Show No Fear (15 page)

Some of the anxiety she’d suffered at the outset of this assignment returned to her, making her wonder if her PTSD was here
to stay. She had just begun to think she was getting a handle on it.

Holding herself back, per Fournier’s recommendation, Lucy watched Buitre hurry over to Marquez. Gesturing at the shed and
nodding toward the bungalow, his dark eyes smoldered with contempt.

Lucy’s stomach cramped. God, she hated that look. But surely Marquez wouldn’t believe Gus had intentionally shot at the rebels.
He listened at length, then abruptly raised a hand. “Release the Spaniard,” Lucy overheard him say.

She expelled the breath she was holding.

“I told you,” said Fournier with a comforting pat on her back.

“But, Commander!” Buitre protested.

“I said release him.” Lowering his voice, Marquez added something that put a cold, resigned look on Buitre’s face. The deputy
swiveled toward the shed, removing the keychain from his hip to unfasten the padlock that kept it closed.

Lucy couldn’t wait a second longer. She leapt off the bungalow deck, sprinting to the shed to see how Gus had fared.

As he stumbled out, blinking against the harsh sunlight, the desire to deck him disintegrated. A lump on the side of his head
disfigured the shape of his skull. Another puffed out just below his left eye. His neck was swollen and red.

“Oh, Gustavo,” she exclaimed, her dismay perfectly genuine. “Someone get a wet cloth,” she pleaded, touching fingertips to
his swollen cheekbone and finding it hot to the touch.

“I’m okay,” he gritted.

“Here, you should sit down,” she said, dragging him toward a tree stump.

“I’m fine,” he assured her, but then he swayed against her, forcing her to catch him before he fell. She hoped to hell he
was faking it.

S¸ ukruye, who’d rushed to get a wet cloth from one of the female rebels, handed Lucy a cool rag. She pressed it to Gus’s
neck as the others converged around the Argentine.

“Rojas has agreed to let you speak with the hostages,” Álvarez informed them tiredly.

As Gus turned his head in surprise, Lucy whispered, “Did you get through?”

He gave a discreet nod, regarding the others intently.

“When?” Fournier demanded. “When can we speak to them?”

“Now,” said Marquez, approaching and waving them toward the hooch.

They were going to speak with the hostages via shortwave radio! With a look of shared victory, Gus let Lucy haul him to his
feet. Together they trailed the others into Buitre’s quarters, thrilled by the prospect of speaking to Lucy’s colleagues.
She couldn’t help but hope freedom was just around the corner for Mike and Jay.

CHAPTER 9
      

F
or the third time, the negotiating team took their seats at the crude table, waiting tensely as Marquez worked the shortwave
radio, scanning frequencies until he found the one he was looking for.

The radio ceased to crackle. A voice responded to Marquez’s greeting, and they exchanged brief words. Marquez extended the
radio to Fournier. “This is the
jefe,
the boss who guards the hostages,” he imparted with a stern look all around. “You have two minutes to speak to the Americans.”
As Fournier took the radio, he left the building.

“Hello?” said the Frenchman cautiously.

“Yes, hello!”

Lucy’s heart leapt at the familiar sound of Jay Barnes’s voice. Relief sang through her veins. Soon he would get to go home.
He would put this behind him and move on.

“Er, who is this?” Fournier replied in his heavily accented English.

“This is Jay Barnes, from St. Louis, Missouri.”

“Mr. Barnes, good afternoon. My name is Pierre Fournier. I am with a UN negotiating team. We are currently situated on La
Montaña.”

“Thank God,” Jay exclaimed, his voice breaking with the force of his relief. “Please, I appreciate whatever you can do to
seek my release.”

“How is your health, Mr. Barnes?”

“Fine. I’m weak, but my health is…it’s okay.”

“You make no mention of your companion,” Fournier pointed out.

“Oh, he’s…he’s here. He’s not doing so well, though.”

“Is he ill, Mr. Barnes?

“Yes, yes, he’s terribly ill. Cranial malaria, I think.”

