Hostage Zero

by John Gilstrap

  Chris looked concerned. “Which one? I didn’t know charters were laying off.”

  “In Georgia,” Harvey clarified. He had no idea why he’d just said that. He’d never even been to Georgia. “Out of Savannah.” Please, God, let Savannah be on the coast.

  “Well, that’s a great line to be in around here if you’re any good at it,” Chris said. “Where are you staying?”

  Jesus Christ, did he not have an off switch? “With friends.”

  The kid’s smile brightened even more. “Anybody I know?”

  Harvey opened his mouth to say something, but no words formed. His library of lies had just checked out its last edition. He found himself staring.

  “Give the guy a break,” Denim said. “He just found out that a stranger is looking for him, and you keep leaning on him for information. Would you want to be answering your questions if you were him?”

  A lightbulb went on over Chris’s head. Almost literally. “Oh, jeeze, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to push too hard. I was just-”

  Harvey waved him off. “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

  “Sure looked spooked, though,” Denim said. He toasted him with what looked to be a pint of Coca-Cola.

  Harvey forced a smile, and tried to devise an exit strategy. Denim worried him. Assuming he was a bad guy, Harvey would be foolish to leave a public place. The guy would only have to follow him, wait for the right moment, and then do whatever he came to do. On the other hand, waiting would guarantee a meeting with the big Bostonian.

  Even if Harvey did leave, where would he go? He wasn’t the most selfless guy in the world, but there’s no way he could lead killers back to the mansion.

  When you’ve got no good options, all you can do is hope to choose the least shitty one. In this case, it meant finishing his Harp and getting out of here. He waited a couple of minutes after he drained the pint to ask for the check. While Chris rang the order, Denim defused everything by dismissing himself from his stool and heading to the men’s room.

  “I hope our friend isn’t stepping out on his bill,” Harvey quipped as he slipped a twenty into the little plastic folder embossed with yet another set of ass-kissing fish.

  Chris smiled and shook his head. “Nah, he looks honest to me.” As he cashed out the change he added, “Sure you don’t want to stick around for your friend?”

  Harvey spun himself off the stool. “Chris, I gotta tell you. I don’t know anybody who fits the description you gave, and I’ve never won any medals. If he comes back, feel free to forget you ever saw me.” He eyed the cash in Chris’s hand. “Keep the change.”

  The kid’s eyes saucered at the three hundred percent tip. “Forget I saw who?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Jonathan settled into his chair at the head of the conference table in the War Room and gave the floor to Venice. Behind her, at the far end of the room, Evan Guinn’s face continued to watch them from the projection screen. It disappeared only when she began to speak, replaced by the face of a man in his mid-forties, shot at an oblique angle, clearly through a telephoto lens.

  “This is Mitchell Ponder,” she began. “Of the few pictures of him that are available in any of the databases we can access, this is both the most recent and the most identifiable.”

  Identifiable was a relative term, Jonathan thought. Sure, the guy had features-he had a nose and a mouth and a set of eyes just like everyone else, but nothing about him truly stood out as unusual, which meant that even the best facial recognition software would be only marginally useful.

  Venice clicked the remote control in her hand, and the image on the screen changed to a much younger version of the same plain vanilla face, but this time accompanied by a complete set of fingerprints. “This is his Army induction photo from twenty years ago,” she explained. “His service record is unremarkable. In and out in six years with an honorable discharge as an E-5.”

  Jonathan recognized E-5 as the Army’s rate of sergeant. To achieve a third chevron in six years was admirable, but nothing special.

  “The big break,” Venice went on, “is the set of prints. Since we know who we’re looking for, and we know where to look for him, I was able to trace him down.” She clicked again, and brought up a picture that could have been snapped at any immigration counter at any airport in the world. Obviously shot by a security camera, the photo showed the same man as the other pictures-Mitch Ponder. “Because the Colombians are still pissed at us for our hundred years of meddling, they require fingerprints of any American, Brit, or Frenchman coming in and out of the country.” The time stamp on the photo showed he’d been in country for just over eighteen hours. “He’s traveling under the name Robert Zambrano. I don’t know if there’s significance to the alias.”

