Show No Fear Page 5

  “Running will tear your incision,” he argued.

  “We can’t be late,” she insisted. “Come on!” She urged him into a quick trot, and, almost immediately, her agitation subsided. Fueled by adrenaline, she flew along the sidewalk, scarcely hampered by the boots she would wear into the jungle.

  Beside her, Gus easily kept pace as they raced in silence, down dark, deserted sidewalks, past storefronts whose doors and windows were barred by gates of steel. A light drizzle began to fall, dampening their clothing. At last, the lights of the hotel twinkled up ahead of them.

  One block from the hotel, they slowed to a walk, catching their breath before pushing into the lobby through the revolving front doors.

  Four middle-aged adults rose from the plush seats as they entered, flushed and damp. The silver-haired gentleman with patrician features glanced at his watch.

  Carlos stepped forward to pull them over. “You’re late,” he scolded, tempering his impatience with concern. “I was beginning to worry.”

  “Our mistake,” Lucy apologized, mindful of keeping Gus’s Spanish to a minimum. “We took the TransMilieno and got off at the wrong stop,” she added, smiling cautiously at the others.

  “Well, you’re here now,” said Carlos. “Everyone, this is Luna de Aguiler and Gustavo, her husband. Luna works in my office in New York. Her husband is a human-rights officer also stationed in New York. Luna, Gustavo, this is Pierre Fournier, our lead negotiator.”

  “A pleasure,” Fournier asserted, shaking Gus’s hand first. He held Lucy’s hand for an extra-long moment. “I was in New York last year. I don’t remember you,” he said, sounding puzzled.

  Lucy’s skin seemed to shrink. “I must have been out of the office,” she agreed.

  Carlos introduced Bellini next, an effusive Italian who bestowed three kisses on Lucy’s cheek and apologized—ironically—to Gus for his wretched Spanish.

  S¸ ukruye Kemal, a Turkish woman in her midfifties, had worked for the Turkish Red Cross for twenty years before transferring to the UN. She was small and dark, with a compassionate gaze, and Lucy hoped the woman was tougher than she looked, or the rigors of the jungle would cripple her.

  “Come,” said Fournier, gesturing to the hotel’s restaurant. “Let us dine in style tonight. Who knows when we may enjoy fine food again?”

  Hours later, Lucy stood under a scalding shower, paralyzed by anxiety. Fournier had stared at her hard all evening. Visions of La Montaña loomed like a dark cloud in her mind. And her cowardly reaction to the taxi mugging filled her with self-doubt. What if her PTSD was here to stay?

  She couldn’t let Gus see her like this.

  And yet Gus was part of the problem. He was the one who continuously fed her fear, implying that she was somehow on a quest to destroy herself. And then there was her shattering awareness of him. She would have to share a bed with him and, at the same time, maintain her professional edge, which was being called into question anyway.

  Fed up with her anxiety and the realization that she was dawdling, Lucy shut off the shower and got out. Coiling her damp hair in a towel, she exited the bathroom in her boxer pajamas and found Gus inserting his cell phone in the sole of his boot, a sight that knotted her stomach all over again.

  “Does it fit?” she asked, briskly rubbing her hair.

  “Barely,” he replied. He stood up to depress the heel fully into place. “A better question is, Is it waterproof?”

  Lucy peered out from under the towel. “Would they give it to you if it wasn’t?” she asked.

  The anxious question had him glancing at her sharply. He sat back down and took the one boot off. “What’s the matter?” he asked, watching her closely.

  “Nothing.” She tossed the towel over the back of the chair and picked up her hairbrush, dragging it through damp snarls. “Fournier seems a bit suspicious, that’s all.”

  He stood up, coming to stand behind her. The sight of his broad shoulders filling the mirror did little to soothe her. “You can stay here tomorrow if you want to, Luce. I’ll go by myself.”

  She whirled on him, holding up the hairbrush like a weapon. “Stop saying that!” she hissed. “I don’t need your negativism undermining my self-confidence.”

  “It’s not a question of self-confidence. You were traumatized at the warehouse. That’s not going to go away just because you want it to.”

