Deadly Journey (6 page)

Chapter 10

The Villa

I was jammed in
between two people in the back seat of a vehicle, listening to my new captor
chat in an accented but cultured voice from the front passenger seat. He
rambled on about the upcoming presidential elections in Mexico. His stance on
the state of the Mexican economy and the need for better social housing,
schooling and health care for the poor clearly defined his politics. If he was
the one who was going to look after my welfare, at least I knew he had a
conscience. At least I dared hope.

We had only driven for around ten minutes
when we stopped and someone helped me out of the vehicle. An arm either side of
me gripped and guided me in a shuffle along a pathway. My host quietly gave his
orders.

‘Take off his leg irons at the door. I
don’t want the ceramics damaged.’

I was brought to a jarring halt and,
someone fumbled with the chains and removed the ankle shackles, leaving me with
an itch from hell. The toe of my boot stubbed against a protrusion. I assumed
it was the threshold and I could feel a welcome blast of cool air from an AC
unit.

‘Remove the sack.’

I scanned the opulent surroundings, and my
jaw slackened at the contrast with the poverty of Leila’s home. We were in a
large hallway facing two stairways running either side of the walls, leading to
a balcony supported by two marble columns, and framing a large doorway. The
feminine pink and cream decor and Greek-style ornate reliefs seemed at odds
with the heavily armed guards. They wore black Special Forces-type uniforms.
Glancing down at my feet, I could see my reflection in the ceramic floor tiles
and I could smell floor polish.

From behind me, my host called out orders.

‘Take him for a shower and remove all his
shackles. Give him a change of clothes and then bring him to the dining room.’

I noticed camera domes in the foyer and on
the ceiling at the top of the stairway. He was obviously relaxed about any
attempts I might make to escape, but then with the armed guards and the
security system, I would have put my chances on a scale of one-to-ten at a big
fat zero.

A rifle barrel digging in my back guided me
up the stairway and into a bedroom.

The room was far removed from the one at
Leila’s home. A chandelier hung from the centre of the ceiling. There was a
flat-screen television facing a king-size bed. French windows led out onto a
balcony. In the corner of the ceiling next to the clothes closet there was a
CCTV security camera.

A guard removed my waist and wrist shackles
while two others watched and pointed their automatic rifles in my direction.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a young maid enter the room. Maybe in her in
her early twenties, she was wearing a black skirt and a white starched blouse
with a huge black bow tie. Her black hair was fastened in a bun. In her arms,
she carried a bright orange bundle with what looked like an oversized
wristwatch perched on the top. She set it down on the corner of the bed.

‘I need your clothes,’ she said.

She had the appearance of a native Bolivian
with her narrow eyes and high cheekbones. The rest of her was all Hispanic,
especially her fulsome lips. My cheeks flamed and I hesitated, until the prod
of a rifle butt prompted me to undress. Stripped of my dignity, I stood there
in my underwear. Her hand gestured in a wave. An impish grin formed on her lips
and a glint in her dark, almond-shaped eyes told me she enjoyed watching me
squirm. One of the guards stepped forward. I slipped off my shorts and stood
with my hand covering the source of my embarrassment. The maid laughed, picked
up my clothing from the floor and breezed out of the room.

The shower felt good, and I wished it could
go on forever. When I removed the bandages from my feet, I saw they were far
from healed.

‘Enough,’ someone called out.

Stepping out of the shower, I wiped the
steam from the cabinet mirror and rubbed myself down with a towel. The
reflection staring back at me looked like a stranger. The swelling had almost
gone from my upper lip, but both lips were raw and split. The gash on my nose
sat at the top of a bend that said my nose was probably broken. Black casts in
the skin around my bloodshot eyes reminded me of just how much of a beating I
had taken.

‘I need a shave. Is there a razor?’

Two of the guards looked at each other,
puzzled. I made the gesture of shaving, as they clearly hadn’t understood a
word I had said.

‘No shave,’ one of them said, and grabbing
me by the arm, he pulled me out of the en-suite and pointed his rifle at the
clothing on the bed.