  “Who else arrived on the same flight?” Jonathan asked.

  “Too many to help us,” Venice said. “He came in on a commercial flight from Houston with about a hundred of his closest friends.”

  “Houston?” Boxers asked. “Not Dulles, which would have been much closer.” He looked to Jonathan. “I guess they took their collapsible chopper to a private airport somewhere and then took a private jet to Houston? Why not just fly him to Colombia?”

  Venice explained, “The Colombian government pays very close attention to incoming civil aviation traffic. And the U.S. government pays even closer attention to outbound civil aviation traffic.”

  “But why Houston?” Jonathan wondered aloud. “Of all the outbound connections, why there? Were there any children who look like our boy?”

  Venice shook her head. “I’ve done an initial run-through of faces and didn’t see anything that even came close.”

  “So where could he be?” Boxers asked.

  “Assuming he was on the plane, there’s only one other place I can think of,” Venice said. “In with the luggage.”

  Gail sat forward. “Wouldn’t he suffocate?”

  “I thought the same thing,” Venice said. “But the research says no. I’d never really thought about this before, but they have to keep cargo holds pressurized now because of people transporting pets and such. With the pressure, there’s plenty of oxygen to survive and temperature controls to keep you from freezing to death. I verified this on the Internet. But the key…” She paused for dramatic effect, hoping the Jonathan would complete her thought for her.

  “Ven, please. You know I hate this game.”

  “The key is to properly sedate the passenger you pack.”

  Now he saw it. “Jeremy Schuler was sedated, too.”

  Venice licked her finger and affixed a gold star to the air. “Bingo.” She pressed her remote and revealed a sea of luggage being managed by uniformed airline personnel. “It turns out that the El Dorado Airport in Bogota has high-end security in their baggage claim.”

  “But clearly not on their firewall,” Jonathan quipped. “You never cease to amaze me with this stuff.”

  She gave a coy grin. “Oh, I’m just getting started. So, at the airport, every bit of luggage is tracked as a function of the passenger who carried it. Since we have fingerprints, we also have a ticket number. With the ticket number, we can know exactly what our guy was carrying on his direct flight from Washington.”

  She clicked again, and the screen filled with images of an unremarkable black nylon suitcase and an oversize hardsided case that was double-sealed with a wrap-around strap. “Take a look at the big one,” she said, “because I believe that it contains Evan Guinn. Notice the orange tag warning that it’s overweight.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Boxers said. “It’s too risky. TSA opens half the bags that get loaded onto a flight.”

  Venice clicked again. The screen displayed a close-up of a TSA clearance tag. “I thought the same thing, so I enhanced this image and got lucky. I cross-referenced the number to the tracking database, and wouldn’t you know it? There’s no record of this particular piece of luggage being processed through TSA’s Houston operation. It is a Houston tag, but it
was cleared outside of normal channels.”

  Jonathan continued to be amazed, but right now he was confused. “Read between the lines for me, Ven. What are you telling us?”

  “This is the same sort of thing that the government does when they transport items that they don’t want to be opened in transit,” she explained. “It looks to me like these skids are definitely being greased at a high level. I figure the guy with the grease gun must be in Houston.”

  Jonathan thought she was right. “I hope you’re going to tell me where that big bag ended up.”

  Another smirk. Jonathan had learned over the years that this bit of theater was as important to Venice as the information she got to dig up. She pressed the button again.

  Now they saw a still picture of Mitch Ponder at an airport luggage carousel, pulling the heavy bag off the turntable. “Prepare to be impressed,” Venice said as she clicked through photo after photo. Each showed a still image, yet as she scrolled through, the photos left the impression of a movie on Jonathan’s mind.