  “You see?” she said, menacing him with the brush.

  “What are you going to do with that?” he asked, a hint of laughter in his eyes as he glanced at her weapon.

  “Don’t mock me,” she warned. “I can have you doubled over and begging for mercy in five seconds.”

  “Go ahead,” he offered, visibly bracing himself.

  “Forget it.” She shoved at his chest, needing space to clear her thoughts. Turning her back on him, she went back to brushing her hair.

  For a nerve-racking minute, Gus just watched her. Awareness tightened Lucy’s nipples, putting twin points on the front of her pajama top.

  “A massage would help,” Gus announced unexpectedly. “You’re way too tense.”

  Startled, Lucy put the brush down. Oh, no. A massage wouldn’t help anything. “Maybe you’re projecting your anxiety onto me,” she bluffed. “I am perfectly fine.”

  “You’re right,” Gus agreed with a nod. “I’m the one who’s tense.” He stripped off his T-shirt unexpectedly. “How about you massage me?” Suddenly he was standing in a pair of gray gym shorts and nothing else.

  Lucy’s gaze fastened helplessly on the expanse of naked chest. The lean youth she had loved in college had, in addition to widening his shoulders six inches, grown a six-pack and chest hair—lots of chest hair, the same russet brown as his head. It furred his upper chest before narrowing into a line that bisected his abs and arrowed into his gym shorts. “I suck at giving massages,” she protested stonily.

  “No, you don’t. Come on, Luce. Don’t be chicken.” He sprawled gracefully across the coverlet, exposing a back that was all swells and ridges and thick, dense muscle. “It’s just a massage.”

  Who was he calling chicken?

  Resentment bolstered her courage. Seeing that he was watching her, she marched over to the bed and casually chopped his back, her hands bouncing off the resilient slabs of muscles. “There,” she said, straightening.

  “Not like that. Sit between my legs.”

  His legs were long and strong and bare, and dusted with light brown hair. Lucy swallowed hard.

  Could she touch him and not get lost in the past? It would be a test of her professionalism, that much was certain.

  Maybe he was testing her, in which case, she had better surpass his expectations.

  With a careless-looking shrug, she kneeled between his slightly spread thighs and braced her hands on his smooth back. His clean skin exuded a familiar scent that made her head spin, made her insides melt with remembered pleasure.

  With a tremor in her fingers, she dug in, instantly intrigued by the interplay of muscles and sinew.

  Gus gave a low groan of pleasure, the sound of which seemed to vibrate inside her. The impulse to lower her lips to the expanse of bare back had her swimming in her desire.

  Of their own will, her fingers trailed lower, drifting just under the elastic band of his shorts toward his firm buttocks. Even as his muscles loosened under her flexing fingers, a different tension invaded his body.

  She could take this as far as she liked. The realization filled her with bittersweet triumph. She was still in control. She still had what it took to turn a potential recruit into an asset. Only Gus wasn’t a recruit. He was her partner, the first she’d ever had, and probably the last.

  Slapping his butt with a playful swat, Lucy jumped from the bed.

  He cracked an eye. “Where are you going?”

  “To brush my teeth.” His groan of disappointment made her smile. She would have loved to have kept it up, enjoying reciprocal treatment in return. But even Gus knew better than to go tha
t far.

  People who fell in lust got stupid. Lucy was too smart to be stupid, especially now, when the stakes were so high.

  CHAPTER 4

  Lucy saw Gus glance at his watch, the only indication that this unforeseeable delay was getting to him. It sure as hell was getting to her.

  In the rear seat of a stuffy little van chartered to drive them to the edge of civilization, they sat motionless on Highway 40, just one link in a chain of vehicles heading into the tunnel that burrowed through the side of a mountain.

  Thanks to an avalanche of rock that had strewn debris across the road, the tunnel was blocked. Lucy could see highway workers under the vigilance of Colombia’s equivalent of the National Guard scrambling to remove the obstruction.

  If sitting in a stuffy van doing nothing could get her stomach churning, then how the hell was she supposed to come face-to-face with guerrillas and not embarrass herself?

