NINE
Alim Afundi longed for the arid Zagros Mountains of his homeland and for the village of his father. He wondered if he would ever see his home again. He knew he would never see his parents. Both had been killed two years earlier in an errant attack by American warplanes while visiting relatives near the border with Iraq. The mighty Satan called the accident “collateral damage” and dismissed it as part of the unfortunate cost of peacekeeping.
And for now Afundi and his comrades remained on another continent half a world away.
It was nearly a year since their escape from America ’s fenced fortress at Guantanamo Bay. This word, “ Guantanamo,” was one they had never heard or known of until they achieved their freedom. In the months that he and his men had been held, there had been no visits from international groups or others representing the prisoners. Afundi’s American captors had seeded rumors within the prison that they were on the American mainland in a place called Florida, surrounded by swamps and shark-infested seas, and from which there was no way home.
There had been a few attempts at escape, but as far as Afundi knew, he and his comrades, six of them, were the only freedom fighters thus far to succeed. They cut through wire, tunneled under fences, and waded through swamps until, exhausted and lost, they stumbled into a group of armed military men.
Despondent, believing they had been recaptured, Afundi tried to kill himself by cutting his wrist with a small blade from a razor. But he was saved by two of the men in green fatigues. It wasn’t until later, when Afundi’s own counsel general visited him in the hospital, that he realized that the men who saved him were Cuban soldiers, and that the American prison fortress was itself an island in the middle of a Cuban sea. Had his freedom fighters known it, Afundi believed they would have stormed the fences in the American compound even in the face of machine-gun fire.
For weeks Afundi and his men remained as guests of the Cuban government, feted and entertained, waiting for the propaganda coup of their escape to be unveiled to the world. But this never came. The Americans, it seemed, were too embarrassed to admit their own incompetence, and therefore disclosed nothing regarding the escape to their own press. Afundi was then certain that the Cubans would disclose it in concert with his own government. But strangely they did not.
Instead, six weeks after their escape from Guantanamo, Afundi and his men, along with an interpreter, boarded a Cuban military plane and flew west, away from the island and farther from their homeland, toward a rendezvous with armed allies in the mountains of Colombia. They carried twenty million dollars in cash from their own government and were told that they would receive their orders for their next mission as well as the training necessary to carry it out from the people in Colombia. The small area of that country, tucked up against the Pacific Ocean on the western approach to the Isthmus of Panama, had been controlled since the 1960s by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as FARC.
Alim had learned much from his FARC hosts in the months he and his men had been with them. The organization operated within Colombia as a kind of government in exile. The FARC possessed an informal alliance with his own country as well as other nations. They participated in a complex web of international connections and subnational associations. These included people’s governments on nearly every continent, freedom fighters such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, and drug cartels that, along with kidnapping for ransom, the FARC used to derive most of its funding.
The relationships were complicated, but for Alim and his men it reduced down to a single common goal shared by all: the desire to annihilate the Great Satan, to eliminate the power of the American regime so as to shake its grip once and for all on the rest of the world.
To Alim, that the devil should die because of its warfare and interference in the affairs of others should come as no surprise. The irony was in the fact that after launching successive wars over oil in the Middle East, it should meet its fate because of a war on drugs launched in its own backyard, a war that most had already forgotten about.
In the 1980s and early ’90s the Americans had linked arms with the Colombian government in a decade-long war to drive drug traffickers from Colombian soil. The Americans succeeded, only to have the cartels reappear in an equally violent form in Mexico, directly across its own border in places with names that Afundi could barely pronounce, Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez.
The proximity of these forces to the huge amounts of money and armies of violence at their command had now caused Satan to try to wall himself in.
The Americans had planted new listening posts abroad in an effort to revive their human intelligence networks. They used technology to listen in on telephones and to read e-mail. But with all of this they were now more vulnerable than ever before. They had done nothing to alleviate the anger of millions, which carried on its wings the threat that soon Satan would face something he could not even begin to comprehend.
Elements of the plan were already under way. Money had been delivered to the cartel to begin work. They were not told the precise nature of the cargo to be delivered. They were told that the product of their labors would be theirs to use as they wished once it was completed and the delivery was made. The Mexican cartel was now a critical element in the plan.
And for the moment the cartel had saved both Afundi and his mission. For how long he couldn’t be sure. The problem arose because Alim had allowed the woman to come here into FARC territory in the first place. Because the old man was sick, he needed her. FARC had provided doctors, but the old man wanted his daughter. Alim was desperate. He would do anything to keep him alive.
The difficulty arose because the man he had assigned to watch her had not done his job, that and the fact that she should never have been allowed to leave. That was the blunder.
It had all started with an argument. When the old man told them how long it might take, Afundi knew they couldn’t wait that long. The doctors had already given him their estimate that the old man might have six months left, eight at the outside. That was four months ago. If he died, it was over. They all knew it. Afundi’s government had sent over technicians to look at the problem. They determined that the Russian possessed both information and techniques without which the entire project was hopeless. Safety devices incorporated in the original assembly could not be overcome except by those with specific knowledge of its design.
In the quarrel that followed, Alim and his men, including the one who was supposed to be watching the woman, became so bound up with the interpreter in arguments with the Russian, insisting that they could do much of the work for him if only he showed them how, that no one even noticed the woman and her camera.
Alim had no idea there was even a problem until months later. Fortunately, the FARC had sources in Costa Rica. An American tourist had started asking questions, and even brought up the name Nitikin. Some judicious probing and the fact that the tourist had somehow found photographs, and Alim jumped on it immediately.
The cartel in Mexico possessed what Afundi did not: access across the border by way of travel documents for daily business and people with the skills to solve the problem.
True, the man was a mercenary being paid, but he acted swiftly and, for the moment at least, the project was still alive. But he had left a loose end and now it was threatening to come unraveled. It was a sensitive issue, one that Afundi was anxious should not be allowed to disturb the old man or, for that matter, his daughter. She was in permanent residence now, though as far as Afundi knew, she had not yet come to realize this. There would be no more phone calls home or trips to Medellin. At this point the opportunity for harmful information to flow in either direction was far too great.
The cartel’s man would have to deal with the loose end. This morning Afundi was busy with the interpreter, writing riddles to make sure that this happened and that it happened quickly.
Liquida sat at a table at an outdoor cafe on Orange Avenue in Coronado, two blocks from the lawyer’s office.
