“Ai-yi-yi.”
“I insist, Maggs. You’re my responsibility. Don’t worry. Cain won’t even know they’re there, unless he tries to pull a fast one.”
If anyone could do such a thing, it was Ed. “K,” she said.
“Anything you read on my work email is going to be bullshit from now on. Disinformation. Play along.”
Ed wasn’t trusting the powers that be. Interesting.
“I thought it was all bullshit anyway.”
“Ha ha,” he said, puffing. “Give me a word. For Quito.”
Maggie thought for a moment. “Moshi’s.”
“Got it. Call me later.”
“If not later, then tomorrow. You got my number, but who knows about coverage. And these Grim Harvest guys tend to get weird about making contact with the outside world.”
“Maybe because they’re terrorists?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t want to tell you how worried I am.”
“Then don’t.” The cell phone startled to crackle as the boat swerved around a wide bend of muddy river. “Time to go, bud.”
“Stay safe, Maggs. I’ll do my best to get your cowboy out ASAP. Hopefully, we’ll be sitting around a table at Moshi’s—that’s the real Moshi’s—in a couple of days, patting ourselves on the back and looking forward to commendations. Or at least, keeping our jobs.”
“Just don’t eat all my calamari this time.”
“You’re too slow.”
“Ciao.”
She clicked off and powered down the phone. When the driver bent down to light a cigarette, out of the wind, she slipped the old-style cell phone down in her cleavage. Not super comfortable, but she could get away with it. She’d smuggled how many baggies full of Bacardi into music concerts as a teenager?
Truth was, she didn’t know exactly what to expect next. Everything she suspected told her Cain was just another dissolute ex-revolutionary who would sell out to the highest bidder. For some of his ilk, that meant working as security for the drug cartels. But Cain seemed to have gone one better and found himself an even bigger opportunity: trading hostages with the oil companies. Shipping cocaine to the Western world was small potatoes compared to that.
They arced around a sunken tree poking up out of the water as they continued their journey upriver.
~~~
Not long ago, a boat under motor wouldn’t have been allowed so far back into tribal areas, but the onslaught of oil had changed things.
It started to rain just as they headed into a tunnel of trees, shortly before ten a.m., which meant a torrential downpour that thrashed the jungle canopy and awning of the boat with ominous strokes. Rain in the Amazon wasn’t the civilized showers found elsewhere, or even volleys of water—but vertical floods beating down unmercifully, soaking everything despite whatever measures were taken. Nothing man-made stayed dry. The bottom of the boat was inches deep in water and Maggie had to lift her feet and prop them on the gunwale. It was a reminder that this was still, for the time being, the wilds.
And then, as quickly as it had arrived, the rain was gone. Billowing clouds parted for emerging sunshine. Steam rose from the river. Monkeys reappeared, shaking branches overhead, letting water fly down. The boat headed upstream on the narrow passage, then they pulled out from under the trees into a lake. A dozen thatched huts sat just across the water that shimmered with bluing sky.
On the far shore, where the village once had an unobstructed view of unblemished jungle, numerous non-pleasure boats and barges now crowded a small dock. Pickup trucks and jeeps were parked anywhere there was room. Construction workers came and went, and a bright yellow Caterpillar was firing up its motor, blasting black smoke into the air. It had a huge blade on the front and was towing a trailer loaded down with lengths of pipe, identical to the ones Maggie had seen on the barge. More pipe was stacked nearby on the docks.
Maggie saw several soldiers, looking bored, standing around the dock with rifles shouldered.
“How long have they been here?” she asked the driver.
“A state of emergency was declared a week or so ago. After the attacks on the oil work by the terrorists. It all started with the arrest of a sixteen-year-old girl and half a dozen villagers from the interior just over a month ago. A minister was kidnapped in Quito. They’re getting worried in the capital. Have you got your papers ready?”
“Yes.”
As the boat approached the dock, Maggie saw a wide clearing, cut in what had once been dense jungle, coming into view. She heard the Caterpillar groan.
