“I’m not destroying anything,” he assures me. “I’m just the facilitator. Would you like to see how it works?”

I don’t bother to answer. He’s like Dargon—so used to being obeyed that his whims have the force of royal edicts.

Suddenly, cottony green holographic images flash across the floor from wall to wall, like a 3-D shag carpet. It’s a miniature of the rain forest, complete with rivers and mountains. “Mato Grosso and Pará states,” he tells me. “Virgin rain forest. All I’m doing is opening it up by encouraging the building of a few thousand roads.”

“Roads to where?” I ask.

“Mahogany trees,” he answers. “If loggers spot a valuable tree, they’ll cut a road for miles so that it can be dragged out. Once those roads are cut, the forest can be developed. Other loggers will pour in to harvest the less valuable hardwoods. The more that’s cut, the more becomes available. The animals will be hunted for bush meat. The land will be cleared for farming. So the whole trick is getting loggers to cut that first road.”

“How much money do you bribe them with?”

“I don’t have to offer them anything but information,” he explains. “Their greed does the rest. Mahogany is the ‘green gold’ of the Amazon. A single tree can be worth thousands of dollars. But even the tallest trees can be hidden beneath the jungle canopy. So I designed the technology to pinpoint them by their chemical fingerprints. Would you like to see every mahogany tree in the Amazon?”

Suddenly red dots start flecking the green carpet, and each time one appears there’s a PING sound. It becomes a rising crescendo of PINGs as hundreds and then thousands of the red dots appear, alone and grouped in clusters. “This is what I give the loggers,” the colonel says. “They build the roads. And the roads open up the forest.”

“Loggers chasing mahogany didn’t have anything to do with the trees your guards made us burn down,” I tell him.

The colonel grins. Ernesto was right—he does have a sense of humor, albeit a sick one. “I thought you might find that little outing interesting. It’s incumbent on a warden to make sure his prisoners get enough recreation,” he says. “You must have run quite fast to survive.”

I remember sprinting through the black clouds of smoke, fleeing for my life. “It was beautiful, pristine forest, filled with life. Why did you make us burn it?”