Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

Maggie shrugged. “Oh, I suppose he’ll go along eventually. It’s not that his criticisms are necessarily invalid, it’s just that they’re… well, quibbles: style, punctuation, chapter organization, that kind of thing. But between us, Tim’s material is certainly no worse than what you find in the published journals. Personally, I think it’s a damn shame, and I’ve said so to Arden. But Arden’s his own man, and where I come from, what Arden says goes.”

“Arden’s the department chair?” Gideon asked.

“The director. Formally, we’re an institute, not a department, although we come under Biological Sciences. That is to say, we were an institute. As of September, we won’t exist anymore. The ethnobotanical faculty will be whittled down from three to one – that’ll be Arden, it goes without saying. The other prof, Slivovitz, saw the handwriting on the wall and lined up a job for himself down south.”

“And what will happen to you, Maggie?” John asked. “Where will you be?”

“Well, technically I’m still a contender for that one slot, but that’s never going to happen, and nobody’s pretending that it will. So, in answer to your first question, I’m out. In answer to the second, it looks like I’ll be moving down here.”

“To the Amazon?” Phil asked.

“To the Huallaga Valley, a few hundred miles south of here. Much the same jungle ecosystem, but a few hundred feet higher, so maybe not quite as hot and humid… but close. Arden’s gotten me a faculty appointment at his school down there. In the idyllic garden spot known as Tingo Maria.” It was too dark to read her expression, but Gideon heard her sigh. She wasn’t happy about the prospect. He wouldn’t have been either.

“That sounds like a terrific opportunity for someone in your field,” he said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. “For an ethnobotanist, it must be paradise.”

He heard her chuckle, a single arid note, as she got to her feet. “All things considered,” she said with a side-of-the-mouth twang, “I’d rather be in Iowa City. Goodnight, all.”

“Well, Doc,” said John, watching her leave, “as far as your theory of aggravating Scofield goes, at least there’s one problem it doesn’t have.”

“Namely?”

John laughed. “Shortage of motives.”

Of the entire trip, this was the moment that Capitan Alfredo Vargas had most dreaded. He had managed, by and large, to keep it from his waking thoughts, but not his sleeping ones. For the past two nights he had dreamed the same dream, something out of some movie about Devil’s Island: with his hands tied behind him and wearing a blood-drenched, open-throated white shirt, he was being marched to the guillotine while six drummers, three on either side of him, kept up a dismal drumbeat that grew louder and louder and faster and faster until it shook him violently awake. Both times the drumbeat had turned out to be the hammering of the blood in his ears, and the wetness had come from the sopping T-shirt in which he slept.

Well, he was wide awake right now, but it seemed to him that the thumping in his chest was loud enough to be heard ten feet away – even the leaping of his shirt front with each beat must surely be visible – and his uniform, the best, cleanest whites he had, was already dark under the arms and at the small of his back, and spotty streaks were starting to show on the front.

Scofield had laughingly assured him that there was nothing to worry about, that nothing could possibly go wrong, but Vargas had heard those words before from others, spoken in the same carefree manner, and he had observed that disaster had a way of almost invariably following them. Scofield, after all, had never dealt with the volatile, hard-drinking, unpredictable Colonel Malagga, a hard case if there ever was one, and a greedy, vulgar grafter besides. And Scofield wasn’t the owner and captain of the Adelita, the man on whom all responsibility must ultimately fall. Scofield, he was sure, already had figured out some way to wiggle out of trouble if it came, leaving Vargas holding the ball, or the bag, or whatever the hell it was.

He stared ruefully at the haggard face in the mirror – why had he let himself get talked into this; was he crazy? His heart couldn’t stand it; he wasn’t a young man any more. Making a final adjustment to his cap, the good one with the gold braid that was hardly corroded at all, he murmured a final prayer to the effect that Malagga would not be on duty at the border checkpoint today, and stepped out on deck.

An hour earlier, at a little after four in the afternoon, after cruising most of the day, he had swung the Adelita north, leaving the broad, safe, familiar expanse of the Amazon for the narrower, endlessly winding, more oppressive Javaro River. He had quickly pulled into a narrow inlet to let off Cisco and one of the kitchen crew, the Yagua Indian Porge, neither of whom had papers that would pass inspection at the border. They would run up ahead through the jungle, and once the Adelita was safely past the checkpoint (by the grace of God) and out of sight, the boat’s dinghy would pick them up.

A few minutes later the ship had passed the rusting Republica de Colombia sign high on the right bank (which was what had started the perspiration streaming), and now they were pulling up and securing to the dilapidated pier, at the end of which was the falling-apart wooden shack that housed the Colombian military border police. At Vargas’s order, the Adelita ’s gangplank, a two-by-twelve board studded with crosspieces every couple of feet, was let down. The door to the shack opened.

El momento de la verdad. The moment of truth.

From the shack swaggered an overweight officer in mirrored sunglasses, fatigues, and combat boots, with a black baseball cap on his head and his hand resting on the heavy, black butt of the supersized handgun holstered on his belt.

Vargas’s heart sank. Malagga.

“ Buenas tardes, mi coronel!” Vargas effused, grinning away like crazy. “ Como esta usted?”

He extended his arm to assist Malagga in making the one-foot jump onto the deck, but Malagga ignored him, as he had ignored the greeting. Instead he let himself down, and without even looking at Vargas, held out his hand and rubbed his thumb and forefinger impatiently, abstractedly together.

“Pasaportes.”

Vargas had them ready, having collected them earlier. Malagga riffled through them without evident interest, although he occasionally looked up, apparently to match a photograph with one of the faces of the passengers, all of whom were assembled in the deck salon at Vargas’s instruction.

While Malagga shuffled the passports, two soldiers that Vargas had not seen before came aboard, one well into his fifties, wiry and sly, the other a pot-bellied, dim-looking, snaggle-toothed youth of twenty. That these were low-grade officers was evident from their ragged, stained uniforms. Both wore fatigue pants, but only the older one had a matching shirt. The other had on a dirty T-shirt with a picture of an Absolut vodka bottle on it. The older one was wearing filthy tennis shoes; the other had on flip-flops. Neither had shaved for a few days. Both had the same sinister, mirrored sunglasses and the big semiautomatic pistols that Malagga had.

But it wasn’t the guns that had sent an icy, new spicule of fear deep into Vargas’s gut, it was the small, friendly-looking brown-and-white dog they dragged with them on a leash. A drug-sniffer, God help him. He had worried that such a thing might happen and had expressed his concern to Scofield, but Scofield had laughed it off – he was a big laugher, Scofield was, always chuckling – telling him that the balls of coca paste were hidden in the sixty-kilo coffee bags for a very good reason: the coffee beans would mask their scent so that the dogs couldn’t smell them. But did Scofield know that this was so? Or was it only something he had heard? Vargas, in the clutch of his shameful greed, which he now so sorely repented, had not asked, but only eagerly accepted it as fact.