“I wasn’t sure if I should call you or not. I wrote a little personal note to your mom. I know this might sound hollow, but if there’s anything I can do, just call. I mean it. I feel terrible that this has happened.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
I paused, not sure where to take it from there. We’d been best friends and lovers for almost five years. How weird it was to think that if my father hadn’t been kidnapped we might never have uttered another word to one another. My heart was pounding. I was nervous and confused. I felt guilty, too, thinking that in some way I’d used my father’s crisis as an excuse to reconnect with Jenna, however briefly. Calling her had accomplished nothing. Or maybe it had proved too much. The mere sound of her voice had only confirmed that I wasn’t over her.
“So, how are you doing?” I asked.
She said something beyond “Good,” but it was garbled. The connection was breaking up.
“I’m sorry, what?” I said.
Her response was pure static. The connection was even worse.
“I think I’m losing you.” As soon as I’d said it, the line went dead, and I realized the irony of my words. I placed the receiver in the cradle, sat back in my chair, and stared blankly off to the middle distance.
“I’ve definitely lost you,” I said softly.
My cell phone rang. I snatched it from my pocket, thinking it was Jenna. It was my mother.
“Good news,” she said.
“What?”
“I’ve been worried sick ever since Guillermo told us how those kidnappers think of your father as a gold mine. All I’ve been able to think is, What if we can’t pay the ransom?”
“I know. We’re all worried.”
“Well, our worries are over.”
“What do you mean?”
“If we have to, we can pay a gold mine and then some.”
“How?”
“Your father once told me that if anything ever happened to him on one of his trips, I should check a special safe-deposit box he opened at Brickell Trust. The last couple of days I’ve been putting it off. I was afraid I would find a letter of good-bye or something on that order. This morning I finally went. You won’t believe what was in there.”
“Stop right there, Mom.” On the heels of Agent Huitt’s accusations, I was suddenly concerned that Mom and I might not be the only ones on this phone line.
“But this is really good news.”
“We’ll talk about it when I get home. I’ll be right there.” I hung up before she could say more.
I had no idea what she’d found, but I surely didn’t want her blurting it out if there was any possibility that the FBI had tapped our lines and was eavesdropping. I returned the notice of Gilbert Jones’s death to the top of my pile, then quickly headed out the door.
10
As a lawyer, I was embarrassed to admit it. But I couldn’t lie to my own mother. I’d never heard of kidnap-and-ransom insurance for a fisherman.
That was exactly what Mom had found in the safe-deposit box: a K amp;R insurance policy issued to my father. I’d seen that type of coverage before, but only for the big multinational conglomerates. For companies with employees abroad, it certainly made sense to shift the risk of an abduction to an insurance company. The insurer was then on the hook for paying the ransom and, even more important, hiring a private security consultant to negotiate a safe release. When I thought about it, the concept made even more sense for a small business. A half-million-dollar ransom would do much more damage to Rey’s Seafood Company than would a ten-million-dollar hit to a Fortune 500 company. Until now, however, I’d never realized how affordable it was even for the little guy.
I read the entire policy carefully, first page to last, while seated at the kitchen table with my mother looking over my shoulder. I was at once proud of my old man for thinking of it and excited as hell that he’d actually followed through and bought it. Hot damn! Dad was insured.
“This is good, right?” said Mom.
“It’s fantastic.”
“So I read it correctly? The insurance company pays the ransom?”
“Up to three million dollars.”
Her eyes brightened, and she actually smiled. It was the most upbeat I’d seen her. “I wish your father had told me he had insurance. Why was he so secretive with the safe-deposit box?”
“It says right here in the policy that if the insured tells anyone that he has kidnap-and-ransom insurance, the policy is void. Apparently Dad took that pretty literally. He wouldn’t even tell you.”
“What happens now?”
“I’ll call the insurance company and give them notice. If I read the policy right, they select the negotiator who will handle Dad’s case.”
“Is that better than using the FBI?”
I hesitated to tell her about the disastrous meeting with Agent Huitt. Her spirits were too high. “My guess is that these private consultants are former FBI hostage negotiators and the like. How can it get better than that? We’ll have a skilled negotiator who doesn’t have to work within the box created by bureaucrats and diplomats.”
“If only I’d gone to the bank sooner. But when your father told me to check the safe-deposit box if anything ever happened to him, I thought he meant if he crashed in one of those little airplanes they fly into Puerto Cabezas or was lost at sea in a leaky old shrimp boat. I was so afraid to find something in the box that I wasn’t ready to see, a last will and testament or-”
“I understand.”
“Please be firm with this insurance company. You know how slow they can be.”
I could hear the concern in her voice, her fear that she’d needlessly delayed things by not finding the policy sooner. “Mom, I don’t care what it takes. Before the day’s over, I’ll speak to our negotiator. I promise.”
As it turned out, keeping that promise proved almost too easy. Dad was insured with Quality Insurance Company, a Bermuda-based subsidiary of a worldwide underwriting group. More important, I quickly learned that Quality was a client of Coolidge, Harding and Cash. The connection wasn’t surprising. While scores of companies offered kidnap-and-ransom insurance, the leaders in the industry-and the ones who had pioneered the concept-were the largest insurers in the world. Companies like that were the mainstay of the Cool Cash client roster.
The Miami office had never done work for Quality Insurance, but a woman in our New York office was their go-to lawyer in the United States. She was only too glad to help, which underscored the wisdom of my earlier decision to run a conflict check at my firm before placing a phone call to Quality. Having represented insurance companies myself, I’d anticipated needing to be aggressive, perhaps even a little nasty, to make the elephant jump. However, I recalled a fellow associate in our office who, on a purely personal matter, had written an ugly letter to an appliance discount store on Cool Cash letterhead. The scathing missive eventually landed on the desk of the partner in our Atlanta office who happened to represent that “sleazebag, bait-and-switch, two-bit operation.” Two weeks later my friend was working in the county attorney’s office. I learned from his mistake. Instead of being in the defensive posture of explaining to a New York partner why I was beating up on her client, I had the partner working for me from the get-go. She personally followed through to make sure the case was assigned immediately to a Miami consulting firm, and Duncan Fitz offered to sit through our first meeting in his office, just to make sure that Quality Insurance understood that this law firm had a keen interest in the case.
Thank God for small favors. Twice for big ones. This was huge.
“Alex Cabrera is here,” Duncan’s secretary announced over the intercom.
“Send him in,” said Duncan.
Duncan and I rose as the door opened, both of us surprised to see that Alex was a her, not a him. I’d expected someone like Agent Nettles, but in walked a striking Latina woman with big brown eyes. She was dressed in a fitted gray business suit that was conservative only in color, as it did little to hide the fact that she took very good care of her body. I probably looked a split second longer than I should have. Any man would have done the same, and notwithstanding the one-two punch of Jenna and her dive-bombing seagull on the beach, I was, after all, still a man.