Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
The afternoon sun had heated the courtyard, and without the benefit of the breeze, which was blocked by brick walls, it had become stifling. They’d moved inside for lunch, but Kenzie was convinced the hotel room had shrunk. It was definitely not large enough for three adults.
She sat cross-legged on her bed, leaning against the wall.
Dad occupied the single chair, scrolling on the tablet he’d set on the table.
Jaz sat on the other bed, laptop open. He was trying to dig up more information on Henry Sebast. By his scowl, he wasn’t pleased with what he’d learned—or more likely, had failed to learn.
The remains of the lunch they’d had delivered were scattered on the nightstands and small table—empty sandwich wrappers and empty water bottles. The ceiling fan turned overhead.
Outside, the streets of Phillipsburg thronged with tourists who seemed to have multiplied overnight. Music drifted up, steel drums and laughter, a celebration that felt like it belonged to another world entirely.
They’d been waiting for hours for Wentz to call back and for Alyssa to finish her facial recognition search, gathering as much information as possible on Henry and Francine.
Kenzie had been looking for information on Francine. She was fifty-seven—younger than her husband by a decade. Born in a small Missouri town, college at the University of Missouri—
“Mizzou,” both Jaz and Dad had said at the same time when she’d mentioned it, then chuckled together. It’d been their one point of connection since they’d met.
Francine was a nurse. She married right out of college, divorced soon after. She met Henry and married him when she was in her late twenties. They started a family.
Nothing about her screamed drug smuggler. Maybe she didn’t know what her husband was up to.
Dad was using his connections to dig up as much information on the Consortium as he could find. If he’d learned anything interesting, he hadn’t shared it.
Mostly, they were waiting for something—anything—to break open.
When Kenzie’s phone rang, both Dad and Jaz looked at it.
“Alyssa,” Kenzie answered, putting it on speaker. “What did you find?”
“Got your facial rec results,” Alyssa said. “Henry Sebast’s real name is Marcus Aldridge.”
“Aldridge?” Jaz moved to the edge of the bed and dropped his feet to the floor. “Never heard of him.”
“Marcus Aldridge. Born in 1963.”
“An old man,” Dad said.
“Stop it.” Kenzie shook her head. “He’s younger than you.”
“By a year, and that’s my point.”
“Anyway,” Alyssa continued, “Aldridge disappeared in 1988. He’d been working in Venezuela at the time.”
“He would have been—” Kenzie did the math “—twenty-five? And he just, what? Fell off the map?”
“Apparently,” Alyssa said. “When his parents couldn’t reach him, they reported him missing and launched a massive search. Never found him. He’s been missing ever since.”
Jaz was nodding. “He reinvented himself. But why?
“There’s more.” Alyssa’s keyboard clicked in the background. “Marcus Aldridge’s parents were missionaries in Venezuela when he was a kid. In 1975, he was kidnapped.”
Jaz whistled. “Wow. He was twelve?”
“Yeah. The kidnappers kept him for months.”
“Alyssa.” Dad leaned toward the phone. “Is there any information on who kidnapped him?”
“Looks like something called the Socialist League? They didn’t demand a ransom, according to this, but a… Hold on, it’s here somewhere.”
“A revolutionary tax.” Dad had obviously heard of this before.
“That’s right,” Alyssa said.
“In Venezuela in the seventies and eighties, the locals were suspicious of Christian missionaries, thinking they were associated with the CIA, gathering intel.”
“Were they?” Kenzie asked.
Dad shrugged, the only answer she was going to get. She focused on the phone. “Lyss, did the family pay?”
“I’m trying to get more info, but I’ve run into a wall. Dad, you might have faster access through your channels.”
“I’ll see what I can find out.” He reached for his phone and headed to the short hallway outside the bathroom to make a call.
“I’ll email what I’ve learned, Kenzie, and I’ll keep digging.” Alyssa ended the call.
Jaz leaned back against the wall, scrubbing a hand over his face. “So Marcus Aldridge was a missionary kid who got kidnapped in Venezuela when he was twelve. If Aldridge is Henry, and Henry is El Fantasma… But The Ghost is Venezuelan.”
“You’re sure? Maybe one reason Henry’s stayed hidden is because everyone’s looking for a Hispanic man.”
“Huh.” He considered that. “Okay, so a white kid gets kidnapped, is held for months, then somehow ends up running a drug empire? Is that what we’re saying?”
