A King's ransom

by James Grippando

  “Not too long-term, I hope.”

  She didn’t smile. “Didn’t the FBI even tell you that much?”

  “What?”

  “The length of time it normally takes to bring a Colombian kidnapping case to closure.”

  “He wanted to wait and see who was involved before making any projections.”

  “That makes some sense. But you should be forewarned.”

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “These guerrilla organizations don’t exactly operate at breakneck speed.”

  “How long might it take? Weeks? Months?”

  “I’ve had a few relatively quick resolutions. But for the most part we’re definitely talking months.”

  “How many?”

  “The average case, anywhere from six to twelve.”

  “A fucking year?” My astonishment was met with plaintive silence.

  “I warned you, I don’t sugarcoat.”

  “I prefer it that way. Excuse my profanity.”

  “No problem. You’ll hear worse from me before this case is over. Assuming you want me on the case.”

  I shot a quick glance at Duncan. He seemed to be as impressed as I was. “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Great. Now, it’s been very nice meeting you and Duncan, but I’d like to meet with you and the rest of your family as soon as possible.”

  “My sister’s traveling, and we haven’t been in touch with her yet. But I can drive you over to my mother’s house right now.”

  “Let’s go.”

  We rose to leave, but Duncan stole another minute of Alex’s time. He needed surveillance work for one of his cases and wanted to know if Alex had any suggestions. Right. Ever since his divorce, Duncan seemed to draw personal validation from any attractive woman who would smile and talk to him, even if it was purely business from her standpoint.

  I waited at the window and looked down thirty stories on the evening rush hour traffic. It was slowly snaking south on busy Brickell Avenue, an endless chain of fuzzy orange taillights at dusk. People were going home, the same old routine, not knowing how lucky they were to have their routines.

  Could this possibly drag on for a year?

  So much in a person’s life could change in that much time. Look at me and Jenna, engaged one month, history the next. Could my father physically survive that long in some remote guerrilla camp? He’d survived Vietnam, albeit as a much younger man. What would the emotional scars be like, the effects of prolonged captivity? Not seeing him for that long was unfathomable.

  Poor Mom, I thought, the reality sinking in. Poor Dad.

  11

  For only the second time in my life, I was taking a woman home to meet my mother and desperately wanted them to hit it off. Obviously the circumstances were very different, as were my motivations. Yet, I was strangely reminded of Jenna as Alex and I wove through traffic in my Jeep with the canvas top down. It was a rare comfortable evening in early autumn, without the persistent mugginess that usually lingered in South Florida until almost Halloween. Alex had removed her jacket and pulled her shoulder-length hair back to keep it from blowing in the breeze. Her profile was classic. Whether she was the more beautiful was hard to say, but, no slight to Jenna, she was definitely more intriguing.

  “So, how’d you get caught up in FARC?”

  We were stopped at a traffic light on Coral Way. Just ahead was the world’s first Burger King restaurant. Decades later it was still there, but everything around it had changed as the new Miami took over the old Miami-“My-ama,” my grandmother used to call it, an era as extinct now as the old notion of a “healthy” suntan. To my left was the original Latin American Cafeteria, where people waited in line outside for a chance to sit at the long, horseshoe-shaped counter and order everything from medianoche sandwiches to milkshakes made with exotic fruits like mamey. At the walk-up cafe across the street stood a group of Spanish-speaking men dressed in guayaberas, traditional Cuban shirts. Espresso served in little plastic cups inspired friendly arguments over beisbol and politicians who were too soft on Castro. Just ahead, the man in the intersection with the big straw hat was hawking bags of limas from the tree in his neighbor’s backyard. It was the Miami I’d grown up with, the cultural mix I liked.

  Alex said, “I wouldn’t say I was caught up in FARC. I just joined.”

  “Why?”

  “The usual burning philosophical issues that propel teenage girls to do anything.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “My boyfriend was in it.”

  “I suppose we’ve all been there on some level. Except that the craziest thing I ever did was sign up for the glee club.”

  “Hmm. Not sure which of us was the bigger sucker.”

  “True. I got dumped about two weeks after I signed up. How about you?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “Did he meet someone else?”

  “No. He took a bullet in the head.”

  For a second I felt like I’d taken the bullet. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. He was a drug-addicted worthless piece of trash who didn’t think twice about kidnapping people like your father.”

  “Did he ever kill anyone?”

  “Yes.”

  I hesitated, then asked, “Did you?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just thought it might come up with my mother. You know, the natural progression of things. ‘Hello, how are you, ever been a revolutionary?’ ”

  She smiled cryptically. “Would it make a difference to you if I had?”

  I wasn’t sure it would, but I was beginning to wish I hadn’t asked. “I suppose not. Like you said in Duncan’s office, that was your other life.”

  “Exactly.”

  The light turned green, and we were flowing with the traffic again. I waited for her to elaborate, but after several moments of silence it was clear that she wasn’t about to. FARC was her other life. That was that. Maybe she had killed someone, maybe she hadn’t.

  Just don’t piss her off, Nick.

  “Tell me about your father,” she said. “What’s he like?”

