James Grippando - A King's ransom

“Consider it done,” said Duncan.

“You can help?”

“Can camels spit?”

I had to think about that one.

“We have a former undersecretary of state working in our Washington office. I’ll call him right now.”

“That’s fantastic. I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” he said proudly. He leaned back in his leather chair and rested his hand atop the globe on his credenza. It was another antique, a distinctive but ugly piece with the oceans in black. He gave it a spin and asked, “What do you see here?”

“The world?” I said tentatively, sensing a trick question.

“Look closer. It’s Coolidge, Harding and Cash. We’re everywhere. Which is very good news for your father. This phone call I’m about to make is only the beginning.”

“Thank you.”

He opened his desk drawer, removed a three-ring notebook, and handed it to me. “Open it.”

I thumbed through the first few pages. The book was filled with pictures and bios of influential people-members of Congress, the U.S. attorney general, even the president of Costa Rica. It went on for pages, at least two inches thick. “What is this?”

“It doesn’t have an official name, but call it our A-list alumni registry. Everyone in that book has worked at this law firm in one of our offices around the world. If you think any of them might be able to help your father, you just let me know. All I ask is that you let me make the phone calls for you. Nobody is going to jump for a young associate in the Miami office, even if your father is kidnapped.”

“Damn, Duncan. Maybe you aren’t the heartless son of a bitch everybody says you are.”

“Don’t be so sure. It doesn’t hurt to have the most promising young lawyer in Miami beholden to me for life.”

He was half smiling, but I knew Duncan well enough to know he was at least half serious. Sure, I’d owe him big time if he could pull this off, and that was fine by me. Dad would have sold off his fleet to save me. At least I liked to think so.

I moved to the edge of my seat as Duncan picked up the phone and dialed our Washington office.

An hour later I was at my mother’s house, trying to cheer her with a little good news. The wheels were in motion, I assured her, and I tried to put on my best face. I was fooling her no more than she was fooling me, the way she emerged from her bedroom every forty-five minutes, trying to hide her red and puffy eyes, assuring me it was allergies.

We sat down together at the kitchen table and made a list of people we should notify. Mom made the first few calls, but it was emotionally exhausting. I picked up where she left off, and soon the grapevine was in full swing. By midafternoon our phone was ringing off the hook. Dad’s friends, Mom’s friends, friends of friends, people we hadn’t heard from in years-all were offering to help in any way they could. Other than to keep Dad in their prayers, we didn’t know what to tell them. This was all foreign to us. The only thing we knew was that, by the end of the day, the one phone call we’d wanted had yet to come.

There was still no word from the FBI or the State Department.

I decided to stay with Mom that night, though my being there only seemed to highlight the fact that my sister wasn’t. In a crisis like this, I suppose it was natural for Mom to want both of her children, even if she and her daughter weren’t even technically on speaking terms.

My parents had given me the right amount of freedom as a child, but Lindsey they’d strangled. Especially my mother. From preschool on, whatever Lindsey was doing, Mom was right there, as room mother, assistant soccer coach, teacher’s aide, you name it. It was all out of love, surely, but Mom just couldn’t seem to grasp that taking her eyes off her daughter for more than five consecutive minutes didn’t constitute abandonment. A disastrous semester of home schooling in the eighth grade made it almost inevitable that Lindsey would run with the wrong crowd in high school, and by her junior year she was barely speaking to either parent. I became Lindsey’s only lifeline to the family. Knowing that she was a bright kid, I talked her into going to college, though it was her own idea to enroll at the University of Puget Sound near Seattle, farther away from home than any other school in the contiguous United States. She earned a degree in journalism, and for the past two years she’d been traveling across the Americas in search of her first byline. Unlike my mother, I didn’t see it as the end of the world that she wanted to go out and find herself. She never phoned our folks, and even her calls to me were pretty rare, maybe once every six weeks. I’d find out where she’d been, send her a little money, whatever she needed. For my parents’ benefit, I’d subtly try to convince her that finding herself didn’t necessarily mean losing her family. She didn’t seem to be biting.

Mom and I stayed up talking till after the eleven o’clock news, then said good night. My old room was virtually unchanged since the day I’d moved out to go to college, preserved like a time capsule. The dim light of the moon shone through the window, just bright enough to reveal an outline of my past. The Miami Dolphins team poster I’d worshipped as a teenager was still on the wall, hovering over the old dinosaur of a computer I’d used to explore everything from Super Mario Brothers to-well, dinosaurs. I half expected the door to open at any minute and my father to check on me the way he did when I was in high school. Spot checks were his way of keeping his teenage son from sneaking out at midnight to hang with the cool crowd in Coconut Grove. But as the minutes slowly passed, the house slipped deeper into an eerie silence. It seemed empty without Dad, and it made me ache inside. I wondered where he was sleeping tonight, if he was sleeping, if he was still alive.

The phone rang at half past midnight. My immediate hope was that they’d found Dad. My fear was that they’d found his body. It was FBI Agent Nettles on the line, which put my heart directly into my throat.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It’s sort of an administrative issue.”

“At this hour?”

“I’ve just received confirmation that the Colombians are officially treating this case as an abduction. Which is good news. That means they have reason to believe your father is still alive.”

“Have they heard from the kidnappers?”

“No, but their divers have searched the area thoroughly. No body was found.”

No corpse. That was good news, I supposed. “Will the FBI take the lead now that it’s officially a kidnapping?”

“It’s not legally a kidnapping until there’s a demand for ransom. It’s an abduction.”

“We’re still talking about a United States citizen. I’d like to see the FBI assert itself.”

“That’s the other reason for my call. I’m afraid that the FBI isn’t going to intercede in this case.”

I’d been pacing across the bedroom with the phone to my ear, but I suddenly stopped cold in my tracks. “Come again?”

He paused, as if measuring his words. “As I explained to you and your mother earlier, the FBI can’t get involved in cases of international abductions or kidnappings unless the State Department invites us.”

“That’s being taken care of. The supervising partner at my law firm assured me that the State Department would extend an invitation within twenty-four hours.”

“That much has been done. They’ve extended an invitation.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The FBI has declined it.”

“What?”

“The State Department placed certain conditions on the FBI’s involvement that were out of line. It was impossible to accept their invitation.”