As Lost as I Get (14 page)

“You could have stayed in Miami.”

“No, I couldn’t have.” She turned her whole body to face him. “Do you know how many doctors per patient there are in Miami? And how many there are per patient in Guainía? This is what I do.”

“Why does it have to be you?”

Zoe put down her meal, giving up on it for now. She leaned forward and scrubbed at her face with her hands. This was exactly why she’d stopped dating. Every single guy, no matter how cool he’d seemed about her job to begin with, eventually
got here, either about the level of danger or just about how much time she spent away from home. “You’re driving down the road, and the car in front of you veers off the road and crashes into a guardrail. The driver doesn’t get out. What do you do?”

“I’d stop to help.”

“Of course you would. Lee, I look at the world, at the parts of the world like Guainía, and all I see is one giant car wreck, full of people that need help, and it’s help that I can give them.”

He didn’t answer right away, then gave her a faint smile. “And there’s no way you can help from, I don’t know, an underground bunker somewhere, surrounded by armed guards?”

“If I could, I wouldn’t be me.” At least she’d found out now that he’d never be able to cope with what she did. “Besides, you’re one to talk about having a job that puts you in danger. What do you think would have happened to you if you’d gotten caught back there?”

Lee made a frustrated sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Unlike you, I wasn’t there by accident. I was armed, and I was doing what I’m trained to do.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better? That you’ll happily walk right into a ridiculously dangerous situation because you took some classes?”

“I didn’t just do a correspondence course, you know.” She was making him angry, which wasn’t what she’d wanted—but it felt safer than when he was flirting with her. He went on, “I spent ten years in the U.S. Marines, about half of that in special ops, followed by another five with the CIA. And why do you care, anyway, as long as I’m there to bail you out?”

She chewed on her lower lip and clenched her hands to resist the urge to strangle him. She
did
care, too much. The jungle was fully dark now, with only starlight and moonlight filtering down through the trees. She was glad he couldn’t see her face. “I’m going to try the sat phone again.” She turned away. It had been hours since the river, but it still didn’t turn on. She didn’t realize how much she’d been counting on it until the crashing thud of disappointment hit her hard enough to make her want to cry. She pried the back off and checked for moisture damage, but saw nothing—not that she knew exactly what she was looking for. Lee came over and eased the phone from her hands, resting the other hand between her shoulder blades.

“Get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll stay up and keep watch, and wake you when it’s your turn.”

She didn’t have to worry about sharing his sleeping bag after all. And that was a good thing, so why was she so disappointed?

***

Lee jerked out of a sound sleep and scrabbled for the weapon he’d placed by his pillow before realizing the sound that woke him was a bird screeching in the jungle and not a scream. A quick glance showed Zoe still on watch where he’d left her around two AM, perched on the fallen log where they’d had dinner.

God, he was an idiot. Things had been going okay. Despite their situation, she’d been laughing, relaxed, even flirting with him a little. And then he screwed it up. He’d pushed too far and found out what she really thought of him and his job.
To make it worse, he wound up sounding like every overprotective girlfriend he’d ever had—“But why do you have to go into danger?”—and he imagined she’d had her share of overprotective lovers who’d said the same thing. The worst part was, he didn’t want her to stop what she was doing. She was right. It made her who she was. He just wanted . . . Oh hell. He didn’t even know what he wanted anymore. Right now he just needed to focus on getting the two of them back safely.

His internal clock told him it was sometime around eight AM. Six hours wasn’t enough sleep to make up for being awake close to forty-eight hours, but they needed to take advantage of as much daylight as they could. He rolled onto his side and sat up, crawling out of the tent to stretch out the night’s stiffness.

“I wasn’t sure if I should wake you,” she said. She’d pulled on an oversized denim jacket sometime in the night against the cooling air, and he could imagine what she might have looked like in college—or med school—after a long night of studying. When she’d been in med school, where had he been? Iraq?

“It’s fine. Did you eat already?”

