Frustration, anger and impotence welled up in him. It mushroomed around him like a great shadowy monster. All he’d wanted was to make amends, to try somehow to show her, wherever she was, that he hadn’t meant to let her down. That, were he given the time over, he would willingly sacrifice his own life in place of hers. But that wasn’t possible, so making this movie, immortalizing her memory and bringing her killers to justice, was the only way he could think of to let the whole world, and her, know that he still loved her, still thought about her every day and still longed for her in a way he knew he would never long for any other woman.
He sat very still, showing nothing of the torment going on inside him. Sandy was beside him, allowing him the silence he needed. She had seen the e-mail too, and being unused to Colombian ways, her shock had been even more profound than his. He wished he hadn’t shown her. There was no good reason to show anyone the terrible image that had been transmitted from Bogotá. They’d contacted him direct this time, obviously wanting no doubts about the message reaching him. There had been a message from Alan Day too – it seemed they had e-mailed him as a backup.
Chambers felt sick to his stomach, and afraid in a way
he
hadn’t been in a very long time. He knew the most important thing now was not to panic, or do anything rash that would end up causing more confusion and damage. He had to think about this as rationally as he was able, to sort out in his mind what he could do to stop the barbaric slaughter Galeano and his people had already set in motion.
By the time the plane landed and they were through customs, Michael was outside in the car. Seeing the Land Cruiser, Sandy pointed it out, then, stopping Tom as he made to go towards it, she said, ‘You two need to talk. I’ll take a taxi and see you back at the hotel.’
He nodded, kissed her hard on the forehead, and went to get in the car.
As Michael pulled away Chambers folded down the visor, attempting to see if they were being followed. There was so much traffic it was impossible to tell.
‘I need to know,’ he said abruptly, ‘if Ellen has received any more calls.’
Michael glanced at him, then indicated to change lanes. ‘No,’ he said, narrowly avoiding a car rental bus.
Chambers allowed himself a moment’s relief.
‘Why?’ Michael demanded. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Something I wasn’t expecting,’ Chambers responded. ‘It wasn’t what they’ve been preparing us for. I guess the schmozo who’s been calling me, the one who made out he was contacting someone else on the unit too, was just a decoy, someone to make us look the other way while they worked out the next best way to get to me. I say next best, because obviously going after Ellen would have been the worst. But if she hasn’t received any more calls then we can probably assume the one she got, that she wasn’t even sure was a threat, was benign.’ He glanced over at Michael. ‘We should keep on with the bodyguard though, just to make sure, but my guess is they don’t want to bring the Feds down on their case, which is what it would mean if anything happened to her.’
Michael swallowed hard. ‘You think just the threat of the Feds is enough to keep them away?’ he said.
‘I sure hope so,’ Chambers replied. ‘But what we’re facing now has already become a reality. Find a place to pull over, you need to see this e-mail.’
They sped out of the airport, hanging a left down on to Sepulveda, and at the first hotel Michael pulled into the parking lot.
Chambers’s laptop was already open, the image he had downloaded there on the screen. He passed it over to Michael.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Michael murmured, when he saw the mutilated body of a teenage boy. He felt his stomach rise and the air lock in his lungs. During all his years in the business he had seen a thousand pictures like this, but none had ever been real. There was no doubt in his mind that this one was. ‘Who is it, do you know?’ he said quietly.
‘His name’s Casto,’ Chambers answered, his face totally devoid of colour, his words without tone. ‘He’s one of the kids Rachel photographed for her exhibition.’ A stark bitterness crept into his voice. ‘The exhibition we’re due to start shooting at the end of the week.’ He looked at the picture of the boy again, then looked away. ‘His story’s not unique,’ he said. ‘Sold by his mother, age five, for the price of a hit, taken in by a bunch of druggies who used him as a house-slave until he was ten. Then they put him into prostitution. He ran away, lived on the streets, continued his prostitution in order to survive. Sniffed glue, smoked basuco, got regularly abused in ways you don’t even want to hear about. A street-smart, mischievous kid, with a wicked humour and a spirit that kept him alive when no doctor would even check him over. Not a handsome boy, which was why he was so badly abused – no pity for ugly gay boys in the macho world of Bogotá. Got his teeth smashed out by one of his tricks who thought it would make for a better blow-job.’
