The Wrong Hostage

2

U.S.-MEXICO BORDER

SATURDAY MORNING

GRACE BARELY REACHED THE border by the deadline. Traffic had been heavier than usual, which meant six lanes of stop-and-slow on southbound interstates. The good news was that the Mexican customs officials were waving people through as fast as they could. They might hate Americans, but they loved the Yankee dollar. The only cars the officials stopped held women worth staring at twice.

The customs official in Grace’s lane looked half asleep behind his two-hundred-dollar Ray-Bans. With a practiced, languid gesture he started to wave her dark green Mercedes SUV through the checkpoint. Then he saw her through the open driver’s window. He leaned forward, hand raised in a signal for her to stop.

The same thing had happened to a convertible three cars ahead of Grace and one lane over. That one had held two California blondes out for a little sin and excitement south of the border.

“Good morning, senorita,” he said with a smile just short of a leer. Despite the polite words, his glance never got above her breasts. “And where in my beautiful Mexico are you going?”

Anger snaked through Grace, a welcome vent for the anxiety about Lane that made her shoulders and jaw tight. As a teenager, she’d put up with enough macho male crap to last her a lifetime. She really wanted to teach this border cowboy some manners, but it would take more time than it was worth.

Her grandmother Marta had taught her when to fight and when to duck.

You must come to Ensenada immediately.

“Ensenada,” Grace said through clenched teeth.

She handed him her passport. Inside the front cover was a laminated Mexican Department of Justice identification card. The Mexican government issued the cards as a courtesy to American judges and other officials.

The customs inspector’s thick black eyebrows rose behind the cover of his sunglasses. He handed over her passport and waved her through. “Excuse the inconvenience, licenciada,” he said quickly. “Bienvenido.”

Grace hit the window’s up button and left the border behind. Sometimes she didn’t know which annoyed her more: Mexico, where men assumed superiority over women and weren’t afraid to show it, or the U.S., where men assumed the same thing but the smart ones left it in the locker room.

She wasn’t a stranger to the problems of Latin machismo. She had a Mexican grandmother on her mother’s side-thanks to the failed 1911 Magonista rebellion in Baja California-and a Mexican great-grandfather and grandfather on her father’s side. She had Native American mixed with the pure Mexican, as well as several Scots and a roving Norwegian dangling from the family tree. She also had an Irish-Mexican father and a Kazakh-Mexican mother, plus a pure Kazakh grandmother, refugee from some failed tribal revolt after Communism hit the Asian steppes.

Although bureaucratic types labeled her Hispanic, Grace considered herself the perfect all-American mongrel.

Despite being raised from age thirteen in a Santa Ana barrio by her Kazakh grandmother, Grace was always uneasy in Tijuana. Or maybe it was because of her teen years in the barrio that she disliked Tijuana. It didn’t matter. She never thought about it and never looked back.

That was another thing Marta had taught her.

La Revo, the traditional entry into Tijuana, seethed with open-air sex shops, girlie bars, and hotels that doubled as whorehouses or holding pens for illegal aliens heading north to the Promised Land. A single woman alone in La Revo was fair game, which was why Grace avoided the whole area by using the new port of entry at Otay Mesa.

Avoiding La Revo took longer, time she didn’t have but had to take anyway. Just one more price for being a woman in Mexico, a macho world.

The Otay crossing took her down the Avenue of September 16th through the Zona Rio, past bank after international bank, classy entertainment centers, more banks, and enough upscale international stores to bankrupt a Saudi prince.

Grace paid the glittering shops even less attention than she had the border guard. The brief, chilling phone conversation kept echoing in her mind.

It is your son, Lane.

She turned onto the toll road that led south toward Ensenada and hit the accelerator. The big engine hummed happily. Air-conditioning kept the sultry monsoon air at bay.

There was nothing to do about her anxious thoughts except live with them.

The cell phone in her purse chimed. She grabbed it, glanced at the caller ID window, and pulled onto the shoulder of the road. She didn’t want to drive while she had a tricky conversation with a United States senator.

She punched the receive button and tried to sound cheerful. “Good afternoon, Chad, or are you still in a time zone where it’s evening?”

Senator Chadwick Chandler made a startled sound. “Oh, yeah, that new ID thing. I keep forgetting that you’ve got a phone that gets past the usual blocks. For a second there, I thought you were clairvoyant.”

“I am,” she said, careful to keep any edge out of her voice. “That’s how I figured out you’ve been ducking my calls for the last week, all five of them.”

Chandler chuckled. In person, the laugh was engaging. Over the cell connection, it sounded like he was choking on the olive in his second martini.

“I’m not ducking my favorite district judge,” he said. “Unlike you rich California kids with your horse ranches and golden surfboard tans, we schlubs in the nation’s capital have to work double shifts just to stay even.”

“My tan is genetic. I haven’t ridden a board in twenty years. As for the horse ranch, that was Ted’s idea. He thought it looked good as a backdrop for all the fund-raisers he throws for people like you.”

Grace winced as she heard the impatience in her tone. Maybe that was why Calderon had insisted on seeing her in person rather than simply talking on the phone. She didn’t have a chatty, schmoozing phone manner. Her work didn’t leave her any time for it.

“Ted and you are valuable supporters,” the senator said, “and I’ve always made sure to express my appreciation, even if I do take a day or two to return calls. What can I do for you?”

“You can tell me if the nomination is in some kind of trouble.”

“These things need patience.”

