“Would you like a beer? We have Aguila Light.”
Edilson lifted the top of the cooler and pulled out a beer. His hand was shaking. Jefferson saw Edilson follow his eyes to that shaking hand. He put the beer down.
“Nervous?” Jefferson asked.
“We have demands,” Edilson said again. “All you have to agree to is a fair price—”
“Are you talking about coca?” Jefferson said. “Is this all over coca?”
Edilson seemed taken aback. That was good. Jefferson wanted him off balance. He had a very different sort of negotiation in mind than the one Edilson had probably come prepared for.
“Idiot.” Jefferson scowled. “Your men who took the gringa. That was well done. Are they ex-guerrilleros? How many men do you have?”
“Many.”
Jefferson sighed. “I’m going to need to know how many men you have. And how many of them know how to use a weapon. Ex-guerrilleros are good. They’re trained.”
“I—”
“The people out here, do they trust you? The cocaleros?”
Edilson raised his head, a confident look in his eyes for the first time. “They do.”
“I think that’s true. You couldn’t have hidden from me if they weren’t protecting you.” Jefferson pointed his finger at Edilson’s chest. “That’s worth something. That’s worth a lot. I don’t like this anger between me and my growers.”
“The price you pay for coca—”
“I told you. Coca is nothing.” He waved his hand. “It’s worth nothing these days. This country is stuffed with it.”
Edilson shook his head, still not understanding.
“You little farmers sit on land that is worth far more than anything you will ever grow on it.”
That interested him. Jefferson could see that.
“This area is difficult for the police to patrol,” Jefferson said. “And it’s right on the border with Venezuela. Do you understand?”
Edilson nodded.
“Coca leaves will never make you rich. But this territory, right on the border . . . It is very important to a lot of people. Jesúses. Peludos. Urabeños.”
“We—”
“Listen to me. If the army comes here, no one gets rich. If the army comes here, we are all fucked. So first, you are going to give me the journalist. And I am going to give you fifteen thousand mil.”
“I’m not here for the money. I’m here for my people.”
“That is why you’re going to give me the journalist. Because if you don’t, I’m going to hunt you all down and kill you and have my men rape your wives and your daughters and your mothers. And that is not good. But if you work for me—”
“If I work for you?”
“Yes, if you work for me. I can’t have these problems over a couple of angry cocaleros. You will work for me, and your men will control this territory for me, and I will pay you a salary, and that will be better for everyone.”
Edilson stared back, bewildered. He wasn’t much to look at, Jefferson thought, but he’d built up a crew of fighters, and he’d shown some balls. Perhaps he could be useful. Perhaps this whole thing wasn’t a complete disaster.
“But first,” Jefferson said. “You have to give me the journalist. Or we are all fucked.”
Very soon, Jefferson had worked out a rough agreement, Edilson had called out to his men on a handheld radio, and a small boat began making its way downstream. Inside was nothing dangerous. Just the American, hands tied and blindfolded.
—
Intelligence officers are conspiracy theorists by vocation. You want them to see enemies everywhere. Peace treaties are smoke screens, violence an inoperable cancer, and civilians the sea our enemies swim in. At a presentation at the Escuela de Inteligencia that Juan Pablo had attended in 2009, a professor there had proclaimed, “This is Colombia. This is the country of the conquistadores—the bandits, the criminals, the terrorists of Spain. And they are our grandparents, our ancestors, our forefathers. We have their evil and their mischief in our blood. This is why we must always be vigilant. This is why we will never have peace.”
No matter. Sift through the paranoia, find the actionable intelligence. That was Juan Pablo’s approach. It was a bit more concerning, though, when the malice was directed at him.
The sergeant from the CIME clicked on a slide, up popped a photo of Luisa Porras Sánchez, and the eyes in the briefing room began crawling over him. Sánchez led the so-called human rights foundation his daughter was tangled in, and the connection between the foundation and the kidnapping was looking stronger by the hour, especially since that peculiar photograph of Jefferson had surfaced on Twitter, of all places.
“Head of the local office of the Fundación de Justicia y Fe,” the sergeant said, his eyes not on Colonel Carlosama, who he was officially briefing, but on Juan Pablo. Everyone’s eyes were on Juan Pablo.
In the past day, Juan Pablo had spoken up for the Jesúses. They’d been getting conflicting reports. Human intelligence sources telling them the journalist had been taken by guerrilla, police intelligence fingering the Jesúses, the foundation itself putting out a statement that it’d been guerrilla, American signals intelligence picking up suspicious traffic suggesting the Jesúses.
It was an unusually sensitive question. Given ongoing negotiations with the ELN and the peace treaty with the FARC, a high-profile kidnapping by the guerrilla would have been a political problem for the president and his supporters. Given the military’s push to take over Agamemnon and other operations against BACRIM, adding the Jesúses to the list of Class A groups would be a welcome step in the next phase of military targeting against nonpolitical actors. These considerations meant that the evidence pointing to the Jesúses was highlighted, and counterevidence ignored. But to Juan Pablo, who tried to resist that kind of political pressure, the whole thing didn’t make sense, and he’d said as much. Why would the Jesúses kidnap a journalist?
He’d held his own in the argument for a few hours, and then the news reports came out, showing the photo of Jefferson in what a human intelligence source confirmed was the offices of the Fundación de Justicia y
