He felt paralysed. Moustache smirked at him, as if he knew exactly what was going on in his prisoner’s mind.
As Pitted Cheeks waited to turn right on to the busy Avenida 2 a bus first lurched forward and then abruptly pulled up again as the lights changed. This motion not only fooled Pitted Cheeks, who paused for a second before pulling out, but also a taxi coming up on the blind side of the stalled bus, which was through the red light before the driver had realized his mistake. His emergency stop would have pleased his original instructor, but there was no way he could avoid making contact with the side of the Toyota.
The crash was louder than it felt, and Moustache’s gun hardly seemed to waver, but the taxi driver was already out on the street and hundreds of eyes were turned their way. Two of them, Shepreth realized with sudden hope, belonged to a traffic cop who was now walking their way.
Moustache had seen him too, and the gun was now in his pocket, albeit still obviously aimed in Shepreth’s direction.
Pitted Cheeks climbed reluctantly out of the Toyota, just as the cop arrived to take charge. As he looked into the car Shepreth deliberately reached for the door handle, opened the door and climbed out on to the street. No bullets gouged into him.
He smiled at the cop and leant against the car’s roof for a moment until the man’s attention was back on the two drivers. There had to be about two hundred people standing around enjoying the show, and the cop was obviously going to milk the spotlight for all he could. A cacophony of horns was rising from the stranded traffic.
‘I’ll see you later,’ Shepreth told Moustache, and began walking away. Ten steps later he was through the first line of watchers, and looking back he could see that neither of the Colombians was making any attempt to follow him. He walked on along the crowded pavement, his heart thumping in his chest, hardly daring to believe his luck.
From Avenida 2 he took a taxi to his hotel, tipping the driver with a generosity which the man appreciated better than he understood. It took Shepreth three minutes to clear his room and check out; fifteen minutes later he was registering at another hotel under another name, using the alternative identification he carried for such emergencies. He didn’t think the Colombians would come looking for him – the risks seemed to outweigh the potential benefits – but he spent most of the night dozing in a chair, fingers wrapped round the butt of his other gun.
With an hour-long stopover in Quito, Docherty’s journey from Santiago de Chile to Mexico City took just over ten hours. For almost all of the first flight he was able to stare out of his window at the majestic Andes, but most of the second was over water, and the choice of entertainment came down to either Arnie Schwarzenegger or his own thoughts.
Five days had passed since he and Isabel had visited the Macíases in Devoto, two since their return home from Buenos Aires. He had watched out for signs that his wife was regretting her decision to approve the trip, but, natural anxieties apart, there had been none that he could see, and on the eve of his departure, after they’d made love on a bed still strewn with his packing, she had made her feelings clear. ‘If it wasn’t for the children,’ she had told him, ‘I’d be coming with you. In fact, there’s one voice inside me says I should be going instead of you. These are the people I’ve been fighting all my life. The people who killed my friends.’
Sitting in the plane, Docherty could see her face on the pillow, the same mingling of determination and anxiety in her dark eyes, and he could remember that moment in the car outside Rio Gallegos in 1982, when the rest of the SAS patrol had been captured and she’d refused to head for the border alone. ‘I could cross ten borders and never leave this war behind,’ she had said at the time.
But what was his excuse? Terrible things had been done in Argentina, but the same could be said of many other countries, and though he had more than a vague attachment to old-fashioned notions of justice, Docherty had no desire to take on the mantle of a one-man crusade. The money would be nice, of course, but that wasn’t the reason for his presence on this flight either – in fact he wasn’t at all sure what his motivation was. He hoped it was more than an older man’s attempt to relive his youth. ‘But I wouldn’t bet money on it,’ he murmured to himself.
He shook the doubts aside, and picked up the guide to Mexico City which Isabel had bought for him the previous day. In his two stays there in 1977 he had found the place oppressive, but that was hardly surprising – during the first he had still been crazy with grief and by the time of the second he had the rest of the country to compare it with. In nearly five months of travelling he had fallen in love with Mexico, its people and its churches, its mountains and its beaches.
A part of him had always meant to go back, but another part had feared that for him the country would always be entangled with memories of Chrissie. It was her senseless death on a zebra crossing just six months after their marriage which had driven him abroad in the first place, and fate had decreed that Mexico should be the place which brought him back to life. The life he had given to the SAS and his family, and not necessarily in that order.
He turned his attention to the present. If Gustavo Macías was right, and Lazaro Toscono’s business in Mexico City was just a drug-trade front, then he would have to be careful about how he approached the man. It would not do to start hammering on the bastard’s front door before he found out what was behind it. As one of his old SAS instructors had put it: a few hours of observation is worth a thousand stun grenades.
It was a pity he had no local contacts – he’d made friends in Mexico, but none in the capital. It suddenly occurred to Docherty that he might be able to pick up some intelligence from the Embassy if he used his contacts in Hereford, but then he remembered that Barney Davies had finally stepped down as SAS CO, and been replaced by someone whom he barely knew.
In any case, he thought, that would be like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Or a general to run a country, as they said in Chile.
The plane was losing altitude now, and he spent the next fifteen minutes yawning to unblock his ears, watching as the yellow-browns and greens of the central plateau grew more distinct. Then they were flying down through either thin clouds or dense smog, re-emerging less than a kilometre above an overcrowded multi-lane highway that was snaking its way through shanty-covered hills.
The airport seemed three times as big as he remembered it, but he had no trouble getting through Immigration or Customs. Noticing the Hertz sign, he thought about hiring a car, but decided against it – there was no point in leaving such an obvious trail for an enemy. Instead he fought his way on to the modern Metro, remembering as he did so a recent traveller’s comment that its off-peak crowds would pass for a rush hour anywhere else. Two changes and several buffetings later, he emerged from the Zócalo station, no more than a stone’s throw away from the great square at the heart of the old city.
This seemed unchanged from nearly twenty years before, and he realized with a grin that he had arrived just in time to witness the six o’clock flag-changing ceremony – one of the world’s longest-running farces. The troop of a dozen soldiers was already halfway from the Palacio Nacional to the flagpole in the centre of the square, and by the time Docherty had joined the circle of spectators the drums were echoing, the national colours on their way down. A kind of baroque minuet followed, whereby the huge flag was folded to the size of a small tablecloth and then carried, with stunning reverence, back into the palace.
The crowd was now filtering away, the sun almost gone, its rays touching only the highest reaches of the cathedral on the square’s northern side. The sound of more drumming – rhythmic, distinctly unmilitary drumming – was
