Page 46 of Prisoner of War
Chapter Eleven
The young soldier, Soto, took Minnie straight to Zalaya’s office with no detours, not even a word to her. Zalaya obviously had his personnel cowed into complete obedience, which filled Minnie with more confusion. Duardo was clearly Zalaya...but Zalaya had a reputation filled with unspeakable horrors and atrocities. How could this be Duardo? How could the man she loved—who wasvery much alive—be committing these terrible things?
Then relief filled her as she remembered something Nick and her father had said when she, Calli and Carmen had pried information from them. Zalaya had been dishonorably discharged from the Army two years ago. So there had been a real Zalaya, which meant Duardo was only pretending to be that evil man.
Only, where was the real one and how hadDuardo stepped into this role?
Worry about it later, she told herself. The answers would come. For now it was clear that everyone around her was convinced DuardowasZalaya and until she had some answers, she must deal with him as Zalaya.
She hugged the crucial fact to herself, barely able to hide her smile. Duardo was alive.He lived!
Zalaya’s office was on the second floor, north wing, whichput it smack in the middle of all the bedroom windows they had been studying all night. Was his the light that had continued to burn?
Soto opened the door and beckoned her inside by waving the point of his gun. Minnie stepped into an electronic nightmare. There were banks of screens and monitors on every wall and no windows. Sitting in the middle of the room was a console of switches and dials.The nerve center, clearly. Beside it was a large teak desk with a perfectly normal executive chair behind it.
She looked around, then studied the monitors. They seemed to show every single room in the palace, along with most of the areas outside the building. She and Carmen had not stood a chance of going undetected. How long had Zalaya’s people been watching them?
“Here. Wait,” Soto said.
Minnie looked over her shoulder. He was pointing at her feet.
“Here?” she said. “Right here on this spot?”
It was too much English for him. He shrugged and slung his submachine gun so it rested against his hip. He curled his forefinger over the trigger guard and watched her.
She went back to studying the monitors. How much of the grounds did Zalaya have covered? How much had he seen of theirmovements? Did he know she had not been alone? She scanned the outside screens. None of them showed the thick grove of trees at the back of the grounds. None of them showed the section of the building with the square iron patch of the coal chute. Yet they could have been seen crossing the grounds. They might have been seen in the building itself. She couldn’t see a view of the fire-escape stairs,but there was a reason for all the switches and dials on the desk—he could jump from camera to camera.
Why had Carmen not warned her about the cameras? She could not have known about them. These were something that Serrano—or Zalaya—had installed. Minnie glanced around the room. There was a lot of expensive equipment in here. It indicated that one or the other of the pair was overly paranoidabout security.
She turned and glanced at Soto. His gaze didn’t shift from her. He was the perfect guard.
Her study of the room completed, Minnie dropped her gaze to the floor. Duardo/Zalaya said he would interrogate her. She had to come up with a story now that would explain away everything and not have her shot on the spot as a spy...or turned over to the whorehouse, like Soto wanted. Regardlessof what Duardo may want to do with her, he was surrounded by men with machine guns who wanted her dead or given to them as some sort of prize.
But as the minutes ticked away, she could think of nothing that would cover every facet of the circumstances under which she had been discovered. Plus, she had to make sure that whatever story she came up with would expand to cover Carmen, if she had beenseen at all. She squeezed her temples under her fingertips, rubbing them as she rapidly discarded each idea that occurred to her. She’d had plenty of practice lying to her parents as a teenager, sneaking out at night and heading for clubs when she was supposed to be on homework dates...but this was such a different scale!
Then she paused, considering that thought. No, it wasn’t a different scaleat all. Lying was lying. The only difference in scale was that if the lie didn’t hold up this time, she’d have way more than a simple grounding to deal with.
The door handle turned and Zalaya limped in with two more soldiers behind him, both with machine guns at their hips.
In this better light, Minnie was struck by the changes in Duardo. He had lost muscle and was leaner and paler than sheremembered. What had he been through to make him look that...used? Then there was the melodramatic moustache and the eye patch, which must have been the real Zalaya’s. Most distressing was the limp and the cane. Were both because of the bullet he had taken in the back to protect her? She could not ask.
Unexpectedly, different ideas connected up. Duardo’s limp and a conversation Minnie barelyrecalled—she could hear Cristián’s studied tones as he’d explained the theory, with Trini Juanita bouncing on her chair with enthusiasm.
She looked at the way Duardo held his mouth and the strange light in his eyes. He had never shown that calculating gleam before. It would be better to think of him and deal with him as if hewereZalaya for now. It would help her avoid a slip of the tongue thatwould betray both of them.
Duardo—Zalayadumped a length of chain on the desk and from the center of the pile extracted a single handcuff. He held it out to her. “Put this around your wrist.”
She kept still. She had no idea what he intended, but she wasn’t going to cooperate because that’s not what she would have done with Zalaya.
He spoke in fast Spanish and immediately she was grabbed frombehind and her arm extended out painfully. Soto scooted forward, took the cuff from Zalaya and slapped it over her wrist so that it snapped shut with a distinct click. The chain was attached to it.
The soldiers kept hold of her as Zalaya picked out another cuff from the middle of the pile of chain. This one he slipped around the handle of the drawer under his desk. He then pulled the chair upand dropped into it. He put the cane aside and lifted his leg to the desk and absently rubbed at his thigh. All the while he kept his gaze on her.
“Search her,” he said.
Hands grabbed her arms again, holding her still. More hands and fingers pried her legs apart and probed her thighs, her hips. Higher. She struggled and even got her foot up high enough to smash it into one of their thighs. Itwas a near miss. She had been aiming for his balls.
“I’d keep still if I were you,” Zalaya said, barely raising his voice. There was a quick snick of metal that Minnie recognized. She looked up, straight into the barrel of a revolver. She could see the bullets in the chambers, pointing at her. Behind the gun, Zalaya’s steadfast gaze.
