Blue Knight (25 page)

Daniel sighed and walked over to the table and lowered himself into the empty chair. Olivia didn’t even look at him. She hadn’t removed the sunglasses. Jenny had her hand and was holding it in her lap, sandwiched between both of hers.

Jenny smiled at Daniel. “I couldn’t leave you sitting there alone.”

Daniel felt rather than saw Olivia’s glance at him.
You give to get back
. He heard her voice in his mind and for a second he hated it. He didn’t want all that touchy-feely mumbo jumbo shit in his mind, cluttering up clear thinking.

Too late.
The cynical whisper breezed like distant laughter.

Then, because he knew Olivia was watching him, he shrugged and looked at Jenny. “Thank you,” he told her. “It was feeling chilly out there in that vacuum, I admit.”

Jenny’s smile back was incandescent. Warmth bathed him. He felt like he was standing inside a beautiful golden sunrise at the start of a knockout June day. He was left blinking at the impact.

Jenny turned to Oberstz and spoke swift, fluent German, something about lunch and Olivia. Daniel didn’t know enough German to put it together, but knew it was trivia. Chatter. He let his attention wander from the conversation.

Olivia seemed to be following along just fine, which left him on his own. He leaned back a little so they knew he was not participating.

There was something happening in the foyer and he leaned back a little bit more to get a better view.

He saw a man hoist a very professional-looking outside TV camera onto his shoulder and put his eye to the viewfinder to test it. Another was testing the light on the top of it. A third was setting up a mobile microphone and boom rig hanging off his shoulder.

A fourth was threading a microphone into Ibarra’s shirt.

Ibarra was talking to a man in a suit and tie. The man was standing in profile to Daniel, but even so, he looked familiar.

“Shit,” Daniel said and sat forward. He put his hands flat on the table. “Don’t move, anyone.”

His heart was racing. Thoughts tumbling, but not in the same way they had just been chasing their tail about Olivia. This was cold, hard, professional data.

It was here. The time was really here.

Everyone was looking at him.

“What is wrong, Daniel?” Jenny asked.

Olivia took off her glasses. “It’s happened, hasn’t it?” she said. “The shit is about to hit the fan.”

Daniel nodded, moving his head just a little.

Hans looked at Olivia sharply. “You ‘ave a better grasp of this situation than I, then.”

Daniel pressed his palms together. “Do you have the gun with you?” he asked Olivia hopefully.

She shook her head ruefully. “I hid it just as you did.”

“Gun?” Hans squeaked.

“I knew it,” Jenny said, looking from Daniel to Olivia. There was a sparkle of tears in her eyes. “I knew you two had something going on.”

The murmuring from the foyer was coming closer. Daniel leaned back enough to sight around Hans’ ample back. The film crew and Ibarra and his guards were moving down the long foyer now. His time to develop a plan of action was running out.

Hans tapped Daniel’s shoulder. “What zhit will it be, when it ‘its?” he asked. He was calm now he’d had time to absorb the shock. As one of the more senior diplomats here, he was trying to rally himself and figure out how to manage the situation.

“There’s nothing you can do about this, Hans,” Daniel assured him. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know what Ernesto told them. He could have given them just one American. He could have spent all night selling us all out. We just have to strap in and hang on, because it’s going to be very ugly indeed.”

“Daniel…” Olivia breathed.

He let himself look at her. One glance. The glance lingered as the guards marched into the bar and their tramping shook the glasses in their overhead brass runners, while everyone else in the bar who hadn’t got the warning Daniel had given his table sat up with shocked gasps. When they saw the film crew and Ibarra’s dress uniform, the gasps turned to fear, for they sensed that everything was about to change.

Olivia kept her wonderful eyes on him, instead. He saw her fear there. Her sadness.

It tore at him. He wanted to climb over the table and pull her into his arms and promise her that nothing would ever touch her again and then spend the rest of his life working to make sure that nothing ever would.

She shook her head. “No,” she said softly, just loud enough for him to hear. “Don’t do anything, Daniel. Please.”

It was only then he realized that he was coiled and tensed. Ready to spring. Ready to take action.

Hans glanced at him. “They will kill you, boy. Keep your seat.”

