by M C Rowley
I told Pep I was leaving quickly. He said it would be best to stay, but I shrugged it off and took a walk, leaving Polysol´s lot.
The industrial park street was desolate. The street lights were out, and no steam vapor poured from any of the great hulks of businesses spread around.
Still, I took caution, walking slowly outside and sticking to the edge of the walkway.
I used the grassy pathways to the sides of the main streets, just to be sure. But it was unnecessary I soon realized. The park had been closed. For the search, I supposed.
After fifteen minutes, I made it to the main entrance of the industrial park. But the lights of the security cabins were out. I stalked up to them from behind, so the angle was too short from their windows to detect me, and crouched under the main window, before slowly rising and looking in. Nothing.
I was about to turn back when a sharp blue light bounced off a shiny surface in the guard´s cabin, then a red one. I stayed still.
Taking my time, I shuffled along the side of the security booth until I made the wall, and peered around it.
The entrance, and the part of the enclosing fence of the industrial park was full to the brim with police. They had lined it with squad cars to make an effective barrier of metal and flesh, and guns.
I hunched down and stalked back to the interior of the park. From there, I took a side street which looked identical to that which housed the Polysol site. After four big businesses, and about a kilometer of tarmac, I reached the south side perimeter of the park.
It too was lined with cops.
This time, I stayed well back. It was almost dark but I didn´t want to take any chances. Salvatierra´s threat had been genuine.
I did a count, multiplying the amount of cops I could see visibly on the 200 meter section of fence in front of me. I guessed the whole park was a good 1.5 km by 1.5 km, and I counted 20 squad cars and 40 cops. That made 600 patrol cars, and 1200 cops.
Even if I was being overly generous, half of that amount made the prospect of escape impossible.
The dark sky had changed and a thin layer of cloud covered the stars, and the horizon merged into the great black cape of cloud. I could hear a small rumble of chatter and engines running from the line of cops.
I walked slowly to Polysol and saw nobody in the darkness. I got to the trailer and opened the door. Pep was sat up looking anxious.
“Where were you?” he said.
“Seeing if we could make a run for it.”
He smiled, “And?”
“No chance in hell,” I said.
Chapter Fourteen
I collected the plates and what was left of the food and put it outside the cabin door, and walked back in.
Pep had already laid down on his sofa. I turned off the lights and walked behind my desk and laid down on the cold, hard floor. Sleep began to wash over me in an instant. My eyes rolled back towards my weary brain and I felt my breathing become heavier.
Then Pep spoke from the darkness,
“Is your name really Mark?” he asked.
I sighed. I wanted to sleep
“Yes, it is,” I said.
I rolled the situation over in my mind. I knew Esteban was behind this. But what did Esteban want with Pep? And why did he need me to frame? I longed for Jason´s phone more than ever. I needed to speak with him. I ran back through our conversation a few days earlier, in the cantina. But I made it two minutes in and fell asleep.
Pep woke me. He was saying my name in that annoying loud shushed voice that people use when they want to wake someone but seem to be quiet. I looked up. It was light outside. I had slept a solid 10 hours at least. My head hurt from the lack of water I´d drunk. And my back was in agony from the floor that had served as my bed.
Pep was repeating my name, “Mark. Mark. Mark.”
“What is it?”
“The door,” he said. “Someone´s outside.”
I sat up. My back felt like someone had snapped it. I got up to my feet and walked to the door, I opened and peered out. There stood Concha, with a new tray, and new plates covered in aluminum foil. “Buenos días,” she said.
I greeted her and asked her how she got in. There was no truck or car with her. No-one at all.
She shrugged. “Caminando, señor,” she said. Walking.
I let her pass me into the office. Pep smiled at her and she unloaded the stuff onto my desk. She walked past me and smiled. Then she left the cabin and shut the door.
She must be close, I thought. Which meant Salvatierra - and maybe Eleanor - must be close too.
I started the coffee machine using water from the WC tap. I served up Pep his breakfast and mine. It was huevos albiñiles. I had come to love spice in the mornings, with decent black coffee, piping hot. Something in the combination of those two senses prickled you awake.
I had felt hungry and took heart from a returning appetite. Pep was enjoying his food too. The most basic of needs, when exceeding your rudimentary requirements, yields the power to change your heart. Like a glass of cold water in the desert, or a cigarette after some drama. We were grateful as we destroyed the breakfast. We felt grateful to it.
We were hostages for sure.
We finished and both had second coffees. We sipped them in silence for a long while before Pep started speaking.
“My family will be beside themselves with preoccupation.”
“Worry,” I said.
“Huh?”
“The word is “worry” not preoccupation.”
Pep shrugged. “Is it incorrect”?
I sighed. “No, not exactly. But it sounds weird.”
Pep shrugged again.
We stayed silent for an hour. The silence hummed in my ears. The small space of the porte-office shrank into me, like the walls were moving. My mood descended into a dark place.
Maybe Jason was dead, his corpse somewhere here in Polysol?
What if they´d found him the night I left to the Sierra and just shot him there and then? I could hardly ask Salvatierra the next time I saw him. And I hadn´t seen him anyway. Salvatierra had been as AWOL as Jason in fact. Concha the cook was our sole connection to the outside.
