The Argentine Triangle: A Craig Page Thriller Page 19

  Nicole was facing the road. The sudden movement from behind startled her. She reached into her purse, grabbed a .22 caliber pistol, and pivoted in his direction.

  Once she recognized him, she put the gun away. “I wasn’t expecting you to come from that direction.”

  A chilly wind blew through the hills. She shivered and said, “Can we go in my car and talk.”

  Craig shook his head. “We’re too exposed that way. I pissed off some important people on the way here. Let’s climb over the wall. We can sit behind it and talk. Assuming you can sit in those pants.”

  “Are you coming on to me?” she said, laughing to ease the tension.

  “Right now the only thing on my mind is staying alive.”

  Craig positioned them so they were squatting on the ground, behind the wall, facing each other, while they still had a view of the overlook. The duffel with his guns was beside him.

  “What information do you have for me?” Craig asked.

  “Later in the day, after you left my shop, I went out of town. I …”

  Before she finished her sentence, Craig saw a midnight blue Ford race into the overlook parking area. The car slammed to a halt. A side window in the back was rolled down and the barrel of an AK-47 shoved out. The man holding it raked the white car and the entire overlook area with automatic fire.

  Craig pushed Nicole down flat on the ground and covered her body with his. He heard the sound of bullets ricocheting off the sides of stones, not far from his head.

  The automatic fire stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Through a crack in the stones, Craig watched the gunman yank the pin out of a grenade and roll it under the BMW. As he did, the blue Ford roared away.

  Craig sprang to his feet and pulled Nicole by the arm down the hill, wanting to get as far away as he could before the explosion. They stumbled in the dirt until he spotted a large tree with a thick trunk. He pulled them both behind it.

  “Close your eyes and hold your ears,” he shouted.

  The explosion was deafening. Fire and shards of metal shot into the air. That bastard Peppone must have double-crossed me, Craig decided. He must have used his cell phone to tell the people in the Ford their location.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  With Craig in the lead and Nicole following, they ran through the dirt parallel to the road toward the restaurant and the gas station. Hiding in a row of trees, he saw Peppone’s Mercedes parked ten yards away. Strange that the driver had remained there after the double-cross, Craig thought. He had to settle the score with Peppone and, more important, commandeer the Mercedes to get out of the area.

  “Wait here until I call you,” he told Nicole. He grabbed the Beretta and dropped the duffel at her feet.

  On tiptoe, he approached the front of the Mercedes from the passenger side. In the dim light coming from the restaurant, he looked through the front side window of the car and saw Peppone sitting up behind the steering wheel.

  Craig opened the passenger side door and cried out, “You bastard!”

  When Peppone didn’t respond, Craig got into the car and pulled him by the arm. Peppone fell toward him. Craig tossed his gun on the floor of the car and felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one. In the interior light of the car, he saw that the driver’s neck was heavily bruised. Someone had strangled him.

  He sat up and looked at the dash. The keys were still in the ignition. He began pulling Peppone’s body out of the car when a man suddenly jumped up from the floor of the back seat. Before Craig had a chance to react, the man grabbed his neck with powerful hands in a vise-like grip. Craig lunged for his Beretta, but it was too far away.

  He tried punching the man, but all of the strength was quickly ebbing from his body. His blows were nothing more than harmless taps. “Ah …” he cried gasping for breath. He barely had any air left in his lungs. He felt tightening in his chest. I’m done, he thought. A dead man.

  Then he heard it: the most wonderful sound he could ever have imagined. The firing of a gun.

  The vise opened. Craig was gulping in air.

  “Are you okay?” Nicole called, the hot .22 in her hand. “Are you okay?”

  “God, I’m glad you had the gun. Another couple of seconds and I was finished.”

  The assailant was prone on the back seat, bleeding from the head. He wasn’t moving.

  Craig felt his body returning to normal. “You scored a direct hit,” he said. “Help me dump these two bodies in the trees. Then let’s hit the road. The police will be here soon because of the explosion.”

