Elizabeth Lowell - The Wrong Hostage

“What a grim phrase. I guess he was too much of a diplomat to use it with me.”

“Too bad. The term describes what you lawyers might call an exceptional business model.”

“Meaning?” she challenged. He still hates lawyers. Why am I not surprised?

“When a businessman can’t rely on contracts and statutory protections to guarantee performance, he finds other ways. If he fronts, say, a ton of cocaine to a smuggler, he expects the smuggler to put up a son or a daughter or a wife in return.”

Grace grimaced. “All right. Yes. Of course I’ve heard about such things, but not here, not as part of American life.”

“And you don’t want to know about it.”

“Not everyone likes living in the gutter. Most people want more.”

Didn’t we have this conversation sixteen years ago?

Both thought it.

Neither said it aloud.

“It’s all very civilized,” Faroe said, his voice neutral and his eyes cold. “The hostage takes a little vacation trip to Bogota or Medellin or Cartagena. They get to stay in a nice hotel, all the comforts that money can buy, no car batteries wired to their genitals, no cigarette burns. In a month or two, they fly home with a good suntan…so long as things go well with the shipment. If something goes wrong, too bad, how sad, you’re dead.”

Grace put her cup on the table hard enough to send coffee jumping over the lip. “Blunt. Yes, I remember that about you.”

“Pretty words don’t make a situation pretty. The Mexicans have been hauling loads for the Colombians for years.” Faroe set his own coffee mug aside. “I guess the Mexicans have taken over the kidnap part of the business model. But then, you kind of knew that, didn’t you? You’re a very bright person. You were usually miles ahead of me in terms of seeing how the world worked beneath the legalities.”

With cold eyes, he waited for her response.

“Do you really believe I’m involved with something as twisted and corrupt as drugs and hostages?” she asked.

“That’s a no-brainer. You are involved. The only question is how much you know.”

“You’re still a real hard-case son of a bitch, aren’t you?” Grace said it calmly, like she’d just discovered he still ordered his steak blood rare.

“It’s a hard-case world out there. And isn’t that what you’re spending two hundred fifty grand for? A hard-case son of a bitch who can deal with this problem efficiently, ruthlessly, few or no questions asked?”

Grace stared at Faroe, trying to see past the cold eyes and expressionless face of a man who’d spent his adult life working undercover against drug smugglers and murderers.

“Right,” she said. “I got what I asked for.” Lucky, lucky me.

“So, are you involved?” Faroe asked, pouring himself a little more coffee.

“In what?”

“In whatever deal Calderon and Rivas are on the other side of.”

“You insulting, overbearing, obnoxious-” Grace bit off the rest. She needed him. Lane needed him. “No. I’m not involved.”

Faroe watched her closely, searching for the microexpressions of deception. He glanced quickly at the vital triangle at the base of her throat. Her pulse beat steadily beneath smooth skin that was the color of light toast. She faced him without flinching. Her lips were drawn back in a snarl that was much less civilized than her words.

Not lying.

“But you do have some idea of what Calderon and el jefe chingon want, right?” Faroe asked.

Grace translated the nickname in her mind and made a face.

“Yeah,” Faroe said, watching her over the rim of his coffee mug. “El jefe chingon. The head motherfucker. That’s what they used to call Hector Rivas Osuna, back when I was buying dope in the Pussycat bar on Revolucion in Tijuana.”

“Delightful.” Grace looked at her clenched hands and slowly unlocked her fingers. She didn’t know why Faroe was baiting her, but she knew that he was. “There was talk about money, but I don’t think it’s merely that.”

“Merely?” He smiled grimly. “Spoken like the wife of a billionaire.”

“Ex-wife.”

He shrugged and told himself he didn’t care. “So you’re half a billionaire.”

“Don’t count on it,” she shot back. “All I got from Ted was the house my salary had been making payments on for ten years, my car, and half of a horse ranch that is a college fund for Lane.”

“Then how could you afford St. Kilda Consulting?”

“The old-fashioned way-I mortgaged my house. Anything else you want to know about me and money?”

“If the boys down south don’t want money from you, what do they want?”

Grace had thought about that a lot on the way back from Mexico. “Ted.”

“Why?”

“They say he stole money from them.”

“Did he?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He’s had dealings for years with Carlos, but I don’t know any of the details.”

“Yet you let your soon-to-be-ex-husband send your son south. Why?”

Grace made herself ignore the baiting tone and answered the question. If she’d thought yelling at Faroe would do any good, she’d have started screaming the instant she set foot on the dock.

“Lane is very bright, very bored in school, and a wizard with computers,” she said. “He’s a teenager in full hormonal rush. His judgment isn’t all it could be.”

“Drugs?”

“No! He hacked into the school computer and changed his grades.”

Faroe almost smiled. “I like the kid already.”

“Ted had been saying that I was spoiling Lane. Maybe he was right. But someone had to make up for Ted’s indifference to-” She stopped, got a better grip on her emotions, and said, “I knew that something had to be done about Lane. He loves me, but he wasn’t listening to me or anyone else.”

“He’s a teenage boy. It’s called age-appropriate behavior.”

“Is that what you did, kick back at anyone in authority?”

“Pretty much,” Faroe said.

“I feel sorry for your mother.”

“She was dead before I was fourteen.”

“Something else we have in common,” Grace said.

“What?”

“My mother died when I was thirteen. So did my brother and my father. I was babysitting a few blocks away or I’d be dead too.”

