Chapter Thirteen
Ron Pelley rode in the car with Anthony Delaware, one of four cars doing a “follow and drop” on the signal coming from the envelope with the bearer bonds. One car had finally caught up with the motorcycle and relayed the position back to the others. In staggered movements that car dropped back, another took its place, and so on. The motorcycle hadn’t entered the interstate, instead taking side roads.
Delaware had placed a hand radio on the seat between himself and Pelley so they could both hear what was happening.
“I’ve still got him,” the agent picking up the signal on a laptop told him. “Everyone keep heading in the same general direction.”
“No one for more than five or six blocks at a time,” Delaware warned.
He glanced over at the man sitting next to him. He could tell Pelley’s nerves were on the ragged edge, and he had a very bad feeling about what was going to happen next.
“Boss, he’s stopped,” the man with the laptop said, interrupting the agent’s thoughts. “The signal shows him dead ahead of us.”
“What do you see?” Delaware asked.
“He entered the parking garage on Houston Street. We’re gonna have to follow him, or we’ll lose him.”
“Just watch yourself,” Delaware warned. “Don’t let him spot you. Go past him and radio back to me. Everyone else fall back and wait for my orders.”
The silence stretched out with no sound from any of the other agents. Finally a voice came over the radio.
“Boss?” The man sounded none too happy.
“Yeah?”
“We . . . ah . . . that is, we lost him.”
“What?” Delaware screamed. “How the hell could you lose him? Didn’t you follow him into the garage?”
“Yes, and we watched the down ramps while we were going up. I’m telling you, he just disappeared.”
“That is absolutely not possible. Check again.”
“He’s not here,” the agent insisted.
“Damn it all to hell.” Delaware wanted to throw his radio through the windshield. Instead he clicked the Talk button. “Everyone meet me at the garage where we lost the motorcycle. Pull up to the first level and watch for me.”
They went through the place with a microscope, but in the end they came up with nothing. They’d been outfoxed.
“He must have had a closed van waiting,” one of the agents said. “Just pulled right into it. It could be sitting on any one of these levels, locked tight, and looking empty.”
In the back of his mind Delaware wondered whether Pelley had passed along the information about the prototype GPS chip to the other two men. Or even directly to the kidnappers. So they’d know how to block the signal. How the hell was he supposed to find that out?
As they pulled out onto the street again, Pelley’s cell phone rang, and a text message popped up on his screen. Cursing, he showed it to Delaware.
You made a mistake. Now everyone will pay. Check for new email.
All the FBI agent could think was, Shit.
Kat tried to control her impatience as they flew south from San Diego and headed along the coast of Baja California. The bobbing sailboats, Jet Skis, ski boats, and other watercraft might make a beautiful picture for tourists, but she wanted to get where they were going and see whether they could find where Mari and the Wrights were being held. All she needed was an approximate area and coordinates, and she felt inside that she could “view” a clear picture of what was going on.
They cut east across the coastline, passed over scattered signs of civilization and then up the foothills of the Sierra Madres Occidental Range. Everyone was poised and ready, waiting for the right area to come into view. They’d been in Sinaloa air space for less than twenty minutes when Ed turned around a yelled back, “We’re coming into range, according to your best guesstimate. Get ready.”
Then Kat gave an excited cry and pressed a finger against the window.
“There,” she called, trying to contain her excitement. “Right below us. See it?”
If they hadn’t been looking carefully they might have missed it, hidden among the acres of what could only be marijuana plants and copses of native trees. The red tile roof of what seemed to be a massive estate house peaked tentatively through the foliage, the hint of other buildings scattered at either side of it.
“Got it,” Troy said, working the video camera. Mark was at another window snapping stills as fast as he could.
“See up there on the hill?” Faith pointed. “Oh, damn. We’re already past it. I could have sworn there was a small outbuilding up there.”
“It’ll show up on the pictures and the video,” Dan assured her. “I don’t want to take the chance of making another pass and calling attention to ourselves.” He raised his voice and hollered to the cockpit. “Mike. Haul ass out of here right now. Before someone below gets out their own binoculars.”
“Hauling away,” Mike shouted back.
He lifted the nose of the plane slightly, it began a smooth ascent and then they were away from the Herrera land and heading toward the coast.
