Jungle Up, page 3
He laughed.
I asked quickly about his wife and son, then I said, “I need a favor.”
“Carmen is married now. Two kids.” He paused for a half second, then added, “Though, come to think about it, she might be into it.”
When I was thirty and working contract cases with the Philly PD, Gallow and I had investigated the murder of a college student during Occupy Wall Street in Philadelphia. During the month-long investigation, I’d had a brief fling with Mike’s sister. But she’d been a little too crazy, even for me.
I chuckled and said, “Not exactly the favor I’m looking for.”
“All right. What’s the ask?”
“Can you track down a satellite phone number for me? I need the owner and last known coordinates, if you can swing it.”
“Why?”
I told him about Gina.
When I was finished, Gallow said, “I don’t know all that much about satellite phones, but I’ll see what I can do. Give me the digits.”
I did.
He said it would take him a couple of days—three, tops—then he’d get back to me.
I’d just hung up with him when another call came in. It was a 202 area code. Washington, DC.
I answered.
“This is Paul Garret,” the caller said. “You sent me a message on Twitter with this number. What’s happened to Gina?”
“This is Thomas Prescott.”
“Prescott? Oh, right, from South Africa.”
I skipped the pleasantries. “Gina has been abducted.”
He went quiet and I told him everything I knew.
“Narcos?” he asked.
“That’s what she said in the voicemail.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, no bueno.” It couldn’t hurt to start brushing up on my Spanish.
“What can I do?” he asked.
“If I go through traditional channels, the earliest I can get boots on the ground is six days from now. Do you have any contacts left in the government who can expedite the process?”
“I’m not sure. I burned a lot of bridges on my way out of town.” He paused, I supposed to come up with names, but then surprised me by saying, “Do you think you going down there is the best course of action? Can’t we hire a rescue team to go in there or something?”
Sometimes pronouns are important, and I noticed he had said “we” and not “you.” Who knows, maybe he still carried a flame for Gina. Or maybe it was the fact he and Gina had grown up together. It didn’t matter to me either way, as long as he was willing to help.
“A rescue team?” I asked.
“Yeah, I heard about some college kid who went missing somewhere down in South America, and the family hired a private search-and-rescue team from Israel to find him.”
The idea of not having to go down to Bolivia myself hadn’t even crossed my mind. I mean, how narcissistic was I that I thought I was the only one who could find Gina? The only thing I knew about the jungle was what I’d seen on Naked and Afraid. Surely there were people far more qualified to find Gina than Thomas Dergen Prescott.
I said, “Okay, so let’s hire these Israelis.”
“It’s going to be expensive.”
“How expensive are we talking?”
“Probably a quarter million, maybe more.”
A few years earlier, I wouldn’t have balked at a quarter million dollars. My parents had left Lacy and me a sizable inheritance when they died just over a decade earlier. Most of that money was now tied up in real estate: the house on Puget Sound, a beach house in San Diego, another house in Maine, Lacy and Caleb’s flat in Nice, plus the commercial lease for Lacy’s art gallery. Not to mention the rising cost of Lacy’s medications, which even with quality insurance was still a few thousand dollars a month.
As for money coming in, Lacy was barely breaking even on the gallery, and any profits she did make went right into improving the space. As for moi, my last paycheck had been over four years earlier. Since then, I suppose freeloading might be the most accurate term.
The market was good at the moment, and Lacy and I could easily sell any of the four properties for over a million dollars, but that would take time. As for liquid currency, the last time I checked, our joint account was hovering right around two hundred thousand dollars.
“I can do a quarter mil, no problem,” I said. I would find the rest of the money somehow.
“Okay,” Garret replied. “Let me make some calls. I’ll get back to you ASAP.”
We hung up.
Lacy brought me a sandwich and a juice box while I waited. Fifteen minutes later, Paul called back.
“Okay, so on the expedited-visa front, I put in a few calls, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. The companies on the internet can probably cut through the red tape faster than any government agency will. Plus, no one is looking to do me any personal favors these days. Good news and bad news, as far as the search-and-rescue team goes. Good news is I have a contact who can get the ball rolling on the private Israeli team. He just needs the go-ahead.”
“And the bad news?”
“These things don’t happen overnight. He said it will take a week to put together. And I was a little low with the estimate. Probably be closer to half a million.”
I could scrape together a quarter million, but I wasn’t sure about five hundred grand. I let out a groan and asked, “Why does it have to be an Israeli search-and-rescue team? Why don’t we hire some Bolivians?” This was code for “Can we get someone cheaper?”
“I talked to my contact about that. It’s definitely an option. But he warned me that corruption runs rampant in Bolivia. It’s the poorest nation in all of South America. He said there’s a fifty-fifty chance whoever we hire will just pocket the money. And on the off chance they do look for her and recover her, they may then try to extort even more money out of you.”
“You mean, they’d rescue her from her kidnappers, then kidnap her themselves?”
“He said it happens. He said if it were him, he wouldn’t go local.”
