by M C Rowley
The Blood Ties Trilogy
Books 1 to 3
M C Rowley
Contents
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Book 1: Blood Ties Us
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
Book 2: Blood Runs
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Epilogue
Book 3: Blood For Blood
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Epilogue
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Book 1: Blood Ties Us
Prologue
Guatemala City, 1992
I held our son only once before they took him.
I should have known something terrible would happen. The whole pregnancy had been tumultuous, a blur of doctor appointments. Then the insurance company kicked us out of the fancy private joint, citing unpaid installments two years previous, and shunted us to Hospital Roosevelt, the biggest, busiest public hospital in the city. The fact we were expats - Eleanor, an American and myself, British - did little to help.
Eleanor was noble about it, but I felt it in her grip as she panted through contractions. She resented my company, and thus me, for not being able to sort this out. The wonder of the birth eclipsed all that, though. Seeing life come from life, the gigantic cut, the blood, the purple-blue baby that emerged—quite the magnificent experience.
And that moment proved to be a pivot in our lives that would alter our course forever.
Eleanor held our son, pink now and mewling. She couldn’t move as the doctors were stitching her back up, but it was enough to have his minute wrinkled face brushing against hers after nine months of anxious waiting. I couldn’t believe my luck at being there. The doctors had told me I could attend the birth, but after that I would have to wait outside. So I cherished this scene. Then I was no longer the onlooker: Eleanor beckoned to me, and held him out, and I took him, my boy, wrapped in a blue blanket. His eyes were closed, but when I touched his palm his tiny fingers gripped mine. Eleanor and I looked at each other with relief, after all the mess getting there, and with love. We were a family.
The nurse told Eleanor that they had to check the baby and weigh him, and then he’d be placed in the newborn nursery, where we could visit him in a while. Our Spanish in those days wasn’t great but we understood fine, and said goodbye to the little one. One of our biggest regrets of that day, besides failing to prevent what would happen, was not giving him a name. We couldn’t decide and left it for later—believing there would be a later with our baby.
They moved Eleanor to a ward full of other new mothers and their family members—husbands, parents, aunts, grandmothers. Kids weren’t allowed, at least; twenty-odd more souls running around would have cemented the discomfort. There was a steady rumble of chatter, loud enough to make me strain to hear Eleanor’s light utterances, but not so loud we were bothered.
It was over this buzz of conversations that we heard the first gunshots.
They came from outside, on the street right by the hospital’s main entrance. I knew that because our ward was directly over it.
Three single shots. Loud and unmistakable. We’d heard a few during our time there. The cops were facing the worst drug war in decades, the power shifting from Colombia in the south to Mexico in the north. And yet, as common as gunshots were in Guatemala City, their sound always ripped through the air, smashing the calm and unleashing fear.
Most of the people not in beds stood. We looked at each other in a sort of collective parenthood. Ready to protect, but unsure what to do.
Then the gunfire started for real. Machine guns, like the ones you hear in movies: rat-atat-atat, again and again. Then screams from down on the street.
Eleanor grabbed my arm. “Scott,” she said. “Our baby.”
I squeezed her hand. “Don’t worry.”
But as I said it, a nurse burst through the door, shouting something in Spanish. I couldn’t understand, but all around us people reacted, surging toward the nurse and yammering at her, confused. She was sweating, her face a deep red, and she k
ept repeating the same word:
“¡Vayanse, vayanse!”
Eleanor gripped my hand. I felt her wedding ring dig into my palm. “Get out,” she said. “Scott, she’s saying get out.”
There was a commotion outside the ward, panicked voices and distant screams.
“Get out?” I said.
The nurse was drowning amongst the throng of people shouting and pointing at her, and yet she persisted:
“Vayanse. ¡Ya! Vayanse.”
More shots from outside. I rushed to a long slit window and pressed myself against the glass. The street below was full of cops. I counted seven patrol cars parked in a semi-circle, surrounding the entrance. A truck parked at the bottom of the entrance steps was peppered with bullet holes.
It was then we heard the first shots fired inside the hospital, somewhere below us.
“Find him!” Eleanor cried. “Damn it, Scott, find our son!”
I ran.
Outside the ward, hundreds of people were moving about in a mass panic. No one seemed to know where to go, and no one was taking charge. As the gunshots continued downstairs, I searched the crowd for a green or blue uniform, and saw a nurse amid a group of women, all screaming and gesticulating at her. I pushed past them and grabbed the nurse by the shoulders and said:
“Where is the baby nursery?”
She looked at me blankly; she didn’t understand English.
“Bebé,” I said. “¿Dónde?”
She shook her head at me and pushed my arms away. The crowd of women swarmed around me and shoved me back.
The hospital was huge, but surely the babies would be kept close by. I moved through the crowd, along the corridor, until I reached a mezzanine balcony that looked down on the lobby. There, in front of the reception desk, were five men firing machine guns through the doors of the hospital. The noise was terrible and there was glass everywhere—and blood, from a man in a doctor’s coat lying prone on the floor.
I turned and was about to continue pushing through the throng when gunshots sounded right next to me.
