Spy Mom (15 page)

“Well, your demise won't be nearly as poetic as it sounds.” I hauled him to his feet and pushed his great mass toward the dark edge of the jungle.

It's not easy to move through a dense jungle in the best of circumstances, which these certainly were not. A short distance in, we huddled down and tried to be as still as possible. The guards spread out across the lawn, weaving through the gardens, shouting commands, and trading insults. A squad of six headed down the driveway, the most obvious escape route because even they wouldn't believe we'd be stupid enough to go into the jungle at night.

“Don't even blink,” I whispered to Roger.

Flashlight beams swept right in front of where we sat. But this jungle was so thick that unless the guards were actually upon us, we would remain invisible. Ten long minutes passed and they gave up. I could hear them berating each other for losing us, working up the nerve to go back inside and tell one very angry Sovann that not only were we gone, but there was no sign of whoever had shot out the windows. We stayed completely still for another five minutes, and right around the time when I thought we might be able to wait them out and kind of creep down the driveway undetected, I heard a most unpleasant noise, the snorting, snarling growl of a guard dog.

“We need to go now,” I said, turning to head deeper into the thicket.

“That way?”

“Yes. Why? You have a better idea?”

“No, not really.”

“Fabulous, get moving.”

We plunged, unwilling but desperate, deeper into the tangle. Behind me, I could hear Roger wheezing with exertion. But I suspected he would rather die of an asthma attack than let me get too far ahead.

“This is dangerous,” he managed between gasps. “A jungle like this, well, something very bad could happen to us.”

“Other than being shot at, you mean?”

“You are not the easiest person to talk to,” Roger said. He hunched over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. His bald spot was shiny with sweat and glowed in the darkness.

“I get that sometimes.”

“Who
are
you? And what are you doing here? Because this has turned out to be a very unusual day. If you don't tell me, I swear I will dedicate the rest of my life to finding out.”

“Here's hoping that will be longer than ten minutes. Now please shut up, will you?” All around us was silence. The guards had retreated. The dogs had retreated. Better to lose one's prey than to follow it into the jungle in the dead of night. Great.

“Let's take a moment and assess our situation, shall we?” I suggested.

I spun around in a slow circle, trying to find anything to orient myself in a darkness challenged only by a silvery sliver of moon. Roger sat down on the thick jungle floor.

“We are in the jungle,” I began.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Roger muttered from his position at my feet.

“Hey! Enough of that. You are not allowed to be snippy unless you have a better plan and I think we already agreed that you don't.”

“I might come up with one if I had more time and perhaps a piece of paper and a pencil,” he sniffed. I ignored him.

“It's night,” I said. “We have no supplies. There is practically no moon and I can't remember how I'm supposed to use it to navigate anyway, so that's a complete loss. But the jungle. We have the jungle. All this jungle. So much jungle.” I sat down next to Roger.

“I hate the jungle,” I said.

“What have you got against the jungle?”

“Where does one begin?” I asked. “Hot, wet, bugs, spiders, snakes, land mines, angry man-eating vines that grow six inches a minute, unexploded ordnance from a war that never happened. And oftentimes, if I'm really lucky, like now for example, men with guns trying to kill me.”

“That was a rhetorical question, but the way you describe it sounds lovely, especially the land mines part.”

“Yes, that's certainly a highlight,” I said. “Now let's go. Get up.”

“Which way?”

“I have no fucking idea,” I said. “How about that way?”

“We're going to die,” Roger moaned.

“Maybe. It's always a possibility. Up. Time to move.”

We began a slow, arduous trek through the nighttime jungle in a direction I hoped would run parallel to Sovann's long driveway, eventually dumping us out on the dirt road I came in on.

“Can you please explain to me what made you think you could go poking around Sovann's place without getting caught? Do you know who he is? Whatever you are searching for, it cannot be important enough,” I said, trying to stomp down a particularly dense section of vine.

