The Wrong Hostage

by Elizabeth Lowell

  77

  TED FRANKLIN WAS COMING down off his drunk, which meant that he swung between surly and frightened.

  When Cook approached with handcuffs, Ted freaked.

  “I’m not wearing those things! No way! You crazy?”

  “Settle down,” Cook said. “It’s part of the act. You’re supposed to be Faroe’s prisoner, remember?”

  “I said I’d go with him—I didn’t say anything about cuffs!”

  “It isn’t a choice,” Cook said.

  Before Franklin could do anything but gasp, Cook had the man’s hands behind his back and the cuffs on tight.

  Franklin started sobbing.

  Jesus, Faroe thought. He’s going to have a total meltdown before he even sees Hector.

  Faroe elbowed his way into the circle of agents around Franklin.

  “Give me the key,” Faroe said to Cook.

  Cook hesitated, then handed it over. “Personally, I’d rather bitch-slap some sense into him.”

  “Take a ticket and get in line.” Faroe unlocked Franklin’s cuffs, but left one of them attached to his right wrist. “Ted. Yo, TED!”

  Franklin blinked and focused on Faroe.

  “This is an act,” Faroe said distinctly. “These are props.” He held the open cuff in Franklin’s face and pointed to the chain. “See that link? It’s weak. All you have to do is give a good solid yank and it breaks.”

  Cook turned away so that Franklin wouldn’t see him smile.

  The other agents did the same.

  Franklin tried to focus on the chain, but he couldn’t see through the tears.

  Faroe had counted on that.

  “It will break?” Franklin asked.

  “Yes. I’d show you, but we’ve only got one pair of fake cuffs. So relax and remember it’s an act.”

  “An act,” Franklin repeated. He took a few ragged breaths and wiped his face on his shirtsleeve. “Do I have to?”

  “Hector expects to see you in cuffs, so that’s what we’ll show him,” Faroe said. “But we know better. We know you can get free anytime you want, right?”

  A few more broken breaths, another swipe of arm over nose, and Franklin said, “Uh, yeah.”

  “Ready to play your part?” Faroe asked.

  “…yeah, I guess.”

  “Okay. I’m going to cuff you, but I’ll keep your hands in front this time. Ready?”

  Franklin swallowed and stood up straighter. “Okay.”

  Faroe had the handcuffs back on before Franklin could blink.

  Or change his mind.

  “What’s going to happen?” Franklin asked in a rising voice. “I should know. I have to know!”

  With a muttered curse, Cook turned back to his reluctant snitch. “Like I told you the last twenty times you asked, you, Grace, and Faroe are going to meet Hector in a warehouse up on Otay Mesa in about forty-five minutes. You listening this time?”

  Franklin nodded.

  “The warehouse has a tunnel that leads to another warehouse south of the line,” Cook continued in a monotone. “That’s how Hector will bring Lane north. It’s the only way he can cross north without risk of discovery.”

  “A tunnel,” Franklin said. “Why can’t you come along, you and a bunch of armed men? It would be safer.”

  “Because Hector isn’t a fool,” Faroe said. “He’ll have men watching the warehouse. If too many people go in, the deal’s off, Lane dies, and if you’re really lucky, you go to prison for money laundering. If you’re not lucky, Hector has you killed before you go to trial.” Assuming I don’t drop you first. “Any questions?”

  Franklin shuddered. He shook his head.

  “To keep everyone alive,” Faroe continued with false patience, “we have to make it look like I grabbed you and am willing to trade you for Lane. That’s why the weapons teams from the Bureau will have to hang way back in the weeds, waiting for our signal.”

  “But when Hector knows it’s a trap, won’t he try to kill everyone?” Franklin asked.

  Cook’s eye-roll said that the question had come up before.

  Repeatedly.

  “He won’t get the chance,” Cook said, giving an impatient glance to his watch. “We’re running out of time.”

  Faroe started to turn away, then stopped. “Here, let me help you get into the act.”

  “What?” Franklin said.

