Viola had no idea what to say, so she nodded.
“When they brought the chef Jean here as a slave nine months ago, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t lift a finger to help him. Too selfish. He’s fabulous in the kitchen.”
Heidi reminded Viola of Esmeralda and Jesus and the way she tried to justify the indefensible. At least Heidi felt guiltier about it.
Viola was in deep trouble, so she couldn’t afford to cut the woman any slack. “It sounds like you haven’t gotten any blood on your hands yet. You can still get away from here without worrying about being arrested. Giving me clothes, even really nice ones, isn’t going to make up for your silence from here on out. Jean deserves a life he chooses. So do I.”
Heidi sighed. “God knows I’ve thought about it. But if I left, I’d have to spend the rest of my life hiding from the hassles out there in that barracks. Pablo, in particular, is a lunatic killer. Worse, his family is spread all across the West, from Houston to Seattle. I can’t leave anymore. I know too much.”
Viola didn’t buy it. “Listen, you can call the Denver police tip line. Remain perfectly anonymous. The Santiago family will never know it was you.”
She hugged herself. “But I love Carlotta with all my heart. I could never betray her, particularly not after she’s been so generous.”
Before Viola could respond, Heidi’s voice hardened. “Look, don’t ask me again. I’ll keep this conversation to myself unless you keep naggin’ me about escapin’. Do you want some of my clothes or not?”
Viola wasn’t surprised by the pushback. These sick people had learned long ago how to survive without a conscience. Money might not buy love, but it bought plenty of other cool things.
“I’m sorry I annoyed you.” Viola couldn’t afford to push away one of the few people at the compound who at least pretended to be a friend. “Thanks so much for helping me. Yeah, I do need some clothes. Got anything casual?”
Chapter 7
Bombay Heaven Restaurant
For dinner, Beau took Athena to an early buffet at an Indian restaurant near the capitol. She tried to eat healthy for Leo’s sake, but she never seemed to get enough.
While she stuffed her face with tandoori chicken and curried rice, Roger sent a message on her encrypted system. She wanted to keep eating, but she knew she couldn’t put off checking to see whether some new catastrophe had erupted.
I just got a secondhand report from a DEA buddy you might be interested in. He says Fernando Santiago went berserk when that lady convict in Oklahoma City killed his daughter. Naturally, the patrón blames you because otherwise he’d have to blame himself. The bastard never should’ve involved his children in the family’s business, not if he’d wanted them to stay alive.
Just that quickly, Athena lost her appetite. She emailed back, Okay, so he’s pissed. We’ve been to that rodeo before and survived the rattlesnake roundup.
Almost immediately, Roger emailed back. He’s upped the prize money. You now have a bounty of five hundred grand on your head. That’s some serious dough. It’ll attract the best hitmen in the country.
A wave of nausea washed over her. How could anyone survive so much hate?
She had no good answers, so she kept reading. We’re putting together a task force, including DEA and CIA, to figure out how to deal with the bastard. Not just because of you. Cops all across the West are screaming about his stranglehold on the states. We may have to go after him in Nicaragua. But it’ll take months to get something like this rolling. In the meantime, I’m worried about you. By the way, Fernando wants you tortured before you die.
She lumbered toward the bathroom and made it in time to hurl her dinner into the toilet.
For a few minutes, she sat and cried. She was doing everything she could to survive, and it had barely been enough. Now, she might not even survive long enough to bring her son into this horrible world.
When she returned to the table, Beau tried to comfort her. She let him read Roger’s message.
Beau’s face turned pale. “You have to tell Roger that DOJ and the other agencies really, really need to deal with those bastards, once and for all.”
She emailed the message to Roger, then said, “I plan to go deep underground, immediately.”
That meant they’d have to pay for everything with cash or Bitcoins. She and Beau each dropped a ten on the table and headed outside. They couldn’t keep using Beau’s official vehicle, so he drove it back to the office. She followed in her SUV. It was actually owned by a Wyoming LLC, and the corporate papers disclosed absolutely nothing about the true owner. That should be safe—at least until they could find something better.
