“Okay,” she said wearily, “wake the kid. Everybody out.”
They trouped through the rain into the Donut Hutch. Usually the place was a magnet for cops, but Bonnie was betting all the local units were still occupied at the Roach House. She was right. There were a lot of empty seats and a distinct absence of customers. From the kitchen came the sizzle of lard. It didn’t exactly make her salivate. Deep-fried dough wasn’t one of her weaknesses.
She led the family to a booth in a corner, away from the windows, and slid onto the banquette next to Alan, across from Cynthia and A.J.
They were a bewildered, bedraggled group. Cynthia sat silently, her face expressionless. The kid, still wearing earbuds, played a game on the cell phone, restlessly kicking his feet together. Alan swallowed way too often as he stared, hollow-eyed, at nothing at all.
“Come on, you guys, shake it off.” She undid a couple of snaps on her poncho, then leaned back in her seat and lit a cigarette.
A waitress trudged up to the table, looking bored. “Can’t smoke in here.”
“Oh, right.” Bonnie stubbed it out. “Force of habit. I’ll just have coffee.”
“Same for my wife and me,” Alan said. “And a jelly donut for the boy.”
“Sugar will keep him up,” Cynthia warned as the waitress retreated.
“After what he’s been through, he deserves something.”
“You spoil him.”
“Folks.” Bonnie held up her hands. “Can we save the domestic drama for some other time? We need to finish up our talk and get where we’re going.”
“Just where are you taking us, anyway?” Cynthia asked.
“Never mind that. I got a plan.”
“I hope it works out better than your other plans.”
“Me too. I’ve already been shot at a couple times, not to mention our mutual friend tried to electrocute me in a bathtub.”
“Electrocute?” Cynthia said, sounding more skeptical than horrified.
“Electrocute,” Bonnie confirmed. “He also said unkind things about my hat.”
“That hat?”
“No, a different one. Why, what’s wrong with this hat?”
Cynthia looked away, a sour grimace riding her lips. It was pretty clear they weren’t destined to be BFFs.
“So you really did talk to him face to face?” Alan asked. “And it was the same man? The one in the photo?”
“If it wasn’t, it was another top prize winner in the Skeletor look-alike contest.”
Cynthia didn’t get it. “Skeletor?”
Her husband shrugged. “She’s trying to be funny.”
“Yeah, I’m a laugh riot. I work comedy clubs on weekends.”
“What photo are you talking about?”
“On my cell,” Alan said. He eased the phone away from his son with a smile. “Just need to borrow this, buddy.”
He paused the kid’s game and found the photo, showing it to Cynthia. She studied it intently, her face losing some of its color. Her hand was shaking when she handed it back.
Alan resumed the game and let A.J. have the phone. The boy was instantly lost again in his tiny electronic world.
The waitress returned with their orders, leaving a bill. Bonnie reached for her purse, then remembered she didn’t have it. “Um, I’d cover this, except Pascal took my cash.”
“I’ve got it.” Alan dropped some money on the table, then registered what she’d said. “All of it?”
“Afraid so.”
“Then—your retainer ...”
“Not your fault. My carelessness, my problem.” She took a sip of coffee. “Let’s get back on track. You were saying you moved from Chicago to take a job at Conscience Watch. Why the move?”
“The chance to do more. Which was a joke, because at Conscience Watch I hardly accomplished anything.”
“You must have accomplished something, because you’ve got a hitter on your ass. At least, I’m assuming your current troubles are tied in with your previous do-goodery.”
“Yes.”
“How so?”
“I broke the law,” Alan said quietly.
“Great. Dig through enough shit, and we find our pony. Was it just you, or were others involved?”
“There were others. Two of my colleagues—Amy Bernstein and Herb Sentner.”
“The ones who croaked?” Bonnie said, remembering the news stories on Pascal’s iPad.
“Herb died two weeks ago. Amy died just yesterday.”
“Amy is dead?” Cynthia whispered. Bonnie glanced at her and saw the woman’s eyes widen. It didn’t look like she was faking surprise.