Lying on the hard metal floor of the van, Eli heard Pedro and Enrique conversing in Spanish in low tones. With a working knowledge of the language, he strained his ears to try to make out what they were saying. It appeared they weren’t being transported very far, just to another area of their captor’s land. He wondered why they were being moved at all. Had someone found out where they were? Tried to rescue them?
No, he would have known if anything like that had happened. But something was wrong. Both the men seemed agitated, and he kept hearing the Spanish word for double cross, then ransom, then trap.
What the hell was going on? Who had they contacted for the ransom? It had to have been Ron Pelley. No one else would be logical. So had Ron screwed up somehow? Had he called in the FBI, and they had made a mess of things?
He glanced at the women, trying to make themselves as comfortable as possible under the circumstances. Lissa was trying hard to blink back tears, Mari’s eyes were closed but lines of pain scored her face, and the long cut along the length of Sydney’s face looked as if it might be getting infected.
Shit!
Wherever they were being taken, he’d have to try to figure something out. Maybe there would be a larger window they could squeeze through. Or maybe . . .
Before he could finish running through scenarios in his mind, the van jolted to a stop. A minute later the side panel slid open, and hands pulled them roughly from the vehicle.
Eli blinked at the building in front of him. It could have been a duplicate of the one where they’d been held, except this one was completely surrounded by trees. And there were no other men with enormous guns hanging from shoulder straps lounging in the area.
Pedro pulled open the door to the hut, and one by one, each of them was shoved inside. Eli looked around. The first thing he spotted was the window, high up like the last one but a lot larger. It was protected by trees and foliage, not completely exposed. If he could figure out the guards’ schedule, and if anyone was left to keep an eye on things, maybe, just maybe they had a way out of here.
For right now he just needed to keep everyone’s spirits up and make sure they didn’t deteriorate physically. He wondered idly how long a person could subsist on a diet of water and tortillas.
The first thing Anthony Delaware had Ron Pelley do when they returned to his office was check for the promised email. A sick feeling gripped him as he saw the photo of the hostages, hands bound, ankles hobbled, bruised and damaged, and lined up as if facing a firing squad. He could only hope that the threat was implied rather than real and that all the hostages were still alive. He printed out the message, then assembled all the people who had been involved in the ransom drop in Pelley’s conference room.
“As you read this, Señor Rasgon, I remind you that we had a deal. You have stupidly made a bad mistake,” he read from the printout. “Even so, I have outwitted you. But the price is now fifteen million. Five million additional. No more tricks, no attempts to locate the hostages, or we’ll be sending you their bodies. We have been forced to move them to a different location. New instructions to follow.”
Everyone sat, looking at Ron Pelley.
“What?” He threw up his hands. “I was the one who told you not to play games with these people. Remember?
“I’d like to know how they were aware of the tracking device,” Mary Alvarez said. She’d been in the original trail car. “You were the only one who knew about it.”
“Maybe they have more sophisticated equipment than the FBI does.” His tone of voice was surly, his posture defensive.
“And who the hell is Señor Rasgon?” Boyd Delco, another agent, threw in. “Is this someone we’re supposed to know? This is the first time a specific name has appeared in any of these messages. Why is he giving us a clue now?”
“An interesting point,” Delaware told them. “Maybe he’s sending a real warning.” He looked at Pelley accusingly.
The man in question snorted. “Not me. You know I’ve been with you every minute. You know that. You even had someone sleep on my couch, and you’ve tapped my phones and computers. And I have absolutely no idea who this Señor Whoever is.”
Delaware held his eyes until Pelley looked down, a flush staining his cheekbones.
He’s hiding something, but what the hell could it be? If he’s the one who set this up, we’d better find out damn soon. And is Señor Rasgon an alias for whoever set this up?
As soon as he finished with this briefing, he’d call his office and have them run it through every database they had access to.
“I can’t think where else it would have come from,” he said to Pelley at last. “If you’ve got any ideas, now would be a good time to let us have them.”
“I don’t understand why we haven’t even been able to find out who the kidnappers are,” Mary Alvarez put in. “We’re running blind here.”
“Don’t think I don’t know it,” Delaware told her. He looked at Pelley again. “If we knew who their contact was, we could squeeze him and find out. I’m not used to a situation where I don’t even know who’s pulling the strings. Maybe identifying this Rasgon will give us some answers. Finally.”
