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  I insisted on helping with his stretcher. I desperately needed him to regain enough consciousness to tell me where my family was. We took Perrine up through his Hanging Gardens of Babylon, through the back of the mansion, and pigeonholed him in a ground-floor office.

  As the medics worked on trying to get him awake, I decided to scour the house for any sign of my family. The inside was as opulent as the outside, if that were possible. Twenty-foot coffered ceilings, wedding-cake moldings. In the jaw-dropping, ballroomlike kitchen was an island slabbed with some kind of blue gemstone.

  Some Delta Force guys were sitting on it, passing around a bottle of Dom Pérignon. Beside them was a long-faced guy handcuffed to a chair.

  “Who’s this?” I asked them.

  “He says he’s the butler,” said one of the commandos, with a southern drawl. “He also claims he no habla inglés, but look at him. Look at those tombstone chompers on him. This guy’s a Brit if I ever saw one.”

  “The butler, huh?” I said, immediately drawing my Glock. A round was already chambered in the pipe. I’d dealt with the fabulously rich before, back in Manhattan, and knew that butlers, like doormen, know everything.

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Chill out!” the southern Delta Force guy said as I pressed the barrel under the guy’s chin.

  I ignored him as I stared into the butler’s eyes.

  “One question,” I said. “One chance to get it right. A plane arrived after Perrine. There were prisoners in it. Where are they?”

  “Up at the lake house,” he said with an upper-crust British accent. “There’s a road behind the runway.”

  CHAPTER 96

  MINUTES LATER, I WAS roaring up the mountain road behind the runway on the back of one of the four-wheelers the Delta Force guys had wisely thought to bring with them.

  As we were pulling into the front yard, AK-47 fire raked the dirt in front of us.

  “Guess we didn’t get all of them!” I screamed as I dove off the vehicle and rolled behind a low stone wall.

  The Delta Force guys seemed much less fazed by the turn of events. Instead of retreating, they sped even faster forward on the four-wheelers, pouring deadly-accurate fire into the window as they went. Some big Delta Force psycho, who I learned later had played right tackle for Georgia Tech, actually drove his four-wheeler up onto the porch and put his size-fourteen boot to the door’s lock.

  Half of the door’s frame was actually ripped off as he caved it in. Then one of his buddies threw in something I’d never heard of before. Not just one flash-bang grenade, but a whole firecracker pack of them suddenly went off.

  They poured into the house behind the deafening banging. I rushed in behind them, eyes scanning the corners of the rooms I ran past. There was a bar, red couches, rococo mirrors. My family couldn’t be here. This wasn’t happening. I almost got sick. It looked like a brothel of some sort.

  “Bennett! Back here! Back here!” one of the Delta Force guys cried.

  I burst into a room.

  How can men be so evil? I thought, looking around. Just how?

  There were children.

  Crouching fearfully on stained mattresses were about a dozen twelve- or thirteen-year-old girls. Relief flowed through me as I put my light on their tragic faces and realized that they weren’t my kids.

  Then the relief disappeared as my dread flooded back. If my guys weren’t here, then where the hell were they?

  CHAPTER 97

  A FIVE-TRUCK CONTINGENT of Mexican federales and military had arrived by the time we raced back to the main house. Inside, six or seven Mexican soldiers were standing out in front of the door to the office where Perrine had been secured.

  “What the hell is going on?” I said to Emily, who had her phone to her ear.

  “The Mexicans are claiming they need to interrogate Perrine. Washington told us to back off. We had to let them.”

  “Is Perrine conscious?” I asked.

  “I think so. Just barely,” Emily said.

  “I need to talk to him, Emily,” I said as I walked toward the office. “My family wasn’t up at that house. They didn’t come in on that second plane. I need to know where they are.”

  “Calm down, Mike. You’ll get your chance,” Emily whispered. “Sit tight and let the honchos hash it out first. This is a delicate situation.”

  “Not gonna happen,” I said, turning and marching past her, toward the guards. “No more hashing.”

  A crackerjack-looking, silver-haired Mexican soldier in a beret stepped in front of the door with his hands behind his back as I approached.