A young man holding a semi-automatic stood at the top of the stairs, shouting the same command as the nurse in our ward, and now I understood the context.
“Get out, get out now!”
Each sentence was punctuated by a rapid burst from his gun into the ceiling.
The result was an absolute meltdown. I tried to push my way back to Eleanor’s ward, but the crowd’s strength was too fierce, and I was swept along in a tide of people desperate to get out—along to a second staircase and down onto the ground floor and toward a light which I quickly gathered was a fire-exit sign. Within a couple of minutes, I was standing outside in a side street.
I heard gunshots inside the hospital. I spun in a circle, hands clutching my face. I was in the middle of what felt like a thousand people moving and surging like an ocean. I began pushing through to the front, but the going was too slow.
Then came intense gunfire up ahead, toward the front entrance of the hospital. An engine revved, then two, then three. The crowd struggled to part, and people screamed. I had to fall back on the man standing behind me to get out of the way as the trucks—big, black and with tinted windows—roared through.
The scene quietened for a moment. No gunshots or police sirens, just the murmurings of the crowd, of shock and desperate fear.
In the lull, I began shoving once more. The crowd was dispersing, and precious minutes later, I made it back into the hospital.
I ran to the first nurse I saw, a short lady standing against the wall and taking shuddering breaths. “Mi bebe,” I said. “Por favor.”
She looked at me, but didn’t say a word, just pulled my arm. We walked through the lobby, through the droves of confused people, up the stairs and down a corridor to a blue door. She opened it.
Inside, thirty or so cots were laid out in rows.
Empty cots.
“Se los llevaron. ¡A todos!”
My Spanish was poor, but I understood the horror and gravity of her statement perfectly.
They’d taken the babies. All of them.
Chapter One
Mexico City, 2014
The phone call that would change everything came on a Friday evening.
When the phone in my pocket began buzzing, I didn’t answer it. I couldn’t, because it was my other phone, the one I was supposed to keep secret from my colleagues. So I let it vibrate away and tried to concentrate on the presentation.
It was late, and outside the meeting room’s floor-to-ceiling windows the car park was desolate except for the managers’ cars—mine and five others’. Inside, the walls were bare, except for a single framed image of a white man holding a letter, smiling like a maniac at the camera.
International Paper
Every sheet of the highest quality.
The presentation was being given late because of the sensitive information it contained: a warts-and-all look at how International Paper was holding up. An acquisition was on the cards. The potential buyers hadn’t announced their interest as yet, but word from the top, by way of expensive dinners in New York, where our headquarters was situated, indicated positive vibes. This acquisition would make us all a little richer—if we could hide certain details, such as missed debt repayments to the Banco de Mexico and a massive slump in production due to rumors that our main customer would drop us in a year’s time. The buyers wouldn’t take too kindly to this type of crap. They were already a competitor, and so we were on shaky ground. Our jobs and thousands of others depended on this deal going through.
Actually, not my job. Because what the men in this room didn’t know was that I was spying for the acquiring company, and was in fact feeding them these golden nuggets, so they could force us into bankruptcy and commandeer our market share.
The phone vibrating in my pocket was my one connection to my real boss. He would be wanting an update.
No one in my life had a clue what I really did—not even Eleanor. I’d been here only a year, brought in as plant director to turn the numbers around, but really to ensure they fell at the right time. Corporate saboteur. I wasn’t proud of it. But now the role was like a comfortable, well-worn pair of slippers.
The phone went still, and then started vibrating again, and the production chief looked at me. “You gonna get that?”
I shook my head and kept looking at the presentation. “Nah,” I said. “It’ll be some sales call from the bank.”
He nodded and turned back to our controller, who was telling us how we could get a loan from Europe, mask the money as healthy capital while the buyers did their audits, and then pay the money back early before the final deal went through.
The company was buggered, as they say in my native England.
Once the controller had finished up, I stood and told the men to go home, that we were ready for the board meeting in the morning. Everyone shook hands, and then I strode off, down the hallway, down the stairs and through the lobby. The phone started vibrating again the moment I stepped out into the night, like they were watching me—something I had often suspected. I pulled it out and pressed the green button.
“Yes.”
My real boss was called Mr. Reynolds, and that was all I knew of him. In the ten years I’d been working for him, I’d never met him—never even heard his voice, since he used a distorter on the rare occasion he spoke to me. Usually, it was a “handler,” as they liked to be called, who phoned. Lately, I’d been dealing with Jason, an American with a twangy voice like a harmonica.
“Dyce,” said Jason. “You should answer when I call more than twice in a row.”
“I couldn’t,” I said. “Look, it’s done. I got the info you need. I’ll email it the usual way early tomorrow morning. I have to get home now.”
“Dyce,” he said again. “There’s something else.”
“Not tonight. I’m tired. Phone me tomorrow.”
At that moment, one of the other managers came out of the building into the c
ar park and waved.
“Bye,” I said and hung up.
I waved back at my colleague, a guy called Martin, and got into my car to avoid the stop-and-chat.
