Free Mounting Fears by Stuart Woods

The Bureau was lucky to have her, he felt, and he was lucky to have time to look at her thoroughly without getting busted for sexual harrassment.
    Kerry had recently broken up with his girlfriend of two years, or, rather, she had dumped him. She wasn’t up for his schedule—the broken dates and missed vacations—and it had annoyed her that he couldn’t talk about his work after he got promoted. When he had been an ordinary special agent, he could tell her most things, entertain her with stories of busts, but not when Bob Kinney got the director’s job, noticed him, and started promoting him. Shelly would understand that.
    While strictly enforcing the sexual harassment rules, Director Kinney had quietly let slide any notion of a nonfraternization policy in the Bureau. He figured, he had said to Kerry, that with more and more women agents in the Bureau, attractions would exist, liaisons would form, and some marriages would result, and that might be a good thing, since agents would understand each other’s problems. Kerry thought so, too, but he had not been tempted until now. He was her supervisor on this job, of course, but that would end when they turned in their report, and he would be free to ask her out.
    She opened her eyes and looked at him across the table between them. It was as if she had known that he had been watching her as she slept. She gave him a little smile, and the effect ran directly from his eyes to his crotch, as though a wire existed for that communication.
    BARBARA ORTEGA TOOK OFF from Mather, a general-aviation field ten miles east of Sacramento, in a Beechcraft Baron, a twin-engine aircraft being used for air-taxi work, at ten o’clock Pacific time. She was in Tijuana and in a rental car three and a half hours later. She had a road map and the address the woman at the Coca-Cola bottling plant had given her. Pedro Martínez lived near Baja Malibu, on the coast, not far from the U.S. border. Following directions, she turned left off the coast road and climbed a hill. A couple of turns later she came to a small adobe house that looked old but in good repair. She remembered the old man from San Diego, and he now sat on the front porch, looking out across the sea, a couple of miles away. A small duffel bag rested beside him on the porch. She got out of the car and switched on her Spanish.
    “Pedro,” she said, “my name is Barbara. We met in San Diego last spring, do you remember?”
    Martínez fixed her with his gaze. “Ahhh,” he said, “you are the friend of Martin. Yes, I remember you—you gave me champagne.” He smiled broadly, revealing perfect dentures.
    “May I sit down?” she asked, reaching into her purse and switching on her recorder.
    “Of course, señorita. What brings you to visit me?”
    “I came because you told me a story in San Diego, and I wanted to hear it again.”
    “A story?”
    “The one about how you delivered Martin in the backseat of the Cadillac.”
    Pedro threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, yes, it is true. I brought Martin into this world.” He began the story, starting when he drove to the Stanton home to drive the señor to work. “Then we got to the border crossing,” he said, “and we were stopped for inspection. Big Martin said to me, ‘Pedro, you have to help her. I don’t know what I’m doing.’ So I got out of the car and got into the backseat, and Big Martin got behind the wheel, and little Martin was born. Then he drove us to the hospital in San Diego.”
    Barbara switched off the recorder. “Pedro,” she said, “where were you, exactly, when Martin was born?”
    “At the border, the guard, who was very young, was scared when he saw what was happening, and he yelled, ‘Get out of here!’ and waved his arm, and Big Martin put his foot down.”
    Barbara switched off the recorder. “Pedro, this is very important: Were you in the United States when Martin was born or in Mexico?”
    “Between, I think. I don’t know