Where Are My Children? The True Story of a Mother Who Risked Her Life to Rescue Her Kidnapped Children

by Cassie Kimbrough

  "Cecilia?" Lloyd stepped forward. My alias, Lloyd had decreed back in Texas, would be Cecilia Jones. He introduced "Raul," who for all the world looked like an insurance salesman on vacation. Paunchy and balding, maybe in his late forties, "Raul" had blue eyes that twinkled as he grinned and shook my hand.

  "The El Dorado is full," Lloyd said. "We'll go to the Copacabana Hotel down the street." He motioned me back into the taxi and both men squeezed in beside me.

  The Copacabana was an old street-front hotel like the El Dorado. Inside, the clerk shoved an immigration form across the desk at me. I was puzzled. I knew that in Bolivia everyone who registered in a hotel had to show a passport or a Bolivian I.D. card. These records were then sent to the Ministry of the Interior, probably as a means of keeping tabs on foreigners. Hadn't Lloyd known about this and made provisions for it ahead of time? I didn't dare ask now. I couldn't read Raul's face as he stood silently next to me. I fished my passport out of my purse and the clerk copied my name and passport number onto the form. A red capped porter grabbed my bags and we all ascended in silence up the creaking elevator.

  As soon as we were inside my room, Lloyd scolded me. "You weren't supposed to sign the register. Didn't you see me signaling you?"

  "No."

  "Raul was supposed to sign the register, not you."

  I felt properly abashed. I had been here only twenty minutes and had already screwed up.

  "Well, we'll see what we can do to fix that," Lloyd said gruffly. "Do you need us to get you anything?"

  My throat felt dry. "I could use some water."

  "We'll bring you some and be back in a while." They left.

  I looked around the spartan room. It was quite a change from the luxury of the hotel in Miami. Cramped and dimly lit, it contained a sagging single bed, wood floors with a threadbare rug, and no heat. I followed the sound of a constantly running toilet into the bathroom. The shower ran only cold water. I then ran the tap. Rusty cold water spurted out. Suddenly I felt very tired and stretched out on the bed. Not a very comfortable place, but after all, I would be here for only a couple of days. My heart quickened at the thought. In two days I might be leaving Bolivia with Jane and Michael. As soon as there was an opportunity I would ask Lloyd and Raul about them.

  In a few minutes Lloyd returned with several bottles of mineral water. He perched his bulk on the bed and without preface launched into a briefing on the situation. My heart sank as I listened.

  "I'm going to tell it like it is. Your children never leave that apartment of your mother-in-law's except to go to school at Amor de Dios. Federico drives them to school himself every morning. That's the only place they ever go. We've never seen any show of affection or warmth between Federico and the children. We've never seen them smile. They get into his car like little robots, and they get out like little robots, He walks them up to the school and watches them go through an iron gate into the schoolyard."

  My teeth were clenched so tightly that my jaws had begun to ache.

  Lloyd went on, "In all my experience, I've never seen a situation with so few options. It's marginal, very marginal." My teeth began to chatter now, and my eyes filled with tears.

  Lloyd demanded irritably, "Why are you crying?"

  "It sounds like such a bleak existence."

  "Bleak isn't the word for it, my dear," he said more kindly. "You have reason to cry for that. But remember, you are the key player in this, and you've got to hold yourself together."

  I nodded. Outside the window, music blared from a cafe across the street. The reflection of a neon light flashed on and off the wall of the room. There was a rap on the door. Lloyd stood and opened it.

  "I've got us a room at the Sheraton," Raul said breathlessly, closing the door behind him. "I got your hotel registration back, too, and tore it up."

  After gulping a bottle of the water Lloyd had brought, I gathered my two small bags and once more we stood at the elevator. Raul winked and said, "You've got beautiful kids. I've been watching them for over a month now. They seem to be real close. They're always holding hands."

  I blinked back tears again. I cleared my throat. "Lloyd said they never smile." Please tell me differently, I silently begged, but Raul avoided my eyes and said nothing. My heart dropped along with the elevator.

