As Lost as I Get (9 page)

Chapter Eight

The first quiet moment Zoe had all day was when regular clinic hours ended and most of the staff had gone home. From her office, she could hear Ana talking quietly to the two patients they had staying overnight. One of them was La Abuelita, who would be staying with them for at least a few weeks. Her surgery had gone perfectly—now Zoe was just waiting for Santiago to claim his dinner with her.

It was just a precaution in both cases, and it would probably be a quiet night. The air had been still and heavy all day, the humidity oppressive enough that Zoe had a headache forming behind her eyes. She would have loved to go home, but there was paperwork waiting for her. Thankfully, a rumble of thunder outside promised some relief.

The rain had just started to beat against the tiny window of her office when Ana knocked at her door. “Zoe, I’m sorry to interrupt. We have an emergency patient. I . . . think you’d better come see.”

Zoe rose to her feet, frowning. Something was off. Ana didn’t say, “I need your help,” like she would if the patient required more than her nursing skills could provide. Ana had the patient tucked away in their most remote exam room, and Zoe opened the door to see a young man with his shirt off and blood streaming from a wound in his side. She was so focused on him that she almost missed the third person in the room.

And then she was so startled, she almost said his real name by mistake, remembering right as her lips were forming the words. “Will?” She tried to keep her composure and be professional, difficult as it was. All she could think of was their kiss the other day, and she felt the blush creeping up her cheeks.

“I’ll explain,” he said. “Timo needs your help.”

She looked at Ana, who looked as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t have, rather than just letting a patient in. “I told Will we could help,” Ana said.

For now, Zoe had other things to worry about. “Timo, I’m Doctor Rodriguez. That looks like a gunshot wound. You want to tell me what happened?”

He smiled, and his teeth were white—a good sign. “I was helping a friend in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Well, I hope you weren’t helping your friend do something illegal.” She glanced at Lee, trying to figure out his role in this. She pulled on her gloves and started examining the wound.

“It’s my fault,” Lee said. “Timo . . . works for me.”

“For you . . .”

“I recruited him. And Ana.” He looked at her as if he were waiting for her to catch on.

She paused while cleaning Timo’s wound, a combination of fear and anger rising in her chest. “We’ll talk about this later. Ana, I need you to prep him for surgery.” She tugged off the gloves and threw them away. To Timo she said, “It looks like it was a low-caliber bullet, so I don’t expect to find any extensive damage, but I have to look anyway. Do you understand?”

He nodded.

Lee spoke up. “What can I do?”

“You’ve done enough. Just don’t get in my way.” So much for wanting to keep her safe.

She clamped down on her emotions and sealed them away for now. She had a job to do. It didn’t take long to determine that Timo had been very, very lucky. There was minimal internal damage, which she was able to repair. She was grateful for Ana’s steady, reliable presence. Ana was a good nurse, whatever else she might have done.

Once Timo was out of surgery and in recovery and Zoe had scrubbed off, she pulled Lee and Ana aside. “Ana, you’re a spy?” she asked. “How could you put us in danger like that?”

“It’s not like that,” Ana said, but Zoe cut her off, nodding to where Timo was drowsing.

“No? I’d say it looks a lot like that.” How could any of her staff do something so . . . so dangerous? “Does Susan know?”

Ana shook her head.

“We have government officials in here all the time. What if one of them found out?” Zoe demanded.

Lee cleared his throat. “Actually, that’s why I needed someone inside your clinic.”

“So they know?” She felt impossibly slow, indicating Ana and Timo. “They know everything?” Obviously they didn’t; they were still calling him Will. Or maybe that was for her benefit. God, she was confused.

“Yes,” Lee said. “They know that Will Freeman actually works for the CIA, not IFI.”

So not everything. How could he live like this? “Does Will Freeman know that he’s put dozens of women and children in danger by bringing this shit into my clinic?”

