Elizabeth Lowell - The Wrong Hostage

Dwayne laughed. “Nobody gets turned on by hidden numbered accounts like the Ambassador.”

“He’s not the only one. Some stripe of cop had Ted’s La Jolla office staked out.”

“Steele won’t like that,” Dwayne said.

“I’m not doing backflips of joy myself. How close are you to finding Ted?”

“So far he hasn’t used any of his accounts or credit cards. When he does, we have him.”

“Kick some ass,” Faroe said impatiently. “We have a day to get Lane Franklin out of jail.”

“We’re kicking ass and taking names. No guarantees on the timing.”

“Two days, two weeks, two years,” Faroe said coldly, “find the son of a bitch who nominated his kid for a Colombian necktie. Men like that need to be taken out of the gene pool.”

Dwayne opened his mouth, but he was talking to a dead phone.

ALL SAINTS SCHOOL

SUNDAY, 11:30 A.M.

CARLOS CALDERON KNOCKED AT Lane’s door and went in without waiting for an invitation. The two guards watching Lane didn’t stir from their comfy position propped against a shady side of the cottage. Nothing moved but their dark eyes and the sweat sliding down their cheeks.

Lane was sprawled half dressed on his bed, watching flies walk across the ceiling.

Calderon went to the kitchen, saw the empty orange juice carton, and replaced it with the fresh one he’d brought. A plate of cold tacos and beans sat in the refrigerator next to the juice. It didn’t look like Lane had been hungry.

Empty-handed, Calderon went back to the bedroom and roughly hauled Lane into a sitting position.

“Have you heard from your father?” Calderon asked.

“…uh?”

Calderon gave Lane an open-handed slap. “Your father. Have you heard from him?”

Lane blinked. His eyes almost focused. “No phone.”

“The office has a phone. Did he call you?”

Lane’s head lolled and his eyes started to close.

A sharp smack across his face focused him again.

“Dunno,” Lane said. “Don’…tell me…shit.”

Calderon shook Lane hard enough to make his hair lift. Then he buried one hand in Lane’s hair and twisted hard, dragging the boy’s face close to his.

“Listen to me, pendejo,” Calderon said. “I’m not as patient as Hector. If you hear anything from anybody about your father, you tell me immediately or I’ll cut your throat and send your head home to your mother. Hector’s nephews can have the rest of you. You understand?”

All Lane’s fuzzed mind understood was that Calderon really wanted news about Ted Franklin. The rest was a nightmare of funhouse mirrors, sharp pain forgotten in the instant it was felt, and echoes without meaning.

“Unnerstan.”

Calderon shoved Lane away so hard that the boy’s head thumped against the wall. Lane groaned and slumped onto the bed again. Calderon strode out of the cottage.

The guards were still outside, still sweating.

So was Calderon.

NEAR THE BORDER

SUNDAY, 12:30 P.M.

SOUTH OF THE CORONADO Bridge, the muggy air began to congeal. American industry and Mexican charcoal cooking fires turned the sky into sludge.

“Use the Otay Mesa route,” Grace said. “It takes longer on this side, but it’s better than having the tires stolen at a stoplight.”

“Talk about not being politically correct…”

“Neither is being stared at like I have ‘for rent’ written on my ass.”

Faroe made a sound like a swallowed laugh and watched his back trail. After another quick glance at the mirrors, he shot into the fast lane.

“What are you doing?” Grace asked. “It’s a right-hand off-ramp.”

“I know.”

He kicked down the accelerator and watched the speedometer leap to ninety miles an hour. They raced through the spotty traffic for a half mile. At the last possible moment, he cut across four lanes and drove onto the freeway spur that led up the hill toward Otay.

Grace grabbed the handle in the armrest and looked over her shoulder at the cars Faroe had just cut off.

“Are you crazy?” she said sharply.

“Just careful.”

“Careful? You nearly caused a wreck!”

“It’s a good way to burn a tail.”

Grace went still. “We’re being followed?”

“A red Jeep showed up three times in the last thirty miles. Funny thing, but he decided at the last second to go to Otay, too. Reckless, but you know how it is with those Southern California drivers.”

She closed her eyes for an instant. “Now who’s after us-the Russians?”

