Rodriguez leaned back in her chair. ‘ Mierda! ’ she swore, shaking her head.
‘These people don’t give up, do they?’ Aleta observed when O’Connor returned to the cabin.
‘Nope, but then, neither do we.’
Nine hours later, the Galapagos rounded Cape San Antonio, the westernmost tip of Cuba, and headed south into the Caribbean towards Panama. The gale warning was still in force, and the winds tore foaming white spume from the backs of angry, rolling waves, although the ship’s roll had abated. To the west the sun had set over the Mexican coast, and the bars and nightclubs were in full swing in Cancun and Playa del Carmen’s Fifth Avenue, the centre of the Mayan Riviera.
O’Connor wondered when the Sicilian might strike and he put himself in the hitman’s place. He would probably make his move some time after midnight, when the minimum number of crew would be awake and on duty. O’Connor resolved to turn the confrontation on its head, to provide the Sicilian an opportunity to strike, but on O’Connor’s terms. He looked at his watch. It had just gone 10 p.m. He turned to Aleta, who was sitting at the table beneath the porthole, working on her grandfather’s notes and the angles of deflection of the sun’s rays that a third figurine might produce. ‘I may be gone for some time,’ he said, ‘but don’t worry – unlike the British explorer, I will return.’
‘Where are you going?’ Aleta asked.
‘Secret men’s business… a little something that has to be attended to. This is 101 stuff, but on no account open the door, even if a key turns the lock, okay? It may not be me.’
Aleta nodded fearfully. ‘Be careful.’
She watched the bow of the ship dipping and rising more gracefully now, with the occasional large wave exploding over the for’ard containers. The white caps were intermittently caught by the moon, illuminated through gaps in the clouds scudding across from the west. Silently Aleta wrestled with her thoughts, and the irony of finding herself caring for a man who had been sent to Vienna to kill her.
O’Connor took up a position near a stanchion at the stern of the ship, leaning against the rail but looking back towards the superstructure. The Sicilian would want a clear shot and to dispose of his target quickly. That would mean a close-quarters kill. Twenty minutes later, the asset walked through the aft bulkhead and onto the stern deck beneath the containers.
‘You’re up late. Can’t sleep?’ The Sicilian spoke Spanish with a thick Italian accent. He approached slowly, his right hand in his trouser pocket. His dark eyes were focused and cold.
‘ Potrei dire lo stesso per voi. I could say the same for you.’ O’Connor’s use of the Sicilian’s native Italian had the desired effect, momentarily unnerving the Sicilian. He drew the Glock from his pocket and pointed it at O’Connor, the long silencer barely a foot from O’Connor’s chest.
‘ Forse questo vi aiutera, bastardo. Perhaps this will help you.’ The Sicilian pulled the trigger but the mechanism went forward with a dull clunk. The assassin frantically reached to recock the slide but O’Connor’s reaction was lightning fast. In a movement perfected by the Israeli Defense Forces, he pivoted ninety degrees on his left leg, and with a sliding step, he rammed his right knee into the Sicilian’s groin. The assassin grunted in pain and made another attempt to load the Glock, his head lowered. O’Connor slammed his elbow behind the Sicilian’s ear, sidestepped, straightened his right leg, swept it behind the Sicilian’s knee and slammed the assassin’s head onto the steel deck. The Glock clattered against the aft bulkhead.
Dazed, the Sicilian got to his knees. O’Connor straddled his neck and with one hand under his chin and the other clamped to his hair, rolled his target sideways onto the deck. Ankles crossed, O’Connor held the Sicilian’s head in a vice-like grip while he choked him with his legs. The big man flailed helplessly, but gradually his protests grew weaker. O’Connor continued to crush his neck until he was sure the Sicilian was dead. He checked his pockets for identification, but they were empty. O’Connor took him in a fireman’s lift, pushed up and heaved him over the rail. Dispassionately he watched his would-be-killer’s body plunge into the Galapagos’ moonlit boiling wake, ten metres below.
