by Andrew Mayne
With Moya covering him with his own gun, I put Esteban’s arm and legs in a splint using duct tape and broken branches. To be safe, I handcuff his free wrist to a handle in the back of Moya’s SUV.
“If he moves, hit him,” I tell Moya, who is now sitting in the passenger seat, as I turn the ignition.
“Gladly.” Moya is holding up better than I expected.
“Where’s the nearest hospital?”
“There’s one in Tixato, but there might be a problem . . .”
“Right. It’s next to the police station?” I recall. “That’s a little inconvenient.”
“Si. Most of them are good men, though.”
“But we don’t know which ones he knows. We also don’t know who he’s working for. Hell, I don’t even know why he wanted to kill me.”
“He was after you?” Moya gives an exaggerated sigh. “There’s a small mercy for me.”
“How far is the next hospital?” I ask.
“About thirty miles.”
“Damn. They could be waiting.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s what a good cop would do. Or a bad one. If Esteban was supposed to do this for someone else, they’ll be expecting a report telling them that it’s taken care of. When it doesn’t come, they’ll know something went wrong.” I check my phone again for a signal. I still can’t get through. “Does your phone work?”
“It got broken in the fall.”
“How about Esteban’s?”
Moya reaches into the backseat and rifles through the barely conscious Esteban’s pockets. The old man is tough. He barely grunts as he makes the effort. “I found two.”
“Of course. One’s a burner.”
He checks them both. “Neither seem to be working right now.”
“What is it with the cell phone signal around here?”
“Sometimes it goes down. I’ve heard the gangs will take out towers when they want to keep the police away.”
I slam the steering wheel. “Christ!” I can’t call Ailes for help, and I can’t go to the police.
We reach the end of the dirt road and get on the highway. I head north, more out of instinct than any logical reason. Almost midnight, the road is deserted. There aren’t any streetlights, so Moya’s headlights provide the only illumination other than that from the clouded moon. Another car could be ten feet behind me and I’d never know.
As we drive I try to think of a plan. I need to get both of them medical assistance. If I find a working phone I can call for help then leave them to be found. The trouble lies in trying to track down a landline this late and in this day and age.
“What was that?” Moya breaks my concentration.
“What?” I stare into the darkness beyond the road.
“Something went past the window. Like a big bat.”
“Maybe it was a big bat? You said they live around here.”
“Not that big. Maybe I’m delirious,” he replies and shakes his head.
“You holding up okay?” I ask. I’d never even asked my grandfather that at the airport. Do people have to be physically hurt in front of me for me to notice their pain?
“I’ve done worse. I’m getting too old to be stumbling around in caves.”
“You’re not going to make it out of here,” Esteban says weakly from the back. “There’s no place to go.” His hoarse voice is full of pain.
“Who are you working for?”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re all dead now.”
“I can get you help.”
He laughs faintly. “You can’t even make a call.”
“Tell me what this is about. We can make a deal.” I angle the rearview mirror so I can see him and keep my attention on the road.
“There aren’t any deals. None of us will see dawn.”
“They’re going to kill you because you screwed up?”
“Essentially,” he replies.
I try to push him into giving up more information. “So how’s it feel to know you’re about to die?”
He raises his head and looks out the window. “For what it’s worth, sister, my heart was never in killing you, I hope you know that. I didn’t have much of a choice.”
“Who? Who put you up to this, Esteban?”
He doesn’t respond.
“If you think you’re going to die, why not tell me?”
“If I keep my mouth shut, I’ll get a merciful death. They’ll leave my family alone.”
“What did Moya see outside?”
“A bat,” replies Esteban.
“Bullshit.” He’s hiding something. I’m on the verge of pulling over and aggressively interrogating him.
“Bat . . .” He lets outs a laugh. “They’re watching us. Right now, men are on their way to kill you. You won’t even make it to the next town.”
There’s a small glow in the distance. “Is that the town?”
“No,” says Moya. “It’s a bodega. A market with a little kitchen. A woman and her father run it. They live in the back.”
I pull into the parking lot. It’s a small cinder-block cube of a building. The front is tiled? plastered? with a rainbow of signs for sodas and candy. The only opening I can see is the glass door, its exterior covered with metal bars. The inside is dark.
“Can you walk?” I ask Moya.
“Yes, I’m good. I think my arm is only bruised. I will get the key for the store.”
Moya returns with the confused woman and her father. They see Esteban in the back of the SUV, and Moya gives them an explanation that’s too rapid-fire for me to know if he’s telling the whole truth.
I write down Ailes’s number on my business card. “Go with them. Don’t go to a hospital. Go to a friend’s house and try to call this number from there.”
“What about him?” He points a thumb at Esteban.
“He’s staying with me.” I look to the dark sky. “Hurry before their bat-thing sees you.” It may be nothing. It might be a drone.