She held up a pack of Skittles leftover from the MREs the night before.

“Well, you’re all set for the day then,” he teased.

“Breakfast of champions.”

“We should get moving as soon as we can.”

They filled their canteens and packed up quickly, then started off.

As they walked, their feet stirred up the mist covering the jungle floor. On higher ground now, the dirt and humus beneath their feet wasn’t as mucky as it had been. According to his map, that would get better for a while, then get worse as they descended back down to Inírida.

They didn’t talk. Was she upset about the night before? Should he bring it up?

They’d been walking for about an hour in relative silence—nothing except “Watch your step here” or “Thanks”—when there was a raucous squawking ahead of them, and a flock of brightly-colored macaws burst from cover and swooped across their path. Zoe gasped, and they both stopped and watched the birds pass. When they were gone, she laughed. “Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them outside of a zoo before.”

He smiled, and his shoulders softened, releasing tension he hadn’t been aware of. “You don’t strike me as a big zoo person.”

On an unspoken accord, they started walking again. “I’m not now, but I was when I was a kid. We went to the Bronx Zoo for school trips, and during the summers my Tia Angela would take my sister and me if we bugged her enough.”

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“Just one,” she said. “Isabel. She’s older than me, lives near our mom.”

He lifted a mass of branches for her to walk under, conscious of the brush of her body heat and her natural scent that combined with wood smoke and insect repellent to make him smile. “Are you a Tia Zoe?”

She laughed up at him as she walked under his arm. “Your accent is terrible, you know. I am. My sister’s husband had
two girls from his first marriage. I don’t get to see them much.”

“What’s your family think about your job?”

“You can probably guess,” she said ruefully. “My mother hates it, but I think she’s more worried that I’m never going to give her grandchildren. Two is not enough.” She swatted at gnats swarming in front of her face. “What about you? Does your family know what you do?”

“Vaguely. More now than they did.” He flashed her a grin. “My mother hates my job too. I’m sure she wonders how she managed to give birth to two boys who refuse to settle down and get normal, adult jobs.”

“Why, what does your brother do?”

Shit
. He hadn’t meant to go there. “Uh, well. Have you heard of Lucas Wheeler?”

“The musician? Yeah, I—” She stopped and grabbed his arm, spinning him around, then stared intently up at his face. “Oh my
God
. I kept thinking you looked like someone I knew, but I thought I was crazy. Lucas Wheeler is your brother?”

“My twin brother, actually.” He fought to keep from shuffling his feet. Now would come the questions. Was it true Lucas still did drugs, what was it like having a famous brother, could Lee get her tickets sometime? It had happened before.

Zoe didn’t ask any of those, but laughed, sounding as raucous as the macaws they’d just seen. “Wow. What is Christmas like at
your
house? Or family reunions. ‘Hi, these are my sons, the rock star and the secret agent . . .’”

“Well, she didn’t know I was a secret agent,” he started, then joined in laughing with her.

“Right,” she said. “She thought you were just a tourist who happens to carry a small arsenal and wanders around dangerous countries saving random dominicanas like me.”

“Not random at all,” he said. “You were my mission both times.” No sense telling her that this time she was a mission he chose, and fought for.

“Yeah.” She started walking again, her brown cheeks darkening. What had he said?

Chapter Fifteen

Just the mission. That’s all she was. She needed to keep that in mind, no matter how much he flirted. Still, now she was dying of curiosity about his family. What sort of family produced two sons who were successful in such high-pressure careers? She had to assume Lee was good at his job—he was still alive after years of doing it.

“Zoe?” He caught up with her. “Everything all right?”

“Yeah. You just mentioned earlier we should keep moving.”

“We should,” he said. “If we keep this pace, we should get back to Inírida the day after tomorrow.”

That’s what she needed. Get back to the clinic and her patients. Tia Yana had had her surgery by now, and was probably wondering where Zoe was.

