The Wrong Hostage

9

MANHATTAN

SUNDAY, 2:15 A.M.

“COVERTLY REMOVING LANE FROM Mexico is the most dangerous of your options,” Steele said neutrally.

“What’s the safest?” Grace asked instantly.

“Find Ted, find the money, and return it.” Steele ignored the phone ringing on his desk. “Tell me about Hector Rivas Osuna and Carlos Calderon.”

“They’re both rich and well known, but for different reasons. I suspect you know more about both men than I do.”

“My files don’t have anything new to teach me. You do, Judge Silva.”

Grace stared at the image of Steele while she organized facts in her mind. “Carlos Calderon is one of the most prominent men in Tijuana, and in northwest Mexico for that matter. He’s the oldest son of a major Mexican politician, a former minister of the interior. His father, Higoberto Calderon, was a member of the ruling class, a kingmaker, very wealthy and very powerful. He passed all of it on to Carlos.”

Steele nodded. “Hereditary power. Is that how Ted met Carlos? Mutual financial interests?”

Grace looked at her short nails. “Carlos and Ted have been friends and associates for a number of years. Carlos owns a bank as well as other businesses. My husband owns and runs an investment fund with worldwide holdings. Their interests naturally coincide.”

“From your description, Carlos and Ted are rather like mirror images across the border. Both are wealthy. Both are well connected politically. Both have known you for a long time.”

Silently Grace absorbed the fact that Steele knew she’d gone to high school with Carlos Calderon. “His grades were worse than mine.”

Steele smiled. “It was the same for everyone at Our Lady of the Immaculate Heart. To put it mildly, you excelled at what was and is an intellectually demanding private high school. Does Calderon still live in the United States?”

“No, but at least two of his sisters do. And his mother, I believe.”

“That leaves Hector Rivas Osuna,” Steele said. “How long have you known him?”

“If you know where I went to high school, you know that I met Hector for the first time today. Sorry, yesterday, by your time. It’s after midnight in Manhattan.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “I’m not as much into global time as you are.”

“Globalism is at the very heart of St. Kilda Consulting. What do you know about Hector?”

“He’s almost courtly for a thug, ugly, ruthless, intelligent, a careful dresser in his own cowboy style. He has the crude charisma that a few criminal leaders achieve. I suspect he had it before he went into crime. Triple testosterone. Whatever. He doesn’t respect anyone’s law except his own. He has frightening insight into everyone’s own special weakness. In my case, my son.”

“What about Hector’s business?”

“Put ROG into Google and see what you come up with,” Grace said roughly.

“I’m more interested in what you know.”

She shrugged, hating every second of the conversation, every word that dragged her closer to the barrio gutter her grandparents, parents, and she herself had spent lifetimes trying to crawl out of.

The gutter Lane was trapped in.

Two days.

And one of those was halfway gone.

“The Rivas clan has long been said to control the smuggling trade in Tijuana.” Grace’s words were as tight as the line of her shoulders. “That accusation has never risen above the level of hearsay, in Mexico or in America.”

“Rumors, shadows flickering on the cave wall,” Steele said. “You dismiss them. Is that because the rumors have never achieved judicial proof in either country?”

“What I believe personally and what I believe wearing a judge’s robe are two very different things. You’ve already heard my personal take on Hector.”

Criminal.

“Tell me about your view of the relationship between Calderon and Hector,” Steele said. “What do you know and what do you suspect?”

“What relationship? There isn’t one. Carlos is a businessman and-” Abruptly she stopped.

For a moment she looked past Steele to the glass walls. Far off to the north, through a gap in the picket line of lighted high-rise buildings, was the place where the twin towers of the World Trade Center had once stood. Their absence was a monument to the way the world could change from one moment to the next.

Her world certainly had.

“Sorry,” she said finally. “That was an old reflex, very deep. If you deny the monster in the closet, it doesn’t exist, does it?”

Steele waited with the patience of a former diplomat.

“Everyone,” Grace said, “agrees on one thing about St. Kilda Consulting-what happens here stays here.”

Steele nodded.

Her mouth turned down. “In any case, I doubt my former client is in a position to object if I talk out of school. Ten years ago, before I was appointed to the federal bench, Ted talked me into doing some legal work for Carlos Calderon.”

You owe me, Gracie. Without me, you wouldn’t be considered for a federal appointment. I’m raising your bastard. If you don’t want Lane to know, you’ll climb off your high horse and do something for me for a change.

“Carlos wanted to sue two San Diego journalists for reporting there were links between his business empire and drug traffickers like the Rivas-Osuna cartel,” she said quietly.

“Men like Calderon often fear a free press more than they do the police.”

Grace’s smile was more of a grimace. “As I investigated the matter, it became clear that the only basis for the news reports was a federal law enforcement intelligence report that had never been made public. In an effort to demonstrate that the source material was unverified and unproven, my law firm demanded to examine the report. We argued that the entire matter was an unfair effort to discredit a well-known Mexican businessman on the basis of innuendo. Racism of a sort. That was the card we played.”

“You weren’t the first. You won’t be the last.”

“That doesn’t make it easier to live with now.”

Denying the monster in the closet was a child’s game, one she’d been playing too long. Yet it was still her first and deepest reflex.

Up to now it had worked.

“Go on,” Steele said.

“The government claimed that the Calderon suit was nothing but a fishing expedition,” she said tiredly. “They argued that turning over the report would reveal the names of dozens of informants. As a defense lawyer, an advocate, I demolished that idea. We won. The report was turned over. Carlos said he was vindicated and there was no point in pursuing the suit.”