The bright-orange garment was a one-piece
overall. There was no underwear, so I pulled the overall on over my legs, stood
to finish dressing, and fastened the buttons. One of the guards pushed me back
onto the bed and picked up the wristwatch-type object. On closer inspection, I
could see it was an offender tracking bracelet that he clasped around my ankle.
As the fastener clicked into place, the bracelet started to emit a flashing
green L.E.D. He stood back and threw a pair of flip-flops beside me. I glanced
at my feet and then the flip-flops and back again. Shrugging my shoulders, I
looked at the guard nearest me and pointed at my feet. He talked on a radio and
shortly afterwards, the maid re-entered carrying bandages. She knelt in front
of me and bandaged each foot in turn.

Glancing up at me, she whispered, ‘Do
everything they ask. You may be worth something to them, but they’ll shoot you
like a dog if you don’t give them what they want.’

She stood and walked over to the clothes
closet and opened the door. After fishing inside, she turned and tossed me a
pair of slippers. ‘Try these.’

The guards hauled me to my feet, led me out
of the bedroom, down the stairway and through the large doors in the foyer into
a dining room. There was a long oak table with a dozen chairs. A gray-haired
man of slight build sat at one end of the table, with his head bowed, studying
papers. The canvas bags we had brought on our journey sat to one side of him,
with one of them open.

A guard forced me to sit to one side,
halfway down the table. My host’s head remained buried in the file on the table
and he began to read aloud.

‘Kurt Rawlings, drug enforcement agent. El
Paso. Age thirty-four. Date of birth, December fifth, nineteen-seventy four.
Wife, Mary. One son and one daughter, Craig and Claire. It says here you passed
on promotion to stay with your existing team, following the recovery of
twenty-five million dollars’ worth of cocaine. Black belt in judo and karate.
Top scores in marksmanship, et cetera, et cetera.’

He closed the file, raised his head, and
gazed at me over half-rimmed spectacles.

My heart sank and a cold wave washed
through my body. He knew exactly who I was.

And looking at him, I now knew exactly at
whose mercy my life depended.

Chapter 11

Devil in Disguise

It was hard to
believe that I was sitting at the table with our department’s very own Ace of
Clubs. A sigh escaped my lips, catching his attention, and without moving his
head, he shot me a penetrating stare over his glasses. Averting my gaze at
first, I glanced back to see him reading papers.

His appearance was that of a genteel,
amiable professor, rather than a potential dictator. Only the abnormality in
his brow, giving him a Neanderthal ridge, created a primal signal that behind
the mask might lurk danger. If I thought I had reached despair before, knowing
who sat at the head of the table took events to a new low. Escaping and
returning to my loved ones seemed more of an outside chance than ever. But why
and what had brought me to this situation was beyond anything I could work out.

The guy stared at me again, this time as if
trying to guess what I was thinking. A disgraced Mexican politician, he had
been hounded out of office for corruption and was suspected of having a
connection to Panama’s former President Noriega and his money-laundering and
drug-running operations.

Always on the move, he had evaded justice
over the years. But that was no surprise, given that the majority of the
population he presided over considered him a hero of the impoverished. So many
depended on a paycheque from him to put food on the table, or to supplement their
public sector pay, or were fearful for their lives, that someone betraying him
was a long shot at best. His politics might sound magnanimous to the population
at large, but he was fast becoming the biggest threat to the established order.

He lowered his gaze, flicking through more
pages of what I assumed was my personnel record.

I would have given anything to turn the
tables on him and sit in his place. To slap cuffs on him would have given me
pleasure. Department estimates were that his operation brought in more than
thirty percent of the gross domestic product for his state. The Mexican army
seemed to be reluctant to move against him. But then the top brass probably had
one eye on the future. He employed ex-Special Forces soldiers and top brass at
retirement, particularly those who had been born in his area of influence. His
army and corrupt influence gave the mere mention of his name the air of his
invincibility. Capturing him would more than likely result in a medal. Resting
my elbows on the table, I shook my head.

