Amid the thrum of the semi-sub’s engine, he read the letter, digesting every word as thoroughly but as quickly as possible, before Jorge spotted his subterfuge.
Dear Michael,
I don’t know even how to start this letter. I can’t believe I’ve found you, more than twenty years after you left. There’s so much I want to say to you, but now is not the time. Time is the thing we have the least of. We are both in danger, but for now, I know you’re alive and that’s the main thing.
When I saw you in the jungle encampment, handcuffed to the wall of the shack you share with their chemist, it was all I could do not to cry with relief. I’ve travelled halfway across the world to find you, Papa, and don’t worry. While there’s breath in my body, I won’t let you go. Not without a fight. Like Letitia, the one thing I excel at is fighting. I’ve inherited her stubborn streak, you’ll be glad to hear.
So many things to tell you …
Know first, that I have never forgotten you. I realise that Letitia stripped you out of my life and that your departure was not your fault. I remembered all this time the way your voice sounds and the way you smelled when you put me on your shoulders and I hugged your head or when you cuddled me if I had fallen over. I learned Spanish at school to keep the memory of you alive, always quietly hoping that we would be reunited one day but, sadly, never finding time to look you up in those years when I had the chance and you were still safe and living in Spain. I’m so sorry for that. We should never delay the important stuff, like telling the people we love so dearly that they are loved. You never know when that opportunity might be gone forever. Well, I do love you, Papa. I always did. I never stopped.
I will see you on the beach tonight when I load the drugs into the semi-sub that you are supposed to pilot to the Dominican Republic. Travelling undercover with this band of violent transportistas, I am writing this letter from the relative safety of a locked toilet, praying that my true identity is not discovered. I don’t know how things will play. But I have a plan to rescue you.
The man you are working for is extremely dangerous. He knows exactly who you are and I have a feeling he kidnapped you specifically to get back at me. That’s possibly why he named the sub after me (though my name is now something entirely different). It’s a long story that I don’t yet fully understand all the twists and turns to. But I’m not afraid, Papa. I’m coming to get you.
All my love always and forever.
Ella xxx
Realising that he had already been staring at the clipboard’s contents for too long, George’s father wiped away the tears with the back of his hand. Set the clipboard down and thought about the fragment of an old photo concealed inside the back of his watch, showing his beautiful daughter as a tiny 3-year-old. A photo he had kept in his wallet since it was taken almost twenty-five years earlier; a photo he had secreted inside the watch shortly after being snatched from his company’s shuttle bus by those Honduran gangsters. Years ago, now. He silently chastised himself for not taking note of the transportista who had bumped into him on the beach. He had no notion of the woman his little girl had turned into. His internet search efforts had revealed nothing under the name Ella Williams-May. It was as though she too had disappeared.
‘Hey! What’s this you’re so damned interested in?’ Jorge asked. Unexpectedly on his feet, stooping at his side beneath the low ceiling. His guard picked up the clipboard and leafed through the paperwork.
‘Nothing!’ Michael said, trying to snatch it back. Suddenly ice-cold in the knowledge that his only chance of rescue was about to be discovered and that his daughter’s safety – already more than precarious – was now in jeopardy. ‘Give it to me!’
The blow to the head from Jorge’s practised fist stung. But it was clear that the guard had happened upon the letter.
‘What’s this shit, mecánico? Eh?’ Another stinging punch sent him flying from the chair onto the floor of the sub. ‘A letter in English? What the fuck is this, man? Tell me what it says.’ Jorge leaped on top of him and started to rain down merciless blows on him.
‘I don’t know. I can’t read English,’ Michael lied.
‘Where did you get it?’ There was meth-fuelled bloodlust in Jorge’s eyes.
‘The chemist! The guy I share the shack with. He must have put it in my pocket. I haven’t got a clue what it says either. I swear.’
Jorge pinned him on the floor painfully, digging his knees into Michael’s arms so that they felt like they might snap in two. He took his pistol out of the waistband of his sweat-soaked jeans. ‘You’re lying. I can see it in your lying Spanish face.’
Clicking a bullet into the chamber of the gun, Jorge bared his teeth like a feral dog, his nostrils flaring. Ears ringing. The end of Michael Carlos Izquierdo Moreno’s life decelerating almost to single stills right down now, as though someone had slowed the footage on old film to capture his final moments in slo-mo. Michael’s only thought as Jorge pulled the trigger was not of the deafening gunpowder blast or that he was going to die. He thought of his daughter, being discovered and beheaded because of his own stupidity.
And then the bullet found its mark.