“The informants died,” Steele said, watching her.

Grace closed her eyes. She’d always been afraid that might have happened. Now she knew.

She swallowed bile, swallowed again.

“When I saw Carlos standing by while a notorious drug lord threatened my son’s life,” she said hoarsely, “I understood that I’d been played for the fool I was. The monster has always been in the closet and all my denial and shoving against the door won’t keep him from getting out.”

Steele was silent a moment. Then he looked down at his own legs, wasted to sticks, useless.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “you aren’t the only person in the room to have been fooled by someone like Carlos Calderon.”

Her hands clenched. “I’ve spent my life climbing out of places where criminals strut and cops tiptoe. I won’t be dragged back. I won’t let them have my son. Right is right and wrong is wrong and common citizens shouldn’t live in fear. That’s why I dedicated myself to the law.”

Silence stretched before Steele sighed. “I thought diplomatic immunity would deflect the small-caliber bullet that my trusted translator fired into my spine. My mistake. My payment.”

Tension vibrated through Grace. “Ted is my mistake. Yet my son is paying.”

“That’s the real reason you’re here, isn’t it? To right the wrong being done to Lane? You don’t care if your husband is a criminal working with criminals or an honest businessman making honest mistakes.”

“All that matters is Lane. If I have to deal with Satan-” Again, Grace shut up. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that Joe Faroe is the devil.” Even if he is.

The phone started ringing again. Another one chimed in.

Steele ignored them. “Your attitude is very much that of the safely legal citizen. That’s why St. Kildans don’t wear uniforms or talk to reporters. It’s one of the reasons that professional counterterrorists hide their identity by wearing black ski masks. They aren’t ashamed of their job, but they are targets who get tired of trying to explain to people living in the black-and-white world that reality is a thousand shades of gray, yet some things are still worth killing or dying for.”

“I-”

Steele kept talking. “St. Kildans work among the shades of gray. All of them. The shadow world. All the places where good citizens don’t want to go, don’t want to know, don’t want even to think about.”

“I know.”

“But do you know that when reality rears its complex head-and it always does-citizens, politicians, and journalists race to blame the messenger? Mr. Faroe has already felt the impact of just such an exercise in civic piety.”

She nodded unhappily. “I first met Joe about sixteen years ago, just before he was arrested and sent to federal prison.”

Days before, to be exact. Time enough to fall in love and then watch him turn on me, screaming accusations in gutter Spanish while I cowered beyond the reach of TV cameras and reporters in a shadowy apartment hall.

The flash of steel handcuffs and metal badges was something she’d never forget.

So was the savage hatred in Faroe’s face.

She’d done what he wanted-she’d run and kept on running, never looking back, staying the hell out of his life.

Until now.

Ruthlessly Grace stuffed the memories down and locked them in the deepest closet of her mind. It had been sixteen years. She needed Faroe. If he still hated her, she’d just have to suck it up and take it. Lane was all that mattered.

Steele waited while Grace looked somewhere only she could see. He needed to know her state of mind. He wouldn’t find out anything useful if his own mouth was open.

“I’ve kept track of Joe through the same contacts who got me a copy of the CIA dossier on St. Kilda Consulting,” Grace said tightly. “When Joe got out of prison he went to work for you. Since then he’s been involved in activities in southern Europe, Asia, Iran, and most often, South America. Some of those activities have been termed ‘morally ambiguous.’”

“Does that bother you?”

“Yesterday, yes. Today, I don’t care. Today all that matters is my son. Joe Faroe is the only man I’ll trust with Lane’s life.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Why?” she asked, startled. “Don’t you trust Joe?”

“I trust him far more than either of you can imagine.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“A week ago Joe Faroe was exactly what you said-St. Kilda’s best operative, especially in Latin American kidnap situations.”

“And now?”

“He retired.”

“Try again,” Grace shot back. “He’s way too young for retirement.”

Steele smiled sadly. “Where Joseph has spent his years, time isn’t the best measurement of age. His last assignment was particularly difficult. Among other unpleasant things that occurred, he was forced to kill a good friend who was trying to kill him.”

Grace made a low sound.

“Despite the bloodshed,” Steele continued, “the operation itself was a success. Forty percent of the money recovered came back to St. Kilda, as per the contract. Joe took his five percent, told me to go to hell, and walked out. I haven’t heard from him since. Knowing him, by now he could be anywhere on earth.”

“Knowing St. Kilda Consulting,” Grace said, “I’d bet you know exactly where Joe is.”

“To what point?” Steele asked. “He’s never been motivated by money. The idealism that led him to be an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration was kicked out of him in federal prison. What does that leave you for leverage?”

“Pride. I can clear his name.”

And I should have done it before now. I should have believed in him and searched and…

But she’d been married then, the mother of a young child.

Now she was divorced and fighting for that child’s life.

“How can you do that?” Steele asked.

“I have the rest of the story, the part that never made the news. Joe was set up and sent to prison because he wouldn’t hand over two men beneath him as politically convenient international scapegoats. I have proof, and I have the political clout to arrange a pardon. How’s that for leverage?”

Steele raised his eyebrows. “It will be interesting to find out. Your driver will give you a single-use cell phone. It will ring as soon as I’m certain of a few things.”

Grace hesitated. “Please don’t tell Joe my name ahead of time.”

Surprise flickered over Steele’s face. “Why?”

“He hates me.”

“Interesting,” Steele murmured. “You’re the first.”

“What?”

“Joe Faroe is a man of few emotions. Prison taught him that. How do you feel toward him?”

“He was the worst mistake of my life.”

And the best.

But that was something Steele didn’t need to know.