The Wrong Hostage (17 page)

T
IJUANA
S
UNDAY EVENING

G
RACE LAY SPRAWLED ACROSS
Faroe’s chest, listening to the faint ticking of the old-fashioned analog clock on the bedside table. Sultry wind billowed the heavy curtains. The sound of the restless ocean slid between the insistent honking of vehicles looking for space where there wasn’t any.

Like her, looking for time when there wasn’t any.

“Do you remember when we took one look at each other and just, well, dove in?” Grace asked softly.

“I remember the smell of the match you used to light a cigarette afterward.”

“It was a joint. I was tired of being a good girl.”

“Yeah, I remember that too.” Faroe smiled. “I should have busted your naked ass right there. Maybe we’d have had a better chance of making it stick if we both were convicted felons.”

She almost laughed, almost cried, and wished she could make time run backward.

“One first dance, one last dance,” she said in a low voice. “I guess that’s more than most people get.”

He wanted to ask what that meant, but didn’t. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

She pushed away from the shelter of his arm around her shoulders. Then she sat up and looked at him, memorizing the moment and the
man, savoring the taste of him in her mouth and the scent of him sliding into her with every breath.

In the faint light from the city, Faroe saw the fullness of Grace’s naked body. He reached out to trace the line of her collarbone, then the curve of a breast. It wasn’t a demanding touch. He simply enjoyed feeling the heat and weight of her on his palm, the difference between male and female.

“What happened after they hauled you away?” she asked softly.

He rose to one elbow, caught a loose strand of her hair, and pushed it aside so that he could see her eyes, her expression.

Dark, withdrawing, waiting to speak the words she was so afraid of giving him.

“That was a long time ago,” he said. “Do you really want to live through it again?”

“Want to? No. But we need to. We can’t understand how we got here tonight unless we understand where we were sixteen years ago. I was a girl whose IQ and drive to get out of the barrio fast-tracked me through every school I ever went to. I passed the bar exam when most twenty-one-year-olds were planning how many ways there were to get drunk, high, and laid.”

“A lot of them still are doing the same thing.”

“Well, one day I looked around and decided I wanted to be like they were. So I told my boyfriend that I needed space. Not a whole lot. Just a week. I didn’t want to be fast-tracked into marriage the same way I’d gone through my childhood.”

“Another thing we have in common,” Faroe said. “An unusual childhood. My father was almost old enough to be my grandfather. Not that he was frail. Far from it. He was just a little…crazy. Too much weed, maybe.”

Faroe traced a fingertip around Grace’s shadowy smile.

“Tell me more,” she said. “You never talked about yourself.”

“Neither did you.”

“I guess we didn’t talk much the first time, did we?”

He smiled and kissed the hand that was stroking his cheek. “We were too young and too hot to know any better.”

“We’re older now. Talk to me.”

“When other kids played baseball, my father took me out in the desert
and taught me about tracking, shooting, hiking, camping, seasons of rain and sun and dust and hail, bandits and wetbacks, and never really trusting anybody but yourself.”

“Why was he such a loner?” she asked.

“When he was young, he ran drugs. Maybe he still did when he was older. I never asked, but I don’t think so. He hated what marijuana had become, the change from a playful girl to a ball-busting bitch running a billion-dollar business. He grew his own, smoked it, and watched the seasons change.”

“Your mother?”

“Left him shortly after I was born. Left me, too, I guess. I don’t remember. None of the women after her stayed long. It was just Dad and me.”

“No wonder you assumed I’d set you up for a fall,” Grace said. “Women have been disappointing you all your life.”

Faroe shrugged. “I’m not the only kid who was ever dropped on a doorstep. Things happen. You survive and learn and walk on.”

“And after they dragged you off to prison?” she asked. “What happened then?”

He swung his legs off the bed and sat up, turning so that he could face her. “I spent a night in the lockup. The Department of Justice wanted to make an example of me, show how tough they were on civil rights violators. The next day a judge released me on my own recognizance. You weren’t around when I went back to my apartment.”

