The Wrong Hostage (10 page)

M
ANHATTAN
S
UNDAY, 2:10 P.M.

D
WAYNE PICKED UP
S
TEELE’S
private hotline. “Dwayne here.”

“Faroe.”

“The Ambassador is talking to a CEO whose assets surpass that of all but a few nations. Shall I interrupt?”

“No. Turn loose the dogs on Theodore Franklin.”

“We already have. Steele was certain you would take the job.”

“Damn, I hate being predictable. What do you have?”

Dwayne clicked over the computer and looked at various summaries. “Do you want the long form or the bottom line?”

“Whichever gets me closer to Teddy-boy.”

“His hedge fund is in trouble. Big trouble.”

“Why?” Faroe asked.

“Bad investments.”

“If that was against the law, half the investment experts would be in jail.”

“That’s just part of the problem,” Dwayne said. “Think of a Ponzi scheme crossed with a classic money-laundering profile.”

“You’re giving me a headache.”

“Take two aspirin and call me when I care. Ted’s going down. Steele is already smacking his lips.”

“I’m trying to imagine that,” Faroe said. “It’s giving me a bigger headache.”

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.

A
LL
S
AINTS
S
CHOOL
S
UNDAY, 11:30 A.M.

C
ARLOS
C
ALDERÓN 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.

Calderón 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, Calderón went back to the bedroom and roughly hauled Lane into a sitting position.

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

“…uh?”

Calderón 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.”

Calderón 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,
” Calderón 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 Calderón 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.”

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

The guards were still outside, still sweating.

So was Calderón.

N
EAR THE BORDER
S
UNDAY, 12:30 P.M.

S
OUTH OF THE
C
ORONADO
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 Aeroméxico 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.”

“I see the autonomous part of it, but why temporary?”

“These places only exist as long as they stay under the global radar,” Faroe said. “Once the structured world of governments and corporations stumble across a TAZ, they set to work taming it or trying to turn a profit from it. Then the game is over. Any surviving misfits move on to the next TAZ and hope it lasts as long as they do.”

A Mexican customs officer wearing Ray-Bans and a brown uniform waved them through without inspection. They crossed the line into Mexico.

“Still Don Quixote,” Grace said softly, “the ever-hopeful romantic, looking for the next windmill, the one that he
will
defeat.”

Faroe smiled thinly. “You need romance more on this side of the line than you do back there in the sunshine world.”

Grace thought about what her life had been even a year ago. She’d been sad about the coming divorce, but safe.

Now I lay me down to sleep…

But she hadn’t said that childhood prayer in years, because she’d known she would awaken safe in her bed. Alone, but safe. If she ever spent the night in Mexico, she’d be awake praying.

That’s foolish. Most of Mexico is safer than the California barrio I grew up in
.

At least it had been, before Ted slid down whatever slippery slope he had.

I can’t trash him for that. I’ve started down my own morally greasy slide
.

Ted had been furious when he found out he wasn’t Lane’s father. He didn’t believe she hadn’t known when they were married. He didn’t want to believe her. It gave him the perfect excuse for ignoring the boy who called him Dad, just as he’d ignored Lane from the moment of his birth. It also gave Ted an alibi for all his affairs, which had started years before he knew about Lane. Ted was perfect, she was a deceitful slut, and that was that.

Grace didn’t want to think about how Faroe would react when she told him that he had a son. He’d look at her as a liar, a cheat, a thief who had stolen his son’s life.

Sooner or later, she’d destroy the fragile, necessary romantic illusions of the man who sat beside her in the car.

Maybe I won’t have to
.

Maybe pigs sing soprano
.

“What’s wrong?” Faroe asked. “You look pale.”

“Just worried.”

It was the truth, if not the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help me God
.

Faroe glanced in the rearview mirror. “You can stop worrying about our tail. The Jeep peeled off at the line. That pretty well confirms that they’re cops. FBI, maybe. Or DEA driving a vehicle they seized during a drug bust.”

“Why did they stop at the border?”

“Feds don’t like coming south. The Mexican government makes them leave their guns on the other side of the line. Not a healthy way to live.”

She frowned. “Doesn’t it bother you? Going unarmed?”

“I’m not a purist. In some situations I’ll carry. But guns have limited uses. Unless you’re willing and able to kill, a gun is just iron, lead, and smokeless powder.”

Grace drew a deep breath and let it out. “And you’re willing. And able.”

Faroe gave her a look out of cold green eyes, then went back to staring at the traffic ahead. Silence filled the car.

And filled it.

Pressing against the two people inside.

Faroe lifted one hand, then the other, from the wheel, flexing his fingers.

“There was a guy, a pretty good guy,” he said finally. “I thought he was a friend. I would have died thinking it except that I was wearing Kevlar underwear. Body armor.”

Grace’s breath broke. “Where were you?”

“In a filthy alley behind the Lisboa Casino in Macao. It started out as a drunken fistfight. At least I thought he was drunk.”

Faroe looked at his right hand.

Grace’s glance followed his. She saw a thin, livid scar that began on the back of his thumb and ran across to the base of his knuckles to his little finger. There were other scars, too, but this one was new.

“After he got me in a clinch, he pulled a knife out of an ankle sheath and said, ‘Sorry, Joe.’ That’s when I understood he wasn’t drunk. He was trying to slit my belly and dump my guts on the ground with the fish heads and the prawn fondue.”

“A friend,” she said, her voice raw.

“We were working an investigation for a major multinational electronics firm. Somebody was tipping off Malay pirates about shipments of high-definition color televisions. Turns out the snitch was my pal, and he thought I was about to figure it out. So I strangled him while he tried to cut off my hand. Then I went back and told Steele I was done.”

“That’s…” She swallowed hard and shook her head.

“Shit happens.”

“But you can’t blame yourself, not for that,” she said. “You were fighting for your life!”

“He was working for the paycheck, same as I was. But after that I didn’t want to work anymore for other people or politicians or corporations that could write off lives and black millions as a business expense. I took my winnings off the table and started rigging out the
TAZ
.”

“And now I’m dragging you back into it.” Her fingers laced together, squeezed. “I’m sorry.”

“Consider it a charity gig. We international hired guns do them all the time.”

“So you’re doing this as a special favor for me?”

He glanced at her for an instant, then back at the jumbled, free-form traffic in front of them. “I don’t have a hidden agenda, if that’s what you mean.”

Avoiding his sideways glance, Grace looked down at her hands clenched in her lap and thought again of what would happen when Faroe found out about Lane.

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” she said.

“Then what?”

“I can’t—don’t—won’t—”

The dashboard cell phone rang.

Grace could have kissed it.