Again he let his eyes travel to Pelley. Despite being allowed to shower and change in his private bathroom, the man looked rumpled and used, strain drawing lines on his face, his hair disarranged from running his fingers through it. The image of the high-powered, high-priced executive had long disappeared. God, he’d love to pin all this shit on him. With great, great pleasure.
“I’m telling you again, I don’t know anything,” Pelley snapped. “And besides all this, what’s happening with the people from the Phoenix Agency? Shouldn’t you be calling them? Katherine Culhane’s sister is a hostage, and I’m sure she’d like to know what’s going on.”
“The longer I can keep them out of it, the better off we are.” Delaware bit off his words. “My gut tells me they’re not waiting for us, however. They aren’t the kind of people to take a back seat. I just hope they don’t make a mess of things, playing cowboys.”
“What about the rest of the money?” Mary asked, turning to Pelley. “Can you gather it quickly? And turn it into more bearer bonds?”
“It will take a little doing, but I can arrange that.” Pelley looked at the Feds. “In fact, if you’ll let me go to my office, I’ll get started on it right now.”
“Fine. Mary?” He looked at Alvarez. “Keep him company, and don’t let him out of your sight. The rest of you? We’ll start breaking this down and try to figure out what happened.”
“I need to make a quick pit stop,” Pelley said. “Do you want Agent Alvarez to accompany me there, too?”
Delaware had to restrain himself to keep from punching the other man. “I think you can handle that yourself. Just hurry it up.”
Mary stopped on the way out of the room and leaned close, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Anthony? I can decipher Señor Rasgon for you. We still won’t know exactly who he is, but it will narrow things down.”
He tugged her into a corner of the room. “Okay. I’m all ears.”
The hostages glanced around their new prison. Just as they’d thought, it was almost a duplicate of the other one. Adobe walls, dirt floor, filthy, crude bathroom facilities. The first thing Mari did was check to make sure this bathroom had paper towels, wet a batch of them, and made sure everyone wiped their faces. She insisted on cleaning the cut on Sydney’s face as best she could, praying that the signs of infection she was seeing were superficial and water would keep it at bay.
Sydney and Lissa seemed at the end of their resources. Eli urged them to sit down, backs to the wall, and close their eyes. Lissa leaned over and put her head in her mother’s lap. When Mari was confident they had dozed off, she motioned for Eli to stand in a corner with her. She had assessed the situation much as he had and pointed to the window.
“I saw it, too,” Eli said. “If we can figure out the guard rotation, it might be a possibility.”
“What do you think happened?” she asked in a quiet voice. “Do you think there was trouble with the ransom?”
“I wish I knew. I’m still trying to figure out how this whole thing was set up. Someone had to give these people the information on our flight, when we’d be in San Diego, where we’d be eating lunch.”
Mari hesitated a moment before speaking. “I hate to say this but do you think it could be Ryan? I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing the argument in your office when he came to borrow money.”
Eli gave a mirthless laugh. “It’s no big secret. He had a very public argument with Sydney at the country club at a fundraising dinner.” He shook his head. “He blew through his trust fund like an alligator through bait, and I don’t know exactly what shape his spas are in. Or what other mess he might have gotten himself into.”
“It’s just so hard to think of him involved in something this despicable.” She shook her head. “Or anyone else, for that matter. I’m just praying very hard that my sister’s friends can figure something out.”
“I’ve heard the Phoenix Agency is very good,” Eli told her, “but are they this good? No one even knows where we are.”
“My sister, Mari, can find us,” she told him.
“God.” He blew out a breath. “I hope so. If only she can ‘see’ where we are. That may be our only hope.”
“I know that if Katherine can give them the details they want, the Phoenix Agency has what it takes to rescue us.”
‘So we should pray for Katherine, right?” His grin was lopsided. “Meanwhile, help me figure out the situation with the guards. If we discover any kind of lag time, maybe we can make it through that window and out through the trees.”
“We’ll need a lot of luck,” Mari pointed out. “And then we have to pray we can find someone to help us who doesn’t work for our so-called host before we all get lost and die.”
Eli grimaced. “Hardly a pleasant thought. Okay, let’s see what we can do to help ourselves while sending thoughts and prayers to your sister.”
Kat wanted to shout at everyone to hurry, hurry, hurry until they landed back in San Diego and drove to the hotel. They were barely in the suite she and Mike were sharing before she asked to have the camera unloaded onto the laptop, almost grabbing it from Dan’s hands in her haste.