  Together, they watched as Mitch Ponder left the terminal and wheeled his luggage to what Jonathan assumed was the Colombian version of short-term parking. “Notice how careful he is on the curbs,” Venice said. She was right. Although for the life of him, Jonathan couldn’t imagine how a bump on a curb could do anything to wake up a child that manhandling by baggage claim attendants hadn’t done already.

  The farther Ponder moved out into the parking lot, the wider and higher the angle became in the security camera photos, but they could easily make out the images of him wheeling the bags to a dark-colored SUV. The distances didn’t allow for detailed viewing, but from the way Ponder squatted at the rear wheel well on the driver’s side, Jonathan figured he had to be searching for a key. If so, he found it, because he stood again and loaded the bags into the rear compartment. From there, he backed out of his space and drove out of the frame.

  “I thought for a second that we were going to lose him,” Venice said, articulating Jonathan’s thoughts. “But we lucked out.” The image shifted again, this time to a split screen. On the left, they saw a head-on shot of the driver, unfortunately distorted by glare in the windshield, and on the right was an even more valuable prize.

  “Holy shit,” Boxers exclaimed. “Is that his license plate?”

  Venice beamed. “The Holy Grail. Unless he changes it-and why would he? — we can use that number to track him through any number of databases. With any luck at all, he’ll get pulled over for speeding or something.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” Jonathan asked.

  “Well, there’s a little more,” she said. She scrolled through a few more photos showing the SUV passing through various traffic cameras at intersections. “The complexity of their surveillance surprises me,” Venice said.

  “They’re officially trying to beat down their drug industry,” Jonathan said. “It’s costing billions of dollars and thousands of lives, but-wink, wink, surprise, surprise-it continues to thrive. I’ll bet you a thousand bucks that U.S. aid paid for that surveillance system.”

  Venice acknowledged him with a nod, but clearly she’d moved on in her mind. “These last two or three shots just show him driving into the jungles north of the city,” she said. “I wish I had more.”

  “That’s a lot,” Jonathan said. “We know that Evan is alive-at least that Ponder thought he was. And we’ve got a positive means to identify his vehicle. Compared to other square-one intelligence data we’ve had, we’re in a pretty good place.” He turned to Boxers. “We need to get this info to Josie so he can start bribing the right people.”

  Boxers’ expression showed disbelief. “I don’t believe you’re going to trust that son of a bitch again.”

  Jonathan recoiled. “Why shouldn’t we? What did he do?”

  “It wasn’t what he did,” Boxers said. “It’s what he didn’t do.”

  Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Don’t dig all that up again. He was in self-preservation mode. He did what he thought was best.”

  “Since when did doing what’s best involve throwing your ass under the bus?”

  Venice cocked her head. “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing,” Jonathan said.

  “Fine. Have it your way. I just always promised myself that the next time I saw that son of a bitch I’d be pulling his liver out through his nose.”

  “Oh, now that’s pleasant,” Gail groaned.

  “I’ve given Josie a list of what we need,” Jonathan said, moving on. “He’s going to meet us in the boonies at what he said will make a good base camp.”

  “You gave him the list of acceptable aircraft?” Boxers prompted.

  “We’ll exfil in a private jet, but only after a long hike and a car ride.”

  “No chopper, then?”

  “No stealthy LZs,” Jonathan said. “We can’t afford to make noise.”

  “How do we get in?” Boxers asked.

  “Commercial. Just like Ponder. The Colombian government is quick to shoot down anything these days.”

  “What about visas?”

  “I’m going in as David Grossman. I’ve got you as Richard Lerner.” Both names came from the lengthy list of fully vetted and documented aliases that Jonathan had collected for them over the years. If things went well, the aliases could be recycled, but if not, they could just as easily be tossed.

  “I wish we had a third,” Boxers mused aloud. “It’s doable with just the two of us, but another face you know you can trust is always a good thing.” He looked to Gail.

  “No,” Jonathan said before he could ask. “Gail has a job to do.”

  “Bruce Navarro has a sister,” Gail explained. “Apparently, I’m considered charming enough to squeeze information from her. We’ve got to find Bruce. We’ll never know it’s over if we don’t know why it started.”

