“Idiota,” he said.

  “Just a scratch,” the guide said in Spanish.

  Javier had honed his trick to perfection as a guerrilla, making it look easy. True enough, back in the day, it had often ended badly—but only for the hostage. Of course he hadn’t expected Patrick to accept his challenge that morning. No hostage, however, had ever been given a choice in the matter. A severed finger, delivered to the family, was a common “proof of life” tactic—a dramatic confirmation that the hostage was still alive and, at the same time, a horrifying reminder that time was running out. The hostage, in effect, chose his own proof of life: the first digit nicked in Javier’s unwinnable game.

  “Twenty years ago, you would have lost that thumb,” Javier replied in Spanish.

  The other guide laughed, even though he didn’t know what Javier was talking about. He invited Javier over to the campfire to share in the whiskey, but Javier declined. He removed the satellite phone from his satchel and walked deep into the grassy meadow, where reception would be uninterrupted by the forest. It was time to report back to the client.

  “I can’t find him.”

  Javier had told his client nothing about pushing Patrick off the mountain. He’d fed him the same lie he’d told the guides—that Patrick was a quitter and had headed off into the jungle to find his own way home.

  His client was not the least bit understanding.

  “He’s still missing?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Damn it, Javier. All I asked was that you take him outside the subpoena power of the Department of Justice for a while. Now he’s lost in the jungle.”

  “No worries. I’ll search again in the morning.”

  “Find him. We have enough problems.”

  The call ended, and Javier was glad to have it over with. But the call to his “client” was the easier of the two calls he needed to make. He took a moment and dialed the boss—or, more precisely, the boss’s representative. It was Javier’s practice never to have direct communication with the person who actually ordered the hit.

  “It’s done,” Javier said into the phone. “I think.”

  There was a pause on the line. “You think?”

  “No one could have survived a fall from that height. But when I climbed down after him, I couldn’t find the body.”

  “Then you didn’t look hard enough.”

  “He must have hit the ground and just kept on rolling toward the river. Maybe a croc got him. They’re around here. Big ones. A girl got dragged into the Sardinata River, same elevation, a few years ago.”

  “What if he just got up, dusted himself off, and walked away on his own power?”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible.”

  “You’re guessing.”

  “It’s an educated guess.”

  “We don’t pay you to guess. Call me back when you have an answer.”

  Javier switched off the telephone.

  He could deal with an unhappy “client.” It was rare, but shit did happen on corporate adventure challenges—snake bites, dengue fever, heart attacks—and all clients understood the risks. But the boss was the top of this pyramid. He expected perfection, and Javier had promised “no screwups” in the dispensation of Patrick Battle.

  He was cursing himself, muttering under his breath, as he started back toward the campsite. Then he heard a noise in the weeds. He stopped and saw Olga emerge from behind a scrub of bushes.

  “What are you doing out here?” he asked.

  “El baño,” she said.

  Mountain bathrooms. That was another thing that hadn’t changed since the heyday of the FARC.

  Javier stepped closer. The glow of twilight was fading, but with some effort, he could study her expression. “Did you hear the conversation I was just having?”

  “No. But don’t be alarmed. I’m told it’s quite normal to talk to yourself. Only when you start answering is it time to worry.”

  He didn’t appreciate the attempt at humor. “I was talking on the satellite phone.”

  “Oh. Cool. No. I didn’t hear anything.”

  Javier tightened his gaze. If he had to guess, he would have said she was playing dumb.

  We don’t pay you to guess.

  “I heard Patrick quit,” she said.

  It was the ruse Javier had shared with his team: Patrick quit. “Yeah. There’s a quitter in every group.”

  “I was hoping you could change his mind. But he’s not coming back, is he?”

  Javier let her question hang in the air, and he watched closely to see how she dealt with the silence. He could still only guess as to her truthfulness, but one thing was certain: he would need to keep a close eye on this Olga.

