River of the Damned

by Aiden James

  “I’m not following you, man,” I said, wondering why in the hell he wanted to discuss something other than the assignment we would be quizzed on less than ten hours from now, based on the ten o’clock news broadcast just starting five minutes ago. “Is it because of those pictures?”

  I pointed to the barely recognizable bodies of the editor and his wife, butchered beyond recognition by a barrage of bullets while sitting in their car at a traffic light in Sao Paulo.

  “Yes. We’re going to die if we go to Fiji, Boss—I can feel it,” he said, pounding once on his chest to emphasize his point. “These men… they are just like Yassir Ali’s men, and maybe worse since instead of pursuing us, this time we are pursuing them. What happens to a jaguar when you corner it in its den?”

  He had a point.

  “Have you ever cornered a jag in its den before?” I asked, unable to contain the smirk Marie always hated and my Tawankan pal had learned over the years to tolerate.

  “Go ahead and make fun, Nick,” he said, scowling. “But if I die, then you get to tell my auntie why you didn’t listen!”

  “How in the hell does listening to you sharing your fears make me take on the blame if you happen to be right?” I countered, getting more irritated by what I considered a stupid and useless conversation. “Look, Ishi, we’re either headed to Fiji or a long prison term tomorrow morning. Five years of doing what they tell us, or the rest of our lives spent half in prison and half in poverty. And, as far as these other assholes are concerned? We’ve faced worse. Don’t you remember the Rodriguez brothers on that island near Belize? Hmmm?”

  He nodded sullenly.

  “And what did they say they were going to do to us after they had us tied up in the cave where the tide was coming in, steadily getting closer to our feet?”

  “They were going to cut us and let us either bleed to death or drown,” he mumbled.

  “Well, just to clarify… it wasn’t going to be a suicidal cut on the wrists, pal. They intended to cut our nuts off and let us bleed out in agony,” I reminded him. “These cats don’t seem that extreme to me—”

  “We could leave tonight and head for Honduras. Once we’re in the jungles, no one would find us!” he interrupted me, and his soft brown eyes twinkled with hope. “I checked the roads to Florida, and we could be there by morning and on a boat that night—”

  “Where the local police and feds would be waiting, thank you very much!” I said, returning the favor of cutting him off. “Dude, we’re stuck! All running will do is make things worse. We need to chill and focus on doing what Spence and Jacobs have assigned to us, and try not to get killed. It’s the only…. Well, who in the hell could that be at this hour?”

  Someone knocked on our front door. The knuckles’ rap upon the wood was almost like a secret lover’s message intended to only awaken their beau sleeping somewhere close to the door. The doorbell contained a musical bell chime, and one couldn’t miss the button next to the doorknob. But it was ignored.

  “Who is it?” whispered Ishi, when I shook my head in surprise after peering through the peephole.

  “It’s our employer.”

  I opened the door to Agent Jacobs, who pushed his way inside and then quickly closed the door behind him.

  “Are you all right, man?”

  “Sorry, Nick… sorry to you too, Ishi,” he said, dusting off snowflakes from his trench coat while wiping his shoes on the floor mat. “I know it’s late. But this can’t wait until tomorrow.”

  I shrugged indifferently and Ishi offered to take his coat and scarf.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I won’t be here too long…. I see you guys are working on your assignment.”

  He motioned to the files and photographs spread out on the dining room table and stepped over to them.

  “We’re getting a good handle on what to expect,” I said, pausing to wait for Ishi to rejoin us. “Maybe we should’ve signed up for the life insurance policies after all.”

  The three of us shared a polite laugh. By then, Ishi seemed to notice the same thing I had immediately picked up on. Jacobs was nervous… almost jittery.

  “Christ… I won’t beat around the bush about what’s up,” he said, gazing down at the same Brazilian homicide photographs that had spurred Ishi’s wariness about the upcoming trip. “But may I ask for something to drink? I could use a beer.”

  “All we have is Guinness,” I said.

  “That’ll do.”

  “You want one too, Ishi?”

