Heart of the World (29 page)

“I don't know about it. I found the number on a phone bill.”

“Whose phone bill?”

“A man named Naylor. Look, I'm not here to harm anyone,” I snapped. “I need to know who's got Paolina. If I don't know, I can't decide what to do next.”

“The decision is not yours.” Cabrera shot me a hard look.

“It's not yours, either.”

Roldan held up his hands, palms outward. “Please,” was all he said, but his glance silenced both of us. He turned to me and focused on my eyes as though there were no one else in the hut, no one else in the world. “I will tell you what I can. Five, no six days ago, a message came up the mountain by the usual route and made its way to me.”

“May I see it?”

He reached into a bag lying by his side. The bag was made of cloth similar to his white shirt and trousers, but coarser and patterned, and filled with a quantity of small green leaves. A few scattered to the ground as he dug to the bottom and retrieved a folded slip of paper.

“I thought you destroyed it,” Cabrera said.

The words were typed. “We have your daughter. We will deal for her. We will call. Three rings. Five o'clock.” Each sentence was typed as a separate line. It made the note look strange and solemn, like poetry.

“What did they say when they called?” I asked. “What's the price?”

“He will not deal with them,” the journalist said. “Tell her, Roldan. Nothing sways you, certainly not a child you don't even know. If you won't use this to make a difference in the history of your country, a difference you once fought for, a difference your friends died for—”

“Enough, Luisa.”

“Wait a fucking minute,” I said. “Are we talking about something other than Paolina here, something other than getting her back from whoever the hell took her?”

Cabrera ignored me. “El Martillo,” she said, “it isn't too late. Together we can still make it happen. We need you to lead us; we need the magic of your touch. When the story of Colombia is written, yours will be one of the great names.”

“I don't care about that,” he said quietly.

“And I don't give a damn about it,” I said. “Paolina's in danger for no other reason than that she's your daughter. You can save her, and that's the only thing that's important here.”

“You have no idea what's important,” Cabrera said.

Roldan said, “Luisa, you must cool your temper. She doesn't know what you know. And Luisa, you must not forget that you do not know what I know.”

For a second or two, Cabrera looked like she wanted to use the knife on him, but she took a deep breath and gulped back any reproach.

“Perhaps,” he said, “I must go to
them
. Perhaps it is time for their counsel.”

“It's time to act,” Cabrera said. “Make her tell what she knows. Make her—”

Roldan interrupted her. “There was something that arrived with the note,” he said, fixing his eyes on mine.

I tried to swallow. I know what Colombian kidnappers send with notes. Sometimes a finger, sometimes an ear.

“No,” he said, again reading my mind. “Nothing like that. They sent a Kyocera Iridium phone, a satellite phone. That evening, I heard from them, and they asked for something I could not possibly give them, something I have no right to give, in return for the safety of the girl.”

“Your daughter.”

“My daughter,” he conceded. “I made a counterproposal, an offer I believed they would find acceptable, a fair trade. They asked for time to consider, and I granted it. I recharged the battery. We are not without resources here. I have kept the battery charged.”

“Yes?”

“They have not called again. It has been three days, three nights. They haven't called. I fear for the girl.” He met my eyes. “My daughter.” “But you know who has her,” I said.

Cabrera made a noise in her throat. “Here, many victims have no idea who their captors are. It's not so simple here.”

“Truly,” Roldan said, “I did not know.”

Did not
. Past tense. He didn't know then, but
now
he knew.

“Something has happened?” Cabrera picked up on it, too.

Roldan stood motionless, with a thousand-yard stare on his face. I followed his unseeing gaze and wondered what he saw that I was missing.

“You went through my backpack,” I said. “You saw the photos, the man and the woman with Paolina. You recognized them.”

It took him some time to come back from wherever he'd been in his
head. “I am not certain. Not at all certain. There is a familiarity, a similarity.”

“It's a start,” I said. “Does the sat phone work? Maybe it's broken. Maybe they'll still call. If not, we'll go with the photos. We'll go after them.”