After helping me to drag Esteban into the store, Moya talks the reluctant woman and her father into taking him to a safe place. I park the SUV behind the back of the store so it’s not visible from the road.
Esteban could be all talk about roadblocks and other people coming after me, but I don’t want to take the chance. If I come across a roadblock, they will gun me down before I can slam on the brakes. It’s also too dark and there are too many dangerous curves in the roads. I don’t know my way around here.
My safest bet seems to be hunkering down in a secure place. The bodega looks like a World War II pillbox if you ignore the flashy posters and colors. I decide we’re better off waiting for help in here than out in the open.
I bolt the main glass door from the inside and drag a refrigerated case in front of the opening, then I push the freezer from the kitchen across the store’s back entrance. To see out, I use a screwdriver I find in a toolbox under the counter to scratch holes in the poster that obscures the glass above the refrigerator case. Finally, I yank the racks from the shelves and wait.
Esteban slumps in the corner, silently watching me.
Just as I feared, forty minutes later I hear a truck pull into the gravel parking lot in front of the store. Through one of my poster holes, I spy five men in army fatigues climb out. A second pickup truck, with a heavy machine gun mounted to the bed, parks directly across from the front door.
A voice calls over a loudspeaker in accented English. “Agent Blackwood? Are you okay?”
“Looks like you’ve been rescued,” says Esteban.
I give him a sharp look. If this is the cavalry, why do I feel like I’m an Indian?
17
THE FBI TRAINED me to handle hostage situations—but not the kind where I’m the one holding the hostage.
I push my face clo
ser to the glass and shout, “This man says he’s going to hurt me. He says he wants to speak with the American authorities.”
“What are you doing?” Esteban hisses through pained groans. Crumpled like a rag doll, he’s too weak to even raise his voice.
“Calling their bluff.” The longer we can pretend Esteban is holding me hostage, the longer I stay alive.
“These men are here to help you.”
“And you’re a Ministerial Federal Police officer who was just trying to kill me. You do the math.”
Beads of sweat pour down his face. “You’re being a fool.”
I need to buy some time. I can’t trust anyone until I hear a familiar voice. Esteban fights through the pain to slide his body closer to me while my attention is on the armed men. “There’s something you need to know . . .”
I give him a sideways glance and kick him in the shoulder. Then I pull a wad of paper towels from a roll and shove them in his mouth. “Don’t even think about yelling,” I say as I drag him behind the counter. Not taking any chances, I open a package of zip ties from the toolbox and bind his wrist to a drawer.
A man calls out my name again. He sounds sincere. Almost.
I cautiously resume my position by the door. “This policeman wants to speak to my superiors,” I shout back. “He wants you to get them on the phone.”
“Agent Blackwood, we’re trying to reach them right now,” he replies, still standing behind the headlights.
When this is over, I’ll either look like the biggest fool or see their bluff called. So I use the time to prepare.
Back in hostage-rescue training, they taught us how to handle a variety of scenarios. If I was dealing with a hostage situation and had to enter a building, I’d send agents through the front and the back at the same time. The heavy refrigerator and freezer I pushed into place as barricades will slow these men down, but won’t stop them. The key is to make the terrain difficult so they get pinned down.
Outside they’re hesitating because they don’t know what’s waiting inside of here. You can practice a raid using a known floor plan all you want, but if you don’t notice the coffee table in the middle of the room you’re liable to trip and get yourself killed.
My survival depends on making this open space hostile and unfamiliar to them.
For a planned military maneuver you have barbed wire, barricades and a variety of other resources. This is a situation where I have to improvise. In training they showed us a variety of films and instructional videos depicting the different ways to act in a critical situation. They shared case studies about soldiers pinned down behind enemy lines who used everything from dead animals to car tires to make barricades.
My favorite example came when our instructor brought out a DVD case titled A Narrative Example of Unconventional Domestic Defense Techniques Utilized by a Non-Combatant. We were expecting another dry video, but it was Home Alone followed by Die Hard. Our teachers wanted us to understand that although these Hollywood examples may not be the most practical, thinking outside of the box is an essential survival skill.
In the back kitchen of the bodega I knock down two shelves from the wall and stack them on top of the freezer in front of the back door. If the men make it through, they’ll have to climb over that. This could give me the opportunity to take a shot.
There’s a propane tank under the stove. I unhook it and place it behind the butcher’s block.
I pull racks of merchandise behind the freezer and pour motor oil over them. Hopefully this will make navigating the obstacles even more difficult.
I’m changing the store into a briar patch.
For added protection, I kick over a squat freezer filled with popsicles and face the opening toward the back of the counter so it acts as a barrier. There’s a bathroom I could retreat to, but that would leave me pinned down with no way out.
“Agent Blackwood,” calls out the man hidden behind the lights. “Our phones don’t seem to be working. Please tell Mr. Esteban there’s little we can do. If he lets you go, we can bring this conflict to an end.”
Esteban’s eyes plead with me to agree.
