‘Get up!’ the woman said, kicking the metal frame of George’s bed.
Opening her eyes, George caught sight of her roommate. A dark-skinned woman who was perhaps in her mid-twenties. Her long black hair was tied back in a utilitarian ponytail. Like the others, she wore black combat trousers and a simple black vest.
‘Paola, isn’t it?’ she said in Spanish.
‘You want something to eat?’ Paola folded her arms, partially obscuring the delicate artistry of her tattoos that scrolled from her wrists to her shoulders, disappearing beneath the sleeves of her vest where the ink reappeared on her neck, winding up onto her cheeks. The girl threw a bottle of water to George.
Sitting up, George rubbed her face and unscrewed the lid of the bottle. Her stomach churned at the thought of drinking from a receptacle that somebody else had drunk from. She didn’t dare look down at the thin camp bed she had spent the night on. Memories of the cockroaches that had scattered in the dead of the night when Paola had switched the naked bulb on almost took George’s breath away. But she knew she had to keep cool.
‘Thanks. Yes. That would be great.’
Paola picked up a rucksack that hung from a hook above her own cot. Rummaged inside. Reached up to a shelf that contained a bible and two photos of an old woman cuddling a grinning toddler and grabbed a box. ‘Maritza will sort you out with some ammo and your own gun once you’ve eaten. Make it snappy though. We’ve got to be in the truck and ready to go in twenty minutes. Okay?’ She stuffed the box into her bag. George caught sight of it – rounds of bullets. Then the girl reached under her cot and retrieved what George guessed to be a semi-automatic rifle, the kind she had only ever seen in films before. ‘You know how to handle one of these?’ Paola asked?
‘Naturally,’ George lied, trying to look as hard and as knowledgeable as possible under the circumstances.
Once her roommate had left the shack, George bent double on her mattress, dry-heaving from the stink of refuse coming from outside. She batted fat black flies away that darted around her head, on the brink of tears. Suddenly, the dark days of her girlhood seemed like playtime compared to this hell on earth. And she knew it would get worse.
‘What have I done?’ she asked under her breath. ‘I must be fucking mental.’
What time was it? She peered through the open hole in the corrugated sheeting that served as a window. The sun was already up, but not high. Surreptitiously, she sneaked a peak at her Longines watch that Van den Bergen had bought her for her twenty-fifth birthday. Only 6 a.m. and the sweat was already pouring down her back and trickling in rivulets from beneath her breasts.
‘Shit. The tats.’ Holding her breath, she slid her boots onto her bare feet and padded to the window, holding her left arm aloft to examine it in the daylight; peering down at her chest. Exhaled heavily when she saw that they had not smudged in the night. She padded back to her cot to check that they had not rubbed off onto the sheets either. No sign of the ink having transferred onto the greying bedlinen.
But the ink had dulled somewhat, having soaked into her skin. Taking the black permanent felt tip with a shaking hand and a thudding heart, she carefully started to retrace the pen over the intricate patterns of the giant, stick-on tattoos she had pre-ordered from the internet. They weren’t a million miles away from the ink sported by gang members of an El Salvadoran mara and the temporary tattoos had promised to be wash-proof for up to a fortnight.
‘Oh, shit, shit, shit!’ she said, trying and failing to be neat but swift. ‘Why the fuck didn’t I pay more attention in art? Come on, you bungling turd. Fuck it!’ She stopped. Inhaled deeply and spoke to the bare bulb that hung from a cable suspended on a hook in the shack’s ceiling. ‘I bet Van den Bergen would do a brilliant job of this.’
In the late afternoon of the previous day, in the relative safety and calm of the taxi driver’s modest three-roomed house in a poor suburb of Tegucigalpa in the hills, George had begun her transformation with the temporary tattoos, watched by the driver’s children. They had been fascinated by her, but his wife had expressed her misgivings with undisguised hostility.
‘If they discover she is a fraud,’ the wife had said, speaking through gritted teeth as she kneaded dough at the kitchen table, ‘and they trace it back to you, they’ll find you, you idiot! They’re going to come to our house and kill the lot of us. You, me, the kids. Finished. They’ll dump our bodies in the street to set an example.’
‘You’re overreacting,’ he had said. ‘She’s not going to lie … much, are you?’ He had turned to George and had nodded encouragingly at her.