“He won't,” Cabrera said sharply. “There are more important things for—”

“I think I must show her,” he said to the journalist.

“Show me what?” I said.

He'd turned into a statue again. The more distant and still he became, the more it seemed to annoy the fiery Cabrera. There was some power struggle going on between them, and while I didn't relish getting caught in the middle, I thought I might be able to use it to my advantage.

“If you're planning to show me the American soldier you captured, I've already seen him,” I said.

Roldan's eyes opened wider and I realized that he hardly ever blinked. It made his gaze both hypnotic and otherworldly. “That was very careless of my men,” he said softly, staring intently at Cabrera.

“No,” she said. “I told them to put the two together.”

“That may not have been wise, Luisa.”

“You'll have to kill her,” she said. “You'll have to kill her now.” There was the unmistakable ring of triumph in her voice.

CHAPTER 25

Back in the prison hut, two feet from
the guarded door, I sucked air greedily into my lungs. El Martillo had won the round. Cabrera's demand that I be marched into the jungle and shot by an impromptu firing squad had withered under his stern disapproval, but I was under no illusion that the sentence had been stayed indefinitely. Next time, the journalist might prevail.

I exhaled. Blood pulsed in my veins. I was alive and unbound, but my knees had abruptly turned to rubber, and I found myself huddled on the dirt floor. My head spun like some castoff satellite, rotating out of control, and the air seemed heavy and difficult to breathe. In bustling Cambridge, in urban Boston, in my chosen surroundings, I feel helpless so infrequently it took time to diagnose the condition.

It wasn't simply Cabrera's casual brutality or Roldan's lofty indifference. It was only partially the language. I could understand and speak, but it wasn't my tongue. It took effort, concentration; I had to be missing nuances. The surroundings threw me. I'm a city girl; the urban jungle is where I feel at home. This vast true jungle, the endless green, the heavy vines, disoriented me. Not a single tree was familiar. No oaks, no maples, no aspens or firs. Some of the jungle trees had roots so shallow they poked out of the earth like snakes. Even the ground tilted, and the alien smells keyed no memories.

Since the first moment I'd realized Paolina was gone, I'd kept a tight
rein on my imagination.
She's with her father
, I'd told myself. No matter why, the fact was
he wanted her
. He wouldn't harm her, not intentionally. Now, even when I shut my eyes, I saw her abandoned and alone, or worse, with men who'd harm her irreparably, who'd do brutal collateral damage, irrevocable damage.

I'd kept a tight rein on my emotions, too. Now a hammering pulse thudded in my ears. I could have wept. I could have gnashed my teeth, and rent my garments, but I knew it wouldn't help. All my tears and lamentations wouldn't buy Paolina a second's freedom, so I sucked in more air and straightened my spine and tried to recall every word that had passed between Cabrera and Roldan, each smoldering glance, each change of expression. They hadn't shot me. The decision had been postponed until Roldan could
show me something
. What?

Roldan had been furious that I'd been placed in the same hut as the wounded soldier, but now I'd been returned to the same damned hut. Why? I stood and walked to the center of the circular structure. The wounded man's hammock hung heavy with his weight. His chest rose and fell softly. They hadn't moved him; he hadn't died. He was deeply asleep, probably drugged. I paced quietly.
Why had I been brought back to this hut?

Roldan's enemies had captured Paolina; they were holding her for some sort of ransom.
Not money
. If Roldan had anything, he had money. What had they demanded that he wouldn't give? And what business was it of Cabrera's? Slow, burning anger began to replace the helplessness and I welcomed it.

What was the relationship between the two of them? He was old enough to be her father, but that didn't rule out sexual attraction. There were undercurrents of strong emotion. She was an attractive woman and the charisma came off Roldan in waves. Was it the courtly manners or the thinly shielded brutality? The distant, penetrating gaze? I'd rarely met a man who seemed so completely alive in the present moment. When his eyes met mine, he
saw
me, not his preconception of me, not an American, not a red-haired woman. Me.

Why the hell had I been brought here to wait for Roldan, here of all places, here with the captured American? How much time did I have before Roldan decided to show me whatever it was I needed to see before I died?

