Leather Stephen

Breakout

BREAKOUT

A LEX HARPER THRILLER

STEPHEN LEATHER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

About the Author

Slow Burn

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There really is a San Pedro prison in La Paz, Bolivia and it is every bit as bizarre as Lex Harper discovers in the course of this book. It’s effectively run by the inmates with the guards largely confining themselves to manning the main gates. There are different sections within the jail, with the best of them corresponding to the affluent suburbs of the city on the outside, and the worst even more dismal than the barrios and slums where the city’s poorest inhabitants live.

Visitors, tourists and prisoners’ wives, children, girlfriends and prostitutes all come and go from San Pedro. All manner of goods are carried in and out, and traded within its walls, and there are scores of thriving businesses inside the jail, even including a cocaine factory. Bolivian politicians - one or two of whom have even spent time in San Pedro themselves - frequently announce that they will reform or close down the jail, but - up till now at least - it has never happened.

So that is the reality, but of course, this is a work of fiction, and so any similarities between the characters in this book and the actual wardens, guards or inmates, past or present, of San Pedro, are entirely coincidental.

Stephen Leather 2020

CHAPTER 1

Scouse Davies took the glass of champagne that the stewardess offered to him and settled back in his seat. He smiled to himself. He’d been doing this job for almost a year now and had flown Club Class on quite a few occasions already but he still couldn’t quite believe his luck. He’d grown up as the shit-poor kid of an unemployed single parent, living in the roughest part of Liverpool and yet, while the ordinary mortals were crammed together back in cattle class, here he was, rubbing shoulders with the rich and successful, with an armchair ride and as much expensive wine as he could drink. Best of all, it wasn’t costing him a penny, and in fact, he was actually getting paid to do it.

‘Shall I put your bag away for you, señor?’ the stewardess said, glancing at the flight case next to his feet.

‘No thanks, I like to keep it close at hand, ’ he said, pushing it under the seat in front of him.

He glanced around as the cabin filled up. There was the usual scattering of businessmen travelling alone, a married couple who were obviously unused to turning left when they got on a plane because they were swivelling around as they took it all in and nudging each other like over-excited kids, and a very attractive Latino woman sitting across the aisle from him. When he caught her eye, she briefly returned his smile before going back to her study of the menu.

Scouse finished his drink as they rolled back and taxied out, then settled back in his seat as the pilot wound up the engines and launched the aircraft into its take-off run.

The plane stopped for a crew change in Lima and then flew on to El Alto airport in La Paz, Scouse’s destination. He left the plane and walked quickly to Customs and Immigration. It was familiar ground for Scouse, who had already made the same journey four times over the previous few months.

A few police were watching the arrival without evident interest, some wearing the green uniform of the regular police, others the sharper-looking blue uniforms of the FELCN - La Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Narcotráfico - Bolivia’s anti-narcotics force. A customs officer - a senior one, from the gold braid on his sleeves and the row of medals on his chest - was scrutinising the passengers as they passed him. Scouse headed towards the passport control when the customs officer stopped him and directed him to one of the desks. ‘If you please, señor.’

Scouse saw no great cause for concern. He recognised the customs man on duty at the desk he was being sent to and had dealt with him before on previous trips, so he was sure that the man knew the form. Scouse’s flight case would remain unopened, and after a brief examination of his small back-pack, including the removal of the $500 in $100 bills that he had placed on top of his clothes when packing it in Geneva, his bags would be chalk-marked and he would be waved through.

He placed his bags on the steel table in front of the customs man and, ignoring the flight case, the man was about to open the back-pack as usual, when the senior customs officer reappeared. He walked round behind the table and shooed his subordinate away. ‘Toma tu descanso para tomar café ahora.’

Even Scouse’s limited Spanish was enough for him to know that the junior customs man had just been told to take a break. He attempted to argue ‘Pero señor…’ but his superior’s response was a brusque ‘Esa es una orden. Vamos!’

With an apologetic look at Scouse, the junior customs man turned and walked away.

The officer at once reached for the back-pack, opened it and held up the $500. ‘What is this, señor? You realise that attempting to bribe a customs officer is a serious offence?’

‘It’s not a bribe, officer,’ Scouse said, thinking fast and still confident that he could blag his way out of any awkward situation. ‘It’s just some cash I’d left in there. I don’t like to keep all my money in my wallet in case I get mugged.’

The officer looked past Scouse and beckoned over two armed police lounging on the other side of the customs hall. They walked over and stood flanking Scouse while the officer examined the flight-case. ‘This is locked,’ he said. ‘The key, señor, if you please.’

Scouse hesitated but then handed it over, still certain that, at worst, a phone call to the office would make the problem go away. The officer opened the case. It was full of plastic packs of US banknotes. ‘How much is here, señor?’

‘Fifty thousand American dollars.’

‘I see. Come with me please, señor.’ He nodded to the two policemen who took Scouse’s arms and frog-marched him away from the table towards a doorway set in the wall behind it.

He was marched down some steps and along a neon-lit corridor running under the floor of the terminal and taken into a windowless interview room. There was a transparent-sided toilet, where drug mules would eventually have to deposit any packages they were carrying internally, once Nature, or a laxative, had taken its course. The stench in the room suggested that it had seen recent use for that purpose. There was also a steel table, a large wooden packing crate that stood empty, its lid open and propped against the wall, and two metal chairs. There was a sick feeling in Scouse’s guts as he saw that the chairs were fitted with restraining straps and bolted to the floor. He was hustled into one of them and held there while the straps were tightened around his arms. The police then searched him, handing his passport and wallet to the senior customs officer who had settled himself on a much more comfortable, leather-seated desk chair facing him.

‘We can straighten all this out immediately, ’ Scouse said. ‘It’s all perfectly legitimate. I’m employed as a courier by a company called Risk Reduction Inc, specialising in Kidnap and Ransom negotiations. The money is a payment for the release of one of our clients currently being held by criminals here in Bolivia. If you call the Risk Reduction Inc office in Bogotá - the number is on the business cards in my wallet - they will be able to straighten this out right away.’

The customs officer opened the wallet, took out one of the business cards and glanced at it, then tore it into quarters and tossed it into a waste-bin. ‘Trafficking undeclared cash, bribery and corruption, señor. These are very serious crimes and no reputable company would be a party to them. So either your company is not a reputable one, or they have no knowledge of what you are doing, and in either case, I see no need to speak to them.’

‘If you won’t speak to my company, then will you at least notify the British consul that I am being held here?’

The officer remained impassive and unmoving, other than to give a slow shake of his head.

‘I know my rights, ’ Scouse said, trying to keep his fear from showing in his voice. ‘I demand to speak to the British consul or a lawyer.’

‘You are not in a position to make any demands, señor. You have committed serious crimes and there are consequences of such things.’ He glanced at one of the policemen and said ‘Sabes qué hacer - you know what to do.’

He handed the $500 from Scouse’s back-pack to the policeman, who pocketed it at once, while the customs officer stood up, picked up the flight case and walked towards the door. ‘Don’t worry, señor,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘I’ll see that this reaches the right people.’ He laughed, and a moment later, the door clicked shut behind him.

Scouse watched with mounting fear as one of the cops took off his jacket, folded it and placed it carefully on a chair. He took a set of brass knuckles from one of his pockets, slipped them onto his fists and walked towards Scouse. The other cop pulled a night-stick from his belt.

‘Do you speak English? Habla usted Inglés?’ Scouse said, panicking. It was the only Spanish phrase he knew. ‘I’ll tell you anything you want to know.’

‘We already know everything we need to know, gringo,’ the cop said and the next moment the brass knuckles smashed into Scouse’s face. He heard the crack of a bone and tasted blood in his mouth. More punches and blows followed, one upon another, the cop with the brass knuckles working over his face and upper body while the other one beat Scouse’s legs and arms with his nightstick. The blows came so fast and so frequent that before long he could no longer tell where one ended and the next began. All he knew was an unrelenting agony that was only ended with a final blow to his head with the nightstick, like a flash of blinding light through his brain, and then he blacked out.

As Scouse came back to consciousness, he let out a groan. He had a pounding headache, every bone in his body seemed to ache and he had the metallic taste of dried blood in his mouth. He ran his tongue over his bruised and swollen lips, then slowly opened his eyes. He was in a dark cave or cellar that, as far as he could tell in the dim light, seemed to be carved out of solid rock. The wall he could see was stained and green with mould, and there were names, dates and phrases in Spanish crudely scratched into the stone. There was also a stench of sewage so powerful that it was almost palpable and when he stirred and moved his arm, he heard the dry scraping rustle of cockroaches as they retreated into the even darker shadows at the foot of the walls.

As he struggled to sit up, pain from scores of cuts and bruises stabbed at him and he let out a yell of shock and revulsion as a blood-red millipede fully three inches long that had been hiding in a fold of his clothes, slithered to the floor and scuttled away. As his head cleared a little more, he looked around. The only light was coming from a tiny metal grating set in an ancient looking door, studded with iron bands, at the head of a flight of a dozen stone steps leading up out of the cellar. Slowly, each movement agony, he got on to his hands and knees and then his feet, and pulled himself up the steps.

He put his face to the grille and peered through it. Outside it looked to be late afternoon, with a low sun reflecting from the blue-painted walls flanking a dusty yard. Twenty or thirty men, all Latino-looking, and dressed in filthy, nondescript clothing, shuffled aimlessly through the dust, or leaned against the walls, or sat cross-legged on the ground.

He called out, his voice cracking from the dryness of his mouth and throat. ‘Hey! HEY! Anyone? Help me?’

There was a movement nearby and a powerful figure loomed over the door. His arms were tattooed with gang symbols, his nose had been broken and never properly re-set and his shaven head was criss-crossed with scars, both the neat white lines of razor cuts, and the jagged, puckered marks left by clubs or broken bottles. ‘Cállate gringo! - Shut the fuck up.’

‘Water please. Water.’

‘Agua, gringo? Quizas más tarde - maybe later.’

‘Where am I?’ Scouse asked.

The man laughed. ‘En el infierno, gringo - in hell.’ He spat in the dust and turned away.

CHAPTER 2

Lex Harper was in the gym on the ground floor of his condominium building, working out with weights. He generally preferred exercising outside, but in recent months the air pollution in Pattaya had reached seriously unhealthy levels and it had been a while since he had run along the beachfront. The appalling air quality was the result of farmers burning agricultural land prior to planting new crops, a construction boom and pollution from the growing number of cars that were gridlocking Pattaya’s roads. Pattaya was a beach resort and the wind coming off the sea generally kept the air moving, but most of the country was now wreathed in smog and the Government regularly issued warnings for elderly people and at-risk groups to stay inside. Harper didn’t consider himself in an at-risk group, at least not from air pollution, but he figured that exercising indoors was definitely the healthy option.

He held a twenty kilogram weight to his chest and did thirty squats, then sat on a bench and did ten arm curls, left and right. He was just getting ready to start his sit-up program when his mobile phone rang. It was in his bum bag, along with an Irish passport, two gold chains, and a wad of currency, Thai baht and American dollars. The bag was always close by in case he had to leave at short notice.

He wiped his face with a towel and answered the call. He didn’t recognise the number, or the voice of the girl, but he definitely recognised her name: Myfanwy. She was the girlfriend of an old mate of his, Scouse Davies, and she was clearly distraught.

‘Lex, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know who else to call, and Scouse always said that if he was ever in trouble you’d be the guy he’d come to.’

Harper put his towel around his shoulder and sat down on a weights bench. ‘Calm down, Myfanwy,’ he said. ‘Just tell me what’s happened.’

‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ she said. ‘That’s the problem. He’s just disappeared.’

‘And you’re sure he’s not just on a bender? He has been known to go walkabout.’

‘We’ve got a kid now, Lex. A daughter. He doesn’t do that any more.’

‘Okay, so what can you tell me? What makes you think he’s disappeared?’

‘He always rings me when he’s away working, every day without fail, even just a text message, just to tell me he’s safe and to check if me and Grace - our daughter - are okay. But I’ve not heard from him in well over a month.’

‘So what was he doing? Where was he? And who was he working for?’

‘He told me he was doing Top Secret work for a company that was involved in kidnap negotiations.’ The silence from the other end of the line made her pause. ‘I know he could sometimes exaggerate things, Lex, but this was the real deal. He flew all over the world for them, but he was mainly in South America.’

It sounded like another of Scouse’s bullshit stories, but at least the location rang true to Harper. If you wanted to make a living as a kidnapper or were involved in negotiations with kidnappers, then South America was the best place to be. It was practically an industry there. ‘Tell me everything you can remember about how he started doing it and who he was working for,’ said Harper. ‘The last I heard of him he was doing body-guarding around London.’

‘He was away a lot but he came home to Hereford when he could, but there was always another job in the offing, so he could never stay for long.’

‘Did he see anyone else while he was home?’

‘No, of course not, he was with me.’

‘I didn’t mean any other women,’ Harper hastily added, hearing the anger in her voice. ‘I meant any old army colleagues or anyone like that? Anyone from the Regiment?’ The SAS was based in Hereford, and while Scouse had never made it into the elite special forces group, he had plenty of friends who wore the sand-coloured beret.

‘Not really. He said that the guys he had left behind in the Army were the ones who’d made the wrong choices in life, and they weren’t going to be keen to be reminded of it by him.’

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘When he went back nearly three months ago. He kept in touch as usual for the first three weeks he was away and then it was as if he had simply vanished into thin air. When I phoned the company to find out if he was all right, they said they’d never heard of him.’

‘Don’t be too alarmed by that,’ Harper said, trying to give her some reassurance. ‘In this line of work, company spokesmen will routinely deny all knowledge of everyone and everything, even if the person you’re asking about is sitting across the desk from them. So… how did you know who to call? Did Scouse tell you much about the company?’

‘No, he always said it was on a need to know basis and since I didn’t need to know, he wouldn’t tell me.’ She hesitated.

‘But?’ Harper said, sensing her discomfort.

‘I found the name on a letter heading in his jacket pocket. I wasn’t spying on him,’ she said hastily. ‘I was taking it to the dry-cleaners and was just checking the pockets first.’

‘A perfectly sensible thing to do,’ Harper said. ‘So what was the company name?’

‘It was called Risk Reduction. I know they’ve got an office in London, because it was an 0207 number I dialled when I spoke to them.’

‘And why have you only just called me?’

‘The number I had for you didn’t work. Then I called the Regiment and tried to speak to one of his friends, a guy I only knew as Mustard.’

‘I know him,’ said Harper. Ricky ‘Mustard’ Coleman had been in the SAS but prior to that had been in the Paras for more than a decade. ‘Well Ricky was away in the Middle East somewhere and he’s only just come back. He said he didn’t know anything but he had your number and suggested I try calling you.’ She sniffed. ‘Which is what I’m doing.’

‘Okay,’ said Harper, his mind racing. Even from the little she had told him, he was already more than half-convinced that Scouse was dead, but he let no trace of that feeling show in his voice as he said ‘Look Myfanwy, no promises, but I’ve not got much else on at the moment, so I’ll ask around and see what I can find out about him.’

‘Thank you, I’m really grateful.’ She paused. ‘I haven’t got much money, but I’ll find what you need somehow.’

‘I’m not looking for money. Scouse is one of my oldest mates. I’ll see what I can do. It might take me some time but trust me, I’m on the case.’

He ended the call and put the phone back into the bum bag. He lay on his back and began to do his sit-ups. He had known Scouse Davies since their schooldays together on Merseyside. Scouse had always been a bit of a scally and a motormouth, but he also had enough charm and humour to win most people over, even when they caught him trying to rip them off, and he was always up for a laugh or an adventure. He and Harper had knocked around together on the margins of the rough-arse streets where they’d grown up, scrapping with the local toughs and doing a bit of petty crime like shoplifting or pinching lead from church roofs.

They’d been collared by the police a couple of times but on both occasions had managed to talk their way out of it with nothing more than a caution. However, the last time they’d been taken in, the desk sergeant had given them a final warning. ‘I’m telling you now,’ he said, before he let them go again. ‘This is the last chance saloon. We’ve got your number now and if we catch you again, it’ll be straight to the Magistrates Court, followed by a spell in juvie for you. That’s if you’re lucky; if you’re not, you might find yourselves going straight off to Walton jail instead, and trust me, you really don’t want to find out what the old lags do to juicy young fresh meat like you in there.’

Harper wasn’t much deterred by the warning and when he left school soon afterwards, at the minimum age allowed and having played truant for most of the previous year, he had no academic qualifications whatsoever. However the prospect of a dead-end career in some mindless manual job in Liverpool was about as unappealing as the thought of Walton jail, and he chose instead to enlist in the Parachute Regiment. He was quickly followed by Scouse, though he was mainly attracted by the glamour of the red beret and the effect it might have on the girls in Liverpool. ‘They say all the nice girls love a soldier, don’t they?’ he’d said. ‘But I’m hoping a few of the not so nice ones might do as well.’

They had both served in the Paras, but Scouse hadn’t been an enthusiastic soldier and when it seemed he might be sent on active service operations in Afghanistan, he found a way to sidestep the active service tour with them by applying for the SAS Selection course instead. Having done very little training or preparation for Selection, it came as a surprise to Scouse, but not to anybody else, least of all Harper, when he struggled to get anywhere near the necessary standard. Scouse eventually developed a tactical injury to his ankle during the ‘Fan Dance’ - one of the multiple ascents of Pen y Fan in the Brecon Beacons in Wales that was the culmination of the first part of Selection - and failed the course. Fortunately for him, because of the SAS’s heavy commitment to the same war in Afghanistan that the rest of his Para comrades were fighting, the Regiment temporarily found itself short of troops and Scouse was retained in the SAS Training Wing’s Demonstration Troop, known to everyone in the Regiment by its sarcastic nickname of ‘Doom Troop’. They were ordinary soldiers who did jobs for the SAS, like pretending to be the enemy during exercises or attending presentations and ceremonial occasions where Army politics required an SAS presence but no actual SAS skills were needed.

After a while Scouse tried to join the Reserve, or R Squadron of the SAS that was part of the Territorial Army, but he failed that Selection too. However, as part of Doom Troop, Scouse found himself in the perfect niche position for him, ideally suited to his particular skills, or lack of them. He was not in the Regiment, but in the Demonstration Troop he was close enough to be identified with it. It gave him access to the right people, so he could hang around and mix with the real SAS guys on exercises, and have a brew and eat his lunch in the same Mess, and by keeping his ear to the ground, he could get to know all the regimental gossip and file it away for future use. He never had the beret, the pass at Selection or the badge, he had never been on any postings, nor carried out any operational duties, and he was never a member of 22 SAS. However, before long he had picked up enough information, SAS slang and mannerisms, and knew enough of the names of senior NCOs and officers, and the nicknames of some of the men in the Sabre Squadrons - the fighting troops - that when he was off base among the civilian population, he could pass himself off as a member of an SAS Squadron, something he invariably did.

It wasn’t an unusual phenomenon around Hereford. At a conservative estimate there were half a dozen bullshitters for every genuine SAS man and the older, more streetwise young women in Hereford spotted him at once for what he was, a first-class specimen of the breed, and either gave him the cold shoulder or took the piss out of him, but a young girl called Myfanwy was much less worldly. The only daughter of a deeply religious family, she had grown up on a farm in the Welsh mountains but was now living with her grandmother in Hereford, while working behind the counter of Scouse’s local newsagent. She believed every tall tale that Scouse told her and after he asked her out, she sat saucer-eyed as he recounted his war stories.

Newly back from his tour of duty in Afghanistan, Harper was still in the Paras, but was on attachment to the SAS in Hereford at the time, and when he met up with Scouse for a drink and a catch up, he introduced him to Myfanwy. Harper was struck by the girl’s naiveté and shy charm, in sharp contrast to the loud, brash personality of her boyfriend, and it struck him straight away that the relationship was unlikely to last long or end happily for her.

Scouse’s life on easy street came to an abrupt end as soon as the guys who had actually passed the SAS Selection process, gained the necessary skills to become part of a Sabre Squadron and then been posted to a tough, demanding and dangerous environment in Afghanistan, returned to discover that Scouse had been busily doing his best to reap the rewards for their efforts among the local girls. In no uncertain terms they let the boss of Training Wing know that Scouse now either had to put up or shut up, and an ultimatum was given to him: either he passed Selection this time or he’d have to be RTU’d - Returned To Unit - back to the Paras.

He immediately re-applied for the next Selection course, but once more it came as no surprise to anybody - perhaps not even to Scouse this time - that he only lasted a couple of days before once more retiring with a self-proclaimed injury that the doctor who examined him failed to detect. However, moving with more alacrity than he’d ever displayed during Selection, Scouse then managed to resign from the Army before the SAS could complete the formal process and the paperwork to get rid of him.

Out of work but still full of wind and piss, Scouse reckoned - correctly, as it turned out - that he now had enough knowledge of the SAS to bluff his way along, like many others who were already working the system. Scouse then talked his way onto ‘The Circuit’ - the unofficial network of ex-military men, mostly Special Forces, who shared knowledge of work as bodyguards, mercenaries and soldiers of fortune around the globe.

He spent a further happy time, mostly doing body-guarding for clients around London, which often involved nothing much more arduous than carrying the Harrods’ shopping bags for the wives and daughters of oil sheikhs, billionaires and hedge fund managers. He also found time to make the occasional foray back to Hereford to large it up about how well he was doing in the rarefied air of celebs and foreign royalty. He impressed few listeners apart from Myfanwy, who would hang on his every word. Lex was surprised that the relationship had lasted and was even more surprised to hear that Scouse had a daughter.

Harper finished exercising and went up to his flat where he showered and changed into a clean Polo shirt and Diesel jeans. He made himself a cup of coffee, sat on his balcony and phoned an old mate who was working on the Circuit. Like Harper and Scouse, Jinx was an ex-Para. He’d quit the regiment after serving for fifteen years, including active service in Iraq and Afghanistan, but soon found that he missed the mateship, shared identity and common purpose of a fighting unit, and the sheer adrenalin rush of combat. Unable to settle back into life on Civvy Street, he had gone on the Circuit, working mainly for civilian contractors who were hiring armed guards to safeguard their operations in combat zones or volatile Third World countries.

After catching up on what they had been doing - at least as far as they were able to discuss it - Harper brought the conversation round to Scouse and Risk Reduction Inc.

‘I’ve not worked for them personally,’ Jinx said, ‘but I’ve heard mixed reports about them. They were fairly late in the field - well after the big British and American private security companies had got going - and I think they grew by taking on the jobs that the big boys avoided. So although their pay rates appear pretty high, the money they pay is certainly no more and maybe a good bit less than the jobs actually merit.’

‘Why’s that?’ Harper said.

‘Because they’re often operating in some of the most problematic areas in the world. I mean there’s risk in any Kidnap and Ransom operation, but going into the Colombian jungles to try to do deals with renegade bands of ex-FARC guerrillas, or trying to haggle over ransom payments with Mexican drug cartels is not work I’d be willing to take on for any amount of money.’

‘And that’s what their operatives do?’

‘That’s what some of them do anyway. It’s not impossible, but like any op, you’d need to be fully up to speed on what you were dealing with, and have the right kit and all the back-up you could need, and then maybe you’d be okay. But you know what they say: if you spin a roulette wheel enough times, you’re going to wind up losing in the end.’

‘The guy I’m looking for was never big on research or preparation,’ Harper said. ‘He was definitely much more of a just do it and hope for the best kind of guy.’

‘Then he was definitely in the wrong line of work.’

‘Something I also told him about most of his previous jobs, without any obvious effect. Thanks Jinx, I owe you one.’

‘Forget it Lex, what are old mates for?’

Harper’s next call was to the London number of Risk Reduction Inc, but the man he was put through to, speaking in a weary-sounding public school and Oxbridge drawl, told him that it was company policy only to divulge information about their activities to those who are personally known to them and certainly not over the phone

Harper ended the call. He’d already decided that he was going to go to London, and hadn’t expected to get much over the phone, but the man’s attitude was still annoying. He went online and booked a flight from Bangkok to Paris, departing the next morning. He never liked flying directly into London and usually either went via Paris and the Eurostar or to Dublin and then taking the ferry over to Holyhead. He planned to travel light with just a washbag, a change of clothes and his phone in a backpack. Anything else he needed he could buy on his travels.

CHAPTER 3

Harper arrived at St Pancras station at just after eleven o’clock at night. He walked to King’s Cross and checked into a cheap, no questions asked hotel, paying cash for his room. There was no real need for hyper-security at this stage of this op but old habits die hard and Harper made it a policy always to be a ‘grey man’, never drawing attention to himself by driving flash cars or staying in top of the range hotels. Nor did he ever use credit cards or traceable ID or mobile phones, so there was never a paper trail nor an electronic one that could be used to track his movements and activities. He’d eaten on the Eurostar so he showered and went straight to bed.

He woke at eight, had breakfast and two coffees in a local café, then bought a burner phone and called the London office of Risk Reduction Inc to make an appointment to see the manager later that morning. The office was located in a discreet, high-end block on the south bank of the Thames, close to MI6’s marble and glass Lubianka.

The office was manned by a PA/receptionist screening visitors to the manager, the only other visible occupant of the office, and who turned out to be the man Harper had spoken to on the phone from Thailand. He had a neat moustache and thinning, sandy-coloured hair flecked with grey, and just in case there was any doubt about his military background he wore a regimental tie with his pinstriped suit. Harper was admittedly slightly prejudiced after their earlier conversation, but the manager looked to him like the sort of anal retentive type who would be an absolute stickler for formalities, rules and regulations, an impression reinforced by the nameplate on his desk which announced him as ‘Robin Parker-Phillips, Esq.’ Harper forced a smile as he sat down and looked around. ‘From your company’s reputation, Mr Parker, I was expecting a rather larger organisation.’

He gave Harper a condescending smile. ‘It’s Parker-Phillips actually, and we’re a very large organisation indeed. But this is purely a recruitment office, finding personnel for our head office in Geneva or our regional offices around the globe, as required. I and the other recruitment managers are given a profile of the type of person and skills required, and the terms of reference, and our job is to find the right person to fill that vacancy. All positions are short term, lasting only as long as the requirement lasts, which is often only a few days and never more than a few months at most, and all our people are not employees but self-employed contractors. We very rarely need to advertise, because we have hundreds of CV’s already filed away. When we need someone for a particular job we will identify an individual who we think will be suitable because their skills and experience match the brief. We contact them and if that person is not available, he will ring around his own circle of contacts and usually within the space of an hour someone who we have used previously will ring in and be offered the job. Once accepted, the successful applicant will be processed, told the daily rate of pay for that assignment and he will then sign a contract, complete any other necessary paperwork and then be fully briefed on the job. Like the rest of the security industry, we prefer British ex-military, particularly SAS, because of their experience of working under difficult and often hostile conditions while being separated from their family and loved ones. And of course the cachet of the SAS resonates well with the firm’s clients because of its association with successful outcomes in dangerous situations.’

He looked Harper over. ‘So, if you’re looking for work, you need to follow our protocol. Fill in the form that my PA will give you, then if you get over that hurdle, you’ll be interviewed by me or one of our other recruiters and after that, if we find you suitable, we’ll add you to our register and contact you if and when appropriate work becomes available.’

‘I’m not looking for work,’ said Harper. ‘I’m looking for information on a specific person, a friend of mine, who I believe was working for you and has now disappeared. Name of Scouse Davies. Scouse is a nickname. Pete Davies. He’s based in Hereford.’

Parker-Phillips’s expression became even more guarded. ‘As I’m sure you’ll appreciate, we operate on a strict need to know basis, so I’m afraid you really can’t expect me to discuss the confidential details of any of our self-employed contractors with you, whoever you are.’

‘His girlfriend called me, she’s very worried. Hasn’t heard from Scouse for weeks. They have a young daughter.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sure if I can’t get her the answers she wants she’ll be on the phone to the police and probably the newspapers.’

Parker-Phillips nodded. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what I can. Though frankly that isn’t much. As I said, we recruit here but operations are run out of our Geneva office.’ He sat back in his high-backed chair. ‘There were some unusual circumstances surrounding him being recruited. Our task often involves finding a courier to transport ransom payments or other high value consignments in and out of hostile environments. In this particular case, we were under extreme pressure to find a courier at short notice to take a payment in US dollars to South America. None of our regular contractors were available and, as usual, they rang round their contacts to find someone, but while we were waiting for the expected response, your Mr Davies turned up unannounced at the office. This in itself was unusual because, as I told you, the normal procedure is to complete an application form and then be invited to attend the office for an interview. The second unusual occurrence was that he not only brought his current CV, but his army discharge book as well. That was very useful in those circumstances because it enabled me to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, verifying everything on the CV from the discharge book. So because of the time pressure we were under, I took the unusual step of processing him straight away and shortly afterwards he was on his way to Switzerland to be fully briefed.’

‘I have to say I’m surprised that you found Scouse Davies suitable to be hired as a bagman.’

The manager raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? He had the right background. You need ice in the blood for that kind of work. Carrying a few hundred thousand dollars in cash around London or New York would give most people palpitations, but taking it into South American bandit country is something else again. You’ve got to have the presence - the balls, if you’ll pardon the phrase - to do it and you also have to be streetwise, with all the fighting skills needed to get out of there if things turn ugly. That’s why we only use ex-SAS men. They have the right skill-set, including the ability to think on their feet.’

‘And you thought Scouse was ex-SAS?’ Harper said.

Parker-Phillips frowned. ‘Are you implying that he’s not?’

Harper gave him a quizzical look. ‘Did the discharge book specifically mention service in the SAS?’

Parker-Phillips unlocked a filing cabinet behind him, riffled through the file drawers and then pulled out a slim folder. He scanned the contents and then said ‘As a matter of fact, it actually says Hereford Garrison, but I took that to mean SAS. I mean no one else is garrisoned there, are they?’

‘Plenty of people are, actually, but never mind, you aren’t the first to be hoodwinked by a Walter Mitty pretending to have served in the Regiment and you certainly won’t be the last.’ He gave a sly smile. ‘I guess that’s what happens when you don’t follow the protocol.’

He watched as Parker-Phillips’s face reddened with anger. ‘I’m ex-military myself,’ he said. ‘I was a superintendent clerk in the Rifle Brigade and I’ve come to expect a certain level of honesty from military men. Evidently I was wrong in this case.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Harper said, ‘your secret’s safe with me. However, I will need to talk to someone further up the food chain who can give me more details on where Scouse was sent.’

‘I’m the most senior person in London.’

‘Then I’ll obviously need to be in Geneva, bearing a letter of introduction that I’m sure you’ll be happy to provide for me.’ As he saw the manager hesitate, he added ‘That way, no one at head office need ever know that you hired a fake SAS man.’

Parker-Phillips scowled at him but then bowed his head. ‘Very well, tell my PA what you want it to say and she’ll type it for you.’ He glanced at his watch and shuffled the papers on his desk together. ‘Now, unless there’s anything else?’

‘We’re good,’ said Harper.

CHAPTER 4

Harper flew to Geneva that afternoon, taking with him the letter of introduction to the chairman of the company that he’d been given by Parker-Phillips, and at just before four o’clock, he presented himself at Risk Reduction’s corporate headquarters, a low, ultramodern glass and stainless-steel building in a fashionable area of the city. He was kept waiting in the lobby for a minimal amount of time while he was issued with a visitor’s security pass, but it was long enough for him to be able to observe the security systems. A couple of uniformed, armed guards patrolled the entrance, while CCTV cameras covered the interior and exterior of the building and the approaches to it, but there was also much more sophisticated protection: an airlock walled with bullet-proof glass through which all visitors to the building had to pass. When a visitor entered, the glass doors behind him closed, but the ones in front of him remained shut until sensors had sniffed the air for any trace of explosives or firearms. Only then did the doors slide open and allow the visitor into the interior of the building.

Having passed though the airlock, he was escorted to the lifts by the chairman’s mini-skirted blonde PA. They took the lift to the top floor and she led him past a cavernous room with dozens of employees staring at monitors and computer screens, and a glass-fronted conference room, before reaching the chairman’s office. It occupied a corner suite with wall-to-ceiling windows giving magnificent views over the city and Lake Geneva.

The chairman, a large and serious-looking middle-aged Swiss man in an immaculate Savile Row suit, greeted him in almost accentless English, and after shaking his hand and sending his PA off to bring coffee, he gave Harper an appraising look. ‘Mr Harper, so how can I help you today? The letter of introduction from our London office is rather short on detail.’

Harper smiled. ‘I hope you’ll be able to help me trace a colleague and friend of mine, who has done some specialist work for you in Latin America. And by the way,’ he gestured to the bank of CCTV monitors on the wall, ‘I didn’t realise that security would be such an issue here in Switzerland.’

The chairman laughed. ‘As I’m sure you know, it isn’t really. If you so much as snatch a purse in this country, you will probably find yourself locked up before you’ve had time to count the money. No, this is all for the benefit of our visiting clients. When they arrive here, it is usually because they are nervous and in need of reassurance about the safety of themselves, their families and employees-’ He paused and permitted himself another smile. ‘Not forgetting their wealth, of course. So we want them to understand that all the money they have will not keep them safe unless they make use of our expertise. The subliminal message we hope that our clients will take away is that we are leaders in our field and we can keep them safe, not just in the First World but in the Third World too. And if the unthinkable happens and they are actually kidnapped, we have the expertise, skill and experience to secure their prompt release. So this colleague, what was his name again?’

‘Pete Davies. He went by the name Scouse.’

The chairman buzzed for his PA on the intercom. ‘Could you bring me our file on a contractor called Mr Pete Davies please?’

She brought the file through and after studying it for a few moments, he nodded. ‘Well, it seems your friend Mr Davies was recruited via our London office and initially employed by us to act as a courier of a large sum in US dollars from here to Bogotá in Colombia. We have him listed as Peter Davies. That was successfully accomplished and he carried out - let me see - four, no, five more courier assignments for us, first to Colombia and latterly to Bolivia, which has become the new focus of cocaine trafficking and kidnap and ransom. They grow a huge amount of coca leaves in the Chapare and Benir regions and Bolivian drug lords have long been supplying raw cocaine base to the Colombian cartels, particularly Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel before they imploded. When a coca grower, Evo Morales, became President, one of his first actions was to kick the DEA out of the country, and even though he was eventually deposed, the Bolivian cocaine trade has boomed ever since. The Colombians are no longer such big players - Medellin is a tourist town these days - but the Mexican cartels and their allies have replaced them and Bolivia is now the main transhipment point for cocaine from Peru, Colombia and Bolivia itself. There are scores of drug gangs operating in La Paz, Cochabamba and particularly, Santa Cruz de la Sierra in the east of the country. Cocaine is carried by planes taking off from primitive strips deep in the jungle, or boats using tributaries of the Amazon like the Chapare river, or human pack mules following narrow tracks through the rainforest into the Mato Grosso and Rondonia in Brazil. The cocaine is then shipped from Brazil to every part of the world: North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.’

‘And Scouse?’ Harper said, trying to drag the chairman back to the point.

The chairman again consulted the file. ‘In between his assignments as a courier, he was also apparently employed on some lower grade work by one of our representatives out there, but I don’t have the details of it, I’m afraid.’

Harper gave a slow shake of his head. ‘I must confess I’m having a bit of difficulty getting my head around the fact that you use people like my friend Mr Davies to courier large amounts of cash, alone and unescorted, to some of the most high-risk areas of the world. Why, in this day and age, can’t it be done electronically?’

‘With the exception of South America, that is exactly what we try to do. We invite the parties involved to Switzerland, and the transaction often simply involves the transfer of the ransom payment from one numbered account to another. For obvious reasons, that is our much-preferred method. We even managed to move the Somalian pirates online. But in South America, cash is still king. There tend to be so many different interested and involved partners in a kidnapping, with a complete lack of trust between them, that it would be impossible for the payment to be anything other than cash. As for the couriers being alone and unescorted, as you put it, they are as closely monitored as possible from leaving here to arriving at the distribution point, usually Bogotá in Colombia or La Paz in Bolivia. The system seems to work, we have only ever lost one shipment or courier in transit.’ He fixed Harper with his gaze. ‘The one your friend Mr Davies was carrying when he disappeared.’

‘And what was his last job?

‘A delivery of a ransom payment to Bolivia. He was to take the money to La Paz. As well as the cartels, there are still a few renegade guerrilla groups there, like exiles from FARC in Colombia, who see kidnapping as an easier way to make a living than fighting the government or trafficking cocaine, though most of them do that too.’

‘And was the payment delivered?’

‘We don’t know. According to the airline, he arrived at La Paz but the kidnappers said they never received the money, which may or may not have been true, but in the end we paid out another ransom; it was a fairly modest payment by normal standards.’

‘And what about Scouse?’

‘We never heard from him. To be honest, we don’t know what happened to him. He simply vanished.’

‘So he could have been killed or kidnapped himself?’

‘The latter is not likely, because no ransom demand has been received. As to the former…’ He spread his hands. ‘Who knows? I’m sorry we can’t offer you more definite information.’

‘Well I hope to discover what happened to him and the money,’ Harper said, ‘and it would help me if you could run me through the courier system you use.’

The chairman nodded. ‘First, we do regular dummy runs to test that the system is working as it should, and second, we do not let the courier wander where he wishes. He is required to follow a fixed route and timetable, which we monitor as closely as we can, and we always have a tiny locator beacon concealed in the wall of the case containing the money, operating on a frequency that we can monitor from our control room here. As an important commercial bank, we have some influence here in Switzerland, so we have the co-operation of the customs and immigration authorities at Geneva airport, easing the courier’s path through security here. From here he takes a SWISS flight to Madrid, connecting with one of the South American airlines’ overnight flights either to Bogotá, if the payment is to be made in Colombia, or via Santiago or Lima to La Paz, if the kidnapping case is in Bolivia. Similar arrangements to Switzerland are in place with customs and immigration in those countries.’ He gave a bleak smile. ‘The courier’s arrival is expected and he will be briefed as to which immigration desk and customs desk to use. Once he is on the ground-side of Arrivals, he will be met and escorted to his hotel where he will be debriefed and the contents of the suitcase checked before the operation moves onto its next phase. The courier transports the cash but he does not become involved in the negotiations or hand over the cash to the kidnappers himself. We use go-betweens to deal with them, maintaining a degree of separation between us and the criminals.’

‘Because there is always the danger that the courier might himself become a kidnap victim?’

‘Exactly. Anyway, when the courier reaches his destination, once he has passed through customs and immigration - and obviously we have people on our payroll there to ensure his bags are not searched or impounded - he is normally met by a company employee who transfers the cash into another flight case fitted with two different locks. The employee keeps one of the keys and the courier has the other. Any attempt to force the case or open it using only one of the keys triggers a device that renders the money worthless. The courier then proceeds to the holding point - usually a hotel with good security - and waits there until the go-between arrives, ready to collect the cash and make the handover. The courier gives the go-between his key and the company employee provides the other one when he is satisfied that the deal will go through without a hitch. Once the ransom is paid, the victim is released alive. Hopefully.’

‘But Scouse never got that far, did he? He just dropped off the map.’

‘As I said, we sent another courier and the ransom was paid and the hostage released.’

Harper sat back in his chair and sighed.

‘I can see you’re not getting the information you hoped for,’ said the chairman. ‘You are welcome to go to South America yourself. I will ask our representatives there to make themselves available.’

‘Where would be best to start? La Paz, where Scouse went missing?’

‘I would suggest you first talk to one of our people in Bogotá. He knew your friend and worked with him. Sam Standish.’

‘Sam Standish? Samuel Arthur Standish?’

‘You know him?’

‘Small world,’ said Harper. ‘He was a Para when I was in. We were together in the Balkans, back in the day. We called him Sass, because of his initials. SAS. You know his story, right?’

The chairman shook his head. ‘Not really.’

‘Sam was a subaltern, a lieutenant with one of the Para companies with a great future in front of him. His grandfather had served with distinction in the army during the inter-war years, retiring from the General Staff at the end of the Second World War, while his father had commanded a parachute battalion and was a legend in airborne forces. Sam’s father had such high hopes for his son that he had been christened Samuel Arthur Standish, but those initials turned out to be rather optimistic because Sam soon discovered that he really disliked being a soldier. He left not long after we were in the Balkans and we lost touch. It’ll be good to see him again.’

‘My PA will get you the address of the hotel he’s using. And as a gesture of good faith, we can buy your ticket. Business class, obviously.’

Harper smiled and shook his head. ‘That’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay my own way.’ Actually he’d happily have taken the man’s money but if he booked tickets for Harper he’d need his passport details and Harper preferred to keep them to himself.

CHAPTER 5

Harper was given the address of a hotel in Bogotá and he booked his own tickets. On the way to the airport he stopped off at a travel shop and bought several maps of Bolivia, covering La Paz and the surrounding areas, and maps of Colombia and Peru to be on the safe side. The only relatively gentle terrain around La Paz appeared to be due west, towards the southern end of Lake Titicaca and the Peruvian border beyond it. In every other direction, the terrain looked daunting whether it was through the high mountains of the Cordillera Occidental - the western range of the Andes - as far as Peru to the north and north-west; or east across the Cordillera Oriental - the equally mountainous eastern range - and then through the dense tropical rainforest to the border with Brazil; or the Altiplano to the south - the arid high plateau between the twin arms of the Andes mountain ranges. The further south you went, the drier the terrain became, with first salt flats and then desert: the start of the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth.

He flew with Air France via Paris, and paid for his own business class seat so that he would arrive in a reasonable state. The food, and the wine, was excellent, as he’d expected from the French, and the seat was comfortable enough that he managed to grab several hours sleep.

He arrived at El Dorado airport in Bogotá just after 10pm and was given a ninety-day tourist visa by a bored immigration officer. He left the terminal and joined a taxi queue, and after a ten minute wait climbed into the back of a yellow taxi. He gave the driver the address that the chairman had given him and the driver grunted and set off.

After a thirty-minute drive, during which the driver said not a word, the taxi pulled up outside a large terraced house in an area of the city housing several foreign embassies. There was nothing to indicate that the building was a hotel, except for a discreet brass plaque screwed to the wall on the right of the door. The driver jerked his head towards the door and then turned away, looking down the street, while Harper jumped out and retrieved his case. He paid the fare and Harper went inside as the taxi drove away.

There was a small reception desk to one side, with a bar barely large enough to house half a dozen guests and a small dining room on the other. There were noises and good smells from the kitchen at the back and a few moments later, a young woman dressed in jeans and a T-shirt protected by a cook’s apron came out.

She smiled at Harper and handed him an envelope and a large brass key. ‘Welcome, Señor Harper,’ she said. ‘This is a message that was left for you and your room is number six on the top floor at the back. It is the room that has been used by your previous colleagues who found it quite satisfactory. When you are in your room, please keep the door locked. There is very little crime in this part of the city but it is better to be prepared. Enjoy your stay.’

Making his way up two flights of stairs, Harper found himself in a surprisingly large room with two windows looking out over the rooftops. He dropped his backpack on the bed. Testing the windows, he found they had not been used recently and squeaked and protested as he tried to open them.

He had only been in the room a few minutes when there was a soft knock on his door. He opened it to see Sam Standish, as large as life and probably fifty pounds heavier than the last time Harper had seen him. ‘Fuck me, Sass, you’re a sight for sore eyes.’

‘Of all the gin joints in all the world,’ said Standish, stepping forward and giving him a bear hug. ‘Good to see you, Lex. Fuck me, it’s been years.’

‘Older but not really any wiser,’ said Harper, patting the man on the back.

‘Fancy a drink in the bar?’

Harper grinned. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

They went downstairs and sat at a corner table. They both sat with their backs to the wall, creatures of habit. Standish was wearing a crumpled linen suit, his skin was sheened with sweat and it had a faint yellow tinge.

‘You okay?’ Harper asked.

‘I got a dose of malaria,’ said Standish. ‘Forgot to take the fucking tablets. Actually that’s not true. The tablets made me feel like shit so I stopped taking them. Serves me right.’

The young woman who had checked Harper in came over, this time without her apron, and they ordered beers from her.

‘So you’re in the kidnapping business,’ said Harper as the woman walked away. ‘That Proof Of Life was a great movie.’

Standish chuckled. ‘It’s not like the movies, mate,’ he said. ‘And I’m no Russell Crowe, obviously. In fact it’s precisely as exciting as being a loss adjuster for an insurance company, which in fact is pretty much all the job entails. Kidnappers open negotiations with a demand for a stupendous sum - $10 or $20 million is not unusual - but the Kidnap and Ransom negotiator’s job is simply to counter first with a demand for a proof of life - the victim holding a copy of that day’s newspaper or something to prove he’s still alive - and then make a minuscule counter-offer. Through long, wearisome weeks or even months of negotiation and haggling, we eventually beat the kidnappers down to a figure that the insurers are willing to pay - usually in the region of $50,000 to $100,000. That K and R strategy invariably means that the victim of the kidnapping spends far longer in captivity, fear and terror than would have been strictly necessary had the insurance company been more concerned with his well-being and less concerned with the bottom line.’

The two men fell silent as the woman returned with their beers. They clinked glasses and resumed their conversation as she walked away.

‘I also have to put up with the negotiators we employ who are often prima donnas, strutting around full of their own self-importance and looking down their noses at the rest of us,’ said Standish. ‘They call us The Dirty Trade, forgetting that without us, they would be permanently out of work. In fact, they’re the perfect example of power without responsibility: if they make errors, someone else dies and they just go on to the next case.’ He flashed an embarrassed smile. ‘Apologies, Lex, I was on a bit of a rant there, wasn’t I? Anyway basically I’m now not much more than a salesman and an office boy. I have to go around the region persuading people to buy goods and services they often can’t afford and don’t really want, so basically I’m just preying on people’s misery in order to keep a load of tossers in company headquarters in their comfortable, well-paid positions.’

