The Cornwalls Are Gone Read online

  Damn!

  The current has grabbed the Chevy and is taking it downstream.

  And me along with it.

  The Wrangler stumbles back, I shift again, pumping the accelerator, and I don’t think I’m going to make it. In my mind’s eye, I can see it all, the Chevy dragging me in, the fastened chain linking my Wrangler, no way to get out, nothing to do but open the door right now and dive out onto the soggy embankment.

  Damn it!

  I see quick movement.

  Men and women are in the water, holding on to the floating Chevy, pushing it to shore, and I hit the accelerator again, and now I’m going, now I’m going. I drag the overturned vehicle a few meters and stop.

  The Chevrolet is out of the water. The driver’s-side door flops open. Water streams from it. The Hispanic father has a hammer in his hand, and he’s joined by a bulky woman in dungarees with a crowbar, and both of them attack the windows.

  I get out and slop through the mud, and by the time I get to the car, a young woman, a little girl, and a little boy have been dragged out.

  They’re coughing, they’re choking, but they’re alive.

  I stop in knee-deep water, breathing hard, as the sirens start wailing in the distance.

  A local volunteer fire department and its ambulance arrive, along with a number of volunteers with flashing red lights in their vehicles’ grilles. Then a Texas state trooper arrives, and names are taken, and photographs, and statements, and the Hispanic father—named Carlos—keeps on hugging me, and hugging me, and all the while I’m thinking, I’ve got to go, but I can’t race away, because that will raise too many questions.

  The rain finally lets up as I get away from the crowd of rescuers, onlookers, EMS, and law enforcement, and with wet and muddy boots, I get back into the Wrangler.

  The thought comes to me, like a sweet taste of wine, that I’ve rescued a family.

  I check my watch.

  I have thirty minutes to call the kidnapper with the word that I’ve fulfilled his demands.

  And I’m an hour away from Three Rivers.

  I’ve saved this family.

  And killed my own.

  CHAPTER 45

  WITH HIS trusted associate Casper Khourery at his side, Pelayo Abboud unlocks the basement door and strolls in to check on his guests. Coming in behind Casper is the woman doctor from Afghanistan, named Bahara. Even in this heat, the woman insists on wearing a loose black robe nearly covering her plump body, and a distant, human part of Pelayo admires such piousness.

  The inside of the room stinks—from fear, burnt tissue, and a foul scent from the area of the chemical toilet. The little girl cries out as they come in, and the poor man backpedals his way across the bed, until his back is up against the cement wall, his eyes wide, holding up his injured arm in an awkward position.

  “Please,” Pelayo says. “Let the doctor examine you.”

  Tom’s face is red and his eyes are swollen from all the weeping and sobbing, and even though Pelayo can sense the fear in the broken man, Tom does as he’s told and gingerly presents the burnt arm to the doctor.

  She sits across from Tom on the girl’s bed, whispers to the girl, and little Denise turns her head and looks to the wall. Tom groans a couple of times as the doctor goes through her large black valise and begins to work on Tom’s arm. It looks like a raw, bloody business, and Pelayo—who fondly recalls killing a school bully back in Veracruz by shoving a mechanical pencil in the teen boy’s right ear, said pencil having been gifted to him on his twelfth birthday by his grandfather—doesn’t flinch.

  Eventually a gauze bandage is loosely wrapped around the burnt arm, and Bahara gets up, rearranging her black robe. She steps away and whispers to Pelayo, “I…this is not what I agreed to do. This is evil work.”

  Pelayo shrugs. “Then you may leave, if you wish.”

  The Afghan doctor’s eyes widen. “For real?”

  “Certainly,” Pelayo says. “But you cannot fly or drive. So if you can determine a way of walking back to your cursed country, go. If not, stay quiet, woman, and do your job.”

