by Fiona Quinn
“Axel White.” Axel displayed his credentials. “Iniquus operative, representing the Honduran and United States governments. May I come in?”
Castillo pushed the door wide and stepped aside, scanning behind Axel’s shoulder. I assumed he saw other boots on the ground. His face slackened with resignation.
They sat in a comfortably-sized room on black leather furniture. Glazed terracotta tiles shone under their feet. “I’m looking for my colleague, India Alexis Sobado.”
Castillo nodded. “She was here. They took her away.”
“Who took her?” Axel had a very good accent. This was the first time I’d heard him speak Spanish. Impressive.
“That I do not know,” Castillo shrugged and settled back into the cushions.
“Can you tell me what you do know? When was she here?”
“The last time my staff saw her was the day the tropical storm hit in July. They called her Santa Blanca.” Castillo offered up a rueful smile. “The woman who serves the morning oatmeal started calling her that. She said a saint had come down to bless our village, that she could feel God’s great love when she opened the chute on Sobado’s door to slide in the breakfast tray.” Castillo crossed an ankle over his knee. A man comfortable in his own home. “This created quite a problem for me. The villagers came up and wanted to touch her so they too, could receive a blessing.” He pursed his lips, making his heavy mustache fan. “I ended up buying some plastic crosses and handing them out, saying they held Santa Blanca’s special prayers. That seemed to keep everyone happy.”
“Go on,” Axel commanded.
“One morning, Sobado didn’t reach for her oatmeal. The storm was raging. The other server thought Sobado was moved to a different floor, since she had no windowpane in her cell. Sobado’s exercise guard didn’t go to let her out because of the weather. No one had seen her for days.
“I only discovered that she was missing from her cell when I went up to the village to survey the damage and drink. The cantina owner asked about her. There were rumors that Santa Blanca flew straight up to heaven in the storm. I checked Sobado’s cell, and sure enough—gone. We couldn’t account for her. We let the dogs search, but there was too much time and too much wind. Sobado must have been taken from the jail.”
“And how do you think that happened?”
Castillo shrugged and offered open hands. “I don’t know. This has never happened here before. It was odd, though. There were two men, Latinos with heavy foreign accents. They were at the cantina, asking many questions and going for hikes. I think they probably took her from the jail. I don’t know how. But, yes, I think these men got to her.”
“Who brought her in to begin with?”
Castillo shifted uncomfortably and adjusted his pants leg. “A drug runner. My guards met the plane.”
“This was the plane that was stolen from the airport?”
“No, a different burro,” Castillo said.
“Who did they work for?”
Castillo shook his head.
Axel pushed his briefcase out in front of him and unlatched the clasps; it fell open to show that it was full of Euros. “Your time here is over. We are taking over the prison. This is to help you settle elsewhere. There is a passport and plane ticket to Barcelona. It is important that you cooperate. The other side of the coin is not as shiny.”
Castillo nodded and pulled the case over next to him. “The first burro, I don’t know. We are not on his usual route. The second one, the one with the stolen plane, refuels here. He works for Sylanos.”
“And you work for him as well. This is his prison,” Axel said.
Castillo nodded. “His cartel owns and runs this prison. I have not learned the name of the new director.”
“You heard that Sylanos is dead?”
“Si.”
“Have you heard from your niece Maria since she sent you Sobado?” Axel asked.
Castillo startled, then shook his head. “No. She asked me to hold the girl in solitary, and make sure that she was secure and unharmed.”
Liar. And if he lied about Maria going down to collect my fingers, well, that made everything he said suspect.
“We made a video of Sobado, and sent it via satellite so Maria could get her husband out of jail. Since we made the video, I have heard nothing.”
“Tell me about Omega.” Axel used his hypnotizing voice – slow, with few modulations. No peaks or valleys.
Castillo got up and poured a glass of tequila at the bar; he signaled an offer to Axel, who shook his head. “It’s early to drink. But I think this is a special occasion,” he said, then wandered back to his seat. “Omega came into our lives a few years ago. They were brought in by a Sylanos man.”