  “Sure.”

  I had a sudden impression that we might polish off the eight longnecks remaining from a twelve-pack in the fridge. Agent Jacobs being on edge was a totally different side of him from what we had seen the past few days. I looked forward to finding out what was eating at him.

  “You might want to put this shit away for now,” he said, after I returned with three opened bottles. He pushed aside the files closest to him as he took a seat at the table. Ishi and I did the same.

  “Why? Aren’t we supposed to be getting a pop quiz on ‘this shit’ in the morning from Professor Spence?” I asked, drawing a pained grin from our late night visitor.

  He drained nearly half of his Guinness before responding.

  “If you’ll be agreeable to what I ask of you tonight, you won’t be heading to Fiji tomorrow after all,” he said.

  “Really?” Ishi’s eyes lit up.

  “Something much more important has come up,” he said, shifting his gaze from me to Ishi and back again. “I need your help with something personal…. It might even cost me the career I have dedicated myself tirelessly to these past eight years. But I have no choice, and you guys are perfectly suited for this mission.”

  “Gee, thanks for the flattery,” I deadpanned. “But while you are polishing up your resume to work for someone else, perhaps some swanky D.C. senator’s office or law firm, what’s to prevent us from swinging from the gallows like Mary Surratt?”

  “You have my word—I would go to jail first before allowing either of you to take the fall for this,” he said. “You won’t be breaking any laws, and what you’ll be doing still falls under the general guidelines of what we take care of under Project Golden Eye.”

  “So, is this an official reassignment?” I asked.

  “No… It won’t be on the books until William finds out about it,” he said. “I can’t tell him anything until after you guys arrive in Ecuador.”

  “Huh? So… this is a rogue assignment?” I must confess to enjoying the secretive and almost privileged way it sounded.

  “It is,” he admitted. “If William finds out about any of this before you guys are on the plane I booked for Quito earlier tonight, and have safely cleared the United States’ airspace, all three of us will be royally screwed. That is why I am taking extra pains to make sure he doesn’t find out.”

  “You hear that, Ishi?”

  “We are going to Ecuador, right?” he replied.

  “Yep, and what does that imply about your earlier rant?”

  “I don’t know… oh, oh… I get it! You are so funny, Boss!”

  “What’s he talking about, Nick?” Jacobs frowned suspiciously.

  “Nothing too serious,” I said, and it was a sweet thing to be the guy smiling smugly. “My buddy over here thought you guys might have the place bugged, since he and I are held in such high esteem.”

  Agent Jacobs suddenly seemed worried, which wasn’t at all the reaction I expected. Ishi’s relief melted into a paranoid expression worse than before. If the two didn’t look so damned hilarious in their reactions I might’ve withheld my devil-may-care reaction.

  “It’s not funny, Boss!” said Ishi, when I burst out laughing.

  “The hell it isn’t!”

  To my further surprise, our guest shook his head sheepishly and soon chuckled about it, too—surely resigned to the fact he had already stepped past the point of no return when he showed up at our condo that night.

  “So, I guess we could
be under surveillance right now from hidden devices?” I persisted.

  “Not that I know of,” he said, after a moment’s silent deliberation. “But anything’s possible with an agency that protects a portion of our government’s chief interests. If this place is wired, well… I hope whomever is listening will hear me out before deciding to crash the place.”

  That last part was especially comforting. Ishi looked more and more like the timid kid I rescued from a San Lorenzo slum’s garbage dump.

  “Well, then, let’s hope for the best,” I said, tipping my bottle toward my companions. “So, tell us why you want us to visit Ecuador.”

  Our proposed assignment turned out to have even less to do with Project Golden Eye’s scope of support than I suspected, as it consisted almost entirely of a personal matter. A personal matter that was very dear to the heart of Agent Jacobs… namely a woman.

  Sandra Pierce was her name, and to hear Jacobs speak of his one-time-sweetheart, who attended the University of Virginia while he was at Georgetown, she was a former flame who remained greatly cherished by him. To watch his eyes tear up and the fact he had to clear his sinuses several times in detailing her recent misfortune told me the man’s devotion to this long lost love was far from familial, and far from over. He was still madly in love with Ms. Pierce.

