by Jack Mars
“Yes?” Darwin said.
“Sir, that call you were expecting? I’m told he’s on the line and ready.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1:15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Cape Fear Hyatt Regency Hotel
Wilmington, North Carolina
“It’s okay here,” Luke said. “Kind of pretty. I mean, it’s not the Grand Canyon or anything.”
Luke stood on the balcony of the hotel room, sipping a paper cup of room coffee, and talking to Becca on the telephone. From where he stood, he could look across the Cape Fear River at the historic brick buildings of downtown Wilmington. The river was dark brown and the buildings were three and four stories high.
Up the river from here was an old naval destroyer they had turned into a museum, and further upriver were the massive dock cranes of the Port of Wilmington.
Luke had slept a bit, and had strange, vivid dreams.
Ed wasn’t the only one who had lost a girl when he was young. Luke never spoke of it, and could go years without even remembering it, but there had been an incident when he was a child. It was not his life. It took place entirely on the TV.
He had grown up in Northern California. When he was seven or eight, a pretty blonde-haired girl about his age had disappeared from a town near his. Her name was Megan. Megan Rose Abbott. God, he could see her so clearly, even now. There was a photograph of her, smiling in a pink dress and a sun hat. The light around her seemed to shimmer.
She was gone, just gone, her family distraught and crying on the TV news every night. The days turned to weeks. Her father was detained, but then released. A local auto mechanic was detained, but released. Hundreds of people were searching for her in woods and grasslands. Time passed, and the story faded from the news. Then only a handful of people were still looking.
One day, they found her body at the bottom of an old boarded up well twenty miles from where she lived. How did she get there? Did she fall in?
No. She had been taken. She had been viciously assaulted. Then she had been thrown away, discarded. The man who had taken her was an animal. He was not fit to live. A man like Ed Newsam, if he could find this animal, would pull him apart, like taffy, like a Thanksgiving turkey. Maybe Luke would even do the same. He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t want to find out.
But the animal was never found. DNA evidence did not exist in those days. There were suspects, but they all had alibis. A drifter, a beast, someone unknown, a darkness in human form, had stolen Megan, and he had done this.
Luke used to dream of her, off and on, for years. And he did again, today.
She was still a child. They were sitting together, cross-legged on the wooden floor of a cabin, like children would do. It was similar to the cabin where he and Ed had brought Louis Clare, but it was not that cabin.
Luke and Megan faced each other. She was his mentor. She knew more than he did. Her suffering had made her wise, not beyond her years, but beyond all time and space.
“What is this nightmare world?” he asked her.
She looked into his eyes. She was a very serious little girl now.
“It’s a vale of tears,” she said.
She nodded to herself. “It’s a valley of shadow.”
“‘Yea,’” Luke quoted, “‘though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’”
She shrugged. “If that helps you.”
He nodded. “I think it does.”
“Okay,” she said softly.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” he said.
She shook her head. “No. What’s done is done. There is no going back. All you can do is your best.”
Luke was crying then, tears streaming down his face. Megan stared at him, her face blank. She said nothing.
Later, he dreamed of a sturdy oak door. He was on one side of the door, trying to keep it shut. On the other side were at least a dozen men trying to push their way in. With a giant effort, he was able to slam the door closed, but then found out that the lock was broken. As he stared at the broken lock, it changed. Not only was the lock broken, there was no lock. In fact, there wasn’t even a doorknob. There was just a hole in the door where the doorknob would be.
A hand came through the hole. It wasn’t attached to a wrist. It was just a hand. It reached Luke’s side of the door and crawled up the door toward his arms like a crab.
That’s when he woke up.
He imagined that this was the life of a real FBI agent. Hotel rooms in semi-picturesque places, waking up with a start from strange dreams, nightmares about the victims of horrible crimes. Spending the days following up on leads, chasing the nightmare, closing in on it, then chatting pleasantly with the spouse on the phone during downtime. This had never been his life before now. He didn’t know what to make of it.
Becca, for her part, seemed to like it. It was what she had been hoping for when he joined the SRT.
“How did the interview go?” she said now.
“It went all right,” Luke said. “We might have gotten some things we can use. Not sure yet. We passed it up the line. Trudy Wellington and Mark Swann and some other people are digging into it.”
The lies were still part of this. That hadn’t changed. He made no mention of traveling here under assumed identities, of how they extracted the information from Louis Clare, or of the three dead children they’d found as a result of that information. He would never, if they lived to be 100, tell her about the child they found in the ice chest.
He also made no mention of driving through the night, or the rental van owner appearing with a shotgun this morning. He made no mention of being arrested by the FBI, the same agency he ostensibly worked for, or of the fact that he and Ed were probably off the case now.
All he and Ed had done so far, according to this conversation, was interview one man. It had run late, so he hadn’t called her to say goodnight. They were at the hotel now, would probably spend one more night, and come home in the morning. They were just waiting for instructions.
Police work. Following up leads. Sending in the information. Waiting for further instructions.