Jesus.
Lucy fought to keep her reaction from showing. The distress in Jay’s voice made her chest tight, made her eyes sting. She
longed to reassure him.
Jay, it’s me. We’re gonna get you out of there, I swear it.

“Can Mr. Howitz speak?” Fournier inquired.

“Uh, yeah. I’ll hold the radio for him.”

“Hello? Mr. Howitz?”

An unintelligible grunt followed.

“Are you Mike Howitz?” Fournier asked as every team member strained to hear the man’s reply.

“Yes,” rasped a voice.

Lucy cocked her head, sending Gus a frown. It didn’t sound like Mike.

“Mr. Howitz, my name is Pierre Fournier. I’m with the United Nations. Can you tell me where you’re from?”

“Los Angeles,” rasped Howitz.

With hope in his gray eyes Fournier nodded encouragingly. “Can you tell me the date of your son’s birthday?”

A muffled whisper followed the question.

“Mr. Howitz?” Fournier repeated.

“Mikey,” breathed the ill man on the other end.

“Yes, when is Mikey’s birthday?” Fournier repeated.

A long pause ensued. Either the man was too ill to remember, or—“February 3rd,” he wheezed at last.

Fournier cut Lucy a frown, meant to chastise her for getting the date wrong.

No. Lucy shook her head. Mikey’s birthday was December 8th. She was certain of it.

Across from her the Argentine appeared to be meditating.

“Have any doctors tried to treat you, Mr. Howitz?” Fournier asked with grave concern.

“They gave me pills,” the man corroborated.

Lucy closed her eyes to conceal her sudden dismay. Whoever was pretending to be Mike Howitz was not a native English speaker.
He’d pronounced pills as
peels.
That meant Mike was either too sick to talk or he was dead.

But Fournier, who spoke with an accent himself, couldn’t hear that subtlety. Carlos caught his eye and vehemently shook his
head. “He is not American,” he mouthed.

“Thank you, Mr. Howitz. May I speak, again, with Mr. Barnes?”

“
Basta.
” growled the voice of the
jefe,
hostage boss.
Enough.
“Your time is up.”

The radio in Fournier’s hand emitted a low hiss. He lowered it to the table, swallowed hard, and looked up at the others with
a sad, troubled gaze. “I’m afraid we may assume Mike Howitz is dead, or too ill to speak at all.”

Shocked and horrified, Lucy slowly lowered her eyes to the radio. Mike had been so full of life, always grinning, full of
jokes, up to any challenge. Apparently, being held against his will, in a jungle rife with disease, was just too much.

She thought about his eleven-year-old son, and his beautiful wife, and her throat constricted. Life—or was it death?—was so
fucking unfair, stealing away the most precious people.

Lucy lifted an accusing gaze toward the Argentine. “Did you know anything about this?” she demanded, fighting to contain her
runaway emotions.

“No,” said the man tiredly. “They tell me nothing. I travel from one camp to the other bearing offers to Rojas and counteroffers
to you, nothing more.”

“Where are the hostages kept? Have you heard anything?” asked Carlos, ever mindful of Lucy and Gus’s objective.

“I believe they are kept at a remote camp,” Álvarez replied, darting a quick, frightened look toward the door. Leaning in,
he pitched his voice lower to add, “I’ve heard rebels whispering of a place called
Arriba,
up there.”

Remembering the place on the map marked with an X and nothing more, Lucy cut a glance at Gus.

“Sounds like it’s near the mountaintop,” he mused, ignoring her look.

Bellini sat forward. “How does the death of one of the hostages change our situation?” he asked in awkwardly phrased Spanish.

Fournier frowned. “It gives us the advantage, actually,” he admitted, slowly. “Clearly they were hoping to pass some other
hostage off as Mr. Howitz, only we are not fools, are we?”

He focused a compassionate eye on the Argentine. “Tell Commander Rojas that because we have no proof of life for Mike Howitz,
we are unable to fulfill the FARC’s demands. General Gitano will never be released in exchange for a single hostage and a
dead man. If Rojas is wise, he will accept the Colombian government’s offer to release ten FARC captives of midlevel authority
instead.”