“I’m sorry,” she told him, pulling back. “I just—”
“It’s okay.” He smiled at her. “We’re all anxious.”
He removed the SIM card from the camera, inserted it in the laptop’s reader, and gave it the command to unload. In seconds rows of pictures began unwinding across the screen, more than a hundred all told.
“God.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “How will I ever figure out which ones to concentrate on?”
“Take it easy, kitten.” Mike came up behind her, eased her into a chair, and rubbed her shoulders to ease the tension. “You know what you’re looking for. Let’s just take them one at a time. Meanwhile Troy can replay the disk from the video camera on the other laptop.”
Faith called room service and ordered sandwiches and drinks, with a pot of hot tea for Kat, telling them there was an extra tip if they got it up to the suite right away. Then they began the process.
Someone poured Kat a cup of tea as soon as the food arrived, and she sipped at it absently, refusing anything to eat as she studied photo after photo, trying to find just the right one that would help her “see” what she needed to.
“There!” She almost dropped her cup in her excitement as she pointed to one picture. “Right there. All of these. There’s five of them. See?”
Mike leaned over her shoulder. “You mean that small piece of roof and the tiny bit of dirt clearing?”
“Yes. I know it isn’t much, but that’s the building I saw. I know that’s where they’re being held. Can you print these out?”
“No problem,” Dan told her. He selected each frame, hit print, and they began to spit out of the printer. He spread them out in front of her in a row. “What’s next?”
Kat studied each one carefully. Finally she looked up. “Okay. I’m ready. Mike?”
“Got it.” He closed the drapes in the room, left only one lamp on low, and moved everyone away from the table.
Kat breathed deeply, wiping everything else from her mind, stared at the photos, closed her eyes, then opened them again. The scene was so clear for a moment she thought she was actually at the place. She saw the entire adobe hut, the dirt clearing at the back and to the side, one tree with its branches overhanging the roof. The field of marijuana. A huge field.
A heavy-set man in sweat-stained khakis sat on a tree stump just outside the cabin, cradling a large gun in his hands. Rifle, she thought. She wished she were more familiar with guns.
The dog she’d seen before came into view, sniffing around the man with the gun.
A black van pulled up, and two men emerged, one of them lifting a huge tray from the interior. The door to the hut was opened, and there they were!
Kat gasped as she saw them, the Wrights and Mari, dirty, bedraggled, but still keeping it together. They all moved back from the door as the tray was set down on the floor. One of the men gestured with a gun, then they backed out of the hut and shut the door. A large piece of wood was slammed into a hook to keep the door locked from the outside.
The two men stopped while one of them spoke to the man on the stump, then they climbed into the van and drove away.
The picture wobbled, fading in and out, and then it was gone.
Kat had been drawing on the pad of paper in front of her. Now she blinked her eyes, asked Mike to turn the lights on, and pointed to the pad.
“Got something?” he asked.
“I think so.” She struggled to keep the excitement from her voice. What if she was wrong? Carefully she described what she’d seen, detail by detail, and showed them the rough sketch she’d made while “viewing” the location. “I saw them,” she said. “They’re alive. I really saw them.”
“All right.” Dan sat down next to her and took her sketch, placing it with the photos she’d been studying. “We need to go over every photo carefully, see if we can find any approaches to the hut where we’re not exposed. You said only one guard?”
Kat nodded. “Two others come to bring them food and water, but I don’t know how often.”
“Not at night, I’m sure. That’s when we’d have to go in, anyway.” He looked at the other men. “All right, pull up a chair, guys. Let’s get to work and figure out exactly how we’re going to do this. I need two of you to study all the still shots and give me an idea of the geography around the estancia. Troy, play that videodisk again and give me all you can. And we need to make a list of the things we’ll have to take with us.”
“Remember the dog,” Kat added. “You need to be on the lookout for it. If it’s a trained attack dog . . .” She let her words trail away.
“So noted,” Dan said.
Kat moved away from the table, carrying her tea with her, and dropped into one of the big chairs in a corner. Faith brought her a plate with a sandwich on it and put it on the little table next to her.
“I know you’re not hungry, but you have to eat. It won’t do anyone any good if you get sick.”
Kat obediently picked up a sandwich half and began to nibble on it. “Can they really do this?” she asked. “Go in and get them out?”
