“Yeah? What did he say?”
“He said he had a message from Jim. Do you know a Jim?”
“Yes. What was the message?”
“There were two pieces of information he wanted passed on to you when we heard from you. First, he said that a guy you were in the Marines with, named Barry Hedger, is working in the American Embassy in Bogotá. He thought that might be a good contact for you if you had problems.”
Cat remembered Barry Hedger well. He had been a fellow platoon leader in the company, a gung-ho, straight-arrow Naval Academy man who none of the ROTC officers had liked very much. “Well, I guess that information won’t be of much use now,” he said. “What was the other thing?”
“The other thing,” Ben said, “was the phone call you thought you got from Jinx.”
“What about it?” Cat asked.
“This guy, Jim, says it was traced to a hotel room in Cartagena—”
“What?”
“He was very emphatic about it, said it was confirmed that the phone call came from” — a paper rustled — “from the Caribé Hotel in Cartagena.”
Cat grabbed a nearby chair and sank into it, his knees weak.
Ben was still talking. “I don’t know how the hell a thing like that could be confirmed,” he said, “but the senator’s aide said you could take it as gospel. Listen, Cat, I owe you an apology. I thought you were hallucinating or dreaming or something.”
Cat’s heart was pounding, his mind racing. He thought for a moment he might faint.
“Cat? Are you there?”
Cat got hold of himself. “Yes, Ben, I’m sorry, I was just having a little trouble absorbing that information.” He dug into his coat pocket for Bluey’s notebook. “Listen, Ben, I want you to do something for me, something important, okay?”
“Sure, anything.”
He gave Ben the address of Bluey’s daughter and ex-wife. “I want you to confirm that Marisa Holland is the daughter of one Ronald Holland, and I want you to tell her mother that Holland was killed in a mugging in Colombia, all right?”
“Sure, all right. You didn’t get mugged, did you, Cat?”
“No, just Holland. He was helping me out down here. Something else: I want you to send her ten thousand dollars immediately, then I want you to set up something for the child’s future; get hold of my lawyer, and put a hundred thousand dollars into a trust. Make her mother and me the trustees; I want to keep in touch with the child. You’ve got my power of attorney; can you get all this done right away? I won’t be coming home just yet, not after the news you’ve given me.”
“Sure, Cat, I’ll get on it tomorrow. Anything else?”
“That’s it for now. I’ll call you when I’ve had a chance to check out the Caribé Hotel. And, Ben, thanks so much for this news.”
He hung up and returned to the table. “I’m not leaving tomorrow,” he told Meg. He explained what he had just been told.
Meg leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. “Do you know anybody in any of the American intelligence services?” she asked.
“Sort of. Why?”
“Well, that phone call is the sort of thing that only the National Security Agency could track down. They’re constantly recording all sorts of international telephone calls.”
Cat nodded. “Maybe that’s how it was done. You say you’re finished in Santa Marta?”
“Yes, all I’ve got to do is edit my videotape when I get back, then lay a voice track over it. No rush about that, though. I haven’t sold the piece yet.”
“Will you come to Cartagena with me tomorrow, then? I could really use the help of somebody who knows the territory.”
“Can I come as a reporter? Can I shoot if I want to?”
“All right.”
She offered him a firm handshake. “You’ve got a deal. If I can help you find her, I will. I just want it all on tape.”
It seemed a small price for her help, Cat thought. And quite apart from that, he was glad she would be around for a while longer.
16
With Meg Greville’s help, Cat managed to file a flight plan for Cartagena and get a weather forecast. He was relieved to have good flying weather, since, in spite of the instrument rating on his forged license, he didn’t want to have to make an instrument approach.
On the taxiway, he went slowly and carefully through the checklist, doing the procedure as Bluey had taught him. “Listen,” he said to Meg, “the international language of air traffic control is supposed to be English, but if I get into trouble, jump in and save me, okay?”
“Sure. I don’t fly, myself, but I’ve got a lot of hours as a passenger in light planes in Latin America. I know the drill pretty well.”
Cat called the tower and reported ready for takeoff. He was relieved to get permission in clear English. He taxied onto the runway, noting the time, glad to have the Rolex back on his wrist where it belonged, and shoved the throttle forward, watching the airspeed indicator carefully. At sixty knots, he pulled back on the yoke and the airplane rose into the air. He climbed to his filed altitude of four thousand, five hundred feet and turned southwest, working through his checklist. He leaned out the engine, set a course, and switched on the autopilot and altitude hold. He relaxed a little, feeling as if Bluey were still seated beside him, issuing instructions.
Cat chose to fly over the sea, a mile or so offshore, to get a better view of the coast. In an emergency, he could always set down on the beach. The coastline looked ordinary enough. There was an occasional tiny village, hard against the beach, and the large city of Barranquilla with its VOR beacon. He hardly needed radio navigation, though. It was simply a matter of hugging the shore until Cartagena hove into view.
Just before Barranquilla, Meg pointed ahead and down. “Can you make out a twin-engine airplane just inshore of the beach?”
Cat looked for a moment and found it. The aircraft was sitting only a few yards from a house.
“Drug runner inbound from the States,” she said. “Probably aiming for the Guajira, got lost, and ran out of fuel. He put it down on the water, skipped a couple of times, plowed across the beach, and came to rest in somebody’s front yard.”
Cat was thankful he’d been with somebody as capable as Bluey on his inbound trip.
An hour or so after leaving Santa Marta, Meg pointed again. “There’s Cartagena Airport.”
They were five miles out, and the single long strip was easily visible. Cat started a descent and called the tower. Shortly, he was on final approach, running through the last of his checklist. He bounced once, then settled the airplane down. Soon he wished he’d aimed for the middle of the ten-thousand-foot runway. It was a long taxi to the terminal. A lineman guided him to a parking spot, and Meg ordered fuel. A policeman appeared, but the forged papers and a smile from Meg got them cleared quickly. A teenage boy turned up with a cart to carry their luggage.
“Where do we get a cab?” Cat asked Meg.
“My car’s in the parking lot,” she said.
The car was a dusty, elderly Mercedes sedan, from which the radio had apparently been stolen. Soon they were entering the city, driving along a high, stuccoed wall.
“What’s behind the wall?” Cat asked.
“The Old City. I’ll show you later.”
They came to a stretch of beach rimmed by a string of high-rise hotels disappearing into the distance. Modern Cartagena, at least the beach portion of it, looked very like a Florida resort city. The Caribé stood out among the modern hotels, an older, lower building of pink stucco. Meg pulled into the driveway and under a portico. A doorman took the car, and they entered the cool lobby of the Spanish-style building and approached the front desk.
“May I speak with the manager, please?” Cat asked a woman at the front desk.