Cesar Calle headed his own group, and though the meanderings of the trail twisted back and forth over the intervening seven years, Calle did have connections to Jesus Henao Abadia. Therein lay a motive for Calle ordering a hit on the team that had brought down his old friend, but it was pretty weak. I still believed there was more to it than that.

Last night Juan Charles had mentioned the crimes that Calle was suspected of. They included torturing a pair of French students whose backpacking adventure had brought them unexpectedly to one of his cocaine production bases. The students—little more than children—had been found in a shallow grave, semi-decomposed, but their injuries were still very evident. Calle was never brought to book: a few well-placed bribes in the correct hands saw to that.

Even if he wasn’t the person responsible for sending Rickard, I’d have no regrets about killing him. In fact, his card was already marked.

We did a controlled starburst, Rink and Harvey heading off on their tasks while I now led the Jungla troopers further along the forest trail. A cleft through the cliff marked on the map was about a hundred yards ahead, but it meant a climb to get to it. On our right the river twisted away in a tight curve, bottlenecking between massive algae-slick boulders. The noise from the gushing flume beyond was the same as the blood in my inner ears.

Reaching a small cliff face that blocked our path, I slung my sub-machine gun over my shoulder and hauled myself up onto a ledge. I could see old boot prints in the mud that had gathered in a shallow indentation: proof that Nunez and Charles had been here before. It was bad form to leave such obvious evidence, but I chose not to comment. If anyone had noticed and were watching the trail, we’d have been cut down long before this. I nodded to the troopers, then scurried up the cliff, using vines and protruding rocks to pull myself up. About twenty feet up I found the cleft and it was like a huge knife slash through the hillside. Taking my H&K in my hands I edged forward as Nunez clambered up behind me. I indicated that he should keep an eye on the steep cliffs above us: until Rink was in place I didn’t want one of Calle’s sentries to spot us. I moved on, stepping carefully among loose rocks, while Charles made the climb.

I could see daylight at the far end of the cleft, but it was only a narrow chink through which I could make out nothing of the land ahead, just pale blue sky dotted by clouds of moisture rising from the jungle on far slopes. It was idyllic in its own way, and there was nothing about it to suggest what horrors lay ahead of us.