Defying belief, here he was, no more than a
few feet from me and I was powerless to act. Francesco Perez Alonso, better
known as “
El Presidente
”, head of the Perez cartel.

Looking at him, it was hard to believe that
the United States government would be cowed by his influence. Word was, the
boys at the top were afraid he was planning to fund his old political party, or
maybe a brand-new one, and he would take over the country as a dictator.

Where or why I figured in his plans, I
couldn’t be sure. It wasn’t as if I were a top executive in drug enforcement.
All I knew was that for now, I owed him my life for buying out the hit. It left
me certain that I had to spend my every waking hour coming up with a plan to
escape.

He rummaged in the open bag and pulled out
a wallet that looked suspiciously like mine. Inspecting the contents he took
out a photo and slid it across to me.

‘Your wife and children, I assume? Keep it,
we have a copy.’

The nape of my neck felt an icy blast. Not
only did he have my service record and address, but also a photo of my family.
Acid started to burn away at the lining of my stomach at the thought they might
be stalking and considering harm to my family. Instinct told me to start asking
questions like a good agent, but logic told me it was better to act dumb, and
hopefully the silence would get him to open up.

He held up my wedding ring.

‘I’m so pleased we have this. It saves
sending them a piece of your anatomy as proof we are holding you. All we need
now is a swab of your DNA to go with the ransom note, together with a speech
from you on camera.’

He picked up a hand bell and rang it
several times. One of his security guards opened the door and in walked the
young maid carrying a small specimen bottle. She was wearing gossamer kitchen
gloves.

The maid came up to me and smiled as she
took a swab from the sample bottle. There was no need for instructions. I
opened my mouth and she tickled the inside of my cheek with the swab and then
replaced it in the bottle.

Perez put on a pair of latex gloves in the
manner of a surgeon preparing for an operation. He glanced at me with a smirk
as if to show me how intelligent he was at avoiding transferring any evidence. I
couldn’t help but curl my lips at the thought I already had his prints on the
photograph of Mary and the kids.

He opened the file in front of him and
teased a typed letter out of an envelope. He slid it across the table to me. ‘Read
it. I’m sure you need to know what we think your freedom is worth.’

He took a handkerchief from his pocket,
wiped the ring, and slipped it inside the envelope. When he snapped his
fingers, the maid passed him the sample bottle and it followed the ring inside
the envelope. The letter was addressed to the head of my department and dated.
I cringed. The only thing that was missing was the sender’s name and address
and a signature.

My eyes honed in on a figure in words and
writing.
Twenty-five-million dollars
. I couldn’t contain my silence any
longer. That sum of money was beyond my family’s means if the government failed
to pay the ransom. I was looking at a death warrant. When did negotiations with
bank robbers holding hostages ever end in them being given a getaway airplane?

Never.

The government would rather spend twenty-five
million sending in Black Hawks and teams of Special Forces operatives. I
decided to act dumb, with the intention of finding out why they had chosen to
kidnap me.

‘Why twenty-five million? My family can’t
raise that!’

‘I’m not asking your family. You and your
government stole an equal sum from me and my country when you confiscated our
shipment of cocaine. It’s simple: I want my money back... one way or another.’

The last part of the sentence, he’d almost
spat out through gritted teeth.

‘But why me? I only work for them for a
paycheque to support my family.’

‘Now, that’s not really true, is it? You
work for drug enforcement because of your ideology concerning drugs. To me you
are a terrorist. I hope the orange overalls will not be lost in their meaning to
your government when they see your film.’

‘A terrorist?’

‘What’s so strange about that? We are war
with the United States in the same way that you are at war with the Taliban or
Al Qaeda.’

‘But Mexico isn’t at war with the United
States. You have the same laws against drug trafficking.’

‘For now, maybe, but laws that are against
the public interest are meant to be broken. Otherwise, your laws on prohibition
would still be in place. Just think about all that wasted beer the FBI poured
down the drain. I may be your Al Capone today, but in years to come I will be
the darling of Wall Street. At least some of your states have seen sense on
cannabis.’

