Now he is alone with the man who had earlier blowtorched his arm.

“My apologies,” Pelayo says.

Tom grits his teeth. “For what? Burning my arm?”

The man grins. “Of course not.” He gestures to where the chemical toilet is hidden in the small cell. “It appears your sanitary facilities are failing. I will ensure it is taken care of, very shortly.”

Tom looks at his bandaged left arm. The nice woman doctor—still not saying a word to him—had cleaned the large broken blister, applied some sort of ointment, and gently wrapped it with clean white gauze. She left him with a pack of painkillers.

“May…may I ask you a question?”

Pelayo nods. “Go ahead.”

He pauses, tries to gather his thoughts. In his newspaper career, he thinks he has interviewed a number of evil men, from a weapons smuggler in the Philippines to a proud blood diamond traitor in Liberia, but compared to this quiet, well-dressed man with the cold gray eyes in front of him, they were Boy Scouts.

The man’s assistant comes back into the room, whispers into Pelayo’s ear, and then he says, “Bueno,” and returns to looking at Tom.

Tom finally says, “You…who are you?”

Pelayo says, “Dear me. I was expecting a better question. You know who I am. I know you’ve spent enough time doing research about me and my career.”

Pelayo gets off the bed, and Tom surprises himself by saying, “No, wait. Don’t go. I meant, who are you beyond that? Beyond what I’ve found out? What’s going on here?”

His kidnapper chuckles. “I thought it would have been apparent, considering what you norteamericanos think any time you hear a Mexican accent.”

“But…I’ve heard Spanish, all right. But the men who grabbed my daughter and me, I think they spoke Farsi. And I’ve heard Pashto, as well. What are you doing?”

Pelayo pauses. “Now I’m impressed. That’s an adult question. I will spare some of my time to give you the answer.”

He sits back on the bed. Tom glances at Denise. She is desperately holding her Tigger in one arm, and is trying to ignore the adult world so scarily nearby by working on a coloring book with her free hand.

Pelayo sits down. “But please, Tom Cornwall. Look at the facts. You are a dinosaur working for an industry and in a world that’s already dead, but you don’t know it. You still believe in that old-fashioned thought of a free press, operating in a world with set rules and boundaries. That world is gone. National interest is gone. What remains are the conglomerates, the corporations, the cartels. The three Cs, as it would be. There is no such thing left as governments. It’s a mere shadow play and puppets, done so well that most people still believe those illusions.”

“But…”

“But what?”

Tom forces the word out. “You’re evil.”

Pelayo laughs. “Compared to what? If one of my associates machine-guns down a competitor and six of his workers at a café in Mexico City, that’s a national disgrace, a world story with large headlines about the barbarians operating beyond the fringes of the law. But when an oil company’s action incinerates a hundred or so Nigerians in the course of a day’s work, well, that small story is buried somewhere deep inside your newspapers. Am I right?”