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?”

The man’s assistant stands there. Pelayo sits comfortably on the bed. It’s so quiet Tom hears the scritch-scritch of his daughter coloring in her book. He moves his left arm some and the pain still hits him behind his eyes.

“You may be correct,” he says. “But it’s not right.”

Pelayo smiles, leans over, gives him a gentle slap on the knee. “For a while there was a world where you and your kind struggled to report the truth. That’s now gone. Every newspaper and television network is now handcuffed to their ideology, their way of looking at the world. Governments once pretended they worked for the poor common man. That’s gone as well. Your elected representatives in this so-called democracy won’t pass legislation because their paymaster lobbyists tell them what to do.”

Pelayo stands up, shakes his head, brushes each hand as if there was some sort of dust or contaminant there. “In some ways I admire you, Tom Cornwall, still bravely struggling to stay alive and pertinent in this world. But in reality, you’re playing in the shadows, thinking it’s real. None of it’s real.”

Tom says, “Someday, you and your kind will be stopped.”

“Not today, not ever,” Pelayo says, now glancing at his watch. “And you best pray that your wife has not been stopped. She has…eleven minutes to contact me.”

Tom looks to his daughter and asks the question. “What happens at the twelve-minute mark?”

Pelayo says softly and with great courtesy. “Please, Tom, not in front of the little girl.”

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 46

AT SOME point just outside of Three Rivers, Texas, the deadline passes.

But my mission still goes on.