Monatero said, "You believe me, then."
"I'll believe you when I've got Beltran looking down the barrel of my gun."
"You will, if you act quickly."
Paz said, "One good turn deserves another. Now I'll do you a favor. This is funny — you know who Beltran is, you've known all the time."
Monatero said, "No, no."
"Yes. You know him but you don't know him. It all makes sense to me now and it will to you, too, when I tell you who he is."
Paz told him Beltran's true identity, who he really was. Monatero looked like a sleeper trying to awaken from a nightmare and failing. "No... it can't be! Him... Beltran?"
Paz nodded. "That's right."
The sheer, outrageous audacity of the revelation struck Monatero as funny. The funniest thing in the world. Too bad the joke was on him.
Or almost. It would be even funnier when Beltran found himself cheated of a million-dollar ransom and, with luck, face to face with Paz, thanks to what Monatero had told him.
Monatero laughed out loud. The effort was too much for him, snapping some vital thread inside him, the one that held him to life. He coughed, choking, blood coming out of his mouth.
He shuddered and died.
Paz went into the showroom, stuck his head in the door to the back of the building, and called for Fierro and Carrancha. He said, "All done?"
Fierro nodded. "All done. None left alive."
Paz said, "Here, too. Let's go."
The three of them piled out the front door. Vasco saw them coming and jumped behind the wheel of the SUV. The trio hurried toward it.
Gunfire blasted, hitting Carrancha in the back, ripping through him.
Paz and Fierro ducked, crouching, looking around in all directions for the shooter. More gunfire followed, coming from above, ripping up the pavement a few feet away from them.
Fierro spotted the shooter first. It was a rifleman on the roof, the one who hadn't fallen to the ground. Mortally wounded by the grenade, he still had enough left to try and take out the enemy before they made their getaway.
Fierro tagged him with a shotgun blast in the chest and head, knocking him backward out of sight.
Carrancha lay on the ground, bleeding from several bullet holes in the back, arms and legs thrashing, gasping for gurgling breath.
Fierro said, "Of all the filthy luck... "
Paz said, "We can't leave any wounded behind. He would do the same for me; I would expect no less."
Carrancha saw what was coming and raised a hand, pawing empty air, pleading, "No — no, don't!"
Paz shot him, putting a bullet in the back of his head.
Paz and Fierro hopped into the Explorer. Vasco drove off almost before they were entirely inside, putting distance between them and what was left of the Supremo Hat Company.
Paz reached inside his shirt, squeezing the talisman of Saint Barbara. Breathing a silent prayer of thanks to the dark spirit that was his guardian angel.
15
THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 7 P.M. AND 8 P.M. CENTRAL DAYLIGHT TIME
Sad Hill, New Orleans
The site of the swap was a footbridge spanning the Long Canal in Sad Hill, a forlorn patch of lowlands south of East New Orleans. East New Orleans was one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the city. Sad Hill was a few notches below that.
Named for Governor Huey Long, who'd had it dug in the early 1930s, the canal was part of an intricate system of waterways and pumping stations designed to prevent flooding. It ran roughly north-south through Sad Hill.
Its east bank was a weedy field sloping to a low rise. Its sole distinguishing feature was a knoll on which was sited an ancient cemetery, Our Lady of Sorrows, which had given the area the name of Sad Hill. The graveyard had been abandoned close to a century ago.
Beyond it, farther east, the rise topped out into a ridgeline running parallel to the canal. It had been cleared and flattened and now served as a power trail, along which ran a row of steel pylons carrying high-tension electric wires. The towers were placed high enough to avoid being swept away by floodwaters.
Linking the east and west banks was a footbridge with a cast-iron framework and a wooden plank bed. It was old, but its antique construction had survived Katrina better than other newer, more modern spans.
On the west side of the bridge was a deserted neighborhood, a tract of ramshackle huts and burned-out ruins. The few paved roads were veined with cracks, out of which grew waist-high weeds. Most of the cross streets were dirt tracks.
