Conspiracy in Kiev

“Why did you do that? You’re not wearing anything at your neck,” she asked.

“I used to. But I lost it,” Alex said.

“Oh.”

Alex grinned and selected one of the girl’s pieces. It was a flat round stone, graying pink, slightly smaller than an old American fifty-cent piece, but twice as thick. The cross had been carefully cut into the center of the stone. The stone was heavy for a piece of jewelry but had a slight hole at the top where a fine strand of leather was threaded through.

Alex put it on right away.

“It will protect you,” the girl said engagingly.

“Of course it will,” Alex said. Impetuously, she hugged the child. The asking price was less than fifty cents American. Alex gave the girl the equivalent of five dollars. Then she bought two smaller ones for friends back home.

The stone crosses were, Alex reasoned, the perfect souvenirs of her stay at Barranco Lajoya. For some reason, it made her feel complete again, as if she had found something that had been missing. Even when bathing in the river, even when washing her hair in the river with the coarse Mexican soap, it was the one thing she never removed.

A fifth week passed. Then a sixth.

She thought of Robert many times during these days, his smile, his sense of humor, his kindness, his body, his warmth. She still was resentful for one aspect of her life, angry with God so to speak, over Robert’s abrupt departure from this world, without even a word of farewell. How could that have been in the plan of an almighty and forgiving God?

But she mentioned this to no one. Being so far away from her normal life, all her past experiences, allowed her to think, to put things in perspective, to turn new emotional corners.

Curiously, she also realized that she had no remorse about the men she had shot and presumably killed in Kiev while defending herself. She kept all of this locked up inside her, and went about her daily business in her remote venue, even while no answers were coming forth for Mr. Collins. She had been sent here to observe, to develop a theory about who would want these indigenous people off their land and want the missionaries gone. She had by now spent several weeks studying the area from the ground, from the air, and occasionally by water. And there were no suggestions of anything amiss.

She began to wonder if she had made this trip for nothing.

SIXTY-EIGHT

Then there were the events of late July.

They began when the young girl, Paulina, who had sold Alex her new pendant, had traveled halfway down the mountain path one morning with two other girls. The three girls came running back in terror around noon.

Alex was one of the first to see them. “?De que se trata?” Alex asked the breathless girls. “?Quien es?” What’s this about? Who is it? A group from the village gathered, including the missionaries.

The girls explained. “Strange men,” Paulina said. “A whole band of them!”

“?Donde estan?” Alex asked. Where are they?

“At the clearing. Halfway down the mountain,” said a second girl, trembling with fright. The men, the girls said when they came breathlessly back to the village, were heavily armed and had threatened them. They had tried to capture the youngest and prettiest of the three girls, but the girls had run.

“?Quantos?” Alex asked. How many men?

Maybe a dozen of them, the girls answered. Men they had never seen before, at one of the clearings. Men who had no good business in this area.

“?Cazadores? ?Banditos? ?Soldados?” Alex pressed. Hunters? Bandits? Soldiers?

“?No se, no se!” Paulina said, starting to cry. The girls couldn’t tell. They only knew enough to be frightened of this band of outsiders.

“Did they follow you?” Alex asked.

“No,” Paulina said. “They looked like they were scouting. They didn’t follow.”

Alex embraced Paulina and turned to the men of Barranco Lajoya. “We should go have a look,” she said.

Several men from the village went into their homes. They emerged with rifles and an array of handguns. Alex went back to her own hut and strapped the holster with the Beretta around her waist. The pistol hung on her right side. She tucked an extra clip of bullets in her pocket. She brought a canteen of water, also, as well as a compact pair of binoculars.

A group of angry men waited for her when she emerged. They looked at her oddly.

“You are going with us?” one of them questioned. “?Una mujer?” A woman?

“I’m going with you,” she said steadfastly in Spanish. “?Claro! ?Si! ?Una mujer!”

The men looked at each other, then nodded, all in accord. There were no further questions. They brought with them every rifle in Barranco Lajoya.

In a burning sun, they went back down the mountain to take a look. Paulina went along, staying close to Alex. They tried to find the place where the strange group of intruders had been seen.

Alex expected the worst. Her heart was like a drumbeat as the group from the village descended the rugged mountain trail. She wondered whether this event would throw some light on what she had been sent here to discover. She wondered what Robert would have thought if he could have seen her here now with these people. He would have been proud of her, she thought to herself.

After a march of half an hour, they found the spot where the girls had seen the men. “They were here,” Paulina said. But no one was there now, other than the party from the village.

Alex stepped slightly off the path near the clearing. She examined the thick underbrush. It had recently been trampled, but that indicated nothing. She looked for other signs of human activity, food wrappers, cigarettes, bullet casings, but found nothing.

“There were men here. I swear,” Paulina said to Alex.

Alex placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Yo se. Te creo,” she answered. I know. I believe you.

A moment later, there was a sudden noise in the brush about fifty feet away. Reflexively, Alex’s hand went to her pistol. She drew it and instinctively went down to one knee. The men of the village turned toward the sound with their rifles. And then a wild ram emerged slowly from a thicket. The beast looked at them in contempt, chewing on something, then turned its head and disappeared.

Alex put her gun back into its holster.

“We shouldn’t return home until we’ve had a thorough look around,” she said.

There was agreement. The group from the village split in two and followed two paths that led away from the clearing, about a dozen individuals in each group. They searched the area, found vantage points that allowed them to look across clearings up and down the mountain. At her locations, when she could, Alex used her binoculars to scan in every direction. But she saw nothing.

The two groups made a rendezvous back at the larger clearing an hour later, hot and exhausted. The blazing summer sun was starting to sink in the sky by this time. Alex glanced at her watch. It was past 5:00 p.m.

The search party returned to the village without a shot fired. Several men had the nagging suspicion that for whatever reason the teenage girls had made up a tall tale.

Alex quickly grew tired of listening to them. Quietly, she slipped away from everyone and disappeared to a secluded cove in the river with a change of clothing. She wanted to bathe and wash the day’s sweat from her body as well as rinse the shorts, T-shirt, and underwear she had worn that day. Alone and undressed, she was careful to go only knee deep in the water and keep her pistol within quick reach on the riverbank.

She washed quickly, herself and her clothes, then stepped out of the water, dried off, and dressed in a clean shirt and shorts. Her only witnesses were a flock of noisy parrots who kept her company overhead. She welcomed the presence of the birds, as they formed a primitive sentry system. She had already learned that the birds’ chatter changed when strangers approached.

In the evening, after dinner, the men from the search party grumbled loudly about the hike down the