by Phil Klay
Staring at Javier’s face, the last words of the psalm echoed in her memory. Your wrath has swept over me, your terrors have destroyed me. You have taken from me friend and neighbor—darkness is my closest friend. She had come so far since then. She was not that girl. She knew so much better how to handle the Javiers of the world now.
When Javier finally arrived, she got straight to the point.
“I respect you,” she lied. “Like few people in this town do.”
And he growled. Growled. These men were children.
Carefully, without suggesting he had anything to do with her death, she brought up Alma. It was her opening gambit. To suggest he pay her family a condolence payment.
“With Jefferson gone,” she said, “everyone knows blood is in the water. This is a delicate time. And her death has angered people.”
“No one cares about a dead guerrillera.”
“I have ways of knowing what the people of this town care about,” she said. “Things they won’t tell you. It is useful knowledge.”
That surprised him. He had obviously never considered that she could be anything more than an irritant. Before he could reject the possibility, she added, “Do you want to rule over a town of people who support you, or a town of toads, croaking your every movement to the government and to the Peludos and to the Urabeños and to the police?”
She could see him considering the question seriously.
“How much would you suggest?”
She named a ridiculous figure, a year of income for a woman like Alma but an easy payment for Javier. Then she explained that it had to be exorbitant. A miserly payment would be worse than nothing. If he wanted to be a king, he had to show a king’s generosity. Now, at the beginning of his reign more than ever. He said he would consider it.
As she left, she decided to use the payment as a benchmark. If he made it, it’d show his intentions. If he didn’t, she’d evacuate the office, wait for him to get himself killed, and only move back in once a new order had established itself. She’d seen cycles like this before.
* * *
—
Everyone expected her to catch the next flight to America, to head home and lick her wounds. Concerned, faintly patronizing emails came from around the globe. Friends, family, colleagues. The only one she really appreciated was from Bob.
“Here’s my take,” the email began, followed by a bullet-pointed list of threat assessments for the area, best practices for journalists, and how the actions she’d taken racked up. It was lengthy, a display of Bob’s precise attention to detail and fine-grained nuance. And pedantry. It concluded, “Yes, you could have done better. But we both know that most of the journalists we admire take far bigger risks. What happened was not your fault, except insofar as you were doing good reporting and pissing people off.”
It wasn’t true, of course. She didn’t have anything to report, not even enough of a handle on the area to know who had kidnapped her, and why. When the Colombian military had showed up at the clinic where she was being treated for cracked ribs and the early stages of pneumonia, they’d been up front about their annoyance at her presence in the region, her inability to answer even their most basic questions about who’d been holding her, and what their relationship was to Jefferson.
Nevertheless, Bob had suggested she put together a pitch for a story about her kidnapping and what the situation in Norte de Santander said about the coming peace deal. “Remember the old New York Sun style guide,” he said. “A reporter can’t begin a story with the word ‘I’ unless they’ve been shot in the groin. And since you haven’t been shot in the groin, the piece has to be about the peace deal, not you.” She didn’t know what her story said about the peace deal, but she bullshitted a few hundred words, sent them to Bob, who revised them and sent them to an editor at The New York Times Magazine. Who emailed her directly to say she was interested. It was the best break she’d ever received in her career, and it depressed her.
“Take what you can get,” Diego told her at a Japanese restaurant in Bogotá, where he’d flown out to see her. “You deserve it.”
“It’s quite a way to earn a story,” she said. Though she hadn’t earned it, not yet. Her pitch was bullshit, but her story couldn’t be. She had more reporting to do.
“You know,” Diego said, “I’m the guy who found out they were holding you. If only you’d had the good sense to stay kidnapped for a day or two, the Colombians would have rescued you—”
“Or got me killed trying to rescue me.”
“—and I would have been the knight in shining armor responsible.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Of course you had to go rescue yourself,” he said. “That’s very on brand, Liz.”
“I didn’t rescue myself,” she said. “I wasn’t worth keeping.”
“I think I still deserve thank-you sex.” It was only partly a joke.
“They broke my ribs,” she said. It was only partly a rejection, leaving the future more open than she’d intended. But perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing. And she did accept his offer to convalesce at his place outside of Medellín, which is where she finally broke the news to her mother that, no, she was staying in Colombia. She wasn’t going home.
She did it over Skype. First, she carefully applied makeup to conceal the remaining traces of bruised skin. Then she angled the camera on her laptop so the mountainside would be behind her, a calm, beautiful scene that might help explain an attachment to the country. And at the time they’d agreed on via email, when her sister would be free and when Uncle Carey was generally most lucid, she dialed up her mother.
