The Wrong Hostage (27 page)

S
AN
Y
SIDRO
M
ONDAY, 7:15 A.M.

F
AROE AND
G
RACE CROSSED
back over the line into San Ysidro and headed west on Dairy Mart Road into the marshy bottomlands of the Tía Juana River. The silence in the car didn’t bother either of them.

Then she sat up straight and shook her head.

“What?” Faroe asked.

“I’m sorry. But I’ve got to say it. What’s to prevent Beltrán from keeping the diamonds you gave him and blowing you off?”

“Greed,” Faroe said. “Beltrán wants the rest of the payoff. He doesn’t get it unless he delivers this miner.”

“He could double-cross you.”

“Beltrán?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not a fool, Grace. Neither is Beltrán.” Faroe smiled coldly. “He likes his brains right where they are, in his skull. And he wants Hector dead so bad he sweats thinking about it.”

“Are you really going to kill Hector for Beltrán?”

“Not unless I have to.” Faroe looked in the mirrors automatically. Nobody in sight.

Time to start worrying.

“But knowing how that smart son of a bitch Hector works,” Faroe added, “he probably won’t leave me any choice. That’s one hard, efficient dude.”

“You sound like you admire men like Hector.”

“Admire? No. They’re filth with a swagger. But respect? That’s a different matter. Hector and men like him are modern warlords. They grab survival with both hands and use it to club any rival to bloody surrender.”

Grace grimaced.

“Civilization is all about not having to confront warlords on an everyday basis,” Faroe said. “But just beneath the pretty veneer, survival is always about the strong and the quick and the mean.”

She wanted to argue.

She couldn’t. She’d seen too much in the past day that supported his words.

A mile north of the spot where the stinking little channel of Río Tía Juana flushed into the ocean, Faroe turned into a small, decently maintained trailer park that had far more vacancies than rentals. The fencing that surrounded the park had gaps you could ride an elephant through.

“What’s this?” Grace said.

“A trailer park.”

She gave him a sideways look that burned.

“That St. Kilda owns,” Faroe added, smiling.

“It doesn’t look like a profit center.”

“It isn’t. The previous owner went bankrupt because the nightly traffic in smugglers and illegals scared the tenants. The few people who live here now make it a religion not to notice anything. Period.”

“Convenient.”

“St. Kilda owns a lot of small, shabby properties like this around the world in places where borders meet, either formal national borders or the less formal ones on the slip face between chaos and civilization.”

“Today this is a command post,” she said, looking around, “and tomorrow a field that needs mowing.”

“Actually, the illegals keep it pretty well flattened.”

“You could repair the fence.”

“We do, like clockwork.”

Grace looked at the ragged fence. Her mouth flattened. “Are you sure this is southern California, U.S. of A.?”

“Dead sure.”

Quintana Blanco’s retread Brinks truck and two other motor coaches were parked close to Steele’s coach.

The helicopter crouched in one corner of the park. Next to it was a ground-start unit whose batteries were being recharged by extension cords from the RV utility stands.

“Guests?” Grace asked tightly.

“Command and control in Steele’s coach, armory and bunkhouse for the standby crew in one of the new coaches and intell in the second.”

“Intell?”

“I asked for somebody who can monitor the juicier frequencies on either side of the border,
federales
and state judicial police down south along with some of the freqs that I guessed are being used by ROG’s operators, FBI, DEA, and border guards on this side.”

“You know the radio frequencies that ROG uses?”

Faroe parked and shut off the Mercedes. “I described the equipment I saw in the safe house, and St. Kilda’s tech figured out what bandwidth they use.”

“Don’t they scramble it or something? The FBI certainly does.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t stop guys like Randy, it just slows them down. And even scrambled traffic can be useful. It tells us there’s something going on, even if we don’t know exactly what it is.”

“All this in the hands of a bunch of private operators,” she said. “It ought to bother me.”

“But it doesn’t, does it? Not anymore.”

“I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“Let me know when you figure it out.” Faroe draped his hands over the wheel and stretched his shoulders. “And while you’re figuring, keep in mind that St. Kilda Consulting isn’t at war with the forces of civic order. It’s just that we can do things governments can’t or won’t do for reasons that those governments just as soon the world never knew.”