  “No,” he said. “Patrick is not coming back.”

  Chapter 20

  It was almost midnight, and Kate was still angry at her father.

  She’d been typing furiously on her laptop since returning to her apartment, alone—out on the balcony. If she wanted a balcony, she’d have one. If she wanted to write a play about Big Data, she’d write one.

  If she needed a new hero, she’d find one.

  Kate had never told him, but the final assignment in her seventh-grade English class was to write an essay about a personal hero, which each student read aloud to the class. Most chose well-known figures: LeBron James, Jesus Christ, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and so on. Kate was the only one to catch grief from her classmates. She’d chosen her father.

  The problem with her essay was honesty. Her father was her hero, but she didn’t feel comfortable standing before her classmates and telling them why. Her essay heralded his business success, his study of philosophy at Oxford, and other distinctions that belonged on a resumé. She couldn’t tell a bunch of seventh graders that her mother was an alcoholic—that it was her father who assured her that “Mom didn’t really mean it,” that Kate really was smart and pretty and not a manipulative little “mean girl” who thought only of herself, and that she could be anything from an astronaut to a zookeeper when she grew up, as long as it made her happy. “Be true to yourself and follow your dreams,” he’d told her, and she’d let herself believe that he lived his life by the same credo. Not for a moment did she think he was actually following the money.

  “That just sucks,” she said, deleting the last eight lines she’d just written. She’d been on a tear, working without so much as a bathroom break, but too much was landing on the proverbial cutting room floor.

  Honesty. Like her seventh-grade essay, there just wasn’t enough of it in her play. She wasn’t being true to her own research. It was tempting to sensationalize the story and turn Watson into a corporate monster, to portray the founder and CEO of the world’s first tech powerhouse as Hitler’s strategic ally in genocidal warfare. Had she really wanted to go that route, there was plenty of low-hanging fruit to exploit—Willy Heidinger, in particular, the CEO of Watson’s German subsidiary and member of the National Socialist Party. Kate uncovered a speech he’d delivered in 1939, urging Germans to follow the Führer in blind faith. “Our characteristics are deeply rooted in race,” the German CEO had said. “We must cherish them like a holy shrine which we will—and must—keep pure.” But Watson was no Heidinger. And he was definitely no anti-Semite. Other than family, the first person through the church door at Watson’s funeral in 1956 was Charles Gimbel, co-owner of Gimbels department stores, a Jew.

  Irving Bass was right. It was up to the world to judge whether or not he was evil, whether it made him any less culpable that he wasn’t motivated by hate. Simply put, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., was a capitalist to his core.

  And so, it seemed, was Kate’s father.

  She stepped away from her laptop and went to the balcony railing. She’d reached a pivotal point in the play. By the late 1930s, IBM’s crown jewel in the world of electromechanical technology was the model 405 alphabetizer. The Germans didn’t have them. Hitler demanded state-of-the-art technology for the 1939 Polish census. No one knows for certain how the decision was made. All Kate could do was follow Irving’s guidance and write, in fairness, what could have been said. She returned to her laptop and started typing.

  It was no accident that, as she imagined the words flowing from Watson’s mouth, she heard her own father’s voice.

  “I read the New York Times,” Watson said into the telephone. “I know the kind of questions that the Third Reich asked in the May census.”

  Watson was speaking on the telephone from his town house on the Upper East Side. Heidinger replied from his office in Berlin, speaking in a matter-of-fact tone:

  “I presume you mean the requirement that all Germans state whether a grandparent was a full Jew by race.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You Americans are such hypocrites.”

  “What does this have to do with Americans?”

  “The U.S. Census Bureau used Hollerith machines to ask about quadroons and octoroons. It’s okay for the Americans to identify their Black bogeyman. But let the Germans ask who has Jewish blood, and it’s an international crisis.”

  “I have no time to trade insults,” said Watson. “Germany made my decision for me when they invaded Poland. No 405 alphabetizers to the Third Reich.”