  The polished floors and huge spiky chandelier of the Sheraton Hotel lobby were almost comforting in their familiarity. I'd been there many times to partake of an American-style breakfast of eggs and pancakes, or to buy the latest copy of Time or Newsweek in its shop. Raul took my luggage and proceeded to the desk to register the room in his name, while Lloyd and I took the elevator to my fifth-floor room. It was spacious and comfortable, with thick carpeting and a large picture window looking out over the city.

  Before they left me for the night, I learned that Raul's real name was Bob Kreiler. That certainly fit him better than Raul. They told me they'd be back in the morning and warned me not to open the door to anybody.

  My body was weary but my mind was racing. Did they have a plan ready? When would we carry it out? What was my role to be? Before I fell into a heavy sleep, I prayed the same prayer I had been praying for months: Dear God, watch over my children. If it's Your will, give them back to me. If not, help me somehow to accept that.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Thursday, April 21, 1988

  I got up early and had showered and dressed by 8 A.M. It would be my second day to wear the wig. To pass the time, I did crosswords and wrote in my journal. By ten o'clock no one had shown up and I was starving. I dialed room service and in rusty Spanish ordered breakfast. It couldn't hurt, I reasoned—in a hotel this big, the waiter wouldn't know that a woman was occupying the room that a man named Bob had registered for.

  I felt lightheaded, both from hunger and from the effects of the high altitude. The waiter arrived and laid out quite a spread: a basket of rolls and breads, jams and butter, juice, and café con leche, thick Bolivian coffee made with steamed milk. Shortly after I laid down my napkin, Lloyd showed up. He glanced at the untidy table and reprimanded me for ordering the food. Embarrassed, I apologized. Maybe I wasn't taking this cloak-and-dagger stuff seriously enough. He told me it was foolish to take a chance, to assume people wouldn't notice things.

  "How did you pay for it? You don't have any Bolivian money yet," he asked.

  "Uh, I charged it to the room." I felt like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

  "Did you sign anything?" he demanded.

  "Well, I signed the tab. I just scribbled down some initials, as illegibly as I could." After all, I didn't know Bob's last name. But I figured the hotel people would think nothing of the scrawled initials. Bolivians seemed to take great pains to create individualized and totally unreadable signatures.

  "Don't do it again," Lloyd scolded. "Don't ever do anything unless we tell you to. We'll take care of the food and whatever else you need."

  He went on briskly, "We're moving you out of this room today anyway. There's a suite on the other side of the hotel, with a sitting room adjoining it. That way we'll be closer to you and we'll have space to make plans. If a maid comes to clean the room, you can switch to the other room. That way nobody has to know you were ever here."

  For the second time since my arrival in La Paz, I was moved to another room.

  As soon as I entered my new quarters I went to the window, which faced south. From there I had a clear view of the apartment building where Federico and the children were living with Nila, some three or four blocks down the street from the hotel. I counted up from the ground to the fifteenth floor, where her three-bedroom apartment occupied half the floor. I knew her living room was on the other side of the building, overlooking the circular Isabel la Catolica Plaza. I remembered the room clearly, having eaten many meals there and sat many times on her formal velvet sofa. The room was furnished with a mixture of handmade Bolivian furniture and quite a few artifacts that Nila and her husband had collected in Asia: solid brass tab
les from Afghanistan, urns and carvings, a painting of a Burmese dancer, and a huge Persian rug.

  On the side of the building facing the Sheraton would be the TV room and one of the bedrooms. I squinted. The curtains seemed to be drawn. My heart thumped. At that very minute my children might be sitting in one of those rooms behind those curtains. Lloyd came up beside me.

  "I'll bring you some binoculars later and you can watch the windows." I nodded, unable to speak.

  After I had gotten settled into the suite, I met the third member of the team: Guy. A dapper man in his sixties, Guy looked out of place in gray La Paz in his white slacks and short-sleeved tropical shirt. Apparently no one had briefed him on local weather conditions.

