“This is good, right?” said Mom.
“It’s fantastic.”
“So I read it correctly? The insurance company pays the ransom?”
“Up to three million dollars.”
Her eyes brightened, and she actually smiled. It was the most upbeat I’d seen her. “I wish your father had told me he had insurance. Why was he so secretive with the safe-deposit box?”
“It says right here in the policy that if the insured tells anyone that he has kidnap-and-ransom insurance, the policy is void. Apparently Dad took that pretty literally. He wouldn’t even tell you.”
“What happens now?”
“I’ll call the insurance company and give them notice. If I read the policy right, they select the negotiator who will handle Dad’s case.”
“Is that better than using the FBI?”
I hesitated to tell her about the disastrous meeting with Agent Huitt. Her spirits were too high. “My guess is that these private consultants are former FBI hostage negotiators and the like. How can it get better than that? We’ll have a skilled negotiator who doesn’t have to work within the box created by bureaucrats and diplomats.”
“If only I’d gone to the bank sooner. But when your father told me to check the safe-deposit box if anything ever happened to him, I thought he meant if he crashed in one of those little airplanes they fly into Puerto Cabezas or was lost at sea in a leaky old shrimp boat. I was so afraid to find something in the box that I wasn’t ready to see, a last will and testament or-”
“I understand.”
“Please be firm with this insurance company. You know how slow they can be.”
I could hear the concern in her voice, her fear that she’d needlessly delayed things by not finding the policy sooner. “Mom, I don’t care what it takes. Before the day’s over, I’ll speak to our negotiator. I promise.”
As it turned out, keeping that promise proved almost too easy. Dad was insured with Quality Insurance Company, a Bermuda-based subsidiary of a worldwide underwriting group. More important, I quickly learned that Quality was a client of Coolidge, Harding and Cash. The connection wasn’t surprising. While scores of companies offered kidnap-and-ransom insurance, the leaders in the industry-and the ones who had pioneered the concept-were the largest insurers in the world. Companies like that were the mainstay of the Cool Cash client roster.
The Miami office had never done work for Quality Insurance, but a woman in our New York office was their go-to lawyer in the United States. She was only too glad to help, which underscored the wisdom of my earlier decision to run a conflict check at my firm before placing a phone call to Quality. Having represented insurance companies myself, I’d anticipated needing to be aggressive, perhaps even a little nasty, to make the elephant jump. However, I recalled a fellow associate in our office who, on a purely personal matter, had written an ugly letter to an appliance discount store on Cool Cash letterhead. The scathing missive eventually landed on the desk of the partner in our Atlanta office who happened to represent that “sleazebag, bait-and-switch, two-bit operation.” Two weeks later my friend was working in the county attorney’s office. I learned from his mistake. Instead of being in the defensive posture of explaining to a New York partner why I was beating up on her client, I had the partner working for me from the get-go. She personally followed through to make sure the case was assigned immediately to a Miami consulting firm, and Duncan Fitz offered to sit through our first meeting in his office, just to make sure that Quality Insurance understood that this law firm had a keen interest in the case.
Thank God for small favors. Twice for big ones. This was huge.
“Alex Cabrera is here,” Duncan’s secretary announced over the intercom.
“Send him in,” said Duncan.
Duncan and I rose as the door opened, both of us surprised to see that Alex was a her, not a him. I’d expected someone like Agent Nettles, but in walked a striking Latina woman with big brown eyes. She was dressed in a fitted gray business suit that was conservative only in color, as it did little to hide the fact that she took very good care of her body. I probably looked a split second longer than I should have. Any man would have done the same, and notwithstanding the one-two punch of Jenna and her dive-bombing seagull on the beach, I was, after all, still a man.
“Alexandra Cabrera,” she said. “Call me Alex.”
“My pleasure,” I said, as we shook hands.
“I’m with Crowell Associates.”
“A fine organization,” said Duncan. “I’ve used your investigators for litigation support.” He glanced at me and added, “They’re one of the largest private investigative and security firms in the world.”
“Actually, you’re thinking of Kroll Associates. I said Crowell.” She spelled it.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“A lot of firms in this business have similar-sounding names. It gets confusing.”
“So you’re based here in Miami?” I asked.
“For the past two years. I spent seven years doing the same kind of work in Bogota.”
“Well, you come very highly recommended by our partner in New York. She says you’re an expert on kidnapping and business extortion.”
“Solving and preventing it,” she said, “not committing it.”
We shared a little smile over her joke, and then she turned serious. “I’m very sorry about your father. But you’ve come to the right place for help.”
Duncan’s secretary brought us fresh coffee. We took our seats, Duncan behind his desk, Alex and I in the wing chairs that faced him.
“Where do we begin?” I said.
“I want to hear your whole story, but I should tell you a little about myself, just so you know you’re not wasting your breath. I was born in Bogota. My mother was Colombian, and I’m told my father was from Italy. I won’t burden you with the details of my childhood, but suffice it to say I grew up very fast. By the time I was a young teenager, I was already caught up in antigovernment activities. At age sixteen I joined Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. FARC for short.”
“That might be the group that has my father.”
“It’s one of the largest and last remaining Marxist guerrilla armies on earth. More to the point, it’s probably the biggest kidnapping enterprise that has ever existed. FARC and organizations like it account for over sixty percent of the kidnappings in Colombia.”
“That’s a lot of kidnappings.”
“You have no idea. The more you analyze the numbers, the more ridiculous they seem. One out of every five kidnappings for ransom in the entire world happens in Colombia.”
“How long were you with FARC?” I asked.
“Less than two years. Long enough to learn the kidnapping trade.”
Duncan said, “I don’t suppose you’d find many FBI stiffs with those kinds of credentials.”
“You won’t find any,” said Alex. “I once thought of applying to the FBI, but with my past connection to FARC, I was told not to bother. It’s their loss. My other life is exactly the reason I can help you in ways they can’t.”
“Don’t be offended,” I said. “But I have to be honest. I was expecting my negotiator to be a former law enforcement officer. Not a former member of FARC.”
“First of all, I was sixteen years old when I left FARC. Second, you won’t find a former FBI agent or Scotland Yard negotiator with more experience in Colombia or a better success record than mine.”
“Have you negotiated the release of an American before?” asked Duncan.
“Yes, and some Canadians as well. But if you’re thinking it’s any easier to negotiate for the release of a Colombian, you’re wrong. Generally, these aren’t politically motivated kidnappings. They’re financially motivated. The nationality of the victim is relevant, if at all, only to the extent that it might affect the amount of ransom demanded.”
“You certainly seem to know your stuff,” I said.
“The most important thing is that you have confidence in your negotiator. Under your father’s policy, the insurance company pays for a private consultant only if you use Crowell Associates. But if you don’t like the specific consultant assigned to your case, you’re not stuck. There are others in our organization to choose from. For example, we have a former CIA agent who’s a crackerjack on Mexico. I’m sure he’d do a fine job in Colombia, much