  Faroe gave him a short, sharp right cross followed by a left uppercut that ripped along the side of Franklin’s face.

  It was over before Cook could stop it.

  Blood trickled from the left corner of Franklin’s mouth and from his nose and the ugly welt on his cheek. Automatically he reached up to the wounded areas.

  “I’m bleeding!” Franklin said.

  “That’s the whole idea,” Faroe said. “Smear the blood around on your white banker’s shirt. You have to look like you put up a good fight but got your clock cleaned. And it has to be real, right down to the shocky look around the eyes. Hector knows exactly how a man who has been beaten looks.”

  Franklin stared, then touched his own bloody face and wiped his hands on his shirt.

  Faroe patted him on the shoulder. “Lookin’ good. Keep it bleeding, or I’ll have to pop you again.” He looked past Franklin and the agents and spotted Grace. “Motor coach,” he said to her.

  She caught up with him just as he got to the motor coach.

  “You lied about the cuffs, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you really have to hit him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You enjoyed it.”

  “Yeah. You have a problem with that?”

  She sighed. “Not as much as I should.”

  The same hand that had opened up Franklin’s cheek stroked gently down Grace’s. “We’ll get through this, amada. But first, we have to wire you for sound.”

  She opened the door to the coach. “Cuffs on Franklin and a body bug on me. Lord.”

  “That’s how the weapons team will know when to hit the front door. I’d wear it, but I’m going to be in another country.”

  “Once I put it on, they’ll be able to hear everything I say?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Then I’d better say it now.”

  Grace grabbed Faroe, pulled him close, and said against his mouth, “Come back to me, damn you. Promise me.”

  Faroe sank into the kiss, grateful that he had a way not to make promises he couldn’t keep.

  OTAY MESA

  NOON, MONDAY

  78

  RAIN CAME DOWN IN drenching curtains blown apart by gusts of wind. The windshield wipers beat like a frantic heart.

  No, Grace thought. The wipers don’t care. They’re just machines doing a job.

  It’s my heart that’s frantic.

  She was swimming through a mercury landscape laced with dull diamonds where industrial lights tried to penetrate the stormy gloom.

  Franklin sat in the backseat, saying nothing.

  Faroe drove the Mercedes slowly along slick streets lined with square, windowless import-export warehouses and used-car lots surrounded by sagging chain-link topped with coils of razor wire. If there were any employees around, they were tucked inside away from the weather.

  “It reminds me of a war zone,” Grace said. “Fortresses without windows and stockades without prisoners.”

  “Close enough,” Faroe said. “This used to be rye fields and tumbleweed, but even then it was crisscrossed by smuggling paths and pockmarked by foxholes. The border patrol had to come out here once a month to shoot the packs of feral dogs that crossed over every night from Mexico to hunt.”

  “They shot dogs?”

  “Rabies. Distemper. You name it, the feral dogs had it. Shooting them was the only way to keep them out of San Diego.”

  Grace couldn’t disagree, but she didn’t like knowing about it.

  “There it is,” Faroe said.

  She leaned forward and saw a boulevar
d sign: EL REY MEXICAN FOODS. The sign was in front of an oversize tilt-up slab building that backed up to the border fence. Except for a faint light in one of the interior rooms, the building was dark.

  The warehouse was barely a block west of the Otay port-of-entry buildings.

  Grace looked at the front of the building, where the offices would be.

  Nothing moving.

  “It looks deserted,” she said uneasily.

  “It probably is,” Faroe said. “Galindo did a little touch-up work after the tunnel was finished. He said Hector always made sure no employees were around when the tunnel was being used. Even the family members who humped the drugs through the tunnel only knew the one end of it.”

  Faroe slowed and turned into the darkened parking lot beside the warehouse. “Galindo should have guessed what Hector planned for the tunnel rats. Dead men tell no tales.”

  “So he killed the miners,” Grace said, shaking her head. “Hector makes the feral dogs look sweet.”

  “That means he’ll try to kill us,” Franklin said in a rising voice. “He will!”