Alan nodded soberly. “She was killed in her co-op. I saw it in today’s paper.”
“First things first,” Bonnie said. “Tell me about Herb.”
“He retired around the time I left the company. Moved to Maine with his wife. She found him in the lake by their house. The official verdict was that he slipped on the dock, fell into the water, and drowned. But there were no witnesses.”
“You told me Muriel saw it happen,” Cynthia said in a low, reproachful tone.
“I lied. I didn’t want you worrying. You’d been through enough.”
“For God’s sake, Alan, you owed me the truth.”
Bonnie grinned. “Seriously, Skeezix, you were trying to protect this shrinking violet? Newsflash—I don’t think your wife is auditioning for the role of damsel in distress.”
Alan looked abashed. He glanced at his wife. “From now on, no more secrets.”
“Great.” Bonnie took some more coffee, enjoying the caffeine hit. “We’ve had our Hallmark moment. Now how does this all hang together?”
“We’re getting there,” Alan said. “You have to understand, I wasn’t sure what it meant. Herb’s death could have been an accident. Amy talked to Herb’s widow. Muriel didn’t know anything.”
“But you and Amy suspected foul play?”
“We did.”
“Why? What were you so scared of?”
Alan hesitated, staring into his coffee. “A year ago, the three of us did something reckless. It involved Mariana Ortiz.”
“Alan ...” Cynthia warned.
He waved off her objection. “She needs to know.”
“Who’s Mariana Ortiz?” Bonnie asked.
“An attorney in Colombia who made a name for herself handling legal issues for farm workers. A real idealist. She’d lived abroad, but returned to her native country to help the poor. She taught them about their rights. She helped them stand up to the government.”
“And I’m guessing she paid for it.”
“The authorities convicted her on trumped-up charges of collaborating with FARC, the insurgency group. She was sentenced to twenty years at the Buen Pastor Women’s Prison in Bogotá. By the time Conscience Watch got the case, she’d been there for eight months—subjected to constant abuse, even physical torture.”
“Okay ...” Bonnie said, not quite sure where this was going. Cynthia shook her head in disapproval. The little boy hummed to himself, playing with the phone.
“Conscience Watch works with foreign governments to secure the release of political prisoners. Mariana Ortiz became the top priority for our Latin American division, which I headed up. But the Colombian authorities wouldn’t budge. They intended to make an example of her. They didn’t want other lawyers helping the farmworkers. There was no way we could get her out. And we had to. We just had to. I guess—I guess I got a little bit obsessed about it.”
“Alan’s a romantic,” Cynthia said dryly. “He has a chivalrous streak.”
“I take it you’re not so much on Team Mariana?”
“I had no objection to helping her. But it’s pointless to idealize the woman.”
“She risked her life—” Alan said.
“Yes, certainly, but who knows why? Maybe for ideals. Maybe just because she wanted adventure. She could have had a death wish. We can’t know a stranger’s motives.”
“I knew
everything I needed to know about her,” Alan said stiffly. “And I still do.”
Cynthia looked at her hands. “I’m sure you believe that.”
Bonnie thought wifey might be a little put out by her husband’s evident fascination with another woman—and an exotic foreign freedom fighter, to boot. “Focus, people. What does Mariana Ortiz have to do with Amy and Herb getting snuffed?”
Alan took a breath. “As I said, we were getting nowhere with the Colombians. Then we learned something that made the situation even more urgent. Mariana had cancer. She wouldn’t receive treatment in prison. The government was content to let her waste away. If she didn’t get out soon, it would be too late. All legal options were exhausted. All conventional avenues ... So we thought outside the box. We threw a Hail Mary pass.” He met Bonnie’s eyes. “We hired a merc.”
“A what?”
“A mercenary. A soldier of fortune.”
“Holy shit.” Bonnie let out a low whistle. “I really fell ass backward into something, didn’t I?”
No one answered.
“Whose idea was it to go rogue?” she asked, already sure of the answer.
“Mine,” Alan said.
