'That is not the deal. A deal is a negotiation. That was no negotiation.'
'You are a criminal. The French government does not negotiate with criminals. They impose conditions. You will not see the admiral and we will not be manipulated.'
He was angry and knew he shouldn't do what he did next, but he could not lose face now. He yanked her from the chair, dragged her to the door, and threw her out of the office so that she tripped in her chains and landed hard on the linoleum. The guards looked mystified and a little nervous. She looked up with pure superiority and he knew he wouldn't like whatever she was about to say.
'If the Americans get Chaperone before you do,' she whispered, 'you will look like an idiot.'
He kicked the door shut and felt for a fleeting moment as though he had reclaimed his manhood. Then her words sank in and he knew that she knew.
The place was a green-leafed steam bath. In some places the visibility in the beam of the flashlights narrowed to a few feet. Dawn had just arrived, revealing highland jungle: terra firma. It actually tended to have thicker foliage than the low land jungle because it was not underwater for six months out of the year. There was no visibility above to the sky even in the daylight except in natural openings and thin spots in the forest canopy. GPS signals were often weak, maybe one good satellite signal and one faint. In the rare clearings five good satellite signals were common.
Sam was getting the hang of this jungle, although navigating was extraordinarily difficult. Javier managed to walk generally in the appropriate direction according to the intermittent GPS readings, but it was obvious that they traversed nothing like a straight line, making the journey longer than the map would indicate.
Sam used a GPS to find the approximate coordinates of a spot on the Tapiche closest to Bowden's house. As they went, they meandered, looking for the sign of a small group of men. They traveled into the early afternoon and then looked for a natural opening in the canopy and once again used the satellite phone. Sam noted that he had a good signal. He di aled and got his office on the line and soon was talking to Jill.
'Where are you?'
'About twenty miles from Bowden's as the crow flies. We've been wandering, looking for a sign. We'll go no farther toward the Tapiche, unless you guys know something we don't.'
'Give me your latitude and longitude.'
Sam gave it.
'Yeah, we have you. We are almost sure you have bad company.'
'Yeah?'
'I don't know if you want the particulars or just the conclusions.' She was referring to Big Brain, which must have correlated far-flung data to make the conclusions.
'What do you have?'
'We have Girard and company traveling to Brazil, then into your area. We have a confirmation of that from French intelligence as communicated to Figgy.'
'Why is French intelligence mucking around in our business?'
'Just trying to be helpful, I guess.'
'So Gaudet or whoever it is didn't come through Lima?'
'For some reason they flew from Manaus to Iquitos. We have confirmed they hired a boat in Iquitos, went up the Ucayali. We have six bodies leaving the Tapiche on foot.'
'That from Big Eye?'
'Yeah, the on-foot part.'
Big Eye was a surveillance system built at the urging of the United States by Raytheon for the Brazilian government at a cost of about $1.4 billion and consisting of nine hundred listening posts, five airborne jets, and three remote sensing aircraft. From a height of 33,000 feet and a distance of 125 miles, the radar systems could detect a human being under cloud cover on the forest floor. Brazil had not yet consented to share Big Eye information with the United States, but the CIA viewed that issue as a diplomatic technicality. Some how U.S. spooks had hotwired the thing, and since Sam's project was of some interest, they ran a data pipe over to Big Brain, which did its usual voracious data guzzle.
'You could be watching any six people. You don't know they came in a boat, right?'
'Right. Could be Matses people returning from a rare trip to Requena. Maybe European types on holiday. But I doubt it. What are the chances?'
'How close are they?'
'Very close. Under a mile. And there is a lone somebody even closer and another single a little farther away.'
'Two alone?'
'Natives probably. Especially one of them-from the way he moves. Fast.'
The sat phone's connection fizzled.
Sam told Javier what he knew. The guide nodded and they began making a slow circle, using their flashlights. Staring at the forest floor, they walked for what seemed an hour in constantly widening circles. Since they were not paying at tention to natural pathways, they had to claw their way through tangles and vines, which were dripping with ants. Even seeing the ground was difficult at times.
'I found them,' Javier said at last, surprising Sam, who hadn't even realized that Javier had disappeared and traveled some distance.
'Six pairs of shoes.' They all gathered around and looked. In the soft mud next to a small deep river of black water- that no doubt ran into the Galvez-the imprints were obvious. 'By now they could be several miles distant.'
'Next clearing we'll try the sat phone and find out.'
Nothing about the trek was as Sam had envisioned. Most significant, of course, was the fact that they were now following six pairs of shoes, one of which might be Devan Gaudet's. From this fact flowed many other unanticipated eventualities, such as Sam's decision to stalk these killers, which added the prospect of a deadly encounter. Walking in the same general direction as the six men, they would not lit erally follow each footstep because the process of tracking over a leaf-littered jungle floor would slow them down. Instead, they would travel on their own and make sure they located the track every fifty feet or so; failing that, they would backtrack to the last-known location and try again.
Sweat poured down Sam and the heat baked through him. For reasons he couldn't quite grasp, he was drawn to this place, perhaps to the utter wildness, and so it seemed was Grady, although there was no hiding her physical discom fort. Perhaps the anticipation of meeting Michael Bowden kept her going. Yodo never seemed to feel much of anything about his surroundings. He was pretty close to immune to environmental influences except when someone was trying to kill him or one of his charges.
They tried not to use machetes to cut a trail because it made noise and left a memoir of their passage and, more sig nificantly, because to actually chop enough to do any good required great effort and much time. So they slithered past everything they could, all the while unable to imagine how any human without a GPS could find anything or anyplace in this jungle-ever. They came upon a toppled tree that opened a vine-tangled spot in the forest that was maybe thirty or more feet across. In this stretch of jungle the open space seemed like a mall parking lot.
As they made their way across the opening, Sam glanced down and saw something protruding from the base of a small tree. He stopped to retrieve an arrow, which no doubt missed one lucky monkey. Grady stepped around him, apparently walking on automatic. Just as she was looking for a likely spot to re-enter the green wall, Sam noticed a brown face with interesting tattoos around the mouth. He stared at two brown eyes. The young man's body was partially obscured by foliage, but his face was clearly exposed. His hair fell below his shoulders. The fellow seemed to be naked above the waist. He was quite thin and Sam wondered if he saw hunger in the eyes.
Neither Sam nor the native moved. There was a wicked- looking, stone-tipped arrow about fifteen feet from Sam's nose and it was poised for release, but it was not aimed at Sam. Grady was standing immediately in front of him, so it was her forehead that would take the shot.
Very slowly Sam put a hand on her shoulder and gently eased beside her, and then around her, all the time watching the native's eyes. It took a full minute to make the switch.