Harper grinned. ‘So just like the Army then.’ He paused. ‘So to business: I don’t know whether Risk Reduction has brought you fully up to speed on why I’m here?’

Standish nodded. ‘I gather you’re on the trail of Scouse Davies.’

‘So what can you tell me about him?’

‘Well he turned up here pretty much out of the blue when we were in the middle of a ransom case. We were under pressure to get the money brought out and none of our regulars was available, so our office in Geneva just took pot luck on someone. That was Scouse and when he turned up here, having known him from the Paras, I must confess I had my doubts about whether he was right for the job, but by then I just had to go with what we had. Scouse had clearly not done his due diligence and so seemed to be blissfully unaware of the risks he was running, not only from the forces of law and order in Europe and South America, who are not always well-disposed to men transporting huge amounts of undeclared cash across their national borders, but also the criminal elements - thieves, gangsters and drug cartels - in those regions who would have happily dispatched Scouse from this earth for a lot less than the amount of money he was carrying.’

‘Is that what happened, you think? He was killed for the money he was carrying?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Standish. ‘You’ve got to be brave, foolhardy or suicidal to hijack the ransom money because, no matter who actually carried out the kidnapping, the big boys are always behind it. The reason the cartels don’t do the kidnapping themselves is that it’s a big logistical strain to keep someone alive, fit and healthy over a long period of time. The victim has to be fed, watered, toileted, looked at by a doctor if he becomes ill and kept away from prying eyes, and of course if the victim dies, no one gets paid out. So the organised gangs use low-level criminals to do the kidnappings and keep the victims safe until the money has been paid. And if anyone steals the ransom money, they have the cartel to reckon with.’

‘So how is it that the money Scouse was couriering disappeared without trace?’

‘Either Scouse himself took it - you’ve known him longer than me, Lex, but we both know that he might just have been dumb enough to think he could get away with it. But if not, then the thief is probably a bent cop or official, or a rival cartel to the one running the kidnap. Whoever took it must be very well connected and protected to run the risk of antagonising a powerful cartel, and that usually means a rival one. In effect all Scouse had to do was sit quietly in his room and keep himself occupied until someone came for the money. We, as a company don’t actually hand the money over, and we don’t speak to the kidnappers direct. Everything is handled by go-betweens, so really it’s just a case of waiting until the victim is released and the money is handed over. The victim is then repatriated and the ransom money is usually divided to an agreed ratio among the people involved, with the big boys taking the major cut. To be fair to Scouse, despite my reservations about him, he did a decent enough job to start with and it did free me up to do other, more important things, so I gave an old Para comrade a helping hand by keeping him on the payroll and sending him off to do a couple of security audits on the companies that run the oil palm plantations - they’ve been clients of ours forever. It’s not a life I’d like, the plantations are usually in cleared areas of jungle, the heat and humidity are awful, the mosquitoes are even worse, and the only towns within a hundred clicks tend to be one horse, one bar, one cantina and one brothel dumps.’

He finished his beer and waved over at the woman to bring him another. Harper drained his glass and raised it to show her that it was empty. She smiled and nodded.

‘The guys who own and run the plantations don’t usually have a lot of security problems,’ said Standish. ‘The cartels don’t interfere with them, partly because shipments of fruit and palm oil can give them useful cover for their own exports. However, because the plantations have flattened large areas of rainforest and replaced it with oil palms, the owners are a bit twitchy and do have occasional spats with displaced indigenous people or local wildcat loggers who are pissed off that they weren’t the ones felling those giant rainforest hardwoods. Anyway, the plantation bosses are mostly expat British and Americans who just need an occasional bit of TLC, so most communications are in English, but when we do need interpreters at the high end of the business, we always use the best that money can buy, university graduates and the like. Lower down the scale, we still expect our consultants - and indeed our couriers - to be able to speak the language of the country in which they’re operating sufficiently well to be able to do their own interpreting and run their own instructional programs.’

The woman returned with two more beers and Standish waited until she was out of earshot before continuing.

‘Scouse had originally persuaded the people at head office that he was fluent in Spanish.’ Standish gave a weary shake of his head. ‘Apparently no one there thought it worth making the effort to check if that was true. Anyway, I explained to Scouse that while he was doing the security audits, he had to use his spare time to learn Spanish, and if he did, I would be able to give him a lot more work in the future, but…’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Scouse being Scouse, instead of doing it the hard way, he found a local girl who had taught herself to speak English to a very decent standard, and used her as a translator. Providing it didn’t pose any threat to the security of our operations, I didn’t object, but I did make it a condition that I would only pay Scouse - at the standard rate - and he then had to pay the girl out of his money. I wasn’t prepared to sign off any extra payments just because he couldn’t be arsed to get his nose into a Teach Yourself Spanish book, or get the Rosetta Stone app.’

‘So what was his relationship with this girl?’ Harper said.

‘I don’t know if it was sexual, if that’s what you’re getting at,’ Standish said. ‘She’s very good looking but she’s twenty years younger than Scouse, and as you’ll see for yourself if you meet her, she’s a very self-confident, feisty character in her own right, so I think she’d have been much too sassy to have been Scouse’s arm-candy. I guess the arrangement just worked for both of them. With her as his interpreter, I could give him work, but without her I couldn’t; it was as simple as that.’

‘And how did Scouse come to meet her?’

‘He met her in Bolivia when he went there on a job that should have lasted a day or so but eventually ran into several weeks. When he came back to Bogotá, he had the girl - she’s called Lupa, by the way - in tow. It was mutually beneficial; he was able to make some sort of a living and no doubt she did quite well out of it, at least by local standards.’

‘What happened on Scouse’s last job for you then? Was Lupa with him? And how did it go wrong?’

‘She wasn’t with him, she was due to meet him later that day in La Paz in Bolivia, where the ransom drop was supposed to take place. He was flying in on a flight from Geneva with a change of aircraft at Madrid, carrying a $50,000 ransom payment in cash. Our man in Madrid observed him boarding the flight to La Paz without incident and although it’s routed via Lima in Peru, the same aircraft completes the journey, so there’s no need to disembark. As far as we know, Scouse followed all the usual SOPs, and he certainly arrived at the airport in La Paz, according to the airline’s records, but there the trail goes cold. We don’t even know how he left the airport, if he did, and we’ve not seen hide nor hair of him since.’

‘Was there no CCTV?’

‘There should have been, but either the cameras in immigration and arrivals were malfunctioning or the tapes have gone missing.’ Standish spread his hands, palms up. ‘That’s not necessarily significant; shit like that happens all the time over here, as much from incompetence as corruption. We have two customs officers and a supervisor on retainers…’

‘Or bribes, as we say in English,’ Harper interrupted.

‘Indeed, but as our CEO always likes to remark, we have to deal with the world as it is, not as we might prefer it to be. So… Scouse’s SOP was to go to a customs desk manned by one of our men, but when we spoke to the one who was on duty that day, he told us that he’d not seen Scouse at all, so either he’d gone to one of the other desks or he’d been intercepted before he’d even got that far.’

‘And do you believe your pet customs guy?’

Standish shrugged. ‘By Bolivian standards he earns good money from us, so he’d be unlikely to jeopardise that.’

‘So do you think Scouse stole the money?’

‘I’d say it was unlikely. He’s carried far larger amounts than that for us before. And if you were going to steal it, why wouldn’t you take a ransom of $500,000 rather than settle for $50,000? In any case he’d know that wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to pay for a new identity and a safe house for the rest of his life, in case someone came after him. And as you’re in a related line of work yourself, you’ll know we have ways of finding even those who go to great lengths to try and remain hidden.’

‘So if not theft by Scouse, a double-cross then. By who?’

‘You pay your money and take your pick: the kidnappers, the cops, customs men, rival gangs, cartels, chancers, hustlers. We did talk to a couple of air stewardesses on the flights he caught. He’d apparently been drinking quite a lot on the plane flying him from Madrid to La Paz but so what? Whatever, Scouse disappeared at some point after disembarking from La Paz. So either he found a way to dodge our employee waiting for him in the Arrivals Hall, or he didn’t get that far.’

‘And what do you think has happened to him?’

‘Probably dead or maybe, if he’s very lucky, in jail.’

‘You’ve made no further effort to trace him?’

‘We’ve tried the usual channels, but came up with nothing, and there’s only so much time, energy and resources I can persuade the company to devote to it. The loss was only $50,000 and that’s small change in this line of work.’

‘But it’s not just about the $50,000, is it? It’s for someone who was employed by Risk Reduction and went missing in the line of duty on a job for the company.’

Standish shrugged. ‘I made the same argument to Geneva, but you know the answer I got? Those are the risks our men take. The rewards are high for a good reason.’

Harper shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter where you go in the world, does it? If there’s cash on one side of the equation and human decency on the other, the cash will always win out. So…’ He straightened his shoulders. ‘Let’s get moving. Can I have the name of the customs guy?’

‘Sure,’ Standish said. ‘Alvaro Lopez. I can give you a photograph too.’

‘And, like Scouse, my Spanish is pretty much non-existent, so I’ll need a translator. Is Lupa contactable?’

‘She should be. Scouse used to leave messages for her at a hotel in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, which were passed on to her. Lupa would then make contact and fly here to Bogotá or to La Paz, or wherever the job was to be carried out. After it was done, Scouse would pay her and she’d fly back home until the next time. Want me to get her up here, if she’s still around?’

‘No thanks. I’ll make contact with her and if necessary I can take a trip down to Santa Cruz to meet her.’

Standish frowned. ’Take a tip from me, Lex, and meet Lupa here in Bogotá or in La Paz, not in Santa Cruz. There are a lot of cartel gangs operating there and large parts of the city, even including the business district, are bandit country. We have put it out of bounds for all our people because the risks there are too high. Anyone who looks like a businessman or an American is at risk, either of kidnap for ransom, or murder if suspected of being an undercover cop. And since most cartel gangs are paranoid - and the cocaine that they use themselves as well as selling it to others makes their paranoia even worse - they kill an awful lot of people. So those who really do have to go to Santa Cruz tend to just take a flight down there, meet their contacts at the airport, settle their business and fly back before nightfall the same day. No one even stays overnight because it’s too dangerous.’

‘I hear what you’re saying, but the only way I’m going to find Scouse or discover what happened to him is by retracing his steps. So I need to meet this Lupa, and I need to see the places he worked, maybe including the palm oil plantations. You can help me with some background, though, like what comms I should be using?’

‘Well, as you know, South America covers a vast geographical area and the cell phone coverage is very patchy. In the cities it’s fine but as soon as you get a couple of miles out in the countryside, the mobile coverage is largely non-existent. That applies in spades in Bolivia, but unlike mobiles, sat phones will work almost anywhere. We have a relay system up on the roof here which automatically works between sat phone and cell phone, saving us having to chop and change. So just let me know what you want and I’ll make sure you’ve got it.’

‘A sat phone definitely sounds the way to go, if you’ve got one I can borrow.’

‘Sure. I’ve got a spare in the car, just wait for a minute.’ He stood up and headed out. On the way he waved at the woman and asked for two more beers.

When he returned after a couple of minutes, the beers were on the table, along with a plate of tortilla chips and a bowl of salsa. He sat down and gave Harper a charger and a sat phone that was not much bigger than a regular mobile. ‘These are the business,’ Standish said. ‘As you remember, I’m sure, the traditional sat phones, work off single, hugely powerful, geo-synchronous satellites. They orbit up to twenty thousand miles above the earth, so they can provide coverage over a vast area, but there’s a noticeable delay in transmission because of the distance the signal has to travel. The sat phone you need to use with them is also a pretty chunky item, about the same size and weight as a laptop. Now these little beauties are very different.’ He held up the sat phone he’d brought. ‘They look just like an ordinary mobile, but they work off a series of less powerful but far more numerous satellites than the earth-synchronous ones. They fly in low-earth orbit, about 400-700 miles above the ground, orbiting the earth every sixty to ninety minutes, and the network we use has enough of them to give blanket coverage wherever you happen to be. So you can get enough reception to make a call from almost anywhere on earth.’ He grinned. ‘Even including the North and South Poles apparently, though I don’t have any personal experience of that.’

‘You’re a star, Sass, much appreciated.’

‘So when do you think you’ll head to Bolivia?’

‘First thing tomorrow,’ said Harper. ‘The trail’s cold enough already, and the longer I leave it the colder it gets.’

‘But time for a few more beers,’ said Standish.

Harper grinned. ‘Hell, yeah.’

CHAPTER 6

After he and Standish had drunk the best part of a dozen beers between them, Harper said goodnight and went up to his room. He called Lupa on the number Standish had given him but it went through to voicemail. He left a message and she called back within the hour.

‘I’m Lex, a friend of Scouse’s,’ he said. ‘Have you heard from him recently?’

‘Not for a few months,’ she said. ‘Is he okay?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Harper. ‘I’d like to meet you in Santa Cruz if that’s okay with you.’

‘That’s fine. When?’

‘Tomorrow. I’m in Colombia at the moment but I’ll be flying in from La Paz. I gather Santa Cruz can be a bit edgy, and I could do with some weapons, if that’s possible.’

She laughed. ‘You’re definitely a friend of Scouse’s.’ she said. ‘In Santa Cruz anything is possible, at a price.’

‘I’ll have money,’ said Harper.

‘Shall I meet you at the airport?’

‘No,’ said Harper. ‘We need a safe and semi-public meeting place - a hotel, a restaurant, or something like that. Do you have somewhere in mind?’

‘Of course,’ Lupa said, giving him the name of a hotel. ‘It’s in downtown Santa Cruz, about a half hour drive from the airport. We can meet in the coffee shop.’

‘Excellent,’ Harper said. ‘I’ll call you when I’m en route.’

Harper used his smart phone to book flights for the following day, then he showered and slept a dreamless sleep.

He didn’t bother with breakfast the following morning. He paid his bill and had the hotel call a cab for him. The flight to La Paz took four hours. The views of the Andes all the way south must have been breathtaking but like ex-soldiers everywhere, Harper always took any downtime as a chance to catch up on some sleep, so he was dozing well before the plane reached its cruising altitude.

After they landed at La Paz’s El Alto international airport, he shivered in the cold as he stepped out of the aircraft. The air at this altitude was crystalline, the sky a deep, dark blue and the snow-capped peaks of the high Andes looked so close he almost felt he could have reached out and touched them. He paid very close attention as he went through the formalities at arrivals in the airport, glancing around apparently casually as he waited in line to clear immigration and customs, but closely scrutinising the lay-out of the areas, the personnel on duty, and the glimpses of the secure areas where those suspected of smuggling or other crimes were taken. His practised eye also spotted the security cameras - one over each desk and two high up on the wall, giving general views of the area - and the mirrored glass concealing the observation window where police and customs men could scrutinise passengers for the tells that often gave smugglers and drug mules away.

Although the policeman on the immigration desk gave him a long look as he compared his face with the passport image, there were no hold-ups and no searches of his case or body before Harper was waved through.

He checked in for the shuttle to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, then passed through security and after an hour long wait nursing an airport coffee he boarded the plane. The flight was short but spectacular. As the aircraft climbed steeply from the Altiplano and then began to bank around, Harper caught a brief glimpse of light reflecting from Lake Titicaca - the lake, sacred to the Incas, that began thirty miles to the north-west and stretched well beyond the Peruvian border. The jet flew on, making a long turn to the east before passing between the mountains that reached over six thousand metres into the sky. As it did so, a glorious Andean sunrise lit up the heavens, painting the clouds red and gold, and then the aircraft was plunging down the eastern slopes of the mountains towards the vibrant green, tropical rainforest of the Amazon basin that filled the horizon.

After landing at Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz, Harper strode through the terminal and walked swiftly to the cab rank, where he ignored the first few taxis and got into the fifth one in line. He jumped into the seat alongside the driver, waved a US fifty dollar bill at him and said ‘Vamos!’.

Without taking his eyes off the $50, the driver let in the clutch and drove off at top speed, much to the consternation of the rank’s security marshal who was busy noting down taxi numbers, destinations and passenger ID’s, but now had no information at all on the gringo passenger who had just jumped the queue and ignored him.

Harper hunched down in his seat so that he could see out of the rear-view and wing mirrors as the driver pulled away and was amused to note that a small, nondescript and very weather-beaten saloon had tucked into the traffic behind them. The driver was obviously not well used to following a car because, still keeping an eye on the mirrors, Harper could see the red glow of the brake lights flickering on and off as the driver kept accelerating to keep pace with the taxi but then overdid it and had to hit the brakes repeatedly to slow down again.

Once they were clear of the airport, Harper told the taxi driver to head for the city centre, then phoned Lupa. She said she would meet him in the coffee shop of a hotel and Harper relayed the address to the driver.

Santa Cruz looked to be a big, bustling city, with plenty of luxury car showrooms, high-end clothing and jewellery stores showing the affluence of some of its citizens - just the sort of places favoured by narco-traffickers and gangsters with cash to launder, Harper thought. He paid off the taxi on a downtown street around the corner from the hotel, noting that the same weather-beaten saloon had pulled in to the kerb a short way up the street.

He waited until the taxi had driven off before walking swiftly up the road towards the hotel. He paused on the corner with a side-street, using the reflections in a shop window to check the pavement behind him and smiled to himself as he noticed a dark-haired young man twenty metres behind him, suddenly become surprisingly interested in the window display of a dress shop. He was wearing a trilby hat with a condor feather stuck in the hat-band, which might have been the sign of a professional; even the most experienced of surveillance operatives was sometimes guilty of following a distinctive hat, rather than the person wearing it, and if the hat was suddenly removed, the person effectively disappeared. However, the body language of the young man and the way he shot a sidelong glance at Harper when he thought he was not being observed, suggested that he was not a professional and the hat was probably being worn out of vanity, not tradecraft. However, he didn’t seem to pose any immediate threat, so Harper turned and carried on, but paused once more a few metres further on, as much for the entertainment value of watching his tail having to stop dead again and back-track to a newspaper stall he’d just passed, as from any sense of danger.

Harper was early and he took a seat at a corner table in the coffee shop. He put his backpack on the chair next to him. Dead on time Lupa entered and after a brief glance around the room, threaded her way through the tables to where Harper was sitting. She was in her early twenties, with a slim figure and long, jet-black hair. Her eyes were almost as dark as her hair and her beauty was little affected by the thin white line of a scar - the result of a slash from a knife or razor, Harper thought - extending from just below the corner of her eye to her jaw.

‘You’re Lex,’ she said, a statement not a question. ‘I’m Lupa.’ She had a large leather bag over her shoulder and was carrying two plastic grocery bags which she unceremoniously dumped on the table in front of him. ‘I hope you’ll be happy with these,’ she said, ‘because we may well be needing them. My brother is watching our backs and will let us know if we have problems, but we’ll be lucky to get out of this area without a fight, because gringos like you are walking million-dollar ransoms, so you will have been noticed and word will have been passed on.’

An elderly waitress in a black and white uniform came over and Harper ordered a double espresso for himself, figuring he could do with the caffeine jolt. Lupa asked for a mint tea.

As the waitress walked away, Harper peered into the bags, and found that each of them contained a large pistol. The bluing of the gun-metal had been worn away through so much use and age that the pistols had reverted to the original silver colour. Harper immediately recognised them as old model .45 calibre Colts. They had been used by the US military throughout two world wars and in countless other twentieth century conflicts. The Colt was a single-action, semi-automatic, magazine-fed and recoil-operated pistol, and the magazine held seven rounds with an additional round in the spout.

‘Will they do?’ Lupa said.

‘Absolutely. The old ’uns are the best,’ Harper said, unfazed by the age of the weapons. ‘Did you bring any ammo as well?’

’Of course, sixteen rounds a gun, two mags of seven and one for the chamber.’

Once more he was impressed. ‘I can see why Scouse hired you. These are perfect; .45 calibre rounds would stop an elephant.’ He eyed her slim frame and gave her a slightly dubious look. ‘So will you be carrying one of the Colts yourself?’

She shook her head. ‘No, the kickback on the Colt is too much for my wrist.’ She patted her shoulder bag. ‘I’m carrying a 9 mm Makarov.’

‘Good choice. It’s an easy weapon to use, very rarely jams and packs enough punch for most situations. So who’s the other Colt for - your brother?’

She nodded. ‘He’ll be joining us as soon as he’s worked out what company we have outside.’

Harper grinned. ‘He’ll be the guy with a Condor feather in his hat then, who followed me in from the airport.’

She gave a rueful smile. ‘I asked him to ride shotgun on you in case of trouble. Was he really that easy to spot?’

‘He was for me, yes, but I’ve had a lot of practice at this. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed, although the hat with the condor feather is a bit too flamboyant if you’re going to do the job properly.’

The waitress returned with their drinks and placed them on the table. ‘Tell me,’ Harper said, as the waitress moved away, ‘how come you speak such good English? Is one of your parents British or American, or something?’

‘No, they’re both Bolivian. I learned English through reading comic books at first, then books, and then TV and films.’ She shrugged. ‘Even when we were young, my brother and I always had our eyes on a bigger world than the small town where we grew up, and learning to speak English was part of the escape plan. We practised on each other, listened to English-language radio and TV shows.’

‘And your parents, what did they do?’

‘They ran a bar and cantina in our home town, near Trinidad, in Beni state. It’s about 500 kilometres from here.’ She grimaced. ‘Not a place I’d recommend to you. The heat and humidity is hard for native Bolivians to take, let alone pale-skinned gringos, and the wet season runs from December to May, though when you’re in the middle of it, it seems a whole lot longer than that. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the whole area is a swamp. As well as the river that runs through the town, there are half a dozen other tributaries of the Amazon within a few kilometres and the place is so wet that there are water-filled ditches at the side of every street.’ She gave a grim smile. ‘Every building’s drains empty into them as well, so you can imagine what they smell like, and the mosquitoes also love them, as you’d expect. They’ll eat you alive and malaria is rife, and in the wet season you can even find caiman - alligators - and anacondas in the ditches as well.’

‘Sounds the perfect spot for a family holiday,’ Harper said with a laugh.

‘Most of the people there used to be miners, loggers or farmers, but coca is now one of the main crops around there - but the drug cartels have moved in on Trinidad, just like they have here, and a lot of people work for them, harvesting coca, converting it into cocaine paste, and carrying it to the airstrips or the rivers, or even working as human mules, taking it on foot right through the rainforest into Brazil.’

‘I can see why you wanted to get out,’ Harper said. ‘So how did you meet Scouse?’

‘He was down here checking security on some of the oil palm plantations. A lot of the owners are gringos but their guards, chauffeurs and servants aren’t. Many of them don’t speak a word of English and the only Spanish word Scouse knew was cerveza - beer.’

Harper laughed. ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

‘So he needed an interpreter and I happened to bump into him, in a bar, as it happens.’

‘Again, no surprises there.’

‘So we started chatting and he hired me to work for him. He paid well and the work was a lot more interesting than showing American tourists around Santa Cruz, not that there have been many of those since the cartels moved in and the drug wars started.’

‘And your brother?’

‘Like me, Ricardo had no taste for subsistence farming or helping our parents to run the bar and cantina. He was a bit of a wild boy, getting involved in petty theft at first, and then graduating to break-ins, car-jackings and armed robberies. I’d sometimes help him, first just as a look-out, then as a getaway driver, and eventually as his partner in crime. I was good at it too.’ Her look challenged Harper to disapprove. ‘Inevitably he got involved with one of the cartels, and at that point I stepped back. Not for moral reasons - if gringos are stupid enough to pay a fortune to snort white powder or smoke crack, that’s not my problem, and the farmers who grow coca make a better living from that than they do from any other crop. They get three crops a year from coca bushes, and the price they get is far higher than for any alternative crops they could grow. Anyway, I’d seen enough of the cartels to know that the only people who really survive and thrive, the ones living on ranches, driving around in Mercedes with tinted windows and drinking French champagne, are the ones at the very top. The rest: the sicarios - the assassins - the foot-soldiers, the men making the cocaine in the jungle factories and the mules shipping it out, sooner or later, they all end up in jail or dead. So I took a few steps back, but my brother still works for one of the cartels.’ She smiled. ‘So, now you know our criminal background, perhaps you want nothing more to do with us?’

Harper smiled. ‘If I refused to have anything to do with people just because they had a bit of a criminal background, not only would I have no business associates, I wouldn’t have any friends either. So… let’s get back to Scouse, what can you tell me about his disappearance?’

‘Only what I already told Sam in my statement to Risk Reduction, and I’m sure you’ve already read that. He was flying into La Paz and we’d arranged to meet later that day, but he never showed up at the rendezvous and when I called his mobile phone, it was switched off. Risk Reduction said they could only track it as far as the airport at La Paz and no further, so it had evidently been destroyed almost at once, either by Scouse himself or by whoever had taken him prisoner.’

‘What do you think happened?’

She shrugged. ‘He always seemed a little careless to me. He’d talk about things he shouldn’t have in places where you needed to watch your words. I don’t know if he let something slip and was overheard or if he didn’t follow the right procedures and strayed into an area he shouldn’t have been in, or was betrayed, or was just unlucky and caught the wrong taxi - if he even got that far. I know Risk Reduction bribes the customs and police officers to look the other way when their couriers are passing through the airport, but they certainly aren’t the only organisations doing that. In Bolivia, you can buy everyone from the lowliest policeman to the President - the only thing that varies is the price you have to pay.’

Harper had been keeping half an eye on the door of the coffee shop, and when it opened he saw the now familiar condor feather in the new arrival’s hat. Lupa’s brother looked around for a moment before spotting them. He walked over to them, winked at Lupa and nodded to Harper. ‘Nice hat,’ Harper said. ‘I was admiring it when we were out in the street.’

Ricardo gave an uncertain smile.

‘My brother doesn’t really do irony,’ Lupa said. ‘Ricardo, Lex means he spotted you following him.’

Harper smiled. ‘If you’re going to do surveillance on someone, you need to be a grey man, Ricardo, melting into the crowds, not standing out from them.’ He saw Ricardo’s crestfallen expression and sugared the pill a little. ‘But that aside, you were pretty good at it. I do this kind of stuff for a living, so it’s second nature to watch my back, but most people wouldn’t have noticed you.’

‘So, what’s the situation, brother?’ Lupa said.

‘We seem to be surrounded,’ he said. ‘But meanwhile, if you’re buying, señor Lex, mine’s a latte.’ He sat down opposite Harper.

‘Surrounded by who and how many of them are there?’

‘Cartel guys and not ones I’m friendly with. There are about sixty gangs in Santa Cruz, but only two that matter. The Santa Cruz cartel is run by a mixture of Colombians and Bolivians. They are my guys. The ones outside are our enemies - Brazilians from the Comando Vermelho - the Red Command. They were originally just one of the big prison gangs in Brazil, but they now control the cocaine trade in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and have spread into Bolivia as well. I reckon there are eight of them outside altogether: two at the back, four in a car at the front, and another couple in shop doorways on the other side of the street.’

‘Are they after me or you?’ asked Harper.

Ricardo laughed. ‘It was you they were looking at. But they’re no friends of mine.’ He looked around. ‘You’re buying me a coffee, right?’

‘Right,’ said Harper. He waved the elderly waitress over and ordered a latte.

‘Okay, once we’ve got our present situation sorted, I’d like the two of you to come to La Paz with me and see if we can find Scouse.’ He nodded at the bag. ‘I’m assuming we can’t take them in our hand luggage, but can we check them in a suitcase?’

Lupa shook her head. ‘They X-ray bags for drugs and guns will show up. But I have a way to get us and the guns to La Paz, don’t worry.’

Harper sat back in his chair. ‘So I know a bit about Lupa now, Ricardo, but what about you? Tell me about how you came to get involved in a life of crime?’ He winked to show he wasn’t bothered by it.

Ricardo shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, to be honest, it’s all I’ve ever known. It was certainly easier money than farming or working in the bar with my parents, but I was never interested in that anyway. I wanted to be one of the guys I used to see who could walk into the bar, buy drinks para todos - for everyone - and pay for them by pulling out a fat roll of bills from their pocket and peeling off a couple. So I hung around those guys, got to know a few of them and, as well as a few crimes of my own - mostly robberies - I started getting involved with some of theirs. There was sometimes a price to pay of course; I did my first jail time when I was fourteen. I’m thirty now and I’ve been inside five times altogether, once in Trinidad, once in Cochabamba, twice here in Santa Cruz and once in La Paz. It’s not such a big problem, if you have money or friends with money, life inside can be quite comfortable and you’re not there for long.’

The waitress returned with Ricardo’s coffee. He added four sugars and stirred it. ‘The men outside, they are tough hombres, Lex,’ he said.

‘I’m no softy myself, and your sister has brought us firepower,’ he said. ‘Have you ever been in a gunfight? Ever shot anyone?’

Ricardo smirked. ‘Probably more than you.’

Harper laughed. ‘Now that I don’t believe.’

‘You can count on him, Lex,’ Lupa said. ‘You don’t work for a cartel without knowing how to shoot.’

Harper finished his coffee. Lupa and Ricardo sipped theirs. ‘Right, let’s get this done,’ said Harper. ‘Lupa, you go out the back way, take care of any guys there and then work your way round to the front. Ricardo and I will take care of business there. But remember, we’re in a city street, not the desert, so it’s got to be aimed shots, not close your eyes, pull the trigger and hope. I don’t want half a dozen passers-by wiped out as well.’

He took out one of the guns and kept it below the table. He slipped a spare magazine into his pocket.

Ricardo took the second gun and slipped it inside his jacket.

‘Do you think they’ll start shooting, or do they have something else planned?’ asked Harper.

‘It’s a hit team,’ said Ricardo. ‘They’re assassins.’

‘Terrific,’ said Harper. ‘Okay, Lupa, head out back. When you hear shots, you move out. The two men there will probably move too so with any luck they’ll have their backs to you.’ He forced a smile. ‘Not that we’re going to be relying on luck. Be careful.’

He stood up and shouldered his backpack. As Lupa moved towards the rear of the coffee shop, Harper nodded at Ricardo. ‘Translate for me, okay?’ He whistled and as the waitress and the other coffee shop customers turned to look at him, he held up the Colt and then said ‘There is going to be some shooting, ladies and gentlemen. Please get on the floor under the tables and stay there.’

He waited until Ricardo had translated and then, as the customers dived for cover, he and Ricardo walked towards the front of the coffee shop, and paused there just inside the door, scanning the street and noting the position of the car with four gunmen inside and the two others lurking in doorways.

They waited until the pavement in both directions was empty of pedestrians. Harper didn’t at all mind killing cartel members but he didn’t want innocent people who just happened to have been in the wrong place on the wrong day on his conscience as well.

He nodded at Ricardo and mouthed ‘Go’ and burst through the door, diving, rolling and already firing as he bounced back to his feet. Ricardo followed him.

In any gunfight, the most dangerous targets were always the first to be eliminated and, reasoning that the men in the car would be slower to draw their weapons than the two standing in the shop doorways, Harper targeted them first, aiming for the sternum at the centre of the body mass. He took out the one closest to him first, firing a double tap that punched holes through the man’s chest and blew him back through the shop door in a shower of flying glass. Harper was already dropping and rolling a few feet, targeting the other gunman as he struggled to bring his weapon to bear. Harper wasn’t even aware of thinking about whether to fire single shots or double-taps. Instead he drew largely on his instincts to decide whether one shot was enough or a double-tap was needed. The Colt barked again and the second man slumped against the stone doorframe, sliding slowly downwards as arterial blood pulsed from the wound the Colt had opened in his chest, blowing away his sternum and rupturing everything around it. His death spasm triggered a shot from his weapon but it ricocheted off the pavement and flew well over Harper’s head with a shrill whine.

Ricardo fired his gun and put a shot through the car windscreen, killing the front-seat passenger. The driver was already scrambling out of the car, but Harper’s first shot hit him in the shoulder and, though the second one flashed past the driver’s ear, he slumped to the ground alongside the car. As the men in the back-seat jumped out, firing wild bursts from their semi-automatics at him, Harper dived and rolled towards a parked car that would serve as cover, changing the Colt’s magazine even as he was still rolling across the pavement.

As he rolled behind the parked car, he heard shots from the rear of the hotel, the higher pitched crack of the Makarov, counter-pointed by a burst from a semi-automatic, and then two more shots from the pistols. Keeping a wary eye on the entrance to the side-street from which the survivors of that skirmish would soon emerge, he flattened himself in the dirt and peered along the road underneath the parked car. He had a clear view of the slumped body of the driver he had shot, but from this angle, it was impossible to tell if he was dead, mortally wounded or still capable of holding a weapon.

He could also see the feet of the other two gunmen, who were holding their fire until they saw their target. Both were crouching behind their car, one behind the front wing, with just the toe of his boot poking out from behind the tyre, and the other using an open car-door as cover. ‘Big mistake,’ Harper thought to himself. ‘If he knew what a Colt could do, he wouldn’t be hiding there.’ He aimed for the exact centre of the door panel and squeezed the trigger. The round drilled a neat circular hole through the front panel and then exploded out through the back one, smashing a jagged hole through the man’s solar plexus but still having enough residual velocity to sever his spine and burst out through his back, while shreds of metal from the car door tore the rest of his guts to shreds. There was no need for a second shot because no man could survive such an impact but, operating on autopilot, following the drills that would ensure a kill and guarantee his own survival, Harper had already swung the barrel and put the second half of the double-tap into the man’s head as he lay on the tarmac.

That left two targets: the man still crouching at the rear of the car and the driver who might or might not still be alive. Once more taking the most dangerous target first, Harper focussed on the man crouching behind the rear wing on the far side of the car. There was no point in trying to shoot him through the car. Although a .45 round from a Colt could punch through the sheet metal of doors and side panels, the engine block was an entirely different matter. The steel sidewalls of the tyres were also difficult obstacles that might block or at least divert a round away from its target.

Harper squeezed off another shot from the Colt at the only part of the man’s body that was not hidden by the car and the tyre. He saw the man’s exposed toecap explode into a mist of blood, bone and leather fragments. There was an unearthly scream as the man toppled over, howling in agony. He had fallen backwards, still behind the car, but Ricardo could get a clear shot and he pumped two rounds into the man’s chest.

Harper jumped to his feet sprinted across the street, keeping the Colt pointed at the prone body of the driver, the only one of the six who might still be alive. He dived for the far side of the gunmen’s car and then ran round the back, stepping over his victims’ bodies while the blood pooling around one of them, splashed from Harper’s boots as he ran. He paused a split second, then sprang out of cover. The driver’s eyes were open and though his shoulder was shattered, with a spreading blood stain covering his shirt, he still had a weapon in his other hand. His lips curled into a snarl as he saw Harper and his finger began to tighten on the trigger, but Harper was on him in one stride, kicking the weapon aside and drilling a round into the man’s head at a range of a foot, close enough for a spray of blood and brains to speckle his gun hand.

He caught a movement from the shadows in the side-street and swung round, bringing his weapon to bear, but he relaxed when he saw it was Lupa.

Harper grinned. ‘All good round the back?’

Lupa nodded. ‘One of them was on his phone, so he never got off a shot. The other fired a burst, but missed me and I hit him before he could fire again.’

‘Good work,’ Harper said. He glanced along the street. Emboldened by the silence after the last burst of gunfire, a few people were now emerging from cover and people in the upper floors of the buildings were leaning out of the windows, staring at them.

‘Just walk, don’t run,’ said Harper, slipping the gun into his jacket. ‘Nobody will do anything, they’re in shock.’

He walked briskly towards Ricardo’s car and Ricardo and Lupa fell into step either side of him.

Ricardo opened the driver side door and got in. Lupa got into the front passenger seat and Harper climbed in the back. He put his backpack on the seat and unzipped it so that he could store his Colt. ‘Drive slowly, Ricardo,’ said Harper.

Ricardo did as he was told.

‘Lupa, what’s the plan to get back to La Paz?’

She twisted around in her seat. ‘There are several companies that fly from around here to unofficial air strips near La Paz. Most of them use C-47 aircraft left over from World War II and don’t fly to any fixed schedule, but if you pay them enough, they’ll fly you like a taxi.’ Ricardo groaned. ‘Take no notice of him,’ said Lupa. ‘He hates flying.’

‘Flying I don’t mind,’ Ricardo said, ‘it’s crashing that bothers me.’

‘Well, if it helps, you’re probably safer in a C-47 than a modern jet.’ Harper said. ‘The reason there are still so many around the world is because they’re such a strong and reliable aircraft - easy to fly and easy to maintain. I’ve flown in them quite a few times in Africa and Asia, and I’m still here. Okay Lupa, let’s give it a go.’

They kept to the back roads out of the city and then headed into the countryside, passing fields full of fruit, rice, corn crops and a plant Harper didn’t recognise. ‘What are those?’ he said, gesturing out of the open window.

‘Quinoa,’ Lupa said. ‘It’s been a subsistence food here for hundreds of years, but since it become fashionable in the West, the entire crop is exported because hardly anyone here can afford it anymore.’

They drove on through the agricultural land and climbed the lower slopes of the mountains, cloaked with rainforest, before eventually arriving at a crude airstrip. There was a cluster of palm-thatched buildings, one open-sided hangar, roofed with corrugated iron, and a runway of beaten earth. At the near end of the strip, three Douglas C-47s were drawn up in a row.

‘Perfect,’ Harper said. ‘Good call, Lupa.’

‘A rangy man with a grey crew-cut and a grizzled weather-beaten face, prised himself out of a crumbling armchair in the shade of the hangar and strolled over to them. He nodded to Ricardo and Lupa but gave Harper a quizzical look. ‘American?’ he said, in what sounded to Harper like a Texan accent.

‘Brit,’ Harper said. ‘I’m Lex. Who’re you and who are you working for here?’

‘Name of Randy, and not the DEA, if that’s what you mean. I fly these old birds.’

‘Then you’re the man we’re looking for. Any chance you can fly us up to La Paz?’

Randy gave him a shrewd look. ‘Without attracting too much attention about it, right?’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Hell no, my only issue is whether I’ll get paid.’

‘Let me put your mind at rest on that score,’ Harper said, reaching into his backpack. How much?’

‘Four hundred dollars and I’m yours for the day.’

‘Deal,’ Harper said, peeling off eight $50 bills from the bundle he was carrying.

They waited while Randy finished fuelling the C-47 he’d chosen from the row of three in front of the hangar. Its fuselage had scores of dents in it and the perspex canopy was hazed with a myriad of tiny scratches, but when Randy fired it up, there was nothing wrong with the engine’s throaty roar. ‘All right,’ he said, raising his voice to be heard above the engine noise. ‘All aboard who’s going aboard.’

Lupa and Harper climbed in but Ricardo hung back for a moment. ‘Are you sure this is safe?’ he said.

Randy gave him a world-weary smile. ‘Friend, I may not look it, but I’m mighty attached to this life of mine. I’m not going up there in any aircraft that isn’t going to get me home to my Conchita tonight. And we need to get going now because once we’ve ditched the car, it’s a three hour flight and I’ve got to be back here before dark, so let’s do it, shall we?’

Ricardo still looked dubious. ‘There are some very big mountains between here and La Paz,’ he said.

Randy smiled again. ‘Really? You don’t say, son? I’ve been flying aircraft out of here for twenty years and I never knew that. But seriously, my Daddy was a pilot in the USAF and way back in 1944 he was flying C-47s right over “The Hump” as they called it then - the Himalayas in other words - and tall as the Andes are, the Himalayas are higher still, so getting over the Andes is never going to be a problem for a C-47. There are still thousands of them in use all over the world and you can’t get a more solid and reliable aircraft, but just to be sure, I maintain this baby myself. Now we’ve no time to argue about this any longer, so what’s it to be - fly or walk?’

Ricardo hesitated a moment longer and then climbed aboard with a face like a man on his way to the gallows. Randy turned to wink at Harper. ‘Hope your friend here is better on the ground than he is in the air.’

Without waiting for a reply, he opened the throttles and they bumped their way down off the mound and began rumbling along the airstrip. They took off, and began banking around to fly further over the dense canopy of the rainforest beneath them.

As they flew above the Andes, the warm, steamy air rising up the face of the mountains caused some turbulence that made Ricardo cross himself again and close his eyes, while the stomach-churning lurch as they hit an air pocket and dropped fifty feet, turned him an even whiter shade of pale.

Beyond the mountains, they flew on over the endless barren plain of the Altiplano, before Randy began the approach to landing, eventually setting them down at a dirt airstrip on the edge of a small town, a handful of miles east of La Paz. There were a few decrepit-looking buildings - more barns than hangars - to one side of the runway and one man in an oil-stained boiler suit, who got out of a crumbling armchair, stationed next to the fuel pump, and stood waiting for Randy to taxi over to him to refuel. There were no other aircraft or people visible.

‘Just how I like it,’ Harper said. ‘Nice and quiet.’

‘And it’s no more than a mile into town from here,’ Randy said. ‘You can pick up a flota- a bus - in the market square that will take you right into La Paz.’ He handed Harper a battered business card. ‘Just in case you ever need another flight any time. The phone service in Bolivia is a joke outside the cities but if you dial that number, Conchita will get a message to me and I’ll usually be back to you within a couple of hours. Okay, adios, and you take care now, y’hear?’ He raised a hand in farewell, then gunned the engine and taxied over to the man at the fuel pump.

By the time Harper, Lupa and Ricardo had walked up the track away from the airstrip, Randy was on his take-off run, bouncing and jolting down the airstrip and then climbing steeply back towards the mountains.

Harper, Lupa and Ricardo walked into the nearby town, their feet scuffing up clouds of reddish-brown dust that clung to their skin and clothes. Harper still hadn’t fully adjusted to the altitude and even at the steady pace they were walking, he didn’t have much breath to spare for conversation and they walked in silence most of the way. Just as Randy had predicted, a flota - the gaudily decorated minibus/taxis that, under a variety of different local names, were the cheapest and most widely used form of transport throughout South America - was parked in the town square. It was half full, the driver dozing at the wheel. As was the custom, he had painted his bus in vivid colours, and decorated it with hundreds of mirrors, religious medals, emblems of his favourite football teams, feathers, bits of cheap costume jewellery, motifs and photographs. He opened an eye wide enough to sell them tickets to La Paz, then went back to his slumbers.

‘Let me guess,’ Harper said, as they settled themselves on the back seat. ‘When does the bus leave? When the driver feels like it.’

Eventually, without any obvious reason for it, the driver stirred himself, started the engine and the bus began its slow, meandering journey into La Paz. At intervals people materialised out of the apparently empty plain and boarded the bus, while others, most of them carrying goods from the town market, got off and disappeared.

They reached La Paz at sunset, where the flota ground to an apparently final halt by the Cementerio General, a sprawling necropolis filled with thousands of graves and crypts, extending for a square mile through La Paz’s outer suburbs.

‘Know where we are?’ Harper said, looking around for a recognisable landmark.

‘Not really,’ Lupa said. ‘I’ve never been in this part of the city before, but do you know what they say about La Paz? You can never be lost here, because if you’re in doubt, you just start walking downhill and you’ll come to the centre.’

‘Then let’s try that,’ Harper said, setting off down the sloping street. They found a small hotel in a quiet square and Harper booked them three rooms before they headed to a nearby café.

Lupa chose for all three of them: sopa di mani: a spicy peanut, vegetable and pasta soup; salteñas de carne: empanadas stuffed with chicken and peas, that looked to Harper like Cornish pasties; and anticucho: which turned out to be skewers of barbecued ox heart, but tasted much more delicious than it sounded. They drank bottles of beer and then had a glass of San Pedro Singani - a fiery, grappa-like spirit made from grape skins - as a nightcap. ‘You should try a Chuflay as well,’ Lupa said. ‘It’s our signature cocktail: Singani, dry ginger and a twist of lemon.’

‘Maybe tomorrow night,’ Harper said. ‘I’m going to turn in now and I’d advise you to do the same, because first thing tomorrow, we have to start looking for Scouse.’

‘So where do we begin?’ Lupa asked.

‘We’ll start with the customs guy that Risk Reduction were paying off.’

‘And how do we find him?’

‘Well, we’ve got his name - Alvaro Lopez - and his photograph.’ He pulled the mugshot Standish had given him out of his pocket and passed it to her. ‘And we know where he works, don’t we? So it shouldn’t be too hard to track him down.’

CHAPTER 7

Alvaro Lopez had just finished his shift at the airport that afternoon and was walking away from the terminal on his way home, when two men, a Bolivian and a fair-skinned Westerner, appeared at either side of him. A beautiful young Bolivian woman then stepped out in front of him, barring his way.

‘Qué esta pasando?’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘No es nada - It’s nothing’ Lupa said. ‘We just want a word with you.’

Harper and Ricardo steered him away from the entrance to the terminal and backed him up against the steel and glass facade of the building. Then with Lupa translating for him, Harper began interrogating him. ‘I’m with Risk Reduction,’ he said, not all together truthfully. ‘I want to know what happened when Scouse Davies came through here a few weeks ago.’

Alvaro shot a nervous glance to either side as if seeking an escape route, but said ‘I already told the company about this. I was on duty, but it was very busy - his flight was one of three that had all just arrived - and he didn’t come to my desk at all. So I didn’t see him and I really don’t know what happened to him.’

Harper said nothing, studying the bead of sweat trickling down Alvaro’s forehead. He knew that in interrogations it was often better to stay quiet and let the tension build because often the victim would then begin to blurt out information, just to break the oppressive silence.

‘I swear that’s all I know,’ Alvaro said.

Harper waited a few more moments and then gave a slow shake of his head. ‘Okay. I don’t believe you, so there are two ways this can go. Firstly, I give you your usual payment.’ He pulled a $500 bill from his pocket and showed it to him. ‘And you tell me what really happened. Or…’ He tightened his grip on Alvaro’s arm, keeping his voice low and level, but there was no mistaking the menace in his eyes. ‘Or my friends and I will take you for a walk into that car park over there. And if we do, you won’t get your $500 and by the time you get home tonight, your wife and your children will have difficulty in recognising you - and that’s always assuming you get home at all. So, one way or the other, you are going to tell me what I want to know, aren’t you? So which is it going to be?’

