Coincidence Page 3

  “Hey, Juanito, cómo estás?”

  “Great. Everything’s cool. How’s with you?”

  “It’s good; we gonna do it.”

  “I was hoping you say that. Last Thursday was exactly the same again, same time, same route, same everything. Esteban is in?”

  “He’s in. Thinks we nuts for taking on the cartel, but he’s in. You talk to the others?”

  “Talked to all three yesterday and they all in. Severo, he needed a little persuading, but I got him to come around.”

  “I bet you did. Tell me about last week’s run.”

  “They still taking the back route to Medellin. I been to the spot five times the last two years and every time they pass the curve at Buenaventura at one o’clock, give or take a couple minutes. They get into Medellin just before six, so we got nearly five hours before they catch on the van is missing. It’s gonna be getting dark by then. They won’t be able to do nothing until the next morning. And anyway, we’ll be five hours at sea before they even know anything’s wrong.”

  “Beautiful. Okay, I’m outta here on July twenty-first. I wanna check out the truck run at least three times myself. Let’s set it up for the last Thursday in September. Might be a little rainy then, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And the weather should be good pretty good in the Pacific then. That house still vacant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bueno. Go ahead and rent it right away. Get the guns and arrange for the others to move in by the middle of July. I’ll be there on the twenty-third; Esteban’ll get there about two weeks later. That’ll give us time to go through the plan several times together. What you gotta do now is find us a boat in Costa Rica so Phillip will have time to look at the same kind of boat in the States. Or go to Nicaragua if you have to.”

  “I’m gonna try to find a boat by end of next week. I find something, I let Phillip know. He can find one Stateside so he can learn everything about it.”

  The meeting was over in twenty minutes. Stefano went out to the exercise yard, where he walked around the hard-packed dirt path three times before falling into stride with Esteban.

  “It’s set,” he said, looking up at the sky as if interested in the clouds. “The last Thursday in September. As soon as your parole starts in August, you go straight to Colombia. Any problem?”

  “No,” Esteban replied.

  “Just make sure you not traced.”

  “No problem, man.”

  With his usual attention to detail, Juan scouted out boats in Costa Rica, finally finding one in Puntarenas that he thought would do: a sixty-five-foot Real Ships motor yacht called the Two Wise. It was well equipped with twin Cats, two generators, inverter, water maker, stabilizers, and bow thrusters. It sounded perfect, and its owner, an American who vacationed on it only every three months or so, was expected to use it in August, so it was a fit, time-wise. He called Phillip, who found a similar boat for sale in Florida and made arrangements to check it out.

  Renting the house turned out to be a bit trickier, even though Juan had been keeping his eye on it for several weeks. The property was just off the main road heading north from Buenaventura. The driveway, on the inside of a large curve in the road, was nearly two hundred feet long and was almost hidden by a cluster of trees and overgrown bushes. The Pacific Ocean was a little over a mile to the east. You could actually see the ocean as the land sloped gently down toward a cove with a sandy beach.

  Juan walked with the landlord down the driveway to the nondescript house. Two of its bedrooms had twin beds, the third, a double bed. Somebody would have to sleep on the couch and it wasn’t going to be him. He noted that the large kitchen had a freezer. Good. They’d be able to stock up on food inconspicuously, buying a little extra to freeze every time they went into town and then transfering most of it to the boat.

  Behind the house was a large barn, still in pretty good condition, with two large swinging doors. It was empty except for a few rusting paint cans, a rolled-up rectangle of cheap carpeting, and the pervasive odor of mildew. It was plenty big enough to hold the van and the two pickup trucks, along with their own SUV. The whole setup seemed perfect.

  ”Looks all right,” Juan told the landlord. “I’ll take it for six months.”

  “No, no. I can only rent for nine months. The dueno are in Europe until next March. Their hija lives in Paris and is having other baby. They gone over to help. They want siete mil pesos a month for nine months.”

  Damn. This was not in the cards.

  “I don’t need it that long. Look, we’re doing some—uh, climate research and being this close to the ocean here is ideal. How about thirty-five thousand up front for six months?”

  “No, mis instruciones son de tener en nueve meses.”

  “I’ll sign a lease for six months at six thousand pesos a month up front plus six thousand pesos for you. What you say?”

  The landlord made a quick calculation. He’d get to keep two thousand a month from the owner for looking after the property, plus the six thousand. Eighteen thousand pesos total, almost six months’ salary.

  “Estamos de acuerdo!”

  “Excelente. Now, I’ll have to ask you to leave us strictly alone once we move in. Our—our equipment is extremely sensitive and requires a high level of concentration to operate. We gotta have complete privacy. You understand.”

  “No hay problema. If I have come over, I phone night before.”

  “That sounds fine. We’ll move in within two weeks. There may be up to six technicians here at a time.”

  A handwritten lease was prepared and signed, and cash and keys were exchanged.

  Phillip had phoned the yacht broker, Jim Higgins, in Fort Lauderdale, who had faxed him all of the specs on the Real Ship. The boat looked ideal. Quite a bit bigger than what he was used to, but he was sure he could handle it. After an uneventful flight from Chicago, he was ready to take the boat out for sea trials.