  As they moved the bodies, he thought of Elizabeth. Fearless and gutsy like Nicole, Elizabeth had saved his life in Aspen.

  Minutes later, they were in the Mercedes, with Craig driving, heading down the hill back toward the city. “Thank God that’s over,” Nicole blurted out.

  Craig looked in the rearview mirror. A car was barreling down the hill too fast and too close. He pressed hard on the accelerator. “It’s not over yet. Bastards must have had a homing device attached to the Mercedes. You navigate. Tell me where to turn. Get me out of town on steep hilly roads. I’ll take it from here.”

  Nicole didn’t miss a beat. “Turn right at the next intersection. I’ll tell you what to do after that.”

  Fortunately, traffic was light in this remote area. Craig ignored the red light at an intersection and sped around the corner. The car squealed as he floored it.

  Despite the cold in the hills, Craig’s forehead was dotted with perspiration. He was gripping the steering wheel hard, tapping his left foot on the floor of the car trying to burn up nervous energy. “What color’s the car following us?” he asked.

  “Dark. Maybe blue.”

  “Probably the thugs who destroyed your BMW.”

  The road wound higher and higher into the hills with one hairpin turn after another. Craig heard gunfire from behind, but his assailants were too far away to get a good shot. The Ford was no match for Peppone’s Mercedes, particularly with Craig, a trained rally racer, behind the wheel. The gap between the two cars was widening. A light rain began to fall. Shit. That’s what I don’t need right now. A slick pavement. It was if he were back in Sardinia in the rally race. Except I’m not going to fuck up this time.

  “Grab my Beretta from the floor,” Craig called to Nicole, “and hold on to it. Then tighten your seatbelt.”

  His eyes were riveted on the road. He was looking for a turn off, some private road, the entrance to a property. Up ahead on the left, he saw a dirt road. Just what he wanted. They were far enough in front of the Ford that with the bends in the road, their pursuers would never see where the Mercedes turned off.

  “Hold on tight,” he said.

  He cut sharply to the left and onto the dirt road. Then he spun the car again hard left into a muddy area with a scattering of pine trees he narrowly avoided. He jammed on the brakes and cringed when he heard a loud squeal. But the car stopped dead parallel to the road.

  “Give me the Beretta.”

  Once he had it in his hand, he jumped out of the car and hid behind the Mercedes on the passenger side. Nicole was next to him.

  He heard the Ford coming up the highway before he saw it. They had no idea he had turned off. The perfect ambush.

  As the Ford passed by, through the open car window, Craig saw the look of recognition on the driver’s face. By then it was too late. Craig aimed and fired three shots at the driver. He only needed the first one. The bullet slammed into the side of the head of the driver, who lost control of the car. It spun off the road, flying down a steep embankment where it rolled over and over until it struck a rock, exploded, and burst into flames.

  Craig doubted that anyone survived, but he had no intention of checking to find out. Examining the rear bumper of the Mercedes, he found a small, round metallic object affixed to the bottom. That had to be the transmitter of the homing device. He crushed it under the heel of his shoe. “Now let’s get the hell out of here,” he told her.

&nbs
p; They climbed back into the Mercedes. At a speed of a hundred and twenty miles an hour, they raced down the hill with Nicole holding on to the front dash and gasping for breath.

  Ten minutes later, Craig told her, “Nobody’s following us. Take us back to the city, and find a quiet out of the way place where we can talk. We were rudely interrupted in the middle of a discussion. I want to finish it.”

  “We’ll go to my house,” she said without hesitation.

  “I don’t want to put you in danger.”

  She burst out laughing. “You’re a little late for those sentiments. I’ve been shot at. My car blown up. I’ve been riding with a maniac behind the wheel. And you don’t want to put me in danger.”

  “I meant any more danger.”