  Had he brought this up, say, a year before, I might’ve been tempted to hand him the rest of our Guinness and send him on his way—to wallow in his misery until he came to his senses and realized a host of realities pointed to him needing to move on from the gal, even if it meant enduring extensive professional counseling to do so. But, my heart’s grief over Marie Da Vinci was quite fresh, and watching the man bravely talk about his ‘former’ love was like holding a mirror up to my face and heart.

  I was all in for aiding his quest—even before he got to the part about Sandra crusading across the northern sections of South America with her family—a family led by a famed archaeologist I was quite familiar with from afar: Dr. Nathaniel Pierce.

  “Dr. Pierce is on a humanitarian pursuit of securing recently discovered Inca treasures—many of which are tied to several ‘city of gold’ legends that have long existed throughout the Amazon nations, such as Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia,” Jacobs explained.

  “And, apparently, Ecuador, too,” I added, since that was where we were being rerouted for our initial assignment under his supervision.

  “Yes… that is correct.” He nodded thoughtfully. A hopeful smile belied the forlornness in his dimmed blue eyes. “Sandra and her mom joined her dad and two brothers in Manaus, after Dr. Pierce’s most recent success in northern Brazil. Then, with a dozen guides and other assistants, the group headed north through the Amazon jungles in search of the lost city of Logrono.”

  “Not too far from Cuenca, in the southwest section of the country,” I said, drawing an admiring look from Jacobs and a perplexed one from Ishi. “No, I’ve never been there… but I have heard of the place—both the new town founded by missionaries in the early nineteen-fifties, and the original one that once was near a mystical refuge that belonged to the Jivaro people. No one has ever found evidence of that golden metropolis, from what I understand.”

  “That’s what our records showed, too… but apparently due to the deforestation going on throughout the Amazon Basin, large sections of what used to be impenetrable wilderness is being explored and marked for further pillaging. During one of these ‘expeditions’, small golden artifacts were recovered, and when the items hit the black market, rumors spread that the relics were found near a cave that bore an Incan seal carved into the side of the cavern’s entrance.”

  “I would think the place has already been plundered by now… yet you wouldn’t be enlisting our help if that was the case…. Would you?” I thought of my own experiences, where certain hidden sites were stripped clean once they made it onto the antiquities radar.

  “No, I wouldn’t be troubling either of you tonight,” he said. “What scares the hell out of me for Sandra and her family’s safety is the fact the area is said to be the home of what’s left of the Ecuadorian Jivaro tribes. And, one of the reasons nothing more than the initial small statues made it into the black market is that one of the men died from a poison dart wound. His partners—all indigenous Indians from Cuenca—refused to discuss the details of where the mysterious cave could be found. Superstitions run deep in Ecuador, and since their attackers never revealed themselves from the thick cover, they believe they had angered the spirits who rule the Amazon jungle…. At least, this is what I was told when I began researching Logrono, after I learned from a friend that Sandra had already left the States and would be traveling through ‘headhunter’ territory with her dad and family. I was panicked then, and am beyond terrified for her safety now….”

  Agent Jacobs began to tremble, covering his mouth with one hand while digging the fingertips of his other into a crevice in the tabletop’s leather façade. He obviously pictured and believed that something horrible had already happened to the Pierce clan and their team.

  “When did they go?” Ishi asked.

  “Sandra and her mom flew out to see Dr. Pierce the week before Halloween,” he said, after releasing a deep breath. “Then the two decided to join him and the rest of the group in early November, with the intent of coming back to Virginia in time for Thanksgiving. Sandra’s return ticket was left open until November twenty-first….”

  I reached out and gently touched his wrist when more than a minute passed and Jacobs wouldn’t continue. “When was the last time anyone heard from her, Dr. Pierce or the team?”

