Lab Notes: a novel (22 page)

They had the compartment to themselves except for the two Styrofoam containers strapped to the seats across from them. Diane looked over at the coolers and shook her head. She turned back to the window as the helicopter lifted off the ground with what seemed like a grunting effort and headed toward the mountain.

In spite of herself, Diane’s spirits rose with the aircraft. She was on a magic carpet flying up the lush Buritaka River Valley. Beneath her flowed every shape and shade of green in the universe. She settled back and listened to the beat of rotor blades stroking the air. The throbbing was curiously relaxing; it seemed to be resetting her biorhythm to jungle time.

How she loved the jungle. What an adventure this could be, if only…

The helicopter settled down into a hole in the dense greenery. Once below the jungle canopy, Diane could see they were landing in a clearing atop a ridge. From there, the ancient city was tiered downward into terraces connected by elaborate brick pathways supported by substantial stone walls.

From Olimpia and the pilot, Diane had learned that “The Lost City” was found in 1965 by
quaqueros
, grave robbers who plundered Indian tombs for antique gold jewelry, semi-precious stones and other artifacts, some dating back to 500 B.C.

An archeological base was set up there in 1976. The site was a sacred city of Kogi ancestors. Legend told of two more ancestral cities, still hidden in precipitous mountain valleys. In recent times the tribe complained loudly to the government about tourists overrunning the area. So now visitors to the city were restricted.

Diane and Olimpia stood amidst their gear and pizza in a whirlwind of dirt and dead leaves while they watched the helicopter depart. It would return for them in three weeks.

Diane inhaled a deep whiff of jungle bouquet. Mingled in the wet foliage was a strangely familiar smell she couldn’t immediately identify. She stepped over to the edge to study the vertical maze of staircases built by the ancient civilization, then turned back to express her amazement to Olimpia. But she was gone.

A quick scan located her at the opposite edge of the clearing. To Diane’s astonishment, two white-robed figures with dark shoulder-length hair rose toward Olimpia from below.

Diane jogged toward them to give Olimpia back-up if necessary. But reaching within ten feet of them, she was halted by sounds emanating from the threesome. Their tones were not like any language. They were more like a deaf person’s indistinct speech, but melodious and, in fact, the trio seemed to be in perfect communication with one another.

At that moment, Olimpia turned and invited Diane into the group.

“Diane, this is Oji and Baluna. They are Kogi. In addition to their tribal language, they can speak some Spanish.”

“
Buenos tardes
,” Diane, Oji and Baluna said in unison, bowing slightly. The men’s gentle manner put Diane at ease.

“They will bring pack mules to carry our things. And they have prepared a hut where we will spend the night,” Olimpia said.

The men took that as their cue. They raised their hands in a parting gesture and headed down one of the stone staircases.

Diane heard a neighing sound in the distance. Aha! That was the smell in the air. “Can that be horses?”

“They belong to some elite hunting club. The Kogi take turns descending the mountain to tend the horses. You will get to see them. Their stables are not too far from our lodging.”

Diane smirked at Olimpia and said, “About that hut: You said the Kogi have prepared it for us. They were expecting us? Did you phone
them
and make reservations this morning too?”

Olimpia laughed. “Hardly. But even if they had access to telephones, they would not need them. Just as they knew when the conquistadors were coming, they know when I will arrive; they are clairvoyant. Some of them practice telepathy also.”

Oji and Baluna returned with two mules and some ropes woven from liana vines. They tied the ropes to the coolers and slung them over one mule. The gear and other provisions were packed on the other animal. And off they went down and around the labyrinth of ancient stairways.

Their hut, called a
kankurua
, was a round thatched structure with a cone-shaped roof. Olimpia touched Diane’s arm to slow her entry. “Listen.”

At first Diane heard only the sound of loose thatch rubbing. But then from side vents in the apex came a sound, a chorus of whispers. The voices rose to a crescendo, then died, then rose again. Was it an architectural anomaly? Or had she entered the Kogi’s sanctum sanctorum? She looked at Olimpia for an explanation.

“We are in contact with a Kogi state of mind. An understanding of it can only come with time.”

Diane listened to the voices from aloft while she surveyed her surroundings, typical jungle accommodations: two hammocks covered with mosquito netting, a crude table that held one large and one small gourd, presumably the wash basin and water ladle and on the floor beside the table stood a wooden bucket with a flat stone lid, probably the toilet.

The floor was carpeted with a scattering of fresh leaves. Diane was pricked with a momentary longing for civilization, her customary reaction to the first night on a trek.

Diane and Olimpia shared some pizza with four Kogi tribesmen. The men baked it in a thousand-year-old stone open-flame oven that would have been coveted by any restaurant in the world. Diane found the meal and the company quite satisfying.

