The Wrong Hostage

20

BAJA CALIFORNIA

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

SILENTLY GRACE WATCHED FAROE from the corner of her eye. He looked calm and determined, doing what he was very good at doing. She kept forgetting how focused he could be, intelligence like a laser illuminating everything in its path.

Once she’d been the object of Faroe’s focus; his strength and intelligence had almost overwhelmed her. Yet it had been electrifying. Erotic beyond anything she’d ever known. When Faroe slipped the leash on his control, he was like riding a storm.

That’s why she was frightened of what would happen if he focused on her in rage and betrayal.

I can’t tell him the truth until Lane is safe. Otherwise Lane might not be safe at all.

And every moment she didn’t tell Faroe piled up guilt on her side and rage on his.

“Joe,” she said softly, “do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

He glanced quickly at her. “Why should I mind? There are some downright personal things between us.”

Grace pushed back the memories of just how personal they’d been. After a moment she asked, “Are you ever frightened?”

“Hell, yes. Every day. Sometimes a lot more often. Why?”

“Right now, I’m so scared I feel like hurling. Yet you sit there like someone taking a Sunday drive. So I ask again. Have you ever been afraid, like I’m afraid right now, a sickening certainty of things spinning out of control?”

“I looked down the barrel of a revolver once,” Faroe said. “The barrel was short and the sun was just right. I could see the crosshatching on the blunt end of the round that was about to come under the firing pin. The thirteen-year-old holding the gun was scared, too. I could see his finger so tight on the trigger that his black skin was white.”

“What did you do?” she asked in a low voice.

“Same thing you’re doing. I swallowed hard. Then I reached out real slow, real careful, and moved the muzzle to one side. I got it through about twenty degrees of arc before the kid flinched.” Faroe reached up and touched the hair above his right ear. “The crosshatched round literally gave me a buzz cut. I was deaf in this ear for a week.”

“Did you-kill him?”

Faroe laughed roughly. “What for? I helped him clean out his britches. Then he helped me clean out mine.”

Grace shuddered and shook her head, wondering how he could laugh about an experience like that.

“So, yeah, I’ve been scared lots of times,” Faroe said. “Fear of death is a natural reaction closely tied to survival. It’s a universal part of the human experience.”

“You say you’re scared, but you don’t act like it. Every time I think of Lane and Hector and Ted, I-” Her voice broke. She held out her hands. Fine tremors shook them.

Faroe caught one of her hands, kissed it gently, lightly, and released her the same way. “Up north, you live in a nice, neat, lawful world, but even there, gangs and mafias and terrorists use violence or the threat of it to get what they want.”

Grace cupped the hand he’d kissed. “It’s not the same.”

“No, it’s more personal now. A fist in your gut. Breathe, amada. You’re still a long way from being a Hindu holy man.”

She made a sound that could have been a laugh or a throttled cry.

“Just relax and accept what is rather than what you want it to be,” he said. “South of the line, violence isn’t just a fact of life. It’s a way of life. Just like it’s a way of life in most of the rest of the world, all the places you read about in the headlines, failed states and feral cities. Mexico is veering dangerously close to being a failed state. Tijuana is arguably a feral city.”

“It can’t be that bad.” But there was more hope than certainty in her voice.

Faroe barely suppressed a cold smile. “Let me put things in perspective. When I first came to the border, the weapons of choice were a Model 1911A Colt and the M2 carbine. The Colt had the shock power of a sledgehammer but it rode nicely against the hip, even without a holster. The M2 was popular because with a sharp file and a few minutes it could be morphed from a semiautomatic shoulder weapon into a light machine gun.”

Grace looked at him. In profile he looked as hard as the weapons he knew too much about.

“Now the pistolero’s tools are different,” Faroe said. “Glocks are the favorite pistol, and a Glock would cost an honest Mexican cop half his yearly pay. For long guns, Mexicans prefer H amp;Ks or Uzis that can rip through a thirty-round magazine in five seconds. Northern Mexico is the new Dodge City. Shoot first, shoot most, and to hell with the bystanders. They should have stayed out of the streets, anyway.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Am I? There were some contract killings in Texas, north of the border. That’s in the U.S. of A. The murders were carried out by renegade federales. If that’s happening in the U.S., you know it’s worse south of the border. We just don’t hear about it. Or if we do, we don’t listen.”

“You said renegade federales. Not official.”

“In northern Mexico, police badges are as cheap and meaningful as dime-store whistles. Guns are what count. The borderlands are medieval fiefdoms held by the man with the most money, because money means arms. Power. Entire police departments are for sale to the highest bidder. They become militias for competing bands of traffickers. Police fighting police, federales fighting federales, and all variations in between.”