On the screen were her mother, her sister, and in the bed behind them, Uncle Carey. He’d lost maybe seventy pounds. After the initial Hellos and Oh, my god, Liz, it’s so good to see yous, as well as the initial tears from her mother and the initial detailing from her sister of How Worried Everyone Was and How Awful It Was, her sister trained the camera on her iPad on Uncle Carey so they could show her to him. His eyes seemed to light, and he made an incomprehensible grunt that both her sister and mother would later make much of. In the past weeks, there’d been less and less of Uncle Carey every time Lisette did this, which was one of the reasons she rarely Skyped anymore. They told her excitedly that these days his eyes only lit for her and for her sister’s babies. What might he do when he saw her in person, not over a video screen? And how soon could that be?
Lisette didn’t know how to tell them. When his eyes lit, it moved her, yes. It really did seem as though the man he had been was calling her through the cage of his dying body and failing mind. But that idea frightened her too much to dwell on, and she told herself that whatever was left of Uncle Carey was gone. His mind had totally deteriorated to a few randomly firing neurons. That wasn’t the real Uncle Carey. The real Uncle Carey lived only in her memories. And the Uncle Carey of her memories had told her to be somewhere else when he died. Somewhere awesome. He would have thought of her kidnapping and escape as an adventure. He would have thought Colombia sounded awesome.
“I’m not coming home.” She just blurted it out. Bad news is easier done with quickly.
“Jesus, Liz,” said her sister, managing to sound both unsurprised and deeply disappointed.
Her mother, on the other hand, simply looked down at her hands.
“You come home after something like this,” her sister said. “You come home and let your family take care of you for a bit. Just for a little bit.” Liz didn’t know what to say to that, and the silence dragged on, and her sister added, this time with a pleading, almost pitiful note, “For a few days.”
Her mother said nothing. And so Liz tried to explain. That it was like getting in a car accident. If you didn’t start driving again right away, if you didn’t get back on the road immediately, before the shock died away and the fear set, it’d screw you up for life. It’d mean t
he fear would be there every time you got behind the wheel. And she couldn’t do her job with that fear. She had to get out there again.
“Why can’t you just . . . come home? Rest a bit. You said they want you to write about what happened to you. You don’t need to be in Colombia to do that.”
“I don’t know what happened to me.”
And that was the crux of it. She didn’t know who had kidnapped her. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know what their connection to Jefferson was. She didn’t know what his real interest in her was. She didn’t know why he’d released her. She didn’t know what that meant for La Vigia. She didn’t know what La Vigia meant for the military. She didn’t know what the Jesúses meant for the region. She didn’t know what it meant for the cocaine trade, for Venezuela, for the U.S. military, for civil society, for the politicians who had been involved in paving the way for the raid or the diplomats and soldiers involved in giving it the okay and carrying it out and being deeply disappointed when she wasn’t there. She didn’t know what it meant for American interests in this country that had been the largest recipient of American military aid in the Western Hemisphere for decades. She didn’t know what it meant, period. So what did she have that she could write about? Some shitty things that had happened to her. But shitty things happened to people all the time. It doesn’t make a story.
She couldn’t go home. She had to be working here, someplace awesome, someplace still unknown, and not there, where people thought they knew her, and wanted to tie her to the worn old image of her they carried in their minds. Home was a trap.
* * *
—
Mason was ashamed of himself. Throughout the kidnapping, the rescue mission turned straightforward raid, the aftermath and after-action reports, he’d kept silent about his role in the journalist ending up in La Vigia.
“Who, exactly, would it help if you tell them?” his wife had asked, fixing him with that cold accountant’s stare of hers.
“It could, maybe—”
“Maybe?”
“You never know what could be import—”
“So it’d help nobody.”
“I don’t know that.”
“You have two daughters who need a father with stable employment.”
“They’re not going to kick me out of the army for—”
“If they want to screw you”—she pointed her finger directly at his chest—“they’ll find a way.”
And so he’d kept quiet, working with more than usual diligence on marshaling support for the Colombian mission to recover the journalist. And all had turned out well. The journalist was safe. A narco boss with Venezuelan ties was dead. His wife, assessing the profit and loss, assured him there was nothing to worry about.
But there were things that bothered him. Like how the Jesúses had gone so quickly from a potential Colombian asset a few months ago, when Lieutenant Colonel Juan Pablo Pulido had first mentioned them, to the top of a kill list. Whatever. It was above his pay grade. And in Colombia, it was possible for a career soldier like himself to believe that the folks high above his pay grade could be trusted with the mission he was carrying out. The yearly death toll in Colombia was half what it was when he’d first shown up here a decade ago, as a young medic. The peace treaty with the FARC was going up for a vote to the Colombian people soon, heralding the end of the longest insurgency in history. The evidence on the ground was that the folks high above him knew what they were doing. Or they were lucky, which was just as good.
And then the day of the peace vote arrived, and the great democratic body of the Colombian people collectively shrugged. Only 37 percent turned out to vote. Of those voters, a bare majority said no. No to the peace. And the day after the peace vote, Diego texted him to ask if he’d like to get drinks with him and Lisette Marigny, this woman who’d caused so much trouble.
