As Lost as I Get (16 page)

“You don’t get along?”

“Didn’t. He died five years ago.” He waved her apology away. “There was always friction between him and Lucas—you can imagine. I sided with Lucas.”

“What about your mom?”

“Mom . . . is a force unto herself, now that Dad’s gone. She throws herself into loving anything that makes us happy.” He let the silence spin out, then tried to change the subject. “When did you know you wanted to be a doctor?”

“Sometime last year. Before that, it was still touch and go.” Zoe laughed, and he laughed with her.

He knew he shouldn’t press his luck, but he couldn’t help it. “Zoe, what’s different now? From before, back in Inírida?”

“I don’t know. It is different, though.” She lifted her head to look him in the face, so beautiful it made him ache inside, but more than that, she was brave and dedicated and strong. He had to face the fact that he was head-over-heels in love with her. Maybe he had been since the first time he’d seen her.

Something was still bothering her, he could see it. “Are you sure?”

“How do you do it?” she finally said. “How do you lead separate lives, how do you—how do you lie for a living?”

It had been years since he’d thought of it that way. Years of living under a cover story of some sort—his own family didn’t know he was CIA until just recently—he’d just . . . gotten used to it. “I guess you stop thinking of it as lying,” he said. “It’s a cover story instead.” He could tell her it was for the greater good, that he lied to protect people, to protect his country, but was that what she wanted to hear? Instead he told her the only truth he could think of. “I do my best to never lie
otherwise,” he said, “and I would never lie to you about how I feel.”

She’d made it clear after that first night she wasn’t interested in more—had things changed? If they hadn’t, he was heading for one hell of a heartbreak—but he leaned in and kissed her anyway.

“So this, right now, it’s real?” she said.

“The realest thing I’ve ever known.”

Her smile was worth everything. She took his hand. “Come on, let’s keep going.”

They spent the day talking more than they had before, about little things. Family stories, school stories. When they stopped for lunch, it felt more like a picnic than anything else.

They hadn’t been walking long after lunch when he heard a helicopter overhead again. “Quick, under the trees.” He took her arm and moved them both down the small incline off the road, trying to get as much tree cover between them and the chopper as it got closer. The ground was slick from the rains and he was too concerned about getting Zoe down safely to pay attention. His heel slid to the side and his toes didn’t, giving his right knee a vicious twist. He heard a crunch just as the pain rocketed up his leg, spilling him to the ground.

“Lee!”

“We have to keep moving.” He gritted his teeth against the pain that rolled through him in sickening waves. “Can you help me up?”

“What did you hurt?” She moved to his right side and took his outstretched hand.

“My knee,” he said. “You can be a doctor later. Now we need to move.” She eased his arm around her shoulder and took on his weight. A tentative step confirmed the worst: his knee wasn’t going to bear any weight at all right now. They made slow progress away from the road, each step making him cringe at the knowledge that they’d just have to make their way back again. When he felt they’d gone far enough, Zoe eased him down onto a fallen log.

“All right. We’re not going anywhere until I have a look at that knee.” She made him lie down on the ground and pulled this way and that, noting what hurt and what didn’t. He’d seen enough knee injuries in the field to know what she was going to say before she said it. “Probably an ACL tear, but I can’t tell how bad.” She rummaged around in her pack. “I can wrap it to stabilize your knee some.”

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak through his irritation. The last thing they needed was for him to slow them down.

Together they managed to fashion a rough crutch out of a tree branch. Zoe wrapped one of her extra shirts around the top to try and cushion it, but it was still going to be hellish getting back. Better the crutch than leaning on Zoe the entire way, though.

With their progress slowed, he mentally tacked on another day to their trip home, at least.

***

They were nearly ready to stop for the night when Zoe’s heart leapt at a new sound: an automobile motor. She should have guessed that walking along a road, however deserted it seemed, might lead to someone driving by. A good thing, too. Lee’s knee needed more treatment than she could give it, and the last thing he needed to be doing was trying to hobble along on it. If she thought he would have agreed, she would have rigged up some sort of travois and carried him back. She checked to see how he was doing, and he was stock-still, frozen with his head up, like a wild animal scenting a forest fire.

“Lee? What is it?”

“Run,” he said. “Run into the trees as fast as you can and don’t look back. Don’t come near the road unless you hear me yell ‘Zoe, the Yankees suck.’ You hear me yell anything else, stay away.”

“What are you—?”

“
Go
.” He gave her a push away from him.

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Yes, you are. Now, before it’s too late.” When she still didn’t move, he grabbed her arm and hissed, “Listen to me. If it’s who I think it is, you do not want to be here. If I have to fight, I can fight better if I’m not worried about you.” He gave her a little shake and looked in her eyes. “Trust me.”

