A King's ransom

by James Grippando

  14

  More than a week since Dad had disappeared, and still not a word from his kidnappers. Alex assured me that this was normal. The consul’s office told me the same thing in my daily update from the State Department. Families always want the ordeal to end quickly, but the kidnappers move at their own pace. It’s not that they’re incapable of moving faster. They’re simply in control, and they want you to know it.

  On Monday morning I went to the office to see if Duncan would extend my personal leave for another week. He agreed, though we both knew the rules. At a large firm like Cool Cash, associates either billed twenty-two-hundred hours annually or took a pay cut. No slack for kids, kidney stones, or kidnappings.

  Back in my office I logged on to my computer to enter my time for the week. Lawyers at Cool Cash recorded their time in six-minute intervals. Each billing day had entries for a twenty-four-hour day, as you never knew when you might be stuck in the office till 3:00 A.M. cranking out a brief. I entered zeroes across the board, ten slots per hour, two hundred and forty per day, twelve hundred for the week. Staring at five days’ worth of zeroes, I suddenly realized how incredibly long a day could be. It made me think of Dad sitting in the jungles or mountains somewhere in Colombia and counting each passing minute, nothing to do but survive and wait for his ordeal to end.

  I checked my e-mails. Most were office memos, easily deleted. I printed a half dozen updates from the lawyers who were monitoring my caseload in my absence. One that caught my eye was from an address I didn’t recognize. It had arrived just a half hour earlier. I opened it, then froze.

  “I know where Matthew Rey is,” it read.

  I stared at the words. The sender’s screen name was an eight-digit number, not even a word. I scrolled down to check the rest of the message.

  “If this interests you, please come see me.” An address followed, but no name and no telephone number.

  At this stage of the game I had to take every lead seriously. It was only instinct, and my thinking was definitely colored by my meeting with Agent Huitt-but I suspected that if this guy really knew where my father was, he might also know things that were better not shared with the FBI, my negotiator Alex, or even my friend J.C.

  I wrote down the address. It wasn’t too far. I could be there in twenty minutes-alone, just me and my family secrets.

  As usual, a twenty-minute trip on the Palmetto Expressway turned into forty. With no map, I tried to find my way by using two handy mnemonic devices that helped drivers get around Miami-Dade County. The more well known one was STL: streets, terraces, and lanes ran east to west (think “St. Louis”). The one I seemed to remember better was courts, roads, avenues, and places. In Miami, as at Cool Cash, CRAP flowed north and south, top to bottom.

  Unfortunately, someone had stolen most of the street signs in the neighborhood, and I finally realized I was in Hialeah, which had a different street-numbering system entirely. I stopped for directions at a gas station where a big Cuban flag was draped in the window. An old bumper sticker on the counter read, NO CASTRO, NO PROBLEMA. In Spanish, the attendant directed me to one of many rows of two-bedroom, sixties-vintage houses. Once upon a time Hialeah had been synonymous with pink flamingos gracing a manicured infield as powerful thoroughbreds raced around the famous old track. Many areas were beautiful to some, but I was in a declining neighborhood where the flamingos were plastic and front lawns were surrounded by chain link and barbed wire to keep away the car thieves.

  I found the right house halfway down the street. An old Chevy was parked in the driveway. Beneath the carport was an aluminum fishing boat on a trailer with two flat tires. As with most of the surrounding homes, the windows and doors were covered with jail-like security bars. I had to wonder what this person could possibly know about my father’s kidnapping. After my conversation with FBI Agent Huitt and his threats against my father’s partner, Guillermo, I supposed it could have been just about anything.

  I opened the gate, walked up the cracked sidewalk, and knocked on the front door. A man answered, dressed in sandals, shorts, and a Miami Dolphins T-shirt. It was only 11:00 A.M., but he had a healthy five o’clock shadow, the kind that was chic on a movie star but plain old scruffy on just about everyone else. A protective Doberman pinscher was standing behind him.

  “I’m Nick Rey. You sent a message about my father?”

  He smiled and unlocked the screen door. “Si. Come on in.”

  I glanced at the dog.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “She’s friendlier than she looks.” He led me down a dark hall to the kitchen. The window shades were pulled shut, and the only light in the house was from the lamp in the living room and the ceiling fixture in the kitchen. Incense burned in a small urn on the kitchen counter, filling the air with an almost sickeningly sweet odor.

  “?Cafe?” he offered.

  “No, thanks.”

  He poured himself half a cup and filled the rest with milk. At his insistence I took the good chair, the one that didn’t have duct tape covering splits and tears in the vinyl covering. He seated himself opposite me at the kitchen table, the dog at his feet.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  He smiled and extended his arms like a preacher. “The answer to your prayers.”

  “I hate to be blunt, but you don’t look like it.”

  “Looks don’t matter. It’s the message that’s important. It was very powerful, no? ‘I know where Matthew Rey is.’ ”

  “It brought me here.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So where is he?”

  “In due time, we’ll get there.”

  “Do you know my father?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have some connection to the kidnappers?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  At the risk of offending him, I had to speak my mind. “You have no idea where my father is, do you?”

