“I was screaming at Victor to get him some help, but when Alvarez saw him, he said it was dengue fever, and he claimed there was nothing anyone could do for him.”
I nodded. “If it was dengue fever, he was right. You either get over it or you die. When I was in Barranquilla, I heard about a—”
Suddenly, Mitchell hit one of the iron bars with his bare hand. “Don’t keep stalling, Titus. Tell me what’s going on.”
“I wasn’t stalling. I was just—”
“Yes, you were,” Mitchell said, grasping the bars of his cell with both hands. “What’s your plan for getting us out of here?”
“I wish I could tell you, Ben, but right now, I don’t have one.”
* * * *
Mitchell stared at me for several long seconds before exploding in an angry tirade about how long he’d been waiting for the Agency to negotiate his release.
He went on for several minutes describing the indignities he’d suffered at the hands of the guards, the lousy food he’d had to eat, and the sheer boredom of being cooped up like a caged animal.
When it sounded like he might be running out of steam, I said, “If you ever get to a stopping point, I’ll tell you what happened after Lorenzo kidnapped you. After that, maybe we can figure out how to get out of this place.”
Mitchell took a deep breath and plopped down on the bed. “Okay, I’m listening. But you might as well begin by telling me who Lorenzo is.”
“You don’t know Rafael Lorenzo?”
He shook his head. “No, but if he’s the man responsible for kidnapping me, then I’m guessing he’s a member of Los Zetas. The men I saw working at the warehouse where I found the missing canisters had Zeta tattoos on their arms.”
“You’re right. Lorenzo is a lieutenant in the Los Zetas cartel, but you’re wrong about the canisters. You didn’t find the missing canisters inside the warehouse.”
“Of course I did. I saw the shipping containers with my own eyes. They had the same hazardous material warning on the side as the rest of the containers did.”
“You probably saw the shipping containers, but the cartel had already removed the gas canisters by the time you showed up at the warehouse. When Lorenzo’s men grabbed you at Club Nocturno, those canisters were already on a flight to Tijuana, Mexico.”
“You found the canisters in Mexico?”
“No. The cartel smuggled them from Tijuana into San Diego to fulfill a contract they’d made with Hezbollah to deliver the chemical weapons to the East Coast. Eventually, those canisters ended up at a truck stop outside of Baltimore.”
“Don’t tell me a terrorist cell has them.”
“No, but that was Hezbollah’s plan. A cell in Baltimore was supposed to deliver the canisters to an Iranian operative who planned to use the sarin at an event in Washington.”
Mitchell shook his head. “Tell me that didn’t happen.”
“If it had, the DDO might have assigned someone else to come down to Santiago and find you.”
“I’m guessing you stopped the attack.”
“It wasn’t just me. You were partly responsible by helping me interrogate the Hezbollah guy we captured in Buenos Aires.”
“You mean Marwan Farage?”
I nodded. “When we played Marwan back into Syria, he turned out to be an excellent asset. In fact, that’s how I found out Hezbollah was using Los Zetas to get the canisters into the U.S.”
Mitchell walked over to the sink and picked up a half-filled bottle of water. After taking a long swig, he said, “I wasn’t the only person who helped you interrogate Marwan when we were in Buenos Aires.”
I wondered how long it would take before Mitchell brought up her name. By my count, it was less than five minutes.
“You’re right. Juliana Lamar was also there.”
* * * *
I was just about to tell Mitchell about the role Juliana had played in trying to find him, when Victor walked in. He was carrying Nacio Bandera’s suitcase.
After propping his rifle up by the door, he put the carryall on the table in the center of the room and said, “Does this look familiar, Nacio?”
I nodded. “That’s my suitcase.”
He unzipped the canvas bag. “This is how things work around here. Tonight, you can choose one item. In a few days, if you haven’t broken any of the rules, you can choose another.”
He picked up a green Guayabera shirt and waved it at me.” Looks like you’ve got plenty of clean clothes in here. You might have enough to last until you leave us.”
He picked up my toothbrush and ran his dirty fingers over the bristles. “Or maybe you’d rather have your toothbrush instead of a clean shirt.”
He picked up my comb and ran it through his greasy hair. “How about your comb? You want that instead?”
Like a salesman showing me his wares, Victor tilted the suitcase in my direction and asked, “What will it be?”
“I’ll take the Bible.”
He looked down at the suitcase. “The Bible?”
“Yeah, that’s the black book on top of the blue shirt.”
He picked up the hardback Bible I’d tried to give Phene and shoved it through the bars at me.
“I would have taken the green shirt,” he said, zipping up the carryall, “but now it’s too late. From now on, you won’t get the rest of your stuff until you’ve earned it.”
He walked over and set the suitcase down near the twin-sized bed where there were several other pieces of luggage. Before he walked out, he jerked his thumb in Mitchell’s direction.
“Ask him how he’s earned his stuff; see if you don’t regret the choice you made.”
* * * *
I had no intention of asking Mitchell to explain Victor’s statement. Instead, I returned to the subject of Marwan Farage, and what I’d learned about Hezbollah when I was in Syria.
