In the lobby, he made briskly for the rear door. No one seemed to notice him. He walked quickly along the rear of the building to the maintenance closet, looked around, then opened the door. Rodriguez and Meg were gone.
He swore to himself. If the hotel security people had Meg, the police were already on the way. He left the closet and closed the door behind him, looking desperately about. He hadn’t seen them in the lobby, so he started for the pool. As he came out of the garden, he spotted Rodriguez and Meg across the pool, sitting at a table. Meg had a tall drink, and they were chatting amiably, even smiling. He got there as quickly as he could without running.
“Oh, there you are,” Meg said gaily, then under her breath, “What the fuck took you so long?”
“Sorry, it couldn’t have been done any faster.”
“Mr. Rodriguez and I have just been having a chat,” she said.
He noticed that her hand was in her pocketbook. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” He turned to Rodriguez and shook his hand, pressing five hundred dollars into it.
“Now listen,” he said, smiling, “we’re going to leave quietly, and I don’t want any fuss from you. If we have any problems about this, I’ll simply tell them I bribed you for your passkey, understand?”
Rodriguez smiled weakly and nodded. “Of course, señor, I do not wish to make problems for you. Please, please do not let anyone know how you got this information.”
“I have no intention of telling anyone,” Cat said, handing the grateful man his passkey. “Let’s go,” he said to Meg.
They walked quickly from the pool, through the hotel lobby, and asked for their car, waiting nervously for it to arrive. He had visions of security guards pouring out of the hotel, with Rodriguez screaming and pointing. The car came, and they drove away.
“I believe this is yours,” Meg said, handing him the pistol. It was still cocked. “If I had any doubts about how serious you were, I don’t anymore.”
Cat eased the hammer down and engaged the safety. “I wasn’t going to shoot the guy, but I didn’t want him to know it. Why did you leave the closet?”
“A maintenance man came back for his mop. I just barely managed to get the gun into my handbag. Rodriguez talked us out of there. I thought we were better off in the open. What did you find out?”
“Not a hell of a lot. The place looks like William F. Buckley, Jr. lives there, except for the master bedroom, which looks like Hugh Hefner lives there. There were a man’s suits — on the small side — and clothes for several women. Looks like an assortment to handle whoever’s in residence. The man’s stuff had a monogram, A. And there was this.” He handed her the matchbook.
“A for Anaconda,” she said.
“Right. When we were in Riohacha, Bluey and I had a meeting with a local drug dealer. We were pretending to be buyers. He mentioned something called Anaconda Pure, a sort of brand-name cocaine, I guess. He spoke of it almost reverently. Where are we going?” She had turned along the sea, past the old city.
“To the airport. We know the jet left on the third of the month. Let’s see if we can find out where it went. There isn’t all that much traffic out of there. Somebody might remember it.”
“You have to file a flight plan in this country,” Cat said. “I wonder how long they keep them on file.”
At the airport, it took Meg fifteen minutes and a hundred-dollar bill to get copies of flight plans of the only two jets that had left Cartagena on the third of the month. “There was a Lear for Bogotá and a Gulfstream for Cali,” she said, translating the papers. “There’s no information about who owns the planes, just the pilot’s name and a phone number.”
They drove back to Meg’s house.
“Okay,” she said, sitting down at the phone. “Which one is it going to be?”
“Well, from the looks of the hotel suite, they like the best of everything. A Lear is a comparatively cheap jet. A Gulfstream costs twelve or fifteen million dollars. Let’s try Cali first.”
“Sounds good,” she said, dialling. “Cali has a reputation as a center for the drug trade, too.” The number answered, and she spoke in rapid Spanish for a couple of minutes, then hung up. “Bingo, maybe,” she said. “The number is the service company that hangars and maintains the jet. I pretended to be a girlfriend of the pilot, and I think they bought that. When I asked them for the name of the company that owns the plane so I could call him, they got cagey, said I could leave my number. Let’s try Bogotá.”
She went through the same routine with the Bogotá number, then hung up. “The airplane is owned by a construction company that does a lot of government work — roads, bridges, that sort of thing. Doesn’t sound nearly as likely. Looks like we’re off to Cali.”
“I’m glad you said ‘we.’”
“You’re not going anywhere without me and my camera,” she said, kissing him. “I got the whole scene in the maintenance closet.”
“What?”
She reached into her handbag and pulled out something the size of a large paperback book. “The latest in Japanese technology,” she said. “I try new stuff out for them occasionally.” She led him to the tape machines, popped out a tiny cassette, and shoved it into a machine. A moment later, Cat watched himself, from a low angle, terrify Rodriguez. The sound was hollow, but every word came through.
“Gosh,” he said, “I never knew I did such a good George Raft.”
18
Cat spent considerable time on his flight planning that evening. The longest nonstop flight he had ever made as pilot-in-command had been a little over a hundred miles, a solo cross-country during his flight training. Cali was south, in the western part of the country, some five hundred nautical miles from Cartagena.
He checked the range of the aircraft in the owner’s manual and satisfied himself that the wing tanks held more than sufficient fuel for the trip. Using Bluey’s charts and books, he determined that Cali was in the mountains, and all he knew about mountain flying was what he had read during his training. He satisfied himself that he could find the city, in decent weather, simply by following the Rio Cauca upstream from where it branched off the Rio Magdalena all the way to Cali, should his radio navigation equipment fail.
He calmed his nervousness about the flight with attention to detail. He had been taught all the essentials of flight planning; all he had to do was to remember it and do it right. And he was not about to fly commercial. The airlines had metal detectors, and he wanted the weapons with him more than ever.
Meg called the airport for a weather forecast. “Good,” she said. “Only scattered high clouds at twenty thousand feet en route. Cali ceiling should be unlimited. We’ll have a ten-knot tail wind. Could hardly be better.” Looking over his shoulder, she pointed to the airport guide, open to Cali. “Here, this is the company I called to find out about the Gulfstream jet. Aeroservice. It says they have fuel, engine, and airframe repairs for Piper and Cessna aircraft and Lycoming, and Continental engines. It seems to be the only service for private aircraft on the field.”
“Well, at least we have someplace to start, and a legitimate reason for being there,” he said.
They took off at nine the following morning, into sunny skies and unlimited visibility. Minutes after departing Cartagena, they picked up the Rio Magdalena, Colombia’s principal river, which divides a wide, green plain that is swampy in many places. Cat was beginning to feel quite confident as pilot-in-command. He thought Bluey would be proud of him. In less than an hour they had found where the Cauca branched off. Cat climbed to ten thousand five hundred feet in order to have plenty of altitude when the mountains presented themselves. The land rose to meet them as they approached and passed Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, and after Medellín, a railway ran alongside the Cauca and further confirmed their position. Piece of cake.