His eyes returned to the downloaded image of Casto’s chubby, twisted little body lying in a doorway, neck so deeply cut his head was almost severed. ‘He told me once he wanted to be a movie star and live in a big house with gates and bars and security guards so that no-one could ever get to him again,’ Chambers murmured.
Michael was so appalled he could barely find any words. ‘So what’s the message?’ he asked.
‘The message,’ Chambers responded, ‘is that for every day the movie goes on one of these kids, the ones Rachel took shots of, is going to die.’
Michael’s face drained as he stared at Chambers in disbelief. ‘You can’t be serious,’ he said.
‘No-one gives a fuck about any of these kids,’ Chambers responded. ‘They’re
gamines, desechables
– gutter waste, disposable.’
With a horrible morbidity Michael looked at Casto’s picture again and tried not to measure his own livelihood and reputation against the lives of children such as this. That was what it was now coming down to, because in order to save these kids he was going to have to jeopardize, and probably lose, everything he owned in the world – his agency in London, his stake in World Wide, his homes in London, Barbados and LA, not to mention all the hard-won commitments from investors – and bring the movie to a standstill. Not only a standstill, a total demise. And then he would have to look at the debts, the lawsuits, the bankruptcy and probable prison sentence that would inevitably follow. His brain began speeding, so fast he felt nauseous.
‘Fuck,’ he muttered. ‘Fuck, fuck, and fuck.’ He looked at Chambers.
Chambers looked back helplessly. He knew what this meant to Michael, so was under no illusion how much he was asking.
In the end Michael said, ‘There’s no choice, is there?’
‘There’s always a choice,’ Chambers responded.
Michael sighed. ‘You think I’d let them die?’
Chambers shook his head.
‘Were it just me, I could try to do what you’re asking,’ Michael said. ‘But there’re the other shareholders, and I just can’t see them going for this. Christ, I can hear Forgon already.’
Chambers remained silent.
Michael turned to look out of the window, his eyes unfocused on the passing rush of headlights. He thought of Robbie and knew there was no way in the world he could live with himself if he didn’t do something to rescue these kids, no matter what the cost to himself. But still he felt sick, wishing to God he could think of something, anything, that would avert this disaster. He’d never dreamt that the day would come when Forgon would be his saviour, but right now that was exactly what he could turn out to be, for there was just no way Michael could see him agreeing to pull out of the movie. Too many stood to lose too much, including Forgon who personally was in to the tune of two million. And over twenty million more was already committed in ways it was impossible to back out of without facing bankruptcy and maybe prison.
His hand went to his head. The very idea of the bond company coughing up was so delusional it was laughable. The rest of the world had never cared about these kids before, and now with so much money at stake he could already hear the answers, that they were probably better off dead anyway.
Taking out his cellphone he started to dial.
‘Who are you calling?’ Chambers asked.
‘Forgon. If he’s home we’ll go over there now.’
Forgon’s leathery face was incredulous. In fact, he was so stunned by what Chambers and McCann had just shown him – and then told him – that he couldn’t find a way to express his amazement. ‘Let me get this straight,’
he
said, when finally he recovered his speech. ‘You want me to turn tail on this movie because a bunch of badass Spies are threatening to off a few kids no-one’s ever gonna miss, except the poor bastards they rob and contaminate with their foul diseases?’ He looked at Michael. ‘Did you get a brain bypass, boy? I mean, did you fuck up your wits with some shit drug, or something, because it’s the only reason I can think of that you’d actually come here and ask me this, like I was going to give a fuck?’
Michael glanced at Chambers. He was about to speak when Chambers beat him to it.
‘I think you should know that I’ve got a lot of powerful friends in the media,’ he said, guessing blackmail was the language Forgon understood best, ‘and they’re just going to lap up the story of how Mr Bigshot Hollywood Producer let innocent kids die rather than lose a few million.’
