“I could possibly be persuaded to stay a while,” he said.

  “Cool,” she said, and even with all the hours he’d logged in the virtual world, Patrick knew that smile on her face was actual flirtation.

  The ten-minute break was over, and Javier called them to shore. Putting on the same dirty clothes after bathing seemed to defeat the purpose, but such were the rules, whoever made them.

  Javier laid out the afternoon agenda. “We have one more cliff to conquer, followed by two more hours of hiking. Then we make camp.”

  The newly restored color seemed to drain from Olga’s face. The New York accountant and his insurance executive friend from Chicago were on the verge of mutiny.

  “Unless Romeo wants to take the challenge,” Javier said, looking at Patrick.

  Patrick glanced at Olga, who smiled back.

  “I’m listening,” said Patrick.

  “I lead the way down the next cliff. You follow. If you can keep up with me, the rest of the group walks the easy path on the other side of the mountain. From there, we all ride mules to the next campsite. No more hiking today.”

  “I thought you said this was a competition,” said Patrick.

  “It’s pretty clear you’re today’s winner,” said Javier.

  “Do it,” said the accountant.

  Olga didn’t say anything, but Patrick could see it in her eyes: she couldn’t handle another cliff.

  Patrick looked Javier in eye. “All right. We’re on.”

  Javier led him up the side of the next hill, an even steeper climb through the jungle than before. The footing was unsure, and a misty rain made the rocks especially slippery. The warm waters of the pond had actually made Patrick’s legs rubbery, and after a full morning of hiking followed by a traverse of the cliff, fatigue was taking a toll. Upward they continued, until the foliage thinned, the mist seemed to evaporate, and the air turned colder. They stopped at a rocky ledge. The view of the valley and winding river was breathtaking, like a scene out of National Geographic, as the fog crept through the lush green forest hundreds of feet below.

  “We start here,” said Javier.

  “And go where?”

  “Down,” said Javier, glancing over the ledge. “Straight down to the valley floor.”

  “That’s pretty far,” said Patrick, more than aware of his own understatement.

  “You want me to go back to the group and tell them you chickened out?”

  Patrick didn’t answer.

  “Remember, this is not a race,” said Javier. “All you have to do is keep pace with me. I didn’t say you had to beat me.”

  Patrick considered his options. Going straight down might actually be easier than hiking back down the slippery, forty-degree grade they’d just climbed.

  “Okay. I’m up for it.”

  Patrick attached his Y-configured climbing rope, connecting the base to his safety belt, and took hold of the carabiners, one at the top of each outstretched arm of the Y.

  “There are two columns of pitons hammered into the cliff face. One column is mine. The other is yours. Start with both carabiners connected to the eyelets.”

  He connected Patrick’s for him, then connected his own.

  “Step down with your left foot,” he said, doing so. “When you have firm footing, disconnect the left carabiner and reattach it to the eyelet below it.”

  Patrick followed his example.

  “Now step down with the right foot, get your footing, disconnect the right carabiner, and reconnect to the eyelet below.”

  Javier went first, then Patrick.

  “We do that all the way down. Got it?”

  A gust of wind cut through the canyon. Patrick was glad to have both carabiners fastened.

  “Got it,” said Patrick.

  They started slowly. Step down with the left foot, unclip, reclip. Step down with the right, unclip, reclip. Patrick was finding his rhythm, though his legs were painfully reminding him of how far they had to go—at least another four hundred feet.

  Javier quickened the pace. Patrick kept up, step for step, clip for clip. With three hundred fifty feet to go, Javier bumped up the pace a notch. Patrick responded, but he was feeling rushed, not entirely comfortable. At three hundred feet, Javier had him working so furiously that he was breaking a sweat, despite the cold. Patrick wasn’t sure he could sustain this pace, and he prayed it didn’t get any quicker, though his mind flashed with the disturbing image of Javier and his knife back at camp, the tap-tap-tap between outstretched fingers that built to a wild frenzy all the way down.

  Clip, clip, clip.

  Patrick glanced over at Javier. He showed no sign of slowing down, but of greater concern was how shiny and new Javier’s pitons were compared to Patrick’s, which were discolored and much older. At two hundred fifty feet, Patrick was having difficulty clipping onto them, the eyelets were so rusted. The pace quickened. Patrick unclipped the left carabiner, and before he could reattach to the piton below it, the weight of his body snapped the rusty right piton from the rock. Patrick was exactly where no climber ever wanted to be, both carabiners disconnected at the top of the Y, hiking out from the cliff with nowhere to go but straight down.

  “Javier!”

  Javier grabbed him by the wrist. Patrick had just one foothold on the cliff, his left leg dangling, his body hanging off the sheer face of the mountain at a fifty-degree angle.

  “Pull me in!”

  Javier didn’t. Not only that, but he seemed to resist Patrick’s efforts to pull himself up.

  “This isn’t funny! Pull me in!”

  Patrick worked from his core, as if trying to do a sit-up in midair. But Javier’s elbow was locked in place, making it impossible for Patrick to save himself.

  “Help me!”

