Missionaries

by Phil Klay

  * * *

  —

  Police captain Victor Hernández Nieto wasn’t expecting the call. Yes, since the kidnapping of the American, his carabineros had been working overtime, reaching out to every contact they had. Yes, Army assumed it was Mil Jesúses, but he knew better and he’d let the Operations and Intelligence Group know. And yes, he had some ideas about what might be going on, but still, he didn’t expect anyone to call him.

  It had become obvious very early that the military had muscled its way into the lead for the journalist’s recovery. This was undoubtedly what the Americans wanted. So when a call came through and the voice on the other end of the line announced that he was a lieutenant colonel in the special forces and he wished to get Nieto’s honest assessment of the situation—not just the kidnapping situation but the security situation in La Vigia and the possible repercussions any military actions might have—he didn’t quite believe it.

  “I know you police sometimes have issues with our style of doing things,” the lieutenant colonel, Juan Pablo Pulido, said.

  “I don’t have a problem with your style,” Nieto said, choosing his words carefully. He knew nothing at all about this lieutenant colonel. “I think there is a time and a place for a more . . . for your approach. I simply wish there was more coordination.”

  “And here I am,” Juan Pablo said, “coordinating.”

  Nieto considered complaining about the raid on El Alemán, which had happened on his turf and which he had only been informed of as it was happening. As far as he could see, that raid hadn’t led to any decrease in narcotrafficking. If anything, the opposite. And most of the individual players hadn’t changed. Javier Ocasio, a former army officer turned paramilitary turned narco, had been a lieutenant for the Urabeños in La Vigia before the takeover and was now the second in command after the takeover. Meanwhile, sources had dried up, and Los Mil Jesúses had solidified control of the town. They’d put up a candidate for mayor to challenge the insufficiently corrupt incumbent. They’d put pressure on the head of the local police outpost, a talented noncommissioned officer named Diego Murillo, who had recently claimed to be sleeping with a loaded pistol under his pillow. And the Fundación de Justicia y Fe, which he’d tangled with in the past but which did good work in the town, claimed to have had their movement and operations increasingly curtailed in the name of “public order.” In short, the space for civic-minded leaders to operate was withering.

  “I should mention,” Juan Pablo said, “that we have requested that Los Mil Jesúses be listed as a Class A Organized Group.”

  “Ah.” That changed things. “You want to know what kind of havoc might occur if there’s a decapitation strike.”

  “Well, yes. Yes, of course.”

  There was something the lieutenant colonel wasn’t telling him. It bothered Nieto. But he went on and started to explain the challenges such a strike would present. That Jefferson had somehow brokered a peace with the Urabeños but that if the army took him out the truce probably wouldn’t outlast his death. That the second in command, Javier Ocasio, was generally considered unstable. That Nieto didn’t have the resources to control the chaos that would follow a decapitation strike. And then the lieutenant colonel interrupted.

  “There’s a couple of university students in the town,” Juan Pablo said. “With the foundation.”

  “Ah.”

  “It would look bad if a few children from Nacional got caught up in something like this.”

  Nieto started to chuckle. Of course! God forbid the violence in La Vigia affects someone from the capital! And students at a university, no less! Valuable lives. Lives of the sort that got him a direct conversation with a senior officer in the special forces.

  “Is there any way,” Juan Pablo went on, “of escorting them out of the town?”

  Unbelievable.

  “Oh, I really wish there was a way,” Nieto said with great pleasure. “But you know what us poor rural police forces are like. Underfunded. Underequipped. We just don’t have the resources for that kind of thing.”

  The conversation was short after that. Toward the end, the lieutenant colonel did ask one more fairly significant question.

  “There is another theory I have heard,” he said. “That this kidnapping was not the Mil Jesúses. That it was a cocalero association in conflict with the Jesúses.”

  “Ah,” Nieto said. That was unlikely, but not out of the question.

  “The FARC started as peasant self-defense forces,” the lieutenant colonel continued. “If the cocaleros aren’t just organizing, which is bad enough, but turning to violence, that is something we need to know. So is it possible?”

  What he thought wasn’t as important as what consequences it would have in terms of where army resources were deployed. The army’s approach was the kinetic intelligence approach, knowing the territory so as to prepare the battlefield. Pushing hard. Rustling feathers. Kicking up dirt to see what settles. An approach well geared to units that helicopter in, shoot things up, and then leave others to deal with the consequences. The approach he had been trying to bring to his region, with limited success, was the approach he had been taught at the General Santander Police Academy back in 2004, a form of intelligence gathering that was less about generating targets than expanding a network of sources and community relationships, knowing every block on a street, every rural road, and every peasants association. Then you know who lives there. What they do. Who matters. Then you can do prevention. Then you can expand the “culture of legality.” Or hope to.