“What´s your plan, Pep?” I asked.
He looked up from where he had had his head slumped in the sofa arm, dozing.
“How do you mean?”
“With your career?” I said. “What´s next after Governor?”
Pep sat up. He thought about his answer for a few seconds. “I don´t know. Honestly. I know that people like you, and most other people, think we politicians are all ´rateros´, only interested in our own careers. And a large proportion of congress is like that, believe me. But we are not all driven by ego. I care about Lujano. Everything I do, I do for Lujano, and Mexico. I was born here and my parents both worked during a time when both parents didn´t work. But mine had to. They struggled to put me and my brother through school. And I mean public school. Just to get me there on time every day was hard. I got into the UNAM on merit, and then a scholarship to Harvard. I don´t take anything for granted.”
I looked at him. He wasn´t lying. People did one of two things when they lied. They either looked all over the place, darting their gaze around, avoiding eye contact, or they stared too intensely, like they were aware of it. A sure sign of memorized script. Lying was an art. And Pep did not need to use it here. It came from his heart. The way his eyes sunk to the side at every sentence, always returning to my eye line. And sinking again. Real feelings cannot be hidden so easily. I knew that.
“So maybe this position of State Governor I have is the end of the road for me. That´s fine. I will use it to do as much good as I can. Do you know, or have you heard of our projects?”
I shook my head.
“We have the best attendance rates for public schools in the whole of Mexico. The lowest unemployment rates. The lowest crime. I cleaned out the cabinet that was before me, and made a lot of enemies.”
I nodded.
&n
bsp; “My country. I love my country. The potential is so huge. I meet a rich investor and he sees a different Mexico to the kid I meet in the orphanage. And you know who is more positive?”
I shook my head.
“The kid! The kid with nothing believes. The rich guy doesn´t. Young people are different. The machismo is dying, and it´s a good thing. So I will work my hardest while I am able, and I hope something will improve.”
I shifted in my seat. “How will this affect things?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “Maybe they replaced me already.” He smiled a deep smile of warmth.
Against my instinct, I liked him. He oozed earnestness. He didn´t have to put anything on. Either that, or he was the greatest liar I had ever met.
We passed the rest of the morning and the early afternoon until Concha arrived for lunch.
The cabin stank of food. The WC was beginning to back up a little, and mixture of odors sapped hope from the soul. The food, when it arrived, was fresh and at least provided a new smell and with it some remnant of hope. I had been opening the door in and out when Concha arrived holding her usual array of trays and pots and pans. I greeted her. I still couldn´t work out where she´d walked from, and she wouldn´t say. She served pan basos, fried pork sandwiches and served them with a couple of glass bottles of Coca Cola. She had flan for dessert. This time she stayed and ate with us in silence, and then trudged off again and I opened the door to a graying sky and heavy atmosphere. But at least the fresh air cleaned out the cabin a little.
Pep and I continued our conversation. He spoke with a soft and gentle voice. He told me of the projects he had authorized, and the people he had under him who believed in his way. He detested corruption, and told me the stories of greed that served him as warnings. I knew it was rhetoric partly, but I was convinced. His voice, when he switched to Spanish, and his rhythm was magnetic. Every noun and verb placed in a meaningful sentence. Every nuance and detail stripped back to the bare necessity. Like a radio presenter with a long CV.
We stayed that way until it began to get dark. I think we drank at least ten cups of coffee. I had started to visit the WC every twenty minutes by the time Concha had arrived for supper.
Concha knocked as usual and entered in silence and left three pans covered in aluminum foil on my desk and left.
I thanked her and walked over to the food.
I stood, my back to Pep and looked over the pans, wrapped in foil.
I lifted the first foil off and found chicharron bathed in a deep red sauce. There was a basket of tortillas too.
I lifted the foil from the second pan.
There was no food.
Instead, in the middle, was an old Motorola clam-style mobile phone.
Chapter Fifteen
I froze. I could sense Pep´s glare on my back.
I picked up the phone and slipped it into my pocket while my other hand lifted the foil on the next pan.
I carried on with the third pan, which was full of red rice.
I served up two plates full of rice and chicharron and took Pep´s his. He didn´t look at me in any way, or seem to fluster at anything.
We ate in silence, and the weight of the intruding phone hung in my pocket. It had to be Jason. He´d used the method before. And Concha knew. The way she had walked in silently was different from before. Guilt.
As soon as I had cleared up the plates, I excused myself and went to the WC.
Stooped on the cheap toilet confined like a London train bathroom by four tiny walls, I flipped open the phone. It was about five years old, and used. The screen burst into life. I looked straight for the silent mode, but it was already activated. I opened the contacts and there were no entries. Then, the messages, and the menu indicated one message, already read. I opened the folder. The number was listed but no name. The message read:
Hang in there.
Looking into this.
Jason.
I hit the reply button and wrote:
Where are you? What do you know?
And hit send.
I waited, conscious of the time I was in the WC. I had another two minutes max before Pep would start wondering what was taking so long.
