“That’s something to consider, but it takes planning. You have to ask yourself, what message do you want the kidnappers to hear? And how will it be interpreted by everyone else who hears it? The general public. The police. It’s even possible that your father will hear you on Voice of America or RNC radio.”
“I hadn’t really thought of Dad hearing anything while in captivity.”
“Some prisoners are more isolated than others, but I know that FARC does on occasion give radio privileges to some. So if we do decide to use the media-and I’m not saying we will-it might make sense to have more than one person in the family do interviews. The longer this drags on, it could be of psychological benefit for him to hear his wife’s voice, then his son’s voice, his daughter’s voice, and so on.”
“How do you know so much about these kidnappings?” Mom asked.
Alex looked at me, as if to say that the message would flow best from my lips.
“Remember that group Agent Nettles told us about, FARC? She used to be a member.”
Mom blinked hard, as if my words weren’t quite computing. After several moments of silence, she was slowly turning green.
“Are you okay, Mom?”
Her shoulders started to heave. “Excuse me,” she said as she bolted from the table.
Alex gave me an awkward look. “Maybe I should leave.”
A strange noise emerged from the bathroom at the end of the hall, like a goose honking. Mom sounded really sick.
“Wait here. Let me check on her.”
The retching noise grew louder as I headed down the hall. The door was half open. I was almost afraid to look inside. After several moments of silence, I heard the toilet flush, then silence. Figuring the worst had passed, I tapped lightly on the door and entered.
Mom was kneeling on the floor, her arm resting on the rim of the bowl.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I should have warned you about Alex. I know you’re under a lot of stress, and I-”
“It’s not her. It’s morning sickness.”
“What?”
“It may be nighttime, but my stomach doesn’t know it. All damn day long, I’ve got morning sickness. It was the same way with you and Lindsey.”
“You’re pregnant?”
“Yes. I’m pregnant.”
“How?”
Her expression said, How do you think?
I checked my astonishment slightly, reminding myself that she’d become my mother just a year out of high school. “Does Dad know?”
“Yes. It wasn’t planned, but he was actually excited. We both were. And now,” she said, her voice shaking, “now, I might already be a widow and not even know it. This is such a disaster.”
I sat on the floor beside her, my hand atop her stomach. “This is not a disaster. This is the most important reason in the world for Dad to reach inside himself and find the will to survive, no matter what happens. And it’s the most incredible reason on earth for me to do everything I can to make sure he gets home.”
Tears welled in her eyes. She reached out for me, our first hug ever on the bathroom floor. She wasn’t just holding me; she was holding on to me. I’d never thought of my mother as weak. But if Alex was right-if this ordeal could last twelve months-I honestly wasn’t sure how Mom would deal with it. Especially now.
“We’ll be fine,” I said as we rocked gently in each other’s arms on the cold tile floor. “The whole new family is going to be just fine.”
12
Matthew Rey lay sleeping beneath the makeshift remains of a shoddy old army tent. A cold rain dripped onto his foul- smelling bed, which was nothing more than a dirty blanket stretched atop a pile of corn husks. The canvas roof was so saturated from steady rainfall that it leaked even where there were no holes. It would have been impossible for most people to sleep under these conditions. Matthew slept from exhaustion.
The first night he and his five armed escorts hiked for two hours. The valleys here were savanna, with a broad belt of trees about halfway up the mountain, then more savanna at the mountain crest. All of it was swampy, even the mountainside. Thick grass, clover, and mosses held rainfall like a sponge well into the higher elevations. Soggy ground made for tough going in the moonlight, but the guerrillas seemed determined to evacuate the grassy valley and reach the cover of tall trees before making camp. The next morning they’d risen at dawn and continued deeper into the forest, walking at a healthy clip beneath the canopy of bushy trees and twisted vines. The guerrillas didn’t seem concerned that they were wearing boots and Matthew wasn’t. The higher altitudes brought cooler temperatures, about a drop of three degrees centigrade for each five hundred meters. Matthew had no jacket and was still wearing the short-sleeved shirt in which he’d been captured.
As the sun descended toward the jagged mountaintops, the thinning air turned chilly, though not unbearable. Just before dusk they stopped to make camp, and Matthew was finally given a blanket. The guerrillas made a small fire and ate boiled goat, the one Joaquin had butchered in such cruel fashion. Matthew had only a tin of Vienna sausages and a hot cup of sabayon, a milky drink made from aguardiente, a local firewater that tasted like a bad imitation of French Pernod. They didn’t tell him what it was until after he’d finished, and it was the first alcoholic beverage he’d had in almost fifteen years. It warmed him slightly, but in the fading afterglow of the sunset he had to focus hard on his surroundings to take his mind off his goose bumps. Their camp was near a field of onions intercropped with magnificent blackish-purple plants topped with bright scarlet flowers. In a country that boasts over a hundred and thirty thousand different plant classifications, Matthew couldn’t even hazard a guess. “Amapola,” one of the guerrillas had told him. “Poppy,” said another. The translation belied the beauty. It struck Matthew that few Americans had ever been this close to the raw materials for heroin.
No one had told him exactly where he was, of course. The endless peaks and valleys suggested western Colombia, the most mountainous part of the country. The five-thousand-mile Cordillera de los Andes runs the length of South America, then splits into three ranges in Colombia. Sandwiched between the peaks of Cordillera Occidental, Cordillera Central, and Cordillera Oriental are two great valleys, Valle del Cauca and Valle del Magdalena, whose two rivers run northward until they merge and flow into the Caribbean. Just the sight of moving water had Matthew thinking of possible escape routes, though escape seemed impossible this far from civilization. Last night at their campsite, Matthew looked up through the trees to the vast ocean of stars twinkling overhead. They were so brilliant and plentiful, he had to be hundreds of miles from any city lights. The world was so quiet at this altitude, and the weather changed so quickly. By the time he’d made up his tent and bedding, the stars were gone. Low-hanging clouds had turned the camp pitch-dark, and he slowly became more aware of sounds than sights. The river churned through the valley a thousand feet below, like static on the radio. The gurgling sounds just ten meters from his tent were from a stream of the sweetest, purest water he’d ever tasted. Ten meters in the opposite direction stood a patch of bamboo, the bathroom, from which a strange clicking noise emerged in the darkness. A bird, he assumed. Colombia was full of birds, more species in this one country than in all of North America and Europe combined. The lure had gotten many an unsuspecting bird-watcher kidnapped.
The last sound he’d heard before dozing off to sleep was the patter of raindrops on canvas. It continued until he woke at the crack of dawn the next morning.
“Up,” said one of the guerrillas.
His eyes opened to instant disappointment. The shooting and kidnapping on the boat, the daylong ride in the back of a truck, and the hike through mountains had all seemed like a bad dream. The sight of a girl almost ten years younger than his daughter, armed with an M-1.30-caliber carbine, only confirmed how real it was. She poked him with the barrel.