“That’s good,” Becca said. “It sounds like you’ve done your part.”
“Yeah,” Luke said. “Maybe so.”
“Well, Gunner and I miss you. We can’t wait to see you.”
“I miss you, too,” Luke said. And he meant it. One some level, he would just as soon walk away from this life, from career criminals and alligators and nasty surprises lurking in the back of abandoned trucks parked in the middle of nowhere.
He could easily imagine a life of just him, Becca, and Gunner spending the vast majority of their time out at the cabin, time passing, the seasons changing, Gunner slowly growing to manhood.
It was so idyllic, in fact, that…
A knock came at his door. The hand that made the knock was heavy enough that Luke knew right away who it was.
“Hold on one second, honey,” he said. “Yeah?” he called.
“Stone. It’s Ed. We’re doing a conference call with SRT in five minutes. My room. They tried to reach you, but you’re not answering your phone.”
“Hon, I have to go,” he said to Becca. “I have a meeting.”
“Okay, sweetie. Call me later.”
Luke hung up and went to the door. He opened it and Ed stood there in a dark blue SRT T-shirt and athletic shorts. Everything Ed wore clung tightly to his body.
“Going for a jog?” Luke said.
Ed didn’t smile. “I was sleeping. I just woke up. But I talked to Trudy briefly. We’re back on the case. No more sneaking around. No more fake names. The Special Response Team has been brought on board. They’re making it official now.”
He gave Luke a funny look.
“But we’re on a short leash this time.”
* * *
“It was a long night,” Ed said. “But we’ve had longer.”
Ed’s cell phone was on the desk in his room. He had the speakerph
one feature on, which made this something like a conference call. Luke could picture the rest of them in the conference room at SRT headquarters, talking into the black plastic octopus on the long table.
“You boys were busy,” Don said. “Good work.”
“Thanks,” Luke said.
He glanced at Ed. Ed was not his normal self. He had exactly zero sense of humor left. He had stopped smiling entirely. Luke wasn’t the staff psychologist, but it wasn’t hard to put a finger on it. Ed had a baby on the way, and he was worried. Luke knew that feeling very well.
Also, Ed had a traumatic experience when he was younger, an experience with a girl he knew being abducted. Now they were on the trail of another girl who had been abducted, and they had no idea what they were going to find at the end of it, or if they would even find the end.
In the course of it, they had found a dead child, thrown away like trash. And there were two more at that site. They’d had to deal with a man whose specialty had once been trafficking people, including children. If Luke hadn’t been there, Ed would have killed that man. But he would have tortured him first.
Ed was nearing some kind of breaking point. Luke had seen it before, in combat. And this had all started as some kind of favor. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
“Wellington will bring us all up to date about the developments since this morning,” Don said. “Some have been significant. Trudy?”
“Hi, guys,” she said. She spoke mechanically, as if to keep her emotions walled off from the situation.
“First off, the warehouse in Florence. The children are two Jane Does and a John Doe. There is very little in the way of fingerprints or identifying features left to go on. Their DNA is being matched to a database of missing children, in an attempt to get some closure. In terms of who the perpetrators may be, the South Carolina Bureau of Investigation is sweeping the truck and the warehouse for fingerprints, hair samples, DNA. The place has not been used in a while, but at one time, there had been a fair amount of activity. There is a working kitchen, with food left behind in the cupboards. Much of it was consumed by rats or mice. There are also several rooms sectioned off with drywall. The best guess is they were used as cells in which to keep prisoners.”
Luke let that sink in. He realized this case was affecting him, too. The changes coming over him were not as stark as the ones coming over Ed, but it was clear to him they were happening. The people they were dealing with were not combatants. They were predators. And their behavior was premeditated. They didn’t fight for any cause. No religious dogma or nationalistic glory. They just defiled the innocent for some sick, twisted pleasure that was impossible to understand.
Luke didn’t want to understand it. He wanted to kill it.
“Who owns the building?” Ed said.
Trudy paused. “Richard Davis Spence, a forty-nine-year-old who lives in Atlanta, appears to be the owner. He hides that ownership behind multiple shell companies based in Bermuda and Aruba. The building is three years behind on its property tax payments. Spence has a long history of court cases and criminal charges for wire fraud, impersonating various people, credit card fraud, and the like. He has never done significant jail time. He was brought into custody by the Atlanta PD this morning. His house was raided, and his phones, computers, and cars were seized. He was taken by surprise and offered no resistance. He was questioned with a lawyer present. So far, he claims to know nothing about the warehouse or what went on there. He was booked on suspicion of kidnapping, capital murder, and accessory to capital murder. That’s for starters. He’ll see the judge tomorrow morning.”
“I hope they give him bail and he gets out,” Ed said. “Keep me posted about that.”
“Next,” Don said, quashing that kind of talk instantly.
