The Wrong Hostage sk-2

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “The law notices,” Grace said.

  “Sometimes. Then you have the cops running behind the crooks, usually way behind. The cops are lagging because they have a ball-breaking handicap. Not only do they have to figure out what’s happening, they also have to gather legally admissible proof of same, and the courtroom bar is set about as high as the moon.”

  “There’s a good reason for high standards. It separates us from the gutter.”

  “Judge, the gutter loves your high standards because they make life merry hell for cops.”

  “You aren’t stupid,” Grace said curtly. “You know why police actions have to be carefully restricted.”

  “Yeah, I understand the legal fiction you lawyers have spun in justification. But on the other hand, no, I have no gut-deep sense of why society worries so much about cops.”

  “Because somebody has to watch the watchdogs.”

  “Watch them, yes. Pull their teeth and shoot them in all four feet? No.”

  “Just like the old days,” she said, shaking her head. “Me on one side of Justice’s scales and you on the other. It’s a miracle you didn’t become a crook.”

  “The company sucks sewer water. Be grateful there are noncrooks like me, Your Honor. We keep the biggest turds from ending up on your white linen tablecloth.”

  Glancing frequently at the mirrors, Faroe followed the road up onto the mesa that was the principal trading post of the NAFTA era. Fresh produce from the interior of Mexico and cheap TVs assembled in maquiladoras in Tijuana clogged the northbound roads, swimming against a steady stream of structural steel and manufactured goods headed south. The storage warehouses and import-export brokerages stood shoulder to shoulder with vast fields of used cars and trucks too clapped out for the high-speed American interstates, but okay for the slow, rough roads of Chiapas and Guanajuato.

  A gleaming Aeromexico jetliner leaped up off the Tijuana International Airport runway a thousand yards beyond the barbed-wire and metal-mat border fence. The plane banked out to the south, spewing burned exhaust over the crowded, penniless colonias that consumed the rolling coastal hills as far as the eye could see.

  Grace felt that old familiar uneasiness crawl through her. “I should be more comfortable with this place. Some of my ancestors came from Mexico. But I always feel alien here.”

  Faroe touched her hair gently before he put his hand back on the wheel. “Don’t worry about it. I know enough about Tijuana for both of us. Tijuana is the model for the shadow world.”

  “The world you were trying to get out of.”

  He shrugged.

  “Isn’t that why you retired,” she said, “so you don’t have to cross over this line and go back into the Mexico of the mind?”

  He braked to a stop at the end of a short line of American vehicles headed south.

  “I’m trying to get away from the whole spectrum, light to dark,” Faroe said. “That’s what my boat is all about.”

  “The TAZ. What language is the name from?”

  “It’s an acronym dreamed up by a freelance Sufi philosopher named Hakim Bey. The letters stand for temporary autonomous zone.”

  Grace thought about it for a moment. Each word was familiar, but put together they didn’t particularly make sense. “I give up. What does it mean?”

  “Bey describes these zones as remote, renegade places scattered throughout the world-Tibet, the South Sea Islands, monasteries high up in the Alps. One of my favorites is an abandoned oil-drilling rig in the English Channel between France and Kent.”

  “Is St. Kilda named for one of those zones?”

  “Not quite. Well, maybe, now that you mention it. Temporary autonomous zones are populated by people like me, dudes who couldn’t cut it in the civilized world, burnout jobs, head cases, and fugitives. The zones can be lonely, but they’re the only places where misfits have a half-decent shot at being free.”

  “I see the autonomous part of it, but why temporary?”

  “These places only exist as long as they stay under the global radar,” Faroe said. “Once the structured world of governments and corporations stumble across a TAZ, they set to work taming it or trying to turn a profit from it. Then the game is over. Any surviving misfits move on to the next TAZ and hope it lasts as long as they do.”

  A Mexican customs officer wearing Ray-Bans and a brown uniform waved them through without inspection. They crossed the line into Mexico.

