Stephen Leather - Breakout

‘You’re Lex,’ she said, a statement not a question. ‘I’m Lupa.’ She had a large leather bag over her shoulder and was carrying two plastic grocery bags which she unceremoniously dumped on the table in front of him. ‘I hope you’ll be happy with these,’ she said, ‘because we may well be needing them. My brother is watching our backs and will let us know if we have problems, but we’ll be lucky to get out of this area without a fight, because gringos like you are walking million-dollar ransoms, so you will have been noticed and word will have been passed on.’

An elderly waitress in a black and white uniform came over and Harper ordered a double espresso for himself, figuring he could do with the caffeine jolt. Lupa asked for a mint tea.

As the waitress walked away, Harper peered into the bags, and found that each of them contained a large pistol. The bluing of the gun-metal had been worn away through so much use and age that the pistols had reverted to the original silver colour. Harper immediately recognised them as old model .45 calibre Colts. They had been used by the US military throughout two world wars and in countless other twentieth century conflicts. The Colt was a single-action, semi-automatic, magazine-fed and recoil-operated pistol, and the magazine held seven rounds with an additional round in the spout.

‘Will they do?’ Lupa said.

‘Absolutely. The old ’uns are the best,’ Harper said, unfazed by the age of the weapons. ‘Did you bring any ammo as well?’

’Of course, sixteen rounds a gun, two mags of seven and one for the chamber.’

Once more he was impressed. ‘I can see why Scouse hired you. These are perfect; .45 calibre rounds would stop an elephant.’ He eyed her slim frame and gave her a slightly dubious look. ‘So will you be carrying one of the Colts yourself?’

She shook her head. ‘No, the kickback on the Colt is too much for my wrist.’ She patted her shoulder bag. ‘I’m carrying a 9 mm Makarov.’

‘Good choice. It’s an easy weapon to use, very rarely jams and packs enough punch for most situations. So who’s the other Colt for - your brother?’

She nodded. ‘He’ll be joining us as soon as he’s worked out what company we have outside.’

Harper grinned. ‘He’ll be the guy with a Condor feather in his hat then, who followed me in from the airport.’

She gave a rueful smile. ‘I asked him to ride shotgun on you in case of trouble. Was he really that easy to spot?’

‘He was for me, yes, but I’ve had a lot of practice at this. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed, although the hat with the condor feather is a bit too flamboyant if you’re going to do the job properly.’

The waitress returned with their drinks and placed them on the table. ‘Tell me,’ Harper said, as the waitress moved away, ‘how come you speak such good English? Is one of your parents British or American, or something?’

‘No, they’re both Bolivian. I learned English through reading comic books at first, then books, and then TV and films.’ She shrugged. ‘Even when we were young, my brother and I always had our eyes on a bigger world than the small town where we grew up, and learning to speak English was part of the escape plan. We practised on each other, listened to English-language radio and TV shows.’

‘And your parents, what did they do?’

‘They ran a bar and cantina in our home town, near Trinidad, in Beni state. It’s about 500 kilometres from here.’ She grimaced. ‘Not a place I’d recommend to you. The heat and humidity is hard for native Bolivians to take, let alone pale-skinned gringos , and the wet season runs from December to May, though when you’re in the middle of it, it seems a whole lot longer than that. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the whole area is a swamp. As well as the river that runs through the town, there are half a dozen other tributaries of the Amazon within a few kilometres and the place is so wet that there are water-filled ditches at the side of every street.’ She gave a grim smile. ‘Every building’s drains empty into them as well, so you can imagine what they smell like, and the mosquitoes also love them, as you’d expect. They’ll eat you alive and malaria is rife, and in the wet season you can even find caiman - alligators - and anacondas in the ditches as well.’

‘Sounds the perfect spot for a family holiday,’ Harper said with a laugh.

‘Most of the people there used to be miners, loggers or farmers, but coca is now one of the main crops around there - but the drug cartels have moved in on Trinidad, just like they have here, and a lot of people work for them, harvesting coca, converting it into cocaine paste, and carrying it to the airstrips or the rivers, or even working as human mules, taking it on foot right through the rainforest into Brazil.’

‘I can see why you wanted to get out,’ Harper said. ‘So how did you meet Scouse?’

‘He was down here checking security on some of the oil palm plantations. A lot of the owners are gringos but their guards, chauffeurs and servants aren’t. Many of them don’t speak a word of English and the only Spanish word Scouse knew was cerveza - beer . ’

Harper laughed. ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

‘So he needed an interpreter and I happened to bump into him, in a bar, as it happens.’

‘Again, no surprises there.’

‘So we started chatting and he hired me to work for him. He paid well and the work was a lot more interesting than showing American tourists around Santa Cruz, not that there have been many of those since the cartels moved in and the drug wars started.’

‘And your brother?’

‘Like me, Ricardo had no taste for subsistence farming or helping our parents to run the bar and cantina. He was a bit of a wild boy, getting involved in petty theft at first, and then graduating to break-ins, car-jackings and armed robberies. I’d sometimes help him, first just as a look-out, then as a getaway driver, and eventually as his partner in crime. I was good at it too.’ Her look challenged Harper to disapprove. ‘Inevitably he got involved with one of the cartels, and at that point I stepped back. Not for moral reasons - if gringos are stupid enough to pay a fortune to snort white powder or smoke crack, that’s not my problem, and the farmers who grow coca make a better living from that than they do from any other crop. They get three crops a year from coca bushes, and the price they get is far higher than for any alternative crops they could grow. Anyway, I’d seen enough of the cartels to know that the only people who really survive and thrive, the ones living on ranches, driving around in Mercedes with tinted windows and drinking French champagne, are the ones at the very top. The rest: the sicarios - the assassins - the foot-soldiers, the men making the cocaine in the jungle factories and the mules shipping it out, sooner or later, they all end up in jail or dead. So I took a few steps back, but my brother still works for one of the cartels.’ She smiled. ‘So, now you know our criminal background, perhaps you want nothing more to do with us?’

Harper smiled. ‘If I refused to have anything to do with people just because they had a bit of a criminal background, not only would I have no business associates, I wouldn’t have any friends either. So… let’s get back to Scouse, what can you tell me about his disappearance?’

‘Only what I already told Sam in my statement to Risk Reduction, and I’m sure you’ve already read that. He was flying into La Paz and we’d arranged to meet later that day, but he never showed up at the rendezvous and when I called his mobile phone, it was switched off. Risk Reduction said they could only track it as far as the airport at La Paz and no further, so it had evidently been destroyed almost at once, either by Scouse himself or by whoever had taken him prisoner.’