Shattered (25 page)

“The U.S. doesn’t negotiate with terrorists,” Shane reminded her for their audience.

“I know. And the guerillas definitely fit into that category, since everyone knows they’re getting funding from sympathetic terrorist groups. But WMR certainly doesn’t have the funds to pay Castillo off.”

“So, it all comes down to Vasquez,” Shane said.

“That seems to be the case.”

“What are you going to do if he turns you down?”

“I don’t want to consider that.”

“But it’s a possibility, darling.” He placed his hand on her leg. “You have to be prepared to be disappointed.”

“The president’s a reasonable man. I’m sure he’ll listen,” she argued, knowing nothing of the kind. Especially after the way she’d argued with him at the dinner only nights ago. But he’d probably enjoy making her beg.

“But if he doesn’t?”

“Maybe we could go to the clinic ourselves,” she suggested. “Try to negotiate on our own. Surely Jesus Castillo could be made to understand that harming an innocent American wouldn’t help his cause any among the patients she’s been serving for all these months.”

“I doubt if any of those patients are going to leap up to defend her,” Shane pointed out. “The rebels have a reputation for being brutal. If you were some peasant with a wife and five kids to feed, would you risk your life, and perhaps theirs, for a foreigner?”

She folded her arms. “I hate it when you get into that know-it-all professorial mind-set,” she complained.

“I am a professor,” he reminded her. “And you’re a doctor. Neither of us has the skill set to take on terrorists.”

“I know.”

The sob in her voice was in no way feigned. For the first time, Kirby really understood, deep down, the meaning of survivor guilt. Because if Rachel was seriously injured, or, even worse, killed, because she’d taken her place before that subcommittee, she knew it would be a very long time, if ever, before she’d be able to forgive herself.

“But that’s not going to keep me from trying to do everything I can.”

“And it’s not going to stop me from dragging you onto a plane back to the States if the president turns you down,” he said.

“You’re not the boss of me.”

“No. But I am the guy who adores you,” he said evenly. “And who is also willing to admit that I made a helluva mistake letting you get away. No way am I letting that happen again.”

As he shot her a hard, don’t-mess-with-me-look, Kirby couldn’t quite decide whether or not he was talking for the hidden microphone’s benefit. Or hers.

Although Kirby trusted Phoenix Team, she also knew that the odds were stacked against them. And while all three men who’d fought together that day in the Kush had assured her that they worked best against impossible odds, because it kept them at the top of their game, she was still having problems seeing this entire adventure as a game.

The hotel was in the Zona Rosa. It was also the priciest hotel in the city, probably the entire country. It was not one Kirby would have normally chosen, but Zach’s CIA station chief friend had insisted on it, assuring them that they had “friendlies” working among the staff and on the security detail.

The liveried doorman was clad in a scarlet uniform adorned with gold braid and tasseled epaulets, which reminded Kirby a bit of the president’s military uniform.

“Welcome to the Hotel de la Revolutión,” he said in English, bowing low as he opened the passenger door of the rental car. He waved at a bellman, clad in a similar jacket but without the tassels, as Shane began to take the luggage out of the backseat.

“Your room is all arranged,” the bellman murmured, for her ears only, as he gestured for Kirby to enter the revolving door ahead of him.

Although she resisted shooting a glance back, she did give him a quick, sideways look as he led her to the registration desk.

Was he one of the CIA friendlies? Maybe even an operative?

Or one of Vasquez’s men, assigned to watch for her arrival and make sure the president knew where she went and whom she might meet with?

Wondering if Mata Hari had felt anywhere as nervous as she did now, Kirby pulled out her WMR credit card and greeted the desk clerk with her sweetest smile.

The guard couldn’t watch her around the clock. Even he had to answer the call of nature occasionally, leaving Rachel alone with the armed children soldiers. As she watched a boy, no older than seven, killing time and apparent boredom by expertly taking his AK-47 apart, then putting it back together and reloading it, she worried they could be even more dangerous than her guard.

They were obviously more impulsive, and she knew from years of fieldwork in other impoverished countries that when abandoned children had no other way of getting the necessities of life—protection, food and even water—they’d bond together with other such children, who’d become their families.