He at least had the good grace to look abashed. He looked at Ana. “Can you give us a minute?” Ana nodded and went to check on Timo. “Zoe,” Lee said, “you know I would never, ever do anything that would put you in danger.” He touched her arm, and his eyes were so soft. It was too reminiscent of the look in his eyes when he’d had her in his arms, in his bed. “I swear to you, Ana’s not doing anything dangerous.”

“So you say.” She wasn’t ready to forgive him. “Go home. I’ll have to report his injury since it was a gunshot wound, but if the two of you have a cover story worked out, it should be fine.”

Lee sucked in a breath through his teeth. “That’s . . . a problem. Timo’s a corporal in the ENC.”

“Well, your story better be good, then, because he’s not going to be fit for duty for a while.” It wasn’t her problem. Her problem was getting Timo well enough to get out the door. The rest of it was their problem. That’s what she’d keep telling herself. “Go home. Come back in the morning.”

He looked as if he was going to argue, then shook his head. “All right. Good night, Zoe.”

“Good night,
Will
.”

***

The next morning, Timo was gone from the clinic, along with every record that he’d been there at all.

Zoe found Ana getting ready to go home after her night shift. “Where is he?”

Ana shut the door to the small kitchen that served as a dressing room and break room all in one. “He’s off our hands.”

“You released a patient without a doctor’s consent, and I’m guessing you’re the one who got rid of the records too.” Zoe kept her voice calm. She knew who was behind this. How dare he interfere with one of her patients?

“Zoe, we’re all safer with him gone, and you’re safer not knowing anything.” Ana could be parroting Lee, she sounded so much like him.

Zoe laughed, although nothing about this was funny. “Safer. You’re going to talk to me about ‘safer’ now, after you’ve put this clinic in danger. I should fire you.”

“No, you shouldn’t.” Ana was so calm Zoe wanted to strangle her. “If you fire me, what will you tell everyone? Will is your friend, and he’s trying to find out who killed ten people. Are you going to destroy that because you’re mad at him? At me?”

“I could say it’s because of Susan.”

Ana lifted her chin. “And I could say you fired me for being gay. How well would that go over? Tell me the truth: are you angry, or are you scared?”

Zoe had no intention of answering that. “Why are you doing this?”

“I grew up in Medellín. You don’t understand what that means, what that was like twenty years ago.” Ana leaned against the counter and looked out the window. “It’s better now, but there are still plenty of men who want to be the next Escobar.”

“But your own government—”

“They need help, but they won’t take it.” Ana laughed, and it sounded about as real as Zoe’s laugh had. “Do you think I trust your government’s intentions? Of course I don’t, but as long as their interests coincide with Colombia’s, I’ll keep working with Will.”

Some of Zoe’s anger drained away, and Ana wasn’t wrong. She
was
afraid. Trouble came often enough without looking for it, and Lee’s whole career seemed based on going out and trying to grab trouble by the neck. She folded her arms and her shoulders slumped. Of course she wasn’t going to fire Ana. As frightened as she might be, she wasn’t sure Ana was wrong.

“Okay,” Zoe said. “Keep doing what you’re doing. But you have to promise me that if you find out anything dangerous, you’ll come and tell me, not just Will.”

“If I can, I will,” Ana said.

Just because she wasn’t as angry with Ana didn’t mean Zoe wasn’t still angry. She went to her office and the first thing she did was try to call Lee. When he didn’t answer the first time, she tried again, and again. Either he truly wasn’t available, or he was determined to ignore her call.

When his voice mail picked up, she said, “Call me. We need to talk about last night.”
And boundaries
, she didn’t say.
She half-worried she didn’t have boundaries where Lee Wheeler was concerned.

She still couldn’t stop thinking about him. Every time she’d start to get a handle on how she felt, he’d show up again at the clinic.

The solution came to her during that afternoon’s medical staff meeting. It was brilliant. It would not only distract her and get her away from Lee, it would give her a chance to see more of the country outside of Bogotá and Inírida.

