what you wanted, isn’t it?” She was annoyed now, too. “Look! You said the shooter will be on foot. Those secretaries and clerks you’re so worried about have just put in a day’s work and they’re going to be tired and walking heads down. There’s snow on the way so nobody will be strolling. What do you want already? You want a nice empty street, so the shooter can really stick out? Besides, you hired him. Is he a pro or what?”
Another tense pause. Then, “This Lemon Tree ... Fancy, but not too fancy? And it’s light menu, right?”
Deliberately, she waited just a little bit longer than necessary, and then spoke just a touch more slowly than needed. “It feeds the downtown office crowd. Mostly fast lunches. Upscale wraps, rabbit food, stuff like that. Closes at 7:00, so they don’t even have a dinner menu. Nobody takes your coat and fusses. None of that ‘Hi! I’m your waiter’ blather.”
“But it takes reservations, surely? We need a table at the door, or the shooter walks right on by.”
This time she almost lost it. “Are you nuts! Reservations? You want me to hang a flag on myself or maybe carry a sign so we can make sure the restaurant will remember us?”
“I didn’t get most of that! You’re breaking up.”
Yeah, sure, she thought, but bit her tongue. They hadn’t liked each other from the beginning, but a job was a job and squabbling would get them nowhere.
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Traffic’s bad here. Can you hear me now?”
“All clear now.”
“We don’t need a reservation. I’ll be across the street from The Lemon Tree in about half an hour. There are two tables for four right by the door, so when one’s free – that won’t be a problem, guaranteed – I’ll grab it. He’ll be on time – apparently he’s a punctuality freak – so you join me by five to five, right? So we can make sure he sits in the only seat with its back to the door?”
“As we planned,” he replied. His voice was much calmer now, too, as though the need to cooperate had occurred to him at the same time. “And when I see the shooter,” he continued, “I excuse myself and go to the restroom. You get up to find a waiter.”
“Right. That covers it. See you, then, in ...” She looked at the clock on the dashboard, “... in fifty-five minutes.”
He didn’t say good-bye either.
?
The woman in the conversation above provides a clue as to how she and the man she is speaking to will make sure the victim sits with his back to the door. How will it be done?
Under the Home Team Bench
With a grimy index finger, Fritz Lang pulled back the tangle of leaves and vines to get a better look at the game but immediately drew back, violently slamming both elbows into his stomach. He was all too familiar with the symptoms of malaria and knew that without quinine there was no way to stave off the delirium that was sure to come. Fritz pushed his arms even harder to squeeze the chill rolling up through his torso. It worked this time, helped along by rapid breathing, but it wouldn’t be long, he knew, before the strange visions would begin, and the dizziness. Then would come the sweats and the blackouts. He needed quinine.
It was out there, he knew, waiting for him just a short distance away in a bag, a tattered little blue canvas sack. On the edges of Fritz’s feverish brain, the last words of the senior agent were playing over and over.
“You’ve got a two-hour window at the airstrip seven days from now. If you’re not there, we go, and you’ll have to get out on the river. There’ll be a cache set up for that, just in case. The canvas-bag routine; you know it. Pesos for bribes. Some bolivars, too, because you’re pretty close to the Venezuelan border, but I doubt you’ll need them. Astronaut food. Quinine. The usual. Once you’re on the river, it should be a pretty quick run to the coast for a jungle man like you.”
That was two weeks ago. Fritz had found the cocaine processing lab they’d been looking for, so in that sense it was mission accomplished, but he’d been too late for the airplane and had had to go to the backup escape plan. Whether it was the extra time in the Colombian jungle, or whether his body was simply due no matter what, this morning Fritz Lang’s malaria had returned full bore.
He leaned forward again into the vines, put out his finger tentatively, and waited. No chills this time. He leaned forward a little more. Still okay. He reached all the way and pulled the vines aside. Now he could really see and hear the crowd. Amazing, he thought, what a filter the jungle is. Only about fifty yards from the edge of the growth where he was hiding, the soccer game – uh, the football game; get it right, this is South America! – the football game had attracted the whole town. Yet he was barely aware anyone was there.
Or maybe it was the malaria. Through the buzz gathering strength in his brain, Fritz could hear the agent again. “Blue canvas bag, the same kind we always use, with a piece of duct tape on it. Our man will put it under the home team bench, if you can call it a bench. The facilities there are about as low end as they come. Soccer’s huge in all these countries – you know they call it ‘football’? – and every little village has a team and a cow pasture with goal posts.”
Another sudden chill grabbed Fritz at the waist and rushed up to encircle his chest. He sat back, hugging himself again, forcing the shakes to stop with sheer willpower. But he couldn’t stop the buzzing; it was like a million tiny insects in his head, insects that were chewing at ... No, not insects! The noise – it was the crowd! They were yelling about something. For the third time, he made a window for himself, wider this time. Somebody score a goal? No ... well, maybe. A tall, extremely thin player was running along the sidelines with both hands in the air. Yes, he was the one the crowd was cheering. The player stopped under the goal posts and pumped a single fist into the air, raising the crowd to a frenzy. Twice, after he’d sat down with his team, he had to stand and salute the crowd before it turned to the game once more.
Now Fritz had a better understanding of something the agent had said.
“Wait till the end of the game,” he’d instructed. “You got maybe ten, fifteen seconds if you play it right. Doesn’t matter who wins or loses, the place’ll go nuts and everybody’ll go out on the field. Could be you’ll even get lucky and there’ll be a brawl. Anyway, chances are about zero that you’ll be noticed if you act like they do. So you get in, get the bag, and get out. From the field you’re not more than five minutes to the river, so ... Now, if worse comes to worst, forget about the bag altogether. You can still make it without the pesos.”
But not without the quinine. Fritz studied the field, trying to take in as much as he could before the next chill grabbed him. Directly in front of him, fifty yards away, were the goal posts where the player had danced a few seconds ago. The crowd was big for a simple village game; Fritz estimated several hundred at least. And it was a shabby place. At the other end of the field, a small red splash on top of a stake suggested that Coca-Cola had once sponsored a scoreboard, but that was long gone now. There were well-worn players’ benches on either side of the field at what would have been the center
