“Sorry, I always get awkward right before I’m about to be killed.”

I’d had a lot of practice.

The soldiers parted, and the man walked between them. He had a salt-and-pepper beard and aviator sunglasses. As he drew close, he pulled the sunglasses off and shook his head lightly from side to side.

Then he smiled, one of his front teeth capped in gold.

“Papagayo!” he shouted.

≈

Vern had met Felipe in Colombia twenty years earlier, when Felipe was a driver for one of the cartels. He had driven Vern to and from meetings with his boss on several occasions.

“This is Thomas,” Vern said, introducing me.

“A friend of Papagayo’s is a friend of mine,” Felipe said, clapping me on the shoulder.

The moment Vern and Felipe embraced, all the tension from the soldiers dissipated. A few of the soldiers even jumped on their four-wheelers and headed back to wherever the other operation was located. As for Diego, he went to retrieve Carlos, Juan Pablo, and Camila.

I shook Felipe’s hand, then said, “We’re looking for a woman doctor who was taken from her village twelve days ago. She was taken by soldiers, and we suspected it might have been narcos.”

“I see,” he said, nodding along.

He pulled a phone from his hip and turned and walked away.

“Seems like a nice enough guy,” I said to Vern.

Vern shook his head. “Don’t let looks deceive you. That man has spilled more blood than anyone I’ve ever met. If I hadn’t been here, you and Diego would be digging your own graves right now.”

I gave him a pat on the shoulder and said, “Proof positive that it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

He tried to fight off a laugh, but it slipped out.

Felipe returned a moment later.

He shook his head and said, “I don’t know who these men were who took your doctor, but I can assure you, it wasn’t us.”

≈

It wasn’t them. And Felipe was certain they were the only operation in all of northeastern Bolivia. From the way he said it, I’m sure the competition had learned this the hard way. He was steadfast in his conviction that if narcos had taken her, he would know.

I asked him about the drug lab we found yesterday, and he said they’d abandoned that lab a month earlier, well before Gina was abducted.

So the question remained: If narcos didn’t abduct Gina, who did? Illegal loggers? Illegal miners? The Bolivian Army?

It could have been anyone in desperate need of medical help.

We were back to square one.

Or so I thought.

We were getting ready to backtrack to the drug lab, where we would follow the path leading east, when Felipe—who had made a few more phone calls—returned to our small group and said, “I may have something for you.”