The Wrong Hostage Read Free Page B

had once held the infamous Blue Fox. Sidewalk bar barkers hailed him every few steps.
    “Hey, mister, you want some pussy? How about a little fun? Preeeety girls, right here, come in.”
    A thin man with a thinner black mustache had incorporated sound effects into his sales routine, pinching one side of his face between thumb and forefinger and jerking the flesh of his cheek juicily to suggest sex.
    Faroe had heard all the come-ons since he was fifteen. Once he’d smiled at the grimy tricks. Then he’d become indifferent. Now he was disgusted.
    He didn’t know if it was an improvement.
    He flagged a passing yellow cab and climbed in the backseat with his parcel. Instantly the driver made eye contact in his rearview mirror and gave him a broad, practiced grin.
    “I can find anything for you, señor . Girls, mebbe? I know where the clean ones are.”
    “La Línea,” Faroe said. “Go back through the Zona Río.”
    The driver looked at Faroe’s eyes, shut up, and turned north.
    In three minutes the taxi left the hustling, squalid streets of Old Town behind. Now Faroe looked out on the broad boulevards of Tijuana’s international district. When he’d first come to Tijuana, this river district had been an open sewer over a marshy land. It had been equal opportunity sewage—some stayed south of the border and some emptied with the Tía Juana River into the ocean at Imperial Beach, U.S. of A.
    The river still carried sewage, but it was underground now. On top were streets like the Paseo de los Héroes, whose high-end international shopping rivaled that of any city on earth.
    Stores. Discos. Nightclubs. Restaurants.
    Banks.
    Lots and lots of banks.
    Their business towers were modest compared to those in San Diego, but by the one- and two-story scale of the rest of Tijuana, the banks were giant, glistening, new. A mecca for money.
    Just shows what thirty billion dollars a year in outside income can do for a city, Faroe thought. Too bad the billions came mostly from ghetto addicts and barrio hypes north of the line .
    But that wasn’t his problem anymore. Steele and St. Kilda Consultingbe damned, he was through with the crisscross, double-cross, black-is-white and white-is-black world he’d lived in all his adult life.
    Let some other fool risk his butt to save a world that doesn’t want to be saved, fuck you very much .
    Yet Faroe still felt sorry for the poor citizens in TJ who weren’t in on the money game that was going on all around them. They scrambled for a lousy living while most everyone else fattened on the sugar teat of smuggling.
    Too bad, how sad, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I’ve retired my broken lance and put poor old Rosinante out to pasture .
    And if Steele doesn’t understand, he can just shove it where the sun don’t shine .
    The cabbie dropped Faroe at the edge of the neutral zone called the port of entry. He walked along another street crammed with pharmacies and souvenir stands. A block south of the physical frontier, shops gave way to storefront travel agencies offering passage to Los Angeles and the Central Valley, Wenatchee and Burlington and Spokane, fifteen hundred miles away. Kansas, Chicago, New York, Colorado, the cotton fields of the South; any and all destinations welcoming cheap workers were represented by hawkers competing for warm bodies to fill their quotas.
    Faroe passed the long, snaky line of visa seekers outside the administrative offices of the Border Protection Agency. Like someone who has done it many times before, he pushed through the swinging doors that led to the auditorium-sized processing center.
    Last stop before American soil.
    A customs inspector wearing a blue shirt and a sidearm spotted Faroe’s parcel and pointed to the X-ray scanner.
    Faroe put the box on the conveyor belt and waited. A second inspector stared at the scanner screen, examining the contents of the parcels and bags on the belt.
    Automatically Faroe stepped through the metal