James Siegel: Detour

Detour James Siegel

Also by James Siegel

Epitaph

Derailed

To Sara Anne Freed, a remarkable editor and an even better human being, who took a chance on me, for which I’ll be eternally grateful.

I’d like to thank Richard Pine, a remarkable agent, Rick Horgan for his editorial wisdom, and Larry Kirshbaum for getting into the trenches with me. Also, all my Colombian friends who took the time to tell me where I screwed up.

PROLOGUE

It’s an old saying. An adage. A reassuring word to the wise. Or actually, to the scared. It’s meant to mollify, to calm, to show one the utter silliness of their thinking.

You say it when someone’s frightened to do something.

To travel, for instance.

To ride the rails. Hop a plane. Charter a boat.

To scuba dive. Jet-ski. Rollerblade. Balloon.

They’re frightened a terrible something will befall them, that they’ll set out to experience an enjoyable afternoon, a day, a vacation, a life, but instead, they’ll end up dead.

And what do you say to them?

There’s more chance you’ll get hit by a bus while crossing the street.

Because how often does that happen, huh?

He kept a secret file in his bottom drawer, buried beneath his myriad charts, pulled out and dusted off for special occasions, as a kind of reminder.

J. Boksi, thirty-eight, about to be engaged. He was walking out of the jewelers, admiring the sparkling oval-cut two-carat ring set in filigreed white gold.

S. Lewes, twenty-two, newly earned MBA in business administration from Bucknell University. She was coming from her first job interview and staring up at the grandest buildings she’d ever seen.

T. Noonan, seventy, doting grandfather. He was taking a walk with his four-year-old grandson and explaining why Batman could not beat Superman in a fair fight, never ever, not on your life.

E. Riskin, sixty.

C. Meismer, seventy-eight.

R. Vaz, thirty-three.

L. Parkins, eleven.

J. Barbagallo, thirty-five.

R. and S. Parks, eighteen-year-old twins.

They’d all been hit by a bus while crossing the street.

Every single one of them.

They were all dead.

It reminded him that despite what you think, it can happen.

It can.

It can even happen to you.

The Insurance Actuary calculates the tipping point between risk and probability, thereby hoping to reduce the likelihood of undesirable events.

— The Actuary Handbook

Chances are, your chances are, pretty good.

—Johnny Mathis

ONE

Buenas tardes.

When they got to Bogotá, the first thing Paul and Joanna saw was a man with no head.

A picture of the man in question, apparently once the deputy mayor of Medellín, was plastered across various table-sized posters stuck to the walls in El Dorado Airport, all of them advertising different Bogotá newspapers. The man was carelessly sprawled in the middle of the street, as if he were just taking a much-needed rest. Except his shirt was stained with dried blood, and he was clearly missing something important. It had been blown off by a car bomb, which had been set by either the leftist FARC or the rightest USDF—depending on which theory you chose to believe.

Paul thought it was a hell of a welcome. But all in all, he still felt like saying thanks .

Glad to be here.

That’s because flight 31 from JFK to Colombia had lasted eighteen hours, which was eleven hours longer than it was supposed to. There’d been a five-hour delay in Kennedy and an unscheduled stop in Washington, D.C., to pick up baggage belonging to a Colombian diplomat who’d remained nameless.

They’d sat on a broiling Washington tarmac for hours—with no Bloody Marys or gin and tonics to cut the boredom or beat the heat. Serving alcohol during ground delays was apparently an FAA no-no. That was probably a good idea. The general disposition on board had grown angry and mutinous—with the possible exception of Joanna and the passenger to Paul’s right, who calmly stared straight ahead into the seat back in front of him.

He was an amateur ornithologist, he volunteered.

He was used to waiting. He was off to the jungles of northern Colombia to hunt for the yellow-breasted toucan.

Paul kept looking at his wristwatch and wondering why it wasn’t moving.

Joanna, mostly a bastion of calm, had reminded him that they’d waited five years. Ten hours, more or less, wouldn’t kill them.

She was right, of course.

The New York delay, the eight-hour Washington layover, the increasingly fetid cabin, wouldn’t kill him. He knew what would kill people and what wouldn’t. After all, he was an actuary for a major insurance company, whose logo—a pair of paternal cradling hands—appeared regularly on sickly-sweet commercials twenty times a day. He could spin the risk ratios on all sorts of everyday activities, recite the percentages of accident and death chapter and verse.

He knew that the odds of dying in a plane, for example, were exactly 1 in 354,319—even with the recent small bump due to men whose first name was Al and last name was Qaeda . A delay in takeoff would be in actuary-speak: statistically insignificant.

Plane delays couldn’t kill you.

Car bombs could.

Speaking of which.

The sight of the headless man admittedly threw them just a little. As they walked from the gate in the general direction of baggage claim, Joanna noticed the first gruesome poster and immediately turned away, while Paul felt the first vague prickling of fear.

Worming their way through customs under the sullen eyes of soldiers with shouldered AK-47s didn’t exactly help. When they finally made it through baggage, they were approached by a stooped white-haired man holding a crude hand-lettered sign over his head.

Breidbard, Paul, it said. Their last name was misspelled.

“I guess I’m considered luggage,” Joanna whispered to him.

The old man introduced himself as Pablo and timidly shook Paul’s hand. He picked up all three of their suitcases in one swift motion. When Paul tried to wrest at least one bag back from this man who, after all, had to be thirty years older than he was, Pablo politely refused.

“Is fine,” he said, smiling. “Please follow . . .”

Pablo had been hired through the local Santa Regina Orphanage. He would be their man in Bogotá, he explained. He’d drive for them, shop for them, and help guide them through the entire process. He’d accompany them everywhere, he told them.

It was reassuring to hear.

Pablo led them through the unruly and suffocating crowd. All airports were experiments in barely managed chaos, but El Dorado was worse. The crowd seemed like soccer fans who’d lost—loud, milling, and dangerous. Paul, who’d done a little boning up on his Spanish, forgot the word for excuse me and had to resort to a primitive form of sign language in an effort to get people to move out of the way. Most simply ignored him, or looked at him as if he were touched in the head. He eventually relied on out-and-out shoving to navigate their way out.

Getting through the crowd was just one of their problems.

The other was keeping up with Speedy Gonzalez, a.k.a. Pablo.

He seemed remarkably spry for a man who had to be pushing seventy. Even while carrying three bulging suitcases.

“Think he’s chewing coca or something?” Joanna asked. Joanna ran three mornings a week and could do a good hour and a half on the StairMaster, but even she was having trouble keeping pace.