Rafael hopped back into the vehicle.
“He says we can pass freely now. The rebels will allow us past their checkpoint.”
Gabriella didn’t ask who the old man was and Rafael didn’t volunteer. Apparently, this crappy, pothole filled dirt road taking them deeper into the jungle had an entrance fee. If they didn’t pay the price, they wouldn’t get far. The man in front of the hut somehow had some control of what happened further into the jungle. As they pulled away, Gabriella gave one last glance back at the man to see if he was going to get up to make a phone call or pull a radio out of his pocket telling someone down the road that Rafael and Gabriella had paid to be unmolested. But when she turned, she saw he had pulled the brim of his hat low over his face and was leaning his head back against the building. His chest rose and fell heavily, as if he had immediately dropped into a deep sleep.
Nothing in Gabriella’s thick sheaf of documents mentioned these types of roadblocks. Once again, she was relieved the senator had made the arrangements for her journey through his official channels.
About a mile out of the small village, the road split into three directions. Rafael took the road to the far left. The road instantly curved and they’d gone only about a quarter mile when she saw them. Five men dressed in khaki camouflage standing in the middle of the road with what looked like a machine gun. The rebels.
CHAPTER TEN
Off to the side of the road was a small shack. Smoke rose from a fire pit and Gabriella could smell charred meat. Five chairs were gathered around the fire and several cans of beer with condensation were scattered on stumps that served as end tables. A small table held a few bowls of food and some tortillas. They’d heard the Jeep coming and had interrupted their lunch to greet them. If that is what they were doing.
Rafael stopped the Jeep well before they got close to the men. One man, with a tiny moustache and military cap, approached, holding the gun out in front of him, aimed at Rafael, his finger on the trigger. A second man wearing a black tank top with his khaki combat fatigues, trailed behind him, pointing his gun at Gabriella. He was not smiling. For a second, Gabriella was convinced she was going to die. Her heart pounded wildly in her throat. She was so stupid to have come out here.
Rafael slowly put both of his hands straight up in the air until the man reached the side of the Jeep.
“La noche está cerca.” Rafael said as soon as the man was close. The night is near.
The man nodded. It must have been some type of password.
By this time, the gunman on Gabriella’s side had reached her door. He slung his gun down by his side and reached in, gently rubbing his rough finger down her cheek. She stared straight ahead out the windshield.
From doing stories with the gang investigators in Hunter’s Point, San Francisco’s most dangerous neighborhood, she’d learned not to make eye contact with gang members. She figured the same rule applied out here.
After stroking her cheek for a second and mumbling something in Spanish she didn’t understand, the man started to trail his hand down her neck and to her chest. When his fingers reached the scooped top of her tank top, she finally turned her head to Rafael, desperate. She was fighting her instinct to slap the guy across the face. The other gunman, who had been flipping through Rafael’s wallet, saw what his compadre was doing and said something sharply in Spanish. The man instantly drew back. The man with the hat threw Rafael’s wallet onto the seat between them, whistled piercingly and backed off.
Hearing the whistle, the other men moved off to the side of the road.
Rafael started the car and was about to step on the gas when the gunman told him to stop. He’d spotted the small ice chest in the back of the Jeep. He reached in and flipped it open, grabbed a bottle of amber liquid and then waved them on.
As they passed the gunman on the side of the road, Gabriella felt a chill run down her arms even though she was sweating from the heat. The gun-men looked like teenage boys. They stared, black eyes expressionless, until the Jeep had passed.
After a few minutes when they were about a mile past the checkpoint, Rafael reached back into the cooler behind the seat and handed Gabriella a dented tin canteen full of water.
“So, what? He takes my tequila? Big whoop,” Rafael said, clearly irritated. “But we have more important thing still—the water. Tequila you can buy here cheap. Water? Is much harder to find in the jungle.”
She gratefully chugged on it, while he took a long sip of his own canteen before wiping the sweat dripping down his brow with a blue bandanna he untied from his neck.
They drove away, neither one of them mentioning the encounter with the rebels, but Gabriella’s heart was still racing. Rafael seemed unfazed by it.
Even after she had calmed down, Gabriella was perspiring like mad. The sweat pooled in the small pocket under her tank top between her breasts. Gabriella poured a tiny bit of water in her palm and then splashed it on her face. Rafael gave her a sideways glance she immediately understood. She remembered what he said about it being hard to find water. It was not to be wasted.
Chastened, she screwed the lid back on and tucked the canteen between her knees.
Gabriella scanned the thick jungle closing in on the road, looking for signs of life. Animals. People. Anything. In her imagination, the Jeep would round a corner and there they’d find Donovan, bruised and battered, maybe with blood-soaked bandages and torn clothing, but alive.
She was jolted out of her daydream by Rafael slamming on the brakes and skidding to a stop. A bloody carcass with strips of torn meat and bones was scattered across the road in front of them.
“Did you see it?”
Gabriella’s eyes were wide as she shook her head. She’d been looking off to the other side and didn’t see anything.
“A jaguar. It ran that way when we came around the corner.”
