The insistent knocking at the door of his hotel room jolted Van den Bergen awake.
‘Where am I?’ he said, wiping the string of drool from his jaw and staring at the ceiling fan that spun above him. Then he remembered. ‘Shit.’ Glanced at his alarm clock that said 11 p.m. Still jet-lagged and exhausted from being dragged to a bodega where his stomach acid had consumed nearly everything in the place, he had made his excuses and passed out on his bed by 9.30 p.m. So, who the hell was this?
He padded to the door, wearing only his pants. Wondered briefly if it was George. Peered through the spyhole. More knocking with some force behind it.
‘Gonzales?’
Opening the door, the Mexican detective pushed his way into his room. ‘Get dressed, Paul,’ he said, the excitable grin sliding from his face as he spotted Van den Bergen’s sternum-to-abdomen scarring. He turned away abruptly and began to study the plan of the hotel on the fire escape notice, pinned to the door.
‘Are you drunk?’ Van den Bergen peered down at the back of his head, trying to work out what the hell was going on.
‘No, my friend,’ Gonzales said, his attention still fixed on the door. ‘I’m sitting in the bar with Baldini and I get emailed anonymously with GPS co-ordinates for a location in the jungle. I figure, maybe it’s a hoax or maybe it’s real intel about cartel activity, right? It’s worth checking out. So, I send the highway patrol guys to take a look. And you’ll never guess what.’
‘No. I guess I never will.’
‘They spotted a huge meth lab and what looks like some accommodation in active use. They’re waiting on me and my guys for backup. I thought you’d want you to come with us. Baldini is waiting outside.’
Pulling a T-shirt over his upper body, Van den Bergen tugged a pair of jeans from his case and a clean pair of socks. ‘You can turn around now,’ he said. ‘I’m decent.’
‘Aren’t you hot in jeans, man?’ Gonzales asked, raising an eyebrow. ‘And socks?’
‘Malaria.’ Van den Bergen did not clarify further.
‘You won’t get malaria here!’
‘Are there mosquitoes?’
‘Naturally!’
‘Then I’m wearing jeans and socks.’ Hastily, he resprayed his arms with strong Deet. It wouldn’t do to get bitten. He had heard the test for malaria involved giving a blood sample every day for three days running. No bloody way.
As the police truck bounced along a rutted track that led deep into the nocturnal blackness of the Yucatan jungle, Van den Bergen was irritated to see that he couldn’t get a signal on his phone. What if George had been in touch? Marie had finally confessed that she had bought a ticket to Toncontín airport in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa on George’s behalf. But where was his contrary, absent lover now?
‘I can’t wait to see if this is the source of the bad meth,’ Baldini said, talking over the chatter of Gonzales and his uniformed driver at the front of the truck. ‘I sure as hell hope it is. I don’t wanna see no more dead kids on the back of it.’
Van den Bergen wrinkled his nose at the smell of beer on the American. He stared in silence into the dense tangle of trees and palms, feeling strongly that they were on a wild-goose chase on which George had persuaded Minks to waste thousands of the department’s euros. Even if the meth lab did turn out to be connected to his floaters, he had no jurisdiction over a Mexican cartel. Hell, even the Mexican authorities had little control over the cartel bosses. The problem was endemic throughout Central America. And he had bigger problems in the Rotterdam Silencer being back on the scene in Amsterdam. The very thought made the hole in his hip, left over a decade earlier by a bullet that had been shot from the gun of that drug-dealing morally bankrupt bastard, twitch painfully.
‘We’re here,’ Gonzales said, peering into the darkness through the windscreen. They had pulled up alongside another Policía truck. He tossed two bullet-proof vests into the back. ‘Put these on, guys, and stay behind my men.’
Suddenly, it occurred to Van den Bergen that he was placing himself in mortal danger on a continent and in a country that had nothing to do with him or the Dutch police. Hadn’t he sworn to his daughter, Tamara, that he would take more care of himself now that he had little Eva in his life? Fastening the clips of the vest, his hands started to shake. He clutched the Kevlar tightly, hoping that, in the poor light, Baldini wouldn’t have noticed his weakness.
Pull yourself together, you lanky streak of piss, he admonished himself. You’re more experienced than the lot of these swaggering tits. You have the battle scars to prove it. Now is not the time to lose your nerve.
Whispering instructions to his uniforms, Gonzales motioned that they should creep forwards alongside him towards the compound.
At first, Van den Bergen could see nothing apart from the strobing light of the torches, held by the uniforms who led the way. Dry stalks crunched underfoot. The heady smell of chlorophyll was everywhere. The jungle rang with the sound of cicadas chirruping and the eerie cries of strange, exotic creatures that called out into the night. Then, he became aware of the shapes of the trees. The pitch black was no longer quite as impenetrable.
‘Look!’ Baldini whispered.
Van den Bergen squinted beyond the fat leaves of some tropical bush and caught his first glimpse of a clearing that was dimly lit by one or two lights, strung high on tree trunks – no doubt powered by a generator, hidden somewhere on the makeshift cartel complex, judging by the low thrum.
