Betrayed (45 page)

“And the girl?”

So quickly she was not a person they’d known but an anonymous subject. An obstruction. Vicki might have been invisible for all that either man looked her direction.

“We can’t take her. She’d draw too many eyes. And we can’t let her go. She’ll run straight to Camden.”

“So leave her here with Garcia?”

“No, we’ll need him.” Joe glanced around. “But this’ll do unless she’s a monkey.” He scattered the contents of Vicki’s pack on the table, shook the half-empty canteen, and glanced at the food she’d brought. “She’s got supplies to hold her until we can deal with her. Do you need to use a restroom?”

Vicki didn’t realize he was addressing her until she caught the arched eyebrow. She shook her head.

“Better take the sat phone and computer though. You can bet she’d figure out how to make use of them.” Disconnecting wires, Joe scooped up the laptop and satellite phone setup, even lifting the modem off the wall, leaving only the dangling wires. He touched something on the shelf wall, then pushed it open. “Bring the maps. And we need to move. We’ve lost too much time.” Without a backwards glance, he was through the opening.

Bill grabbed the aerial maps. He lingered briefly in the entrance, and Vicki saw what might have been regret, even compassion, in his eyes as he turned to her. “I’m sorry about this. I wish you hadn’t gotten involved. It’ll be okay. I prom—”

“Taylor! We’re on a countdown!”

The wall panel clicked shut behind the old man.

And Vicki was alone.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Despite Joe’s confidence, Vicki spent her first minutes determined to find a way out. She quickly found the button Joe had used to open the pottery shelf wall. Her own repeated jabs produced no response. Though that would have been too easy.

There must be an override lock in the outer office, or the two men would have never left her in here. The wall itself had looked like ordinary shelves bracketed onto a plastered wall just like the other shelves around the office. But on touching it, Vicki could feel solid metal under the paint, and where her fingers traced the edge, it fit smoothly into a steel jamb. She broke a nail prying on it before she gave up and turned to the rest of the safe room.

The other three walls rose sheer to the ridge-pole, easily three times Vicki’s height, the plastered concrete offering not a single handhold. Vicki climbed onto the table, feeling it sway precariously under her weight. But this closed only half the distance. Next she turned her attention to the file cabinets. They were all locked and too heavy to even budge. She broke another fingernail on the drawer into which Bill had dumped her birth father’s photos before giving up on its lock. With phone, computer, and map gone, the room’s remaining contents were Vicki’s food and water supplies, the empty folders still scattered on the floor, a few wires hanging from the rafters, and the night vision goggles still sitting on the table. Maybe classic TV's McGyver could engineer an escape plan out of them, but Vicki was no prime-time adventuring genius.

All that remained was what any self-respecting heroine in captivity did next.

Scream.

“
¡Socorro!
Help!
¡Socorro!
” Vicki’s throat was sore, her body trembling, when she finally gave up. It wasn’t just the thickness of concrete and brick, soundproof enough that Vicki hadn’t heard the pickup leaving, though the men must be long gone by now. A clear image came to her of the empty fields she’d seen from the ridge around the hacienda. Even if Joe had pulled the veranda guard, there was still the guard at the gate and a work force drilled to maintain a respectful distance from Bill’s living space. Something Joe had certainly taken into account.

Sinking into the single chair, Vicki dropped her face into her hands. But only for a moment. Banishing weakness with a deep breath, she straightened and reached for the canteen. She was unscrewing the lid when her gaze chanced on one other object left on the table among strewn finger bananas, oranges, and rolls.

Holly’s PDA.

It made little difference now except to hold her thoughts at bay, but Vicki turned it on and started perusing its contents again, this time reading line by line through the Human Rights Watch report and other documents. In the context of her birth father’s photos and Bill’s own admissions, paragraphs leaped out at her with new relevance.

Most striking was just how extensive the CIA’s involvement had been in Guatemala, at least according to footnotes from numerous declassified documents, including some Holly had managed to download in their entirety. Lynn had been right that day at the WRC hostel. With a free hand offered them by a grateful aristocracy, the CIA had made the Central American isthmus their experimental laboratory for decades. Not just in the distant past but more recently, even during the decades when the country’s blatant human rights abuses had evoked a congressional moratorium on US military and government aid.

Worse, if these declassified documents were accurate, any number of informants on CIA payrolls were not only trained by US military aid programs but were among the more well-documented human rights abusers.

A connection to Holly’s drug-dealing downloads became clear toward the end where a DEA whistle-blower complained of the CIA sabotaging their counternarcotics operations to protect intelligence assets who were known traffickers. The Iran-Contra scandal rated a mention as a primary case in point.

Vicki took particular notice of the indictment by a US judge of a Guatemalan colonel and CIA informant for the murder of an American expat innkeeper, a certain Michael Devine, in a remote tourist destination, presumably for having stumbled over the colonel’s drug operation. Had that killer also been Castro II?

But, no, Bill had given Castro II a name. Hernandez.

If Vicki had the newspaper printout currently in her duffel bag, she could dig up Hernandez’s full name among that list of training program graduates, but it definitely wasn’t the one in this report. Not that the American innkeeper’s killer had been called to account either, despite that indictment. In fact, the report concluded with the denunciation that no Guatemalan military or government personnel had been held to account for any atrocities committed in the last fifty years. Nor had the US government ever ceased to laud Guatemala as their staunchest regional ally.