  Javier’s arm only stiffened. Patrick tried to plant another foot on the cliff face, but he couldn’t get traction. His left leg was shaking, weakening, as Patrick came to the terrifying realization that there were not two columns of pitons to allow side-by-side climbing; there was only one usable column of new pitons, which had replaced the old one. He locked eyes with Javier, and could see that no help was forthcoming. Javier said something in Spanish, but what Patrick thought he heard made no sense in the moment.

  “Boss’s orders.”

  Then he didn’t just let go of Patrick’s wrist. He pushed off, as if ejecting Patrick from his only foothold.

  Patrick felt as though he were flying, but only for an instant. Gravity grabbed him, his body falling at incomprehensible speed, arms and legs flailing, as the jungle canopy below rushed toward him.

  Chapter 18

  Kate exited the law school’s main lecture hall at 3:00 p.m., her final class of the day.

  Cyber Law was the hottest course at American University, so high in demand that it was virtually impossible for all but third-year students to enroll. Most of her classmates dreamed of landing with the NSA or other government agency, or snagging a high-paying job in the cyber department of a Washington megafirm. A few wanted to go straight to Silicon Valley, not necessarily to practice law, or to companies like Buck Technologies. Kate guessed that she was the only one writing a dramatic play.

  Kate’s cellphone rang as she was heading down the stairway to the student lounge. It was her father’s assistant.

  “Mr. Gamble requests that you stop by the house after class,” she said. “It’s very important.”

  Kate said she could “be there in twenty,” grabbed a green iced tea from the café, and started the scenic walk across campus toward Georgetown.

  Kate and her father were in agreement that his next residence should be nothing like the penthouse in Tysons Tower, and he’d settled on a classic Italianate-style house on Cooke’s Row on Q Street. Georgetown architecture was often associated with Federal-style town houses, but the Italianate style prevailed from the 1840s to the 1880s, and the finest remaining examples evoked the romantic ideal of an Italian villa. It would be Kate’s first visit to her father’s new address, and she fully anticipated the most secure Italianate-style villa on the East Coast since Al Capone’s dream villa in Miami Beach, and definitely the most tech-smart. True to form, there was no bell to ring outside the stone wall. Kate peered into the retinal scanner, and the iron gate swung open. She continued across the courtyard, between the north and south towers, to a grand set of entrance doors that, in classic Italianate style, formed an upside-down U. Kate entered and found her father in the first-floor study. He was on the telephone but quickly wrapped up the call upon seeing her.

  Kate immediately saw the concern in his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked with trepidation.

  “I don’t have many details, so there’s no reason to assume the worst. But this could make the news, and I wanted you to hear it from me first. Patrick Battle has gone missing.”

  Kate lowered herself into the armchair. “I was told he was on a corporate adventure. But I didn’t hear where.”

  “Colombia. The mountains and the jungle make it pretty challenging, but everyone has their own guide. The report is that he told his guide he was quitting and walked off.”

  “Walked off to where?”

  “That’s the worrisome part. This territory used to be controlled by the FARC—Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. They funded their operations by kidnapping ordinary Colombians and collecting ransom.”

  “You think Patrick may have been kidnapped?”

  “No, that was in the past. The point is that FARC was so successful because the Colombian mountains and jungle are so impenetrable that a rescue mission was virtually impossible. It’s easy to get lost. Not so easy to be found.”

  “Didn’t Patrick have a tracking chip?”

  “No,” he said with a sigh. “That will be a bit of egg on our face in the media.”

  Kate rose and walked to the window. “So many things about this sound wrong to me.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She turned to face him. “First of all, Patrick never quits anything. I took him to his first cross-country meet in middle school. He pulled a hamstring on the first hill. The race was over in about twenty minutes. Two hours later, Patrick crossed the finish line, practically hopping on one leg. Quitting is not in his DNA.”

  “We’re talking about a twenty-two-year-old man, not a twelve-year-old boy.”

  “There’s more.” She told him about her conversation with Noah on the jogging trail—his suspicions about Patrick’s sudden disappearance.

  “What was Noah implying?” he asked. “That we sent Patrick away to undermine his security audit?”

  “Noah put him on his list of employees to interview, and the company sent him on a survival venture in the Colombian jungle with no way to communicate with him. Are you saying that’s a complete coincidence?”

  “I had no idea Patrick was even gone. The first I heard of it was an hour ago, when I learned he was missing.”

  “Really?” she asked, not in an accusatory tone, but hoping it was true.

  “Yes. Kate, do you have any idea how many employees there are at Buck Technologies? I’m the CEO, not the attendance taker. I don’t keep track of everyone’s comings and goings.”

  “Then who sent him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you find out?”

  “Has Noah asked that I find out?”

  “Not explicitly. But Noah was doing you a favor by reaching out to me, indirectly.”

  “How is that doing me a favor?”

  “He was giving you a chance to produce Patrick for an interview before reporting back to the DOJ that Buck Technologies was playing games with witnesses. When he hears that Patrick has gone missing, that will only confirm his suspicions.”

  “In his mind,” he said.

  “In the minds of many,” said Kate. “You need to get to the bottom of this, Dad. Not just for your own sake. For Patrick’s.”