The canal, like so many others, had failed under Katrina, leaving Sad Hill part of the eighty percent of New Orleans that had been flooded by the storm. The residents who'd evacuated it had never returned.
Since then, a number of houses had been burned down by vandals; the charred remains stood in place, no effort having been made by the city to clear them away. Many standing houses bore spray-painted Xs and other symbols left by searchers in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, signs indicating whether any dead bodies were left in the houses, and if so, how many. The dead had been carted away then, only to be replaced more recently by others, victims of gang killings and random murders.
The site was so blighted that even the teen gangs who haunted New Orleans's phantom zones had forsaken it, except as a body dump.
Such was Sad Hill. Blighted, blasted, and abandoned, an ideal spot for shady dealings best conducted beyond the eyes of the law, or for that matter, those of any other witnesses.
* * *
Not long ago, within the last hour, the kidnap gang chief had resumed contact with Mylon Sears, naming Sad Hill as the site where the ransom swap would be made. He didn't give Sears much time to get there, either. Fast-fast-fast, that was how the deal had to go down.
Sears had told him, "We'll get there as quick as we can without breaking any speed laws that might attract police attention."
The abductor said, "No police, or Garros dies."
"I get the message."
"Hirelings like you need things repeated to drive them home into your pea brains," the abductor said, breaking off communication.
The EXECPROTEK crew waiting at the day care center hopped into their vehicles and drove cross-town for some miles before arriving at Sad Hill.
Now, Susan Keehan and her Sears-led security squad were on the west bank of the canal, where they'd been told to wait for final word on swapping a million dollars in ransom money for Raoul Garros.
The hour of exchange was at hand. The convoy of a half-dozen SUVs and outrider cars was parked in the middle of a cross-street in the tract of abandoned houses. Not as many reinforcements as Sears would have liked, but enough to repel any possible attack.
Susan had insisted on coming along. There was no way around it; it was easier for Sears to give in than to try and fight it. Otherwise she'd have tried to fire him and replace him with someone more amenable to taking her orders, requiring Sears to invoke the authority of Wilmont Keehan to back him up; a diversion that would have eaten up precious time and created a dangerous distraction.
Better to have her along where he knew where she was and could exert some control over her contacts with the outside world, preventing her from throwing a wild glitch into the situation by going outside the closed circle of in-house channels.
Susan was allowed to be present under strict conditions; she was to remain in a bulletproof, armored SUV surrounded by a cordon of armed guards. They were in the midst of the tract houses, which served as a barrier screening them from potential snipers on the far side of the bank. In case the kidnap plot turned out to be an elaborate ruse to make Susan herself the target for abduction or even assassination.
Stranger things had happened in the world of the ultrarich; Sears recalled the chain of mysterious deaths in the Niarchos/Onassis feud of the great Greek shipping tycoons.
* * *
Sears refused to let Susan leave the protective cocoon of the armored SUV. To keep her company (and to keep
an eye on her), he had Gene Jasper beside her, figuratively and by now literally holding her hand.
She seemed to take comfort in the presence of the big, good-looking security specialist; Jasper was feeling no pain from the assignment, either. He knew the score: not Susan but Wilmont Keehan was their boss; no harm must come to a single hair of her head. With Jasper covering Susan, Sears had one less distraction to worry about.
To be on the safe side, though, Sears had put a guard on the guard, also posting Ernie Bannerman in the Keehan limo as a precaution in case Jasper proved unable to resist Susan's blandishments, financial or otherwise. Bannerman was a middle-aged, hard-nosed, old ex-cop with a one-track mind who knew how to follow Sears's orders.
Sears sent out a detail of several men to search the vacant houses in the immediate vicinity, to make sure that no ambushers or spotters lurked in hiding. None of them much liked having to poke around in the garbage-strewn ratfraps, but they did what they had to do. The buildings came up clean — of potential threats, that is.
