“Fine,” I said, resigned. “I’ll go with them.”

  ≈

  I was in a small gray-walled room not far from the traditional customs counter. The two men had escorted me there from the tarmac, pushed me down into one of two chairs surrounding a table, and left. There were scuff marks on the table, as well names, Spanish phrases, and drawings—some crude, some not—carved into it. That had been twenty minutes ago.

  Another fifteen minutes passed, and then the door opened. Two men entered. One of the officials from before, plus a man in a suit.

  “Mr. Prescott?” the Suit said in slightly accented English. He was older, maybe in his sixties, his Latin features softened by time.

  “Yep.”

  He sat across from me.

  “It would appear there is a problem with your entry papers. We do not have any for you.”

  I considered making up a story about how I lost all the paperwork, but my story would be easy enough to dispute. And I didn’t feel like spending another two hours in this room while they tried to pull up my fake hotel reservations and had someone at the US Embassy check their files for a travel visa application that didn’t exist.

  “You have my money,” I said matter-of-factly. “Can’t you just take it and let me in?”

  A look of disgust flashed across the Suit’s face. “Yes, I bet you expect the corrupt Bolivian to take your American dollars, and everything will be fine.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  He shook his head. “Your drug money means nothing to me.”

  “It’s not drug money.” Technically, it was bribery money—at least some of it—which didn’t sound much better. I was tempted to tell him the real story: that my ex-girlfriend had been abducted, and I was here to rescue her. Surely this would pull at his heartstrings. But before I could continue, he waved in two men. Both men were policía.

  The officers made me stand up and put my hands behind my back. They clicked handcuffs around my wrists.

  Not again.

  “Alto.”

  I turned around.

  A fifth person had entered the room. He too was in uniform. But his was military. He had a thick black mustache and hard-parted black hair. He spoke a few words to the Suit, and after a sigh and nod, the Suit instructed the police officers to remove my cuffs. The Suit then said, “I apologize for the misunderstanding, Señor Prescott. Please enjoy your stay in our country.”

  It was as painful to watch the Suit deliver the words as it must have been for him to deliver them.

  Military Mustache led me out of the room to where another man in uniform, who saluted MM, was holding both my pack and the duffel.

  “Again, sorry for the misunderstanding,” MM said, then stuck out his hand. I shook it, and just as quickly, he turned to leave.

  The officer handed me my teal pack and the duffel—which, thankfully, still had a nice heft to it—then waved for me to follow him. I trailed him through the airport and outside to where a line of taxis were waiting. The officer walked to a red Honda, opened the door, and ushered me inside. He gave a curt nod, then closed the door. The taxi—or at least, what I hoped was a taxi—sped away from the busy pickup area and merged onto a road that the signage indicated led to La Paz.

  The driver was Bolivian with dark hair and sunglasses. In the rearview mirror, I noticed a few silver-capped teeth.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked, cradling the duffel to my chest.

  He nodded and said, “Sí, sí, sí.”

  I shook my head and conjured up one of the few words I remembered from tenth-grade Spanish, which I should point out I got a C− in because I couldn’t roll my r’s. “¿Dónde?”

  “Aeropuerto,” he responded.

  “Yes, we are leaving the aeropuerto, but where are we going?”

  “Sí, sí, sí.”

  For the next few minutes, I watched as the sprawling city of La Paz grew larger. Then the taxi took an off-ramp and headed back away from the city.

  I leaned forward, wondering where this guy was taking me and in what fashion he and his pals were going to kill me, when I noticed a chain-link fence in the distance enclosing a bunch of small planes.

  He was taking me to the airport—just a different airport.

  We pulled through an open gate and drove over gravel toward a faded yellow prop plane.

  There was a man sitting on a beach chair next to the plane. He was older, well into his late fifties, with a thick gray mustache, and a ruddy complexion. The last third of a cigar was tucked into his cheek and he was wearing a faded maroon hat and a bright yellow, blue, and green Hawaiian shirt, which I have no doubt is where his nickname came from.

  Papagayo.

  Parrot.

  9

  la paz, bolivia

  august 13, 5:32 p.m.

  days since abduction: 8

  The taxi driver sped away before I could even think about tipping him—I assume he’d been paid enough already—the wheels on the old Honda kicking up dust as he left.

  “Open the duffel,” Papagayo said, pushing himself up from the collapsible beach chair with a grunt. “And count the money.”

  I unzipped the bag and counted the stacks. There were thirty-four.

  “One hundred and seventy thousand,” I said.

  “Good, good.”

  The way he said it, I got the impression that in the past he’d had trouble with people taking a bit more than the agreed upon bribe. But evidently, everything that occurred at the airport had gone exactly as intended. This meant MM had been paid $30,000 for his interference. Not a bad day’s work.

  “Give it here.”

  I handed him the duffel, and he pulled out two stacks and handed them to me. He had heavily tanned and thick forearms, the kind I’ve seen on many farmers in Missouri. The kind that have never seen a weight room but can rip a phonebook in three. “Keep these on you,” he said. “In case of emergency.”

