Shattered (8 page)

The dinner was followed by a concert by members of the Guardia de Hacienda, or house guards. The soldiers, handpicked by the president, had apparently been chosen for their good looks as well as their harmonic voices.

They were uniformly tall, dark, and handsome. Unfortunately, the oversized gold braided epaulets on their fitted red jackets and the gold-edged crimson stripes down their white trousers made them appear to be auditioning for Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore.

While Kirby found the rousing, patriotic Sousa-type war marches and American show tunes to be an odd mix, the rest of the guests seemed to enjoy the performance.

Not that anyone would dare not to, given that anyone who publicly criticized anything about the government tended to disappear.

Kirby nearly wept with relief when what seemed the longest evening of her life finally came to an end.

Although their car had been searched on the way into the compound by grim-faced soldiers wearing green-and-brown jungle camouflage and armed with riot guns, they were forced to undergo yet another search on the way out. Only after the guards had thoroughly searched the trunk was the heavy red-and-white steel barrier pole raised.

“What did they think?” Kirby asked, as she and Rachel were finally allowed to leave. “That we were going to try to take off with the silverware? Or some sterling saltshakers?”

“I suspect it’s routine security procedure,” Rachel said, touching a finger to her lips to remind Kirby that their vehicle could have well been bugged while they were inside the palace having dinner.

They drove down Carretera Libertad, a broad esplanade bisecting the capital city to the Plaza de Armas—which featured a towering statue of Vasquez, arms outstretched, as if offering benediction to his people.

While hiding out in the mountains, forming his army, he’d named himself El Libertador, shamelessly stealing the title from the George Washington of South America, Simón Bolívar, who’d actually liberated nearly an entire continent from the Spanish.

The one thing the two men did have in common was their harsh, autocratic rule once they achieved government power. Proving, as it always seemed to, that while power might corrupt, absolute power corrupted absolutely.

As they made their way across the circle, a delivery truck ran the red light, then cut through three lanes of traffic to pull in front of a bus. Horns blared, adding to the usual pandemonium. By the time she’d been in the country a week, Kirby had decided that driving in the capital entailed a type of Darwinian, survival-of-the-rudest logic.

The rusting city bus rumbled along, belching a noxious cloud of black fumes that smelled like burning tires, adding to air pollution considered by many environmentalists to be even worse than that of Mexico City.

Which partly explained the helicopters whirring overhead. While the majority of the people lived in abject poverty, the überwealthy had begun choosing to avoid the smog and traffic snarls by flying above them.

There was also the little matter of Monteleón having become the kidnapping capital of Central America. While even an armored car could be run off the road, it was difficult to kidnap someone out of the air.

Rachel zipped around the bus with a daring that had Kirby gripping the edges of the seat. As she looked through the open windows—which were lacking glass—the passengers, crammed together like sardines in a rusting can, all had their heads down, not bothering to admire the statue of their leader. They did not look the least bit liberated.

“I’ve decided how we can make big bucks.” Kirby forced herself not to close her eyes as a huge black Hummer headed straight for them.

“How’s that?” Rachel deftly pulled back into their lane, earning a long blast of the horn and a rude gesture from the annoyed truck driver she cut in front of. The same one who’d crossed all those lanes of traffic earlier.

“We should start promoting driving in this city as an extreme sport. Make up some T-shirts we can sell on the Internet and have people pay us for the excitement of trying to make their way from one side of town to the other.”

“The really strange thing is that you’d probably have people take you up on it,” Rachel said.

This time Kirby did close her eyes as a petroleum tank truck passed a car in the oncoming lane and, like the earlier Hummer, headed straight for them.

Following the unwritten “He who is larger wins the road” law of driving in Ciudad Libertad, she knew it wouldn’t budge. Which forced Rachel to pull so far over the car’s right wheels went up onto the sidewalk.

Which was another reason for those helicopters. As dangerous as it was to drive in the city, walking, except in a few select areas, was even more deadly.

The road continued through a wealthy community of gated homes, all surrounded by twelve-foot-tall walls. Broken bottles had been embedded in the top of the concrete walls like spikes. Which said a lot about the state of the country, Kirby thought as they passed the American ambassador’s mansion, its gate guarded by U.S. Marines armed with automatic weapons.

The mansion’s high walls were covered with bougain-villea, and while the red flowers were stunning, Kirby suspected they’d been planted more for their thorns, which provided an additional barricade against the unwashed masses, than their beauty.

Across the street, a ragged group of protestors waved signs and chanted “Yanqui, go home!” Monteleón had become so splintered, it was impossible to guess which of the many different factions they represented.

The neighborhood walls were broken up at intersections, leaving room for yet more heroic statues of El Presidente Vasquez.

“I’m sorry for mouthing off like that,” Kirby said.

“Don’t worry about it.” Rachel slowed as they passed through the Zona Rosa, a neighborhood of pricey restaurants and nightclubs.

American pop music blared from open doorways, and well-dressed pedestrians crowded the sidewalk, safe in the knowledge that private police hired to patrol the area would turn away—or even, if given any trouble, shoot—any undesirables who might attempt to enter their comfortable zone without the proper windshield sticker.

Rachel turned left at the BMW dealer onto Avenida del la Reforma leading out of the city. “There are times I get frustrated, too.”

“But you don’t insult the dictator who has the power to shut you down.”

Or arrest them. Or worse.

“I’m older.” Kirby heard the reassuring smile in the other woman’s voice. “And have more years dealing with uncooperative governments.”

