I ran to my sister’s office and pulled a piece of computer paper out of the printer. I jotted down the new satellite phone number, then the date and time of the call. But the call log was misleading. The call registered in my phone at 1:03 a.m. yesterday, but that was Central European Summer Time. Bolivia was in the same time zone as the eastern United States, which was six hours behind. So Gina placed the call at 7:03 p.m. on August 9.

Two days earlier.

I replayed Gina’s voicemail.

“Thomas! I don’t have much time! Four days ago, a group of men came to my village and abducted me. They said they needed a doctor. I think they are narcotraff—Oh, shit, here they come! . . . Please find me, Thomas! Please!”

The men came to her village four days before she placed the phone call to me. Which means Gina was abducted six days earlier: August 5.

I sat down and flipped open my sister’s laptop. Gina had often talked about Tibióno, and I knew it was in northern Bolivia—not too far from the Brazilian border. I pulled up a Google map and zoomed in on northern Bolivia. I recognized the name of a town—Riberalta. Gina had said she would travel there every few months for supplies. It would take her nearly an entire day by river to reach the town I remember her calling “the Bolivian capital of the Amazon.”

Riberalta sat on the confluence of two major rivers, the Río Madre de Dios and the Beni. The Río Madre started in Peru, then ran west to east through Bolivia, intersected with the smaller Beni in Riberalta, then headed north into Brazil, where it fed into the mighty Amazon.

But Tibióno wasn’t located on either of these rivers. According to Gina, the river structure of the Amazon basin was a complex system of interstates, highways, and side streets. And depending on the season, dry or wet, some of those rivers might not exist, or if they did, may not be passable by boat.

Gina once pointed out to me roughly where Tibióno was located on Google Earth, and I clicked the small box in the bottom left corner of the screen marked “Satellite.” The map refreshed: blue rivers turning gold, solid lime turning into veiny forest green. Those veins, like hundreds of small capillaries, were rivers.

I recalled the area where Gina had pointed and said, “My little village is somewhere in there.” I zoomed in until the sea of green separated into the leafy broccoli heads of the impenetrable jungle canopy.

Gina was somewhere in that thicket of madness.

And I was going to find her.

≈

My next move was to contact the US Embassy in Bolivia, but according to their Google search page they were closed until 8:00 a.m. on Monday, which was almost forty-eight hours away.