State of Emergency

CHAPTER 56


January 10





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.

Thibodaux popped another boob biscuit in his mouth. “That’s a good sign, l’ami,” he said. “The little book Adelmo’s bride gave me said that when you see pink dolphins you don’t have to worry about the crocodile caiman things and can go in swimming. Sort of reminds me of home . . . minus the pink dolphins.”

Bo leaned over to take a whiff of his armpits. “I still smell like rosy lilac water.” He grimaced at Jericho, the wind blowing a lock of blond hair across his face. “You, however, ought to jump in. You know how you get when you haven’t bathed for two days.”

“We don’t have time,” Quinn said. “And besides, just because the caimans are afraid of dolphins doesn’t mean the piranhas are.”

Bo jerked his hand out of the water. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Or how about those teensy little catfish?” Jacques observed around a mouthful of cunape. “The som-bitches swim up inside you when you pee underwater and get stuck in there.”

Aleksandra crinkled her freckled nose in disgust. “How do you know this revolting thing?”

Jacques took slug of bottled water. “Jungle training.”

“I didn’t know you’d been to jungle training,” Quinn said. “That’ll come in handy out here.”

“Truth be told”—Thibodaux grinned—“I haven’t really. I saw it in that Tom Berenger Sniper movie.”

“Who knows,” Quinn said, looking ahead at the thick foliage along the river. He swatted a mosquito that landed on his forehead. “Maybe that will come in handy too.”