  “Germany is not at war with the United States,” said Heidinger. “Have you asked your shareholders how they feel about your decision?”

  “Making a decision like this is my job.”

  “No,” said Heidinger. “When it comes to Germany, it’s your job to bow your head as you receive the Merit Cross. It’s your job to smile for the press as you trumpet your slogan as president of the ICC, ‘World peace through world trade.’ It’s my job to know all the things you don’t want to know.”

  “That’s enough, Willy.”

  “You know I can’t make these machines in Berlin. The 405 requires rationed metals that Dehomag cannot get.”

  “That’s not my problem,” said Watson.

  “You’re being a fool! In a week, all of Poland will fall. If we don’t deliver these alphabetizers, you will lose your Polish sub.”

  “I understand the risk.”

  “Sacrificing your shareholders will not save the world! The Führer will get these new machines from someplace. Even if he has to steal the technology from Dehomag and make them in a government-run factory.”

  Watson hesitated, then asked the question that was on the mind of every American CEO in 1939: “Is that what you believe is coming? Nationalization of U.S. companies by the Third Reich?”

  “Let me be very clear on this. There is one way to make sure the Third Reich will nationalize Dehomag. And that is if you keep us from getting the 405 alphabetizers.”

  Watson did not reply.

  “Watson, do you hear what I’m telling you?”

  More silence.

  “I need an answer,” said Heidinger.

  There was none, which only infuriated the German CEO.

  “Watson!”

  Finally, Watson spoke, trouble in his voice. “I’ll have to call you back,” he said.

  Kate’s cellphone rang, and she was suddenly back in the real world. It was Noah.

  “Hey, sorry to call so late,” he said.

  “No problem. I was up.”

  “I have some disturbing news. Patrick Battle has gone missing.”

  “I know. I heard.”

  There was silence on the line, and Kate could tell he had something more to say.

  “Go ahead,” said Kate.

  “Go ahead and what?” asked Noah

  “Ask me what you really called to ask me.”

  Noah took a moment, as if summoning the nerve. “Have you ever heard of a Project Naïveté?”

  Kate froze, but she managed not to convey any reaction over the line. “What if I have?”

  “I want to know about it.”

  Kate took a breath. “I’m sorry, Noah. I can’t help you.”

  “Actually, I want to help you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then let me explain.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “Not on the phone. Meet me tomorrow morning at eight a.m. Same place I not so accidentally ran into you on Sunday. No one will have to know about it.”

  He meant their “chance” encounter on the jogging trail.

  “I can’t do that,” she said.

  “I hope I’ll see you there.”

  “Good night,” she said, but Noah had already hung up.

  Chapter 21

  Patrick’s eyes fluttered open to the strange equivalent of a seventh-story view. Surrounding him were enormous green leaves, tangled vines, skinny branches—and flowers. Brilliant white. Spotted purple. Bold magenta. Thousands of dew-covered orchids that clustered in the treetops and thrived in midair. The valley floor was about seventy-five feet below. Suddenly, the realization came to him.

  He’d been swallowed by the jungle’s canopy.

  The last thing Patrick remembered was flying. Then darkness. Somewhere between flight and unconsciousness had come the fall, but he had no memory of that sensation. It had all happened too quickly.

  Patrick shifted gently to his left, but even the slightest redistribution of his body weight caused a spindling branch to slide out from beneath his legs and catapult toward the sky. Patrick lay perfectly still, even forcing himself not to breathe too deeply. The loss of another supporting branch or vine could be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, sending him from this heaven-like field of orchids in the sky to a most unfortunate landing far below.

  He took stock of his condition. The canopy had broken his fall, but the rips and tears in his shirt and pants were too numerous to count. Scratches covered his body. Most were minor, but a bloody wound to his forearm had left a large brown stain on his sleeve. He tried to move his wrist but couldn’t. Slowly, biting through the pain, he rolled up the sleeve and, to his relief, saw no protruding bone. Just a sprain, hopefully.

