Bogotá, Colombia | October 1, 2011 | Morning
The details took two days.
Ortega's people were efficient in the specific way of organizations that had learned efficiency through consequence — you moved slowly when the cost of error was low and very fast when it wasn't. Getting John Michael Kane into a guild that Blue Umbrella's vetting team would recognize as legitimate was not a low-consequence task. It required Diego's agreement, which required a phone call between the brothers that lasted forty minutes and that Ortega summarized afterward as "he said yes, but he wants to see the man first."
Alen spent the two days doing what he did in any unfamiliar environment: learning its geography. The district around the bar, the sight lines, the transit routes. He read what he could access on Blue Umbrella's current operational status — they were four years into the Chapter 11 reorganization, still operating under strict UN sanctions that limited their armed capacity. Their vetting process for field operators was thorough by PMC standards, which meant it would survive a surface check of the Kane documentation but would look for the kind of operational history that paper couldn't fully fabricate.
The Lobos record would need to hold.
On the morning of October 1st, Ortega drove him to a small airfield south of the city and shook his hand at the steps of a charter flight that had no published flight plan.
"Diego is not a gentle teacher," Ortega said.
"I wasn't looking for gentle," Alen said.
"No," Ortega said. "I don't suppose you were." He released his hand. "Come back, brother. Isabella wants to meet the quiet angel properly."
The charter took him northeast, across the Caribbean, and by the time the Carpathian range appeared below the clouds he had already reviewed everything he could find on Los Lobos Negros and had constructed the version of John Michael Kane that would walk off the plane.
Kane was thirty-seven, Canadian-born, raised partly in Europe, drawn to mercenary work in his late twenties after a short and undistinguished military career that he didn't talk about. He was competent, contained, and not given to explaining himself. He was looking for work and he had been recommended by someone Ortega trusted.
That was the cover.
The man under it would do what was required.
END OF CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Chapter Fifty follows...