I didn’t get very far before Mitchell interrupted me. “Don’t you want to know what Victor meant?”
“If you want to tell me, I want to know.”
“It’s not what you think. Victor’s idea of punishment is making his prisoners do his dirty work, and I do mean dirty work. He’s supposed to clean our cells, including the toilets.”
He pointed at a small bathroom next to where the cots were located. “He’s also in charge of keeping that bathroom clean. That’s the one he and the other guards use when they’re on duty.”
“I see where you’re going with this.”
Mitchell nodded. “Whenever I ask for something, he makes me earn it by cleaning toilets, scrubbing floors, and scraping gook off the shower stall.”
“There’s a shower in the cabin?”
“Don’t get too excited. Victor only allows showers once a week.”
“Have you been here ever since they kidnapped you?”
He nodded. “They brought me here the night they grabbed me at Club Nocturno.”
“Tell me what you remember about what happened that night.”
“You probably know most of it by now.”
“Maybe, but I’d like to hear it from you.”
I have to admit I was curious whether Mitchell would begin his narrative with the disagreement he’d had with Juliana or whether he would begin with his arrival at the club.
He chose the latter.
“I arrived at Club Nocturno around two-thirty in the morning. The night before, I’d talked to some dock workers who told me any cargo that went missing from a container ship usually showed up at a warehouse located about a block away from the club, so, after I left the safe house, I called a local taxi privado driver and had him drop me off outside the club.”
“That would be Mateo Aguilar.”
Mitchell smiled. “You’ve met Mateo?”
“Yeah, but I’ll tell you about that later. Go on. What happened after you arrived at the club?”
“I wanted to establish my presence at Club Nocturno in case something went wrong at the warehouse and I needed an alibi, so I asked a couple o
f the waitresses if the club had a Wi-Fi connection. I told them I was a photographer, and I needed to upload some pictures. I’m sure you’ve been in the club, so you probably know asking about Wi-Fi was a ridiculous question.”
I nodded. “It’s not exactly a classy joint. A waitress there remembered you’d asked about the Wi-Fi.”
“I chose that location because it has an outdoor patio, and I was able to sit out there and check out my surroundings before I made my way over to the warehouse.”
“How were you able to get inside the warehouse? The images from the satellite surveillance showed there were guards stationed at the entrance.”
Mitchell’s face became animated as he described how he had slipped past the guards when they’d opened the gates for a truck to enter. “Once I found the canisters and snapped the pictures, I had to look for another way out of the warehouse. At the last minute, I decided to slip through an opening in the chain-linked fence. I’m guessing that fence was under video surveillance because a few minutes after I returned to the nightclub, two Zeta guys showed up and insisted I go with them.”
“I’m sure they were very polite about it.”
Mitchell rubbed the top of his head. “I wouldn’t know about that. I either hit my head, or one of them knocked me out when they threw me inside the van. The next thing I remember I was being dragged out of the van and put in another vehicle. They put a blindfold on me and didn’t remove it until they brought me here.”
“So when you got here, you had no idea where you were?”
He shook his head. “No, but the next day, Victor took me up to the house where Alvarez lives, and I happened to see some papers on his desk with invoices addressed to Alma de Cuba, Número Diez.”
“What were you doing up at Alvarez’s house?”
“They wanted to find out who I was and what I was doing snooping around the warehouse. As soon as they kidnapped me, I told them my name wasn’t really Luis Torres. I said I was the son of a U.S. Senator, and I assured them he would pay whatever ransom was necessary to get me released.”
“That was bold.”
“It definitely got their attention.”
“How did you explain your presence at the warehouse?”
“I told them I was looking for drugs.”
“And they believed you?”
“I was a rich American kid looking for drugs. They believed me.”
“Was Alvarez the person who questioned you?”
Mitchell nodded. “It was Alvarez and another guy. The other guy never introduced himself, but it was obvious he was in charge.”
“I suspect that was Rafael Lorenzo. What’d he look like?”
“He was an older guy, probably about your age, but he was a lot heavier and had a thin mustache. I couldn’t tell if he was wearing a toupee or if he just had thick hair. He was very intense, and the only time he smiled was when I suggested he ask the Senator for a ten-million-dollar ransom payment.”
“I’m not an old guy.”
“You’re not young either.”
* * * *
Mitchell drained the last drops from his water bottle and took aim at a trash can about twenty feet away from his cell. He tossed the bottle inside, hitting it dead center.
“They didn’t believe I was the Senator’s son until they were able to access the internet,” he continued. “After they got online, I directed them to a magazine article profiling the Senator and his family. When they saw a picture of me standing beside my father at a Washington event, they were finally convinced I was Ben Mitchell.”
“That magazine article couldn’t have been a recent publication.”
“No, it was probably published seven or eight years ago, but as soon as they saw I was telling the truth, they demanded I give them my father’s personal email address. Once I did that, I figured they would start negotiating with the Senator for my release.”
“Tell me about the proof of life photographs they sent the Senator,” I said. “Where were those taken?”