Her driver pulled the long canoe up on the shore amidst the squawking of rust-colored pheasants. Prehistoric-looking, the Indians called them “stinky turkeys,” as the taste of their flesh made them inedible. Nature had a way of protecting her offspring. Maggie hoped that adage applied to the Yasuni as well.
A youngish woman in a loose handmade skirt and thin white blouse approached, with two children, a girl of five or six, who wore tattered shorts and a faded T-shirt with robots on them, along with a little boy who sported a mop of jet black hair. The woman was pretty in an exotic way. Blue zigzag tattoos on each cheek accentuated her gentle features.
Maggie gathered her backpack, hopped off the bow onto the beach. The driver spun around, took off with a lazy wave. One of the soldiers came sauntering up, a young guy with knock-off aviator glasses and a sheen on his slim face. He gave Maggie the once-over, like she was a sight for sore eyes.
“Sorry, do you need to see my papers?” Maggie said in Spanish, retrieving her Alice Mendes passport. “It’s not very interesting. You guys must get bored to death stationed out here.”
“You don’t know the half of it, chica.” He examined her passport. “San Antonio, Texas? I hear half of Mexico lives there.”
“Only a third.” She smiled and fluffed her hair out with her fingers. Flirting could open doors. “Ai, it’s hot. How on earth do you guys have any fun?”
“It’s not easy.” He smiled. “You’re norteamericana. What are you doing here? Tourist season is over.” He looked around at the construction. “Maybe for good.”
“I’m an accountant with Commerce Oil.” Maggie got out her forged company badge. “Five Fortunes, actually, but it’s all the same thing. We’re doing an equipment audit.”
The soldier examined her company ID, gave it back, along with the passport. “I’ll need to see inside the bag, I’m afraid.”
She let him. It was a good thing she’d ditched the pistol.
“Are you here because of the truck that was attacked?” he asked, once he’d finished.
“Yes,” Maggie said, playing along. “It’s not a huge thing, but we do need to follow up, so we can file a claim. Those things cost some serious cash.”
“I imagine they do. Your Spanish is excellent.”
“Gracias.” Maggie winked. “Maybe I’ll catch you later.”
He walked back to the dock like a man who’d just received a check in the mail.
“Are you Alice?” the woman with the tattooed face said in a soft voice.
“Indeed. And you are?”
“Gauman’s wife.” She turned to the boy and told him in Quechua to go get his papi. He scampered off with purpose.
“Gauman,” Maggie said. The name Cain had mentioned.
“He’s taking you inland.” The woman gave Maggie a shy smile, took the girl’s hand, and said, “This way, please.”
Maggie followed her to a hut.
Villagers peered out of their shelters as Maggie walked by. There didn’t seem to be much for anyone to do but stay inside, away from the soldiers and construction. Maggie pulled a bag of candies from her backpack as she walked, tore it open. Children gazed out of huts with interest. She shook the bag.
“Any takers?”
One or two brave kids ventured out. One child came up with his mother. He dipped his arm deep into the bag and extracted a small fistful.
“Come on!” Maggie shook the bag.
More children appeared, along with a few adults, helping themselves to sweets.
A man emerged from the hut, sun-beaten, wearing threadbare baggy shorts, and a washed-out green ball cap with a long brim. He needed a haircut in the worst way and looked exhausted. Even so, he had the stoic, expressionless face of an Indian who knows better than to make his presence too well-known.
“Gauman?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you. Follow me.” He turned, headed off toward the jungle. Maggie had to pick up the pace to keep up.
The clearing turned out to be a section of rainforest that had been obliterated for a wide road. The surface was red mud, deeply rutted, and unwalkable after the recent downpour. Water still ran in gurgling rivulets and formed deep puddles. The remains of a truck sat at an odd angle a hundred or meters so down. Black burn marks were visible around the cab, signs of a fire, or worse. The bulldozer was attempting to forge the road, but its treads were tearing deep gouges into the wet earth, filling the air around it with flying sticky red mud.
