They were there by one o’clock. The few fisher-boats they had seen on the broad expanse of the bay had taken no notice of them.
The American wanted to cruise along the coast a hundred yards offshore. Five minutes later, east of Chiriqui Viejo, they saw a sandy beach with a brace of straw huts, the sort local fishermen use when they wish to overnight. That would mean a track leading inland. Not feasible for a vehicle, even an off-road, but manageable with a trail bike.
It took some grunting and pushing to get the bike down into the shallows; then the haversack was on the beach and they parted company. Fifty per cent at Golfito and fifty on delivery. The gringo paid up.
He was a strange one, thought Arias, but his dollars were as good as everyone else’s when it came to feeding four hungry kids. He backed the Chiquita off the sand and headed out to sea. A mile offshore he emptied the two drums into his fuel tanks and gunned her south for the headland and home.
On the beach Cal Dexter took a screwdriver, unscrewed the Costa Rica plates and hurled them far into the sea. From his haversack he took the plates a Panamanian motorcycle would carry and screwed them on.
His paperwork was perfect. Thanks to Mrs Nguyen he had an American passport, but not in the name of Dexter, which already bore an entry stamp apparently entered a few days earlier at Panama City airport. Plus a driving licence to match.
His halting Spanish, picked up around the courts and remand centres of New York where 20 per cent of his clients were Hispanic, was not good enough to pretend to be Panamanian. But a visiting American is allowed to ride upcountry to look for a fishing resort.
It was just over two years since, in December 1989, the USA had turned parts of Panama into an ashtray to topple and capture the dictator Noriega, and Dexter suspected most Panamanian cops had retained the basic message.
The narrow trail led back from the beach through dense rainforest to become, ten miles inland, a track. This became a dirt road with occasional farms, and there he knew he would find the Panamerican Highway, that feat of engineering that runs from Alaska to the tip of Patagonia.
At David City he filled the tank again and set off down the Highway for the 500-kilometre run to the capital. Darkness came. He ate at a wayside halt with truck drivers, tanked up again and rolled on. He crossed the toll bridge to Panama City, paid in pesos and cruised into the suburb of Balboa as the sun rose. Then he found a park bench, chained the bike and slept for three hours.
The afternoon was for the extended recce. The huge-scale city map he had purchased in New York gave him the layout of the city and the tough slum of Chorillo where Noriega and Madero had grown up a few blocks from each other.
But successful low-lifes prefer the high life if they can get it, and Madero’s reported watering holes were two he part-owned in upscale Paitilla, across the bay from the slums of Old Town.
It was two in the morning when the repatriated thug decided he was tired of the Papagayo Bar and Disco and wished to leave. The anonymous black door with discreet brass plaque, grille and eyehole opened and two men came out first: heavily built bodyguards, his personal gorillas.
One entered the Lincoln limousine by the kerb and started the engine. The other scanned the street. Sitting hunched on the kerb, feet in the gutter, the tramp turned and grinned a smile of rotting or missing teeth. Greasy grey locks fell to his shoulders; a fetid raincoat clothed his body.
Slowly he eased his right hand into a brown paper bag clutched to his chest. The gorilla slipped his hand beneath his left armpit and tensed. The hobo slowly pulled his hand from his bag clutching a bottle of cheap rum, took a swig and, with the generosity of the very drunk, held it out to the gorilla.
The man hawked, spat on the pavement, withdrew his own hand empty from beneath his jacket, relaxed and turned away. Apart from the wino, the pavement was empty and safe. He tapped on the black door.
Emilio, who had recruited Dexter’s daughter, was the first out, followed by his boss. Dexter waited till the door closed and self-locked before he rose. The hand that came out of the paper bag a second time held a shortened barrel .44 magnum Smith and Wesson.
The gorilla who had spat never knew what hit him. The slug broke into four flying parts; all four penetrated at ten-feet range and performed considerable mischief inside his torso.
Drop-dead handsome Emilio did exactly that, mouth open to scream, when the second discharge took him in the face and neck, one shoulder and one lung simultaneously.
The second gorilla was halfway out of the car when he met his Maker in an unforeseen rendezvous with four spinning, tumbling metal fragments entering the side of his body exposed to the shooter.
Benyamin Madero was back at the black door, screaming for admission, when the fourth and fifth shots were fired. Some bold spirit inside had the door two inches open when a splinter went through his marcelled hair and the door shut in a hurry.
Madero fell, still hammering for admittance, sliding down the high-gloss panel work, leaving long red smears from his soaked guayabera tropical shirt.
The tramp walked over to him, showing no panic or particular hurry, stooped, turned him on his back and looked into his face. He was still alive but fading.
‘Amanda Jane, mi hija,’ said the gunman and used the sixth shot to shred the entrails.
Madero’s last ninety seconds of life were no fun at all.
A housewife in an upper window across the street later told the police she saw the tramp jog away round a corner and heard the puttputt of a scooter engine moving away. That was all.
Before sunrise the trail bike was propped against a wall two boroughs away, unchained, ignition key in place. It would survive no more than an hour before entering the food chain.
The wig, the prosthetic teeth and raincoat were bundled into a trashcan in a public park. The haversack, relieved of its remaining clothes, was folded and tossed into a builder’s skip.
At seven an American business executive in loafers, chinos, polo shirt and lightweight sports jacket, clutching a soft Abercrombie and Fitch travel grip, hailed a cab outside the Miramar Hotel and asked for the airport. Three hours later the same American lifted off in Club Class on the regular Continental Airlines flight for Newark, NJ.
And the gun, the Smith and Wesson adapted to fire slugs that split in four lethal fragments for close-quarter work, that was down a storm drain somewhere in the city now dropping beneath the wingtip.