An Abduction (The Son of No One Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  An Abduction

  Part One of The Son of No One Trilogy

  M C Rowley

  Contents

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  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

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  Prologue

  Guatemala City, 1992

  I should have known something terrible was going to happen. The whole pregnancy had been tumultuous. I held Eleanor´s hand the whole time and she gripped it back, despite her weakening strength. The pregnancy had been fraught with complications, due to the baby spinning around, or rather refusing to do so. And when the day came, our insurance company rejected our case citing unpaid monthly installments two years previous, kicking us out of the fancy private joint to one of the biggest and most in-demand public hospitals Guatemala City could offer.

  In truth, Eleanor was noble about it, but I felt it in her grip. She resented my company, and thus me, for not being able to sort this out. Time had run out. The baby was too big to remain and our doctor had told us as a parting gift of knowledge before removing us from his family-owned clinic´s records, that our baby boy could remain unborn another two weeks maximum. There had been nothing else for it. And we ended up here. Hospital Roosevelt, Guatemala City.

  The wonder of the actual birth eclipsed all else of course. Seeing life come from life, the gigantic cut, the innards of your loved one. The purple-blue colored baby that first emerges. It is quite the magnificent experience.

  And that moment proved to be a pivot in our lives, a divide that altered our course forever afterward.

  I knew our son for an hour before he was taken.

  Eleanor held him to her face for 10 minutes. She couldn’t move with the doctors already busy stitching back the incision in her lower abdomen but it was enough. His minute wrinkled face brushing against his mother´s after nine months inside of her. I couldn´t believe my luck at being there. The doctors had told me I could attend the birth, but after that, would have to leave and wait outside. So I cherished that image, Eleanor crying gently, her tears rolling down her cheeks onto the nurse´s hand which cradled our baby´s head. The baby´s blue blanket, the same material as my gown, wrapped tightly around him. He was safe, and healthy, and we were relieved, after the mess getting there.

  The nurse told Eleanor that they had to check the baby, and that he would be weighed, and then placed in an incubator. Our Spanish in those days was not great but we understood fine, and said goodbye to the little one. One of our biggest regrets of that day, besides not stopping what would eventually happen, was not giving him a name. We had not been able to decide and left it for afterwards, in the calm of the post-parto.

  The ward we were in was full of other recently turned mothers, and it was crowded. The long slit windows did nothing to lighten up the environment, and with the various other husbands, parents, and family members it made for a pretty cramped space. Kids weren´t allowed in the ward, which was a god-send. Twenty odd more souls running around would have cemented the discomfort.

  The noise was a steady and low rumble of chatter. Loud enough to make me strain to hear Eleanor´s light utterances, but quiet enough not to bother.

  It was over this abiding roll of conversations did we hear the first gunshots.

  They came from outside, on the street right outside the hospital´s main entrance. I knew that because our ward was directly over it. I remembered the building opposite and could see it from my bedside seat now.

  First, three single shots. Loud, terrible, violent and unmistakeable. We had heard a few during our time there. The cops were facing the worst drug war in decades at that time, the power shifting from Colombia in the South to Mexico in the North. And yet as common as gunshots were in Guatemala City, their sound always ripped through the periphery, tearing open the activities that had preceded them, smashing the calm and bleeding panic.

  Most of the people not in beds stood. We looked at each other in a sort of collective parenthood. Ready to protect, but unsure what to do.

  Then, the shots started for real.

  The sound was about three machine guns. Like the ones you heard in movies. Rat-ata-tata-tat. Again and again. Then, screams from down on the streets.

  Eleanor turned to me, “Scott,” she said. “My baby.”

  I nodded and ran my hand through her hair. “Don´t worry.”

  But as I said it, a commotion from behind me rose up and burst through the door. A nurse shouting something in Spanish that I couldn´t make out. But its effect was clear, the family members of the women in the beds were looking incredulous, and gathering to gang up on the poor nurse. She was sweating, her face a deep red, her flustered voice was saying the same thing again and again.

  “Vayanse, vayanse.” Over and over.

  Out of instinct I had joined the crowd around her in the hope of gaining some sort of clarity, but no luck. I walked back to Eleanor´s side, “Did you catch what she said?”

  Eleanor´s face had turned a pale green. She was weak, but managed to nod, “get out,” she said. “Everyone get out.”

  The commotion outside the ward was growing and screams from a distance and panicked voices penetrated our room.

  “Get out?” I said.

  Eleanor nodded, and gripped my hand again. I felt her wedding ring squeeze against my palm.

  It was then we heard the first shots fired inside the hospital.

  “Find him,” she said. “Damn it, Scotty. Find him!”

