I wondered about that. They all had a distinctive look to them—broad faces, flat and wide noses, straight black hair cropped close. They looked like they all had a large amount of Native American blood in them. Of course, that’s true of many people in Mexico, but it tends to be more common in southern Mexico. That look is much more common in the Central American countries further south.
Like Panama.
And the only gemstone missing from Sir Edmund’s vast and priceless collection was the Volcano Stone of Panama.
Well, wasn’t that an interesting coincidence?
CIA operatives don’t believe in coincidence.
And back in the 1980s, my late husband, James, and I had been assigned to several missions in Panama. Manuel Noriega, once a U.S. ally and one of the only Latin American leaders not to have ties to the Soviet Union, had gotten his hands dirty with drug trafficking and had been making overtures to the Soviets. We had gone on several missions to break up his drug network and recruit military officers to overthrow him. I was probably the only person in Cheerville who had been in Panama during those tense days, and whose shopping cart did Sir Edmund Montalbion fall into?
That made two coincidences I didn’t believe in.
I put in a call to the CIA. Yes, I had retired a few years ago, but like the Mafia, no one leaves the Company. I still occasionally got calls asking for advice, and as a professional courtesy, I could do the same.
The person I was looking for was Gary Wycliff. Gary had been a cub agent back in the eighties, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Nearly got killed on his first mission with us, which dulled his eyes and drooped his tail somewhat. He learned, though, and survived a lot of hard assignments until a bit of Taliban shrapnel gave him a permanent limp and a desk job in Langley, Virginia.
He also had undying loyalty to me because James saved his life once. He saved James’s life once, too, but that didn’t make it even. That’s not how it works.
“Barbara Gold! How are you? It’s been too long.”
“Oh, things are going about the same as usual”—yes, witnessing a murder was the “same as usual” for me—“and how are you, Junior?”
Gary laughed. “I turned fifty-six last month! I guess I’ll never get rid of that nickname, will I?”
“When you started with us, you only had to shave once a week.”
“Ah, the good old days.”
After a bit more chatter, we got down to business. Soon I could hear him tapping away on the CIA’s computer database.
“Ah, here we go. Escudo Security. Yep, it’s just as you suspected. The company is co-owned by the president, vice president, and accountant. All three of them came in on Mexican passports but are in fact Panamanian. They are now all green-card holders.”
“If we know that their passports were fake, why did we let them in?”
“Because we gave them to them.”
“Oh. May I ask why?”
“That’s classified.”
“Come on now, Junior. I explained the situation. I might be a target here.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. It’s above your level. You know how it works.”
I did. A CIA agent didn’t have free access to every bit of information the agency had. We operated on a need-to-know basis. I’d been out for a while, and while my service was respected and got me a lot of perks, it did not give me a look at everything they were doing.
Especially if it had to do with an ongoing project or something that occurred after my retirement.
But was it? While the CIA kept agents in every country in the world, Panama wasn’t as hot as it used to be. Noriega was in prison, the Soviet threat was long gone, and the Panama Canal was running smoothly. While the country was more or less stable now, and stably in the orbit of the United States, it still needed watching. All of Latin America did. Now it wasn’t Communist insurgents. Instead it was potential coups by generals who would be hostile to the United States and its interests or the rising power of drug barons. The drug barons were the worst. While dictators always created enemies and rivals and were thus fairly straightforward to topple, drug barons were harder targets. They didn’t have a presidential palace to storm or a regiment of troops you could turn to your side. They moved in the shadows and had secret and always-changing distribution networks, and even if you nabbed them, there was always someone eager to take their place.
So what was I dealing with here? Not drug kingpins. Despite the rumors, the CIA didn’t deal in drugs. We did occasionally get intel from people in the drug trade so we could take out rivals or people higher up the food chain. Could the people of Escudo Security be some mid-level narcos who informed on their boss and got granted a new life in the United States? If so, they were picking an odd way to lay low. Their pictures were right there on their website.
So this must be more of a government thing. What it was, I couldn’t say. None of the faces I’d seen on the Escudo Security website looked over fifty, making them teens or kids during the tumultuous years of the eighties. They wouldn’t have been important enough to pull out of the country.
Unless they were the sons of important people.
Gary, bless his heart, kept quiet as all this whirred through my mind. I bet he could hear the wheels