Daniel made himself relax.

The interviewer was circling the room, his eyes widening as he checked off names on a list on his clipboards. “Lars Nass, Hans Oberstz, Olivia Davenport, Jennifer Egstrom. Jesus, Mary mother of Christ, they’re all here. Daniel Castle, Erin Johnston—”

The list went on.

Everyone. They had everyone. Ernesto had a phenomenal memory for names and faces, being a diplomat, which they must have hooked up to the landing papers and diplomatic red tape to cross-match IDs. It would have taken them all night and most of the day.

All it needed was one confirmed American among them.

Fear was a huge lump sitting like an anvil on his chest. Daniel watched the reporter move around the room, followed by the camera crew, who were filming everything. Then he noticed the big radio pack attached to the camera and his heart hit the bottom of his stomach. This was going out live.

He focused on the reporter and realized where he had seen him before. It was Ciro Solos, the Mexican investigative reporter who had won international awards for his news coverage. He worked for MNTV, the Mexican national media network.

A live broadcast, with only Ibarra present, meant that something very bad was going to happen and Serrano wanted to be far enough away from it that if it went wrong, later he could wash his hands of it and pretend he had nothing to do with it. Ibarra would get to wear the blame for all of it.

Daniel pushed his chair out a little farther from the table, giving himself room to move if he needed it. The sick feeling wasn’t going away, though. He had no gun and no allies in the room. There were five officers with Sig Sauer pistols and thirty-two guards carrying HK21 machine guns. There were twenty-five civilians and one of them—god help him—one of them was Olivia.

What the hell was he going to do?

* * * * *

Minnie burst into the potting shed, slamming the door up against the back of Nick’s wooden chair with an impact that made everyone in the room except Nick wince.

Nick reached around the chair to steady Minnie, who was hanging onto the door, catching her breath.

“You. Better. Come. See.”

“Minnie, we’re conducting a meeting—” Duardo began.

Nick dropped his pen and stood up. “She’s gone gray!” he said, picking Minnie up around the waist as she sagged tiredly over.

“Waste bin!” one of the officers called helpfully.

Duardo, stuck behind the cramped table, reached out with his long leg and kicked the metal garbage tin toward Nick, who propped Minnie’s head over it.

She retched desperately into it.

Duardo rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling, sitting ramrod straight and stiff, while the officers chuckled.

There was another set of pounding footsteps along the covered breezeway. Then Calli burst into the room, her face pink from running. “Now! Come now!” She looked around the room. “Ibarra has the UN diplomats as hostages on live television right now and it doesn’t look good.” She glared at them as they stared at her. “Move your asses, gentlemen!”

They moved. There was a scramble for the door and they slid past Calli, murmuring apologies and pleasantries as they did so.

Duardo came last, after plucking a limp Minnie from Nick’s hands and hoisting her into his arms. Minnie lay with her head against Duardo’s shoulder, white and drained. “I hate being fucking pregnant,” she groaned. “What about the garbage can?”

“You’ll get used to it,” Duardo assured her and kissed her forehead. “We’ll clean up later. This is more important.”

Nick closed the door of the room and locked it, pocketing the key. “We’ll get back to this. You’re right, we need to see what Serrano is up to. This doesn’t sound good.”

“It doesn’t look good at all. Those people look terrified, Nick.”

“If they have been there for nearly five weeks, then they are most certainly terrified,” Duardo said over his shoulder as they turned in to the house proper. “They can be nothing else. Serrano knows human psychology too well to let them linger there and not play games with them. If this is going out live and he is not there himself, it is not going to be pleasant.”

“Plausible deniability?” Calli asked.

Nick nodded. “We should be ready, Duardo, just in case.” They moved through the front foyer, heading for the formal lounge room where there was a big screen television from where they could watch the broadcast.

“Just in case of what?” Calli asked reasonably. “You have no idea what’s going to happen.”

“That is the problem with Serrano,” Duardo said. “His mind doesn’t work under the same mental laws us ours, which makes him unpredictable.”

“Doesn’t that also make him dangerous and difficult to kill?” Calli asked in an undertone as they stepped into the room where everyone else was assembled.