“You mean like my ex making a farce of law enforcement and justice?”

“Yeah.”

She sighed. “Is it really that simple?”

“It’s always that simple and never that easy. Why do you think that the
United States has such a difficult time shutting down the narcotics traffic?”

“According to the head case I had in my courtroom a few months ago,” she said, “it’s because the CIA and the FBI make part of their annual budget by pushing heroin and crack in ghettos and barrios.”

“Was he wearing a tinfoil helmet to keep aliens out of what passed for his mind?”

“She, actually. And she wasn’t, but it would have been an improvement over her hair.”

Faroe shook his head. “Crooks and politicians love conspiracy theories—it keeps the masses entertained and their eyes off the bottom line.”

“Which is?”

“If we shut down the
traficantes,
we take a huge risk of turning Mexico into a failed state, like Afghanistan or Somalia, except those countries are half a world away and we share one hell of a long border with Mexico.”

“Speaking of tinfoil helmets and wild ideas…” Grace muttered.

“I wish tinfoil would get the job done. I’ve seen reputable estimates that more than half of Mexico’s economy depends, directly or indirectly, on drug money. It’s the great multiplier, creating jobs at home because there’s money to spend. Without the money from illegal workers up north and drug money everywhere, Mexico’s economy would implode. A failed economy equals a failed state.”

Faroe turned and looked at Grace, trying to see what she was thinking. Whatever it was, she was thinking hard.

“Shutting down the smugglers,” he said, “would lead to the collapse of the Mexican banking system, the Mexican political system, the Mexican economy. The dudes who run things in Washington, D.C., understand macropolitics, and that is macropolitics to the third or fourth power.”

She let out a long breath. “Keep talking. This time I’m listening. Really listening.”

“Think about the fact that the Clinton administration shut down two different investigations that led straight into the heart of the Mexican banking system. One was a banking and money-laundering investigation that implicated about a dozen of Mexico’s biggest banks. The other was a long-term effort to document the ties between Mexico’s power elite and
the drug lords.”

Grace thought about Calderón. “What did Mexico do?”

“It threatened to start shooting American investigators as invading terrorists unless the U.S. backed off. We backed off real quick. All the presidents since then have made the same choices, only a lot more quietly. Nobody, north or south, is going to derail Mexico’s economy, and every politician you put a microphone in front of is dead set against drugs and indignant as hell if anybody suggests otherwise. You’ve seen Hector’s money rooms. You do the math.”

“In the courtroom it’s called ‘complicit behavior.’” She stared at Faroe. “You aren’t the complicit type.”

“I’m not a government with a government’s problems. Neither is St. Kilda Consulting. That’s why we don’t have to call failure a ‘deferred success.’”

She laughed softly, raggedly, drew a broken breath or two, and forced herself not to look at her watch.

“Ready?” Faroe asked quietly.

“As in ‘Ready or not, here it comes’?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m working on it.”

“That’s what I love about you,” Faroe said.

“Work ethic?”

“Guts.”

“Guts?” She gave a crack of laughter. “I’m so scared my hands shake if I don’t clench them together.”

“And yet you keep on doing what has to be done. That,
amada,
is my definition of guts.”

S
AN
Y
SIDRO
M
ONDAY, 7:26 A.M.

T
HE MOTOR COACH WAS
more crowded than it had been before dawn. Quintana Blanco was seated at the dinette table, speaking in low, sharp Spanish on a cell phone and taking notes on a legal pad. Harley was seated across the table from him, talking quietly into another phone.

A new operator had taken over in the cramped little kitchen. He was building a dozen sandwiches on a long counter that looked like a short-order cook’s prep table. The new op had the lean, weather-burned look of a hunter or a cowboy. His gaunt face was buffered with a salt-and-pepper beard. He sliced open packages of meat, cheese, and bread with a double-edged dagger. He had the same focus and economy of motion that the other operators did.

“Do you have any clumsy people in St. Kilda?” she asked Faroe.

“Clumsy ops don’t last long enough to get disenchanted with government service, drop out, and join St. Kilda.”

Steele was conducting a briefing in the rear salon of the motor coach. Three more operators had squeezed into the small space. Two were strapping, muscular men whose lats and pecs bulged beneath snug T-shirts. The third was a woman in her late twenties with long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. The big men deferred to her without hesitation.

