Slowly I got to my feet. I scanned the room. Through the smoke, I could see long wooden tables upon which sat piles of bags containing an off-white powder and buckets of paste. There were a few men scrambling at the far end of the lab, collecting money and weapons. Each wore a white face mask covering nose and mouth. Particles of cocaine could be seen floating in the air like dust.
I lifted myself up.
Soon as I did, a bullet struck the table in front of me, then another, striking a bag of product. A cloud of white fog suddenly enveloped me, and I breathed deeply and choked, a drip instantly forming in the back of my throat.
My eyes bulged as I hacked. But when I finally recovered, every part of the room before me seemed as clear as though I were seeing it through a high-definition flat screen, and I raised the M16, yelled at the top of my lungs, and returned fire in an unexpected rage, causing the few men still in the lab to scatter.
Hyperalert from the cocaine I’d inadvertently inhaled, I again surveyed the lab, trying to orient myself according to the layout I’d seen aboveground. I turned right, operating with laserlike focus, and ran in the direction I was most likely to find José Andrés.
Behind me I heard shouting. I turned to see men in face masks returning belowground. The assault was evidently over as soon as it had started.
I kept running.
Ten feet ahead of me another gunman deftly lowered himself down a ladder. I stopped, took aim with the M16, and waited for him to turn.
“Grey,” I shouted when he spun around.
He didn’t waste a moment. “This way,” he yelled, motioning for me to follow.
We ran down a long damp corridor that led to what looked like a dead end.
Grey stopped in front of the wooden wall blocking our path, lifted his boot, and kicked, breaking one of the larger planks in half.
I followed his lead.
We kicked at a few more planks, then began tearing them away with our hands, splinters piercing our palms, nails slicing our fingers.
When there was enough of a hole for us to crawl through, Grey motioned for me to stop, then took the lead himself.
Once we were through, we moved slowly down a dark corridor. Quietly, at Grey’s instruction.
I no longer felt any fear, only a fierce determination to take José Andrés alive and have him lead us to his brother and, with any luck, ultimately to Olivia Trenton.
As we approached, the corridor lit up with gunfire, and Grey and I went to our stomachs, firing back. My M16 took out at least one of the two gunmen; the other man seemed to vanish into thin air.
“Forward,” Grey shouted at me. “Let’s move.”
We reached the end of the corridor and turned the corner.
Twenty feet away stood the second gunman, his hands in the air, his firearm on the floor in front of him.
Grey shouted something in Spanish. The man bowed his head and Grey cautiously moved forward, his gun raised.
As he advanced, Grey said, “This guy says that José Andrés is behind that door.”
I felt my teeth grinding inside my mouth. “We take him alive,” I growled.
Grey gave a slight nod, motioned for me to get into position with my back flush against the wall next to the door.
I exhaled.
“On three,” he said, lifting his right leg. “One … two … three.”
Grey kicked the door in and I took point, ready to drop anyone who might fire at us.
Only one man stood in the room, however, and he was unarmed, his hands out at his sides. His grungy gray flannel shirt hung open, revealing a narrow brown torso heavily inked and scarred. His face wore no expression. Like a department store mannequin, there was no light or movement in his eyes.
The room was surreally silent following all the explosions, and for a moment I fully expected a sudden blast would take all three of us apart.
I waited, then finally turned to Grey, who smiled.
“Simon,” he said, “I’d like to introduce you to el hermano pequeño del hombre malo.”
The bad man’s little brother.
Chapter 50
Don Óscar’s hacienda rested just above a breathtaking gorge several miles outside of Cali. As I drove the Hilux up the dirt road, I thought of the Trentons’ house in Calabasas and how it paled in comparison. Don Óscar’s country estate was larger than most shopping malls, with enough land to make all of Rhode Island envious.
At the towering gate stood a half dozen men with M16s slung over their shoulders. As I approached, one man stepped forward and held out his palm like a traffic cop. The Hilux rolled to a stop, and the man moved toward the driver’s side.
