself mixed up with the CIA and whether he was in danger or not.
So I glanced at Hector, who remained silent, suspicious. But he looked at me and his expression said that he’d back whatever move I made. So I said, “Deal.”
We couldn’t squeeze a third body into Hector’s training jet, and Jones didn’t trust us out of her sight, so we flew back to Colon again in her plane: a twin-engined executive jet. I was beginning to feel like a Ping-Pong ball, bouncing from Colon to Panama City and back again.
Hector was impressed with the plane’s luxurious interior. “Like a movie,” he said, awed. Instead of sitting beside me, he asked to go up into the cockpit. Jones gave him a friendly smile and said OK. I didn’t see him again until we landed.
An unmarked Mercedes four-door sedan was waiting for us at the runway ramp, the kind of luxury car the drug dealers call a “cocaine Ford.” Two men in dark suits bustled Hector and me into the rear seat. Jones sat up front with the driver. The other man followed us in another unmarked Mercedes. I felt distinctly nervous.
But all we did is drive across the airport to Sam’s converted blimp hangar.
“Mr. Gunn is doing a special flight this afternoon,” Jones told us cryptically, half turned in her seat to face us. “Once it’s finished, you two can go back to the States—if you promise not to blow the whistle on Space Adventure Tours.”
“And if we don’t promise?” I asked. Instead of strong and forceful, my voice came out as a little girl’s squeak, which made me disgusted with myself.
Jones didn’t answer; she merely reverted to her rattler-type smile.
We pulled up outside the hangar. Inside, I could see the big 747 with the orbiter clamped atop it. Technicians were swarming all over it.
“Sam had his regular flight this morning,” I muttered to Hector. “Now they’re getting the plane ready for another flight.”
Hector nodded. “Looks like.”
We sat and watched, while our Mercedes’ engine purred away so the car’s air conditioning could stay on. Sam came out of an office up on the catwalk above the hangar floor, with two slick looking lawyerly types flanking him. He was grinning and gabbing away a mile a minute, happy as a kid in a candy store. Or so it seemed from this distance.