  “Just a regular guy.” I reconsidered, then said, “Actually, he’s pretty extraordinary. Dad never went to college. Went straight from high school to Vietnam in the early seventies, came home and fell in love with my mom. She was nineteen when she got pregnant. They married, and six months later it was the three of us.”

  “So you’re a love child?”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t stay together for twenty-six years because of me. After all these years, after all they’ve been through, they really are still in love.”

  “Does your mom help in the business?”

  “That’s totally my dad’s passion. He started it with one old lobster boat that on a good day broke down only once. Now his company has forty boats pulling twenty tons of lobster a week out of Nicaragua. It’s a cutthroat business, but I daresay there’s not a guy in it who doesn’t trust my dad.”

  “Sounds like you think highly of him.”

  “I do.”

  “You two must be close.”

  That gave me pause. To hear me gush, it did sound as though we were close. I gave her the same kind of half-baked answer that she’d given me when I’d asked about her body count with FARC. “I’m sure we’d be closer if I’d gone into the fishing business with him.”

  We were a half block from my house when I noticed a van in the driveway, Action News emblazoned on its side. The media had found us. I pulled up in the driveway beside it, jumped down from the Jeep, and confronted a couple of tech guys packing away their equipment. They were leaving, not coming.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Our job,” he said in a flat, sanctimonious tone.

  “Did you interview my mother?”

  “She was great. It’s over.”

  Alex laid her hand on my shoulder, as if to calm me down. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll deal with it.”

&
nbsp; I took it down a notch, but knowing how upset my mother had been lately, the thought of someone’s sticking a microphone in her face really angered me. “Where’s your reporter?”

  “Gone. You’re not the only news in this city. Just relax. No one was traumatized here.”

  Alex and I went inside. She waited behind in the living room as I continued to the kitchen. Mom was seated alone at the table, sipping a glass of orange juice. She was dressed nicely, with her makeup on, which I was glad to see. If she was going to be on television, it wouldn’t have done her any good to have people saying that she looked as if she were falling apart. She smiled nervously as I entered, perhaps rethinking the things she’d told the reporter.

  “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “They just showed up at my door, no notice, and said they wanted a live interview for their six o’clock broadcast. I said no at first, but the reporter was very nice and convinced me that a little publicity might help your father’s cause. I was going to call you, but she had to do it right then. I shouldn’t have done it, I guess.”

  “It’s okay. I’m sure you were fine.”

  “Can I say something?” Alex was standing in the doorway, not really eavesdropping. It would have been impossible for her not to overhear.

  “Who are you?”

  “Alex Cabrera. I’m with Crowell Associates.”

  “She’s a private consultant,” I added. “The insurance company pays for her.”

  “Mrs. Rey, dealing with media under these circumstances can’t be pleasant for you, but don’t second-guess yourself. Even the experts disagree on whether the families of kidnap victims should lie low or try to drum up publicity. Since cases of international kidnapping are often tinged with politics, some people think that publicity helps bring pressure on the politicians to resolve them quickly. Others think that if a case gets a lot of publicity, the kidnappers will infer that they’ve caught a really big fish, which inflates their demands.”

  “They already think they have a gold mine,” said Mom.

  “And nothing you said on the evening news is going to affect that view one way or the other. But from now on let’s have an agreement, all right? No one talks to the media unless it’s something we all agree on in advance.”

  “I only did the one interview.”

  “And that’s probably enough for now. Once you get a ransom demand and we know for sure that FARC or whoever is behind the kidnapping, then we can develop a media strategy.”

  I offered Alex a chair, then pulled one up for myself at the kitchen table. “Shouldn’t we also give some thought on how we might use the media? We haven’t heard anything from the kidnappers yet. Maybe it’s a way to get a message across.”

  “That’s something to consider, but it takes planning. You have to ask yourself, what message do you want the kidnappers to hear? And how will it be interpreted by everyone else who hears it? The general public. The police. It’s even possible that your father will hear you on Voice of America or RNC radio.”

  “I hadn’t really thought of Dad hearing anything while in captivity.”

  “Some prisoners are more isolated than others, but I know that FARC does on occasion give radio privileges to some. So if we do decide to use the media-and I’m not saying we will-it might make sense to have more than one person in the family do interviews. The longer this drags on, it could be of psychological benefit for him to hear his wife’s voice, then his son’s voice, his daughter’s voice, and so on.”

  “How do you know so much about these kidnappings?” Mom asked.

  Alex looked at me, as if to say that the message would flow best from my lips.

  “Remember that group Agent Nettles told us about, FARC? She used to be a member.”

  Mom blinked hard, as if my words weren’t quite computing. After several moments of silence, she was slowly turning green.

  “Are you okay, Mom?”

  Her shoulders started to heave. “Excuse me,” she said as she bolted from the table.

  Alex gave me an awkward look. “Maybe I should leave.”

  A strange noise emerged from the bathroom at the end of the hall, like a goose honking. Mom sounded really sick.

  “Wait here. Let me check on her.”

  The retching noise grew louder as I headed down the hall. The door was half open. I was almost afraid to look inside. After several moments of silence, I heard the toilet flush, then silence. Figuring the worst had passed, I tapped lightly on the door and entered.

