Six Minutes To Freedom Read online

  Of course they’d torture his children. To extract information or merely to make a point, the PDF would do whatever was necessary. And more likely than not, they’d do it in front of Kurt, where he could see the blood and hear the screams. In the face of that, Kurt knew that he’d beg for the chance to turn on his friends, if only to make his children’sagony stop.

  The fear in his gut began to bloom, building exponentially. He prayed that Tomás would get to a radio in time to sound the distress signal. Shopette. It all came down to two syllables. Would he think to make the transmission? Would he do it in time?

  The police station was as hot as a sauna. Clean enough at first glance, the place had a yellow-brown hue to it, testament to the ever-presenthaze of tobacco smoke. They led him through a squad room toward an office in the back, past a warren of desks and chairs that looked as if they’d been arranged by air drop. Kurt noted with curiositythat his hands were free, that they hadn’t cuffed him, and it occurredto him that he was quickly approaching his last opportunity to run. It would be suicidal, but at least it would be on his terms.

  The images of his family returned, and the option evaporated. If there was a chance of seeing them again, he’d do everything in his power to make that happen. After thrusting all of this trouble on them, the very least he could do was struggle to stay alive.

  His captors led him to a closed door in the rear of the squad room, where the escort on Kurt’s left opened the door and ushered him inside.One man sat in a metal, army-surplus chair while three others hovered nearby. A desk sat in the middle of the small room, lit only by a dangling bulb that seemed to have the light of the noontime sun. The heat in the room was off the scale, and every face he saw sweated profusely.They were all looking at Kurt’s passport.

  One of the armed escorts placed a hand heavily on Kurt’s shoulder and pressed him into the hardbacked wooden visitor’s chair. “Here he is, Major Moreno,” the guard said.

  The seated man raised his head to make eye contact. Muscular and wiry, Moreno wore a pastel blue shirt that fit his form tightly. The major’seyes were hotter than the room as they bored through his visitor from behind an ugly, pock-marked face. As he measured Kurt with his glare, his hand fiddled with a riding crop on his desk.

  Kurt did his best to return Moreno’s glare, but he didn’t have it in him. By breaking the gaze, Kurt knew he was projecting guilt.

  “You are a spy,” Moreno said in Spanish.

  Kurt spoke without a trace of a gringo accent. “No, sir, I’m not a spy.” A spy? he thought. Why would ...

  “You traveled to Honduras,” Moreno said, indicating the visa stamp on the passport. “Meeting with the Contras, no doubt.”

  Kurt smiled in spite of himself. “No, sir, I was there on business, meeting with local officials about printing equipment.” Every word was the absolute truth. Could it be that they didn’t know who he was? How could that happen?

  “And the trip to Nicaragua immediately afterward?” Moreno prompted.

  Kurt’s smile started to fade as he realized that a lie would actually sound more convincing than the truth. “I am a Rotarian,” he said. “On my return from Honduras, I visited Managua to attend a Rotary conference. There was no spying involved.”

  Behind Kurt, a brief knock preceded the swing of the door. A short, trim man in civilian clothes but with a soldier’s bearing stepped into the office. “Captain Cortizo is here to translate,” said the clerk. On the other side of the glass partition, Kurt could see Cortizo’s familiar face and form standing in the squad room. A graduate of West Point, Cortizowas a Noriega favorite, constantly paraded in front of the cameras as an embarrassment to the Americans.

  Moreno waved the clerk off. “It won’t be necessary,” he said. “The prisoner speaks Spanish.” The clerk disappeared, and the major turned his eyes back toward Kurt. “You are lying,” he said.

  Kurt cursed himself for his own guilty demeanor. He knew that from here on out nothing he said would be perceived as truth. “No, sir, I’m not. You can check these things yourself.” As an afterthought, he added, “If I were a spy, do you think I’d be traveling on my own passport?”

  The question angered Moreno even more. “I will ask the questions,”he snapped.

  Kurt had pushed too hard. Yes and no would be the standard from now on. His mind raced even faster now. They think I’m a spy. They honestly don’t know who I am. How can that be? If they don’t know, then why the hell am I under arrest?