“Your name is not Camilla, is it?” I could hear Roger close behind me, swatting at the plate-size mosquitoes that had finally discovered our hot, sweaty bodies. If we were truly blessed, we'd both leave this jungle with a whopping case of malaria.

“No, it's not. What were you thinking?”

“Well, I didn't mean to end up there,” Roger said, grunting as one of the vines whipped him in the face. “I was given some information and paid rather well to follow up on it.”

I took a minute to digest that.

“Who do you work for?” Roger asked, waiting for me to clear the way. “What is the Agency? What was Sovann talking about back there?”

“I think a better question is who do
you
work for?”

“Oh, I can't tell you that. I signed confidentiality papers.”

“Well, in that case, maybe I'll leave you here.”

“No! Wait. Being as we're probably going to die anyway, I suppose it can't do any harm. I was hired anonymously to see if I could find the mythical Blue Wing Lily. My source was supposed to have found new evidence of its existence. I rarely go into the field anymore, but how could I say no to all that money?”

“Did your source tell you why he was looking for this particular flower?”

“Well, everyone knows about the Blue Wing Lily and its ability to alter consciousness.”

“In a good way?”

“No. Definitely not in a good way.”

I didn't think so.

“And it's supposed to be here, in the middle of nowhere?”

Roger shrugged. “So they say.”

“I hope it's a really pretty flower, Roger.”

“Yes. I agree. Do you really think we are going to get out of here?”

“Alive? Of course,” I said, grabbing onto a thick vine and pulling. This one came off with surprising ease. I threw it back over my shoulder. Roger screamed, the snake, my easy vine, now awake and dangling around his neck, hissing and spitting.

“Get it off me!” I couldn't see well enough to determine if the snake was poisonous, so I said a quick prayer that it wasn't and snatched it behind its head, tossing it to the ground. There it sat, coiled and ready to strike.

“Don't move,” I whispered. We stared at the snake and it stared at us. Finally, it decided we weren't worth it and slithered off into the jungle. Our first break.

“Damn,” Roger said, swatting furiously at the accumulating bugs, the sweat pouring down his face. “This is crazy.”

“I'll say. But look on the bright side. At this moment I'm not frantically trying to suck snake venom out of your neck.”

“Are you a blind optimist or just completely insane?” Roger asked. It didn't seem like a question worth answering. We trudged on. I figured it was about one ridiculously long mile from Sovann's house to the dirt road.

“I heard something when they were holding me back there,” Roger said after a while. I paused for a moment in my bushwhacking and wiped my dripping forehead with the back of my arm, which served only to spread the blood from my various wounds all over my face. Couldn't win for trying around here.

“What did you hear?”

“The guards in the room where they were holding me. They were talking about the coming wave of blood. Something along those lines.”

“You speak Cambodian?”

“No, but I can understand some of it.”

“Did they say anything else?”

“They were afraid, thinking about not sticking around.”

“And that was it? No more details?”

“That was it. What do you suppose a wave of blood means?”

I took a deep breath, gearing up to continue my battle with the jungle.

“I don't know exactly. But I think it's a safe bet to say it's not good.” I crushed a huge bug on the inside of my thigh, the wet guts stuck like glue to my fingers. I didn't want to think about the leeches clinging to my ankles contentedly guzzling down my blood like it was happy hour, and I thought it wise not to mention them to Roger yet either. We kept going, slowly pushing forward. I prayed we weren't walking in circles.

We both smelled the flowers at the same moment. It was a silky scent, floral and light and somehow damp, too. It was soft but all-encompassing, wrapping us completely in its warmth. We stopped abruptly and took a few deep breaths.

“What is that?” Roger asked.

“I don't know. Isn't this your area of expertise?”

The scent grew more potent the longer we stood there, intoxicating, sickly sweet. “They told me to expect this but wow … it's … magical,” Roger said.

“Did your source tell you?”

“What?”

“You just said you were told to expect this. Who told you?”

“What?” he said again, sounding stoned. And I gave up, the fragrance somehow making it okay for me to not give a shit. Our dire situation suddenly seemed irrelevant and silly.