“And how did you happen to get hold of a mercenary?”
“Herb had connections from his Army days. I don’t know exactly how he did it. There were only three of us involved—him and Amy and me. It was a black op, so to speak. No one else at Conscience Watch knew anything about it.”
“I take it the three of you met with this guy.”
“Several times. We worked out the whole thing. Amy did some fancy accounting to divert funds to the project. We supplied our man with all the intel we had on Mariana. His job was to assemble a team, enter Colombia, penetrate the prison, and break her out.”
“Who was your hired gun, anyway?”
“His name was Hector Bezos.”
“So I take it Lee Marvin wasn’t available.”
“You can laugh, but we were trying to save a woman’s life. You know how I said the frustration gets to you—the bureaucracy? Well, this was our chance to bypass the red tape and political obstacles and really make a difference.”
“If it had worked.”
“Yes.”
“Which it didn’t.”
“Well ... no. How’d you know that?”
“These things never work, except in the movies.”
Cynthia set her mouth in a frown. “At least they tried.”
“That’s what people always say when they’ve screwed up. By the way, Cindy, when exactly did you find out about all this?”
“Early on. We don’t keep secrets from each other.”
That was a laugh. Everybody kept secrets. “Okay, so let me guess how this played out. This guy you hired—what was his name? Bozo?”
“Bezos,” Alan said irritably.
“Right. Bezos and his team got captured during their raid on the prison. Correct?”
Alan turned the coffee mug in his hands. “Um ... actually they never made it to the prison. Their arrival in-country apparently didn’t go unnoticed. But only Hector was captured alive. Two others were killed. The remaining three escaped.”
“And one of those three reported back to you.”
“Yeah. We were devastated, of course. It didn’t occur to us until later that we should also be afraid.”
Bonnie understood. “Because the Colombians would make Bezos spill everything. His mission, and the people who hired him. I’m guessing he knew your identities or had some way of figuring them out.”
“We made no secret of who we were.” Alan coughed. “Guess that was a mistake.”
“One of many. You guys were in so far over your head, you couldn’t see daylight. You were like kids playing around, but the Colombians don’t play games. You should’ve known that.”
“This man, Hector Bezos—”
“—was probably more of a wannabe than the genuine article. For every real commando out there, you got a hundred dime-store Rambos who like dressing up in camo fatigues and firing AR-15s. Their only training in special ops comes from watching The Expendables on pay-per-view.”
“Herb thought he was the real deal.”
“Herb is dead,” Bonnie said bluntly. “So is Amy. And the guy who killed them—he’s the real deal.”
Cynthia bristled. “If you’re trying to scare us, you’re wasting your time.”
“If you’re not scared already, you’re not paying attention.”
“Maybe your idea of taking action is to run and hide—”
“You were already on the run and hiding out, Cindy. Remember?”
“My name is Cynthia, not Cindy.”
“Actually your name is Caroline. But I realize it’s tough to keep track.”
Alan raised a hand. “Please ...”
Bonnie yielded. “Right, gotta stay on point. So Bezos’ Colombian jailers learned all about the people behind this paramilitary raid on their soil. They didn’t take kindly to it. They could have lodged a formal complaint with the US government—”
“That’s what we expected,” Alan said.
“But they didn’t.”
“No.”
“And that’s when you got really scared.”
“We knew they wouldn’t just let it go. If they weren’t coming after us legally ...”
“Then they were coming after you extralegally.” She glanced at A.J. and was glad to see he was still ignoring the conversation. “They turned the tables and hired a freelancer to enter this country and take care of you.”
“We didn’t know for sure. We didn’t know what Hector might have told them or what they might do. We each chose a different way of dealing with it. Herb was close to retirement anyway, so he left the organization and relocated to Maine. Amy stayed on at Conscience Watch. She wasn’t going to be intimidated. And I—Caroline and I ...”
“You got the papers to establish new identities and started laying low at the beautiful Jersey shore.”
“Yes. And time passed. Nothing happened. We started to think we were off the hook.”