“Vega.”
“You know much. Yes. Vega has worked here at the prison for a long, long time. He enjoys this job. It’s like a sport to him. Sylanos kept this prison to pressure other families to cooperate with his demands. A very successful business plan. He was able to get the families to do almost anything he wanted them to do when they saw their loved ones being beaten, wearing rags, skin and bones. This prison operation is one of the keys to his achievements. But Sylanos? He’s dead now, so no matter, right?”
“Omega?”
“Ah, yes. Omega needed a place to do their special interrogations and bury bodies. We have a hole twelve kilometers north of the airport. Omega brings bodies in wrapped. We drive the corpses up and throw them in our hole. If the bodies come in alive? They go in the cell and get interrogated by Vega. If it were me? I’d rather skip the interrogation and go right in the dump.” Castillo took a big swig and gestured with his glass. “Sylanos was very grateful to Vega for his expertise. Treated him like family.”
“Vega brought down Omega prisoners as well as Sylanos prisoners?”
“Exactly.”
“Did Sylanos’ people or Omega know about Sobado?” Axel asked.
“No, I kept her quiet. Maria said the girl couldn’t be hurt; she had to be in good shape for the tape and the exchange. If Vega knew about her, beautiful girl like that? Well, when she first got here, she was beautiful. I saw her in the yard when she had air time, and she became quite horrific. Probably dead now,” he mused, rubbing his thumb and forefingers through his mustache. “I don’t know how long she could survive, looking like that. Dim around the eyes, then they die, and we put them in the hole.”
“Again, I’m asking you, neither Omega nor Sylanos knew about Sobado?”
“Correct.”
Huh. Okay, that meant there was another player , one that I hadn’t accounted for. Yet.
“But there were men who were asking questions,” Axel said.
“Two sets. Latinos, then Americans. I’m guessing that you are one of the Americans. They told me about your scar.” Castillo ran a thumb down his face to mimic the line that ran from brow to jaw on Axel’s.
Axel nodded, swinging the picture on the screen up and down. “I was in the second group. I need to know who was in the first group.”
“I don’t know. We didn’t see them after they left, and then you and your companion moved in.”
“And you weren’t curious?” Axel asked.
“They were here a very short time, and no, sometimes it’s better to focus somewhere else.”
“Why did you keep Sobado for Maria?”
Castillo shifted his shoulders and screwed his lips into an unpleasant shape. “I’m old. I do not want to work here forever. When I give up my job, I give up my house. Life in the village is not lovely. Maria told me that Julio had a fortune hidden away. She said that if I helped her conceal Sobado, then she would be able to get Julio out of the American prison. I would move with them to Indonesia as a rich man,” Castillo gave a soft chuckle. “I have magazines from Vega about the young girls over there. They do things for a man that a Catholic Honduran girl would never consider. I would like that. To have little oriental girls take care of the General.” Castillo gestured towards his crotch.
> Blech. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair.
“Were records kept?” Axel seemed unfazed by the visual Castillo had offered.
“I do not. That doesn’t mean there aren’t files somewhere – there must be. I have tallies on a chalkboard so I know how many I am to feed, and I can tell the cooks what portions to prepare. Other than that? My job was to make sure no one ever got out and brought attention to our little prison. And I failed at my duties. Sobado is gone. You are here. And I am done. Who’s outside?” Castillo glanced towards the window.
“Iniquus operatives and the Honduran Army,” Axel replied evenly.
Castillo got up to pour himself another drink.
“No one has ever been released from here?” Axel asked.
“The only release is death. Sweet, sweet death. I am happy for the men and women when they die.” He took a swig. “The families may be told that they will get their loved ones home, but they never do, no matter what. Even after they die, Sylanos still exploited the family by not telling them.” Big grin, full of tobacco-stained teeth. “Brilliant mind that man had. Absolute genius.”
