Betrayed (43 page)

Vicki covered the open lawn in less than ten seconds. Slipping across the veranda, she froze as her foot accidentally dislodged an empty beer bottle. The guard’s afternoon refreshment by the liquid trail still dribbling from it.

But the sound had been negligible, and an instant later Vicki was at the back door. Noiselessly, she slid the latch downward. The door didn’t budge, and she panicked when she heard footsteps on the side veranda. Then she pushed the latch upward. The door swung open. The latch nicked quietly behind her just as footsteps rounded the corner of the veranda.

She was inside.

Chapter Thirty-Three

After the early afternoon sunshine, the interior was dim. Vicki paused to orient herself. She was in the kitchen. Part of the dimness came from a white blind pulled down over the window. Bill Taylor clearly didn’t care for prying eyes. 

Vicki stepped farther into the kitchen. A door stood open into a pantry. “Bill?”

No answer.

She walked into the living room. It was empty. The two bedroom doors stood ajar so Vicki didn’t have to step inside to see they were unoccupied. Poking her head into the office, she called softly again, “Bill?”

No one was there, but a mug of coffee sat on the desk, recently poured from the wisp of vapor.

Vicki returned to the living room and peeked around another blind. Since the green pickup was still here, Bill hadn’t gone far. Maybe he’d stepped out to deal with some plantation business. She’d just have to wait and hope that Bill would be right back.

Meantime, Vicki slipped into the bathroom between the two bedrooms. She wiped dirt and sweat from her face and arms. Pulling her ponytail loose, she raked debris from her hair before twisting the hair tie back into place. As she peeled a banana and assuaged thirst from her canteen, she felt almost human again but increasingly edgy. Where was Bill? Pressing in on Vicki was the urgency that they were running out of time. Had Cesar reached the village yet? What would happen even if he could get the villagers into the hills? They couldn’t stay there forever.

I’ve got to get help to put an end to this. If we can make it public enough, the authorities will have to do something or be embarrassed before the whole world. That’s the only way the villagers and Cesar can go back to their lives
.

Was this how Vicki’s birth father had felt? Why he’d been so passionate about taking his pictures? "Truth-teller", the Mayans had called him.
Jeff Craig—no, Papa!—maybe I don’t really know what I’m remembering and what I’m imagining, but I’m so proud to be your daughter. And Mama’s. Let me be like you. Let me tell the truth to the world like you were trying to do here—and Holly
.

Restless, Vicki wandered back to the office. Maybe something in here would indicate what had taken Bill away and how long he’d be. But the desk held only a neat blotter and a stack of what looked like junk mail and magazines, the computer monitor showing only a blank screen. Vicki looked longingly at the radio equipment. It looked high-tech, a far cry from the center’s UHF radio, but she didn’t know how to work it. And if she did, who would she call? 

Vicki was turning to leave when she noticed the pottery shelf standing slightly ajar from the wall, as it had been when she’d seen Joe working in here, and if it hadn’t been for a soft whistle of wind, she would have walked away. She stared at it for a moment. Then she reached for one of the pottery figurines. Or tried to, because as she tugged, Vicki discovered it was glued into place. She pulled instead at the shelf. Noiselessly, as though on oiled wheels, the entire bookcase swung another two feet into the room. Vicki stepped around it.

It was the fireplace that allowed the illusion an entire room didn’t exist. Not that it was a big room—the width of the fireplace and half the depth of the office.

The whistling came from an air vent high in the back of the fireplace, cleverly placed to allow for a flow of air through the chimney, even if the pottery shelf was shut. The room itself was warm and dry. Touching the back of the fireplace, Vicki found it pleasantly hot. A built-in dehumidifier. The room was also surprisingly well-lit, considering it had no windows. She tilted her head back. There was no ceiling except for the roof tiles. Right alongside the ridgepole, a square meter or so of these had been replaced with what looked like a solar panel. Through the skylight Vicki could see the satellite dish that had masked the solar panel from above. The height of the ridgepole and smallness of the room gave the impression of standing at the bottom of a well.

A safe room. A wise precaution for a lone foreigner living in this lawless region. Did Bill know Joe had found it? Because Vicki had no doubt what Joe had been doing that day she’d seen him in here.

At first glance, the safe room’s contents hardly seemed worth the concealment this hiding place entailed. A small, wooden table disordered with papers and files, a pair of night vision goggles tossed on top. A single chair. File cabinets. Vicki tugged at the nearest. Locked. An open laptop seemed superfluous with the desktop version in the other room until she saw wires snaking up the wall and a modem. The satellite dish above her was not only for cable. And from a still-damp coffee ring, it was from here Bill had responded to whatever interruption had come.

Then Vicki saw a satellite phone. Black and sleek in its bulky base, it was the kind of setup Holly had dreamed of for the center. Vicki could understand Bill keeping it locked away. It had to be worth what a coffee picker earned in a decade.

Vicki didn’t consider she was snooping as she walked over to the table. The papers scattered on top looked to be some sort of aerial maps. Pen markings and some sort of scribbled diagrams in the margins looked rather like a football coach might use to outline a game plan.