Alvaro looked into Harper’s eyes and what he saw there was enough to persuade him. ‘All right, I did see Señor Davies that day,’ he said, his words falling over each other in his desperation to placate Harper. ‘He came to my desk as normal, but at once my supervisor stepped in and told me to take a coffee break. I told him that I wasn’t due a break for another hour but he ignored me and told me it was an order and that I had to go.’ He gave Harper a pleading look. ‘He is my boss, what else could I do? When I got back there was no sign of Señor Davies or my supervisor. That is all I know, you must believe me.’

‘What is your supervisor’s name and where does he live?’

‘He is called Javier Flores. He has a house in Calle 15 in Calacoto in La Zona Sur - the Southern District of La Paz.’

Lupa gave a low whistle. ‘That’s a very fancy address for a man on a customs officer’s salary,’ she said.

‘Perhaps he comes from a wealthy family,’ Harper said, dripping sarcasm. ‘But let’s find out, shall we?’

He released his grip on Alvaro’s arm and handed him the $500. ‘This will be the last time we meet, Alvaro, unless someone tips off your boss that we’re going to pay him a visit tonight. Do we understand each other? Good. Vamos!’

Rather than hire a car, which would have required paperwork and records being kept by the hire company, Harper followed his usual practice of finding a second-hand car lot in a down-market district and then buying a car for cash. He found a Mercedes saloon that seemed to fit the bill. The bodywork was scraped and dented but the engine and gearbox were still in good nick, the tyres had some tread left on them and, best of all, the brakes worked, so he decided it would be easily reliable enough for the limited use he’d be putting it to. Lupa haggled the salesman down a couple of hundred Bolvianos before Harper handed over the cash from his backpack.

Ricardo drove them out to the Southern District. The narrow streets, industrial buildings and cramped-looking apartments and mud brick houses in the inner suburbs of La Paz slowly gave way to broad, tree-lined avenues and large houses with high stone walls. They parked fifty metres down the street from the address Alvaro had given them and then settled down to wait.

CHAPTER 8

It was dusk when Javier Flores drove along Calle 15 that evening and pressed the button to open the steel security gates at the entrance to his property. Mariachi music was blaring from his car radio and he neither heard nor saw the black-clad masked figures that emerged from the shadows on the opposite side of the street and ran towards him. He only became aware of the danger when the driver’s door was suddenly thrown open. He was dragged out of the car and as he opened his mouth to shout for help, he was silenced and knocked to the ground by a fierce blow. A ball of cloth was forced into his mouth and a hood was placed over his head. His assailants pinned him face down in the street, lashed his wrists and ankles together with plastic ties, and then threw him into the back of his own car. Someone jumped into the back seat next to him, the others - there must have been two more, because he heard both front doors slam shut - got into the front, and then they were driving off up the street. The whole thing had taken less than fifteen seconds.

They drove for what seemed to him like an hour, first on tarmac city streets and then on increasingly rough and rutted dirt roads before finally coming to a halt. Flesh creeping and his pulse rising as panic gripped him, he heard his captors get out of the car. There were a few moments of silence, broken only by the metallic tick of the cooling engine, and then the door next to his head was opened and he was dragged out of the car. He felt dry, gritty soil beneath him as he was dropped to the ground and he shivered as the cold wind of the open Altiplano knifed through him.

Through the thick material of the hood covering his head, he heard a woman’s voice. ‘SeñorFlores, we are going to ask you some questions. On your answers rests whether you will live or die. Please believe me that we already know many of the answers, so if you lie, we will know that and you will die. Entiendes?’

‘Si, entiendo - I understand.’

He heard a man’s voice then, speaking English, and the woman then translated his words into Spanish. ‘Some weeks ago, an Englishman called Scouse Davies flew into La Paz on a flight from Madrid via Lima. He had made a similar journey several times before. In his flight case was a $50,000 ransom payment for a kidnapping and in his back-pack was the usual $500 bribe for the customs officer to chalk his bags and wave him through. However, on this occasion, you intervened. You made that customs man take a break and dealt with the passenger yourself. He did not arrive at his destination and has not been seen since then. Now, please understand me: we do not care about the money he was carrying - what happened to it is your business - but we do care very much about what happened to Scouse Davies. So think very carefully before you reply to my next question, because there will be no second chances. If you lie even once, then we will kill you and leave you here, and when the sun comes up in the morning, the condors will find that they have some fresh carrion to feast on.’

‘Please, I beg you, I have a wife and children.’

‘Not to mention a house that must have needed a lot of bribes to pay for. So tell us the truth and you will see them all again tonight. Lie and no one will ever even know what happened to you.’

‘It was the Brazilian cartel, the Red Command.’ His voice cracked with fright. ‘I was forced to do it. They said…’

The woman interrupted him at once. ‘Señor Flores, please do not waste your breath or our time. We do not care why you did it. We only want to know what happened to Scouse Davies.’

‘I had been told he would be carrying a lot of money. I found $500 in his back-pack and had him arrested by two policemen who were waiting nearby. They are also in the pay of the Brazilians. We took him into the interrogation room and I opened the flight case and found the money. As instructed, I gave the policemen the $500 from the backpack but I at once delivered the flight case with the rest of the money to a member of the Red Command, who was waiting in the arrivals hall. I did not see the Englishman again after I left the room.’

‘But you know what happened to him, don’t you? Was he killed?’

‘Please, if the Red Command find out that I have spoken to you, they will kill me.’

‘I’m sure they will,’ the man said, ‘but if you don’t tell us what you know right now, we will also kill you and, unlike the cartel, we’re in a position to do so immediately.’

Flores took a deep breath and then the words began to tumble out of him in a rush. ‘They beat him up but they didn’t kill him. They said he was worth more alive.’

‘But there’s been no ransom demand. Why would they keep him alive, if not for that?’

‘I don’t know. They said they had un destino especial - a special fate - in mind for him, but I don’t know what it was, I swear.’

‘And where did they take him?’

‘If they find out what I told you, I’m a dead man.’

‘You’re wasting our time, Señor Flores. You had better hope that they don’t find out but you are going to tell us what we want to know.’

Flores hesitated a few moments longer, then bowed his head. ‘They took him to San Pedro.’

‘What’s San Pedro?’ the man said, but the woman held up a hand. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll explain later.’

‘That is all I know,’ Flores said. ‘And I have told you the truth, I swear it.’

‘Let us hope so, Señor,’ said the woman. ‘Or we will be paying you another visit and the next time there will not be a happy ending for you.’

They threw him back into the back seat of the car and began the drive out of the desert and back towards La Paz. When they pulled up near his house, the man pressed the barrel of his Colt against Flores’s neck as they cut the ties bindings his wrists and ankles. ‘You are nearly safe Señor Flores,’ he said. ‘Lie still and don’t do anything foolish now. After we get out of the car, you need to count to fifty before you sit up and remove the hood. Entiendes?’

‘Si.’

The doors slammed and he was left alone. A few moments later he heard another engine start and a car drive off, but he remained flat on the back seat, counting silently to himself until he reached fifty. Only then did he sit up, remove the hood and wipe the sweat from his eyes. He looked around to make sure that his captors really had gone and only then, when he had done so, did he begin to shake and felt tears pouring down his cheeks. It was some minutes before he had enough of a grip on himself to drive the last few metres to his home.

CHAPTER 9

‘So, tell me, what is San Pedro?’ Harper said as Ricardo drove them away.

‘It’s a prison,’ Lupa said. ‘In Spanish it’s called El Penal de San Pedro, and it is the most notorious prison in South America.’

‘Bloody hell, so he’s in jail,’ Harper said, ‘which means I’m probably going to have to go in there to get him out. And I’ve heard of plenty of people breaking out of prison, but having to break into one? That’s going beyond weird.’

‘You won’t need to do that,’ Lupa said. ‘It’s not just a jail, it’s also a tourist attraction. They even run tours of San Pedro.’

Harper gave her an incredulous look. ‘You’re kidding me, aren’t you? Bloody hell, now I truly have heard everything.’

‘At one time the tours were official,’ she said. ‘And a few years back, visiting the prison used to be one of the most popular tourist attractions in La Paz - sixty or seventy people were going in every day on organised tours, with guides who’d been prisoners themselves to show them around and serving, long-term prisoners acting as security to make sure nothing bad happened to them while they were in there. For an extra payment, the tourists could even stay overnight, if they wanted to find out what it was like to spend a night there. They had some great travellers’ tales to entertain their friends when they went home and the guards got a bribe from everyone doing one of the tours, so everybody was happy.’

‘I can understand why people might be curious enough to see what it was really like on the inside of a prison,’ Harper said. ‘But why the hell would anyone want to stay the night?’

Lupa flashed him an amused look. ‘For the cocaine, of course. The best and purest you can get in South America is made in San Pedro. Western tourists stumbling out of the prison every morning, high as kites, weren’t the best advertisement for Bolivia, but the authorities turned a blind eye to the tours until two men were stabbed and a woman tourist was raped in San Pedro. The other inmates dealt with the perpetrator - he was beaten and then drowned- but because the victims were Yanquis it became a huge international incident and the bad publicity forced the government to intervene. They banned the official tours, but unofficial ones still go on. You just pay a guide to take you in and a bribe to the guards to allow it and that’s it - you’re in - though prices have gone up and there are still some risks.’

‘A little while ago two young American tourists went on a tour with a so-called guide who then did a runner,’ Ricardo said. ‘When they found their way back to the gates, the guards claimed they were prisoners trying to escape and they had to pay a thousand bucks each to get out. So anyone can walk in, but getting out can be more complicated. So if you want to see the prison and find out if your friend Scouse is there, taking a tour would definitely be an easier way than trying to break in. And if you want to know anything before then, you can ask me - when I was imprisoned for credit card fraud in La Paz, that’s where I was jailed.’

‘Are there many gringos in La Paz?’ Harper asked.

‘There were none when I was there. So if your friend is among them, don’t worry, we’ll find him.’

CHAPTER 10

Before they set off for the prison the next morning, Harper held a briefing session over coffee and empanadas at a street café they had used the previous day. ‘The first thing I need to do is walk round the place,’ he said. ‘So I can get a good look at it and check for any potential weak spots or dangers. Then, if you’re absolutely sure we can get in, Ricardo, let’s take a tour of the inside too, because until we know where Scouse is being held and how he’s being guarded, we can’t work out a plan of how to get him out of there.’ He paused. ‘I do have one worry, though. Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that any Westerner is seen as a potential kidnap and ransom target. So I don’t understand why someone would be holding a man who came into the country with $50,000 in a flight case without trying to raise at least the same amount by ransoming him. It doesn’t make sense to me, unless they have another plan for him, and I’m at a loss to think what that could be.’

When they’d finished their coffees, Ricardo led the way through the centre of La Paz towards San Pedro. They crossed the busy Avenida América and soon afterwards Ricardo turned down a narrow alley. The sign hanging on the wall at the entrance read Calle Melchor Jimenez. The alley was lined with shops, many selling brilliantly coloured rugs, blankets and traditional clothes. ‘This place is known as Mercado de las Brujas - the Witches’ Market,’ Lupa said.

‘Why’s it called that?’ Harper said, but then had his answer as, past the clothes and fabric shops, they came to smaller shops and stalls, selling small figurines of Inca-like figures, plants and herbs, dried frogs, snakes and starfish, bird skulls, owl feathers, armadillo skins and a myriad other objects. All were run by women, sitting cross-legged in the dust at the side of the street, and all were wearing the traditional black bowler hats and had pouches of coca leaves at their waists.

‘We call those women the yatiri,’ Lupa said. ‘You’d probably call them shamans or witches. They make potions and spells that are used in traditional Aymara rituals. You can buy charms to bring you health and wealth, love potions, aphrodisiacs and even poisons too. Tourists buy them - apart from the poisons - as souvenirs and curiosities, but to Aymara people these things have real power.’

‘And what the hell are those?’ Harper said, pointing to some, withered looking, mummified animals hanging on one stall. They had white fur and long, spindly legs, but were so strange looking they appeared to be more like puppets than actual animals.

‘They’re llama foetuses,’ Lupa said.

‘Bloody hell, what do people do with them? They don’t eat them, surely?’

‘No, they bury them under the foundations of buildings.’

‘You’re kidding me? Why would they do that?’

‘It’s no joke. Belief in the old ways is still very strong. You’ll even see yatiri women waiting outside the cathedral and the churches on Sundays, selling potions and rituals to people as they emerge from church.’

‘So their customers are hedging their bets?’ Harper said. ‘A Mass for the Christian god, and a ritual for the old faith too, so whichever one ultimately proves to be the one true religion, they’ve already paid their dues.’

She shrugged. ‘People here are highly superstitious and the Aymara believe that there are many spirits inhabiting our world, whose favour can be won by making offerings. There are spirits of the sun - Inti - the mountains - Apus - the trees, the waters, and many more, but the most powerful of them all is Pachamama, the earth mother. You’ll have seen people here shaking out the last bit of their coffee onto the ground in front of their feet? They’re not getting rid of the dregs, they’re sharing their drink with Pachamama, giving her an offering. Her blessing must be sought for any disturbance of the ground, like mining, digging or building, by making an offering to her. So if you’re building a new house, you make a gift to placate Pachamama and bless the site where it is going to be built, by burying a llama foetus in its foundations. That is enough of an offering for a house but if you’re building something larger, you need a bigger offering, like a whole llama carcass. And for even larger buildings - mansions, apartment blocks, factories, or skyscrapers offices - even a whole adult llama carcass may not be seen as a sufficient offering. If any sort of animal sacrifice isn’t considered enough, there is another option, because there are always rumours here of people being sacrificed instead - a salute to our Inca roots.’

‘Do me a favour,’ Harper said. ‘The Incas checked out about 500 years ago.’

‘I’m deadly serious,’ Lupa said. ‘Human sacrifices are illegal of course … but there are still stories about well-dressed men being spotted searching the worst parts of La Paz for potential victims, who they invite to a party from which they never return. They are rumoured to be plied with drugs, alcohol and hookers until they pass out, at which point they are taken to a building site and entombed in concrete at its base as an offering to Pachamama. Obviously some people believe it’s just folklore but, trust me, it does happen, and like in any big city, there are thousands of homeless people, drug addicts and alcoholics across La Paz whose absence would barely be noticed by anyone, let alone reported.’

They moved on, but as they passed the copper sign above the entrance to the Museo de la Coca Harper again had to shake his head in disbelief. ‘Only in Bolivia - and possibly Colombia - would they have a museum dedicated to cocaine.’

‘It’s dedicated to the coca plant, not just to cocaine,’ Lupa said. ‘Indigenous people here had been chewing coca leaves to suppress hunger, thirst, pain and fatigue for at least eight thousand years before anyone thought to turn them into cocaine. And it was not just South Americans who used it; when CocaCola was first made, the recipe actually included coca leaf extract, hence the name.’

They walked for another half mile, passing a sea of dust and rubble which a hoarding proclaimed to be the site of La Paz’s newest and finest five star hotel and conference centre, though all that could now be seen were a couple of bulldozers. Eventually they came to a tree-lined square, in the heart of downtown, with manicured flowerbeds dominated by a towering statue of Bolivia’s first president, Simón Bolívar. On the far side of the square was a building that stretched the full width of it. The only breaks in its walls were the arched entrance and a double row of similarly shaped windows to either side, thickly barred with iron. Flanking them, the rendered stone walls were featureless but for small rectangular windows like firing slits, set high up in the walls.

‘There you are,’ Ricardo said. ‘La Paz’s premier tourist attraction: El Peñal de San Pedro - the San Pedro prison.’

As they walked towards it, Harper could see that the arched entrance opened onto a passage that was perhaps five metres long. It was guarded at the street end by massive arched wooden doors that now stood open. At the other end of the passage, iron gates that exactly filled the arch barred the way to the interior of the prison. Beyond them, a crowd of prisoners stood staring out, either hoping to catch sight of a visitor or just because they had nothing better to do.

Harper paused to watch the crowd of would-be visitors trying to negotiate with the guards in olive drab uniforms who were lounging, half-hidden, in the gloom of the entrance. Then he followed Ricardo and Lupa along the street and right around the perimeter of the prison. Brick guard towers rose above each of the two front corners of the sprawling building, manned by guards with what looked to be well-used .30 carbines slung over their shoulders. They were facing inwards across the patchwork of rusting, corrugated iron roofs where a couple of prisoners could be seen spreading out bedding to dry in the sun and the cold wind. The roofs were punctuated by open spaces - the courtyards that divided the prison into separate sections.

San Pedro’s other walls were much less well maintained than the facade facing the square. Rising sheer, three storeys above the street, they were crudely rough-cast with lime mortar or adobe that had peeled away in places, revealing the stone underneath. A series of small holes, a few centimetres in diameter and about four metres above the pavement, had been knocked into the walls here and there, but whether they went right through to the interior and what purpose they served wasn’t clear. ‘Ventilation?’ Harper said, but Ricardo merely shrugged his shoulders. The pavement at the foot of the walls also seemed to serve as a dumping ground for builders’ rubble and other fly-tipped rubbish, and the three of them had to step into the road a few times to get round them. ‘The walls look climbable with the right kit,’ Harper said, ‘but the fifteen metre drop to the ground means you’d need ropes to escape that way; if you jumped, you’d shatter your legs when you hit the pavement.’

A telegraph pole at the first street corner was festooned with a forest of wires and cables, some so slack or crudely attached that they must have been put up without the knowledge of the electricity company. On the next corner, where the pavement widened for a short way, a row of low, wood and corrugated iron stalls had been erected against the wall. Only one was in use when they passed, where a toothless old woman sat cross-legged on the ground next to it, selling cigarettes, sweets, fruit and the inevitable coca leaves to passers-by.

At the back of the prison, they reached a part where the walls had collapsed. Until repairs could be completed - and the vegetation sprouting from the mound suggested it was not a high priority for the authorities - the gap had been temporarily sealed by a head-high wall topped by a barbed wire fence with a triple strand canted in towards the interior of the prison. ‘This happened while I was here,’ Ricardo said. ‘As you can see, the walls are not well-maintained anyway, but they’re very thick - a bit like the gang who tried to free some of their members by blowing a hole in the wall. They weren’t the smartest gang ever because they didn’t pack the explosives they used with anything to shield them, so when they detonated the bomb, it killed two of the gang members on the outside. Part of the wall did collapse, but the weight of stone, mortar and render falling from the floors above it, left this mound of rubble. It was so big that the gang members waiting on the inside couldn’t climb over it before the guards came running down the street and fired a few warning shots to persuade them to stay where they were.’ He shrugged. ‘It would have been much simpler and probably cheaper just to have bribed the guards to let them out.’

‘Has anyone ever broken out?’ Harper said.

‘A group of sixteen prisoners did once dig a tunnel from a cell near the outside wall. They got out, but the authorities then filled the tunnel and the whole cell with concrete, so no one else would ever get out that way. That’s the only escape I’ve heard of.’

‘So that completes that part of the tour,’ Harper said as they came back round into the square in front of the prison. ‘Now, how do we get to see the inside?’

‘We could join one of the semi-official tours,’ Ricardo said. ‘I’ve heard that if you look like a tourist, you just have to wait around in San Pedro Square and within a few minutes, someone will approach you and ask you if you want to see the prison.’

‘Then let’s put that theory to the test shall we?’

They sat on a bench but after a few minutes, despite the sunlight, the chill of the Altiplano was enough to make Harper get to his feet and pace around. ‘You sure this is going to…’ he started to say but then broke off as he saw a Latino with slicked down hair and an ingratiating smile approaching him. ‘Buenos dias, señor,’ the man said. ‘Hello, how are you? My name is Pedro - like the square.’ He gave another insincere smile. ‘You want to make the tour, yes?’

‘Of the prison? Yes.’

‘Normally it is 400 Bolivianos each, but I can give you a special price of 200. We go to the police station and pay them 100 and they give us a permit to enter San Pedro.’

‘And the other 100?’

‘My fee.’

Harper shrugged. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

‘Bueno. Give me the money for the police and I’ll arrange it at once.’

‘Of course,’ Harper said, pulling three 100 Boliviano bills out of his wallet, but keeping hold of them. ‘But we’ll come with you.’

Pedro’s shit-eating smile faded away. ‘As you please, señor.’

He led them to the nearby police station, paused on the steps and held out his hand for the money. ‘You see - no tricks. I’ll just go and pay the desk sergeant.’ He pointed to a burly, mustachioed figure they could see presiding over the front desk just inside the doors.

‘Fine,’ Harper said, handing him the money. He watched closely as Pedro went up to the desk and exchanged a few words with the sergeant, who then nodded to the two uniformed policemen standing just inside the doors. They immediately stood in the entrance, blocking the way, but over their shoulders Harper caught a glimpse of Pedro disappearing from sight along a corridor. ‘Wait here,’ he said to the others, ‘and grab him if he comes back this way.’

He ran down the steps, sprinted round the corner and along the side to the rear of the building, then stood flat against the wall next to the rear entrance. He had not been there for more than forty or fifty seconds when the rear door flew open and Pedro burst out, still clutching two of the three 100 Boliviano notes in his hand.

In case any of Pedro’s mates in the police station were watching, Harper didn’t waste time on preliminaries. He stuck out a leg, tripping up Pedro as he ran down the steps. As he hit the ground with a thud, Harper booted him in the mouth to stifle any shouts for help, grabbed his wrist and rammed it up between his shoulder blades and then marched him round the corner.

‘Nice try, Pedro, but I’ll be taking care of those now,’ he said, taking the notes that, despite his injuries, Pedro was still holding. Harper then patted him down, took Pedro’s wallet from his pocket and emptied it of cash. ‘Four hundred and twenty Bolivianos,’ he said, with a grin. ‘What do you know? We’ve even made a profit. Now, although you deserve it, because I’ll bet you and your mate at the front desk have conned hundred of tourists this way, I’m not going to break your legs. So you can walk away from here now, but if you shout out or try to go back in the police station to get your friends to help you, then I promise you that I’ll track you down and make sure that you’ll never walk again. Look in my eyes and you’ll see that I mean every word. Entiendes?’

‘Sí, I understand,’ he said, mumbling the words through a mouthful of blood and broken teeth.

‘Good. Vamos!’

Harper kept watching as Pedro hobbled away, and waited until he had disappeared up one of the side-streets before returning to Lupa and Ricardo. ‘Well, I got our money back and a good bit on top,’ he said, as they walked back to the square, ‘but we’re no closer to getting into the prison.’

‘Why don’t I talk to the guards and see how big a bribe we’d have to pay to go around on our own?’ Ricardo said. ‘I spent two years in here so I already know everything about the place.’

Harper nodded. ‘I like that option. You’re probably as good a guide as any, and if we’re not with a group, we’ll have more freedom about where we go.’ He paused. ‘What about Lupa, though? Is it safe for her?’

Lupa answered for him. ‘I’m not some frightened young girl who needs to be protected, Lex. If it’s safe for you and Ricardo, then it’s safe for me too.’

‘But women have been raped here, haven’t they?’

‘So have men, Lex, is that going to scare you off?’ She smiled. ‘Besides, I’ve heard so much about it from Ricardo that I’m not going to miss the chance to see it myself for anything.’

Harper and Lupa waited at the edge of the square as Ricardo pushed his way through the crowd around the prison entrance and began talking to one of the guards. Harper saw him gesture towards them and nod his head in response to whatever the guard said. He carried on negotiating with the guard for a few more minutes, even shaking his head and walking away towards Harper and Lupa at one point, before the guard called him back and made another counter-offer. At last they reached agreement and after shaking hands with the guard, Ricardo beckoned to them. ‘We’re in luck,’ he said. ‘On Mondays and Thursdays only women visitors are allowed and on Wednesdays it’s men only, but since today is Friday, we can all go in. We’ve just got to pay fifty US dollars to the guards for el ingreso - the entrance fee - and another fifty to the chief warden - the Colonel-in-Chief. I could probably have got us in for less, but once they knew you were a gringo, the price went up.’

‘It’s still a bargain,’ Harper said. ‘So when can we go in?’

‘As soon as we pay the money.’

Harper pulled out a wad of notes and peeled off a few. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘No time like the present.’

They filed through the crowd outside the gates, earning themselves a few hostile looks and muttered comments from those still waiting for the guards to let them in. Among them were a group of prostitutes who eyed Harper and Ricardo with calculated interest and stared at Lupa with ill-concealed hatred. They stepped aside to let them through, and then resumed negotiations with the prisoners pressing against the inside gates. They had already been shouting themselves hoarse, calling to relatives, would-be visitors and the waiting prostitutes, or just begging for money, and they now redoubled their shouts as they saw tourists approaching.

Harper slipped fifty dollars to the guard Ricardo had done the deal with. He held them back while he checked the notes to make sure they weren’t counterfeit, as many were throughout South America, and then opened the inner steel gates and ushered them through. Harper heard them clang shut again behind them. For better or worse, they were now inside the most notorious prison in South America. The watch towers at the corners of the jail were high above them and Harper could see the faces of the guards with their rifles slung over their shoulders as they leaned over to stare down into the courtyard. As he glanced around he saw big CocaCola signs fixed to the walls on either side of the entrance. ‘What the hell?’ he said. ‘They’re advertising to the inmates?’

‘Of course,’ Ricardo said. ‘Embol, the main brewery here, has the rights to bottle and sell CocaCola in Bolivia and they made a deal with the prisoners. Rival brands are banned, so no one else is allowed to supply beer or soft drinks to the prison, and in return Embol paid some money to the prison bosses, but also donated stacks of chairs, tables and sun umbrellas to be used by the prisoners. Every section has its own bars and restaurants, so Embol is doing very well out of the deal. So are the guards, because, like everything else, deliveries have to come through the main gates, and they don’t let anything pass without a bribe.’

Harper grinned. ‘From what I’ve seen of the country, everything in Bolivia is absolutely shambolic, with the exception of the corruption which seems to be remarkably efficient!’

The paved yard in front of them was packed with prisoners, just standing and staring, or sitting on stone benches around the brick planters out of which trees and shrubs were growing. Some of them were holding the handles of empty wheelbarrows.

‘What do they use those for?’ Harper said.

‘Those are the porters,’ Ricardo said. ‘Anything you want to bring into the prison, you just bribe the guards and then pay a porter to deliver it to your cell.’

There did not appear to be any prison uniform, because all the inmates Harper could see were wearing their own clothes, mostly jeans and sweatshirts or hoodies in varying states of repair. Some prisoners ignored the new visitors, or gave them hostile stares, but others crowded around Harper, begging for money or offering to sell him souvenirs of the jail or cocaine - ‘the purest and finest in Bolivia, señor.’

The guard waved his nightstick to open a way through the crowd and led them through a doorway and up a rickety flight of steps to a room lit by one of the arched windows they had seen from outside. He had a muttered word with the chief warden, Carlos Fernandez, a morbidly obese man in a uniform stained with sweat patches, with his body bulging out of every seam. He prised himself out of his sagging chair to greet them and trousered the fifty dollars Harper proffered without even glancing at it. ‘My assistant here will complete the formalities,’ he said, pointing to the guard who had brought them in, as he lowered himself back into his chair and went back to watching a Spanish football match on the TV that was fixed to the wall facing his desk.

The guard asked for Harper’s passport and the ID cards of the other two, then laboriously copied the details into a ledger and wrote a number alongside each entry. He then put the passport and the ID cards in a desk drawer and picked up a black marker pen. He mimed pulling up their sleeves and wrote the corresponding numbers on their left forearms. He gave a gap-toothed smile and said something in Spanish to Ricardo. ‘No number, no way out of the prison,’ Lupa said, translating.

‘Yeah, I guessed as much,’ Harper said.

The guard searched each of them in turn, patting them down, getting them to turn out their pockets and even open their mouths so he could check they had nothing concealed in their cheeks. The guard then recited the rules: no film, photography or sound recording and all visitors had to be out of the prison before the 6pm curfew. He took them back down the stairs and left them in the courtyard as he strolled back to the entrance.

‘Are we good to go?’ Harper said.

Ricardo nodded. ‘Just one thing. Being a gringo in here is bad enough but this is definitely not a good place to be mistaken for an American, because they’re all assumed to be spies or narcs from the DEA. So if any of the prisoners say Yanqui? to you, say “No, Inglés!” at once. If they think you might be a cop, an informer or a narcotics agent, someone will try to stab you, so keep alert.’

Harper smiled. ‘Thanks for the warning,’ he said, ‘but alert is my default setting. You look after you and I’ll look after me.’

CHAPTER 11

Ricardo led the way across the main courtyard of San Pedro and as he did so, Harper noticed a couple of prisoners wearing red jackets with TAXI written on the back. ‘Taxi?’ he said. ‘What the hell is that about?’

‘They’re guys who carry messages for wealthier prisoners or search for people if visitors arrive unexpectedly. They charge one Bolviano - about twelve cents at the official rate - for each message they carry. So they don’t earn much but it’s enough to buy food.’

He led them into a passage on the far side of the courtyard. ‘This is the callejón - the alley as you would say - the main gateway from the entrance to all the other sections of the prison.’ The broad passageway was lined with stalls selling fruit, vegetables, used clothes, newspapers and DVDs, and there was also a more permanent food shop and a café/restaurant.

‘You won’t find this in any British prisons,’ Harper said, shaking his head in disbelief.

Ricardo smiled. ‘There are a lot of things here that you won’t find in any other prison, not just in Britain but anywhere else in the world. At night the doors at either end of the Callejón are closed and it becomes a place to sleep for those who don’t have a section - either from choice or because they’ve been expelled from their section by the other inmates, or most likely, simply because they don’t have enough money to buy or rent a space in a cell, or even pay the entrance fee to a section.’

He led them into the first of the prison’s sections, radiating from the central courtyard like the spokes of a wheel, each one separated from its neighbour by one or more courtyards. Harper noticed at once that there were no bars on the windows of the cells and some did not even have a lock on the doors. ‘No locks? No bars?’ he said. ‘Not very secure is it?’

Ricardo laughed. ‘Prisons here are nicknamed depósitos - and, just like a depósitobancaro - a bank deposit - or a depósitos agua - a water tank - the guards’ only interest is in making sure that nothing escapes from it. So San Pedro is run by the prisoners, not the guards. There are only about a dozen guards and they just control the entrance and virtually never come into the rest of the prison. Nor do the police, not even to investigate murders. The prisoners have their own security force called the Disciplina - no one serving less than a thirty year sentence is allowed to join them - and they keep discipline and punish offenders, usually by stabbing them.’

‘I can think of some right wing politicians in the UK who would wholeheartedly approve,’ Harper said with a grin. ‘So the guards don’t interact with the prisoners?’

‘There is one area the guards control, at least in part,’ Ricardo said. ‘La Muralla - The Wall - the punishment block. Prisoners who are sent there either by the Disciplina or by the guards, are very badly treated. I know the chief warden, Fernandez, because he was in charge when I was here, and though I was never in the punishment block myself, I heard the tales about it and saw the state of some of the people who had been in there. Fernandez is often down there himself, because he is a sadist who delights in torturing helpless prisoners. San Pedro is like a city within the city. It was built in the 1890s and only intended to house five hundred people but about three thousand live here now, including every sort of criminal from petty thieves to drug lords and corrupt politicians. There’s a hotel for official visitors, a hospital, workshops, factories and churches - the Catholic one has a beautiful statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, known as La Morenita - the Brown Lady. There are markets, shops, bars, restaurants, pool halls, gyms, a football pitch, a swimming pool, and there are different barrios - districts - just like the city outside the walls. When you’re sentenced to do time in San Pedro, you have to pay an entrance fee to the prison based on your known or estimated wealth. So a petty crook might only pay fifty Bolivianos, whereas a corrupt politician or drug lord will have to pay thousands. You then have to buy a cell or a share of a cell in one of the sections. The prices vary, maybe as little as ten dollars to be one of five or six men sharing a single cell in the worst sections, but as much as two thousand dollars in the most affluent ones. You buy your cell from the President of the prison or from a real estate agent - no really,’ he said as he saw Harper’s sceptical expression. ‘You’re even given a legal document to show your ownership, witnessed by prison officials.’

‘What if you don’t have any money?’ Harper said, looking at a group of ragged prisoners sitting, head in hands, at the edge of the yard.

‘You work to earn enough to pay for a share in a cell, or if you can’t afford a cell, you sleep on the ground, in the open or on the stone floor of a passage like this one. A lot of the people are addicts or alcoholics who are often beyond help or hope. Others - sometimes whole families - try to build little shelters under the stairs or hide a few belongings in the cells of their friends, or in the roof-spaces of the buildings, but other prisoners will steal them if they find them, so if all you’ve got is a blanket, you would never lose sight of it, even for an instant. So, there is no guaranteed accommodation here and there are no prison uniforms; if you arrive in rags or even naked, that’s how you’ll stay. If you don’t have money, you don’t always eat either, because apart from the rice ration the government is supposed to provide for all prisoners - and in my experience, you often didn’t get it anyway - nothing is provided free. In any case, you would only eat the rice if you had no other food, because it’s widely believed that the guards mix some kind of tranquilliser into it to keep the prisoners docile. On the few occasions I ate the rice I felt drowsy afterwards and no one knows what drug they’re using or what its long term effects might be, so we avoided it whenever we could. It’s also often contaminated - I’ve even seen rat droppings in it. The kitchen where it’s prepared is in the Palmar section and it’s used as a punishment block for those sex offenders who haven’t been killed, and for prisoners who have cheated other inmates on drug deals or gambling debts. They are forced to work in the kitchen and live there too, sleeping under the tables on which they prepare the food, and the man who runs it - a lifer - is notorious as the most brutal and sadistic prisoner in the entire jail.’

‘And no one in Government sees anything wrong with this?’ asked Harper.

‘It suits the government to turn a blind eye to everything that goes on here, because this way the prison is very cheap to run,’ said Ricardo. ‘The guards are very badly paid and the chief warden steals their wages anyway - so they rely on bribes and kick-backs to survive. You often even have to bribe guards just to be sure of being put on trial - when I was in here, there were men who had been on remand for eight years, even though the legal maximum is supposed to be two. So you have to pay to get a trial, you pay again to get a lawyer and then - if you can afford it - you pay even more to bribe the judge to let you go. If you can’t, you just stay here and rot. Once you’ve been convicted, there is no parole system, so you serve your full sentence whatever happens.’

‘So there’s not much interest in rehabilitation then?’ Harper said.

Ricardo shook his head. ‘There’s none at all. And even if you’re innocent when you come in here, you’ll be guilty of plenty by the time you leave. So anyway, there are eight sections in the prison, each with their own courtyards, shops, bars and cafés, and it’s a democracy of sorts in here because each section elects someone to represent them on the Council of Delegates, who run the place. They set the tax all the prisoners have to pay to cover the cost of maintenance, roof repairs, repainting of the walls, and social events like the annual Día de los Prisioneros - Prisoners’ Day - on the 24th of September. It’s a day-long fiesta with bands, barbecues, drinks and, of course, coca, and all the cafés cook Sajta de Pollo.’

‘That’s the signature dish of La Paz,’ Lupa added, ‘a chicken stew with a mountain of chillies, pepper and cumin.’ She gave Harper a sly look. ‘It’s probably too hot and spicy for a Brit like you.’

Harper grinned. ‘Listen Lupa, I’ve been eating fiery hot Thai street food for years so a chicken stew with a few Bolivian chillies in it is not going to be a problem.’

She smiled back. ‘Challenge accepted, Lex. It’s going to be our meal when we get out of here this evening, with a few Anticuchos - those pieces of beef heart on skewers - with a dipping sauce of tomatoes and Locotos - crazy hot peppers - as an appetiser.’

‘Bring it on!’ Harper said.

‘Anyway,’ Ricardo said, ‘most men here can’t afford to eat Sajta de Pollo or Anticuchos, except maybe on Prisoners’ Day. The rest of the time they have to make do with rice and beans. They also have to do unpaid maintenance work on their section when it’s needed, like fixing the holes in the roof. The President of the Council of Delegates raises complaints about prison conditions with the Chief Warden and the Governor - not that it ever seemed to have much effect when I was here. And as well as the section delegates, national political candidates also often come here canvassing for votes.’

‘Prisoners can vote in elections here?’ Harper said.

‘Of course, do they not in your country? You often see candidates in here, invariably promising prison reform, lower penalties for drug offences or even abolition of the gringo drug laws. Since eighty per cent of the inmates are in here on drug charges, as you can imagine those pledges always go down well, though nothing ever seems to happen once the politicians have been elected. In theory prisoners are allocated to a section depending on what day of the week they arrive, but in fact it’s not so straightforward and they can buy their way into a different section … if they have the money. La Posta is for the rich and famous. The cells have fitted carpets, large screen TVs, balconies, en suite bathrooms and even hot tubs - if you have the money, you can buy absolutely anything here. But you not only need a lot of money to buy a cell in La Posta, you also have to be approved by the people already living there.’

Harper laughed. ‘Sounds more like a private club than a prison.’

‘That’s not far from the truth. Colombia’s Vice President once did time in La Posta for cocaine trafficking and the former President of Bolivia’s biggest bank is still an inmate.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He defrauded thousands of investors and robbed many more of their pensions. Rich inmates like the banker and the cocaine kings own all the businesses here. They provide the money to set them up and take most of the profits in return. And as well as the bars, cafés, barbers and shops, there are small factories making toys, clothes and souvenirs for tourists, a forge that turns scrap metal into pots and pans, and a cocaine lab that not only supplies the junkies inside the prison but La Paz and beyond as well. Most people here take coca paste - it’s green coloured and the last stage of the process before it’s refined into pure cocaine. They smoke it using pipes made from the silver paper inside cigarette packets, or you can snort powder cocaine if you can afford it. You can buy any drug you want here, from marijuana to crack and methamphetamine and the prices are so cheap that San Pedro supplies the whole city as well as the prison. Dealing is so common, it’s just called negocios - business - and in fact, just like everybody tells you, cocaine from San Pedro really is the best you can buy. Try some if you want, everyone sells it.’

‘No thanks,’ Harper said, ‘I’ll take your word for it. Anyway, it doesn’t sound like La Posta would be the place to look for Scouse. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have the money and he certainly doesn’t have the social airs and graces. What about the other sections?’

‘We can try them all until we find him,’ said Ricardo. ‘Pinos and Alamos are the next most affluent. Like La Posta, they bar any visitors after dark - the time when most beatings and stabbings happen. The other sections are San Martin, Prefectura, Palmar, Guanay and Cancha. As you go down the scale, the cells become smaller and have more occupants - it’s not unusual to find six, seven or even eight men sharing a cell meant for one person. The last two sections, Guanay and Cancha, are definitely the worst. If you’ve no money and no protection, that’s where you’ll end up.’

They passed through Pinos - named for the old pine tree that grew in a small courtyard. It was lavishly equipped with two bars, two restaurants, a small soccer pitch, a billiard room and a copy shop with a geriatric looking printer and photocopier. Next was the Alamos section but neither there nor in Pinos was there any sign of Scouse. Ricardo asked some of the men they saw if they knew anything about a gringo prisoner, but all shook their heads.

The remaining five sections housed the poorer prisoners. They were connected by a warren of passages, tunnels, yards and stairways which made it hard to tell where one section ended and another began. There were lights at intervals along the passageways but most were smashed or the bulbs were missing, making each one dark and forbidding-looking. As they came out of a passage into the next courtyard, Harper stopped and stared in disbelief at a group of small children playing in the dirt at the centre of the yard. ‘There are children in here too?’

‘Sure, when a man is sent to San Pedro, his family often come and live with him,’ said Lupa. ‘They’re safer in here than out on the streets and if he was the only breadwinner, they may have no other option. They’re free to come and go; there are two nurseries inside the walls but children often go out to schools in the surrounding area in the morning and come back to the prison to sleep, while their mothers bring food and other goods in and often run the market stalls here. Some children are even born in here and live the whole of their childhood inside the prison.’

‘But there must be all sorts of lowlifes here - murderers, rapists, paedophiles - how can prisoners keep their kids safe?’

Ricardo shrugged. ‘In other jails sex offenders are kept in separate wings and protected by the authorities. There is no protection for them here, so paedophiles sent to San Pedro just don’t survive, because as soon as they arrive, they’re given justicia communitaria - community justice.’

‘Meaning?’

Ricardo grinned. ‘They’re stabbed or sometimes drowned in la piscina.’

‘La piscina? There’s a swimming pool?’

‘It’s called that but it’s really just a small plunge pool, and believe me, you really wouldn’t want to swim in it, though some of the children do. There are a few other sex criminals here. They’re not well-treated as it is, but they know that if they attacked one of the children or a prisoner’s wife or girlfriend, they’d be dead by nightfall.’

A sign on the wall announced that they were now in the San Martin section. A statue of the saint stood in the centre of the yard, with carefully tended flowers growing from its plinth. Washing was strung on lines across the yard, and draped over the wooden balcony at first floor levels. The blue plaster on the courtyard walls looked newly painted and there were neat tables and chairs outside the bar and cantina in one corner. A few prisoners sat on benches against the walls or leafed through the second-hand clothing on a market stall run by an Aymara woman. Behind the statue of the saint was a circular opening a couple of metres across, filled with water. ‘Is that the pool you mentioned?’ Harper said.

Ricardo nodded. ‘It’s also the well that provides the water for the prison.’

A queue of men was waiting to use a payphone fixed to the wall and presided over by a heavy-set prisoner who was extracting a fee of a few Bolivianos from each user, in addition to the coins they had to put in the slot. ‘Presumably mobile phones are banned?’ Harper said.

Ricardo laughed. ‘They are, but prisoners who can afford the bribes all have one - you can’t traffic cocaine if you don’t have a mobile phone.’

There was again no sign of Scouse in the yard or in the cells opening off the passageways through the section, and they moved on, exploring two more sections without result. In each courtyard there was a café and one or more shops, and at least one room where prisoners were shooting pool or playing cards or chess. There were also a couple of weight rooms where massive guys were adding even more muscle, pumping iron with a variety of improvised weights.

The cells surrounding the yards contained not only bedding and personal possessions but also an astonishing range of cottage industries: wood- and metal-workers, men making toys, kites, ceramics, figurines, paper flowers and tourist souvenirs including scale models of San Pedro, and artists painting sketches of prison life. There was a bakery, a shoeshine stand, a laundry and even a hardware store. As Harper peered into it, he burst out laughing. ‘They sell hacksaws? This must be the only prison in the world that sells prisoners the tools they need to escape!’

In one cell three prisoners were hunched over new-looking Singer sewing machines making clothes. Ricardo smiled and waved to one of them. ‘He’s the boss of the workshop,’ he said. ‘He’s learned to be a tailor while he’s been in here and he makes fine suits for some of La Paz’s politicians and wealthy men.’

‘Arranging fittings must be tricky,’ Harper said with a grin.

‘Not at all. He makes the clothes in here, but for a bribe, the guards let him out on day release. He advertises for clients, rents a hotel room for the day to measure his new customers and do fittings for existing ones, and then comes back to San Pedro before curfew.’

‘I thought I was past being surprised by what goes on in here,’ Harper said, ‘but it turns out I was wrong.’

In another cell, Harper glimpsed the primitive apparatus used to convert coca paste into cocaine, before the door was hastily slammed shut by one of the two burly prisoners guarding the cell. He fixed Harper, Ricardo and Lupa with a baleful stare as they walked past. The other one wolf-whistled and called out ‘Que bella! Cuánto cuesta, hermosa?’ to Lupa, but she whipped round and gave him a fierce glare and a torrent of Spanish insults that silenced him at once.

In the yard just in front of a ground floor cell in the next section, there was the fierce red glow of a fire burning in a small forge. One prisoner was forcing air into the fire through a pair of bellows, made from what must have once been a leather coat, because a row of sewn-up buttonholes was still visible in it. The asthmatic wheeze of the bellows was punctuated by the clang of iron on iron, as a second prisoner, his face cast into deep shadows by the glow of the fire burning in front of him, pounded a strip of red-hot metal with a heavy hammer.

‘They can make anything here,’ Ricardo said, ‘tools, cutlery, pots and pans.’

‘Weapons too?’ Harper said.

‘Officially no.’

‘And unofficially?’

Ricardo gave a theatrical shrug. ‘Like I said, they can make anything.’

Harper stepped closer, smiling and nodding as he studied the fuel the blacksmith was using. ‘Charcoal,’ he said. ‘That could be handy. Where do they get it from?’

‘Like everything else here,’ Ricardo said, ‘someone must bring it in for them through the front gates.’

Next door to the forge was an open-fronted cell where two prisoners were up to their elbows in icy water in two stone sinks, washing some bedding and clothing, using a bar of coarse soap. Their hands and arms looked red raw. ‘It’s tough work,’ Ricardo said, following Harper’s gaze, ‘but if you’ve no money and no other work, you can make a few pesos doing other prisoners’ cleaning and washing for them.’

On the wall above the sinks, a painted sign set out the house rules and Lupa translated them for Harper. ‘It is forbidden to steal another inmate’s property; extort or assault another inmate; do physical damage with knives or other sharp objects; or incite others to commit acts of violence. Sanctions are expulsion from the section and being reported to the Council of Delegates and the Governor.’

‘That doesn’t sound like much of a sanction,’ Harper said.

Ricardo shrugged. ‘Don’t be too sure about that. The Delegates appoint the Disciplina - the internal security - and nobody wants to tangle with them. At the least you’ll get a bad beating, but they can also take you to the isolation cells where not only they, but also the prison guards, can use you as a punch-bag. Even worse, they can get you transferred to Chonchocoro - the maximum security prison, and believe me, you wouldn’t ever want to go there.’ He glanced around. ‘See those two guys over there?’ He nodded towards two powerful looking prisoners wearing black tracksuits emblazoned with a logo of a lion and unicorn supporting a heraldic letter “V” with “VICTORINOS” inscribed beneath it. ‘The Disciplina all wear that uniform,’ Ricardo said. ‘There are about thirty of them altogether and if you fight with one of them, you have to fight them all.’