I wonder if the military men actually believe that Esteban is holding me hostage. Given his fear of them, it’s not an outrageous theory. If they do, it means that things are very compartmentalized within whatever organization they’re working for. Distrust is my ally, for the moment.
It’s all game theory. I’m alive right now because Esteban wanted to make my death look like an accident to avoid suspicion. In not taking a clear shot when he could have, he put himself in a position of vulnerability. These men might accept my claim because they think it’s possible Esteban is using me for leverage after he screwed up killing me.
Even if they don’t believe me, they could be playing along in the hope that I might come out willingly so they can still stage their “accident.”
But for how long will they play?
The longer I stall this out, the better my chances are of getting help. At this point, my best strategy is to ignore them. Let them decide if Esteban is being difficult, or if it’s me who is complicating things.
“Agent Blackwood?” Back at the front door, I steal a quick glance through the hole. As the man steps to the side and the light catches his shoulder, I can see he’s wearing a sergeant’s uniform. “Can we speak?”
I say nothing. Every minute of delay helps.
“We’re having trouble with our phones,” he repeats.
Of course. They could just use their radios, but there’s no point in me telling them this. Doing so would tip my hand.
I take Esteban’s phone from my pocket. There’s still no signal, but it gives me an idea. I shout to the man outside, “Esteban wants you to bring a charger for his phone so he can make a call. He says he’ll let me go then.” I try to sound as vulnerable and desperate as possible, but to be honest I’m not sure how much of that is an act.
The charger is a simple request, yet it’s bound to buy some time as they discuss it. If they agree, they’ll have to find a charger. Assuming they don’t have one in their trucks, the nearest one for miles is on a rack by my head. But I’m not telling them that.
“Hold on, Agent Blackwood. We’ll get you out safely.” His voice is so genuine. He’s continuing the ruse with conviction—or I’m making a horrible mistake.
Twenty minutes go by. The real cavalry has yet to show up. I retreat from the front door and keep my back to the wall and my eyes on both entrances. In a real hostage crisis, the goal of the police is to rescue the innocent. But if these men are crooked like I think, they’re not going to care who they hit when they burst through the doors. My only protection comes from making the idea of entering the bodega a very dangerous prospect for them. None want to risk a bullet if they think they can talk me out of here.
“Agent Blackwood, we’d like to speak to Esteban, please.”
This is a stalling game. I ignore him.
“Agent Blackwood, please. We’ll give him the charger if he speaks to us.”
I make up an excuse to explain his silence. “He’s afraid to come near the door.”
“Tell him it’s okay. We can bring his wife here to talk to him.”
His wife?
Shit.
They just called my bluff. They’ve made it clear they have a hostage of their own.
Esteban stares at me with rage. He knows they’ll kill her if I keep up this charade.
18
ESTEBAN’S WIFE IS going to be murdered if I don’t do something. He’s a piece of dirt that can get shot in the crossfire for all I care, but his wife is another matter. For all I know, she’s a civilian with no part in this. My job is to protect her.
The only way to keep her out of this mess is to admit my bluff. As long as they think Esteban is running things, she’s in danger.
Esteban�
��s eyes lose their anger and fill with pleading. There is someone who cares inside of there. “She’s got no part of this!” I shout outside.
“Are those your words or his?” asks the sergeant. Once more at my lookout, I can see the outline of his body as he stands in front of the headlights. “You are holding a federal agent hostage, Blackwood. This won’t end well if you don’t surrender.”
“Let me speak with someone from my agency.”
“Is Esteban even alive?”
I need to buy time. “Yes.”
“What’s his favorite football team?”
I run over to him, pull the wad of paper towels from his mouth, and place my pistol against his temple. “The only way you stand a chance of surviving is by telling me the truth. You understand that?”
“Yes. Yes. Thank you, for my wife,” he whispers through twinges of pain.
“I’m not a monster,” I tell him.
“Nor am I. Mallorca. They’re my favorite.”
Back at the front door, “Mallorca!” I shout.
The man steps away from the headlights and fades into the darkness. Right now he’s assessing his options.
Now this isn’t a hostage situation anymore, and I’ve made it clear that I won’t walk into a trap that could make my death look accidental, they just want me dead.
Probably the easiest way to do that would be to start a fire.
Fortunately, however, the walls of this building are concrete and the roof is metal. Getting it to burn isn’t going to work so well for them.
I take inventory again. On the rack where I found the motor oil is a stack of air filters. I pull them from their casings and start layering them.
Outside, there’s the crunch of boots on gravel as men walk around the building. They’re planning their attack. I have the advantage inside here, and they want to minimize that.
Using a box knife from the toolkit, I carve up an empty two-liter soda bottle and place the air filters inside. It’s not the best gas mask, but it should protect my lungs if they use smoke grenades. I also spot a pair of children’s swim goggles and I put them on my head, ready in a moment’s notice to keep the tear gas out.