Once, he was watching when three men stepped out of a car and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at their apartment building. He carefully noted their appearance and the make and model of their car as the grenade slammed into the building, spewing smoke and debris but causing no casualties.
Juan Pablo also noted the license numbers of cars driven by those he suspected of working for Col. Martinez. He photographed men outside the building whom he found suspicious, and indignantly asked the prosecutors who visited the family to pursue and arrest those he described.
Unlike his mother, who was overcome by the situation, Juan Pablo seemed to relish it. He clearly enjoyed his dealings with Correa and other representatives from the Fiscalia, or Attorney General's Office, using their fear of his father to bully them. He received coded written messages from his father and wrote him cocky letters in return. In one undated letter written that fall, Juan Pablo updated his father:
Remembered Father,
I send you a big hug and warm wishes. . . . The prosecutor's office cannot raid the places of the guys in the pictures because unfortunately that is the way the law goes.
In the letter, Juan Pablo told his father where he thought Col. Martinez sometimes stayed overnight in Medellin, and wrote out two pages of descriptions of the men and cars he had seen outside the apartment building.
He concluded by suggesting that his father send a scare into a local TV station that had dared to air pictures of the family's apartment building: It would be good to tease the TV people so they won't make the building stand out so obviously, because when they came here they told me they were going to erase the tape and they didn't do it. Take care of yourself. I love and remember you. Your son.
On one official visit, Correa noted that Juan Pablo carried a beeper, and when it went off (at regular times during the day) he would abruptly leave the apartment. Correa presumed it was to speak on a phone or radio with his father. This was something he definitely intended to pass on to Col. Martinez and the Search Bloc.
On one of his many visits to the apartment building that housed Pablo Escobar's wife and family in Medellin, the Colombian prosecutor Fernando Correa had noticed several cellular phones. On another visit, he discovered a radio transceiver hidden behind the trap door on the ceiling of the building elevator.
This information was relayed to Col. Hugo Martinez at the Search Bloc headquarters outside Medellin. The colonel passed it on to his son Hugo, a member of a Colombian electronic surveillance unit recently dispatched to Medellin to assist in the hunt for Escobar.
Hugo asked his father to have Correa note the make and model number of the radio, and its frequency range. He also asked his father to get Correa to do what he could to encourage 15-year-old Juan Pablo Escobar to speak for longer periods with his father.
Provided with the frequency of Juan Pablo's radio, and with a rough idea of when father and son spoke, Hugo and his surveillance teams set about intercepting these calls.
At first they tried working with the CIA, which had its own eavesdropping team in Medellin. The Americans were not having much luck tracking Escobar, but Col. Martinez urged his son to work with them because he wanted to keep an eye on them. He didn't fully trust the American spy agency. The gringos jealously guarded their methods, and they would often fail to share everything they uncovered.
The younger Martinez had his own reasons for wanting to work with the American team. He thought he might learn from them, and he, too, wanted to find out everything the Americans were doing. 'With me there, you know you will get everything,' he told his father.
One of the first problems faced by the new unit was deciphering the coded lingo Juan Pablo and his father had constructed to confuse their pursuers. They used key words as a signal to switch frequencies, which they did quickly and often.
At first this tactic prevented the surveillance teams from getting even a general fix on Escobar's location, because every time father and son switched frequencies the signal would temporarily be lost. The direction-finding cars drove in randomly throughout the city, racing a few blocks in the direction of a signal and then pulling over to the curb when they lost it.
After a few days of this it became clear that the streets of Medellin, with so many walls, overhead wires, high-rises and other obstructions, were the worst kind of environment for direction-finding.
In the first few weeks, the Search Bloc followed the efforts of the younger Martinez and his teams with great interest. Once or twice they launched raids, breaking into the houses of startled Medelliners who had no connection to Pablo Escobar. Very quickly, enthusiasm for this new tool dried up. The new little vans and CIA equipment were just another disappointment.
Col. Martinez told them to keep at it, but in time everyone assumed the only reason the teams were still around was because Martinez's son was working with them. This was humiliating for the son, because he knew it was true. But it wasn't true in the way everyone suspected. Without a doubt, their rapid series of failures would have sent any other unit packing, their antennae and weird little boxes heaped with scorn.
But Hugo had his father's ear. They would sit together into the night, with Hugo selling his father on the amazing potential of the technology, how close they were to actually making it work. When it failed again and again he would explain to his father exactly why, his crew-cut head hunched between his shoulders as he sketched out his diagrams with arrows and filled the margins with math.
'It isn't something simple and straightforward,' Hugo said. His father listened and asked questions, and, in time, was converted. The rest of the Search Bloc may have considered the technology a useless whim, a father's indulgence, but the colonel had become a believer.
It wasn't just that he loved his son and wanted him to succeed, although the colonel was smart and honest enough to know that was part of it. The equipment, he was convinced, had potential. If Hugo and his men could work out the bugs, this was the thing that would give him a decisive advantage over Escobar, the magic device that could pick him out of the city.
The best thing about it was that Escobar knew absolutely nothing about Hugo's team. By now he knew the American spooks could pinpoint him with some accuracy from the air. He had even taken to talking on his cell phone while in the backseat of a car, moving through city streets, just to throw them off. But he did not yet suspect that their technology might, at least in theory, enable a team like Hugo's to find him in his moving car and follow him home.
In time, the colonel became convinced that when they finally got Escobar, it would be with Hugo's equipment, while the fugitive was talking on the phone, unsuspecting. He believed this in part because of Hugo, but