Faith smiled at her. “I was with them when they went into Peru to get Mark. They pulled him right out of the heart of a terrorist camp and took everyone down while they did it.”
“But there may be more guards around the hut where the . . . hostages are being held.” She still had a hard time getting the word out. “I could be wrong, you know.”
Faith pulled up a footstool and sat down in front of her, reaching out to touch her hand. “Trust your instincts. That’s what I do. And trust the guys. They know what they’re doing.”
“This is the first time it’s been so personal for me.”
“I know. Just be glad that Brent Fontaine showed up in the wrong place and the wrong time for him and we were able to get him out of the way. Your powers seem a lot stronger since then.”
“They are.” She put the half-eaten piece of sandwich back on the plate. “Has Mark heard any more about him?”
“Detective Wagner said they had someone from the Tampa Police Department meet the plane and take him into custody. When they began looking into his background, the names of several other women he’d stalked turned up, so the TPD thinks it can make a good case against him. And he won’t be in any position to bother you for a long time.”
“I can’t believe how stupid I was, getting mixed up with him.”
Faith smiled. “We all do things we regret. But you were smart enough to walk away from him.
Kat dropped her eyes to her lap. “Mike and I had some . . . issues to work out.”
“Well, it looks like you did. I can tell he cares for you a great deal.”
“You think so? I’m not imagining it?”
“Oh no. I’ve had enough opportunity to see the playboy in action. I know when he’s hit and hit hard. Whatever he feels for you is good and strong.”
“Thanks.” Kat gave her a tentative smile. “I really appreciate you saying that.”
“I’m only telling the truth.” Faith winked at her.
They heard the ringing of a cell phone, and everyone pulled theirs out and looked to see who was getting the call.
“Me,” Mark told them and flipped open the phone. “Go ahead.” He listened for a few minutes, nodding his head. “Good. Good. Excellent work. Now, I’ve got something else for you to do.” He chuckled. “You didn’t want to sleep, anyway, did you?”
“What’s up?” Dan asked.
“Andy’s sending us more info on the three men involved. He’s found some additional stuff that looks pretty hinky. I also gave him the coordinates of Herrera’s estancia and asked for satellite imagery of the area.” One corner of his mouth turned up. “He’s getting pretty good at stealing it.”
At that moment the soft ding! of a bell announced the arrival of a new email. Andy had forwarded the latest email from the kidnappers.
“Fifteen million?” Dan stared at the screen.
“Shit.” Mike slammed his fist on the table. “The feds screwed up somehow this morning, and now the hostages are going to have to pay for it.”
“Mike?” Kat put a tentative hand on his arm.
He turned and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her into his warmth. “Don’t sweat it, kitten. We’ll get them.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.” She pointed at the email. “He’s calling someone Señor Rasgon. It’s the first time he’s addressed anyone by name.”
“It’s got to be some nickname for the key person he’s dealing with. He must be very pissed off to do that. We just have to figure out whose nickname it is.” He shook his head. “Maybe Andy can run it through the Dragon.”
“You don’t need Andy for this,” she corrected. “I can translate. But it could belong to any of the three we’ve keyed in on. You’ll have to figure out which one.” And she translated from the Spanish for them.
Mike whistled. “Damn and double damn. Now we just have to find out which one it is.”
“No small task,” Mark said.
“Let’s get these people back, and then I have an idea how we can figure it out. If we snatch the hostages from under Herrera’s nose, he’ll be all over Señor Rasgon like white on rice. Once the hostages are safe, we need to connect with the very hostile Agent Anthony Delaware and see if he’ll go along with our plan.”
“I don’t think he’ll have a choice if he wants to wrap this up. He can have all the credit. We just want to take down Señor Rasgon.” Dan stacked the photos together. “Let’s go over this one more time. We don’t have a lot of margin for error.”
As soon as the Gulfstream had left the airfield, the mechanic called Nando to report to him. He called back when they returned.
“They filed a flight plan for Baja,” he said. “They weren’t gone long enough to go anyplace else.”
“Nothing for this area of Mexico?” Nando pushed.
“No, nothing at all. And I timed them carefully.”
Nando was silent a moment. “Still,” he said at last, “they could have been one of the planes flying over here this afternoon. But if they were, they were too high up and flew too fast to see anything. Keep an eye on both aircraft, and let me know if they take either one out again.”