  Tom Cornwall sees the doctor scurry out, and he can feel the fear and terror spread inside of him, like a splotch of oil slowly spreading across a blank pavement. With the woman in the room, there was a bit of reassurance that nothing bad would happen to him and Denise, but now, it’s his kidnapper and the other well-dressed man who is his deputy.

  Pelayo Abboud sighs, sniffs, and says something in Spanish to the other man, and he leaves as well.

  Now he is alone with the man who had earlier blowtorched his arm.

  “My apologies,” Pelayo says.

  Tom grits his teeth. “For what? Burning my arm?”

  The man grins. “Of course not.” He gestures to where the chemical toilet is hidden in the small cell. “It appears your sanitary facilities are failing. I will ensure it is taken care of, very shortly.”

  Tom looks at his bandaged left arm. The nice woman doctor—still not saying a word to him—had cleaned the large broken blister, applied some sort of ointment, and gently wrapped it with clean white gauze. She left him with a pack of painkillers.

  “May…may I ask you a question?”

  Pelayo nods. “Go ahead.”

  He pauses, tries to gather his thoughts. In his newspaper career, he thinks he has interviewed a number of evil men, from a weapons smuggler in the Philippines to a proud blood diamond traitor in Liberia, but compared to this quiet, well-dressed man with the cold gray eyes in front of him, they were Boy Scouts.

  The man’s assistant comes back into the room, whispers into Pelayo’s ear, and then he says, “Bueno,” and returns to looking at Tom.

  Tom finally says, “You…who are you?”

  Pelayo says, “Dear me. I was expecting a better question. You know who I am. I know you’ve spent enough time doing research about me and my career.”

  Pelayo gets off the bed, and Tom surprises himself by saying, “No, wait. Don’t go. I meant, who are you beyond that? Beyond what I’ve found out? What’s going on here?”

  His kidnapper chuckles. “I thought it would have been apparent, considering what you norteamericanos think any time you hear a Mexican accent.”

  “But…I’ve heard Spanish, all right. But the men who grabbed my daughter and me, I think they spoke Farsi. And I’ve heard Pashto, as well. What are you doing?”

  Pelayo pauses. “Now I’m impressed. That’s an adult question. I will spare some of my time to give you the answer.”

  He sits back on the bed. Tom glances at Denise. She is desperately holding her Tigger in one arm, and is trying to ignore the adult world so scarily nearby by working on a coloring book with her free hand.

  Pelayo sits down. “But please, Tom Cornwall. Look at the facts. You are a dinosaur working for an industry and in a world that’s already dead, but you don’t know it. You still believe in that old-fashioned thought of a free press, operating in a world with set rules and boundaries. That world is gone. National interest is gone. What remains are the conglomerates, the corporations, the cartels. The three Cs, as it would be. There is no such thing left as governments. It’s a mere shadow play and puppets, done so well that most people still believe those illusions.”

  “But…”

  “But what?”

  Tom forces the word out. “You’re evil.”

  Pelayo laughs. “Compared to what? If one of my associates machine-guns down a competitor and six of his workers at a café in Mexico City, that’s a national disgrace, a world story with large headlines about the barbarians operating beyond the fringes of the law. But when an oil company’s action incinerates a hundred or so Nigerians in the course of a day’s work, well, that small story is buried somewhere deep inside your newspapers. Am I right?”

  The man’s assistant stands there. Pelayo sits comfortably on the bed. It’s so quiet Tom hears the scritch-scritch of his daughter coloring in her book. He moves his left arm some and the pain still hits him behind
his eyes.

  “You may be correct,” he says. “But it’s not right.”

  Pelayo smiles, leans over, gives him a gentle slap on the knee. “For a while there was a world where you and your kind struggled to report the truth. That’s now gone. Every newspaper and television network is now handcuffed to their ideology, their way of looking at the world. Governments once pretended they worked for the poor common man. That’s gone as well. Your elected representatives in this so-called democracy won’t pass legislation because their paymaster lobbyists tell them what to do.”