  I shoved the ten grand in the front pocket of my pants and waited for him to elaborate. He did not. He did, however, toss his cigar to the loose gravel, then open a compartment near the back of the plane and push the duffel inside. He waved for my pack. I handed it to him, and he added it to the duffel and another large pack before slamming the compartment shut.

  “So what do I call you?” I asked. “Papagayo? Parrot? Mr. Parrot?”

  He smiled, revealing a missing left canine. “Vern.”

  I stuck out my hand and we shook.

  “What’s the plan, Vern?”

  “Right now: get to Riberalta.”

  I’d done enough reading and stared at a map of Bolivia long enough over the past two days that I had the 424,000 square-mile country (that’s twice the size of Texas) memorized both geographically and topographically. I knew the average temperature for each month, average rainfall, who won the last election and by how much. Heck, I even knew the national bird: the Andean condor.

  Bolivia was smack-dab in the middle of South America. It was bordered to the west by Peru and Chile, the north and east by Brazil, and to the south by Paraguay and Argentina.

  The Amazon basin covers an area of 2.4 million square miles of South America, 2.1 million of those square miles being dense tropical rainforest. More than half of that is located in Brazil, and the rest is spread out over eight other countries: Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, Ecuador, and French Guiana. Six percent, or 130,000 square miles, of the Amazon rainforest is located in northern Bolivia.

  I assumed at some point we would head to Riberalta, which is in the northeastern corner of Bolivia in the Pando Department (Bolivia was separated into seven different “departments”) not far from the Brazilian border.

  I asked, “What happens after we get to Riberalta?”

  “We can chat on the flight,” he said, nodding toward the mountains to the west. “The sun sets early this close to the equator, and I want to get through the mountains while we still have daylight.”

  Gina had mentioned this once. Unlike the United States—where the amount of daylight varies between fifteen hours during the summer and nine in the winter—near the equator, there are twelve hours of daylight nearly all year long.

  I glanced over my shoulder. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains and the cloudless sky had already started to dim.

  “You ever fly in one of these?” Vern asked, giving the plane’s faded yellow fuselage a few light pats.

  “Once.” One of the cops I came up with at the Seattle Police Department had his flying license and he took me up in a little Cessna. He was a prankster, so I wasn’t surprised when halfway into the flight he acted like we had engine failure. Still, when one is plummeting toward the earth at 150 miles per hour, one can never be entirely certain that it’s a prank, and by the time he pulled us out of our dive, yes, I had peed a little. “It was a hoot,” I told Vern.

  “Don’t worry, Margarita here is a champ. She should get us there in one piece.”

  I nodded at this rock-solid assurance of my safety.

  “After you,” he said, waving for me to get in.

  I climbed into the cockpit, taking in the many pieces of duct tape holding the instrument panel together. I had twenty seconds alone with my thoughts, doubts, concerns, and regrets, then Vern clambered into the pilot seat and began flipping switches. The propeller roared to life, and he handed me a pair of headphones, also heavily duct-taped, shouting, “Put these on!”

  As I pulled the headphones on, I couldn’t help but think about Anthro Andy and what I wouldn’t give for his lucky flying shirt.

  “Here we go,” Vern said, pushing the throttle forward.

  The plane lurched, and we taxied a quarter mile to a small runway.

  A minute later we were airborne, the plane shaking violently as it gained altitude. Within a few minutes we were closing in on our first hurdle. The altimeter hovered around seventeen thousand feet, but it felt like we weren’t nearly high enough to get over the mountain’s shark-tooth peak. It quickly became evident we weren’t so much going over the Andes as going through them.

  For the next ten minutes, Vern piloted the plane through the deep scissoring valleys between the high mountains. Sometimes it felt as though we were barely skimming over the ragged terrain that quickly turned from snow to rocks and finally to unending green foliage.

  “You see those cliffs down there?” Vern asked. His voice was reasonably clear through the headphones, but he was still yelling.

  I gazed down through the side window at the green rocky cliffs. “Yeah.”

  “There’s a road that cuts through there called the North Yungas. They call it the Road of Death.”

  I squinted down and was surprised to see a sliver of brown cut into the side of one of the green mountains.

  “For a long time, it was the only road connecting La Paz to Coroico. It goes from fifteen thousand feet down to four thousand feet over the course of forty-plus miles. Three hundred drivers used to die on the road each year.”

  I grimaced.

  He continued, “They put in a better road a decade ago, so not many cars these days. Big thing now is cyclists. They come from all over the world to bike it. Killed about twenty of them over the years.”

  “How many rollerbladers?”

  He cut his eyes at me. “Don’t tell me—”

  “What?” I said. “It’s good exercise.”

  He found this funny and let out a gravelly, smoker’s chuckle.

  Since I had him talking, I said, “So lay out the plan for me.”

  “Right.” Vern nodded. “I spent three hours this morning at the US Embassy making sure Gina hadn’t contacted them. She hadn’t. I filled out some missing-persons paperwork, just in case, but there’s nothing they’re going to do.”