  The guy looked a bit like a wild card, Jim thought, what with his baseball cap with a long ponytail hanging out the back and rumpled bermudas, no socks. But the laid-back harbor-rat look was just the impression Phillip wanted to create. Whatever happened, nobody would be out looking for a balding businessman.

  Phillip handled the boat with ease. She quickly got up to ten knots once they cleared the Intracoastal Waterway. At sea she did everything she was supposed to do, and in spades.

  Back at the dock they got down to the nitty gritty. Real Ship boats are pretty standard, all of them loaded with all the bells and whistles. Philip felt sure the Two Wise would be pretty much the same as this boat.

  The engine room, with standing headroom, housed two 510 hp Caterpillar diesel engines and two Westerbeke marine diesel generators, a 10kw and a 20kw. The master electrical control panel was in the engine room, too, as well as a store of batteries. Off to the side was a workshop that had spares for everything. It had a sizeable electronics package with everything they could possibly need, including radar, COMSAT telephone, chart plotter, weather fax—you name it, it was there.

  Phillip made a mental note of the locking system on the entry doors, the keyed ignition switch, and the keyed lock on the instrument-panel door. All would provide easy access with the right tools.

  Accommodations were adequate for six. The galley housed a large freezer and refrigerator, so food storage would be no problem. The cocaine could be stored on the covered aft deck. There was no question this boat could handle the trip they were planning.

  Jim, meanwhile, could almost taste his commission after spending four hours on the boat with Phillip, watching his painstaking appraisal of the mechanical and electrical systems, answering his detailed questions, and trying not to think about lunch while Phillip reviewed the comprehensive owner’s manual. Didn’t matter that the guy looked like a beach bum. He’d seen his kind before, coming in deliberately dressed down to hide his affluence, hoping to negotiate a better deal. This guy knew boats, that was for sure.

  Dropping Philip off
at the airport for his return flight, Jim handed him his card with his phone numbers—office, home, cell, and fax—on it, and told him not to hesitate to call any time if he had any more questions. What other questions the man could possibly come up with, though, was beyond him.

  Phillip promised to get back to him within the week, and, for a wonder, didn’t even quibble about the asking price of $1.2 million.

  Philip knew the boat was perfect, but of course he had no intention of buying.

  5

  Spring and summer passed in a flurry of preparations. By her mid-August departure, Melissa had packed and repacked half a dozen times, changing her mind again and again about what was truly essential and what was not. (Sunscreen and vitamin C were always essential.) She was allowed to take only one soft-sided Blue Water Academy bag plus two small carry-on bags because storage space on the ship was limited.

  In a way it was just as well that the academy rules prohibited any sort of portable CD players onboard ship, she thought, though how she was going to get along without hers she couldn’t imagine. She loved music and did her best studying to a rock beat. But headphones weren’t exactly conducive to the social bonding that was crucial to living in a small shipboard community. Besides, you had to keep one ear out at all times for emergency announcements.

  In any case, there was no room in her luggage for her beloved Discman. Her bag came in at just one pound below the seventypound limit. Her carry-on bags consisted of a bulging backpack and a video camera, a farewell gift from Uncle Jack.

  Customs, immigration, and security went without a problem; boarding and departure for San Diego were on time; and the Inspiration was the next stop. She was on her way!

  On the flight there were four other “Floaties,” as students on the ship liked to call themselves. They were easily recognizable by their red shirts, part of the BWA uniform. They were not seated anywhere near one another during the flight, however, so Melissa pretty much kept to herself, lost in her own thoughts. The flight was smooth, but her stomach was doing flip-flops as her emotions seesawed between elation and apprehension. No homesickness yet, at least. But then again, a few days after the orientation period her parents would be coming to San Diego to see her off, so it wasn’t really a fair test.

  The source of both her greatest excitement and her greatest anxiety was the prospect of all the new people she would be meeting and all the new friends she’d make. Might that even include a boyfriend?

  Anyone looking at Melissa would assume she had scads of boyfriends already. She seemed to have everything going for her: a tall, slim, well proportioned figure; lustrous hair in soft waves that reached halfway down her back; a silky cream-colored complexion; and eyes so deep brown they were almost black. She was, in fact, a knockout. And she attracted more than her share of attention from the opposite sex. Heads swiveled in her direction wherever she went.

  And yet she’d never had a boyfriend.

  Unfortunately, the average male is only five feet ten inches tall. At just shy of six feet, even when wearing flats, Melissa was taller than most. It wasn’t that she would reject a guy if he was shorter—she wouldn’t have turned away a midget if he’d been nice. But the fact was, most guys felt intimidated around her. And attending an all-girls school decreased her opportunities to dispel any boy’s awe of her. About the only boys she knew were Eric’s friends, who were much too young for her.

  But that was all going to change on the Inspiration. According to the list of names and addresses she’d been sent, there were twenty boys to twelve girls. Good odds, she thought. But the two male Floaties on the plane were disappointingly short. She wondered what the other eighteen would be like.

