Coincidence - Alan May [9]
“Beautiful. Okay, I’m outta here on July twenty-first. I wanna check out the truck run at least three times myself. Let’s set it up for the last Thursday in September. Might be a little rainy then, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. And the weather should be good pretty good in the Pacific then. That house still vacant?”
“Yeah.”
“Bueno. Go ahead and rent it right away. Get the guns and arrange for the others to move in by the middle of July. I’ll be there on the twenty-third; Esteban’ll get there about two weeks later. That’ll give us time to go through the plan several times together. What you gotta do now is find us a boat in Costa Rica so Phillip will have time to look at the same kind of boat in the States. Or go to Nicaragua if you have to.”
“I’m gonna try to find a boat by end of next week. I find something, I let Phillip know. He can find one Stateside so he can learn everything about it.”
The meeting was over in twenty minutes. Stefano went out to the exercise yard, where he walked around the hard-packed dirt path three times before falling into stride with Esteban.
“It’s set,” he said, looking up at the sky as if interested in the clouds. “The last Thursday in September. As soon as your parole starts in August, you go straight to Colombia. Any problem?”
“No,” Esteban replied.
“Just make sure you not traced.”
“No problem, man.”
With his usual attention to detail, Juan scouted out boats in Costa Rica, finally finding one in Puntarenas that he thought would do: a sixty-five-foot Real Ships motor yacht called the Two Wise. It was well equipped with twin Cats, two generators, inverter, water maker, stabilizers, and bow thrusters. It sounded perfect, and its owner, an American who vacationed on it only every three months or so, was expected to use it in August, so it was a fit, time-wise. He called Phillip, who found a similar boat for sale in Florida and made arrangements to check it out.
Renting the house turned out to be a bit trickier, even though Juan had been keeping his eye on it for several weeks. The property was just off the main road heading north from Buenaventura. The driveway, on the inside of a large curve in the road, was nearly two hundred feet long and was almost hidden by a cluster of trees and overgrown bushes. The Pacific Ocean was a little over a mile to the east. You could actually see the ocean as the land sloped gently down toward a cove with a sandy beach.
Juan walked with the landlord down the driveway to the nondescript house. Two of its bedrooms had twin beds, the third, a double bed. Somebody would have to sleep on the couch and it wasn’t going to be him. He noted that the large kitchen had a freezer. Good. They’d be able to stock up on food inconspicuously, buying a little extra to freeze every time they went into town and then transfering most of it to the boat.
Behind the house was a large barn, still in pretty good condition, with two large swinging doors. It was empty except for a few rusting paint cans, a rolled-up rectangle of cheap carpeting, and the pervasive odor of mildew. It was plenty big enough to hold the van and the two pickup trucks, along with their own SUV. The whole setup seemed perfect.
”Looks all right,” Juan told the landlord. “I’ll take it for six months.”
“No, no. I can only rent for nine months. The dueno are in Europe until next March. Their hija lives in Paris and is having other baby. They gone over to help. They want siete mil pesos a month for nine months.”
Damn. This was not in the cards.
“I don’t need it that long. Look, we’re doing some—uh, climate research and being this close