  “A few days ago you weren’t sure you could trust me. Now suddenly you want to be my great male protector. I’ve had enough macho crap from the men in this country to last a life time. I don’t have to take it from an American. And by the way, remember I saved your life.”

  She paused for an instant, then continued, “I doubt if anybody who works for Schiller and is still alive saw us together. I’ll show you where you can ditch the Mercedes in the woods. Then we’ll call somebody who works for me to pick us up.”

  Nicole lived in a large stone two-story house surrounded by a twelve-foot red brick wall. An armed guard was stationed in front of the metal gate and another on the other side. Two sleek black Dobermans snarled and sniffed Craig as he walked alongside Nicole on the path cutting through a perfectly manicured lawn into the house. “It’s okay,” she called to the dogs. “He’s my friend.” They backed away.

  “Pretty impressive security,” Craig said.

  “A girl can’t be too careful these days when she lives alone. Especially when she’s made some powerful enemies like your friend Colonel Schiller.”

  “Aren’t you worried he’ll arrest you?”

  “For now, they have to tolerate me. My father not only has a lot of money, but powerful friends in the business establishment. If they harm me, Estrada will lose the support of his friends. The general’s not willing to do that—at least not at this point.”

  “You lived here long?”

  “I grew up in this house. When my mother died three years ago, Papa turned it over to me and took an apartment in the city not far from the Alvear. I’m an only child, so he hoped I’d move in and fill up the house with little bambinos, the grandchildren he never had. Not much chance of that. I tried marriage once to somebody who I thought was a nice man. A university professor who taught the Greek classics. A year into the marriage, I showed up at his office as a surprise to take him out for his birthday. Timing is everything in life.” Her tone was bitter.

  “He had a female student on her back on his desk. Her skirt was up around her waist, her panties off, legs spread and high in the air. His own pants were down around his ankles. He was getting ready to plunge right in. Quite a graphic scene. The men in this country think it’s their God-given right to fuck anything that moves. But not if they’re married to me. So it was the end of the marriage. I won’t accept screwing around with somebody else. Fortunately, we didn’t have children.”

  She led the way through a formal living room with a baby grand piano into a book-lined den paneled in rich cherry wood.

  “Grappa?” she asked.

  “Precisely what I need.”

  “Me too.”

  After she poured two glasses, he raised his and said, “I didn’t mean to sound macho. I know that if it weren’t for you, I’d be a dead man.” His neck was still sore from the thug’s grip.

  “Isn’t there a Chinese proverb about that? I’m responsible for you from now on.”

  “Something like that. How’d you learn to shoot?”

  “One night during the Dirty War a couple of soldiers stopped my car for supposedly a routine identity check. When they told me to get out of the car and one of them began running his hands over me, doing a body check, he said, I understood where this was going. I’d join the ranks of los desaparecidos. They’d put me into a jail cell and take turns raping me. When they’d had all the fun they could, they’d kill me and dump me into one of those mass graves. Fortunately for me, they got a call on their radio ordering them to go somewhere else. I vowed I would never again be defenseless so I bought a gun and took lessons. If I was going down, I’d take a couple of those thugs with me.” She paused and gulped some of the potent liquid. “I have to admit, though, I never fired it for real before tonight.”

  For Craig, that made what Nicole had done ever more awesome.

  She took another sip. “I’m damn glad to be alive.”

  He raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

  “I should feel some remorse for the ones we killed, but the way those people act, they don’t deserve to live. All they do is cause innocent people to suffer.”

  Craig realized he had a valuable ally in Nicole. Together, they had to find out what Estrada was planning and stop him.

  She pointed to a plush brown leather sofa and they settled down at each end.

  “When we were so rudely interrupted, back at the overlook,” Craig said, “you were explaining to me that you left your shop later in the day of my visit and went out of town.”

  She kicked off her shoes and paused to light a cigarette. He waited patiently for her to begin.

  “First, I called some people in the north. One of them told me that our troops were massing on the Brazilian border. So I flew up to see what was happening.”

