James Siegel - Detour

Back to the table. Where three more condoms had been added to the pile.

“Sí,” Arias said, staring at Paul and stopping the women in midmotion. “Start swallowing.”

THIS IS WHAT THE FARC COMMANDER HAD TOLD THEM.

“We are a revolutionary army. We are involved in a long struggle against oppression. We are in need of financing this struggle, so we must do whatever we can.”

Whatever we can turned out to be exporting pure Colombian cocaine to the eastern seaboard of the United States.

That’s how he began, as if he were seeking some kind of approval from them. Explaining the distasteful nature of the drug trade as a kind of necessary evil. A means to an end.

When he paused, Paul nodded, even nervously smiled, bestowing a kind of absolution on him. Perhaps that’s all he wanted, Paul thought, someone to take the message back to the world.

Yes, we smuggle drugs, but only to further the cause.

Of course, that was stupid. They weren’t going to kidnap them to relay their apologies. Of course, Paul hoped otherwise. Up to the minute the man told Paul he’d be swallowing thirty-six condoms stuffed with two million dollars’ worth of cocaine and bringing it to a house in Jersey City.

He would do that if he wanted to see his wife and new daughter alive again.

Then and only then did Paul understand the full enormity of their predicament.

Yet there were still things Paul didn’t understand.

The man asked him who knew they were here in Colombia—not everyone, just the people who kept tabs on them, who’d be expecting them to return on a certain date. Paul told him. Starting with his boss—Ron Samuels, head actuary of the firm he’d called home for the past eleven years. His in-laws, of course, Matt and Barbara, who resided in Minnesota and were due to fly in bearing gifts for their first grandchild. Finally, John and Lisa, their next-door neighbors and best friends.

Paul was ordered to write them letters, pretty much the same letter, three times.

Things are taking a little longer than expected down here and it will be a few more weeks before we can return with our adopted daughter —that was the general theme. They made him add a part about there being no need to call, since they’d be running from place to place with little time to chat.

Paul thought, they don’t want anyone to know. Not yet.

They’d forgotten something, hadn’t they?

“Pablo checked you out of L’Esplanade,” Arias said. “The reservation clerk thinks you changed hotels. That’s all.”

So they hadn’t.

No one would know they were missing.

Not for weeks.

They gave him three sheets of paper and a blue ballpoint pen that someone had virtually chewed the end off of. Paul wrote the letters with Arias hovering over his shoulder, evidently looking for any hidden messages, disguised cries for help.

When Paul finished, Arias read them out loud.

Later that afternoon, as Paul and Joanna sat on the mattress with their backs against the wall, Paul said, “I think I know why they switched her.”

“What?”

He’d been thinking this through; he thought he understood now. “Why they switched babies. Why they didn’t just wait and take all three of us together.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Remember when Galina came back with the thermometer? You said we hadn’t been paranoid, that we were in a foreign country. Paranoia is a foreign country, Joanna.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Galina took Joelle that day so we would come back and find her gone. So we’d call the police. There was no note—remember, she went into the bathroom and found it.”

“Why would they want us to call the police?”

“Because they wanted the police standing there when Galina walked back in.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sure it does. You’re in the country of paranoia now, remember? Think like a citizen. They wanted us to cry wolf. They wanted to make us look crazy.”

“Why?”

“Because crazy people have no credibility. Crazy foreigners have even less.”

“I still don’t—”

“First we called the police and insisted our baby was kidnapped. Only she wasn’t kidnapped. Then we noticed we had the wrong daughter—so she was. Only, if we called the police a second time, we would have looked more deranged than before. They wanted us to know they’d taken her.”

Joanna seemed to contemplate this notion. “Okay. What if we hadn’t noticed? I did—you didn’t.”

Paul shrugged. “If we’d never noticed, they would’ve called and told us. We’ve got your baby—come and get her or else. Either way, we couldn’t have gone to the police without looking like lunatics. Maybe it was a kind of insurance policy: if one of us got away, if they botched the kidnapping, if I’d refused to drink that coffee and never passed out. Who knows? Maybe they were always going to make that call. We were early, he said, remember? Galina was yelling at Pablo about something—maybe it was that, bringing us there before she was ready.”

“Okay,” Joanna said. “Why us?”

“Why not us? They must pick people they feel no one will bother at customs. The last time I looked, I didn’t look like a drug smuggler.”

Joanna said, “You’re not a drug smuggler.”

“Not yet.”

She turned to look at him as if to gauge his expression for degree of seriousness. “You’re going to do it?” she asked. It sounded more like a statement.

Paul looked back at his wife. Her face had changed, he thought. Four days of mostly not eating or sleeping had sharpened her cheekbones and dug craters under her eyes. Yet even now when she was hollow-eyed and terrified, he saw something etched there on her face, as if the last few days had removed everything extraneous and left the only thing that really mattered. He’d like to think it was love .

“Yes,” he said.

“They’ll arrest you. You can spend twenty years in jail for smuggling drugs. You’re not a criminal—they’ll see right through you.”

Yes, he thought, everything she was saying was true.

“What other options do I have?”

Joanna had no answer. Or maybe she did. She leaned her head against his chest, somewhere in the vicinity of his heart.

Thump, thump, thump.

“What if they’re lying? What if they’re lying about letting us go?”

Paul had been waiting for that question, of course. He gave the only answer he could.

“What if they’re not?”

FOURTEEN

He would have eighteen hours.

Three-quarters of one day. One thousand eighty minutes.

That’s it.

In those eighteen hours, he would have to swallow thirty-six condoms filled with two million dollars’ worth of pure, undiluted cocaine, take a plane to Kennedy Airport, and get to a house in Jersey City, where he’d be expected to deposit them onto a dirty Newark Star-Ledger .

If he made it to the house one minute after the eighteen hours allotted him, Joanna and Joelle would be killed.

If he made it to the house and only thirty- five condoms came out of him, Joanna and Joelle would be killed.

If he didn’t get the condoms out in time and one of them dissolved inside his stomach, he’d be killed.

His heart would go into cardiac arrest, his body into toxic shock.

He’d begin salivating from the mouth and shaking uncontrollably. He’d be dead before anyone knew what was wrong with him.

This was carefully and painstakingly laid out for him by Arias. To get his attention, to have him maintain focus.