  “May I help you?” he said with a smile.

  “I’m United States law enforcement,” I said, showing him my federal badge. “That man has been placed under arrest by me, and I need to speak with my prisoner.”

  His smile didn’t waver.

  “Impossible,” he said as his men stepped up beside him menacingly. “This is Mexican soil and a Mexican matter. If you persist in annoying me, I shall be forced to place you under arrest.”

  I stared at him, trying to figure his angle. Will they try to take Perrine? I thought. Is that it?

  I turned at a sound behind me to find my new Delta Force pals filling the hallway.

  “Well, if you continue annoying my buddy,” said the monster soldier who’d smashed in the lake house door, “me and my friends will be forced to place you fellas underground, comprende? Now open that door!”

  That was when it happened.

  From the other side of the door came a crisp, sudden POP!

  I bulled my way in past the Mexican colonel and through the door.

  Perrine was still sitting on the stretcher we’d brought him in on, with his hands cuffed behind his back. He was shot through the head, and his brains were blown out against the marble lintel of the fireplace.

  Another colonel inside the office shrugged as he holstered his pistol.

  “I had no choice. He was trying to escape.”

  I realized it then. They were cleaning up. Perrine knew too much. About the government, how far the corruption went. And still my family was missing. They’d killed the only man who knew where they were. Would this nightmare never end?

  I lunged for the bastard who’d killed Perrine, but I didn’t get a foot before someone grabbed me from behind. There was a lot of shoving, a lot of cursing in two languages, but it finally died down. I started shaking as I broke free and headed for the mansion’s back door to the backyard, where they had just brought some of the Salvajes cartel guys they’d captured.

  Someone is going to tell me where my family is, I thought as I reached for the handle of the French door.

  I hadn’t gotten it halfway open when Emily slammed into me. She was grinning as she shoved a phone into my hand. I put it to my ear.

  “Mike? Mike? Is that you?” said a voice. It was an Irish voice, an Irish woman’s voice.

  I took the phone off my ear and stared at it. For a moment, I thought I was hallucinating. I slid to the floor. I put the phone back to my ear.

  “Mary Catherine?” I said. “Mary Catherine?”

  “Mike!” Mary Catherine said. “Oh, thank God, Mike.”

  “But how—? Where—?” I sputtered. “Are you OK? Are the kids OK?”

  “We’re all fine, Mike. The children, Seamus, me, and Mr. Cody are fine.”

  CHAPTER 98

  “WHAT? HOW? WHERE?” CAME Mike’s voice from the old CB receiver in front of Mary Catherine. She pressed the red key with her thumb.

  “Don’t worry, Mike. We’re hiding out in a place not too far from Mr. Cody’s, a safe place,” she said, and let the button off.

  “But the cartel sent a video of them kicking in the front door in the middle of the night,” Mike said from the boxy unit’s speaker. “I thought you were kidnapped. I don’t understand.”

  “For the last day, we’ve been hiding out at Mr. McMurphy’s house, up in the hills north of Mr. Cody’s,” Mary Catherine said. “We would have called y
ou sooner, but there’s no phone service up here. I’m actually talking to you over Mr. McMurphy’s CB that he uses when he needs to contact someone.”

  “A CB?”

  “Yes. Mr. McMurphy contacts his friend a few miles away on the radio band, and then his friend patches him through to a phone. But the friend was away for a few days and just got back. That’s why we haven’t been able to contact you.”

  “Wait. McMurphy?” I said. “Who the hell is he?”

  “A nice man from town. He said he met you at church a few weeks ago when Seamus filled in to say Mass.”

  I shook my head in disbelief as I remembered the Nick Nolte-ish hippie with the gun.

  “Him?” I said. “How did he get involved?”

  “Up here in the hills, he’s got a, um, unique farm, Mike. He keeps a low profile because of the business he’s in. He also keeps his eyes and ears open. He heard through the grapevine in town about the cartel looking around for us. He was coming by to tell us that we were in danger right as the cartel was heading for the house.