  “Still Don Quixote,” Grace said softly, “the ever-hopeful romantic, looking for the next windmill, the one that he will defeat.”

  Faroe smiled thinly. “You need romance more on this side of the line than you do back there in the sunshine world.”

  Grace thought about what her life had been even a year ago. She’d been sad about the coming divorce, but safe.

  Now I lay me down to sleep…

  But she hadn’t said that childhood prayer in years, because she’d known she would awaken safe in her bed. Alone, but safe. If she ever spent the night in Mexico, she’d be awake praying.

  That’s foolish. Most of Mexico is safer than the California barrio I grew up in.

  At least it had been, before Ted slid down whatever slippery slope he had.

  I can’t trash him for that. I’ve started down my own morally greasy slide.

  Ted had been furious when he found out he wasn’t Lane’s father. He didn’t believe she hadn’t known when they were married. He didn’t want to believe her. It gave him the perfect excuse for ignoring the boy who called him Dad, just as he’d ignored Lane from the moment of his birth. It also gave Ted an alibi for all his affairs, which had started years before he knew about Lane. Ted was perfect, she was a deceitful slut, and that was that.

  Grace didn’t want to think about how Faroe would react when she told him that he had a son. He’d look at her as a liar, a cheat, a thief who had stolen his son’s life.

  Sooner or later, she’d destroy the fragile, necessary romantic illusions of the man who sat beside her in the car.

  Maybe I won’t have to.

  Maybe pigs sing soprano.

  “What’s wrong?” Faroe asked. “You look pale.”

  “Just worried.”

  It was the truth, if not the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help me God.

  Faroe glanced in the rearview mirror. “You can stop worrying about our tail. The Jeep peeled off at the line. That pretty well confirms that they’re cops. FBI, maybe. Or DEA driving a vehicle they seized during a drug bust.”

  “Why did they stop at the border?”

  “Feds don’t like coming south. The Mexican government makes them leave their guns on the other side of the line. Not a healthy way to live.”

  She frowned. “Doesn’t it bother you? Going unarmed?”

  “I’m not a purist. In some situations I’ll carry. But guns have limited uses. Unless you’re willing and able to kill, a gun is just iron, lead, and smokeless powder.”

  Grace drew a deep breath and let it out. “And you’re willing. And able.”

  Faroe gave her a look out of cold green eyes, then went back to staring at the traffic ahead. Silence filled the car.

  And filled it.

  Pressing against the two people inside.

  Faroe lifted one hand, then the other, from the wheel, flexing his fingers.

  “There was a guy, a pretty good guy,” he said finally. “I thought he was a friend. I would have died thinking it except that I was wearing Kevlar underwear. Body armor.”

  Grace’s breath broke. “Where were you?”

  “In a filthy alley behind the Lisboa Casino in Macao. It started out as a drunken fistfight. At least I thought he was drunk.”

  Faroe looked at his right hand.

  Grace’s glance followed his. She saw a thin, livid scar that began on the back of his thumb and ran across to the base of his knuckles to his little finger. There were other scars, too, but this one was new.

  “After he got me in a clinch, he pulled a knife
out of an ankle sheath and said, ‘Sorry, Joe.’ That’s when I understood he wasn’t drunk. He was trying to slit my belly and dump my guts on the ground with the fish heads and the prawn fondue.”

  “A friend,” she said, her voice raw.

  “We were working an investigation for a major multinational electronics firm. Somebody was tipping off Malay pirates about shipments of high-definition color televisions. Turns out the snitch was my pal, and he thought I was about to figure it out. So I strangled him while he tried to cut off my hand. Then I went back and told Steele I was done.”

  “That’s…” She swallowed hard and shook her head.

  “Shit happens.”

  “But you can’t blame yourself, not for that,” she said. “You were fighting for your life!”

  “He was working for the paycheck, same as I was. But after that I didn’t want to work anymore for other people or politicians or corporations that could write off lives and black millions as a business expense. I took my winnings off the table and started rigging out the TAZ.”

