The Wrong Hostage (5 page)

L
A
J
OLLA
S
ATURDAY EVENING

“W
HAT IS IT THAT
can’t wait, Grace?” Stuart Sturgis asked. “We’re having a dinner party and—”

“Have you heard from Ted?” she cut in urgently.

“I told you I would call you when and if Ted contacted me.”

“I can’t wait that long.” Grace’s hand clenched the phone until her fingers ached. “I have to talk to Ted
now
.”

“I’m sorry. I’m his lawyer, not his keeper. I just can’t help you.”

“Stu, it’s an emergency.”

“Look, why don’t you have a glass of wine or two and relax? Ted will probably call in a few days. He’s just a footloose kind of guy.”

Grace wanted to scream that she didn’t have a few days for a footloose kind of guy to show up. Instead, she said, “Sure. Sure. Sorry to interrupt the cocktail hour.”

She hung up and looked at her Rolodex. She’d made thirty calls, talked to twelve answering machines, eight spouses, and ten of Ted’s friends/ business associates who hadn’t heard from him in a while but sure would pass along her message if good old Ted happened to call.

There was only one call left to make.

Two days
.

She went to the safe, unlocked it, and pulled out a file it was illegal for
her to have. But she had it anyway, and she updated it as often as her CIA source could.

Damn you, Ted. Why aren’t you ever here when Lane and I need you?

And damn me for choosing the wrong man
.

Ignoring the official stamps across the papers that advised her to do everything but Drop Dead Before Reading, she flipped rapidly through the file, hardly seeing the names—Philippines, Belize, Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay, Guatemala, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and most of all, northern Mexico. St. Kilda Consulting wasn’t a government agency, but it had employees in all the hot spots in the world.
Outside the law
.

Not outlaws.

Just not officially sanctioned.

Everything Grace had worked to be rebelled at the thought of being caught in a place where the law she loved was worse than helpless. The courtroom was like a hospital—awful things might happen in it, but the purpose was greater than the blood and pain, and at the end of the day everything was disinfected and ready to work again. Not like the gutters, where nothing rose above the blood and pain, and nothing was ever clean.

St. Kilda Consulting worked in the world’s gutters.

Grace memorized the number, locked up the file again, and went to find a minimart that sold phone cards. This was one call she didn’t want a record of on her monthly statement.

M
IDTOWN
M
ANHATTAN
S
ATURDAY NIGHT

D
WAYNE
T
AYLOR REACHED FOR
one of the three landline phones sitting on a desk that was neither messy nor neat, simply well used. “Steele’s office.”

“This is Mandy in triage,” a husky voice said. “I’ve got a Judge Grace Silva on line four. She won’t talk to anybody but Ambassador Steele himself. I’ve forwarded what we have on her to you. File SK1/17.”

Dwayne’s broad fingers danced across his computer keyboard, found the file, and opened it. “What’s her problem?”

“Kidnap/ransom. Beyond that she won’t talk to anyone but Steele.”

Dwayne scanned the information he’d retrieved on Judge Silva and made one of the intuitive, incisive judgments Steele paid him very well to make.

“Put her on.”

Dwayne took the phone off speaker and switched the sound to the headset he wore. “Judge Silva, this is Mr. Steele’s personal assistant, Dwayne Taylor. What can St. Kilda Consulting do for you?”

At the other end of the line, Grace held on to her patience by a very fragile thread. “I made it quite clear to the last four people who wasted my time that it was Ambassador Steele or no one.”

“I understand. Are you on a secure line?”

She hesitated. This morning she would have laughed. Now she was glad she’d left her house to make the call.

You keep this between us or I kill the boy
.

“I think so,” she said. “I’m at a pay phone in a cinema multiplex. I’ve got maybe two more minutes on this calling card. Then I have to go to the minimart and buy another.”

Dwayne almost smiled. Whatever the judge was, she wasn’t stupid. “Were you followed?”

“I—” It hadn’t occurred to her.
God, I hate this
. “I don’t think so.”