Athena drove Beau to a motel in a small town in the mountains west of Denver. She’d used the place before. The owner recognized her face but didn’t know her real name. He rented rooms for cash for repeat customers. Although the place wasn’t fancy, it was much better than most cheap motels.
“This will do for a few days,” she said, “but after Leo is born, we’re going to need an absolutely secret place to live for a couple of months. I’ve been thinking about it, and I think the best thing to do would be to look for a place in the mountains, using one of those online listing services. A summer cabin or second home somewhere remote would be perfect. You might have to pay extra to find somebody willing to accept cash, but money isn’t a problem. And as soon as you get a handful of good responses on your burn phone, destroy it so that can’t be tied to us later.”
“You’ve thought this through, chère. I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re the expert on hiding.”
Beau began checking online listings and responded to a few. Soon, the burn phone he’d just bought at a stop-and-go store began to ring. That was a good sign.
While he looked for a home away from home, she checked the bike computer he’d picked up earlier that day. The device was seriously damaged, but she extracted the memory chip. The data was readable. Based on the route information, the tiny computer had definitely been mounted on Viola’s missing bike.
The kidnapper might have taken the bike, or someone could have stolen it after it was left behind. But even if the cops found it, the bike wouldn’t help them find its owner. They needed a trail to follow, and damned if she could imagine what it would look like.
-o-o-o-
Casa Santiago, near Louviers
Heidi turned out to be a clothes horse with a flamboyant style. That meant Viola couldn’t use of most of Heidi’s hand-me-downs. But the blonde did have a few casual outfits from before she’d landed in the lap of luxury. Viola received two pairs of jeans, one pair of khaki slacks, three short-sleeved cotton blouses, and several items of underwear.
Then, Heidi showed Viola her new room. It had belonged to Selena, but they’d removed every trace of her except for several stunning mountain photographs mounted on the walls. The bedroom included a door that led directly to Carlotta’s suite, lockable only from the jefa’s side.
When Viola returned to her office, Carlotta gave her a list of 168 business entities owned by the Santiago family. They were organized into subsidiary LLCs for retail stores, wholesale distributors, restaurants, bars, casinos, and brothels.
Viola suppressed a groan. Every company would need to file annual corporate reports with various secretaries of state and pay taxes, including quarterly estimated tax before the yearly full returns.
Viola checked the tax folders. Instead of filing the last year’s returns in mid-April when she should have, Selena had requested six-month extensions. That meant Viola would have to work insane hours before mid-October. The shit just keeps flowing.
To top it all off, Viola seriously doubted that the Santiago family paid any taxes on its illegal operations. So, as soon as she submitted any tax returns, she’d be criminally liable for fraud, like the rest of the family. She bent her head to her desk and wept.
Carlotta may have heard her because she poked in her head. “That’s enough for one day.
Tomorrow will be much busier, so go relax. We have several entertainment rooms that I’ll be happy to show you.”
Viola barely had enough energy to shake her head. “Can I just go to my bedroom and rest?”
“Of course, you are not a prisoner.”
Viola raised her eyebrows.
Carlotta smiled. “Well, I suppose you are, but as long as you put in a full day’s work, you are welcome to spend your free time as you please. Just don’t try to leave the compound. If you get yourself shot, I’ll have to go through the annoyances of finding a good accountant again.”
Boo-hoo for you. Viola dragged her weary body upstairs to her room and laid on the bed, still wearing her clothes. How had her life gone so horribly wrong?
-o-o-o-
Mount Evans Motel, Idaho Springs, Colorado
When Athena ran out of ideas for finding Viola, she turned her mind to an even more pressing problem. How could she protect herself from Fernando Santiago’s hitmen?