***
The men had left a while ago. They had done KP while I took a nap. Now I was up and banging around the kitchen, making a lot of noise. The stories about the prison churned through my mind, becoming a storm as big as the one that forced my plane to the ground. I slammed a plate on to the counter with way too much emphasis. Laser-eyed and steel-jawed, I looked over at Striker, who sat calmly on the bar stool watching me like a TV show. He held my gaze, and I reviewed the scene.
“I’m angry,” I whispered.
“I can see that, Chica.” Placid. How could he be so damned imperturbable?
“I’m angry that I’m angry.” My voice ratcheted up a notch. “I don’t want to feel like this anymore.”
Striker nodded, a safe response to offer a Tasmanian devil.
“It’s like someone is holding a remote control and channel surfing through emotions that I have no reason to feel with the volume up way too loud. Uncomfortably, miserably loud. And I can’t turn the damn thing off.” I grabbed up a dish towel to stuff over my face. “I hate this. Look at me. I’m out of control.”
Striker came over and gathered me in his arms. “Shhh,” he whispered against my hair.
When I moved my head, I rubbed snot and tears into his shirt.
“You’ve been through hell and back. This is understandable.”
“It’s not understandable. I need serious psychiatric help.” I pushed my tear-dampened hair back from my eyes.
“You need freedom. You’ve been a caged bird for way too long.” He pulled me by the hand to the sofa, where I curled, cat-like, against him, and he petted me. Long, soothing strokes. “I have good news, though. Forensics has pulled all of the information off Frith’s flash drive. It’s being translated by cryptography now. They should have something soon—maybe as soon as tomorrow.”
Forty-One
I sat down at the breakfast bar with my laptop. I had been anticipating this moment for weeks.
“Okay, Jonathan Frith, what are those innermost secrets that you think need encryption and possible destruction?” I opened the file, more than slightly afraid that all I was going to find out was that he had a nasty porn fetish for being tickled with duck feathers while wearing Latex and women’s underwear.
No. . . not a porn fetish. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My mind literally went numb. I had to wait and look again. Comprehending was a process, but when I finally got it through my thick skull, I was off my stool with my fists to my head.
Striker moved over and grabbed me by the elbows, ready to jump into action.
“It’s not my head, Striker. It’s freaking Frith. I can’t believe it. I am such a moron. I have major freaking brain damage. How is it that I could be standing there, chopping up a fruit salad, when it’s been the poison apple all along?”
“I’m completely lost. Start at the beginning. When did you make a fruit salad?”
“I have been trying to put it all together, the Omega apples and Assembly oranges, Sylanos – he’s bananas - and the rest. Some of it does mix together. It’s all rotten fruit to be sure. But the apple! The apple is what I should have had my eye on the whole time. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Don’t you remember me telling you that that was the story being pushed forward as a psychic knowing? I should have seen it. All this wasted freaking time.”
“Snow White, that’s you.” He was using a calm, controlled voice – maybe he thought that would rub off on me somehow.
“Yes.” I danced around, shaking my hands. My body buzzed like I had stuck a wet finger in a socket.
“And the poison apple is how the wicked stepmother is trying to kill you.”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re reviewing the secret Frith files. Frith is the wicked stepmother?” Striker asked.
“Yes. This whole time he dressed like a beautiful queen – well, you know what I mean — he was dressed as a friend, when he was really an old witch who wanted me dead.”
“Lexi, what was on the flash drive?” Striker’s tone turned glacial. His face a stone mask.
I turned my laptop towards him. “This first file is called ‘Daddy’s Little Whore.’ In it is a series of poems in their original form, and here are the changes.”
Striker moved to the counter and tipped the screen so he could read. “I recognize these. They’re from the Bayleigh Joseph case. The letters Frith brought to us when he contracted Iniquus to find her killer.”
“Travis Wilson. Yes. How about this file?” I tapped the buttons to bring up a different file.
Striker scanned through the poems. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s Mary Snyder, the targeted victim with the CIA.”
