9

He was a young man, Annja’s age, maybe a bit younger. He looked as if he might be older. But that was because he was definitely the worse for wear. As was his dark suit and rumpled white shirt, whose collar lay open, like a slack noose. If he had worn a tie it had vanished, like the old-time pirates of the Spanish main. Except it wasn’t near as likely to turn up again, either as a signature Disney attraction or in speedboats.

“Damn you,” he moaned in Spanish at the devastatingly beautiful female newsreader in the red dress. “Tell the truth for once, can’t you?”

“Mind if I sit down?” Annja asked.

He blinked eyes like cocktail onions at her. He had olive skin, light for a local. She guessed he wore a hat and lots of sunscreen outside. He had longish dark hair, almost down to his collar, and a longish sort of face, with brown eyes and charcoal-smudge eyebrows.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions,” she said.

“Why not?” he said. “I may despair, but I am neither dead yet, nor blind.”

Switching to English, he said, “I am Guillermo Miller. I am a reporter. For a newspaper—a real reporter. I don’t just play one on TV.”

His smile was even briefer than the joke called for. His lips were loose and purple and moist. They suggested he’d been drinking many beers, as did the array of bottles on the bar before him. The eyes suggested he’d cried into them all.

Annja settled on a stool beside him. They had that end of the bar to themselves. The lounge wasn’t particularly crowded. And apparently the existing customers didn’t want to listen to his heartfelt moans and groans.

“Why do you bemoan your fate so?” she asked in Spanish.

But he wanted to speak English. He did so with complete fluency, albeit a distinct accent.

“I might, if I were a cautious man,” he said, speaking with the exaggerated precision of the well and truly drunk, “suspect you to be from the authorities, come to test my discretion. But I have no such fear. Do you know why?”

“Why?” Annja asked.

“Because I see you are clearly an American. Oh, not by the lightness of your skin—there are Latin women lighter even than you.” He turned back to curse the newscast.

Annja could see from watching him that the young Panamanian showed many clear symptoms of being someone who cared, way too deeply, and was wounded by the gashing realization that the world, by and large, didn’t.

“Well,” she said, a little shakily, “I’m a pretty skeptical person myself.”

“Ahhh,” he said, drawing it out. “That’s too bad.”

She felt cold, as if the air-conditioning had suddenly been cranked to rapid glaciation. She was losing him suddenly. What did I say? she wondered.

“It is too bad,” Guillermo continued, taking his time until she had to step hard on the impulse to grab him by the throat and shake a few words out of him. “Because people like us, we skeptical rationalists, are prone to disbelieve in conspiracy theory.”

He raised a bottle of beer that he almost certainly thought of as half-empty, scrutinized it, then drained it. “Because if we actually look closely at the world, we see that conspiracies do not simply exist, they abound. They’re all around us.”

“You’re right,” Annja said, a little shortly.

He blinked at her like an owl at a hunter’s jacklight. “You agree?”

“Oh, yes.”

He nodded. He seemed pleased. His brief reserve had melted away into good-feeling and relief so overt and sloppy she was afraid he’d burst into tears.

“Well then. You might be surprised at what I will tell you, but you may not reject it out of hand, as I feared a skeptic would. As I would, before I became a reporter and began to see how the world really worked.”

“Don’t tell me anything that’s going to endanger you,” she said. It cost some effort to do so. But if I let my integrity slip I’m no better than those I fight against, she thought.

He shook his head. “It’s already beyond that, dear lady. Oh, if you went to the authorities, things would go hard with me. But the greatest risk is knowing what I know. What I dare not say. Because, you see, I have been warned.”

“Warned?”

He nodded his head emphatically. Then he stopped abruptly, as if afraid it might fall off. “Warned. Warned that if I tried to publish what I had learned, well—there’s always plenty of room in the broad Pacific Ocean for another body to float in.”

“Don’t keep a girl in suspense,” Annja said.

But he suddenly became coy. “But it is hard to talk when one’s throat is dry,” he said.

Part of her, a somewhat cynical side she suspected she should be ashamed of, actually exulted—a potential informant I don’t have to get drunk! That was always a pain and entailed certain risks. Although Annja usually found it much easier to get a guy drunk than a guy would getting her drunk. She despised the sensation of being out of her own control.

But Guillermo was beyond mere drunkenness to the point where Annja’s saying, “Here, will you finish my beer for me? I hate to see it go to waste,” was received, not with instant ice-bath-sobering suspicion, but with a sly sloppy joy, as if he’d somehow, without even trying, put something over on her.

He swigged at it happily and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Better. Much better. Now. I have excited your curiosity, no?”

“Why, yes. Don’t be a tease, Guillermo.” That was as far into flirtation as she intended to stray. She despised teases, and in general tried not to lie. That said, if lives lay at stake, she would do as she must.

“I know a man,” he said. “Not a good man. But one who has no reason to lie. Also he has given me information before which was good as gold.