“You didn’t want me anymore. You made it clear in the kind of gutter Spanish I hadn’t heard since I left Santa Ana.”

He would have smiled, but the memory was too painful. “You didn’t want to be around me. Before my arrest, I believed in the DEA the same way you did in the law. Complete, unquestioning faith. The DEA was the family I never had. After the arrest…”

“You felt betrayed and shaken and furious, like I did when I realized that the law I loved so much couldn’t save the son I loved more than anything else.”

“Yeah.” Faroe’s smile was a cold curve of light. “Guess I was really young for my age.”

“Belief isn’t a bad thing.”

He shrugged.

Wind sighed through the room, smelling of past and present, ocean and badly tuned engines.

“What did you do after the arrest?” she asked. “Did they offer a plea bargain?”

“Don’t they always?”

“Six months in prison isn’t much of a bargain,” she said. “I’ve seen drug dealers and rapists get off with less.”

“Oh, the U.S. Attorney offered better than six months.”

“What happened?”

“A month after the arrest, I told the U.S. Attorney to take his plea bargain and shove it. I pled guilty to a single count because it was the quickest way to get the mess in my rearview mirror.”

She waited, barely breathing.

“I did my six months in the federal day-care camp,” Faroe said neutrally, “came out the front gate, and didn’t look back. There was nothing back there I wanted.” He touched her cheek. “At least, that’s what I told myself. I signed up with St. Kilda Consulting and saw every part of the world that had shadows.”

“Maybe you should have looked back. Did you ever think of that?”

He stood up and went to the window. She could see him outlined against the night sky, echoes of past anger and pride in his posture.

“Did you look back?” he asked softly.

Silence. A long, ragged sigh.

“No,” she said in a low voice. “You made me out of control, wild, desperate for things a good girl couldn’t even imagine.”

“You could, and did. I wasn’t alone in that bed.”

“That’s what really scared me. When I saw you hauled off in handcuffs, reality came crashing in.”

“Which reality?”

“I was a young woman whose amazing career was the result of years of clawing and striving and sacrifice—my own, my dead parents’, my dead grandmother’s. All of those lives had been devoted to one thing and only one thing: giving me what was needed so that I could leave the violence of the gutter behind.” Her hands clenched and a tear left a gleaming trail
down one cheek.

“Go on,” he said.

“There’s nowhere to go but where I did. Was I supposed to turn my back on three generations of sacrifice because I’d met an outlaw who gave me the best sex of my life?”

“That’s what really confused me,” he said.

“What?”

“You shouldn’t have been in my bed, but there you were. If you were working for the opposition, it made sense.”

“Only to you,” she shot back. “It made no sense at all to me. When they were dragging you off, you looked right into the lens of a television camera with such rage that the cameraman nearly fell down running away. Even with your hands cuffed behind your back, you scared him. And me. I ran and never looked back. Except…”

“Except?”

“You say I haunted you.”

“You did.”

“It went both ways. At night I’d dream and I’d wake up abandoned, crying. If Ted was there, I’d just say it was old nightmares left over from the day I walked in and found my family murdered. It was halfway true.”

“Only half?”

“Maybe less,” she whispered. “But you hated me. I could no more have you than I could bring my family back to life. Love was a bait-and-switch game, and I wasn’t going to play it anymore. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t survive.”

Faroe caught the second tear before it reached her cheekbone.

“I went back to Ted, told him I didn’t need any more space. A week later he hustled me to a JP. The week after that, I missed my period.”

Faroe tried to breathe, tried to speak, but there was a fist in his throat he couldn’t get around.

“Since birth control pills made me hurl,” Grace said evenly, “and Ted was careless with condoms, I figured there was a much better chance that he was the father than you. And once I held Lane, it didn’t matter. I took one look at his wrinkled face and tiny fists, and I fell hopelessly in love.”

Breathing was all Faroe could manage.