I lowered my window.
“Are you the valet?” I said.
He motioned for me to step out of the vehicle. When I did, two of the others approached while the first one frisked me. Thoroughly.
“Ever think of applying for a job with the TSA?” I said as he worked his way down my left leg. “They can always use a guy like you.”
All he found was my BlackBerry. I’d left my weapons with Grey and Mariana back in the city.
“I’m going to need that,” I told him, pointing to my phone.
He handed my BlackBerry to one of the other two men, who indicated they were the ones about to lead me inside.
I’d changed out of the camo fatigues and into a black T-shirt and blue jeans so that I wouldn’t look quite so imposing. The men walking me inside were all wearing dark suits, so I felt a bit underdressed. But then, my attire was really the least of my worries.
My life—and maybe Olivia Trenton’s—depended solely on a brotherly affection that I wasn’t sure existed between two low men. Could be that Don Óscar had invited me into his hacienda just to blow my goddamn head off face-to-face, either for killing Javier or destroying his lab and kidnapping José Andrés.
The walk through Don Óscar’s courtyard seemed to take longer than the drive. The blistering sun had replaced the black clouds and hard rain we’d found in the jungle. It was hot and hazy, and sweat was continuously dripping down into my eyes.
When we entered the house, I felt thankful for the cool breeze blowing in from all sides. The place itself looked like something straight out of a ’70s crime movie. Although the décor was light and unimposing, I half expected to find a fountain with a globe wrapped in the words THE WORLD IS MINE.
After stopping several times for no reason I could discern, I was led to an enormous room on the third floor. There, Don Óscar’s wide body sat on an oversize sofa, his thick legs casually crossed, an unlit cigar hanging loosely from the corner of his mouth.
Roughly, the men sat me on a wooden chair placed several feet in front of him.
“Where is my brother?” He said the words so matter-of-factly, you’d think his brother was downstairs mixing our drinks.
“He’s safe,” I told him. “I left him with my associate. As long as you cooperate, he’ll be dropped off somewhere in Bogotá, unharmed, later today.”
Don Óscar was unmoved. “I need to see him. Proof that he is alive.”
I turned to the man who held my BlackBerry and stretched out my bloodied hand.
Once I had the phone, I pulled up a picture of José Andrés in a pitch black room. He was on his knees, bound and gagged, but otherwise okay.
I passed the BlackBerry over to Don Óscar.
When he looked up from the phone, I could see in his eyes that he wanted to kill me. Calmly, he said, “You realize, do you not, that once my brother is safe, I will have you hunted down and killed like a dog in the street?”
“That’s a chance I’ll have to take.”
Don Óscar tossed the BlackBerry back to me, then rose out of his seat and nodded to his men, who promptly stepped outside the room, shutting the door behind them.
“All this for a teenage girl,” he said as he picked up a gold lighter and thumbed the flint wheel. His English was fluent and Americanized; clearly he’d been educated in the States. From
the sound of it, probably the East Coast.
I waited as he took several pulls from the cigar until it was securely lit. He turned his head just slightly, blowing smoke in my direction.
He stared at me through the smoke, his face a mask of cruelty and indifference. “First I require another promise from you,” he said. “I can tell you up front that you will not like what I have to say. Regardless, I want your word that if I tell you the truth, you will release my brother.”
I leaned forward, a fresh wave of anxiety flooding my system. “You have it,” I said. “Now get to it. Where is she?”
He lugged his girth a few steps around the sofa, then returned. He was letting me know we were going to do this at his pace, not mine.
“Several days ago,” he said, “I received a phone call. It was from someone who for years had been an ally, and when our conversation began, I’d expected a simple request. A request was eventually made, but it was not so simple. It wasn’t a request for money or cocaína or weapons or even women. It was a request for a particular woman.” He lifted his heavy left shoulder. “Not even a woman, but a girl. A child my own daughter’s age. I flatly refused before I heard even the first detail.