‘What does Victorinos mean anyway?’ Harper asked

‘Winners.’

‘Winners who’ll spend most of their lives in jail - not much of a victory is it?’

‘Just don’t let them hear you say that,’ Ricardo said.

CHAPTER 12

As they walked through the passage from the previous section and came out into the next open courtyard, they found themselves at the edge of a cramped football pitch complete with nets and white line markings. A game was in full flow, with both teams wearing what looked like brand new strips and boots. A painted sign, covering the wall behind the goal, read ‘Bienvenidos a Cancha’. The wooden gallery running round the walls at first floor level was packed with prisoners watching the match below, some leaning on the rail, others sitting with their legs dangling between the uprights. From the brutality of the tackling, and the shouts and curses of the spectators, this was a grudge match. ‘It’s just like professional football,’ Ricardo said. ‘The section bosses own the teams and even pay transfer fees for players switching to their section.’ A goal was scored as Harper stood watching and he could see money immediately changing hands among the spectators. ‘They bet fortunes on these matches,’ Ricardo said, following his gaze. ‘Not just on the result but on the times goals are scored and the players who score them. Men who lose big sometimes extract pay-back from the players - and I don’t mean money. One of the Guanay players missed an open goal against Cancha when I was in here and the boss of his section had him stabbed. The Palmar goalkeeper didn’t wait for his punishment after he let a weak shot go through his legs; he hung himself from the balcony surrounding the courtyard that night.’

The bars at the edge of the yard were doing a roaring trade and many of the football spectators were drunk. Empty aluminium cans, bright purple and branded with the name Caiman littered the ground.

‘What’s Caiman?’ Harper said.

‘Almost pure alcohol. Ninety-six per cent.’

‘Bloody hell - if you drank that you’d go blind, if it didn’t kill you first.’

‘They don’t drink it neat, the bars dilute it with water or juice, or they add a shot to a beer to boost the alcohol content.’

‘It would do that all right,’ Harper said

A prisoner was shuffling round, picking up the empty cans and stuffing them into a sack.

‘Recycling too?’

‘Nothing’s wasted here,’ Ricardo said. ‘The metalworkers make toys out of the empty cans.’

Harper thought for a moment. ‘I imagine the cells aren’t fitted with en suite facilities, so where are the latrines? I don’t need a piss or anything, I just want to take a look at them.’

Ricardo gave him a puzzled look. ‘There are no proper drains here,’ he said. ‘So everyone just shits into a trench which the poorest prisoners have to dig out and load into the shit cart that calls once a month.’

‘And the urinals, what are they like?’

‘Some are concrete troughs, and some are just earth closets.’

‘Show me.’

Ricardo raised an eyebrow but when no explanation was offered, he just shrugged and led Harper across the yard to a small, adobe-walled enclosure built in the angle of the prison walls. It was open to the skies but still stank of stale urine.

‘Perfect,’ Harper said, smiling despite the stench.

As they left the courtyard for the gloom of another passageway, three figures stepped out of the shadows and blocked their way. Two of them were built like weightlifters and wore the black uniform of members of the Disciplina, but the other was dressed more like a New Jersey pimp than a prisoner, in a purple suit with a silk Versace shirt, a bootlace tie and a pair of sunglasses with the Versace crest on them. He was in his forties and more than a little overweight, with fleshy features and black, thinning hair.

‘That’s the boss of the prison,’ Ricardo murmured to him. ‘Don Lorenzo. Not a man to cross.’

‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Harper said.

The man walked over to them smiling broadly to reveal several gold teeth. ‘Welcome señor,’ Don Lorenzo said. ‘I heard there was a stranger in our midst, so I decided to come and see for myself. What do you think of San Pedro?’

‘It’s quite a place,’ Harper said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it.’

Don Lorenzo smiled. ‘You won’t have, it is unique. Here anything is possible. You can live well and get anything you want, drugs, women, caviar and champagne, I even have a sauna, a hot tub and a masseuse. And you know the best thing of all? No one can arrest me or deport me and I can’t be guilty of any crimes because I’m already in jail. However, one can tire of the same people and the same conversation, so a new face is always welcome. Won’t you join me for a drink, señor, or perhaps a little coca?’

Harper thought fast. ‘That’s very generous of you, Don Lorenzo, but I’m here to visit an old friend. Could I take you up on your kind offer a little later, after I’ve seen him?’

The prison boss’s smile remained in place but his eyes, glimpsed though his sunglasses, were hard and predatory. ‘People do not usually turn down my hospitality señor, but as you please.’ He paused. ‘But tell me, who is this prisoner you are visiting? Perhaps I know him and can help you find him.’

Harper felt a warning pressure as Lupa placed her hand on his arm. ‘It’s all right,’ he said out of the side of his mouth. ‘I can handle this.’

‘He is another Englishman like me,’ Harper said to Don Lorenzo. ‘A man of about my age and build, called Scouse Davies. Do you know him by any chance?’

Don Lorenzo’s smile snapped off. ‘I know no one of that name, señor, and believe me, I know everyone in this jail. Nothing happens here without my being aware of it, so I can assure you that there are no Inglés in San Pedro. Bolivians, Colombians, Peruvians, of course, and sometimes we have even had a Yanqui in here, but an Inglés - never.’

‘Then I must have been misinformed,’ Harper said, giving him a friendly smile. ‘But you’ll understand if I make sure of that before leaving.’

Don Lorenzo hesitated then inclined his head. ‘As you wish, but allow me to send one of my bodyguards with you for protection. This is no place for strangers to be wandering unprotected, least of all when one of them is such a beautiful young woman.’ He flashed Lupa a smile.

‘That’s very generous of you,’ Harper said, ‘but she is perfectly capable of protecting herself and if she needs any extra help, myself and my friend here are all she’ll need.’

‘Nonetheless I must insist. I would never forgive myself if anything should happen to you while within these walls.’ He gave a chilling smile. ‘So Mateo will look after you.’ He turned to murmur something to one of his bodyguards, then bowed. ‘I hope we will meet later. Ask anyone and they will show you to my cell.’ He and the other bodyguard disappeared into one of the passages, leaving Harper, Lupa and Ricardo under the brooding gaze of Mateo.

‘Do you speak English, Mateo?’ Harper said.

The bodyguard did not respond.

‘Hablas Español?’

Mateo gave a slow nod.

‘Pero hablas Inglés?’ Lupa said.

He hesitated, then shook his head.

‘Do you think he’s telling the truth?’ Harper murmured to the others, studying Mateo’s face as he did so. ‘No matter, let’s speak quickly to make life more difficult for him, but anyway, best to assume he understands more than he lets on and be a little cautious about what we say. So… looks like we’ve got company for the rest of our tour but we’ll just have to put up with it and if things turn ugly, I’ll deal with him or whatever else comes our way. So, where now?’

‘One more section,’ Ricardo said, leading them into another passageway, this one so narrow that Harper’s shoulders brushed both walls as he walked through. It was cold and dark, the floor was wet and the walls were filthy and stained with damp. ‘This is the last one,’ Ricardo said, ‘and definitely the worst, the place where those who have no money and no influence have to sleep. People who have to exist here, don’t tend to live that long.’

Harper nodded. ‘I can see why.’He studied the faces of the men sitting against the walls, their faces and hands so filthy that he had to look hard to even establish their race. He scanned each face but once more Scouse was not among them. ‘Have we seen it all now?’ he said. ‘If so, either Flores was lying or Scouse has already been taken somewhere else.’

An old prisoner, grey-haired and dressed in rags, was sluicing the yard with a bucket of water. He looked up, saw Harper and at once dropped his bucket and brush, and hurried over. ‘Cocaine señor?’

‘No thanks,’ Harper said.

‘You sure? We have the best you can buy.’

‘So everyone keeps telling me,’ Harper said, ‘but the answer’s still no.’

‘Maybe you could give him a few Bolivianos anyway, Lex,’ Ricardo said. ‘This is Luis, he’s an old friend from my own time in San Pedro.’

When the old man heard Ricardo’s voice he broke into a broad smile and embraced him. ‘Ricardo? Is that you? I didn’t recognise you. You look so… so different.’

Ricardo laughed. ‘So I should. I’ve washed off all the filth, shaved and had a haircut, changed my clothes and eaten enough proper food to put on a few kilos since the last time you saw me.’

‘For you,’ Harper said, giving the old man a handful of Bolivianos.

‘Muchas gracias, señor,’ Luis said. ‘Eres un caballero - you are a gentleman.’

‘That’s one thing I’m not,’ Harper said, ‘but you’re welcome. What are you in here for anyway?’

‘For dealing coca,’ Luis said. ‘Almost everyone here is in for that.’ He shrugged. ‘You don’t bribe the right policía or someone else pays him more, and they send you here. Once you’re in, it’s hard to get out and this place is heaven and hell all in one. It’s a heaven because everything a man could want is here - alcohol, coca paste, cocaine, marijuana, prostitutes - and every one a lot cheaper than they are out there in the city, but a hell too because you can never stop and you can never leave, or if you do, you soon find yourself back here.’

Ricardo and Luis chatted for a few minutes and then Ricardo said ‘You haven’t seen any new gringo prisoners recently, Luis, have you?’

Luis shot a nervous glance at Mateo, standing impassive next to them.

‘It’s all right,’ Harper said, ‘he doesn’t speak English.’

Luis gave him a doubtful look. ‘Please Luis,’ Ricardo said. ‘If you know something, tell us.’

‘Well, I’ve not seen one myself,’ Luis whispered, ‘but I’ve heard rumours of a gringo being held in the isolation cells.’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows if they are true, there are always rumours.’

‘Is that the only place we haven’t seen?’ Harper said.

Ricardo nodded.

‘Then let’s go.’

Luis had tucked the Bolivianos inside his jacket and with a farewell wave, abandoning his bucket and brush, he headed for one of the bars to celebrate his new-found wealth while Ricardo led the others through another dark passageway into a cramped, enclosed courtyard. It sloped steeply downwards and at the bottom end, carved out of the bedrock beneath one of the prison buildings, was a row of six iron doors, each with a hatch and a tiny grille set into it. The cells were guarded by two scowling and powerfully built convicts.

‘I’m guessing those are two more of Don Lorenzo’s boys,’ Harper said as he studied them. ‘But where are the guards?

Ricardo shrugged. ‘They’re lazy pigs. The cells are locked and unless there’s a prisoner to interrogate or beat up for sport, they’d rather be pocketing bribes at the front gates than scuffing their boots in the dust back here.’

‘So why are Don Lorenzo’s boys here then?’

Lupa chipped in. ‘Presumably because there is something - or someone - here of value to them.’

‘Exactly,’ Harper said, ‘so let’s find out what or who it is.’

The two convicts had been giving them baleful stares and one now pulled an ugly-looking knife out of his waistband and took up a fighting stance with the knife gripped in his right hand.

‘I thought you said weapons were the only things you couldn’t bring into the prison,’ Harper said.

‘You can’t - or not guns anyway. The guards are the only ones with those and make sure it stays that way, but knives… You can either pay the guards a big enough bribe to forget that rule for a few moments or you can get the metalworkers in here to make you one.’

One of the thugs took a step towards them. ‘Qué pasa?’ Before they could reply Mateo intervened, stepping in front of Harper. ‘Mantén la calma, manejaré esto,’ he said to the thugs.

He turned to face Harper and the others and spoke in Spanish, gesturing for them to turn round and go back the way they’d come.

Lupa translated. ‘He says we’re not allowed here, it’s off limits to all outsiders.’

‘Yeah, I’d already got the gist of that,’ Harper said spreading his hands in a show of resignation. ‘Oh well, in that case we’d better go. Vamos.’

Lupa and Ricardo exchanged baffled glances. ‘Are you serious?’ Lupa said. ‘That’s it? You’re just going to leave?’

Harper didn’t reply. He turned away from the cells and took a couple of steps towards the passageway, but then whipped around, brushing past Mateo and yelling at the top of his voice ‘Scouse! It’s me, Lex! If you can hear me, make some noise!’

The second convict had now also drawn a knife and took a few steps towards him but he stopped as Harper’s words were choked off by Mateo’s powerful arm clamping around his neck.

There was a weak cry from one of the cells. ‘Lex? Is that you, mate?’

Mateo’s grip tightened, setting Harper’s heart racing as he struggled for breath, but he threw himself back into him, smashing the back of his head into the bodyguard’s nose, then stamped down viciously on Mateo’s instep. The iron grip on his neck loosened and at once Harper tore Mateo’s hand away and forced it back against the wrist until there was a crack of bone and a cry of pain. Harper let go of the wrist, smashed a side-arm chop into the bodyguard’s Adam’s apple, rendering him speechless and unable to breathe, then felled him with a roundhouse punch to the jaw that put Mateo’s lights out.

The two convicts were now advancing on them again. ‘Get going!’ Harper said, pushing Ricardo and Lupa towards the passage. He shouted ‘Scouse! Keep the faith! I’ll be back!’ He stepped over Mateo’s prone body and dived for the passage. The convicts hesitated for a few seconds, torn between wanting to pursue him and the need to keep watch on the cells, and Harper used the time to get away.

He caught up with the other two. ‘Right, Ricardo, take the fastest way back to the main gates. We need to get out of here, regroup and make a plan, and then get back in.’

‘And Don Lorenzo?’ Ricardo said, as they hurried back through the maze of passages and courtyards. ‘He is not going to be pleased about what you did to Mateo and if we come back…’

‘Let me worry about Don Lorenzo,’ Harper said. ‘You just concentrate on getting us out of here now.’

Ricardo led them at a run through the warren of passageways and courtyards back towards the main gates. Harper then discovered that in order to reclaim his passport from the guards, despite having already paid them to get into the prison a further payment ‘Una punta, por favor’ - a tip - would be necessary to get them out again. Harper wasn’t inclined to argue on this occasion, so he handed over a further $50 and they were then ushered out of the gates. They pushed their way through the crowds clustered around the prison entrance and hurried away.

CHAPTER 13

Once safely away from the prison, they stopped at a cafe in a nearby square, ordered some coffee and then sat down to discuss their options.‘So,’ Harper said. ‘How are we going to get Scouse out of there?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Ricardo said. ‘Usually you can free someone either by paying his bail or bribing the guards - it comes to pretty much the same thing in the end. Either way you go free, and the guards are usually cheaper than the lawyers and more likely to keep their end of a deal. However, with Scouse it’s going to be more complicated. He may be sick, he probably has no money, no food, and maybe not even any clothes, and he will have been badly treated just because he’s a gringo and the prisoners, including Don Lorenzo, will think he’s either an informer, a cop or a DEA man. So they’re certainly not going to allow us to just walk him out of here.’

‘It may be worse even than that,’ Lupa said ‘Do you remember what I told you about sacrifices to Pachamama: llama foetuses, llama carcasses and maybe human sacrifices too? Homeless people, drug addicts and borrachos - drunks - would be potential victims of that, but the other source would be the jail. The lowest rank of inmates - men with no money, no food, no clothes, nothing - wouldn’t be missed by anyone if they went missing. And, if you were building something big, an apartment block, a narco trafficker’s mansion, or a hotel like that site we passed on our way here, a gringo - a Westerner - might be seen as an even more valuable gift to the gods. So perhaps he is being held to sell as a human sacrifice.’

Harper frowned. ‘It still sounds insane to me but it would explain why he’s being guarded so tightly and why everyone has been at pains to deny all knowledge of him. So we’d better get him out of there and quick. Who holds the key to those punishment cells?’

Ricardo looked blank. ‘That I don’t know. The guards or the chief warden I suppose.’

‘In any case we can’t rely on being able to get hold of the keys, so we need to make plans to bust Scouse out of there.’ He thought for a minute. ‘We could use explosives to blow our way into the prison - I could make a frame-charge and do a much better job than those bunglers who killed themselves trying to blow a hole in the walls - but it would bring every guard running, all guns blazing, and I’m very doubtful we’d have enough time to get Scouse out of his cell and back through the wall. That’s assuming we could avoid or neutralise the guards in the watch-towers, who would otherwise have a clear shot at us.’ He paused. ‘So we need to find another way to spring him, and that means starting from inside the jail, though we’re still going to need weapons and probably explosives.’

Ricardo shook his head. ‘But I’ve already told you, we’re not going to be able to get guns or bombs past the guards on the gate.’

‘So you did, but I think we can get most of what we need in there, and the other stuff can be disguised, so it seems harmless.’ He began writing in his small notebook. ‘We have to split up for a while. Lupa, you need to go shopping for me.’ He tore a page from his notebook and handed it to her. ‘I need a roll of gaffer tape, a pair of scissors, a razor, soap, a towel, make-up, hair dye - my colour - plenty of deodorant, a black marker pen, some vaseline and a packet of condoms.’

‘Why do we need all this stuff anyway?’

He just gave an enigmatic smile. ‘You’ll see. Now Ricardo, while she’s doing that, I’m going to need you to get me some sulphur. We can’t make it in San Pedro, and I don’t know if you can buy it in La Paz, but you can find it around any hot spring or lava flow - it’s bright yellow, so you can’t really miss it or mistake it for anything else. Since the western range of the Andes is pretty much one continuous volcano, it shouldn’t be hard to get some, should it? Just take the car, drive up into the mountains and head for the nearest plume of smoke and steam and you should be in business.’

Ricardo’s expression was puzzled but he just said ‘So how much do you need?’

Harper did a quick mental calculation. ‘A couple of kilos should be enough. That’ll probably take you a few hours, so let’s RV back at the hotel this evening, grab some food and sleep, and then go back into the prison first thing tomorrow morning, as soon as they unlock the gates for the day.’

He gave them both some money and while they disappeared to carry out their tasks, he went to a flight centre and bought an open ticket from La Paz to London via Miami, using the name on one of his false passports. He then went back to the hotel and stashed the sat phone, some of the money, the air ticket, his passport and the Colt .45 in the hotel room, sticking the packet containing them to the underside of the wardrobe. An expert searcher from one of the intelligence agencies would find them soon enough, but the average sneak thief would almost certainly miss them.

Lupa returned within a couple of hours, bringing the shopping with her. ‘Good work,’ he said. ‘You might as well keep most of it with you, because there’s more chance of you taking it into the prison unchallenged than me, but give me the condoms, because I’ll need them before we go in tomorrow.’

By the time Ricardo eventually returned, Harper and Lupa were sitting at a street café, eating their evening meal. Ricardo dumped a bagful of yellow powder down on the table and slumped into a chair. His clothes, face and hair were covered in yellow dust, streaked where trickles of sweat had run down his forehead, and he gave Harper a baleful stare. ‘“Get some sulphur,” the man said, but he forgot to mention that I’d have to climb a mountain to get it.’

Harper smiled. ‘Sorry Ricardo, I sort of assumed you’d know that volcanoes tend to be quite high and pointy. But let me get you a beer so you can wash the dust away and then you can tell us all about it.’

Lupa peered into the bag. ‘It’s strange stuff, isn’t it? So how are we going to get it into San Pedro?’

‘Well, we could bribe the guards,’ Harper said, ‘but we don’t want to be answering any questions about what we’re planning to do with a couple of kilos of sulphur, so it’s probably better to hide it in something.’ He glanced at a couple of the market stalls that were still trading on the far side of the street, one selling sweets and cigarettes, the other fruit and vegetables. ‘We should be able to find something there.’ He sauntered across the street and came back a few moments later with a bag full of pineapples. ‘These’ll do it,’ he said.

‘Pineapples?’

‘Sure. We’ll cut the bottoms out of as many as we need and hollow them out. We can seal the sulphur in plastic bags and put them inside, then reattach the bottoms of the pineapples, using a needle and thread or wooden pins to hold them in place. We’ll leave a couple of untouched pineapples on top but,’ he winked at Lupa, ‘if you wear something low-cut, I’m betting the guards won’t even look at the pineapples! But if things do get awkward, just tell them you’re Don Lorenzo’s new girlfriend and I’m guessing they’ll back off very quickly.’

After they’d eaten, he ran through the outlines of his plan with them. ‘We need to rent one of the cells,’ he said. ‘Ricardo, that’ll be your job obviously. The nearer to the punishment block the better, but we’ll make do with whatever there is.’

‘We’re not planning to stay in there, are we?’ he said.

‘No longer than necessary, but we need somewhere to sort out Scouse before we get him out of the prison, and it’ll be handy to have a base of sorts, both so we can work undisturbed and so we won’t be surrounded by Don Lorenzo’s gorillas coming at us from all directions if things turn ugly… and trust me, they will.’

‘About that,’ Ricardo said. ‘I’m not frightened of a fight, but his guys are all murderers doing thirty year sentences. One more killing won’t bother them at all.’

Harper held up his hand. ‘Then we’ll have to make sure they don’t get the opportunity, won’t we? But don’t worry, if any of them get in our way, I’ll be the one taking them on. I’ll need you to watch my back but that’s it. This is my battle - well it’s Scouse’s really, but I’m fighting it for him. Okay?’ He paused. ‘Now, like I said, we need to rent a cell. Get it by the day if you can but if you have to pay for a week or a month, that’s not a problem because as you know…’ He smiled. ‘We’ve got plenty of money in a safe place.’

‘So what is the plan?’ Lupa said.

‘The plan is to keep a discreet watch on the punishment cells for 48 hours or so, as long as it takes to get a handle on the routine of the guards and Don Lorenzo’s thugs. Once we’ve got that, we can work out the best time to spring Scouse, but we will probably need at least a couple of hours and maybe more than that, between getting him out of the cell and smuggling him out of the prison.’

‘And how do you propose to do that?’

He gave a broad smile. ‘Straight out of the front gate. The time we spend taking turns to carry out surveillance of the punishment cells won’t be wasted because while one of us is doing that, the others will have a little basic chemistry to do.’

When they went back to the hotel, Lupa borrowed a needle and thread from the owner, while Harper and Ricardo hollowed out the pineapples, and once they were put back together, it would have taken a keen eye to spot that they’d been tampered with.

They headed back to the prison the next morning. Just before they set off from the hotel, Harper carefully rolled up most of his remaining US dollars into a tight roll, unwrapped one of the condoms and slid the roll of notes inside it. He looked up to see Lupa watching him, intrigued. ‘Can you give me a minute, you two? I need to stash these where the sun doesn’t shine, and it isn’t really a spectator sport.’

‘Right,’ Lupa said. ‘Now I understand what the condoms were for. I was wondering.’ She grinned. ‘We’ll wait downstairs.’

Harper joined them and they walked through the city to the prison. The gates had just been opened but already a queue of people, mostly women, were filing through, laden with food and all sorts of other merchandise. Each of them presented their bags to the guards for a cursory inspection, paid a few Bolivianos or dollars in bribes and was then waved through. ‘You go through separately, Lupa,’ Harper said. ‘They’ll be less likely to search you if you’re not with me.’

He waited as Lupa made her way through, smiling and flirting with the guards, who barely glanced at the bags she was carrying. She paid the modest bribe they charged her without complaint - Bolivian women paid a lot less than men and especially foreigners to enter San Pedro - then stood well back from the gates, waiting as first Ricardo and then Harper made their way through.

As on the previous day, Harper and Ricardo both had to pay $50 to the guards and to the chief warden, surrender Harper’s fake passport and have a number inscribed on their forearms before they were allowed to proceed. Fernandez was once more staring at a television showing one of the previous day’s Spanish football matches as they were ushered into his office. ‘Back so soon, gringo?’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should arrange for you to stay here permanently, seeing you like it so much.’

‘Kind of you to offer,’ Harper said, with equal sarcasm. ‘But I don’t think I’d ever like it quite enough for that.’

The chief warden had already lost interest and resumed staring at the television. Harper and Ricardo rejoined Lupa in the courtyard. ‘No problems with the pineapples?’ Harper said to her.

She laughed. ‘No, they were too busy trying to look down my cleavage to worry too much about anything else.’

They made their way through the prison to the poorer sections at the rear, close to the punishment cells where Scouse was being held. There was a spare cell in one of the one-star sections, left empty after its previous inhabitant died. ‘And for once it was from natural causes,’ Ricardo said.

‘What do you know?’ Harper said. ‘Miracles do happen, even in San Pedro.’

Ricardo went off to find the boss of the section who was now the notional owner of the cell and, using a few more of Harper’s dollars, managed to rent it. ‘Sorry, he made me pay a month’s rent,’ he said when he returned, ‘twenty dollars’.

‘No problem,’ Harper said. ‘It’s a bargain.’ He looked the cell over. There were two narrow beds, a small table and a couple of chairs, a stove, fuelled by a gas bottle, and a sink in one corner. ‘A couple of beds - just right, because one of us is always going to have to be awake and on watch.’ He tested the door. It was solid hardwood and there were three locks on the inside. ‘You did well to get this, it’s strong and gives us good security.’

Ricardo nodded. ‘A bent politician used to have this cell when I was in here. He’d been running a scam that stole the savings of thousands of Bolivians, and blew most of it on supercars, casinos, fine wines, prostitutes and gambling in casinos. A few of the prisoners had relatives who’d been scammed by him, so he wasn’t expected to survive even one night in here, but he was shrewd enough to realise the danger he was in and took steps to protect himself. He paid a prisoner who was a safe-cracker to fit secure locks to the cell door and then locked himself in. He stayed there for days while the other prisoners yelled threats and curses at him through the door but eventually he paid Don Lorenzo enough to be under his protection, and after that no one dared touch him.’

‘Okay,’ Harper said. ‘This will do nicely. Now let’s get to work. We’ll take the surveillance of the punishment cells in four-hour shifts. We don’t need an actual sight of the cells themselves, we just need to be able to watch the passage leading to them, so we can see when people come and go, and we can do it from the café, or one of the benches in the courtyard during the day. At night we can keep watch from the doorway here. If we leave the lights off and the door ajar, we can spot anyone passing by, without showing ourselves. We need to record the times when anyone - guards, thugs, or anyone else - comes and goes. Lupa, you take the first shift.’ He handed her a few Bolivianos and a notebook and pen. ‘Buy yourself a beer or a coffee and keep your eyes open.’

‘And what are you and Ricardo going to be doing?’

‘We’re going to make a start on that simple chemistry, I told you about. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries British people called saltpetre men used to dig up the floors of stables, pig-sties, pigeon cotes, hen-huts and sheep-pens to get what was called “black earth” - full of urine and manure. They’d soak it to leach all the nitrates out of it then boil it in lead or copper vats to evaporate the liquid. The crystals that were left behind when all the liquid had boiled off were saltpetre, also known as nitrate, one of the three ingredients you need to make gunpowder. Mix 75 per cent saltpetre with 15 per cent charcoal and 10 per cent of the sulphur you got for me from the Andes, Ricardo, and hey presto! You’ve got black powder, the gunpowder that the Chinese invented and that was used in guns and explosives for a thousand years.

Human piss works just as well as animal. So we could dig up an earth-floored latrine, but it’ll be much easier to just scoop piss out of the concrete trough in the urinal. We could evaporate it in the sun but, since we don’t have much time, we’ll boil it up. That gives us our saltpetre. Charcoal is obviously easy to make, you can light a wood fire, cover it to block out the air so it smoulders rather than burns, and you’ve got charcoal, but since the blacksmith uses it in his forge, it’ll be quicker and easier to buy some from him.’

As Lupa headed for the café in the courtyard, Harper turned to Ricardo. ‘I need to go and see the guy at the forge,’ he said, ‘so I’m afraid that means you get the shitty end of the stick - quite literally in this case. I need you to get the biggest pan you can find in the kitchens, pay whatever you need to buy or borrow it, and then - here comes the hard part - I want you to fill it with piss from the trough in the latrine.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘I’m afraid not. Even worse, we’re then going to start boiling it up, so you’ll need to make sure there’s enough gas in that cylinder and buy some more if not. The stench will be absolutely terrible while we’re doing it, but it has to be done. That will give us one of the ingredients we need. Those pineapples that Lupa brought in contain another - the sulphur you got from the mountains - and I’ll be getting the third and last one - the charcoal - from the forge.’

Leaving Ricardo still shaking his head in disbelief, Harper went straight to the forge and spoke to the blacksmith. ‘You speak English, don’t you?’ he said.

‘A little.’

‘Good. I need to buy two things from you. I want to buy some of your charcoal - a couple of kilos will be enough - and I need you to make me a knife.’

‘Sure, how big?’

‘Well, you don’t want to take a penknife to a knife fight, do you? So I need something I can conceal but which is big enough to give me an edge - in both senses of the word - if I have to use it. Let’s say this big,’ he said to the blacksmith, holding his hands almost the width of his shoulders apart.

‘Okay, I’m busy now, maybe tomorrow.’

Harper shook his head and held up a $50 bill. ‘Are you this busy?’

‘Give me an hour,’ the blacksmith said, already reaching for a bar of scrap metal and signalling to his cell-mate to start pumping the bellows.

‘And the charcoal?’ Harper said.

The blacksmith just jerked his head towards the sacks in the corner. ‘Help yourself.’

When Harper came back an hour later, the blacksmith was just finishing working on the blade of a knife that was about a foot long. He repeatedly heated it and then plunged it into a bucket of water, sending clouds of steam billowing out of the door. ‘That hardens it,’ he said, ‘now it needs to be tempered - heated again, and then cooled more slowly.’

Harper watched, fascinated as he did that. ‘Now I just have to put an edge on it,’ the blacksmith said, working a foot pedal to send a grindstone spinning and then showering sparks in all directions as he held the blade against it. He swapped to a finer-grained grindstone for the final sharpening, tested the edge with his thumb and then held it out to Harper. The metal was still a little blued by the heat it had been exposed to, but the edge was cut-throat sharp.

‘Perfect,’ Harper said. ‘Muchas gracias.’ He slipped the knife into the back of his belt, handed the blacksmith the $50 note, and went back to the cell where the stench from twenty metres away showed that Ricardo was still stirring boiling urine.

Harper sent him to relieve Lupa on watch, but the smell was so bad that she stopped dead as she was approaching the cell and said. ‘Oh no, Lex. I don’t want to see what you’re doing in there, and I’m definitely not coming in to find out. I’ll be back at the café if you need me.’ She turned on her heel and went back across the courtyard.

It took the rest of the day and most of the night to convert sufficient urine to saltpetre crystals. They then used a rounded stone to reduce them to powder and then did the same with the charcoal from the forge, breaking the lumps apart with their fingers and then crushing them to powder with the stone. Harper then carefully weighed out the mixture of sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal, and blended them together with exaggerated care.

‘Producing gunpowder this way is obviously not a precise science,’ he said. ‘So it will be of variable quality and it’ll be quite unstable. You can’t use it in wet weather, because damp black powder won’t ignite, but when it’s dry, it’s so volatile that it can be detonated by a spark of static electricity. You have to pack it down into your weapon or explosive charge, but if you compress it too much, by ramming it down hard with a ramrod for example, it may explode and blow you to pieces. On the other hand, if you’re too tentative and leave too many air-gaps, then when you try to detonate the charge or pull the trigger of your weapon, it either won’t go off at all or the powder won’t combust properly. However, if we get it right, it’ll do the job and it’s perfect for close range work because black powder combusts so rapidly that a round reaches its maximum velocity after travelling less than ten feet. So as well as a frame charge and some grenades, we can use it in improvised weapons too.’

‘The guards up in the towers are a lot more than ten feet away,’ Lupa said. ‘So will we have the range to hit them?’

‘Almost certainly not,’ Harper said, ‘so we’ll have to take care of them in Phase Two of the plan.’

‘What plan?’

‘The one I’m about to tell you about. Right, we’ve learned the routine of the guards and Don Lorenzo’s thugs. Two are stationed outside the punishment cells at all times. They sit on those battered chairs or pace around the yard and don’t leave even to relieve themselves, using a corner of the yard instead. But whatever hours the guards are actually supposed to be keeping, they are rarely there during the day and never after dusk, relying on the locked cell doors and Don Lorenzo’s thugs to keep the prisoners confined overnight.’

One of the walls in the San Martin section had been scaffolded with bamboo, ready for repainting, and a couple of spare lengths of bamboo, three metres long and about ten centimetres in diameter, were lying next to it. ‘Grab those,’ Harper said, ‘they’ll be perfect.’

‘Perfect for what?’ Lupa asked.

‘I’ll show you. Ricardo, can you buy or hire a wood saw from that guy who sells hardware from his cell?’

When Ricardo returned, holding a rusty, but still serviceable saw, Harper cut two pieces from one of the lengths of bamboo, one about a metre long and the other a metre and a half, and then split them lengthwise. He joined them together into a rectangle, using bits of scrap wire from the forge and then packed them with some of the home-made gunpowder. He made a fuse from a twisted piece of newspaper, filled with more black powder, and inserted it into the charge, then held it up and examined it. ‘It’s pretty primitive,’ he said, ‘and the fuse is probably only good for three or four seconds, but it’s a frame charge of a sort, so it should do the job and blow Scouse’s cell door if we need to.’

‘But a bamboo frame?’ Lupa said. ‘Won’t it just blow apart?’

‘It may not be as hard as steel,’ Harper said, ‘but it’s not far off - they use it for scaffolding for a reason.’

‘Couldn’t we just pick the lock?’

‘You know any safecrackers? Me neither, so a frame-charge is going to be the best option.’

‘And what if one of Don Lorenzo’s men has the key to the cells on them?’

‘Then we won’t need to set the frame charge, but it’s best to be prepared for any eventuality.’

Ricardo glanced into the huge pan which was still two-thirds full with black powder ‘There’s a lot of gunpowder left.’

‘Yeah, but we don’t need any more to blow the cell door. We may not need the rest, but better to have it ready, just in case.’

‘So when are we going to try to free Scouse?’

‘Tonight’s the night. Best try to grab a few hours’ shut-eye now because we’ll not be getting any the other side of midnight. One of us needs to stay on watch in case Don Lorenzo’s boys decide to pay us a visit, but I’ll take the first watch while you two get some rest.’

CHAPTER 14

Harper had always planned to make the attempt to free Scouse at around four in the morning, when the body’s daily cycle was at its lowest ebb and the thugs guarding him were likely to be drowsy or even asleep. Timing it then would also leave the minimum possible time before the gates of the prison were opened soon after day-break, when they could attempt to get Scouse out, with luck, before his absence from the cells had been detected.

They remained inside their cell until well after midnight. When Harper heard the church clocks out in the city streets striking three o’clock, he eased the cell door open and slipped out into the yard, followed by Ricardo and Lupa. The moon had already set, leaving only the faint glow of starlight illuminating the yard in front of the punishment cells, and it barely penetrated the darkness of the passage where Harper and the others were watching and waiting. They remained there, silent and motionless, every sense attuned to the noises of the night and the movements of the two men in front of the cells. One sat on a battered chair, his eyes half-closed and his chin drooping towards his chest. The other, more alert, was standing, occasionally pacing to and fro across the yard.

After Harper had been watching for almost an hour, the man yawned, stretched and walked towards the corner of the yard. Harper heard the sound of a zip and a moment later, his back to the yard, the man began to take a piss against the wall. At once Harper broke cover, sprinting silently on his rubber-soled shoes towards the dozing guard, still with his chin on his chest. He had shown no sign of even being aware of Harper’s approach until two powerful hands clamped themselves around his head. One covered his mouth, stifling any cry he might have made, the other grasped the back of his head and with a sudden savage jerk, Harper broke the man’s neck. He died instantaneously with no noise other than the snap of bone, but that faint sound was enough to alert the other man.

Still fumbling with his flies as he turned, he saw the prone figure of his dead comrade with Harper standing over him, and in the next instant, he was running towards him, pulling a knife as he did so. Harper whipped his own knife from the back of his belt and went into a fighting stance, poised on the balls of his feet, half-crouched, hands extended to either side, with the knife gripped in his fist. The thug half-checked his advance, eyes narrowing as he worked out his next move. He feinted a thrust with the knife held in his left hand, then switched hands in an instant and lunged for Harper’s chest with the knife in his right hand.

Harper swayed back, feeling the wind of the knife-blade as it sliced the air close enough to his chest to nick the fabric of his shirt, then sprang forward. He grabbed the man’s wrist, pulling him off-balance, and as his other arm flailed the air, Harper slashed down and across with his own knife, cutting a gash so deep into the other man’s wrist that the tendons severed and gouts of arterial blood began to pump from the wound. The knife slipped from the man’s fingers and clattered to the ground.

Harper was still moving, swinging him around, and as what might have been a cry of pain or a warning shout was still forming in the man’s throat, he slashed him across the throat. It severed the unprotected carotid arteries and the windpipe, so no noise emerged from the dying man’s throat but a gurgling, sucking sound that faded to silence within seconds as the last of his lifeblood drained onto the dust of the yard.

Harper held the body until the death spasm had stilled, then dropped him to the ground. He paused, listening for any sounds, then searched the pockets of both dead men, but neither had been holding the keys to the cells. Stifling a curse, he signalled to Ricardo and Lupa, who came running across the yard, carrying the frame charge.

Harper fitted it to the door, waved the other two back into cover then pulled a disposable lighter from his pocket and held it ready. Before lighting the fuse, he leaned close to the door and whispered. ‘Scouse!’

There was no response and he had to call three more times, each one at slightly louder volume, until he got a sleepy response. ‘Lex? Is that you?’

‘You were expecting Brad Pitt? Yes it’s me. Now listen, we don’t have long. Wake yourself the hell up. We haven’t got the key so I’m using a home-made charge with a somewhat unpredictable explosive. So get yourself as far from the door as you can. Turn your back, close your eyes and mouth, and put your fingers in your ears, otherwise the over-pressure when we blow the door is likely to make you deaf or something worse. Got me?’

‘Got you.’

‘Okay. You ready? Counting down: Three - Two - One.’ He lit the fuse, flattened himself against the wall alongside the entrance and put his fingers in his ears. There was a muffled bang and a dense cloud of smoke billowed around him but when it cleared, the frame charge had done its work and the door was half-open, hanging from one hinge. He ran into the cell and helped Scouse outside. He was in very poor shape, indescribably filthy and weak as a kitten, and the smell of his body and the rags he was wearing made Harper’s eyes water as he supported him. The stench from the cell was even worse and as she ran towards them, Lupa stopped, gagged and turned away, holding her scarf to her face.

‘We need to move fast,’ Harper said. ‘With luck, no one - or no one we’re concerned about anyway - will have heard the noise. Self-preservation will probably keep most, if not all of the other prisoners in their cells, because finding out what is causing noises in the night can be bad for the health, but we don’t want to be standing around out here if the noise brings any of Don Lorenzo’s boys hurrying to investigate. So Ricardo and Lupa, get Scouse back to our cell while I tidy up here.’

The two of them began half-steering and half-carrying Scouse through the passageway and across the next courtyard to the cell they had been using, while Harper dumped the bodies of the two thugs in Scouse’s cell and then dragged the door shut again, its one remaining hinge squealing in protest. Anything more than a casual look would show that it had been blasted open, but he hoped that someone entering the yard who saw a row of closed doors and no sign of the men who were supposed to be keeping watch on them, would be more concerned to track them down than carry out a cell-by-cell inspection.

He kicked some of the thick brown dust of the Altiplano that covered every surface of the prison, including the floor of the yard, onto the already congealing pool of blood where he had killed the second of Don Lorenzo’s men, hiding it from a casual glance. He looked around him, listening intently for the sound of anyone approaching, then ran through the passage and back to their cell.

Scouse was propped up on a chair, blinking in the unaccustomed light from the lamp they had lit. ‘Scouse, mate, we need to get you cleaned up and out of here pronto,’ Harper said, ‘but once you’ve washed some of that filth off your hands, you’d better eat some food if you can. Not too much at once if you’ve not had any for a while or you’ll be barfing it all up again. Then we’ll get you ready to go. Talk if you want or just stay quiet, if you’d rather.’

‘You don’t know how glad I am to be out of there,’ Scouse said, his broken teeth making him mumble his words. ‘There’s no bedding, just bare boards and the concrete floor, and it was so cold at night, I couldn’t stop shivering. I was sure I was going to die in there.’

Lupa washed the worst of the filth from Scouse’s hands, then handed him some bread and a banana. He ate both in seconds. ‘They only fed me a bowl of slops once a day,’ he said, ‘and a litre of water that had to last until the next day. I was never allowed out of my cell at all and the guards and the warden beat me all the time. They told me I had to keep my head bowed when they came into my cell and I wasn’t allowed to look at them or speak to them, but then they’d ask me questions and if I stayed silent they’d beat me for refusing to answer, but if I spoke they’d beat me anyway for breaking the silent rule.’

‘What questions did they ask?’ Harper said, still unwilling to believe that Scouse was being held as a human sacrifice but struggling for any other explanation about why he had been held so long without any ransom demand.

‘Nothing that made any sense. Things like did I have a wife and family and had I booked a hotel before I flew in.’

‘They were probably just trying to reassure themselves that no one, or at least no one powerful or influential, was going to come looking for you and start asking awkward questions of them.’ He paused, casting a critical eye over his old mate. ‘Right, let’s get to work on you. Sit on that chair and lean forward so Lupa can wash your hair.’

She poured a bucket of water over his head, rubbed it with soap and then sluiced it off with another bucketful. Harper used the scissors to cut Scouse’s hair, and applied the hair dye to it, being careful to keep it from staining the skin of his forehead. He soaped Scouse’s face and shaved him, and Lupa then went to work with the make-up she had bought, using it to hide his pallor and his bruises. Harper stripped off his clothes, handed them to Scouse to wear and, wrinkling his nose at the stench, dressed himself in the rags Scouse had been wearing. He then picked up the black marker pen they had brought in with them and carefully copied the number on his own forearm on to Scouse’s. They were of a similar build, though even before his spell in solitary confinement, Scouse had been nowhere near as fit and powerful as Harper, and he was now very emaciated. However with a wash and shave, a little grooming and make-up, and a change of hair colour, Harper felt he was close enough in looks to pass the guards at the gate using the fake passport that Harper had surrendered to them on his way in to the prison.

He checked his watch. ‘It’s just getting light and the guards will be unlocking the gate in a few minutes time. You’ll get my passport back from them. It’s fake but good enough to fool anyone, and I think we now look enough alike for you to pass as me.’ He winked at Lupa. ‘In any case, we gringos probably all look alike to them. I’ll give you some money for a generous tip for them, and once they get a sight of that, I doubt they’ll be asking any questions. They’ll just want you out of the way before they have to share it with the others. Lupa, can you give me a minute? I need to drop my trousers to get Scouse some money for his bribe.’

‘Sure, though it won’t be anything I haven’t seen before.’

Harper laughed and as she sauntered out of the cell door, he undid his jeans, retrieved the hidden condom, handed part of the contents to Scouse and slipped the rest into the pocket of his jeans. ‘There’s $100 to bribe the guards at the gate. Once you’re out, go straight to the place we’ve been staying, The Pacific Hotel, halfway up the street that opens off the far right hand corner of the square. There’s an air ticket out of Bolivia, and some walking around money waiting in my room there - Room 22 - taped to the bottom of the wardrobe. There’s a Colt pistol, another passport and some more money too, but leave those where they are. Hole up in the room, take a couple of showers, because you still definitely aren’t smelling too fragrant at the moment, catch up on some sleep and stuff your face with food. Don’t booze it up too much though because you need to keep your wits about you, and only leave the hotel to go to a dentist who can do a temporary fix on your teeth. The hotel will be able to recommend someone, and for cash in dollars, I’m sure you can jump the appointment queue. Apart from that, don’t leave the hotel at all, and definitely not after dark. It’s best if you wait there for me. I should be there later today or tomorrow, but if I’m held up, I’ll be out of here one way or another as soon as possible. If things look like they’re turning ugly, or if something goes wrong and I don’t show within a week, you can just take the passport, ticket and cash, and get a flight out of here to anywhere - Miami if you can, but if not Peru, Brazil, Chile or Argentina, and then get an onward flight as quick as you can. You should be safe to fly out of La Paz if you keep it low profile. The bad guys will be looking for incoming foreigners to shake down, not departing ones. And when you do fly out, with me or without me, don’t ever come back here.’

‘I hear you, Lex.’

‘And keep those broken teeth covered up when you’re at the gates here, or the guards may twig who you are. I’ve sprung you once but I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it again if you’re spotted. So say as little as possible and if you have to talk, do it without moving your lips much or cover your mouth with your hand.’He looked at his watch. ‘Okay, they should be opening the gates any minute. Time to go.’ He eased the cell door open, checked for signs of any unusual activity in the yard outside and then nodded and beckoned Scouse to follow him. Harper and the others went with him to the main courtyard and watched as Scouse walked up to the guards. He handed over the bribe, waited while the guards checked the number on his arm, retrieved Harper’s fake passport, and crossed out the entry in the ledger. They then held the gate open for him and he strolled out into the square. He walked a few more yards, then showed a bit of his old swagger as he turned to give a salute to Harper, before hurrying away.

‘And now?’ Lupa said.

‘We give Scouse ten minutes to get back to the hotel and off the streets, and then we head for the exit ourselves. I’m hoping that a bit of front and a healthy wad of dollars will solve all problems.’

‘And if it doesn’t?’

‘Then we’ll have to improvise.’

They waited another ten minutes and then Harper led them towards the gates. However, when he showed the guards the number on his arm, they ignored the bribe he produced and instead of letting them out, they escorted the three of them to the chief warden’s office.

‘We’re ready to leave now,’ Harper said. ‘Thank you for your hospitality. I just need my passport back and then I’ll be on my way.’ He showed him the number inked on his arm.