Which, in turn, made it easy for evil adults to take on the role of parental figures, training them to obey orders and commit acts many adults would refuse to do.

However this little band had come to join the rebel army, whether voluntarily or having been swept out of their villages, entering such an armed, macho environment would have to prove frightening. Lacking any other survival skills, it was totally understandable that helpless children would use obedience as a strategy to stay alive.

Since they possessed an immature sense of mortality, they were often sent unprotected into minefields, reducing risks to the adult soldiers who’d follow them. They were also more likely to become conditioned to violence and the most brutal deaths than adults, regarding as normal such things as hacking limbs off a former schoolmate with a machete. Merely part of ordinary, everyday life.

She’d seen teenage boys in Sierra Leone, wearing Rambo-style bandanas, wildly dancing through the streets and shooting their guns into the air to celebrate their murderous sprees. Like some adults, those children appeared to have actually learned to enjoy killing.

When the boy with the Kalashnikov met her gaze, his eyes glittering with drugs and malevolence, Rachel decided that she didn’t want to stick around and become a notch on anyone’s gun belt.

Which was why, when her guard went outside to make yet another call on his cell phone (Is he talking with Castillo? she wondered) she took the opportunity to steal a scalpel from a drawer.

She didn’t believe she could overpower the man, especially if the children decided to back him up, but first chance she got, she was going to make another try at prying open that bathroom window.

The doorman handed their bags off to a bellman, who carried them into the glass elevator that rose to the twentieth floor of the hotel. The rooms all surrounded a central courtyard planted with palm and banana trees and a variety of colorful plants designed to bring to mind the nearby jungle, even down to the brightly feathered birds flitting through their branches.

“Wow,” Kirby said as the elevator passed a towering fake waterfall tumbling over a series of artificial rocks, into a tropical lagoon serving as the hotel’s swimming pool, featuring a swim-up bar. “Too bad Sabrina isn’t here to see this.”

“It might be a bit over-the-top for her five-diamond taste,” Shane said as he looked down onto the tops of a trio of coconut palms.

Which was exactly what Kirby was thinking.

“I wonder if there’s a jungle ride,” he murmured.

Once again, they were on exactly the same track. Despite the seriousness of the situation, Kirby laughed.

Shane flashed her a quick grin. And as she bathed in its warmth, enjoying this single, suspended moment and the company, Kirby found it almost possible to forget their reason for being here.

Until they entered a suite decorated with a haute Caribbean-resort-style flair, boasting shiploads of rattan and pink marble.

The dazzling view out to the Caribbean was actually better than that from the Presidential Palace. The suite was at the corner of the hotel, nearly all windows, with French doors leading out to a private balcony, and in the other direction, Kirby could see the green of the jungle and the mountains rising up from it, and, above all, Ixtab, ominously continuing to steam.

Which had her thinking about what Shane had said about the two of them being like TNT and nitro. Actually, they were a lot like the volcano, and the more time they spent together, the more she felt the pressure building.

The bellman—whose coppery brown skin, broad cheekbones, and black hair could have washed off the enormous Mayan frieze in the lobby—carried their luggage into the bedroom, which featured a king-sized bed with mosquito net curtains and canopy. Since the hotel was air-conditioned, Kirby decided the netting was merely decoration. Then again, if guests decided to sleep with the balcony doors open, they’d be wise to take precautions.

He returned to the living room, demonstrated the air-conditioning controls, showed off the minibar, the private safe, and the flat-screen television, which was hidden away in a whitewashed rattan armoire.

“The room’s been swept,” he said. Kirby wasn’t as surprised as she would have been only two days ago to learn he was undercover CIA. “But I left the trackers the man at the airport put on your luggage to keep Vasquez’s people from getting suspicious.

“That door”—he pointed toward one on the far side of the living room—“leads into the adjoining suite. The NOCs who’ll be leaving the country in your place are already there, but I’d advise not mingling, since not all the maids or housemen are ours, and given the mix of bad guys in this country, you never know who’s being paid under the table by whom.”

He handed Shane a cell phone and a set of car keys. “The unlisted number of the station chief, Señora Gwendolyn Patterson, as well as that of your teammates, has been programmed into the phone. Since the president is out of the city—”

“What?” Shane and Kirby said together.