“He saw what happened at that boathouse. He was watching from an abandoned shop nearby—what he was doing there he did not say, and I did not need to know. Nor do you. He saw only from the outside. But what he saw was armed men who approached the boathouse from cars they had parked some distance away. They suddenly burst inside, as if in response to some signal. And then he heard shouts, and screams, and a poh-poh-poh, as if someone was using an air wrench on an automotive tire.”

“Oh,” Annja said, rearing back. She saw no reason to pretend not to know what a suppressed firearm sounded like.

Guillermo nodded. “He was frightened, as anyone would be. But he is a curious man. I do not know if he is brave, so much—he has more curiosity than sense. Just like a monkey. And we’re really all just monkeys, we humans, are we not?”

“We’ll make an anthropologist of you yet,” she said, which seemed to please him. She prodded him gently back on track. “So what did he see?”

“He saw a large object. Much longer than it was wide or high. A box. Its shape was, shall we say, suggestive?” The way he said suggestive did not bring to mind lascivious eye-rolling and hands making violin shapes in the air, but something darker. “A plain pinewood box. It seemed very heavy. It was being carried by a front-end loader.”

“What happened to it?” Annja said.

“A panel truck backed up. The men shoved it inside with much grunting and cursing. That was how he knew how very heavy it must be. And the cursing was in English. NorthAmerican English, señorita. My acquaintance, let us say he has frequent contact with tourists. He can recognize English accents, as some North Americans can identify Spanish ones—as you yourself can, if I am not mistaken?”

She bit her lip. I can see why he makes a good reporter, she thought. Even with his brain sloshing, he’s pretty perceptive. She hoped he wouldn’t be too keen in scrutinizing her.

“I can,” she admitted. She knew if he caught her in a lie he’d glue his lips shut.

“And it was what he heard that was most intriguing indeed. What I very most wished to share with my editors. And which they told me, flat out, they did not wish to hear.”

“Which was?” If he hits me up for another beer now, I am totally going to smack him, she thought.

He smiled a wide, moist-lipped smile. “Why, the name of its destination. A freighter, he said.”

“What was it?”

He shook his head. “That he would not say. He wanted money. A substantial sum. More than I had on hand, shall we say?”

“So you did try to take the story to your editors?” Annja asked.

“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. I did try that.”

“What did they say?”

He shrugged. “They seemed very…what would you say? Reserved. Not excited, as they should be at such a scoop, no?” He picked up a fresh bottle and cradled it in both hands as if afraid cruel hands might try to pluck it away. “And then not long thereafter I received a visit from certain parties. Which I took, incidentally, to represent in its way the position my editors had taken on my story.”

“Police?” Annja wondered.

Again he shrugged. “Who can say? They made it clear their visit was official. But off the record—as they wished my story to remain.”

He set the bottle on the bar before him and regarded it sadly. “I am a young man,” he said. “I believed myself willing to put my life on the line for the truth.”

He looked at her, and something like defiance blazed in his bleary eyes. “And perhaps I am. But—” He shrugged and sighed. The fire went out. His shoulders slumped and the muscles of his face, briefly taut with passion, sagged. He seemed to age twenty years right before her eyes.

“It seems not so noble to die for a story that will most certainly be spiked.”

She put her hand on his. “This may be little consolation. But I tell you truly, Guillermo—you’re right. A brave man does not simply toss his life away. Any dog can die in a ditch.”

He gazed at her. “You are most wise, despite your lack of years.” He raised the bottle. “I salute you.”

She laughed. “Don’t be too impressed. It’s an old samurai proverb.”

“You’re a student of the martial arts?” he asked.

“Yes.” She saw no harm in imparting that truth.

“Good, good,” he said. “They may come in useful when you go to see my man. If of course, you choose to do so. He lives near the old docks, where the shootings took place. In a part of the CascoViejo that is not so quaint. Although it is picturesque in its own way.”

He gave her an address, and directions that were likely to be of more use. She memorized them easily.

“Thank you for trusting me,” she told him. “You took a great risk, I know. But I will try to justify it.”

“I do risk much,” he said. “And I hope you can make use of what I have told you.

“But then,” he said, and his manner suddenly seemed more sober, “I know the famous Annja Creed is not a spy for the Panamanian police. Whether she is a spy for her United States Central Intelligence Agency I am willing to risk. Because, I think, who better to make use of information I am denied the use of?”

He stood up. His legs were perfectly steady. So were his eyes as he smiled.

“Many thanks for the drinks,” he said and he walked out of the bar—not like a man intoxicated, but rather like one who had just relieved himself of a heavy burden.

Annja stared after him long after he’d vanished into the early subtropical night. Was he setting me up? she wondered. Somehow, she doubted it. His bitter chagrin, and his relief at finding someone who might actually make use of his information, had seemed genuine. Even if his level of inebriation wasn’t.

Whether it’s a trap or not, you’re going to walk into it with your eyes open and trust your reflexes. Because that’s what you do. She realized one of the bottles on the bar in front of the young reporter’s vacant stool was only half-empty. She realized most of what she had taken for thoroughly dead soldiers were.

She picked up one and drained it. After all that, she needed a drink.