Betrayed (44 page)

There was a young Mayan father swinging in a hammock, playing his guitar for two small, naked children. An elderly woman patting out tortillas to bake on a hot stone. Laborers, stooped and worn beyond their years, lifting huge sacks of coffee on bent backs. A young couple dancing together. Children sitting on narrow, wooden benches, wearing neat, white pinafores over their ragged clothing.
If Bill took these
. . . !

It was the last photo that held Vicki to her knees.
I know this place. This is the village schoolhouse
. Then she noticed the words in the photo’s lower right-hand corner:
Jeff Craig Productions
. These were no work of Bill Taylor. They could only be the compilation of Mayan village life her birth father been working on when he died.

No, was murdered.

Vicki spread the photos out. Yes, there were the photos Cesar had mentioned. Army trucks swirling up a dust cloud on the village commons. Soldiers jumping free with weapons unslung. An officer on a cab roof with a megaphone. Women and children running and screaming. A baton slamming brutally down on an elderly Mayan woman. A soldier’s boot crashing into a prone body’s ribs. A crying child cringing from a rifle barrel. Three dead bodies in the dust.

All bore the stamp of Jeff Craig Productions. Her birth father must have shot the roll before the soldiers had spotted a foreign observer in the village. No wonder they hadn’t wanted to see these hit the international media.

There were a handful of guerrilla shots too. A line of them, ragged and underfed with their leader alone in uniform so that only their weapons distinguished them from a crowd of villagers passively listening to the leader’s arm-waving exhortations.

Vicki shook loose the last folder. These pictures alone bore no stamp of her father’s trademark. Dim, fuzzy, no longer shot by an expert eye, they were the images of her nightmares. Flames shooting high against a mountain twilight. A mound of bodies. She could almost make out a paler gleam in the tangle of limbs and hair, and with sickness rising to her throat, she thrust the print away. Soldiers laughing and holding up plunder. An officer in command beret talking into a hand radio. Vicki no longer had any surprise left in her as she recognized the officer. Castro II.

Then nightmare resolved into memory as Vicki brushed prints from the last two photos. Three tall figures striding away from the camera, and beyond them, emerging from the tree line at the very edge of the flash, three small, ghostly blurs.

The last print had caught the three larger figures whirling around, and even in the twilight gloom, the features were identifiable. Two under army caps, annoyed, furious. The third under a floppy hat, impassive, watchful. All unmistakably foreigners.

Vicki’s head swam as the words echoed in her mind. “
No witnesses! . . . Hey, get away from those cameras! . . . No records. Do I have to spell it out?
”

I have to get out of here!
Her hands were shaking so badly she was losing valuable seconds as she scooped the prints into a stack and shoved them into a single folder. Her father’s legacy was coming with her. Stuffing the folder into her pack, Vicki snatched up the sat phone receiver and fumbled on the tabletop for the PDA.
Please, let the guard be away from the back veranda
.

Footsteps and the scraping of the pottery shelf whirled Vicki around. Then a large hand, gnarled but with a grip of steel, closed on her wrist. “I’ll take that, if you don’t mind.”

Chapter Thirty-Four

The weathered features looming over Vicki were no longer of a kindly, old man but bleak and harsh, the blue eyes chips of ice.

Still, it wasn’t her terror that burst out in Vicki’s first accusing words, rather the hurt and bewilderment of the small child she’d been. “You’re CIA, aren’t you? You were one of the Americans in that photo in Alpiro’s office. And in the village that night when my parents were killed. You were the one who told us not to be afraid. Did . . . did you have to kill them?”

Bill released Vicki’s wrist, letting out a tired sigh as he stepped back from her. “No, we were not around when your parents were killed, or things would have been very different. The last thing we were after was killing American citizens, even a busybody journalist like Jeff Craig. Unfortunately, we got there too late.”

“But you covered it up. You lied to the American people, not just us. And the State Department, the embassy—they told the world it was a robbery, while all that time they
knew
their war buddies or allies or whatever you called them had murdered American citizens.”