She had to snoop on the cartel’s private communications. Last fall, when she’d tried, she’d discovered that most of their communications remained low-tech. Like Al Qaeda, the cartel had relied primarily on couriers to hand-carry messages. No electronic intercepts or phone tracing were possible.
Also, last year, they’d avoided using high-tech methods for sending the enormous amounts of money they made back to the mothership. Instead, they’d invested most of their obscene profits in the good ol’ USA.
Athena had her own suspicions about the integrity of digital currencies, but she’d decided she didn’t have much choice. Along with her friend Cici, she was managing hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore money. Whenever she wanted to spend some of it in the US, she had to convert the funds to a digital currency like Bitcoin. It was time to find out whether the cartel had changed its money management and communications systems to adapt to the twenty-first century.
She connected her laptop to the Internet through a virtual private network and used several additional anonymizing protocols to keep other hackers and snooping governments out of her life.
Her first move was to check whatever data the FBI and DEA had already collected. They’d tapped into all electronic communications in or out of Chez Santiago, but according to Beau, the place was too well guarded to sneak someone in to plant listening devices.
The Feds already had plenty of evidence against the day-to-day cartel soldiers. A few were even willing to talk to avoid prison, but none of them would implicate the top dogs. Athena could hardly blame the thugs for being scared. She was petrified herself. And that wouldn’t change until some agency managed to take down Fernando and his top lieutenants like Carlotta.
As she reviewed the data collected by the Feds, Athena noticed that over recent months, the Santiagos had been using encrypted messaging. So far, the FBI and DEA hadn’t been able to crack the key code. Unfortunately, their best specialists were busy working domestic terrorism cases. The drug wars were a much lower priority.
But not for her. She started crunching data using several tools she’d recently developed for breaking encryption.
The name of the game was finding patterns, and no human being could do that as well as a PC in the hands of a creative hacker. It might take days, or even weeks, for subtle hints of meaning to emerge, but she had the rest of her life to devote to this project. She wouldn’t be safe until she succeeded.
-o-o-o-
Tuesday
Casa Santiago, near Louviers
Viola was woken up by several tentative knocks on the hallway door. She found herself in a strange bed and in an equally strange room. Then, she remembered. That dashed her hope that she’d been experiencing an overwrought nightmare. Actually, she was surprised that she’d managed to sleep at all.
The knocks repeated.
In Spanish, she said, “Come in.”
A plump Hispanic girl in her late teens stepped inside and bowed. Her pretty face was carefully made up.
The girl said, “Excuse me, Señorita Hawkins, I am Maria Ramos. I will take care of all of your personal needs.”
A slave for a slave? That’s damned weird. “Thank you, but I can take care of myself.”
Maria tossed her long, silky black hair behind her shoulders and shook a finger at her new boss. “Oh no, I insist. The jefa told me you would be obstinate, but I am to say, ‘No more arguing, please.’”
Viola didn’t want to get Maria into trouble, so she rolled her eyes and nodded.
Maria suggested that Viola get cleaned up. When Viola returned from the shower, Maria had made the bed and placed a vase of flowers on a table next to the window. She’d also laid a white garment across the bed.
Viola recognized it as a monk’s robe, complete with a hood.
“Before you put it on,” Maria said, “I will take care of your makeup.”
“I don’t wear makeup.”
Maria snickered. “Today, you must. In particular, I’ve been told by the jefa to eliminate the dark circles around your eyes.”
Viola checked the mirror over a chest of drawers, and sure enough, her eye sockets looked dark. Probably because the bleach Esmeralda had used would’ve blinded her. What the hell had Carlotta expected? Viola wasn’t a doll who could be painted.
Maria put her hands on her hips like she was used to dealing with stubborn people. They headed into the luxurious bathroom, and Viola stood in front of a marble counter. She opened the mirrored cabinet door. The shelves were packed with cosmetics.
Maria snickered. “Don’t look like I’m about to electrocute you. I studied at a beauty school in San Diego, and I was taught to follow the client’s wishes, within reason.”
