An Abduction (The Son of No One Trilogy Book 1)

by Rowley, M C

  She left the room through the crowd. I waited and chatted for a bit, and then left myself.

  I walked to the bathrooms down the corridor. The ladies´ was locked. I knocked and waited. The corridor was clear.

  The door opened and Lena´s head appeared. She swiped a glance both ways, “Come in.”

  I nodded and passed her. She relocked the door. “Let´s make this quick.”

  The sink tops were a fresh marble and the mirrors above them immaculate. It was a lot nicer than the gents next door.

  She leaned against the counter, looked at me and smirked.

  “So you´re nearly done, huh?”

  I stared back. We had only spoken once about our roles. We had exchanged many data, but not spoken of it.

  “Transferred,” I said. “New job, new project.”

  She snorted through her nose.

  “You have the memory stick?”

  Of course. She was doing her job, and I pulled it from my pocket and handed it over.

  “Anything else?”

  “Production will start getting recalls in about a month.”

  “Where are you heading”?

  “Lujano,” I said.

  Her face dropped and her eyebrows arched. It lasted a second or two before she recuperated her surprise, but I´d seen it.

  “What is it”?

  She became uncomfortable, and fidgeted. “It´s probably nothing, just stuff I heard.”

  “What is it?”

  “They say,” she said, leaning against the bathroom sink granite, “that Lujano is always your last job. What they got on you?”

  I felt my cheeks blush up. This was uncomfortable. I don´t think I had ever spoken so much about what I do to another person before. And it felt good. It felt like dislodging something in your teeth.

  “They have information about someone, that I need.”

  “It´s a secret between them and me. International Paper was supposed to be my last job. Not Lujano.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “They have dirt on me too. I´m wanted. In five countries. For fraud. Credit cards. They can send me back to any of those five countries any minute. And I´ll go down for decades.”

  She looked downcast. “My family don´t know anything either. Think I´m this big hotshot industrialist.”

  She sighed and the WC went silent for a minute. It felt like ten.

  “So,” I started. “Why is Lujano always the last job? What do you know?”

  She looked up. Composed once more. Totally in control.

  “Not sure,” she said. “But it was something to do with politics. I heard it is where our employer is based.”

  “And it´s always the last job? That´s a good thing for me.”

  Lena´s face turned stern. “I don´t mean it like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, they say Lujano is your last job. The last time you´ll do anything.”

  “You mean,…” I said, but Lena interrupted me.

  “Dead,” she said. “You end up dead.”

  Chapter Five

  That night I cleaned my office and left the company, with the belongings I had riding next to me in the passenger seat of the Volvo. The car would be picked up by one of my employer´s people. They always made sure the car came from them. I supposed a car was too personal to allow an outsider to handle it. It was 10pm and Eleanor would be awake. The wheel slid under my palms.

  The night was clear, and I had the windows down and the heater set to warm my feet. The breeze rushed threw the cabin like a shower. I almost didn´t hear my phone ring.

  I couldn´t check the number but I had the thing plumbed into the car´s stereo through bluetooth, and answered it with a click of a button on the dash.

  “Digame.”

  “Mr Skelsh,” said Jason´s voice, loud and intrusive through the speakers. “I heard the news. Congratulations on the promotion,” and he paused, and finished, “or whatever it is.”

  The one goddamn loose end I had failed to tie up. Jason the journalist.

  I thought about hanging up and throwing the phone out of the window. Jason would never find me. As of tomorrow, Mr. Skelsh would be untraceable. But something made me answer him.

  “Evening,” I said. “I guess it´s your lucky night. You just caught me.”

  “Ha, yeah, right,” he said, down the crappy connection. “I didn´t expect you to answer to be honest.”

  “I don´t recognize your number,” I said. And he kind of whimpered something, and I added, “I´m kidding. What´s up?”

  “Well, I´d still love to talk with you. I mean, I know you´re moving on, but that kind of makes my piece more interesting. What do you say? Got time for a quick drink?”

  He nearly had me. A mischievous part of the caveman part of my brain almost accepted, but a second or two corrected the almost-error. A drink with a journalist was like trying to score drugs with an off duty cop. I liked Jason, but I couldn´t let that affect things. It was too dangerous. He´d started contacting me almost a month after I´d been in at International Paper. And he´d persisted ever since. I took Jason for an ambitious young hotshot, an American working south of the border trying to fish that big story to make him famous. Something that would mark him. I imagined him with his Mexican girlfriend and shitty apartment, maybe a kid on the way. Definitely a dog. Trying to learn Spanish to convince the in-laws he wasn´t Satan´s spawn. I felt sorry for him, but I hung up and threw the phone out of the window anyway.

  It had nothing on it. Nothing that traced the real me. Only Jim Skelsh. And that guy was dead now.

  I arrived to the community gate, passed the security module, and headed down the street to our place. I parked, walked to the door, and went in to face my wife.

  Eleanor was sat in the kitchen at the black granite countertop smoking a cigarette with a huge goblet of red wine on the island table in front of her. She was scrolling something on her tablet.

