The boys waved politely, ducking their heads.
“We’re looking for some friends who came in ahead of us,” Aleksandra said. Quinn couldn’t help but think of how sweet she could make her voice considering what he’d seen her do just an hour before.
“Which ones?” the smaller of the two boys in a dirty white T-shirt asked.
“Have there been many?”
“Not many,” the boy said. “I hear there was a mudslide and the miners are marching.”
Alexandra translated in quick whispers.
Word traveled fast in the Andes, a fact that Quinn knew they would have to depend on if they wanted to find Zamora.
“Our two friends are traveling together,” Aleksandra said. “One has a tiny mustache like a little mouse.” She made her voice go higher as if she was telling a story. “The other has a flat nose like he fell against a wall.”
The boys laughed at her impressions. Though Quinn didn’t understand all the words, he knew who she was talking about with each description. He couldn’t help but think she would have made an excellent schoolteacher if she hadn’t gone the professional killer route.
“He stopped at my auntie’s store for a coffee,” the boy said, smacking his stick against the ground as he spoke. “Then they left for Rurrenabaque.”
“How far away?”
The boy consulted with his friend. “All night at least,” he said, scratching his nose. His friend nodded his head in agreement.
“Are there any airplanes here?” Aleksandra asked.
Laughing at the thought, the boys suddenly looked up the road. “More friends?” the boy in the white T-shirt said.
Quinn turned to see Jacques Thibodaux’s big face looking at him from the passenger window of Adelmo’s van. Bo leaned forward from the backseat, a broad grin spreading across his face when he saw Aleksandra.
Valentine Zamora beat on the dashboard with the flat of his hand, cursing at Monagas and ordering him to drive faster. Though not as steep as El Camino de la Muerte, the road from Coroico to Rurrenabaque wound its way deeper and deeper into the jungle, more like a river of thick mud than an actual road. Less than two hundred miles, the trip took nearly ten hours — all night — and Zamora had not slept for a moment.
The sun was just pinking the horizon by the time Monagas rolled the Land Cruiser into the river town of Rurrenabaque, known as simply as Rurren to the locals. It took Monagas less than twenty minutes to rouse a sleeping fisherman and rent his open wooden boat for the river. Zamora rarely used the Beni River camp and had little in the way of staff in the area. He’d thought it better to keep Yesenia and Angelo and a couple of others to guard Pollard and the bomb. Many men would have made it too much of a target.
Once on the boat, he held up his finger to have Monagas wait a moment to start the engine. He took the satellite phone from his pack and punched in the number. Ever the calm adventurer, his hands trembled at being so near his prize.
“Sí,” Diego Borregos said, answering the phone.
Zamora had expected the Yemeni.
“We are almost there,” Zamora said.
“Good,” the Colombian said. “I am not so fond of your friends. May I have the location now? I am ready to be rid of them.”
“Of course. But there may be a problem,” he said, thinking of the Chechens. There had been no sign of them either on the road or in the camp, according to Pollard, but one could never be too careful.
“Don’t worry so much, my friend.” Borregos laughed. “If you had no problems you wouldn’t need my services. I will handle whatever issues I find as long as I can get your friends what they want and be rid of them. Now…” The Colombian’s voice grew grave. “You pay me for transport along our… established routes. Give me the location and I will meet you there.”
The Colombians knew nothing of the bomb itself, thinking only that he was selling arms as he usually did and had had a run-in with his tyrannical father.
Zamora held his breath. In the end, he had to trust someone.
CHAPTER 56
Quinn’s eyes slammed open when the van bounced over a downed log half sunken in the middle of the road. He’d been dreaming about a walk with his daughter and the rutted road provided a rude awakening. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked around to get his bearings. The sun was fully up, but it was still early and the relative cool of night still hung in the trees. Roosters crowed behind a line of shanty houses along the road leading into town. Two blue and gold macaws perched like sentinels high in a gnarled branch, looking more like vibrant jungle ornaments than actual birds.
Aleksandra sat in the back of the van beside Bo, and Thibodaux thumbed through a pamphlet in the front seat beside Adelmo.
Quinn sat up in his middle seat, stretching his back, waiting for the old wounded parts of him to wake up. At thirty-five, the life he had led made the years doubly hard on his body. He turned half around in his seat.
“Have you got any kind of signal?” he asked Aleksandra.
She nodded. “He is on the river.”
Adelmo negotiated with a fisherman to secure a boat and a sack of provisions including bottled water and several dozen cunapes, a sort of bulbous Bolivian cheese bread that, Adelmo explained, got its name because it resembled a woman’s breast. Thibodaux ate them like popcorn and took to calling them boob biscuits.
The unflappable Aymara driver had become caught up in the chase and offered to come with them downriver for no extra charge. Quinn wouldn’t allow it. Where they were going there was bound to be bloodshed. It was bad enough to have Bo along. They paid him well and said their good-byes while they boarded the slender wooden craft that looked like a sort of canoe made of planks from a wooden privacy fence. It proved to be watertight, though, and the little Nissan motor was sound and had them nosed out into the muddy river in a matter of minutes.
“Where are we now with a signal?” Quinn asked, popping the lid on one of the water bottles. As cold as he’d been the day before, he preferred it to the oppressive heat and humidity of the Amazon Basin. He was an Alaskan at heart and always would be.
“My battery is dying and there was no time to charge it,” Aleksandra said. “I have it turned off for the moment, but he was a mile ahead of us when I last checked. Just before we get to that spot, I will check again and so on. Until then we must keep watch.”
Thibodaux sat on an overturned plastic bucket at the tiller, steering away from the muddy bank to head downstream through the low green hills toward the Amazon. A youth spent exploring the Louisiana bayou made him the natural choice to drive the boat.
Three miles from town, the boat slid past a group of chunky capybara grunting in the thick reeds along the bank. A giant ceiba tree grew on a heavily buttressed trunk behind the pig-sized rodents. Hanging moss and aerial ferns hung like decorative feathers from the great tree’s crown, spread high above the surrounding canopy. Troops of squirrel monkeys scolded from the surrounding trees. The rolling hills gradually flattened. Flocks of birds wheeled above open marshes and grassy pampas that reached back in pockets surrounded by the black green of seemingly impenetrable rainforest. The jungle crowded closer as they motored farther north. Dense branches drooped along muddy banks, skimming the brown water.
Bo dangled his hands in the water with Aleksandra, who crouched beside him on the floor of the boat.
A sudden pop and a whooshing spray caused everyone on the boat to jump. Quinn’s hand fell instinctively to his pistol. He smiled when he saw the patches of slick, rubbery skin break the surface of the water beside the boat.