“Now, see.” Kirby turned as far toward the other woman as her seat belt would allow. “That’s what I don’t get. Vasquez and all his pals are rolling in dough. The bunch of them have more tax-free money than their shopaholic wives could spend in several lifetimes, stashed away in Swiss and Caribbean banks.

“Meanwhile, because of their repressive tactics, they have rebel guerrilla groups popping up all over the place like crazed jack-in-the-boxes. So why aren’t they willing to throw some of those bucks our way? Because it seems to me that people would be a lot happier if their children weren’t starving or dying of easily preventable diseases.”

She wondered if Vasquez was listening to their conversation, and since it wasn’t anything different than what she’d said at dinner, hoped he was.

“In a perfect world, that would be the case.” The traffic eased as they got farther from the city. Rachel glanced up into the rearview mirror, as if checking to see if they were being followed.

They wouldn’t be the first relief workers to disappear in Monteleón. Just last month the bodies of two nuns from Catholic Charities, who’d run a mission in the capital and had been like sand in Vasquez’s oyster, had washed up onto the beach below the Presidential Palace.

The drive to the jungle village where their clinic was located would take an hour; something neither woman enjoyed doing at night, yet one did not turn down an invitation from El Presidente. Not unless you wanted a visit by the La Guardia de Seguridad, the most feared organization in the country.

Everyone knew that the guard not only ran the death squads; they were responsible for thousands of citizens being dragged from their homes. Mostly in the middle of the night. Some of the missing later showed up as mutilated bodies; most simply vanished, never to be seen again.

Not having to worry about bad press—the government owned the newspapers and television stations—the president’s goons were experts at torture.

“How do you do it?” she asked. “Year after year. How can you stand seeing such misery?”

“I’ve honestly no idea.”

Although they’d left the bright lights of the city behind, Kirby could hear the shrug in the other woman’s voice. It had begun to rain, the fog surrounding them adding an intimacy inside the car that encouraged the type of personal conversation they normally didn’t have time to share.

“There are times I ask myself the same thing,” Rachel admitted, “but the answer is always the same . . . that it’s what I was born to do.”

“I can’t decide whether I’m envious or feel sorry for you.”

“Ah.” Rachel turned toward her, hazel eyes warm in the soft glow from the dashboard lights. “You sound as if you’re suffering compassion fatigue. I think I should write you a prescription for a vacation.”

“Yeah. Like I’m going to go off surfing while you stay here and handle a measles epidemic. So, how did you end up working for WMR in the first place?”

“It’s a long story,” Rachel said after they’d gone about three miles.

“It’s a long drive.”

“True.”

Another silence settled over them. The only sounds were the drumming of the rain on the roof, the swish, swish, swish of the windshield wipers, and the hissing of the wet pavement beneath the tires.

“I know this sounds very cliché, but it was more a feeling of duty. That because since I’d been born, well, not exactly rich, but very comfortably off, I was brought up to believe I should give something back.

“Since I was already an ER doctor, when things started building up for Desert Shield, enlisting to serve my country seemed a natural thing to do.”

“I can understand that.”

Kirby might have needed the Army to help pay her way through medical school, but she’d learned traveling the world how fortunate she’d been to have been born in a middle-class suburban San Diego home to a school-teacher father and librarian mother. Rather than in Iraq. Or the Sudan. Or the tragically beautiful Monteleón.

“Unfortunately, my husband—”

“You’re married?”

Rachel never really talked about her personal life, but not mentioning a husband out there somewhere was really holding her cards close to her chest.

“Was. Past tense. In another lifetime.

“We met in medical school.
His plan was that I’d go into a plastic surgery practice with him.”

“Plastic surgery does a lot of good.”

In fact, WMR had a program that recruited surgeons to repair cleft palates and do skin grafts on bombing burn victims all over the world.

“True. But he’s definitely more into nips, tucks, and boobs, which personally didn’t interest me. I’d considered joining the regular military, but worried that a long-term deployment would put more of a strain on our marriage, so I opted for the Guard.”

“And got deployed, anyway.”

“Yes. But it wasn’t as dangerous as it is these days. First of all, we were safe in Saudi Arabia, and my rotation was only supposed to be ninety days.”

“But you got hit with a stop-loss,” Kirby guessed.

The involuntary extension of a service member’s active duty service under the enlistment contract in order to retain them beyond their initial end of term of service date was becoming all too common.

“Just the opposite. Treating soldiers was the greatest honor I’d ever had in my life. So, I checked around and managed to hook up with the 5th MASH unit, which became a forward operating clinic in Iraq.”

“That probably didn’t go over real well at home,” Kirby guessed.

“Not well at all,” Rachel agreed. There was another long moment of silence as she seemed lost in thought. “Looking back on it, although Roger blamed the problems on my service, he’d never honestly signed on to our marriage contract.”

“He skipped the part about ‘for better or worse’?”

“Well, that, too. But he also ignored the clause about infidelity being a deal-breaker. Even before I enlisted.” She shook her head. “Our marriage was pretty much over when I shipped out. The only reason I didn’t file for a divorce was that I knew my parents would be upset.”

“But you were a grown woman. A doctor. And a soldier. It seems they’d trust your decision.”

“You’d think so. And perhaps they would have. But I would’ve been the first divorce in our family. Ever.”

“I can see how that would’ve been tough,” Kirby agreed.

Having already witnessed the doctor’s conciliatory nature, she could see how Rachel would have been reluctant to upset her parents with her marital problems when they were already worried about her surviving a war.

“Although they didn’t say it, I knew they were concerned about their little girl going into battle,” Rachel said, confirming Kirby’s guess. “So I decided to wait until I got home.”