I waited 30 seconds before a new message came in. I opened it,
News is international. The park is being guarded 24/7. Only one route out of the industrial park, to the East, through the hills. Small timeframe. Patrols passing every 5 minutes.
I leaned back and thought for a second. I had too many questions to ask for SMS so I chose one,
Why are they doing this?
Then I waited. Jason replied fast.
Not sure yet. But don´t trust anything they tell you. The cook, Concha, is turned. She doesn´t know much though.
My two minutes were up. I deleted all the messages and the number from the memory of the device, and closed the phone and flushed the toilet just to stay in role. I walked out and found Pep sitting up, rubbing his eyes.
“I lost a lot of friends with the education reforms I pushed, and the local job fund. A lot of powerful people got a pay cut thanks to me,” he said.
I struggled to recall the thread of our conversation at first, unable to get Jason´s contact out of my mind.
“Has a politician from Lujano been kidnapped before?”
He nodded.
“What happened then?”
But Pep didn´t answer. He just drew his flat hand across his neck.
I nodded and then went behind my desk to sleep. I laid flat, and despite the evening´s happenings, tiredness washed over me.
The hills then, would be our escape.
Chapter Sixteen
The sirens pulled me out of sleep. Moving sound, or rather sounds, and getting closer. No doubt about it.
I opened my eyes, it was still dark. The tin roof that enveloped me and Pep hung only three meters above my face, I could tell it was early morning by the temperature. The air was steely, like it only is at 3 or 4am. I sat up and saw Pep stirring at the same time. Salvation or damnation was coming as the noise grew into a cacophony, a chaos of blaring compressed air sucked through cones to produce a discordant riot of head thumping screeches.
I heard the patrol cars tires hitting the dirt of the Polysol lot. Brakes slamming, then doors swinging open.
I got up and stumbled for the WC, grabbing the phone Jason had given me and throwing down the back of the toilet cistern. I returned to the main room.
Pep was inert.
“Get up!”
He was frozen, sat upright with his hands spread out gripping the sofa, terrified.
“No,” he said. “They´re here for me.”
I went for the door, but the cops had made it before I could and slammed into its metal frame from the outside, pushing me back into Pep. In poured ten or so Federal Police Officers dressed in their black battle gear; bullet proof vests, semi automatic rifles, ski masks pulled up over their noses and battlefield-like helmets that looked like they were better suited for the latest Playstation shoot ´em up.
The first cop through hit me square in the gut and I went down, winded. The others crowded into Pep and grabbed him by the arms and dragged him out into the early morning darkness.
I stayed on my knees and rolled into a ball. One of the feds was barking instructions from outside. I could not catch his exact words but his colleagues grunted and lifted me by the arms and we left the portable office. It wasn’t the way I had hoped to be doing so.
Outside, the moonlight proved barely sufficient illumination to see the scene but I counted fifty cops before a hood was thrown over my head and everything went black.
Plastic ties went around my wrists, behind my back. My feet stumbled to keep up with my carriers as we moved from outside to inside again. I felt the air change. We were in the hangar. Now, the voices of the feds reverberated up and around and back down, punctuated by the collective marching of fifty pairs of heavy duty boots.
I heard a key turning in a lock. A door openi
ng, and we moved into a smaller space. We shuffled fifty feet into this new room and I was sat down in a chair, I could feel it was one of those cheap plastic chairs they use in university seminar rooms. I felt a tie go around my stomach and tightened so I was strapped completely.
My hood was too thick to sense the light. I only saw blackness so I listened. The cops were talking and their voices were shrinking in number.
My chin hit my chest and I drew long deep breathes, readying myself for what was to come. The plastic ties had been click-closed a couple of clicks too tightly, and the sharp plastic cut into my wrists. The cops´ voices were down to four, or two pairs of conversation, then someone left. Then it went quiet.
I heard a voice I knew.
He was speaking in rapid Spanish and pausing for answers. He was asking if he could “do it” after. Asking and asking again, frustrated. Then Salvatierra stopped talking and his footsteps came to me, and the hood flew off and light hit my eyes like a shovel to the face.
“Confession time,” he said.
He was wearing a Federal Police uniform like the others. Three guys stood behind him and to their left, Pep was sat in a chair like mine, untied and head hung low.
I looked around. The room was an empty warehouse with twenty foot high shelves. I stretched my head behind me. A table had been set up with a camera on a small tripod that pointed to a dark blue backdrop with the letters POLICÍA FEDERAL printed across it.
“Move him,” said Salvatierra in Spanish to the other cops, who nodded and walked to my sides and picked me up with the chair and carried me behind the table, staring at the camera.
“Así,” said Salvatierra.
“Let her go,” I said. “Eleanor doesn´t know anything. There´s no need for you to do anything to her.”
Salvatierra ignored me as he fiddled with the buttons on the camera.
“Please.”
Salvatierra stayed quiet and fired off at least twenty photos of me. His uniform showed off two eight point stars on each shoulder, which I remembered to be high ranking, maybe Chief Inspector. The other cops seemed to be in awe of him, that much was obvious. His stooped frame was triangular, and his face was hidden by the camera.