  She looked up and smiled. She always smiled at me when I came home. Even when she was pissed off at me. She’d smile first a genuine smile. A smile of love, of forgiveness, of understanding. Sometimes her smile said she loved me and sometimes it said she was sorry. I never knew what she forgave me for, or indeed for what she was sorry.

  She was 5 years my younger and at 44, she looked incredible. Even at 10 at night her thick dark hair shined as though she’d just been to the stylist’s. Her gown was silk and outlined her flawless body. After twenty-five years with this woman, I still wanted her. I loved her more than any other woman I had ever met. I had loved her since we were kids. And I still saw her kind of goofy face from the time I had first met her. She was natural in a way only true beauty can purvey. She spoke to people with her eyes locked on theirs. And people loved her for it. She knew people. She knew what made them tick and I figured out years later that she knew their vulnerabilities too. She was manipulative in a sense, but not malicious. With her, it was always like she´d done what you were doing already, and found it boring now. When we were in our twenties, I came close to losing her too many times to remember. She´d fall in love over a few beers with a stranger. And she´d tell me so. And I was supposed to just accept that, because people fall in love quickly. And she was right. I just didn´t have the guts to admit it. And that´s what made her so beautiful. Her honesty. True and pure and never contrived. She had weaknesses though. She drank a lot. And she used to take a lot of drugs. As did I, but not like her. For her, they were lovers. She never questioned the danger attached, only the feeling she sought. She was dangerous like that. But we got older. After our baby was taken from us, kids never came again. Not after we lost our baby. She felt it would be replacing him, and by the same count giving up on finding him.

  We got older and richer, and she calmed. It was easier for me, I admitted. No more fighting, no more holding on to her. She stayed with me I guessed because I was safe in her mind. But I was certain that she´d had affairs. Many, probably. And the worse thing was that I didn´
t mind. That was the worse thing of all.

  “You look terrible,” she said, without moving from her seat.

  I nodded and slung my bag on the chair and approached her and kissed her.

  “Give us one,” I said.

  She pulled another Marlboro slim from the pack and lit it off hers and passed it to me. I dragged long and hard on it.

  “What’s up?”

  There was no point postponing it. “I´m sorry,” I said.

  Eleanor breathed deeply though her nostrils and raised her eyebrows, but didn´t look at me.

  “Moving again,” she said.

  I dragged hard on the cig again. “I go day after tomorrow. It´s in Lujano, you know? Mexico´s cleanest city? The safest city? The only place the narcos don´t go?”

  She swung her eyes round to stare at me. “You leave on a Sunday?”

  I nodded.

  “And me?”

  “Soon as I get everything set down there,” I paused. “Best you stay here until that´s done.”

  She stubbed out the cigarette, and downed the rest of her wine and got up, tightening the gown tie as she did so.

  “Well, thanks for the news. I´m going to bed.”

  I tried to tell her something else as she walked passed me. But there was nothing I could say. I just hung my head.

  She went upstairs and I sat there still.

  I stayed up late and drank white tequilas until I couldn´t sit straight on the stool. When I went upstairs, Eleanor was in the shower and as I walked passed the door I heard her weeping.

  The time to tell her never presented itself, and the Lujano job loomed.

  Chapter Six

  On Sunday, I packed two business suits, some jogging suits and my travel bag to fly back down to Lujano. Eleanor and I went out for lunch at a high end bar in the city. We got drunk on 2 for 1 martinis while we looked at street performers and terrifying clowns in the central plaza. Eleanor spoke about Lujano with some feigned excitement in her voice. It was a nice city, she said. It had a good reputation. But I could see she was torn apart under it all, she hated the moving around.

  Later that day, she drove me to the airport and for the journey, I had all of her attention. When Eleanor´s energy was directed at you, the whole world had a rhythm and everything made sense. I felt comfortable in my lie, it was easier to justify. She kissed me hard in the car and told me she would see me down there in a few weeks. I looked at her in the eyes and I told her I loved her.

  I got out and headed to the terminal and used my real name to fly.

  I had heard of Lujano City. It encompassed modern Mexico; a minuscule ember of hope in the midst of a failing state. The industrial boom city had started as a small town. Back in the revolution´s days, it had been a central meeting point for the founding fathers of my adopted country. Now, it had grown into one of the biggest success stories of Latin America. And that was for two reasons.

  Firstly, one of the richest men in the world and Mexico´s most successful entrepreneur was a famous son of Lujano. Matias Esteban.

  He had got rich when a public gas company had sold up in the eighties. He inherited a network of gas dealerships and acres of land. He then reinvested and became even richer, buying failing companies and pumping capital into them until they revived.

  Forbes reckoned Matias Esteban´s net worth was around 40 billion US. And he was a poster boy for Lujano, still lived there, and invested heavily in its infrastructure, building hospitals, and schools. Despite basically swindling the public sector out of a lot of money, people regarded him a hero, especially as he was richer than Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.

  The second reason Lujano was seen in such positive light was the State Governor, José (Pep) Augusto, to whom journalists in their droves had dedicated kilometers of copy mounting him as a truly non corrupt politician, a future presidential candidate. If Esteban was the poster boy, Governor Pep was the star quarterback.