  Movement outside the building caught Kurt’s eye through the window.A white crew-cab Toyota pickup truck slid to a halt and disgorgedfour armed men. Again, no uniforms. Kurt recognized the vehicle as the typical transportation for the Departamento Nacional de Investigaciones (DENI; National Department of Investigation—a corrupt,miserable Panamanian version of the Federal Bureau of Investigation), the dreaded secret police, and their presence seemed to disturb the officers mingling outside. Moreno saw them too, and he scowled. Whatever was happening bothered the major nearly as much as it bothered Kurt. Tempers were running hot, and he didn’t understand why.

  “Wait here,” Moreno commanded. His chair shot away from his desk as he stood, and his minions jumped out of his way as he stormed out of the office into the squad room. “What is this about?” he heard the major yell, but the rest of the heated conversation was garbled by distance and the separating wall. Kurt probably could not have heard the rest of it above his hammering heart anyway.

  Moreno was gone for all of ninety seconds before the door opened again. “Stand,” he said to Kurt, who complied without question. “Come with us.” To the others in the office, he added, “You stay here.”

  There was a new group waiting in the squad room now, likewise all dressed in civilian clothes. As Kurt followed Moreno to the front of the squad room, and then outside, other soldiers fell in behind him. They led him to the white crew-cab pickup truck. The double-side doors were open, waiting for him. “In the back,” Moreno ordered.

  Kurt steadied himself with his hands and pulled his big frame up into the vehicle. He had some difficulty pressing himself past the seats as he made his way to the back of the pickup. They closed the doors, and suddenly he was alone. The atmosphere outside buzzed with excitedelectricity. More officers swarmed around the vehicle, and as they did, many cast sideward glances his way, only to avert their eyes when he caught their gaze.

  In the silence of the pickup, he tried again to settle himself down. There was a way to survive this, he told himself. First of all, as an American citizen, he had a certain advantage over regular Panamanians.The paternalism bred from the decades of the Panama Canal Treaty—the American money that helped to keep the Panamanian economy afloat and many of the residents employed—brought an intrinsicdeference, despite the increasingly hot rhetoric from the Noriegaregime. It was that deference, Kurt figured, that had kept his captors from pinioning his wrists with handcuffs and beating him for information.

  All at once, as if on cue, the meeting out in the driveway broke up, and people headed for their vehicles. Six armed men joined Kurt and Major Moreno in the pickup. “Take us to your house,” the major demanded.

  Kurt’s stomach fell. This was it. They were going to get his family. For the first time since the moment of his arrest, he considered spilling his guts. Anything to keep them from harming his children. The emotionalside of his brain screamed at him to just start talking, but then the rational side took over. If he talked, dozens of lives would end. Not just his, but all his coconspirators’ and all their families’. Every minute that he remained mute bought them another minute to make their escape.

  “Straight ahead,” Kurt said, pointing, “and up the hill.” The total trip would be less than a mile. His mind raced for some ruse that would lead them to a false location, but a lie like that would cause far more trouble than the few seconds it would save. At least for the time being, his PDF captors seemed content not to hurt anyone. God only knew what might happen if he started sending them
to far corners of the city. Hell, for all Kurt knew, this was a test to see if they could trust him at all. They had his passport, for heaven’s sake, and the passport clearly showed where he lived.

  Sitting in the dark in the back of the stifling pickup, Kurt’s mind whirled out of control. A precise and orderly man by nature, he found himself overwhelmed by the unknown. Nothing made sense, not even the fact of his arrest. His captors seemed to know only that they were to arrest him on sight, but it appeared as if no one had bothered to tell them why. Clearly, they’d been waiting for him—they knew precisely what flight he would be on—yet the poster for his arrest had been hastily hand written and bore no picture. If he was such an important enemy, wouldn’t they at least have taken the time to lift the picture off his identity papers?

  If you get caught, you’re on your own. Richard Dotson’s words echoed deafeningly through his head. On your own. Could Richard have known that his arrest was imminent, yet failed to say anything?

