“What email?” Raul demanded.
Gutierrez shoved himself up from his seat at the desk, pulling the laptop around with him. “It purports to be from the kidnappers, sir. There’s a photograph attached.”
“Don’t look, Raul, let me…” Jack held out a hand to stop Raul.
“She’s alive, sir, and she appears to be unharmed,” Gutierrez said hastily.
“Show me,” Raul demanded, with a nod to Jack to move aside. They both looked at the screen as Gutierrez brought up the image.
Ariana was glaring furiously at the camera, lips parted to show her gritted teeth. A powerful hand clenched on her throat was holding her chin forced up so that she faced the camera; another hand held a dangling hank of shorn hair at the side of her face. The ragged line where the hair had been cut showed very clearly.
Raul’s jaw clenched with rage, but there was pride in his voice as he said, “She will not be cowed, my Ari. They will not break her.”
“You’re a fool if you believe that,” Jack’s voice cracked as he looked at the screen. “Anyone can be broken, Raul. Anyone.”
Gutierrez shot him a look of dislike, but Raul held up a hand to silence him. “This is not the Rangers, Jack. Ari only has value to them as a hostage if they keep her alive and in good condition.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Jack rounded on him, agony breaking the leash on his tongue. “That chunk of hair is going to turn up here in an envelope, tomorrow at the latest, with a list of demands. Every day that you don’t meet them, another piece of Ari is going to turn up in a parcel. And it’s not her they’re trying to break, Raul. It’s you.”
He turned away, unable to look at either Raul or that image of Ariana anymore. The sure and certain knowledge that he would never see her alive again, that her kidnappers were even now considering which body part to cut off her first, ate at his insides like acid. Striding across the office to Raul’s private bathroom, he shoved the door open before slamming it behind him, bending over the toilet and retching his guts up.
* * *
Raul was alone in the office when Jack came back out.
“Where’s Gutierrez?” Jack asked.
“Tracking down some information for me. So, you’re in love with my daughter.”
Jack froze mid-stride, wondering what the hell he’d done to give himself away — and then realizing that even if the older man had only been fishing before, his reaction had just confirmed Raul’s suspicions.
Raul nodded. “I wondered, six years ago. Since you haven’t laid eyes on her from that day to this, as far as I know — and I know very well, thanks to Elliot — I can only conclude that you were doing your best to be honorable.”
Jack had no idea what to say. ‘I never laid a finger on her’ would be a lie, plain and simple, and Raul had caught him with his guard well and truly down, so he just stood there and eventually shrugged. “She was never meant for the likes of me. I’m only a soldier.”
Raul’s eyebrows lifted, and then he snorted derisively. “You never met my wife. Luisa would have slapped your face for saying something stupid like that, but then she always liked to over-dramatize everything. She was an actress, you know.”
Jack blinked, surprised. “I didn’t know that, no. Was she a big star, here in Guàlize?”
“No. She was an extra. Hired to stand in the background a lot. Oh, she had dreams, of course, wanted to make it big. I was still practicing law when we met, a deputy district attorney with a fierce desire to clean up my country. She had witnessed a sanctioned drug killing while attending a party. An assassination, in other words.” Raul’s eyes glazed over as he reminisced about the love of his life.
Jack stayed silent, listening, wondering what Raul was trying to tell him.
“Luisa was afraid to testify. Everyone was afraid of the drug cartels then in Guàlize, even more so than today. I could not promise her that I could protect her; she knew that it would have been a ridiculous lie if I had tried.” Raul shook himself out of his reverie and looked straight at Jack. “I fell in love with her the first time I saw her, Jack. I did something I’ve never done before or since; I told a witness to lie on the stand. I told Luisa to say that she couldn’t remember what she saw, or to mis-identify the killer, anything to stop the cartel from coming after her. The thought of her dead crucified me, and I’d only spent a few minutes in her company.”
Jack found himself unable to speak as Raul’s eyes pinned him in place.
“Luisa told me later that she went away and researched me, asked all over her neighborhood what sort of man I was. She heard only stories of a fair man who fought like the devil to put away the guilty but would not prosecute when there wasn’t enough evidence, a man who would not take payoffs, could not be bought.”
“She must have wondered why on earth you told her to lie,” Jack realized.
“She went to her church and she prayed to God to tell her what to do. And when the trial came, she looked the assassin straight in the eye and identified him as the man she saw pull the trigger.”
Jack shook his head wonderingly. “She trusted you to protect her anyway.”
“No, Jack, she didn’t. She told me that I could not hope to win the war I was fighting if nobody would take up arms beside me. ‘I am a daughter of Guàlize,’ she said, ‘and if I die to protect her, I will call it a life well spent.’” Raul turned, walked to his desk, and picked up the silver-framed photograph of his wife that always stood where he could see it. “Luisa put herself in harm’s way several times over the next few months, making herself into a tempting bait as she worked with the police and my office, knowing that the cartel would not stop coming after her until they were broken, until they were on the run with far bigger things to worry about than one witness who would not keep her mouth shut.”
“She must have been one hell of a woman,” Jack said with deep respect in his tone.
“Oh, she was. She was.” Raul smiled fondly at the photograph before setting it down. “But when I married her, once I was promoted to District Attorney after she helped me prove that my boss was taking money from the cartel, the press still said that she was ‘only an actress.’”
Jack finally realized where the story was leading. He opened his mouth, not even sure what he was going to say, but Raul kept on talking right over him.
“So don’t you ever say to me again that you’re ‘only a soldier.’ I’d be very proud if my daughter married a man like you, Jack McAuley. There is no one, and I mean no one, I would trust more to get her back for me. I’d have said that even before I was sure how you felt about her, by the way.”
“I can’t promise I’ll get her back,” Jack found his voice again at last. “That would be as much of a lie as if you’d told Luisa you’d protect her from the cartels. But I can promise you that I will goddamn well die trying, if that’s what it takes.”
“I know you will,” Raul said simply before turning back to his desk. “You did not hear all of what the email gave us. It is signed with the name El Lobo Negro.”
Jack had heard the name before. El Lobo Negro was a shadowy figure, but he’d still managed to get himself on any number of Most Wanted lists. Startled, he followed Raul to the desk and leaned over to look at the computer. “Do you have any way to confirm that?”