“Si, Nando. I promise.”
But the mechanic had not counted on special orders from his boss, who at that moment came strolling across the tarmac from the terminal building.
“Problem?” the man asked, looking at the mechanic’s worried face.”
“No, no. Just some family complications.”
“Hope it’s nothing serious. I need you to take a run up to Los Angeles.”
The mechanic struggled to keep the dismay from showing on his face. “Los Angeles? Now? It’s after six o’clock. I was just getting ready to leave.” Now he wished he’d told the man the call was about a family emergency.
The manager shrugged. “I’ll pay you double for the overtime. Cisco is working on the Phelps plane and needs a part tonight. I can’t break him loose from the job to go get it because he’s in the middle of other maintenance work on the plane.”
Francisco Antinor was the other mechanic who worked full time. Javier cursed silently at the job that would take him away from the airfield.
“I can finish what he’s doing,” he told the manager, “if he wants to make the extra by going to LA.”
His boss looked at him strangely. “Is there some reason you don’t want to do this? Something you need to tell me?”
Javier swallowed the sick feeling creeping up his throat. “No, no. No problem. Give me the information, and I’ll leave right away.”
He just prayed that neither of the Phoenix aircraft took off while he was gone.
“But we still don’t know which one of them to pinpoint,” Mark said, reading the email from Andy that he’d printed out. He was handing each sheet around as he finished with it.
“Well, we know each of them is a strong possibility,” Dan pointed out. “They’re all in trouble.”
“Andy dug out some offshore accounts that Pelley’s been siphoning money off to,” Mike told them, reading the sheet in his hand. “That must be how he’s covering his investment losses.”
“He’s covered it well,” Dan commented. “He’s got a whole structure of phony companies set up that on the surface look legit. He’s probably counting on the fact that Eli Wright trusts him so much he doesn’t look any further than the financials Pelley gives him. I have a strong hunch he’s also laundering drug money through there, too, for a cut of the profits. I think somewhere he invested in something Herrera had his fingers in, and he got hooked.”
“Ryan Post is in big trouble with his spas,” Mark told them, looking at what he’d printed out. “He’s borrowed money at a high rate of interest from some banks outside the federal banking system. If any of it came from Herrera, there’s your connection. Also, the DEA suspects him of using the Mexico facility to process drugs into the States, which Herrera could be leveraging him to do.”
“Even Rand Prescott is not looking too good. He’s under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for inflating the value of the stock in a couple of his development companies, one of which he’s in partnership with Eli Wright. And there’s a lot of curiosity about where the original capital actually came from.”
“So any of the three of them could be the one working with the cartel,” Faith mused, “or it could in fact be all of them, with one lead person directing the dance. Herrera was in a position to get his hooks into all of them, and they all had both access to and an axe to grind with Eli Wright. He could have forced them to act in concert, hoping to throw us off as to the real contact. We’re still no further ahead with something we can actually prove.”
“No.” Her husband shook his head. “Not true. Andy’s got the Dragon cranking away on Señor Rasgon and the translated version of the name. If anyone can find it, he can. Then we’ll have a starting point.”
“Still no word from the feds?” Rick asked.
“Not even a whisper,” Mark said. “The couple of times I’ve called them they politely told me to mind my own business.”
“Even though Kat’s sister is one of the hostages? I’d think they’d be all over her, holding her hand, waiting to see if she was contacted.”
Dan shook his head. “They know Mari wasn’t the main target, just collateral damage. And Kat wouldn’t have the financial resources to pay any ransom. Either they’re hogtied and don’t want anyone to know it or they have something going and think we’ll mess it up”
“If they investigated Kat, wouldn’t they’d have discovered her remote viewing ability and ask her to help?”
“Not necessarily,” Dan said. “Even though the government continues to do its own experiments with psychic abilities, not everyone is willing to use them. But I’d say by this time the F.B.I., with all its drug cartel experience, knows who we’re dealing with. They just can’t do anything about it. They’re limited in ways to finesse this if the crime crosses international borders. They don’t want us seeing them chase their tails.”
“We aren’t exactly their favorite people, anyway,” Rick reminded everyone.
“All right.” Dan tapped keys on the laptop, brought up the satellite photos of the specified area that Andy had sent, and leaned back in his chair. “Enough. It’s dark at seven after nine. We should be at the airport, locked and loaded, and ready for takeoff in the chopper by nine o’clock. We want the cover of full darkness to do this.”