She nodded, peering into the thick jungle, looking for a spotted coat and glowing eyes. She hugged herself as a chill ran across her scalp, feeling cold and exposed in her tank top in the door-less Jeep.
Standing up in the Jeep, peering across the hood, she tried to figure out what the bloody mess in front of the Jeep once was.
“Tapir.” Rafael said.
Gabriella shrugged.
He scrunched his face and then said, “Like a big pig, but with nose like an anteater.”
Gabriella nodded. It must have been big. There was blood and guts and flesh everywhere. Once again, she glanced around the jungle surrounding them. That cat wasn’t done with his dinner yet.
She was relieved when, without ceremony Rafael stepped on the gas pedal and accelerated across the bloody carcass, bumping along as if it were a pothole and not a creature that had been alive until moments ago.
After a while, the canopy above them seemed to diminish, with more sunlight filtering down on the road. Not long after that, when they’d been on the road about an hour, the Jeep popped out of the jungle and into a clearing with smaller trees and brush. The sunlight beat down on Gabriella’s bare arms and the top of her ball cap.
About a mile ahead, between the trees, she saw the outline of small brown buildings. It was the outpost she’d seen on her map.
Rounding a corner, she saw there was a small dirt parking lot in front of the two buildings. Along with a rusted pick-up truck, a sleek black late model Range Rover was parked in the lot. Rafael leaned forward swearing under his breath.
“Who is it?” Gabriella said.
“This guy. He wanted to hire me this morning to take him to Uaxactun, but I told him I already was taking you.” Rafael said. “I would not work for him anyway. He is ... something off. I don’t know how to say it. In Spanish, we say me da mala espinas.” He hugged himself and shivered.
Gabriella nodded. Without knowing the Spanish, she understood. The guy gave Rafael the creeps.
Gabriella reached for her backpack as the Jeep pulled into the outpost.
Several men wearing big straw hats sat on a bench out front, sipping
cans of beer and spitting tobacco onto the ground. A few boys who looked to be middle school age kicked a ball around in the dirt behind one of the buildings.
“They are on recess.”
“This is a school?”
“Consuela and her daughter, Marta, teach the boys English in the afternoons, after the boys work in the fields all morning. Those men are their fathers and grandfathers who have dropped them off at the school and are sharing a cerveza and village gossip before siesta starts.
“Where do they all live?”
Rafael waved wildly, gesturing somewhere to the right. It didn’t make sense to her, but maybe there were homes tucked into the dense forest.
Within the hour, Rafael said, the men would lie on folded up mats in the shade of a large tree until the boys were done with their English classes, Rafael explained. They gathered here every day, which is why it would be a good place to ask about Donovan.
Rafael thumbed through a stack of American dollar bills, peeling off about twenty of them. He shoved the smaller stack in his front shirt pocket, tucked the larger stack deep into his jeans pocket, and grabbed a stack of the fliers. He told Gabriella to go inside and order something to eat. He would have better luck questioning the men if he were alone. She nodded.
Gabriella swung her legs out of the Jeep. The front door, a tattered screen with bells, opened and a man wearing a crisp white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and khaki pants and dark sunglasses stepped out. A long scar ran down his cheek.
The Italian from Josephine Lake.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Italian’s eyes were impossible to see behind his dark glasses so Gabriella couldn’t tell if his smile was genuine. He took both her hands in his. She caught a whiff of his expensive cologne. Again, she stared at the scar, wondering how he had got it.
“Ciao bella. Mi chiamo Nico Sicilia. I’m afraid we didn’t have time to get introduced the last time we saw each other.”
“Gabriella Giovanni.” She said it with brisk efficiency. She planned to say as little as possible until she figured out what was going on and he explained why he was in the deepest jungle of Central America driving a Range Rover.
“It seems maybe we are on parallel paths,” he said with a smile that revealed perfect white teeth.
She nodded waiting.
“If I had known you would be here, I would’ve waited to eat lunch. I am unaccustomed to dining alone. Ah, but maybe next time. Meanwhile, I would recommend the empanadas. Oh, and the senorita also cooks amazing tamales.”
He held his thumb and fingers together and kissed them, a very Italian gesture. It was sexy and remembering her reaction to his scar, she shifted uncomfortably. The only person she wanted to find sexy was her husband, the love of her life. She reminded herself that this guy gave Rafael the creeps. Gabriella didn’t want to show an ounce of warmth toward him until she figured out why.
And besides, in only a few seconds, he had already lied to her about not knowing she was there. Rafael told him this morning that she’d hired him. Plus, she didn’t want to admit that the shivers he gave her a moment ago had nothing to do with being creeped out. The opposite, in fact.
He continued to stare at her. Even though she couldn’t see behind his dark glasses, she could feel his gaze. When neither spoke for several seconds, she finally caved.
“What brings you to Guatemala?”
“I’m here for my government.”
“In what capacity?”
“I handle covert operations. Things I am not at liberty to discuss.”
“Covert operations involving the cartel, of course,” Gabriella said. “But that still doesn’t explain why you are here at this outpost right now.”
After more than a decade as a reporter, she wasn’t going to accept his evasive answers that easily.
“I’m heading to Uaxactun. Same as you.”