“But this man, he persisted. He called it a simple kidnapping. But this was not a simple kidnapping. The girl he wanted lived with her parents in the United States. ‘The United States?’ I said to him. ‘Are you mad? I can do nothing in the United States.’ He said, ‘Your product makes it to the United States every day.’ Before I could argue that this was apples and oranges, this man—this old friend, this ally—turned his request into a threat.”
Don Óscar puffed his cigar, blew out a cloud of smoke that reminded me of the flash grenades going off in the underground laboratory in the jungle.
“This man, he demanded I use the routes that I use to send my product to the United States to extract this girl and bring her here to South America. ‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘I do not deal directly with anyone in the United States. I deal with maras in Central America and Mexico. It is their responsibility to get the product to the United States.’ I said, ‘If you wish, I will put you in touch with these men.’ But he refused. He said, ‘Have any of these maras ever crossed you?’ I said, ‘Of course not.’ He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because they know I will kill them.’ He said, ‘Exactly. Because they fear you. That is why you will continue to deal with them directly while I continue to deal with you.’”
“And this threat?” I said, trying to steady my left knee, which had begun trembling during Don Óscar’s speech.
Don Óscar hesitated as he debated how much he should tell me. He said, “Los Rastrojos move their product—my product—primarily up the Pacific coast to Central America and Mexico, where we sell it to traffickers who bring it into the United States. But a large part of our business involves moving product toward Europe and to major northern U.S. cities on aircraft and go-fast boats. We are able to do this because of one major smuggling route. A bridge, if you will. Without this bridge, our business would be cut nearly in half and we’d become vulnerable, not only to law enforcement but to our competitors as well.”
In my head I conjured a map of the Americas. There was only one route he could have been speaking of, and it immediately caused me to shudder.
“I had no choice,” Don Óscar said. “The moment I got off the phone with this man, I contacted my largest buyer in Central America. I told him I needed a job done. Before I even quoted a figure, he balked. He said, ‘No way. Too much risk.’ I had no choice but to do to him what my old friend had done to me.”
“You threatened him.”
“I threatened him. First with cutting off shipments. When that didn’t work, I told him he and his family had seventy-two hours to live. I hung up the telephone on him. Forty minutes later, he called me back and told me I’d have the girl. In exchange, he wanted several million dollars in product. We negotiated.”
“Who’s this buyer in Central America? I need a name.”
He took another pull off his cigar. “A name will do you no good. I do not even know who did this job in California. My buyer, he evidently outsourced. It is none of my business. But the girl, I can assure you, is no longer in my buyer’s hands.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because she was already delivered here to Colombia. Four of my best men picked her up in Sapzurro, an isolated resort town minutes from the Panamanian border.”
“Where did they take her from there?”
“I do not know exactly. My old friend, he would not tell me. He demanded to speak to my men directly. He instructed my men where to go. That was yesterday. I have not heard from them since.”
I pushed myself off the painful wooden seat. “Why? Why did your old friend want this girl so badly? For what purpose? Why her, particularly?”
Don Óscar shrugged. “I do not have answers to these questions. I know only what I have told you.” He took a long drag off his cigar, breathed the smoke out his nose. “Now,” he said softly, “if you will call your associate, I would like for us to make our trade. Your life for my brother’s.”
I slowly removed the BlackBerry from my pocket. I had one more question, but I was afraid to ask. And Don Óscar knew it. This was the answer he’d promised I wouldn’t want to hear.
Whoever it was, I suspected, would make going up against Los Rastrojos seem like child’s play.
“The call you received,” I said, my thumb hovering over the BlackBerry’s keyboard, “who was it from?”
Don Óscar bowed his head, bore his eyes into mine. “It does not so much matter whom the call came from as whose behalf the caller was acting upon.”
“All right, then. On whose behalf was the caller acting upon?”
When Don Óscar spoke again, he did so with the cigar in his mouth and in a voice so small, it seemed to come from a frail and frightened child locked away in a dark basement. “El presidente de Venezuela.”