The team of policemen gathered in the treeline in silence, guns drawn. Van den Bergen could feel the adrenalin being pumped around his body. At last, his thoughts had turned from mosquitoes and snake venom to the thrill of a raid. He reached for his service weapon but remembered that he had left it locked in the safe back home. No place for that, here, where he was only a guest.
‘Vámonos!’ Gonzales whispered.
With Van den Bergen and Baldini bringing up the rear, the law enforcers crept into the clearing, working in twos. The set-up resembled a tiny hamlet fashioned from corrugated iron shacks that had been traditionally thatched with giant palm leaves, presumably to prevent them from being spotted by helicopters flying overhead, Van den Bergen assessed.
The Mexican police dipped into each dwelling, guns drawn. Withdrew, shaking their heads at Gonzales, whose weapon was trained more generally on the scene. He directed his men to search the subsequent shacks.
‘Nada,’ they said, approaching and speaking to him in Spanish.
Gonzales sighed and turned to Van den Bergen and Baldini. ‘There’s nobody here. Let’s take a look around.’
Most of the shacks showed signs of having been slept in – mosquito nets, discarded water bottles, makeshift pump-up mattresses and a bucket full of human waste in the corner.
‘They’ve been sleeping two to a shack,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘And look! This one has handcuffs at the end of heavy chains, welded to the walls.’
‘Prisoners?’ Baldini said, taking a pen from his pocket and lifting the opened cuffs into the air for closer inspection.
Van den Bergen nodded. ‘Poor bastards. It’s like a prisoner-of-war camp. Who do you think these were for?’
Gonzales shrugged. ‘If they were worth cuffing, they sure as hell weren’t cartel gang members. You cuff slaves or a prisoner that has value. So I’d say either women used for sex by the men or specialists, working in the lab, maybe. Who knows?’
Inside the other shacks, there was evidence of a communal area with a rough dining table and benches, where people ate, and a kitchenette, where food had clearly been prepared.
‘They’re not long gone,’ Van den Bergen said, sniffing at a supermarket packet of cheese; rummaging through some salad that had been left inside a beer fridge, powered by an extension cable that had been plugged into the generator outside.
‘This place looks like it’s been abandoned in a hurry,’ Baldini said.
‘Maybe it hasn’t been abandoned,’ Van den Bergen said, stalking into the adjacent shack. ‘Look!’ He called his counterparts inside and pointed to an old portable television that sat on a wooden crate. It was still on. ‘I’d say they’re very much planning on coming back!’
Behind a screen of green, the largest of the shacks was a solid-looking prefabricated Portakabin, about four metres long. Its roof had been covered with palm leaves and other foliage, purely for camouflage purposes – that much was clear.
When Van den Bergen stepped inside, he gasped. The sizeable space contained a well-equipped meth lab, the likes of which would not have been out of place in a university science department. ‘Jesus.’ He whistled low at the sight of the oversized bell jars, test tubes and barrels of chemicals on the floor. ‘It’s a bit different from what I saw in the Czech Republic. Those guys were amateurs. But this? This is a professional rig-up, if ever I saw one.’
‘It’s clean, for a start,’ Gonzales said, looking around at the spotless white space. ‘Money has been spent on this.’
Van den Bergen approached one of the barrels. Examined a label on the side. ‘Chinese,’ he said, failing to understand what was written in the unfamiliar script. ‘But hang on!’ He leaned over and examined the far side of the barrel. There was an export label, with the company name, ‘InterChem GmbH’, written on the side. ‘This has been shipped from China to a German company,’ he said, frowning. He turned to Baldini. ‘Can you give me a hand? Let’s see what’s on the bottom of this baby.’
‘Sure.’
His muscles screamed in complaint as they lifted the heavy barrel onto its side. Van den Bergen gasped as he stood, pain spasming in his hip. Grinding his molars in a bid to quash the agony, he leaned over and scrutinised the base of the barrel. There was another label showing the German company’s name. He ran his fingers over it. Smooth and warm – it felt too thick to be just one piece of paper.
Baldini sighed. ‘Nothing new there, bud.’
‘Have you got a penknife?’ Van den Bergen asked Gonzales, sensing that some vital piece of information might be just within his reach.
The Mexican Federale handed him his keyring which doubled as a Swiss Army knife.
‘There’s another label under here,’ Van den Bergen said, gouging at the thick German label. He abandoned the knife in favour of his thumbnail. ‘I know it.’
‘There’s nothing there. I don’t see it,’ Gonzales said.
‘It feels wrong,’ Van den Bergen said. Finally, he got a corner of the German sticker to lift cleanly. Carefully, slowly, he peeled it back. Beneath was a second sticker, as he’d anticipated. In black lettering, it showed the name:
Chembedrijf
‘I don’t believe it,’ Van den Bergen said. He stood too quickly so that his hip cracked audibly and the blood rushed from his head. ‘A Dutch chemical company is somehow involved.’