A King's ransom

by James Grippando

  “Prosecution for what?”

  “Talk to your mother. And take my advice. Watch yourself around Guillermo Cruz.”

  They rose simultaneously, as if on cue. It struck me as pure intimidation, the strategic moment at which an experienced agent like Huitt liked to end meetings of this sort.

  The younger agent opened the door to escort me back to the lobby. As she led me away from the table, I stopped for one last word with Huitt.

  “Just out of curiosity,” I said. “Of all those times my father was stopped by U.S. customs, how many times was he found to have broken the law?”

  He said nothing.

  “That’s what I thought.” I turned and headed out the door, the other agent at my side.

  “Kid,” said Huitt.

  I was halfway down the hall with Agent Pintero. We stopped and looked back.

  “It only takes once,” he said flatly, then stepped back into the conference room.

  I wondered if that was some kind of warning that he’d continue to dog my family until he got something on us. Or was he implying that he already had the goods?

  I continued toward the lobby in silence, more confused than when I’d arrived.

  9

  “Notice of Death” were the three words that caught my attention. Alone at my desk, I read the caption on the pleading twice to make sense of it.

  After the meeting with Agent Huitt, I’d driven straight down I-95 to my law firm. I quickly dismissed the idea of asking Duncan Fitz for advice on how to handle the government’s accusations. My supervising partner would have been utterly unamused to hear that my father and his business partner were on the FBI’s radar screen. Nevertheless, I rode up the elevator and went straight to my office, with no real purpose other than to be alone there. As my ex-fiancee had finally come to realize, my career was my cocoon. Bad news, a crisis of any sort-retreating to my cubbyhole and immersing myself in work could make just about anything seem to disappear. Countless times Jenna had begged me to crawl out of my cave and talk out a problem with her. Eventually I would emerge, usually with the proud announcement that I’d figured out everything by myself and that there was nothing left to talk about. It used to make her crazy.

  And here I was again, going through my stack of mail, as if that would fix everything with the FBI. It wouldn’t, of course, and what made the whole exercise even more absurd was that I didn’t even need to be there. Duncan had arranged for another associate to review my mail while I was on personal leave for the week. Anything that was deemed bland enough to remain in my in-box until my return was about as compelling as reading the phone book, with the exception of the latest pleading filed by the plaintiff’s counsel in the Med-Fam Pharmaceuticals case. A simple one-page “notice of death” advised the court of the sad turn of events.

  Gilbert Jones was dead.

  He had died of respiratory failure the morning after Duncan talked him into playing “Let’s Make a Deal.” We all knew he was going to die. No one expected it to happen this soon. He’d given up. Duncan had snatched away what little he had left to fight for in his life. Having met Gilbert, I felt bad enough. Dad’s being kidnapped made me feel that much worse. Gilbert’s death made me realize that everyone had a breaking point, maybe not the stomach to pull the trigger or jump off a bridge, but certainly the ability to act-or, more precisely, not act-on the realization that there was no escape and that pushing forward was utterly pointless. That Gilbert had reached his point of despair so soon after Duncan’s ploy made me terribly depressed. The thought that Dad might someday follow had me downright distressed. Even the strong could snap at the hands of abusive kidnappers.

  I pushed the mail aside. Being alone wasn’t the answer. I needed to talk to someone.

  I wasn’t exactly sure why, but I found myself dialing Jenna’s phone number. My mother had planted the seed in my head yesterday when she’d suggested that I tell her about the kidnapping. It had sounded like a bad idea then, and in some ways it didn’t sound any better now. I was down in the dumps, however, and for some reason I wanted to hear her voice.

  “Hello,” she answered.

  I almost hung up, but I knew that her cell phone had Caller ID. She’d think I was stalking her.

  “Hi, it’s me. Nick.”

  “I know. I recognized the number. How are you?”

  “I have some bad news, I’m afraid.”

