V ince listened intently as Jack described what was unfolding on the command center’s closed-circuit television-Falcon retreating into the hotel room with both Theo and the injured girl still held hostage. Vince’s telephone rang almost immediately. He answered just as quickly, only to get an earful of Falcon’s most hysterical screams yet.
“You tried to screw me, Paulo!”
“No one’s screwing with you.”
“I heard your SWAT guy or sniper or whoever talking to someone in the next room. He said to take the shot! Now call them off, or I’ll take the shot. This is no joke. Somebody’s gonna die here!”
“Just calm down, all right?”
“Calm down? You send in a shooter, and now you’re telling me to calm down?”
“Hear me out, Falcon. If SWAT or anyone else is anywhere near you, it’s not my doing. Let me check into it, and I’ll get them to back off.”
“I don’t buy that for one second. It’s just like you did to me on the bridge. You’re lying through your teeth all over again.”
“Look, for what it’s worth, I didn’t lie to you on the bridge. When I said you could speak to Alicia if you came down from the lamppost, that was a firm deal in my mind. Someone else-someone higher up-pulled the plug on us.”
“It’s never your fault, is it, Paulo?”
“I know I must sound like I’m full of excuses, but I swear I’m not lying to you.”
“And I swear right back that I don’t believe you.”
Vince could see that this conversation was going nowhere, along the lines of the timeless are-too-am-not playground debate. He needed another tack. “Falcon, let me make good on this, all right?”
“How?”
“First, let’s agree upfront that you are not going to hurt the hostages. If you can make that promise to me, then we can talk about what it is that you really want.”
“You know what I want.”
“Not until you tell me, I don’t.”
“You’ve known all along.”
“Spell it out, Falcon. Tell me what you want, and I’ll see if I can get it done.”
“Anything I want?”
“Within reason. Just don’t hurt the hostages.”
He paused, as if he enjoyed keeping Vince in suspense. Finally, he said, “I want to speak to Alicia.”
“Okay. I think we can do that.”
“In person.”
Vince didn’t want to use the word “no,” even if the answer was “no freakin’ way.” “How about we start with a phone conversation?”
“No, I want to-” Falcon said, then stopped. “You know what, Paulo? I’m calling your bluff. Put her on.”
“Unfortunately, she’s not here right now.”
“Damn you and your lies! Don’t you ever keep a promise? Don’t you ever stop stalling?”
Vince wasn’t sure how to convince him that he was being truthful, but based on what he was hearing in Falcon’s voice, it appeared that he didn’t have nearly enough time to redeem his own credibility. “If you don’t believe me, talk to Swyteck. Here, he’ll tell you.”
He handed the phone to Jack, who had been listening to the conversation on speaker. Paulo would have liked to coach him on what to say, but there was no time for that, either.
Jack spoke into the telephone. “He’s not messing with you, Falcon. Alicia is not here, and we’re doing our best to find her.”
“It’s time she talked to me. It’s beyond time.”
“What do you want to say to her?”
“Just bring her here. Now!”
Jack hit the mute button and spoke to Vince. “Where the hell is Alicia?”
“She rushed out of the command center after I gave her some files from my source. I sensed something was wrong, but she wouldn’t say what. I honestly don’t know where she went.”
“Find someone who does.”
“We’re working on it.”
“Work harder!” said Jack. He disengaged the mute function and spoke into the telephone. “She’s on her way, Falcon. Just give us a couple minutes.”
Falcon didn’t answer.
Vince slipped Jack a note that read, KEEP HIM TALKING.
“Falcon?” said Jack. “Are you there? Come on buddy, talk to me. Tell me more about that stage you wanted. You know, ‘curtain time.’”
F alcon paced across the room, the cell phone pressed to his ear. Swyteck was clearly stalling, but his exact words were lost on Falcon. The lawyer’s voice was just noise on the phone line. Falcon couldn’t focus on conversation. His mind was roaming elsewhere, and the noise was growing louder. At first, it was a hum, then a buzz, and finally the roar of engines. Airplane engines.
“I want to speak to Alicia, damn it!” Not even his own voice, however, could drown out the rumble of airplane engines inside his head.
It had been a moonless night, and the sky was a vast, impenetrable blackness in his darkest memories. He was flying in a retrofitted Skyvan, a propeller-powered aircraft so squat in its design that it was nicknamed the Flying Shoebox. This craft was owned by the Argentine Coast Guard. Nearly all of the passenger seats had been removed to expand the plane’s cargo capacity, and El Oso was buckled into one of the few that remained. The plane’s normal flight crew was in the cockpit. El Oso was part of a working crew that included a noncommissioned officer and a petty officer. The military rotated different working crewmembers onto each flight-involving as many operatives as possible-so that no one who worked at the detention center could point fingers without implicating himself or a friend. El Oso had, of course, heard rumors about the flights, and he had begun to speculate about the nature of his assignment from the moment he received orders to report to the landing field at ESMA, one of the largest and most notorious of all the secret military detention centers. For El Oso, however, the exact purpose of this particular flight was not confirmed in his own mind until he saw about twenty naked, unconscious prisoners laid side-by-side on the floor of the aircraft.