Two of the Kogi reported they had been sent to guide Diane and Olimpia up the secret pathways into their homelands aloft, a three-day trip. Everyone turned in early. The trek would begin at dawn.

Diane collapsed into her hammock and watched leafy shadows beyond the fire through the open doorway. Slowly, the whispers on high lulled her to sleep.

Diane was startled awake by gruff voices and quickly realized it wasn’t a dream. She sat up in her hammock and squinted toward the doorway. Dark figures passed between the hut and the fire in a confusion of motion. Beyond the fire, intermittent, strobe-like images flashed by: bearded men, ammunition belts, automatic weapons, Olimpia. What were they doing with Olimpia?

Diane had close calls before with banditos and guerillas, but always eluded capture. She glanced around in the darkness of the hut. But the hospitable Kogi had thought of everything but a back door.

Now Diane heard bawdy laughter. Then the voices moved away.
Olimpia?

Diane untangled herself from the mosquito netting, jumped from the hammock and headed for the door. She saw figures fading from the yellow sphere of firelight into the jungle. She peeked around the doorway just as Olimpia approached.

“Hernando and his merry band of Guerillas,” Olimpia said. “They come frequently, searching for tourists they might kidnap for ransom. They settled for the pizza. They always do.”

“But they could have had us
and
the pizza,” Diane said.

“They learned their lesson about academics in the early 1990’s.” Olimpia told Diane about the simultaneous kidnapping of three archeologists from American universities and a U.S. researcher studying the Kogi for a secret government program that employed psychics. The government researcher escaped, but the academics were held captive for months.

The prisoners languished in the camp, eating all the provisions, digging holes everywhere. After six months with no payment in sight, the scientists were released. And the guerillas swore they would never again attempt doing business with the universities.

Diane said, “Did the Kogi tell you anything about the government researcher?”

“They were suspicious of him. They did not invite him to their village.”

“He could have been legitimate. Vincent had a friend who was involved in a secret program that was declassified in the middle nineties. It was called ‘Star Gate.’ They employed psychics for remote viewing. It was used successfully to gain information in the Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland and for pursuing some Middle East terrorists. Police in the U.S. still use remote viewing in some cases.”

Olimpia said, “The Kogi would not become involved in such a connection with the outside world. I have a special relationship with the tribe. Because of our exchange of plant knowledge, they consider me one of their natural resources. They are very protective of me—another reason we are safe from Hernando and his men.

Besides, if the guerillas captured me, who would bring them pizza?” She grinned.

They set out in the morning: two women, two Kogi guides, one goat-footed mule. They climbed down the ubiquitous stone stairs, around walls and up pathways. They stopped briefly at the “stables,” ancient caves carved into precipitous cliff faces.

Diane saw magnificent white horses grazing in aerial pastures—fenced-in stone outcroppings. There were twenty or thirty of them. They were powerful looking creatures; compact, wide-chested, relatively short legged. And when they pranced, their necks arched in a majestic curve, and their manes and tails of angel hair flowed behind them.

Wide-eyed, Diane approached Olimpia. “Where did they come from?”

“The Kogi say they were imported from Europe. They are Lipizzaner stallions, descended from the Andalusian horses of the Spanish conquistadors. You have probably heard of them. For centuries the Lipizzaner was considered the horse of royalty in Europe.”

“Their owners, are they from Santa Marta?”

“The Kogi will not talk about them…” Olimpia looked toward the waiting Kogi guides. “We should go.”

And so their assent began. First, a stone staircase took them up and up and up to the next plateau.

Looking back, Diane saw flashes of white horseflesh through the dense foliage. What an enchanted place: A jungle where guerillas ate gourmet pizza, huts whispered lullabies and clairvoyants tended unicorns that waited for their masters in thousand-year-old caves.

But who were these masters? And how often did they come?

μ CHAPTER THIRTY SIX μ

The guides pressed on mercilessly the first day. Climbing through three vegetation zones, they traversed ridges, descended into hidden valleys, slid behind waterfalls and ascended ancient stairways. Negotiating the rough terrain, Diane understood how the Kogi evaded any would-be conquerors over the centuries.

In early evening the group arrived at the first campsite, a wide ledge with a glimpse of the glittering sea thousands of feet below. The push had been worth it.

The Kogi rewarded their effort with flame-roasted venison and mangoes. After dinner, Diane and Olimpia sat by the fire sipping tea from wooden cups. Olimpia picked up a twig, slowly scratched a question mark in the ashes, then turned to Diane. “So… why the hasty departure?”