‘A few million!’ Forgon exploded. ‘You call what we’ve got invested here a few million? The last figures I saw we were in for over twenty, and I sure as hell don’t call that a few. Now I suggest you go get yourselves a hit on reality, before you start believing anything you say is going to persuade me. We got some important people here who’ve put up as much as five million bucks each, do you seriously think they’re going to give a fuck about a few kids in a city half of ’em probably never even heard of?’
‘We need to take a vote on this,’ Michael said. ‘I’ve already called Maggie to get her to set up a shareholders’ meeting.’
Forgon’s eyes almost burst from his head. ‘You’re getting Mark Bergin over here from Sydney for
this
!’ he spat. ‘Did you lose your mind? The man’s not going to vote with you on this. No-one in his right mind’s going to vote with you on this.’
‘Sandy will,’ Chambers told him.
Forgon looked at him in astonishment. ‘Is that so?’ he responded sceptically. ‘Did you ask her?’
Chambers couldn’t lie.
Forgon started to laugh. ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘If you think she’s going to vote with you when she, personally, is answerable to at least half the investors, then you really are cruising with your lights out.’
Chambers looked at Michael.
‘We’ll let you know about the shareholders’ meeting,’ Michael said, and nodding to Chambers he led the way out of the room.
By six the following evening Chris Ruskin in New York and Mark Bergin in Sydney had agreed to fly to LA to attend a shareholders’ meeting. Knowing what was on the agenda, Bergin had already warned Michael that he couldn’t rely on him for support. Ruskin hadn’t yet committed, either to Michael or to Forgon. Nor had Sandy, she’d wanted to speak to her investors first, which Michael had understood, but Chambers hadn’t.
‘These are children, Sandy,’ he raged.
‘I understand that!’ she cried. ‘And I swear, if it were my money I’d be prepared to do what you’re asking. But it’s not mine, and I owe these people, Tom. It wasn’t only their money they gave me, it was their trust.’
‘So you speak to them, and then what? You think they’re going to sanction you voting with Michael?’
‘No,’ she said truthfully. ‘I don’t. But try to see this from my point of view. I
have
to consult them, not only morally, but very possibly legally.’
‘You’re the shareholder in World Wide. They have no say over how you vote there.’
‘Of course they don’t, but it’s their investments that hang on the way I vote. Tom, please. I’d give anything for this to be just my decision, but we both have to face the fact …’
‘That you don’t care about the kids that are getting
killed
,’ he shouted, and before she could say any more he slammed out of the room.
The next morning Chambers downloaded the image of another child murder in Bogotá. This time the victim was a sixteen-year-old girl, whose broken, bullet-ridden body was slumped under a swing in a playground, a used syringe and a cuddly toy only inches from her outstretched hand. Her name was Priscilia. Chambers remembered her well, for many was the time she had tried to come onto him, using her then twelve-year-old body with a sophistication and guile it was tragic to behold in one so young. He guessed it was nothing short of a miracle that she had managed to stay alive this long, but that didn’t change the fact that she didn’t deserve to die like this.
It had been several hours now since he’d last heard from Alan Day, which could be either good or bad. Bad if anything had happened to the man, good if he was managing to get through to General Goméz – just about the only man on the ground who could help them with this. For the time being all Chambers could do was wait, and pray that the rest of Rachel’s wretched child subjects were long gone from Bogotá – or even the world. It wasn’t likely that many of them were surviving, most didn’t last more than a few years on the streets, but as the hours ticked by and the cameras continued to roll he could only thank God that Rachel had never known what a terrible price her photographs were ultimately costing the children.
Ellen looked at Sandy’s calm blue eyes and felt stunned. Not only stunned, but outraged and maddeningly confused. Were she talking to anyone else she might be thinking she hadn’t heard quite right, but as it was Sandy she knew she had, though precisely how she felt about what she’d heard she just couldn’t get a grip on.
‘I’m sure you’d like some time to think this over,’ Sandy said, ‘but as you know, we don’t have that luxury, so I’m going to have to ask you for an answer.’
Ellen blinked, looked away for a moment, then returned her eyes to Sandy. They were sitting in Ellen’s office. Sandy was on one of the sofas, Ellen was squashed into a leather armchair. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I just want to be clear about this. What you’re saying is, that you’ll give me
twelve
per cent of your shares in World Wide in return for me telling Michael this baby is his?’