  “Take it easy,” Faroe said. “The place is already surrounded by a dozen of the best sharpshooters and fast-entry troops in the business.”

  He braked to a quick stop in the parking lot and shut off the headlights.

  “I don’t see them,” Franklin said. “I don’t see anyone!”

  “Neither will Hector, until it’s too late,” Faroe said, looking around. “I’ll bet there are at least two in that Dumpster over there by the back door and another one or two under that oleander hedge along the back of the property.”

  Franklin made an unhappy sound. “But they can’t see us when we’re inside.”

  “With the transmitter that’s wired to Grace’s bra,” Faroe said, “the FBI will be able to hear someone break a sweat a hundred feet away.”

  Static popped twice through the speaker of the small handheld radio on the console beside Faroe.

  “What was that?” Franklin asked sharply.

  “One of the assault team keyed his microphone,” Faroe said. “It’s the standard silent signal that a transmission was received.” He picked up the radio and clipped it to his belt next to his phone. “When I go south, you’ll be in communication with the backup team via Grace’s bra.”

  She shot him a sideways look.

  He smiled. “So just holler if things go wrong and the Bureau powder monkeys will blow every door on that box and come down on Hector like acid rain. They want that bastard bad enough to taste it.”

  “I thought they were after the money,” Franklin said.

  “They’ll take that and be glad,” Faroe said. “It might just cover their expenses plus the five million they’ll have to fork over for the capture of Hector.”

  “You really expect to collect on that?” Franklin asked.

  “St. Kilda will collect. It might keep Steele happy for a whole week.”

  “But—” Franklin said.

  “Later,” Faroe interrupted. “Now it’s quiet time.”

  He drove a slow circle around the square, blank warehouse, checking concealment spots and potential countersurveillance locations. The place looked abandoned, but there were more than twenty federal agents within a hundred yards.

  And there were three St. Kilda operators facedown somewhere in the rows of the strawberry field that lay between the warehouse and the border fence.

  The only sign of the surveillance team was a faintly glittering puddle of broken glass just outside one of the warehouse’s rear doors. Someone had used a silent pellet gun to break the glass housing on the automatic light inside. More than once, Faroe had done the same kind of thing for the same reason.

  He pulled up in the dark shadows of a ten-foot-high oleander hedge and watched a border patrol Suburban cruise slowly by on the dirt road immediately adjacent to the twelve-foot boundary fence. The vehicle slowed even more, then stopped. The driver lowered his window and peered through the rain at the field.

  Damn, Faroe thought. He must have spotted a movement.

  Faroe leaned over Grace’s breasts. “Which mutt forgot to tell the border patrol that there’s an operation going down here?”

  Static popped from the radio on Faroe’s belt.

  Message received.

  The border agent opened his door and stepped out. Obviously he was taking a better look at the rain-swept field a hundred feet away. He stepped off the roadway, an agent on the way to flush a band of illegal immigrants.

  Then the man stopped and reached for his belt radio.

  “Yeah, Cook,” Faroe said against Grace’s shirt. “Hector probably has someone watching from the other side, so tell the border patrol to haul ass out of here like he just got a hot call on Dairy Mart Road.”

  The border agent held the radio to his face long enough to acknowledge. Then he tossed the radio back into the truck and climbed in. The red and blue lights on the roof snapped on. The green and white vehicle left a rooster tail of mud as the agent raced down the boundary road in the direction of Chula Vista.

  “Good job,” Faroe said. He nuzzled against the transmitter. “Thanks.”

  Grace took a startled breath. Then she smiled.

  “Okay, Central,” Faroe said, his lips less than a half inch from her shirt. “We’re going to the warehouse now. We’ll be inside in about thirty seconds. I’ll play it loose until I make sure that nobody’s waiting. And we’ll need a sound check to make sure the body bug works inside the walls. Do you copy? Pop once.”

  A single burst of static whispered from the radio on his hip.

  “Did you get the inside wired for sound?” he asked.