George had paused in her tattooing exercise and had turned to the four small children who had been watching her so intently. The youngest – perhaps 3 years old – had been sucking her thumb, tugging at the hem of her food-stained dress. Big brown eyes watching George’s every move. The child had treated her to a coy smile when she had paused her careful application to survey her audience.
Swallowing hard, George had realised that a fistful of dollars wasn’t enough to compensate the taxi driver for the enormous risk he was taking on her behalf. ‘I’m very good at this,’ she had said, trying to calm the agitated wife. ‘I’ve done this before. I’ve been in a gang back home. I know how to make them think I’m one of them. Honestly, you’ve got to trust me. Your husband trusts me.’
‘It’s the only way she stands a chance of finding her father,’ the driver had said.
His wife had treated him to a sceptical glare, uttering something so quickly in some Tegucigalpan dialect that George failed to follow her retort. In response, he had waved the roll of money George had given him. ‘We can’t afford to turn this down, my love.’
Knowing that she wore an expensive Longines watch on her wrist that would probably keep this family fed for several months, George had almost been tempted to give that to them in addition to the dollars. But sentimentality had stayed her tongue. She had remembered Van den Bergen presenting her with the box on her birthday, fastening the leather strap around her wrist with gentle fingers. Giving away something with such sentimental value would hurt, she had known, and later in her quest, if she made it that far, she had reasoned that the Swiss watch might well serve as currency that might spare her life in a world where money spoke the loudest.
‘What in God’s name are you going to do with her?’ the wife had asked.
‘I need to get to the Chiapas,’ George had said, trying to engage with the woman who could end her Central American venture and her life simply by leaving her house and waiting for a member of one of the maras to walk by.
‘Guatemala?’ the woman had asked. ‘I thought you said he was taken by a local gang.’
George had nodded. ‘Yes. But my father’s last boss introduced me to one of the other employees who had been on the work’s shuttle bus the day it got held up. He had a theory …’
Her memory of visiting the corporate HQ of Earhart Barton had still been fresh enough for George to recollect the pitch of the man’s voice and the bone structure of his face that marked him out as having a mix of both Spanish and native Honduran ancestry. Her father’s colleague, Diego, had been dressed in smart trousers and a crisp shirt. He had had a gentle voice that she had strained to hear above the whir of the air conditioning.
‘Kidnappings happen all the time in Tegus,’ he had said. ‘The gangs make sizeable amounts of money from them. I have a guard outside my house. The firm had provided Michael with one too, I believe. He got perks as an overseas worker. They must have been paying him damned well to lure him over here.’ He had examined his almost delicate draughtsman’s hands and sighed. ‘When my contract ends in two months, I’m going to the United States. I’ve been offered a job – it’s the opportunity I’ve been praying for for years. I can’t wait to get me and my family out of this hellhole.’ George had been able to see desperation and guilt in his eyes in equal measure.
‘So what do you think happened to my father?’ she had asked. ‘Your boss told me the police had investigated it for two days and then dropped it, saying the trail went cold.’
Diego had folded his arms. Adjusted his glasses. Sighed contemplatively. ‘Michael was my friend. I still miss him. He was a good guy. When he was taken, I read the newspapers avidly for weeks to see if any other professionals had been kidnapped. I watched news and those shitty reality TV shows that cover the “murders as they happen”. You seen them?’
George had nodded. ‘I’ve seen clips on YouTube.’
‘Well, I pieced the information together and from what I could gather, the maras snatch targeted individuals to order.’
‘What do you mean? Who orders it?’
‘The Mexican cartels, usually. There have been quite a few skilled engineers and scientists taken over the last few years. Just disappeared.’ He had mimed a puff of smoke erupting with those delicate fingers. ‘If you look at old news reports online, you can see some have been found dead as far north as Tijuana.’
‘Did they find any alive?’ George had asked, inadvertently placing a hand over her heart and recalling the sight of her father’s black hair and hairy forearms as she had sat on his shoulders.
Shaking his head, Diego had glanced furtively towards the window. ‘I don’t know. But basically, the dead guys were engineers, architects, scientists … skilled men and women. They had been trafficked north from other Central American countries by the cartels to design and supervise the build of more sophisticated tunnels through to San Diego or better meth labs in the jungle or …’ He had leaned forwards, staring at George’s chin with something bordering on enthusiasm. ‘I even heard of them being forced to design semi-submersibles for smuggling drugs along the coast.’