“I’m thinking taking two nurses with me should be plenty,” Maria was saying. They were discussing the upcoming circuit some of the staff would be taking through the remoter areas of the departmento. It was easier for some of the staff to travel to the villages out there than for the sick to come to Inírida. For this round, Maria was scheduled to go as the primary physician, but Zoe could switch the roster. Maria had several patients here in town she’d want to keep an eye on, so she wouldn’t mind.

She called Maria into the office near the end of the day. “How’s La Abuelita doing this afternoon?” she asked, shutting the door.

“Demanding to go home and weed her garden,” Maria said. “You know these tough old women. She’ll outlive you and me at this rate.”

Zoe sank gratefully down into her chair. “You agreed to go over and weed, didn’t you.”

“It was the only way I could get her to agree to stay!” Maria laughed and sat in the chair across the desk.

“I wanted to talk to you about the trip,” Zoe said. “I think I’d like to go in your place, if that’s all right. I know you want to keep an eye on La Abuelita and the kids, and at least two of your patients are ready to give birth any day now.”

“Are you sure?” Maria said. “I have been a little worried about that, I admit. Not that I don’t trust you and Susan, of course—”

Zoe smiled. “You’re the only one who can keep La Abuelita’s garden alive. I manage to kill fake plants, and I’m not sure Susan’s ever seen a plant up close that wasn’t part of a bouquet or on a plate.”

“This sudden urge to see the countryside doesn’t have anything to do with a certain American or a certain ENC officer who’ve both been sniffing around, does it?”

Zoe opened her mouth, and Maria grinned at her. “It would be good to get away.” Zoe tried not to grin back.

“All right. You go ahead and flee from your gentleman admirers.” Maria stood up. “If you’ll excuse me, I have some weeding to do.”

After she left, Zoe tried to call Lee once more and got his voice mail again. “Hey. I just wanted to let you know I’m going to be out of town for several weeks. I’ll be going up the river, making rounds of the villages and ranches out there.” Then without thinking about it too much, she added, “Ana will be coming with me. I’ll call you when I get back.” There. It was done.

Chapter Nine

The night before the trip, Zoe tossed and turned in her bed. She felt prepared, but who could say? There were no proper roads to speak of through the jungle. There might be a few narrow tracks once they reached the llanos, but they didn’t reach through the jungle to the town. They’d be traveling mostly by the Rio Inírida, by boat. It limited the amount and type of medical supplies they could take, but she was counting on Ana and the rest of the team, who’d made the trip before, to know what was absolutely necessary. Her own personal supplies were limited to what she could carry on her back. That much wasn’t a new thing for her—she’d had other missions that involved hiking in and out of a remote region. She was looking forward to a few nights sleeping rough out in the jungle—there really was no better way to see the local flora and fauna, even if sometimes it did come at extreme close-up and in places you might not want to find fauna.

If she was honest with herself, it wasn’t the trip that was troubling her. Not her part of it, at least. She worried a little about how the clinic would fare with her gone. Her fellow doctors were immensely talented and capable, but Susan was still inexperienced in the field, and Maria would be busy with two jobs, taking care of La Abuelita’s extended family as well as working at the clinic. She was solving one problem by taking Ana with her—with both of them gone, Lee should have no reason to be around the clinic.

If she was
really
honest with herself, even that wasn’t the whole story. It had been almost a week since she’d called Lee, and he’d left her a message of his own: “Stay safe out there, Zoe. I should still be in town when you come back, so give me a call.” There was the sound of good-bye in his words though. That was for the best, wasn’t it? If so, why did it make her feel so rotten?

The night passed eventually, and when her alarm went off at four AM, she groaned. This was going to be a very long day.

She wasn’t wrong. Sleeping in the boats was impossible, but traveling by the river was so stunning she didn’t mind. The Inírida was wider outside of town, as wide as the Mississippi where it flowed through St. Louis. The water was the same muddy brown, but there the similarities ended. This late in the rainy season, the river ran fast and strong, overflowing its banks and turning the forest around it into a vast wetland. Everything that wasn’t underwater was vividly green. The flooding was a regular seasonal occurrence, and everyone living on the river planned for it. As they floated away from the city, countless houses perched on stilts just above the waterline. In the dry part of the year, they would be elevated as much as ten feet from the ground.