That’s right. Didn’t they just try to nominate Guatemala to the security council? Things still haven’t changed
.

The final recommendation: an immediate cutting of all military aid and strict accountability measures for any further State Department involvement in Guatemala. Since the report was two years old, it had clearly been ignored.

In the PDA’s picture album Vicki found more JPEGs beyond the close-up of a younger Bill Taylor. Holly had cropped and enlarged the other two American advisors as well. Vicki recognized neither, but both had the tight-jawed determination and narrowed, watchful gaze Vicki had seen in Michael and Joe. The look of an elite soldier.

The individual graduates had been enlarged as well. Vicki ticked off those she’d come to know. Hernandez. UPN Commander Ramon Alpiro. Chief of Police Gualberto Alvarez. The minister of environment, Francisco Soliz. And one would be the zoo administrator, Samuel Justiniano, though Vicki didn’t know which face belonged to him. These at least had moved into the well-connected positions Bill had anticipated when the CIA chose and recruited them twenty years earlier.

The battery died in mid-JPEG, and Vicki set the unit back onto the table. What impressed her most was just how much Holly had pieced together even without Vicki’s discovery of their birth parents.

Now with nothing else to occupy hands or mind, thoughts Vicki had been trying to stave off came crashing down. Had Cesar managed to alert the village? What would happen to them if Vicki failed to rouse official help? Were the poppy fields being scythed, the camouflage netting and tents coming down, the opium bricks being loaded into the DHC-2 so that even if someone did come to look, no sign would be left that the Sierra de las Minas biosphere had ever held a sizeable narcotrafficking operation? And how long did she have before Bill and Joe came back?

What would happen when they did?

Vicki didn’t see how they could let her go. Not with what she now knew. Yet whatever murderous rage Joe had so quickly veiled with indifference, she hadn’t forgotten the look of regret, even compassion, Bill had given her as he’d stepped out of this prison cell. The kindness he had shown a number of times over these last weeks. Even all those years ago when he’d snatched two small girls and a Mayan village boy from that massacre and made at least some personal effort to give them a new life. Whatever the former CIA agent had been or done all those decades he’d flown in and out of Guatemala, he clearly had his own code of ethics, and wantonly killing civilians was not part of it.

So Vicki was back at the question she’d thrown at the two men. Why Holly?

If a lifetime of practice in lies and deceit wasn’t enough to deflect Holly from her bulldog course, why not just kidnap her? Once the biosphere was scoured clean of evidence, Vicki had seen nothing in Holly’s possession that would hold up in any court of law. And both the CIA and Guatemalan authorities had ample experience in screaming injured innocence against far more substantial allegations than Holly would be able to bring.

As for the photos in Bill’s possession, not only had Holly known nothing about them, but despite what Vicki had thrown at him, she didn’t see what leverage they could still hold on him after two decades. Those were sins of the past, not the present, the Americans involved and their superiors long retired, the happenings themselves no longer state secrets but documented in the hundreds by the UN Truth Commission. And as the report she’d just read had made clear, none of the perpetrators had paid any penalty. Other than survivors like Vicki herself, who would really care? Not enough to be worth Holly’s life.

Or had the Americans once again simply walked in too late?

Vicki folded her arms on the table and dropped her face wearily into them.
I still haven’t made sense out of all this. I just know I’ve messed things up so badly
.

“
Do what is right and do not give way to fear.” I really thought I was doing that when I came here. That I could make a difference. But what good have I done? If I hadn’t run to Bill, there’d still be a chance. And if I hadn’t come here at all, at least the villagers would be safe. Now they’re going to get away with it. I’m trapped in here like Sarah in her harem
.

And Bill and Joe—I still don’t know how I could have been so wrong. Everything they said—everything Joe said . . . I let myself like him, maybe even start to care about him, even when I knew he was hiding something, because what he said had so much truth and beauty. What he said about You. He helped me see You again. See the beauty and not just the pain in the world You created
.

And what he said was true. I won’t let him take that away just because he proved false. I believe that this is Your world, and no matter what’s happening out there, You’re still in control. And I believe You can rescue me just like You rescued Sarah in that harem. Because it wasn’t Abraham who got her out of there; it was You
.

But even if You don’t, even if what happened to Holly happens to me, I know You’re with me, and I know You were with Holly when she must have been as scared stiff as I am right now. And . . . and I choose to believe what Joe said—that You have something waiting beyond all the wars and the pain and wicked people getting away with murder that’s going to make all this worth going through. Something so beautiful I can’t imagine it
.

Then, because she wouldn’t let herself give way again to tears and if she didn’t rouse herself soon from this slumped position, she’d be too stiff to move at all, Vicki pushed herself back to her feet and began to call out again, “
¡Socorro!
”

The only answer was a faint echo of her voice against the roof tiles, and after a few minutes Vicki’s voice gave out. She picked up the night vision goggles and slammed them against the pottery shelf wall. The collision of goggles on painted metal made a gratifying noise, so she repeated it again and again.
I’ll keep it up till Bill and Joe come back, or someone comes by to let me out
.

It wasn’t her strength but the NVGs that let Vicki down. First the casing cracked. Then the pieces began to fall apart in her hands until in frustration she threw the remnants into a corner and raised her voice instead, alternating shouts with pounding her fists and kicking her boots against the steel.