Trudy went on. “We’ve been following up on the names and aliases that Louis Clare gave you. So far we’ve got exactly one hit, but it’s a good one. The Bureau shared with us the videotape taken from Pistol Pete’s. The man he rented the van to appears to resemble a certain Felix Ramirez Cienfuegos. He is thirty-eight years old. He has a long list of aliases, and his nickname is a Hundred Fires, which is what the last name means in Spanish. He’s originally a Honduran national from the ruling class, but has kept an address in Miami for at least ten years. His great-grandparents on his mother’s side were Spanish nobility. He was educated at private schools in Spain, then joined the Honduran Special Forces, a unit notorious for human rights violations against civilians.”
“What else?” Luke said.
“If it’s him, then we might have a better idea what the deal is here. Cienfuegos is an international high flyer, a border crosser. The intelligence suggests he has moved contraband of all kinds. Freelance cocaine trafficking until the cartels shut him down. Suspected kidnapping and human trafficking. Suspected trafficking in stolen antiquities, as well as illegal traffic in poached animal products, like the horns of rhinos and ivory from elephants. It’s thought to be more his thing to capture women moving across borders, immigrants from Central America headed north for example, than to abduct young American girls. But you never know.”
“Whatever pays the bills,” Mark Swann said. It was the first indication that he was even on the call.
“Not random in any event,” Luke said.
“No,” Trudy said. “If it is Cienfuegos, it was definitely not random. He didn’t accidentally turn up in Wilmington, North Carolina, the day of a kidnapping, case a certain girl’s high school, then coincidentally snatch her during a party later that night. He was sent there to get that specific girl, and he had inside information about her plans ahead of time.”
“Why would a man like Cienfuegos walk into a rental place, knowing that he might be videotaped?” Ed said. “Especially if two men were involved in the kidnapping?”
“One guess is he was the less conspicuous of the two. Cienfuegos is thought to associate and partner with a man named Camilo Ortiz. Ortiz is a shadowy figure who keeps a low profile. CIA documentation suggests he is a Panamanian national with a prominent vertical scar on the left side of his face.”
“Hence the need to stay out of sight.”
“Yes,” Trudy said. “And while Cienfuegos is fluent in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, Ortiz might be a native Spanish speaker with only limited English.”
“Which one is the boss?” Luke said.
“Not enough is known about Ortiz to even say. We don’t know how old he is. He’s never been arrested and doesn’t seem to have a passport, at least not under that name. We don’t know how he gets in and out of the country. He may have protection at high levels that keeps his identity in the dark.”
“Protection by whom?” Ed said.
“We don’t know that, either.”
“He’s a ghost,” Luke said.
“We don’t know if he even really exists. This is all theory. If he does exist, he may go by the nickname El Tigre. It’s Spanish for The Tiger.”
There was a long moment of quiet.
“How did the FBI turn up at that rental place this morning?” Ed said. He said FBI as if it were the sinister intelligence agency of a foreign country, and not the organization he himself worked for.
“The Bureau proper appears to have started looking into this case around the same time we did.”
“Why?” Ed said. “Who called them in? They seem to have been tracking us.”
“They say it’s a coincidence.”
“There is no such thing as coincidence, not when intelligence agencies are involved.”
“Okay,” Don said. “This is where I step in. The Bureau in its infinite wisdom has decided to take on this case. It has all the markings of an interstate human trafficking operation, and they say that’s what pricked up their ears on it. Personally, I don’t believe that. We are sweeping the entire building for bugs, right now, as we speak. In the meantime, after a great deal of string pulling, and a certain amount of negotiating, and you can read that as begging, we are part
nering with the greater Bureau on this case, and they are giving you a field agent to work with.”
“Terrific,” Luke said. “A real G man from Dragnet?”
“A minder,” Ed said.
“Listen,” Don said. “The Bureau would like to pull down our shingle and scatter us to the winds. We have friends in high places ourselves, and we’re being protected for the time being. But don’t kid yourselves. The FBI knows everything. They know you guys were down there under assumed identities. They know you bent the arm of Louis Clare, and found the bodies in Florence. They’re not even hiding the fact that they’re monitoring us. This room was clean as of noon, but that doesn’t mean diddly. They could be listening in some other way. One of us could be feeding them information. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is they knew what we were doing. It’s possible that they let us run because they knew we would turn up leads in a… what would you call it?”
“Informal manner,” Swann said.
“Yes. An informal manner. You bring a man like Louis Clare into a police precinct, and he dummies up. He wants to see his public defender. You bring him to a cabin near a swamp…”
“Understood,” Luke said.
“I want to be very clear with you. I want to bring this young lady home, if we can. But you men don’t have to continue on the case. You’ve done enough, and you’ve already faced some disturbing—”
“You can call me off or someone can kill me,” Ed said. “Otherwise I will be staying on the case. It has become important to me to solve this.”
“Good,” Don said. “I am very glad to hear that. Stone?”
“You know where I am on this, Don.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“I’m in.”
How could he be anything but in? These people were sharks, and they were operating with something close to impunity. For an instant, Luke remembered the moment he was falling asleep this morning. He had closed his eyes, and as he drifted off, he saw the body in the ice chest. You don’t just walk away from something like that.