Between the flooding and the jungle, the river served as the main thoroughfare. Other motorboats and barges ran up and down the river past them. Their expedition consisted of three boats and a total of ten people. The boats sat heavy on the waterline, weighted down with supplies. They hadn’t traveled more than four hours when they heard shouts ahead.

“Someone knows we’re coming,” Jaime, the guide piloting Zoe’s boat, said. “There’s a village on the river up here. It’s
usually our first stop.”

Zoe, who roused herself from the drowsy rhythm of rocking water and trying to watch for caiman and pink river dolphins, nodded. “Let’s go then.”

The village floated at the waterline, perhaps a dozen huts connected by walkways of rough-hewn wood. Children dove off the end to go swimming, and one woman was crouched at the edge, washing her dishes. Rafts and small boats were tied up everywhere. One of the rafts, completely enclosed, seemed too small for anyone to travel in until Zoe heard the clucking of chickens from inside, a floating coop. The ingenuity of it made Zoe grin. Did chickens get seasick?

Their arrival was greeted by thirty or so people of all ages. The faces, from the oldest to the youngest, were similar enough that Zoe suspected she was looking at an extended family of several generations. Their medical needs were basic: setting broken bones (one of which had already started to heal badly), giving vaccinations, offering advice and some prenatal care to a young first-time mother. The people who lived closest to the river were the most likely to come into Inírida when they needed urgent care. For now it was easy, but the farther they got from town, and from the river, the harder the cases would get.

Zoe and her team spent the afternoon working. As word of their presence spread, people traveled from other settlements and villages. By the time the sun went down, Zoe was beyond exhausted, but content. This time around, they’d been able to immediately help everyone who’d come to them. There’d been no referrals into town. Out here, referrals were nerve-racking, frustrating with the knowledge that the patient might never be able to make the trip to get the help they needed.

As they were eating dinner, a young man not much older than some of La Abuelita’s children came running into the village. Zoe heard him asking about the doctors, and a villager pointed in their direction.

As he came toward them, Zoe tried to figure out what might be wrong with him, and was stumped. For good reason, as it turned out. His name was Ramon and he was a llanero—a cowboy—for one of the large ranches across the river. One of his cousins from the village had called him with news of the visiting doctors, and he had traveled hours to reach them.

“My grandmother is very sick,” he said. “Her belly is swollen, and it hurts all the time.”

“Tia Yana is sick? She still has the bellyache?” One of the young women looked dismayed.

“How long has this been happening?” Zoe asked.

“She came and saw me before I had the baby,” the woman said. The child she was holding was about four months old.

“It started before that,” Ramon said. “Maybe eight months ago.”

Zoe talked it out with the others and they decided that she and Ana would go to Puerta del Ángel, the ranch where he and his grandmother lived. On hearing the news, Ramon had embraced them both and promised to see them tomorrow.

“Why doesn’t he just stay and travel with us tomorrow?” Zoe asked.

“He has to be back to work in the morning, I’ll bet,” Ana said. “He’ll probably get home just in time to sleep for a few hours before daybreak.”

They wound up camping a little ways outside of the village, tethered to trees along the river’s edge. The bottom of the
canopied boat wasn’t the worst place Zoe had ever tried to sleep, and the rocking motion was soothing. As she lay in her sleeping bag, listening to the cries of night birds and bats and the occasional scream of a monkey, she felt safe. Even here, in the middle of a dangerous landscape in a dangerous country, she felt safe. It was a false security—she knew it was—but she let herself savor it anyway.

Of course, thoughts of safety led in only one direction.
Damn it
. She wondered what he was doing. Was he still in Inírida? His message made it sound like he might not be there much longer. Had he found the information he needed?

