Blake Mahoney and Nat Karpin were the only SFX team members flying in together. Natalie had called it drawing the short straw. Their cover cast them as a loving but unmarried couple on vacation, although why they would have chosen Medellín was anybody's guess. In flight they kept their voices down, the only way they could present a vestige of a romantic façade.
"I don't remember how long we've been dating," Blake remarked when they were on final approach.
"Which goes to prove we never were," Natalie said.
"Stuck up much?"
"Call it 'confident'," she answered back.
They'd toasted one another with champagne soon after takeoff, but Natalie had not asked for a refill when the flight attendant came around the second time. She didn't dislike Blake, per se—and had the highest of respect for his ability in action—but the lovey-dovey act rubbed hard against her grain, particularly when she never planned on seeing any of the airline's passengers again.
Still pushing it, Blake said, "I wonder if they'll put us in the honeymooner's suite?"
"Don't count of it," she said. "For one thing, we're not married. For another, someone might get you mixed up with Jackie Gleason, but they'll never think I look a bit like Audrey Meadows."
"Bam, pow, Alice! To the moon!"
"I'd like to see you try it."
"Well…"
"That's what I thought."
"How did your brother pick out our hotel?"
"Location, I suppose. Or maybe he just liked the name."
"Click Clack? What were they thinking? Why not Honk-Honk or Gesundheit?"
"You could always ask the manager."
"Not worth my time."
"Do you want to watch a movie then, and cuddle?"
"Do you want to make it off the plane without a stretcher."
"Ouch!" Blake made a face. "That hurts."
"Count on it. If you get carried away, you'll get carried away."
"I'd like to meet you in the cage sometime," he said, only half teasing her.
"I doubt that."
Finally, they touched down without incident on the airport's solitary asphalt runway, just a tad under twelve thousand feet in length. Jose Maria Airport didn't look like much compared to LAX or JFK, O'Hare or Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, either from the air or after they were on the ground. Nat had to take a moment and remind herself that it served sixteen international airlines plus three domestic and four more hauling cargo. Eight million passengers per year was roughly one-sixth of the country's total population, even more impressive when she factored in that many of those forty-eight-odd million natives spent their lives without a car, much less flying the friendly skies.
Deplaning, Blake and Natalie walked through a warm and misty rain to reach the terminal, still caught up in the "modernizing" process that would ultimately offer travelers flight information via digital displays, high-tech communication, passenger arrival lounges with shopping, plus health services and state-of-the-art security systems. Even so, it was a work in progress, tarps and noisy workmen scattered all around.
Their papers were in order, thanks to SFX retainers, but it hardly mattered. A bored-looking Passport Control officer barely glanced at their documents, stamped them as if in a daydream, and waved them on through. No one in Customs seemed to even think about examining their bags.
Colombia's main smuggling problem, after all, was drugs departing from the country for points north and east, not foreign travelers who might arrive with loads of cash or bearer bonds. As far as weapons went, there were enough in circulation to outfit a revolution or suppress one, law enforcement and the military not included.
They had a car reserved with Hertz and once again experienced no trouble beyond showing drivers' licenses, signing the rental contract and insurance forms that would relieve them of responsibility should something happen to their ride—a possibility they'd factored in as fifty-fifty with their present job in mind.
Some Medellinense call their hometown "City of Eternal Spring" or "City of the Flowers," and those nicknames seemed to fit as Blake and Nat followed a road map to their lodging in the suburb known as El Poblado, but this wasn't a first glimpse of Medellín for either of them. Both had seen the city's reeking slums up close and knew that life was cheap here, easily extinguished on a whim.
With any luck they'd live to make it home again.
If not, they didn't plan on checking out alone.
El Dorado International Airport, Bogotá
Avoiding any telltale patterns of behavior was essential for an undercover mission, the first thing any operative thought of on arrival at a destination where he or she stood a decent chance of being killed.
With that in mind, Reg Hardy had not flow directly into Medellín from San Diego International Airport, but rather stopped in Bogotá with a connecting with an Avianca flight between the nation's capital and Antioquia. He'd traveled light, one midsize carryon, trusting that any items he required upon arrival, to protect himself and do his job, would be supplied by SFX's network of accommodating contractors.
Of course, that didn't mean Hardy could trust the locals. Broken promises and back-stabbing graced back to Genesis, when Cain slew brother Abel out of peevish jealousy and got off easy with eviction from Eden. SFX should have an edge of sorts, working on contract for the DEA, but that agency traced its roots to Prohibition in the 1920s, when its agents earned such paltry salaries that very few of them turned out to be "untouchable" where payoffs were concerned.
Granted, the modern DEA was cleaner, overall, and well-funded by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of $3.1 billion yearly, but its problems still made headlines with fair regularity. Its "special" agents had an odd propensity for losing their sidearms in supermarkets, bars, on top of vehicles—and in a men's room at Denver International Airport after its owner had cleared check-in security. Even more embarrassing, a DEA man demonstrating "firearms safety" to grade-schoolers in Florida literally shot himself in the foot, then sued his employer (and lost) when a videotape of the incident leaked to network news outlets.
Beyond such casually clumsiness—and one ludicrous attempt to ban infant pacifiers as "drug paraphernalia"—the DEA had lost various damage suits in federal court, one filed by an innocent man it kept caged for five days without food or water; another by a woman whom a male agent impersonated on Facebook, cyber-stalking the victim and her children; yet another by the parents of a fourteen-year-old boy killed "by mistake." Beyond that, rampant corruption was predictably inevitable: $20 million confiscated dollars missing in one case alone, an agent jailed for pocketing $700,000 during a drug sting.
So, would Reg Hardy trust the government to see him in and out of Medellín alive?
Not even close.
His cover for the mission was that of a wildlife photographer, altered from make-believe big-game hunter on his visa since Colombian lawmakers had banned "sport" hunting in 2019. Today, the country boasted more biodiversity per square mile than any other nation on Earth and ranked as a top destination for eco-tourism. Ostensibly, Hardy hoped to photograph jaguars and jaguarundis, ocelots, pumas and spectacled bears, but in fact the only animals he planned on studying were lowlife narcotrafficantes.