Torchwood: Exodus Code

Director looked up, snarled, and with a wave of his hand dismissed a new recruit who was seated in front of his desk. His assistant shut the door with more emphasis than necessary.
    ‘You have to see this, sir,’ said Darren, placing his palm on the top-left corner of a wall-mounted computer screen. After his access was granted, Darren called up the file that he’d viewed at his desk.
    ‘This better be something,’ said Rex Matheson, the agency’s most recently appointed Deputy Director, stepping out from behind his desk and closer to the screen.
    ‘It’s from the Castenado operation in progress in Peru, sir, the one tracking our lead to the three families.’ Darren paused before adding, ‘And it’s way more than something. It’s someone.’

Isela

11
    Southern Coast of Peru, Hacienda del Castenado, present day
    THROUGH HER BINOCULARS , Isela watched plumes of dust trail behind the minibus as it climbed along the canyon road towards the hacienda. It would be close enough for her in ten minutes, max.
    She peered over the top of the tower wall, signalling to Antonio who pushed off from the tree, and jogged inside the wooden gates of the hotel’s tropical courtyard. A few minutes later, the speakers on the pink adobe wall that faced the square emitted the lyrical strains of Andean charango music, the high-pitched guitar sounds loud enough for even the footballers across the airstrip to take note. The market came to life when the music filtered from the hacienda. The vendors opened their stalls, the women on the church steps haggling with each other for the best spaces.
    Isela stared at the boys playing near the airstrip and realised that she could no longer see the approaching plane. Had it landed and she’d missed it?
    No, that wasn’t possible. But if that wasn’t possible, where had it landed? The hangar, tucked into the trees next to the landing strip was where her father kept his planes, and she could see that it was still secured.
    Focusing her binoculars on the tree line, Isela scanned the area at the start of the hiking path that led deeper into the canyon and up to the mountain plateau. Tourists usually took the other road, the one to Lake Aczuma, a man-made oasis that filtered the spring waters for the travellers who came to the hacienda for something more authentic than the hotel’s swimming pool and the guided tours of the nearby Inca ruins.
    With the music blasting, the men and women dotted around the market place were suddenly livelier, their movements choreographed in response to the hotel’s demands to entertain arriving tourists. Not that these villagers didn’t benefit. The Hacienda del Castenado was the envy of many of the region’s bigger towns, with its community buildings, including a state of the art primary school completely rebuilt after the devastation of the 2007 earthquake, a disaster from which lots of villages in the area had never recovered.
    But hotel or not, beneath the strains of the music and the colourful costumes of those crowding the square, Isela knew these peasants were all still slaves to the owner of the hacienda, her father, the drug kingpin and kidnapper extraordinaire, and her mother, the matriarch of the mountain.
    Beyond the concrete structure, Isela focused on a cluster of round thatched roof huts, brick cairns, built by her ancestors centuries ago for ritual sacrifices to the gods for a rich crop. Her father had kept the outside structures intact, but renovated their insides to create saunas and meditation huts for the New Agers who would make their pilgrimages to the resort in the tourist months. These cairns dotted the landscape, forming a line up into the mountains.
    Forgetting about the plane, Isela zoomed her binoculars in on the last cairn bordering her father’s land.
    Was that movement she could see behind the structure?
    She held her gaze on the spot for a beat, reassuring herself that she had imagined it.
    The minibus was right on schedule, having passed the first cairn on the canyon road, then the second, and was now close enough for Isela to see the driver with her binoculars. She recognized Juan at the wheel.
    Shit, why did it have to be Juan? She liked him. He was loyal, which meant he would not give up the mark without a fight.
    Eight minutes to go.
    Isela turned her attention to the
cóndor
in the café, who was getting to his feet. He threw some money on the table and jogged along the cobbled sidewalk behind the café towards the