“Is this a matter of extreme urgency?”

“What’s your definition of—”

“A terrorist with a gun held against a hostage’s head,” Dwayne said calmly.

“I—God—no, it’s not. Yet.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Two days—no, two days from twelve-thirty this afternoon.”

Dwayne breathed out a silent sigh of relief. Compared to most kidnap/ ransom situations, that was a decent amount of time. He wrote “RED-2” across the notes he was taking.

“How necessary is secrecy?” he asked.

“Life or death.”

His pen paused. He circled “-2.” “Are you at your La Jolla address?”

Grace didn’t bother asking how Dwayne knew where she lived. The CIA file she’d broken rules to get assured her that when it came to private solutions to problems that simply couldn’t be made public, St. Kilda Consulting was the best.

That was what she needed.

The best.

“I’m twenty minutes away,” she said.

“Go home. In an hour a woman will pick you up and take you to a secure place. At twenty-three hundred you will have a video conference with Ambassador Steele. That is eleven o’clock Pacific daylight time. Is that satisfactory?”

Grace looked at her watch and automatically asked, “Can’t I just call him from my house?”

“Are you going to say anything that you wouldn’t like seeing on the eleven o’clock news?”

“Oh. Of course.” Grace felt like a fool. “Sorry. I’m not used to this.”
And I hate it
.

“That’s why you called St. Kilda,” Dwayne said gently. “Do you enjoy reading, watching TV, yoga?”

“Excuse me?”

“The next two days will be hard on you. Find a way to relax that won’t fuzz your mind.”

Dwayne broke the connection, called San Diego, and got the cell phone on its way to her. Then he went to work on his computer. If he was going to dump someone unexpected on his boss, he’d better be prepared with a more thorough background than he had right now. He launched a program, watched for a few minutes, and pushed back from the desk.

It was only a few steps to Steele’s suite. The mammoth mahogany door pivoted at its center and opened into a six-sided room with two walls of glass that looked out over Manhattan. The glass had the special sheen that came from being bulletproof, soundproof, and one-way. It was the kind found in high-tech interrogation rooms around the world.

As usual Steele was facing three walls of video screens, speaking into a headset, and sorting through various documents on his desk. Occasionally he typed on one of the computers that stood by waiting to be used, patient as only machines could be. The sixth wall was taken up by electronics and a huge, colorful clock that divided the world into time zones showing light and darkness. The time zones were made by man; they didn’t change. The areas of day and night across the globe did.

Without looking up, Steele covered the mouthpiece of his headset with his hand. “What?”

“You have a video telephone conference at two hundred local,” Dwayne said.

“Who?”

“Federal Judge Grace Silva, Southern District of California, San Diego.”

“Why?”

“She insisted on speaking only to you,” Dwayne said.

“So do a lot of people.”

“The number she called belonged to Joe Faroe’s cell phone. Apparently Judge Silva didn’t have the recent code, because her call was routed through to the public St. Kilda number.”

Steele spun around and looked at Dwayne. “Interesting. Do we have a good background on her?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Work harder. Get help. Anyone who knows Joe Faroe’s cell phone is someone I want to know.”

“Yes, sir.”

Steele didn’t answer. He was talking into his headphone again.

Without a sound Dwayne shut the door behind him and went to work on Judge Grace Silva’s background.

O
CEANSIDE,
C
ALIFORNIA
S
ATURDAY, 10:55 P.M.

G
RACE LOOKED AT THE
woman who was driving her to a destination she hadn’t shared. In fact, the woman hadn’t shared much of anything but the car. Her bearing was military, but her smile and long nails weren’t. The glittering tangerine polish was striking against her black skin. The watch she wore was solid gold. Grace knew, because she’d seen one just like it in the window of one of La Jolla’s more expensive jewelry stores.

The driver checked the mirrors as often as the road ahead. Other than making turns without warning, sitting with her lights out, and then taking off in a different direction, the driver was very efficient. So was the car. Dark, Japanese, powerful, anonymous.