“I just-”

“Yeah,” he cut in. “I know. You just don’t want to believe. Neither does anyone else. Yet it’s all there for anyone who reads Mexican newspapers. The most notorious of the good cop-good cop battles were between Mexican federal drug agents on one side and Mexican army soldiers on the other. The prize was a jetliner loaded with six tons of Colombian cocaine. The federales were outgunned and massacred. People on the inside said the federales were more interested in the resale value of the cargo than in law enforcement.”

“How can that happen?” she demanded. “Mexico is a civilized country with laws, a constitution, elections, paved streets, electricity, highly developed arts, and-”

“Mexican federal or state judicial policemen are paid a thousand dollars a month by the government,” Faroe cut in impatiently. “They can make five to ten thousand a month by riding shotgun for the traffickers. In Mexico, like most of the world, police corruption is common. But here in Baja, the corruption is systemic, institutionalized. Venality is god and there’s no lack of money for the collection plate.”

“Words,” Grace said. “Rumors. Opinions. Prejudices.”

“Facts. A federal comandante’s badge costs a half million dollars. Of course, the average dude can’t come up with five hundred thousand dollars all at once. He has to mortgage his future and use his badge to raise the installment payments. He has to impose his own tax on the criminals in the street, then pass a portion of his earnings up the chain of command. That’s how you get hired in the first place. You always kick back part of your street taxes.”

Reluctantly, Grace looked at Faroe. He was watching the road with the relaxed intensity that was his hallmark.

“Are you listening, amada?” he asked without turning toward her. “Really listening? Despite the crooks that swaggered or tiptoed through your court, you don’t know shit from shoe polish when it comes to living in the Mexico that drug money has made.”

“I’m listening. I’m just not liking anything I’m hearing.”

“Did I ask you to like it?”

“No.”

Faroe checked the mirrors. “In Mexico, bribery used to be called la mordida, the little bite. Now it’s called el sistema and the system reaches all the way up the chain of command to Mexico City. And since the system moves anywhere from a quarter to half a trillion dollars a year-”

“Don’t you mean billion?” she interrupted.

“No, I mean trillion, as in one thousand billion, the kind of number only astronomers and dope dealers work with. Think of it. One. Thousand. Billion. You could count grains of sand on the beach for a thousand lifetimes and still not get to a trillion.”

“It’s-it’s hard to get my mind around it. Impossible, frankly.”

“Yeah. That’s how the traffickers get away with it. When the average citizen hears the facts, his eyes just glaze over and he goes back to the TV remote to find a friendlier world. But that doesn’t change the other world, the shadow world, where the little bites of corruption get bigger, richer, harder to digest as a society. Money pours through the streets like half-digested banquets washed through the gutters of a Roman vomitorium.”

Grace grimaced.

“That’s why you don’t like going to Tijuana,” he said. “At a gut level you know the city is feral. You can’t trust it.”

“Not all of it. But some of it, surely.”

Faroe shrugged. “Drug lords like Hector and his clan live in the best neighborhoods. Just like the mob does in Chicago or Manhattan. The difference is, the mob doesn’t actually own whole police departments and judicial courts the way the narcotraficantes do in Mexico.”

Grace thought of Hector and Lane. “If you know, or even just believe, what you’re saying, why did you choose to work in Mexico?”

“It’s because I know, and believe, that I wanted to put whatever bit of weight I could on the side of civilization,” Faroe said. “To be effective, I had to understand the reality on the streets, to accept the reality of violence. I had to control my own fear of death or fear itself would kill me.”

She looked at him. His hands were like his voice, calm and relaxed.

I had to control my own fear of death or fear itself would kill me.

“It’s not that I don’t care about dying,” he said. “It’s just that in order to survive, I’ve become pretty much a fatalist. When it comes, there it is. Until then, it isn’t anywhere.”

“Like the chubasco,” Grace said, gesturing to the clouds slowly seething over the ocean. “The storm is and it isn’t. It may never get here, to me. So fearing or anticipating it wastes my energy, my life.”

He smiled slightly. “You’re getting closer.”

“To what?”

“The followers of the Code of Bushido have a saying: The only really effective way to fight is to understand that you’re already dead. Accept that and you’re free to fight as a warrior of the mind as well as the body.”

“But what should I do about my fear for Lane? How would you handle that?”

Faroe was silent for a long time. Then he reached out and slid his fingers through her hair, down her cheek. “I hope I’d do as well as you have.”

“Have I?”

“Sure,” he said, giving his full attention back to driving. “You found the best help you could and then you went looking for throats to rip out.”