Fernandez glanced at the ledger that one of his juniors pushed in front of him, then gave Harper a cold stare. ‘There must be some mistake, señor, the person with that number has already left San Pedro. So your number must be a forgery and therefore you are a prisoner trying to escape.’

‘But he was the prisoner, he just pretended to be me. Look at the picture in my passport, if you don’t believe me.’

‘He took his passport with him.’

‘Then look at me. You must remember me, I’ve been in your office a couple of times in the last few days.’

The chief warden shrugged. ‘A lot of people pass through this office, señor, you cannot expect me to remember them all.’

Harper spread his hands. ‘All right. How much money do you want?’

‘It is not a matter of money.’

‘It’s always a matter of money.’ He studied Fernandez for a few moments. ‘Shall we say $500 to make this problem go away?’

The chief warden gave a crooked smile. ‘It is a very big problem.’

‘How big?’

‘Nothing less than a thousand dollars would solve it.’

‘Then a thousand dollars it is, but obviously I don’t have that kind of money on me, I’ll have to get it for you.’

‘You will need to send someone to do so, because you do not leave here without it.’

‘But if I don’t go out to get it, you won’t get your money.’

‘You have things the wrong way round, señor. If you don’t get me the money, you will never get out of here.’ Fernandez glanced at Lupa, running the tip of his tongue over his lips as he did so. ‘You can send the pretty señorita to get your money, but you stay here.’

Harper calculated the odds. He was confident he could deal with the chief warden and the watching guard, but that still left up to ten other guards to deal with, most of them carrying pistols and two of them armed with rifles who were well out of his reach in the watchtowers. Those odds were too steep to even contemplate, so he gave a reluctant nod. ‘Okay, let Lupa out and she can bring the money here.’

‘One of my guards will accompany her.’

‘No he won’t. You have me and her brother as guarantees that she will return. I am not going to allow a guard to witness how and where she obtains the money.’

The chief warden gave a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘As you please, but if she does not return, you can imagine the consequences.’

‘Trust me, she will return.’

‘It is precisely because I do not trust you, señor, that I am taking the precaution of keeping you and her brother here.’

Harper took Lupa on one side and whispered in her ear, telling her where he’d hidden his money in his hotel room. There was close to ten thousand dollars under the mattress.

Harper and Ricardo watched from the main prison yard as Lupa walked out through the main gates. He was pleased to note that as she crossed the square in front of the prison, she paused twice and glanced behind her to make sure she was not being followed, before moving on.

She was gone for almost two hours and Harper was just beginning to feel a little anxious, worried less that she might have double-crossed him than that she might have been robbed by some opportunist thief. He heaved a sigh of relief as he saw her familiar slight figure picking her way through the crowds outside the prison and approaching the gates.

She was held at the gates for some minutes, before being ushered into the prison and taken straight to the chief warden’s office. When Harper and Ricardo tried to follow her, they found their way barred by four guards, all with pistols drawn.

‘I don’t like it,’ Harper said, out of the side of his mouth. ‘I’m sensing a double-cross.’

‘Not by Lupa?’

‘Of course not, by the chief warden.’

She did not reappear until twenty minutes later and when she did she was ashen-faced, and being frog-marched by one of the guards. Flanked by two more of them, Fernandez lumbered down the steps behind her. He was scowling and there was the vivid red imprint of a hand on his cheek and four parallel scratches down his face.

Screened by his guards, he came to a stop facing Harper. ‘Your girlfriend has stolen your money, señor. She came back here offering to have sex with me instead. When I refused, she attacked me. So there has been a change of circumstances; all of you will now be remaining here as prisoners. You will be charged with aiding and abetting the escape of a prisoner and attempted bribery, and will face trial in due course.’

‘He’s lying Lex,’ Lupa said. ‘He took the money, tried to rape me and is now trying to cover it up.’

‘I know that,’ Harper said, keeping his voice low. ‘But there’s nothing we can do about it now. We’re unarmed and there are too many guards protecting him. If we try anything, we risk being shut in the punishment block and that will make escape much harder. So we need to back down now, get back to the cell and then plan our next move.’

Before they could do so, there was a sudden flurry of activity at the gates. One of the guards, who had strolled off in the direction of the poorer sections that contained the punishment block a few minutes earlier, came sprinting back, shouting to his comrades. The gates were immediately locked and barred, all the prisoners and visitors were instructed to remain motionless where they were and a head count was begun in every section of the jail.

The count was done and then re-done, and there was much head-shaking as the numbers were tallied. From the guards’ conversations, overheard by Ricardo and Lupa, the total number of prisoners and visitors - dead and alive - appeared to tally exactly with the prison records, and yet one of the punishment cells now stood empty, but for the bodies of the two thugs who had been guarding it, and its former occupant had disappeared without trace. Harper, Lupa and Ricardo could have enlightened them about why that was, but although the other two exchanged worried looks, all remained silent. Harper maintained his normal cool outward air in front of them, but he was on maximum alert, watching for any hint of a threat to them, either from the guards or from Don Lorenzo. He must now have been aware that two of his men were dead, and would have been able to make a pretty shrewd guess about who was responsible.

Eventually with much shrugging, head-shaking and gesticulating, the guards resumed their normal routines and the prisoners and visitors were left to carry on with their activities. Harper had been thinking furiously while they had been held for the head-count and he had formed a rough plan. ‘We need to be low-profile for the moment,’ he said, ‘but we have to find a way to bust out of here and quick. Even if Don Lorenzo doesn’t get us, that chief warden is not going to let me - or us - out of here for any amount in bribes. And if you were right about why Scouse was being held, Lupa, it may well already have occurred to Don Lorenzo that one sacrificial Inglés will do as well as another, and funnily enough, I’m not that keen on the idea of spending the rest of my time on earth concreted into the foundations of a hotel or an office block.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘I’ll tell you, but let’s get back to the cell first, we’re too vulnerable out here in the yard.’

Harper waited until they were back in their cell, with the door locked, and then said, ‘Right, here’s my plan, but feel free to suggest any changes or improvements. This isn’t a dictatorship, we’re all at risk here and we all need to feel confident in the plan we choose.’

He watched their faces fall as he outlined what he had in mind, but as they talked it through, it was clear that, with only minor modifications, they accepted that while it was risky and even desperate, it offered a better chance than anything else they could come up with.

‘So first off, we need some weapons,’ Harper said.

‘They’re banned and the guards will seize any they find.’

‘But in practice, as we’ve already seen, the guards very rarely venture into the sections and the police never do at all.’

‘Not even when murders happen,’ Lupa said with a shudder.

‘So while we can assume that the guards will confiscate any weapons like those Colts you found for us in Santa Cruz, if we or any visitors tried to bring them in, they can’t intercept any that we get made in here.’

‘But we can’t just start manufacturing weapons.’

‘Can’t we? I agree we can’t produce Kalashnikovs, Armalites or anything sophisticated, but we can make single-shot pistols easily enough. They’ll be muzzle-loaders like guns used to be way back in the day and we’ll have to fire them using a taper or a smouldering bit of rope to ignite the gunpowder, just like they used to have to do before flintlocks were invented, but since we’re a bit more sophisticated these days, a cigarette end would do the same job for us. To make the actual weapons we could probably just use some lengths of bamboo, but then we’d really have to try and hold them against a wall while we were firing them, which would be awkward, but if we didn’t, the back-blast would be potentially dangerous to us and it would also seriously compromise the power of the weapon. So we’ll be better using some metal piping and some basic metal parts that should be easy enough to get. Plumbers’ copper piping is too soft, it’ll bulge and split if you try to fire a round through it, but the sort of narrow-bore steel piping they use as conduit for electricity cables would do the job perfectly. There’s bound to be some kicking around here somewhere and the guys in the forge can make the other bits we’ll need, including the rounds we’ll fire.’

‘And what about Don Lorenzo while we’re doing all this?’ Lupa said. ‘He’s not going to sit back and politely wait while we do all this, now is he?

‘No and we’ll undoubtedly have to deal with him and his thugs before long, but I’m fairly confident that they’ll wait for darkness tonight before they come calling on us, so at least we do have a few hours to prepare. So let’s get to it.’

With Lupa translating any technical terms, Harper talked to the blacksmith about what he wanted and after a few questions, some diagrams scratched in the dust on his table and the sight of yet more US dollars, he eventually nodded, shook hands and held up five fingers to signal how many hours he would need to do it. As Harper turned to leave, the blacksmith said something in Spanish to Lupa. ‘What did he say?’ Harper said, as they walked back to their cell.

She grinned. ‘He said if we manage to escape, he’ll be sorry to see us go, because life has been a lot more interesting around here since we arrived!’

While they were waiting for the blacksmith to work his magic, Harper sent Lupa and Ricardo to collect handfuls of gravel from the yard, bits of glass from the broken beer bottles littering the ground outside one of the bars and any rusty screws, nails, and small shards of metal they could find in the waste heap outside the blacksmith’s forge.

Harper sawed the spare bamboo pole they had left in their cell into fifty centimetre lengths. He jammed a wad of rags into the bottom of each one and tightly sealed it with mud. He dried the mud over the stove, then filled each piece of bamboo with alternating bands of black powder and metal, glass and gravel shrapnel, tamping the powder down gently with the end of a stick, and using circles of thin cardboard cut from an empty box as wadding to hold each layer in place. A thin strip of rag ran the length of the inside of the bamboo tube and protruded a few centimetres from the top. ‘All we need now,’ he said, ‘is something to ignite it. Paraffin or kerosene would do it, and plenty of prisoners seem to have small stoves, so I’m sure that wouldn’t be a problem, but some of that Caiman alcohol might be even better.’

‘I’ll see to it,’ Ricardo said, peeling a couple more notes from the dwindling roll Harper held out to him.

Late in the afternoon, Harper and Ricardo went back to the forge to collect the improvised weapons the blacksmith had made. There were six of them, each with a twenty centimetre length of steel tube, with one end reinforced with steel and welded to a steel handle. That end of the tube was closed but a narrow hole had been drilled through the tube a couple of centimetres from the closed end. The blacksmith had also made the rounds that these primitive guns would fire. There was no rifling on the barrels, of course, so the rounds were not bullet shaped but like the old musket balls fired from flintlocks before the invention of cartridges in the nineteenth century. The blacksmith had made them by dropping globules of white hot metal into water and then filing off the tail of the metal to leave a round ball.

As Harper paid the blacksmith and was about to leave, he spotted a couple of metal clamps on a shelf and picked them up. ‘These too?’ he said.

The blacksmith nodded. Harper shook his hand and said to Ricardo. ‘Tell him when he gets out of here, he can make a very good living as a straight craftsman.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ Ricardo said, ‘but he’s in here on a thirty year sentence, so he won’t be doing that anytime soon.’

‘What’d he do?’

Ricardo shrugged. ‘The usual: murder.’

CHAPTER 15

Dusk was beginning to darken the sky as they walked back to their cell, Harper noticed a couple of Don Lorenzo’s men lounging against the courtyard walls. They avoided eye contact, trying to appear as if they were ignoring them, but as Harper entered their cell, he glanced back and saw one of the thugs hastily drop his gaze. The other one was half-turned away but talking into a mobile phone and it was clear from the sideways glances he darted at Harper that he was the topic of conversation.

As soon as they got inside the cell and locked the door behind them, Harper tested each of their improvised pistols and then loaded them with black powder, wrapped in twists of newspaper and the iron shot the blacksmith had made. He carefully tamped the powder down with a blunt-ended stick and used more thin cardboard discs as wadding. When the weapons were loaded, Harper carefully tipped a little more black powder into the firing hole drilled in the side of the tube.

‘There we are,’ he said. ‘To fire them now all you need to do is touch a cigarette end or a bit of smouldering string to the powder and Bang! So we’ve now got single-shot pistols and crude grenades, but we’ll not be needing the stove again so we might as well make use of the gas cylinders too.’ He turned off the two cylinders under the stove, disconnected the rubber tubes that fed gas to the burners and used the clamps he had got from the blacksmith to seal the pipes. Then he turned the gas back on and checked for leaks. ‘Should do it,’ he said, ‘release the clamp, strike a match or a lighter and - shazam! - you’ve got yourself a flamethrower. Now one more thing - have you ever heard of napalm?’

‘The stuff the Americans used in Vietnam?’ Lupa said. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it. What about it?’

‘Well we could make our own version of it. All you need to do is boil up petrol with some sort of soap. Soap flakes are ideal but you can just chop up a bar of soap and use that instead. We haven’t got petrol, but kerosene should do the job. You just boil it up till it turns into a gel, and then throw it at the target and toss something after it to make it ignite.’

‘No, Lex,’ Lupa said. ‘I don’t mind the weapons, not even your bombs and home-made flamethrowers, but napalm is too horrible. Please don’t use that.’

‘No?’ he said. ‘Well, maybe you’re right. In any case we probably don’t have time to make anything else now.’ He took a cautious look out of the cell window. In the gathering gloom he could see that Don Lorenzo’s two thugs had now been joined by six others, and the attention of seven of the eight of them was wholly focussed on Harper’s cell. The other thug was running water into the pool in the centre of the yard. ‘They’re filling the piscina,’ Harper said over his shoulder, ‘and I’m guessing that’s not because they fancy a dip.’

‘It’ll be for their other favourite sport,’ Ricardo said. ‘Drowning people.’

All of the thugs were carrying some sort of weapon - mostly knives, coshes or baseball bats - but as far as Harper could see, none had guns. Just the same, odds of eight to three were not that encouraging, but he had faced worse odds than that before and lived to tell the tale, and he did have a few surprises in store for when they made their move.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have visitors quite soon, I think. The door’s got three locks so that will give us some protection, but that ground-floor window is obviously another way in. Ricardo, give me a hand with these.’ The pair of them manhandled the table and chairs across the room and stacked them up in front of the window.

‘That’s pretty flimsy,’ Lupa said. ‘It isn’t going to stop them.’

‘It’s not intended to,’ Harper said. ‘We just need to slow them up enough to be sure of giving them the warmest possible welcome.’

He dragged one of the beds to the back of the room, tipped it onto its side and piled up all their mattresses and bedding in front of it. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘Fort Apache, The Bronx! You two, take two of those home-made pistols each and get down behind that barrier. It won’t stop a bullet but I don’t think they’ve got any firearms anyway, and it will give you some protection from knives, flying glass and anything else they might have, including acid or something like that. If and when they come through the window, don’t fire until I tell you to. We’ll not have time to reload, so we’ll only have six shots, and there are eight of them, so we need to make them count.’

‘What about the other two?’

‘I’ll deal with them. And if I shout ‘Down!’ just do it - flatten yourselves and stay down until I tell you otherwise.’

‘And where will you be?’

‘In front of you, but not in your line of fire.’

He lifted the two gas cylinders in either hand, working out from the weight which one had most gas left, then put the heaviest one next to him and stood the other one directly in front of the window. He tucked the last two single-shot pistols in the front of his belt and slid the knife - its blade still bloodstained from the knife fight outside Scouse’s cell - down the back, next to his spine. He took the clamp on the rubber hose of the heaviest gas cylinder in his left hand and held his disposable lighter in his right. Then he waited, motionless and silent, just watching the window.

They could hear the sound of running water from the yard for a few more minutes, but then it stopped. There were no voices from outside, but, straining his ears, he could hear the scuff of footsteps across the yard, growing louder as they moved closer.

The silence was broken by Don Lorenzo’s voice. ‘You hear me gringo? You have killed two of my men and you have cost me a great deal of money by freeing the other Inglés, and there is a price to be paid for that. But if you give yourself up now, you have my word that the other two will be allowed to go free. If you resist and I have to send my men in to get you, then you and the other man will both die, and I promise you that the beautiful señorita will be praying for death by the time my men have finished with her.’

Harper remained silent as the seconds ticked by.

‘Last chance, gringo, what is it to be?’ Don Lorenzo waited a few more seconds and then said ‘So be it.’

Harper could hear him holding a muttered conversation with his men and then a single set of footsteps could be heard moving away. ‘He’s not even staying for the show,’ he whispered to the others.

Someone standing outside the door slowly turned the handle. There was a pause and a faint creak from the door as the unseen person applied his weight to it, but then, realising it was securely locked, he slowly released the handle again.

‘Get ready,’ Harper whispered.

The silence grew, and Harper remained absolutely still, every sense attuned and his whole attention focussed on the window.

Two minutes passed, feeling like ten, and then he heard a few muttered words from outside, a brief pause and then a crash as a volley of stones and broken bricks were hurled through the window, shattering the glass.

He remained where he was as one of the thugs smashed the rest of the glass out of the bottom of the frame with a baseball bat, and was still motionless as the first two men, one with a murderous-looking machete and the other with the baseball bat, clambered through the window and began to push the flimsy barrier aside. Still Harper waited until the next two were halfway through the window frame as well and then shouted ‘Now!’ He only heard a single shot, but it struck home, dropping the thug with the baseball bat.

He released the clamp on the rubber hose and flicked the lighter. There was a spark and a jet of burning gas shot from the hose, engulfing the thug with the machete in flames. Harper switched targets at once, raking the other two with fire. One went up like a torch, emitting banshee screams of pain and terror as his clothes ignited and his flesh began to blacken and burn. The other man, partly screened by his comrade, dived behind the upturned table, before his clothing could do more than smoulder. The gas from the cylinder was already running out but Harper used the last of it to play his primitive flame-thrower over the second cylinder in front of the window, heating the metal valve and igniting the hose.

As the stench of burning rubber filled the air, he shouted ‘Down!’ and dropped to the ground himself as the hose was breached by the flames. There was a Whoosh! of fire and then a bang that sounded like a thunder-clap in the confined space of the room as the cylinder exploded. Fragments of metal flew past him, rattling against the walls and burying themselves in the mattress protecting Lupa and Ricardo.

‘Up!’ he shouted, but had to repeat it at the top of his voice as, ears ringing from the blast, they failed to hear him the first time. He glimpsed Ricardo peering over the barrier, then saw the thug who had been hiding behind the table burst from cover and, knife arm extended, launch himself into a dive towards Lupa and Ricardo. He was still airborne when Harper whipped one of his home-made pistols out of his belt and aimed and fired in one fluid movement. He aimed for the centre of the body mass - the percentage shot with such an unreliable weapon - and saw the round strike home, punching a hole through the man’s rib-cage and sending pink, aerated blood from his lungs frothing out of the wound. The man’s knife spilled from his hand as he crashed into the bed-frame in front of Ricardo and Lupa, and she was quickest to react, snatching up the knife and driving it through the man’s eye-socket and into his brain.

The flames, the shots and the explosion had given the remaining thugs pause for thought but after a flesh-creeping silence lasting almost three more minutes, two more of them, probably more terrified of what Don Lorenzo would do to them if they returned empty-handed, than whatever fate awaited them inside Harper’s cell, came bursting through the window together. Harper drilled the first one, armed with a knife, with a shot from his remaining loaded pistol and heard shots from both Ricardo and Lupa, but one missed and the other struck the other man in the left shoulder. He went down but sprang up again at once, still clutching an axe in his other hand.

Harper knew that none of them now had any shots left and he launched himself at the attacker, making a pile-driving hit that a rugby player would have been proud of. He crunched his shoulder into the man’s ribs just below his heart. The thug went down again with Harper on top of him. He swung his axe at Harper’s head, but he ducked under the blade and head-butted him, connecting with the bridge of the nose and shattering the bone. Before the man could swing his axe again, Harper drove his knife through the thug’s diaphragm and pierced his heart. He gave the knife a vicious twist before withdrawing it, just as he’d been taught in bayonet practice as a rookie Para recruit many years before. As he pulled the knife out, blood flooded out over his hand and arm, and the man gave a last shuddering breath and lay still.

Harper was already back on his feet, crouched in a fighting stance, facing the window. There were still two more of Don Lorenzo’s private army of thirty-year men outside who might have to be dealt with, but of equal concern, either his primitive flamethrower or the exploding gas cylinder had ignited the filthy rags of curtains around the window and flames licking up the walls had now set fire to the boarded ceiling, that was also the floor of the cell above them.

‘Lupa, Ricardo,’ he shouted. ‘We’ve no water, so you’ll have to beat those flames out with blankets or coats or something. There’s still a lot of black powder in the other room and if flames get even close to it, we’ll all be putting our heads between our legs and kissing our arses goodbye.’ Without waiting to see if they had reacted, he sprinted to the window, dived through it and rolled as he hit the ground, coming up with his knife gripped in his hand, ready to take on the last two thugs, but the yard was deserted. The two men had fled rather than risk sharing the fate of their comrades, but he could see faces at every cell door and window across the yard, where the other prisoners had evidently been enjoying the show. As Harper relaxed out of his fighting stance, he heard a few shouts and whistles from the watchers and one of them called out ‘Olé!’, while another shouted ‘Que hombre!’

He smiled and bowed, acknowledging the applause, then grabbed a bucket that was standing by the piscina, scooped a bucketful of water out of it and, shouting to Ricardo, passed it through the window. It took half a dozen buckets to extinguish the last of the flames, and each time he filled it again, he kept a wary eye open for any sign of Don Lorenzo’s men returning but the yard was still deserted when he climbed back through the window. Water was still dripping from the walls and ceiling and the room stank of smoke, singed cloth and burnt flesh.

Harper double-checked that each of the thugs was dead, then said ‘Okay, good work, but we need to follow up on this straight away, which means paying Don Lorenzo a little visit at his place. So we need to reload at once.’

‘Already doing it,’ Lupa said, busily loading powder and shot into one of the crude pistols.

‘Great, but be gentle with that ramrod or you’ll be picking your fingers out of the ceiling with your other hand. And chuck the gun that misfired. We can’t trust it to fire next time either, but five will still be plenty for what we need to do. Ricardo, we need to take those bamboo bombs with us as well. We might well need a couple of them to get Don Lorenzo’s attention and anyway, if we leave them here, one of our neighbours might climb through the window and help himself to them. Lupa, when you’ve finished loading those, get a can of that Caiman stuff and bring it with you, will you?’

Within ten minutes they were ready. Harper checked the yard - still empty, though a few of the spectators were still standing at their windows, awaiting any further developments. ‘I still can’t believe you can fire weapons and detonate a gas cylinder inside a prison, and the guards don’t even turn out to find out what the hell is going on,’ Harper said.

‘Maybe they’re afraid it’s a diversion to lure them away from the gates,’ Ricardo said, ‘so some prisoners can escape.’

Lupa snorted. ‘Yeah, or maybe they’re just afraid.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Harper said. ‘It’ll make getting out of here a bit easier.’

They made their way through the maze of yards and passageways leading towards Don Lorenzo’s cell, then waited in the deep shadow of the passage opening into the courtyard in front of it. After a few minutes, a bar of light stabbed out into the yard as one of Don Lorenzo’s remaining goons stepped outside. Harper tightened his grip on his knife, ready to take him down if he came their way. However, having scanned the yard and the entrance to the passage, the man merely leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. Harper watched the end of it glow red as the man drew on it and blew out a stream of smoke. If he stayed out there on watch, it would make a surprise attack on Don Lorenzo’s cell almost impossible, but to Harper’s relief, having taken a last pull on the cigarette, the man flicked the butt away, hawked and spat, and then went back inside the cell and closed the door.

Harper waited a few more seconds, straining his eyes into the darkness and listening intently, but then he smiled. ‘It sounds like he’s not even locked the door,’ he whispered to the others. ‘They must be confident that no one would dare to challenge Don Lorenzo in his own lair, so let’s surprise them, before anyone else comes out for a cigarette break.’

He led them out into the yard, hugging the wall and moving without a sound from shadow to shadow until he was standing alongside the cell window. A blind hung over the window but one of its slats was slightly twisted, leaving a narrow gap through which Harper could peer into the brightly lit room. There was no sign of Don Lorenzo, but three more members of his army, including the smoker they had seen, were sitting around a table, talking. The door to the next room stood open, and the moving shadows on the wall by the door, suggested at least one more person was in there, pacing to and fro.

Harper hefted one of the bamboo grenades in his hand and gestured to Lupa to pour some Caiman spirit onto the fuse from the can she was carrying. He then gave her his lighter, put his mouth close to her ear and breathed ‘Hold the lighter ready and when I nod, light the fuse.’

He inched his way to the door, turned the handle so slowly that even though she was watching closely, Lupa could barely see it move. He pushed against it until it opened a few millimetres, making sure it wasn’t locked. He held out the grenade and nodded, and Lupa lit the fuse. He counted off three seconds as the flame raced up the fuse, then pushed the door open, threw the burning grenade into the room and slammed the door shut again. The thud of it closing was drowned by an explosion that blew out the window, sending shards of glass flying out into the yard, but Harper was already shouting ‘Go! Go! Go!’ and throwing the door wide open.

The sulphurous smell of gunpowder was thick in the air as smoke billowed around him. All three men were on the floor, with blood seeping from their mouths, noses and ears, and with scores of cuts to their faces and bodies from the primitive shrapnel the grenade had been packed with. One man was motionless, probably already dead, another was clawing at his face and screaming in Spanish. The other was trying to get to his feet but Harper booted him under the chin, sending him sprawling. He shouted to Ricardo ‘Finish them off!’ and with his crude pistol in one hand and his knife in the other, he burst through the doorway into the next room.

Don Lorenzo was sitting, still wearing a silk shirt and bootlace tie but now ashen-faced. He had just one remaining bodyguard to protect him. The man stepped in front of his boss and pulled a blackjack from his belt - a narrow handle with a bulbous, leather-covered lead weight on the end. A single blow from it could concuss a man or fracture his skull, if the bodyguard managed to get close enough to use it. Harper looked at it, shrugged and pointed his home-made pistol at the dead centre of the man’s chest. He pulled the trigger. The range was so short that a halo of burning powder fragments scorched the man’s shirt around the entry wound as it punched through the sternum. He stared at Harper, lips working as if trying to speak, then slowly buckled at the knees and collapsed to the floor.

Harper jammed the homemade pistol back in his belt, switched his knife to his right hand and sliced the blade across the man’s throat, severing the carotid arteries on either side of his neck. He bled out in seconds.

Don Lorenzo had remained frozen in his chair as he watched the grisly tableau unfold. Now his eyes shifted to Harper’s face. ‘What do you want, Inglés? Money? Cocaine?’

Harper shook his head. ‘Neither of those, Don Lorenzo. I want to be sure that I and my companions can get out of San Pedro safely and that no one will be coming looking for them afterwards, and the best way to ensure that, as far as I can see, is to kill you.’

‘I am a man of influence. If you kill me, my cartel will avenge me.’

Harper smiled. ‘That I doubt. They’d have to find me first, and anyway, your cartel bosses are men of business. Their only concern is that the product is produced, transported and sold. The loss of a man - even a man of influence like you, Don Lorenzo will concern them no more than a cockroach they step on.’

Ricardo and Lupa had walked into the room behind Harper. ‘I know those cartel guys,’ Ricardo said to Harper. ‘I can negotiate with them, make a deal.’

Harper paused, watching the nervous tic tugging at the corner of Don Lorenzo’s mouth, and the bead of sweat rolling down his forehead. ‘So it seems we don’t need you at all, Don Lorenzo, but there are still two things you can do for me. You can give me the keys for the punishment cells and you can tell me the name of the man you were going to sell the Englishman called Scouse to.’

‘If I tell you that he will have me killed.’

Harper gave a cold smile. ‘Very probably, but that prospect is the least of your worries, because I can kill you right now.’

There was a silence while Don Lorenzo weighed up his non-existent options. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘And if I give you the keys and tell you what you want to know, you will spare me?’

‘I will.’

‘The keys are hanging on the hook behind the door, the ring with six keys on it.’

Harper found the keys and pocketed them. ‘And the man my friend was to be sold to?’

Don Lorenzo hesitated, then bowed his head. ‘His name is Jacobo Guzman.’

Harper gave Lupa and Ricardo an enquiring look. ‘I’ve heard of him,’ Lupa said. ‘He’s a property developer, no? They have a big office on Avenida de 6 Agusto.’

‘And how do you contact him? I’m guessing you don’t ring his office.’

‘I have a number for him on my mobile.’ Don Lorenzo made to reach for the phone lying on the table behind him, but Harper shouted ‘Stop!’ He walked over to the table, knocking Don Lorenzo’s hand away and picked up the phone himself.

He held out the phone so Don Lorenzo could unlock it with his fingerprint, then opened the contacts and scanned down the list. ‘There’s no Guzman listed.’

‘Of course not. I would not be so stupid as to have it under his name. He’s listed as El Carnicero.’

Harper looked at Lupa for a translation. ‘The Butcher,’ she said,

‘The Butcher?’ Harper said. ‘And you’re the supplier of fresh meat for him. How much was he going to pay for this particular piece of English beef?’

‘Ten thousand US dollars.’

‘Scouse will be disappointed he was worth so little.’ He paused. ‘Okay, I think we have all we need from you, Don Lorenzo. So this is goodbye.’

‘So I am free to go?’

‘Not exactly. Ricardo do you want to deal with this? Perhaps it’s time for Don Lorenzo’s swimming lesson.’

Ricardo’s face broke into a broad smile. ‘It will be my pleasure.’

As the realisation of what Harper meant dawned on Don Lorenzo he began to curse him. ‘You swore to me, Englishman, you gave me your word.’ He half-rose to his feet but Harper prodded his chest with the point of his knife, pushing him back into his seat.

‘Indeed I did, Don Lorenzo, but I only swore that I wouldn’t kill you. I didn’t say Ricardo wouldn’t. And it’s no more than you deserve, you murderous scumbag. You would have had Scouse or any of us killed without a moment’s hesitation, but now your own time has come.’

The scar on Don Lorenzo’s cheek stood out white against his puce face and a vein was throbbing at his temple. He bowed his head as if in acquiescence, but in the next instant he launched himself at Harper. Harper had been expecting just such a move and he swayed to one side like a matador side-stepping an onrushing bull and threw a vicious short-arm punch at Don Lorenzo’s throat. He crashed to the floor, his hands clawing at his neck as he tried to draw breath. Harper dropped on him with both knees, forced his arm up his back until he heard the joint crack and held him there while Ricardo tied Don Lorenzo’s wrists with the bootlace tie that he tore from around his neck.

Ricardo and Harper took one of Don Lorenzo’s arm each and, keeping a wary eye out for any other retainers of the prison boss who might try to intervene, they marched him out of the yard and through the passageway that led to the piscina. Lupa followed them, her face expressionless.

At the brink of the pool, Don Lorenzo let out a cry of fear and tried to throw his weight back. ‘I beg you,’ he said, ‘don’t kill me. I have money, you can have as much as you want.’

‘Jódete,’ Ricardo said, ‘Fuck you. How many men have you watched drown in this pool? When I was a prisoner here myself I saw you beating a man with a baseball bat, as if he was a piñata. Then you threw him in the pool, stamped on his fingers as he tried to drag himself out and laughed when he went under and drowned. Now it’s your turn.’ He kicked him in the back of his knee, and as his leg buckled, Don Lorenzo lost his balance and, still with his hands tied behind him, fell face forward into the icy water of the pool. He broke surface, coughing and gasping, unable to use his hands and flailing with his legs with panic in his eyes. ‘Help me, for the love of god,’ he said. ‘I can’t swim.’

‘Then your end will be quicker than you deserve,’ Harper said, his face implacable.

Don Lorenzo went under and surfaced twice more, his struggles growing weaker as the exertion and the cold sapped his strength. When he went under again for the third time, nothing broke the surface but a thin stream of bubbles.

They waited until it was certain that he was dead, then turned away.

CHAPTER 16

‘Right,’ Harper said, at once all business again. ‘We’ve a real need for speed now.’

‘Lex,’ Lupa said. ‘I know the guards normally stay on the gate or go to the punishment cells and don’t come into the prison itself, but in the course of this evening they’ve heard gunfire and a couple of explosions and when they next do a head count, they’ll find there are…’ She hesitated. ‘I’ve lost count - nine bodies? Surely even they are going to have to do something about that?’

Harper nodded. ‘You’re probably right, so we need to give them something else to think about before they come looking for us, all guns blazing. So, as they say in all the best cowboy movies, let’s head them off at the pass.’ He pulled the keys to the punishment cells from his pocket.

‘Why did you want those?’ Lupa said. ‘We’ve already got Scouse out.’

‘We did, but there are still a few other guys in there and if they aren’t completely wrecked by beatings and hunger, they’ll be very useful to us.’

They both gave him blank looks and he smiled. ‘We’re going to recruit a beggars army to help us fight our battle with the guards. We’re going to lead a revolt by all those half-naked, starving, lowest of the low who have been locked in the punishment cells or forced to sleep on the concrete and stone floors, begging for scraps of food and performing any task to keep them alive. So we’ll set free the men in the punishment cells, round up all the other no-hopers and then I’ll talk to them, with you two translating.

He tossed Ricardo the keys. ‘You let those guys out and tell them that if they want to stay out of those cells, they need to come with you. Lupa and I will round up the others and we’ll see you in the yard of the Cancha section in twenty minutes.’

When Ricardo entered the yard with a dozen prisoners from the punishment cells straggling behind him, he found Harper and Lupa already there with another twenty men they had rounded up. Harper jumped up on an upturned barrel outside the bar and began to address them, pausing every few seconds to allow Lupa and Ricardo to translate. ‘No one in authority cares what happens to you or goes on in this prison,’ he said, ‘as long as nothing spills onto the streets and threatens their power. Now, with your help, we’re going to overthrow the guards and when we do, you’ll be left with two choices. You could go through the gates, get back on to the streets and take your chances out there, until the police arrest you again and you get thrown back in here to be abused by a new group of guards. The alternative is to stay here and take your turn at running the place.’

There were rumbles of disbelief and disagreement as this was translated, but Harper held up his hand for silence and carried on. ‘The chief warden and the guards aren’t paid, because the governor pockets their pay from the government and he never shows up at the jail at all. So he doesn’t care who’s guarding it as long as there are no mass break-outs or bad headlines that might cause him trouble. Fernandez and his guards are vicious, even murderous, and as corrupt as hell. They’ve been taking bribes, shaking down you and your families, and forcing some of your women, wives and daughters into prostitution, while you live in worse conditions than their dogs. So it’s time to shake up the system. We’re going to take them down. Help us do it and you can take their places, wear their uniforms, guard the gates and pocket the bribes that used to go to them. Some of the guards will have to be killed, and those that aren’t, you can put in what used to be your cells, so they can see for themselves what your lives have been like.’

One of them raised his hand. ‘But they have guns and we’ve got nothing.’

Harper held up one of the improvised guns in one hand and one of the bamboo grenades in the other. ‘We have weapons, we have the element of surprise and we outnumber them three or four to one. So we have enough - more than enough.’ He paused, letting the silence build. ‘Now, are you with us? Anyone who is, step forward and come and stand beside me. The rest stay where you are and we’ll take you back to your cells or the concrete floors where you’ve been sleeping what’s left of your lives away.’

There was little movement at first, other than a shuffling of feet, but then one prisoner and then another crossed the yard to stand beside him. There was another pause, during which he wondered if he’d blown it, but then two, three and then four more men moved across. They were followed by almost all the rest, leaving just two men standing there. ‘Last chance to join us,’ Harper said and one of them shuffled across to join the ranks. The other gave a slow shake of his head, turned and walked away.

Harper raised his voice and shouted after him. ‘Keep your mouth shut and nothing will happen to you. Tell the guards what’s coming and you’re dead.’ He turned back to his army of recruits. ‘Okay, some of you will be armed, but the main job of the rest of you is just to apply pressure and create panic. Keep them off guard, hemmed in, pushing and jostling them, and make plenty of noise as well. Let’s see them flinch and make them sweat. Right,’ he said. ‘Now let’s have a show of hands. Who wants revenge on the chief warden and the guards?’

Every hand shot up.

‘Who can handle a gun?’

Only a couple of hands went down.

‘Now why does that not surprise me?’ Harper said, laughing to himself. ‘All right - who’s killed a man?’

Still about half of the hands remained up.

‘Okay. Now we don’t have enough weapons for all of you, so I’m going to give the home-made pistols we have to the three guys who look to me most likely to use them - and shoot accurately - if it proves necessary. The rest of you can take small weapons, like coshes and blackjacks, so long as they can be carried concealed. If you walk out there carrying a baseball bat, then the game will be up before it’s begun. But whether or not you are carrying a weapon, you all have an equally important role to play. So here’s what I need you to do: I want you to wait for my signal and then begin to walk through the passageway and out into the main courtyard. Don’t go as a bloc, head out there in twos and threes with a few seconds’ gap between each group. Once you’re in the courtyard, make your way towards the gates and begin to surround the guards there, but you still all need to be slow and measured in your movements. If you rush the guards, you’re likely to panic them, in which case they may draw their weapons and start shooting before you’re able to do anything about it. So take your time and don’t offer them any immediate or visible threat. Let them think that there’s at least a chance that you’re all just joining in the usual clamour at the gates, trying to shout to relatives and friends, or slip the guards a bribe to let some package or other through. But keep moving forward, denying them space, crowding and jostling them. The guys at the front need to include the ones with the weapons, but they’re only to be used as a last resort, if and when the guards try to draw their pistols. The front rank also needs to include men who are willing to try to disarm the guards if that happens, either by knocking them out before they can draw and shoot, or by taking their guns from them and using them to threaten them and, if necessary kill them.’

‘And where will you be señor, while all this is going on?’ one of them asked, a man with the battered looks and mean air of a bar-room brawler. ‘Will you be sipping Singani and waiting for us to do your dirty work for you?’

‘No, I’ll be dealing with the guards with rifles up in the towers. If you think you know how to do that and have a better chance than me of coming out of it alive, then you’re welcome to try.’ Harper kept staring at the man until he dropped his gaze. ‘However, you look like you can handle yourself in a fight, so make sure you’re in the front rank when you’re crowding around the guards.’ His glance swept over the rest of them. ‘Anyone else got any other objections?’

No one spoke and after waiting a few more seconds, he said ‘Right, just two more things I need to emphasise to you. Firstly, if this works - and there’s no reason why it won’t - in a few hours from now, you could be in charge of San Pedro. The obvious temptation - and I’m sure it will be your first instinct - will be to throw the gates wide open and let everyone out. But if you do that, even your shambolic government here will not be able to ignore a tidal wave of thugs, armed robbers and murderers being unleashed on to the streets of La Paz, and they will be forced to take action. They will almost certainly not only bring in more police but the army as well to restore order and round up the escapees, and they won’t be too choosy about the methods they use or the casualties they cause.’

He paused to let that sink in before continuing. ‘It also means that your chance to run the place and start collecting the bribes and kick-backs that the guards have been pocketing will have gone. So my very strong recommendation to you is that the first thing you should be doing if we do manage to overthrow the current regime is to secure the gates and stop a mass escape.

‘My second recommendation is this: You know what it’s like to be at the bottom of the heap - that’s where you are right now, isn’t it? So if and when you get to be the ones who are collecting the bribes and kick-backs, how about pledging to yourselves and the other inhabitants of this place that you’ll share some of the wealth around, so that every inmate benefits to some extent from the money you’re collecting. It’s not just a matter of doing the right thing, because if everyone has a stake in the system and is earning a few Bolivianos from it, then visitors will go unmolested, the overall amount of money available will increase and everyone will be happy - or happier anyway. Not only that, but your job of running the place will be a whole lot easier. Okay?’ The men nodded and no one seemed to disagree with him. ‘Right, then let’s get to work.’

He first made them go through a series of rehearsals, using the entrance to the passageway leading out of the yard to stand in for the front gates, with most of the members of his ragged army practising crowding in and jostling a few of the other inmates who were posing as the guards. ‘That’s good enough,’ he said at last. He glanced at his watch. ‘It’ll have to be, because we’re getting tight for time. He took the last of his once fat bundle of dollars out of his pocket. ‘Ricardo, shake the guy who owns the bodega there awake, and buy everyone a drink - a little Dutch courage will help things along - but make sure no-one has more than a couple, because we want them aggressive, not pissed and passed out.’

The eastern sky was already greying at the approach of dawn and while their beggars’ army fuelled up as the sleepy-eyed owner of the bodega sold more alcohol than he had in months, Harper, Ricardo and Lupa discussed the next move. ‘We can march them into the main yard,’ Harper said, ‘but like I just told that bruiser, our big problem is going to be the two guards in the watchtowers. We’re going to have to find a way to deal with them because both of the towers overlook the yard and the gates, and are in line of sight of each other, giving them cross-cover if one is attacked. Both of the guards are armed with rifles, and since those towers are at least twenty metres above the ground and these pop-guns-’ He held up one of their primitive pistols. ‘Only have a killing range of four or five metres, we need to work out a way to deal with them. I’m confident I can climb up one of the towers undetected by the guard in it and take him out, but unless the other guy is asleep on the job, I’m likely to get a bullet between my shoulder blades while I’m doing it.’

He thought for a few moments. ‘How’s your throwing arm, Ricardo?’

‘What about asking me as well?’ Lupa said, indignant.

‘Look, Lupa, this isn’t the moment for a debate about sexism. Blokes tend to be better at throwing things because they’ve got longer, more powerful arms and they tend to have spent a greater part of their youth playing stupid ball games.’ He gave a sly grin. ‘But when I want someone to make a dress for the chief warden or give make-up lessons to the guards, don’t worry, you’ll be first in line.’

She laughed despite herself. ‘You’ll pay for that, you sexist pig.’

‘So Ricardo?’ Harper said.

‘I can throw.’

‘Do you think you can light two or three of these bamboo bombs and throw them so they land close enough to one of the watch towers to make the guard in there shit his pantalones and keep his head down? You don’t have to be able to land one actually in the tower, just lob them on to the roof close enough to make him duck.’

‘Lex,’ Ricardo said, ‘I could do that in my sleep. Even Lupa could manage it.’

Lupa switched her furious scowl from Harper to her brother, but said nothing.

‘If you can do that on my signal,’ Harper said, ‘and keep that guard’s head down for about twenty seconds, that’ll give me enough time to shin up the other tower, wipe out the guard in that one, and then use his rifle to get rid of the other one. And without the guys with rifles up in the towers to pick them off, our ragtag army should be more than enough for the guards on the gates. There are only twelve altogether, we’ll have taken two of them out, and at least four others will be off duty or asleep, so they’ll have a maximum of six guards to deal with. Odds of five to one, you’d bet the farm on that, wouldn’t you?’

‘I guess we’ll have to,’ Lupa said, ‘if we ever want to get out of this place.’

‘Lupa, I’ve two tasks for you. The first is to marshal our army so they don’t all forget their instructions and go flooding out into the main courtyard together. The second is to follow close behind the last group, then move straight across to the western side of the yard where the warden’s office is, and cut the phone line there. It runs across the wall and in through the window frame of his office.’ He held out his knife to her. ‘Use this.’

As the morning light began to strengthen, they set the plan in motion. As arranged, Harper left Lupa to control the beggars’ army, releasing them in twos and threes to make their slow way into the main courtyard. Ricardo went with the first group, walking behind them and using them as a screen to conceal the bamboo grenades he was carrying tucked inside his waistband under his shirt. He took up position in the main courtyard close to the foot of one of the watchtowers and in a place where the long shadows cast by the rising sun partly concealed him from the gaze of the guard in the other tower. He laid the grenades in a row on the ground behind him, took out his disposable lighter and then waited for the signal.

Harper climbed the stairs to the wooden balcony on the first floor of one of the sections near the front of the prison. He grabbed an armful of washing that had been draped over the rail to dry, then took the steps to the top floor and climbed the rickety ladder that led to the roof, used by prisoners every day either to spread their washing or the painted children’s toys some made, on the corrugated metal panels where they could quickly dry in the sun and the perpetual wind from the Altiplano.

Lupa had followed the last of the beggars’ army into the main courtyard and strolled across to the far side. Choosing her moment, when the guards were already distracted by the growing numbers of prisoners crowding around them, she reached up with the knife, slid the point of it under the phone cable just below the chief warden’s windowsill and severed it with the razor-edged blade.

Harper walked out across the roof towards the foot of the other tower, spreading the washing he had gathered as he went, trying to look as casual as possible. He waited until he saw the guard looking away from him, his attention caught by the growing numbers of prisoners flowing into the main courtyard. Harper dropped the rest of the washing, hurried to the foot of the tower and began to climb it on the side furthest from the courtyard and the other guard tower on the far side.

As they had arranged, Ricardo began a silent count as soon as he saw Harper disappear from sight. Harper too was also mentally counting down from fifty as he scanned the tower for handholds. It had brick pillars at each corner, supporting the flat concrete roof above it, but with a glazed window on the side facing outwards, beyond the prison. The open sides on the other three faces were shielded only by waist-high wrought iron railings. The brickwork was newer than much of the prison’s other masonry, but it was a short climb to reach the bottom of the railings and, using the clamps that held the wiring for the floodlight that was fixed to the tower and the places where the mortar between the bricks had begun to crumble enough to give finger-holds, it was easy for Harper to climb it and reach up to grasp the bottom rail.

He clung there for a moment, completing the countdown in his head and listening to the ever-louder hubbub of noise from the main courtyard below as his beggars’ army crowded around the guards. He was already beginning to swing himself up and over the railing as he heard the sound of the first grenade detonating on the roof at the far side of the courtyard.

The guard had his back to him and was unslinging his rifle from his shoulder as he scanned the crowd below for the source of the explosion. Harper saw him stiffen as he identified the target - Ricardo, who was now sending another grenade flying after the first one - but as the guard put the rifle to his shoulder and started to bring it to bear, Harper was already in motion. He covered the two metre gap between them in two strides, smashed his fist against the side of the guard’s head, momentarily stunning him and followed up with a karate chop to the throat. As the guard began to crumple, Harper tore the rifle from his grasp and brought the butt crunching down on the guard’s skull. He then stepped over him to the front of the tower and sighted through the guard’s rifle. It was a .30 Carbine, a vintage weapon, used by the US Army in World War Two. Short, light and with a good rate of fire, it was first issued to US Paratroopers and tank crews, but it had also proved perfect for use in guard towers.

