Elizabeth Lowell - The Wrong Hostage

“Okay. Point taken. But this is going to get ugly,” Faroe said. “I don’t want it to get ugly all over you.”

“Too late.” She toed off her flat shoes. The recessed lighting inside the vehicle showed dark spots against her golden brown skin. “I still have that murdered man’s blood on my feet.”

Instantly Harley got up, went to the sink, returned with a wet cloth, and knelt in front of Grace.

“Thank you, but it won’t change anything,” she said to Harley. Then she looked at Faroe. “Will it.”

Faroe opened his mouth, closed it, and ran his thumb over her cheekbone. “I’m sorry.”

She turned her head, brushed her lips over his thumb. “Why? You didn’t do it.”

Steele watched them, eyes narrowed, face expressionless.

Grace turned to him. “You made the trip for nothing, Ambassador. Joe and I aren’t going to bloody each other.” Yet. But tomorrow? Well, tomorrow is another day, isn’t it? “It’s also too late to separate us. You need Joe. You need me. If we break your rules by being together, well, we’ll just have to be your exception, won’t we?”

Steele almost nodded.

And almost smiled.

The expression on the Ambassador’s face made Faroe wonder what he’d missed.

ALL SAINTS SCHOOL

MONDAY, 2:25 A.M.

LANE SWIPED AT HIS EYES, telling himself it was sweat, not tears, that kept blurring his view of the computer screen. He really wished he believed it.

Another bout of thunder made the cottage tremble.

He noticed the sound only because it meant that his mouthy guards wouldn’t be catcalling from the windows. His stomach growled and cramped with hunger.

He ignored it.

He couldn’t take a chance on eating drugged food. After he was free, he’d eat a double-sausage pizza as big as a coffee table. He’d bury his face in the spicy sauce and-

After.

But first he had to hack his way into his father’s file.

The second sample key wasn’t any better than the first had been. He must be screwing up something because he was light-headed and scared and hungry.

Focus, Lane told himself fiercely. You can do this in your sleep and you know it. It’s just a matter of concentration and time.

Concentration he didn’t have.

Time that was sliding away.

Suck it up.

Just. Suck. It. Up.

Lightning burned through the little bathroom window. Lane didn’t notice it, or the thunder that followed. He was staring at the computer screen, his fingers poised over the keyboard.

Shaking.

BROWN FIELD

MONDAY, 2:30 A.M.

GRACE AND STEELE SAT at the motor coach’s built-in dinette. Across from them, Faroe and Quintana conferred over a map of Baja California del Norte, orienting the journalist on All Saints School.

In the background the three operators checked firearms and ammunition, set the defaults on cell phones and pagers, and inventoried the equipment that had already been laid aboard the coach. Their movements were economical, quick, and relaxed. They slid through the small space between Steele’s wheelchair and the cupboards with the casual grace of the physically fit. Every time they passed, they looked at the map, noting anything new that had been added by Quintana or Faroe.

Grace was getting more and more nervous. Everyone was paying way too much attention to what everyone agreed was the most dangerous option.

Brute force.

She put her hand over the map. Both men glanced up at her.

“I know I should shut up and let you do your thing,” she said, “but I can’t. I have to be certain we haven’t overlooked some other way to get Lane free.”

Faroe put his hand over hers and curled their fingers together. “What angle do you think we’re missing?”

“Politics.”

“Whose?”

“Start with Hector,” she said, looking at Quintana.

“Hector smokes enough crack to put an elephant on the moon,” Faroe said.

Quintana lifted his thin shoulders in an elegant shrug. “May he smoke too much and die soon.”

“Someone else will take his place,” Faroe said.

“It is the curse of American drug habits feeding Mexico’s political corruption,” Quintana said.

“Somehow I can’t see Hector running for president,” Grace said. “And that’s the kind of politics I’m talking about.”

“Very few traficantes care about politics,” Quintana said, “except to understand who to buy in order to be left alone. Traficantes have no interest in a director of public works, or a provincial secretary of education. They are only interested in the police. As long as they control the police, they are safe.”

“Don’t forget the people who appoint men to direct the police,” Steele said.