  Pelayo stands up, shakes his head, brushes each hand as if there was some sort of dust or contaminant there. “In some ways I admire you, Tom Cornwall, still bravely struggling to stay alive and pertinent in this world. But in reality, you’re playing in the shadows, thinking it’s real. None of it’s real.”

  Tom says, “Someday, you and your kind will be stopped.”

  “Not today, not ever,” Pelayo says, now glancing at his watch. “And you best pray that your wife has not been stopped. She has…eleven minutes to contact me.”

  Tom looks to his daughter and asks the question. “What happens at the twelve-minute mark?”

  Pelayo says softly and with great courtesy. “Please, Tom, not in front of the little girl.”

  CHAPTER 46

  AT SOME point just outside of Three Rivers, Texas, the deadline passes.

  But my mission still goes on.

  The destination town is flat, with a two-lane state road passing through, and as I go by the Y intersection of Route 72 (King David Drive) and Route 281 (North Harborth Avenue), there’s a McDonald’s restaurant with flapping, colorful banners saying JUST OPENED PLEASE STOP BY.

  The homes are all single story, in tidy square yards with scraggly brown and green lawns. There’s not much here, but there’s enough, and I slowly go down what appears to be the main road, North Harborth Avenue. There are a couple of service stations, a dollar store, and little stores here and there set back from the road. This is what my supposed betters call flyover country, even though the people in that part of the country pump the oil, grow the food, and mine the ore.

  My supposed betters should hope they never band together and go on strike.

  I don’t have time, and I don’t have what I need—an idea of where Linden Street is located. I also don’t have much money, which I discovered about thirty minutes ago, when I was making a fast refueling in the previous town, called Kenedy. There I found that my wallet had been stripped of the cash from my go bag—probably by one of the bystanders back at the river rescue—and I made an equally fast withdrawal from a Bank of America ATM.

  A risky move, but I needed the money and I also did it for another reason.

  So low on cash, not knowing where I’m going, beyond the deadline.

  Pretty crappy.

  For some reason my overworked mind flashes back to the history of the Israeli-Arab war of 1967, the one called the Six-Day War. It was small Israel versus twelve Arab nations, and instead of waiting around to get slaughtered, the Israelis conducted a preemptive strike. Before the jets flew and the tanks rolled, an Israeli armored-division commander said, Each unit will push forward as fast as it can. Pay no attention to your flanks. Give no thought to resupply. If you lose nine tanks out of ten, keep advancing with the tenth. Stop for nothing.

  Right now I’m my own unit, Task Force Cornwall, and I’m stopping for nothing.

  Up ahead I see two young women walking by the side of the road, and I pull over. In a few seconds, after spinning a tale of woe about some shithead boyfriend who dumped me for parts unknown, I now know where Linden Street is located. I say thanks and get back to my driving.

  My loved ones may be dead by now. Or the kidnapper could be secretly extending the deadline. Or the kidnapper could have choked on a chicken bone last night and be dead. Or Tom and Denise could have escaped on their own.

  I don’t know.

  As an intelligence officer, I need to deal with facts and figures. Making assumptions is forbidden. So are most educated guesses.

  So I go on.

  Less than five minutes later, I come to Linden Street. It’s off another main street in this little town, called North School Road, because—wow, it has a school. I resist the urge to drive down Linden. Instead, I drive a few more meters, stop, and turn around so I can get a look.

  The street seems reasonably new and well-paved, with a half dozen homes on each side, and then the road dribbles out to a dirt path with some exposed foundations. A housing development that ran out of money?

  Possible.

  But which one is holding the prize, the key that will get my family free?

  From my glove box I pull out a pair of nice compact Zeiss binoculars, give the street a quick glance.

  Then I know.

  The last house on the right looks like every other house, a one-story structure with a carport on one side, some thin shrubbery, and twisted trees that look doomed to only grow a few feet or so.

  But that last house has a huge pickup truck parked in the small driveway, the kind of truck with big tires and overhead roll bars fitted with lights. It also has an extended cab.

