“My friend.” Thibodaux took a drink from his water bottle and looked across the front seat at the driver. “We are in a hurry. I will double your fare if you can pick up your speed.”
Leonardo grinned broadly and slammed his foot to the floorboard, throwing them all back in their seats. He drove with one hand while he spoke in animated Spanish on his cell phone. The car sped over cobblestone streets, climbing steadily upward thousands of feet, splashing through puddles and drenching pedestrians who trudged too close to the edge of the road. Rain spattered on the foggy windshield but did little to slow the boy down.
“I don’t want to be the pantywaist here,” Bo said, bracing his knees against the front seat to keep from being thrown completely on top of Aleksandra as the cab made a hard left. “But we don’t exactly need a run-in with the local polícia right now, considering our status in the country.”
Leonardo smiled over his shoulder. “Not to worry, amigo,” he said, with an apparent understanding of English far greater than that of their last driver. “My cousin Mateo is the captain of the traffic police. His men know my cab.”
Leonardo’s cousin Adelmo had the van ready to go by the time the cab came screeching to a stop high up on the barren mountainside in front of a terraced yard full of rusted vehicles. Chickens pecked in the mud, oblivious to the rain. A tawny billy goat peered through the mist from the long hood of an old AMC Javelin sitting on concrete blocks.
Not much older than Leonardo, Adelmo was more somber than his cousin with a curl of black hair hanging over expressive brown eyes. His English was not quite as good, but he was pleasant enough and willing to get them over the Road of Death. His services as a driver, along with a plate of piping-hot meat empanadas and chunos, a grayish frost-dried potato, came with the price of the vehicle rental.
“He has stopped,” Aleksandra said through clenched teeth, eyes glued to her phone. Her entire body seemed to hum with nervous energy. “If we hurry, we can catch him.”
Adelmo’s young wife, plump cheeked and pregnant, had given Jacques a small pamphlet on the Yungas Road, as the Camino de la Muerte was more formally known. It was written in Spanish, but the big Cajun’s French and Italian helped him pick through the descriptions as they drove.
“Did you know the American tourist books call this place we’re going WMDR — the world’s most dangerous road — on account of the little factoid that two or three hundred people plummet to their deaths there every year? It says here that we’ll be climbing to over fifteen thousand feet at La Cumbre Pass before we drop down to about four thousand feet.” He glanced up at Quinn, wagging his head. “But don’t you worry because the drop-offs are only eighteen hundred feet or so and we’ll have plenty of room since the shittin’ road is all of ten feet wide.” He turned to stare out the side window. The fog made it impossible to see the sheer cliffs that fell away from the mountain just inches outside the door. “Don’t be surprised if I use up a non-Bible curse word or two, l’ami.”
“We will be fine, señor,” Adelmo said, nodding to the clay statue of a big-breasted Pachamama, the Aymara earth goddess, on his dashboard. It bore a surprising resemblance to his wife.
Traffic grew thicker as they approached the pass, with cargo trucks and brightly painted buses known as col-lectivos inching along in a soggy parade to clog the ever-narrowing road ahead. Within another half mile they were at a complete standstill. Nothing but fog to the left and rivulets of muddy water gurgling down the rock face to their right.
“I don’t think anything has passed us from the other direction for quite a while,” Bo said, leaning out the window.
“Can we go around?” Quinn asked, pulling a wad of American bills out of his pocket. “It is important that we catch our friend.”
Adelmo took a deep breath, reached to touch the statue of Pachamama, then pulled his little van out of line and began to slog forward, past the line of glaring truck and bus drivers, up and over the pass.
Quinn kept an eye out as they drove past every vehicle.
“Do you see him yet?” Adelmo said, eyes glued to what he could see of the narrow road through the fog.
“Not yet,” Quinn said.
“He’s still ahead of us,” Aleksandra said from the back of the van where she got better reception from her satellite.
Well below the pass, Adelmo slowed as a truck driver wearing a North Face fleece jacket and traditional bowler hat ghosted through the fog outside his flatbed. Smoke from his clay pipe curled around his brown face. Adelmo apparently knew him and rolled down his window to shout a greeting. They spoke in a rapid-fire language Quinn guessed was their native Aymara. Adelmo’s young face grew grave as he listened to his friend.
“There is a mudslide ahead,” he said, pulling his head back inside. He switched off the engine and leaned back in his seat, settling in as if this was something he did all the time. “A road crew is there, but it will take two or three hours to clear.”
“I don’t like this,” Thibodaux said. “I jump out of airplanes and go toe-to-toe with whatever badass you want to shove my way, but you can have this road-of-death shit.”
“Oh, señor.” Adelmo opened his eyes, chuckling. “We are not yet on El Camino de la Muerte. That does not begin for five more kilometers at the town of Cota-pata.”
“Damn to hell!” Aleksandra hissed. She looked up, a dark frown creasing her face. “They made it around the slide. He is moving again!”
CHAPTER 51
Quinn stood beside Thibodaux under a drizzling rain along the edge of the pavement, a satellite phone pressed to his ear. What had been bare, skeletal rock from the Altiplano to Cumbre Pass was now covered by a lush skin of green cloud forest. Towering peaks vanished into the clouds in every direction, blocking the horizon and making it difficult to get a signal. He had to turn every now and again to stay connected.
Bo and Aleksandra had walked ahead a little, passing the line of trucks and buses to see if they could get a feel for how long the road would be blocked. It was eerily quiet but for the gurgle of newly formed streams and waterfalls that tumbled down through the foliage. Drivers and passengers alike dozed in their seats.
Palmer answered on the third try.
Quinn brought him up to speed quickly about Aleksandra’s tracker. Few details were as important as the fact that they were about to lose the only link they had to the bomb.
“He’s moving north,” Quinn said. “We believe he’s trying to get to a place called Rurrenabaque.”
“Dammit,” Palmer said. “It had to be Bolivia.”
“Sir?”
“Since Evo Morales shut down cooperation with drug enforcement, we’re pretty slim in the way of resources in that part of the world.”
Quinn could hear the click of a keyboard in the background and imagined Palmer sitting behind his expansive wooden desk in the study of his Virginia satellite office away from the White House. “I may have somebody,” Palmer said. “What kind of a vehicle are they in?”
“Not sure,” Quinn said.
“Okay,” Palmer sighed. “You realize you’re asking me to call a seldom-used asset and ask him to look for two Hispanic men coming into a town of eight thousand or so people who look just like them in a vehicle you can’t describe?”
“Bolivian police then?” Quinn offered. “Someone has to stop this guy before he dissolves into the jungle. Maybe regular military.”