Diane looked down at the distant sea. After fleeing Carrera Island, she had thought of fabricating some tale of woe. But she came to realize that if Olimpia was in league with the Carreras, she already knew their side of the story. So she might as well tell her the rest. But where to start? How could she distill the nightmarish scene into meaningful language? Not the methodical inventory of facts she had laid out for the Coast Guard, but the description of her husband’s murder, as she saw it.

Then the video returned to her with wrenching clarity. And the words came to her in a torrent. She described the swift white monster diving, breaching, closer, closer, plunging toward its mark. Vincent’s fall. Splintering wood. The retreating stern with its muddled black letters spelling treachery.

“It was Aruba, not Cuba,” she cried. It was the
MARIA V.”

Olimpia looked stunned. Her lips moved but nothing came out. Then, finally, she said, “With those weather conditions and at that distance, how can you be sure of what you saw on video?”

Diane bit her lip and stared straight ahead. Olimpia continued.

“Your theory that it was an intentional collision does not hold up. They would have had to track him down in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. Even if they knew the point of his departure and his destination, how could it be possible to pinpoint his location?”

Diane wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and thought a moment. She remembered scores of people having access to
Woodwind
the month before the race. Electricians, riggers, electronics experts, mechanics all came and went freely.

Just before the race, ESPN installed the videocam. That day alone, there were at least ten people aboard the boat working on different systems. No one at BRI knew them. Anyone of them could have smuggled a transmitter on board. In addition, all the racers reported their latitude and longitude via single side band daily. That could have been intercepted.

Diane looked up at Olimpia with a steely squint. “I’m certain of what I saw. And yes, Woodwind could have been tracked electronically.”

“But why would they do it?” Olimpia asked.

Just then the Kogi shouted from their perch atop a nearby rock. They pointed to an Andean condor soaring overhead. “A sign,” they yelled.

“A sign of what?” Diane shouted back.

“An airing. A telling.”

They watched the condor dip and glide majestically then climb again.

Diane shifted her gaze from the bird to Olimpia and said, “How well acquainted are you with the Carreras?” Her voice held an edge.

Olimpia’s jaw tightened. She continued watching the condor. The ancient bird swooped down the cliff face displaying its far-reaching wings, its dark underbelly, its tucked talons.

Diane waited. She thought Olimpia suddenly appeared old, diminished. She was eleven years Diane’s senior, but always had a younger spirit than most adults. At that moment, however, Olimpia looked spent.

Finally, she turned. Diane saw pity in her eyes… Or was it self-pity?

“Where shall I begin?” Olimpia asked. “Everything that I am involves the Carreras.”

Twenty-three year old Olimpia Garza sat wedged among the supplies in the thirty-five foot dugout she shared with her maid, her bodyguards and her Indian guide. She strained her eyes to watch three work boats carry the Carrera’s dynamite around the broad river bend. Relieved the explosives had been sent on ahead, Olimpia settled back and marveled at her good fortune in joining the Carrera’s logging expedition.

Her uncle, Padre Garza, had not written her that Gabriel Carrera would be in Turbo. Remarkably enough, Gabriel was even handsomer than his society page photographs. The pictures Olimpia had seen were of a tall, lean young man with an attractive face. They did not show that his eyes were sometimes gray, sometimes green; or that they reflected a soul full of intelligence and mirth. The newspapers had no way of depicting his powerful presence, his ever-so-gentle touch. Olimpia shook her head to clear it.
Madre de Dios! Contain yourself, Olimpia. Stop acting like a giddy schoolgirl. You traveled here to do research, not write poetry.

Olimpia focused her attention on the water up ahead. She had volunteered to help look out for snags or flotsam that could pass under the dugout and sheer the propeller or jam the outboard motor to one side. She felt fortunate that their route had remained clear during her silly musings.

Before dusk on the first two evenings, the canoes nudged into the river bank. The crews set up camps and prepared dinner. Olimpia and Gabriel were drawn to one another. They talked on into the night while the moon transformed the river into a silvery ribbon.

Olimpia told Gabriel of her secret desire to set up an international center for ethnobotany in Bogota some day. Then she asked him: “What is
your
dream? What do you want to look back on with pride when you are an old man?”

He was silent for a long moment, then he said: “In due course, I would like to use my position to help bring the nether regions of our country out of the dark ages.”

Olimpia wondered if it was a quiver or just fatigue she heard in his voice.

On the last evening before Olimpia and the Carreras were to go their separate ways, Eduardo and Gabriel pulled up to a settlement of thatched huts built off the ground on stilts. They signaled Olimpia’s helmsman to pull in beside them. Eduardo waved the rest of the fleet on to the logging camp, one kilometer up river.