But Lee had said she should get out of Colombia. She wouldn’t worry about that now. She’d wait until they were safely back.

They stopped for a quick lunch just as it was getting muggy and warmer. “Is it my imagination, or are we climbing?” Zoe asked over something vaguely resembling vegetable soup.

“We are.” He took a swallow of water. “I thought it would be easier to get away from the damp ground. Getting tired?”

“A little.” Running a couple of miles a few times a week hadn’t prepared her for an extended cross-country hike. Her calves burned, and she mostly wanted to take a nap.

“We can stop more often if you need to. It’s okay.”

“Maybe.” Her ego was a little bruised at the notion of slowing them down. “I’ll take it more careful.”

And she thought she was. When the afternoon rains started up, she had a sudden irrational urge to cry. She had finally started to feel a little dry again. At least this time she wasn’t slogging through a river as well as the rain.

They were pushing their way up a particularly steep slope, the water running down her face and turning the ground beneath her feet to treacherous black mud. Her feet started to slip in slow motion. Her first instinct was to push forward harder, to try and get past the slippery spot. It just succeeded in making her fall faster, and the world sped up when she landed face first and started to slide down the slope. “Lee!” was all she managed before she had to close her mouth to avoid a mouthful of mud.

It was like sledding, if snow were black instead of white, and warm instead of cold. She tried to turn over, tried to grab at roots and tree saplings to stop her fall, but she was moving too fast. Mud filled her shoes and pushed up her pant legs, soaked through her shirt. When she finally slid to a stop—at the bottom of the slope she’d just climbed—it felt like the entire fall had taken an hour. Despair pushed her down into the mud like a bully’s hand, and she didn’t try to get up at first.

“Zoe?” Lee sounded frantic. “Zoe, are you okay?”

Nothing hurt seriously. She had a few scrapes from the trees, maybe some bruises, but mud, as she’d just discovered,
was very soft. “I’m—” She stopped and rubbed at her mouth with the back of her hand, which only made it worse. She spit out dirt. “I’m okay.”

She was pushing herself to her feet when Lee reached her and helped her stand. “Are you sure?” He looked her over like he was expecting to find blood or broken bones.

“Yeah, I’m just—”

“Oh thank God.” Ignoring the mud, he pulled her into his arms for a startling hug. She wanted to melt into it and stay there for a while, but—

She moved back. “Careful, you’re getting mud all over you.”

“I don’t care,” he said, but didn’t grab her again. He was nearly as smudged as she was, although he didn’t have any in his hair, and she did. “I’m so sorry. I should have let you go up first. I saw you falling, I just—”

“Oh, so I could knock both of us down the hill?”

“No, I would have caught you.” His eyes met hers and something flipped in her belly, warming her despite the rain. “Or at least I could have cushioned the landing,” he added with a smile.

“It’s not your fault.” She didn’t look away. They must have looked like statues, standing and staring at each other. He moved first, leaning down to swipe a spot clean on her forehead with his thumb, then placing a careful kiss there. He brushed her lips with his other thumb and kissed her, very gently. At first he kissed her as if she were fragile and about to break, with one hand resting on her shoulder. Her hand floated up to rest along his jaw and slowly, breath by breath, their arms went around each other and the kiss deepened. The intense sensation drove away all others, making her forget her aches and pains, her fatigue, everything except the feeling of his lips on hers. Zoe wanted him, longed for him, beyond the ever-present physical desire. The kiss stirred up the part of her heart she’d been trying so desperately to keep locked away for years.

Long before she was ready, he let her go.

“You’re sure you’re all right?” he murmured, resting his forehead against hers. “You’re not hurt?”

She was absolutely not all right. This wasn’t just about sex anymore, if it ever had been. This was about feeling safe and cared for and protected, making it scarier than just sex could ever be. In spite of everything, she wanted nothing more than to let him hold her again, mud and all, and that scared her more than all the men with guns chasing her. She understood a man with a gun. She knew what the men chasing her wanted, and the correct response was to flee. What did Lee want, and what was the correct response here?

