Stephen Leather - Breakout

‘What happened on Scouse’s last job for you then? Was Lupa with him? And how did it go wrong?’

‘She wasn’t with him, she was due to meet him later that day in La Paz in Bolivia, where the ransom drop was supposed to take place. He was flying in on a flight from Geneva with a change of aircraft at Madrid, carrying a $50,000 ransom payment in cash. Our man in Madrid observed him boarding the flight to La Paz without incident and although it’s routed via Lima in Peru, the same aircraft completes the journey, so there’s no need to disembark. As far as we know, Scouse followed all the usual SOPs, and he certainly arrived at the airport in La Paz, according to the airline’s records, but there the trail goes cold. We don’t even know how he left the airport, if he did, and we’ve not seen hide nor hair of him since.’

‘Was there no CCTV?’

‘There should have been, but either the cameras in immigration and arrivals were malfunctioning or the tapes have gone missing.’ Standish spread his hands, palms up. ‘That’s not necessarily significant; shit like that happens all the time over here, as much from incompetence as corruption. We have two customs officers and a supervisor on retainers…’

‘Or bribes, as we say in English,’ Harper interrupted.

‘Indeed, but as our CEO always likes to remark, we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we might prefer it to be. So… Scouse’s SOP was to go to a customs desk manned by one of our men, but when we spoke to the one who was on duty that day, he told us that he’d not seen Scouse at all, so either he’d gone to one of the other desks or he’d been intercepted before he’d even got that far.’

‘And do you believe your pet customs guy?’

Standish shrugged. ‘By Bolivian standards he earns good money from us, so he’d be unlikely to jeopardise that.’

‘So do you think Scouse stole the money?’

‘I’d say it was unlikely. He’s carried far larger amounts than that for us before. And if you were going to steal it, why wouldn’t you take a ransom of $500,000 rather than settle for $50,000? In any case he’d know that wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to pay for a new identity and a safe house for the rest of his life, in case someone came after him. And as you’re in a related line of work yourself, you’ll know we have ways of finding even those who go to great lengths to try and remain hidden.’

‘So if not theft by Scouse, a double-cross then. By who?’

‘You pay your money and take your pick: the kidnappers, the cops, customs men, rival gangs, cartels, chancers, hustlers. We did talk to a couple of air stewardesses on the flights he caught. He’d apparently been drinking quite a lot on the plane flying him from Madrid to La Paz but so what? Whatever, Scouse disappeared at some point after disembarking from La Paz. So either he found a way to dodge our employee waiting for him in the Arrivals Hall, or he didn’t get that far.’

‘And what do you think has happened to him?’

‘Probably dead or maybe, if he’s very lucky, in jail.’

‘You’ve made no further effort to trace him?’

‘We’ve tried the usual channels, but came up with nothing, and there’s only so much time, energy and resources I can persuade the company to devote to it. The loss was only $50,000 and that’s small change in this line of work.’

‘But it’s not just about the $50,000, is it? It’s for someone who was employed by Risk Reduction and went missing in the line of duty on a job for the company.’

Standish shrugged. ‘I made the same argument to Geneva, but you know the answer I got? Those are the risks our men take. The rewards are high for a good reason.’

Harper shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter where you go in the world, does it? If there’s cash on one side of the equation and human decency on the other, the cash will always win out. So…’ He straightened his shoulders. ‘Let’s get moving. Can I have the name of the customs guy?’

‘Sure,’ Standish said. ‘Alvaro Lopez. I can give you a photograph too.’

‘And, like Scouse, my Spanish is pretty much non-existent, so I’ll need a translator. Is Lupa contactable?’

‘She should be. Scouse used to leave messages for her at a hotel in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, which were passed on to her. Lupa would then make contact and fly here to Bogotá or to La Paz, or wherever the job was to be carried out. After it was done, Scouse would pay her and she’d fly back home until the next time. Want me to get her up here, if she’s still around?’

‘No thanks. I’ll make contact with her and if necessary I can take a trip down to Santa Cruz to meet her.’

Standish frowned. ’Take a tip from me, Lex, and meet Lupa here in Bogotá or in La Paz, not in Santa Cruz. There are a lot of cartel gangs operating there and large parts of the city, even including the business district, are bandit country. We have put it out of bounds for all our people because the risks there are too high. Anyone who looks like a businessman or an American is at risk, either of kidnap for ransom, or murder if suspected of being an undercover cop. And since most cartel gangs are paranoid - and the cocaine that they use themselves as well as selling it to others makes their paranoia even worse - they kill an awful lot of people. So those who really do have to go to Santa Cruz tend to just take a flight down there, meet their contacts at the airport, settle their business and fly back before nightfall the same day. No one even stays overnight because it’s too dangerous.’

‘I hear what you’re saying, but the only way I’m going to find Scouse or discover what happened to him is by retracing his steps. So I need to meet this Lupa, and I need to see the places he worked, maybe including the palm oil plantations. You can help me with some background, though, like what comms I should be using?’

‘Well, as you know, South America covers a vast geographical area and the cell phone coverage is very patchy. In the cities it’s fine but as soon as you get a couple of miles out in the countryside, the mobile coverage is largely non-existent. That applies in spades in Bolivia, but unlike mobiles, sat phones will work almost anywhere. We have a relay system up on the roof here which automatically works between sat phone and cell phone, saving us having to chop and change. So just let me know what you want and I’ll make sure you’ve got it.’

‘A sat phone definitely sounds the way to go, if you’ve got one I can borrow.’

‘Sure. I’ve got a spare in the car, just wait for a minute.’ He stood up and headed out. On the way he waved at the woman and asked for two more beers.

When he returned after a couple of minutes, the beers were on the table, along with a plate of tortilla chips and a bowl of salsa. He sat down and gave Harper a charger and a sat phone that was not much bigger than a regular mobile. ‘These are the business,’ Standish said. ‘As you remember, I’m sure, the traditional sat phones, work off single, hugely powerful, geo-synchronous satellites. They orbit up to twenty thousand miles above the earth, so they can provide coverage over a vast area, but there’s a noticeable delay in transmission because of the distance the signal has to travel. The sat phone you need to use with them is also a pretty chunky item, about the same size and weight as a laptop. Now these little beauties are very different.’ He held up the sat phone he’d brought. ‘They look just like an ordinary mobile, but they work off a series of less powerful but far more numerous satellites than the earth-synchronous ones. They fly in low-earth orbit, about 400-700 miles above the ground, orbiting the earth every sixty to ninety minutes, and the network we use has enough of them to give blanket coverage wherever you happen to be. So you can get enough reception to make a call from almost anywhere on earth.’ He grinned. ‘Even including the North and South Poles apparently, though I don’t have any personal experience of that.’