Bridal Op

“I liked symposiums and consultations with local police. Court appearances to give expert testimony definitely beat wondering if any poisonous bugs will crawl into my sleeping bag.” Or snakes. She swallowed.

She should have thought of that before she’d signed up to be an undercover agent at Miami Confidential. But she’d given up her comfortable job of profiling and in-house suspect interviews, partially because the offer from Miami Confidential had been hard to turn down and because she’d seen it as another new challenge to prove that she could stand her ground anywhere, do anything a man could. It was something her father had taught her at an early age, at times when having four brothers had overwhelmed her.

She thought of her work at the DEA then glanced around at the narrow ledge that was to be their resting place for the night. Now that she was with Miami Confidential, she had a feeling she could kiss assignments that came with room service goodbye.

“Snakes can’t climb this high, can they?” she asked, to be sure.

He was playing with the phone, trying to make a connection. “What would be the point? Nothing’s up here. They stay where their prey is.”

Damn smart of them.

“Okay. Good.” She nodded. “Anything?” she asked after a while.

He shook his head. “Even satellite phones don’t work everywhere.”

“We’ll report back once we reach the top.” She hoped and prayed they would make it that far.

“Not much left for tomorrow—an hour’s worth of climbing at best. But it’s tricky.”

Tricky? What the hell was the wall-of-death they’d just conquered? “Worse than up to here?”

“We’ll be getting to the part where the rock is covered with soil.”

And soil crumbled, slipped. “Great.”

“Plus we’ll be above the tree line,” he added. “We could be spotted.”

“All this good news is overwhelming.”

“We can handle it.”

Damn right they would. Failure was not an option. She wasn’t going to let Sonya die.

“She was still alive four days ago.” She kept telling herself that throughout the day, hanging on to the thought for hope.

The last time Carlos Botero had been contacted he had demanded to hear Sonya’s voice. The contact the kidnappers allowed had been brief but sufficient to reassure the father. “We have no reason to think anything has changed since then. Rachel will call us as soon as anything new comes in.”

The whole case was full of oddities, starting with the ransom note. It had been delivered to Sonya’s father instead of her fiancé, Juan DeLeon, a powerful politician. Why? Did that have significance or was it random choice? Both men were wealthy and powerful.

“I keep thinking there’s more at stake here than money. The kidnappers have to be from Ladera. Otherwise, why bring Sonya here? It only makes sense if they know the country like the back of their hands, if they’re sure they can hide out more effectively here.” She paused. “But if they’re Laderan, they have to be more familiar with Juan than with Botero. Why not send the note to him? Or why not kidnap Sonya in Ladera in the first place? Law enforcement is a lot more lax here. She’s been spending as much time here lately as she does at home.” They’d been over the same questions before. But maybe if they kept asking them, eventually one of them would come up with the correct answer.

“They want to keep the focus away from the country.”

She nodded, still agreeing with the conclusion they kept coming up with every time they talked about the clues. At least, as far as they knew, the kidnapers were not aware that Miami Confidential now had Sonya’s true location.

“I—” She fell silent then went ahead and, for the first time, voiced the thought she knew had been creeping around in both their heads. “I don’t think they’re bringing her back.”

His face darkened. “No. Transporting her across borders was way too much risk the first time around. They’d have to be stupid to try that again.”

“They never meant to return her.” Her words hung with a heavy finality in the air between them.

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. They’ll keep her alive as long as they need her in case Botero asks to hear her voice. As soon as they have the money…”

He didn’t have to finish.

“It’s about politics,” he said with conviction. “Juan has a number of bills on the table, bills that would cut in to the drug trade, bills that would alter some political processes. The House is in session. His bills are coming up for a vote soon. Someone wants him distracted and far from Ladera. They know he’s not coming back from the U.S. as long as he thinks Sonya is still there. The longer he is away from home, the more time his enemies have to conspire against him and make sure his bills fail.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“But?”

“I don’t know. Doesn’t feel right to me.”

“You don’t think Juan is the real target? Someone tried to shoot him a few weeks before the kidnapping. Hell of a coincidence.”

“Of course Juan is the target,” she said, agreeing with him up to that point. “I just don’t think the kidnapping is politically motivated.”

“Right. Because it doesn’t feel right.”

“I just think that the fact that whoever is trying to get to Juan DeLeon is doing it through his fiancée has some significance.”

“His ex-wife, Maggie, is locked up in an insane asylum,” he said, repeating an earlier argument. “Sean checked her out.”

Of course, he was absolutely right, frustrating as it was. And yet, her instincts were definitely pulling her in Maggie’s, the ex-wife’s, direction. “The only people caught so far that we know for sure were involved with the kidnapping were Maggie’s doctor, Dr. Ramon and her cousin, Jose Fuentes. The only reason we even know that Sonya is at the army base is because Fuentes confessed it before he bled out.”

“He never confessed a connection to Maggie.”

“He couldn’t very well tell his life story, could he? He didn’t live long enough, for heaven’s sake.”

“And if he worked for someone else?”

She considered that, determined to keep an open mind. Most of Maggie’s family were well-to-do, a few of them in politics, but there were a couple of black sheep, some with ties to the drug trade. Rafe had a valid point there.

Fuentes could have worked for one of Juan’s political opponents or one of his enemies in the drug trade. There were too many possibilities. His bills were making him unpopular with a lot of people.

“Anyway, the most important thing is we know where Sonya is right now,” he said. “First we get her to safety, then we can figure out who was behind it all.”

She nodded. If all went well, at one point tomorrow Rafe and she would see to it that Sonya Botero was freed from her captors, whomever they might work for. She hoped and prayed the woman was still alive when they got there.

“They’ll keep her around for a while yet,” he said, his thoughts apparently running along the same line. “For the money and because of Juan. She’s just a tool to hurt him, to distract him from his political agenda. If his young, beautiful fiancée died now, think of the headlines. Think of the outpouring of sympathy he’d get, the votes. No.”

She nodded. It made sense that whoever Juan’s enemies were, they would go for total destruction—messing up both his career and personal life. Distract him with the kidnapping to make sure his bills fail, then finish him off by murdering the woman he loves. The plan seemed diabolically thorough. She could definitely see Maggie, year after year in the insane asylum, plotting her revenge. “The fury of a woman scorned.”

“Somebody wants to go, you’ve got to let them. If that’s how they feel, no sense in them staying, is there?” he asked. “I never understood jealousy.”

“You might have to be in an actual relationship, you know, with feelings, to experience it.”

“Ouch,” he said, but grinned.