Faroe smiled. “Doubt it. Best guess is that the Jeep is part of the team we picked up at Edge City. These dudes are better than the brain-dead in the sedan. Got to be feds of some stripe. This is a full-on, multiagency surveillance squad.”

“I’m so glad you enjoy leading a parade. I could live quite well without the armed attention.”

“Don’t worry, amada. It’s only dangerous when they stop watching.”

She hoped he was right.

Faroe dropped back to only ten miles an hour over the speed limit, just fast enough to keep from being run over by the rest of the traffic.

“Right now, what I’m guessing is a task force is still in the early stages of the investigation, picking up pieces of string and pulling them to see where they end. Like us.”

“Is your world always so…active?”

“Bet on it. Things happen right here in the middle of the sunshine world that would probably make the average citizen’s hair stand on end and then fall out. That’s what crime is, dudes sneaking around, filling their pockets one way or another, and trying desperately to make sure nobody notices.”

“The law notices,” Grace said.

“Sometimes. Then you have the cops running behind the crooks, usually way behind. The cops are lagging because they have a ball-breaking handicap. Not only do they have to figure out what’s happening, they also have to gather legally admissible proof of same, and the courtroom bar is set about as high as the moon.”

“There’s a good reason for high standards. It separates us from the gutter.”

“Judge, the gutter loves your high standards because they make life merry hell for cops.”

“You aren’t stupid,” Grace said curtly. “You know why police actions have to be carefully restricted.”

“Yeah, I understand the legal fiction you lawyers have spun in justification. But on the other hand, no, I have no gut-deep sense of why society worries so much about cops.”

“Because somebody has to watch the watchdogs.”

“Watch them, yes. Pull their teeth and shoot them in all four feet? No.”

“Just like the old days,” she said, shaking her head. “Me on one side of Justice’s scales and you on the other. It’s a miracle you didn’t become a crook.”

“The company sucks sewer water. Be grateful there are noncrooks like me, Your Honor. We keep the biggest turds from ending up on your white linen tablecloth.”

Glancing frequently at the mirrors, Faroe followed the road up onto the mesa that was the principal trading post of the NAFTA era. Fresh produce from the interior of Mexico and cheap TVs assembled in maquiladoras in Tijuana clogged the northbound roads, swimming against a steady stream of structural steel and manufactured goods headed south. The storage warehouses and import-export brokerages stood shoulder to shoulder with vast fields of used cars and trucks too clapped out for the high-speed American interstates, but okay for the slow, rough roads of Chiapas and Guanajuato.

A gleaming Aeromexico jetliner leaped up off the Tijuana International Airport runway a thousand yards beyond the barbed-wire and metal-mat border fence. The plane banked out to the south, spewing burned exhaust over the crowded, penniless colonias that consumed the rolling coastal hills as far as the eye could see.

Grace felt that old familiar uneasiness crawl through her. “I should be more comfortable with this place. Some of my ancestors came from Mexico. But I always feel alien here.”

Faroe touched her hair gently before he put his hand back on the wheel. “Don’t worry about it. I know enough about Tijuana for both of us. Tijuana is the model for the shadow world.”

“The world you were trying to get out of.”

He shrugged.

“Isn’t that why you retired,” she said, “so you don’t have to cross over this line and go back into the Mexico of the mind?”

He braked to a stop at the end of a short line of American vehicles headed south.

“I’m trying to get away from the whole spectrum, light to dark,” Faroe said. “That’s what my boat is all about.”

“The TAZ. What language is the name from?”

“It’s an acronym dreamed up by a freelance Sufi philosopher named Hakim Bey. The letters stand for temporary autonomous zone.”

Grace thought about it for a moment. Each word was familiar, but put together they didn’t particularly make sense. “I give up. What does it mean?”

“Bey describes these zones as remote, renegade places scattered throughout the world-Tibet, the South Sea Islands, monasteries high up in the Alps. One of my favorites is an abandoned oil-drilling rig in the English Channel between France and Kent.”

“Is St. Kilda named for one of those zones?”

“Not quite. Well, maybe, now that you mention it. Temporary autonomous zones are populated by people like me, dudes who couldn’t cut it in the civilized world, burnout jobs, head cases, and fugitives. The zones can be lonely, but they’re the only places where misfits have a half-decent shot at being free.”