And listening.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you speechless,” she said.

He could feel his heart beating in his chest. The blood roared in his ears. He began to breathe again. “Finish it.”

“You do the math.”

He just watched her with green eyes that looked dark, feral.

Grace drew the sheet across her breasts, suddenly aware of her own nakedness and vulnerability. “The age-old male problem—how do I know the bitch is telling the truth?”

Though he didn’t move or speak, the pulse at his throat beat hard and fast. His expression was closed, blank, bleak.

“A year later I wanted more children,” Grace said. “Ted didn’t, but he sure did like sex better without a condom. Lane turned five, and no siblings in sight. By then I’d nagged enough that Ted went to a doctor to shut me up. He discovered he was a few sperm short of meaningful fertility. We were very, very lucky to have conceived once. It must have eaten at Ted, because after a few more months he quietly took a swab of his mouth, and of Lane’s, and sent both to a DNA lab.”

She stared at Faroe through eyes blind with tears.

“Say it.” Faroe’s voice was as grim, his whole body vibrating with suppressed emotions.

“Lane, a sweet, beautiful boy who called Ted Daddy and followed him every chance he got; Lane, the innocent who idolized his daddy even though Ted barely bothered to notice him…” Her voice frayed.

She drew a deep breath and slid off the bed, pulling the sheet with her, wrapping it tight around her. She walked to the bathroom door, opened it, and snapped on the lights. In the white glare, her face was streaked with tears. She turned and looked at the man who seemed to cast shadows even in darkness.

“Say it.”

“Lane is your son.”

M
ANHATTAN
S
UNDAY NIGHT

“W
ELL?”
S
TEELE DEMANDED.

Dwayne typed on the computer keyboard quickly, then touched the screen with his finger. Documents flew by in a kaleidoscope of information. Narrow-eyed, he watched them, then touched the screen again.

“No calls from any number registered to Ted Franklin.”

Steele made a frustrated sound. “Apparently he’s smarter than his previous actions would suggest.”

“That wouldn’t be hard.”

“This is an inconvenient time for Mr. Franklin to improve his criminal IQ.”

Dwayne bent over the computer again. More documents flew by. He tapped on several, read, shook his head.

“What?” Steele asked.

“A lot of nothing. The team watching the La Jolla house is suffering terminal boredom. No one coming or going. The hostiles watching the house are equally bored and equally determined. Gotta give it to those feds. They’re real bulldogs. Some wild-card Mexicans cruised the place. No point in following them, because if they’re sniffing around the judge’s house, they’re as lost as we are.”

“Telephone? E-mail?”

“One of our people took the judge’s computer and hacked it. So far, nothing helpful and no e-mail but the business kind. No physical mail but
bills. No phone calls to the house except from people looking for Ted. No point in following up on them, because they know exactly what we do about his whereabouts. Zip. Zap. Zero. Did I mention zilch?”

“Keep everyone in place. Ted might run for familiar ground.”

Dwayne nodded and continued his update. “The team watching the lawyer’s house hasn’t learned anything except how the rich and ridiculous shop. The team that black-bagged the lawyer’s office has an eye-popping list of clients, but none of them connect in any obvious way to our Teddy-boy.”

“Try for a subtle way.”

“I’ll need hundreds of people to backtrack the clients and stake them out.”

“Pick the top five prospects. Follow them.”

“Pick them how?”

“That’s why I hired you. For some things, your instincts are better than mine. Pick five. And get Faroe on the phone. We need to make some plans for the rendezvous.”

“I tried. He’s not answering his phone.”

“Try again.”

T
IJUANA
S
UNDAY EVENING

G
RACE WATCHED
F
AROE WITH
the kind of intensity he often used on her. In the three minutes since he’d backed her into a corner and dragged the truth about Lane out of her, Faroe had calmly pulled on his clothes, gathered up his cell phone, adjusted something on the unit, and put it in his pocket. Then he’d turned his back on her and stared out the window.

He hadn’t said a word.