Sears posted a sentry to keep an eye out for cops, too. All he needed was for some zealous NOPD officers to come snooping around to investigate suspicious doings in Sad Hill. Luckily, storm-related duties kept the city police far from the locale.
* * *
Sears and a squad of five hard-core protectors from the EXECPROTEK roster were grouped near the footbridge under a cypress free hung with Spanish moss. Winds blew, ruffling the dank black canal waters, agitating the free branches.
Sears reflected sourly that the kidnappers had chosen their site well. The footbridge was too narrow to allow the passage of a motor vehicle, thwarting any possible pursuit from that direction. The tract of deserted houses was set far enough back from the canal to leave a belt of open ground between it and the footbridge, forestalling a buildup of backup forces for an ambush or counterattack.
Presumably the kidnappers were somewhere on the east bank, but if so, Sears was damned if he could tell where they were; the area seemed deserted.
He stared at his cell phone with irritation. He couldn't call the kidnap gang chief, he could only wait for the kidnap gang chief to call him. He'd had a devil of a time keeping the all-important contact cell away from Susan, finally convincing her of the necessity of his having possession of it for immediate handling of all fast-breaking developments.
With Susan on the line, she'd have wound up agreeing to anything, pledging five, ten, twenty, a hundred million dollars if that's what the kidnapper demanded for Raoul's safe return.
The kidnapper himself kept changing cells, using a different one for each call to ensure their unfraceability.
Sears looked across the canal at the cemetery on the knoll. A more mournful sight would have been hard to find, even in New Orleans, lately a showcase for so many scenes of devastation and destruction.
The city was famous for its aboveground cemeteries; persistent floods cause bodies buried below ground to rise from their graves and float away. The dead are generally interred in aboveground mausoleums.
Our Lady of Sorrows had seen its peak a century and a half ago. It had been on the decline back in the late nineteenth century; it had been closed in the 1920s. The remains were removed from their crumbling mausoleums and reburied elsewhere. It was a necropolis gone to seed, the remains of ruined stone tombs, catafalques, and monuments peeking out from a tangle of weeds and scrub brush.
Sears's downbeat reflections were suddenly interrupted by the jangling of the cell phone. His nerves were so taut that he found himself catching his breath for an instant at the sound of it. But only for an instant. Now that he was in action, trained reflexes took over; he was all business.
He hauled it out of his pocket and answered it. "Yes!"
The kidnapper said, "You have the money." Not a question, a statement, delivered in the mechanical tones of the electronic voice changer. Somehow, that flat, denatured mechanical intonation was more hateful to Sears than would have been the leering, preening tones of a crook who knows he's holding the whip hand.
Sears said, "Where's Garros?"
The kidnapper said, "Where a million dollars will allow him to resume his interrupted life."
"Let's make the exchange, then."
"Soon, soon," the kidnapper soothed. "One more point: Miss Keehan will deliver the ransom money personally."
Sears had been more than half-expecting something like that, some new quantum jump in escalating demands to demonstrate the kidnapper's control of the situation. Susan would have done it, too, in a heartbeat, but Sears was having none of it. He said, "Not a chance."
The kidnapper said, "I suggest you talk it over with Miss Keehan. She may have a different perspective on it, especially when she hears her fiance screaming during the removal of certain vital body parts."
Sears hung tough. "Nothing to talk about. It's a nonstarter."
The abductor came back strong: "Then Garros dies."
Sears fired back, "So does your shot at a million-dollar ransom. No way in hell that Miss Keehan is going to take part in this exchange. I'll never agree to it. She can't fire me, I'm not working for her, I'm working for her father. He'd have my head if I agreed to that.
"Don't overplay your hand. Wilmont Keehan's not that crazy about Garros to start with. If something happens to him, he'll be able to control his grief. She can always get another fiance, he can't get another daughter."
The abductor said, "This is no bluff."