  “Nothing?”

  “They don’t have the resources to go looking for a missing woman in the Pando jungle. Maybe if she went missing in Madidi, but not up north.”

  Madidi National Park is the largest and most popular national park in all Bolivia. When your average tourist wants a taste of the rainforest in Bolivia, Madidi is their destination. Because it’s a national park, they presumably have several ranger stations, maintained trails, and access points and can deploy a search-and-rescue team much easier. But from what I’d read on the internet, outside of some small tourism in Riberalta, the rainforest in northern Bolivia was a no-man’s-land.

  Vern continued: “I checked with the hospital in Riberalta and a few others up north, in case Gina had shown up, but again, she hadn’t.”

  These were all the calls I would have made if I hadn’t been stuck on a plane all day. My confidence in Vern was growing by the second. “Did you by chance get in touch with the World Health Organization?”

  “I did. They hadn’t heard from her since they left a year earlier.”

  “They offer any assistance?”

  “Since she’s no longer on their payroll, not a whole lot they can do, and even if she were, they’d probably contact the Bolivian Army and leave it up to them. There’s a slim chance they would put together a rescue team themselves, but it would take time.”

  “And we aren’t contacting the Bolivian Army because?”

  “Because in my experience they are unreliable and corrupt, and it would be a waste of time.”

  I considered asking him about Military Mustache but decided against it. I did say, “So what you’re saying is that it’s up to us?”

  “Correct.”

  He pulled an orange Gatorade from behind his seat and took a drink, then he said, “I’ve hired a tracker I’ve worked with before named Diego. He’s a jungle guide in Riberalta and knows the Pando jungle as well as anyone. Better yet, he knows the village where Gina was living.”

  “He’s been there?”

  “Yeah, a few times.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “Diego is putting together a team and supplies,” Vern continued. “Everything should be ready to rock by tomorrow morning. Tibióno is a day by boat up the Río Orthon from Riberalta. If all goes according to plan, we should get there before dusk tomorrow.”

  That was later than I would have hoped, but I suppose I couldn’t just expect to teleport to the middle of the Amazon jungle.

  “And then?”

  “We track them. Or Diego does.”

  I’d tracked serial killers across the entire United States, but I didn’t know the first thing about tracking in the wilderness.

  “And if we do find them?” I asked. “I mean, at this point, we’re presuming they’re narcos.”

  “Yeah, Garret played the recording for me.”

  I had sent a recording of Gina’s voicemail to Paul Garret. Evidently, he’d played it for Vern.

  “There are a lot of narcos up north,” Vern said. “Mostly Colombians. They set up drug labs in the jungle, then move the product across the Brazilian border. Brazil is the largest consumer of coke behind the US, and there’s a much smaller chance of seizure than trying to move it up through Mexico.”

  I thought back to what Paul Garret said about Vern and his involvement in the drug trade. I wondered if he was still connected.

  “But they’re usually small groups,” Vern said. “Four, five guys. We’ll be able to handle them. Trust me.”

  “And by handle, you mean?”

  “Put a bullet through each of their skulls.”

  “Good to know we’re on the same page.”

  He nodded.

  We had another hour and a half of flight time—plenty of time to go over the mission details—so I switched subjects. “Where did you meet Roger Garret?”

  “Vietnam.”

  I’d put Vern in his late fifties, but to have fought in Vietnam, he had to be in his midsixties. “How old are you?”

  “Sixty-five. Enlisted in the Marines at nineteen.”

  “Where were you living?”

  “Carson City, not too far from Reno. I didn’t have much going for me. Working a construction job. Drinking most nights. Making bad decisions. I needed structure.”

  When I was nineteen, I had flunked out of the University of Washington and was taking classes at the local community college and, much like Vern, making plenty of my own bad decisions. Two years later, searching for structure myself, I enrolled in the police academy.

  “I can relate to that,” I said.

  “A year later, and I’m up to my ass in snakes and spiders and black palm. Plus, I have to worry about Charlie jumping out of a hole in the ground and blowing my brains to kingdom come.”

  “That sounds terrible.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, it was.”

  “Was Garret in your platoon?”

  “Sure was. He was a riot, funnier than hell, but you could tell he was cut from a different cloth than the rest of us.”

  “How so?”

  “It was a chess game to him, and he was better at it than anybody else. War, I mean. He was just a grunt like the rest of us, but other lieutenants would run their battle plans through him.” He paused, then said, “He was the one who busted me.”

  “Busted you? For what?”

  “Hash.”

  “Smoking it or smuggling it?”

  “The latter.”

  I waited for him to expand.

  “Routine patrol,” he said. “Three of us stumbled on this hash operation. It’d been firebombed. Everybody was dead, but a lot of the hash survived. Me and another one of the guys were bugging out soon, so we loaded up. A week later, getting on the transport, Garret was on the seat next to me. All our duffels looked the same, and Garret accidentally opened mine. Saw the hash. I can still see the look of disappointment on his face.”

 

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