Nunez nodded. He flicked a glance over at the driver. Charles looked at the rearview mirror and met my gaze staring back at him.

“He is obviously working for one of the death squads who blight this country,” Charles stated. “The same people who are trying to kill you, Hunter, and the people already responsible for murdering the members of your team. What do you believe that makes him?”

Sitting back in my seat, I grunted in assent. But I wasn’t happy. Not for the first time, I had the feeling that those who were supposed to be my allies were using me to meet their own ends. From the stillness of my two friends they were thinking the same thoughts.

“Any sign of Luke Rickard yet?” When all was said and done, that was why I was there, and for whatever reason this situation had come about it really made no difference. Forget the politics: Rickard was my enemy, whoever had engaged him to murder my team.

Both Nunez and Charles shook their heads. But then Nunez said, “He’s probably going to the same place as we are.”

And that was good enough for me.

Chapter 31

31

Rickard didn’t have the resources of his Colombian employer to fall back on now but it mattered not. He’d been in the business of killing men for long enough that he’d set up his own network of contacts and had various drops where he stored sufficient weapons, cash and documentation to get a job done. Plus there was his man in Miami, who he could still rely on to arrange the things he couldn’t.

Flying direct to Colombia was a no-no, as the likelihood that he’d be spotted was too great a possibility. Instead he arrived in neighboring Ecuador, having transferred commercial airlines three times. Then he had organized a flight across the border and up toward the district of Tolima, paying hard cash to a one-eyed pilot. Rickard wasn’t choosy about the man’s lack of vision: he bragged about having been half-blinded by shrapnel when his plane was forced down by DEA agents while doing a narcotics delivery to the U.S. mainland. The pilot had evaded capture, had his wounds tended, then had got right back in the saddle. Rickard admired his tenacity, but not the stench of body odor wafting from him. The man didn’t offer a name beyond Romeo, and Rickard didn’t ask.

The plane put down in a field cleared by local farmers, ready for sowing the next crop of Erythroxylaceae, a plant with great significance to the Andean culture and also the basis of the drug cocaine. From there he hitched a ride on the back of a pickup truck to a small village that had an unusual profusion of shacks covered in black plastic sheeting.