He needed time to think, but the interrogator wasn’t going to give him the space to do that. He didn’t have much in the way of options. He could tell them the truth—that he was in the jungle to kill La Bruja and any other cartel leaders that he could find—but he knew that was going to sound fantastic without evidence to back it up. Another alternative was to fall back on the legend, but that would mean trying to persuade them that he was a drug dealer looking to score a new supply line. It sounded like a bad option, but, perversely, it might be the best of a bad lot. The Americans wouldn’t prosecute him; it was more likely that he would be given to the Colombians. He preferred the odds of breaking out of a Colombian prison cell to an American supermax.

The man got up and came closer.

“You know what I think?” he said. “You’re a liar.”

“I want to speak to someone from my—”

The man drilled Milton in the gut. He hadn’t expected it and the man had a decent right hand. Milton felt the flash of pain as it radiated out from his stomach and would have doubled over if it wasn’t for the fact that his wrists were attached to the arms of the chair.

The man leaned in so that Milton could smell the deodorant that he was wearing and feel the flecks of spittle that spattered against his ear and the side of his face.

“Who are you?” the man said.

“Santa Claus.”

The man clenched his fist and drilled Milton again.

72

La Bruja was showing absolutely no sign that she was about to crack. They had put the narco in one room and the man who had been found with her in another, and Ellie had taken a place at the back to watch as she was questioned. She had insisted that her name was Esmerelda Dos Santos and that she was a campesino—a peasant farmer—who had been employed in the camp. She said that she was a coca leaf raspadora, responsible for helping to prepare the paste that would eventually be turned into the cartel’s powder. She appeared to be confused and frightened, nothing like what Ellie would have expected from the ruthless mass murderer who had spread her poison like a web across the world from her little nest in the jungle.

Denying her identity was a reasonable strategy. Proving that she was La Bruja might be difficult for them.

She caught Fuentes’s eye and indicated that she was going to go and see what was happening in the other room. He nodded and turned his attention back to the woman on the chair.