Harper heard a third detonation and the sound of shrapnel rattling across the metal roofing as he squinted through the iron sights of the rifle, aiming at the edge of the other tower. He concentrated until the iron railing was in sharp focus. As the echoes of the last grenade blast ebbed away, the other guard cautiously raised his head. Harper only had to swing the barrel a couple of centimetres to bring the man’s head into line with the round rear sight and the front blade sight, to create the perfect sight picture he had been taught many years ago as a Para on the ranges at Aldershot. He sharpened his focus still more, then exhaled and gently squeezed the trigger. Even as he felt the recoil in his shoulder, he saw the man’s head disappear, replaced by a mist of blood droplets and fragments of bone.

At once he switched his aim to the guards in the courtyard, who were hemmed in by the gates and struggling to hold back the mob pressing in around them. Two of them had already drawn their pistols and one fired a warning shot into the air, hoping to frighten the mob and drive them back, but as the pressure increased, Harper saw the pistol barrel swing down and in that moment he drilled a shot through the guard’s head. Without waiting to see the impact, he swung the sights on to the second guard and shot him too, the bullet’s steep downward trajectory punching a neat hole through his eye and then exiting through the back of his neck.

The beggars army let out a collective roar as they saw their tormentors fall and they overwhelmed the four remaining guards. Only one even managed to draw his weapon - the others were already being punched and kicked to the ground - and before his fumbling fingers could raise it, the pistol was torn from his grasp by the bar-room brawler Harper had put in the front rank, who clubbed the guard with the butt and then shot him through the head at point blank range, spreading his brains all over the ground in front of the gates.

Still holding the rifle, Harper vaulted over the rail, clambered down the tower and ran across the roof, the metal panels rattling underfoot. As he reached the edge, he slung the rifle over his shoulder, swarmed down a drainpipe to the floor of the yard and then ran to join Lupa and Ricardo. The mob was already carrying off the three guards they had overpowered, beating and punching them as they dragged them toward the passage that led to the punishment block and the piscina, where the body of Don Lorenzo still lay on the bottom.

Even if the three men’s fate was to join him there, Harper felt little sympathy for them. They had all brutalised the prisoners who now held them captive, men who had no money, friends or influence to protect them and couldn’t fight back. The guards had forced many of the prisoners’ wives, girlfriends and even children to perform sexual acts in return for access, or simply to prevent further beatings for their men, and they had robbed, extorted bribes and swindled countless others. Now the reckoning was being made.

The remaining guards, off duty or asleep in their dormitory, were rounded up, stripped of their weapons, uniforms and money, and then, after Harper intervened to prevent further drownings, they were force-marched down to the punishment cells or the bare concrete floors that the lowest of the low had been occupying.

Some of the members of Harper’s beggars’ army were trying on the guards’ uniforms, and taking over their weapons and roles. The remaining section bosses within the prison, drawn by the gunshots and general commotion but watching from the safety of the far side of the main courtyard, just shrugged. Don Lorenzo was gone, and the chief warden’s guards had been deposed, but business as usual would soon resume, just with a different bunch of guards to pay off. A few of the other prisoners had taken the opportunity provided by the temporary absence of guards to leave the prison and go back on to the streets. Whether they could survive there for long without falling foul of the police and finding themselves back in San Pedro was not a question that appeared to concern them, any more than it did Harper; they’d been given a chance, whether or not they now took it was up to them.

CHAPTER 17

Only one loose end remained to be tied up: the chief warden, Fernández, was still holed up in his office behind a locked door. Squinting through the keyhole, Harper saw him sitting behind his desk facing the door, with a pistol gripped in his hand and his nightstick still lying across the corner of the desk. Keeping to the side of the doorframe in case Fernández tried to fire through the door, Harper called out to him, making sarcastic use of the word ‘Don’. ‘It’s over for you now, Don Fernández. Your men have all been killed or captured, and you are the only one still holding out. As you’ve no doubt noticed, your phone line’s dead and there won’t be any cavalry riding to your rescue, so you’re on your own.We’ve now got three options. We can simply sit here and starve you out, though with the amount of excess weight you’re carrying, that might be a long process. The second way is to blow the door in or toss a grenade through the window, but both of those will be messy - first for you, and then for us when we have to scrape what’s left of you off the floor, walls and ceilings. So the best option for you and for us, is for you to put that gun down, prise your fat arse off that chair, walk over to the door and unlock it, and then come out with your hands above your head. I’ll give you five minutes to think about it and if you haven’t come out by the end of that time, we’ll be taking option two. Okay?’

There was a long silence from the other side of the door, but then Harper heard the creak of a chair and Fernández’s slow footsteps moving across the office. Harper nodded to Ricardo on the other side of the door. Both of them were now armed, not with their primitive single shot weapons, but with pistols that had been liberated from the guards. They flattened themselves against the wall on either side of the doorway, pistols cocked and pointing at the door. There was a metallic scraping sound as the key was turned and a creak as the door began to open. Fernández then emerged, his pudgy hands held above his head. Harper grabbed him by the arm, swung him around and pushed him, none too gently, face against the wall and held him with a pistol at his neck while Lupa patted him down.

Harper then pulled Fernández’s arms down behind his back and Lupa secured him with a pair of handcuffs that had been liberated from the warden’s own men. They pushed him back into the office, collected his pistol from the desk and then left him standing while the three of them settled themselves in his chairs, with Lupa trying his desk-chair for size and Harper and Ricardo lounging on the greasy sofa, pushed against the wall facing the TV screen, still tuned to Fernández’s favourite sports channel.

‘What do you want from me?’ Fernández said.

Harper shrugged and spread his hands wide. ‘I’m not sure you have anything we want.’

‘There is one thing,’ Lupa said.

Harper raised an eyebrow. ‘Really, what’s that?’

She was staring at the warden. ‘I’ll be taking over your job, SeñorFernández.’

Harper started to laugh, but was silenced by Lupa’s ferocious glare. ‘Neither I nor Ricardo are going back to the streets, Lex, and having to live hand to mouth. We want to be part of all this now, and in fact more than that, we want to run it. Ricardo will replace Don Lorenzo and take care of the cocaine trade and I’ll be sitting at this desk and running the prison.’

Harper couldn’t hide a smile. ‘I admire your spunk, Lupa, but face it, this isn’t a café or a travel agent, it’s a prison full of desperate men.’

‘Don’t patronise me, Lex. I know that and I can run this place as well as any man. Probably better.’

His smile broadened. ‘No you can’t. I’ve only known you a short while, so you may have hidden depths I don’t know about, but from what I’ve seen of you, you’re not ruthless enough.’

‘Am I not?’ She fixed him with a look, then picked up the nightstick from the desk and smashed the chief warden full in the mouth with it. He collapsed to the floor, spitting blood and broken teeth. Lupa stood over him, spat in his face and said. ‘That’s what you did to Scouse, bastardo, how do you like it? And you know what else? Now that Scouse has gone, those developers will be looking for a new human sacrifice to bury in the foundations of that hotel they’re building. So we’ll get rid of a problem for us and solve one for them. You’re not a gringo, but you are - or at least you were until a few minutes ago - a man of some status. So I think you’ll do nicely.’

She turned to Ricardo. ‘While we’re waiting to make the arrangements, why don’t you take the warden down to the punishment cells? There are still a couple available and from the amount of time he spent down there, beating prisoners, Fernández must really like it there.’

As Ricardo pulled the warden to his feet, kicked him in the backside and pushed him towards the door, Lupa turned to look at Harper. ‘That ruthless enough for you?’

Harper bowed. ‘I take it back, you’re plenty ruthless enough, just as long as you can persuade the other guys to support you.’

They walked back down to the courtyard and she called all the former prisoners together, still looking a little uncomfortable in their new uniforms, let alone their new roles. ‘Oye hombres, any of you object to me taking control of the prison and giving you orders?’

They took in the nightstick she was holding and the glint in her eye and, as one, began to shake their heads. ‘Whatever you say, Boss Lupa,’ one said, and there was a rumble of assent from the others.

‘Bueno,’ she said. ‘So, first job: Four of you lock the gates and mount guard on them. The rest of you get down to the cell we were using, get the gunpowder that’s still there, take it into the yard and set fire to it - it’ll only burn and not blow up provided you don’t compress it first. And now we’ve got the guards’ pistols, we don’t need those single-shot weapons. Gather them all up, take them to the blacksmith and tell him to melt them down. If there are any spare gas cylinders - we used the ones in the cell as flame-throwers - connect them back up to the stove and get a couple of people to clean the cell up, mend the window and repaint the walls; someone will want to make use of it soon enough. Lastly, we need to dispose of the bodies in the piscina. Drain it, get them out, cut them up, bag them and mix them with the garbage. That way they won’t be noticed till the garbage truck reaches the dump and even if they are found when it gets there, enough bodies have already turned up there from the cocaine wars between the gangs, to make another couple not even worth bothering about.’

As they dispersed to carry out their tasks, Harper gave a low whistle. ‘I’m going to have to eat my words, Lupa, you look like you really do have what it takes. But it’s early days yet, are you sure you can keep those guys in line?’

‘Why not Lex? They’ve been lower than the cockroaches all the time they’ve been in here, but now they’re in control of their own destinies. If they’ve got food in their stomachs and money in their pockets - and there’s plenty of that to be made for all of us - why would they risk that just because there’s a woman in charge?’

Harper gave a rueful smile. ‘Okay I’m convinced. You were right and I was wrong. And you know what? Why stop here? Give it a few years and I can even see you as Bolivia’s first woman President.’

She grinned. ‘I don’t think so Lex, even I’m not ruthless enough for that, but this will work just fine for me and Ricardo. I’ll have Fernández’s quarters and Ricardo can move into Don Lorenzo’s very spacious cell and take over as prison boss and, with the help of his Colombian friends on the outside, he’ll have no trouble running San Pedro’s cocaine trade.’ She gave him a sweet smile. ‘You see? Everybody wins.’

‘Well, everybody but Don Lorenzo, Fernández and his guards anyway, and I’m quite relaxed about all of them getting what was coming to them.’ He paused. ‘So, I still owe you both the fee for all your help.’

Lupa held up a hand. ‘Olvídalo - forget it, Lex, you owe us nothing. If it hadn’t have been for you, I’d still be scratching around for translation work in Santa Cruz, and Ricardo would have been street dealing waiting for the next arrest. Now we’re on easy street, so gracias but please, keep your money.’

‘Okay, if you’re sure? Then while you’re settling in to Fernández’s kingdom, I’m going to head back to the hotel, bring Scouse up to date, take off these filthy, stinking rags of his that I’ve been wearing, and have a very long and hot shower. Then I’m going to have some food and a couple of very big drinks - and if you’re confident about leaving your posts unattended, you’re very welcome to come and join me for that - and then tomorrow we’ll be flying out.’

Harper found Ricardo already supervising cocaine production in the prison factory. He broke off from what he was doing to give Harper a hug. ‘What can I say, Lex, we owe everything to you. We couldn’t even have dreamed about doing this, without you.’

‘The feeling’s mutual, Ricardo. I couldn’t have got Scouse out, let alone myself, without your help. And taking down some seriously evil people, well, that was just a very welcome bonus.’ He smiled, ‘Take good care of Fernández, won’t you?’

Ricardo laughed. ‘Don’t worry, he’s going to be playing a big part in La Paz’s new hotel development.’

Harper headed for the gates, saying a few goodbyes along the way, and once out of the prison, he went straight back to the hotel, ignoring the disapproving looks from the hotel staff and guests at the filthy rags he was wearing. He went to his room, and first checked the tells he had left to show if intruders had been searching it, but while Scouse had obviously been in to take the money and ticket that Harper had left him, nothing else had been disturbed and his fake documents, the rest of the money, the sat-phone he’d got from Standish from Risk Reduction, and the Colt .45 Lupa had obtained for him were still where he had left them.

He put the Colt on the bedside table and then called Scouse on the room phone. He was on the floor below Harper’s. Harper went down and knocked on his door. Scouse opened it almost immediately and grabbed Lex in a punishing bearhug. ‘I owe you, mate,’ said Scouse.

‘Damn right you do,’ said Harper. ‘But you’re out, that’s all that matters.’

Scouse was looking semi-human again. He looked like he’d already put on a few pounds, though that was scarcely surprising since, as he said to Harper, ‘To be honest, mate, I’ve not stopped eating since I got out of San Pedro.’ He’d had some temporary repairs to his teeth as well, though until he had them replaced with crowns, every time he looked in the mirror, the row of broken stumps would be a reminder of his time in San Pedro.

‘Right mate, we’re going to stay put here tonight but before first light tomorrow morning we’re going to head out of here,’ Harper told him. ‘I’m going to clean up, shower and get some shut-eye. This evening we’ll have something to eat and drink and then we’re getting out of La Paz before dawn. So don’t leave the hotel until I call you later on and if you must hit the bar downstairs, don’t get pissed, okay?’

Scouse gave him another brutal bearhug and Harper went back to his own room. He stripped off his stinking clothes and dumped them into a laundry bag, knotted the top and stashed it at the back of the wardrobe. He then showered, shaved, and stretched out on the bed to catch up on some sleep. In the early evening, he took another shower and put on some clean clothes, then picked up the sat phone and dialled the number that the Texan pilot, Randy, had given him. He left a message with the woman who answered the phone and within ten minutes Randy had called him back.

‘Lex? I wasn’t really expecting to hear from you again and certainly not so soon.’

‘Me neither, but shit happens and I need a flight out of La Paz tomorrow. Can do?’

‘Sure, if the price is right.’

‘Okay. Two passengers this time, pick up at the same place you dropped us off, as early as you can manage in the morning, and then fly us across the border. It doesn’t really matter which: Peru, Argentina or Chile.’

‘Not Brazil?’

‘No, that might not be the wisest move.’

‘Okay. Peru would probably be the best bet then. It’s a shorter hop and their border security and immigration/emigration procedures are a lot less stringent than Argentina or Chile, so if you were trying to exit from there without having a stamp to show you’d legally entered the country, Peru would be your best shot. I could drop you close to one of the regional airports, probably Juliaca, because they get a lot of tourist flights bringing Americans to gaze at Lake Titicaca, so yet another gringo won’t attract any particular attention.’

‘Perfect,’ Harper said. ‘Same price as last time?’

Randy laughed. ‘Not a chance in hell of that, I’m afraid. Sorry Lex, but for cross border flights, I charge at least treble the regular rates. There’s a lot of risk involved - cartels, customs and border patrols, DEA, yadda, yadda.’

‘So we’re talking what? A thousand dollars?’

Randy laughed again. ‘I guess math wasn’t your strong suit at school, right Lex? I charged you four hundred to fly up to La Paz from Santa Cruz. So treble that is twelve hundred bucks. And the fact that you want me to get you across the border rather than just taking a scheduled flight, makes me think that either the Bolivian authorities or the cartels - and they’re often pretty much the same thing - would like to get their hands on you. So allowing a little more for the extra risk involved in transporting fugitives across a national border, let’s say…’ He paused and exhaled through his teeth, as if pondering a fiendishly complex calculation.

‘I’ve got the back of an envelope here, if that would help,’ Harper said.

‘Nah, I got it,’ Randy said. ‘Including the extra fuel and a five buck penalty for the sarcasm, shall we say fifteen hundred bucks?’

‘Bloody hell, I could get a round the world flight for that.’

‘What can I say, Lex?’ Randy said, with a chuckle. ‘It’s a seller’s market.’

‘And don’t tell me, you’re just taking care of business, right?’

‘Right. So what d’you say? Of course, if it’s too much, you can always see if you can find someone else to fly you out of the country at five minutes notice…’

‘Nah, let’s do it,’ Harper said. ‘How early can you get to the pick up place?’

‘Flying over the Andes in the dark is not really recommended, so I’ll have to wait for daylight, but I can take off at dawn and be at the same strip, fifteen miles east of La Paz, refuelled and ready to go again by say, ten o’clock.’

‘Okay, see you there.’

Harper broke the connection and went to round up Scouse. Harper took him to the street café for some food and a couple of drinks. There was no sign of Lupa, and after a couple of hours, Harper gave up waiting for her, paid their bill and headed back to the hotel. ‘Set an alarm for five o’clock,’ he said to Scouse as they parted in the lobby, ‘because we need to be out of here before dawn.’

‘Sure, whatever,’ Scouse said.

Harper paid the hotel bill with cash, avoiding any delays in the morning that might merely be irritating but could also put them in danger. He then went up to his room and stretched out on the bed, planning to grab a few more hours’ sleep, before setting out before dawn, but a few minutes later there was a soft knock at the door.

He was wide awake in an instant. He picked up the Colt .45 from the bedside table and walked warily towards the door, standing to one side of it, in case the visitor was only waiting for him to speak before loosing off a few rounds through the door.

‘Who is it?’

‘Me.’

He opened the door. Lupa was standing there, wearing a silk shirt open almost to the waist and a very short skirt, and holding a bottle of champagne in one hand.

‘You don’t look much like a Chief Warden,’ Harper said, ‘and you won’t last long as one if you’re already sneaking off on your first night in the job.’

She gave him a smile that again set his blood pounding. ‘I’ve left Ricardo in charge and told the new guards that anyone who gets drunk or off his head on cocaine while he’s supposed to be on duty, will be back sleeping on the floor of the worst section of the prison by morning. Now the despedida - the farewell - is a Bolivian tradition, usually involving a table full of food and as much beer, Singani and perhaps cocaine, as you can take. But on this occasion, I’m hoping that a bottle of champagne will do instead.’ She paused. ‘So, aren’t you going to invite me in?’

Harper stepped to one side and she sauntered past him into the room. She glanced at the crumpled bed and said ‘That’s lucky, you were just going to bed anyway.’

She popped the cork of the champagne, poured some into a glass for Harper and then took a swig from the bottle. Some of it spilled down her chin and ran down her neck. ‘Oops, I’ve spilt some,’ she said with a wicked grin. ‘Want to help me clean it up?’

Harper tore his eyes away from the trail the champagne was making over her olive skin and the silk of her shirt.

‘I’ve got to be honest, Lupa, I make it a rule never to sleep with anybody I’m working with.’

She smiled, but undid the remaining buttons on her shirt, shrugged it off her shoulders and reached behind her to unhook her bra. ‘But we’re not working together any more now, are we Lex?’ She looked down. ‘And from what I’m seeing, it doesn’t look like you’re feeling like it’s a working relationship either. So - what’s that English saying? - how about making me the exception that proves the rule?’

He grinned. ‘Okay, I surrender. Whatever you say, Warden, but no handcuffs or truncheons, okay?’

She was still laughing as he picked her up and carried her to the bed.

CHAPTER 18

Harper didn’t get much sleep and he was awake when his phone alarm sounded early the next morning. It was still dark outside, with another hour before dawn broke. Lupa yawned and stretched like a cat, then gave him a sultry smile. ‘I’m glad you broke your rule, Lex, but I hate goodbyes, so I’m not going to prolong this one. Besides it’s my first full day in my new job and I need to make sure my guards are on duty.’ She kissed him, then rolled out of bed and pulled on her skirt and silk shirt. ‘So, how will you and Scouse get out of the country? If Scouse has your passport, what are you going to use?’

Harper smiled. ‘It’s a fake anyway and I always have a couple of spares, just in case. So Scouse and I’ll be on the same flight, once I’ve worked out where it’s safe for us to fly from.’

‘And how will you be sure of that?’

‘I’ll use my instincts, but I can also contact Sam at Risk Reduction, who may have heard something from their guys on the ground here.’

‘Don’t take any chances, Lex,’ she said. ‘If they don’t kill you, they’ll put you back in jail again, and it won’t be San Pedro the next time, it’ll be Chonchocoro, and no one - not even you - can break out of there.’

‘Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.’

She lingered a moment longer, staring at him as if imprinting his face on her memory, and then she headed for the door.

‘Oh and Lupa?’ She paused and looked back at him. ‘You were well worth breaking the rule for.’

She laughed. ‘Don’t make a habit of it though, will you? Unless it’s with me, of course.’ She blew him a kiss, then closed the door and a moment later he heard her footsteps on the wooden stairs.

Harper jumped out of bed, and had showered and dressed in five minutes. He gathered up his passport, money, the sat-phone and the remaining ammunition for the Colt .45. He stuck it in his waistband under his jacket and hurried downstairs to collect Scouse. He was not surprised, though a little irritated, to find that despite their conversation the previous evening, Scouse was still fast asleep, and Harper had to pound on the door three times before he woke up.

‘Get your shit together and splash some water on your face,’ Harper said, ‘and then let’s get moving. We need to be out of here pronto because once the Brazilian cartel bosses get to know about what happened in San Pedro - and they’ve probably already been told - they’ll be round La Paz like flies on shit looking for some pay-back from us.’

As Scouse shuffled towards the bathroom and started washing his face and then struggling into his clothes, Harper kept talking to him, as much to hurry him up as to impart any useful information. ‘If I were them,’ he said. ‘I’d be getting my men to screen every hotel, hostel and flophouse in the city, looking for gringos. Once they’ve eliminated the students and backpackers, there won’t be many others, so it’s not going to take them long to discover that two Inglés have been staying at the Pacific Hotel.’ He gave a bleak smile. ‘I’m sure they’ll be very persuasive when talking to the staff. And those cartel guys are perfectly capable of burning the whole place down and killing dozens of others, just to make sure they get us as well.’

‘So what do we do then?’ Scouse said, still looking around the room to see if he’d forgotten anything.

‘Well first, we get out of the hotel. And when we do, there’s no point in heading for the airport because even if the cartel haven’t got their own sicarios lying in wait for us, they’ll certainly have alerted the people there - the cops, customs men and soldiers - who are on their payroll. So if we’re dumb enough to turn up there, dollars to dimes we’ll be arrested and handed over to the cartel. After that, it’ll be goodbye world but probably with some heavy duty torture first, just for fun. However, I have arranged some alternative transport. I’ve called the Yank pilot who flew me, Lupa and Ricardo up here from Santa Cruz. We’re going to RV with him at a dirt airstrip out on the Altiplano a few miles east of here and he’s going to fly us across the border to a safe location. Then we can get ourselves to the nearest international airport and get a scheduled flight to a place where we can actually speak the language and where people are not trying to kill us.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘Well, not that many of the people anyway.’

He broke off to glower at Scouse, who was still not ready. ‘So, since people really are trying to kill us here, if you’ve finished making sure that you’ve packed your toothbrush and your spare undies, pretty please with sugar on top, how about we get the hell out of here?’

They went downstairs and crossed the deserted lobby, but Harper made Scouse wait while he scanned the street outside, looking for any sign of a threat or surveillance, or the least thing out of place. After a couple of minutes he gave an abrupt nod. ‘Okay, it’s clear, let’s go.’

They hurried through the darkened streets to where Harper had left the battered Mercedes and he drove off just as the sky was beginning to lighten towards dawn. They threaded their way through the city and as they swung around the series of hairpin bends climbing the hillside out of La Paz, Harper glanced back and caught a few glimpses of the prison at the heart of the downtown district and the ant-like microcosm of the city within its walls. By now it would be business as usual at the gates except that there was a new governor and new guards in charge, who were probably already flexing their muscles.

They drove on eastwards through the suburbs, as the buildings slowly became fewer and more widely separated, and then they were out of the city altogether, passing through an area of scattered subsistence farms and the small town where he, Lupa and Ricardo had caught the flota bus what seemed like months ago but was actually only a week before.

Beyond the town, they reached the dust and desiccated grasslands of the true Altiplano. Harper waited until they had reached a point where they were out of sight of the last building in the town and then took the next turning off the road onto a narrow and clearly little-used track. He drove on, away from the main road for a hundred yards or so, then pulled in behind a low rise building that partly shielded them from the sight of anyone passing along the road and switched off the engine.

‘What now?’ Scouse said.

‘Now we wait.’

‘For what? Christmas? Godot?’

Harper smiled. ‘No, just until we see a Douglas C-47 Skytrain coming in to land at the dirt strip a mile or two east of here.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘But we’ve got a couple of hours to kill, so you can catch up on some more sleep if you want.’

‘I could have done that back at the hotel if we’d set off a bit later.’

Harper gave him a world-weary look. ‘You could, but then by the time you’d done that, you might have opened your eyes to find yourself squinting down the wrong end of a couple of Kalashnikovs with some more of your friends from the drug cartel that arranged your kidnapping and imprisonment on the trigger end.’

‘But we’re safe now, surely. They’re hardly likely to be chasing us across Bolivia.’

‘Aren’t they? Well, let’s see. Since I got to this country a week or so ago, and admittedly it was with a little extra help from Ricardo and Lupa, I first killed eight of their guys in Santa Cruz. Then we came up to La Paz and wiped out another ten or so in San Pedro prison, including the man who was running their cocaine operation there and all the muscle who were making sure no-one else could move in on it - oh, and not forgetting your friend, the chief warden of the prison, who no doubt they were paying to make sure their cocaine trade ran smoothly. I’ve also liberated the man they were hoping to sell to a superstitious property developer for a pretty hefty price and, worst of all from their point of view, whether or not they’ve twigged that yet, they’re now in the process of having their very, very lucrative cocaine operation in San Pedro and La Paz as a whole taken over by their most hated rivals, the Colombians. So I’d say they’d have some pretty powerful reasons for wanting to track down and get rid of the man who has caused them all their problems here, wouldn’t you? Hence the need to get the hell out of La Paz before daybreak, and to be lying up here, off the road, just in case our new best friends are out looking for us.’

‘All right, all right,’ Scouse said. ‘No need to be so arsey, I was just saying.’

Harper gave a slow shake of his head. ‘Why don’t you rest your eyes and maybe get a little more sleep while I make a phone call?’

Scouse shrugged, slid down in his seat, tipped the peak of the baseball cap he was wearing forward and closed his eyes.

Harper picked up the sat phone and called Standish. ‘Sam,’ Harper said. ‘Job done. I’m getting ready to move on but I wanted to tell you that I found Scouse. Alive. I’m telling you because I want to be sure that the company knows that he didn’t take the money, and there won’t be any come-back on him.’

Scouse had now re-opened his eyes and was sitting up in the passenger seat and paying close attention to the conversation.

Harper winked at him. ‘When Scouse flew in to Bolivia, he was arrested in the Customs Hall by a bent customs officer and a couple of cops, working for one of the cartels. They took the ransom money, beat the piss out of him and then dumped him in an isolation cell in San Pedro prison. And had we not found him, he would have been wearing a concrete overcoat by now. So he’s blameless and the only reason Risk Reduction should be contacting him from now on is to give him the back-pay you owe him. Okay?’

‘Thanks Lex, good to know that you got him out of there. I’ll pass that on,’ Standish said. ‘Funnily enough, I got a bit of a garbled version about some strange goings on in San Pedro from our go-between in La Paz. He called me up this morning to say there were reports of explosions, gunshots and gang fights from inside the jail, and quite a few guards and inmates were rumoured to have disappeared.’ He paused. ‘I don’t suppose that has any connection to you getting Scouse out of there, does it?’

‘You know me, Sam,’ Harper said. ‘I go out of my way to avoid trouble like that.’

Standish laughed. ‘It’s because I know you, Lex, that I know the opposite is true. If any trouble is kicking off, you’re usually not far away from it. Anyway, that’s none of my business, but if you were involved, my advice would be to find a covert way out of Bolivia - and quick. I don’t know if you already know this, but the chief warden you killed…’

‘Technically, I didn’t,’ Harper interrupted, ‘but I’ll let that go for now.’

‘Well, he was not only being bribed by a Brazilian cartel, the most vicious one in Bolivia - and that’s saying something, believe me - but he was also the brother of the gang boss’s chief sicario, and they’re not the sort of people to bother about technicalities like who actually pulled the trigger, or wielded the knife, or whatever it was that you or your friends did to him. So my guess is that there is now a price on both your heads. In which case, don’t even think about attempting to fly out from La Paz, because they’ll be watching the airport and the roads and, as Scouse has already discovered by the sound of it, the cartels have more inside men at the airport than we do, and they’re higher up the food chain. I’ll give you any help I can, but to be honest, I’m afraid there’s not much I can do from here, even if we weren’t in the middle of another ransom negotiation.’

‘Forget about it,’ Harper said. ‘Thanks for the tip-off, but we’ve no intention of flying out from the airport anyway.’

‘And don’t delay getting out of the city. The cartel has informers everywhere. The word will have gone out that two gringos are wanted by them. There’ll be a reward for any info about you and a warning that anyone who helps you will meet the same fate as you. Sorry, but that’s the way it is here; your own grandmother would give you up if the cartel got hold of her.’

‘Mate, we’re already out of the city and barring any mishaps, we’ll also be out of the country by the time you’re settling down to your lunch today. So all good. I’ll ship this sat-phone back to you when I get to a safe place to do so.’

‘Don’t bother,’ Standish said. ‘Either keep it if you can use it, or destroy it.’

‘Okay, if you’re sure and thanks for everything, Scouse and I are both really grateful to you.’

‘No thanks needed. Be safe and the beers are on you the next time our paths cross.’

‘You can count on it,’ Harper said and broke the connection.

‘Everything all right?’ Scouse said.

‘Sounds like half the country’s out looking for us, but apart from that, yeah, all good.’

Scouse tipped his cap back over his eyes and reclined his seat a bit more, but Harper kept alert, watching the traffic passing along the main road, a couple of hundred yards away. Most of the vehicles were trucks, grinding their way to and from the outlying towns, but there were a handful of cars and two Toyota Landcruisers also passed, driving fast and with men clustered in the open back of each one. Harper tried to tell himself that they were probably just peasant farmers on their way out to the fields, and attempted to ignore the inner voice pointing out that there didn’t really seem to be any fields worth the name out here on the Altiplano and anyway, farmers tended to be earlier risers than this. He hesitated, then shrugged, deciding he was probably just being paranoid. There were a million reasons why people would be driving along this road.

Nothing else had caught his attention by the time, forty minutes later when, through the open window, he heard the drone of an aircraft approaching from the south-east. He spotted the familiar shape of a C-47 outlined against the deep blue of the sky and watched as it banked around and then disappeared from sight as it came in to land. Scouse had heard it too and had sat up and brought his seat back to the upright position.

‘Are we off?’

‘We’ll give it another ten minutes,’ Harper said. ‘He’ll need to refuel and the less time we spend hanging around there, the less chance there is of someone spotting us.’

He waited ten minutes, then re-started the engine and drove back to the main road. He took a careful glance up and down it before emerging and then headed east towards the landing strip where Randy had dropped him, Lupa and Ricardo on their way in to La Paz.

As he turned onto the track leading to the strip, he could see the C-47 at the end of the runway and the dark outline of Randy inside the cockpit, leaning forward as if checking something on the instrument panel. There were no other aircraft or vehicles in sight and no sign of the guy who operated the fuel pump.

‘I hope he’s got enough fuel on board to get us over the border,’ Harper said as he braked to a halt, in the shadow of the aircraft.

‘What’ll we do about the car?’ Scouse said.

‘Just leave it here. Randy can have it if he wants to come back for it, but if not, it’ll be a nice little bonus for the guy who pumps the fuel. Come on.’

They got out and walked towards the aircraft. Randy remained unmoving, still head down over the instrument panel. ‘Randy!’ Harper said, as he swung himself up through the doorway. ‘Does fifteen hundred bucks not even buy us a meet and greet?’

There was silence from the cockpit, and as Harper looked towards it, he saw that the Texan was slumped forward over the joystick. A small round hole had been punched through the back of his head and the bullet, exiting through his face, had blown his blood and brains all over the instruments.

Harper froze for a millisecond and then span around to get out of the aircraft and back to the car. There was no time to lose.

‘What’s up with…?’ Scouse started to say as he tried to clamber up after Harper and instead found him coming the other way at top speed.

‘Back! Get back in the car NOW!’ Harper shouted and dived for the doorway himself, almost bowling Scouse over as he hesitated for a fraction of a second before jumping down again. As Harper emerged from the plane, he heard the noise of engines and saw the two Landcruisers he had seen earlier come racing around the crumbling airstrip buildings. They roared across the airstrip towards them. Harper jumped into the Mercedes and was already revving the engine as Scouse scrambled into the passenger seat, and he was in second gear before Scouse had managed to slam the door shut.

There was the sound of gunfire and rounds began kicking up puffs of dust from around them as Harper accelerated away. He was cursing himself for not trusting his instincts when he’d seen the Landcruisers passing their lying up place earlier on. Relying on his instincts had kept him alive before and he was bitterly aware that having ignored them now, might just have cost him his life.

He was certain that the rough landing strip and dirt track they were driving along would make accurate shots from a moving vehicle almost impossible, but just in case, he kept swerving the Mercedes from side to side as he burned up the strip with the Landcruisers close on his tail. The men in the back of them were leaning on the roof of the cabs to try and steady themselves as they fired their rifles at the Merc.

Going flat out, Harper picked his moment and suddenly threw the car into a screaming handbrake turn. He reached across to the wrong side of the steering wheel with his right hand, then jerked it hard right with that hand, while hauling on the handbrake for a split second with his left and then switching to the gear shift as he stamped on the clutch, changed down and then hit the accelerator again. The Merc skidded and fish-tailed as the tyres struggled for grip on the dirt, then roared away, back past the Landcruisers. Their drivers, slow to react at first, skidded past the Merc with screeching brakes and then lurched around to follow Harper. One of the gunmen in the back lost his balance and tumbled over the side of the Landcruiser into the dirt, but his comrades simply abandoned him there, speeding off after the Mercedes.

As Harper approached the dirt road leading off the airstrip, he glimpsed the body of the fuel pump attendant, half hidden behind the fuel bowser. There was no time to spare him another thought as they hit the dirt road, trailing a dust cloud as they tried to out-run their pursuers. There was a crack as a bullet smacked through the back window, starring the glass before striking the metal frame of the passenger seat and ricocheting away to bury itself in the upholstery of the back seat.

Scouse slid down, trying to hide himself on the floor of the footwell. ‘It was a lucky shot,’ Harper said. ‘No one can fire aimed shots from a vehicle bouncing around like those two are.’

‘Lucky shots kill people too,’ Scouse said, remaining half-crouched on the floor. ‘So what are we going to do?’

‘Apart from the obvious? The Merc should be a good bit faster than them providing we don’t try to go cross-country, so we should be able to out-run them but we can’t risk staying on this road or in this car for too long. If they’ve got any comms - and I’m sure they will - they’ll already be reporting in and before long their mates will be setting up an ambush or a road block.’

‘So how do we get out of here?’

‘Well the obvious ways would be to pick up one of the main roads and either head west past La Paz and make a run for the Peruvian border, or south-west towards Chile. But if we want to stay alive, obvious is the last thing we need to be. If they don’t find a way to intercept us on the way there, they could certainly find a means to have us stopped at the frontier. And if we try to drive to the Argentinean, Paraguayan or Brazilian borders it’s going to be a couple of thousand kilometres drive to get to any of them. But we’ve got a couple of other options.’

He was still driving flat out as he spoke and checking his rear view mirror to keep watch on the pursuers, who were slowly but steadily dropping back, but he was also scanning the way ahead for any sign of impending trouble from that direction.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Alternatives. Always assuming we can stay ahead of those guys, we can loop around and head broadly west, passing north of La Paz and then trying to make for Lake Titicaca. We could buy or steal a boat with an outboard, or a dugout canoe or even one of those ones made out of woven reeds, and try to paddle up or across the lake until we’re in Peruvian territory, because the lake straddles the border. The only problems are that it is a very big lake - it’s 120 miles long - so we’d have to cover quite a distance, and there’s no hiding place out on the water, so we’d be dangerously exposed and very vulnerable if the cartel’s thugs came after us. As well as aircraft, they use fast speedboats to transport their cocaine, so they wouldn’t even have to shoot us. All they’d have to do is ram us and in the icy waters at this altitude we’d probably be dead from hypothermia before we could reach the shore.’

‘And the other options?’ Scouse said. ‘What if we head south?’

‘Then we’ll be equally exposed as we cross the Altiplano and even if we made it that far, we’d then be heading into a brutally arid region of desert and salt flats. If we break down or run out of petrol there, even if the cartel doesn’t get to us, we’ll die of thirst and wind up as breakfast for the condors because there’s precious little water and nothing much else there for hundreds of miles.

‘If we head east, even supposing we can get through the mountains, we’ll be into prime cartel territory, not just the towns and cities like Santa Cruz where they process the cocaine and launder their money, but the areas where they grow the coca, which is pretty much everywhere else. Even if we somehow manage to get into the jungle in theory we could eventually make our way across the border and into the Mato Grosso in Brazil, but there are thousands of miles of rainforest and jungle rivers to negotiate. Or we could work our way down one of the tributaries of the Amazon in a boat until we reach a large enough town, but whether we stick to the water or try to make our way through the rainforest, a pair of gringos like us will be vulnerable to attack by all sorts of different people, not just the cartel’s sicarios, but illegal loggers, farmers burning the rainforest to plant yet more oil palms or soya beans, and even indigenous tribes trying to protect their traditional lands or fight back against those destroying them. So whichever side of the border we are, gringos won’t be high on anyone’s list of potential best friends, and anyway, since the cartel we’re trying to escape from actually originated in Brazil, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to be heading in that direction.’

‘So if west, south and east are no good, that seems to leave us with heading north as our only option?’

‘Hey, that GCSE in Geography hasn’t been wasted, has it?’

Scouse glared at him. ‘We’re being chased by some guys who want to kill us, we don’t seem to have much of a plan to get away from them and yet you’re still taking the piss.’

‘Of course,’ Harper said. ‘It’s what I do best. Now make yourself useful. There are some maps in the glove-box and I’m hoping you remember enough of the map-reading you learned in the Paras to be able to find us a plausible route out of there. I’d do it myself, but as you can see, I’ve got my hands pretty full at the moment. I’d say our best plan would be to let our pursuers keep us in sight long enough to convince themselves that we’re definitely heading east, and then all we have to do is burn them off, break north-east into the mountains, using minor roads, and then ditch the car into a ravine or some place where the cartel’s sicarios won’t spot it easily. Then we travel on foot, heading north-west, until we cross the Peruvian border. Can you find us a route to do that?’

‘I can plot us a route, yes,’ Scouse said in a slightly injured tone. ‘I haven’t forgotten everything I learned in the army, but as to crossing the mountains… I’m not sure. I never did have much of a head for heights, I’m not exactly in prime physical condition and, correct me if I’m wrong, but the Andes are seriously bloody high.’

‘Yeah, some of the peaks are more than twenty two thousand feet high but we just need to find a lower way through the mountains. If we stick to the plains, they’ll catch us for sure, but they’re not mountaineers or off-road trekkers, so we’ve more of a chance of escaping them if we escape through the mountains.’

There was a long silence while Scouse pored over the maps and Harper kept the Merc well ahead of the pursuers, who were still just in sight, but now out of rifle range. The flat lands and thin, dry air of the Altiplano and the dust cloud they were trailing behind them meant they were visible from over a mile away.

CHAPTER 19

Harper slowed slightly as he approached the junction with the Ruta Nacional, ready to change plan if there was any sign of a roadblock or ambush ahead, but the way was clear and he accelerated again, swerving out on to the highway, and heading east. He then floored the accelerator to open up as big a gap as possible on the pursuit, overtaking and cutting up a series of trucks making for or coming from La Paz to the accompaniment of a deafening salvo of air horns as some had to swerve to avoid him.

‘Have you found us a side road to the north to turn on to?’ he said.

‘Yeah.’ Scouse checked the map again. ‘This road runs broadly east for about twenty miles and then turns due north, but just before that, there’s a smaller track running east and then north. We’re into some serious mountains pretty much all the way from here, so there should be somewhere to dump the car and bale out along there.’

‘Just as well,’ Harper said, glancing down at the fuel gauge, ‘because we’re going to run out of petrol not long after that. My bad, I should have filled the tank on our way out of La Paz this morning, but I was expecting that we’d only need it to get to the landing strip. No matter, we’d have to dump it anyway, petrol or no petrol, before too much longer.’

Scouse nodded. ‘Okay, so about twenty miles from here, there should be a small church and a cluster of houses and then a few hundred yards beyond it, there’s a sharp right turn.’

‘Good work,’ Harper said. ‘And you’ve got a route beyond that?’

‘I’ve got the first part of it and I’m working on the rest. If this car wasn’t bouncing around so much, it would be a lot easier.’

‘It would be a lot easier for the sicarios to put a bullet through your head too, so try to manage.’

The Ruta Nacional was surfaced with tarmac and they covered the twenty miles to the turn-off in less than fifteen minutes, speeding along the highway until Harper spotted a group of buildings ahead of them. The church Scouse had mentioned was now a ruin but the stone cross on top of its one remaining wall confirmed its former use. ‘That’s it,’ Scouse said, ‘watch out for the right turn ahead.’

Harper checked his mirrors. There was no sign of the Landcruisers behind them, but the dust trail the Mercedes would leave as they drove up the dirt road, might well be enough to show the sicarios where they had gone.

Peering at the map, Scouse counted Harper down to the turning. ‘Five - four - three - ready?’ he said. ‘About one hundred yards. See it?’

‘Got it,’ Harper said, braking viciously and throwing the Merc into a hard right turn almost under the wheels of an oncoming truck. He glimpsed a face, mouth open in fury or fright, and heard the blare of a horn, and then they were shooting off the highway on to a frighteningly rough and narrow dirt road, clinging to the almost sheer side of one of the mountains of the Andes that was rearing high above them.

Harper accelerated away again, the car bumping and jolting over the rough, rock-strewn surface. ‘Keep an eye out behind,’ he said, ‘and see if they make the turn after us.’

‘I’ll try,’ Scouse said, ‘but the dust trail we’re making is as thick as a London fog, so I can’t guarantee it.’

Unsure whether the sicarios were still tracking them or had been too far back to realise they had turned off, Harper kept his foot down as much as he could, but the road was following a very erratic course, twisting and turning to keep to the contours of the mountain. There were very few guard rails above the sheer drop on the outside of the road, while potholes and rocks jutting out of the dirt surface only made things more dangerous. Even worse, a series of nerve-wracking blind corners around the shoulders of rocky outcrops left their hearts in their mouths, because only in the very occasional passing places was the road wide enough for two vehicles to pass. ‘If we meet something coming the other way round one of these bends, we’re dead,’ Scouse said. ‘It looks like you could plunge so far down the mountainside that you might never be found.’

‘Then let’s pray if it happens, it’s the other car and not us,’ Harper said, ‘because from what I’ve seen of Bolivian drivers, they all go like shit off a shovel and don’t slow down for anything, even including blind corners. And if we do meet one and by a miracle we both survive, then someone is going to have to reverse until we come to one of the sections that’s wide enough for the other one to get past; and we definitely don’t want to be trying to do that with the sicarios breathing down our necks.’

The road climbed steadily higher for a few more miles, deeper into the mountains, but then began a twisting, switch-backing descent. Far ahead they could see the serpentine line the road took, cutting across the barren rock faces of the higher slopes of the mountain, then disappearing into the cloud forest lower down the slopes, with the emerald green canopy of the rainforest lower on the slopes still and just visible in the far distance.

As they crested a last rise and saw the road ahead dropping steadily away in front of them, Harper braked to a halt for a few moments and looked back behind them. As their dust trail swiftly dispersed on the wind scouring over the rock face, he caught a glimpse of another pall of dust at least a mile behind them, but definitely heading the same way.

‘Shit,’ he said, as he gunned the engine again. ‘It’s too much to hope that’s just some farmer or off-roader, so we’ve got to assume that the cartel’s boys are still on our trail.’ He kept the Mercedes bucketing on, spinning its wheels on the gravel on some corners and bouncing off some of the ruts and potholes in the surface of the road with teeth-loosening jolts and thuds.

‘Should get a good price for this,’ Scouse said, ‘one careful lady owner and all.’

Harper grinned. ‘That’s more like it. I was worried the old piss-taking Scouse had gone for good.’

‘Nah, not dead, just sleeping.’

As they drove on, they passed a series of crosses erected at the side of the road, some still with sun-faded bouquets of plastic flowers at their feet.

The road - though it was now so narrow and uneven that it barely deserved even to be called a track - became even worse and the large rocks protruding from the road surface and the cliff face added to its perils. In places the outer edge of the road had crumbled away altogether, as if some giant creature had been taking bites out of it. The Merc could only squeeze through those parts with its offside wheels within centimetres of a sheer drop that in places went on uninterrupted for almost a thousand metres. ‘Bloody hell,’ Scouse said, sweat pricking his brow as he tried not to look out of the window at the drop below them. ‘If we fall down that, by the time we hit the bottom, there won’t be enough of us left to make a meal for a budgie, never mind a condor.’

The stunted, wind-contorted trees and dry grasses clinging to crevices in the granite rock gave way to a cloud forest zone as they descended. As if to signal the change, the skies darkened and a brief but torrential downpour sent water cascading down the mountain side and made the surface of the road even more slippery and treacherous. The rain ceased as abruptly as it had begun but it was replaced by a thick, clinging mist. A constant stream of drips fell from ferns growing out of the rock face, and crooked trees loomed out of the mist, their branches festooned with mosses, lichens, ferns and orchids.

As the road dropped lower, it passed out of the mists of the cloud forest zone and as the air began to clear, Harper could see that the lower slopes of the mountains below them were cloaked in the dense sub-tropical vegetation that marked the start of the rainforest. There were vines, creepers and vividly coloured flowers and giant, sapphire blue Morpho butterflies weaving among them. After the bone-chilling cold of the Altiplano and the mountain peaks, for a while the air began to feel fresher and warmer, but before long that was giving way to the moist, slightly foetid atmosphere of the jungle.