  The raid on El Alemán had blown things up in La Vigia, opening the door to Jefferson and the Mil Jesúses. But he still had good networks in the rural areas. If the journalist was out there, he’d get firm intelligence eventually, and then he could let the army know. Until then, maybe it wouldn’t be terrible if they started kicking up dirt in La Vigia. He’d lost control there anyway.

  “Your source,” Nieto said, “and the valuable intelligence they provided. Was it for the El Alemán raid? What I want to say is . . . is the source connected to the Mil Jesúses? Because the Mil Jesúses are the only group that matters in La Vigia right now, and no one does anything without Jefferson’s approval.”

  That was, like all the best lies, more or less true.

  6

  As they raced back to La Vigia, as Agudelo spit questions at Abel, as Abel furiously punched numbers into a satellite phone he’d produced from seemingly out of nowhere, Valencia felt a shiver go through her. Not from fear. She felt her heart beating faster. She felt the sharpness of things. The trees speeding by, the poverty of the shanties ahead of them. There were people walking in the street, people who seemed more alive than they had an hour before. Like many young people, who value their lives little because they have such little understanding of what effort it took to wrestle them into existence and tend them into adulthood, Valencia had wanted to be close to the spirit of destruction that her father had taught her from an early age to think of as the true essence of her country. Now she was part of it.

  “I don’t know who they were. No, not Elenos, no. Amateurs.” Abel had the large, boxy phone to his ear, panic on his face. Valencia assumed he was speaking to Jefferson. “They lost control. They could have beat her to death. No one took charge, no one gave orders. Amateurs.”

  Valencia reached over and grabbed Sara’s hand and smiled. Sara startled.

  “This will be a story when we get back to Bogotá,” Valencia said. It was a bizarre thing to say, and later she wouldn’t understand why the words had left her mouth, but Sara smiled and seemed to calm a little, so perhaps they were the right words for the time. Valencia found herself wanting to giggle. It was a reaction she’d later feel very guilty about.

  When they reached Abel’s shop, Agudelo skidded the van to the side of the road, turned to Abel, and said, “Out!”

  “That was not us,” Abel said.
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  “Out!”

  Only once he was gone and they were back on the road did Valencia open her mouth.

  “I should ask my father what is going on,” she said, half to herself.

  Sara looked at her strangely, so, by way of explanation, Valencia said, “He is a lieutenant colonel in the special forces.”

  “What?”

  Valencia said it again. Quiet followed.

  Eventually, Agudelo said, “You should have told me that a month ago, girl.”

  Sara was looking at Valencia with a wide-eyed expression. It occurred to Valencia that perhaps she had just put herself in danger. These people might not be her friends.

  The town whipped by. As they approached the central square of La Vigia, Agudelo began speaking in quick, clipped sentences.

  “News of this will get out very quickly. When we get to the offices, you will email your father. You will tell him you are fine. You will tell him that we have dealt with kidnappings before. You will tell him that the organization will ensure everyone’s safety. You will tell him that leaving La Vigia immediately might worry groups in the region. This is nothing new for us. I will notify the university and we will discuss what to do next. This is nothing we have not dealt with before.”

  There was silence in the van.

  “With an American?” Valencia said.

  “What?”

  “You have dealt with a kidnapped American before?”

  Agudelo scowled. “That’s not important.”

  Sara turned and eyed Valencia. Of course it was important. They both knew it. It changed everything. Actions would be taken here that would never be taken if it was just some poor cocalero, or townsperson, or lawyer, or human rights worker, or student. They should be prepared. They should call her father. And her professor, the one supposedly in charge, didn’t seem to understand why.

  Agudelo parked the car, swung open the door, and marched them up the steps to the foundation’s offices. They barged through the door, and there, sitting in the main room across from Luisa and a few frightened-looking members of the foundation staff, was a tired-looking middle-aged man with a mustache and a jowly face.

  “Agudelo,” Luisa said in an even voice, “I’m glad you’re here. I don’t think you’ve met Jefferson López before.”

  * * *

  —

  Lisette was in pain, but that didn’t matter. Pain she could deal with. She was a runner. She’d long ago learned to abstract herself, to treat the body as an object, dispense orders, and float free. When they forced her to move and the pain spiked and nearly obliterated her consciousness, it was almost a relief. When the pain wasn’t overpowering her, what she felt in its place, suffusing every part of her body and resting like a weight about her chest, was shame.

  She had been abducted. She had been abducted and hadn’t taken any of the normal precautions because, hey, it was Colombia, not Afghanistan. It was the guerrilla, not ISIS. Through her own stupidity and arrogance, she’d gotten herself kidnapped, and now her family would suffer and her friends would suffer. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. There wasn’t anyone waiting for a phone call at the end of the day. She hadn’t noted the lack of traffic coming in the other direction from the checkpoint. She hadn’t called ahead to find out what conditions were like. She hadn’t called the ELN’s representative to the European Union to let them know she’d be in their turf. She hadn’t registered with the embassy (no one registered with the embassy, but still). She imagined Bob’s disapproval. “You’re acting like a twenty-year-old freelancer for Vice.” And she imagined her mother and her sister, terrified for her, anxiously awaiting news of her death while preparing for Uncle Carey’s.

