Page 77 of Code 6

“Patrick!” she shouted, and the exclamation drew immediate reaction from her girlfriends.

“Who’s Patrick?”

“Can I meet him?”

Kate shushed them and pressed the phone to her ear.

“I need your help,” said Patrick.

Trumpets blasted from two tables away. The five-piece mariachi band was starting up again. Kate jumped up from her chair and ran to the restroom, where she could hear.

“Patrick, where are you?”

“Patrick is in deep shit.” The reply was in English, but the accent was Hispanic.

“Who is this? Where’s Patrick?”

“You’ve heard enough from Patrick. Now you know he’s alive. The question for you is, do you want to keep him alive?”

Kate’s conversation with Noah was proving prophetic. The Colombian government’s crumbling peace treaty with Marxist guerrillas was no longer an abstraction, the revival of kidnappings for ransom no longer theoretical.

“What do you want?”

“Two million dollars.”

Kate hesitated, but only because she didn’t know how the game was played. She wondered if she was expected to negotiate.

“It’s not negotiable,” the man said, as if reading her mind.

“I’ll need time,” said Kate. She wasn’t sure where those words had come from. Probably a movie or a TV drama she’d watched. Kate had no idea what to say or do, no conception of how much time she needed. It was almost incomprehensible, the fact that she was in a restaurant bathroom, talking on her cellphone to a Colombian kidnapper, trying to ransom the boy who used to haggle with her over eating his vegetables, as a Mexican mariachi band played on the other side of the door.

“You have forty-eight hours,” the man said. “I will call you. And if you want to see Patrick again, the only acceptable answer is that you have the money. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“And don’t bother calling the Colombian police, the American police, the U.S. embassy, the FBI, or anyone else you might be thinking of calling. That is the quickest and surest way to end up with the dead hostage. This is a private transaction. Understand?”

“Yes,” she said, and the line went dead.

Kate fell back against the wall, emotionally spent. Her legs wobbled, no longer able to support her weight. Her cashmere sweater against a tiled wall was like butter on a griddle, and she slid all the way down, slowly, until she was sitting on the floor. Tears were about to flow, but Kate fought them off. Her first instinct was to call Noah, her best law enforcement connection, but the kidnapper’s clear warning—“This is a private transaction”—was not to be ignored.

She gathered herself and dialed her father’s cell.

Patrick looked on with contempt, still on his knees, as his captors hooted, hollered, and slapped each other on the back as if they were all heroes.

“Dosmillónes!” Inkface shouted.“Kiss my ass, Javier. El Rubio is ours!”

“Olga, too!” said another.

Patrick’s gaze swept the room. They were all smiles and laughter, except for the naked pig on the floor, who was still out cold, and the youngest one in the group—probably still a teenager—who was throwing up in the corner. Another, who looked like the teenager’s older brother, was so drunk he couldn’t even slap a high-five without staggering to the floor. He was down on one knee and unable to stand, which struck him as hysterically funny. Two others, the least drunk in the group, had left before the phone call to deal with the other hostages. That left just Inkface, a shirtless muscleman, and a third guy with gold teeth to guard Patrick and Olga. They weren’t totally incapacitated like the others, but the rum had robbed them of the alertness needed to guard hostages. It seemed they’d forgotten that Patrick’s hands were still free, Inkface having untied them for the phone call. Patrick kept them behind his back to keep the illusion alive and discreetly looked in Olga’s direction. She cut her eyes toward the chair beside the bed, where the naked blob of blubber on the floor had left his clothes. Patrick spotted the pistol beside the fat man’s dirty underwear, and at that moment he and Olga reached their silent agreement to escape.

Inkface stepped toward the mattress.

“You think you’re better than us, don’t you, Olga?”

She didn’t answer.

“Javier made you his high-class whore for his American clients. That doesn’t make you high-class. That makes you a whore.”

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