“Until Herb died.”
Alan sighed. “As I said, it wasn’t clear if it was an accident or ... something else. Amy and I exchanged emails about it. Yesterday she sent me that photo I showed you. It was a man she thought was following her. She snapped his picture in a coffee shop in Manhattan. Heard him place his order. A Spanish accent, she said. A cultivated voice. That’s the last time I heard from her. Today I read a story in the New York Times saying she’d been murdered in her apartment last night. It must’ve happened very soon after she took the photo.”
Bonnie nodded. Now she understood why the hitter had checked into the Coach House only hours ago. He hadn’t been in town before that. He had been in New York, taking care of Amy Bernstein.
“Okay,” she said. “So Pascal learned enough from Amy to trace you here.”
“He must have. But I don’t know how. I never told Amy our new names or where we’d relocated. She didn’t even have my cell number. We only kept in touch by email.”
“Did you send your emails through an anonymizer?”
“A what?”
“I’ll take that as a no. An anonymizer is a service that conceals the origin of an email. Since you sent your messages directly, all Pascal had to do was go on Amy’s computer, bring up the emails, and analyze the routing info. Then he would know roughly what town you’re in.”
“But not our new names, our address ...”
“Wouldn’t take him long to track you down,” she said, preferring to pass over that part of the story. “Anyhow, he zeroed in on you and made his move.” She shrugged. “Dude works fast. You gotta admire that.”
Alan reached across the table and squeezed his wife’s hand. It was not clear if he was providing reassurance or requesting it.
“You said he’s from Chile,” he said quietly. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would the Colombians contract out the job instead of sending one of thei
r own people?”
“Deniability. They’re conducting wet work on foreign soil.”
“But if he’s caught, he’ll implicate them anyway.”
“I don’t think so. This guy won’t break under pressure. And I doubt he would let himself be taken alive in the first place.”
“You talk about him like he’s some sort of supervillain,” Cynthia said.
“He’s a professional. That’s all.” Bonnie hoped this was true. At this point she wasn’t so sure. “And it’s my job to see he doesn’t collect his fee. What I don’t get is why you didn’t go straight to the police after you saw the newspaper story.”
“We can’t. What we did was illegal. Hiring a mercenary, arranging a raid on a prison—we’re responsible for an international incident.”
“The authorities still would have to protect you.”
“They also would have to charge us. Recruiting mercenaries for a military action against a foreign regime when we’re not at war is a violation of the Neutrality Act. Then there’s section 956 of Title 18, which prohibits conspiracy to commit mayhem or damage property in a foreign country. Those statutes are aggressively enforced. We’re talking federal felonies with maximum penalties of twenty-five years to life.”
“Spoken like a true attorney-at-law. All right, so you met with me—but you made up a bunch of crap about the G-Rocs because you didn’t trust me not to go to the cops. That was a dumb-ass, chickenshit move, pal.”
“Look”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“if you want off the case, I wouldn’t blame you.”
“No can do, Stu. And yeah, I know your name isn’t Stu. I do want off the case, but what I want doesn’t matter. It’s all about what the baldheaded hombre from south of the border wants. Pascal will be gunning for me, whether I’m on the case or not.”
“You’re not the one he’s after.”
“I am now. I’m on the hit list. And I can’t just bail. He knows my name.”
“I’m sorry, Bonnie. I didn’t want ... I’m sorry.”
He sounded so morose, she had to laugh. “Brighten up. Believe it or not, this is not the first person who’s wanted me dead. Hell, he’s not even the first person who’s wanted me dead today. Now here’s the plan. You guys need to go to ground for a day or two. I’m taking you someplace where he won’t find you.”
“To a safe house?” Cynthia asked.
“Well, it’s my friend’s house, which oughtta be pretty safe.”
“And after we’re ensconced at your friend’s house,” Cynthia pressed, “what are we supposed to do? Just wait for this man to leave town?”
“He won’t leave town. It’s not like they’re gonna take off the hit. He’ll nose around until he finds you—unless I find him first.”