  Her slowly drawn breath caught Gus’s attention. “¿Estás bien?” he asked her. You okay?

  “Claro.” Of course. Why wouldn’t she be?

  She tried to focus on the scenery. To the east, Bogotá sprawled like a patchwork quilt, its lush green parks breaking up squares of steel and concrete. With the mountains looming protectively behind, the megalopolis looked downright picturesque, till one looked more closely and saw the shanties pushed up onto the sides of the mountains.

  A high-pitched whistle snatched her attention forward. At last, the road was clear! Engines roared to life and their van inched toward the tunnel. But then a national guardsman waved them down.

  Fournier swore under his breath, and a guard leaned into the passenger window demanding to see their passports.

  One by one, the peacekeeping team was scrutinized. Lucy fought to hold the guardsman’s gaze as he looked up from her passport to scrutinize her. Her heart sank as he stepped from the vehicle to confer with his companions, taking all the passports with him.

  While a ripple of excitement seemed to pass through the ranks of the guards, Lucy sat in a cold sweat, wondering where her composure had flown.

  “Mon Dieu,” Fournier muttered, looking as ill at ease as Lucy felt. Cars honked impatiently behind them. If they were detained much longer, they might miss their rendezvous with the FARC tomorrow.

  At last, the guardsman returned with their passports. “Where are you headed?” he demanded inscrutably.

  “To Villavicencio, to see how the peace is being kept,” said Fournier, answering in a half-truth.

  The man nodded. “You may proceed,” he announced, handing back the passports and waving them on.

  As the window closed, the entire UN team, Lucy included, heaved a sigh of relief.

  With horns urging them to hurry, their driver lurched forward, eager to make up for lost time. They surged into the dark, unlit tunnel, and Gus pinned Lucy against the seat with his shoulder, bracing her with his arm in the absence of a seat belt.

  Lucy snapped her eyes shut. Please don’t do that, she wanted to tell him, recognizing his attempt to save her life in the event of a head-on collision.

  The tunnel ended abruptly, spilling them onto lush, rolling plains called Los Llanos, where Gus’s vigilance relaxed. Their first destination, Villavicencio, stood less than thirty miles away.

  With a squeal of brakes, the van stopped for lunch. Seated at an outdoor café, the team enjoyed a midday meal under the watchful eye of soldiers patrolling the industrial city. Once terrorized by the FARC, Villavicencio was now occupied by the Colombian army.

  “Eat well,” Fournier murmured to them. “We have no way of knowing if the FARC will be able to feed us.”

  While Gus slipped away to place a call to the JIC, Lucy watched the soldier standing guard across the street. As they boarded their van to continue the journey, he spoke into his walkie-talkie. The suspicion that the army was tracking the team’s movements congealed into certainty as a motorcycle, driven by two more soldiers, pulled out of an alleyway and started chasing them. Lucy met Gus’s eye and he nodded toward the Frenchman.

  “Monsieur Fournier,” Lucy called up to him. “I believe we’re being followed.”

  With a grimace, Fournier looked back at the motorcycle, then gave directions to their driver to outrun it. “The last thing we need,” he grumbled, “is to lead the army to the FARC and start a war.”

  In the end, Mother Nature got rid of the soldiers for them. The sky darkened abruptly. Leaden clouds opened up and rain poured down. The motorcycle floundered. Soon it was just a speck behind them, eventually disappearing altogether.

  The team members smiled at one another in relief. Their van slogged on, traveling over a highway that went from asphalt to gravel, to a muddy trail riddled with potholes of deceptive depth.

  With every hundred meters, the road seemed to narrow until it was just wide enough for one car. Windshield wipers beat a frenzied tempo but never succeeded in clearing the fogged glass up front. The music on the radio crackled and faded into static. The driver turned it off.

  A somber silence descended over the occupants of the van. Lucy dragged air into her tight lungs and wondered if the others were thinking what she was thinking: They’d come this far; now there was no going back.

  Staring out a fogged window, all she could see were coca fields and banana groves. A swollen brown river ran parallel to the road for a while, then veered away. With every hundred meters, she felt their isolation deepening.