Álvarez rubbed his closed eyes. “Ten guerrillas for one U.S. hostage,” he mumbled. “Sounds fair to me.”

Lucy dragged air into her pressured lungs. At this rate, negotiations would continue indefinitely. And Jay would be left suffering
in the meantime, not knowing if he would be rescued or if he, like Mike, would sicken and die. “Plus the body of Mike Howitz,”
Lucy suggested thickly.

“Yes,” the Frenchman concurred, sliding her a look. “We must bring him home, dead or alive.”

Mike was dead.
Dead.
The realization loosed the lock that kept Lucy’s older memories contained, and they spilled free, rushing through her mind
in streaming video.

The friends who’d studied in Valencia with her, Amy, Melissa, and Dan, had been put in closed caskets, their bodies mutilated
by the roadside bomb. She’d attended every one of their funerals, watching as family members and loved ones mourned their
loss.

Since then, she’d done everything in her power to give their deaths meaning—befriending scum, risking her life for information.
She was still at it, even here in Colombia. She did it for Mike and Jay’s sakes. Only she was too late.

Mike was dead.

Suddenly, just sitting in this stiflingly humid little hole of a building, stuck under the watchful eye of fanatics like Buitre,
was more than she could tolerate. Unwieldy emotion kept her in a chokehold. She could not escape it.

She could feel her poise slipping away like granules of sand through her fingers. PTSD was here to stay, apparently. Even
Lucy Donovan had her limits. There was only so much of this hellish work that she could take.

*      *        *

S
ENSING TENSION IN THE
woman next to him, Gus glanced over. Lucy’s face was, as always, serene as a marble statue’s. He slid his gaze to her lap
and realized with an unpleasant start that she was digging her nails into her palms, leaving little purple crescents in her
flesh.

Howitz’s death was freaking her out. She needed to get away from these people before she lost it.

With Fournier still drawing negotiations to a close, Gus thrust back his seat, stood, and weaved uncertainly. Everyone gaped
up at him.

“Gustavo!” Lucy cried, snatched from her self-absorption.

“I don’t feel so well,” he confessed. “Mr. Fournier, please excuse me and my wife.”

“Of course.” The Frenchman dismissed them with a frown of concern.

S¸ ukruye rose to help.

“I’ve got him,” Lucy reassured her.

Together they staggered from the building to find Buitre seated at a crude field table, erected in the shade of the orange
tree, inspecting rebels’ weapons. A growing pile of discarded rifles lay at his feet.

“We need to talk,” Gus whispered.

“The bungalow?”

He spied Marquez sitting by a crackling fire, looking tired and grizzled. “Ask Marquez if you can take me to the waterfall,”
he suggested. It was a long shot, but the man had shown some compassion; perhaps he’d show some more.

As Lucy steered him toward the fire, the commander looked up, his expression not without sympathy as it touched on Gus’s ravaged
face.

Lucy’s voice sounded strained as she made her request. “The stinging is too much,” she added, and Gus hung on her, showing
every indication of a man suffering from an overdose of insect venom.

To Gus’s surprise, Marquez conceded. He swung a thoughtful look toward the rebels, then waved David over. “Take these two
to the
salto,
” Marquez ordered him. “Do not let them out of your sight.”

“
Sí, comandante,
” said the youth, shouldering his weapon and gesturing for them to precede him.

Giving Marquez no time to change his mind, Gus and Lucy hastened across the field toward the vertical path that disappeared
into the jungle.

L
UCY COULD TELL THAT
G
US
was on to her. Somehow, some way, he’d intuited her need to escape, to flee the rebel camp and every horrible, violent thing
it represented. Her impulse was so
unprofessional,
showed such
weakness,
that she tackled the incline at a near-run, furious with herself.

Gus tugged her back, slowing her down.

From the corner of her eye, she could read his concern. The fact that he was worried about her at all was as unpalatable as
this alien feeling that she might burst.

“Luce, I’m sorry about Mike,” he apologized.

David had evidently fallen far enough behind that he felt safe speaking in English. English made his words seem all the more
final, the more painful. Regret stabbed Lucy in the heart. “Fucking bastards,” she choked out.