“It's wonderful,” I agreed.

“I'd like to eat it,” Roger cooed, as if he was talking to a baby. I giggled and my face felt like Jell-O.

We looked around to see if we could identify the plants, but the darkness and the jungle did not cooperate. I wanted to stop and roll around in the scent like a cat in a bed of catnip until someone thought to rescue us. Which would probably be never at the soonest, but I didn't care.

But there was the voice in the back of my head, sounding suspiciously like Simon Still, telling me to get the fuck up.

“Okay, okay,” I said, when it appeared the voice would not be shoving off any time soon. “Roger, we need to keep going.”

“Poppies, poppies,” Roger murmured, staggering around like a drunk.

“Don't sit down!” I shouted, sure I could never get him back up without the assistance of a crane. “You are not Dorothy and that is not the Emerald City over there. That is more impenetrable Cambodian jungle and it is the middle of the night, do you hear me? Now stand up!” I pushed him forward.

“Wait!” He got down on his hands and knees and started crawling around on the ground. “A sample,” he said. “I need a sample if we are going to grow it.”

Grow it, I wanted to ask, and do what with it? But any questions would have to wait. I grabbed Roger by the back of his sweaty shirt and, with my remaining strength, pulled him back up on his feet, steering us as far away as possible from the mind-bending scent of those flowers.

With the first rays of light, I saw the cut of the road in the jungle. We'd been bushwhacking with nothing but our hands, my hands, for what felt like an eternity. My tongue was dry and swollen in my mouth. My fingers were raw and burning. Roger was barely upright. I sat him down and popped out onto the road to see if Sovann and his men were waiting to mow us down for our effort. But there was no one, only the low hum of Rangsey's motorbike approaching.

“Here is our ride,” I said, trying to get Roger upright.

“Mr. Ford and I thank you for saving my life, Camilla or whoever you are,” Roger whispered. “God knows you didn't have to.”

I dropped him to the ground.

“Mr. Ford?” I asked, my dehydrated stomach clenching in a tight knot. “Does your Mr. Ford happen to have blue eyes, really blue eyes?”

“Funny you should ask that,” Roger said, his head bobbing around oddly on his neck. “Yes, he does. A lovely color, like a Centaurea cyanus. The cornflower.” And with that he passed out. No, no, no. I shook him hard.

“Wake up!”

“Sally, are you trying to kill him?” Rangsey asked, pulling up beside me.

“I'm considering it,” I said. I mean a personal botanist? What kind of person has a personal botanist? Now I could understand an accountant, a secretary, a lawyer, a hairstylist even. But a botanist? Not so much. I got down on the ground and put my lips right up against Roger's ear.

“Did he shoot out those windows?” I shouted. “Did he set me up to save you? Is he everywhere?” Roger did not even stir.

“Hey, Sal?”

“What?” Rangsey was staring at my legs.

“That's a lot of leeches, Sally.”

I looked down and almost swooned. My legs were thick with the bulging bloodsuckers. I was definitely being punished. Slowly I began to pluck them off, fat and soft between my fingers. The blood flowed freely from the little holes they left behind, like a red rivulet down my ankles and onto the dusty road. Maybe this was what the guards meant when they were talking about the coming wave of blood? But somehow I didn't think so.

The night that Theo was born, deep in the winter rainy season, the wind was howling so intensely I thought the heavens might actually split at the seams. Will and I were watching TV. I was alternatively standing, sitting, lying on the floor, bending over the couch, and complaining.

“Should we start counting?” Will asked, tension spread across his normally calm and serene visage.

“Counting what?” I snapped. “Sheep?”

Will picked up the day's
Wall Street Journal
and held it between us like a wall.

“The paper is upside down,” I said. He flipped it but continued to use it as a shield. He was patient. He would wait for me to answer his question about counting the contractions if he ended up having to deliver the baby himself, which was not something I saw myself enjoying.