  He looked up suddenly, as if awakened from an extremely lucid daydream, likely picturing this girl, Sandra, in terrible straights. As if he could read my assumption, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, removing her picture.

  “This is her when we were dating,” he said proudly. “Granted, it’s been almost ten years since that photo was taken, but I swear to God she looks the same…. The last time anyone reported seeing them was in the new town of Logrono. That was on November eighth, and they were purchasing supplies and food. No one has seen or heard anything since. A search team comprised of Dr. Pierce’s associates in Brazil and Peru turned up nothing. It’s as if they vanished from the face of the Earth.”

  Sandra back in college was a pretty blue-eyed blonde, and didn’t look like the type who would fair well after disappearing from contact nearly five weeks ago. However, the chances of anyone surviving in the jungles are not near as bad as some might think. But to survive means knowing how to procure food and shelter, and also know what plants and creatures to avoid—some toxins from either one could kill a human within a few hours, and often in minutes if the toxins reached the bloodstream unimpeded.

  And if the infamous Jivaro were involved?

  Let’s just say that the Ramos brothers—the so-called ‘ghost bandits’—would have nothing on this reclusive tribe that was never conquered by the Spaniards, who brought an end to the Inca’s mighty empire. The Jivaro warriors were said to be able to strike cleanly and as effectively as any guerilla soldiers from more modern ages, and when confronted face-to-face they would fight with a ferocity that defied fear of pain or death. Then, as was their custom, they would decapitate their victims and through a painstaking ceremonial process would remove the face and hair from a victim’s skull and shrink it to the size of a man’s fist. Seeing one’s comrades hanging from a Jivaro warrior’s belt was most certainly a terrifying sight!

  I would rather pursue the Ramos and Rodriguez brothers as a tandem any day over dealing with a single Jivaro warrior—in ancient or modern times. Yet, as I prepared to decline Jacobs’ request, on behalf of both Ishi and myself, his desperate gaze bore a hole to the core of my soul as it met my eyes…. I thought about my own haunted look that had greeted me the night before in the bathroom mirror’s reflection. It effectively trumped what my mind wanted to tell him.

  “All right, boss,” I sa
id, while Ishi’s raised eyebrows anticipated what was coming out of my mouth next. “We’ll do it. You take care of Agent Spence’s wrath and we’ll take care of finding your lovely woman… and the rest of Dr. Pierce’s team, of course.”

  Hopefully, Jacobs’ heart and mine proved to be right, and our new mission would be successful. Otherwise, being disciplined or going to jail would be the least of our worries. We could very well end up over our heads in this… or without them.

  Chapter Four

  Our flight to Quito that Monday morning departed from Dulles much earlier than I would’ve liked, but at least it was a chartered airplane again. The captain and lone flight attendant were accommodating—more so than the ones on our transatlantic flight. I slept for most of the six-hour flight that departed Washington just after 4:30 a.m. The time in Ecuador is exactly the same as Washington’s Eastern Standard Time, outside of daylight savings in the spring, which made for an easy adjustment as we prepared to land.

  “I think I could go for some good ceviche, Ishi,” I said after we landed, and the customs routine had been taken care of. “Maybe that and a steak.”

  “Marinated in achiote? Mmmm… it could get us all tasty before the headhunters decide to eat us!”

  Ishi was still smarting from my decision without discussing it with him privately first before giving the okay to Agent Jacobs. But, hell… he already said he wasn’t up for the Fiji deal, and I assumed he would be all in for Ecuador.

  The good news was he had warmed up to the idea quite a bit during our trip—likely since it was too late to turn back now.

  “Where is this guide supposed to meet us?” he asked, as we gathered our duffel bags from the plane and headed across the tarmac where the main terminal sat.

  “Someplace out front, according to Jacobs,” I replied, picking up my pace when the drizzling rain threatened to become a downpour.

  December is moderately warm in this part of the world, but also very wet. It usually marks the start of the rainy season, and those who have spent extensive time in Ecuador will gladly confirm the next four months will be a sodden mess. Traveling in the deeper wilderness is never recommended.