Grace had the unsettling feeling that she’d fallen through a hole in reality and was now in a totally different world.

Because I have,
she told herself.
It’s called the illegal world. What did Faroe call it? The shadow world
.

The world where Lane is prisoner
.

This can’t be happening
.

It’s happening. Get over it and deal
.

The night guard at the office park waved the car through without a pause.

Three minutes and six locked doors later, Grace found herself in what
looked like an ordinary video conference room. One of the three large flat-screen monitors was on. It showed a handsome black man wearing an expensive three-piece suit and what looked like a two-carat ruby in his right earlobe. He was looking at Grace’s driver.

“Were you followed?” he asked.

“Possibly, but not for long.”

“Just possibly?”

“You told me to keep a low profile,” Grace’s driver said. “Playing tag on crowded streets doesn’t qualify.”

The man frowned. “Steele doesn’t like uncertainty.”

“Then he’s in the wrong business.”

The woman left the room, shutting the door behind her. Firmly.

“Judge Grace Silva?” asked the man on the screen. “I’m Dwayne Taylor.”

“You look awfully good for two in the morning,” Grace said, conscious of her own rumpled clothes.

He smiled. “The world runs 24/7. Mr. Steele expects us to do the same.”

“How do you manage that?”

“I have two well-dressed clones standing by in the closet.”

Despite the tension that made her vibrate, Grace smiled.

“Mr. Steele will be with you as soon as he finishes a debriefing,” Dwayne said.

The view switched to the room behind Dwayne. Grace saw walls of video screens, other glass walls with views of the Manhattan skyline, and one with a projection of a global map and time zone clock. A computer-driven terminator line showed the sharp edge between night and day as dawn advanced from east to west across the globe. Computers and other electronic equipment she couldn’t identify waited at various workstations around the big room. The floor was wood, polished, expensive.

The best money and blood can buy
.

The disdainful thought was reflexive. Grace had spent her life studying the law, weighing its nuances, balancing the larger might of society against the rights of the individual.

St. Kilda went against everything she’d worked for in her life.

The law can’t help Lane,
she told herself roughly.
Don’t look back. Don’t have regrets
.

If it would free Lane, I’d cut a deal with Satan and every devil in hell
.

A silver-haired man in a wheelchair was talking to one of the screens. Six of the eighteen television sets showed the muted talking heads of American news and business channels. Other screens were tuned to international satellite feeds. On the center plasma computer screen, a sweat-soaked man with a three-day beard and a redheaded woman with a bandanna tied across her forehead talked with tired animation. A line of print ran across the screen.

Grace looked at the conference controls in front of her. She hit the zoom button. “Ciudad del Este” leaped into focus. She ran up the sound, but it didn’t help. Only the man in the wheelchair could hear what was being said. She turned the sound down and went back to looking at the two sweaty, exhausted people on the screen.

St. Kilda employees?
Grace wondered.

Plainclothes international cops?

Extreme travelers?

Nothing she saw gave her a clue. From what she’d learned about St. Kilda Consulting, any and all possibilities were on the table.

She zoomed out so that Dwayne was center screen again.

“What’s happening in Ciudad del Este?” she asked.

“It’s a big world. Lots of things happen.”

Right. New topic
.

But before she could say anything, Dwayne got up and walked offscreen. So she sat and watched the wall with the global clock, hypnotized by the brilliant edge of dawn advancing across the Atlantic toward New York.

Time made tangible.

And Lane’s time is running out
.

Steele ended the conference and spun his wheelchair on the wood parquet floor to face his guest.

“My apologies, Judge Silva,” he said as he used both hands to propel himself across the conference area to the desk where Dwayne had been. “One of the few things you can say with certainty about my work is that appointments are only as good as the paper Dwayne writes them on.”

“No problem, Ambassador. Considering the hour, I’m grateful that you fit me in.”

“People who come to us tend to be at the end of their, shall we say, socially acceptable resources. Your love of and respect for the law is the first thing people mention about you.”

“So why am I here, is that it?”