‘So your theory is that the maras stole my father to sell to a Mexican cartel.’
Diego had nodded energetically. ‘Definitely. If they had only wanted ransom, they would have come to our boss with their guns held high and their hands out. Your dad was testing a prototype for a new airline jet engine at our facility in the mountains. Anybody with a laptop could find out he had experience in working on aeronautical projects and that he had worked for the Armada Española too – the Spanish navy.’
George acknowledged the pain of a fleeting pang of guilt that she had never once tried to Google her father, despite her fond memories of her infancy. Too busy wallowing in her own melodrama and emotionally stunted by some perverse loyalty to Letitia.
‘If I was a cartel boss and I wanted to build, say, one of these semi-submersibles or some kind of transportation for my drugs and trafficked people,’ Diego continued, ‘I’d want to recruit a man like Michael. Or me! Or any of the other hundred-plus engineers who work here.’
‘But they picked on my father, didn’t they?’ George had raised an eyebrow. A nasty, sneaking suspicion crawling along her every synapse that the phenomena of disappearing Daddy Dearest, absconded Letitia the Dragon and the bogus emails, sent to her from some server in the Americas, were almost certainly linked. ‘If my dad had been trafficked north to the Mexican cartels, where would they do the handover, do you think?’ she had asked …
‘Chiapas?’ the taxi driver’s wife had said. ‘She wants to get to Chiapas? Why doesn’t she get a bus or the train north like a normal person? Why take her to meet them? Are you mad?’
‘It’s what she wants,’ the driver had said, shrugging. ‘And I know where they hang out.’
George had nodded eagerly, willing the woman to collude. ‘It’s the only way,’ she had said. ‘If the cops want to brush my father’s disappearance under the carpet and if his ex-colleague was right about cartel involvement, I need to get on the inside.’ She had held her hands aloft in a gesture of surrender. ‘All I need is to hitch a ride to the right part of town and for your husband to point me in the direction of their safe house. I won’t mention your names. Nobody will ever know about your involvement, señora. I promise.’
The journey to the barrio had taken them further up into the mountains. At dusk, they had snaked through winding roads that had been little more than shack-lined dirt tracks. With the sun setting, enshrouding the city in an incredible orange-pink light, the distant views had been spectacular from the passenger seat of the white taxi on those stretches of road that took them over open ground, unobscured by dwellings. But close up, George had been appalled by landslides of trash that seemed to pour down the upper slopes in 200-metre tracts, as though a volcano had erupted over Tegucigalpa, spewing used water bottles and filthy nappies instead of molten lava on the hillside occupants. The smell of putrefying effluent and food waste had started to come through the air-conditioning, filling the taxi with a choking stink.
‘Jesus,’ she had said to the driver. ‘Doesn’t the city council collect the rubbish? This is appalling.’
He had merely laughed in response.
As they had travelled deeper into the sprawling, ramshackle barrios, George had started to question to wisdom of her chosen route to Guatemala. But it had been too late.
‘We are deep in gang territory now,’ her companion had said. ‘Look!’
He had gesticulated with his chin towards a makeshift bar, which had been little more than a shack, containing a fat woman who had been sitting beside a plastic table, selling bottles of beer from a barrel full of ice. Outside, a group of about ten young men had gathered in the satanic-looking red light of the sunset. They had been drinking beer and laughing at each other’s jokes. Nothing unusual there, in a warm place where beer was in ready supply at sundown. But George had toyed nervously with the strap of her rucksack and had removed her watch when she had caught sight of the bodies of these men.
They had all worn the same kind of baggy jeans, low-slung at the waist, showing the tops of their pants above the waistline – the same style that George had seen every day of the week gracing the bottom half of wide boys on the streets of London. But on their naked top halves, they had all been covered in the same kind of tribal tattoos that she had seen sported by the guys on the mopeds, hours earlier on her journey from the airport to her father’s place of employment. Blue-black or black ink covering every inch of their skin, from their waistlines upwards. All had either shaved heads or close crops. In many of the men, the tattoos had ended at the neckline and their heads were clear of markings, but there had been a frightening few who had been inked all over with carefully crafted skulls, numbers, words, flowers and the faces, presumably, of loved ones or the fallen. George had found them, in equal parts, mesmerising and terrifying.
‘You’re in the lion’s den, now,’ her driver had said. ‘Are you armed?’
