The Wrong Hostage

58

SAN YSIDRO

MONDAY, 7:15 A.M.

FAROE AND GRACE CROSSED back over the line into San Ysidro and headed west on Dairy Mart Road into the marshy bottomlands of the Tia Juana River. The silence in the car didn’t bother either of them.

Then she sat up straight and shook her head.

“What?” Faroe asked.

“I’m sorry. But I’ve got to say it. What’s to prevent Beltran from keeping the diamonds you gave him and blowing you off?”

“Greed,” Faroe said. “Beltran wants the rest of the payoff. He doesn’t get it unless he delivers this miner.”

“He could double-cross you.”

“Beltran?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not a fool, Grace. Neither is Beltran.” Faroe smiled coldly. “He likes his brains right where they are, in his skull. And he wants Hector dead so bad he sweats thinking about it.”

“Are you really going to kill Hector for Beltran?”

“Not unless I have to.” Faroe looked in the mirrors automatically. Nobody in sight.

Time to start worrying.

“But knowing how that smart son of a bitch Hector works,” Faroe added, “he probably won’t leave me any choice. That’s one hard, efficient dude.”

“You sound like you admire men like Hector.”

“Admire? No. They’re filth with a swagger. But respect? That’s a different matter. Hector and men like him are modern warlords. They grab survival with both hands and use it to club any rival to bloody surrender.”

Grace grimaced.

“Civilization is all about not having to confront warlords on an everyday basis,” Faroe said. “But just beneath the pretty veneer, survival is always about the strong and the quick and the mean.”

She wanted to argue.

She couldn’t. She’d seen too much in the past day that supported his words.

A mile north of the spot where the stinking little channel of Rio Tia Juana flushed into the ocean, Faroe turned into a small, decently maintained trailer park that had far more vacancies than rentals. The fencing that surrounded the park had gaps you could ride an elephant through.

“What’s this?” Grace said.

“A trailer park.”

She gave him a sideways look that burned.

“That St. Kilda owns,” Faroe added, smiling.

“It doesn’t look like a profit center.”

“It isn’t. The previous owner went bankrupt because the nightly traffic in smugglers and illegals scared the tenants. The few people who live here now make it a religion not to notice anything. Period.”

“Convenient.”

“St. Kilda owns a lot of small, shabby properties like this around the world in places where borders meet, either formal national borders or the less formal ones on the slip face between chaos and civilization.”

“Today this is a command post,” she said, looking around, “and tomorrow a field that needs mowing.”

“Actually, the illegals keep it pretty well flattened.”

“You could repair the fence.”

“We do, like clockwork.”

Grace looked at the ragged fence. Her mouth flattened. “Are you sure this is southern California, U.S. of A.?”

“Dead sure.”

Quintana Blanco’s retread Brinks truck and two other motor coaches were parked close to Steele’s coach.

The helicopter crouched in one corner of the park. Next to it was a ground-start unit whose batteries were being recharged by extension cords from the RV utility stands.

“Guests?” Grace asked tightly.

“Command and control in Steele’s coach, armory and bunkhouse for the standby crew in one of the new coaches and intell in the second.”

“Intell?”

“I asked for somebody who can monitor the juicier frequencies on either side of the border, federales and state judicial police down south along with some of the freqs that I guessed are being used by ROG’s operators, FBI, DEA, and border guards on this side.”

“You know the radio frequencies that ROG uses?”

Faroe parked and shut off the Mercedes. “I described the equipment I saw in the safe house, and St. Kilda’s tech figured out what bandwidth they use.”

“Don’t they scramble it or something? The FBI certainly does.”

“Sure, but that doesn’t stop guys like Randy, it just slows them down. And even scrambled traffic can be useful. It tells us there’s something going on, even if we don’t know exactly what it is.”

“All this in the hands of a bunch of private operators,” she said. “It ought to bother me.”

“But it doesn’t, does it? Not anymore.”

“I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“Let me know when you figure it out.” Faroe draped his hands over the wheel and stretched his shoulders. “And while you’re figuring, keep in mind that St. Kilda Consulting isn’t at war with the forces of civic order. It’s just that we can do things governments can’t or won’t do for reasons that those governments just as soon the world never knew.”

“You mean like my ex making a farce of law enforcement and justice?”

“Yeah.”

She sighed. “Is it really that simple?”

“It’s always that simple and never that easy. Why do you think that the United States has such a difficult time shutting down the narcotics traffic?”

“According to the head case I had in my courtroom a few months ago,” she said, “it’s because the CIA and the FBI make part of their annual budget by pushing heroin and crack in ghettos and barrios.”

“Was he wearing a tinfoil helmet to keep aliens out of what passed for his mind?”

“She, actually. And she wasn’t, but it would have been an improvement over her hair.”

Faroe shook his head. “Crooks and politicians love conspiracy theories-it keeps the masses entertained and their eyes off the bottom line.”

“Which is?”

“If we shut down the traficantes, we take a huge risk of turning Mexico into a failed state, like Afghanistan or Somalia, except those countries are half a world away and we share one hell of a long border with Mexico.”

“Speaking of tinfoil helmets and wild ideas…” Grace muttered.

“I wish tinfoil would get the job done. I’ve seen reputable estimates that more than half of Mexico’s economy depends, directly or indirectly, on drug money. It’s the great multiplier, creating jobs at home because there’s money to spend. Without the money from illegal workers up north and drug money everywhere, Mexico’s economy would implode. A failed economy equals a failed state.”

Faroe turned and looked at Grace, trying to see what she was thinking. Whatever it was, she was thinking hard.

“Shutting down the smugglers,” he said, “would lead to the collapse of the Mexican banking system, the Mexican political system, the Mexican economy. The dudes who run things in Washington, D.C., understand macropolitics, and that is macropolitics to the third or fourth power.”

She let out a long breath. “Keep talking. This time I’m listening. Really listening.”

“Think about the fact that the Clinton administration shut down two different investigations that led straight into the heart of the Mexican banking system. One was a banking and money-laundering investigation that implicated about a dozen of Mexico’s biggest banks. The other was a long-term effort to document the ties between Mexico’s power elite and the drug lords.”

Grace thought about Calderon. “What did Mexico do?”

“It threatened to start shooting American investigators as invading terrorists unless the U.S. backed off. We backed off real quick. All the presidents since then have made the same choices, only a lot more quietly. Nobody, north or south, is going to derail Mexico’s economy, and every politician you put a microphone in front of is dead set against drugs and indignant as hell if anybody suggests otherwise. You’ve seen Hector’s money rooms. You do the math.”

“In the courtroom it’s called ‘complicit behavior.’” She stared at Faroe. “You aren’t the complicit type.”

“I’m not a government with a government’s problems. Neither is St. Kilda Consulting. That’s why we don’t have to call failure a ‘deferred success.’”

She laughed softly, raggedly, drew a broken breath or two, and forced herself not to look at her watch.

“Ready?” Faroe asked quietly.

“As in ‘Ready or not, here it comes’?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m working on it.”

“That’s what I love about you,” Faroe said.

“Work ethic?”

“Guts.”

“Guts?” She gave a crack of laughter. “I’m so scared my hands shake if I don’t clench them together.”

“And yet you keep on doing what has to be done. That, amada, is my definition of guts.”