“I don’t know who they were. No, not Elenos, no. Amateurs.” Abel had the large, boxy phone to his ear, panic on his face. Valencia assumed he was speaking to Jefferson. “They lost control. They could have beat her to death. No one took charge, no one gave orders. Amateurs.”
Valencia reached over and grabbed Sara’s hand and smiled. Sara startled.
“This will be a story when we get back to Bogotá,” Valencia said. It was a bizarre thing to say, and later she wouldn’t understand why the words had left her mouth, but Sara smiled and seemed to calm a little, so perhaps they were the right words for the time. Valencia found herself wanting to giggle. It was a reaction she’d later feel very guilty about.
When they reached Abel’s shop, Agudelo skidded the van to the side of the road, turned to Abel, and said, “Out!”
“That was not us,” Abel said.
“Out!”
Only once he was gone and they were back on the road did Valencia open her mouth.
“I should ask my father what is going on,” she said, half to herself.
Sara looked at her strangely, so, by way of explanation, Valencia said, “He is a lieutenant colonel in the special forces.”
“What?”
Valencia said it again. Quiet followed.
Eventually, Agudelo said, “You should have told me that a month ago, girl.”
Sara was looking at Valencia with a wide-eyed expression. It occurred to Valencia that perhaps she had just put herself in danger. These people might not be her friends.
The town whipped by. As they approached the central square of La Vigia, Agudelo began speaking in quick, clipped sentences.
“News of this will get out very quickly. When we get to the offices, you will email your father. You will tell him you are fine. You will tell him that we have dealt with kidnappings before. You will tell him that the organization will ensure everyone’s safety. You will tell him that leaving La Vigia immediately might worry groups in the region. This is nothing new for us. I will notify the university and we will discuss what to do next. This is nothing we have not dealt with before.”
There was silence in the van.
“With an American?” Valencia said.
“What?”
“You have dealt with a kidnapped American before?”
Agudelo scowled. “That’s not important.”
Sara turned and eyed Valencia. Of course it was important. They both knew it. It changed everything. Actions would be taken here that would never be taken if it was just some poor cocalero, or townsperson, or lawyer, or human rights worker, or student. They should be prepared. They should call her father. And her professor, the one supposedly in charge, didn’t seem to understand why.
Agudelo parked the car, swung open the door, and marched them up the steps to the foundation’s offices. They barged through the door, and there, sitting in the main room across from Luisa and a few frightened-looking members of the foundation staff, was a tired-looking middle-aged man with a mustache and a jowly face.
“Agudelo,” Luisa said in an even voice, “I’m glad you’re here. I don’t think you’ve met Jefferson López before.”
—
Lisette was in pain, but that didn’t matter. Pain she could deal with. She was a runner. She’d long ago learned to abstract herself, to treat the body as an object, dispense orders, and float free. When they forced her to move and the pain spiked and nearly obliterated her consciousness, it was almost a relief. When the pain wasn’t overpowering her, what she felt in its place, suffusing every part of her body and resting like a weight about her chest, was shame.
She had been abducted. She had been abducted and hadn’t taken any of the normal precautions because, hey, it was Colombia, not Afghanistan. It was the guerrilla, not ISIS. Through her own stupidity and arrogance, she’d gotten herself kidnapped, and now her family would suffer and her friends would suffer. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. There wasn’t anyone waiting for a phone call at the end of the day. She hadn’t noted the lack of traffic coming in the other direction from the checkpoint. She hadn’t called ahead to find out what conditions were like. She hadn’t called the ELN’s representative to the European Union to let them know she’d be in their turf. She hadn’t registered with the embassy (no one registered with the embassy, but still). She imagined Bob’s disapproval. “You’re acting like a twenty-year-old freelancer for Vice.” And she imagined her mother and her sister, terrified for her, anxiously awaiting news of her death while preparing for Uncle Carey’s.
After her beating, they’d loaded her on a truck and driven down what felt like exceptionally bumpy dirt roads. Her kidnappers hadn’t bothered to blindfold her, and at first she took this to mean that they were heading to her execution. As time passed and they drove past fields filled with the soft round leaves and red berries of coca plants, she noticed the nervousness of her captors. Sometimes they’d mention “el plan de Jorge.” She heard the names of towns. And she thought, these guys are really bad at this. It was not an entirely hopeful realization.
Eventually, the truck stopped at a shack by the side of a coca field, sheltered under larger trees to provide some degree of protection from the gaze of herbicide-spraying planes. And out of the shack, a simple, rough concrete construction, emerged two men. The first was a sweet-faced young man in his midtwenties wearing a loud T-shirt with pinks and blues and red zigzags splashed across his chest, along with yellow, graffiti-style words like “ZAM!” and “FOXY!” and “SEX!” The other, older and thicker and shorter, had a tight braid necklace and an extremely faded shirt with the cracked remnants