  “Not in the conventional sense. But I have access to a power that can lead us straight to your father.”

  “By power, do you mean a person?”

  “No. Collective mind power.”

  I smelled a scam. “Are you supposed to be some kind of psychic?”

  He leaned across the table and looked into my eyes. “Not the kind you’re thinking of. Look around the room. There’s no crystal ball, no dead chickens to dissect, no turban on my head. I don’t work with tarot cards or birth dates. What I’m offering is a clean and legitimate opportunity to link your father telepathically to the most powerful minds in the world. I call it my deluxe power package.”

  “Does it come with a moon roof and CD player?”

  “This is no joke. It’s done by e-mail to a group of specialists selected by me. Each of my contacts around the globe is strategically located to enhance the flow of energy from one to the next. At a predesignated moment, each of them opens the e-mail and reads the exact same message: ‘I know where Matthew Rey is.’ The timing is critical. It sparks their collective mind power. If it’s done right-and this is where my expertise comes in-I guarantee that someone in that group will know where Matthew Rey is.”

  “Yeah, probably last seen with Elvis.”

  “Please, I understand your skepticism. But only after your father returns home safely will you realize that this was the best five thousand dollars you’ve ever spent.”

  I nearly laughed in his face. “Five thousand dollars? For what?”

  “For my connections to the very best minds in their field. I have a woman who has helped law enforcement officers locate missing children all over the United States. There’s a guy in the U.K. who gets patients through major surgery without anesthesia. An aboriginal tribe member in Australia can snap a butter knife in half using only her powers of concentration.”

  “I came here thinking you knew where my father was. You’re lucky I don’t snap you in half and kick your ass all the way to Colombia to go look for him.”

  “No need to kick me anywhere. The mind is all-powerful. I
’ve been invoking the message for two days now. Don’t be at all surprised if you experience a telepathic communication very soon.”

  I rose to leave. “You’re a crackpot.”

  He glared, as if I’d just hurled the ultimate insult. “Your mother didn’t think so.”

  “You’ve spoken to her?”

  “Yes,” he said smugly. “I saw her on the television news last week. She finally agreed to speak to me this morning. I just about had her sold on the deluxe power package, and then she backed off and said it was up to you.”

  “Well, the answer is no.”

  He sipped his coffee, unfazed. “For now, maybe. But a month from now, or two months from now, as this drags on with no end in sight, she’ll turn to me. With or without your approval, she’ll cough up the money. Probably more than once.”

  “You scum.” I shot from my chair, ready to grab him by the shirt.

  “Sergeant!” he shouted.

  His dog leaped from the floor, up on its hind legs, and pinned me against the wall. It was growling in my face, mouth wide open, its long white canines an inch away from my carotid artery. One more command from its master, and I was a dead man.

  “Release!” he shouted.

  The dog retreated obediently to its master’s side. “You’ve got thirty seconds to leave peacefully. After that, Sergeant drags you out by the throat.”

  “Where’s your conscience, man? This family is suffering.”

  “I want my money.”

  “You talk as if we owed it to you.”

  “Wow. You must be psychic.”

  He was being coy, but he seemed to be saying exactly that. We did owe it to him.

  “You’ve got ten seconds to be on the other side of that door,” he said.

  The dog growled. This was no time to pick a fight. I walked down the hall and let myself out. Halfway to my Jeep, I heard him say, “Hey.”

  I stopped and turned. He was standing inside the house behind the closed screen door.

  “Tell your sister that Jaime Ochoa sends his regards.”

  He spoke as if the name should mean something to me. It didn’t. “Sorry. I don’t know where my sister is.”

  “I do,” he said, his eyes narrowing into a piercing stare that chilled me.

  I couldn’t tell if he was bluffing, and he didn’t give me a chance to ask. I stood there and watched, confused, as he closed the door and retreated into the house.

  15

  I called Alex for lunch. I figured it was time to level with my consultant.

  We met at Scotty’s Landing, a waterfront patio-style restaurant, where the specialties were grilled mahi-mahi sandwiches and bowls of delicious conch gumbo, served cold, like gazpacho. The place was essentially an open hut with a bar and a kitchen, flanked by a wood deck eating area with little round tables, plastic chairs, canvas umbrellas, fresh sea breezes, and nice views of the bay. It wasn’t exactly in the heart of Coconut Grove, but to me the sign posted at the entrance captured the old Grove spirit. PLEASE WAIT HERE FOR NEXT AVAILABLE TABLE, it read, followed by separate, smaller signs in increasingly smaller print: IT DOESN’T SAY WAIT TO BE SEATED. SEAT YOURSELF.IF NOT UNDERSTOOD, START AGAIN.

  We seated ourselves at the table nearest the water. Alex sat with her legs crossed, which I naturally noticed because the sundress and sandals she was wearing made her legs highly noticeable. It was actually the toe ring that had caught my attention, a little gold band around the middle toe, her longest. Feet like a ballerina, or so I recalled from the day Lindsey had come home from ballet crying because her teacher said it would be harder to stand on point if your first toe was your longest toe. She gave up dance and took up hell-raising.

