Page 63 of Fear No Evil

Jake signed to her that he would go alone, while Maggie stayed here.

No.She vehemently shook her head, at which Jake made a face of resignation and rotated quietly out of his hammock. Maggie’s pulse sped up as she did the same. She really ought to stay put. After all, what would they say if David caught them atany significant distance from thecasita? But waiting for others to act had never been Maggie’s strong suit.

Slipping outside, they found the three other teens taking refuge under the lean-to, all of them sound asleep.

With a shared look of amusement, Maggie and Jake hurried away from thecasita, striking out in the same direction Marquez and Gallo had taken earlier. Once out of view of the building, Jake grabbed Maggie’s arm and urged her into a run. Hampered by the pain in her hip‍—which she admitted to herself was getting worse, not better‍—Maggie hobbled alongside him.

But as Jake had pointed out at the outset of their assignment, running in the mountains wasn’t feasible. When she slipped and nearly wound up on her back, he slowed to a brisk walk so she could keep up with him. In just minutes, they came to a bluff where a mudslide had sheared off the slope of the mountain, taking trees and rocks with it.

“Wow. Let’s have a look,” Jake suggested. Grabbing Maggie’s hand, he guided her over the spongy ground toward the edge of sheared earth.

As they neared the drop-off, he went down on his hands and knees, and Maggie followed suit. Peering over a felled tree covered in lichen, they were treated to a breathtaking view of the canopy at lower elevations. One area had been thinned out, making it possible to see tin and thatched roofs peeking through the leaves below them.

“Voilà.” Maggie breathed. It had to be Rojas’s camp,Ki-kirr-zikis,the only X on the northeast side of the mountain. Sawing and buzzing noises reached their ears, but the drizzle and the trees kept them from identifying the source.

“Are we hearing chainsaws?” Jake put his back to the log and wrestled off his right boot. He’d asked the question in English since he probably didn’t know the word in French.

Still peering at the camp, Maggie glimpsed a motorized vehicle cutting across a break in the trees. “No, they’re ATVs. There must be at least a dozen of them.” Higher up, a flash of burgundy caught her eye.

Was that a bird? She squinted, trying to decipher what she was looking at. “Oh, look. It’s a watchtower.”

“Where?” Jake pulled up the phone’s antenna as he turned to see what she was looking at.

Maggie leaned close so he could follow her finger. A log-hewn tower, draped in green netting, cleared the top of the canopy. She never would have seen it if one of the three men standing at the top of the tower wasn’t wearing a red beret.

“Is that Rojas?” Jake tore his gaze away to frown at the phone in his hand.

Maggie’s thoughts flashed to the photo they’d seen of the FARC leader at the safe house. “Looks like it.” The two men with him also looked familiar. “And I think he’s talking to Marquez and Gallo right now.” Her heart sank as she imagined what Gallo might be telling Rojas about her, Jake, too, for that matter.

“Don’t sweat it. Things are going well. Just picture us flying out of here in a couple of days.”

Imagining Jake and her in a helicopter soaring away from these forbidding mountains failed to lift her spirits.I don’t want to go back yet, to say goodbye to Jake.

When he stayed quiet, she looked over and found him frowning. “What’s wrong?”

He grimaced. “It’s the new battery. It doesn’t seem to have a charge.”

Her heart skipped a beat. Now there was no way to contact the JIC. Would that matter? Uneasiness coiled in her intestines. She looked back at the tower while wondering again what Gallo was telling Rojas. Was it about her possibly being a spy?

“Well, it’s not the battery,” Jake said a minute later.

Maggie tore her gaze from the tower to find Jake peering inside the phone’s casing. “It’s the phone itself. There’s too much humidity out here. I can see condensation inside.”

“Can’t we do something about that?” The rain had started to pick up, drawing a silvery curtain between them andKi-kirr-zikis. She and Jake would be soaked through if they didn’t head back soon.

“Maybe. Question is, how do we dry it out?”

Maggie already knew. “We put the phone in the rice sack by the hearth and let it dry out overnight.”

Jake’s gaze flew to hers. “That should work, but it’s risky.”

“Yeah, well, it’s our only option.”

He nodded slowly. “Okay, then. I’ll slip it into the sack tonight and sleep with one eye open.”

His optimistic tone was for her sake, she knew, to keep her anxiety from rising.

“We’d better get back,” he added, “before David does.”