“Alvarez took the first photograph in the farmhouse right after I gave them the Senator’s email address. I’d just seen the invoice with the Número Diez address on it, so when he told me to hold the newspaper in front of my face, I tried to make sure all ten fingers were showing. I was hoping someone in the Ops Center would notice what I was doing and make a connection.”
“You looked pretty somber in that first picture.”
“I was trying to make sure anyone who studied the photograph would concentrate on my fingers and not on my face.”
“The photograph was sent to your father. What made you think the Ops Center would see it?”
Mitchell gave a short laugh. “I figured the Senator couldn’t resist an opportunity to wield his power over at the Agency. What did he do? Call up the DDO and demand a full-scale operation to rescue me?”
I decided now was not the time to tell him about the conversation I’d had with his father, and I sidestepped the issue by saying, “Yeah, that’s more or less what happened, and when the DDO offered me the assignment, I asked him to make Douglas my operations officer.”
He looked skeptical. “I bet it was more like you wouldn’t accept the assignment unless Douglas was your operations officer.”
I shrugged. “Does it matter? Don’t tell me you’re not happy Douglas Carlton is running the show instead of C. J. Salazar.”
“I’m not sure what difference it makes as long as we’re stuck in here.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
Chapter 45
I spent the next hour bringing Mitchell up-to-date on what had happened since I’d arrived in Santiago. He didn’t seem surprised when I told him I’d asked Carlton to name Juliana as the secondary for the operation.
What did seem to surprise him was that I’d asked Keith Gabriel to join the Peaceful Retrieval team.
“Are you kidding? I’ve never met Keith, but from what I’ve heard, he’s a real nut job. With your standards, I can’t believe you were able to work with him.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by my standards, but I figured his showman skills were the only chance we had of getting into Lorenzo’s compound, and that’s where the Ops Center thought the cartel was holding you.”
“And you agreed with that analysis?”
“Yes, but that was a mistake on my part. I should have paid more attention to the red flags that kept popping up on my radar.”
“What kind of red flags?”
“For one thing, your favorite taxi privado driver, Mateo Aguilar, insisted you weren’t in Santiago any longer.”
“You think he was in on my kidnapping?”
“No, but he saw those thugs grab you at Club Nocturno.”
“He told you that?”
“No, not voluntarily.”
I explained how I’d met Mateo, and how Juliana and I had spiked his drink with yellow poppers in order to get him to tell us what he knew about the photographer Luis Torres.
“He kept insisting you’d left Santiago,” I said, “but he didn’t seem to know where you were.”
“I don’t know, Titus; the answers he gave you were pretty vague. I’m not sure I would have seen them as red flags.”
“Well, maybe not by themselves, but a few days later, the Ops Center got some fresh intel from Alex Nelson, our chief of station in Havana. He’d had an encounter with Lorenzo’s wife, and she’d told him her husband was holding an American at a farm in El Cobre. She was willing to exchange that information for an American visa.”
“I can see why that might have gotten your attention.”
“The thing is, she said she didn’t know anything about the identity of the American, and all our signals intelligence indicated Lorenzo was guarding something extremely valuable in his guesthouse. He had security stationed around the place 24/7.”
“So you thought there was a possibility Lorenzo was holding me in his guesthouse?”
“I thought it was more than just a possibility.
I was absolutely convinced that’s where you were.”
“If it was so well-guarded, how did you—”
Mitchell stopped in mid-sentence and pointed at the door. A few seconds later, Victor walked in.
He was carrying a large plastic bottle with a nozzle attached to it.
Before I knew what was happening, he aimed it at my cell and squeezed the handle.
* * * *
I managed to turn my head before the mist hit me in the face. When I retreated toward the back of the cell, Victor laughed and continued pumping the nozzle.
“This will help you sleep better tonight,” he said, spraying the mist around the entire cabin.
When Victor walked over to Mitchell’s cell and aimed it inside, Mitchell, who had already turned his back to him, shouted, “Don’t worry, Nacio. It’s only mosquito repellant. Victor has a thing about mosquitoes.”
Victor walked over to where the single bed was located and saturated the entire area with the repellant, bedding and all.
“Yeah,” he said, “I have a thing about the little suckers. I don’t want to die with dengue fever, or the Zika virus, or a dozen other diseases they carry.”
After aiming his nozzle at the ceiling and giving the bottle one last squirt, he said, “It’s Enzo’s turn to stay in here tonight, but don’t worry, I’ll be back tomorrow.”
Once he was gone, I asked Mitchell, “Did I hear that right? Do the guards sleep in here at night?”
He nodded. “During the day, they stay outside, but at night, one of them stays in here. Sometimes it’s Enzo and sometimes it’s Victor. I haven’t been able to figure out any kind of pattern yet, and I think it just depends on what Victor wants to do.”
“How about meals? Do they come inside for meals?”
He shook his head. “No. An old lady brings us food three times a day, but they always eat their meals outside.”
“That old lady is Alvarez’s mother-in-law.”
“How do you know that?”
After I told him about the conversation I’d had with Alvarez earlier, I asked him if he’d seen any evidence Alvarez had children living with him.
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