With those words, the same words he’d used to save her life before, she couldn’t do anything else. She dove between the trees and ran, with one backward glance at him standing by the side of the road. Once he was out of sight, the urgency faded a little. Oh, she was going to give him so much shit when it turned out to be a truck full of tourists.

The minutes stretched by like hours as the motor sounds got closer, then stopped moving. She held her breath, waiting for Lee to call her back. Instead, she got an unfamiliar male voice: “Doctor Rodriguez, if you come out now, we won’t hurt your boyfriend.”

She remembered Lee’s words:
You do not want to be here
. He promised he would be all right. She stayed where she was.

Then came the sound of crashing through the trees, rustling through the leaves. Men shouted at one another in Spanish to spread out. They’d find her if she didn’t hide. Where? She moved as quietly as she could. There. That tree with low-hanging branches. It was better than running—she couldn’t run fast enough if they really wanted to chase her. She hauled herself up onto the first branch, reaching up and pulling her feet up past a layer of foliage just as someone burst through into the clearing beneath her tree. She pulled herself into a tight ball in the fork of the branches and prayed it was enough.

“You find anything?”

“Nah. Either he’s telling the truth and the bitch ditched him on the river, or she’s waiting back at that hotel at the end of the road.” Two of them near her tree. She didn’t breathe, didn’t so much as blink.
Please don’t let them look up
.

“What do you think the boss will do?”

“Do I give a shit? If he kills the boyfriend, I hope he does it here instead of somewhere it’ll make a mess.”

Zoe had to fight the urge to reveal herself, beg them to let Lee go.

“Come on, let’s get back. You get to tell him we didn’t find her. I got put in the shit last time.”

They walked off, still complaining at each other. Zoe leaned back against the bark, conflicted. How long should she wait? She tried not to think about Lee fighting off all those men with a hurt knee and just his pistol.

The first man yelled again. “Doctor Rodriguez, one last chance. Your man says you’re not here, but I think he’s lying.”

Zoe bit her lower lip to keep from responding.

The sound of the gunshot made her startle so hard she had to make a panicked grab for the branches to keep from falling. Just one shot, although in her head it echoed around her again and again. If he was fighting them, there wouldn’t just be one. She curled her fingers against the tree bark and focused on the bite of the wood into her skin. They shot him. Her vision went blurry and she blinked hard. She didn’t come out, so they shot him.

Oh God oh God oh God
. He was dead and it was her fault. All she felt was the sting of the bark in her fingers; everything else was numb.

***

The police wound up calling it a mugging, which was so ludicrous Ana didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Thwarted muggers ran away, they didn’t chase you down and shoot out a store. One of the younger officers, probably a rookie, suggested that maybe they were after a doctor and a nurse to get access to the clinic’s drug supply, but he was quickly shut down by his superiors.

They were on their own. Jacira had taken to keeping a loaded .45 hidden at the reception desk, and none of them went anywhere alone. Christiane kept advising them to close the clinic until Zoe was found. It had been days and no one had heard from her. No one wanted to suggest that she was probably dead. Ana wasn’t going to be the one to say it, but it was what she believed. Those men on the llanos weren’t the forgiving type—that much they’d already seen.

The only missing piece was that Will Freeman was still incommunicado as well. She didn’t know if the two were connected, but they did know each other. Had he gone after Zoe? The rest of the medical team—the team that had dropped Ana and Zoe off near Puerta del Ángel—came back after waiting for a day for Zoe, otherwise without incident.

By the third day after the “mugging,” they’d all settled into a routine, life under siege and without Zoe. Ana had just finished with a patient when Jacira corralled her. “You have a visitor in Zoe’s office. She’s American.”

Anyone from MI would speak to Maria or Susan before her. Curiosity drove her to scrub up quickly and get to the office. A tiny old white woman stood with her hands behind her back, looking at the pictures hanging on Zoe’s wall. Her clothes were pressed but practical, and she had short iron-gray hair.

“Can I help you?” Ana asked in English.

The woman turned around, and she looked Ana over. “You’re Ana Vasquez?” When Ana nodded, she sidestepped Ana and closed the office door before Ana could react. “I’m supposed to tell you that I’m finding the humidity in Bogotá exceptionally difficult to deal with this year.”

Her tone was so matter-of-fact it took Ana a second to realize she’d just given the pass phrase Will Freeman set up with her. “But Bogotá is never humid,” she remembered to reply.

“Weather,” the woman sighed. “Only spies talk about the weather. That lazy boy.”

“You’re CIA?”

“Most of the time,” she said. She held up her ID for Ana to see. “Janet Wishnevsky. I’m Will’s boss, and I’m here to try and find out where the hell he is.”

“You don’t know either?”

“Well, I know where he was headed, but not where he’s wound up.” She gestured for Ana to sit down, as if it were her office, then leaned on the desk. “Last I heard from him, he was headed up the Inírida to keep an eye on some trouble up there and try to make contact with a team from your clinic, escort them out of harm’s way.”

