“One sixty-two over one eleven,” Gina said, loosening the cuff on Bill’s arm. “That’s pretty high.” The reading put him in stage 2 hypertension. If his blood pressure got much higher, he could be at immediate risk of a stroke or a heart attack.

Bill—that’s what her patient had told her his name was, anyway—grimaced and said, “Yeah, that is.”

“Do you take medication for high blood pressure?”

“I’ve been on a few different ACE inhibitors over the years.”

An angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor relaxes blood vessels and decreases blood pressure. It is usually one of the first lines of defense against hypertension.

“You don’t have any with you?”

He shook his head. “I stopped taking them a couple months back. They were making me too tired.”

“Better to be a little tired than a little dead.”

He huffed out a laugh.

When Bill had first started complaining of light-headedness, Gina thought he was probably dehydrated from the ten hours they’d hiked in the intense heat. Nearly his entire shirt was soaked through with sweat, and every few minutes he would need to take off his tinted glasses and wipe them free of the fog that had formed.

Thankfully, not long after Bill’s first stumbles, the jungle had opened slightly, and they had come across a raised black plastic tank and a small bamboo structure with a gray tarp. Gina overheard one of the soldiers say the words “laboratorio de drogas.” Drug lab.

Gina had assumed her abductors were narcotraffickers, but now she was certain.

They’d set up camp at the far end of the clearing, fifty meters from the tank. Gina had been changing the dressings on El Jefe’s head wound when one of the soldiers summoned her to come to Patrick and Bill’s tent and to bring her medical kit.

When Gina ducked inside the large tent, she found Patrick’s associate alone. He was sprawled out and looking flushed.

After giving Bill a thorough examination, it appeared the man’s symptoms stemmed from something more than a little dehydration. No, the man, whom Gina guessed to be in his midfifties, was simply in horrific shape. He was thirty pounds overweight, and he had the cardiovascular amplitude of a man whose idea of exercise was walking to the mailbox.

Gina said, “I would advise you to take it easy, but I don’t think that’s an option.”

“I’ll power through,” Bill said. “You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, but I was in pretty good shape at one point in my life.”

Gina raised her eyebrows.

“I used to bike a lot. Even thought about doing this two-hundred-mile race once.”