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.