Aha. A sliver of honesty. She rewarded him with a smile.
It seemed like it made him nervous because he stumbled a little over his next words. “We could caravan if you like. My driver will wait until your business is finished here.”
For a second, the aura of confidence seemed to dim a little as if he knew the answer already.
“No, thank you.” Gabriella brushed by him and tugged on the screen door, letting it slam behind her without a backward glance.
Inside, a squat woman with dark hair pulled back in a thick braid gave Gabriella a giant smile and gestured to a small table by the door.
“Buenas tardes,” she said.
Gabriella smiled as she settled into the red plastic chair.
The small room only had three tables, but each one had a clean white tablecloth, white napkins, silverware and a tiny vase with a small flower in it.
The woman brought a plastic cup of water. “Qué te gusta?” What would you like?
Her Spanish was rusty so she shrugged and pointed at the woman repeating the words back to her, “Qué te gusta.”
She hoped it translated back to something like “I’ll have what you like to eat.”
The woman stared at her for a second and then understood, nodding and smiling, running her palms down her apron as she walked back to the kitchen whistling.
Gabriella’s mouth watered from the smell of some type of meat simmering in a large pot on the counter. On a small griddle the woman was heating up a stack of tortillas.
After a few moments, she brought over some tortillas, refried beans, white rice and chunks of meat smothered in some sort of chili sauce. She hesitated and Gabriella smiled. Perfect.
She dug in, piling beans and rice and meat in the tortilla, folding it carefully and taking a bite. She closed her eyes with happiness. When she opened them, she caught the woman watching. She put her hands on her heart in a gesture of gratefulness and pleasure. The woman blushed with pleasure and bustled around cleaning while Gabriella finished the first tortilla and started to fill a second one.
When the door opened, Gabriella didn’t look up from her food, expecting Rafael to slide into the seat opposite her. Instead, she smelled that same cologne. She knew who it was before her eyes traveled up the man’s body. The Italian.
He crouched down so they were eye level and took off his sunglasses. Gabriella was startled by the color of his eyes. Not many Italians had eyes that icy blue. They were striking against his dark skin.
“I came in to apologize for being so vague and unhelpful,” he said and quickly looked around. The woman had disappeared into the kitchen. “It’s the Omerta. You must know what that means, right? You do have ancestors from Italy, I assume.”
“I know what Omerta means,” Gabriella said, not flinching from his gaze. “And I know people use it as an excuse to keep secrets.”
He smiled at her curt tone. And shrugged, as if conceding. But Gabriella knew every word was calculated. Whatever came out of his mouth next, she knew he had planned on what to say before he walked in the door.
“There is a man I need to find. Someone who is very dangerous to our undercover operation here in Guatemala. My job is to find him and make sure our cover is not blown. I am not allowed to speak about it because if they even get an inkling that we might have an operative undercover here, I am effectively signing his death warrant. Do you understand why I must be careful about who I share this information with?”
“I’m also looking for a man.” Gabriella said in a small voice, looking away.
“Your husband. Sean Donovan.”
She was startled, even though she knew she shouldn’t be. She nodded.
“They said his plane went down near the Northern border of Guatemala,” she said. “That’s why I’m heading to Uaxactun.”
“I know. The man I am looking for was on that plane.”
Now, she really was surprised.
“So, we are looking for the same thing?”
“I believe so.”
Gabriella kicked out a chair with one booted foot. “Have a seat, Mr. Silicia.”
“Nico.”
“I’m going to ask around in the small villages. There are a lot of small ranches, tucked away in the jungle, mostly run by people hired by the cartel. It is dangerous to start asking questions, but it may be my best bet. If you like, I will also ask about your husband. But first I need to go to El Mirador first to pick up some guns. I’ve arranged for the purchase of two weapons. It was too difficult to try to bring them into the country, but it appears easy enough to buy them once you are here. Money talks, as they say.”
He looked at her. “What is your plan?”
Gabriella shrugged. She wasn’t sure she wanted to share.
“You know this is not America,” he said. “These people kill as easily as they scratch an itch. You need a cover. With Rafael as your guide, you could easily claim to be an environmental reporter studying the rainforest. You have reporter’s credentials with you, correct?”
Gabriella nodded, thinking of the press pass with her photo tucked deep in her bag.
“They won’t kill you for that. For reporting. At least I don’t think so.”
“That’s comforting.”
When she was done eating, she left a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and headed outside to where Rafael was waiting in the driver’s seat of the Jeep. Nico trailed behind her, settling into his own vehicle.
When she had walked out of the small café and Rafael had seen her with Nico, he had spit out the open door of the Jeep.
Gabriella gestured toward the Range Rover.
“They are going to follow us. We are all heading to the same place, after all.”
Rafael shook his head but didn’t say anything, just turned the key in the ignition.
Too bad. It was her dollar. Rafael wasn’t showing her around for free. She was paying him to do what she asked, so he’d have to deal with Nico, even if he didn’t like him.
After he started the engine, Rafael told her in a low voice that he’d had no luck with the men out in front of the small kitchen. He said one guy knew something but wasn’t talking. He could tell by the look in his eyes.
Blessed are the Peacemakers Page 4