“Let’s get away from this,” Gauman said. He and Maggie headed off into the trees.
“How long ago did they cut the road?” she asked in Spanish. She wasn’t going to let on that she spoke Quechua. It had been a handy ruse so far. Who knew what she might learn?
“Two months ago,” Gauman said as he walked, looking straight ahead. “It’s temporary—so they tell us.”
“Certainly doesn’t look that way.”
“No.”
Her mind was cast back to Tica and her allies, arrested for protesting the bulldozers.
“Are you with Grim Harvest?” she said quietly. She didn’t see a weapon on him.
He shook his head no. “They frighten me. But they say they will save our land. So I help them sometimes. In small ways. They give me food to feed my family. I used to take tourists deep into the jungle. Otters. Birds. Monkeys. I know them all. Since I was a boy. No more. I have no work, but Grim Harvest.”
“Have there been any more arrests?” she asked casually.
“For the truck you saw?” Gauman shook his head again. “No. But there have been skirmishes.”
“I heard something about some demonstrations a while back. A teenage girl . . .”
“Tica,” he said, without looking at Maggie. “My neighbor’s cousin. A teenager. She was quite active in getting people to protest what is happening to our land. But now people hide in the jungle. They don’t want to be taken away.”
“Taken away?” she said. “That doesn’t sound good.”
He gave Maggie a quick sideways glance. “We told Tica not to protest. But her mind was full of justice. She is young. She thinks the world is one where her voice will be heard. Instead, she was taken by the soldiers. To set an example for the other young people.”
They marched through the more navigable rainforest, heat rising as the sun baked the tree canopy fifty meters overhead. Howler monkeys boomed, their throats dispensing warnings to the human invaders.
They had gone well inland, away from the road, when two guerillas appeared out of nowhere. Only Maggie seemed surprised at their arrival; Gauman gave the pair a silent nod.
One was a woman about forty with the thick hair of an Indian cut into a sensible short length. Her face was angular and her cheekbones high. Her eyes were almost Asian. She had light-colored skin and wore denim cutoffs, hiking boots, and a shiny nylon shirt with vertical green-and-white stripes bearing a patch with the letters “AN” on a small embroidered tower. A Colombian soccer team. Although she was tomboyish and affected no feminine behavior, wearing no jewelry, earrings, or nail polish, she was lithe and had a way of holding herself that would easily turn men’s heads. She gave Maggie a tight squint, accentuated by flat unsmiling lips pressed together. “Alice Mendes?”
“Yes. And you are?”
“Let’s go,” she said without warmth, turning to lead the way. The bulge of a small pistol was prominent in the waistband of her shorts under her soccer shirt.
Her companion was an older man, probably in his 60s, although life outdoors often made that difficult to judge. He wore a battered baseball cap, Speedos, and Teva sport sandals, and a huge sweat-soaked cotton T-shirt with the name of an auto-parts store on it. He had an old bolt-action rifle slung over his shoulder and a machete in his gnarled hand. He gave Maggie a warm smile, waved the machete for her to go ahead of him.
Gauman turned, disappeared the way he had brought her.
The three of them set off further inland, Maggie in the middle.
The man and woman spoke Quechua. Maggie learned they were northern Colombian U’wa Indians from land that the Colombian government had appropriated for oil drilling. The woman was referred to as Comrade Lita. Maggie knew that when the fighting in Colombia had grown worse after the U’wa had blown up an oil pipeline, many of the Indian revolutionaries had come down to the Yasuni, recruited by Comrade Cain for Cosecha Severa. Lita mentioned Comrade Cain several times, in the same tone of voice a priest might utter the Lord’s name.
“Any more repercussions?” the man said to Lita. “From the truck attack?”
“Willy finally died,” Lita replied, as if talking about the weather.
“Is Comrade Cain here?” Maggie asked Lita in Spanish.
“Oh, yes. You’ve got the ransom money.”
“And Beltran?”
“Chat-chat-chat. What are you—a doll with a pull string on her back? You look like a doll. A pretty little doll.”