  The plane circled San Diego Bay as it approached the airport. Peering out the window, Melissa was able to see the Inspiration docked next to the Marine Museum, right behind the Star of India, an old tall ship that used to ply lumber between Alaska and San Francisco. With its vivid color and distinctive three-mast barquentine rig, the Inspiration was easy to recognize. That green dot in the water, she reflected, which looked so tiny from the air, was going to be her home for the next year.

  As Melissa heaved her bag off the revolving carousel, she was startled to hear a voice with a pronounced Québécois accent just behind her.

  “Please, allow me to help you with that.”

  Turning, she found herself looking up into the face of an extraordinarily good-looking young man—an extraordinarily good-looking young man some four inches above her in height! His red shirt identified him instantly as a fellow Floatie.

  “I am Pierre,” he said, smiling at her.

  “Melissa,” she had the presence of mind to reply, while thinking, “Oh my God, the plane must have crashed. I must have died and gone straight to heaven.”

  Who knows how long they might have stood there in the baggage-claim area just gazing at each other had not a second tall and good-looking fellow come bounding in. This one was a bit older—about thirty, Melissa guessed. His blue shirt marked him as a Blue Water Academy teacher.

  “Dave Cameron,” the man said, trying to catch his breath. “I had to leave the van in a no-parking spot about a mile away. All the luggage accounted for, Pierre?”

  Pierre Rouleau realized he had not made the first move to help the other students with their bags, or even to welcome them to San Diego. No matter, they had retrieved them on their own and everyone was soon bundled into the van and heading toward the harbor. Pierre was glad a seat was open beside Melissa.

  He had arrived the day before, he told Melissa as they bounced along. His eagerness to tell her everything about himself helped him overcome his self-consciousness in speaking English.

  He was eighteen, he said, and lived with his mother and younger sister in Québec City. His older brother was away at McGill University. His parents, both chartered accountants, had divorced five years before, and his father had moved to the Montréal office of their accounting firm after the split.

  Applying to the Blue Water Academy program was his mother’s idea, he said. He hadn’t been enthusiastic about the prospect at the time. But he was a pretty sure why his mother had enrolled him.

  Hélène Rouleau had not been happy about the direction her middle child’s life was taking. At thirteen Pierre had begun hanging out with a group of kids whose idea of ultimate cool was to wear their hair long and their pants baggy, with big gangster-style metal chains attached to their wallets. All of which Hélène could have put up with as an adolescent fashion statement—after all, hadn’t she looked pretty silly herself as a teenager? Hadn’t most people? The swearing and smoking that were part of the group’s image, however, were another matter.

  And although the kids spent their days skateboarding—or snowboarding in the winter—Pierre’s mom was afraid their activities might not be so innocuous when they got just a bit older. There had been a lot of talk among the parents about an underground culture that was springing up among skateboarders, a culture that involved not just the performance of risky feats of daring on their boards but drugs as well.

  That’s why she packed Pierre off to the Caneff School for Boys in northern Ontario. Caneff had a reputation for working with wayward kids, keeping them in line through exhausting physical activity and rigorous discipline. Pierre had to be in top shape every morning, prepared for whatever was going to be thrown at him during the day—and that could be almost anything. The boys were united in their hatred of the place. However, they knew voicing even just one complaint wasn’t worth the consequences.

  When Hélène saw how miserable Pierre was at Caneff, she began to think it was too high a price for a child who had never been in any serious trouble. Besides, some of the Caneff boys were far rougher than his friends in Québec, so perhaps it was not the best environment if she hoped to protect Pierre from unsavory influences. She hated having him so far away yet was reluctant to bring him home. One of his skateboarding friends—a cherub of a boy struggling desperately, at age thirteen, t
o look like a tough guy, cigarette dangling from his lips—had recently spent twenty-four hours in jail following a night of drunken brawls.

  Then she heard one of her office partners talking about her daughter’s experience with Blue Water Academy. That, Hélène thought, might be exactly what Pierre needed. It would be a year of hard work and rigorous study, and discipline, too, bien sûr, but in an atmosphere of adventure and camaraderie rather than punishment. She would have to scrimp to afford the tuition, but it would be well worth it if Pierre emerged from the program the mature, capable young man she knew he could be.

  “You will love it,” she had told him, nearly breathless with enthusiasm about the wonderful plan she had devised. She was disappointed when Pierre said he wanted no part of it.

  “I felt like she just wanted to get rid of me,” Pierre told Melissa. “I was so happy when she said I didn’t have to go back to Caneff, but then …”

  He was sick of authority figures telling him not to think for himself, to do whatever they said and do it quick, no questions asked, and was sure life on the Inspiration would be more of the same. And he was sure that the other kids on the ship would look down on him once they knew he had been to Caneff. It was practically a reform school, wasn’t it? Everyone would assume he was a juvenile delinquent. They would all be rich kids, anyway; the concept of hard work would be foreign to them. And why were they all paying good money for the privilege of working their tails off, anyway?

  Not that he was ever going to be accepted in the program.

  “The interview was awful,” he told Melissa. “They kept asking me questions about drugs, about drinking. And I told them what I thought—that onboard ship, no, drinking should not be allowed, that could be disastrous, but on land? I said I didn’t know what authority the program has over the local officials.