Vicki pushed aside a stack of folders to reach for the phone.
I could call someone. No, I have no numbers, not even Evelyn’s. But 0 is for the operator even down here. If I could get through to the embassy, talk to Marion Whitfield
. . .

But she didn’t lift the phone from its cradle. Her hand trembled slightly as she reached for the PDA that had been exposed when she moved the folders. If it wasn’t Holly’s, it was an identical model. Whether her passionate hope was that she were right or wrong, Vicki wasn’t sure. Any doubt evaporated as the liquid-crystal screen came to life.

The screen saver was one of Holly’s photos: the landscape shot of fields of flowers. Vicki’s fingers felt as cold as the stone in her chest as she began running the unit back through its most recent usage. If Holly had intended that screen saver as the clarion announcement it was, surely she’d left some message here for her sister. But Vicki found no personal communication at all, only file after file Holly must have downloaded from the Internet.

What they did show was that Holly had been researching along the same lines as Vicki’s own deductions. Several documents addressed the rising heroin traffic in Central and South America. A dozen of them dealt with the Guatemalan regime’s decades’ long war. Vicki soon spotted the common denominator. The files Holly had chosen to save dealt less with military wrongdoing than the United States’ own involvement in Guatemala over the past half century. Vicki scanned through each file until the group photo Holly had posted for bedtime viewing scrolled across the screen. The document was a Human Rights Watch testimony from more than two years back. A number of photos were buried in the text. Vicki was interested only in the group photo. The caption was the same as that Guatemalan newspaper account from which it must have been scanned, but here a question mark had been satirically added: “America and Guatemala: Allies Against Communism?”

The report mentioned the scathing coincidence of how many CIA informants in the region just happened to be graduates from the special counterinsurgency training programs. No explicit connection was made between photo and the text, but the implication was clear.

Vicki eyed the tiny turned head of the American in civilian clothing and floppy hat.
I figured you as CIA. Were you recruiting while they were training?

That was the last text file. Interesting material under more leisurely circumstances, but was there any relevance? So these men had been trained by the US, maybe even recruited as an intelligence asset by the CIA. Vicki had no real argument with the recruiting practices of her nation’s intelligence service. Sometimes you had to deal with scumbags to get information. She’d done so herself. And once again, this was all far in the past.
What are you trying to tell me, Holly?

Nor was it relevant to the more urgent question. What was Holly’s PDA doing in Bill’s safe room?
Joe must have had it after all—one more lie
. But why not simply return it to Vicki? There was nothing particularly incriminating in this hodgepodge of downloaded research files.
Except then he’d have to explain where and how he got it
. Had Bill come across it? Or had Joe mislaid it here when he was snooping around?

The pain was hot again in her chest as Vicki turned next to the photo album her sister kept on her PDA. Most of the photos were variations on the ones Holly had posted on her bunk. A number were different angles of the poppy fields, though none showed the ripened bulbs. Though of course they wouldn’t, since Holly was dead by the time the petals had fallen.

Vicki flicked almost impatiently past a larger version of the small image in that last text file. Speed-reader though she was, it must be close to fifteen minutes since Vicki had slipped into the house, two hours since she and Cesar had fled from the encampment. Joe and his rogue military allies would not be sitting still.
Please hurry up, Bill!

That mental plea gave way to cold dismay as the next JPEG flashed onto the screen. It had been cropped and blown up from the prior group photo.

“
Why not one of the American volunteers—Roger, or Joe
.”

Or William Taylor, WRC’s most generous and long-serving volunteer.

Vicki would never have recognized that turned-away profile under the tilted brim if it hadn’t been cropped and blown up. But then she hadn’t worked as closely nor admired so deeply the center’s elderly benefactor as Holly had. He hadn’t been young even when the photo was taken, the hair longer than his present crew cut, the aquiline profile sagging only a little twenty years later. When Vicki flicked back to the last JPEG, that straight-backed, ageless posture screamed for recognition.

Vicki turned off the PDA, snatching up the knapsack she’d allowed to rest on the table. She glanced at the sat phone.
I have to call for help. It’s my only hope
.

The sat phone was cordless. She’d have to hope it had range outside the house. But in her haste to snatch the receiver, Vicki hadn’t watched for the knapsack on her shoulder. As she swung around, it slammed into the sat phone and folders, sending them scattering to the floor. Diving to her knees, Vicki caught the bulky weight of the phone's base before it crashed against the hard tile floor. But the receiver had tumbled out amid a welter of folder covers and what looked like dozens of full-page snapshots. Not paper copies such as Holly had posted. The colorful gloss of professional prints.

Pushing the phone base back onto the table, Vicki grabbed the receiver. She scrabbled instinctively to shove the photos into a pile as she checked anxiously for a dial tone. The phone was still functioning. Recognizing the absurdity of her frantic gathering, Vicki let the photos in her hand fall. But she didn’t rise from her knees. The bright rectangle from the skylight overhead fell directly on the scattered prints. Despite her urgency, Vicki’s first reaction was of wonder. The photographs were so beautiful, a work of such love and vision that she was left confused.