Nick sighed. “Unfortunately, yes.”

* * * * *

Solos and Ibarra stood in the middle of the bar and the big light fell on the pair of them. Daniel moved a few inches to the left so that Hans’ shadow fell on his face. That would keep his features obscured in any shots the camera caught him in.

Solos was counted down by his network director and cut in. He gave a polished introduction and said that he was standing in some undisclosed location and that he had been invited here by the current Vistarian governing body.

That tightened Daniel’s gut. The delicate phrasing, given the people sitting around him, meant that Solos was just as aware of the political ramifications and potential crisis happening in this room as they all were. It seemed that Ibarra and Serrano were the only ignorant ones.

Or were they? Were they trying to commit some complicated form of political suicide and go out in a blaze of historical glory?

Daniel discounted that immediately. Serrano simply didn’t have that sort of panache. He was a third-rate thug. The only reason he had got this far was because he had been able to lean on the minds of brilliant strategists like Torres, Zalaya and even Ibarra for a while.

But Ibarra was crumbling fast. If he was about to do what Daniel thought he was going to do, Ibarra had lost what little original thought he’d once been capable of.

Solos finished his preamble and introduced Ibarra, who stepped up in front of the camera. Alone.

Daniel clenched his hands together. Solos had stepped aside. He wasn’t even going to interview him. Ibarra had full control of the camera.

This was very bad.

“I am speaking to you on behalf of the glorious nation of Vistaria and the government that leads it.”

Daniel blinked. Ibarra was speaking formal Spanish, but he had named the country informally, Vistaria. The full name of Vistaria was
La Vistaria de Escobedo
. Daniel hid his smile. The
insurrectos
, it seemed, would do a complete whitewash if they ever came to full power. Every trace of the previous power-holders would be wiped from existence, including their name.

Ibarra didn’t take long to get to his grievance. The next breath, in fact. He held up a long, slender finger toward the camera. “The refusal of the United Nations to extend full diplomatic status to my beloved country is causing hardships and difficulties for our wives. Our children. Our loved ones. We cannot let this insult pass. Third world nations that have less stable governments than ours can sit at your political tables and pass laws. Why can we not?”

Ibarra spread his hands wide, palms up. The reasonable man. “We tried simple negotiations. You would not listen.”

Daniel looked over at Solos. The man looked worried. He was glancing down at his clipboard. This clearly wasn’t what they had promised him would go down. They had lured him and his team here under false promises. Of course they had—Solos would not be here for this sort of circus, otherwise.

The journalist reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. The alarm was going up now. Would they cut the feed? Daniel surely hoped so. It was one way to prevent this disaster from going ahead and Solos would know that. Take away the feed and you took away Ibarra’s microphone, too.

Ibarra shrugged, a Latinate expression that no one else in the world seemed to be able to pull off. “We tried a more rugged form of persuasion and still you would not deal with us.”

He means blackmail. Holding us hostage didn’t work
, Daniel thought. But that also wasn’t something that Ibarra wanted to say on national television. Or was it international television? MNTV had contra deals with US and Canadian networks, internet stations and some Asian Pacific-rim nations including China and Europe. Just how far was this broadcast being sent?

Daniel felt sweat pop on his temples as he realized that it didn’t matter. The studio would be taping it anyway. If it was dramatic enough—and Ibarra was building up to something big, so that was pretty much in the bag—then even if the international networks weren’t interrupting their regular broadcasts, they’d find time to run this later, sure as sheep frolic in the meadow.

Solos had to cut that feed. Now. It would be playing into Ibarra’s hands if the cameras kept rolling.

Solos was turning away, tapping on his phone with his thumb, bringing it up to his ear slowly, so he wouldn’t alarm Ibarra.

Ibarra lifted up his hands toward the camera, once again the reasonable man. “What are we to do?” he asked. “We have run out of options.”

Daniel didn’t like that phrasing. But then, this was always going to be the no-win scenario.

Ibarra must have given that phrase to the guards beforehand as a cue, because Daniel didn’t see him give any physical signal. Two guards stepped around their table and picked up Jenny’s arms and hoisted her out of her seat and almost off her feet. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened.