Free As Lost as I Get by Lisa Nicholas Page B

to stir the heavy, stifling air. Lee found a corner table and ordered guarapo, which was cold and sweet and reminiscent of limeade. The café was nearly full, with various Puinave and Curripaco natives, some llaneros in town to conduct business, and a few soldiers taking a break. In one of the opposite corners sat a hard-eyed woman perhaps a few years older than him. He wasn’t sure who she was working for, but if she wasn’t his foreign equivalent, he’d be shocked. The Colombian government liked to claim that the revolutionaries and the cartels were less active these days than they’d been in the 1990s, but there were plenty of countries that wanted to keep tabs for themselves.
    If the woman recognized him for what he was, she didn’t show it. She met up with another woman, and the two of them walked out, chatting about shopping. Her Spanish was accented enough to mark her as not a native, but Lee couldn’t nail down an origin before she was gone.
    Shortly after noon, Timo walked in, smiling when he saw Lee. “Will, how are you?”
    “Good. It’s been too long though.” Excluding clandestine meetings in cabs, that is. He signaled for another guarapo for Timo, and they chatted for several minutes about nothing in particular—the latest soccer match, what teams were doing well, the weather. They talked long enough to bore any casual listener. When his internal clock told him they’d stalled long enough, Lee said, “Did you ever find those photographs we were talking about?”
    “My sister, at the wedding.” Timo beamed and produced a large envelope from his messenger bag. The envelope crinkled in his hands and looked stuffed. “She is a beautiful girl, my friend. I think you will want to meet her after you look through these.” He handed the envelope over. The kid was good at this, and unlike many of the informants and recruits he’d worked with in the past, absolutely fearless.
    Lee grinned back at him. “If I want her phone number, would you give it to me?”
    “Only after I warn her never to trust an American man.” They laughed.
    “I’m hurt,” Lee said.
    “I like you, William, but I do not like you
that
much.”
    The conversation went on, and Timo invited him to lunch, which he turned down, citing another appointment. It wasn’t a lie. Part of his cover involved getting to know local businessmen, other foreigners, other soldiers. He was careful to make his meetings with informants indistinguishable from his meetings with everyone else. Bribery was a tradition that was alive and well in Guainía, and Inírida was at the heart of it. Almost every meeting he had involved giving or taking envelopes openly or under the table. There was no reason for anyone to suspect that a few of those envelopes contained something other than a mix of local and foreign currency. Some, like the one he’d just received from Timo, held Colombian government reports and photographs.
    When he returned to his hotel room, the town had settled into its late afternoon lull. During his last meeting, with a representative of one of the local rubber manufacturers, he kept getting distracted, thinking his phone had buzzed with a message from Zoe. He’d forced himself to let it go until he was in private. Even now, in his hotel room, he did his usual sweep for bugs before checking his phone.
    There was nothing. Lee sat down on the edge of his bed, the same bed that not eighteen hours earlier he had shared with her. She hadn’t promised to call him today, and just reminding himself of that made him feel like a teenager. Still, whatever had happened the night before, he was getting the feeling that Zoe didn’t want to see him again.

Chapter Six
    The days went by in a haze. Zoe had to fight to get the other doctors to go home, and they fought just as hard to get her to go home. By the third day, they were taking turns sleeping in the office and washing up in the clinic bathroom. The nurses were rotating out in eighteen-hour