  “You like my toe ring?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “The ring,” she said, wiggling her toe with the slender ankle flexed. “It seems to have caught your fancy.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  She smiled. I looked away, embarrassed. We both knew I’d been staring.

  The waiter brought us water and took our order. While waiting for our food, I told her all about Jaime Ochoa, which prompted the obvious question.

  “Do you think he really knows where your sister is?”

  “Probably in much the same way he knows that at age sixty-three Julia Roberts will give birth to triplets.”

  “You think he’s ever met Lindsey?”

  “My guess is that she probably stiffed him on payment for psychic readings somewhere along the line. When he saw Mom on television last week talking about the kidnapping, he decided to rip off the family as payback.”

  “Nice guy.”

  “I love my sister, but she has a habit of mixing it up with deadbeats, usually about as far away from home as she can get. She likes to think it’s part of her adventuresome journalistic spirit, very Ernest Hemingway. One of her old J-school professors once told her that if you want to write a story about sewer rats, you don’t interview swans. I wish he’d also pointed out that to write a story about suicide, you don’t have to kill yourself.”

  “So, you think she met Jaime Ochoa doing research for a story?”

  I looked away, then back. I wasn’t a good liar, and there was no point pulling punches at this point. “That’s what I’m hoping. But I’m starting to get a little worried.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Last time we talked, Nicaragua. Even though she and Dad are kind of on the outs, I always took some comfort in knowing that they were at least in the same country.”

  “How long’s it been since you last heard from her?”

  “A while. It’s always a while. She calls when she’s broke. But to be honest, it’s a little different this time, now that Dad’s missing.”

  “That’s true. But I’d have to say that the odds are pretty low that both of them would be kidnapped at the same time in different countries.”

  “Unless the kidnappings are related.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  I noted that she didn’t totally dismiss the possibility.

  The server brought our food and left. I popped a french fry in my mouth, then said, “I’ve been thinking of going down there. I need to check on Dad’s business anyway. Maybe I’d do a little checking on Lindsey, too.”

  “I recommend you at least wait until you hear from the kidnappers. Don’t leave your mother here to deal with that herself.”

  I nodded, then glanced toward the bay, where a sunburned tourist was struggling furiously to tack his rented sailboat. “Maybe it would help to run a background check on Jaime Ochoa.”

  “Sure. I can do that.”

  “I’m sure he’s just a crackpot.”

  “Then why did you go see him?”

  I knew that the conversation would lead this way, but I also knew that it was high time I stopped keeping secrets from the person I was depending on most to bring my father home. “Does everything I tell you get back to the insurance company?”

  “No. The insurance company pays your bill, as required by the policy. But my client is you, not the company. If you ask me to keep something in confidence, it remains in confidence.”

  That was the answer I’d wanted, but I still hesitated. Dad’s problem with the FBI was not my favorite lunch topic. “I went to see him because I thought he might have something to do with some accusations I’d heard. About my dad.”

  “What, specifically?”

  She listened without interruption as I told her about my meeting with Agent Huitt, the FBI’s suspicions about my father’s business. She seemed particularly interested in the bureau’s apparent refusal to assist us in the kidnapping unless the Rey family cooperated in some as-yet-undefined investigation against Guillermo. When I’d finished, she said nothing. In fact, she looked a little miffed.

  “Should I not have told you any of this?” I asked.

  “You should have told me as soon as it happened.”

  “It’s all suc
h a crock. I didn’t want you getting the wrong idea about my father.”

  My cell phone rang. I debated whether to answer till I’d cleared the air with Alex, but so long as Dad was missing, this was no time to be screening calls. It was my mother.

  “A courier package just arrived from Colombia,” she said, her voice racing. “I think it must be from the kidnappers.”

  I nearly fell off my chair. From the look on my face, Alex knew what it was. I waved her over so she could put her ear next to mine and listen in.

  “Open it,” I told my mother.

  “I already did.”

  “Is there a ransom demand?”

  “I can’t read it. It’s all in Spanish. There’s a little note on the bottom that looks like your father’s handwriting, but that’s in Spanish, too. I just don’t understand. Why would he write to his own family in a foreign language?”

  She sounded so frazzled, I was about to suggest that she take it to one of our bilingual neighbors to translate. But this wasn’t something to share with the neighborhood.

  “Just hang in there a few more minutes. I’m with Alex right now. We’re on our way.”

  “Should I call Agent Nettles at the FBI?”

  I paused, and Alex seemed to sense the reason: I hadn’t even talked to my mother about our problems with the FBI. “Let’s not do anything till I get home and read it.”

  “Then hurry, please. It’s killing me not knowing what it says.”

  “You and me both,” I said.

  16

  We reached my mother’s house in ten minutes. She met us at the door.

  “This way,” said Mom as she led us to the kitchen.

  The letter was resting faceup on the table beside the opened courier package. I was glad Alex was with me. I probably could have translated it myself, but I suspected that a communication from a kidnapper would contain subtleties in word choice and phraseology that I would never be able to interpret. She seemed like the right person to discern the true meaning. I wondered if perhaps she’d even written a few letters like this before.

  As Alex read the letter, I tried to read her face. “Is it FARC?” I asked.