They swung round yet another bend and found themselves looking down into a steep-sided valley with a fast-rushing river glinting in the sunlight on the valley floor, and a road running parallel with it. The dirt road they were following clung to the mountainside for a couple more miles or so, passing a deep gorge into which a waterfall was plummeting, but then descended to join the other road at the midpoint of the valley. There was something at the junction of the two roads but from this distance he could not tell if it was a low building, a vehicle or something else.

‘This is where we need to ditch the car before the road starts dropping down and then strike off back up the mountainside,’ said Scouse.

‘Then that gorge ahead might do as a car graveyard,’ Harper said. ‘There looks to be plenty of vegetation growing in it so with luck, it might finish up out of sight.’

He slowed as they approached the gorge, crossed by a rickety-looking iron bridge floored with thick baulks of timber. It had no guard rail and was only a little wider than the Mercedes, but large boulders were blocking the way to the gorge on the near side so they had to inch their way across before coming to a halt on the far side with the nose of the Merc a few feet from the start of the sheer drop down into the gorge.

‘Grab the maps and your water bottle,’ Harper said, ‘and then let’s go.’ He switched off the engine, left the handbrake off and waited until Scouse was out of the car before grabbing his backpack and jumping out himself. At once they began to give the Merc a push, grunting with the effort. As soon as it started to move, they stepped back and watched as it rolled slowly on, then toppled over the edge, and began to plummet down, gathering speed as it fell. However, it had only crashed down fifty feet or so before it came to a halt against a huge boulder with a sickening thud. ‘Damn it! But it’ll have to do,’ Harper said. ‘And with luck, unless you’re actually peering down into the gorge, you probably won’t catch sight of it anyway. Right, let’s move.’

They jogged about a hundred yards along the road, then branched off onto a faint track with a dense growth of plants and grasses along it, suggesting that few, if any, people had come this way in quite some time. Harper kept scanning the mountainside above them and when he saw a place where the gradient eased a little, he led Scouse off the track and up through the fringes of the rainforest. They had covered only a couple of hundred yards when they heard the sound of an engine on the road below them and the rattle of timbers and metal as it began to cross the bridge over the gorge.

‘Down!’ Harper said, dropping flat into the soil and humus of the forest floor. The sour odour of decaying leaves filled his nostrils as he heard Scouse drop beside him. They waited, every sense focussed on the sound of the vehicle below them. It seemed to take an eternity to cross the bridge but after a heart-stopping pause as it slowed right down, it accelerated away again and a moment later, through the thick vegetation, Harper caught a glimpse of one of the cartel Landcruisers, with four gunmen still perched in the back. It passed by without stopping and disappeared down the dirt road.

Harper’s heart rate slowed as he got to his knees and crouched, watching the red glow of the Landcruiser’s brake-lights flickering through gaps in the foliage each time it slowed for the sharp bends, as it headed down the mountain side towards the junction with the other road. When it reached that point a couple of minutes later, it came to a halt next to another vehicle. The occupants jumped out and must have had a hasty consultation in which, no doubt, the driver of the vehicle that had been waiting at the junction would reveal that no other cars had come down that road for some time. A moment later the Landcruiser began a three-point turn.

‘We’ve got to get moving again,’ Harper said, ‘because they’ll be coming back up now, looking for traces of where we left the road. We need to be out of sight before they get back to the bridge and realise where we’ve dumped the car.’

He led the way through the edge of the rainforest, using it for cover but not wanting to descend any lower into it, since every metre of height they lost now would only have to be regained later when they began to climb back up the mountain in earnest. Within a few minutes, they heard the sicarios’ Landcruiser returning, driving much more slowly, and they again flattened themselves into the soil and leaf litter, remaining motionless until it had passed by.

As soon as its engine note had faded, Harper led the way on through the jungle, using a path so faint that he might have taken it for an animal track, had he not spotted a few stray, yellowing coca leaves lying in the dirt. He had seen no coca plants in this area so the leaves could only have been lost by human drug mules when the bulky bundles of leaves they were carrying to a jungle lab somewhere had snagged on low-hanging tree branches as they passed underneath them.

In the small clearings where one of the rainforest’s giant trees had fallen or been felled, hummingbirds were flitting through the patches of bright sunlight, feeding on the nectar of exotic flowers, but Harper had no eyes for the beauty of the scene, only for the way ahead and whatever dangers it might contain. He moved on even more cautiously, signalling Scouse to stay quiet, certain that there must be a jungle cocaine processing laboratory somewhere not far ahead of them. The dense vegetation meant that they could see only a few yards ahead but they kept their ears pricked for any sound of activity or people moving through the rainforest towards them, and paused to listen in absolute silence every few yards before moving on again.

Had he been alone, Harper would have left the path at once, and worked his way through the jungle until he was safely past whatever lay ahead, but even if Scouse had been relatively fit, Harper knew he would have struggled to make good time through such dense secondary jungle and in his present weakened state it would be next to impossible for him.

Harper moved on, measuring each footfall, scanning the foliage for bent or broken branches, and scenting the air for the distinctive sour aroma of coca leaves being processed into cocaine base. When they reached a jungle stream, he even crouched down and scooped up a mouthful of water, tasting it for traces of chemical run-off, that would have signalled an active cocaine lab.

They had walked on for another mile or so, when they came to a row of pits, like roughly dug open graves in the forest floor. They were lined with plastic sheeting and though they were empty, they still carried the stink of kerosene. ‘What the hell are these?’ Scouse whispered.

‘Maceration pits,’ Harper said. ‘Fortunately for us they haven’t been used recently, so the cocaine fabricás must have moved on to a new site. They don’t stay long in any one place in case the DEA find and target them.’

‘It stinks,’ Scouse said, wrinkling his nose.

‘It’s the kerosene. They fill the pits with coca leaves, soak them in kerosene and sometimes sulphuric acid as well, to break them down. Poor kids they call pisadores - walkers - get paid a few Bolivianos to speed the process by treading them with their bare feet, just like French winegrowers used to tread grapes, except that French kids don’t have to permanently damage their feet by paddling in sulphuric acid, nor get brain damage from the fumes. But the cocaine traficantes don’t care, one thing Bolivia is not short of is destitute kids who’ll do anything for a few bucks.’ He shook his head at the thought. ‘Once the leaves have been macerated long enough, they siphon off the liquid from the pits, mix it with water, bicarbonate of soda and more sulphuric acid, give it a stir and voila! - they’ve got cocaine base. They can’t convert it into powder cocaine in the jungle though, because the chemistry is too complex, so it’s carried into the cities or across the border first. Sometimes it’s hidden in petrol tanks, gas bottles or tyres, or in loads of fruit and vegetables but often it’s just carried on the backs of kids acting as mules - and there are so many that the slang name for them is hormigas - ants. Kids can earn ten or twenty US dollars a day doing it - ten times more money than they could earn in a month working in a legitimate job.’

‘I’m scared to ask why you know so much about the cocaine trade,’ said Scouse.

‘Probably best,’ said Harper.

They moved on again, but the rainforest now began to thin, the remaining trees marked by the scars of logging and burning, and as they reached the edge of a clearing, they saw a few shacks built of mud and branches, and roofed with palm fronds or rusting corrugated iron sheets, that were held in place by rocks and tyres piled on them. Harper put his mouth close to Scouse’s ear and breathed, ‘We can’t risk being spotted by whoever lives in these, so we need to retrace our steps a little way and then start to climb up the mountain again.’

They back-tracked for a couple of hundred yards and Harper then turned back up the mountain, following a stream bed that offered a slightly easier path through the last fringes of the rainforest. Before he did so, he drank as much water as he could hold and got Scouse to do the same and then re-filled their bottles from the stream. ‘It may be a while before we find another water source,’ he said, ‘so let’s make the most of this one while we can.’

Then they began to climb. The rainforest thinned and then gave way altogether, first to the narrow zone of the cloud forest. As they paused while Harper assessed the way ahead, he cast a glance up at the tree canopy above them, which was almost buried under the thick mat of moss growing over it. As they reached the end of the cloud and moved on to the open slopes beyond, Harper kept his gaze moving, scouring the slopes above them for movement, but concentrating most of his attention behind them. The slopes offered little cover other than scattered boulders and a few trees that diminished still further in number as they climbed higher, but he made use of whatever he could find, working his way up from boulder to boulder and using any dip or patch of rough grass that gave even a vestige of cover from any watching eyes below.

A few short stretches of the road had now come back into view, and he raked each with his gaze for any sign of the Landcruiser or the sicarios before moving on again. He set a stiff pace, climbing up the mountain side at a forty-five degree angle to the slope, but soon had to slow his pace as Scouse was already beginning to struggle and his chest was heaving from the effort of scaling the steep slope in the increasingly thin, oxygen-depleted mountain air. Harper could hear Scouse’s gasps and rasping breath as he tried to match Harper’s pace, and he eased off a little but said ‘Scouse, mate, we’ve got to be up to the ridge and well away before they spot the car and start searching for us, can you give it all you’ve got?’

‘I’m trying, Lex, believe me, but I just can’t seem to get my breath.’

‘It’s the altitude,’ Harper said, ‘but save what breath you’ve got for climbing and once we reach the ridge the going should be a lot easier. The good news is that if any or all of the guys who are following us are Brazilians or Colombians, they aren’t going to be any more comfortable at this altitude than we are.’

‘They have big mountains in Colombia too.’

‘I know but most of the country is tropical coast or rainforest and the guys who run the cocaine cartels there are mostly from the lowlands.’

‘But if the guys chasing us are Bolivians or Colombians from the Andes?’

‘Then we might well be in the shit, because they’ll be far more used to operating at altitude than we are and it won’t have the same ill effects on them that it does on us.’

They had to climb with some care for the gritty soil and dry grasses of the upper slopes didn’t offer the most secure footing and beyond that were bare rock and loose screes that posed even greater problems. Higher still above them, they could now see the permanently snow-capped peaks of the Andes filling the horizon. ‘Be glad we’re not going over those,’ Harper said. ‘Just another couple of hundred metres and we’ll be up to the ridge and then we’ve just got to keep following the contours around the head of the valley and over the next ridge beyond it.’

‘Oh is that all,’ Scouse started to say, but then his breath failed him, and he shook his head and ploughed on, ever more slowly, using his hands to pull himself upwards over the steepening gradient.

CHAPTER 20

They were crossing a stretch of bare granite rock, and the sun striking it at a low angle was sparkling, both from the billion quartz crystals embedded in it, and from the veins of a silvery metal ore that were threaded through it. ‘That couldn’t be silver, could it?’ Scouse said, forgetting his breathlessness for an instant in his excitement.

‘I dunno, maybe,’ Harper said. ‘They used to mine a lot of silver in Bolivia.’ They moved on up the glittering slope. In other circumstances it would have been a truly beautiful sight, but here it merely increased their danger, for anything moving across it would break up the pattern of light and be clearly visible from a long way away. Had Harper been able to find a way to skirt it, he would have done so, but it stretched for as far as he could see in either direction, so there was no option but to grit his teeth and cut across it, praying that they would remain undetected. They had almost reached the upper edge of it, where it disappeared beneath the scree that cloaked the approach to the summit ridge, and had heard no sound, nor seen any sign of their pursuers, when something struck a rock a few yards away to their right and they heard the unmistakable sound of a ricochet as a round whined away.

Harper dropped and looked back behind them. He had to look carefully at the mountainside before he spotted a group of figures, darker outlines against the rock, way below them. ‘They’re at absolutely maximum range,’ he said, ‘and I’d be very surprised if they have sniper rifles, so it is going to take a very lucky shot indeed to hit us. So let’s just keep moving upwards, we’re nearly at the ridge and once we’re back among the rocks we’ll be just about impossible for them to spot.’

‘Okay,’ Scouse said, ‘I’ll believe you, but like I told you before, if it hits you, a lucky shot will kill you just as dead as any other kind.’

He let out a yelp and almost lost his footing on the mountainside as a shadow swept over them for a second and a majestic condor appeared over the ridgeline just above them. It banked sharply as it saw them, the wind through its feathers making a curious hissing noise as the condor flashed past them and then began to soar ever higher, circling as it rode the thermals rising up the face of the mountain.

As Scouse teetered, close to overbalancing and falling, Harper grabbed his arm and pulled him into the lee of a large boulder around which the screes were parting like a river of stone. He shot a wary glance back down the mountainside. ‘I don’t know if they’ll try to climb up to catch us,’ he said, ‘but even if they don’t, they know where we are, so they can track us and try to intercept us when we come down off the mountains - and we’ll have to eventually. But whatever happens, let’s put some more ground behind us before we even begin thinking about that. They’ve also got access to aircraft, so it’s not impossible that they could try to use those. They can’t land obviously, but they could try to bomb us with grenades or shoot us up with sub-machine guns.’

‘You’re just a constant source of cheerful thoughts, aren’t you Lex?’ Scouse said, with a world-weary sigh. ‘I don’t know why I put up with you.’

‘Probably because I’m all that’s standing between you and a very unpleasant death of one sort or another,’ Harper said. ‘So come on then, let’s move.’

They moved off again, keeping just below the ridgeline and holding to the same contour as much as possible, though each time they crossed a gully or gorge, or forded one of the streams running down off the ridge, they had to lose some height as they slithered down one side and then were forced to regain it as they clambered up again on the other. They moved as fast as Scouse could manage, with Harper always on hyper-alert, keenly aware of the twin dangers of pursuit from behind and possible ambush from ahead.

The next real danger point was when they would have to come down from the ridge they were following to cross the valley, ford the river in the valley floor and then climb up again on the other side. The peril of that was heightened by the need to also find a way across the road running alongside the river. The terrain was so rugged and the river so fast-flowing that there would be few places where Harper and Scouse could get across it. Knowing that their prey were somewhere on the mountainside and would have to cross both river and road to escape them, the sicarios would certainly be patrolling along the road and also setting sentries or mounting ambushes at natural choke points.

They had been moving fast over the difficult ground for a couple of hours when Harper called a halt. ‘Five minutes breather,’ he said to Scouse, who looked close to exhaustion. ‘We’ve no food, we’ve got water, so drink some of that and get your breath back a bit while I take a look at those maps.’ Scouse drank greedily from a water bottle as Harper studied his maps. ‘Brilliant,’ he said at last. ‘Beyond the ridge on the other side of this valley there’s another rugged and very steep-sided valley, but that one runs due west right through the heart of the Cotopata National Park.’

‘And you think that’s good news?’ Scouse said, casting a baleful glance towards the ridge they would have to cross to reach it.

‘Yep, because although we’ll have to be up at an altitude all the way - and it is never going to be less than two thousand metres and will often be a lot higher than that - there are two very good things about it. One is that the valley extends virtually right the way through the mountains, leaving only a low ridge to cross at the far end before we’re back on the Altiplano again. The second is that there is an ancient, high level Inca trail running in the same direction that we need to be travelling. It’s part of the network that once connected Cusco and Machu Picchu to all parts of the Inca empire, and the Incas were definitely not jerry-builders. So I’m sure it will be solidly constructed, supported by stone walls where needed, and have a decent surface. Best of all, from the map it appears to be pretty much level going, following the contours of the mountainside, just like we’ve been doing. So once we get up on it, we should be able to make a pretty fast pace.’

‘But if it’s a National Park, isn’t there a risk that there’ll be hordes of tourists on the trail?’

‘Not at this time of year,’ said Harper. ‘Even if there are, that’s not necessarily a handicap because the presence of tourists may make the sicarios more cautious.’ He paused. ‘So that’s the good news. The bad news is we have to find a way to cross the river and the road in the bottom of this valley before we can even think about getting over to the next one.’

He looked down at the map again, making sure of his facts. ‘Okay.’ He tapped a spot on the map with his finger. ‘See here, there are two tributary streams feeding into the river along this stretch of it. Both of them must pass under the road through culverts. So we need to get within sight of them so we can evaluate which offers the line of least resistance and the best cover to hide us from the sicarios’ patrols and look-outs. Then we can crawl along the bed of the stream through the culvert. We’ll get soaked of course, but we’re going to get wet crossing the river anyway. Once through there-’ His finger traced a line on the map. ‘We can move upriver, using both the river-bank and the surrounding vegetation for cover, and then cross the river somewhere about here, either wading or swimming it, depending on how deep it is.’

‘What if it’s too fast-flowing?’

Harper shrugged. ‘From the contour lines on the map, there may very well be some rapids here and here.’ He moved his finger across the map, tracing the river’s course. ‘But on this section the contour lines are much more spread out and the river bed looks broader, so with luck, that’ll give us a chance to cross. All right, silent running from here on in. Any noise or sudden movement could be enough to give us away.’

As they descended from the ridge towards the valley floor, Harper moved much more slowly and every fifty yards or so, he would hold up a hand to signal Scouse to wait and then scanned the next part of their route for any signs of danger. He expected that the sicarios’ main efforts would be devoted to watching the road, not the river, but it was unwise to put too much trust in assumptions, however well-founded.

Harper made Scouse wait just inside a copse of scrubby pine trees at the foot of the mountain, while he dropped and belly crawled forward until he reached the edge of a bluff that overlooked the river. To his left he could see one of the streams he had spotted, cascading down from the mountain and flowing into a stone-lined culvert under the road. However there was a wide stretch of open ground to either side of it, unbroken by any bush or tree, and it would be in full sight of anyone passing along the road. He frowned, retraced his steps and they moved on, further up river, hoping that the second culvert would be more viable.

Once more Harper left Scouse in cover while he evaluated it. The banks of this stream were flanked by fallen rocks, bushes and long grasses, offering excellent cover, but as he looked at the culvert, Harper could see that the stream was in spate and the water was almost filling it as it surged through, leaving only a narrow gap at the top of the culvert.

He moved back to where he had left Scouse and outlined his plan. ‘It’s going to be a very tight squeeze through there,’ he said, ‘because the stream is filling about three-quarters of the culvert and there’s only a small gap above the water. However, the approach to it is in good cover so it’s going to be the best option.’

‘What if it’s blocked in the middle?’ Scouse said.

‘If it was, the water would be backing up on this side. It isn’t and seems to be flowing through the culvert pretty quickly, so I’d say it’s going to be fine. However we don’t want to get our clothes wet if we can avoid it. So when we get right up to the culvert, so we’re out of sight underneath the edge of the road, you need to strip down to your undies, roll your clothes up into a ball and knot the sleeves of your shirt over it to hold everything in place. Then hold it on top of your head with one hand, and use the other to keep you upright as you crawl through the culvert and with luck, your clothes will still be dry when you get to the other side. Then you can rub yourself down and put them back on, whereas if they get wet, it’s going to be very hard for you to get warm again.’

Scouse’s expression showed how much enthusiasm he had at the prospect of that.

‘It’s that or we don’t get out of here at all,’ Harper said. ‘Besides you’ve still got a bit of that prison aroma about you, so a cold bath won’t do you any harm.’

‘Very funny,’ Scouse said. ‘Well, if we’re going to do it, let’s get on with it then.’

‘Spoken like a man after my own heart,’ Harper said and led the way down to the stream. Scouse lay flat and wormed his way alongside the stream, using the grasses and bushes to hide himself from anyone looking down from the road. Colt in hand, Harper kept watch, his eyes ranging up and down the road until Scouse had made it to the entrance to the culvert. Harper followed him there and they stripped off in the lee of the roadway a few feet above them and tied their clothes in bundles. With a last look towards the road to check for any movement, Harper slipped into the water and, balancing his bundle of clothes on his head, he crawled into the culvert on his knees, feeling reassured that he could already see the glow of green light at the other end. The water was so cold it felt like needles on his skin and though he only had to cover a few yards, he was glad it was no further.

Halfway across his thighs bumped against a branch that had become wedged in the culvert. It was too high to climb over and though he could have swum past it, his clothes would then have been soaked. So, still clutching the bundle on his head with one hand, he reached down with his right hand and began trying to free the branch. It barely moved at first, wedged in place by other debris that had become lodged against it, but as he worked it to and fro, it gradually loosened and at last came free, and with a gurgle of water, it flowed away through the end of the culvert. Feeling the cold really biting into him now, Harper followed in its wake and hauled himself out on to the bank of the stream just beyond the end of the culvert. Trying to avoid making any noise, he untied his bundle again, used his shirt to rub himself down and then began to put his clothes back on.

He had just finished getting dressed when Scouse appeared out of the culvert. Harper helped him drag himself out of the water and then rubbed him down hard because Scouse was shivering and his teeth were chattering. He got dressed again and they moved on at once, crawling away from the road until they reached the river bank and then working their way upstream, always keeping a wary eye on the road running parallel to them.

As Harper had hoped, after passing two sections of rapids where the river narrowed and churned angrily among the jagged rocks, they came to a section where it broadened again and flowed more quietly. Beyond that they could see a group of buildings close to the river. ‘We can’t get past them, can we?’ Scouse said. ‘So it looks like it’s going to have to be here or nowhere.’

Harper nodded, but he could feel his skin prickling and had an uneasy sense of something wrong. ‘But let’s not rush into it. The road is very close to the river here and I’ve got a bit of a bad feeling about this.’

‘The famous Lex Harper instinct?’

‘If you like, but if I’d listened to it when I saw those Landcruisers pass us as we were waiting to head out to the landing strip this morning, we’d be in a lot safer place now. Wait here.’

Harper slipped away from the river bank and began creeping through the undergrowth and then flattening himself to worm his way through a patch of dry grasses. He stopped at the bottom of the sloping embankment a few feet beneath the level of the road and listened intently, then crawled up it, pausing at each move to listen. He reached the edge of the sparsely grassed verge at the edge of the road, moved forward a couple more inches, then raised his head slightly and peered down the road. There was nothing to be seen.

He had started to relax slightly as he turned his head the other way, then froze as he realised that, not ten yards from him, a figure was sitting on the guard rail at the side of the road where it took a sharp bend. Had he been looking Harper’s way he could not have failed to see him, but luckily the man’s gaze was fixed on the road and the riverbank in the other direction. The fact that he was cradling a rifle in his arms, left little doubt that he was one of the sicarios, left there to keep watch for any sign of the fugitive gringos.

Heart in mouth, Harper eased himself backwards a millimetre at a time and then slid back down the embankment, until he was out of sight. For once his heart rate - normally almost unchanging whatever the stress - was beating out a tattoo as he took a deep breath and considered his options. They could look for another place to cross but they might not find one and anyway, the longer they spent near the road and the river, the greater were their chances of being discovered. Failing that, they could try to wade the river, praying that the sicario would continue to stare in another direction and not see them escaping from under his nose, but that would have required a degree of optimism or stupidity that Harper did not possess.

The only other option was for him to take out the sicario and then put enough distance between themselves and that place before his body, or his absence, were discovered. Since Harper could not be sure that there were no other men keeping watch within earshot, he could not use his Colt to shoot him and so would have to get close enough to do the job silently, without the sicario seeing him coming. He thought for a few more moments, then signalled to Scouse to stay where he was and inched his way along the edge of the embankment until he could see the top of the guardrail and the back of the man’s head. He was still sitting there looking away from him down the road.

Harper began to scale the embankment, measuring the placement of each foot and hand, and pausing to gently brush away with his fingers any twigs or dry leaves that might make a noise and give him away, before lowering his hand to the ground and then repeating the process with the other one. He paused at the top of the embankment only long enough to ease the Colt from his waistband and then, grasping it by the barrel and praying that the man had not taken the safety catch off his rifle, which might have caused it to go off if it was dropped and bring the rest of the cartel’s thugs running, Harper rose silently to his feet.

He covered the distance between himself and the sicario in two strides, and smashed the butt of the pistol down on to the man’s skull. He brought it down with such force that the plastic covering the metal frame of the butt split in two, but it did even greater damage to the sicario. The butt of the gun punched right through his skull, sinking an inch into his brain. He went into spasm, his heels drumming on the road surface, but Harper made sure, battering him again with the gun-butt. He then grabbed him by the shoulders as he slumped, stone dead, and pulled him back over the crash barrier and sent him tumbling down the embankment.

The man’s rifle slipped from his hands and fell into the river, and after a swift glance up and down the road to make sure he had not been observed, Harper slid back down the embankment after him. He crouched alongside the body and went through his pockets, finding a half-eaten chocolate bar in one of them but nothing else that was useful. He took the chocolate bar but ignored the billfold with a few Bolivianos in it. He stood up, looking and listening intently for a few moments, then lifted the sicario’s body and threw it into the water after his rifle.

The body drifted out into the river, but was then caught in an eddy for a few moments, circling slowly and Harper was about to strip off and plunge in to push it into deeper water when the current at last caught it and it was carried away downstream.

Harper ran back to where Scouse was waiting and first divided the chocolate bar between them, giving most of it to Scouse. ‘Eat that,’ he said, ‘it’ll give you a little energy boost, and then we need to get moving before anyone finds that guy or realises he’s gone missing. We don’t have time to do counter-surveillance up and down the river bank to make sure they haven’t posted anyone else to keep watch on this stretch, so we’ll just have to chance it on the river crossing. Right, we need to strip off again. If you like, I’ll carry your bundle of clothes as well as mine this time and then you can wait till I’m over and just swim across after me.’

‘Great idea, Lex,’ Scouse said. ‘Just one problem: I can’t swim.’

‘Then you’d best get wading and hope it isn’t too deep in the middle. Don’t worry,’ he said, as he saw the panic in Scouse’s eyes. ‘I haven’t got any water-wings, I’m afraid, but I’ll wade alongside you and help you if you get out of your depth. But if you slip and go under, for fuck’s sake don’t panic and start thrashing around or you’ll probably drown and even worse than that, my clothes’ll get wet.’

‘You’re all heart, Lex, you know that?’ Scouse said, trying and failing to smile.

Before he stripped off, Harper went to the water’s edge and swept both banks of the river with his gaze, trying to look through the foliage rather than at it, searching for an outline or unexpected shape behind it that might give away the presence of an enemy.

‘It looks clear,’ he said eventually, ‘but the only way to be sure is to get in the river and find out. Let’s go.’

He stripped off his clothes and wrapped the Colt inside the bundle. Then, picking up Scouse’s bundle as well, he carried them on his head as he walked down to the water’s edge, waiting for Scouse to join him before stepping into the water. ‘You’d better go on the upstream side, Scouse, and then if you fall, I can catch you as the current sweeps you past me.’

Scouse was now past speaking, staring at the river with the expression of a man who was expecting to find it infested with crocodiles or piranhas, but he edged into the water after Harper. The rocks and pebbles were slimy and slippery underfoot and after the crawl through the freezing culvert, the temperature of the water was an even icier shock to the system. They moved slowly out towards the middle of the river while the water rose up to their chests and then their necks. ‘Relax,’ Harper said, seeing Scouse’s wide-eyed look. ‘We’re in the middle now, it’s not going to get any worse.’

The words were barely out of his mouth, when Scouse took another step forward, lost his footing in a hollow in the river bed and disappeared beneath the surface. He came up again, coughing and gasping, his arms flailing and panic etched on his face.

Still trying to keep a grip on the bundles of clothes on his head with one hand, Harper grabbed Scouse by the only thing he could get a grip on: his hair. ‘Stop panicking, and keep the bloody noise down,’ he said. ‘If there’s anyone within half a mile of here they’re going to hear you splashing around. I’m still standing on the river bed so if you calm down, move a little more towards me and put your feet down instead of kicking out in all directions, you’ll be able to stand up again.’

He waited until Scouse had stopped panicking before releasing his grip on his hair. ‘Right, take a couple of deep breaths and then let’s get out of this sodding river before we both freeze to death.’

Half-guiding and half-dragging Scouse behind him, he struck out for the opposite bank and within a few strides, the water level had dropped back down to their chests and then their waists.

‘Sorry about that, Lex,’ Scouse said, when they were once more on dry land, rubbing themselves down and struggling back into their clothes. ‘I’m never good in water.’

Harper smiled despite himself. ‘They really broke the mould when they made you, Scouse, didn’t they? We’re trying to cross some of the most mountainous and unforgiving terrain on the planet, with virtually no food and not much water being pursued by a bunch of psychotic sicarios with the blood of hundreds of people on their hands, whose only thought is to torture and kill us, and yet you’re worried about drowning in a river that doesn’t even come up to your chin!’ He even won a smile from Scouse at that.‘Right,’ Harper said. ‘We’re very far from safe here, so let’s get going.’

CHAPTER 21

Harper made a quick study of the map to refresh his memory and then pointed up the side of the valley towards the shoulder of the ridge high above them. ‘Once we get over that ridge, we’ll be in the right place. Let’s go.’

He set off at a steady pace, his relentless stride eating up the ground, but once more Scouse was soon struggling and dropping behind. Harper couldn’t bollock him, because he knew Scouse was moving as fast as he could, so he slowed his own pace to match, but he kept casting anxious glances behind them as they moved up towards the shoulder of the ridge at what now felt like a pace that could see tortoises overtaking them.

They were still exposed on the slopes, well below the ridge, when he saw one of the Landcruisers moving along the road in the valley bottom behind them. It came to a stop at the point where Harper had killed the look-out and he saw two figures emerge from the vehicle and begin walking up and down the road. They were out of earshot, but he could imagine that they were shouting to their missing comrade. They wouldn’t find him, of course, but his absence would tell them that something was wrong and if they began to use binoculars to sweep the mountainside, they would almost certainly spot Harper and Scouse, for there was little cover on the steep slopes they were crossing.

Movement was always more visible than stillness, however, so he said ‘Drop and keep still’, and did the same himself, lying in a position where he could keep watch below them. The two men eventually abandoned the search for the look-out and returned to the Landcruiser, but they did not drive off and remained standing by it. A couple of minutes later, Harper saw a momentary glint of light as the sun reflected from the binoculars one of the men was using. They remained there for another ten minutes, scanning the valley walls on both sides of the river, and then the two men suddenly jumped into the Landcruiser and set off with such speed that Harper saw a puff of smoke from the tyres as they accelerated away.

‘They’re in quite a hurry,’ he said, ‘which is probably not good news for us. I think we’ve got to assume we’ve been spotted.’ He looked at Scouse, who was pale with fatigue. ‘Normally I’d opt for doing the unexpected, which would be to turn round and back-track, on the assumption that the last place they would be likely to search for us is the one where they know we’ve already been, but you’re looking pretty knackered, mate, so I’m thinking that the best thing is to keep going. Once we’ve rounded the shoulder of the ridge, we’ll be into much easier terrain for a while, with only a short climb up to the Inca Road on the far side of the valley. I doubt very much if it’s wide enough for vehicles - the Incas never invented the wheel so they didn’t have carts or wagons or anything like that, so they’d no reason to build their roads wider than a couple of men or a man with a llama would need. And there’s no other road in that valley, so if they’re going to come after us, it will only be on foot, which will give us a bit more of a chance. You all right? Then let’s go.’

They moved on up the slope, but Scouse was now struggling so badly that their pace was agonisingly slow. Two hours had passed by the time they at last reached the shoulder of the ridge and were able to look down on to the terrain they now had to cross. It was more of a plateau than a valley, a narrow span of roughly level ground sandwiched between two towering and brutally steep mountain ridges. Beyond the far one, ranks of jagged peaks marched away to the far northern horizon, including the mighty summit of Huayna Potosí, soaring over six thousand metres into the sky.

There was no river running through the plateau, just a series of glacial lakes, separated by patches of sparse, frost-bitten grassland, and expanses of glittering white snowfields, the ice crystals in their frozen surface blindingly white in the glare of the sun. The lake water was a vivid aqua green, coloured by the tiny flakes of mica ground from the bedrock by the glacier that spilled through a break in the north wall of the mountains. Its meltwater fed the lakes and their surface was so still, undisturbed for the moment by even the gentlest breeze, that it was difficult to tell where the rocks ended and the water began, so perfect were the reflections in it.

In different circumstances Harper might have sat down and spent an hour just soaking up the beauty of the scene, but this was no time to be admiring natural wonders and he barely gave the scenery a glance before first raking the entire length of the plateau for any sign of figures or movement, and then, finding none, turning his attention to the far side. He found what he was looking for two-thirds of the way up the ridge, a thin, wavering line, extending from east to west along it, following the contours of the ridge but too straight and level to be natural. ‘That’s it,’ he said to Scouse, who had slumped down to rest. ‘The Inca Road.’

‘Is it safe for us to use?’

Harper shrugged. ‘Normally I’d avoid any trail or road, but I think using it is a pretty low risk in these circumstances. You’re already pretty much done in, but once we get to the trail it’ll give us pretty level and easy going, so it’ll be a lot less taxing for you and we should be able to make much faster time than picking our way over the rocks or around the lakes and across the snowfields on the plateau. Although there’s still a risk of the sicarios spotting us, we’ll be moving farther and faster than they would probably expect, so with luck we may out-run them. Anyway, it’s our best option,’ he said, seeing Scouse’s dubious expression. ‘So the only question is whether you’ve got enough strength left to make it up that ridge?’

Scouse nodded and stood up. ‘Just watch me.’

For all his bravado, their progress across the plateau and up the rock-strewn mountainside beyond was even more painfully slow and by the time he hauled himself the last few metres onto the edge of the Inca Road, Scouse was grey-faced with exhaustion. Harper scanned up and down the track for signs of potential danger, and then checked Scouse’s pulse. He frowned as he felt its shallow, rapid and irregular beat beneath his fingertips. ‘Talk to me,’ he said. ‘Don’t be brave, just tell me how you’re feeling.’

‘I’m all right,’ Scouse said. ‘Tired obviously, and a bit light-headed, that’s all. And maybe a little bit nauseous as well.’ As he said it, he began dry-heaving. ‘Honestly, I’ll be all right,’ he said again, but Harper could hear that he was slurring his words slightly and a few moments later, he was dry-heaving again.

‘I’m not sure you will,’ Harper said. ‘It may just be exhaustion, but it may also be altitude sickness and if it is, the only short-term remedy that will work is to get you away from the altitude that’s causing it, which means getting you down from the mountains.’

‘We can’t do that.’

‘We may have no choice.’

Harper helped Scouse along the trail for another hundred yards, supporting him with an arm round his shoulders as he stumbled his way onwards. He stopped by a group of boulders at the edge of the track and sat Scouse down. Harper refilled their water-bottles from a half-frozen spring trickling out from under the rocks and handed one to him. ‘Drink this, sit still and try to relax,’ he said, listening to Scouse’s wheezing breath as he did so. ‘We’ll rest here for a few minutes and then we’ll head a little further on again. You’ll be better in a little while.’

Scouse nodded but didn’t trust himself to speak. While he waited, Harper studied the map again, and spotted something - a building, a ruin or maybe just a cairn - marked on the map, only mile or so from where they were. ‘Just wait here,’ he said. ‘I’m going to walk as far as the next bend and take a look-see along the track. Don’t move.’

Scouse forced a smile. ‘I’m not sure I could, even if I wanted to.’

Harper walked away but paused at the first bend in the trail and looked back towards Scouse, who managed to give him a thumbs up sign. Harper carried on along the Inca Road, marvelling at the quality of its construction. It was about ten feet wide, surfaced with compacted gravel and grit, and supported at its outer edge by a stone retaining wall that ran along most of its length, enabling the trail to cling to the steep mountainside. The wall had been constructed without a shred of mortar but was so artfully built that apart from a handful of small stretches where it was beginning to crumble, it had survived almost intact, for seven or eight hundred years, despite everything that the howling mountain winds and the effects of ice, frost and snow could do to it.

As he rounded another bend, a long straight stretch of the trail opened up ahead of him. Towards the end of it, just discernible in the distance, there was something set slightly back from the edge of the trail, at the point where there was a small patch of level ground before the wall of the mountains closed in again. Harper glanced behind him but Scouse was now out of sight. He hesitated, then hurried on, jogging along the trail until he reached what turned out to be a tiny building, a traditional hut, dry stone walled and roofed with a collapsing thatch of mountain grasses. What its original purpose had been was not clear. No shepherds or hunters would ever have patrolled these barren, frozen wastes, so he could only assume that it had been built - perhaps by the Incas themselves - as a refuge for those travelling along the trail, a place where they could pause and rest or wait out a snow storm sweeping through the mountains. If so, it might serve a similar purpose for him and Scouse now. When he pushed against the ancient, very weathered wooden door, it opened with a protesting squeal from its hinges. He peered into the gloomy interior. There were no windows, and the only light inside the hut came from the open doorway. It was so small that there would barely be room for two people inside it but it would be a welcome shelter from the terrible cold of the night that would soon be coming on.

Every instinct would normally have told him not to use such an obvious and visible lying-up place, and instead he would either have pressed on or found a place to lie up out on the mountainside. But Scouse’s condition was now worrying him so much that he felt his only option was to use the shelter the hut would provide to allow him to rest and recover a little overnight. If he was still sick and dizzy in the morning, they would have to find a swift way down from the mountains and hope that they would not find themselves walking in to a sicario ambush along the way.

He ran back along the track and rounded the bend to see Scouse sprawled in the dirt. His heart missed a beat and he sprinted the last few yards and began shaking his friend. ‘Scouse! SCOUSE!’

There was an agonising pause before Scouse opened his eyes and looked up at him. ‘S’all right,’ he said drowsily. ‘Just resting.’

‘I’ve found us a better place to rest up,’ Harper said. ‘Come on, I’ll help you.’

He got Scouse to his feet, put his arm around him and they shuffled along the trail to the hut. It was less than a mile but took them almost an hour to cover the ground. He helped Scouse into the hut and propped him against the wall while he went back outside and gathered a few armfuls of dead grasses from the slopes around the hut. He spread them on the floor of the hut to give a little insulation from the cold stones, and made Scouse lie down on them. The sun was now touching the horizon and the temperature outside was falling dramatically, but their body heat was already starting to make the hut feel a little warmer.

‘I’m going to stand-to outside and keep watch until after dark,’ Harper said. ‘No one will be moving along the plateau or this track after that but while I’m doing that, you just rest up and try to get some sleep.’ Harper fell silent as he realised that his words were superfluous - Scouse was already quietly snoring.

Harper went back outside, closed the door and crouched against the wall, watching the track in both directions until the last glow of the sunset had faded and he could see no more than a handful of yards. Then he went back into the hut, trying to ease the door open and close it again without disturbing Scouse, though he was pretty sure he could have detonated a grenade without waking his friend. He lay down next to him, huddling together for warmth, closed his eyes and slept.

CHAPTER 22

Harper woke before dawn, leaving Scouse still snoring gently, he let himself out of the hut, rubbed a handful of snow on his face to give himself a rudimentary wash and wake himself up, and then settled down to keep watch until dawn. He kept his eyes on the trail and the plateau below him as the skies lightened, and he waited until the line of the sunrise had gilded the snow-covered summits of the mountains and begun inching down the upper slopes before he went back into the hut to wake Scouse. ‘The sun’s up and we need to be moving,’ said Harper as his friend opened his eyes. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Too early to say,’ Scouse said, ‘but better for some kip, for sure.’

‘Okay, neck some water and then let’s see how we go. Don’t be a hero, though. If you start to feel dizzy or like you’re going puke, tell me. People can die of altitude sickness, so let’s not take any chances, right? I’ve not got you this far just to lose you here.’

They set off along the trail and Harper was relieved to see that Scouse was now moving at a reasonable pace without showing any obvious signs of discomfort. ‘Maybe all you needed was a bit of shut-eye,’ he said.

‘Maybe, though what I really need now is a full English breakfast with all the trimmings: bacon, sausage, egg, black pudding, beans, mushrooms, fried bread and a shedload of toast and tea on the side.’

‘Thanks, that’s really helping,’ Harper said. ‘The only thing worse than hearing my empty stomach rumbling is to have to listen to someone telling me all the things I could be putting in it.’ He grinned. ‘Brown sauce or red?’

Scouse laughed. ‘Gotta be HP sauce,’ he said. ‘And being the rebel I am, I often throw on a few picked onions.’

‘You’re an animal,’ said Harper. He kept a constant watch on the track ahead of and behind them, and paused every few hundred yards to rake the plateau and the ridge on the far side of it with his gaze, but there was nothing to worry him as they moved steadily further west. The mountains still spread out to the north and south of them, but they could see the way ahead beginning to open out as they crossed the watershed and the plateau began to slowly dip towards the west. From the map, Harper could see that the Inca Road would soon begin to curve round to the north, following the line of the mountains towards the ancient, far distant Inca strongholds of Cusco and Machu Picchu in Peru, and he was just beginning to think about when would be the right moment to break away from it when he saw a figure moving along the trail towards them. He was too far away yet to distinguish much about him, but he seemed to have an unnaturally bulky outline.

‘We have company,’ he said. ‘And either that guy’s extremely tall and broad-shouldered or more likely, he’s either wearing a bergen or carrying a rocket-launcher on his back.’

‘Let’s hope it’s a bergen then,’ Scouse said, screwing his eyes up as he peered into the distance.

Harper had immediately looked for cover but there was none to be had and in any case, there was every reason to believe that the figure would already have spotted them too.

‘What do we do?’ Scouse said.

‘We just keep walking,’ Harper said, resting his hand on the butt of the Colt in his waistband. ‘If it’s trouble, we’ll just have to deal with it.’

He kept a wary eye on the figure as the distance between them narrowed, but then began to relax as the upper part of the outline resolved itself into the square, boxy shape of a bergen and he saw that the figure looked European and was grey haired, bearded, and wearing hiking shorts. ‘If he’s a sicario,’ Harper said, ‘he’s not like any I’ve come across before.’ He held up a hand in greeting as the man approached, but kept his other hand on the butt of the Colt, just in case.

‘Buenos dias,’ the stranger said, in a thick German accent.

‘Guten morgen,’ Harper said with a grin.

The German smiled. ‘Danke schon, or should I say Thank you and good morning? I was just beginning to wonder if I would walk the rest of the trail and never see another soul and now here you are.’

‘So you’ve not passed anyone else?’ Harper said.

‘Not going your way, no. There were two men just off the trail a few kilometres back but they didn’t look all that friendly, so I didn’t detour to say hello.’

‘Bolivians?’ Harper said, trying to sound disinterested.

The German shrugged. ‘They looked like it, Latinos certainly. I presume they were hunters because they had rifles, though what they’d be hunting up here I have no idea. Perhaps there are some wolves or wild guanaco in the mountains, though I haven’t seen a sign of any.’ He waved a goodbye and continued down the trail.

‘Sorry mate, but we’re going to have to do a bit more climbing,’ Harper said to Scouse as the German walked away. ‘We’ll have to move up to the ridge and work our way around them before we drop down again.’

‘Better that than dying, I suppose,’ Scouse said, though his tone of voice suggested there wasn’t much in it.

‘We don’t know if they’re lying up in ambush or moving towards us, so the first thing to do is get well clear of the trail.’ He scanned the mountainside, searching for the line of the most gradual ascent he could find and then led the way up, pausing frequently to scan the trail and the plateau below him, and to check on Scouse, who was once more labouring up the mountainside in his wake.

Moving in small stages, with long pauses both to watch for danger ahead and to allow Scouse some recovery time, it took another two hours to reach the ridgeline, by which time the sun was already well past its zenith. They moved west again, along the line of the ridge, but as they did so, Harper was acutely aware of the steadily narrowing gap between the ridge they were following and the floor of the plateau. They were close to the western edge of the mountains now, and the dizzy heights of the great peaks behind them were receding, beginning to give way to the foothills, with the flatlands of the Altiplano just visible in the distance ahead.

He had still not spotted any sign of the sicarios that the German hiker had seen, but he didn’t relax his vigilance for a second. If they were in camouflage gear - or at the least, drab clothing - and were remaining motionless, he could pass within fifty yards of them without necessarily being able to see them. In such circumstances, only movement, a wrong colour or shape, or some intangible, instinctive sense of a thing out of place would give them away.

As he was pondering this, Scouse had moved on, slightly ahead of him and when he glanced up, Harper saw that Scouse’s outline was now breaking the skyline. Trying to raise his voice enough for him to hear, but not so loud that it would carry far down the mountain, he called out, ‘Scouse, for fuck’s sake get your head down. I could see you from miles away. You might as well paint a target on your chest.’

Scouse turned towards him, a smart-arse reply beginning to form on his lips, but the next moment he was hurled backwards, his arms out-thrown as he fell. A heartbeat later, Harper heard the diminishing echo of the gunshot that had hit him rolling around the bowl of the mountains.

Flattening himself in the dirt and keeping as low to the ground as possible, Harper crawled up the slope, flesh creeping as he waited for the impact of a bullet. He heard the whip-crack of another shot, but it went high and wide of him, striking sparks off a granite boulder. Before the sicarios could fire again, Harper had grabbed Scouse by the ankles and dragged him into the cover of some rocks.

He felt sick as he saw the dark red stain that was slowly spreading across Scouse’s chest. He tore open Scouse’s jacket and saw a dark hole just above his breastbone that was spurting bright, arterial blood. He had no field dressings or any medical kit with him, and all he could do was press his hands against the wound.

Scouse stared down at his chest, watching the blood still bubbling out from under Harper’s fingers, and then looked up and locked eyes with him. ‘Don’t waste your energy, mate. If you stay here to try to help me, you’ll just slow yourself down and let those bastards get you too.’ He shook his head as Harper opened his mouth to argue. ‘You know I’m done. Just like I always told you, even a lucky shot can kill you.’ He choked on the last word as his mouth filled with blood and moments later his eyelids flickered and closed, and with a last sighing breath, his body twitched and then lay still.

Harper pressed his bloody fingers against Scouse’s neck but he already knew that he would feel no pulse there. He hesitated a moment longer, then crawled a few yards to the cover of another boulder and slowly peered around the edge of it, trying to spot the sicarios who had killed Scouse. In the split second he was exposed, he heard a crack and the whine of a ricochet as a bullet struck the boulder. Needle-sharp splinters of rock flew around him, and one embedded itself in his cheek. He pulled it out between his forefinger and thumb and roughly wiped away the blood trickling from it.