  Lloyd said proudly, "Don't you think Guy could pass for your father? I thought we might run into a situation where that would come in handy." I looked dubiously at Guy. We both had big grins, squarish jaws, and light eyes. But Guy had a slight build and was much shorter than I was. He smiled and shook my hand, saying kindly, "Don't worry. We're going to get your kids back."

  Moments later, Lloyd locked the door between the rooms, shutting me in my half of the suite. Suddenly the room felt empty and cold. The Sheraton was supposed to have central heating, but after a search of the room I could find nothing that resembled a heater or a thermostat. I put on an extra sweater and slipped under the bedcovers for warmth. I lay there listening to the murmur of voices through the adjoining door. I felt completely left out of things. Lloyd kept telling me that the success of the operation hinged on me, yet they were telling me very little of what was really going on. It was frustrating. What did those three gringos know about Bolivia? I had lived here for almost seven years, I thought indignantly, and yet they weren't confiding in me, much less turning to me for information.

  My head throbbed and my stomach churned. I recognized the signs of altitude sickness, known as soroche by natives and tourists in the know. There was no cure except time, rest, and perhaps a dose of coca tea. Soon it became too much of an effort to hold my eyes open, and I slept.

  I was awakened in the afternoon by a knock on the adjoining door. Lloyd had ordered a huge meal for me—four meals, in fact, and he now wheeled them in on a cart.

  "This ought to hold you until tomorrow, he said. "There'll be no need for you to repeat your foolishness of this morning."

  He left me alone again, and I gratefully dug in. The hot soup was delicious. It was made with chuno, potatoes that Aymara farmers spread outside on blankets where they froze at night and dehydrated during the day under the fierce sun of the altiplano. The wrinkled, discolored lumps that resulted were quite tasty in spite of their appearance, and could be prepared in a number of ways.

  Lloyd, Bob, and Guy were about to leave on some unnamed mission. Before going, Lloyd gave me instructions to call Dr. Castillo, my Bolivian attorney. He wanted to know what our legal status was before proceeding further. If the Bolivian Supreme Court had signed the papers granting me custody, we would be on a much better footing should we get caught trying to leave the country with Jane and Michael. He reminded me not to tell Dr. Castillo that I was in Bolivia.

  When I called, Dr. Castillo gave me his usual assurances: everything was fine, and he was certain that I would get my children back.

  "What about the court orders? Have they been signed yet?" I asked in Spanish.

  "Oh, Catereen," he said regretfully, "I was going to fly to Sucre, and you know what happened? I got sick."

  His voice was deep and reassuring. "I have been very sick with pneumonia and was even in the hospital for a week. I am just now recuperated enough to work again. But I'll be going there as soon as possible, early next week, if I can get a ticket. You call me back next week and I can tell you more. You just need to have patience. That's all. Everything will be okay."

  So much for that, I thought.

  Lloyd had left me a small pair of binoculars. I crouched by the window and trained them on Nila's apartment. I watched off and on all day, but the curtain never stirred.

  I felt very alone that long afternoon. Lloyd hadn't said when they'd be back. Maybe they'd gone to check on escape routes, or perhaps they were out posing as American businessmen. Their cover, Lloyd told me, was that they were in Bolivia to buy wedding dresses for export. This involved going to shops, talking to manufacturers, having conferences, discussing contracts, and whatever else went into it.

  There was no TV or radio in the room to break the silence. I felt fatigued from the soroche and I slept again. I was awakened by the sound of explosives going off in the streets nearby. I knew from Lloyd that the current conflict had to do with tin miners protesting the freeze on their salaries, which was part of the government's attempt to stem the rampant inflation. The workers had come out of the tin mines in the country's interior and swarmed the city by the thousands, marching in the streets and setting off sticks of dynamite. This time there was more urgency than usual on the part of the government to quell the unrest, because of the Pope's impending visit.

  Along with the miners, bus and taxi drivers were on strike. Most people depended on public transportation to get around, but in spite of the absence of buses and taxis, the streets were alive with people. They went about their daily business as best they could in spite of the turmoil surrounding them. I had never learned to handle the constant near-chaos with anything approaching the equanimity of the Bolivians. They took it as a matter of course.

