The Wrong Hostage (28 page)

A
LL
S
AINTS
S
CHOOL
M
ONDAY, 7:31 A.M.

L
ANE HEARD THE NEW
guards arrive, heard just enough of their conversation to know that he was being taken away. He dove for the satellite phone and hit the button that automatically connected him to Faroe.

One ring.

Answer it
.

He grabbed his computer and ran for the bathroom.

Two rings.

Be there. Oh, God, please be there!

He locked the door behind him.

Three rings.

He turned on the shower.

Just like always. Nobody but Mom to
—

“Faroe,” said a voice.

“They’re moving me,” Lane whispered.

“I can’t hear you over the background noise. Pitch your voice low and don’t whisper.”

“They are moving me,” Lane said, struggling with his voice and his fear.

“When? Where?”

“As soon as I get out of the shower. I don’t know where, but I got it! I cracked that sucker bigger than shit. It was so sweet. I had this old beta tester’s code key and they used it almost verbatim in the 8.0 version.”

In San Ysidro, Faroe put together enough of the rush of words to understand. Lane had hacked the file. “Good job! What’s in the file?”

“A bunch of numbers, bank names, and dollar amounts. Greek to me. Here, I’ll read you some. There’s a January eighth date, then Bank of Vanuatu, a ten-digit number, and the figure, two million three hundred thousand, to
Sparbuch
…”

Faroe closed his eyes, visualizing the data. Ted Franklin had used a blind overseas account to transship a hefty sum of money, then converted it to an Austrian savings passbook account.

“…followed by another sixteen-digit number,” Lane said. “Do you want me to read the number to you?”

The
Sparbuchen
were anonymous. Period. Creating new accounts was difficult, but existing accounts were still as protected from money-laundering investigations as they ever had been.

“I don’t need the number yet,” Faroe said. “How many entries are there?”

Lane juggled the phone between his ear and his shoulder while he wiped steam from the shower off the computer screen. “About sixty. No, more like seventy. Some of them look like duplicates.”

He glanced over his shoulder. The guards were shouting for him to come out.

“Give me a minute to dry off!” he yelled back at them in Spanish.

Then he punched a button on the laptop keyboard.

“Lane, what’s happening?” Faroe asked.

The keyboard popped up slightly.

“They’re getting impatient,” Lane said.

Someone began hammering on the door with something harder than a fist.

Lane grabbed the computer’s hard drive.

Wood splintered.

He pushed the hard drive into one of the many deep pockets in his cargo shorts and fastened the Velcro tab.

Wood groaned and popped.

He slammed the keyboard back in and shoved the gutted computer beneath a pile of damp towels. The charging cord stuck out like a flag. He
yanked the cord out of the wall and buried it with the computer.

The door shuddered on its hinges.

“I’m coming!” Lane shouted, turning off the shower with one hand and reaching for the bathroom lock with the other.

The door burst open, shoving Lane backward. He tripped and went down. The satellite phone flew against the toilet, then bounced against the shower curtain and into the bathtub.

Kicking, cursing, and slinging punches, Lane tried to get free of the hands reaching for him. Something hit him on the cheek. His head roared and things went fuzzy.

A deep male voice snarled commands. Then the man picked up the phone.

“¡Dígame!”
he ordered.

Faroe didn’t.

“Who you talk?” the guard shouted at Lane in English.

“His name is Ivegot Thedrive!” Lane yelled toward the cell phone.

Something connected with his head.

The world exploded into a nasty shade of red, then faded to the kind of black Lane had never seen before.

S
AN
Y
SIDRO
M
ONDAY, 7:34 A.M.

F
AROE STARED AT THE
handset. It took every bit of his discipline not to throw the phone against the wall.

Grace felt the rage tightening the muscles in his body. She spun toward him. “Lane? Is it Lane?”

“He’s okay,” Faroe said quickly, despite the sound of fists hitting flesh he’d heard. Some of those blows had undoubtedly been scored by Lane. He was a tough, wiry kid well on his way to becoming a man. “The guards are onto the phone. They turned it off. They’re moving him somewhere.”

“Is the phone with him?” Steele asked.

“Would you leave the phone with him?” Faroe asked sarcastically.

Steele didn’t bother to answer.