Quintana sighed and looked like a man who wanted a cigarette. “Important appointments are made in Mexico City. That is why men like Hector Rivas own jet aircraft that depart weekly with millions of gringo dollars headed for the corrupt bosses in our national capital. There was a time when the national power structure was as addicted to those weekly payments as Hector is to his cocaine. That is how one president ended up in exile and his brother in prison.”

“But it’s better now?” Grace asked.

Quintana hesitated. “At the highest levels, it is better or at least more discreet. But the corrupt relationship between trafficking and law enforcement still remains. Hector Rivas is the boss. Four of his nephews participate in the daily activities of payoffs and corruption. Several nieces are said to be involved.”

“What about Hector’s own children?” she asked. “Does he have any?”

“Si. It is not well known, but they are in the United States with their mother. He loves them very much. We know he visits them often, but we don’t know how. No one sees him crossing the border.”

“They live in the U.S. so they can’t be taken hostage,” Grace said bitterly.

“It is a way of life,” Quintana said.

“It must be,” she said. “Carlos Calderon acted like it didn’t matter that his son was enrolled at All Saints.”

“Oh, it matters. Many million times it matters.” Quintana pursed his lips. “Think of the narco dollars as a river. The river flows out into the desert and disappears into the ground. But down there, beneath the surface, everything still flows, yes? Underground rivers.”

Grace nodded.

“Then, hundreds of miles away, the water surfaces again. Carlos Calderon is where the dollars reappear. He is not a traficante, he is a facilitator, one of the principal links between the traficantes and the politicos. That is politics.”

“Is it something we can prove?” Grace asked.

Faroe shook his head. “We don’t have time for courtroom proof.”

“But we have time to mount an attack that could get Lane shot?”

“Contingency planning only.” He released her hand, pushed back against the seat, and rubbed his face wearily.

“Can’t we leverage Carlos’s political need to have a clean public image into a way to help Lane?” she insisted.

Faroe reached for a cup of coffee and emptied it in three long swallows. “We don’t have enough time to convince anyone who matters.”

“But-”

“Your ex is trying to save his ass by handing a U.S. federal task force a gift-wrapped, high-level money-laundering case,” Faroe said impatiently. “Whatever he says about Calderon is tainted. Lane is hacking his way into the closest thing we might have as proof of Calderon’s complicity. The money trail. That’s what Hector wants, and he wants it enough to kill.”

Steele fiddled with the joystick on his wheelchair and closed in on a cup of coffee. “Why would Ted Franklin put that information on a teenager’s computer?”

“Because he didn’t trust his own accountants,” Faroe said. “But he still needed a record of money transfers, passwords, accounts, and the banks that hold them. All the hundreds-thousands-of details that go into money-laundering buttloads of money.”

“Where is the money due to surface?” Steele asked.

“As the funds to purchase the bank Ted peddled to Carlos, who peddled it to Jaime, who talked his uncle into buying his very own personal laundry,” Faroe said.

Grace looked at Quintana. “Do you know anything that would give you leverage over Hector?”

“Short of a sawed-off shotgun?” Faroe muttered.

Quintana smiled rather grimly and concentrated on Grace. “Do not waste your son’s life trying to reason with ROG. They kill because they can.”

“Listen to him, Grace,” Faroe said. “How many drug murders a year in Tijuana?” he asked Quintana.

“Perhaps five hundred, mas o menos. These are savages. You cannot bargain with them. You can only stop them with overwhelming force.”

“And before you think of going to Ted’s senatorial buddy,” Faroe said to Grace, “think about this. At the end of the twentieth century the U.S. investigated Mexican money laundering. Investigators posed as drug traffickers and implicated a number of Mexican bankers. A classic sting. The Mexican bankers were lured to Las Vegas and arrested. Want to guess what happened?”

“No. Yes. Tell me.”

“Within three days, the entire Mexican political establishment closed ranks. American drug agents in Mexico were threatened with arrest, or worse. Our ambassador was recalled. The American attorney general apologized publicly about our outrageous conduct.”

“Why?” Grace asked flatly.

It was Steele who answered. “Mexico treated the entire matter as an attack upon its national honor. The administration in Washington, in its effort to avoid upsetting the fragile Mexican financial structure, acquiesced. It takes no great genius to imagine what a well-placed and powerful man like Calderon could do if he felt seriously threatened by a U.S. senator.”