In the instant he had been looking around the rock before the bullet struck it, he had caught the movement of figures, dangerously close below him, no more than a hundred yards away. It was well within range of the rifles they were carrying, but too far for a killing shot with the Colt that he still carried, tucked in his belt. He needed them within twenty metres or so before he could be certain of taking them out.

He spent a few more precious seconds scanning the slope around him, plotting a course he could take, using every inch of cover that the boulders, loose rocks and scree could provide. Then he showed himself for an instant at the left hand side of the boulder, dived back into cover as another bullet struck it and then belly-crawled away from the other side, worming his way to the next patch of cover he had identified. Each time he crossed a patch of open ground, his flesh crawled, expecting at any second the impact of a bullet, but although the sicarios kept firing whenever they caught a glimpse of him, and rounds were peppering the hillside around him, he remained unscathed.

After a five-minute eternity spent crawling across the slope, he reached the fissure he had noticed, a boulder-strewn stream bed that had cut a notch into the ridge. Clinging to the near side of it, to make maximum use of the cover it afforded him, Harper crawled his way up, flattening himself against the ground as he reached the top, minimising his exposure to the sicarios as he crossed the ridgeline and then wormed forward a few more yards. There was a narrow ribbon of land along the summit of the ridge, a gentle downslope of weathered rocks and gritty sand before the plunge began down the other side of the ridge. Once Harper had worked himself away from the ridgeline behind him, he could crouch and then stand, unobserved by the sicarios until they had climbed up to the ridge themselves.

He knew he had no more than two or three minutes respite before they would reach the ridgeline and, keeping low, he ran flat out, due west into the now setting sun, counting down from fifty as he did so. Then he dived behind an outcrop of rocks and looked back. The imprint of his boots had left a clear trail in the loose gritty sand back along the plateau. He ran another twenty yards at right angles to his previous course, then worked his way back, looping his track and going to ground again behind a low rock at right angles to the line of his footprints and about fifteen metres from it. He arranged some smaller rocks in front of his hiding place, then pulled up a couple of handfuls of dry mountain grasses and pushed the stems roughly into his hair - as good a camouflage as he could manage in the short time available. He eased the Colt from his waistband, flicked off the safety catch and sighted along its barrel, pointing along the line of the footprints he had made. Then he settled back to wait.

His thoughts were all of Scouse, a mixture of bitter, agonising regret at the death of his childhood mate, after going through so much to try and save him, but also blind fury at Scouse’s stupidity in breaking one of the cardinal rules of soldiering. Not breaking the skyline was one of the first things you learned as a raw recruit, but despite his years as a Para and then associating with SAS men, and even pretending to be one, it was one of the many things that Scouse had either forgotten or, more likely, Harper thought bitterly, had never bothered to learn.

He pushed the dark thoughts away. Scouse was gone and there was no point in wasting time and energy on anger, regrets or thoughts of what might have been. Harper was in extreme danger himself and the only way to get out of it was to eliminate the sicarios who had been tracking them and who had already killed Scouse.

He waited as the shadows cast by the low sun lengthened and at last he heard a faint noise and saw a movement at the periphery of his vision. He remained absolutely motionless as two figures peered cautiously over the ridgeline, then climbed up and stood still, the barrels of their Armalite AR-15 assault rifles following their gaze as they scanned the summit plateau in both directions. Harper saw one nudge the other and point at the ground. Both heads then turned in his direction and they began to move slowly along the ridge, following the trail of his footprints, one moving while the other remained still, covering him.

He watched and waited as they moved towards him, still tracking the footprints in the dirt. If they failed to see him, they would have to pass within fifteen metres of where he lay, and at that range even Scouse couldn’t have missed. He waited as the first sicario approached, a squat figure dressed in army-style camouflage fatigues but with the hair and facial colouring of an Aymara tribesman. He paused almost level with him, glancing from side to side, and his gaze must have passed right over Harper, but he evidently failed to detect anything unusual about the loose rocks and the clump of grasses that concealed him, as he then moved on. His body now filled Harper’s sights, but he still held his fire. Only when the first man had passed and the second was in his sights, would it be the moment to fire.

The second sicario was now almost level with him. As he looked to his right, a gust of wind parted the grasses Harper had used to hide himself and blew a few of the stems away downwind. In that instant Harper saw the sicario’s face change and his mouth began to open in a warning cry as his gun barrel swung towards Harper’s hiding place. Harper pulled the trigger and the Colt barked. Still travelling at close to muzzle velocity, the round smashed into the centre of the man’s chest, hurling him backwards as if he had been hit by a sledgehammer, and tearing a hole in his back as it exited, through which blasted a spray of blood and lung tissue.

The first sicario swung around but froze for a crucial instant at the sight of the other one sprawled across the rocks. He had barely had time to register that a second figure was lying on the ground a few yards from his dying comrade when Harper squeezed the trigger again. The Colt bucked twice more, the first round smashing into the sicario’s solar plexus, the next punching a hole a few inches higher as he began to topple backwards, tearing away most of his heart. Harper switched back to his original target and put a final round through his head - a coup de grace that might not have been necessary, but Harper had been in enough gunfights to never assume anyone was dead until you had made absolutely certain of it.

He tucked the two dead sicarios’ pistols in his belt, and picked up one of their Armalites. He swung the other rifle above his head and then launched it out over the ridge and it disappeared from sight, bouncing away down the mountainside. He threw the Colt after it, then filled his pockets with the ammunition that they had been carrying. He crawled to the edge of the ridge and spent ten minutes raking the slopes below him with his gaze, making absolutely sure that there was not another party of sicarios following behind the first. Then he climbed down to a few yards below the ridgeline and made his way back to where Scouse lay.

Two condors were already circling overhead, drawn by the fresh carrion they had spotted as they circled on the thermals high above the ridge. He dragged the body right up to the back of the boulder that had been shielding him. He spent another five minutes finding all the rocks he could carry and piling them up over Scouse’s body in a rough cairn that would have to serve as his mausoleum. He saluted the grave, muttered ‘Farewell mate. I’ll see you one day on the other side - if there is one.’ And then he turned and hurried away, keeping on the same contour with the setting sun always in his face.

After sunset, he found a little shelter in the lee of some rocks, and lay up there for a while dozing and drifting into a troubled sleep, but the cold bit into his bones, and when the moon came up, he moved off again at once, picking his way among the rocks.

Dawn found him west of La Paz, which lay some miles to the south of him, and already emerging from the last ridges of the mountains, back on to the Altiplano that ran from there all the way to the Peruvian border.

The eastern arm of the Andes rose behind him and the snowy peaks of the western arm spanned the far horizon but he was now moving across a flat grassland plain. Without Scouse to slow him down, he could cover the miles far more rapidly and was now taking a direct lower level route, making for the shore of Lake Titicaca, though it was still a long forced march ahead of him. He didn’t know if the cartel bosses had called off the hunt or still had their sicarios scouring the area, but the faster he moved, the greater his chances of escaping.

He hadn’t eaten now for more than four days and a gnawing hunger griped at his guts, but he forced himself to ignore it. He had lost some weight already, burning first what little body fat he’d had and then his solid flesh and muscle, but he would survive that and could soon put the weight back on once he had reached a safe haven. Trying to find or buy food could only increase the risk that he would not reach safety at all.

Occasional dirt roads ran from north to south across his track, but the land ahead of him was punctuated by very few buildings and even fewer trees. He kept well clear of any towns or villages and held to a course roughly parallel to, but about a mile from the Ruta Nacional. He was far enough from it to be invisible to the naked eye, but if any sicarios were patrolling it and using binoculars, Harper would have been easily spotted so wherever possible he used the undulations of the terrain and the occasional low hills to shield himself from view.

There were some isolated farms near his route but most were sited closer to the main road and when he did see one in his path ahead he gave it a very wide berth. Farm dogs sometimes barked in the distance as he passed and occasionally he disturbed small groups of vicuna and guanaco, the wild relatives of the domesticated llama and alpaca that had been kept by the indigenous farmers since Inca times and were still used both as beasts of burden and for their wool and meat. However he saw no trace of anyone appearing in answer to the noise of the dogs or the movement of the animals as he kept on steadily to the west.

There were two possible ways to reach the Peruvian border. One was to turn more to the south-west, aiming to cross close to Ruta Nacional 1, which ran pretty much due west from La Paz and along the southern shore of Lake Titicaca all the way to the border at Desaguadero, by repute a dirty and lawless frontier town. The other way was to continue on his present course, reaching the eastern shore of the lake near the town of Huarina, and then carry on parallel to the course of Ruta Nacional 2, which hugged the shore before turning to run down the peninsula that led to San Pablo de Tiquina.

The problem with that route was that the road ended there, at the point where Lake Titicaca narrowed to a strait less than one kilometre across, connecting the lower and upper halves of the lake, Lago Pequeño - the little lake - and Lago Grande. The strait also separated San Pablo de Tiquina and the rest of Bolivia from its sister town of San Pedro de Tiquina at the end of the peninsula facing it on the other side of the strait. The eastern half of that peninsula was still Bolivian territory but the border with Peru ran right across the middle of it. That was the route Harper had decided to take.

He carried on to the north-west, tracking the road. Lake Titicaca came into view as he moved on, its beautiful waters reflecting the azure blue of the sky and shimmering like silver as a gentle breeze ruffled the surface. As it reached the start of the peninsula that jutted out into the lake, the Ruta Nacional turned to the south, and began the run down towards the tip. The terrain of the peninsula was much hillier than the plain Harper had been traversing and the road ran through cuttings for parts of the way. That suited Harper fine, helping to keep him out of sight of the road as he trekked onwards. He was further aided by the rough, rocky ground, studded with eucalyptus trees, which offered much better cover than the flat lands of the Altiplano. He was still moving parallel to the road, but kept working his way through the dry, stony heights above it.

However, as he moved down towards the end of the peninsula, there were a growing number of houses to negotiate and they were set closer and closer together, as if jostling each other for prime views of the lake. That made it increasingly difficult to work his way around them and in the end, to make any further progress without straying into people’s yards and small fields, he was forced to move down within a few yards of the road. He advanced at a wearyingly slow pace now, flattening himself in the ditch at the side of the road whenever he heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. He kept following the road, which was now dropping steeply, twisting like a snake as it ran down towards the lake.

At the water’s edge at the bottom of the last steep hillside, Harper could see the small town of San Pablo de Tiquina laid out along the eastern shore of Lake Tititcaca, and beyond it was its sister town of San Pedro de Tiquina, facing it across the water and what looked to be no more than eight hundred metres away. He left the road, slipped between two brick-built, workshop buildings that were locked and shuttered, perhaps for the siesta, and then crouched behind a low wall beyond them that overlooked the waterfront, allowing him to get the lie of the land and watch for potential dangers before approaching any closer. There were rows of houses on the hillside behind him looking out over the lake, and in the little town itself there were a couple of shops, a café and what looked like a small amusement park with a roundabout and some swings, and a stall selling toys, sweets and neon coloured kids drinks.

Vehicles and people were queueing to be carried across the water to San Pedro on a number of flat-bottomed barges, but the people were travelling separately from their vehicles. The pedestrians - and the drivers, once their cars were on one of the barges - used a concrete-surfaced, stone pier with a small wooden jetty leading off to one side of it to board their barges, while cars, buses and trucks were driven along a series of precarious ramps - thick wooden planks embedded in the shingle beach - on to the vehicle barges. Those had low gunwales on three sides but an open rear, allowing the vehicles to be driven straight on to the deck. Ferrymen with punt poles provided the motive power to push off from the ramps and through the shallows, and then an outboard motor drove the barge the rest of the way across the narrow strait.

A prominent sign at the landward end of the jetty ordered passengers to “Use salvavidas” - wear lifejackets. His jaw tightened as he spotted two men, leaning against the side of a battered white Landcruiser, who were scrutinising the faces of the passengers waiting to board the barges. They were both wearing jeans and black leather jackets and had the look and the arrogant attitude of sicarios. That impression was reinforced by the bulges he could see under the armpits of their jackets.

He shifted his gaze, looking across the water. If he were to move a couple of hundred yards along the shore in either direction, he would be out of sight of the sicarios and any onlookers in the town. He could then have slipped into the water and swum across to the other side, had it not been for one factor that made it inconceivable. He would not normally have hesitated for a second about making an eight hundred metre swim, especially across a tideless lake. It was well within his capabilities, for he regularly took swims of two or three miles in the sea off the beach at his home in Pattaya, but there was a crucial difference. In Pattaya he was swimming in a warm tropical sea, but this lake was at an altitude of almost four thousand metres and the temperature of the water, fed by snow melt from the Andean glaciers, was bone-chillingly cold. In such waters, without a wet suit, a man could rapidly become hypothermic and lapse into unconscious. Even so, Harper would have attempted it had he been in his normal excellent physical shape, but he had now been without food for five days and had barely slept during that period. He was close to exhaustion, his stores of body fat had been exhausted and his muscle mass was being rapidly depleted as his body drew on it to survive. Whatever means he was going to use to get across, it could not be by swimming the strait.

As he watched, a bus was being loaded that was almost as big as the barge that would be carrying it across the strait. As it was inched aboard, the gunwales of the barge sank dangerously close to the water level. The people on the shore, including the sicarios, now had their attention entirely focussed on the barge, watching as it creaked and groaned under the weight of the bus. That gave Harper his chance. He broke cover, ran down to the waterfront and slipped into the icy water of the lake, alongside the next barge in the queue. He swam to the end of it and then ducked under the surface, pushing himself off from that barge with his feet and using the momentum to swim underwater, only coming to the surface again as he saw the dark shape of the barge that was carrying the bus looming in the water above him.

He was now at the opposite end of the barge from the jetty and, providing he remained there, shielded by the bulk of the bus, he was out of sight of anyone on the shore, including the sicarios. However he knew that if he remained immersed in the water any longer, he would be in serious difficulties, so at once he hauled himself up so his body was half out of the water, hanging by his fingers, then swung a leg up, hooking it over the gunwale and rolled onto the deck of the barge under the front bumper of the bus. He huddled in the foetal position, conserving what body warmth he had, and was grateful for the heat of the still-warm bus engine just above him.

Within a couple of minutes he heard shouts and then felt the barge begin to move as the crewmen cast off from the shore. There were only two of them on the barge and both were busy at the stern, one using his punt pole to push off from the ramp and through the shallows, and the other steering and running the outboard motor. Harper was still soaked through and shivering from the cold, but he stayed where he was as the barge nosed slowly out into the deeper water of the lake and then increased speed, with the bow wave splashing on to the deck, making him feel even colder.

The barge soon reached the other side and the outboard’s engine note fell away as the crewman eased back on the throttle, letting the barge swing around on the current so it could again approach the jetty stern-first. Harper felt it beginning to turn and heard the other crewmen’s footsteps on the planking of the deck as he began to walk to the prow, carrying his punt pole, ready to push the ferry the last few metres to the jetty. At once Harper crawled further under the bus and, hidden in the gloom underneath it, he peered out at the shore, noting where people were standing in line for the ferry and how far he would have to swim to be out of sight of them. Any stray people further along the shore who happened to spot him would just have to be dealt with as the situation required.

As the barge bumped to a halt and he heard the crewman walk back along the barge, Harper slid out from his hiding place. Crouching low, still hidden from the shore by the bodywork of the bus, he rolled over the gunwale until he was once more hanging by his fingertips. At once the cold again struck deep into him, but he just gritted his teeth as the driver of the bus came on to the barge and slowly reversed his vehicle off. Then, before the vehicles began to be loaded for the return journey, and hoping that the bus driver’s manoeuvres would still be holding the attention of the watchers on the jetty and the shore, Harper let himself drop back into the water.

He worked his way around to the side of the prow, still out of sight of the people on the jetty, and then pushed off as hard as he could with his feet and swam underwater, away from the jetty and parallel to the shore. He kept swimming, using powerful strokes with his arms and legs, as his lungs tightened and the urge to breathe became almost unbearable, then released the last of the air in his lungs in a steady stream of small bubbles. When he could hold his breath no longer, he swung round towards the shore and broke surface just as he started to feel the sloping shingle beach against his chest. He crawled forward, hauling himself out of the water on his hands and knees, then raised his head a little and took a cautious look around.

Two young children who had been playing on the beach right in front of where he had emerged from the water, were watching him, their eyes like saucers. Harper gave them a big smile, and then shot a quick glance back along the shore. There was no sign of any alarm, nor movement towards him from the jetty which now looked to be almost 100 yards away. He turned his head, looking back across the water. The next queue of people waiting to cross was lining up at the jetty on the far side and beyond them he could just make out the figures of the two sicarios, still leaning against the Landcruiser.

He turned back, gave the children another big smile, and then reached into his pocket. He pulled out the few coins he had there and tossed them towards the kids. They fell glittering among the shingle on the beach and the children scrabbled among the pebbles for them, giggling and laughing. Harper got to his feet, ran past them up the beach, around the end of a row of houses and then dived into some scrub behind them. He was still cold to the bone, shivering hard and struggling to focus his mind. He knew that he must be close to hypothermia, so with a quick look around to make sure he was still not being watched, he took off his clothes. He spent a couple of minutes wringing as much water from them as he could and then trying to rub some warmth into his frozen limbs and then put his clothes back on.

He ran up the hillside away from the lake, feeling weak as a child but resisting the siren call from his mind to just sit down for a minute and rest. He knew that if he did that he might not get up again.There were no shouts or sounds of pursuit behind him and when he finally paused to risk a look behind, with his chest heaving, nothing seemed to have changed at the waterfront. Cars and people were still moving slowly to and from the barges, and as far as he could tell, only the two children had paid him any attention, and they were now heading for the shop next to the jetty, presumably to spend their windfall.

Harper turned and rounded the shoulder of the hill. One hurdle had now been safely negotiated but an even more difficult one lay ahead, because although he was now safely across the lake, he was still on Bolivian territory and he could not afford to relax, nor begin to feel safe until he was well across the Peruvian frontier. At its closest point, that still lay twenty miles away.

As he moved on, he kept following the contours around the hillside above Ruta Nacional 2. It had resumed its course on this side of the lake but ran close to the shore on the narrow coastal plain. The wind off the lake coupled with the body heat he was generating from his exertions was helping to dry Harper’s clothes a little but it was still an hour after he had emerged from the water before he began to feel anything like warm again. He kept forcing himself on, trudging towards the border, trying to ignore his gnawing hunger and the fatigue that dragged at him like a lead weight around his neck.

CHAPTER 23

By mid-afternoon Harper was in sight of the Bolivian frontier post at the village of Kasani, the last obstacle before he could reach Peru. Still on the high ground above the road, he worked his way forward until he reached a point overlooking the village and the border post. There was a cluster of buildings around the border post and a mission-style church with adobe walls and half a dozen stepped concrete benches in front of it, all individually numbered as if to accommodate ticket-holders enjoying the show as people queued to cross the border. A few yards beyond the church was a thin stone arch arcing right over the top of the road that must have been used to mark the actual frontier at some time in the past. To either side of the border post he could see a very new-looking chain-link fence complete with CCTV cameras mounted on poles roughly every couple of hundred metres. Whether they worked or not was another question, and in any case, to Harper’s relief, although the line of CCTV cameras marched right down to the shore of the lake, it did not appear to extend far up the hill on the inland side of the border post.

There were no lounging sicarios nor white Landcruisers parked near the border post, but he knew only too well that it did not mean that the frontier was not being watched. The cartels had people everywhere, not just corrupt police and customs officers in their pay, but mules, look-outs, runners and kids eager to make an impression and be recruited into the cartel’s army. A sighting of any suspicious individual, whether a potential DEA man, a spy, a sicario working for a rival drug lord, or a man on the cartel’s most wanted list, would earn them a reward. So Harper would not be passing through the border post and was merely observing it to work out when, where and how would be the best means to get across.

As he was watching, he saw one of the border officials emerge from the post just long enough to push back the queue of people waiting to have their papers and passports checked before crossing the frontier. The official then went back inside and slammed the door shut, while those outside could only settle down to wait. Harper figured it must be siesta time, which meant it was the perfect time to cross

He began to climb further up the hillside, until he was out of sight of the last of the scattered houses in Kasani and then he turned back towards the border. He crept forward. As he approached the fence he was well up on the hillside and safely out of line of sight from the border post. To his relief, he saw that the fence was not electrified, but it was still an unexpectedly formidable barrier, a steel chainlink fence showing no signs of rust or wear, and capped with a triple strand of razor wire. Keeping low to the ground and still using every scrap of cover, he began tracking the line of the fence up the steep slope, scouring the ground with his gaze, looking for any faint traces of animal tracks. He knew there were viscacha - rodents like rabbits with long tails - and the maned wolves that preyed on them, in this area, so all he had to do was find their tracks. After a couple of false alarms - tracks that appeared to be running towards the border fence but which then either veered away from it again or just ran parallel to it, Harper found what he was seeking. It was another track that was just visible as a slightly fainter line across the yellowing mountain grasses over which it ran. Harper began to track its course over the hillside. He followed it to the fence and smiled as he saw it continuing beyond the fence on the other side. Where it crossed the fence line, there was a shallow depression in the dust and he could see a small tuft of viscacha fur caught on the lowest strand of the wire.

Harper cast a swift glance up and down the fence, making sure there was no one in sight, and then stretched himself out flat on the ground and began to belly crawl his way forward under the fence. He had to turn his head sideways to squeeze through the gap and could feel the bottom wire strand scraping along his spine. He was still not quite halfway under the fence when he became stuck fast, held by the wire that had now become trapped in the back of his jacket. He reached behind him, trying to free it, but in the end he had to wriggle his way backwards from under the fence to free it.

He took off his jacket, knelt at the foot of the fence and began clawing at the dusty, gritty soil with his fingers, scraping some of it away to deepen the shallow depression slightly before trying again. Pushing his jacket in front of him, he slithered back under the fence and this time he felt the wire snag for a moment on his shirt but then slip down his back and he was able to wriggle out on the other side of the fence. He reached back under it, brushing the dirt and grit back into the depression and smoothing away the marks that showed someone had crawled through. When he had finished, he cautiously got to his feet, still sweeping the hillside around him with his gaze to make sure he hadn’t been observed.

He was now past the Bolivian border but not yet safely in Peru, for there was still a short stretch of no man’s land to cross before reaching the frontier on the Peruvian side. He advanced with extreme caution, and went to ground as soon as he saw the Peruvian border post ahead, heralded by a sign reading Puesto de Control - checkpoint. He inched forward again until he could observe the post, where a handful of people were waiting to pass through from the Bolivian side.

Harper could also see another, longer line of tourists, most of them backpackers, waiting on the far side of the border to cross into Bolivia. However, the local bureaucracy evidently required them to fill in a form at the border post, then take it to be photocopied at a print shop that, conveniently, had been set up next to the post. They then had to return with the copy of the form and their passport so they could be stamped at the border post, before the traveller could proceed. Harper had endured such bureaucratic rituals at scores of borders over the years, and knew that each step in the process was mainly designed to provide an additional opportunity for locals to extract a little more cash from wealthy tourists before they crossed the border and became someone else’s opportunity.

He could also see that money-changers had set up on either side of the border, some squatting cross-legged in the dust with an open suitcase full of cash, ready to convert crumpled Peruvian Soles notes into Bolivianos or vice versa. Others, slightly better equipped, had seated themselves at a small table and wooden chair that had been set up in the open at the side of the road. Three-wheeler moto-taxis were parked next to the money-changers on the Peruvian side, at a point where the road widened slightly, also waiting for trade from those crossing from Bolivia.

There was no sign of any sicarios or police at the border and he could simply have dropped down to the road and joined the line of people queueing to pass through the border post, but there was some risk in doing that. His description could have been passed to the officials, with the promise of a reward if he was held until the sicarios could get there, and he had not come so far and risked so much just to become complacent and be trapped at the final hurdle.

He decided to keep to the high ground and work his way along the steep hillside until he was level with the border post. To his relief there was no sign of another fence of any sort, just sparse grassland, studded with rocks. He passed well above two isolated farms clinging to the hillside, and then scrambled down a steep, terraced slope into a dry stream bed. According to his map, the stream marked the line of the border, but unwilling to take the least chance, as he moved on, he kept in cover high on the hillside and still skirted any farms or buildings he saw until he was well beyond the frontier.

Even though he was now safe on the Peruvian side of the border, Harper knew that he could not afford to lower his guard completely. Cartels, narcos and sicarios were not exactly unknown in Peru either - with Bolivia and Colombia, it was one of the three countries that grew 98 percent of the world’s coca leaves between them. Neither the Peruvian cocaine cartels nor the Bolivian, Colombian, Mexican and Brazilian cartels with which they often formed shifting alliances, paid scant attention to national boundaries in pursuit either of narco-dollars or their enemies.

He was still no more than a mile beyond the border and was still alert and very watchful, continuing to steer well clear of the main road from Bolivia. Harper was now confident enough to begin making his way down from the mountainside. As he approached the small Peruvian town of Yunguyo, straddling the narrow neck of the peninsula, he began to work his way through the backstreets of the town. By now his hunger pangs had become almost unendurable and he knew he must have cut a weird and suspicious-looking figure. He was wild-eyed, unwashed and unkempt, with a five-day growth of beard and he was wearing clothes that were crumpled, torn and covered in dirt and dust, most recently from where he had wriggled under the border fence. Despite his appearance, he felt secure enough, and certainly hungry enough, to enter the town. He needed food and was confident that the risk involved in obtaining it was manageable. He continued on his cautious way towards the centre of the town, drawing curious looks from the few people he passed, all of whom appeared to be townsfolk just going about their daily business and none seemed to pose any immediate threat to him.

Yunguyo was a drab, functional small town and even the sprawling town square in the heart of it contained no fountains or monuments, just a concrete-surfaced space, the size of two football pitches laid side by side. None of the market stalls in the middle of the square nor the shops around the edge seemed to be doing much trade. Staying close to the edge of the square, Harper circled the whole of it once, keeping a wary eye out not only for sicarios but also for any Peruvian police or soldiers. Satisfied, he walked into the middle of the square and bought some empanadas from one of the stalls. He wolfed down two of them at once, standing next to the stall, but could eat no more for the moment because after days of starvation, his stomach had shrunk to the size of a clenched fist. However, while he was there, he bought another half dozen empanadas and took them with him in a paper bag, ready for when his appetite returned a little more.

He next walked to a farmacia on the edge of the square and bought some soap, a disposable razor and a toothbrush, before heading for the small single-storey building he had noticed at the far corner of the square with a crudely lettered sign reading ‘Baño Público’ - public toilet - painted on the wall above the entrance. He was planning to wash and shave there but as he walked through the doorway, parting a dense cloud of flies as he did so, a hideous stench filled his nostrils. The room was empty but for the filthiest sink he had ever seen, and a dark hole in one corner from which the stench was issuing. Harper held his breath and turned on his heel.

He walked back along the edge of the square and chose a street leading away from it at random. At the far end, looking out over the lake, was a building with a domed red roof, that sprawled over a whole block and towered above its low-rise neighbours. It turned out to be a sports centre. It seemed little used and had been constructed on far too grand a scale for a small town like Yunguyo, perhaps having been built mainly to satisfy the ego of some over-ambitious local politician, or by a drug lord using some of his narco dollars to ensure local support by spreading a little largesse around the town. Whatever the reason, Harper was not going to complain about it, since when he went inside, in return for the equivalent of two US dollars, a stolid looking Aymara or Quechua woman issued him with a threadbare but clean towel and pointed the way to the mens’ changing rooms. There he was able to use a shower that, if not hot, was at least warm, wash and comb his hair, and shave at a newly-installed sink. While he could not wash his clothes, he was at least able to shake the dust out of them and then sponge them down with a damp cloth to remove some of the worst of the dirt. Before leaving, he gave himself a critical once over in the mirror. If not exactly looking like the typical Western tourist, he was at least clean and presentable enough now to pass a casual inspection.

CHAPTER 24

Harper retraced his steps to the town centre. The stallholders had now packed up and gone home for the day, but one of the gaudily painted and decorated local buses was parked in the centre of the square. In Bolivia the bus would have been called a flota but here in Peru, as in many other parts of South America, it was known as a colectivo, one of the numerous small buses that followed a regular route but stopped wherever anyone wanted to get on or off, and even made small detours from its official route in return for the driver’s palm being crossed with a couple of Peruvian Soles. The driver of this one was sitting in the sun, with his back against the bus at the side of the door, and chewing on a coca leaf.

By a mixture of sign language and his few words of fractured Spanish, Harper managed to establish that when it eventually pulled out, the colectivo would be heading further west towards the town of Puno and not back towards the Bolivian border. With that settled, using US dollars, he paid the fare that the driver asked without quibble and climbed on board the bus. As he did so, he passed an array of medals, artifacts and statuettes arranged like a Nativity scene around the driver’s seat, and that seemed to cover all religious bases, including blood-dripping Catholic sacred hearts and Aymara ritual objects. Harper took a seat at the back and felt a powerful temptation to close his eyes and cat-nap, but he made himself stay alert, keeping watch to make sure the driver did not try to slip away and let anyone know that a strange gringo had just boarded his bus.

Over the next hour, three or four more passengers emerged from the side streets and boarded the colectivo, and then a pair of backpackers - Americans with unnaturally white teeth and booming voices - came running across the square, shouting and waving at the driver in case he was thinking of leaving without them. That was never going to happen, Harper thought, reflecting that the fare paid by the three gringos now on board was probably considerably more than the driver would have charged three dozen Peruvians to make the same journey.

Harper started to relax a little more as the driver evidently decided there were now sufficient paying customers to begin the journey. He stood up, scratched himself and spat in the dust, and then boarded the colectivo and set off with a crash of gears. The bus lurched and rattled its way out of town and carried on to the west. Just beyond the town, the coastal strip narrowed still more, becoming a thin ribbon of land sandwiched between the lake shore and the caldera of the huge extinct volcano that dominated the skyline on the other side of the road. The bus rattled on, with the lake always close by. Sometimes the driver used the tarmac highway, but more often he turned off to go bouncing and jolting over the potholed dirt roads that linked the tiny villages and hamlets flanking the route.

Harper could have driven the eighty miles to the city of Puno in well under two hours, but the colectivo’s meandering journey, stopping and starting at towns and villages so small and nondescript that even Wikipedia had apparently never heard of them, took far longer. It was well after dark when the bus at last wheezed its way under a red banner stretched overhead across the road and proclaiming ‘Bienvenido a Puno’ and headed in towards the city centre.

It didn’t reach it, but came to a final halt, for no reason that Harper could discern, in an apparently random stopping place. In this case the final stop was in a broad street in a deserted, semi-industrial area a couple of miles short of the centre. There were no street lights - or if there were, they had all been smashed - and on this moonless night there was only starlight to guide them, but the Peruvian passengers seemed unfazed both by this and the curious choice of stopping place, and all disembarked and set off down the street, disappearing into the darkness within a few paces. Harper got off too, leaving the American backpackers trying to bribe the driver with a few more dollars to take them right into the town but the driver shook his head emphatically, pushed them off the bus and locked the door.

As Harper glanced back at the colectivo, he saw the driver settling himself down on the back seat, no doubt getting ready for an untroubled night’s sleep. Harper hurried ahead of the disgruntled Americans but then ducked down a side-street and waited until they had passed him and disappeared into the night. He had no desire to share their company since it might have required him to deal with questions that it was much easier to leave unasked and certainly unanswered. When the sound of their voices had faded, he began walking slowly towards the town centre.

He was unworried about being on the streets alone at this time of night, however rough the neighbourhood he might be passing through. If any street criminals had somehow missed the American backpackers but fancied they had found another gringo tourist ripe for mugging and robbing, they would rapidly get a very unpleasant surprise. However he had seen no one when, after walking half a mile further towards the city centre, he came to a good place to lie up for the rest of the night. It was an area of rough grassland fronted by a hoarding announcing in Spanish and English that it was ‘For Sale - Development Opportunity’.

He walked round behind the hoarding and sat down on one of its timber supports. He ate the last of his now stale and crumbling empanadas, then leaned against the back of the hoarding and rested there, cat-napping, until the sky began to lighten towards dawn. He yawned and stretched, then walked back round the hoarding and joined the steadily growing army of people heading into Puno at the start of another working day.

He had chosen Puno because it was a city that had grown mostly by catering to the influx of foreign tourists arriving to tick off Lake Titicaca on their list of ‘Things To Do In Peru’. By dint more of its geographical location than much in the way of tourist promotion, Puno had become an obligatory stop for the organised tours that also took in the ancient Inca capital of Cusco and the spectacular mountain citadel of Machu Picchu further to the north.

As Harper strolled in towards the town centre, he kept glancing at the lake close by on his right hand side. He could see a couple of the traditional boats made of tightly woven bundles of reeds and with elaborate carved figureheads. Beyond them was one of the ‘Floating Islands’ - rafts made of thick, buoyant totora reeds that the indigenous Uros tribes who lived on them, harvested from the shallows of the lake. They kept themselves above water by continually adding fresh layers of reeds to the top surface of their rafts, keeping pace with those slowly rotting and falling away beneath them. The rafts had originally been built by the Uros to give themselves a safe haven from the other hostile tribes on the shores of the lake. Although the need for that was long gone, they still maintained their rafts and their way of life on them. Perhaps that was partly to cash in on the tourist trade, Harper thought with his customary cynicism, but it might also have kept the Uros relatively safe from the worst depredations of Peru’s cocaine cartels.

Once just a small Peruvian town, the sprawling city of Puno now completely filled the narrow coastal strip between Lake Titicaca and the wall of the Andes. As the city expanded, the homes of its poorer inhabitants had been pushed further and further up the mountainside, where they had to live in barrios and shanty towns clinging to the slopes, some on streets so steep that cars could not access them, not that that mattered, for no one who lived there would have had the money to buy one anyway. When he reached the city centre, Harper first took a walk around it until he had found the terminus for the tour buses that ran a shuttle service between Puno and the airport at Juliaca, forty miles away. It was the nearest airport capable of handling tourist flights and had accordingly expanded as fast as the city of Puno. He checked the timetable of the shuttle buses, though as always in South America, that was more of a rough guide than a guarantee of punctuality, and then took himself off to a street café for yet more empanadas and a couple of cups of strong black coffee.

When he returned to the square, a tourist bus was already parked at the stand, disgorging its cargo of camera-wielding American and Japanese tourists, who were lining up behind the lurid golf umbrellas of their tour guides, ready for the short walk down to the waterfront and the first of the day’s photo opportunities. The bus was utterly unlike the colectivo he had used to reach Puno. It was shiny and new-looking, contained no adornments other than a small Peruvian flag above the driver’s seat and had comfortable seats, air-conditioning and even a loo at the back of the bus. Despite his night in the open, as he checked his reflection in a shop window, Harper felt he still looked sufficiently presentable to pass as a tourist, and joined the queue of people waiting to board.

When they began to board, the other passengers all had pre-booked tickets, and were waved through by the driver, a pale-skinned Latino who spoke English with a strong American accent. When Harper reached the head of the queue, he pulled a twenty dollar bill from his wallet and offered it to the driver. ‘I haven’t booked, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘but unless you’re full?’

‘I’ll probably be able to fit you in,’ the driver said, eyeing the money. ‘No luggage?’

‘No, I’m travelling light. Keep the change,’ Harper said, hurrying down the bus to an empty seat to forestall any further conversation.

He’d planned this way of reaching the airport just because he felt there would be safety in numbers - one more Westerner among the floods of foreign tourists who were by far the bulk of the airport’s customers would be unlikely to attract any particular attention. The dollars, yen and other foreign currencies they brought were a huge boost to the local economy, making it unlikely that the local politicians would tolerate any police or airport officials putting that in jeopardy by any excess of officiousness or any harassment of the precious tourists, so Harper had calculated that this was the safest departure point for him.

The bus set off soon afterwards, and in pleasing contrast to the previous day’s bouncing and bucketing journey, it made smooth and rapid progress along a tarmac highway, pulling in just after midday to the Aeropuerto Internacional Inca Manco Capac at Juliaca, named after the founder of the Inca city of Cuzco. While the tourists lined up to claim their luggage as the driver unloaded it, Harper strolled into the terminal, checked the departures board and then walked over to the LATAM desk and bought a Club Class, one-way ticket to Miami, with a brief stop in Lima.

He checked in using a false passport and strolled through the fast track channel and was on the air-side of the terminal within five minutes. He had another coffee and a second breakfast as he found his appetite returning still more, but saved a celebration drink until he had safely boarded the aircraft and settled in his seat. ‘A glass of champagne señor?’ the stewardess said.

‘Hell yes,’ Harper said, ‘and you know what? Just leave the bottle.’

CHAPTER 25

Harper changed flights in Miami and his first act after disembarking there was to phone Myfanwy. She answered the call and he got straight to the point. ‘I wish I could be telling you this in person, rather than down the phone, but I’m still a long way away and I didn’t want to leave you in suspense any longer than I had to. I did find Scouse but I’m afraid it’s bad news. Do you want to sit down while I tell you?’

‘No, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’d already resigned myself to the fact that he wasn’t going to be coming back to me. Just tell me where he is and what happened to him, would you?’

‘I’m afraid he’s dead.’ He paused, carefully measuring his next words as he heard Myfanwy stifling a sob. In the background he could also hear her baby crying.

‘I found him alive,’ Harper said, ‘but by then he was very ill and weak. Just the same I tried to get him home, but there was some fighting and he was hit by a stray bullet. He wasn’t involved in it, he just happened to have been in the wrong place, at the wrong time. He didn’t die at once and he had time to tell me how much he loved you and your baby, and he asked me to try to help you in any way I could. I couldn’t bring his body home to you, there just wasn’t any way to do it, I’m afraid, but he’s been buried in a really beautiful place, high in the mountains, looking out over a lake.’ He paused again. ‘I know this is going to be absolutely no consolation for your loss, Myfanwy, but the company that Scouse was working for is going to help you financially and I’m sure they’ll be in touch about that, very soon. If there’s anything else I can do, you know how to contact me, and Myfanwy, I’m truly, truly sorry to be the bearer of such terrible news.’

He waited until she broke the connection and then hung up himself. He hadn’t given her the full story, and had glossed over some of the details, but he felt it was the kindest thing to do. Better that she should think Scouse had died in a tragic accident than be burning up with rage and thoughts of revenge against the people who had imprisoned and tortured him, and then had him killed.

He went and splashed some water on his face, then squared his shoulders and went to buy a ticket for his connecting flight. He was desperate to get home to Pattaya but there was something else he needed to do first, and so his next destination was not to be Bangkok, but Geneva.

His flight arrived there too late for him to turn up at Risk Reduction’s corporate headquarters that evening, so he booked into a hotel for the night and took an evening stroll round the city and along the shore of the lake. It was an abrupt, strange and unsettling change of scene for him, from the colourful, vibrant street life of the South American towns and cities he had just been experiencing, with all their attendant noise, dirt, crime and corruption, to the genteel, pristine and rather sterile streets of the Swiss capital. In Geneva even a raised voice was likely to attract some disapproving looks and a carelessly discarded cigarette butt or sweet wrapper was liable to land you in jail. For all their flaws, Harper reflected, he far preferred the cities of the Third World to a safe but bland and oh so boring First World city like Geneva.

First thing the next morning, Harper turned up at the glass and stainless-steel offices of Risk Reduction. He passed the uniformed, armed guards patrolling the entrance, and waited in the airlock with its bullet proof glass while the automatic sensors tested the air for any traces of firearms or explosives, until finally it hissed open to admit him to the inner lobby.

He admitted he had no appointment but told the receptionist his name and said ‘I have to see the chairman on a matter of the utmost importance, concerning the company’s South American operations. Tell his PA that and I’m sure he’ll see me.’

‘Then take a seat and I’ll pass the message on to his PA,’ the receptionist said, ‘but he’s a very busy man, so I can’t promise he’ll be able to make time for you.’

‘Understood,’ Harper said, ‘but I’m not leaving here until he does.’

After being kept waiting in the lobby for over an hour, he was given a visitor’s security pass, and the same blonde and mini-skirted PA he had seen on his last visit eventually appeared and escorted him to the lifts. Her glance took in his still crumpled and dirty clothes, and she raised a disapproving eyebrow but remained silent as the lift climbed to the top floor. She led him past the room filled with employees staring at computer screens, and the glass-walled conference room, to the chairman’s corner suite with its spectacular views over the city and the lake.

The chairman stood up and came round his desk, extending a hand to greet him. ‘Mr Harper,’ he said. ‘What a pleasure it is to see you again.’ He turned to his PA. ‘Some coffee for our guest, please.’ When she had brought it and left the office, the chairman studied Harper over the rim of his cup for a moment and then asked him how he could help.

‘It concerns my friend and your former employee, Scouse Davies, who was illegally imprisoned, tortured and then murdered in Bolivia while carrying out his duties on your behalf. Furthermore,…’

The chairman held up a hand. ‘If you will forgive the interruption, Mr Davies was in fact a self-employed contractor, not an employee.’

‘And with respect,’ Harper said, ‘that’s the sort of crap that PR flacks and faceless corporate spokespersons come up with to hide the reality of what their paymasters are actually doing. Of course you prefer to describe Scouse and the other guys who do the same kind of work for you as self-employed contractors because that way, not only can your company dodge any tax, social security payments, pension contributions, and sickness and holiday payments that you would otherwise have to make, but you can also shirk your responsibilities towards them, including avoiding paying them compensation for any injury, incapacity or death that they might suffer. However, in every other way except the surface appearance and the - I’m sure - very careful wording on his contract, Scouse Davies was your employee.’

The chairman remained silent and Harper studied his expression carefully before continuing. ‘So my only question is: are you going to do the right and honourable thing and take care of his widow, or will I be forced to put the word out on the Circuit that if any of the guys get into trouble while on a job for you, Risk Reduction will just abandon its self-employed contractors without a backward glance, and will make no effort at all to rescue them or compensate their families if they’re badly injured, crippled or killed. And if they need proof of that, I can just tell them what happened to Scouse.’ He paused. ‘Doesn’t paint a very appetising picture, does it? And I’m sure it wouldn’t be good for your Kidnap and Rescue business if the guys who actually do the dirty work for you got word of Scouse’s fate, let alone what the media would make of it, if I were to spread the word to them too.’

The chairman’s normally urbane smile had now completely disappeared. ‘Are you trying to blackmail me?’

‘No, not really, though you can choose to look at it that way if you want. Actually, I’m just trying to state the reality without the PR gloss, and I’m trying to get you to do the right thing by someone who lost his life while working on your behalf, without having to be forced to do it. Your company made 120 million dollars profit last year, I’m only asking you to devote about a tenth of one per cent of that to compensate a woman who has lost her husband and the father of her child, because of the work he was doing for you. I don’t know if we’re talking a seven figure sum here, but I think we’re certainly in the ball park of a pretty substantial six figure one, don’t you? Even that seems scant compensation for his poor widow, who’s lost her man and her provider, and will now have to bring up their child as a solo parent.’ Harper waited, watching the chairman’s fingers drumming on the desk. ‘So, do we see eye to eye on this?’

The chairman stood up, walked to the window and stood with his back to Harper, looking out over the lake. Finally he took a deep breath and turned to face him. ‘I’ll have to clear this with my board members, of course, but I think in these special circumstances, without in any way admitting liability on our part, or setting a precedent for any similar incidents in the future, I will be able to persuade them that it would be appropriate for the company to make an ex gratia payment to Mr Davies’s widow along the lines you have suggested.’

Harper gave a broad smile. ‘There you go. Thank you and trust me, you’ll sleep a lot sounder tonight as a result of that decision.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’ll say goodbye then and I hope - as I’m quite sure you do too - that it won’t be necessary for us to meet again. If we do, I can’t imagine that it will be as friendly a meeting and it will probably take place in much less salubrious surroundings.’

After a brief hesitation as he took that in, the chairman shook Harper’s hand and managed to force a smile. ‘As you say. Well, goodbye Mr Harper. I can’t say it’s been entirely a pleasure, but it has certainly been an education.’

‘You and me both,’ said Harper.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Leather is one of the UK’s most successful thriller writers, an eBook and Sunday Times bestseller and author of the critically acclaimed Dan “Spider” Shepherd series and the Jack Nightingale supernatural detective novels. Before becoming a novelist he was a journalist for more than ten years on newspapers such as TheTimes, the Daily Mirror, the Glasgow Herald, the Daily Mail and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. He is one of the country’s most successful eBook authors and his eBooks have topped the Amazon Kindle charts in the UK and the US. The Bookseller magazine named him as one of the 100 most influential people in the UK publishing world.

Born in Manchester, he began writing full-time in 1992. His bestsellers have been translated into fifteen languages. He has also written for television shows such as London’s Burning, The Knock and the BBC’s Murder in Mind series, Two of his novels, The Stretch and The Bombmaker, were filmed for TV and The Chinaman is now a major motion picture starring Pierce Brosnan and Jackie Chan.

To find out more, you can visit his website or find him on Facebook.

SLOW BURN

The fight against terrorism never ends, and Dan “Spider” Shepherd is on the front line of Britain’s defence against the extremists.

When an ISIS bombmaker arrives at Heathrow Aiport asking for asylum in exchange for revealing details of his paymasters, Shepherd is given the case. The bombmaker specialises in drone strikes, and homegrown jihadists that he has trained are already back in the UK, planning their attacks. But before he’ll agree to talk, the terrorist insists that his wife and son are rescued from a refugee camp in Turkey. Shepherd is tasked with bringing the family back to London, but he soon discovers that dark forces are out to stop him. And if he fails, hundreds will die

Hodder and Stoughton have published seventeen books featuring Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd written by Sunday Times bestselling author Stephen Leather. The eighteenth, Slow Burn, will be published in July 2020.

You can preorder Slow Burn now on Amazon

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