  No. Absolutely not. He and Kurt had been dearest friends for longer than either one could remember. If Richard had known that Kurt was in imminent danger—if he’d even suspected that danger lurked—he would have found a way to warn him.

  So, how then? How could the PDF have known to be looking for him?

  Kurt checked himself. That was the wrong question. Once they knew to look for him, finding him would have been easy. The more appropriatequestion lay rooted in a day and a time before today. Someonewould have had to leak the information about his activities to the PDF, but who? Kurt didn’t work with strangers, he worked with friends—brothers, for all practical meanings of the word. Kurt ran the faces through his head: Tomás Muñoz, Jorge Quintero, Antonio Martinez,Coronado Samaniego. It simply was not possible that one of them would have turned him in. They’d have died first. But who else knew?

  Pablo Martinez. Absolutely not.

  Rod Esquivel. Ridiculous. Kurt had saved Rod’s life, for crying out loud. There was no way that he could have been the traitor. Who then?

  Someone at the Agency? That was always a possibility, given Noriega’sinfiltration of the American intelligence community in Panama, but Kurt’s knowledge of that infiltration was the very reason why he never dealt with any of the operatives assigned to the Panama City Station.Because there were people there whom he disliked and distrusted, Kurt had to assume that there were people who disliked and distrusted him back; but surely not enough to do this. Not enough to risk getting him killed.

  These thoughts raced through his mind at the speed of a heartbeat, manifesting themselves as feelings more than rational thoughts. The longer he stayed alive, the less he worried about dying. If they’d wanted to kill him, he’d be dead by now.

  But there were alternatives to dying. Things could be done to the human body that would make a person pray for death. No matter how hard he tried to will himself to think reasonable thoughts, the projectorin his mind brought him back to the torture chambers about which he’d heard so much.

  As their motorcade of five vehicles sped down Avenue Manuel E. Batista on their way to Kurt’s house, he couldn’t help but think that every turn of the wheel brought him closer to a nightmare.

  3

  Kimberly stared at the handset before hanging up, and as she did, she had to stifle the urge to cry. The fear in Jorge’s voice spread instantly through the phone line.

  “Daddy, come home,” she whispered.

  As if on cue, she heard engine noises out front. She knew just from the sound of the engine that it was another false alarm. Her dad’s Volvo had a sweet hum to it; the vehicle she heard out front was some sort of truck. A peek through her bedroom window confirmed her suspicion.And then it triggered a bolt of panic.

  It wasn’t just a truck, it was a convoy of them, and they completely blocked the street in front of their house. Down to the left, at the bottomof the street, she saw more trucks. And men with machine guns. They were all looking up at her house.

  Suddenly, the stifling night was impossibly cold. She shivered all over and was surprised to find herself crying as she stepped out onto the terrace, just far enough to where she could see the apron of their driveway. A white crew-cab truck blocked the street, parked at an angle, flanked by two white pickup trucks—the standard elements of a PDF goon squad. Wherever they went, they left bloodstains behind.

  Her brain screamed at her to run, but her body wouldn’t respond. She just stood there, trembling, her hands pressed to her mouth, certainthat this was the beginning of something terrible.

  She remembered the tone in Jorge’s voice, and even though the windows on the crew-cab truck were all blacked out, she somehow knew that her dad was in there.

  A few seconds later, the doors opened, and there he was. He stepped out calmly, naturally, and for just a moment she thought that maybe through some weird twist of fate he was just being dropped off. He was dressed in the casual style of Panamanian nationals, in Dockers and a polo shirt, and from this distance, he seemed as if nothing was wrong.

  But then the others climbed out to join him. Five, ten, it might as well have been a hundred for all Kimberly could see. For a long time they just stood there, talking. Then, when they moved, they moved together,and for the first time, the horrifying reality hit her: he’d been arrested.

  As they walked casually up the driveway, Kimberly tried to disappear;but somehow, her dad knew exactly where to look for her. He tried to appear calm, but his face looked tight—as if he was scared to show his fear.