  I stood once more. The nurse was drowning amongst the throng of bodies shouting and pointing at her, and yet she persisted.

  “Vayanse, ¡Ya! Vayanse.”

  She was crying now too.

  Then, more shots from below, from the lobby of the hospital. I ran to the window ledge, which stood about a meter and a half off the floor and held the long slit windows all the way up to the high ceiling. I climbed up on to the ledge and pressed myself against the glass and with my right eye peered down on to the street below. Full of cops. I counted seven patrol cars parked in a semi circle, surrounding the entrance. Another truck, not a police vehicle, was destroyed, parked at the bottom of the entrance steps, peppered with bullet holes, from what I could see.

  I jumped back down. Ti
me to follow the nurse´s advice.

  I ran back to Eleanor, “I´ll be back,” I said, and she nodded and I left the ward, where hundreds of people waited in a mass panic. The gunshots continued downstairs, and I avoided the edge of the mezzanine balcony looking down just in case. I searched the crowd for a green or blue uniform but got nothing.

  Reluctant to go too far, I walked through the people. I was considerably taller than most which gave me a decent vista of the mass. And there, five meters to my left was a nurse in a starched green nurse´s uniform trying to talk to a group of about ten women, all screaming and gesticulating to her. I pushed past them and grabbed the nurse by the shoulders, and spoke English,

  “Where is the baby ward?”

  She looked at me blank, visibly pissed off that I´d breached the physical respect most afford medical staff in hospitals.

  “Perdon,” I said, in my broken Spanish. “Bebé. Dónde?”

  She shook her head at me and pushed my arms back. The crowd of women swarmed around me and pushed me behind them. I heard a few swear words uttered at me.

  The hospital was huge. I knew that much. There was no point in trying randomly for a door, it could take hours. So I ran to the edge of the balcony and looked down on the lobby.

  There, in front of the reception desk were five men, all with black machine guns, pointing and shouting at the doors of the hospital, whose glass had been blown out. They were firing their guns outside, at the cops I guessed, and the noise was terrible, so much so that I didn´t notice at first the body laying behind the gang on a hospital bed, blood seeping from his back, soaking the white sheets.

  And as the men fired at their adversaries, a nurse attended the man laying down. He was a huge figure and thick around the middle. I turned and went toward the opposite end of the floor I was on when a gunshot sounded right next to us.

  A young man holding a semi-automatic stood at the top of the stairs, shouting the same message as the nurse in our ward, and now I understood the context.

  “Get out, get out now!”

  Each sentence punctuated by a rapid burst from his machine into the ceiling.

  The result was an absolute meltdown. I tried to push my way back to Eleanor´s ward but the crowd´s strength was too fierce, we moved against our will to a second staircase that led down into a back part of the ground floor I hadn´t seen before and toward a light which I quickly gathered to be a fire exit.

  I pushed back but gave in to the force, and within a couple of minutes, stood outside in a large side street to the East of the hospital.

  I shouted at the window where Eleanor´s ward was. I heard gunshots from inside the hospital.

  I spun in a circle, hands clutching my face. I was in the middle of what felt like a thousand people, moving and swaying like a small ocean. I tried to push to the front, but the going was too slow.

  Then, the gunshots came outside once more and grew more intense. Up ahead, toward the front entrance of the hospital, a commotion started. An engine revving, then two, then three. The crowd started to part, to let them through, and people screamed. I had to fall back on the person standing behind me to get out of the way as the trucks, all big, black and with tinted windows came through.

  And the scene turned silent for a moment. No gunshots, or police sirens. Just the murmurings of the crowd, of worry, of desperate fear.

  It was easier since the crowd was dispersing back into the hospital to get through. I pushed and reached the edge of the wave and got in.

  I ran to the first nurse I saw. "Mi bebe," I said. "Por favor."

  She was a short lady, with dark hair and a round face full of worry. She was breathing deeply. She heard me but didn´t look at me, and just pulled my arm. We walked through the lobby, through the droves of confused people. We went down a corridor and reached a blue door that said, “personnel only” in Spanish. She opened it.

  Inside, thirty or so incubators were laid out in rows.

  And no babies inside any of them.

  "Se los llevaron, ¡a todos!"

  My Spanish was slow, but I understood the horror and gravity of her statement perfectly.

  They´d taken the babies. All of them.

  Chapter One

  22 Years Later.

  I held my position on the turn of the managers´ corridor at the International Paper Corporation. The cleaning staff were too close, they´d see me. The hallway lights flickered a fluorescent glow across the white tile floor up to where they had polished.

  I checked my watch. It read 23:59.

