Diane sat staring at the monitor while her computer booted up. It was 10 p.m. and she hadn’t located Olimpia yet. But she’d send an email and keep trying to phone her until she knew she was safe. Was it just fourteen hours since the two of them stumbled out of the jungle into that small Colombian village?
Now, here she sat, freshly showered, with Huck happily piling his favorite toys at her feet. But she couldn’t share his homecoming joy. This was no longer home to her.
Suddenly, the background picture of Vincent aboard Woodwind filled her computer screen, jarring her out of her reverie.
She leaned forward and studied his image, then spoke to him: “It haunts me that my selfish career focus might have contributed to your death. I have to leave here for my safety and my sanity. It’s time I moved on. But I promise you I’ll avenge your murder, and I’ll find Peruvase.” She kissed her fingertips, touched the screen, then forced herself to click onto her emails.
While the computer searched for her mail, she reached down and scratched Huck’s ear. Then, glancing up at the screen, she blinked and jerked her head back in shock.
The most recent email was titled: “Important. Please Open Immediately.” It had been sent that day—by Gabriel Carrera.
Driven by an impulse to delete the message, Diane reached for the mouse.
μ CHAPTER FORTY ONE μ
Gabriel stood in front of his father’s massive desk feeling like a child about to be scolded. He ran his finger along the rosewood grip of an antique dueling pistol lying on the desktop while waiting for Carlos to finish his phone call. It occurred to him that Carlos Carrera was the only man he had ever known who could throw down the gauntlet, then casually answer the telephone.
As Gabriel traced the inlaid cruz latina on the pistol handle and the golden gazelles representing the Carrera name on the trigger guard, he remembered the exact moment in his youth when he realized the dueling pistols meant his family had the social position to take the life of another with impunity. Now he wondered if the weapons also gave the Carreras the right to take each others’ lives.
Gabriel sank into a chair. The burdens of the past twenty hours were taking their toll. Yesterday afternoon the woman he revered had called him a murderer. And in doing so, she had led him to painful insights regarding the real murderer’s identity and motives.
Then this morning his father had challenged him to “a duel to the death.” In Gabriel’s state of desolation, his response had been: “Why a duel? Just shoot me.”
Carlos replaced the phone in the receiver and turned to face his son once more.
Gesturing toward the pistols, Gabriel said in exasperation, “Surely you jest about all this.”
Carlos leaned forward. His words were measured. “You have been given special consideration for my sake. But for two years you have shown only disdain for the warnings.”
“Not so. I have detailed my ten-year plan to your lieutenants.”
Carlos slammed his fist on the desk. His eyes narrowed. His nostrils flared. “It is a mockery of all that is right and good.”
Gabriel answered slowly through clenched teeth. “It is just common sense to convert assets from our most powerful resource into legitimate businesses. Then, in ten years, our country will no longer need to produce cocaine.”
Carlos stood up from his desk chair and jabbed his finger in the air to emphasize his words. “What the rest of the world calls money laundering, you refer to as asset conversion? It grieves me that I have sent you to the finest schools in the U.S., and what have you learned? You have become expert at putting spin on your words as well as your actions.”
Gabriel picked up one of the dueling pistols and waved it in the air. “I did not have to leave your house to learn about Machiavellianism. When I was quite young, you exposed me to your ‘Knights’ and their trials in absentia and their imagined mandate to murder.”
He aimed the pistol at Carlos. “You call the use of this barbaric anachronism honorable? Does its expensive ornamentation and ritualized violence exalt it above the level of the street gun?
Carlos collapsed back into his chair. His voice was barely above a whisper now. “In some situations, the courts are impractical tools.”
Gabriel smirked, still brandishing the pistol. “Judicium Dei—the last man standing assumes his victory represents divine favor. Is that it? You want vindication before God? If it were otherwise, you would have hired an assassin.”
Carlos closed his eyes. “I gave you life. Only I have the right to take it away.”
Gabriel smirked. “How noble.”
Carlos placed his elbows on the desktop and pressed his forehead against his folded hands. The two men sat in silence for several seconds. Then Gabriel spoke.
“Father.”
Carlos flinched. He had not heard that word from Gabriel’s lips in decades. Gabriel saw the effect it had. He continued.
“Your Carabina days were over years ago. I have inherited your accuracy and your speed with the pistol, you know that.”
Carlos raised tormented eyes to his son. “It is too late. It has been done. If I do not honor the pledge I have made, they will kill us both. Another, then another will take up the sword until it is accomplished. If you are the victor, your only recourse will be to leave the country, find a place where you can hide from them—if such a place exists.”
Gabriel shook his head slowly. “There will be no winner here.” He stood up to leave. “I need two days to put some matters in order.”
μ CHAPTER FORTY TWO μ
It rained off and on the next morning; the darkened sky shrouded the earth in a perpetual dusk. Between downpours, Diane donned her wind-breaker and walked Huck. She greeted the neighbors and inhaled the mingled scents of wet gumbo soil, brackish lake water and pine, triggering an unexpected feeling of impending loss.
To Huck’s delight, she walked the entire lake road, avoiding the house and her “To Do” list for as long as possible. But no matter how far she roamed, she couldn’t dodge the awareness of Gabriel’s message locked in her computer’s memory. The unopened email pulsed unrelentingly in the back of her brain.
Returning to the house, she picked up a phone message from Olimpia who was ecstatic that she was okay. She said all was well with her, and she’d call back later that day.
Even with her profound relief that Olimpia was safe, Diane’s mood matched the gloom outside. It was hard to concentrate on the matters at hand—like arranging for the packers and the sale of the house and her car.
But once the phone calls were made, she felt the weight of her possessions falling away, allowing her to focus forward. Tomorrow, she’d clean out her office at BRI. Then there would be only Huck and the Suburban, and the trip back to the Northeast.
David showed up in late morning with a bag of warm kolaches, one of Diane’s addictions since moving south. She made coffee.
They sat at the kitchen counter with the rain drumming on the back deck. Diane told David about an email she had opened from Tung Chen the night before. In doing a new search for Peruvase using the name TekTranz in the parameters, Tung’s people had found Vincent’s drug. It was bought by a Taiwanese pharmaceutical company with a large U.S. affiliate. The drug had been shelved. Tung was going to do a closer investigation.
Diane moved on, telling him about her trip to the Caribbean.
David listened with furrowed brow. Then she told him she was leaving Texas. He began to object. But then he thought better of it. “I’d just be whistlin’ past the graveyard if I said things would turn out alright here,” he said. Somberly, he offered to help expedite her departure.