  “Your dad, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “You heard?”

  “I saw Duncan Fitz at the courthouse yesterday. He told me.”

  Jenna was a trial lawyer at a small firm in Coral Gables. As she used to rub it in, lawyers at smaller firms actually had their own cases and got to see the inside of the courthouse, unlike the young paper pushers at law firms like Cool Cash.

  “Well, I’m glad he mentioned it,” I said. “I wanted you to know.”

  “I wasn’t sure if I should call you or not. I wrote a little personal note to your mom. I know this might sound hollow, but if there’s anything I can do, just call. I mean it. I feel terrible that this has happened.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I paused, not sure where to take it from there. We’d been best friends and lovers for almost five years. How weird it was to think that if my father hadn’t been kidnapped we might never have uttered another word to one another. My heart was pounding. I was nervous and confused. I felt guilty, too, thinking that in some way I’d used my father’s crisis as an excuse to reconnect with Jenna, however briefly. Calling her had accomplished nothing. Or maybe it had proved too much. The mere sound of her voice had only confirmed that I wasn’t over her.

  “So, how are you doing?” I asked.

  She said something beyond “Good,” but it was garbled. The connection was breaking up.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I said.

  Her response was pure static. The connection was even worse.

  “I think I’m losing you.” As soon as I’d said it, the line went dead, and I realized the irony of my words. I placed the receiver in the cradle, sat back in my chair, and stared blankly off to the middle distance.

  “I’ve definitely lost you,” I said softly.

  My cell phone rang. I snatched it from my pocket, thinking it was Jenna. It was my mother.

  “Good news,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been worried sick ever since Guillermo told us how those kidnappers think of your father as a gold mine. All I’ve been able to think is, What if we can’t pay the ransom?”

  “I know. We’re all worried.”

  “Well, our worries are over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we have to, we can pay a gold mine and then some.”

  “How?”

  “Your father once told me that if anything ever happened to him on one of his trips, I should check a special safe-deposit box he opened at Brickell Trust. The last couple of days I’ve been putting it off. I was afraid I would find a letter of good-bye or something on that order. This morning I finally went. You won’t believe what was in there.”

  “Stop right there, Mom.” On the heels of Agent Huitt’s accusations, I was suddenly concerned that Mom and I might not be the only ones on this phone line.

  “But this is really good news.”

  “We’ll talk about it when I get home. I’ll be right there.” I hung up before she could say more.

  I had no idea what she’d found, but I surely didn’t want her blurting it out if there was any possibility that the FBI had tapped our lines and was eavesdropping. I returned the notice of Gilbert Jones’s death to the top of my pile, then quickly headed out the door.

  10

  As a lawyer, I was embarrassed to admit it. But I couldn’t lie to my own mother. I’d never heard of kidnap-and-ransom insurance for a fisherman.

  That was exactly what Mom had found in the safe-deposit box: a K amp;R insurance policy issued to my father. I’d seen that type of
coverage before, but only for the big multinational conglomerates. For companies with employees abroad, it certainly made sense to shift the risk of an abduction to an insurance company. The insurer was then on the hook for paying the ransom and, even more important, hiring a private security consultant to negotiate a safe release. When I thought about it, the concept made even more sense for a small business. A half-million-dollar ransom would do much more damage to Rey’s Seafood Company than would a ten-million-dollar hit to a Fortune 500 company. Until now, however, I’d never realized how affordable it was even for the little guy.

  I read the entire policy carefully, first page to last, while seated at the kitchen table with my mother looking over my shoulder. I was at once proud of my old man for thinking of it and excited as hell that he’d actually followed through and bought it. Hot damn! Dad was insured.

  “This is good, right?” said Mom.

  “It’s fantastic.”

  “So I read it correctly? The insurance company pays the ransom?”

  “Up to three million dollars.”

  Her eyes brightened, and she actually smiled. It was the most upbeat I’d seen her. “I wish your father had told me he had insurance. Why was he so secretive with the safe-deposit box?”