“This is probably the best place for the drop.” Mark pointed to a spot on one of the photos. “Far enough away that unless they’ve got guards out in the marijuana fields we won’t run into trouble with the insertion.”
“But they’ll hear the sound of the bird coming in,” Troy pointed out. “What do we do about that?”
“Hopefully that far away it won’t draw too much attention to us. And Ed, you’ll pull away the minute the last of us drops and wait for us”—his finger hovered over the aerial shot, then landed on a spot—“here.”
“We’ll all be linked through the comm gear, but if we need communication between the helo and us, Mark, we’re going to depend on you and Faith.”
Kat realized they were talking about the ability the Hallorans had to communicate telepathically with each other. Mike had told her it was that special connection between them that had actually allowed them to pinpoint Mark’s location when he was captured by terrorists and affect a successful rescue. She hoped that between them, she and Faith had enough psychic abilities to help make this mission successful, too.
“Kat and I need to do a little shopping,” Faith told them. She looked at Kat. “Black jeans and shirts,” she told her. “Nothing light than can be seen anywhere.” She turned back to her husband. “I spotted a place to shop when Mark and I were out. We won’t be more than a half hour. Meanwhile, you guys can go over this one more time.”
“All right,” Mark said. “But hurry.”
As the women entered the elevator, two men in dark suits exited and headed down the hallway.
“God,” Faith breathed. “I hope that’s not trouble coming.”
Rip was pacing his office, trying to keep himself as calm as possible. The news of the aborted ransom drop had everyone on edge, and he knew they’d begin looking harder for a connection to the kidnappers. And trying to force a location from someone. His own personal FBI barnacle was cutting him no slack.
He was tired, irritable, stressed out, and wishing this whole disaster would finally come to an end. He desperately needed the cash he’d get from this, but his bad feeling about the whole situation was getting worse by the minute. He knew the feds had been checking his personal financial situation, just as they had the other two men. But thus far, none of his secrets had emerged. Now, with the ransom catastrophe, they’d get out bigger shovels and dig deeper. Everything he’d worked so hard for could come crashing down around him.
Making sure he had the disposable phone in his pocket, he managed to slide into the restroom and lock the door. First he called the other two men, and the message from both of them was the same.
“I’m trying to put this to bed as quickly as possible,” he told both of them. “Otherwise we’re all in big trouble. Just keep the feds at bay, and we’ll get through this.”
Next, with a finger that shook slightly, he dialed the by-now-familiar number.
“What?” Nando snapped.
“Are you crazy, asking for a bigger ransom?” Rip asked, pitching his voice low.
“We need to teach the gringos a lesson. Don’t mess with us, or there will be consequences.”
“They’re pulling in more agents,” he protested. “And looking harder into everyone’s background. They’re determined to find out who the kidnapper is. If our . . . arrangement comes to light, there might not be any ransom.”
“Then you’d better make sure that doesn’t happen,” Nando told him in a tight voice. “Herrera won’t like it if your stupidity costs him all that money. He needs it quickly.”
“Why? What’s the hurry?”
“You know why. There’s a shipment of arms coming through, and the dealer needs to be paid.”
“Damn it, no!” Rip exploded. “You can’t use the same shipping pipeline. There’re too many eyes watching.”
“Again I tell you, take care of it. Herrera gets very testy when his business is interrupted.”
“Then Herrera shouldn’t have kidnapped a high-profile hostage,” Pelly blurted out.
“Ah.” Nando’s voice sounded very sly. “Then you should not have gotten yourself in this situation. If we don’t get the money and are forced to kill the hostages, you could disappear right along with them.”
Rip tasted the bile rising in his throat. “Just set the next ransom drop quickly and release these people,” he said. “We’ve got to get this thing done. Don’t forget, the people from Phoenix are still out there, operating on their own and doing God only knows what. Trust me. You don’t want them on your back.”
“We will take care of them. Your job is to make sure nobody screws with us again.”
Nando disconnected the call, and Rip was once more left with dead air. He had no choice now. He just had to play the cards that were dealt the best he could.
When he opened the door and walked out of the bathroom, it was to be told the next call had come in on the cell phone he’d left on a table and the email had just arrived.
“Same arrangements as before. Same time, same place. No tricks this time.”