Ballistic(12)

Sergeant Martin Orozco Fernandez and Sergeant Ramses Cienfuegos Cortillo bobbed in the black water. Both men were injured: burns to Ramses’s legs that would scream in the salt water as soon as his adrenaline dissipated enough for him to feel them, and a slightly sprained left wrist for Martin that would make seven miles of swimming a special kind of hell. But they were excellent swimmers, and their wetsuits were buoyant. They would not drown.

But that did not make either of them feel much better. Because the rest of their team was dead, and it was obvious to both of them that they had been set up by their leaders, and their leaders were somewhere on the shore they swam towards. Only a few knew of tonight’s attack, and Ramses and Martin knew that at least one of those few had tipped off de la Rocha.





SEVEN



As a general rule, Court liked third-world bus stations. Here he could people-watch with a minimum of return scrutiny, sit by himself in a dark corner, and soak up the experiences of others. His personal predicament, the fact that many highly dangerous people wanted him dead, necessitated a solitary existence, a distance from and a general mistrust of other human beings. For this reason the thirty-seven-year-old American by and large learned about normal everyday life and family and relationships by proxy, often in bus stations. Watching a father scold a misbehaving child, a young couple cuddle and laugh together, an old man eat his dinner alone. Court had been living this way exclusively for five years, the time that the former CIA asset had been on the run from the Central Intelligence Agency, ducking a shoot-on-sight sanction. But to one extreme or another, sitting alone and watching others live their lives had been Court’s life as long as he could remember.

Nine days had passed since Brazil; he’d traveled overland ever since—bicycles and buses and shoe leather into Central America. He hadn’t remained for more than six hours in a single place. He now sat at a bus station in Guatemala City, waiting on a chicken bus that would take him into the northern jungle near the border with Mexico and Belize.

He had a little money now but not much. He’d sold the manhunter’s pistol in El Salvador, and he still had some of the euros he’d pulled from the Dutchman’s wallet. But he’d bought secondhand clothing in Panama and a green canvas gym bag to carry it in. That and food and bus tickets had not been much. Gentry could get by with less than virtually any other American; nevertheless, cash would become an issue before too long.

A black-and-white television hung from a metal pole in a corner of the waiting room. It broadcast a talk show from Mexico City featuring transsexuals shouting at one another over some nonsense. Court didn’t pay much attention to the TV; instead his eyes were fixed on the old man and his plate of rice. It was the man who mopped the dirty floor and perfunctorily wiped the toilets here at the bus station; the American assassin had been sitting here long enough to see the man at work. Now the janitor sat at a table by the café and picked at his food, sucked the rice because he did not have enough teeth to do anything else with it. Did he have to work all night? Was there anyone to come home to in the morning?

Court found himself imagining a story for the man, and in many ways it mirrored his own.

Court did not expect to live as long as the old man, and he found perverse comfort in that because he did not want to be both lonely and old.

The village in the Amazon had been an eye opener for him. When Court arrived there, he’d been traveling for five months straight. A couple of weeks in Rio, a couple of weeks in Quito, a few days in two dozen other towns. All that time he thought of stopping; it never left his thoughts. He thought he wanted to find a place to stay, a job to do, people around him who, obviously, would never know his true identity but who would know him as someone, which was quite unlike traveling, where he was neither known nor noticed by those around him.

And the Amazon village had provided all this for him. The people were kind, and they weren’t too inquisitive. The austerity had helped him focus and pushed him further away from the painkiller addiction that he’d left behind him, bit by bit, in each town he’d passed through since Caracas the previous April. He’d been clean for two months by the time he arrived in the Amazon, and the constant exercise and work and danger from nothing more nefarious than God’s nature had helped his body forget about such banal trivialities as the desire for a pill’s relaxation.

But there was a downside. He had come to the realization that the things which he had sought—stability, relative safety, a routine—did not satisfy him. It disgusted him to admit it, but when young Mauro came and told him about the arrival of the manhunter, he’d felt an undeniable sense of relief wash over his body.