  “It says right here in the policy that if the insured tells anyone that he has kidnap-and-ransom insurance, the policy is void. Apparently Dad took that pretty literally. He wouldn’t even tell you.”

  “What happens now?”

  “I’ll call the insurance company and give them notice. If I read the policy right, they select the negotiator who will handle Dad’s case.”

  “Is that better than using the FBI?”

  I hesitated to tell her about the disastrous meeting with Agent Huitt. Her spirits were too high. “My guess is that these private consultants are former FBI hostage negotiators and the like. How can it get better than that? We’ll have a skilled negotiator who doesn’t have to work within the box created by bureaucrats and diplomats.”

  “If only I’d gone to the bank sooner. But when your father told me to check the safe-deposit box if anything ever happened to him, I thought he meant if he crashed in one of those little airplanes they fly into Puerto Cabezas or was lost at sea in a leaky old shrimp boat. I was so afraid to find something in the box that I wasn’t ready to see, a last will and testament or-”

  “I understand.”

  “Please be firm with this insurance company. You know how slow they can be.”

  I could hear the concern in her voice, her fear that she’d needlessly delayed things by not finding the policy sooner. “Mom, I don’t care what it takes. Before the day’s over, I’ll speak to our negotiator. I promise.”

  As it turned out, keeping that promise proved almost too easy. Dad was insured with Quality Insurance Company, a Bermuda-based subsidiary of a worldwide underwriting group. More important, I quickly learned that Quality was a client of Coolidge, Harding and Cash. The connection wasn’t surprising. While scores of companies offered kidnap-and-ransom insurance, the leaders in the industry-and the ones who had pioneered the concept-were the largest insurers in the world. Companies like that were the mainstay of the Cool Cash client roster.

  The Miami office had never done work for Quality Insurance, but a woman in our New York office was their go-to lawyer in the United States. She was only too glad to help, which underscored the wisdom of my earlier decision to run a conflict check at my firm before placing a phone call to Quality. Having represented insurance companies myself, I’d anticipated needing to be aggressive, perhaps even a little nasty, to make the elephant jump. However, I recalled a fellow associate in our office who, on a purely personal matter, had written an ugly letter to an appliance discount store on Cool Cash letterhead. The scathing missive eventually landed on the desk of the partner in our Atlanta office who happened to represent that “sleazebag, bait-and-switch, two-bit operation.” Two weeks later my friend was working in the county attorney’s office. I learned from his mistake. Instead of being in the defensive posture of explaining to a New York partner why I was beating up on her client, I had the partner working for me from the get-go. She personally followed through to make sure the case was assigned immediately to a Miami consulting firm, and Duncan Fitz offered to sit through our first meeting in his office, just to make sure that Quality Insurance understood that this law firm had a keen interest in the case.

  Thank God for small favors. Twice for big ones. This was huge.

  “Alex Cabrera is here,” Duncan’s secretary announced over the intercom.

  “Send him in,” said Duncan.

  Duncan and I rose as the door opened, both of us surprised to see that Alex was a her, not a him. I’d expected someone like Agent Nettles, but in walked a striking Latina woman with big brown eyes. She was dressed in a fitted gray business suit that was conservative only in color, as it did little to hide the fact that she took very good care of her body. I probably looked a split second longer than I should have. Any man would have done the same, and notwithstanding the one-two punch of Jenna and her dive-bombing seagull on the beach, I was, after all, still a man.

  “Alexandra Cabrera,” she said. “Call me Alex.”

  “My pleasure,” I said, as we shook hands.

  “I’m with Crowell Associates.”

  “A fine organization,” said Duncan. “I’ve used your investigators for litigation support.” He glanced at me and added, “They’re one of the largest private investigative and security firms in the world.”

