She scrolled for the attached photo, a watermarked image of Japanese macaques in a hot spring. “To anyone else, this is just random stock photography,” she said, “but it references an inside joke from when we were kids that only I would know. It’s a secret handshake. Between that and the words, there’s no doubt it’s him. As for the timing, he posted the message yesterday. Three days is self-explanatory. Travel, if necessary, means he isn’t certain where we actually are. Basically, he’s hoping we see this and that we can make it there in time. The artifact stuff, that’s all throwaway language, but Bolivia is a reference to when we were fourteen and Clare threw us into a live-fire ambush, using a mercenary team for the first time.

“I mean, we’d worked under live fire before, and we’d been ambushed before, but never both by strangers at the same time. We were in this small town north of La Paz. Clare had gone off to do whatever Clare did, and we thought we were settled in for a typical wait. We had supplies and money, but not much in the way of weapons. That was the thing about her. She trained us incessantly in how to use them, but she never actually let us carry, so when the ambush hit, we were completely outgunned. We’d been trained hard enough at that point that we got out of the house fairly easily. We carried bags, tool bags . . . God, I can’t believe I’m telling you all this. It’s embarrassing.”

“No,” he said. “It’s fascinating. Please don’t stop.”

She sighed. “Okay. So, tool bags were the essentials. We could live for weeks, months with everything in them. We made it out with those and not a lot else and headed farther up the highlands. But these guys, they were hard core, and we were tired of being fucked with. John didn’t want to spend the next few weeks on the rough if this was just more of Clare’s bullshit. The way he saw it, these guys knew we were kids, and they were fighting for money, so the easiest way to end it was to figure out their lead and snatch him—torture him if we had to—to find out who’d hired him. John figured if it was Clare they were working for, we could kick the guy in the nuts and send him on his way, and if it was someone else, we’d cut off his nuts and save them for Clare.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah, that was it.”

“No, what happened?”