“Yeah. I’m okay.”

“All right. Let’s try again.” He stepped back but held out his hand. “Together, this time.”

She took his hand.

***

Ana couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched. Once she and Susan got back to the clinic, she tried to go back to
her usual routine, but that first morning she saw more strange men watching her. While Susan was working with the MI staff in Bogotá to try and locate Zoe, Ana tried to contact Will Freeman, with no luck. He didn’t answer her calls. She thought about trying to reach the kid in the military, Will’s other contact, but she wasn’t sure how safe he was to speak to.

“Christiane says she’s in touch with the State Department,” Susan said. She, Ana, and Maria were in Zoe’s office. “We’re not to do anything else in the meantime.”

“What could we do?” Maria asked.

“I still think we should call that colonel of Zoe’s. He’s sweet on her—he might be able to pull some strings.”

Ana kept her mouth closed. She hadn’t told either of them about Zoe seeing Colonel Vargas in the village. Her gut told her that information was dangerous, maybe the most dangerous part of this entire mess.

“I tried,” Maria said. “As soon as you called from Puerto Ayacucho. He’s on leave right now.”

Of course he was on leave—Ana knew exactly where. The question was, was he undercover or was he somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be?

Around one, Ana and Susan left the clinic to find something to eat. As they walked down the street, a young man approached them. He had a friendly smile—a panhandler’s smile—but Ana didn’t miss the gun tucked into the waistband of his dirty jeans. “You ladies want to come with me, eh? Nice and quiet?” A second man came up behind them.

“Not a chance.” Susan missed the cues that Ana could see plain as day. “Get lost.”

“Your friend, I think she disagrees with you,” the guy in back said. Susan couldn’t miss that. Her eyes widened in fear and sudden realization.

“We don’t have any money,” Susan said. “You can check.”

A car pulled to the curb and the door opened. This wasn’t about money. If they got into the car, they’d wind up dead in the jungle somewhere, never heard from or found again. No one on the street seemed to be paying any attention. To them this probably looked like nothing more than someone trying to scam a couple of tourists. Happened every day. Ana’s heart pounded so hard she could barely hear anything but the sound of rushing blood in her ears. Susan was frozen. If they were going to get out of this, it was down to Ana.

She’d been raised with five older brothers. One thing she could appreciate was the power of a well-aimed shoulder. Without thinking too much about how this could all go wrong, she grabbed Susan by the hand and threw herself forward, ramming into the first guy and knocking him aside before taking off running, dragging Susan after her. She started yelling for help, yelling fire, yelling anything to draw attention to them. Susan was quick to snap out of it, and was running alongside her, yelling in English.

Ana didn’t really expect the men would shoot at them. She believed it right up until she heard the first shot. The car that had been ready to pick them up was following them, and the two men were both armed and firing. Ana did the only thing she could think of: she dragged Susan into the storefront next to them. She no sooner got inside and had thrown them both to the floor when the front window shattered under a burst of fire that didn’t come from any handgun.

Ana would have kept lying there after the shooting stopped, but the storekeeper called, “Come back here, get away from the door!” Ana and Susan wound up crawling up an aisle of hardware, hurrying past hammers and screwdrivers until they reached the counter. The storekeeper was a short, fat, tough-looking old woman who looked like she knew how to use the rifle resting across her arm. She nodded at Susan and Ana, then pointed at the telephone. “Call the police. I’ll keep the bastards out.”

Instead of the sounds of someone bursting in though, they heard a car driving away. The storekeeper started to lower her weapon while Susan spoke to the police in fractured Spanish. “No, wait,” Ana said. “There were two more of them on foot.”

“¿No es narcotraficante?”

“I’m a nurse,” Ana said. “She’s a doctor. I don’t know what they were.”

The storekeeper sniffed. “Los cabrones.”
Bastards
.