“Trauma changes people.” Kenzie checked her email on her phone and opened the document Alyssa had sent.
“Right. And just because he was a missionary’s kid doesn’t mean he believed what his parents did.
And maybe his parents were CIA, not Christians at all.
If Henry’s really our guy…” Jaz shook his head.
“I’ve been chasing El Fantasma for years.
Years. And he’s been right there, running in the same circles as I was, acting like a friend. ”
Dad stepped back into the room. “Got confirmation on the kidnapping. The kid was taken. The parents paid the ransom and then heard nothing for months. When he was released, the family returned to the US. The parents never returned to Venezuela. My source thinks Marcus was taken by a family running a smuggling operation.” He swallowed, looking a little pale.
“Head of the family was Rafael Salcedo.”
Kenzie remembered the name. “He’s the guy who ran that cartel—”
“The Consortium of Orinoco.” Jaz barely whispered the words.
The pieces were coming together.
Dad settled on his chair again. “The Consortium was small at the time, barely a blip on the radar, mostly smuggling drugs from Colombia to the coast. They had ties to a revolutionary group, which was the cover for the kidnapping, though probably the goal was cash.”
Kenzie tried to imagine it—a teenage boy, ripped from his family, held by drug smugglers. What had that done to him? What had he seen?
“So let’s think this through.” Jaz started pacing the handkerchief-sized room. “Marcus was a kid, not even a teenager yet, taken hostage by the Salcedos. He was probably terrified at first, but he was with them for months. Maybe they mistreated him, and he wrested the cartel away out of revenge.”
“Maybe. But if that were the case, why would he ever go back to Venezuela?” Kenzie wouldn’t. She’d have stayed where it was safe—or safer, anyway. “What if it was Stockholm Syndrome? What if he connected with them—and they became like family?”
“I’ve seen it.” Dad leaned back, the movement heavy as if a new burden rested on his shoulders. She didn’t ask about it, couldn’t put her finger on it, but something was different.
“Okay, going with that theory…” Jaz focused on her. “We know Marcus’s parents paid the ransom, but Salcedo kept Marcus for months anyway. What if Rafael told him his parents didn’t pay, that they decided he wasn’t worth what they were asking? That’d be enough to traumatize a kid.”
“Maybe Marcus came to see Rafael as a father figure,” Dad suggested.
Kenzie could see that. “And Sebastián—that was their son’s name, right? The one who took over?” At Jaz’s nod, she said, “Maybe they became like brothers.”
“Marcus would’ve seen him as a little brother,” Jaz said. “Sebastián would have been about five, I think, when Marcus was taken.”
They were quiet, and Kenzie considered what they knew. A missionary couple’s son finding family among drug smugglers. It seemed impossible. And yet—
“The name.” It came to her in a flash. “Henry’s last name is Sebast.”
Jaz’s eyes widened. “Sebast. As in Sebastián.”
“Makes sense.” Dad’s voice held zero enthusiasm. “They must have been close, then. Close enough for Henry to carry the name with him into his new identity.”
“Doesn’t track.” Jaz shook his head. “My intel says El Fantasma—we’re assuming Henry—killed Sebastián and took over the operation.” He looked between Kenzie and her father. “So maybe he was motivated by revenge, but he felt guilty? Took the name as some kind of penance?”
Kenzie turned to her father to see what he thought.
His jaw was tight. He looked like…like he was about to crack.
“Dad, what’s wrong?”
He met her eyes, and she saw something there she’d rarely seen. Regret.
“El Fantasma didn’t kill Sebastián. Marcus didn’t.” His voice was flat. “I killed him.”
Whoa.
Her father had killed a man? A young man, barely an adult? Why?
Jaz sat on the edge of the bed.
“Rafael died of a heart attack,” Dad said. “Sebastián was his only son, his only child. He took over the operation. This would have been more than a decade after Marcus’s kidnapping, in eighty-six. Sebastián was eighteen or nineteen.”
Dad’s information agreed with everything Jaz had told Kenzie.
Dad stared at a point somewhere over Jaz’s head, beyond the wall.
“I was in Venezuela. My focus was on socialist agitators, which was why Rafael was on my radar. His death was concerning because of the cartel. We worried a larger one would absorb them, or the socialists would and use the profit to fund their plans. I was supposed to observe and report, nothing else.” His eyes flicked to Kenzie’s but didn’t hold.