  Mom was kneeling on the floor, her arm resting on the rim of the bowl.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I should have warned you about Alex. I know you’re under a lot of stress, and I-”

  “It’s not her. It’s morning sickness.”

  “What?”

  “It may be nighttime, but my stomach doesn’t know it. All damn day long, I’ve got morning sickness. It was the same way with you and Lindsey.”

  “You’re pregnant?”

  “Yes. I’m pregnant.”

  “How?”

  Her expression said, How do you think?

  I checked my astonishment slightly, reminding myself that she’d become my mother just a year out of high school. “Does Dad know?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t planned, but he was actually excited. We both were. And now,” she said, her voice shaking, “now, I might already be a widow and not even know it. This is such a disaster.”

  I sat on the floor beside her, my hand atop her stomach. “This is not a disaster. This is the most important reason in the world for Dad to reach inside himself and find the will to survive, no matter what happens. And it’s the most incredible reason on earth for me to do everything I can to make sure he gets home.”

  Tears welled in her eyes. She reached out for me, our first hug ever on the bathroom floor. She wasn’t just holding me; she was holding on to me. I’d never thought of my mother as weak. But if Alex was right-if this ordeal could last twelve months-I honestly wasn’t sure how Mom would deal with it. Especially now.

  “We’ll be fine,” I said as we rocked gently in each other’s arms on the cold tile floor. “The whole new family is going to be just fine.”

  12

  Matthew Rey lay sleeping beneath the makeshift remains of a shoddy old army tent. A cold rain dripped onto his foul- smelling bed, which was nothing more than a dirty blanket stretched atop a pile of corn husks. The canvas roof was so saturated from steady rainfall that it leaked even where there were no holes. It would have been impossible for most people to sleep under these conditions. Matthew slept from exhaustion.

  The first night he and his five armed escorts hiked for two hours. The valleys here were savanna, with a broad belt of trees about halfway up the mountain, then more savanna at the mountain crest. All of it was swampy, even the mountainside. Thick grass, clover, and mosses held rainfall like a sponge well into the higher elevations. Soggy ground made for tough going in the moonlight, but the guerrillas seemed determined to evacuate the grassy valley and reach the cover of tall trees before making camp. The next morning they’d risen at dawn and continued deeper into the forest, walking at a healthy clip beneath the canopy of bushy trees and twisted vines. The guerrillas didn’t seem concerned that they were wearing boots and Matthew wasn’t. The higher altitudes brought cooler temperatures, about a drop of three degrees centigrade for each five hundred meters. Matthew had no jacket and was still wearing the short-sleeved shirt in which he’d been captured.

  As the sun descended toward the jagged mountaintops, the thinning air turned chilly, though not unbearable. Just before dusk they stopped to make camp, and Matthew was finally given a blanket. The guerrillas made a small fire and ate boiled goat, the one Joaquin had butchered in such cruel fashion. Matthew had only a tin of Vienna sausages and a hot cup of sabayon, a milky drink made from aguardiente, a local firewater that tasted like a bad imitation of French Pernod. They didn’t tell him what it was until after he’d finished, and it was the first alcoholic beverage he�
�d had in almost fifteen years. It warmed him slightly, but in the fading afterglow of the sunset he had to focus hard on his surroundings to take his mind off his goose bumps. Their camp was near a field of onions intercropped with magnificent blackish-purple plants topped with bright scarlet flowers. In a country that boasts over a hundred and thirty thousand different plant classifications, Matthew couldn’t even hazard a guess. “Amapola,” one of the guerrillas had told him. “Poppy,” said another. The translation belied the beauty. It struck Matthew that few Americans had ever been this close to the raw materials for heroin.

  No one had told him exactly where he was, of course. The endless peaks and valleys suggested western Colombia, the most mountainous part of the country. The five-thousand-mile Cordillera de los Andes runs the length of South America, then splits into three ranges in Colombia. Sandwiched between the peaks of Cordillera Occidental, Cordillera Central, and Cordillera Oriental are two great valleys, Valle del Cauca and Valle del Magdalena, whose two rivers run northward until they merge and flow into the Caribbean. Just the sight of moving water had Matthew thinking of possible escape routes, though escape seemed impossible this far from civilization. Last night at their campsite, Matthew looked up through the trees to the vast ocean of stars twinkling overhead. They were so brilliant and plentiful, he had to be hundreds of miles from any city lights. The world was so quiet at this altitude, and the weather changed so quickly. By the time he’d made up his tent and bedding, the stars were gone. Low-hanging clouds had turned the camp pitch-dark, and he slowly became more aware of sounds than sights. The river churned through the valley a thousand feet below, like static on the radio. The gurgling sounds just ten meters from his tent were from a stream of the sweetest, purest water he’d ever tasted. Ten meters in the opposite direction stood a patch of bamboo, the bathroom, from which a strange clicking noise emerged in the darkness. A bird, he assumed. Colombia was full of birds, more species in this one country than in all of North America and Europe combined. The lure had gotten many an unsuspecting bird-watcher kidnapped.