They waited to see who would come through the door: the police or the gunmen.

***

They heard the first helicopters after the rain stopped. Lee’s instinct was to pull Zoe farther under cover of the trees, but as it was there was no way anyone could see them from above. A rescue party would be on foot; they wouldn’t bother with helicopters this deep in the jungle, assuming anyone had organized a rescue party. With as thin a trail as they’d left, no one would know where to start looking for them.

“Lee, what—”

“Shh.” He listened intently. That wasn’t the ENC. Their Aviación Ejército flew the UH-1 Iroquois mostly, and that wasn’t what he was hearing.

“Are they looking for us?” Zoe whispered, as if the sound would carry to the helicopter.

“They might just be passing by.” Plenty of reasons, legitimate or otherwise, for someone to fly off the regular flight paths. The sound of the chopper blades started to fade. Just passing over after all. Then—no. The helicopter turned. He could hear the arc it was making, sweeping over the area. “Well, someone’s looking for something, at any rate.”

“What do we do?”

“Stand right here until they’re gone.” He eyed the foliage overhead. If they had infrared sensors on board, he and Zoe might be in trouble. They were both mud-spattered and wet from the rain, and with enough wet greenery between them and the sensors, it might be okay . . .

He held his breath while the helicopter did one last sweep, then flew away. “Come on, we need to move.” He didn’t know if they would come back, but he didn’t want to be there if they did.

They moved at a fast clip through the undergrowth, still hand in hand. Something had shifted between them after Zoe fell, and he didn’t want to question it too closely, lest it dissolve. Instead he just enjoyed the feeling of her hand in his, and
tried not to think about the softness in her eyes when he’d kissed her forehead.

At the end of a long, steady climb, they came through the trees into a clearing.

“Oh no,” Zoe said. About ten feet in front of them, the ground vanished. Beyond they could see mists, and the far side of a narrow gorge. The usual jungle sounds were overlaid with a loud, rushing roar.

“Wait here.” Lee inched forward, testing the integrity of the ground. With all of the rain, it might be loose and ready to spill into the gorge, and Lee didn’t want either of them to go with it. His footing held, and when he reached the edge, he started laughing.

“What?”

“You won’t believe it,” he said. He didn’t believe it, and he was looking at it. “Come see, the ground is stable.”

She came up beside him, and she started laughing as well. “Is that—a
castle
?” Zoe’s description wasn’t far off. It looked like a castle. The massive stone building rose out of the mist from the side of the cliff, directly across from a waterfall. Even from here it was obvious the building was abandoned: windows broken, the tile roof heavy with moss, the stone walls covered with climbing vines. There was a driveway curving around the far side of the building, suggesting the existence of a road.

“A hotel, maybe?” It was on their side of the gorge. They’d climbed more than Lee realized, if they were up this high. “You know, in the time it would take us to backtrack and find our way over there, it’ll be about time for us to stop for the night.”

“What, there?”

“Sure, why not?” Lee was thinking about stone walls and their tendency to block heat signatures. “We can sleep somewhere dry tonight, and there’s got to be a road of some sort leading to Inírida.” If someone was searching for them, traveling by road was tricky, but faster. And if those someones were using infrared to search, it wouldn’t matter if they were under cover or not—eventually they’d get caught unless they stayed in the densest part of the jungle and never came out. Tempting as the idea was, they’d run out of food eventually.

“Why not,” she said.

***

Zoe was tired to the point that going downhill was almost as bad as going up. They retraced their steps a little, then started following the curve of the gorge to get to the abandoned building—hotel, whatever it was. After about an hour and a half, they came through the trees to another clearing, this one an actual road and a small parking lot. The building stood just beyond. Up close it was immense. It rose up three stories over the parking lot, but they’d seen from the cliff side that it was built into the side of the gorge, so there were at least another three or four floors that went down from the level they were on. The waterfall wasn’t visible from this angle, but she could hear it rushing, louder than before.