“No one’s fault. The price we paid for Baptiste’s survival. I knew what it would mean in terms of supplies, but to find Baptiste alive—that was a miracle. We met Hammer and Nevaeh slogging toward us. I decreed we should trek back upstream as quickly as we could. I was afraid of the Amazon River rising fast and engulfing us. We sank waist-deep in mud. Trees fell in slow motion around us, trapping us in their branches. We no more than gained the high ground when an anaconda dropped out of the tree onto Hammer. I reached for my knife and—” Adam touched his side as if the sheath that held his knife still resided there “—it was gone, lost in the river. I thought. Hammer had his knife, and he slit the anaconda down to its gullet.”

“He took your knife?”

“The knife he used wasn’t my knife.”

“No. I mean, he removed it from the helicopter?”

“To this day I don’t know. If he had stolen it before the helicopter set down, how did I miss that it was gone? It could have washed away in the river, and yet in view of events... I failed to check sufficiently before we set foot on the ground. I was in too much of a rush to beat the storm.” Hectic color blotched his cheeks and forehead. “Excuses.”

“You had no reason to believe you would be sabotaged!”

Adam looked at her, his eyes weighted with guilt and misery.

She didn’t want to hear any more. Her research had told her the bones of the story. But to hear it from Adam, to watch him reveal his past and the grief that had sent him into hiding... She could hardly bear it.

But he needed to tell her, so she asked, “What next?”

“That night, Baptiste fell ill. Desperately ill, maddened, suffering. His eyes bled. He raged in pain. I opened my backpack, searched for the homing beacon that would bring in anyone within range. It was gone.”

She suggested, “Possibly washed away in the river?”

“Impossible. It was zipped into its own pocket. That was when I first looked at Hammer and thought, What is he doing here?”

“A sensible question.”

“Or the start of my paranoia. I searched Nevaeh’s backpack. Her beacon was also gone. Hammer claimed he had never received a beacon.”

“Sure. Paranoia.”

“Baptiste died, swearing at me, condemning me for assassinating him. Afterward I found out he was the grandson of an elderly Frenchman who had been a Nazi sympathizer. Baptiste had been a target his whole life.”

“You were five hundred miles from the nearest place you could call for help.”