Her mother said nothing. And so Liz tried to explain. That it was like getting in a car accident. If you didn’t start driving again right away, if you didn’t get back on the road immediately, before the shock died away and the fear set, it’d screw you up for life. It’d mean the fear would be there every time you got behind the wheel. And she couldn’t do her job with that fear. She had to get out there again.
“Why can’t you just . . . come home? Rest a bit. You said they want you to write about what happened to you. You don’t need to be in Colombia to do that.”
“I don’t know what happened to me.”
And that was the crux of it. She didn’t know who had kidnapped her. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know what their connection to Jefferson was. She didn’t know what his real interest in her was. She didn’t know why he’d released her. She didn’t know what that meant for La Vigia. She didn’t know what La Vigia meant for the military. She didn’t know what the Jesúses meant for the region. She didn’t know what it meant for the cocaine trade, for Venezuela, for the U.S. military, for civil society, for the politicians who had been involved in paving the way for the raid or the diplomats and soldiers involved in giving it the okay and carrying it out and being deeply disappointed when she wasn’t there. She didn’t know what it meant for American interests in this country that had been the largest recipient of American military aid in the Western Hemisphere for decades. She didn’t know what it meant, period. So what did she have that she could write about? Some shitty things that had happened to her. But shitty things happened to people all the time. It doesn’t make a story.
She couldn’t go home. She had to be working here, someplace awesome, someplace still unknown, and not there, where people thought they knew her, and wanted to tie her to the worn old image of her they carried in their minds. Home was a trap.
—
Mason was ashamed of himself. Throughout the kidnapping, the rescue mission turned straightforward raid, the aftermath and after-action reports, he’d kept silent about his role in the journalist ending up in La Vigia.
“Who, exactly, would it help if you tell them?” his wife had asked, fixing him with that cold accountant’s stare of hers.
“It could, maybe—”
“Maybe?”
“You never know what could be import—”
“So it’d help nobody.”
“I don’t know that.”
“You have two daughters who need a father with stable employment.”
“They’re not going to kick me out of the army for—”
“If they want to screw you”—she pointed her finger directly at his chest—“they’ll find a way.”
And so he’d kept quiet, working with more than usual diligence on marshaling support for the Colombian mission to recover the journalist. And all had turned out well. The journalist was safe. A narco boss with Venezuelan ties was dead. His wife, assessing the profit and loss, assured him there was nothing to worry about.
But there were things that bothered him. Like how the Jesúses had gone so quickly from a potential Colombian asset a few months ago, when Lieutenant Colonel Juan Pablo Pulido had first mentioned them, to the top of a kill list. Whatever. It was above his pay grade. And in Colombia, it was possible for a career soldier like himself to believe that the folks high above his pay grade could be trusted with the mission he was carrying out. The yearly death toll in Colombia was half what it was when he’d first shown up here a decade ago, as a young medic. The peace treaty with the FARC was going up for a vote to the Colombian people soon, heralding the end of the longest insurgency in history. The evidence on the ground was that the folks high above him knew what they were doing. Or they were lucky, which was just as good.
And then the day of the peace vote arrived, and the great democratic body of the Colombian people collectively shrugged. Only 37 percent turned out to vote. Of those voters, a bare majority said no. No to the peace. And the day after the peace vote, Diego texted him to ask if he’d like to get drinks with him and Lisette Marigny, this woman who’d caused so much trouble.
They met at a bar in the Zona T. She was a tall, sinewy woman with light eyes and a firm, masculine handshake. She gave off no sign of having endured any particular horror.
“You know your boyfriend moved mountains trying to find you,” he told her over drinks, thinking he was doing Diego a favor. Not that Diego deserved it.
She raised an eyebrow at the word “boyfriend.” Diego seemed to visibly shrink into the rolls of fat that’d been building up ever since he’d left the army.
“I . . . inflated our relationship a bit,” Diego told her, “when I was trying to get in on the search for you.”
“You motherfucker.” Mason shook his head and turned to Marigny. “This asshole. You know he was shit in the teams.”
He almost walked out then and there, but Marigny stepped in, thanked him for what he’d done, and then the conversation stuttered and jerked but eventually restarted. He and Marigny talked western Pennsylvania, they talked Afghanistan, they talked the weird and disappointing peace vote, and he decided that, aside from her taste in men, there was a lot to like in Lisette Marigny.
“What do you think will happen?” she said.
“You mean, What does the embassy think will happen?”
“I’m not angling for anything, honestly. Still finding my feet in this