“What about Chile or Argentina, one of the less corrupt countries? I’m sure they could put together a team and head up to Bolivia.”
“Yeah, we can look into that.” He paused, then said, “But there might be another option.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Papagayo.”
“What?”
He let out a soft chuckle. “Papagayo means parrot. He’s an old friend of my father’s from the Marines. After getting out, Papagayo bounced around South America. My dad said that in the late ’90s and early 2000s, he helped facilitate some shady relationships between the US and some Colombian folks.”
“Cartels?”
“My dad never went into the details, but yeah, I think so. The last time my father mentioned him, he’d set up shop in Bolivia.”
“Do you think you can get ahold of this guy?”
“My dad might have his contact info in his old Rolodex.”
“Where is it?”
“In a box in a storage unit twenty minutes away.” He didn’t wait for my urging and said, “I’ll head out right now.”
≈
The sound of my cell phone woke me up. I shook my head groggily and squinted at the screen.
It was Garret.
The time in the corner said it was 12:31 a.m. I’d fallen asleep next to the laptop an hour earlier after doing internet searches for a myriad of topics: Search and rescue in the Amazon, How to find someone in the Amazon, Narcotrafficking in Bolivia, Flights to Bolivia, Where to get a yellow fever vaccine, and How to sneak into a country, among countless others.
“Hey,” I answered.
“Sorry it took so long.”
I ignored him, straightening myself up in the chair. “Did you find your dad’s Rolodex?”
“Yeah, I did. But he didn’t have this guy’s contact info.”
“Dang,” I said, leaning my head back.
“However, I did find a number for a motel in La Paz.”
“And . . . ?”
“And, well, I don’t speak Spanish, but my wife used to speak it fluently—she even went to Spain in college—”
“Get to the point,” I interrupted.
“Oh, right. Anyhow, my wife got on the phone with the owner of the motel, and through some fumbling Spanish, she mentioned Papagayo and the lady on the other end knew who he was. She wouldn’t give us his number, but she took down mine. Twenty minutes later, he called me.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, he did. And better yet, he can help.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, he said he can get you into Bolivia on Monday, which I guess, technically, for you is tomorrow.”
I pumped my fist.
Garret wasn’t finished: “And he said he would find a tracker and even put a team together.”
For the first time since hearing Gina’s plea for help, I felt the slightest bit of encouragement.
“Okay, so how does this work? Is this Parrot going to call me or what?”
“He prefers to go through me. Because of my father.”
“Fair enough.”
“So the deal is, Papagayo has been helping out one of these jungle expedition teams—greasing the right palms to get permits and licenses—and they are the ones flying into Bolivia on Monday. You can hitch a ride down to La Paz with them, then meet up with Papagayo and go your separate way. But if you don’t somehow get on that expedition flight, he probably can’t get you in until the following week.”
“I’ll be on it,” I assured him. “How much is this going to cost?”
“Three hundred thousand dollars.”
“Done.”
He gave me a few instructions on how I would pay, then said, “Now you need to get your ass to Miami.”
5
miami international airport
august 13, 9:37 a.m.
days since abduction: 8
I’d been to Florida once previously when I was contracting with the FBI’s Violent Crime Unit. A serial killer had been working his way eastward from Louisiana, through Mississippi, into Alabama, and down into the Florida Gulf Coast, knocking off white-hairs left and right. We nearly nabbed him in Clearwater, then again in Sarasota. It was the middle of winter at the time, and the weather was a pleasant seventy-five degrees, the beaches white sand, and the fresh grouper so delicious it almost made you forget about the three elderly couples who’d been stabbed to death on their sundecks.
Good times.
But Miami in August was anything but pleasant. In fact, it was disgusting. I wiped the beading sweat from my hairline as I jog-walked the nine blocks from my hotel back to Miami International Airport, where I had landed less than twelve hours earlier.
I could have taken an air-conditioned taxi, but traffic headed to the airport was at a standstill, and I was running late.
After getting off the phone with Garret, I booked the next flight to Miami. My Air France flight departed Nice Côte d’Azur Airport at 12:15 p.m., and after a four-hour layover at JFK in New York, I landed in Miami at 10:45 p.m. local time.
Having not slept since my little nap more than twenty-four hours earlier, I walked directly to the nearby Embassy Suites and sacked out for nine solid hours. I woke just in time to catch the tail end of the continental breakfast, cramming down two boxes of Honey Nut Cheerios and a hard-boiled egg.
I again wiped at the sweat openly dripping down my face and adjusted the straps of my newly acquired Osprey Rook 65 pack.
Lacy and I had spent a frantic hour the morning before tracking down all the gear I would need for the trip. Luckily, there was an outdoor sports store, Alticoop, six shops down from Lacy’s gallery, and I quickly rang up over two-thousand dollars’ worth of gear. The sixty-five-liter teal pack was crammed with everything Lacy and I thought I might need for the “mission”: tent, sleeping bag, multiple cans of DEET, sunblock, headlamp, Garmin inReach Explorer (a GPS and satellite communicator), hammock, whistle, first aid kit, compass, lighter, water purification tablets, seven-inch bowie knife, hat, sunglasses, specialty hiking clothes, and a three-liter hydration bladder. I had also bought a pair of hiking boots, which I was now wearing, trying to break them in.