Sears said, "You can chop him up on a live webcast for all I care; that's nothing compared to what Mr. Keehan would do to me if I put his daughter in harm's way. It's a deal breaker, so don't even bother mentioning it again. I'll restrain her by force if necessary, rather than let her take the risk.
"You've played it like a pro up to now; the money's almost in your hands, don't blow it at the last minute by trying to get cute."
The abductor paused, as if thinking about it. Finally he said, "I take your point." Like he was magnanimously ceding some major concession.
He added, "You make the exchange instead."
"Me?"
"Yes, you, Mr. Sears. You hand over the money and make the exchange."
"Done," Sears said, without hesitation.
The kidnapper said, "If anything goes wrong, you'll be the one to pay the consequences."
"Fine."
"You — and Garros," the kidnapper said. "Remember, no tricks. If I don't like the look of things at the exchange, Garros dies. If there's interference from the police or FBI, Garros dies."
Sears said, "No outsiders have been notified. We don't want those bunglers around any more than you do."
The other went on as if he hadn't heard him. "Any suspicious persons or vehicles in the area, Garros dies. Any helicopters or low-lying planes, he dies."
Sears said, "We want Garros alive, that's all."
The kidnapper said, "You'll get him, as long as you follow orders. When I tell you, take the money and bring it to the middle of the bridge. You, alone. Keep your cell ready for further instructions."
He broke contact.
* * *
Sears was doing it the hard way: no gun, not even a flak jacket. His jacket was off and he was in his shirtsleeves. Characteristically he still had his tie on, and it wasn't loosened, either.
He was doing it to allay the abductors' fears of a double cross. He told his men, "I want to show them I'm unarmed and that there's no tricks. Don't want to panic them at the last minute. But if they try to pull a fast one on us, shoot them."
He had a couple of sharpshooters posted around under cover, too, as a last resort.
His only sideman in the open was Deauville, an A-1 trigger puller. A clean-shaven face of hard planes and angles, with the cold-eyed, alert gaze of the hunter. He wore a gun in a shoulder holster.
Sears said, "Here goes nothing."
Deauville said, "One million is a lot of nothing."
That it was. Heavy, too. Sears held the briefcase with the money at his si
de, his other hand holding the cell phone to his ear.
He and Deauville stood at the west end of the footbridge, facing the other side. The opposite, east end of the bridge remained empty.
There was a pause, a long one, by Sears's reckoning, but then he was in no position for objective timekeeping.
Then, across the canal, higher up on the slope, there was a stir of motion in the graveyard. Three figures stepped out from behind the standing wall of a collapsed tomb, moving into view.
All three had hidden faces: two masked, the third hooded. The masked men wore dark baseball caps pulled low over their faces and knotted bandanas covering them below the eyes. One was of medium height, athletic build; the other was a head taller, a big, heavyweight bruiser. They flanked a third man who stood wedged between them.
A black hood covered the head of the man in the middle. Opaque, impenetrable, it had no holes for eyes, nose, or mouth.
He wore the clothes that Raoul Garros had worn earlier today, when last seen at the Mega Mart building. They seemed much the worse for wear; the once-dapper lightweight suit was rumpled, filthy, torn at the knees and elbows. The captive's tie was loose and unknotted, his shirt torn open. His hands were tied behind his back. He was weak at the knees and unsteady at his feet, which were bare.
The masked man on his left, the behemoth, held him by the upper arm, supporting him. His other hand held a gun to the side of the hooded man's head.
The masked man on the captive's right held a cell phone to his ear, as though listening to instructions.
Sears guessed that neither masked man was in charge; they were henchmen, taking orders from their chief, who must be hidden somewhere nearby, where he could watch the scene as it developed.
The trio approached the far side of the bridge. The hooded captive shuffled along, uncertain, stumbling. The big masked man gripped him one-handed, half-carrying, half-dragging him, all the while holding the gun to his head.
24 Declassified: 07 - Storm Force Page 23
