Back to the baby nurse in Bogotá.
Her daughter had a daughter with someone.
Let’s call him R.
Let’s imagine he was the wrong kind of person, the guy you wouldn’t want your daughter bringing home from a date. Someone dangerous and abusive. Even criminal.
Definitely criminal.
Once I thought my own daughter was safe from him. I was wrong.
Something happened to the nurse’s daughter.
She was killed, kidnapped, made to disappear, something, because suddenly, it was just the baby nurse and her granddaughter. The daughter was gone, yes, but the little girl—she survived.
Only there was a problem.
Her father is looking for her. He won’t stop till he finds her. As you know, R has the power and means to do so.
The nurse needed to act. Fast.
She needed to get her granddaughter away from R, and the only way to do that was to get her out of the country.
How?
By going to the one person who could help her. The one person who knew how to get kids out of the country because, after all, that’s what he did for a living. She appealed to the adoption lawyer for assistance. One more Colombian child he needed to help el norte.
Only this child was different. This child had a price on her head. Oddly enough, there was price dancing around the lawyer’s head too. All that money he owed to the wrong guys—the Russians with yellow teeth and CCCP tattoos on their arms.
Sure, he wrote, I’ll help. You came to the right guy. No problem.
Just one little stipulation.
Money.
Not the usual legal fees. No.
Enough to get him out of hock to the Muscovites and enable him to keep all those professional sports prognosticators in business. Lots and lots of money. And then he told her how to get it.
Here’s the deal, he told the baby nurse. Here’s how.
I send you couples looking to adopt, just like before. Every so often—not every time, not even every other time, just now and then—one of these couples will have the bad misfortune to be kidnapped. It’s endemic in your country, isn’t it? What can a lawyer do about that?
Who’s going to kidnap them?
Those Marxists in the hills, the ones who’ve helped kidnapping surpass soccer as the Colombian national pastime.
And what was FARC going to do with these kidnapped couples? Easy. Everyone knew that FARC made their money the old-fashioned way—they earned it. How they earned it was through the sale and smuggling of pure, uncut Colombian cocaine.
Mules were their method of choice, but they fit a prototype that must have been summarized in every U.S. Customs training film. Colombian, poor, and disreputable. For every two mules who got through, one was snagged, vacuum-cleaned, and exported back home.
What if these mules could be middle-class, American, and thoroughly respectable? What then? What if the unfortunate husbands could be sent through customs packing millions of dollars of cocaine in order to rescue their wives and babies?
The baby nurse simply had to take this idea, this piece of pure brilliance, to FARC. Oh yes, and assist here and there in the kidnappings. There was that.
Everyone would get their heart’s fondest wish. The nurse would get her granddaughter to safety. FARC would get a foolproof, surefire pipeline to New York. And the adoption lawyer? He’d get the money to keep the Russians off his back and bet the over-unders and the points.
He who saves one child saves his ass.
And for a time it worked. A long time, if you judged by the age of the letters.
Something happened.
Paul. The actuary’s actuary, who always figured the odds, but never considered the odds of his nurse leaving the hotel with one baby and returning with another. The last round-tripper on the Goldstein Express.
Suitably duped, doped, and dumped in front of a burned-out safe house. And then almost slow-roasted to a crisp in the New Jersey swamps.
How did that happen?
Remember what the lawyer told him before extinguishing his own life?
It’s those assholes with Uzis and kerosene I’m worried about.
They’re starting to put it together. They’re closing in.
And earlier, after they’d driven back from the swamp, when Paul asked him who their near murderers were?
Those right-wing paramilitary nuts. Manuel Riojas, he said. He’s in jail. They’re not.
And remember what the nurse wrote in that letter?
He won’t stop looking till he finds her. R has the power and means to do so.
They seemed to be talking about two different people.
Unless, of course, they weren’t.
Miles was scared enough to put a gun to his head and blow his brains out.
Galina was scared enough to send her granddaughter off to another country and to never see her again.
One scared of R. One scared of Riojas.
Think of this R carved not into the desk of a defunct taxi garage, but right into the trunk of the fault tree. And then you understand.
R is for Riojas.
He had the power and means to find her, and slowly and surely, that’s what he did. Those men in the swamp weren’t looking for drugs or money—not simply drugs and money. They were looking for someone’s daughter. They were putting it together. They were closing in.
There it was in all its awful glory, the fault tree.
But when Paul looked at it, he thought he just might be able to use it to find shelter from the storm. Shelter for all of them—Joanna and Joelle and himself.
Just one question.
The girl the lawyer promised to adopt as his very own. Galina’s granddaughter.
Where was she?
THIRTY-NINE
The bird-watcher bit.
Paul was offering a look at a rare bird. At least the elusive progeny of one. He was offering to lead him to the nest.
“That’s an interesting story,” the bird-watcher said. “How would you catalog it? Fiction or nonfiction? Maybe science fiction.” Paul could tell he was more interested than he was letting on. For one thing he slipped the cigarette he was just about to light back into its crumpled pack. He straightened up and peered at Paul as if he were finally worth looking at.
“On the other hand, I’ll admit you’ve created a willing suspension of disbelief, Paul,” he said. “Of course Manuel Riojas isn’t my case. He’s case-closed. He’s sitting in a federal prison on twenty-four-hour butt-bandit alert. So I ask you, why should I give a shit?”
“Because Riojas might be in prison, but his men aren’t.” He was echoing a certain lawyer, now deceased. “They killed two men in New Jersey.”
“Colombian shitbags like themselves. So I ask again, why should I care?”
“Because if he’s still sending men to kill people, he’s still smuggling drugs. His men are. Isn’t your job to stop it?” He was practicing a dangerous kind of role reversal—lecturing his jailer on the right and proper path. Any minute he expected his head to be driven back into the table. Only Tom was still absent, and his back was clear.
“Well, that’s a matter of debate, Paul. What my job is. It’s usually what the U.S. government says it is. Right now it says my case is Miles Goldstein, which means my case, what’s left of it, is you. Not Manuel Riojas. I’ll admit he’s a lot sexier than you are. But that doesn’t mean I can turn cowboy and go riding off in a posse of one. Think what that would do to internal structure—if we all decided to do what we wanted. Think of the paperwork involved.”