Maggie took a breath and continued on, ignoring the unease that was building.
A milk run.
~~~
They trekked until late afternoon, their clothes soaked with perspiration. Maggie had stashed her jacket in her knapsack long ago. She wished she had a pair of light hiking pants and not the jeans she’d put on in San Francisco which had now molded to her in the sticky heat. The sun and humidity so close to the equator were oppressive, even though the group stayed under the tree canopy much of the time.
They passed several settlements, two of them deserted. One small village had been bulldozed, the huts pushed aside and flattened to make room for a secondary road. In the wreckage Maggie saw a dog’s corpse, buzzing with flies, and a child’s toy drum, crushed and broken.
“This was Tica’s village,” Lita said in Spanish to Maggie. “You probably don’t even know who she is, do you, little doll?”
“I know who Tica is.”
“And why would you even know about the little people your company treats like so much garbage in your way?”
“Not all norteamericanos are the same.”
Lita laughed and turned back to face the trail. “Just the ones that want our oil. Which is all of you.”
“Tica’s long gone by now,” the tall older man said behind Maggie in rough Spanish. “She won’t be coming back. Gone.”
Tica would be getting out, Maggie told herself. She just didn’t know exactly how yet.
Finally, they arrived at a clearing below a mammoth kapok tree. Tall grass waved in a welcome breeze that was tantalizingly false. Out in the sun, it was even hotter.
A glint of light flickered from atop the kapok, flashing across her face. Maggie looked up. Again, something reflecting sunlight. A mirror.
“Cain says to approach,” Lita said.
They set across the clearing.
-24-
The narrow wooden stairs that began at the bottom of the giant tree and wound around its trunk up past the tree canopy were rotted out in places and completely missing in others. The stairwell to the observation deck, used in better times by eco-tourists, had fallen into disuse and was in serious need of repair. Looking up, Maggie saw more than a few steps gone, many in sequence. Anticipating the climb tickled her armpits in a disagreeable way.
“Comrade Cain isn’t going to come down to you,” Comrade Lita said, stepping up on the first plank, turning to give her a smirk. “You should be honored you’re allowed to go up to him.
”
“Honored I’m willing to transfer two million dollars your group needs.”
“So you can get your precious oil minister.”
“While we’re on the subject, where is Beltran?”
“I think you forget who is in charge. Watch the first step.” Lita jumped up onto the second stair. It creaked under her slight weight.
The older man with the rifle and machete stayed back, where he disappeared through a secluded opening in the bushes. Maggie was startled when she noticed a Caucasian woman in granny glasses and fatigues sitting on a log there, reading a paperback. An automatic rifle was propped up next to her. Maggie hadn’t seen her earlier. Then again, she wasn’t supposed to. The woman looked up, smiled at Maggie with obvious amusement.
“Come on, come on!” Lita sprang up the groaning steps, disappearing around the first bend of the kapok.
Maggie followed. The first stair crunched ominously.
The original 150 or so steps to the top had been reduced by a fifth, no longer in existence or completely unusable. One section of stairway hung entirely away from the tree, bridged by a yellow rope ladder tied to stairs at either end of the gap. The ladder wavered in the breeze, stronger above the canopy. Even Lita, who had been making quick work of it, took care climbing the rope ladder. Maggie tried not to look down as she stretched out onto the rope. Her weight felt like an impossible burden and, try as she might, she couldn’t help but glance at the treetops and bushes below. For a moment, she thought she must have taken leave of her senses to pursue this journey. She pushed the thought from her mind, body perched on a web that moved with her and the wind. Finally, she made the other side, grabbed the wooden stair with one arm and pulled herself up, trying not to kick frantically.
The worst was over. Except for the trip down.
Fifty vertical feet later, they reached the top of the weather-beaten observation deck.
What had once been intended to provide an unobstructed view of the Amazon rainforest for miles around had grown into a natural tree house of sorts. Fast-growing branches sinewed around the railings, taking over, permitting intermittent views of stunning wilderness that appeared to have no end.
The Cain File Page 22