“We aren’t criminals,” Steele said mildly.

“You sure have made a lot of legal agencies unhappy.”

“We operate where they can’t or won’t. Isn’t that why you’re here—you have a situation that no legally constituted American governmental agency can handle?”

Grace looked into Steele’s clear eyes, metallic blue, deep. She saw intense intelligence and something more. Unflinching ruthlessness, if her CIA file was accurate. His natural coloring was pale, made more so because he had a full head of silver-white hair. His face was handsome in an aristocratic way, with a prominent nose that might have been called a beak on a less civilized, less patrician man.

“You said it was a matter of some urgency?” Steele asked, his voice still soft, gentle, and definitely prodding.

Grace had rehearsed her presentation while she waited for the nameless driver to pick her up. It took less than three minutes to bring the head of St. Kilda Consulting up to speed on Lane.

“Admirably concise, much more so than I would expect from a lawyer,” Steele said. “What do you want from St. Kilda?”

“My son. Alive, well, and in the United States.”

“Again, concise. How much money has gone missing?”

“Calderón wasn’t sure. He said Hector had somewhere between fifty and one hundred million in the fund, some of it his own money, some of it invested for others.”

Steele looked like a man making mental notes. “Unless the Rivas-Osuna crime family has had an unusually profitable year, some of that must have come from people outside of the family.”

“Jaime—Hector’s nephew—would be the one selling the fund outside of the family. He’s the one that roped Calderón in.” Then the implication of Steele’s words sank in. “You sound like you know quite a bit about ROG.”

“Drugs are a substantial part of the billions in black money that rolls
around the globe every hour. Illegal arms dealing is another chunk. Corrupt, legally constituted governments are responsible for the majority.”

Although Steele hadn’t emphasized the words
legally constituted,
Grace got the point.

“I know,” she said. “Legal doesn’t always make it right. But it’s better than the opposite, violence and anarchy.”

Steele nodded. “On that we agree. You’ve explained your son’s situation and your own desires. What of your husband?”

“Ex-husband. We’ve been separated—a personal rather than a legal state—for some time. The divorce was final a few weeks ago.”

“Does Hector know this?”

“I told him. He still thinks I know or can find out where Ted is.”

“Can you?”

“If I could, I wouldn’t be here. Ted and I may share an address in La Jolla, but he hasn’t spent three consecutive days there in years. Other than an e-mail or two, and a voice mail, I haven’t heard from him in three weeks.”

“Did any of the communications suggest he was in difficulty?” Steele asked.

“No.”

“Was the divorce adversarial?”

“No. We’re adults and we behaved like it.”

Steele lifted his eyebrows. “Could Hector be your ex-husband’s stalking horse?”

Grace frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“You say the divorce was amicable—”

“It was.”

Steele ignored the interruption. “—yet you’re a beautiful woman in the prime of life, with a very successful career and a brilliant legal future. Quite a catch by any measure, whether it be physical, intellectual, or social.”

She blinked, surprised by his summary. “I don’t see myself that way.”

Steele’s smile was a lot younger than he was. “I know. It’s part of your allure. By nature men are possessive creatures. Losing you must have stung. Ted wouldn’t be the first divorced man to get even with an ex-wife through a child. Revenge isn’t a pretty emotion, but it’s very powerful.”

Grace looked at her hands. Her nails were short, well kept, businesslike, naked of polish. Hardly the hands of a femme fatale. And if Ted had been hurt by the divorce, he sure never showed it.

Looking back, their marriage had died long before the divorce legally buried it.

“Does it matter why Ted did what he did?” she asked finally.

“It might. Revenge can be a more powerful motivator than fear.”

“Then you’ll have to ask Ted when you find him.”

“Is that what you want?” Steele asked. “For us to find him?”

“If that’s what it takes to get Lane home safe, yes. But I was thinking more along the lines of having one of your, ah, employees go to Ensenada and bring Lane home. To be blunt, I want your best Latin American kidnap specialist—Joe Faroe.”