Faroe felt a sympathy he didn’t want and Grace didn’t need. “Car wreck?”

“My father was an undercover cop working drugs in Santa Ana. One of the drug dealers found out. He shot everyone and fled to Tijuana. By the time I got home…” She shrugged.

“You found them?” Faroe asked, horrified at the thought of a thirteen-year-old Grace walking in on a slaughterhouse.

“Yes.”

“Jesus.”

“That was the moment I dedicated myself to the law. Law was everything the gutter wasn’t. Law was all that separated humanity from violence and horror. I wanted to do everything I could to make certain that no more thirteen-year-olds walked into a house of blood and death.” Grace looked down at her hands, clenched again. She released her fingers. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from. It was a long time ago.”

“You’re telling me why the law is your religion, and there’s no way you’d sell it out for a handful of silver.”

Her eyes widened, revealing both clarity and darkness. “You always saw parts of me better than I saw them myself. It intrigued me almost as much as it frightened me.”

“And you saw me. Scared the hell out of me. We’re alike in that, at least. Long ago, far away, and nothing to do with today.”

“You’re right.” And you’re so very wrong. “I went with Ted to see All Saints School. It was, and is, very impressive. A beautiful campus on the beach north of Ensenada, run by the Catholic Church. The teachers are excellent. Until yesterday, I’ve been able to come and go freely, to see him at least once a week. I could talk to him on his cell phone, until it broke. He used the school computer to e-mail me all the time, until three weeks ago.”

“What happened?”

“Something technical about the uplink.” She shrugged. “I use computers, but I don’t understand them.”

Faroe stood up, grabbed a pair of binoculars from a drawer, and went to the porthole. “Where’s Ted now?”

“I haven’t seen him in three weeks.”

Faroe looked over his shoulder at her. “Is that unusual?”

“No. We haven’t been close in years.”

“You always looked so good on the society pages, the happy and dynamic power couple, out to run the world together.”

“Don’t tell me you believe everything you read in newspapers,” she said coolly.

“Touche. So you and Ted haven’t done the nasty recently?”

Grace came to her feet and got right in Faroe’s face. “My sex life is none of your business.”

“Ease up. I was just trying to figure out whether Ted was the jealous type.”

“Why do you care?”

Faroe stepped back from the porthole and told himself he couldn’t smell the woman-scent of her.

His body told him he was lying.

“If Ted was jealous, I’d have a good explanation for the dude up on the dock.” Faroe gave Grace the binoculars. “He’s got a pair just like these and he’s been trying for the last ten minutes to figure out what we’re doing down here.”

“He’s spying on us?” She stepped swiftly away from the porthole.

“Yeah. Now all we have to do is make sure it’s you he’s after, not me.”

OCEANSIDE

SUNDAY, 10:15 A.M.

GRACE JUST STARED AT Faroe. “You think somebody might be following me?”

“Use the binoculars,” Faroe said impatiently. “Do you recognize him?”

Reluctantly she went to the porthole again. He made room for her by moving aside. It wasn’t enough. She could sense the heat of his body and smell the coffee on his breath. She wanted to tell him to back up, to get out of her space, but she didn’t want him to know how much he affected her physically.

Silently she looked through the porthole toward the gangway that led up to the marina parking lot.

“I don’t see anyone,” she said after a few moments.

“He’s smarter than your average mutt,” Faroe said, his voice very close to her ear. “He’s using the phone booth as a blind.”

With her naked eye, she just made out the figure of a person inside the telephone booth at the head of the gangway. When she lifted the field glasses, she came face-to-face with a dark-haired man who was staring at her through his own binoculars.

Startled, heart racing, she jerked away from the porthole. Her back slammed against Faroe’s chest. She smelled his skin, yeasty, warm, familiar.

That hadn’t changed.

“Easy,” Faroe said. “He can’t see you behind the porthole glass.”

Grace drew a deep breath and inched forward until she could see the gangway again. When she lifted the binoculars, they felt like they weighed ten pounds. Her palms were sweaty. Grimly she focused on the man in the phone booth.

“I don’t know him,” she said. “And you can’t be sure he followed me. Given your line of work, you must have made a lot of enemies.”

“This isn’t a courtroom, Your Honor. This is the real world, the one that lives beneath the nice legal world of reasonable doubts. The first thing you learn down here is to go with your best guess.”

“You think he’s after me.”

“The only person stepping on my shadow right now is Steele. So, yeah, I think this bogey is yours.” Faroe leaned over slightly, just enough to get a good whiff of her hair. It smelled clean and expensive and sexy. “Which means that he followed you here, which means that you’ve been under surveillance for an unknown amount of time. Not good, amada.”

Darling.

Grace caught her breath. Maybe he called all his women amada, but Faroe was the only man who had ever used the endearment with her.

And he was too close.

She could feel his breath stirring her hair when he spoke. She lowered the glasses and tried to turn toward him, to force him out of her space.

He didn’t move. He stood there with a faint, irritating half smile on his face.

He knew.

She stepped sideways and held the glasses like a barrier between their bodies. “Why is it bad that I’m being followed?”

“Because now he knows there’s a connection between us.”

“He’s wrong,” she said instantly.

Faroe laughed. “He knows that you’re down here with me. That means we know each other. That’s all the string he needs. He pulls on that, runs the registration on my boat. That leads him to an overseas corporation in Aruba.”