“The embassy knew what we told them,” Bill answered. “And for your information, we don’t take the murder of our citizens lightly. Unfortunately, in this case we had no choice. We’d just trained a network that was not only the best-qualified in the Guatemalan military but the best-connected for future intel, related not just to half the top political families in the country, but thanks to some serious in-breeding among the local aristocracy, to each other. They had a stake in each other’s lives, and we made sure they had a stake in us.”

“As CIA informants, you mean,” Vicki said.

“Intelligence assets,” Bill corrected. “And letting it get out that one of our expensive protégé’s notion of battlefield censorship was to slaughter a couple of Americans instead of ripping up a few rolls of film—that would have been an intelligence and PR disaster. Do you think we approved? That we didn’t do our best to rein these guys in? But once it was done, there was no point in derailing our entire regional policy by having one unfortunate excess splashed all over the evening news. Besides, you don’t think those pictures you’re about to give back to me were the only copies made that day.”

Vicki didn’t try to resist as Bill took her knapsack and removed the folder from it. Twisting a combination lock on one of the file cabinets, he slid open the top drawer and tossed the folder inside.

“Those were turned over just to keep us well reminded of what they had on us. Clear, recognizable shots of high-ranking American personnel in the middle of a civilian massacre. Who would believe we’d walked in on the aftermath? Every media source and enemy of the administration would have given their eyeteeth to parade that in front of the American people and the world. The scandal could have ruined our entire strategy against global communism. Let’s not forget it wasn’t much later that the Berlin Wall came down and with it the entire Soviet empire. How many potential American lives did that alone save?”

And how many others—maybe not Americans, but human and surely as deserving of life and dignity—had died because the CIA advisor’s “protégés” had never been called to account? How many other mass graves had followed, including the latest that held Alicia and Gabriela’s family?

Bill looked more weary now than angry as he shook his head. “I regret deeply you had to find out this way—or at all. My purpose then and now was to protect you. I made sure you and your sister and that Mayan kid were taken care of. You had no extended family. Your mother was raised in foster care, and your father’s parents were dead. And you were so traumatized you couldn’t even talk. The best thing for all of you was to forget and start a new life. Once you went into the system, you were out of our hands, but they told me you’d been adopted by a good family. Believe me, it was as big a shock to me as you to find out you and Holly were Jim Craig’s kids.

“You think I wouldn’t give anything to roll back the clock that day? I might even have made a different decision, if it had been up to me. I’d been screaming for months it was past time to lower the boom on some of our more, let’s say, enthusiastic allies. But it wasn’t up to me or my colleagues in training that particular unit. My superiors made the decision that seemed most expedient at the time.”

“Expedient, not right. How can you even make that excuse? You said yourself every decision’s personal. That it’s all
I
not
we
. You and those other Americans could have made the right decision. But it was your own backs you were watching out for, weren’t you? You talk about fighting Communism, but it was your careers that were at stake if those photos went public. So you let them blackmail you and get away with it. And what about now? Are they still holding those pictures over you? Or is your CIA pension just not enough for all this?” Vicki’s gesture encompassed the sat phone, the dish overhead. “Is that why you’re still cooperating with them?”

“Cooperating?”

“Yes, I saw what you’re doing out there in the biosphere. It was the same man in the photos. Your protégé. You said yourself he ordered the village and my parents killed. I know he murdered that other village. And burned the church. Was all that worth the money you made? Or your CIA intel?”

“You saw Hernandez in the biosphere?” The old man’s demand was sharp, irrelevant.

“Yes. And Joe too. He’s working for you, isn’t he?”

Bill looked blank for a moment, then grasped that Vicki wasn’t referring to the center. “Yes.”

The unperturbed deliberation of his answers, the mildness of his expression was lessening Vicki’s terror. Bill was taller and heavier than Vicki, but he was still over seventy years old and unarmed. She edged toward the table. Bill had stepped far enough into the safe room that she was now as close to the opening as he. If she could fight her way past him, make a dash before he could call the guard . . .

Vicki sidled another step sideways as she faced him defiantly. “It doesn’t matter. I just want to go home. You can’t keep me. I’m an American citizen, and this isn’t twenty years ago. People will come looking for me. Just . . . let me go!”

“To Michael? I’m afraid we can’t let that happen.”

