meet them, closing the door behind him. The trip had begun a mere five days ago, but the captain looked as if he’d aged twenty years.
“Professor, you told them”—he indicated John and Phil—“what happened?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Everything?”
“Yes.”
His face fell. “Did you...did you told anyone else?” He was still shaky, and so was his English.
All three shook their heads no.
“I got a big favor to ask.” He chewed on his lip and gazed beseechingly at them. “I never done nothing like this before. I never going to do it again, I swear! Was all Dr. Scofield. Please, don’t tell no one else.”
“Yeah, but didn’t the others already see you throwing the coffee overboard?” Phil asked.
“Yes, sure, and I explained them everything.”
Not quite everything, it turned out. He had faithfully given them the essential details of all that had happened— the “rocks” hidden in the coffee bags, the runners who were to pick it up at the warehouse, the forced meeting with Guapo, the reason the bags were being chucked in the river, and so forth. All he had omitted was the little fact that he had known anything about it before being informed by Guapo (to Vargas’s horror and amazement) that the
“And they believed that?” asked John.
Vargas shrugged pitifully. “I hope.” He awaited their response as if his life was in their hands, which wasn’t that much of an exaggeration. “I don’t want to go to jail!” he blurted.
“Up to you, John,” Gideon said, and Phil signaled his agreement with a nod.
Gideon was willing to believe Vargas when he said that this was his first experience with drug transporting and that he’d been scared enough by Guapo never to do it again. His inclination was to go along with him, to let the poor guy put it all behind him, and he knew that Phil, being Phil, would feel the same way, only more strongly. But John was the arbiter in such matters, and Gideon honestly didn’t know what he would do. He could be unbending when it came to breaking the law, especially concerning drug-trafficking, but he was also a genuinely nice guy with a lot of sympathy for people in trouble.
“I’ll take everything into consideration, Captain,” he said magisterially. “For the moment we’ll keep it to ourselves. In the long run, we’ll have to see.”
Vargas’s eyes closed in relief. Obviously, he took it (as did Gideon) as meaning that he was off the hook.
“But I’ll tell you this: if I ever hear your name in connection with the drug trade again—even a
Vargas’s eyes misted. “God bless you, Juan.” He looked as if he might kiss John’s hand if given the chance. “God bless you all.”
“There was something we wanted to ask you,” Gideon said, embarrassed. “Do you have a chart of the river that we could look at?”
“A chart? You mean, a nautical chart? Of the Rio Javaro? There isn’t no such thing. All there is is a map.”
“That’ll do fine.”
“Come, is inside.”
A narrow, four-foot-long strip map that followed the snakelike river, from where it left the Amazon to where it rejoined it at Leticia, had been tacked to the back wall of the wheelhouse. It had been folded and unfolded so many times that it was coming apart at the creases despite several yellowing layers of transparent tape laid along them.
“Can you show us where it was that we stopped yesterday afternoon?”
“Mmm . . .” Calculating, Vargas moved his finger in little circles and brought it down on a spot. “Here.”
Gideon laid his right forefinger on it and left it there. “And the warehouse, where was that?”
A painful little wince wrinkled Vargas’s forehead at the hated word, but he pointed to another spot. “Here. San Jose de Chiquitos.”
Gideon realized he had been holding his breath. Now he exhaled with satisfaction.
“Wow,” said John.
“Whoa,” said Phil.
ITwas so obvious that no explanation was necessary. Gideon’s forefingers were only an inch apart, approximately two miles. Because the Javaro was a giant series of undulating, incurving loops, it doubled back on itself in places, creating slender necks of land that were only two or three miles wide. The warehouse and the place they had stopped yesterday—the place where Cisco had last been seen—were on either side of one of these necks, directly opposite each other. Thus, while the