“Why does Frith have that? The point of the different agencies all signing on with Iniquus was to keep these cases individual to the agencies and under the control of you and your team alone, so there would be no leaks. Either someone leaked…”
“Not from our team there wasn’t.” Striker was emphatic.
“Agreed. The time stamp on the computer shows that these poems were placed onto the flash drive prior to their receipt.”
Striker stood absolutely still. When he finally spoke, his voice was flint edged and dangerous. “The only way to get them prior to their receipt was if he knew what was going on before it actually happened.”
I opened a new file. “Cry-baby Calls Daddy Home.”
Striker’s eyes slid over the words on the screen:
Dearest India Alexis,
O my Luve’s like the melodie
That’s sweetly play’d in tune!
As fair thou art, my bonnie lass,
So deep in love am I:
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till a’ your bones are white and dry:
Till a’ your veins gang dry, my dear,
And your skin melt with the sun;
I will luve thee until your heart is still my dear
When the sands of your life shall no more run…
This poem was mine. The poem that slid under my motel door the day I was getting married to Angel. And of course, my dad was already dead. My second dad, Spyder, was off grid. Frith wanted him called home.
To look at Striker as an outsider, you would think he was merely contemplating. I knew better. If Frith had been in the room, if Striker knew where he could be found, Frith would no longer walk the Earth.
I have seen Striker’s many moods. I have seen him in life-or-death fights. I have seen him when he thought that the drug lord might have beaten his sister to death. I have never seen this; the heat from his anger burned all the oxygen from the room. I froze in place. I knew that Striker had supreme control over himself. I wanted him to have a moment to remember that.
Striker looked at me hard. “Frith met Wilson and decided to use him. That makes so much sense. No wonder Wilson was able to plant high-priced surveillance in
your house and get into your garage. Wilson knew where you went, and when you went there. And you had no clues to puzzle. None. Wilson had a puppet master. Axel was absolutely right about the killer’s profile.”
“They exploded my apartment building.” Unshed tears burned my eyes and blurred my vision. I was freezing cold and trembling at the enormity of what I had caused to happen. “All of my friends lost everything they owned because of me. Here all this time, I thought it was a drunken accident by Mr. Matsy. Mr. Matsy’s dead. It wasn’t an accident at all. Frith and Wilson worked together.”
Guilt choked me; it was hard to breathe around it. It was solid in my chest and almost unbearably painful. “I’m poison. Everyone I love is getting hurt by the bad guys in order to get at me.” All of the loss. All of the suffering had my name graffitied across it.
“Chica, you are not responsible for anyone else’s actions. You had no control.”
I might have found some solace in Striker’s words had I not died. As my team worked to pull me back from the Devil’s grip, that’s when I understood that, in the end, I would be held accountable whether I believed I was doing the right thing or not. Even being a catalyst has repercussions. My heart weighed more than a feather from Ma’at; that was for damned sure.
Striker got on the phone with Command. He paced away from me. I worked to hold back the sobs filling my chest – they felt self-pitying, and there was no room for that. Not when I was the cause of all this pain.
As Striker moved back into the room, he snugged his phone onto his belt. He sat down, pulled me onto his lap, and kissed my hair. “Hopefully, this will be over soon. Command arranged for an arrest warrant for Frith. We’re going after him,” Striker said.
“On what charges?”
“Murder. The Matsy death. Command was already getting that together with the FBI after I took them the information you had been piecing together. The FBI investigation into the Frith-Wilson connection showed that Frith didn’t have a directive to follow Wilson the night that your apartment building burned down. Frith wasn’t assigned to the Patriots United case at that time. The police had never seen the video that Jack picked up from the motel. They never asked for it, chalked the incident up to what it looked like on paper – a drug overdose, pure and simple. Good thing that manager put the tapes in his vault just in case. Smart man. Still, our case is circumstantial. The lawyers think it’s enough, though, so we’re going for it. That’ll get Frith off the streets and behind bars while the FBI aligns the Wilson murders with him.”