I returned to the wounded man's hammock and listened to his ragged breathing. Asleep? Unconscious? Feigning unconsciousness? Aside from the rude splint on his leg and the spotless bandage on his arm, he didn't seem to have other serious wounds. There were abrasions on his arms and legs, as if he'd fallen into some kind of thornbush. No bullet wounds.

I patted his cheek. “Come on. Wake up.”

He snorted, and half-opened his eyes, slate gray and wide, the pupils dilated.

“What's your name?”

No answer.

Rank? Serial number? What the hell else was I supposed to ask? When a teammate knocked herself out on the volleyball court, I knew enough to ask the big four:
What's your name, where are you, what were you doing, what time is it?
I ran through the litany, and got no response.

Were U.S. Army troops involved in spraying coca fields? Coca growth had increased in Colombia in recent years as U.S.-sponsored eradication efforts in Bolivia and Peru paid off. As fields disappeared in neighboring countries, enterprising Colombians, formerly middlemen and merchandisers, concentrated on cultivating their own cash crops.

Aside from Israel, no other country received more U.S. aid than Colombia. “Plan Colombia,” developed by the Colombian government, was a multi-billion-dollar strategy to tame the guerrillas and combat the narcotics industry. The U.S. footed a large part of the bill, eager to pay because the policy was both anti-drug and anti-Communist. The U.S. military had sent “advisors.” Was this man one of them?

I ran my hands over the soldier's chest and behind his neck, but someone had taken his dog tags. If I escaped,
when
I escaped, I'd need to describe him accurately without the benefit of a name or serial number, so I studied him closely.

His protuberant eyes, when open, had been gray. Hard to get a height on a man lying down, but he was tall and well muscled. His hawk nose neatly bisected a narrow face. His lips were thick, sensuous; his ears, large with dangling lobes. If shown his photo in a six-pack, I'd be able to point him out. I caught the faint hint of a dark line that vanished into the bandage on his right forearm and shoved the cloth aside.

The line was part of a tattoo, a black arrow piercing a blue triangle.

I don't count myself among the tattooed, but I have a window on the world: Roz, my assistant and tenant, is a designer and
afficionada
of tats. I didn't recognize this one, but it seemed more like a brand, an insignia, than a personal hearts-and-flowers, I-love-Mom, homegrown job. I committed the design to memory.

The wounded man's hand gripped my arm with surprising strength.

“Hey, Donna, honey, minute I thought I wasn't gonna see ya at all.” His voice was gruff and low, his words slurred like a drunk's. He'd thought he was hallucinating the last time he saw me, now it seemed he'd scripted me into the hallucination.

As I opened my mouth to say, “I'm not Donna,” the words died in my throat.

“Kids're okay, right?”

If I stayed Donna, stayed part of his waking dream, maybe he'd tell me something I could use.

“They're fine, honey,” I said, matching my accent to his, keeping it to a whisper so the guards wouldn't hear. His voice was so soft I had to bend close to hear him.

“The bastards, man, took off and fucking left me. Shoot me with them poison arrows? Fucking bastards.”

Poison arrows?
His breathing got more regular, and for a moment, I thought I'd lost him to the world of sleep.

He snorted again. “Donna? Kids're good?”

“They're fine, honey.”

“The choppers, they get out okay?”

I made a non-committal, but encouraging sound.

“Middle of fuckin' nowhere…whassis name? Indiana Jones. What're they gonna do with it? Bury it in the fuckin' ground, Gee-mo says. That's what Gee-mo says, bury it. Nobody'll miss it.”

“Miss what?” I breathed.
What or who was Gee-mo?

“Wha' the fuck?”

“Bury what?” I said.

“Who're you?” His eyelids flickered. My stint as Donna appeared to be at an end.

“What's your name?” I said quickly. “Come on, we're in the same boat here. We need to help each other. How did you get here?”

I was listening closely, but only to the sounds that came from his
lips, so I didn't hear the DAS guard approach till it was too late to pretend I hadn't been talking to the wounded man. This time he didn't seem to care.