Though depleted physically due to his own excesses, he was pleased with himself. Once healed and stronger, he planned to take his cause a step further and tell the Mexican people that it was time to rise up against their inept, corrupt government, which protected the rich from the poor and made them vassals of the United States.
It was his reason for being.
The doctors had stopped talking and were staring at him.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Did you hear us, Señor Jouma?” the male doctor asked gently. “We asked if you have any questions about the procedure.”
He shook his head. “No, not now.”
“Then all you need to do is sign this consent form and we’ll start early tomorrow, at six a.m. We ask that you don’t eat anything after your dinner tonight.”
He took the pen the doctor offered and signed the document.
“The surgery will take approximately six hours,” the female doctor added. “Possibly longer. Afterward you will be taken to a recovery room, then to the ICU, where you’ll be connected to monitors that will display EKG tracing, blood pressure, breathing rate, oxygen level. You can expect to stay in the hospital for two weeks.”
“Yes.”
“During that time you will likely have a tube inserted through your throat so that your breathing can be assisted by a ventilator. Another thin plastic tube might have to be inserted through your nose into your stomach to remove air that you swallow.”
“When will it be removed?” The longer he was incapacitated, the more time rival drug traffickers and ambitious lieutenants had to take advantage.
“It will be removed when your bowels resume their normal function. You won’t be able to eat or drink until we remove that tube, and will be fed through an IV.”
“Then what happens?” he asked, calculating the timing of his return to Mexico.
“During this whole time, we will continue to monitor all your other body functions and immunosuppression medications. When we feel you are ready, you will be moved to a private room, where you will continue your progress.”
“When will I get back to normal?” In this dog-eat-dog world he had to anticipate every danger and challenge.
“Everyone responds differently, so it’s hard to pinpoint a specific time. But if there are no major complications, expect it to take twelve weeks.”
“Twelve weeks.” He thought he could handle that.
Chapter Eighteen
A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.
– Rudyard Kipling
As Crocker limped back to his room, his mind sifted through the things Mrs. Clark had just told him and settled on what he considered were two significant points. One, she had not seen either Olivia or the Jackal during the last four or more hours at the ranch. Two, the Jackal appeared to be in failing health.
What the two things meant, and how and if they were related to one another, he didn’t know but hoped to find out.
Entering the room, he spotted four familiar faces: Akil’s, Mancini’s, Captain Sutter’s, and Jim Anders’s. The last was the one he least expected.
They all seemed to be mentally engaged in the same problem.
“Jim,” Crocker said, addressing the deputy director of CIA Operations. “You come to try to help us save our jobs?”
“That’s not my agenda. No.”
“Then what’s going on?”
“We just received a preliminary report from the Mexican minister of the interior,” Anders said. “The results of the forensic exam were inconclusive.”
Crocker leaned his back against the wall and let the implications of what he’d just heard process through his mind.
“When you say inconclusive, what does that mean exactly?” he asked.
“It means that the remains they recovered were in such a deteriorated condition that a definite conclusion couldn’t be reached even with Olivia Clark’s dental records.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“The question is, what if anything can we do now?” Sutter said as he rubbed his chin.
“I for one never thought it was Olivia Clark,” Crocker declared.
“Me, neither,” added Akil.
“Why not?” Anders asked.
“Because she wasn’t at the ranch when we raided it.”
Anders: “What are you basing this on?”
“What I just learned from Mrs. Clark and my own observations,” Crocker explained. “Mrs. Clark told me that she didn’t see either her daughter or the Jackal during the last day she was at the ranch, and according to the satellite photos, the plane they had flown in on had left. Once we secured the ranch, we searched the house and grounds thoroughly. Unless the guards disposed of Olivia’s body, or locked her in some hidden underground chamber, she wasn’t there.”
“I agree,” Mancini added. “She wasn’t in the house. The Jackal wasn’t there, either. I believe he moved her somewhere else.”
“Where?” asked Anders.
Crocker shrugged. “Don’t know.”
As Crocker related what Mrs. Clark had told him about the last hours in the house leading up to the raid, Senator Clark entered silently and sat on the edge of the bed.
When he finished, Anders turned to the senator and asked, “Senator, what’s your opinion about this?”
Clark raised his left hand, which held a rolled-up document. He said, “I’ve had the forensic report translated and read it carefully several times. It states that the fire was so hot and burned for so long that the jawbone the Mexicans recovered had almost completely incinerated and the front teeth were destroyed. All they had to go on were some badly cracked molars.”
“That’s a professional translation?” Anders asked. “Can I see it?”
“Of course.”
As Anders perused it, Crocker asked, “What about DNA?”
“The high heat destroyed any DNA, which means we might never be able to ascertain one way or another,” Clark answered. “But I’ll tell you something that I believe is just as important: We’re almost certain the Jackal escaped alive. And as long as we know that, there’s a strong possibility that he took my daughter with him.”
“Okay,” Anders agreed. “But under what circumstances?”
Senator Clark seemed confused by the question. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I’m not sure how to put this delicately,” said Anders. “Did she go willingly?”
“Olivia?”
“I mean, are we talking about a possible Stockholm syndrome condition here?”
All eyes turned to Senator Clark, who rubbed his forehead and seemed to struggle to find the right answer. “If you’re asking if my daughter has somehow bonded with that criminal and even become his lover, that’s a hell of a difficult question for me. My response is, I doubt it, and the prospect frankly sickens me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry. Those are the kind of questions that need to be asked.”
“If we’re able to ascertain the reason they went off together and under what circumstances, we might begin to narrow in on a destination,” Sutter suggested.
“Maybe.”
“What do we know about the Jackal’s movements since Guadalajara?” asked Sutter as he poured himself a glass of water.
Anders shrugged. “We know from the same source that told us about the ranch that he was with the two women in Tapachula, and we also know that the private jet he flew in on left sometime yesterday afternoon.”
“The day of the raid.”
“Correct.”
“How do you know that?” asked Senator Clark.
“From satellite photos,” Crocker answered. “The last one we saw taken at 1600 yesterday afternoon showed no jet on the airstrip.”