She was the one being briefed by Steele.

When she glanced up and saw Faroe, for an instant her face softened. Then the moment passed and her look of calm competence returned.

“Hey, Joe, how’s it?” she said quietly.

“Hi, Mary,” Faroe said. “Glad you’re here. You, too, Ciro, Jake. Grace, this is Mary. She’s the coldest sniper in the can. Ciro and Jake here spot for her and provide cover.”

Mary rolled her eyes. “From you, I suppose that’s a compliment.”

She offered Grace a handshake that was strong and at the same time restrained.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever met a sniper, male or female,” Grace said.

“Maybe you’ve never needed one before.” Mary’s smile was as confident and gentle as her handshake.

Steele said, “Joe forgot to mention that Mary is also an honors graduate from UCLA, physics and literature, and she quit the U.S. Army when they wouldn’t let her train in her chosen specialty.”

“Sniping is an old boys’ club gig,” Mary said.

“The bench used to be,” Grace said.

“Step by step,” Mary said, grinning. “We’ll get ’em yet.”

“Go, sistah!”

This time it was Faroe who rolled his eyes.

Steele folded the topographic map he’d used in the briefing. “News?”

“Nothing since I called you,” Faroe said. “We’re still waiting for Beltrán to call.”

“He gave that thug a third of a million dollars in diamonds,” Grace said, “with the promise of twice that amount if and when.”

“Don’t worry,” Faroe said. “It won’t show up on your bill.”

“That wasn’t what I was worried about,” she shot back.

“Money is just money, but was it a wise investment?” Steele asked.

“Our final option is pretty much fucked,” Faroe said. “This is the only other dog in the race that Hector doesn’t own, so I’m backing it.”

“A real dog,” Grace said.

“Do you have a better idea?” Steele asked her before Faroe could.

“No,” she said starkly. She closed her eyes. “I—no. I’m sorry. It’s just that Beltrán should have called by now.”

Faroe slid one hand into her hair and pulled her gently against him. “You have nothing to apologize for,
amada
.” Because she was right. “Yes, he should have called. A three-legged dog could have made it from the tele
phone to the village and back.” He looked at Steele. “What about you? You have a better dog to put in this race?”

Steele smiled oddly at both of them. On another man it would have been affection. With Steele it was hard to tell.

“The intelligence monitors have picked up a lot of traffic,” Steele said, “all scrambled, all on the bands used by the Rivas satellite cell phones. Randy is very impressed by their encryption program. It has three levels that we know of. He’s working on the fourth. From the language he’s using, it’s hard going.”

Faroe said something foul in Spanish under his breath and added, “Not good.”

“No, it isn’t. If we had more time—”

“We don’t,” Faroe cut in.

Steele nodded. “Something has changed just in the last hour or so, but we haven’t the faintest idea what it might be. So if you intend to make use of this miner and his intelligence, you’d better be quick about it.”

“Anything on the law enforcement bands?” Faroe asked.

“The Bureau and the DEA are scrambled,” Harley said. “Traffic volume seems routine but who knows? There are a few local agencies whose freqs are in the clear. Cahill heard what sounded like a surveillance convoy calling out street grid coordinates in Chula Vista. There’s something cooking but we don’t know whether we’ve got the elephant by his tail or his trunk.”

Grace turned inside Faroe’s arm and faced the other people. No one mentioned the tear tracks on her face.

“See if somebody can figure out what frequency the
federales
use in Tijuana,” Faroe said. “They’re the key. Hector owns them.”

“We’re all over it,” Harley said. “Nothing definitive or you’d know it already.”

“Fine, sorry, forget I mentioned it.” Faroe reined in his frustration, the knowledge that the last hours of Lane’s life were racing away and Faroe was helpless to do anything but take an assault rifle down to All Saints and die with him. “If there’s traffic, there’s action. Let me know when you know.”

Grace put her hand over his, pulling herself closer to him. She didn’t need to be a mind reader to know what he was thinking.

She was thinking it too.

Lane
.

Seconds racing.

Minutes gone.

Less than five hours and counting down.

Too fast
.

Not enough time
.