Stephen Leather - Breakout

Harper stepped to one side and she sauntered past him into the room. She glanced at the crumpled bed and said ‘That’s lucky, you were just going to bed anyway.’

She popped the cork of the champagne, poured some into a glass for Harper and then took a swig from the bottle. Some of it spilled down her chin and ran down her neck. ‘Oops, I’ve spilt some,’ she said with a wicked grin. ‘Want to help me clean it up?’

Harper tore his eyes away from the trail the champagne was making over her olive skin and the silk of her shirt.

‘I’ve got to be honest, Lupa, I make it a rule never to sleep with anybody I’m working with.’

She smiled, but undid the remaining buttons on her shirt, shrugged it off her shoulders and reached behind her to unhook her bra. ‘But we’re not working together any more now, are we Lex?’ She looked down. ‘And from what I’m seeing, it doesn’t look like you’re feeling like it’s a working relationship either. So - what’s that English saying? - how about making me the exception that proves the rule?’

He grinned. ‘Okay, I surrender. Whatever you say, Warden, but no handcuffs or truncheons, okay?’

She was still laughing as he picked her up and carried her to the bed.

CHAPTER 18

Harper didn’t get much sleep and he was awake when his phone alarm sounded early the next morning. It was still dark outside, with another hour before dawn broke. Lupa yawned and stretched like a cat, then gave him a sultry smile. ‘I’m glad you broke your rule, Lex, but I hate goodbyes, so I’m not going to prolong this one. Besides it’s my first full day in my new job and I need to make sure my guards are on duty.’ She kissed him, then rolled out of bed and pulled on her skirt and silk shirt. ‘So, how will you and Scouse get out of the country? If Scouse has your passport, what are you going to use?’

Harper smiled. ‘It’s a fake anyway and I always have a couple of spares, just in case. So Scouse and I’ll be on the same flight, once I’ve worked out where it’s safe for us to fly from.’

‘And how will you be sure of that?’

‘I’ll use my instincts, but I can also contact Sam at Risk Reduction, who may have heard something from their guys on the ground here.’

‘Don’t take any chances, Lex,’ she said. ‘If they don’t kill you, they’ll put you back in jail again, and it won’t be San Pedro the next time, it’ll be Chonchocoro, and no one - not even you - can break out of there.’

‘Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.’

She lingered a moment longer, staring at him as if imprinting his face on her memory, and then she headed for the door.

‘Oh and Lupa?’ She paused and looked back at him. ‘You were well worth breaking the rule for.’

She laughed. ‘Don’t make a habit of it though, will you? Unless it’s with me, of course.’ She blew him a kiss, then closed the door and a moment later he heard her footsteps on the wooden stairs.

Harper jumped out of bed, and had showered and dressed in five minutes. He gathered up his passport, money, the sat-phone and the remaining ammunition for the Colt .45. He stuck it in his waistband under his jacket and hurried downstairs to collect Scouse. He was not surprised, though a little irritated, to find that despite their conversation the previous evening, Scouse was still fast asleep, and Harper had to pound on the door three times before he woke up.

‘Get your shit together and splash some water on your face,’ Harper said, ‘and then let’s get moving. We need to be out of here pronto because once the Brazilian cartel bosses get to know about what happened in San Pedro - and they’ve probably already been told - they’ll be round La Paz like flies on shit looking for some pay-back from us.’

As Scouse shuffled towards the bathroom and started washing his face and then struggling into his clothes, Harper kept talking to him, as much to hurry him up as to impart any useful information. ‘If I were them,’ he said. ‘I’d be getting my men to screen every hotel, hostel and flophouse in the city, looking for gringos . Once they’ve eliminated the students and backpackers, there won’t be many others, so it’s not going to take them long to discover that two Inglés have been staying at the Pacific Hotel.’ He gave a bleak smile. ‘I’m sure they’ll be very persuasive when talking to the staff. And those cartel guys are perfectly capable of burning the whole place down and killing dozens of others, just to make sure they get us as well.’

‘So what do we do then?’ Scouse said, still looking around the room to see if he’d forgotten anything.

‘Well first, we get out of the hotel. And when we do, there’s no point in heading for the airport because even if the cartel haven’t got their own sicarios lying in wait for us, they’ll certainly have alerted the people there - the cops, customs men and soldiers - who are on their payroll. So if we’re dumb enough to turn up there, dollars to dimes we’ll be arrested and handed over to the cartel. After that, it’ll be goodbye world but probably with some heavy duty torture first, just for fun. However, I have arranged some alternative transport. I’ve called the Yank pilot who flew me, Lupa and Ricardo up here from Santa Cruz. We’re going to RV with him at a dirt airstrip out on the Altiplano a few miles east of here and he’s going to fly us across the border to a safe location. Then we can get ourselves to the nearest international airport and get a scheduled flight to a place where we can actually speak the language and where people are not trying to kill us.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Well, not that many of the people anyway.’

He broke off to glower at Scouse, who was still not ready. ‘So, since people really are trying to kill us here, if you’ve finished making sure that you’ve packed your toothbrush and your spare undies, pretty please with sugar on top, how about we get the hell out of here?’

They went downstairs and crossed the deserted lobby, but Harper made Scouse wait while he scanned the street outside, looking for any sign of a threat or surveillance, or the least thing out of place. After a couple of minutes he gave an abrupt nod. ‘Okay, it’s clear, let’s go.’

They hurried through the darkened streets to where Harper had left the battered Mercedes and he drove off just as the sky was beginning to lighten towards dawn. They threaded their way through the city and as they swung around the series of hairpin bends climbing the hillside out of La Paz, Harper glanced back and caught a few glimpses of the prison at the heart of the downtown district and the ant-like microcosm of the city within its walls. By now it would be business as usual at the gates except that there was a new governor and new guards in charge, who were probably already flexing their muscles.

They drove on eastwards through the suburbs, as the buildings slowly became fewer and more widely separated, and then they were out of the city altogether, passing through an area of scattered subsistence farms and the small town where he, Lupa and Ricardo had caught the flota bus what seemed like months ago but was actually only a week before.

Beyond the town, they reached the dust and desiccated grasslands of the true Altiplano. Harper waited until they had reached a point where they were out of sight of the last building in the town and then took the next turning off the road onto a narrow and clearly little-used track. He drove on, away from the main road for a hundred yards or so, then pulled in behind a low rise building that partly shielded them from the sight of anyone passing along the road and switched off the engine.

‘What now?’ Scouse said.

‘Now we wait.’