Vicki whirled around right into a tall, broad frame filling the entrance.

Joe held her, steadied her.

Vicki yanked herself away, retreating with despair back into the safe room. “How did you get here?” She looked past the pottery shelf, half-expecting to see Hernandez or Alpiro with a unit of soldiers. But the outer office was empty.

“You aren’t the only one with a mountain bike. You made better time than I’d expected, but it was an even bet I’d find you here.” As Joe stepped inside the safe room, the shelf wall closed behind him with a click.

Though Vicki hadn’t heard a sound from the rest of the house, he had somehow found time to change from the camouflage fatigues and wash the paint off his face. Perhaps on the trail. Combat attire would certainly have drawn unwanted attention from the laborers and guards outside. But he looked no less big and dangerous in a khaki work shirt and civilian hunter’s pants, and though his tone was level, even conversational, his strong features were taut with anger.

“The question is, what were you doing out there? No, I can guess that. Snooping again. I told you once you were treading on dangerous ground.”

“She says she recognized Hernandez out there,” Bill broke in. “Is that true?”

“Oh, it’s true all right.”

“But it’s done? We’re ready to go?”

“Yes, mission accomplished; at least until she showed up and tossed a smoke bomb into the hornet’s nest. The whole plateau’s boiling over now.” Joe’s eyes hadn’t left Vicki’s face. He closed the gap between them. She could feel the furious energy of his taut body, see a quick pulse at the base of his neck. “So where’s your partner? Who was he—Camden? No, I can’t see him on a bike. That vet you work with at the center? Do you have even the slightest idea of what you’ve just put yourself in the middle of?”

Vicki fanned anger to keep her terror at bay. “I know everything. I know Bill’s CIA. I know you’re working for him. I know about your drug dealers out there. Just tell me this: why Holly? What happened? Did she see you out there? Did you stay in town after you were supposed to have flown back that day and follow her on her way to see me? Or was it both of you together?”

Vicki was talking to both men, but she was looking at Joe, her hands clenched to keep from pounding her fists against his chest. “You didn’t need to. You could have made up some lie. She’d have swallowed it, believe me. She thought the world of you. She trusted you.
I
trusted you.”

“You’re accusing me of killing Holly?” If Joe wasn’t a consummate liar, drug dealer, and only too certainly a murderer, Vicki might almost have imagined a flicker of shock, even hurt, before his gaze hardened to stone.

“I found
this
!” Vicki snatched up the PDA from the table. “You had it, didn’t you?”

Any doubt—hope?—was removed by silence, the abrupt emptying of Joe’s expression. All the pain and grief that had been building up since Vicki had discovered him chatting with a drug-dealing sentry on the mountain burst through in such a torrent of rage she forgot to be afraid. “You lied to me! About the PDA. About being Holly’s friend, and protecting the environment and . . . and your faith. And you were so good at it; I bought every word.”

If she’d hoped to provoke a response, it didn’t work. Joe simply stepped back, leaning against the shelf-wall, his face wiped blank, arms folded across his chest. “Who—
what
—do you think I am?”

“Like Holly, I was stupid enough to believe there was something special about you, no matter how you chose to live your life. That . . . that you were more than a beach bum or handyman. Now I know you’re just an ex-military who’s found an easier way to support your life on the beach than odd jobs for an NGO. So are you on Bill’s CIA payroll too? Or are you just in it for a big enough cut of the drug profits to finance every surfing season for the rest of your life? Well, I’m not afraid of you.” The quiver in Vicki’s voice gave lie to her defiance. “I hope you drown before you catch a single wave with dirty money.”

Bill stepped forward. “Vicki!”

Joe’s hand went up so fast Vicki flinched until she realized that it was raised at Bill. “No, let her get it out of her system.”

But Vicki was done. Mutinously, she lifted her chin and tightened her jaw.

Joe straightened from the wall. “Taylor, we’ve got no time for this. We’ve got to assume we’re blown. We’ll have to push up the timetable. If we don’t get that plane off the ground now, we may not get another chance.”

The plane in which Vicki had only an hour ago hoped to make her own escape. Was it even now being loaded with opium? Was that—not the center’s needs—why Bill had invested in a larger plane?