Elizabeth Lowell - The Wrong Hostage

He hated to see the shadows in his mother’s dark eyes, the tension around her mouth, her voice thick with tears.

“Hey,” he said. “No problem. When Dad checks in, just tell him that-”

“Your Honor,” Calderon interrupted quietly.

“I know,” she snarled. “I know!”

Calderon waited.

She hugged her son fiercely. “I love you, Lane.”

His arms closed hard around her. “Love you too.”

“Remember that.”

“You too.” He released her and stepped back, looking at her closely. “You okay?”

Grace’s smile flashed brighter than the unshed tears in her eyes. “I’m working on it.”

LA JOLLA

SATURDAY EVENING

“WHAT IS IT THAT can’t wait, Grace?” Stuart Sturgis asked. “We’re having a dinner party and-”

“Have you heard from Ted?” she cut in urgently.

“I told you I would call you when and if Ted contacted me.”

“I can’t wait that long.” Grace’s hand clenched the phone until her fingers ached. “I have to talk to Ted now.”

“I’m sorry. I’m his lawyer, not his keeper. I just can’t help you.”

“Stu, it’s an emergency.”

“Look, why don’t you have a glass of wine or two and relax? Ted will probably call in a few days. He’s just a footloose kind of guy.”

Grace wanted to scream that she didn’t have a few days for a footloose kind of guy to show up. Instead, she said, “Sure. Sure. Sorry to interrupt the cocktail hour.”

She hung up and looked at her Rolodex. She’d made thirty calls, talked to twelve answering machines, eight spouses, and ten of Ted’s friends/ business associates who hadn’t heard from him in a while but sure would pass along her message if good old Ted happened to call.

There was only one call left to make.

Two days.

She went to the safe, unlocked it, and pulled out a file it was illegal for her to have. But she had it anyway, and she updated it as often as her CIA source could.

Damn you, Ted. Why aren’t you ever here when Lane and I need you?

And damn me for choosing the wrong man.

Ignoring the official stamps across the papers that advised her to do everything but Drop Dead Before Reading, she flipped rapidly through the file, hardly seeing the names-Philippines, Belize, Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay, Guatemala, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and most of all, northern Mexico. St. Kilda Consulting wasn’t a government agency, but it had employees in all the hot spots in the world. Outside the law.

Not outlaws.

Just not officially sanctioned.

Everything Grace had worked to be rebelled at the thought of being caught in a place where the law she loved was worse than helpless. The courtroom was like a hospital-awful things might happen in it, but the purpose was greater than the blood and pain, and at the end of the day everything was disinfected and ready to work again. Not like the gutters, where nothing rose above the blood and pain, and nothing was ever clean.

St. Kilda Consulting worked in the world’s gutters.

Grace memorized the number, locked up the file again, and went to find a minimart that sold phone cards. This was one call she didn’t want a record of on her monthly statement.

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN

SATURDAY NIGHT

DWAYNE TAYLOR REACHED FOR one of the three landline phones sitting on a desk that was neither messy nor neat, simply well used. “Steele’s office.”

“This is Mandy in triage,” a husky voice said. “I’ve got a Judge Grace Silva on line four. She won’t talk to anybody but Ambassador Steele himself. I’ve forwarded what we have on her to you. File SK1/17.”

Dwayne’s broad fingers danced across his computer keyboard, found the file, and opened it. “What’s her problem?”

“Kidnap/ransom. Beyond that she won’t talk to anyone but Steele.”

Dwayne scanned the information he’d retrieved on Judge Silva and made one of the intuitive, incisive judgments Steele paid him very well to make.

“Put her on.”

Dwayne took the phone off speaker and switched the sound to the headset he wore. “Judge Silva, this is Mr. Steele’s personal assistant, Dwayne Taylor. What can St. Kilda Consulting do for you?”

At the other end of the line, Grace held on to her patience by a very fragile thread. “I made it quite clear to the last four people who wasted my time that it was Ambassador Steele or no one.”

“I understand. Are you on a secure line?”

She hesitated. This morning she would have laughed. Now she was glad she’d left her house to make the call.

You keep this between us or I kill the boy.

“I think so,” she said. “I’m at a pay phone in a cinema multiplex. I’ve got maybe two more minutes on this calling card. Then I have to go to the minimart and buy another.”

Dwayne almost smiled. Whatever the judge was, she wasn’t stupid. “Were you followed?”

“I-” It hadn’t occurred to her. God, I hate this. “I don’t think so.”

“Is this a matter of extreme urgency?”

“What’s your definition of-”

“A terrorist with a gun held against a hostage’s head,” Dwayne said calmly.

“I-God-no, it’s not. Yet.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Two days-no, two days from twelve-thirty this afternoon.”

Dwayne breathed out a silent sigh of relief. Compared to most kidnap/ ransom situations, that was a decent amount of time. He wrote “RED-2” across the notes he was taking.

“How necessary is secrecy?” he asked.

“Life or death.”

His pen paused. He circled “-2.” “Are you at your La Jolla address?”

Grace didn’t bother asking how Dwayne knew where she lived. The CIA file she’d broken rules to get assured her that when it came to private solutions to problems that simply couldn’t be made public, St. Kilda Consulting was the best.

That was what she needed.

The best.

“I’m twenty minutes away,” she said.

“Go home. In an hour a woman will pick you up and take you to a secure place. At twenty-three hundred you will have a video conference with Ambassador Steele. That is eleven o’clock Pacific daylight time. Is that satisfactory?”