  “He came in the back door and woke us up and walked us down in the dark through one of the neighboring farms, to his truck. He drove us up to his place in the hills, and we’re still here.”

  “So I’m not dreaming?” Mike said. “You’re all alive and well?”

  “You’ll not get rid of us that easy,” Mary Catherine said. “I’d put the kids on the phone, but they’re exhausted, and I’d just as soon let them sleep. Now that the coast seems clear, Mr. McMurphy is going to drive us down to the Susanville PD in the morning. How does that sound?”

  CHAPTER 99

  ON AN OLD DIRT mining road in the rugged hills northeast of Susanville, in a place called the Tunnison Mountain Wilderness Study Area, a boxy Land Rover Defender with a whip antenna attached to its roof suddenly stopped as Vida Gomez put a hand to the driver’s chest.

  She adjusted away the static on the radio monitor she held just in time to hear Bennett answer the nanny loud and clear in her earbud.

  “That sounds good. I’m on my way back. I’ll meet you there.”

  “My God! It’s him!” Vida said. “It’s Bennett himself. Tell me you’re getting this!”

  In the seat behind her, Eduardo checked the frequency on her radio monitor, then rapidly clicked at a laptop that was attached to the antenna. The screen showing their present GPS location locked for a moment, and then a pin appeared, showing the estimated position of the transmission.

  The pin began to pulse strongly as the nanny said good night to Bennett.

  Eduardo checked the screen against his compass and the geological survey map spread out on the seat beside him. He had worked in the signal corps of the Colombian government catching narcoterrorists before he had met Perrine and switched sides. There was no one better in the cartel at radio tracking than he.

  He pointed to the juniper-covered hill beside them, toward a stand of trees.

  “The nanny and Bennett’s kids are less than a mile up there somewhere,” he said.

  Vida got on the radio, and after a minute, another 4x4, an FJ Cruiser, rolled down the steep incline of the mining road from the opposite direction.

  “You have a hit?” Estefan said from behind the FJ’s wheel.

  “We just heard Bennett and the nanny,” Vida said excitedly. “The software is saying we are within a mile, that they’re up in those trees.”

  “Good,” Estefan said. “About two hundred feet back up the road, I saw a tire track going that way.”

  Vida smiled. She knew that the play after finding the Bennett safe house empty was to come up here to Northern California and conduct the search herself. Their contacts in town had put them onto an old, half-mad hippie doper who lived somewhere around here. His name was McMurphy, and not only had he given the cartel trouble in the past, but he’d actually been seen talking to the Bennetts at church.

  She had tried to contact Perrine several times for running orders, but he wasn’t answering. It was his party, she knew. She could picture him in his tux, presiding over the events.

  She felt a tug of envy at not being invited. No matter. In the back of the Rover were twelve air-shipment boxes with dry ice. Twelve little boxes that would be packed with twelve Bennett heads and would be on their way to Real del Monte by morning. Manuel would know soon enough her devotion to him.

  Around Vida’s neck, on a gold chain, was the emerald ring Perrine had given her after she’d finally broken him down and they’d made love the last day of his stay. They didn’t use protection, and it was the middle of her cycle. She hadn’t taken a test, but she knew she was pregnant with his baby. It would be a boy, as handsome as his father.

  Everyone had said what a charming man he was, but he was far better than just that. In their time together, he had been so kind to her, asked about her daughters, her life. He was like a father to her, or at least what she thought a father might be like, having never actually had one.

  She sighed as a full-body tingle glowed all around her. Her, Vida. A simple farm girl. She’d always known she was special. That things would change for the better. And they would be getting better beyond her wildest dreams. For now, inside her, growing, was the Sun Prince.

  “Vida!” said Estefan.

  “Yes?” she said, shaking off the daydream.

  “Shall we drive a little farther in or leave the cars here and walk?”

  Vida grabbed her machine pistol and opened the door.

  “Let’s walk, but quickly,” she said. “I want out of this shithole before the sun comes up.”

  CHAPTER 100

  McMURPHY CAME IN AND placed a cup of tea in front of Mary Catherine as she hung up the CB.

