Faroe smiled. “May the enemy of my enemy lead a long and fruitful life.”
LA MESA PRISON
MONDAY, 6:25 A.M.
57
WHEN GRACE WALKED THROUGH the prison alley again, she was braced for whistles and catcalls.
Not one rude sound came from the men.
Whatever these inmates had done outside the wall, they respected Sister Maude. Men took off their ball caps when she walked by. Some inmates approached her shyly, kneeling by the bars and asking her blessing.
Faroe and Grace followed the nun out of the main yard and through a gate watched by two burly men wearing designer exercise suits and high-crowned Stetsons.
“Welcome to Shangri-la,” Faroe said softly to Grace. “Private apartments for the dudes who can afford it or who have the raw physical power to hold on to real estate without paying rent.”
They followed Sister Maude into another alley with a dozen wooden doors opening onto it, like an auto court without a parking lot. The ramshackle buildings were made of corrugated plastic sheets and plywood. Makeshift plumbing dripped water and sewage. Electrical cords looped from apartment to apartment like orange and yellow spaghetti. At the far end of the alley, a man sat on a three-legged stool.
There was an assault rifle across his knees.
“That’s the first La Mesa guard I’ve seen down here,” Grace said.
“He’s not a guard. He’s a prisoner,” Faroe said. “The guards own the top of the walls but the yards belong to the inmates.”
“That’s a form of prison management we haven’t tried in the States.”
“You’d be surprised.”
Sister Maude led them to the front door of a two-story hooch with a television antenna on the front corner. She knocked and waited. After a moment, a scowling man came to the door. He had reddish hair and a wide scar that ran from the corner of his mouth to his forehead.
She spoke to him in Spanish, gesturing to Faroe and Grace.
He said he would ask el jefe and closed the door.
It popped open a minute later. The red-haired man invited them inside. The interior of the apartment was clean and well furnished, a surprise after the slapdash exterior. A large-screen plasma television hung from one wall. The screen showed a Mexican soap opera whose leading lady was in real danger of falling out of her tube top and breaking an ankle on her four-inch spike heels.
A gray-haired man with a big belly and a face that looked like it had been flattened with a two-by-four sat in a leather recliner, staring at the television.
The man with the red hair disappeared down a short hallway that led to another room.
“Jefe Ascencio,” Sister Maude began.
The man in the recliner held up his hand. In a few moments the screen faded and a commercial came up.
“Begging your pardon, Sister, but I had to see what kind of hellish problem my poor Amelia would find herself in,” Beltrán said wryly. “Those poor, sexy ladies always have a big problem at the end of each episode, as if they believe we watch for more than the moment her top slips down.”
He looked past her to the two Americans. He glanced at Grace and dismissed her. Then he looked at Faroe and grunted.
“Some gringos are very brave,” Beltrán said. “Or did you think I would forget you, you son of a bitch.”
Faroe smiled. “Not likely, jefe.”
“You two know one another?” Sister Maude asked.
Beltrán pursed thick lips and nodded. “He is the reason I am here.”
“Hey, we offered you Terminal Island and you ran south,” Faroe said.
Beltrán chuckled thickly. “The gringo prisons up there are much cleaner, it is true, but the warden down here, he is very understanding. So are the guards. I pay and they let me live and work as I wish.”
“Work?” Faroe asked. “I thought Hector Rivas had run you out of smuggling.”
“Rivas!” The old man turned his head and spat in the direction of a wastebasket. “That bastard has tried to kill me three times. I have one of his bullets in my head and another in my left kidney.”
“Hector Rivas is our enemy too,” Faroe said. “He has taken this woman’s son and threatens to kill him. We ask for your help.”
Beltrán scratched his belly through a gap in his loose shirt. “Why would I help you? You are no friend of mine.”
“I’m the enemy of your enemy, and sometimes that’s enough,” Faroe said.
Scowling, Beltrán gestured toward the leather sofa that sat at a right angle to his recliner. “I will listen but don’t expect more.”
Grace and Sister Maude settled onto the sofa on either side of Faroe while he gave a quick sketch of the kidnap, deliberately leaving out what Franklin had that Hector wanted.
“Aiee, chingón. Hector Rivas. He kill a boy as quick as a man. I have lost much to that son of a bitch. He owns the police, he owns the politicos, he has an army, he has the load cars and the tunnels, all the plaza, at his disposal. Most of all he has Jaime, the real brains. No balls, but…” Beltrán shrugged.
“Tunnels?” Faroe asked casually. “The Chinese ones?”
“Tunnels?” Beltrán said, smiling like a cat. “I know nothing of such things, the eighth wonder of the underworld, ROG’s great secret.”
“The Chinese tunnels were shut down a long time ago,” Faroe said.
“Sí, but Jaime built them again.”
“You mean the one the DEA shut down a while back?” Faroe asked. “The one that was good for forty tons of cocaine?”
“That was one of them, yes. A half mile long. It goes from a pottery warehouse in Mexico to a farmer’s barn in Campo, on the other side.”
That was one of them.
Faroe was glad his game face had had a lot of practice. “Too bad they found it. A blocked tunnel doesn’t help me kill Hector, so it doesn’t help you get out of La Mesa alive.”
“There is another tunnel,” Beltrán said.
Grace looked at her hands and prayed as she hadn’t since she was thirteen years old.
“Is it open?” Faroe asked.
“Like the plaza, yes, it is open.” Beltrán grinned, showing off some gleaming stainless steel teeth. A rich man’s smile, because only the rich in Tijuana could afford a dentist.
“Where is it?” Faroe asked.
“Ah, that is the mystery.”
“The men who built it know where it is.”