  The flight was fast and we landed in the small airport situated around 50 kms from the city center. The airport was right in the middle of one of Lujano’s industrial zones. A map of Lujano resembled the center of a tree that had been cut through. The middle circle was the 500 year old colonial center. Around it, rings and rings of newer development, largely from the last century. Then, as the rings grew wide and sparser, large highways pushed out of the circular shape stretching out connecting with the three big cities 5 hours away, Guadalajara, San Luis Potosi and the capital, Mexico City.

  Along these highways were industrial parks, and the reason for Lujano’s economic wealth. The land sales, the jobs, the exports. All of it made Lujano one of the hottest Latin American cities of the new century.

  I left the airport and found the driver, with my new cover name written in marker pen on a laminated piece of legal paper, with an non-distinguishable logo in the top right corner.

  MARK KERSTEEN.

  Once aboard, we drove out of the airport area, where low hills framed the small patch of cement and concrete and hit a lonely road, immaculate, and desolate, with solar powered street lights lining the entirety.

  The landscape was pitted with hills and mountains in the distance. Farmland led through huge valleys, up to the hills in the distance. As they grew larger, I realized the industrial park rested between these hills, guarding their businesses from the winds of the valley. Lujano was high, and the air was dry, but I could see green creeping up into the distant hills, so the rainy season had begun.

  We arrived to the industrial park after 45 minutes. It was cold, with laid out streets and cactus rock gardens in the middle of each “boulevard”. Each business was the size of about 20 football fields, the only adornment on each gray hulk was the logo of each company.

  We rode through the streets at the limit of 40 km/h, under the strands of electricity cables overhead, until we reached the back of the park and pulled in to a space, with the logo, Polysol, suspended above on two sturdy cement poles.

  In front of us lay a huge space, maybe 1 or 2 kilometers squared. In the middle of the plot lay a gigantic metal shell, with mountains of raw material pallets piled up around it. To the right of the shell lay five caravan mobile offices.

  I thanked the driver and grabbed my roll on luggage from the back of the car and watched him drive off.

  I considered the landscape. Behind our site, huge green mountains grew out of the horizon. They were close, and I analyzed the terrain from a distance. The hills were green but devoid of any sign of developed human life. Good shrubbery for hiding. I pondered whether there were any people up there, and promised myself to check it out.

  I stared at the hills a while, so long that I failed to notice the tall and lanky, dark haired Mexican guy in neat and pressed chinos and spectacles stomping toward me across the lot before he was five yards away.

  “You must be mister Mark Kersteen,” he said, and held out his hand.

  “Huh?” I said as I broke from my daze. “Call me Mark. Please,” as I shook his hand. “And you are?”

  “Alejandro Ponce. Chief Financial Officer of Polysol, at your service.”

  I´d never met a Finance Chief who actually separated the CFO. His skin was pampered, and his nails manicured. He was not a fancy guy, but clearly someone who got up early to prepare for his day. His outfit looked as if he had bought it that morning. He squinted through his rimless spectacles at me, as if they were not working very well for him.

  I nodded to him. “Nice to meet you.”

  I began to walk toward the metal shell hangar and the caravan offices to its side and Ponce fell beside me at the same pace.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “England, originally,” I replied.

  “Oh, I like London. My wife and I visited the last year.”

  Ponce´s English was good but not perfect. He had studied abroad but only one course, a Masters perhaps. We walked along across the dusty lot.

  “Oh yeah?” I asked.

  “Yes. Very beautiful.
The people in London,” he said. “They are very…Dignified.”

  An image of Colchester on an early Saturday morning flashed into my mind…short skirts wrapped around freezing pin-like legs standing over vomiting, fighting boyfriends called Dave. Scuffles. Beatings with no robberies. England. The real England. Clockwork Orange. But I could never destroy the fake image Latin Americans held in their minds of the place.

  “Oh yes,” I said. At first I suspected him to be my contact here in Lujano. We went through the motions. I gave him my fake back story, keeping locations and jobs as close to the truth as possible, so they´d be easier to recall later. Ponce told me about Polysol. It was a Mexican venture due to start production in one year. Chinese investors had just promised investment of tens of millions of dollars, and the governor was about to announce the thousands of jobs coming Lujano´s way.

  I nodded all the while and pretended to be interested. He was not my contact. No way. He was actually proud to be part of the project, although he agreed that it seemed a bit early to have us here on site, seeing as there were no employees, let alone production yet.

  Ponce showed me to my porte-cabin office. Inside, the floor had been laminated and faux plants sat in each corner still shiny from the packaging. A large wooden desk sat to the right hand and filing cabinets to the left with a small TV on top. I waved Ponce off and closed the door. I just wanted my order but I hadn´t seen another soul.

  I hate waiting on others, so I took a walk. I walked to the metal hangar-like shell and peered inside. I was shocked to find a throng of bodies.

  There must have been a hundred people all in line, all in silence. They were lined up down one side of the plant, and curled around the lower end. The plant was empty but on the floor were large markings with duct tape indicating the placement of machinery soon to be delivered. There were dates written next to each cell. I walked past the crowd to the start of the line and found another caravan office.