He did notice the altitude. The city of Bogot sits at an elevation of nearly 8,700 feet, on a plain among towering mountains. There was no air to breathe here and he wondered how the ambassador tolerated it. Jacobs was more comfortable with the biting winter winds off Lake Michigan. Even the humid pall that visited Washington every summer was better than this, he thought.
"Tomorrow at nine, right?" Jacobs asked.
"Yep." The ambassador nodded. "I think they'll go along with nearly anything we want." The ambassador, of course, didn't know what the meeting was about, which did not please him. He'd worked as charg d'affaires at Moscow, and the security there wasn't as tight as it was here.
"That's not the problem," Jefferson observed. "I know they mean well - they've lost enough cops and judges proving that. Question is, will they play ball?"
"Would we, under similar circumstances?" Jacobs mused, then steered the conversation in a safer direction. "You know, we've never been especially good neighbors, have we?"
"How do you mean?" the ambassador asked.
"I mean, when it suited us to have these countries run by thugs, we let it happen. When democracy finally started to take root, we often as not stood at the sidelines and bitched if their ideas didn't agree fully with ours. And now that the druggies threaten their governments because of what our own citizens want to buy - we blame them."
"Democracy comes hard down here," the ambassador pointed out. "The Spanish weren't real big on -"
"If we'd done our job a hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - we wouldn't have half the problems we have now. Well, we didn't do it then. We sure as hell have to do it now."
"If you have any suggestions, Emil -"
Jacobs laughed. "Hell, Andy, I'm a cop - well, a lawyer - not a diplomat. That's your problem. How's Kay?"
"Just fine." Ambassador Andy Westerfield didn't have to ask about Mrs. Jacobs. He knew Emil had buried his wife nine months earlier after a courageous fight with cancer. He'd taken it hard, of course, but there were so many good things to remember about Ruth. And he had a job to keep him busy. Everyone needed that, and Jacobs more than most.
In the terminal, a man with a 35mm Nikon and a long lens had been snapping pictures for the past two hours - When the limousine and its escorts started moving off the airport grounds, he removed the lens from the body, set both in his camera case, and walked off to a bank of telephones.
The limousine moved quickly, with one jeep in front and another behind. Expensive cars with armed escorts were not terribly unusual in Colombia, and they moved out from the airport at a brisk clip. You had to spot the license plate to know that the car was American. The four men in each jeep had not known of their escort job until five minutes before they left, and the route, though predictable, wasn't a long one. There shouldn't have been time for anyone to set up an ambush - assuming that anyone would be crazy enough to consider such a thing.
After all, killing an American ambassador was crazy; it had only happened recently in the Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan... And no one had ever made a serious attempt on an FBI Director.
The car they drove in was a Cadillac Fleetwood chassis. Its special equipment included thick Lexan windows that could stop a machine-gun bullet, and Kevlar armor all around the passenger compartment. The tires were foam-filled against flattening, and the gas tank of a design similar to that used on military aircraft as protection against explosion. Not surprisingly, the car was known in the embassy motor pool as the Tank.
The driver knew how to handle it as skillfully as a NASCAR professional. He had engine power to race at over a hundred miles per hour; he could throw the three-ton vehicle into a bootlegger turn and reverse directions like a movie stunt driver. His eyes flickered between the road ahead and the rearview mirror. There had been one car following them, for two or three miles, but it turned off. Probably nothing, he judged. Somebody else coming home from the airport... The car also had sophisticated radio gear to call for help. They were heading to the embassy. Though the ambassador had a separate residence, a pretty two-story house set on six sculpted acres of garden and woodland, it wasn't secure enough for his visitors. Like most contemporary American embassies, this one looked to be a cross between a low-rise office block and part of the Siegfried Line.
VOX IDENT, his computer screen read, two thousand miles away:
VOICE 34 INIT CALL TO UNKNOWN RECIP FRQ 889.980MHZ CALL INIT 2258Z INTERCEPT IDENT 381.
Tony donned the headphones and listened in on the tape-delay system.
"Nothing," he said a moment later. "Somebody's taking a drive."
At the embassy, the legal attach paced nervously in the lobby. Special Agent Pete Morales of the FBI should have been at the airport. It was his director coming in, but the security pukes said only one car because it was a surprise visit - and surprise, everyone knew, was better than a massive show of force. The everybodies who knew did not include Morales, who believed in showing force. It was bad enough having to live down here. Morales was from California; though his surname was Hispanic, his family had been in the San Francisco area when Major Fremont had arrived, and he'd had to brush up on his somewhat removed mother tongue to take his current job, which job also meant leaving his wife and kids behind in the States. As his most recent report had told headquarters, it was dangerous down here. Dangerous for the local citizens, dangerous for Americans, and very dangerous indeed for American cops.
Morales checked his watch. About two more minutes. He started moving to the door.
"Right on time," a man noted three blocks from the embassy. He spoke into a hand-held radio.
Until recently, the RPG-7D had been the standard-issue Soviet light antitank weapon. It traces its ancestry to the German Panzerfaust, and was only recently replaced by the RPG-18, a close copy of the American M-72 LAW rocket. The adoption of the new weapon allowed millions of the old ones to be disposed of, adding to the already abundant supply in arms bazaars all over the world. Designed to punch holes in battle tanks, it is not an especially easy weapon to use. Which was why there were four of them aimed at the ambassador's limousine.
The car proceeded south, down Carrera 13 in the district known as Palermo, slowing now because of the traffic. Had the Director's bodyguards known the name of the district and designation of the street, they might have objected merely on grounds of superstition. The slow speed of the traffic here in the city itself made everyone nervous, especially the soldiers in the escort jeeps who craned their necks looking up into the windows of various buildings. It is a fact so obvious as to be misunderstood that one cannot ordinarily look into a window from outside. Even an open window is merely a rectangle darker than the exterior wall, and the eye adjusts to ambient light, not to light in a specific place. There was no warning.
What made the deaths of the Americans inevitable was something as prosaic as a traffic light. A technician was working on a balky signal - people had been complaining about it for a week - and while checking the timing mechanism, he flipped it to red. Everyone stopped on the street, almost within sight of the embassy. From third-floor windows on both sides of the street, four separate RPG-7D projectiles streaked straight down. Three hit the car, two of them on the roof.
The flash was enough. Morales was moving even before the noise reached the embassy gates, and he ran with full knowledge of the futility of the gesture. His right hand wrenched his Smith Wesson automatic from the waist holster, and he carried it as training prescribed, pointed straight up. It took just over two minutes.