Viola resigned herself to being turned into some kind of comic book ghost. When Maria finished, Viola’s eye sockets matched the rest of her face. Her head had been covered with a lacy white scarf.
She said with perfect sincerity, “Thank you for taking care of me, but why am I dressed up like this?”
“Carlotta did not tell me, and it’s not my place to ask questions.”
Viola didn’t want to get the girl into trouble. “Okay, so when does Carlotta begin work?”
“Always very early. No later than six. I prepared her for the day two hours ago.”
It was a quarter ‘til eight. “I’d better get down there. She’s probably pissed, and I don’t want to get beaten again.”
Maria shook her head. “The jefa says you must first eat breakfast. This will be an important day. You will meet her in thirty minutes.”
Unlike most people she knew, Viola hadn’t been bossed around a lot as a child. Her mother had been too disorganized to enforce rules for Viola or herself. Carlotta’s constant dictates were going to be tough to get used to, but she had no choice.
Maria led Viola down to the dining room where a handful of people had finished eating but remained to chat. Jesus was the only one who paid attention to Viola. He’d saved the seat next to him.
They talked about nothing in particular while she decided whether she wanted to eat. It’d been twenty-four hours since her last real meal, and she got the sense that her day would be busy. She might not get a chance for lunch.
Her resistance crumbled when Jean pointed to a plate in the center of the table that held two freshly baked almond croissants. She devoured them. Then, she ate more than she’d expected.
Jesus said, “I probably won’t see you again, at least not on this trip. I’m flying back to Houston.”
More disappointment. “When?”
“A couple hours.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear it.”
His news left her feeling adrift, even though he wasn’t much of a friend. The over-smart punk hadn’t been willing to lift even his pinky finger to help her. She said the usual meaningless goodbyes and shook his hand. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Talk about awkward. But Diego walked into the room and motioned for her to follow. As
she left, she realized nobody had commented on how weird she looked. So, she asked Diego, “Don’t you think I look at least a little bit weird?”
He glanced at her again as they walked. “Here’s a tip, Señorita. Rule number one around here is: Carlotta is always right. Rule number two: if you think Carlotta isn’t, reread rule number one.”
They stopped at a small conference room. The jefa was sitting next to a handsome, Hispanic guy in his mid-thirties. He had a big chest, muscular arms, and a scar running from his left ear down to the collar of his pale blue polo shirt.
“Viola,” Carlotta said, “this is my younger brother and chief lieutenant, Pablo Sanchez. He and his men keep us all safe.”
He was the infamous bastard Jesus had warned Viola about. He stood and stared at her for a moment before extending his hand in a brief handshake.
When he sat again, he asked Carlotta, “Why La Llorona?”
“Instead of bringing the righteous sword of justice down on twenty people who will be hard to replace, I’m hoping that when La Llorona makes an example of the worst of the worst, everyone else will beg for mercy and change their ways.”
Pablo nodded slowly, as though unsure. “But doesn’t she go mostly after kids?”
Finally, Viola understood all the mystery. Carlotta had dressed her as a murderous ghost.
The bitch said, “Trusted members of our staff have been incredibly reckless with their own lives. I hope that they will be more thoughtful about saving their children’s. The only other solution for our problem is wholesale slaughter.”
Pablo looked at Viola like she’d farted. Diego stepped away from her, too. Apparently, they weren’t keen on murderous ghosts who hated children.
Carlotta patted the back of the chair next to her. “Viola, please sit. Everyone, let’s hope that by making an example of Ricardo and his family, the rest will eagerly return their ill-gotten gains. And pay a penalty.”
She explained how she wanted Viola to audit a pottery and herbal products wholesaler overseen by someone named Ricardo Sanchez. She asked a few questions about accounting details, but Carlotta’s plan of action appeared to be well thought out even though the ghost part was nutty.
Anointed (Vanished Book 3) Page 5