  Lucky to be alive, he reminded himself.

  A pair of blue-and-yellow macaws landed on a branch above him to feast on berries, and then flew away. He envied their ability to fly but did not despair. He’d climbed countless trees as a kid, sometimes a bit too high for his mother’s comfort, but he had always managed to make his way down, though a sprained wrist wasn’t going to make this any easier. He took a firm grasp of the nearest vine with his right hand and then, slowly, drew his knees toward his chin. A second spindling catapulted upward, then another, and the chain reaction was unstoppable. In an instant, the supportive bed of vines and branches beneath him was gone, and gravity did its dirty work. Patrick dropped like a stone but held tight to the vine. His arm nearly ripped from his shoulder, as the fall became more of a swinging sensation. Flashes of Tarzan crossed his mind, though his landing was more city boy than king of the jungle. His chest slammed into the tree’s massive trunk, but he managed to wrap his arms around a sturdy branch about twenty feet above the ground. From there, he lowered himself safely to the ground. He couldn’t see the river, but the comforting sound of rushing water was coming from somewhere beyond the thick underbrush, which only made him thirstier. He followed the noise through the jungle and drank like a man who’d found rain in the desert.

  A large rock near an eddy offered a dry and comfortable place to sit. The winding river cut an S of daylight through the jungle canopy, and as the breeze coursed through the treetops, Patrick caught a glimpse of the gray granite cliff that had nearly taken his life. Those final terrifying moments were still a blur, but his recollection was that Javier had done nothing to help him. It was hard to fathom, and the details still eluded him, but Javier, it seemed, had actually been worse than no help.

  Patrick considered his options. He could stay put and wait for someone to find him. But if Javier had let him fall—or had even made him fall—waiting for rescue was no option at all. He climbed down from the rock and started walking downriver. If he could just keep walking, putting one foot in front of the other, he was certain that eventually he’d find a camp, a farm, a town—maybe even a Starbucks. He walked nonstop for thirty minutes, he guessed, though he had no reliable way to measure the passage of time. He saw plenty of wildlife, but no sign of civilization. Hunger was becoming an issue. His last meal had been beans and rice at camp. He wondered if they were looking for him.

  He wondered if Javier had tried to push any of the others off the mountain.

  The jungle was thinning. Another hour or so into the journey, the terrain became more agricultural. He pulled a plant from the ground. It was an onion, which he quickly devoured. Before him lay an entire field of onions, intercropped with a magnificent, blackish-purple plant with bright scarlet flowers. He recognized the blossoms only because he’d binge-watched Narcos on Netflix, the story of drug lord Pablo Escobar. It occurred to him that he was one of very few Americans ever to see firsthand the raw materials for heroin.

  Patrick kept walking downriver, but there was no sound of rushing water in these flatter stretches of land. The world was so quiet at this altitude, which triggered thoughts of the proverbial tree that falls in a forest. The weather changed quickly, too, and it was suddenly raining, lightly at first, but then a downpour. He headed away from the river and into the forest for cover. The rain pattered on the leaves above him. Several yards into the jungle, completely unnoticeable from the river, he found a cottage on stilts. It was constructed of roughly hewn logs and had a thatched roof. Several smaller huts were nearby, but the place was overgrown with foliage, and he saw no sign of another human being. Perhaps it was seasonal housing for the campesinos who worked the onion harvest, whenever that might be.

  “Hola!” he called out, but there was no response.

  Patrick continued deeper into the forest and soon discovered that the camp was much bigger than he’d thought. He found benches and tables configured like an outdoor mess hall. He passed another cottage and a latrine, beyond which was another cluster of small huts. Some of the huts had doors. Others didn’t. He stopped and looked inside one of them. It was empty, except for the chains on the ground, and the ceiling was too low for any grown person to stand upright.