  At the first glance, Kimberly started to sob.

  “Sweetheart,” he said. “Can you come down and open the door, please?” He stood shoulder to shoulder with five of his captors.

  “What’s wrong?” Kimberly asked.

  Kurt just shook his head. “It’s okay, sweetheart, just open the door.” He looked ten years older than the last time she’d seen him.

  She didn’t believe him. Not for a second. These were the PanamanianGestapo, and they were at her house! She didn’t know what to do. Maybe if she ran really fast.

  “Sweetheart,” Kurt said again, “everything’s going to be just fine. I don’t have my keys, so please just come on downstairs and open the door for us, okay?”

  The world became a blur, an indecipherable swirl of meaningless action and feelings. For a long moment, it seemed as if her feet were glued to the floor, her whole body filled with concrete. Nothing moved but her heart, and it slammed like a runaway drum.

  She wanted to run, but there was no getting away from the PDF. Where would she go? Everything she’d ever known was right here at the end of this dead-end street.

  She had to let them in. She had no choice. If they started their invasionby breaking the door, God only knew what they’d start breaking next. A heavy fist pounded on the front door. “I’m coming!” Kimberly yelled, dashing into the hall on her way to the stairs. “I’m right here.”

  This was the end of everything. Don’t ask her how she knew, but she did. When she opened the front door, she would cross a threshold from which there would be no return. And she’d be making her journeyalone.

  Her mom! How was she going to tell Mom? And what about Erik? A thousand thoughts flooded her mind at the speed of panic—a velocityfor which there was no measure. Without any conscious thought, she snatched the flimsy, paperback family telephone directory off its table in the upstairs hallway and stuffed it into the waistband of her shorts. Her grandmother’s number would be in there.

  As her bare feet finally skidded across the marble tile of the foyer, the invaders started pounding again.

  Kimberly opened the door, and there was her father, aged yet anotherten years.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” Kurt said. “Don’t worry, everything’s going to be just fine.”

  She knew it was a lie.

  They invaded the house like roaches, a dozen of them pouring through the front door and spreading quickly throughout the house. Kurt opened his arms to Kimberly and she hugged him tightly, so close t
hat she could hear his heart pounding in his chest.

  “Daddy, what’s happening?”

  “I’ve been arrested,” he said. His voice showed none of the fear that she saw in his eyes.

  She pushed herself away far enough to see his face. “For what?”

  He pulled her to his chest again and stroked her hair.

  “Do you have weapons in the house?” one of the soldiers demanded.

  Kurt had learned that this one was named Captain Quintero, and he clearly was Moreno’s right-hand man. Blessed with movie-star good looks, Quintero wore a wildly flowered blue shirt that seemed entirely incongruous with his military bearing.

  “I have two guns,” Kurt said. “One is in the closet upstairs, and one is in the living room.” It sounded innocent enough, but he knew there’d be hell to pay when they found the M-1 carbine with 300 rounds of ammunition in his bedroom, and his mind was already racing for a way to explain why his 9mm Glock was poised for quick use in the top of a lamp shade near the front door.

  While the goons went about the business of rounding up the guns and searching the house, Captain Quintero turned to Kimberly. “Do not be afraid,” he said. “We are not here to harm you.”

  “Let her go,” Kurt urged. He was well aware of the art work in her bedroom, and under the circumstances, there was no telling what the fallout might be when it was discovered.

  “She can stay,” Quintero said. He smiled pleasantly at her. “If she has done nothing wrong, then she has nothing to worry about.”

  Kurt lowered his voice to a whisper. “Captain, please,” he said. “Be reasonable. She’s only a little girl. I don’t want her to see me like this.”

  Quintero stewed for a long moment. The way he looked at Kimberlymade Kurt wonder if maybe the captain had daughters of his own. Finally, he nodded. “She can go,” he said.

  Kurt didn’t hesitate. Taking Kimberly’s shoulders in his hands, he gripped her tightly, their noses nearly touching. “Go,” he said.