  After her beating, they’d loaded her on a truck and driven down what felt like exceptionally bumpy dirt roads. Her kidnappers hadn’t bothered to blindfold her, and at first she took this to mean that they were heading to her execution. As time passed and they drove past fields filled with the soft round leaves and red berries of coca plants, she noticed the nervousness of her captors. Sometimes they’d mention “el plan de Jorge.” She heard the names of towns. And she thought, these guys are really bad at this. It was not an entirely hopeful realization.

  Eventually, the truck stopped at a shack by the side of a coca field, sheltered under larger trees to provide some degree of protection from the gaze of herbicide-spraying planes. And out of the shack, a simple, rough concrete construction, emerged two men. The first was a sweet-faced young man in his midtwenties wearing a loud T-shirt with pinks and blues and red zigzags splashed across his chest, along with yellow, graffiti-style words like “ZAM!” and “FOXY!” and “SEX!” The other, older and thicker and shorter, had a tight braid necklace and an extremely faded shirt with the cracked remnants of Che Guevara’s image still visible. On a second look, Lisette could make out bits of lettering floating at the top of Che’s head, and she realized it was a shirt for the ’90s rock band Rage Against the Machine.

  Diego had once told her a story about the weirdness of looking through a scope and seeing a Taliban fighter in a Van Halen T-shirt. “All this old U.S. culture shit, the excess T-shirts that never got sold, they make their way to these countries like ten years too late,” he’d said. “And then you’re looking through the scope getting all nostalgic, like, ‘Yeah, man, I danced to that song with Zhanna Aronov at my prom.’ And then you shoot the fucker.” She had exactly two seconds to wonder if the shirt was some kind of political statement or just another bit of evidence of the reach of U.S. capitalism. And then they dragged her off the truck and the pain spiked again.

  She was standing before them. Or, rather, standing above them. They were short. Really short. And her body was aching, she was trying to stand straight, as though there was some kind of pride to be found there, but she looked at the ground and it seemed like a much better place to be.

  The shortest one, the one in the Rage Against the Machine shirt, seemed to be in charge. He inspected her silently, then turned to her captors.

  “Why is she bleeding?”

  Her captors looked at the ground.

  “Did you take her phone?”

  They said nothing, and he stepped forward and grabbed her sides, feeling for her pockets, and his touch against her caused pain to bloom, an onset so fierce her vision disappeared and she found herself holding him, arms on his shoulders and her legs weak underneath her, clutching him for support, and he threw her off, thinking she was attacking him, and she fell to the ground and one of the others kicked her, but it barely registered. So strange, that his hands were so painful, not meaning to be, but work boots colliding into her bruised side, the sound of it a dull thump against bruised meat, painless, as if it were no more than the distant sound of a woman pounding a piece of veal in another room. She couldn’t feel it. Above her, somewhere, was a scuffle, and a shouted word whose meaning she didn’t catch. Then Rage Against the Machine knelt by her and said, “I am sorry.” She felt his hands on her pants, her phone sliding out of her pocket, and then, in a resigned voice, Rage Against the Machine saying, “Now the Sia knows where we are.”

  And she wanted to laugh, she did. But also, she was pretty sure they were going to kill her.

  * * *

  —

  Jefferson was fat. That’s all Valencia could think, seeing him in the flesh. Not obese, and not fat in the way Luisa was fat, where her bulk contributed to a kind of presence. He was just fat. He looked like what he said he was—a rich rancher who lived well, ate well, and liked to spread his money around. He had a small black mustache, a checkered shirt, tan work pants that were too big for him, and a pistol tucked into his belt. He was unimpressive. Somebody’s rich uncle.

  “Jefferson,” Professor Agudelo said, acknowledging his presence flatly. The other workers and students stood around the room, waiting for something to happen. Luisa looked at him with visible disgust.r />
  “I heard you were attacked,” he said. “I am so sorry.”

  So this was a paramilitary commander. This was the man who’d cornered Alma, called out, Hey Jhon, you wanna eat? Hey Hector, you want to eat? and then watched as they raped her. There was a rumor that Jefferson had killed Luisa’s father. There was a rumor that when he came to town, he’d tortured every Urabeño who wouldn’t swear allegiance. He should look more substantive. He should have a scar on his face, a long crooked scar. A square jaw. Jefferson’s face was pocked, as though he’d had acne as a child, and it was fleshy. His eyes didn’t fix on any one person, but seemed to float lazily around the room as he asked questions about what happened and what the journalist had been doing outside of La Vigia. As the first shock of fear subsided, Valencia began to feel oddly disappointed. Look at him. Just another lump of flesh and blood, like the rest of us.

  “The foundation will put out a statement to the media,” Jefferson said, “saying that the journalist was taken by the guerrilla.”

  “We don’t know who she was taken by,” Luisa said.