“I was on that trip,” Ana said. “I didn’t see him. The others didn’t mention it either. But you’re right about there being trouble up there. And it’s followed us down here too.”

Wishnevsky unfolded her arms and leaned forward. “Start at the beginning, and tell me
everything
.”

Chapter Seventeen

Zoe sat in the tree for what felt like hours, long after the last vehicle sounds died away, unable to will herself to move. Thinking was like pushing through thick, wet wool. What would Lee tell her to do? She should wait until she was sure the men were gone. If they captured her now, his sacrifice would be for nothing.

If she waited long enough, and then got back to the road, she could get back by herself. If they’d left his—if they’d left his body, and his pack, she’d have the extra food and the tarp and the sleeping bag. The idea of finding him dead on the side of the road was too much, and she half-climbed, half-tumbled out of the tree, where she fell to her knees and was violently sick. She pushed herself to her feet, her knees shaky. She couldn’t leave him there. She’d been prepared to haul him out by travois if he couldn’t walk—could she still do it?

How long should she wait? From what the men had said, they’d go check out the hotel. They’d find the room, probably. That room. They never should have left it. Zoe closed her eyes as they filled with tears, choking back a sob to try and stay quiet. She leaned against the tree she’d hidden in and let go. Hot tears streamed down her face as she tried to breathe as quietly as she could.

As the worst of it tapered off and she was down to sniffles, she heard the motor again—coming back from the hotel. She scrambled up the tree again, but they’d find her this time. They’d see where she’d been sick.

The car didn’t stop. Once it faded, she leaned her head back against the bark and relaxed. Her eyes slowly closed, overwhelmed by grief and a lack of sleep the night before.

When she woke, it was full dark. For a miracle, it hadn’t rained that afternoon, and she hadn’t fallen out of the tree. How could she have gone to sleep? Her muscles were stiff and complaining, making climbing down awkward and painful. If she could find the road, she could travel at night. Would that be safer? None of it would matter if Arcangel put his men on the roads to watch, but she couldn’t stay here forever. She reseated her pack on her back and started toward the road.

He wasn’t there.

She could see footprints in the soft dirt on the side of the road, but there was no sign of Lee, or his pack. Or, she realized, of any blood.
No blood
. Her legs threatened to spill her to the hard-packed dirt road. The shot was just to scare her. Maybe he was still alive.

Or maybe they took him somewhere else to kill him, like that man said
. She pushed the thought away.

Although it was fully night, there was starlight overhead, and in a little while, there’d be a moon. The road stretched before her like a pale river, with plenty of light to see by. Zoe started walking.

***

She was stumbling on her feet, drained by what seemed like an endless night. Every noise she heard had her jumping out of her skin. All she could think of was how many predators lived in the jungle—two-legged and otherwise. A crackling branch was a jaguar waiting to pounce. Or a snake about to drop on her from overhead. She walked through a spider web and, in her panic, was certain the owner was about to come bite her and leave her to die.

None of those things seemed like a danger when Lee was with her. Now everything was dangerous. The idea of passing one more night like that—much less several—before getting home made her want to sink to the ground and give up. She took a deep breath and kept walking.

It was nearly daylight when Zoe heard the sound of another motor approaching, different from the one before. The road had widened the farther she’d gotten from the Hotel de la Cascada, but it was still dirt, and still too narrow for two vehicles to pass.
Get off the road; you should get off the road
. It was time for her to stop for the day anyway, find a quiet place to hole up and hide during the daylight hours.

The motor got louder; it was too late for her to vanish into the underbrush. She pushed on, expecting to see a truck full of Arcangel’s men, deadlier and more implacable than anything she’d feared during the night. What she got instead was a small Jeep driven by a familiar face. She couldn’t remember the young soldier’s name at first, just that he was one of Lee’s, and she’d treated him for a gunshot wound. Standing up on the passenger side, looking over the windshield anxiously, was Ana.

“There she is!” Ana yelled, and Zoe let herself finally go limp, and gave in to the weakness in her knees, sinking to the road.

“Oh thank God,” she said. “Thank God.” Timo—that was the soldier’s name—scooped her up while she was still babbling. “You don’t want to kill me, finally someone who doesn’t.”

In the back of the Jeep was an older white woman Zoe didn’t know. The bench seat beneath her was so comfortable she didn’t care who the woman was.

“That son of a bitch,” the woman said. “That’s why he was in such a hurry. You’re Zoe Rodriguez, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Zoe said, too tired and confused to say more.

“You didn’t happen to run into a fool named Will Freeman while you were upriver, did you?”

Mention of Lee’s alias made her eyes sting, so she closed them. “He saved me again,” she said. “The men took him. I don’t know where he is.” That was all she could get out before the tears started to fall.

“Come on.” Ana reached back and squeezed Zoe’s hand. “Let’s get you home.”