Grace looked at her watch and automatically asked, “Can’t I just call him from my house?”

“Are you going to say anything that you wouldn’t like seeing on the eleven o’clock news?”

“Oh. Of course.” Grace felt like a fool. “Sorry. I’m not used to this.” And I hate it.

“That’s why you called St. Kilda,” Dwayne said gently. “Do you enjoy reading, watching TV, yoga?”

“Excuse me?”

“The next two days will be hard on you. Find a way to relax that won’t fuzz your mind.”

Dwayne broke the connection, called San Diego, and got the cell phone on its way to her. Then he went to work on his computer. If he was going to dump someone unexpected on his boss, he’d better be prepared with a more thorough background than he had right now. He launched a program, watched for a few minutes, and pushed back from the desk.

It was only a few steps to Steele’s suite. The mammoth mahogany door pivoted at its center and opened into a six-sided room with two walls of glass that looked out over Manhattan. The glass had the special sheen that came from being bulletproof, soundproof, and one-way. It was the kind found in high-tech interrogation rooms around the world.

As usual Steele was facing three walls of video screens, speaking into a headset, and sorting through various documents on his desk. Occasionally he typed on one of the computers that stood by waiting to be used, patient as only machines could be. The sixth wall was taken up by electronics and a huge, colorful clock that divided the world into time zones showing light and darkness. The time zones were made by man; they didn’t change. The areas of day and night across the globe did.

Without looking up, Steele covered the mouthpiece of his headset with his hand. “What?”

“You have a video telephone conference at two hundred local,” Dwayne said.

“Who?”

“Federal Judge Grace Silva, Southern District of California, San Diego.”

“Why?”

“She insisted on speaking only to you,” Dwayne said.

“So do a lot of people.”

“The number she called belonged to Joe Faroe’s cell phone. Apparently Judge Silva didn’t have the recent code, because her call was routed through to the public St. Kilda number.”

Steele spun around and looked at Dwayne. “Interesting. Do we have a good background on her?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Work harder. Get help. Anyone who knows Joe Faroe’s cell phone is someone I want to know.”

“Yes, sir.”

Steele didn’t answer. He was talking into his headphone again.

Without a sound Dwayne shut the door behind him and went to work on Judge Grace Silva’s background.

OCEANSIDE, CALIFORNIA

SATURDAY, 10:55 P.M.

GRACE LOOKED AT THE woman who was driving her to a destination she hadn’t shared. In fact, the woman hadn’t shared much of anything but the car. Her bearing was military, but her smile and long nails weren’t. The glittering tangerine polish was striking against her black skin. The watch she wore was solid gold. Grace knew, because she’d seen one just like it in the window of one of La Jolla’s more expensive jewelry stores.

The driver checked the mirrors as often as the road ahead. Other than making turns without warning, sitting with her lights out, and then taking off in a different direction, the driver was very efficient. So was the car. Dark, Japanese, powerful, anonymous.

Grace had the unsettling feeling that she’d fallen through a hole in reality and was now in a totally different world.

Because I have, she told herself. It’s called the illegal world. What did Faroe call it? The shadow world.

The world where Lane is prisoner.

This can’t be happening.

It’s happening. Get over it and deal.

The night guard at the office park waved the car through without a pause.

Three minutes and six locked doors later, Grace found herself in what looked like an ordinary video conference room. One of the three large flat-screen monitors was on. It showed a handsome black man wearing an expensive three-piece suit and what looked like a two-carat ruby in his right earlobe. He was looking at Grace’s driver.

“Were you followed?” he asked.

“Possibly, but not for long.”

“Just possibly?”

“You told me to keep a low profile,” Grace’s driver said. “Playing tag on crowded streets doesn’t qualify.”

The man frowned. “Steele doesn’t like uncertainty.”

“Then he’s in the wrong business.”

The woman left the room, shutting the door behind her. Firmly.

“Judge Grace Silva?” asked the man on the screen. “I’m Dwayne Taylor.”

“You look awfully good for two in the morning,” Grace said, conscious of her own rumpled clothes.

He smiled. “The world runs 24/7. Mr. Steele expects us to do the same.”

“How do you manage that?”

“I have two well-dressed clones standing by in the closet.”

Despite the tension that made her vibrate, Grace smiled.

“Mr. Steele will be with you as soon as he finishes a debriefing,” Dwayne said.

The view switched to the room behind Dwayne. Grace saw walls of video screens, other glass walls with views of the Manhattan skyline, and one with a projection of a global map and time zone clock. A computer-driven terminator line showed the sharp edge between night and day as dawn advanced from east to west across the globe. Computers and other electronic equipment she couldn’t identify waited at various workstations around the big room. The floor was wood, polished, expensive.

The best money and blood can buy.

The disdainful thought was reflexive. Grace had spent her life studying the law, weighing its nuances, balancing the larger might of society against the rights of the individual.

St. Kilda went against everything she’d worked for in her life.

The law can’t help Lane, she told herself roughly. Don’t look back. Don’t have regrets.

If it would free Lane, I’d cut a deal with Satan and every devil in hell.

A silver-haired man in a wheelchair was talking to one of the screens. Six of the eighteen television sets showed the muted talking heads of American news and business channels. Other screens were tuned to international satellite feeds. On the center plasma computer screen, a sweat-soaked man with a three-day beard and a redheaded woman with a bandanna tied across her forehead talked with tired animation. A line of print ran across the screen.