  He paused, seeming to consider it. “Sit down, Kate.”

  She did. Her father pulled up the matching armchair and seated himself on the edge of it, facing her. He was looking her in the eye but not in a penetrating manner. It was more on the level.

  “Certain things at Buck Technologies are dark to me,” he said.

  The words took Kate by surprise. “Dark, meaning what?”

  “There are projects for which I don’t have security clearance.”

  “How can that be? You’re the CEO.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “How much is dark to you?”

  Again, no response.

  “Who decides what’s dark to you?”

  Silence.

  Kate stopped asking questions for a moment, collecting her thoughts, trying to figure out what her father was trying to convey—why he had chosen this occasion, Patrick’s disappearance, to share his “darkness.” Then it came to her.

  “Project Naïveté is real, isn’t it? It wasn’t a joke.”

  “The questions you’re asking all raise matters of national security.”

  She’d heard those words many times before—or, more precisely, overheard them—starting when she was a little girl witnessing an argument between her parents. It was usually in response to the question, “Where were you, Christian?” Kate didn’t like his answer any more than her mother had.

  “Is it really about national security?” she asked.

  “Why else would a CEO allow certain silos of his own company to operate in the dark?”

  Kate rose. “I can think of only one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Willful blindness, Dad. It’s a corporate disease. Sometimes fatal.”

  She started toward the door.

  “That’s a cruel thing to say, Kate.”

  She stopped in the foyer and looked back at him, drawing on his own simile about truth. “Or is it ‘poetry,’ as you call it.”

  He started after her. “Kate, don’t leave like this. Where are you going?”

  “To say a prayer for Patrick. It sounds like he could use one.”

  Kate let herself out without saying good night.

  Chapter 19

  Javier rode by mule toward the sunset. He knew these parts of the valley like his own backyard.

  The five-thousand-mile Cordillera de los Andes runs the length of South America, then splits into three ranges in Colombia. Sandwiched between the peaks of the Cordillera Occidental, Cordillera Central, and Cordillera Oriental are two great valleys, Valle del Cauca and Valle del Río Magdalena, whose rivers run northward until they merge and flow into the Caribbean Sea. The valleys in western Colombia, the country’s most mountainous region, were savanna, with a broad belt of trees about halfway up the mountain, then more savanna at the mountain crest. All of it was swampy, even the mountainside. Thick grass, clover, and mosses held rainfall like a sponge well into the higher elevations.

  Javier’s first trip through the valley had been as a teenager—a guerilla. He’d joined the FARC, Colombia’s largest rebel group, at the age of fifteen. Armed with an AK-47, it had been his job to wait at the base of the mountain to receive the “catch of the day” from his fellow revolutionaries, specialized terrorists trained in urban abduction. Each night, they drove from Cali, past the endless fields of sugarcane to, quite literally, the end of the road. Javier never knew who or what he was going to get until the car stopped and the trunk popped open. At first, he’d found it surprising that the hostages were not the superrich. Most were businesspeople, middle- and upper-middle class, whose families were expected to liquidate their entire net worth to free a loved one. For these unfortunate souls, traveling on foot or by mule through the chest-high grasses of the savanna and on into the mountains with young guerrillas like Javier was the most dangerous part of the journey. Teenagers, drugs, and semiautomatic weapons were a deadly mix. Javier had always considered his hostages lucky; he never shot anyone just for the fun of it. Kidnapping was a business for the FARC, as many as three thousand per year at its peak. Javier saw no reason to deplete the inventory—unless it made business sense, which was sometimes the case. Not until he was sixteen did he execute his first hostage, the forty-three-year-old owner of a cabinet-making factory in Bogotá. Javier had guarded him for nearly eleven months, moving from one camp to another to stay one step ahead of the Colombian army. The businessman had begged for his life, even promising to pay double the ransom. Javier chose not to tell him that his wife had refused to pay a single peso. Instead, he’d taken him to the field, unchained him, and told him that freedom was just over the hill. A single bullet to the back dropped him to the ground like a fleeing gazelle. Javier considered it an act of mercy. He’d died a happy man.

  Some FARC dissidents were still active, but Javier had been out since the dissolution of the military in 2017. He no longer believed in the cause. He wasn’t sure he’d ever believed in it. Bottom line, whether it was kidnapping, murder for hire, or myriad lesser offenses, crime paid only if it put money in his own pocket. Business had been good for Javier. He’d never made a mistake. At least not until that morning on the face of the cliff.

  Where the hell did that boy land?

  The long shadows of twilight stretched across the grassland as Javier rode into the new camp. His search for the body had been without success. He’d already told the other guides that Patrick had quit and gone home, and they’d passed the news along to the others. He would just stick with his story.

  “Cómo andas, Javier?” asked one of the guides, greeting him.

  Javier could smell the whiskey. The war was over, and these young men were true adventure guides, not a revolutionary bone in their bodies. But the bottle passed quickly around a campfire, and some things never changed.

  Javier dismounted, and the guide tied the reins to the nearest tree. His hand was bandaged, Javier noticed. The fool had tried to duplicate Javier’s knife trick.