  “Did you get in contact with Mike?” he asked, plopping down in a camp chair.

  “Yes, I did,” Mary Catherine said, taking a sip. “Don’t worry. I didn’t tell him where we are. I wouldn’t want you or your, eh, farm to get into trouble with the law or anyone else, after all you’ve done for us. Actually, I couldn’t have told him if I’d wanted to. I don’t know where we are.”

  McMurphy laughed.

  “Heck, sometimes even I get lost out here,” the burly sixty-year-old said. “But I figured remote is what the doctor ordered, with those bad old Mexican cowboys after you. This is the safest place I thought to bring you to.”

  The McMurphy Mountain Compound was actually pretty incredible. Instead of the run-down shack and marijuana fields she was expecting, his home was a sophisticated and elaborate underground bunker. Built almost directly into the side of a hill, his hobbit hole, as he called it, consisted of twenty old school-bus frames welded together in a long corridor with rooms T-ing off to the right and left.

  Convinced of an impending nuclear attack, he’d built the complex in the eighties with some friends. Over a few months, they’d brought up the old buses one by one on a 4x4 flatbed, dug out the hill, welded them all together, and then buried them again.

  He told her that when the nuclear winter didn’t materialize, he slowly started to move his already flourishing marijuana farm underground, out of sight from the nosy feds. Most of the rooms were currently being used as hydroponic marijuana grow rooms, but there was also a kitchen, a gun room, a workshop, and several bedrooms stacked with bunk beds, where the kids now slept.

  It had heat, ventilation, electricity run off propane, fresh water. Even two neat and clean bathrooms with showers and working toilets.

  It wasn’t just the compound that was surprising. McMurphy, despite his frazzled, nutty appearance, had been so nice and gentle with the children. Before he had brought the children in, he had closed and securely locked the doors to all the grow rooms. Like any gracious host, he made sure that everyone was comfortable and well fed. He didn’t have any video games, but he had Monopoly and Scrabble and cards and a dartboard.

  He’d shown the children the collections on the mantelpiece of rocks that he had found on his wanderings, pointing out the petrified sea creatures in them,
put there millions of years in the past when the Sierra Madre had been the floor of an ancient sea.

  The bus room in which they were now sitting McMurphy called the library. It was actually quite cozy. A mounted bull’s head hung above a chess set. On the walls were shelves bursting with books, mechanical engineering tomes and leather-bound geology texts beside precarious columns of yellowed paperbacks.

  There were also hundreds of framed photographs. McMurphy in wrestling tights, McMurphy in a Green Beret army uniform with his arm around a couple of other soldiers. A lot of them were of hippie people from the sixties. There was a shot of an absolutely beautiful blond woman in a top hat under a tree, playing the flute. One of a young, bearded McMurphy with some other long-haired and bearded blond men wearing Jesus shirts, sitting around a campfire. There was even a shot of some long-haired children in their bathing suits on the shore of a lake, playing with ponies and goats and dogs.

  Mary Catherine gestured at the photographs.

  “What’s your story, Mr. McMurphy?” she said. “How’d you do all this?”

  “Didn’t I already tell you we dug out the side of the hill with a bulldozer and buried the buses one by one and welded them together like Legos?”

  “I meant more like why,” Mary Catherine said. “Why are you here in this place? How’d you get here, if you don’t mind me prying?”

  McMurphy sighed and leaned back as he crossed his legs.

  “You want my story, huh? Hmmm. Let’s see. I grew up outside San Fran. Five kids in the family. Dad was a plumber. My mom was a night-shift nurse at a mental hospital. I wrestled in high school and got good enough to get a scholarship to Berkeley. I was just about to get my mechanical engineering degree when a fit of conscience made me drop out and hitch up with the army.

  “When I returned to the States, I somehow found myself hanging out in Berkeley with a group of writers and artists and drug addicts that would end up being called the Merry Pranksters. I actually stayed at Ken Kesey’s house for a while. I really admired the wild and free, independent way he was living. The parties were a true goof.”