him, and why would gunmen snatch him? She was convinced he’d been taken because someone as smart and quick on his feet as Max would never leave his passports and backpack behind if the shootings had not involved him. More questions: Had the man found dead in the rubbish bins been after Max? Who was the second boy? There were no answers, but these FBI men were officially involved now. Kidnapping-especially of a minor-was a major offense, and that was their jurisdiction. And now they needed her because she was the link to Max Gordon. She wasn’t asking for their help anymore; they would be asking for hers. She felt good. Back in control. She just knew in her bones she was going to find Max-but whether he would be dead or alive was another matter.
Xavier’s brother eased the throttles back. The wind had picked up on the open ocean and small waves lapped the hull. Alejandro nudged the subdued engines forward toward a fishing boat and shouted in Spanish to the two men aboard who caught the ropes thrown by his men.
When the engines were cut and the boat was tied alongside, the silence was complete.
Max stayed where he was. This was no place to jump ship. They weren’t even in sight of land, and they had been pounding the ocean for hours. At those speeds and with the boat’s extra-long-range tanks, they must have covered hundreds of kilometers.
Xavier looked nervous.
“What’s happening?” Max asked him.
“We do the drugs run. We need boats out here to refuel us. This is our gas station,” he said, and smiled. But his eyes scanned the skies. What was it that scared him? Max wondered.
Alejandro’s men seemed unconcerned about anything other than feeding a fuel line into the tanks, and then Max heard the muffled thumping of a generator below the fishing boat’s decks.
The fishermen handed over a cold box. Alejandro’s men opened it and passed out food. Cold meat, sausage, chicken, flat bread, beer and soft drinks. Max made no move toward it, although he was ravenous. He was in an unpredictable situation and felt it best to be as low-key as possible. Stay still. Stay silent. He did not want to tempt fate and have Alejandro dump him out here. Even if he’d spared his life because of the debt he owed Max for saving his brother, he could easily leave him on the fishing boat to be eventually taken ashore.
“Kid,” Alejandro said, offering Max bread and meat, “eat. There’s enough.” He nodded at Max as if enticing a nervous stray dog forward. Max took the food gratefully and had no concern for whatever it was that he ate. It tasted good-salty and tough-and made the juices in his mouth run.
Bobbing in a boat on the deep blue sea, with barely a cloud in the sky and a warm trade wind scuffing the surface, he could have been on a picnic. But he kept his eyes on the gang leader and his gunmen. Max would not be lulled into any false sense of security.
He turned to Xavier. Now that the battering speed had stopped, the boy seemed more subdued. “You all right? Your wound? Does it hurt?” he asked.
“It hurts, but it’s OK.”
“Where are you taking me?” Max asked, daring to prize information from them.
“Yucatan. South.”
Yucatan! Max kept the gasp of excitement locked in his chest. That might take him close to the border with Belize. If he could get ashore and make his way inland from there, he might have a chance to pick up Danny Maguire’s trail.
“Down the cays. Plenty reefs and islands,” Xavier said, his mouth full of food. “You will like it there. We get into the jungle and no one can find us. No one. Out here”-he scanned the horizon again-“there are Coast Guard boats and their helicopters.”
“American patrols?”
“Maybe. We are out of American waters now. But the Yanquis, they pay good money for our people to hunt us down. They all hunt us.”
Max tugged a shred of meat from between his teeth. If government patrol boats found them, he would be repatriated. He would never get to the rain forest and find out what had happened to his mother. His thoughts whirled. Escape now seemed impossible. Even if they got within sight of land, he would not be able to jump ship. Like jumping out of a fast car onto a motorway, hitting the water at the speed the boat traveled would be no different from landing on concrete.
He would go all the way with these men and pray that as soon as he got ashore, he would be able to make a run for it. That was the best bet. But run where? He did not know that yet.
One of the smugglers lifted a shrink-wrapped carton of water bottles onto the boat. With a slash of his knife, he cut free the plastic and handed them out. Everyone drank thirstily. Saltwater spray encrusted Max’s face and hair from the accelerated ride, and after swallowing as much as he could, he tipped the remainder of the bottle over his head and face. Once the sticky film was sluiced away, he immediately felt better. Wind-burned and tanned, and now with a full stomach and his thirst quenched, he felt stronger and more able to tackle whatever lay ahead in the next few hours.
The man who’d ripped the plastic wrap free from the bottles threw it into the sea. Without thinking, Max shouted at him, “Hey! Don’t do that!” The generator stopped, the water lapped and the breeze made a hollow echo in Max’s ears. That was the only sound as the men stared at him in disbelief.
“Dolphins and turtles die because of that kind of stuff,” he mumbled.
“He’s right, Carlos. The boy is right. What are you, an ignorant peasant?” Alejandro said.
“
“You let a fish die slowly because you throw away a piece of plastic?”
The man shrugged.
Alejandro kicked open the lid of a box, and Max could see it was packed with grenades and snub-nosed machine pistols. Alejandro reached down and took out a grenade, testing its weight like a bowler with a cricket ball. Max felt the lump of food he’d just eaten regurgitate. He swallowed hard. Xavier’s brother looked every inch the kind of man who could cause you very serious harm. There was no humor in his eyes. Probably never had been. He yanked the pin, flipped the grenade and everyone ducked-except Alejandro.
A softened
“I am a kind man. I bring death quickly. Yes? You think I care about fishes in the ocean?” asked the man who helped destroy thousands of lives with his drug smuggling. Alejandro and his henchmen laughed, but Xavier and Max did not. Max averted his eyes from the drug smuggler’s. Push a man like that a sliver over the edge and he would forget any sense of obligation or family honor. Max would be fed to the fishes with a grenade tied round his neck.
Alejandro shouted at the men in Spanish. They were obviously commands to cast off and release the fuel lines. No sooner had the boat been pushed free than the monster engines bellowed, churned water and hurled the boat forward. Max was slammed back into the seat. He saw Xavier’s look of concern. The boy raised a finger to his lips and shook his head. The message was clear. Don’t ever challenge his brother.
Cazamind’s power reached far and wide. He had the support of a vast complex of government and corporate infrastructure. Police in Miami were somewhere near the very bottom of authority and power, but Cazamind’s contacts had been busy. The news of Max Gordon being involved with drug gangs was immediately backed up by intelligence reports that a known drug dealer, Alejandro Escobodo Garcia, had been in Miami that night. And someone had contacted the Drug Enforcement Agency to cut a deal. Complete immunity for Alejandro in exchange for information about the drug-shipment routes that flowed up from South America and their dispersal points from Central American countries. It looked as though Alejandro wanted to get out while he still could. It was an excellent opportunity for the American intelligence agency.
Drug dealers were of no interest to the Swiss master planner. The secret he was protecting was more terrifying and dangerous than the international drug trade. Within hours of Max’s disappearance, Cazamind had tracked police and FBI reports, collated all the information and concluded that Max Gordon had stumbled into this very scenario. For whatever reason, the smugglers had taken Max with them.
The Drug Enforcement Agency had issued an intercept command to the U.S. Coast Guard’s Helicopter