“Falcon, are you there?” It was Swyteck’s voice on the telephone, somehow cutting through the deafening airplane engines.
“Just shut up and get Alicia on the line!”
Swyteck kept talking, more stalling, but Falcon wasn’t even listening. He was barely aware of the fact that he was still inside a motel room, let alone that he was on the telephone. There was so much noise inside his head, those damn engines roaring from the past. But why so loud?
They had left the hatch open. The Skyvan had a rear hatch that slid down to open, and there was no intermediate position. It either had to be closed or fully open. On the Wednesday-night flights, the hatch definitely remained open. El Oso was staring directly into the night, a black hole in the aft of a noisy aircraft. Between him and the gaping hatch lay the rows of naked bodies on the floor. He wished that each and every one of them were dead, but he knew better. Only the living would require the injection of a sedative from a medical doctor. The doctor. He was making his rounds, so to speak, moving from one prisoner to the next, administering a second injection that would keep them unconscious. El Oso hadn’t noticed at first, but as the doctor worked his way up the row of naked bodies, emptying his syringe, his face came clear. Finally, El Oso made the connection. This man was no stranger. This was the very same navy doctor to whom he had taken prisoner 309’s newborn baby just two months earlier.
“A couple more minutes, Falcon,” said Swyteck. “Alicia’s on her way.”
Falcon grunted a reply of some kind, but it wasn’t even in English. His memories had him thinking in Spanish, his native tongue.
Mandar para arriba. Send them up. El Oso had been waiting for the order, and it came in those exact words from the commissioned officer. It came just as soon as the doctor had administered the last of the injections and disappeared into the cockpit, literally turning his back on the prisoners-his patients. The physician’s own “disappearance” was an ironic charade, a way to serve the regime and maintain merely technical compliance with his Hippocratic oath. When the doctor was gone, El Oso’s work began. He unbuckled his seat belt, rose, and started toward the row of naked, sleeping prisoners. Among them were the young and not so young, men and women alike. Some bore the burn marks of the grill. Others were bruised from relentless beatings. A skilled torturer could implement the tactics of “special interrogation” without leaving such marks, but finesse of that sort was completely unnecessary in the case of prisoners who were being “sent up.” El Oso worked in a two-man team. They started with the prisoner nearest the hatch, a man who was perhaps in his early twenties, perhaps even younger. El Oso took his arms. His teammate took the prisoner’s ankles. They lifted him up from the floor. In the prisoner’s unconscious state, his body sagged between them and hung before the open hatchway like a broad, sadistic smile.
“Are you still there, Falcon?”
“I’ve had it with this! Stop stalling. Where’s Alicia?” It was a coherent response, and it took every ounce of psychological fortitude for Falcon to string the words together. Even so, he wasn’t strong enough to pull himself up from the past. The lucid moment, however, had managed to shift his focus slightly. It was suddenly as if El Oso were another man entirely, someone whom Falcon didn’t even want to know. This stranger called El Oso was working furiously but in sync with his teammate, swaying the bodies back and forth as if rocking a hammock. They would release on the count of tres, “sending up” the prisoners only in the most figurative sense, as the bodies would soon plunge into the cold, black ocean below, into the depths of the disappeared. The young man went first, then a woman, followed by two men who looked like brothers, an older woman, and so on. Grab the ankles, swing the body, and release. El Oso was on autopilot, discharging his duty with “subordination and courage, to serve the Fatherland,” in accordance with the detention center’s ritual salute. He’d lost count of the prisoners that had, by his own hands, passed through the hatchway. His movements became almost robotic as he disposed of one subversive after another. Their faces were without expression, their transformation into zombies having begun hours earlier, back at the detention center, with the first injection of penthonaval. They went out without a sound, without any knowledge of their fate, without any final scorn for their murderers-until it was the turn of a certain young woman, who suddenly slipped free from El Oso’s grasp and grabbed him by the wrist.
Perhaps she hadn’t been dosed properly. Or maybe it was her extraordinary will to survive that had fought off the sedative and roused her to a state of semiconsciousness. Whatever the explanation, she had found the strength to reach for El Oso and grab him tightly enough to draw him halfway into the open hatchway. At the last second, he managed to brace himself against the frame with his right foot, and his teammate snagged him by the arm. He was staring into empty space, inches away from his own death at the hands of this young woman whose face was no longer without expression. She was no longer just another subversive. She fought with the determination of the young mother she was, and before she disappeared into the darkness, El Oso was struck by a bolt of recognition: he knew that it was La Cacha prisoner 309.
