As he moved to the door, she said, “Carlos — there’s one thing I want.”
“What is it?”
“Let me see Jen Davis.”
His head slumped lower. “We have been over this,” he said, terseness in his voice. “It can only complicate things if you—”
“No,” she said, standing her ground, “I want to see her!”
In the dim light she saw a stony expression come over his face. An expression she had never seen before. “You will see her in the morning. After the money comes, she can go back to America with you if that’s what you want.”
“What about you?”
“I told you earlier — I must join my father’s little band of brothers when they vaporize into the jungle, but it won’t be for long. Only until things are safe. For now we must keep Jen isolated. The less she sees and knows, the better it is for everyone.”
“No, Carlos. I—”
“Enough!” he said harshly. Carlos took two strides toward her and spoke in a whisper, his words taking a slow cadence. “She should never have been part of this. I still don’t understand why you told her to claim your identity on the airplane.”
“I was frightened. I expected you to be there, and they’d just killed Thomas. I didn’t know any of those men, and everything happened so quickly.”
He heaved a sigh of exasperation. “All right, let’s put it behind us. But this is a problem of your creation. I will deal with it as I see fit.”
“If I hadn’t gotten Jen off that airplane she’d be dead.”
She saw a flicker of something in his eyes, but it dissipated quickly. She’d seen it once before, in Virginia, when the meth-head who lived above his apartment came to the door with a gun in the middle of the night and accused Carlos of stealing his stash. She’d sensed a menace in Carlos’ gaze that night, and gone quickly to call 911. While she was in a back room retrieving her phone, the situation had defused, ending uneventfully. Carlos assured her there was no need to call the police after all. And there wasn’t — not until two nights later when the addict’s drug-infused body was found on the concrete sidewalk beneath his fourth-floor balcony. It was the kind of accident that surprised no one, least of all the Charlottesville police whose detectives never so much as knocked on their door.
As she looked at him now, his features seemed to soften.
She said, “Jen will come with me tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
A kiss on her cheek, and Carlos disappeared.
She fell back and put her head on the pillow. Or so he said. She took a deep breath, sensing vestiges of his musky odor. A scent she had once savored now struck differently, activating new synapses.
Much had changed in eight months, since that day during Christmas break when her mother had confessed, divulging the identity of her father. It explained the new house in Raleigh, and the sudden lack of handwringing over out-of-state tuition. Her mother had made a deal with the devil, a binding agreement that would guarantee them a comfortable life. All we have to do is keep quiet. That had become her mother’s mantra. Kristin’s own response, however, had been very different.
Why doesn’t he want to see me?
That was the question she’d never been able to shake, ringing as loudly now as it had when she’d first put it to her mother on Christmas Eve. Her father had always been characterized by her mother as an irresponsible drifter, a romantic mistake named Carl whose last name she’d never known. That blank slate in Kristin’s mind, held lifelessly in place by a token name, had turned out to be something very different indeed — a man destined to be president of the United States. A man whose telegenic face was on the news every night, and whose eloquent words were quoted each day in the papers. A man featured on the cover of Time and Rolling Stone in the same month. A man whose campaign called their house asking for contributions.
All we have to do is keep quiet. How could anyone be quiet in the face of such lies?
There were times Kristin wished it had been the drifter. A vagabond ne’er-do-well would have been far preferable to a man who knew full well of his daughter’s existence, yet who ignored her in the advancement of his own glory. Irresponsible she could understand. Ignoble she could not. She had cried herself to sleep time and again. It was some months later, when her fitful nights came to be spent aside the dashing young Colombian, that she sought solace in a wine-laden confession. She said nothing about who her father was — not then — but through welling tears Kristin explained her feelings of pain and abandonment.
Carlos had never been more caring or tender.
The next week he began asking questions. He took particular interest in the ever-present men who stood discreetly at the back of lecture halls, watchful and quiet. The following weekend, in the wake of a bleak sorority party and far too many margaritas, Kristin had told him who her father was. Carlos, thoughtful as ever, gave new insights, putting into words what she knew but had tried to ignore — that her mother’s new home and car were a payoff for silence, even a contract of sorts, allowing her father to cling forever to his desertion. For Kristin, the pain was excruciating, but her lover understood. A man who listened and, unlike her father, who was there when she needed him.
It was a night soon after that Carlos had made his own confession. His father was the leader of the Fuerzas Amazonas, a peasant militia fighting the Colombian government from the jungles. Carlos described his father as a tough but fair-minded man, a commander who had sent his only son to America for an education, quietly hoping he would return one day to carry on the struggle at his side. At the age of twenty, Carlos had but one desire — to escape the misery of war. Six years later, high on marijuana in a quiet and comfortable townhouse near the University of Virginia, the insurrectionist’s son confided that the only product of his education had been guilt, a sense that he had abandoned his family and people.
It was Kristin’s turn to comfort her soulmate, to arrest his shame and kiss his face. If there was any redemption in his years in America, a tearful Carlos had told her, it was that he had found her. More kisses were exchanged, and in the small hours of that morning, so many months ago, the young revolutionary had given rise to an idea.
An idea that had now gone terribly wrong.
THIRTY-SEVEN
No government organization on Earth, including those residing in Colombia, knows the jagged topography of the northern Andes as well as the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. The War on Drugs, advanced in earnest during the Reagan administration, had ushered in a new era in law enforcement, throwing the weight of the United States DOD, CIA, and State Department behind escalating drug interdiction efforts. High-tech surveillance, low-tech informants, and the aerial spraying of herbicides all became part of a master plan whose long-term results, when it came to supply-side interruption, were decidedly mixed. Less equivocal was the expertise gained by operators in the field.
While Jorgensen worked a computer, McBain gave Davis a briefing on the composition of Colombian rebel forces, some element of which would invariably prove to be their target.
“FARC used to pretty much own the jungle, everything south of Bogotá and east of Cali, which is the area we’re talking about. It began during the sixties, and at their high point they controlled roughly one third of Colombia. Over the last decade they’ve morphed. The government came down hard a few years back, and FARC went into decline. They’ve made a recent comeback in the form of small cells—pisa suaves, which translates to tread lightly. These are company-sized units, about thirty men each, and they move constantly. Of course, it’s not just FARC we have to consider. You’ve got your right-wing paramilitaries and fringe groups. They all make their living in roughly the same way — abductions, extortion, and acting as middlemen in the drug trade.”