Not one.

His cell phone rang. He ignored it.

“Say something,” she said finally.

“You don’t want to hear what I’m thinking.”

“Try me.”

“How would you feel if I’d shown up with a teenager, introduced you, and said, ‘Oh, by the way, this is yours. Little souvenir of three days of jungle sex and a bad rubber.’”

“You look at Lane and see a
bad rubber
?”

Faroe spun toward her. The raw fury on his face was the same as she’d seen sixteen years ago. His voice was deadly calm. It made the hair on her neck lift.

“I look at Lane and see a son I never had the chance to know,” Faroe said in a voice that was as quiet as his eyes were wild. “I look at Lane and see a son who never knew his biological father. I look at Lane and see fifteen years gone, fifteen years I’ll never get back. Neither will he. Then I look at
you.”

Instinctively Grace backed away from Faroe.

He matched her step for step, inch for inch.

She’d known he would be angry. She hadn’t known how it would feel to be the focus of that rage.

“I look at you,” he said softly, “and see an ambitious female who used a stud for sex and a billionaire to raise her bastard.”

“I didn’t know you were Lane’s biological father!”

A wall hit Grace’s back. This time she didn’t welcome it. She ignored the tears blurring her vision and lifted her chin as Faroe closed the last inches between them.

“You didn’t care,” he said. “You had a baby and a billionaire and a fast-track career and you just didn’t give a damn about the dumb sperm donor.”

“The dumb sperm donor threw me out of his life, remember? I didn’t know, Joe. I swear it!”

“The dumb sperm donor remembers that you could have found out at any time and you damn sure have known for, what, ten years now? And you still didn’t tell me.”

“By the time I tracked you down ten years ago, you were in Belize, well out of cell range.”

Faroe looked at Grace’s bitter black eyes and trembling lips. Part of him admired her for standing up to him when most men would have cut and run.

But most of him was too furious to care.

“How did you know where I was?” he asked calmly.

Too calmly.

“I used my connections to track you to St. Kilda Consulting. I even got your cell phone number, the really private one only Steele has.”

“I told Steele he should change those numbers more often.”

“I didn’t call you,” she said roughly. “You were undercover in hostile territory, your life at risk every second. Just imagine how you’d have felt if a woman you hated told you that she’d had your biological son, who by the way was legally the son of a man you’d never met.”

Faroe didn’t say anything.

“Speechless again?” she said. “A rare double.”

“Don’t push me, Grace.”

“I’m the one with my back to the wall,” she said through her teeth.

There was a tight silence.

Then he stepped away, giving her room to breathe.

“Besides,” Faroe said neutrally, “Ted was much better father material, right? Rich, successful, socially acceptable, and best of all—not an ex-con.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Which part?”

“The important one. Ted should have been good father material, but he wasn’t. Even before he discovered that there wasn’t a genetic connection between himself and Lane, Ted didn’t care about his son. Ted was too busy with his hedge fund to take time for a baby, a toddler, a young boy, a—”

“Wife?” Faroe cut in.

“The wife was too busy to care about the husband. Balancing a demanding career and a baby took everything I had.”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

“You don’t have one. If you did, you’d be more worried about Lane than any other part of this mess.”

The smile he gave her was as cold as his eyes. He turned and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” she asked. “You promised that—”

“I need some space,” he cut in. “A whole fucking universe of it.”

The door shut softly behind him.

She wished he’d slammed it.

Her shoulders slumped against the wall.

I’m sorry, Lane
.

No matter what I do, it’s wrong
.

When her fingers went slack, the sheet slid to the floor, leaving her naked again.

But Lane shouldn’t have to be the one to pay for it
.

Grimly Grace kicked aside the sheet and went to the shower. She didn’t have much time to pull herself together before she met Hector Rivas Osuna, the Butcher of Tijuana.

Faroe might have walked out on her, but he’d given her some good advice.

Lie, Your Honor. Hector believes you’re his ticket to your husband
.