  “And now I’m dragging you back into it.” Her fingers laced together, squeezed. “I’m sorry.”

  “Consider it a charity gig. We international hired guns do them all the time.”

  “So you’re doing this as a special favor for me?”

  He glanced at her for an instant, then back at the jumbled, free-form traffic in front of them. “I don’t have a hidden agenda, if that’s what you mean.”

  Avoiding his sideways glance, Grace looked down at her hands clenched in her lap and thought again of what would happen when Faroe found out about Lane.

  “That’s not what I’m worried about,” she said.

  “Then what?”

  “I can’t-don’t-won’t-”

  The dashboard cell phone rang.

  Grace could have kissed it.

  19

  TIJUANA

  EARLY SUNDAY AFTERNOON

  “GOOD MORNING, GRACE, THIS is James Steele.” The speaker gave Steele’s voice a hollow ring.

  Grace glanced sideways, looking for advice.

  Faroe nodded.

  “Ambassador, I’m here with Joe,” she said. “We’re just inside Mexico.”

  “Ah,” Steele said, failing to keep the satisfaction from his voice. “From what Dwayne told me, I take it you’ve signed on.”

  “Don’t take it too far,” Faroe said. “While St. Kilda searches under rocks and in cesspools for Theodore Franklin, I’ve agreed to take a look at the school and give Grace my thoughts about breaking her son out. But all three of us know that it would be better if I bowed out.”

  “I’m disappointed to hear that,” Steele said, “particularly as I’ve turned up some interesting and pertinent background on the matter.”

  “Background? If it’s one of those cut-and-paste jobs that the research department pulls off Google, dump it in my e-mail. I’ll look at it later. Right now we’re heading for hip deep in alligators at the school.”

  “I know you think the research department is of limited usefulness.”

  “All the clippings in the world didn’t warn me about Macao,” Faroe said. “And I’m betting they won’t tell me what I already know-Grace is caught in a three-corner game.”

  “Explain.” Steele’s voice was icy, all irony gone.

  “Just before we came south, we did a drive-by peep of Ted Franklin’s office. The place is under tight surveillance, probably a task force led by feds. They certainly had all the moves.”

  For a time the only sound was that of the road and Steele’s finger tapping gently on his headset mike. “And the third corner?”

  “He looked like a Mexican federale to me,” Faroe said. “He must have put Grace on his radar earlier this morning, at her home. She led him right to me. We’ve covered ourselves for the moment, but I’m burned. You better get busy on Plan B.”

  Steele was silent, then sighed. “That is unfortunate. I’ll prepare to move Barlow into position.”

  “Barlow? Are you kidding?”

  “I assumed you would want someone who spoke good Spanish.”

  “Yeah, right, but Barlow lisps like Philip I. He’s what baja californios call a chilango. Border Mexicans treat chilangos just about as well as your average Texan treats Yankees like you.”

  “Who did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t have a roster in front of me,” Faroe said impatiently. “You’re the brains of the outfit.”

  There was a chilly silence on the line. Then Steele cleared his throat. “Judge Silva, you have more experience dealing with adolescent males than I do, so help me out. Joseph won’t formally commit to the job but he wants to control how the job is done. It’s a classic example of what diplomats and game theoreticians call a no-win situation.”

  Grace smiled slightly. “Ambassador, I’m not in a position to give advice. I’m alone in a car with said sulky male.”

  “Well, when he makes up his mind, please do let me know,” Steele said, biting off each word.

  Faroe was just pigheaded enough not to admit that his mind was already made up. He really disliked being so easily read by his boss.

  Ex-boss.

  Almost.

  “Until then,” Steele said, “I’ll just continue to perform my administrative and support duties, including the collection of very pertinent intelligence.”

  Faroe glared at the speaker. “Okay. Fine. I give up. Tell me what you have.”

  “I was struck by something Judge Silva told me yesterday about the school where her son is being held. All Saints. She said it’s run by the Roman Catholic Church, and that the school is very highly regarded.”