“Since when?” Kirby asked.

“Since this morning. There are rumors Josefina Madrid has surreptitiously slipped into the country. Vasquez’s goons have rounded up all the usual suspects and are interrogating them at the army barracks in Rio del Mar. He wanted to be present, undoubtedly to help convince her army of supporters to talk.”

“Sounds like a fun guy,” Shane said.

“Wait until you meet him,” Kirby muttered, unable to believe this timing. “Since the president has other problems on his mind right now, and undoubtedly moved the possibility of a U.S. invasion down a couple notches on his to-worry-about list, why don’t we just bail on meeting with him and head out to the pyramid and wait there for the others to meet us?”

“He is expected back late tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest,” the bellman said.

“Oh, great. Meanwhile, those rebels could being doing God knows what to Rachel.”

“Dr. Moore is well,” the bellman assured her. “The clinic is closely guarded, which will give your Phoenix Team a challenge. But our man on the inside will keep her safe.”

Kirby could only wish she could believe that.

“What are we supposed to do while we wait?”

“Señora Patterson is waiting to meet you at Casa de Don Quijote. It is a local seafood cantina, only two blocks away.”

“How will we know her?” Shane asked.

“I’ve met her,” Kirby remembered. “She accompanied the U.S. ambassador to dinner at the palace.”

“She’s the ambassador’s press secretary,” the man said. “You will go in. Order your drinks. Behave as if this is just a romantic holiday. Do not look around to try to detect which person in the restaurant might be one of us, or you will risk giving yourself away.

“Ten minutes after you sit down, Señora Patterson will arrive. She will be with friends, but when she sees you, she will break away and ask to join you. She will update you on what she knows of the doctor. She will also have instructions written in indelible ink on a paper cocktail napkin that she will slip under hers when her drink arrives.”

“Geez,” Kirby, stressed out and just wanting to get on with the program, said with more than a little sarcasm, “so when, exactly does Q show up to give us our Aston Martin with rocket launchers and our homing pills?”

When the man, obviously unfamiliar with one of America’s greatest movie franchises, just gave her a blank look, Kirby was tempted to ask him what the hell kind of spy he was.

“Won’t it seem suspicious if we’re seen meeting with someone from the embassy our first night in the city?” she asked instead, trying to bite back her frustration. Her work at WMR had admittedly taught her some level of patience. But her problems had also never gotten this personal.

“The señora’s light cover is as a press officer, which allows her to work undeclared while still providing diplomatic immunity in the event she finds herself in trouble. But she also freelances as a society reporter for El Libertador.”

“It’s the national newspaper,” Kirby told Shane. “Definitely a propaganda rag.”

“True,” the man agreed. “Her ‘beat,’ as you Americans call it, is stories and interviews with Americans and Europeans visiting the country.”

“Which doesn’t give her much to write about these days, with tourism being just about nonexistent,” Kirby said. She’d never been one to focus on the society pages. Especially down here, where the gap between wealthy and poor was as wide as the Grand Canyon.

He favored her with the first smile he’d share so far. “All the more reason why it is only logical that she would be so eager to talk with you.”

Shane nodded. “That’s very good.”

The brief friendly expression immediately vanished. His elongated eyes narrowed and his jaw thrust forward, just enough that Kirby, who’d grown accustomed to such displays in the Army, could sense a pissing contest coming on.

“Monteleón’s freedom from tyranny may not be at the top of U.S. agenda at the moment,” he said. His crisp tone sharpened the melodic accent. “But that does not mean we are second-rate. We have made blood oaths to bring down the dictator pig Vasquez and replace him with Josefina Madrid. Which makes us very good at what we do.”

“If I didn’t believe that,” Shane replied, smoothly slipping his arm around Kirby’s waist, “I would not have risked allowing Dr. Campbell to accompany me on this mission.”

Shane felt her stiffen, as if someone had just stuck a steel rod down the back of that dress. And hoped she’d manage to rein in her annoyance before the fake bellman left.

“Casa de Don Quijote,” the man repeated. “She’ll meet you there.”

Shane walked him to the door, waited until he was in the hallway, thanked him, then handed him a folded bill, tipping him as he would any other bellman. Because, as the man had pointed out, you just never knew who might be lurking around corners.