“Damn it, Swyteck! Put Alicia Mendoza on the phone right now!”
“I just need another minute. I swear, she’s almost here.”
Falcon pushed his memories aside, shoved them right through that yawning black hole in the back of the Skyvan, but the young mother’s face was forever lighted in his mind.
He went to Theo and put a gun to the prisoner’s head. “You’ve got one minute, Swyteck. Your buddy’s got one more minute.”
I ’m here!”
Jack heard Alicia announce her arrival just a split second before the door flew open and she hurried into the mobile command unit.
“Where the heck have you been?” said Jack.
“My parents’ house.”
“Sergeant Paulo has been psycho calling you for almost fifteen minutes. Why didn’t you answer?”
“It’s complicated.”
Jack couldn’t contain his reaction. “What do you mean it’s-”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Vince, interrupting. “She’s here, and there isn’t time for this. Alicia, I need you on the phone right now.”
“Okay.” She moved closer to the desk and took the empty seat by the phone. “What should I say?”
“Just say ‘Hello, this is Alicia Mendoza.’ Then hand the phone back to me.”
Jack said, “That’s not going to satisfy him. In fact, teasing him like that might only infuriate him and make him take it out on Theo.”
“This is negotiation, not capitulation. We let him know that Alicia’s ready to talk to him. Then I get back on the line and make him give up a hostage to get past ‘hello.’”
Jack felt a moment of anxiety, but he knew that if it were anyone but his best friend in that motel room with a gun to his head, he would have agreed wholeheartedly with Paulo’s negotiation strategy. Jack had to remain objective. “All right. But Falcon’s very close to the edge.”
“We all are,” said Paulo. He handed the phone to Alicia. She breathed in and out to compose herself, then spoke in a voice that was almost too pleasant for the circumstances. “Falcon, this is Alicia Mendoza.”
There was silence. Vince took the phone back, but he didn’t speak.
“Alicia? Is that you?” said Falcon.
“It was,” said Paulo. “She’s ready and willing to talk to you, Falcon. All you have to do is let one hostage go.”
“Put Alicia back on.”
“I will. But I need something in return. It’s not too much to ask. Just let one of the hostages go.”
“I need to speak to Alicia.”
“I understand that.”
“I just want to say two words to her.”
“I’ll give you two minutes with her if you let one of the hostages go.”
“I don’t need two minutes! Now put her on the phone, damn it!”
“I can’t do that, Falcon.”
“Don’t lie to me! You can do whatever you want.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that, because all I really want is to get the hostages and you out of this mess safely. So let’s help each other here, Falcon. Let’s help each other get what we want.”
“Okay, how’s this for help? I got a gun to the black guy’s head. Just let me talk to Alicia, and you can have him alive. Just two words.”
Paulo paused, considering it. “Two words, and you give me Theo Knight.”
“That’s all I want.”
“All right,” said Paulo. “I’ll put her on.”
He hit the mute button and handed her the phone. “When I cut off the mute button, tell him you’re back on the line. But don’t tell him anything more. I’m cutting him off after two words.”
Jack said, “I don’t think he literally meant two words.”
“I don’t care,” said Paulo. “The deal was that he gets to say two words to Alicia and then he releases Theo Knight.”
“Yeah, but he also said that he has a gun to Theo’s head. If by ‘two words’ he meant a sentence or two, you could piss him off bad enough to make him pull the trigger.”
Paulo showed no reaction. He laid his index finger atop the mute button. “Two words,” he said, as if to close all debate. He counted aloud-one, two, three-and then pressed the button.
On cue, Alicia spoke into the phone. “Falcon, it’s me again.”
There was silence on the line.
Alicia waited, and then, on Paulo’s hand signal, she tried again. “Falcon, is there something you wanted to say to me?”
A muffled noise carried over the line. It was unmistakably human, so it was clear that Falcon had not hung up, but no words were discernible. It sounded like crying, perhaps from one of the hostages.
“Alicia?” said Falcon.
Paulo raised one finger, indicating that Falcon had just spent one of his two words.
“Yes?” she said.
The sound of her voice triggered a sob over the line, and the source of the crying was no longer in question. “I’m sorry,” said Falcon.
Paulo seemed confused by the words as much as the tone. He was slow to reach for the telephone, apparently not quite so intent on limiting Falcon to his two-word deal.
“Sorry for what?” said Alicia, but as the question left her lips, the crack of a single pistol shot exploded over the line.
“Theo!” shouted Jack, fearing the worst for his friend.