“First, let’s agree upfront that you are not going to hurt the hostages. If you can make that promise to me, then we can talk about what it is that you really want.”
“You know what I want.”
“Not until you tell me, I don’t.”
“You’ve known all along.”
“Spell it out, Falcon. Tell me what you want, and I’ll see if I can get it done.”
“Anything I want?”
“Within reason. Just don’t hurt the hostages.”
He paused, as if he enjoyed keeping Vince in suspense. Finally, he said, “I want to speak to Alicia.”
“Okay. I think we can do that.”
“In person.”
Vince didn’t want to use the word “no,” even if the answer was “no freakin’ way.” “How about we start with a phone conversation?”
“No, I want to-” Falcon said, then stopped. “You know what, Paulo? I’m calling your bluff. Put her on.”
“Unfortunately, she’s not here right now.”
“Damn you and your lies! Don’t you ever keep a promise? Don’t you ever stop stalling?”
Vince wasn’t sure how to convince him that he was being truthful, but based on what he was hearing in Falcon’s voice, it appeared that he didn’t have nearly enough time to redeem his own credibility. “If you don’t believe me, talk to Swyteck. Here, he’ll tell you.”
He handed the phone to Jack, who had been listening to the conversation on speaker. Paulo would have liked to coach him on what to say, but there was no time for that, either.
Jack spoke into the telephone. “He’s not messing with you, Falcon. Alicia is not here, and we’re doing our best to find her.”
“It’s time she talked to me. It’s beyond time.”
“What do you want to say to her?”
“Just bring her here. Now!”
Jack hit the mute button and spoke to Vince. “Where the hell is Alicia?”
“She rushed out of the command center after I gave her some files from my source. I sensed something was wrong, but she wouldn’t say what. I honestly don’t know where she went.”
“Find someone who does.”
“We’re working on it.”
“Work harder!” said Jack. He disengaged the mute function and spoke into the telephone. “She’s on her way, Falcon. Just give us a couple minutes.”
Falcon didn’t answer.
Vince slipped Jack a note that read, KEEP HIM TALKING.
“Falcon?” said Jack. “Are you there? Come on buddy, talk to me. Tell me more about that stage you wanted. You know, ‘curtain time.’”
chapter 60
F alcon paced across the room, the cell phone pressed to his ear. Swyteck was clearly stalling, but his exact words were lost on Falcon. The lawyer’s voice was just noise on the phone line. Falcon couldn’t focus on conversation. His mind was roaming elsewhere, and the noise was growing louder. At first, it was a hum, then a buzz, and finally the roar of engines. Airplane engines.
“I want to speak to Alicia, damn it!” Not even his own voice, however, could drown out the rumble of airplane engines inside his head.
It had been a moonless night, and the sky was a vast, impenetrable blackness in his darkest memories. He was flying in a retrofitted Skyvan, a propeller-powered aircraft so squat in its design that it was nicknamed the Flying Shoebox. This craft was owned by the Argentine Coast Guard. Nearly all of the passenger seats had been removed to expand the plane’s cargo capacity, and El Oso was buckled into one of the few that remained. The plane’s normal flight crew was in the cockpit. El Oso was part of a working crew that included a noncommissioned officer and a petty officer. The military rotated different working crewmembers onto each flight-involving as many operatives as possible-so that no one who worked at the detention center could point fingers without implicating himself or a friend. El Oso had, of course, heard rumors about the flights, and he had begun to speculate about the nature of his assignment from the moment he received orders to report to the landing field at ESMA, one of the largest and most notorious of all the secret military detention centers. For El Oso, however, the exact purpose of this particular flight was not confirmed in his own mind until he saw about twenty naked, unconscious prisoners laid side-by-side on the floor of the aircraft.
“Falcon, are you there?” It was Swyteck’s voice on the telephone, somehow cutting through the deafening airplane engines.
“Just shut up and get Alicia on the line!”
Swyteck kept talking, more stalling, but Falcon wasn’t even listening. He was barely aware of the fact that he was still inside a motel room, let alone that he was on the telephone. There was so much noise inside his head, those damn engines roaring from the past. But why so loud?
They had left the hatch open. The Skyvan had a rear hatch that slid down to open, and there was no intermediate position. It either had to be closed or fully open. On the Wednesday-night flights, the hatch definitely remained open. El Oso was staring directly into the night, a black hole in the aft of a noisy aircraft. Between him and the gaping hatch lay the rows of naked bodies on the floor. He wished that each and every one of them were dead, but he knew better. Only the living would require the injection of a sedative from a medical doctor. The doctor. He was making his rounds, so to speak, moving from one prisoner to the next, administering a second injection that would keep them unconscious. El Oso hadn’t noticed at first, but as the doctor worked his way up the row of naked bodies, emptying his syringe, his face came clear. Finally, El Oso made the connection. This man was no stranger. This was the very same navy doctor to whom he had taken prisoner 309’s newborn baby just two months earlier.
“A couple more minutes, Falcon,” said Swyteck. “Alicia’s on her way.”
Falcon grunted a reply of some kind, but it wasn’t even in English. His memories had him thinking in Spanish, his native tongue.
Mandar para arriba. Send them up. El Oso had been waiting for the order, and it came in those exact words from the commissioned officer. It came just as soon as the doctor had administered the last of the injections and disappeared into the cockpit, literally turning his back on the prisoners-his patients. The physician’s own “disappearance” was an ironic charade, a way to serve the regime and maintain merely technical compliance with his Hippocratic oath. When the doctor was gone, El Oso’s work began. He unbuckled his seat belt, rose, and started toward the row of naked, sleeping prisoners. Among them were the young and not so young, men and women alike. Some bore the burn marks of the grill. Others were bruised from relentless beatings. A skilled torturer could implement the tactics of “special interrogation” without leaving such marks, but finesse of that sort was completely unnecessary in the case of prisoners who were being “sent up.” El Oso worked in a two-man team. They started with the prisoner nearest the hatch, a man who was perhaps in his early twenties, perhaps even younger. El Oso took his arms. His teammate took the prisoner’s ankles. They lifted him up from the floor. In the prisoner’s unconscious state, his body sagged between them and hung before the open hatchway like a broad, sadistic smile.
“Are you still there, Falcon?”
“I’ve had it with this! Stop stalling. Where’s Alicia?” It was a coherent response, and it took every ounce of psychological fortitude for Falcon to string the words together. Even so, he wasn’t strong enough to pull himself up from the past. The lucid moment, however, had managed to shift his focus slightly. It was suddenly as if El Oso were another man entirely, someone whom Falcon didn’t even want to know. This stranger called El Oso was working furiously but in sync with his teammate, swaying the bodies back and forth as if rocking a hammock. They would release on the count of tres, “sending up” the prisoners only in the most figurative sense, as the bodies