  “So?” Faroe said.

  “Well, that raises an obvious question,” Steele said. “What is the church doing as hostage-keeper for a well-known Mexican drug trafficker?”

  “The Catholic Church is like any other human institution, in Mexico or elsewhere,” Faroe said dryly. “If the collection plate is full, the priest is happy.”

  “Perhaps, but one of St. Kilda’s best young researchers came up with several interesting facts. First, All Saints maintains a web site with glowing testimonials from a number of prominent Mexican families, including the Calderons.”

  Grace grimaced.

  “The Calderons,” Steele continued, “are the Vanderbilts of northern Mexico. The paterfamilias was an interior minister and chairman of the political party that has ruled Mexico since the beginning of the last century.”

  “I already knew that,” Faroe said. “So what? It’s like saying the Kennedy family has been entirely straight, except for the days when Papa Joe was a bootlegger.”

  “I bow to your greater familiarity with the criminal backgrounds of leading families. But the Catholic Church is a somewhat different matter. Our young researcher did a thorough background on the people who run All Saints. She found that the school’s rector, a Father Rafael Magon, assumed his post under direct appointment by the Vatican.”

  Grace’s eyebrows rose.

  So did Faroe’s.

  “Father Rafael Magon is a church celebrity,” Steele said. “He comes from a famous Baja California family, and had been on the inside of the Vatican fast track before becoming rector at All Saints two years ago.”

  Grace straightened in her seat. “I’ve met Father Rafael several times. Even though he’s the soccer coach, he didn’t strike me as your average parish priest.”

  “Magon,” Faroe said. “I wonder if he’s from that family.”

  “What family?” Steele asked.

  “The one with the two brothers who organized a successful Baja del Norte rebellion in 1910,” Faroe said. “They captured the only two cities in Baja, Mexicali and Tijuana. Their insurrection became a lightning rod for the wacko left of that day. The Industrial Workers of the World and other anarchist organizations sent in reinforcements, a kind of International Brigade. They had a lot of fun for six months, playing at anarchist government.”

  “You�
�re talking about one of my grandmothers,” Grace said. “When the Magonistas lost, she went north with federales hot on her heels.”

  “Well, that explains it,” Faroe said with a sideways glance and a smile.

  Grace knew better than to ask what had been explained.

  “Mexico City finally got its act together in the summer of 1911 and counterattacked,” Faroe continued for Steele’s benefit. “The federales sent the Wobblies scampering north to San Diego. The Magon brothers and some of their followers went south, into the Baja mountains. Their descendants are still around, still preaching revolution and social change to the mountain peasants and the Indians.”

  “Thank you,” Steele said, and meant it. “I sometimes forget that beneath your relentlessly shit-kicking persona, there lives a serious student of history.”

  Faroe swung the Mercedes around a slow-moving freight truck that was laboring up a grade, spewing black diesel smoke from its chrome stacks.

  “History is a slippery slope,” Faroe said. “Things change day to day, sometimes faster. The Magonistas gambled on the support of the international workers’ movement. They guessed wrong and they’ve been hiding in the mountains ever since. Maybe this new MagOn has finally capitulated and thrown in his lot with the crooks, using his robes as cover.”

  “I wondered about that myself,” Steele said. “Do you remember Umberto Meinhof?”

  Faroe grunted. “The captain in the Swiss Guards? Is he still in charge of the Vatican’s diplomatic security detail?”

  “He is. I spoke with him at great length an hour ago. He confirmed that Magon was, and probably still is, a very bright light in the church’s diplomatic corps. But when I started to quiz him ever so gently about why such a star was stationed in the backwaters of northern Mexico, he acted as if I’d asked him to procure little girls for the pope.”

  Faroe whistled softly through his teeth. “And this very bright light is hanging around with traffickers? Interesting.”

  “I thought so,” Steele said gently.

  “Maybe the Vatican has decided to bring the Magonistas into the fold,” Grace said. “Not to mention the Indians who never really converted.”