  “There’s La Montaña,” Fournier finally announced.

  Peering up the length of the van, Lucy felt her mouth go dry. The ominous-looking mountain had planted itself squarely before them, its twin peaks buried in rain clouds. Somewhere in the looming mass of vegetation, Howitz and Barnes remained hostages.

  If she didn’t screw her courage on tight, they might never make it home.

  It was dusk when they arrived at the last outpost of civilization, Puerto Limón, a tiny pueblo at the foot of the mountain. In the single-story ranchita advertised as an inn, the UN team was warmly greeted by their indigenous hosts, offered bread and goat’s cheese for supper, and dismissed to private bedrooms.

  “Sleep well,” called Fournier, instructing them to awaken early for another dawn departure.

  Lying on a twin-sized mattress made of straw, Lucy realized that, while thoughts of sharing a queen-sized bed last night had unsettled her, she was looking forward to the feel of Gus’s arms around her tonight, a circumstance that secretly worried her. She wasn’t growing reliant on him, was she? Of course not. All she needed from him was his body heat.

  Beneath the glow of a naked lightbulb, she could feel the mountain’s looming proximity. Anxiety sat like a heavy weight on her chest. How was she supposed to throw it off?

  Lucy Donovan operated alone. She was utterly self-reliant.

  Or had the experience in Venezuela robbed her of her self-sufficiency? What then? It was her job to combat terrorists. She didn’t know any other kind of life—didn’t want to. She couldn’t afford to be afraid.

  The door groaned suddenly inward. Gus ducked into the room, his damp head nearly touching the ceiling. At the sight of her cowering in the bed with the blanket pulled to her chin, his jaw hardened. He whipped off his glasses, set them by the bed, and bent low to whisper, “You can’t fight fire with fire, Luce.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you’re trying to scare off your PTSD. That’s not the way to cure yourself.”

  “I don’t have PTSD,” she insisted rigidly. “And I am not scared,” she added.

  “Jesus, Luce,” he swore in disgust. Reaching for the string, he snapped off the light. “Make room,” he warned her shortly.

  Her senses clamored in anticipation of his touch. As he stretched out next to her she fitted her body to his, swallowing a sigh of relief as his warmth seeped into her limbs, his strong arms drove back the demons chasing her.

  But then she imagined what tomorrow would bring. Soon she’d be sharing a camp
fire with guerrillas who blew up people in the name of libertad and exploited innocent children, forcing them to fight. A fresh wave of anxiety rolled through her.

  “Relax, dear. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

  Lucy snorted at the macho assertion. At the same time, she hoped it was true.

  She listened to him lapse into sleep, his soft snores deepening by degrees. With her head on his rising and falling chest, she waited for hours for sleep to claim her.

  The FARC made them wait, choosing not to arrive in Puerto Limón until 10 a.m.

  The UN team had been up since dawn, waiting tensely under the ranchita’s covered porch, listening to the rain drum the red-tiled roof. For hours now they had stared up the muddy track that wound into the dense vegetation of La Montaña.

  The mountain rose straight up. Lushly green, its glacial peaks remained hidden in rain clouds that moved sluggishly overhead, pushed by a wet, jasmine-scented breeze.

  Nothing happened quickly in Colombia, Lucy reflected.

  Seeing the jungle, smelling it, she envisioned how Howitz and Barnes had to feel, cut off from the world, chained like dogs, starved and humiliated. Ten months had to seem like a lifetime. God, she hoped she would never discover that for herself!

  Gus’s last communication with the JIC this morning had echoed that same sentiment. “Don’t lose us out there, guys,” he’d murmured into the sat phone. At his teammate’s reply, he’d raked his fingers through his hair. “Well, damn it, sir, we don’t want to be caught in the middle of that,” he’d hissed.

  Sensing a problem, Lucy had leaned closer, hoping to overhear.

  “Will do, sir. You, too, sir. Out.” He’d severed the call.

  “We don’t want to be caught in the middle of what?” Lucy had questioned him once he hung up.

  “Intel says a battalion of Colombian infantry are headed this way.”