“Stay facing the tree. Move your hands to your front, slowly, and lock the cuff.”
She could see him tense, almost imperceptibly, and she prepared for an assault, chambering a round in the Beretta with a percussive snick. His shoulders relaxed when he registered the distinctive sound, and he obligingly moved his hands in front of him and cuffed himself.
“Very good. Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” she asked.
“I can’t believe you didn’t have one in the chamber.”
“That was for your benefit.” She glanced down to where a shiny 9mm bullet lay on the matted grass.
“I kind of figured.”
“I’m going to toss you some nylon cord. I want you to wrap it around each ankle, twice, and secure it so you have enough room to shuffle, but not enough to get into trouble.” She reached into her backpack with her free hand and pulled out a fifty-foot length of line and tossed the bundle to him, then watched as he did as she’d instructed. Once he was finished, she nodded.
“Try to avoid hitting the rope when you go.”
“I see you’ve done this before.”
“Don’t move more than twenty feet away. Knock yourself out. Then come back, and we’ll reverse the whole process.”
He grinned. “Bit cumbersome, isn’t it?”
“Life is filled with challenges. Maybe I’ll make you dance for me next.”
He lumbered over to a patch of plants and busied himself with his business as she picked up the bullet and replaced it in the Beretta’s clip. When he returned, she cuffed his hands behind him again, then sat down by the stream.
“We’ll rest for a little while, and then start in again. I’d advise you to get some shut-eye if you can. We won’t be stopping again until nightfall.”
“We won’t be able to keep that pace up. I’m just warning you.”
“Thanks for the well-intentioned advice.”
They drowsed in the heat, and then after an hour, Jet popped up, appearing as refreshed as if she’d enjoyed a full night’s rest. She nudged Matt awake with her boot.
“Let’s get moving. You take the lead now that it’s daylight.”
She powered on her GPS and got a bearing, then put it back into her backpack, along with the two water bottles she’d refilled.
As much as she hated to admit it, Matt was probably right about their progress.
It would be almost impossible to keep up a decent pace all day.
But they had to try.
As he shuffled down the trail, Jet shifted the P90 into fire-ready position and followed him, letting him get five yards ahead so he couldn’t easily try anything now that he could see. She wondered what would cause a man who seemed relatively decent to choose a life with sex slavers and heroin dealers, and then banished the thought. It wasn’t her problem. And his whole demeanor could be an act. She’d seen firsthand what Pu’s world was like, and any friend of his was unworthy of her sympathy. Not that she had any.
As to his stealing the diamonds, she had no opinion on that. It was between him and the CIA. Although a part of her bore him resentment — if he hadn’t stolen them, she wouldn’t have had her daughter kidnapped and be trudging through this miserable backwater.
He stumbled and almost face-planted into the trail, but caught himself at the last moment and continued forward.
The hard part of the mission was done. She had him. Now all she needed to do was get him to the bank so they could get the diamonds, and she was home free.
Although a niggling part of her didn’t believe for a second it would be that simple.
Nothing ever was.
Chapter 25
They stopped at five o’clock, this time at the banks of a larger stream, swollen to almost river-size by the rain, which had started again a few hours earlier. They were both soaked completely through, but at least it was warm — the temperature felt like a steady ninety degrees throughout the day, with all the attendant mugginess high humidity brought.
The mosquitoes swarmed as the evening wore on, and they paused to spray themselves again before continuing their forced march. She’d never seen anything like the bugs, not even in Belize — known as the mosquito coast for good reason. But compared to Myanmar, Belize was Toronto; the jungle around them was literally swarming with every variety of bloodsucking parasite known to man, as Matt had been quick to point out during one of their hushed discussions.
They hadn’t come across another living soul all day, but Matt seemed preoccupied with listening for others in the jungle, giving her the distinct feeling that he hadn’t been joking about the drug syndicates and human traffickers being their biggest obstacle to making it out alive.
She repeated the ritual with the breakfast bars and the water, then they sat in the shadow of a rock overhang, which provided slim shelter from the downpour, but more than the trees did. They listened together to the steady drumming of rain on the leaves, a hail of precipitation that seemed to be never-ending.
“You never told me where they got you from,” he began, eyeing her as she chugged more water.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You’re not CIA, I know that. What are you then? Freelance?”
“In a manner of speaking,” she answered, uninterested in pursuing it.
“What did they offer you to do this?”
“None of your business.”
“Whatever it is, I can double it.”
She ignored him, preferring to strip her Beretta and clean it during their break.
“You know about the diamonds. What did they tell you?”
“Guess.”
“Ha. Let’s see. If I was them, I’d tell a story about how I’m the bad guy, and they’re out to set an example. Am I close?”
“You tell me.”
“Who recruited you?”
“Again, none of your business. I don’t want to discuss it.”
“Was it Scarface, the great man himself? Or did he use an intermediary? He’s a coward at heart, so I’ll bet he used a cutout. Unless he’s desperate by now. If so, you met him. Creepy bastard, isn’t he?”
She stared at him with dead eyes.
“So what was the story? How did he explain away two hundred million in diamonds being handled by the CIA in Thailand? That must have been quite a yarn.”
He smiled at her, and she noticed that his eye color shifted from brown to green in the light. Little flecks of gold in the irises created the illusion of them glinting, sparkling.
She relented. “Two hundred? They told me fifty. You stole the diamonds from the CIA, which was supporting insurgency in Myanmar. A formerly trustworthy career officer gone rogue out of greed. Sad story.”
“Not bad. Of course, nothing near the truth, but hey, why let that stop anyone? Why tell you anything even resembling it? Fifty, two hundred, whatever. The only problem being that it isn’t true.”
“Sure it isn’t.”
“You actually believe that tripe? Then I’ve got a bridge to sell you. How about this — tell me which sounds more realistic. That the CIA was funding Myanmar insurgents with diamonds, for unknown reasons. Or that a faction of entrepreneurial CIA scumbags decided to get into the drug business over forty years ago, and the diamonds were just another payment to heroin traffickers in the Golden Triangle.”
She didn’t show any emotion, but she didn’t like what she was hearing.