“One day, one of their shipments was intercepted by authorities, and Sebastián…” Dad blew out a breath.
“He lost it. He was furious. They lived in a little town near the river, a pretty place with families and… Sebastián went on a rampage. I was in a café down the street when I heard the gunshots. I went to observe, but then…”
Kenzie’s throat tightened.
Her father had been a CIA operative. She knew that. Yet in most of her memories, he wore a suit to work. He was a government contractor, an executive. Not a killer.
She’d never thought too much about what he’d done before he’d retired from the CIA.
“I slipped into the house from the alley behind,” Dad said.
“Saw two bodies. Sebastián decided this family was guilty. He’d killed the mom, killed a kid, maybe fourteen, fifteen years old.
And he held a gun to the father’s head, demanding to know who he’d told.
The man had lost his wife, his kid, yet still he claimed he hadn’t betrayed him.
He was crying, sobbing, begging for his life.
I don’t know if he betrayed Salcedo or not.
” Dad lifted his hands, let them drop. “When Salcedo turned the gun toward the only other person in the room, a little girl—couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old—I made a choice.
” Dad lowered his gaze and met her eyes. “I shot him.”
It was a terrible, terrible story, but Kenzie’s father wasn’t the villain in it. He was the hero. She exhaled all the fear she’d held. Her father was the hero, and he always had been.
“I wasn’t supposed to do it.” Dad shifted his gaze to Jaz. “I was young and reckless. I couldn’t see the long-term implications. I just saw a kid about to die.”
“You saved her life,” Kenzie said.
“It seemed like the right thing to do.” Dad’s words came slowly. “And maybe it was. We were the ones who started the rumor that a rival had killed him. We were the ones who gave him the moniker El Fantasma. We couldn’t let the locals know the CIA had been involved.”
“That’s…wow.” Jaz seemed to be processing it. “Marcus capitalized on the story, the mystery.”
“Seems so,” Dad said. “I was transferred out of Venezuela that night, put on another assignment, another country, another continent. Looking back, I see what I didn’t understand then: Sebastián was volatile and impulsive.
Under his leadership, The Consortium would have stayed small.
He would have self-destructed, taken the whole thing down with him. ”
“Maybe,” Kenzie said. “Or a rival cartel would have used his faults against him.”
Jaz ignored her attempt to make Dad feel better. “Marcus didn’t self-destruct.”
“He turned it into what it is today.” Dad’s voice was heavy. “When I killed Sebastián, I created a power vacuum. And Marcus Aldridge filled it.”
Kenzie checked the information Alyssa had sent.
“Marcus Aldridge was working for an oil company in Caracas in eighty-six. Let’s assume he had kept up with the Salcedo family.
He would have known about Rafael’s death and then learned about Sebastián’s.
When Sebastián died, Marcus…what? Just took over?
” Kenzie turned to Jaz. “You told me you thought Sebastián must have had powerful allies. Maybe Marcus was one of them.”
“Yeah, that…that makes sense.” All this information seemed to have shaken loose the melancholy that had descended on Jaz in the courtyard. “And then Marcus decided to end his first identity altogether, maybe so nobody would put it together. He became Henry Sebast. Honoring his ‘little brother.’”
“He must have been running the operation ever since,” Dad said. “Building it. Growing it. Using the moniker I gave him, El Fantasma, to hide.”
“And hiding probably wasn’t that hard,” Jaz said. “Henry doesn’t look like a Venezuelan drug lord.”
Dad stood suddenly, his expression darkening.
“What is it?” Kenzie asked.
“This is about me.” He met her eyes. “Henry—Marcus… It’s not a coincidence that he targeted you. He must’ve somehow figured out who killed his friend.”
“Oh.” The realization dripped down Kenzie’s back. “You think he’s seeking revenge?”
“You were pulled into this… Your life is in danger because of me.” Dad’s voice was rough. “Because of what I did.”
“You saved a girl’s life.”
“And created a monster.”
Kenzie couldn’t wrap her mind around it. How long had Marcus Aldridge been watching her? How long had he been planning?
“There’s no way you could’ve known.” Jaz grabbed his phone and tapped a text. “What matters now is stopping him. I’m reaching out to Wentz again.”
Though Dad didn’t argue, his mind was clearly spinning on everything they’d learned. One way or another, between Dad and Jaz and the entire Drug Enforcement Agency, it seemed Henry/Marcus/El Fantasma was about to go down.