‘No,’ George had said, gulping and wondering if Van den Bergen would ever forgive her for being so utterly stupid. Would he refuse to mourn her on principle for leaving him alone? Pull yourself together, you weak-as-piss, wimpy cow, she had chided herself silently. You made a decision to leave the safety of Cancun for a damned good reason. See this through. You’d regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t. ‘I’ll be fine. I’m pretty handy with a rucksack and my fists.’ She had glanced over at him, giving a weak and unconvincing smile.
The driver had tutted and slowed. Reached over to open his glove compartment and had pulled out a large hunting knife in a sheath. ‘Here,’ he had said. ‘Take this. A good-looking young girl like you will attract the wrong attention out here.’
‘But where you’re taking me, I’ll be safe from those guys, won’t I?’ she had asked, taking a lingering look at the gang members as the taxi sped off up the dirt track.
‘Once you’re out of my car, you’re on your own,’ he had said. ‘They might reject you. If that happens …’ He had drawn a line across his neck with his index finger.
‘We’ll see,’ George had said, the sensible academic in her still wondering if she could ask the driver simply to take her back to the airport, saying it had all been a terrible mistake.
‘Here we are,’ he had said.
Darkness had fallen in earnest. They had pulled up outside a shack that was lit by bare bulbs strung from the ceiling; moths fluttering to and fro past the yellow light, battering themselves against the bulb’s glass. Inside, she had glimpsed three women, sitting on a dilapidated sofa, cleaning rifle parts as they had watched some glitzy show on a small TV set.
‘I wish you the best of luck,’ the driver had said, clasping her hands inside his. ‘May God watch over you.’ He had crossed himself and patted her on her cheek. ‘Go! Find your father.’
As the taxi had turned back towards the safer suburbs, its red tail-lights glowing in the distance and becoming ever smaller, George had taken a deep breath.
‘Come on, Dr McKenzie. It’s showtime.’
Rifles had clicked into action the moment she had set foot inside that sweaty shack. George had been faced with the women she had seen through the window on approach, plus about eight more who had appeared from another room at the back of the shack.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ a middle-aged woman had asked, stalking towards George and poking the butt of her rifle into George’s newly inked shoulder. She had had the same Salvadoran accent that George had tried to perfect; covered in similar tattoos to the ones George had seen on male gang members, winding their way out from the collar and sleeves of a black T-shirt that sported a faded print of the skeletal yet beautiful figure of Santa Muerte. A deep scar that bubbled up along the woman’s left cheekbone had left George in no doubt that this was not someone to trifle with. She had appraised George with all the analytic skill of a scanner. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Who the fuck are you?’ George had asked, hoisting her bag high on her shoulder so that her convincing temporary tattoos had been clearly on show. ‘I was told by Nikolay that I’d find you here.’
All eyes had been trained on her. All rifles had been pointed at her head, poised to end her relatively short life in as long as it took to pull a trigger.
‘Nikolay?’ the woman had asked, her thick black eyebrows drawing together to make her one of the hardest-looking individuals George had ever met.
Her heart had beat so fast and so loudly, George had been certain the woman would be able to hear it or, at least, sense her mortal fear. ‘Nikolay Bebchuck. I got into trouble back home with the police, so I went over to work in Europe,’ she had said. ‘First for The Duke in London, doing a bit of dealing and minding his girls who work in his clubs, until he got sent down. Then, for Nikolay in Amsterdam. He said you’d be able to fix me up with work.’
‘Where are you from? You’re not one of us but you look like one of us and sound familiar but not quite right. Are you a cop?’ There had been fury in the woman’s eyes at the mere possibility. She had widened her aggressor’s stance and had moved the barrel of the rifle up to George’s throat.
Unrest had erupted suddenly in that foetid-smelling claustrophobic metal box, with the younger women registering their mistrust of George at the tops of their voices. What had followed had been a fast and brutal-sounding exchange of words between the women. Then, silence as the rest of the group had clearly deferred to the frightening woman in the Santa Muerte T-shirt.
At that moment, George had been sure that she was about to be killed. There had not even been space in her head for thoughts of Van den Bergen. Only the basic survival instinct that she should keep her breathing even and maintain eye contact with her inquisitor at all costs.
‘You’re a cop,’ the woman had repeated.
