The Evening News by Arthur Hailey Page B

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    Translated: A man has arrived. Delivered by 4 He has gone into the house. We do not know who he is; there is no Polaroid of him . The sharp-edged voice of Miguel, the project's leader, snapped back through the phone, "What is the docket number ? ”
    Julio, not comfortable with codes, swore softly as he leafed through a notebook to decipher the question. It asked him: "at age is this person? He looked to Carlos for help .” Un viejo. How old ? ”
    Carlos took the book and read the question .” Tell him, docket seventy-five .”
    Julio did, producing another terse question .” Is anything special about the blue package ? ”
    Abandoning code, Julio lapsed into plain language .” He carried a suitcase in. Looks like he plans to stay .”
     
    South of Hackensack, New Jersey, in a dilapidated rented house, the man whose code name was Miguel silently cursed Julio's carelessness. Those pendejos he wasforced to work withl In the code book was a phrase that would have answered the question, and he had warned all of them, over and over, that on nidio phones anyone could be listening. Scanning devices that could eavesdrop on cellular phone conversations were available in stores. Miguel had heard of a radio station that used a scanner and boasted of foiling several criminal plots . iEstzipidosl He simply could not get through to the idiots assigned to him-when the success of their mission, plus all their lives and freedoms were at stake-the importance of being vigilant, cautious, on guard, not just most of the time, but all of it . Miguel himself had been obsessively cautious for as long as he could remember. It was why he had never been arrested, even though he was on "most wanted ” lists of police forces in North and South America and some in Europe too, including Interpol. In the Western Hemisphere he was becoming as keenly sought after as his brother-in-terr orism Abu Nidal , on the other side of the Atlantic. About that, Miguel permitted himself a certain pride, though never failing to remember that pride could beget overconfidence, and that was something else he guarded against . Despite all the turmoil he had been a part of, he was still a young man-in his late thirties. In appearance he had always been unremarkable, with average good looks but no more; anyone passing him on a street might think he was a bank clerk or, at best, manager of a small store. In part, this was because he worked hard at seeming unimportant. He also made a habit of being polite to strangers, but not to the point of creating a memorable impression; most who met him casually, not knowing who he was, tended to forget having done so . In the past, this ordinariness had been Miguel's great good fortune, as was the fact that he did not radiate authority. His power of command remained hidden except to those on whom he exercised it, and then it was unmistakable . An advantage to Miguel in his present enterprise was that, although Colombian, he could appear and sound American. In the late-1960s and early '70s he had attended the University of California at Berkeley as a foreign student, majoring in English and patiently learning to speak the language without an accent . In those days he was using his real name, Ulises Rodriguez . His well-to-do parents had provided the Berkeley education. Miguel's father, a Bogotd neurosurgeon, hoped his only son would follow him into medicine, a prospect in which Miguel had no interest, even then. Instead , as the 1970s neared, the son foresaw basic changes ahead for Colombia--conversion from a prosperous democratic country with an honest legal base to a lawless, unbelievably rich mobsters' haven ruled through dictatorship, savagery and fear. The pharaoh's gold of the new Colombia was marijuana; it would later be cocaine . Such was Miguel's nature that the coming transition did not faze him.
    What he coveted was part of the action . Meanwhile he indulged in some action of his own at Berkeley where he discovered