They met at a bar in the Zona T. She was a tall, sinewy woman with light eyes and a firm, masculine handshake. She gave off no sign of having endured any particular horror.
“You know your boyfriend moved mountains trying to find you,” he told her over drinks, thinking he was doing Diego a favor. Not that Diego deserved it.
She raised an eyebrow at the word “boyfriend.” Diego seemed to visibly shrink into the rolls of fat that’d been building up ever since he’d left the army.
“I . . . inflated our relationship a bit,” Diego told her, “when I was trying to get in on the search for you.”
“You motherfucker.” Mason shook his head and turned to Marigny. “This asshole. You know he was shit in the teams.”
He almost walked out then and there, but Marigny stepped in, thanked him for what he’d done, and then the conversation stuttered and jerked but eventually restarted. He and Marigny talked western Pennsylvania, they talked Afghanistan, they talked the weird and disappointing peace vote, and he decided that, aside from her taste in men, there was a lot to like in Lisette Marigny.
“What do you think will happen?” she said.
“You mean, What does the embassy think will happen?”
“I’m not angling for anything, honestly. Still finding my feet in this country.”
“The vote doesn’t matter,” Mason said. “The president has enough power in Congress to push it through anyway. They’ll make a few changes, claim they fixed it, and force it through regardless of what the people want.”
“Is that a good thing?”
Mason shrugged. Realistically, it meant there’d be no political will to implement the peace, which meant less efforts in the poorest, most violent parts of the country, which meant fertile ground for BACRIM and narcotrafficking, which meant guys like Diego would be able to find employment in Colombia for a long, long time. “What do you think?”
“I don’t really understand this country well enough to have opinions about it one way or the other.”
Diego laughed at that. “That’s the luxury journalists have. For guys like us, shit here moves too fast for us to wait to have opinions until we understand things.”
“When I came here,” she said, “Diego promised me a good war.”
“Consider the competition,” Mason said. He knew he’d rather be here than in Afghanistan, or the Horn of Africa, or the Philippines. “I think he delivered.”
On the way home, Mason decided that was true. This was a messy war, but that was the nature of war. And as wars went, it was a good war. Which meant, regardless of the particulars of this or that operation, his efforts were spent for a good cause. His country was a force for good here. His was a good country. His service to it was a way of being a good man. That was the faith, anyway.
IV
To remain a great nation or to become one, you must colonize.
—Léon Gambetta
Juan Pablo waited to see who would come for the bodies. On the video feed before him was the aftermath of the latest air strike near Hodeidah. A wedding tent. Broken instruments. Bits of colorful clothing. If the camera resolution were better, he’d be able to see flesh, teeth. Children’s slippers and severed fingers. Targeting here was not like targeting in Colombia. It was less squeamish.
He’d arrived in the region a few months before. A Colombian company that had a deliberately obscure connection to an American military contracting firm had, upon seeing his résumé, practically rushed him onto the plane to the Emirates, where, supposedly, he was going to help with training and internal security. Most of the Colombian troops here were ground forces. Cattle, more or less. They’d already flown to Yemen and were there, fighting a primitive war with sophisticated weapons. But given his experience and his fluent English, he was placed in a targeting cell staffed mostly with Americans and Israelis, working with a team of analysts constantly flooding the operations center with data from ISR aircraft and drone feeds and sitreps and forensic reports, sifting through and finding people to kill. He was also
making more money than ever before in his life.
His wife was talking about moving to an apartment in El Nogal. He was considering sending his daughter to Externado, which wasn’t necessarily a better school but was where she’d be less exposed to bad influences. It was all possible now. Money made everything easier.
“Look.” Jeffie Sung, a thin, jittery American drone pilot, motioned to the video feed from the drone, where a bongo truck with a crudely painted red crescent on it made its way to the site. Jeffie, who’d flown Predators for the U.S. military, now flew the Chinese drones the Emiratis used. And since his shift overlapped with Juan Pablo’s, and since he occasionally needed to speak to Latin American ground troops but didn’t speak Spanish, they’d built up a good working relationship.
“The Red Crescent hasn’t been operating here,” Juan Pablo said. “Let’s see who this is.”
The truck stopped and a group of young men emerged and began collecting the bodies in a workmanlike way.
“This is the strange part of the job,” Jeffie said. “Watching the cleanup.”
Juan Pablo nodded. “Does it bother you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Good.”
“And you?” There was something peculiar in Jeffie’s tone.
“I’m not without heart.”
Jeffie laughed, even though it was true. Juan Pablo took no pleasure in watching these scenes. But in war, only sociopaths are guided by pleasure. He told himself he was guided by duty. During his time in the Emirates, he’d been trying to determine what that was, exactly.
“Oh, and I’ve finally got my damn liquor license.” Jeffie pulled from his wallet one of the little Alcoholic Drinks Licenses that permitted non-Muslims to buy booze in the country. “Want to swing by after our shift, have a little whiskey?”