  Craig was leaning forward, facing her. “Yeah.”

  “I couldn’t find out what they were up to. The area was sealed tight with security like you would not believe.”

  “Where’s the border area you’re talking about?”

  Nicole walked over to the desk, reached into a drawer, and pulled out a map. With Craig standing next to her, she pointed to the area in northeastern Argentina on the Brazilian border.

  “I learned something else you’d like to know,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “General Estrada is operating up there from an old castle near Iguazu. The building’s in an area that’s a virtual rain forest—lots of trees and thick vegetation. According to a sign on the entrance gate to the grounds, the building is identified “regional headquarters.” She pointed it out on the map. “I did all the surveillance I could from the road without drawing attention to myself from the armed guards in the gatehouse.”

  Craig was studying the map.

  “You ever been up to Iguazu and the Falls?” she asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “It’s one of the few places in the world where three countries have a common border. You can stand at the top of a high bluff above the river and look across into Brazil on the right and Paraguay on the left. The waters flow at a ferocious rate most of the year, particularly now in the spring.” He remembered Gina telling him about the Falls.

  “How do I get up there?” Craig asked.

  “There are direct flights from Buenos Aires to Iguazu. A fair number every day because it’s a big tourist destination.”

  Craig’s mind was churning. Everything Nicole had said was consistent with what Betty had told him about the troop movements. In the morning, he’d fly up to Iguazu and find out what was happening.

  “If I had my way,” Nicole added, “I’d put Estrada and Schiller in a boat without a paddle and send them over the Falls.”

  Craig laughed as he pictured it in his mind. “Let’s talk about Estrada,” he said. “When we were in your shop, you told me he had done something so bad twenty-five or so years ago that you didn’t even want to talk about it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tell me now.”

  She shook her head. “It’s part of our history, I don’t like to share with an outsider. An ugly event from the Dirty War. But after what you went through tonight, I figure that you’re one of us.” She hesitated. “Still, I w
on’t tell you unless you open up to me. Tell me who you really are.”

  When he didn’t respond, she said, “If you won’t level with me, I won’t tell you what I know about Estrada.” Her voice was firm.

  He looked insulted. “Even after what we went through tonight, you don’t trust me.”

  She was staring at him hard. “It’s not a question of trust. Either we’re in this together or we’re not.”

  He sighed deeply. He couldn’t argue with her. “You’re right. Barry Gorman is a cover. My name is Craig Page. I’ve spent my whole career either with the CIA, the EU Counter Terrorism Agency, or doing private security work in Europe.”

  “A year ago, you were CIA director for a short period.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Very short. How do you know that?”

  “You may be surprised to learn that we have the Internet even down here in Argentina, and I follow the news.”

  She sure had a sharp tongue. “I left the espionage game and was racing cars in Europe.”

  “Which explains your driving this evening.”

  “Well, anyhow, the director, Betty Richards, wanted me back for this project. Ted Dunn was my friend. That’s why I agreed.”

  She pulled back and stared at him. “You don’t look like the pictures of Craig Page I saw.”

  “I decided to have my face touched up a bit. I had made enemies with some nasty people. Now tell me what happened.”

  She lit another cigarette, then began in a soft, melancholy voice. “I was working in the office of my father’s shoe factory in those days. The last rule of the generals. It was June of 1979. I had just finished at the university. A young woman worked in the payroll department. Maria was her name. Sweet girl. Smart. Good worker. Her husband worked for us too. He was a leather cutter. He was also a leader in the labor union. Not a troublemaker, but vocal. My father didn’t mind him or the union, but it was a good way to make enemies.”

  “So what happened?”

  Nicole swallowed hard. “One day, Maria came to me and asked if she could talk to my father. She needed his help, she pleaded with me. The woman was in tears. Her eyes were bloodshot. I had never seen her like this. So I took her in to see my father. I stayed and listened.”