Someone from the back of the bus said, “Sat phone hasn’t moved from previous location.”

Faroe looked like he’d rather have been wrong about the phone. “Put someone on the real-time sat photos.”

“There are too many groups of people on the school’s grounds to be certain we have Lane,” Steele said. “The resolution simply isn’t that good.”

“Do it anyway.”

Grace watched Faroe. He looked calm, yet she sensed the waves of rage and frustration radiating from him. Suddenly he spun and hit the wall with his fist. A shudder went through the heavy motor coach.

No one said a word.

Everyone but Steele and Grace retreated to the far end of the motor coach, giving Faroe some room.

“Talk to me, Joseph,” Steele said quietly.

“If they get Lane away from All Saints, they’ll drag him down that rathole called Tijuana, and we’ll have hell’s own time finding him,” Faroe said.

What he didn’t say was that Lane would already be dead if and when they did find him.

Faroe didn’t have to say it aloud. It echoed in the silence that followed his words.

“We have one helicopter, one sniper, and two lightly armed shooters,” Steele said finally. “Even if we had three times that much firepower, I still wouldn’t allow an air strike on a school where an army company is bivouacked.”

The look on Faroe’s face told Grace that Steele wasn’t saying anything Faroe didn’t already know.

“Lane cracked the security on Ted’s file,” Faroe said. “I was right. He ran between fifty and a hundred million dirty dollars through some offshore business accounts and then parked it in some clever little Austrian passbook savings accounts. Nobody’s going to find it without the file, not even Ted.”

“In other words, the computer is the key to a huge amount of narco dollars,” Steele said.

“It was,” Faroe said.

“But now?”

“Now it’s time to look at our hole card.”

“Which is?” Steele asked.

“Father Magón.”

“So you trust him,” Grace said to Faroe.

He smiled thinly and turned away.

“Joe?” she asked.

“When you’re down to your hole card,” Faroe said, “trust is the least of your problems.”

A
LL
S
AINTS
S
CHOOL
M
ONDAY, 7:36 A.M.

F
ATHER
M
AGÓN WAS DRESSED
for the soccer field rather than the confessional. Loose shorts, black T-shirt, and athletic shoes.

Maybe that was why the soldiers ignored him.

“What are you doing?” he demanded in colloquial Spanish. “That boy is a student here. You have no right to—”

“Get out of our way,” one of the soldiers shouted back.

Lane was slung over a big soldier’s shoulder like a sack of beans, held in place by a large hand. The man’s other hand held a school duffel hastily stuffed with clothes.

The boy’s eyes were open, furious. There was a cut on his cheek that was already swelling into a bruise.

Magón stood in front of the soldier who was carrying Lane and said loudly, “Lane, are you hurt?”

The boy said something that sounded like “…hell no…rat bastard pussies…”

Two soldiers grabbed Magón and jerked him away.

“Where are you taking him?” Magón demanded.

The soldiers just kept on walking.

Magón started to follow.

One of the guards turned around and leveled his assault weapon at the priest. “Stay out of this. It has nothing to do with the church.”

Magón waited until the soldiers were out of sight before he turned and
ran into the cottage. Some of Lane’s clothes were scattered around. The bed was a tangle. The bathroom door was smashed, hanging drunkenly by a single hinge.

The priest locked the front door and went to the bathroom. Towels lay in a damp pile. The mirror was a haze of cracks and splinters. The shower curtain had been torn off the rod.

There was a cell phone tangled in the curtain.

Magón picked up the phone, studied it, and hit the button that redialed the number of the most recent outgoing call.

“Who is this?” a male voice asked instantly.

“A man of God,” Magón said, recognizing Faroe’s voice but not knowing if it was safe to speak openly.

“Father Magón?” Faroe asked.

“Yes.”

“You should carry your cell phone with you. Right now it’s ringing and kicking me into voice mail. Is Lane okay?”

“A little bruised, but not really hurt. He was cussing out the soldiers while they carried him off.”

In San Ysidro, Faroe leaned against the counter and almost laughed. “I hope they don’t understand English slang. Do you know where they’re taking him?”

“I asked. They ignored me. I pushed. They pointed an assault rifle at me. All I know for certain is that no helicopters have left the school.”

“Vehicles?”