  Another pop.

  “Remember,” Faroe said to Grace and Franklin, “there are TV cameras inside the warehouse, so expect Hector to be watching.”

  “Can he listen, too?” she asked.

  “Galindo didn’t know about any microphones, but we can’t be certain. The task force will be listening for sure, even if your wire shorts out.” Faroe pointed to the warehouse. “The rathole is in the washroom beside those offices. Knowing Hector, he’s probably got shit smeared on it to blow out the noses of customs dogs.”

  “Sweet,” Grace said.

  “That’s our Hector.”

  Faroe let the vehicle coast silently across the blacktop to the side door. He shut off the engine. Silence built around them.

  “You have that thing Harley gave you?” he asked Grace softly.

  “Yes.”

  “Remember when to use it?”

  “What are you two talking about?” Franklin demanded.

  “The gun in my purse,” she said.

  “They gave you a gun? Why didn’t I get one?”

  “It didn’t go with the handcuffs,” she said.

  Franklin slumped back against the seat.

  “Stop worrying about all the ways I can screw up,” she said to Faroe. “I know the rules of engagement. I do nothing unless someone is in immediate danger of being killed. But if things fall apart, I won’t stand by and scream. I’ll start shooting and save the screaming for later.”

  Faroe’s radio popped once. He smiled. “Dead or alive, just like the posters said?”

  “Exactly like that.”

  Faroe breathed against her neck. “Don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to appear in an after-action report.”

  “I’m just stating the obvious,” Grace said. “Hector is an old-fashioned fool. He doesn’t think women are a personal threat. I’ll have a better chance of getting a shot at him than all the ninjas in the parking lot.”

  “Are you a good shot?” Faroe asked.

  “From six inches who isn’t?”

  “Don’t do anything to make Hector mad,” Franklin said nervously.

  “I was thinking more like dead,” she said.

  “Uh, Cook, you’d better back up that real-time tape and start over again,” Faroe said, pulling out his shirt to cover the radio.

  A sin
gle pop.

  Faroe reached for the door handle. “Showtime.”

  OTAY MESA

  MONDAY, 12:05 P.M.

  79

  IGNORING THE RAIN, FAROE got out of the Mercedes, opened the back door, and dragged Franklin roughly out.

  “Hey, watch it!” Franklin said.

  Faroe’s response was another snake-fast blow to the corner of Franklin’s mouth.

  Grace made a low sound but didn’t say a word. She just shut the door behind her and waited in the rain for whatever came next.

  “Let it bleed,” Faroe said softly to Franklin.

  “No more,” Franklin said, “or I’ll—”

  “You’re lucky I don’t gut you for what you did to Lane,” Faroe cut in. “Shut up and count your blessings.”

  Franklin’s eyes showed white in the rain-washed gloom.

  Faroe shoved.

  A stumble, a lurch, and Franklin was on his way. He staggered over to the concrete slab that was the threshold of the warehouse and stood numbly in the broken glass of another neutralized security light. If he noticed the rain, he didn’t show it.

  Blood ran red, then pink, down his face to his no-longer-white shirt.

  Grace didn’t try to shield herself from the rain. She waited while Faroe punched a seven-digit combination into the electronic sentry that controlled the door.

  The bolt released with a sharp metallic snap.

  Faroe swung the door open, went in low, and felt around until he found a light switch. From the ceiling thirty feet overhead, bright lights blazed on, dividing the warehouse into pools of light and darkness.

  Nothing moved.

  He looked around slowly, twice, then waved Franklin and Grace inside and closed the door.

  The huge warehouse was so empty it echoed. Toward the front, a half dozen wooden pallets stacked with cases of a popular brand of canned Mexican chilies made a backdrop for the front offices. Toward the rear, where the doors were locked and wired to alarms, another half dozen pallets loaded with canvas sacks of pinto beans and rice were lined up as a screen in front of another small suite of offices. In between was more than a hundred feet of nothing but concrete floor and thirty-foot metal ceiling.