  “Actually, you’re thinking of Kroll Associates. I said Crowell.” She spelled it.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “A lot of firms in this business have similar-sounding names. It gets confusing.”

  “So you’re based here in Miami?” I asked.

  “For the past two years. I spent seven years doing the same kind of work in Bogota.”

  “Well, you come very highly recommended by our partner in New York. She says you’re an expert on kidnapping and business extortion.”

  “Solving and preventing it,” she said, “not committing it.”

  We shared a little smile over her joke, and then she turned serious. “I’m very sorry about your father. But you’ve come to the right place for help.”

  Duncan’s secretary brought us fresh coffee. We took our seats, Duncan behind his desk, Alex and I in the wing chairs that faced him.

  “Where do we begin?” I said.

  “I want to hear your whole story, but I should tell you a little about myself, just so you know you’re not wasting your breath. I was born in Bogota. My mother was Colombian, and I’m told my father was from Italy. I won’t burden you with the details of my childhood, but suffice it to say I grew up very fast. By the time I was a young teenager, I was already caught up in antigovernment activities. At age sixteen I joined Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. FARC for short.”

  “That might be the group that has my father.”

  “It’s one of the largest and last remaining Marxist guerrilla armies on earth. More to the point, it’s probably the biggest kidnapping enterprise that has ever existed. FARC and organizations like it account for over sixty percent of the kidnappings in Colombia.”

  “That’s a lot of kidnappings.”

  “You have no idea. The more you analyze the numbers, the more ridiculous they seem. One out of every five kidnappings for ransom in the entire world happens in Colombia.”

  “How long were you with FARC?” I asked.

  “Less than two years. Long enough to learn the kidnapping trade.”

  Duncan said, “I don’t suppose you’d find many FBI stiffs with those kinds of credentials.”

  “You won’t find any,” said Alex. “I once thought of applying to the FBI, but with my past connection to FARC, I was told not to bother. It’s their loss. My other life is exactly the reason I can help you in ways they can’t.”

  “Don’t be offended,” I said. “But I have to
be honest. I was expecting my negotiator to be a former law enforcement officer. Not a former member of FARC.”

  “First of all, I was sixteen years old when I left FARC. Second, you won’t find a former FBI agent or Scotland Yard negotiator with more experience in Colombia or a better success record than mine.”

  “Have you negotiated the release of an American before?” asked Duncan.

  “Yes, and some Canadians as well. But if you’re thinking it’s any easier to negotiate for the release of a Colombian, you’re wrong. Generally, these aren’t politically motivated kidnappings. They’re financially motivated. The nationality of the victim is relevant, if at all, only to the extent that it might affect the amount of ransom demanded.”

  “You certainly seem to know your stuff,” I said.

  “The most important thing is that you have confidence in your negotiator. Under your father’s policy, the insurance company pays for a private consultant only if you use Crowell Associates. But if you don’t like the specific consultant assigned to your case, you’re not stuck. There are others in our organization to choose from. For example, we have a former CIA agent who’s a crackerjack on Mexico. I’m sure he’d do a fine job in Colombia, much the way one of your bankruptcy lawyers would do just fine on a divorce case.”

  “I get your point,” I said.

  “You can also bypass private security altogether and rely on the FBI.”

  “That’s not really an option. I’m at an impasse with them.” I didn’t elaborate in front of Duncan; the threat from the narcotics agents was best kept to myself.

  “I’m sorry you had that experience,” she said. “There are a lot of talented negotiators in the FBI who can be of tremendous help to families when the bureaucracy lets them do their job.”

  “It’s pretty clear the bureaucracy’s winning this battle.”

  “That’s one of the benefits of private security. I’m totally responsive to you, and to you only. My approach is to tell you everything, each step of the way. I’ll advise you of what to do, explain to you the significance of every little thing the kidnappers do, and offer my best guess as to what they might do in the future. Total honesty and openness is the best approach, as in any other relationship. And, believe me, this is a relationship.”