Ariana knew when to let him win a point. I’m definitely ahead in the mind games so far, she consoled herself as she moved toward the door with a slow, deliberate stride, her chin held high. She refused to even look in the mirror to see how messy her hair was. She wasn’t going to primp and preen for some kidnapping, murderous brute of a drug lord.
Tomàs making her go first was actually something of a blessing, because it meant he couldn’t see her eyes darting about, couldn’t see her taking everything in, noting every door, every passage that she would need to explore to find a possible escape route. They were obviously on the upper floors of what Ariana concluded was a very expensive — and extensive — house. Arriving at the top of a grand flight of stairs sweeping downward in an elegant curve toward a floor paved in black and white marble checks, she paused and glanced back at Tomàs.
“Down,” he ordered with a negligent flip of his wrist. She nodded and faced forward, placing her hand on the rail and descending slowly with her head held high, imagining herself at the Presidential Palace for a grand event while wearing a magnificent gown. The thought gave her strength, and as she reached the bottom, her jaw clenched with rage. Raul and Luisa Monterro’s daughter wasn’t going to cringe and grovel and beg for her life, not today.
Not ever.
Stopping at the foot of the stairs, she glanced around, seemingly casually, but in reality taking in every detail of the grand hallway.
Standing beside large, barred double doors was the first other person she’d seen in the house, a whip-thin, mustached man who stared at her, eyes running lasciviously up and down her body. Ariana stared back, head held high, her eyes spitting sparks, until the man glanced away.
I will not be cowed. I will use every weapon at my disposal to defeat these pigs.
“Over there,” Tomàs touched her shoulder, pushing her lightly toward a door near the back of the hallway. She turned her glare on him, and he dropped his hand away as though she had burned him.
She took her sweet time before she moved again, but when she did, she marched swiftly away from Tomàs, grasped the door handle, and shoved the indicated door open without bothering to knock. She heard both Tomàs and the other man gasp behind her and smiled a tiny secret smile to herself. Another small victory; she was betting that nobody ever walked in on The Black Wolf without knocking.
The room beyond the door was dark with heavy shades over the windows drawn even in the middle of the day. It took her eyes a moment to adjust, but then she strode forward to the middle of the room to confront the man who had risen from a chair to face her.
“The Black Wolf, I presume?” she said coolly.
Chapter Six
Jack and Raul listened to the black box recordings, grim-faced. The cockpit recording had perfect clarity, no need for technical wizardry to clean it up. Everything seemed normal until about thirty minutes before the expected landing time, which tied in neatly with the crash site location.
The pilots had just been handed over from Dominican to Guàlizean air traffic control when there was a knocking sound, and: “Señor Fuentes, que pasa?” the co-pilot said inquiringly before there was a gurgling noise and then a cut-off shout.
The only sound after that in the cockpit was the sound of someone tapping keys; reprogramming the autopilot, they already knew, overriding the safety parameters. Fuentes had no formal pilot training according to his files. Someone had coached him very carefully in what to do to convince the jet to crash itself.
The cockpit door clicked shut. Just over nine minutes later the recording abruptly cut out, indicating the time of the crash.
“That ties in with this point in the electronics signals to the cockpit, sir,” the air safety investigator who was assisting them pointed out to Raul. “See here?” He laid down a sheet of paper with time stamps down the left side with various codes Jack didn’t understand next to the time notations. The investigator pointed to two time stamps in the center of the sheet. “This time here is when the cockpit door closes. Forty-eight seconds later, here,” he jabbed the paper, “there’s an electronic alarm signal that one of the aircraft’s rear doors opened.”
“That’s Fuentes opening the door to make the parachute jump. It has to be,” Raul said. “And he wouldn’t linger in an open doorway at that altitude for more than a few seconds, not alone and presumably with Ariana unconscious and strapped to him. He jumped pretty quickly after that, I’d say.”
“That gives us a time stamp,” Jack muttered, turning to look at the map spread out on the table. The jet's known flight route was drawn across it as a thick red line, the times and locations when it was picked up on radar carefully noted. The final location of the crash site was marked with a large red X he was trying not to look at.
“Somewhere midway between here and here.” Jack picked up a blue pen and circled two radar stamps. He looked at the investigator’s marked timeline, grabbed a ruler, and marked with an X the approximate point at which the rear door had been opened. “Give it, say, twenty seconds max before he jumped.”
Marking a second point, he drew an elongated oval shape between the two. “They were still pretty high. About twelve thousand feet. That means the parachute drop was somewhere within this area.” Fifty to sixty miles from the crash site, he figured. Far enough away that Fuentes wouldn’t have to worry about tripping over emergency services rushing to the scene or investigators scouring the area while he made his getaway to wherever he was headed. Because if there was one thing which Jack was quite certain of, it was that Fuentes hadn’t parachuted to his intended final destination. A FBI-trained agent would be far too smart to do something so easily tracked. No, the dropzone was just a waypoint Jack needed to check out on the path to finding Ariana.
The investigator nodded. “You’re probably correct, sir.” He checked the coordinates and pulled out a larger-scale map. He re-drew the oval on it before the three men bent over it.
“There's nothing here,” Jack shook his head. “Just jungle.”
“We need satellite imagery. I could make the request, but… it might be quicker if you did.” Raul glanced at Jack. “The CIA or NASA are most likely to have the images we’ll need at a useful quality. I’d have to go through government channels to get them, and it may take some time.”
“Let me make some calls. I need to check in with Colonel Cullane anyway. He’s already pulled strings to get me down here so quickly; he might be able to pull a few more.”
Raul handed him a prepaid cell. “Untraceable. I promise.”
“Thanks, Raul.” Jack took the phone and moved across to the other side of the room to make the call, leaving Raul and the investigator still bending over the map, checking and double-checking the rough-and-ready calculations Jack had made.
“Cullane,” Brody answered the phone with his customary quick snap.
“It wasn’t an accident. Ariana Monterro has been kidnapped, and one of her bodyguards, Tomàs Fuentes, was almost certainly in on it,” Jack came straight to the point.
“Bastard!” Brody growled furiously. “I don’t recognize the name; was he one of ours?”
“Former FBI. Raul’s got his people going over Fuentes’ records with a fine-tooth comb right now, but my bet is it’s going to come down to the usual motive.”