Part Four
THE CARDINALS OF CARACAS
Chapter 51
As we touched down at Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Aeropuerto Internacional in Maiquetía, I thought again of the old treasure hunter and the first words he spoke to me on Seven Mile Beach in Grand Cayman: If it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.
It was a cliché that might well end up carved into my tombstone if I didn’t survive the next forty-eight hours. Because as fate would have it, Mariana and I were arriving in Caracas on the third day of Carnaval—arguably the loudest, wildest, most crowded festival on earth.
As though Caracas weren’t “exciting” enough with its daily gun violence, kidnappings, and political unrest, we’d now have to contend with thousands of alcohol- and drug-fueled partygoers dressed up in animal, alien, and monster costumes surging through the city’s streets.
At the airport, I rented a black BMW R1200GS. The people at the rental agency seemed so certain I’d get the motorcycle into a fatal or near-fatal collision that they flatly refused to rent me the bike until Mariana and I had both provided them with our blood types. Maybe they’d already heard from Edgar’s neighbor Freddy back in Calabasas.
Dressed in thrift-store clothes we’d purchased before leaving Bogotá, we headed toward the heart of the city. With no real clues as to Olivia’s specific whereabouts, I’d decided to begin at the U.S. Embassy. Although I didn’t expect this ordeal to end with diplomacy, I figured that the U.S. chargé d’affaires had to have at least some ties inside the Venezuelan government, connections who could narrow down the search area within the vast country.
From the air, I’d spoken briefly with Emma Trenton, and now as we crawled through traffic toward the U.S. Embassy, I spoke to her again through my Bluetooth, this time at length. She sounded as though she were on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and it made me think of my late wife and wonder for the umpteenth time what else I could have done to prevent the downward spiral that ended with Tasha’s suicide.
An arres
t warrant had been issued for her husband, Emma told me, and he was in the process of surrendering with his celebrity defense lawyer, Seymour Lepavsky. Ultimately, it was an affidavit from an FBI forensic accountant that convinced the U.S. Attorney to take the case before a grand jury.
“I have no idea what the forensic accountant said, Simon, but whatever it was, it was evidently enough. According to Seymour, after a few hours of testimony, the grand jury handed down an indictment on multiple felony counts. I’m not even sure what Edgar’s charged with yet.”
“The initial arraignment will take place within forty-eight hours of his turning himself in,” I told her over the hum of the BMW’s engine. “You’ll know then. In the meantime, you might want to talk to Lepavsky about Edgar’s plans to make bail.”
“I already have. Artie Baglin is flying in from New York. He’s going to meet with Seymour and arrange to pay Edgar’s bail, whatever it is.”
Artie Baglin, I mused. Arthur Baglin had been the film director attached to Unfathomable, the movie based on Will Collins’s book about my daughter’s disappearance. Had events gone differently, Baglin would have been the man directing Jason Statham on how to properly portray Simon Fisk. Edgar and the director were lifelong friends who’d already worked on more than a dozen movies together, including three films nominated by the Academy for Best Picture.
Arthur Baglin was also one of Hollywood’s most controversial activists. The subjects of his films ranged from historical conspiracies to assassinate world leaders to a highly inflammatory biopic of a sitting U.S. president. He’d recently filmed a documentary called The Pink Tide, in which he glorified the leftward revolutions in South America. Baglin spent weeks interviewing left-leaning Latin leaders, including the presidents of Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, Brazil, and Venezuela, all of whom had been consistently demonized by the mainstream media in the United States.
The centerpiece of Baglin’s documentary was his extensive interview with Venezuela’s president, who—though democratically elected—had been repeatedly vilified as a dictator by scores of U.S. politicians from both sides of the aisle. Critics of the film charged the polarizing director with offering only one side of the Venezuelan story, to which Baglin infamously replied, “It’s a fucking documentary. Of course the film’s going to be sympathetic to one side.”
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