  The three cleaners were finishing the 6 square meter section of carpet with their trollies and mops in tow. Just as my patience was at its limit, the lead cleaner turned off his buffer and grunted at the others to move on. Together, they trudged away and I moved forward, taking five large strides to the glass entrance leading to the office, slid my key into the door, turned it in one swift movement and turned the handle.

  Bumping into the cleaners wasn´t a huge risk of course. They knew me. I was the company´s Director. Avoiding them just made things simpler.

  I took one last look down the corridor, slid into the office and locked the door.

  This particular office was cold and austere. A hot desk, exchanged by executives every six weeks. No personal photos, no coffee machines, no souvenirs from an expensive trek with the partner to Cancun. Just a single framed image of a white man holding a letter, smiling like a maniac at the camera.

  International Paper

  Every sheet of the highest quality.

  The walls and ceiling of the office hummed and creaked, groaning for the company of people. And in six hours or so, 1,800 employees would arrive, with no idea about what mattered, and what affected them.

  I´d been given clear instructions and got to work.

  Ransacking the company´s 5 year production calendar was a simple procedure, yielding data and figures worth millions of dollars to my true employer. The stealing part was easy. Switching files, and deleting the computer´s memory of these transactions took seconds. But the set up for the job took time. Getting hired as a Director. That was the tricky part. Earning the trust of your co-workers, and the board of old men running the stock price. That was hard. The stealing was easy. And yet the stealing held the risk. Any mistake could morph into evidence against me. I slid a rectangular usb memory stick into the drive and followed the steps to copy files from the password locked executive managers´ folder on the hard drive.

  A vibration from my pocket shook my leg, and the silence shattered. I fumbled for the phone and slammed the screen to shut it up. I looked at the number. It wasn´t Eleanor. I didn´t recognize it. I always answer my calls though. Directors have to.

  I hit the green accept call button and spoke in Spanish, “Digame.”

  The American voice was a recently familiar one. It was Jason, the journalist.

  “Mr Skelsh,” said Jason. “A good time?”

  “It´s midnight. What do you think?” I said.

  “But you asked me to call tonight, on this date, late. You said it would be better to talk.”

  I recalled that now. Goddamn journalists. What did he have on me? I´d been careful.

  “Well, I´m sorry. You´re not getting your interview tonight. I´m tied up…” I said.

  I trailed off because the screen in front of me was blinking and alerting that the files had transferred.

  “Look,” said Jason. “I just want to chat. About International Paper, and about what you do.”

  “Another time,” I said. And I hung up on him.

  My day was done. I grabbed the memory stick, and opened the computer´s data log. I cleared the history of my theft, and powered down the machine. I then took the anti bacterial wipes and cleaned down the keyboard, and the monitor of the CPU. I wiped the desk a little, and rearranged the keyboard and mouse exactly as they had been.

  I walked backward out of the office and closed the door, leaving it locked, and was about to turn when a voice came
from behind me, jolting me out of my zone.

  “Jim? What are you doing here so late?”

  I turned. It was Jane, the HR Manager. I smiled at her and saw her eyes dart to my left hand holding the dirty wipes, and memory stick.

  “Just finishing off a few things on the budget. What about you?”

  Her eyes came back to mine, and her cheeks flushed slightly.

  “Well,” she said. “Corporate slammed me on something yesterday, and I just wanted to…”

  But she trailed off. I pocketed the memory and wipes as fast as I could into my jacket pocket and nodded. “Don´t worry,” I said. “They´re a bunch of hard asses.”

  She nodded back, and smiled.

  “Go home,” I said.

  “Yeah, I was going to anyway,” she said. “I just saw the light on and wondered who was here.”

  I smiled, and waited out the awkward 30 seconds for her to get the message.

  “Well, then,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Yes,” I said. And she walked off down the hall. I hung back for 10 minutes before moving.

  Once I was sure she´d left, I walked down the shiny main corridor past the rows of offices, into my own office and grabbed my laptop bag, turned and walked back out and shut the door.

  Outside, the car park lay almost deserted. Only my silver Volvo S40 parked in the VIP section, and my contact Lena´s black Mercedes in the corner remained, tucked under the neat bush that lined the car park.

  I walked across the lot, my footsteps sounding ten times louder than they should have. I could see the blurry outline of Lena´s profile in the driver´s window. There was a three inch slit between the window and the top of the door. I walked up to the car, and barely heard the engine running.

  "I have it," I said, into the crack.

  "Okay," said Lena´s voice. "Give it here then."

  She´d been friendly enough up until tonight, and I put her brusqueness down to the fact that she was a little nervous too. I handed the little black memory stick to her outstretched palm.