James Grippando - A King's ransom

“The women are in the other hut.”

It sickened him that they’d take women, too. He thought of his wife or daughter at the mercy of teenage boys with automatic weapons.

Joaquin stepped out of the cottage. He didn’t look happy as he walked toward the hut. Matthew and Emilio stepped back from the door. It opened, and the guard ordered everyone out. Matthew and the four others stepped into the daylight. The day was overcast, but Emilio and the others who’d been in the hut for hours still had trouble with their eyes. Joaquin walked to the other hut, the same drill. Out walked the women. One looked close to Cathy’s age; the other, about the age of their daughter, Lindsey.

Joaquin and his two men herded the seven prisoners together. Four FARC guerrillas assisted. It seemed to be an unwritten rule that there were always at least as many guards as prisoners. Joaquin spoke to the group in Spanish.

“Welcome to the valley of smiles,” he said.

The group was silent, unamused by his humor. He continued, “Some of you will remain here in the good hands of FARC. Some of you will leave here today. I have only one way to decide who stays and who goes.”

He reached inside his knapsack and removed two billfolds. He opened one and held it up so all could see. It was a picture of a young boy. “Who is this?”

“My son,” said Emilio.

“How old?”

“Six.”

“Come forward.”

Emilio stepped up, apart from the group. The younger woman started crying. “Please, please, senor. I have children, too.”

Joaquin pulled another billfold from the pack and displayed it the same way, so that all could see. There were two children in this photograph, a boy and girl. “How old?” he asked.

“Rafael is two,” she said, her voice cracking. “Alicia is four.”

“Come here.”

“Thank you, oh, thank you,” she said.

With just a signal from Joaquin, the FARC guards herded the three remaining men and one woman back into the huts. They went quietly, though the expressions on their tired faces screamed with despair. The young mother was still crying and thanking Joaquin, even kissing his hand, as if he were the pope. She obviously thought they were going home.

Matthew could only assume that Joaquin had been unable to persuade FARC to pay the high price he wanted for the American. But that didn’t explain why Emilio and the young mother had been segregated from the group along with him. Could this be some kind of humanitarian gesture? Maybe they somehow knew that his wife was pregnant, and they’d pulled out the mother, the father, and the father-to-be for special consideration.

“We have a long journey ahead of us,” said Joaquin, still speaking in Spanish.

Then he looked at Matthew and spoke in English. “And these are the rules. Don Matthew, do not try to escape. If you try to escape and are captured, we kill the daddy. If you try to escape and succeed, we kill the mommy. And I assure you, it won’t be quick and painless.”

He patted the large knife attached to his belt, then reverted to Spanish. “Any questions?”

Emilio said nothing, having understood it all. The young woman looked confused, as she spoke only Spanish. Matthew was angry, but he felt foolish, too, for even having considered the possibility that this animal was capable of a humanitarian gesture.

“ Bueno ,” said Joaquin. “ Vamos .”

At gunpoint, the three prisoners marched past the FARC cottage, across the clearing, and back into the forest, back to the rebel campsite near the beautiful red fields of poppy.

My chance to confront Guillermo came and went. Two days had passed since my meeting with Agent Huitt, and I’d spoken to my father’s business partner on the telephone at least a half dozen times. He was still in Colombia, still the family’s representative in dealing with the local police. Each time we spoke, I resolved to ask the questions that needed to be asked. Each time, I let it go. I needed more than vague innuendo from an FBI agent before questioning the integrity of a man who might be completely innocent. The last thing I needed was to alienate Guillermo and end up having to deal with the Colombian police on my own.

At least for now, I dealt with Guillermo as if the conversation with Agent Huitt had never taken place. Things were so normal that he was even delegating work to me in my father’s absence. I spent the afternoon at the port checking on a shipment of scuba equipment to the lobster divers in Nicaragua.

I’d visited the port once before with my father, when I was a teenager. I remembered it well, because it had shocked me. I’d expected to see the big white cruise ships docked like a string of pearls in the shadow of beautiful downtown Miami. This was an entirely different port, up the Miami River near the airport. Chain-link fences and barbed wire cordoned off ugly metal warehouses and mountains of metal container trucks stacked one on top of the other. The boats were rusty old freighters that looked barely capable of making it to the mouth of the river, let alone to the Panama Canal. Overall, it reminded me of the kind of place a serial killer might dump his bodies. In fact, I think one had a few years back.

This time I took my best friend with me. J.C. Paez was christened Juan Carlos by his Cuban parents, but his friends knew him only as J.C. We’d been friends since we were nine years old. In fact, it was J.C. who’d set me up with Jenna. It was a toss-up as to which of us had taken the breakup harder-a toss-up between me and J.C., not me and Jenna.

“I saw Jenna on Miami Beach the other night,” he said.

I was trying to negotiate a parking space. I didn’t say anything.

“She looked great,” he continued.

I had to wonder, what was it that compelled friends to carry on about how incredible your ex was looking since the breakup? She wasn’t Bigfoot; I didn’t need every reported sighting. But now that he’d opened the door, I had to ask, “Was she with anyone?”

“You mean when she came in or when she left?”

“Don’t mess with me. I know Jenna’s not picking up guys at bars.”

“She was with a girlfriend.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Yeah.”

“Did she say anything about me?”

He smiled coyly. “Now why would you be interested in that?”

“Just forget it.”

“Wait a sec, she did say something about you.”

“What?”

“Something like, ‘Wow, J.C., you do kiss much better than Nick.’ ”

I just rolled my eyes and applied the parking brake. He laughed as we got down from the Jeep. “You should call her sometime.”

“Oh, right.”

“Seriously. I think there’s still something there.”

As much as I would have liked to believe that, I didn’t. J.C.’s parents had divorced when he was twelve, and some fifteen years later he was still clinging to the notion that someday his folks would remarry. That had a way of putting anything he said about Jenna in perspective.

“We’ll see,” I said, noncommittal.

We went around to the back of warehouse Number 3 to see a man named Paco. Shipments had a strange way of not making it onto the boat if you didn’t see Paco-more precisely, if you and Ben Franklin didn’t see Paco. He was busy, so we waited outside his office door. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, bright blue skies. I wished I’d had my sunglasses.

“Hey, isn’t that your Jeep?” asked J.C.

I looked over and saw a forklift pulling my Jeep toward a huge freighter. I nearly knocked J.C. over, I flew past him so fast.

“What the hell are you guys doing?”

The forklift stopped. The driver shrugged and laughed. He said something in Spanish that I couldn’t quite catch with all the engine noise. J.C. translated for me.