O’Connor retrieved the Glock and stood at the stern rail, staring at the diminishing silvery turmoil of the wake until his heart rate dropped back to its normal sixty beats a minute. He hadn’t seen his assassin surface, and if a Caribbean reef shark didn’t get him, then the tigers or great whites certainly would. Satisfied that he and Aleta were safe again, at least until they got to Puerto Quetzal, he headed back to the cabin, wondering if she was still awake. It would be good to feel the softness of her skin against his.
The sun was setting across the Pacific when a week later O’Connor scanned the docks of the Guatemalan port of Puerto Quetzal. The ship had docked three hours earlier, but he had returned to the cabin after talking the captain into letting them stay on board for another night.
‘You’re in no hurry to get off?’ Aleta asked.
O’Connor shook his head and handed her his binoculars. ‘See the taxi parked at the end of the wharf?’ He pointed past the stacks of containers and warehouses to a yellow taxi parked beside the port administration buildings. ‘He’s already cruised up and down the wharf three times.’
‘Looking for us?’
‘The last knucklehead will have been ordered to report on the success of his mission. When Langley didn’t hear from him, they’ll have put in a back-up plan. That’s him at the end of the docks.’
‘A taxi driver?’
‘Probably. They did pretty well to get someone on board the Galapagos, but getting an asset into a place like Puerto Quetzal at short notice wouldn’t be easy. This guy’s a rank amateur, but I don’t want to start a shoot-out at the O. K. Corral. He’ll have already reported that we haven’t disembarked, which will have them in a quandary. They’ll be wondering if we’re still on board or if their man was successful but somehow came to grief in the process. For the moment they’ll be confused, and it’s a waiting game.’
‘A chicken bus leaves about 5 a.m. from Puerta de Hierro, about half a mile east of here.’
O’Connor raised an eyebrow.
‘Trust me; I’ve been here before, or at least not far from here, on a dig.’
‘Excellent. We’ll sneak off early tomorrow morning, and with a bit of luck, James Bond up there will be fast asleep in his cab.’
O’Connor scanned the taxi cab with his night-vision sight and grinned. ‘I can almost hear him snoring. Time to go.’
He followed Aleta down the gangplank and together they crossed the dimly lit concrete dock to the safety of the closest warehouse. O’Connor checked the taxi again and then led the way between two warehouse buildings, and on past some oil storage-tanks. Even at four in the morning, the road tankers were lined up to refuel, so O’Connor and Aleta kept to the shadows, making their way along the dirt easement beside the oil pipes. Ten minutes later, they reached a back-road entrance and walked for another kilometre on a dirt road that ran past a housing estate.
‘Seems like quite a wealthy area,’ O’Connor observed, with a nod of his head towards the houses with pools, which had been built on the series of canals, most with their own jetty.
‘Puerta de Hierro’s eclectic and deceptive,’ Aleta replied, pulling the wheel of her bag out of a pothole in the dirt road. ‘Houses are a lot cheaper in Guatemala, and the big shipping companies subsidise their employees. This is all part of the Maria Linda River, and a little further down the coast is Iztapa, which means ‘river of salt’; there are lots of saltpans. But many of the Guatemalans on the other side of Highway 9 are dirt poor,’ she said, nodding towards the main road. To the east the sky was just beginning to lighten behind the jungle-clad mountains of the highlands.
The bus terminal was small by Guatemalan standards, and just four vehicles were loading – old retired US school buses reincarnated as part of the Guatemalan transport system.
O’Connor scanned the bus terminal while Aleta approached the ayudante, the ‘driver’s helper’ on the nearest bus. ‘Escuintla?’ Aleta asked, looking for the bus that would take them to the next big town.
‘No. That one over there,’ the ayudante said with a big smile, pointing to a brightly coloured bus with ‘Linda’ painted in vivid turquoise on the top of the windscreen, and on the back and sides. The rest of the bus was painted in bright reds and yellows, and the chrome on the old International reflected the lights of the bus terminal. Painted yellow flames issued from the below the big square hood.
The next ayudante offered to put their bags on the roof of the bus with the rest of the menagerie: baskets, tyres, chairs, tables, brightly coloured canvas bags, empty paint cans and assorted parcels of varying sizes wrapped in bright-blue plastic.