  That truck is sending a signal, although its owners probably don’t realize it.

  The signal is that there are men in that house, more than one, and they have the confidence and money to strut around in such a big, visible vehicle.

  Like I said, the owners don’t realize they’ve set up a signal.

  But I do.

  I shove the binoculars back into the glove box, resume my driving.

  A few minutes later I’m parked in the shade behind a three-store strip that has a Laundromat, a dollar store, and a liquor store. I’m scribbling some notes, re-creating what I just saw on Linden Street and how best to approach it.

  I know my time deadline is far and away gone, like New Year’s Eve hats and banners from several months ago.

  But like that Israeli general said more than a half century ago, I’m stopping for nothing.

  I realize the stacked odds against me have gotten higher and higher with each passing hour, from the time delay to being robbed of all of my cash.

  But I’m still not stopping.

  If in the next hour or so, I get out of here with my guy in my Wrangler, I’ll make the call and find out where to deliver him for the trade.

  Oh, yes, I’ll make the drive, and I’ll make the trade.

  No matter what happens, I’ll bring my own kidnap victim to the criminal who’s taken my husband and daughter, and if Tom and Denise aren’t produced alive and breathing, then I’ll blow out the man’s brains in front of said criminal.

  And I’ll drop my weapon, and if I’m instantly killed or eventually sent to prison, it won’t matter a bit to me.

  Without my family, I’m dead anyway.

  CHAPTER 47

  AFTER GETTING off the phone with his mom, who is still living near Seattle with his increasingly ill father, Army Lieutenant Preston Baker goes for a walk to clear his head and stretch his legs.

  The call did not go well. A year ago, his dad, a retired engineer from Boeing, was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and in the past few months, his situation has gotten worse. There was a time when Preston’s dad would impress friends and family with his ability to multiply two-digit numbers by other two-digit numbers quickly in his head and always have the right answer, but now that’s gone.

  For the past couple of months, his father has managed to muddle through by reading little Post-it notes around the house, reminding him to zip up his pants, comb his hair, and brush his teeth, but now, as his mother tearfully said, “his doctors think we need to put him in a facility. Oh, Presty, we don’t have that kind of money!”

  And neither do I, he thinks, as he walks along the roads near his apartment complex, wearing jeans and a faded blue polo shirt, taking his time, going from one busy intersection to another.

  To anyone out there, it would look li
ke Preston was wandering aimlessly, but there is a point to his walk, and after fifteen minutes he gets to a dingy-looking 7-Eleven next to a Shell station. The area around the gas station is littered with plastic bottles, plastic bags, fast-food wrappers, and other trash, but the 7-Eleven is relatively clean, because the guy running it—an immigrant from New Delhi—is an old-fashioned sort who wants to keep his place tidy.

  Preston ducks around the corner. Another way the guy is old-fashioned is that he likes to maintain a pay phone on the outside, even now, in a time when one could pick up a cheap burner phone for just a few bucks.

  But Preston isn’t looking to save a few bucks.

  He’s looking to save his career in the Army.

  He drops a fistful of quarters into the phone, which has bright stickers in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, announcing its wonderful calling plans, and dials a number.

  It rings once, twice, and then is picked up.

  “Yes?” comes a familiar voice, from a man he’s never met.

  “She came by yesterday, the woman you talked about.”

  “And?”

  Preston turns away, as if trying to hide his face from anyone walking by with their Slim Jims or Slurpees. “I told her the story. The one you wanted me to say.”

  “Did it go all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think she was satisfied?”

  “I…think so. She didn’t stay that long. It was like she just wanted to confirm what she already knew. Or suspected.”

  The man says, “You did good. There’ll be a wire transfer to your account within the next twelve hours. Anything else?”

  “I…well, suppose she comes back?”

  “Stick to the story.”

  “But suppose she asks lots more questions.”

  “Stick to the story.”

  “Yeah, I know, but—”

  There’s a click and the man has hung up.