At any rate, the entire point of this trip was to put some distance between them, and that wasn’t going to work if she spent every night mooning over him. She gave a growl of frustration and punched the pillow under her head, rolling over and forcing her eyes closed.

***

“You’ve got a hell of a mess on your hands.” Janet Wishnevsky’s voice over the secure sat phone was harsher than usual. He doubted she was getting much sleep either. “You’re sure it’s the AC?”

The first set of military surveillance photos from Timo confirmed what Lee already suspected. Most of the photos were aerial shots of one of the ranches out on the river plains outside Inírida. The AC were meeting with one of the local bigwigs, the owner of one of the largest cattle ranches on this side of the country.

Lee flipped through his files. “Yeah. There’s a lot of chatter coming down about Arcangel too.”

“Well, you found them, now what?”

“Tricky,” Lee said. “One of the guys in the photos is with the Cali cartel. Just heard back from Interpol.”

“The analysts haven’t been able to give us anything on Arcangel,” Wishnevsky said. Lee would have sworn he could hear her pinching her nose above her glasses. “He’s a ghost. Absolutely nobody seems to have met him.”

“I can’t find a damn thing about Las Autodefensas de Colombia prior to maybe a year ago. If Arcangel’s got the biggest rancher out there on his side, and a cartel, the AC is going to be running the entire river basin before long.”

Wishnevsky snorted, and her chair creaked. “The other paramilitaries won’t stand for that.”

“The Colombian government insists they’ve cleaned everyone out of this region,” Lee said, although he knew what her reaction would be.

“Yes, and the cartels are weak and not a threat anymore,” she said with a laugh. “Colombia’s safe as houses. Do you believe that happy horseshit?”

“Hey, I’m just giving you the official line,” he said.

Wishnevsky sighed. “We still have no idea why the AC wanted to blow up a building in Bogotá either.”

“If we don’t figure it out, Guainía’s going to be a war zone,” Lee said grimly. He unfolded his map of eastern Colombia and spread it on the small hotel desk, moving photographs and his empty coffee cup. He traced his finger north along the Rio Inírida, studying the llanos, the plains that were home to the cattle ranches, and the llaneros who worked them.

“I’ll get in touch with State,” Wishnevsky said. “They may want to issue a travel alert. I don’t imagine we have any diplomatic staff out there, but there are aid workers.”

Shit
. Lee sat back in his chair and grabbed his local phone to check Zoe’s last message to him: “. . . I’ll be going up the river, making rounds of the villages and ranches out there.”

“Goddamn it,” he said aloud.

“What is it?”

“There are some doctors from Médecins International going up the river right now. They’re going to be right in the middle of everything,” Lee said. Two armies wandering the area, looking for supplies, entertainment, and a fight, not necessarily in that order. How long would Zoe be safe? In other countries, a doctor from Médecins International might get a pass, but here? It wasn’t just an ideological fight going on out there, it was about enormous profits for the Cali cartel and the AC—and their respective track record on human rights spoke for itself.

“I can hear what you’re thinking,” Wishnevsky said, “and no. You’re not equipped for any serious fieldwork, Wheeler. Go to the ENC, get their help.”

“You want me to blow my cover? I’ve got a recruit in their ranks. It could put him at risk.” Timo was in enough danger as it was, trying to recover from his gunshot wound—the one he got doing Lee’s dirty work.

“Cut him loose,” Wishnevsky said. “Cut him loose and get the Colombians involved.”

“Let me just go after the MI team,” Lee said. “I’ll find them, convince them to come back to Inírida.”

There was silence from the other end while Wishnevsky thought things through. “Who’s on that team? Someone you know? You’re taking this personally.”

“One of my recruits is in their clinic.” Lee sidestepped the truth. “I know most of them.”

“All right. Go get them. But do not engage with the AC, the cartel, or anyone else, do you hear me? Do not engage.”

“I hear you,” Lee said, but another part of his brain was already making a list of everything he’d need to make a trip up the river.