By the time I had had a couple drinks in an airport bar, my panic had faded and the encounter with Fusk taken on an almost daring, swashbuckling tinge. Memory fucks with you when it tries to protect you. A third bourbon and Coke, and part of me thought I’d been calm when Fusk pulled the gun. That I’d expected something like that. That I could’ve subdued him in close quarters if I’d needed to, with an MMA or wrestling move. Cheers—have another drink.

Fusk, I decided, had been the kind of encounter I’d been seeking at the hotel bar. The purest distillation of it. The kind that’s dangerous but not dangerous. The gun probably hadn’t even been loaded. I’d tell my grandchildren about it someday. How foolish their grandmother had been.

Which made guilt well up, and I texted my daughter. Direct, not through my husband.

>>Headed home, kumquat. How’re you? School good? Dad picking you up on time?

Nothing for several minutes. Then:

>>Not much. It’s all cool. Dad’s out in the yard a lot. Patrolling. See you soon.

Smiley emoticon back. I knew not to push it. Didn’t think to ask why my husband was out in the yard. “Patrolling.” He hated yardwork. We had someone for that.

Two hours to kill and I felt brave enough for risk again. Time to analyze Vilcapampa property holdings. Had to get ahead of this thing. Had to carve a path forward.

Didn’t I?

The Vilcapampa “umbrella,” or “octopus,” looked straightforward because it was so crude at times. A classic autocratic, top-down, family-run company that happened to produce net revenues of just under one trillion dollars a year. Blunt, in how organized, at least from public records. The senior Vilcapampa served not just as the founder and owner but also as CEO. The CFO was his younger brother. The ruling board was riddled through with other relatives. Anywhere Vilcapampa could promote from within the family, he did. This had clearly hurt them in some areas, as the expertise of those appointed didn’t match up with the responsibilities.

Wince-inducing: there was even a Vilcapampa Institute in Peru that traded off the faux indigenous connection to “help” traditionally oppressed Indian groups in the mountains, near ancient Incan ruins. Just enough distance from Argentina that the institute could, with apparent impunity, help launder monies from the less savory of their side businesses, as far as I could tell.

In addition to the main corporation and its subsidiaries, there were, as always, a flurry of shell companies and investments in other corporations. (Incorp Corp, Inc., was my favorite.) Which was where the crude and the blunt became a knot.

I wasn’t yet ready to undo the knot. I just needed to know what company names Vilcapampa had operated under in the Pacific Northwest, to get a sense of other physical locations that might hold the clue to a hummingbird, a salamander.