This would be a good time to mention that I have never—not once, not ever—gone backpacking. However, I had gone camping multiple times, and by multiple, I mean twice. Once for one night, once for two nights—both times in Olympic National Park, both times with my father, and both times with a car parked thirty feet away. I think it’s safe to say that neither my father nor I particularly enjoyed our time amid nature, and we decided after the second trip that in the future we would much rather do our father-son bonding at Seattle Seahawks games.
So, outdoorsy I was not.
After adjusting the straps of the forty-pound pack, I began jogging the remaining two hundred yards to the airport entrance. I was supposed to meet this expedition team at one of the private-jet terminals on the northern side of the airport at 9:45 a.m. According to Garrett, the plane was leaving at 10:00 a.m. “with or without me.”
Unfortunately, I still had an errand to run.
I moved through the sliding glass doors of the airport and into the slightly cooler recirculated air. I checked a large airport directory and found what I was looking for: Bank of America. I hurried my way through the busy airport to the full-scale bank on the fourth floor.
“Thomas?” a fortyish woman asked as I walked through the bank doors.
With my sixteen hours of travel time from Nice to Miami, I had left Lacy the formidable task of securing the $300,000 for Papagayo. I’m not sure exactly how she accomplished the feat, as neither of us had an account with Bank of America—or where she found the extra $100,000 on top of the $200,000 in our bank account—but I woke up to a text on my new burner phone that read “MONEY WILL BE THERE.”
As for my old phone, I’d left it with Lacy, just in case Gina was able to call back. Then I bought a cheap burner phone to communicate with Lacy while I was still in the States. The Garmin inReach Explorer I’d purchased would take three days to activate—and technically, it wasn’t a phone; it was a satellite communicator. I would be able to send and receive text messages while in the jungle.
At least, in theory.
The woman introduced herself as Cathy and led me to a large wraparound desk. She handed me an envelope and said, “Check that over for me.”
I pulled the cashier’s check out of the envelope and looked it over. It was for one hundred thousand dollars and made out to Roth Media Inc.
“Looks good to me,” I said.
Cathy nodded, then she unlocked a drawer, pulled out a small blue duffel bag, and slid it across the table. Had I gotten the money in hundreds it probably would have come in a large manila envelope, but I’d been instructed to get the $200,000 in fifties.
I opened the bag and counted out the brown-banded $5,000 stacks. There were forty.
“It’s all there,” I said.
I’m not sure what Cathy was told, if she thought I was paying off a ransom or blackmail or just going to one of the many strip clubs that were literally across the street, but she put her hand over mine and said, “Good luck.”
I thanked her, draped the duffel over my left shoulder, and checked my watch.
9:54 a.m.
Then I started running.
≈
I remember seeing an old Hertz rental car commercial when I was a kid. It had O. J. Simpson—young, handsome, pre–murder trial—and he was running through the airport hurdling over banisters and jumping over ropes.
That was me.
“Move!” I yelled, pushing a mother and daughter out of my way, then calling, “Sorry!” over my shoulder.
Both the little girl and the mother flipped me off.
Welcome to Miami.
I sidestepped past a few people on an escalator going down, knocking what appeared to be some fancy coffee drink out of one man’s hand, then started down a long, wide corridor.
I checked my watch.
10:03 a.m.
I sprinted—a difficult feat with the large pack and the blue duffel—toward a glass window where a small jet was beginning to taxi toward the runway.
“I need to get on that jet!” I shouted at a young woman behind a desk that read Elite Charter.
The woman’s eyes opened wide, and she brought a handheld radio to her lips. The plane on the runway continued for several more meters, then stopped.
I slowed down, drew a deep inhale through my nose, and put my hands behind my head.
A minute later, I was walking across the tarmac and up the steps into a compact jet shimmering white under the morning sun. I ducked into the plane and a flight attendant in all black with a white kerchief tied around her neck, said, “Welcome aboard.”
Her name tag read Molly.
I unshouldered my pack and handed it to her—she wasn’t touching the duffel—then she steered me toward twelve plush seats, six of them occupied.
Sitting in the first row was a man in his early fifties. He had slicked-back gray hair, crow’s feet clinging to light-brown eyes, a rakish five o’clock shadow, and teeth that were either a genetic miracle or perfectly polished veneers. It was a face that belonged on a Cialis commercial.
He stood, revealing he was an inch shorter than my six feet and said, “You must be our secret financier.”
I stuck out my hand. “Thomas Prescott.”
He gripped my hand, firmly, and grinned. “Jonathan Roth.”
Roth Media Inc.
I pulled the check from my back pocket and handed it to him. He took it with a smile, then turned to the other five passengers and said, “This is Thomas. He’s catching a ride with us.”
Then he nodded at the flight attendant and said, “Now let’s get this plane in the air. We have a lost city to find.”
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