‘I’m not a cop. Do I look like a fucking cop?’ George had laughed, whilst rifling through her mental files of all the things she had researched before embarking on this trip that, at that moment, felt tantamount to a suicide mission. Finally, a useful detail had presented itself and she had made a hand sign of a Salvadoran mara. Another long shot. But the body language of the women in the room had seemed to soften slightly and George had noticed the odd nod and wry smile. ‘I’m originally from San Salvador,’ she had said, manufacturing an air of confidence by carefully controlling her breathing and projecting her speech. ‘Salvadoran father and a black British mother. That’s why I sound a bit different. That’s how I came to spend time in Europe for a few years. But now I’m back and I’m here, hoping you can use my experience and another pair of big cojones – the kind only a woman has!’
The rifle’s position had not moved. The other women had clearly been put at their ease by the gang hand sign but their leader had been no such pushover.
‘How come you’re in Honduras, looking for work with the transportistas?’ she had asked. ‘We’ve got all the girls we need. And we don’t need drug dealers. We’re gun smugglers and hired muscle.’
‘I’m on the trail of someone who owes me money,’ she had said. ‘A Spaniard named Michael Carlos Izquierdo Moreno. You heard of him?’
‘No.’
‘Someone told me he was taken off a bus in Tegus a while ago and shipped north by the maras to work for a Mexican cartel. An engineer. But this bastard owes me three thousand dollars and when I find him …’ In a move that had been so deft that the other women in the room had gasped audibly, George had reached into the waistband at the back of her jeans and whipped out the hunting knife that the taxi driver had given her. She had brandished it beneath the lightbulb so that it glinted menacingly; pointing it towards her opponent as though she feared nothing and was as loco in the coco as her alleged gang member status had suggested. ‘If he’s not got my money, I’m going to cut him from here …’ She had almost touched the carotid artery of the transportista with the tip of the blade. ‘To here.’ Moving the blade down towards the woman’s groin. ‘But Nikolay sent me to Tegus with a message for one of his business associates. He said, once I’d delivered it, if I wanted to earn some money and to track down this Moreno son of a bitch, you would be the women to go to. You could help me get to Chiapas.’
Engaged in a stand-off of sorts, the woman had held George’s gaze for at least a full minute without speaking, as though she had been calculating whether this interloper constituted a risk worth taking.
Had they even heard of the mysterious Nikolay, the Eastern European drugs baron? It had been a long shot that his name might have travelled across the Atlantic, despite it being ubiquitous in Europe and there being a clear link through the drugs to Mexico.
‘You’ll sleep with Paola,’ the woman had said, finally, lowering her rifle.
George had nodded solemnly, sliding her hunting knife back into its sheath. Inside she had been grinning like a demented hyena and mentally twerking her way around the shack but she had resolved it would be deadly to let her hard-woman mask slip for even a second. She had remembered how the toughest women had behaved and held themselves in prison. They had never revealed the slightest weakness and neither would she.
‘My name’s Maritza,’ the woman had said.
‘My name’s Jacinta.’ George had held out her hand, and Maritza had pre-empted her handshake with the gang sign.
‘You answer to me,’ she had said. ‘Tomorrow, we set off for Nikolay’s brothel in Palenque. I’ve got a truck full of AKs that I need to get to the boys up there. Maybe you’ll get to see Nikolay himself. You can ask him about your guy, Izquierdo Moreno.’ Maritza had pulled out a cigarette and lit it, blowing smoke into George’s face. She had held out the packet as some gesture of solidarity, perhaps. ‘And by the way …’ She had curled her lip, making her scar deepen. ‘Did you get your tattoos done by a blind man? They’re terrible!’
Amid gales of laughter, George hadn’t been able to move her hands momentarily. She had felt the blood freezing into ice crystals inside her veins. ‘Hang on. Are you saying Nikolay’s here? In Central America?’
‘Oh yes,’ Maritza had said, foisting the cigarette on her. ‘He has several names. Over here, we call him el cocodrilo.’
And so it was, the following morning, George put the freshening touches to her tattoos under the light of the bare bulb, knowing that by sundown, she might meet Nikolay Bebchuck face to face: the man whom she was supposed to work for and be on good terms with.
‘Come on, Jacinta,’ Paola said, standing at the doorway as George slid her felt-tip pen into her bag.
‘How long have you been there?’ George asked. Had she witnessed George drawing on her arm and chest?
But Paola didn’t answer. ‘The truck’s ready,’ she said, staring at the ink on George’s collarbone. ‘Get your things. We’re leaving.’