As he listened to the sounds of the night and the rhythm of his own breathing, Tristan’s mind took him back home. He saw Mom praying in the dark and Ziggy trying his best just to be noticed. He wondered what she’d said when they told her he’d been kidnapped. When you already prayed ten hours a day, was it possible to find room for more?
After they’d grown so far apart, would this nightmare bring them closer together? Even a little bit?
Even as the question formed in his mind, he knew that the answer would be no. Like everything else, this would be written off as God’s will, another check mark on His shit list that included Dad’s cancer and Tristan’s problems in physics class. If you pray hard enough, you never have to confront anything difficult. You never worry about living or dying, winning or losing. All you have to do is pray for strength.
A knot formed in his stomach as he imagined his homecoming. He’d have to explain to everyone how he’d lived while the others all died. Amid all those parents mourning the loss of their children, there would be no room for him to celebrate the fact that he’d survived. Everything he’d experienced these past twenty-four hours, from the shoot-outs to the plane crash to whatever lay ahead, would have to go unspoken. No one would ever be able to understand the intensity of the life that he’d lived since Scorpion and the Big Guy had pulled him from the bus.
He’d never be able to confess that in the midst of all the terror and the bloodshed, there was real excitement. For this slice of time-and only for this slice of time, unique to his years on the planet-nothing had been predictable. Mere seconds separated boredom from mortal danger. No one would ever understand how even though the odds of survival were slim-well, they were what they were-he never thought about dying. He was too busy living.
Too busy killing.
When this chapter in his life closed, what could possibly replace it? Surely there had to be something.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t in Scottsdale, and it for sure wasn’t in his house. If what Scorpion suspected proved to be correct, the Crystal Palace would collapse, and as it did, it would take Mom with it. That place was her life. Without it, Tristan didn’t think she’d have anywhere else to turn.
And when she turned to him, he wouldn’t be there. He refused to walk that route. She was his past; something else entirely was his future. He didn’t know yet what that was-how can anyone know the future?-but he knew it wasn’t listening to a bitter old woman complain about the grave-like existence she’d carved for herself.
When she turned to Ziggy, though, Tristan would try to help. Again, he didn’t know how, but the kid deserved better than that, even if he didn’t know it.
A cold sense of hopelessness washed over Tristan as he thought these things, and he snapped his eyes open to return to the fears of the present. Those were the important ones to face, anyway.
And if they screwed things up, the future wouldn’t matter, would it?
CHAPTER THIRTY
Maria Elizondo couldn’t breathe. The stress of the darkness, the tightness of the space, and the sheer burden of the unknown had conspired to pull all the oxygen out of the air.
Intuitively, she knew that was impossible, but as she sat crouched in this tiniest of tiny spaces, reason and logic seemed far away. The tunnel smelled of dirt, smelled like a grave. And how appropriate. This would be the night when she lived or died. Either a future lay ahead for her, or it did not.
And it all depended on strangers. American strangers.
Maria prayed. She prayed for strength and courage and for God to forgive the unrelenting anger that had consumed her all these years. She prayed that He would understand not having heard from her in so long, and that He would see that in her heart she was a good person. If, in fact, this was to be the night when she and Saint Peter made personal acquaintance, she prayed that this would be the first day of a blissful eternity, not a tormented one.
According to Veronica, verified by the strange woman, Mother Hen, this tunnel would dump Maria in a storm sewer that ran under the alley behind her house. From there, she would need to find the ladder to a manhole, beyond which freedom lay. As a random thought, she offered up a separate prayer to thank God for not making it rain tonight. In this climate, the ground was so hard and impenetrable that even an inch of rain turned storm sewers into raging rivers.
As she inched down the incline on her rear end, Maria ran the instructions from Mother Hen through her mind. There would be three explosions, and she was not to emerge from the manhole until after the third. She was to stay close to the manhole and await the arrival of a military vehicle. It would flash its lights twice. She was then to approach the vehicle and get in. There would be three American men in the vehicle, one much younger than the others. The older two were soldiers of a sort, and they would protect her as she led them to the tunnels that terminated inside the United States.
“The FBI will be waiting for you on the other side,” Mother Hen explained. “They will take you into protective custody. They wanted me to stress to you that protective custody is not a form of arrest. It is for your own protection, to keep you from being harmed by Felix Hernandez’s friends. You’ll remain in custody for as long as it takes to convict Hernandez of his crimes.”
“Will I be in a jail cell?”
“You will be in a safe house,” Mother Hen said. “It’s a house like any other, but with guards and security systems.”
The news had distressed her. When she thought about her upcoming time in the United States-the nation she’d heard so much about since the day she was born-she’d never thought in terms of security teams and restricted movement. It made sense, she knew, but it was yet another reminder that none of the kindness or cooperation she would see in the future had anything to do with Maria the person. It would all be about Maria the witness.
The end would be the same, yes: a future as an American citizen. It shouldn’t matter how the dream was achieved, so why did it make her sad to be treated as the witness she’d volunteered to be?
Maria sensed in the darkness that the pitch of the incline was becoming more severe, and she found herself pressing hard with her hands and feet against the walls. She’d brought a tiny flashlight with her, one that she’d pulled from her keychain, but she dared not use it. She didn’t want to risk the possibility, however unlikely, of alerting a passing pedestrian or soldier to her presence by startling them with a flash of white light from beneath their feet.
As the dirt became damp, she realized that she must be getting closer to the sewer. Closer to danger.
Closer to freedom.
How in the world had Felix been able to dig this tunnel without her knowing it? His teams must have done it only during the day when she was at work. And what was the purpose? Was he merely preserving his option for a midnight liaison at a time of his choice?
Then she got it. It was the most obvious thing in the world when you thought about it. This was his planned escape route if his enemies arrived while he was visiting her, which he never did because when they were together, it was always at his hacienda. Such was not the case with his other mistresses, however. They were never trusted to be in the house, so he visited them in theirs, on occasion dismissing the mistresses’ husbands from their own beds.
Could it be that each of them have tunnels built beneath their houses?
Of course it could. For something to exist, Felix needed only wish that it be so, and it would appear.