  Boxers moved back to addressing Jonathan. “What are we doing for manpower there?”

  Jonathan cleared his throat. This was the hard part. “Josie promised to raise an army for us.”

  “I’m not talking about cokeheads and farmers in green suits, Dig. I mean skilled operators. Shooters who are more likely to hit a bad guy than a good guy.”

  Jonathan set his jaw against the rising flash of anger. “Time is short, Box. We’re going to have to live with a few shortcuts. Josie said he’d try to use as many familiar faces as possible.”

  Boxers scoffed, “Oh, now that makes me feel better.”

  Jonathan slammed the table with his palm. “Stop!” Everyone jumped. “Box. Gail and Ven. Let’s be clear we understand what we’re doing here. Look at the screen.” He pointed, but they continued to stare at him, startled. “Look at him, goddammit.”

  Their heads all pivoted to the projected image of Evan Guinn. His face seemed small under his thick helmet of white hair. His blue eyes blazed. “Evan Guinn was my responsibility,” Jonathan said. “He continues to be my responsibility. If Ven is right-and Ven is always right-that boy has just been folded into luggage. Luggage, people. Like so much dirty underwear. We need to fix this.” He wondered if his hands might be trembling.

  Heavy silence devoured the room. Boxers dared to be the one to speak. “Calm down, Dig. We’re all on the same team. We’ll get the job done. This isn’t the first time we’ve rescued a kid.”

  His anger continued to burn. “It’s never been one of my own,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Harvey Rodriguez made his way along the boat launch docks that ran behind and below Jimmy’s Tavern. He’d exited the front door, but rather than walk directly back to the mansion, he’d hooked a right to track along the water for a while. He figured he was far less likely to run into the mysterious Bostonian here than up on the street. He’d wander among the yachts for a block or two downstream, and then cut right and meander his way back to where he wanted to be.

  About fifty feet into his plan, Denim stepped around the corner and cut off Harvey’s path. “Hi, again,” the ma
n said. “We need to talk.” He held a pistol in his right hand.

  Harvey reacted with the speed of a reflex, spinning on his heels and taking off at a dead run in the opposite direction. It’s amazing how quickly the brain can process thousands of bits of information when it’s fueled by raw terror. Denim needed information, which meant that he needed Harvey alive, which meant that the gun was purely a bluff. He couldn’t afford to fire anyway. Here along the water, the echo would roll for miles.

  Still, the skin on Harvey’s back itched at the point between his shoulder blades where the bullet would hit if it was fired.

  As his feet pounded along the dock’s wooden planks, he both heard and felt the drumbeat of his pursuer’s strides, but they sounded slower than Harvey’s, reflecting the thirty pounds that separated them.

  Harvey dug deeper with each stride and quickened the rhythm. Back in high school, this was how he’d competed in track meets, and later, in the Marine Corps, this was how he’d finished in the top rankings of his training unit. But that was back when he was in shape.

  If he was going to win this race, he’d have to do it in the next few seconds, before reality overcame adrenaline and he started to lose steam.

  Ahead and to the left loomed the steps that led back to street level, but the stairs would require even more effort than running, and they would shave distance off whatever meager lead he’d opened up against his pursuer. Steps were out. Running wouldn’t be an option for long.

  That left only a swim.

  Navigating only by moonlight and the wash of light from the buildings up along the street, Harvey turned right at the next slip. When he caught a glimpse of Denim in his peripheral vision, his heart jumped. Harvey’s lead, such as it was, had closed to about ten feet.

  “Stop, goddammit!” Denim commanded.

  Harvey poured on more gas. He was still running full tilt when the wooden decking below his feet became only air, and he launched the best racing dive he could muster. He hit the water palms first, and when he realized that he hadn’t drilled himself into the mud and broken his neck, he scissor kicked hard and dove deep, fully expecting to be tackled from above or shot through the water, which was astonishingly cold for July.