Beltrán’s smile was darker this time, shaded with something close to respect. “So quick. You would make a good jefe.”
Faroe waited.
“ROG found a small village of hard-rock miners, brought eighteen of them in under guard, and used them to construct two tunnels,” Beltrán said. “Later he killed the men.”
Sister Maude crossed herself and murmured, “Eighteen souls.”
“Innocents,” Beltrán agreed.
“Even for Hector,” Faroe said, “that’s a lot of bodies to hide in the desert all at once.”
“You remember the massacre three years ago, the men in the mountains east of Ensenada?” Beltrán asked.
“They were members of a tiny ejido, a communal settlement,” Sister Maude explained to Grace. “Armed men stormed the village at night, rounded up all the men, and murdered them with machetes and machine guns. No one knew why. It was just assumed they were smugglers or marijuana farmers.”
Beltrán shook his head. “They were miners, all of them.”
“The men who dug the two tunnels,” Faroe said. “Makes sense, if you’re Hector Rivas.”
Again, Beltrán smiled in approval. “When the first tunnel was discovered, Hector thought someone had talked. To protect the remaining tunnel, he sent men into the village. The executioners were sloppy. One miner survived.”
“That’s quite a story,” Faroe said. “Too bad I can’t verify it unless I talk to the survivor.”
Beltrán laughed with delight. “If you get tired of being poor, I would make you my second-in-command. But I need
much money to introduce you to this miner. For me, for my courier, and for the poor miner, you understand.”
“Do it,” Grace said quietly.
“How much, jefe?” Faroe asked.
“A million dollars. American, of course,” Beltrán said. “Cash, you understand.”
“A million dollars?” Grace laughed sharply. “That’s crazy.”
“A million dollars is not much for a life, when it is your own—or your son’s.”
“Only drug dealers have that kind of cash,” Grace said.
“Or money launderers,” Faroe said.
“I don’t have access to Ted’s accounts.” She looked at her watch and tried to swallow the bitterness clawing up her throat. “Even if I did, I couldn’t raise that much cash in less than six hours.”
Faroe took her clenched hand in his own and gently straightened her fingers.
“The meeting with the miner must be arranged immediately,” Faroe said to Beltrán. “He must give me complete and detailed information about the tunnel. To sweeten the deal, if I get the chance, I’ll throw in Hector Rivas. Dead.”
Beltrán thought about the terms, then nodded his acceptance. Even if Hector killed the boy, there would still be money up front that Beltrán would keep.
A lot of money.
“Sí,” Beltrán said.
Faroe reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small packet. Skillfully he undid the folds of paper and held it out toward Beltrán.
Diamonds gleamed and shimmered with every breath Faroe took.
“Hijo de la chingada,” Beltrán said softly, almost reverently. Then, without taking his eyes off the sparkling stones, he called, “César, ¡andale! Bring your loupe.”
Beltrán took the open jeweler’s packet with an ease that said he was used to handling loose stones. He stared down at the shimmering band of white fire gathered like pay dirt in the seam of a gold miner’s pan.
The redheaded man with the scar came to the doorway of the living room. “Sí, jefe?”
“Are these real?” Beltrán asked.
César looked at the dozen stones in the fold of the paper. His eyes widened. He licked his lips unconsciously, then looked first at Beltrán and then at Faroe.
“Wow!” César said in unaccented English.
“I paid more than a million for that packet in Ciudad del Este,” Faroe said. “I know diamonds. Do you?”
“Oh, he knows,” Beltrán said. “He used to be a cat thief, cat burglar, whatever you call them. Before that, he was a jeweler.”
César took the diamonds over to a window, pulled up the shade, and carefully laid the paper on the sill. He picked up one of the stones and held it to the light. The stone was big enough that he could handle it with stubby, massive fingers that looked more suited for strangulation than finesse.
“You have a good eye,” César said, going through the stones with the speed and precision of a professional. “If these came from Ciudad del Este, on the Triple Frontier, they were probably mined in Brazil or are smuggled goods from somewhere else.”
“What are they worth?” Beltrán asked. It was the only thing he cared about.
César shrugged. “It’s all about demand.” He handed the packet back to Faroe. “But you’d have to be a complete burro not to get a million American for these in Hong Kong.”
Beltrán started to say something, remembered Sister Maude, and said something else instead. “I am in prison in Mexico. How can I expect to turn that pretty pile of glitter into money in Hong Kong?”
“If you can arrange multikilo hashish shipments from here, you can convert those diamonds into cash,” Faroe said evenly.
Beltrán pursed his lips and traced his mustache with his forefinger.
Faroe tapped the jeweler’s parcel and waited.
Beltrán traced his mustache again.
Faroe started to put the packet back into his pocket.
“I will call the miner,” Beltrán said, holding out his hand. “No guarantees.”
Faroe had expected something like this. He opened the packet, selected three of the stones, and cradled them in his palm.
“Here’s the deal, jefe,” Faroe said. “You work on thirds. A third now, a third when you deliver the miner, and another third when we locate the tunnel to our own satisfaction. The miner gets the three smallest stones, two when he tells me about the tunnel and one when we locate both ends of it. Since he knows you’re involved, I’m sure the miner won’t lie to me.”
Beltrán pursed his lips, shifted his belly a bit, and finally reached for the diamonds in Faroe’s hand.
“The miner lives in the mountains,” Beltrán said. “I can get a message to him, but the nearest phone is three kilometers from the village. If he agrees, I’ll call you.”
SAN YSIDRO
MONDAY, 7:15 A.M.
58
FAROE AND GRACE 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?”
The Wrong Hostage Page 28