  As I sat watching the people outside, I felt as though I'd never left. I felt again the omnipresent frustration that had defined my life there. Throughout the afternoon memories kept bobbing to the surface of my mind. I remembered what it was like during the strikes and coups d’etat that were frequent in those years: the impassive faces of the indigenous Aymara people in the open market as shoppers pleaded for the food that they refused to sell because of the inflation. Buying milk wasn’t just a simple trip to the store—it was a daily quest. Finding a bag of flour to make bread with was a major coup. The fifty-pound bag would be locked up at home and parceled out to relatives. Once when no meat was to be found in the city, we had piled into a Jeep with Federico's mother, sister, and brother-in-law and made a trek to the countryside. We found a farmer willing to sell a pig, and he slaughtered it on the spot.

  Later that evening the men finally returned. Bob bounced in and asked merrily, "Did you hear the boom-booms?" I laughed. He could probably make jokes during a nuclear holocaust. His cheerful optimism was ballast to Lloyd's gloomy pronouncements and my own anxiety.

  I told Lloyd about my phone call to Dr. Castillo and about the fact that he hadn't yet had my papers validated by the Supreme Court. Lloyd grunted, "Not good. Well, we'll just have to make sure we don't get caught."

  He decided it was time for me to study the layout of the children's school, Amor de Dios. We went down to the Jeep in relays, first Bob, then Guy, with Lloyd and me last, to prevent the hotel security men from knowing we were together. The school was only a few blocks away, down the street from the hotel and Nila's apartment building.

  It was a handsome two-story building in the Spanish colonial style, with cream colored walls and arched doors and windows framed in dark, polished wood. It was surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence. One building away was the residence of the President of Bolivia. Across from the Presidential Palace was the headquarters of the military police. MP's armed with automatic weapons roamed the street at all hours of the day and night. The street also happened to be part of Embassy Row—all along the sidewalk, sentry boxes with guards inside marked the entrances of several foreign embassies. Federico had chosen a well-guarded fortress in which to put the children.

  For weeks Bob had been hanging around the school. He was there early every morning before the first bell rang. He would sit in the bus with the driver and make small talk and nod to the nuns as they passed by. He would stroll up and down the sidewalk and chat with the school guard at the gate. Posing as a parent interested in enrolling his child, he had
even met with the Mother Superior, the principal of the school, and obtained schedules and other valuable information. He could probably have found his way through the school's corridors blindfolded. In fact, he'd become such a familiar figure that nobody paid attention to him anymore. He was just a friendly, slightly eccentric gringo.

  Now several cars were parked in front of the school, even though classes had been over for hours and dusk had fallen.

  "There's Federico's car," Bob said. He pointed to a gray Jeep parked among the others.

  "Looks like they're having some kind of parents’ meeting," Lloyd said. I wondered if Federico would have brought Jane and Michael with him. What would it be like to see them now, up close?

  "Here they come," Lloyd muttered. I shrank farther into the backseat as several people emerged from the school. I recognized Federico as he moved into the glow of the streetlight. He was neatly dressed in a coat and tie, and his dark hair was gleaming.

  "He always dresses impeccably," Lloyd said, "which is strange, since as near as we can tell, he doesn't have a job. After taking the kids to school he just goes back home. Every once in a while he'll go downtown."

  I felt pity for him in spite of myself. Maybe the suit was a pathetic front to convince the world that he had important things to do. Maybe dressing well was his last remaining vestige of pride. Anyway, he certainly seemed confident now, even cocky, as he took center stage in the group of parents. He held forth about something, gesturing expansively as he talked, for about twenty minutes. He had always been so good at talking—smooth, convincing, polite. He liked nothing better than to have a captive audience while he lectured, and he was in his element. Finally the parents shook hands all around, with kisses on the cheeks for the ladies, and then Federico got in his Jeep and drove away.

  It was then that I recognized the apartment building next to the school. It was the same one where Food Aid International kept an apartment for volunteers. Russ had lived there with other volunteers until recently. Even though I'd been in the apartment several times, I'd never paid attention to the school next door. What an incredible coincidence!