Gabriel spoke to the villagers and arranged lodging for himself, Eduardo and Olimpia in dwellings that stood back off the riverfront. Gabriel and Eduardo’s bodyguards and Olimpia’s bodyguards and maid would sleep in hammocks underneath the huts.

Eduardo covertly rolled his eyes at Olimpia and Gabriel when the village headman invited them for a supper of fried toucan. Eduardo said, “Thank you, but I promised to eat with the crew.” And he headed for his boat.

Olimpia and Gabriel dined with the locals. The toucan was palatable once they got past the stringy blueness of the meat. Afterwards, they thanked their host, and Gabriel escorted Olimpia to her hut. He handed her a flashlight at the foot of the ladder and told her he would return. Olimpia climbed up to her room and turned on a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The headman had promised to leave the electric generator running for a couple hours.

Ten minutes later, Gabriel rattled her ladder and called to her. Olimpia helped him bring up two palm mats, a kerosene lantern, two bottles of Carrera Vineyard wine, plastic cups and a battery-operated shortwave radio. Gabriel placed the radio on the table, tuned in a news station and spread the mats on the floor. Then he dug a deck of cards out of his pocket and challenged her to a game of gin rummy.

Olimpia had never played the game, but she enjoyed learning it. They sat cross-legged on the mats happily playing cards and sipping wine. The radio crackled in the background.

Olimpia said, “Short-wave radios make me feel even more remote from the world than we actually are out here in the wilderness. The radio waves come from way out there, from much much farther than the origin of the transmission.”

Gabriel laughed at her. “It is time to come back to earth. I am one card away from winning again.”

“Gin,” Olimpia said with an impish grin and laid down her cards.

Olimpia was on a run of beginners luck when the electric light went off. Gabriel conceded defeat, then stood up and lit the kerosene lantern on the table. The two of them became enveloped in a sphere of warm yellowish light.

Gabriel tuned the radio dial in and out of static, then grunted with satisfaction when he found a clear music broadcast from New York City. He danced a few steps with an invisible partner, then extended an arm to Olimpia in an invitation to join him. She reached up. Their hands touched, then clasped. A surge of sensations passed through Olimpia, bringing her to a state of near ecstasy. She slowly raised her head and saw in Gabriel’s eyes that he experienced it too. For a moment neither of them moved. They were suspended in a blissful realm of amber-glow and music. Then Gabriel drew Olimpia slowly, slowly up off the mat and toward him. Their bodies touched, then became galvanized.

Olimpia and Gabriel did not dance one step.

A downpour pelted the thatched roof awakening Olimpia from a deep sleep. She moved closer to Gabriel for warmth. He kissed the top of her head, told her it was inconceivable that he should find such love in the midst of that despicable jungle.

He said he would dissuade her from any notions of becoming a scientist. She would bear his children, he said, and when the time came, she would sit by his side at the head of Carrera Industries. He told her he would love her for three lifetimes, even longer.

To protect the locals’ sensibilities, Gabriel descended from Olimpia’s hut while an early morning deluge provided a screen. But he returned shortly.

Breathless, he explained that Eduardo and his dugout had not returned from the crew camp, and someone had tampered with the starter on his boat. He feared the worst. He needed to borrow Olimpia’s boat. Immediately.

“I am coming with you,” she insisted.

Within ten minutes, Olimpia, her maid and the body guards were clambering aboard the dugout as Gabriel backed away from shore. They roared up river, slowing down at the logging camp just long enough to see the crew was gone. Then Gabriel headed the boat upstream toward the blasting site at full throttle.

Just as they reached the turn at the mouth of the tributary, a concussion of cataclysmic proportions jarred the earth, rolling the boat from side to side. Olimpia was transfixed by the chaos erupting around them: The river shot skyward in four-foot spikes. A blast of wind tore at the trees. Monkeys ran screaming, and birds took off in confused flight. An unmistakable rumbling sound followed.

Gabriel whipped the boat into a precarious U-turn and retreated down river. But despite the boat’s considerable speed, the thundering drew closer behind them. Glancing back, Olimpia gasped in disbelief. The river was roiled up in a fury of rampaging water and tumbling logs—now less then thirty meters from their stern.

The sun had dipped around the side of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, but the distant sea still reflected its fire.

The Kogi laid out four sleeping bags. They would be needed at that elevation. Diane pulled a sweatshirt over her head and adjusted the sleeves. “More tea?” she asked Olimpia who distractedly held out her cup in response.

Diane poured, placed the tin pot on a warm rock, sat down and waited. There had been a paradigm shift in her relationship with Olimpia. After all the years of listening to tales of Diane’s successes and failures, her aspirations, her joys and her fears, Olimpia had finally pried opened a crack into her own life. And tonight they had become friends.