In my mind, the guy was more than two cents
short of a dollar. He was getting agitated, so I thought it better to zip my
lip.

He called over the maid and whispered to
her. She left the room and returned with two security guards carrying a model
of a hospital which they placed on the table. A guard took hold of my sweaty
hand and pressed it firmly palm down on the letter. Perez took the letter and
added it to the envelope.

‘You know they’ll have to legalize cocaine
again at some time in the future?’

‘Again?’

‘Come on, you work for the DEA. Surely,
they teach you the history of the drug? But then I guess not.’ He rolled his
eyes and continued without waiting for a reply. ‘Cocaine was used in the United
States for many medicinal purposes, from alleviating toothache, to weaning
people from heroin. In its original recipe, even Coca Cola, your famous
American soft drink, used extracts from the coca leaf, including cocaine. Hell,
your industrialists used to hand out free pills to workers as a pick-me-up.’

‘Well, yes, but that was before scientists
discovered the side effects and the harm it caused to mental health.’

‘Scientists? Bah. You mean those same
scientists who learned how to extract cocaine from the coca leaf to turn it
into a narcotic. Still, I guess I owe them a debt of gratitude. Your government
and its agencies are hypocrites. They browbeat fifty-one countries into banning
the growing of coca and advocate eradication, yet grant a license to only one
company to import the leaf. Then they give permission for them to extract the
cocaine from the leaf so that your precious world-dominating-soda company can
put what is left into their syrup recipe. Anyway, enough of that, we need to
move on.’

He pushed back his chair and stood. Moving
the canvas bags to one side revealed a laptop. Fumbling, he removed a pen
drive. Aptly named, it actually resembled a round fountain pen when he applied
a cover with a clip and placed it in his top jacket pocket.

One of the guards placed his hands on a
large framed painting on the wall behind Perez. It depicted Adam and Eve at the
tree of knowledge; he opened it on hinges to reveal a wall safe. The guard
stood to one side. Perez entered a code and opened the safe. He placed the
laptop inside and then the canvas bags, followed by the ransom envelope.

Perez closed the safe. He turned, looked
directly at me and then at the model.

‘This is what your government has made me
put on hold because of your actions. It’s a state of the art emergency hospital
with a pharmacy that my people badly need.’

I heard his words, but all the time I was
thinking what the department would give to have a search warrant to blow the
safe for the information it contained. His feeble attempt at indoctrination to
win me over failed.

Thinking it best to humour him, I attempted
to gain some empathy.

‘Sorry to mess up your plans, but shouldn’t
the government be building the hospital?’

‘They should, but they won’t.’

‘What you have planned is a magnificent
gesture. I hope you get to build the hospital.’

Thinking about the pharmacy gave me the
idea it was a perfect front for getting the medication used to make crack
cocaine. I suspected those were his motives, rather than a philanthropic
gesture.

‘Do you play chess, Agent Rawlings?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘Good. Maybe you will indulge me when
you’re settled in. I could do with a new victim.’ The laugh that followed
grated, interspersed as it was with pig-like grunts.

I glanced around the room, mentally noting
every detail.

He turned to me and smiled. It was as if he
could read my mind. ‘Don’t even think of escaping. The bracelet on your ankle
contains explosives. Move outside a three-hundred-meter perimeter and you’ll
lose a foot. The guards each have a remote control to set off the charge.’

A gulp stuck in my throat. He reached out
and patted me on the back. Clearly, he had me in check, but I hoped not
checkmate.

‘Don’t worry. For now I’ll offer you my
hospitality to give you time to recover from your ordeal. After that, providing
you cooperate... no problem. All I want to know from you is... Well, let’s save
it for later, shall we? Once I have the information I need, you can live a life
of luxury until your government caves in and pays me what I’m due. Any
questions?’

I wanted to ask who had placed the original
contract on my life, but there and then didn’t feel like the right time to
broach the subject.

There was another question I dared not ask…
What if I don’t cooperate?