“Momentito.”

Magón walked to the front of the cottage, which overlooked the long, sweeping road leading up to the school.

“Three Suburbans are leaving now,” Magón said. “I would guess Lane is in one of them.”

“Can you get into Lane’s cottage without being seen?”

“I’m inside it now.”

“Go to the bathroom. Lane was using the computer when he called me from there.”

Magón walked quickly back to the bathroom. He shook out the shower curtain.

Nothing.

He stirred the towels with his foot. He connected with something solid and ripped aside the towels.

“I have it,” he said into the phone.

Faroe smiled like a shark. “Is it running?”

“No. The screen is blank.”

“Can you turn it on?”

Magón juggled the phone and the computer. He hit the start-up button. Nothing happened.

“It’s not working,” Magón said. Then, “Wait. I see a power cord.”

Faroe waited impatiently while the priest fiddled with the cord.

“It’s not starting up,” Magón said. “The cord is in the wall and in the computer, but nothing happens when I press the start button.”

His name is Ivegot Thedrive!

“Look at the keyboard,” Faroe said. “In the top row of function buttons, above the row of numerals, right in the center, there is a transparent button.”

“I see it.”

“That releases the keyboard so you can get inside. Push it.”

Magón pushed.

The keyboard came free.

“Lift the keyboard and look inside,” Faroe said. “Tell me if you see any loose wires or missing pieces.”

Magón removed the keyboard and studied what was left. “I know little about the interior of computers.”

Faroe waited, reminding himself to breathe.

“There is a loose connection in the lower right-hand corner,” Magón said. “It could have been part of a module that has been removed.”

Shit
.

“Well, that adds a real gloss to this cluster,” Faroe said. Then he grinned. “But good for Lane anyway. Did he get to take any luggage?”

“A small duffel.”

Faroe blew out a breath. He’d have to assume that Lane still had the hard drive.

Assumption is the mother of all fuckups, and she has many children
.

He’d just have to hope that none of those bastards were his.

“Do you remember an incident a few years back,” Faroe asked, “when men were executed in the mountains south of you?”

“I remember several such incidents, regrettably.”

“The dead men were from your birthplace, or close by. They were miners, not
narcotraficantes
.”

“I know the incident. They were Pai-Pai, indigenous communal farmers. Many of them worked their own small gold mines. Seventeen of them were lined up and murdered. No one knows why.”

“Hector Rivas, your favorite parishioner, murdered them to protect a secret.”

Magón turned his head and spat on the bathroom floor.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Faroe said. “You’re undercover there. A spy for the church.”

“Spies and priests don’t live in the same world.”

“Some of them do. You, for instance. I’ll bet you’re gathering a case against ROG as the murderers of Cardinal Ocampo.”

“God doesn’t need my help. He already knows the guilty parties. They will pay their penalty on Judgment Day.”

“But the earthly church is a different matter,” Faroe said, ignoring Magón’s words. “The earthly church has to survive in this cruel, nasty, brutal world of ours. Survival goes to the swift, the strong, and the mean. The earthly church has survived on all three counts.”

“What is the point of this?”

“I could call Hector and blow your investigation right to hell.”

“Why would you help Hector Rivas Osuna?”

“He wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy it. Neither would Calderón or Ted Franklin. Are you listening, man of God? If Lane dies, none of you will have to wait for Judgment Day. I’ll punish sins of commission
and
omission. Do you understand?”

“I understood that since the first time I saw you with Lane,” Father Magón said finally. “I would help if I could. I can’t. The boy is beyond the reach of anything but my prayers.”

“I have something for you to do while you pray.”

“What?”

“Take a little helicopter ride with me to Pai-Pai country. If not, I’ll drop a dime with Hector.”

Magón’s breath sighed across the phone. “I suppose I don’t have a real choice. But I do ask that you keep me out of this as much as is possible. The cardinal’s death is not insignificant.”

“Neither is Lane’s. I’ll do my best to keep your skirts clean. Go to the Mission San Isidro.”

“The church just off the Transpeninsular Highway?”

“No. The ruins. The site of the original church. The place where your church spent a hundred and fifty years trying to separate the Pai-Pais from their native religious beliefs. Be there in half an hour.”

The phone went dead before Magón could ask why.