“I understand that,” she said carefully. “But I didn’t seek an appointment on the federal appeals court. It came to me. Now it’s been on hold for more than two months, and so has my professional life. If the appointment is a no-go, I need to know now so I can get on with my backlog of cases instead of juggling things while waiting to find out if I’m going to be in place for district trials.”

On the other end of the line, the senator sighed silently and looked at the oily bottom of his martini glass. He’d rather deal with Ted than the tiger Ted had married and then found out he couldn’t handle.

“Your own district court nomination took three months,” the senator said. “An elevation to the appeals court will be more thoroughly examined.”

Grace listened to the senator’s tone rather than his words. She glanced at her watch. She’d spare three minutes, no more. “Let’s cut to the chase. You’re waffling, which means something is wrong.”

“No, not at all. It’s just that at this level the background checks take a lot longer, and the politics get a good deal more intricate. I still have every expectation that you’ll be nominated by the White House and confirmed by the Senate as the youngest woman on the federal appeals bench, to say nothing of the prettiest.”

“Don’t.”

Chandler sounded surprised. “What?”

“Don’t patronize me. I just had to put up with a leering Mexican customs inspector. Any more flattery like that today and I’ll go postal.”

Again, Grace winced at her tone. She’d known Chad Chandler for a decade. By the standards of politicians, he’d always been a gentleman.

“Sorry,” she said quickly. “I’m being pulled in a lot of directions right now and I’m trying to understand what’s going on with the appointment. Is the delay because of the divorce?”

“Hell no, nothing like that. This is the twenty-first century.”

The silence spread.

The senator took another sip of his martini.

Grace looked at her watch again. “If everything’s okay, what’s the holdup? We both know I’ve already been vetted back to my great-grandparents. There’s no new ground for anyone to cover.”

Silence.

A senatorial sigh.

“Well,” he said reluctantly, “there’s something that a few folks down at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue want to explore.”

“Such as?”

“Your son. How’s Lane doing?”

A sickening jolt shot through Grace’s body, like brushing against a naked, charged wire.

“Lane is fine.” She tried to modulate her voice, to stuff down the panic that had exploded just beneath her careful professional surface. “Why? What does Lane have to do with this?”

“When I heard about his drug problems, I was concerned and so were some people in the White House. You know how tricky that kind of thing can be.”

Grace heard the words as if they were being pushed through a distorter, tones trembling and booming until there was only sound, not meaning.

Drug PROBlems?

DRug proBLEMS.

“I-” she managed.

“It’s a concern,” Chandler said without waiting for her to finish. “We had a situation last session that was similar. A judicial nominee’s daughter had a cocaine problem and the opposition used it to suggest that the nominee would be soft on drug users. It didn’t get much traction, but it was a near thing.”

Grace swallowed hard.

“Nobody wants that kind of complication on the appeals court level,” the senator said. “These days we have such thin majorities and they shift from hour to hour. Surely you understand the need for caution.”

An eighteen-wheeler rocketed by on the toll road, its slipstream buffeting the SUV.

“Lane doesn’t have a drug problem,” she said.

The senator hesitated, sighed, sipped. “Hey, it isn’t a big deal. It happens in all families and nobody’s saying it will jeopardize your nomination. The White House just wants to be sure there are no unpleasant surprises.”

“Well, I’ve just had one,” she said. “Who gave you the idea that Lane is into drugs?”

“Nobody had to. It’s kind of obvious.”

“Because he’s a teenager from La Jolla?”

“No, because he’s down in that rehab center in Ensenada,” the senator retorted.

“All Saints School is a private high school on the beach north of Ensenada. It’s one of the best prep schools on any continent. The Roman Catholic Church runs it and some of Tijuana’s finest families send their children there, as well as wealthy families from South America, Europe, and Asia. It’s not a rehab center for junkies.”

“Grace, I’m sorry if I offended you. I certainly didn’t mean to.”

“No problem, as long as everyone understands that we didn’t send Lane to All Saints because he needed a drug-free environment. Please tell your informants, whoever they might be, the truth about Lane’s school.”

There was a long pause, another sip, another sigh. Finally, Chandler grunted. “Odd. I can’t say who brought it up. I guess it was just an impression I got.”

Even though fear was shifting the world beneath her, Grace made certain her voice was level. “Well, since you haven’t talked to me about Lane in months, and no one else in D.C. really knows my son, it must have been Ted who gave you the wrong idea.”

“Well, now that you mention it…”

“When did you talk to Ted?”

“Two weeks ago.”

“Did you see him?” Grace knew her tone was too sharp, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

“He was in D.C. for a few hours, some kind of hush-hush meeting. He just stopped by the Hill for a few minutes to say hello.”

She let out a long, silent breath. Someone had seen Ted in the last two weeks. Progress, of a sort.

“Did he say where he was going?” she asked.

“No.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“No. You sound upset.”

“I haven’t seen or heard from Ted for more than three weeks,” she said. “I was hoping to contact him through you.”

“Is something wrong? I mean, between the two of you? I thought the divorce was all very civilized.”

“It was. It is. I just hoped that…” Ted would step up and be the father Lane needs. That Ted would at least call Lane once a week or even every two weeks.

Another truck roared by, belching diesel into the unusually sultry air.

“It doesn’t matter,” Grace said. “But if you hear from Ted, please ask him to contact me. I’m tired of being his answering service. A lot of people get angry at me because they can’t get through to him.”

The senator coughed. “I hear you. Take care, Grace. We need women like you on the appeals court.”

“Men, too,” she retorted, but she laughed. “Good-bye, Chad. And thanks.”

She rushed back onto the toll road, leaving a rooster tail of dirt in her wake and wondering if drugs were what Calderon had on his mind.