Plague (33 page)

“That’s nothing,” Cami said
.
“I think we should pay them more. Dinner by itself’ll be worth more than that.”

“No,” Agent Donner said, “we can’t let them think we have money to burn. They’ll rob us and dump our bodies in the river for the piranhas. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s no police out here.”

“He’s right, Cam,” Benjamin said
.
“
These
people are noble
‘
cause they live off the land, but they don’t think the same way we do. They only see survival.”

“Noble my ass,” Duncan said, motioning with his chin toward the village.

They turned to see what he was looking at. A man was strangling a woman while she fought against him with everything she had. As she fell to the ground, he began to kick her in the head before some of the elders ran over to restrain him. No one helped the woman up.

Sam sprinted over as Benjamin yelled, “No, don’t get involved.”

The woman was bloodied and the strangulation marks around her neck were bright red. Her nose was bleeding profusely and Sam held her hands open, hoping she understood that she was not here to harm. She took a first aid kit out of her pack and used guaze to control the bleeding, tilting the woman’s head back and squeezing the nostrils shut. When the bleeding had stopped, Sam checked her other wounds.
A
bruise on her eye was causing
it to swell shut but she had no
ice to give her.

“Are you okay? Bueno?” she said, realizing that the odds of her speaking Spanish were no better than her speaking English.

The woman rose without a word and began walking away before disappearing into one of the huts.

“What was that about?” Duncan asked.

Benjamin asked the guide
and
replied
,
“He says the woman had disobeyed her husband.”

“Disobeyed how?”

Benjamin asked and then translated
,
“He doesn’t know.”

Sam rose and turned to see the group of men leering at her, venom in their eyes. The man that had beaten the woman was w
aving his hands at her, clearly
furious and causing a scene
,
like he wanted to come over and do the same to her. Just in case, Duncan walked over to her and put his hand on her arm.

“Funny thing about being out in the jungle,” she said to him
.
“
People
seem to forget their civility.”

“It’s not that, Sam.
I think this might be what we naturally are without God.”

“Guys,” Benjamin shouted, “let’s get our huts set up. They’re having dinner soon and if we miss it
,
there won’t be any leftovers.”

Sam took a deep breath and began walking with Duncan to rejoin the group. She glanced back once to the hut the woman had disappeared into. There was a small child at the door
,
peering out and she smiled at him. He turned and went back inside.

CHAPTER 44

The hut was small and hot and the floors were just swept dirt but Samantha didn’t see any spiders or vermin
. It was surprisingly clean
considering that it had been made out of jungle plants and mud. There was one cot in the corner and another by the entrance. A small tray with a pitcher of water and a bowl was on one side of the hut and the only l
ight came from the entrance which
was nothing more than a flap of cloth covering only a portion of a large hole in the hut.

Dinner had consisted of a chicken that
the natives
had killed
, plucked, and gutted
right in front of their guests,
throwing their entrails
to a few of the village dogs that were roaming around. The chicken was then cut up, thrown in a boiling pot with herbs
,
potatoes, roots
,
and a little pink flower that Sam had been told was used for sweetening. The stew was served in bowls made of large leaves and a type of beer was served with it. Sam chose
to drink water from a well the
village used and Duncan joined her as the rest of the
m got drunk and ate several bowls of the stew
.

As night fell, she rose to go back to her hut and Duncan followed her, proclaiming that he wanted to make sure she was all right. They saw A
gent Donner sitting on a carved-out log, sipping
beer. He smiled to them and his teeth appeared little and abnormally white in the moonlight.

“How was the feast?” he said.

“You didn’t eat?” Sam said.

“I wasn’t hungry. I’ll have some rice lat
er.” He took a long drink of
beer. “You know, the village we’re going to, I did some reading up. They have a weekly, well I don’t even know what you’d call it, an orgy I guess. They get absolutely thoroughly drunk and begin having sex with each other; married or not. Then the men choose fighting partners and usually somebody gets
badly hurt if not killed. I’ve never actually seen one. Should be wild.”

“How have you been out here before?” Duncan asked. “This is the middle of BFE. How’d you get out here?”

Donner smiled as he took another drink. “I’ve been around.”

Sam stared at him and they exchanged glances.

“Well you’ll have to excuse me, Agent Donner,” she said
.
“I’m pretty tired.”

“Of course. Don’t let me stop you. Good night.”

“Good night.”

She walked around him as she went to her hut
,
Duncan
following
right behind her.
A
s she was about to go inside and say good night to him as well, he grabbed her by the waist and kissed her warmly on the mouth.

“Sorry,” he said when they had separated, “I’ve been wanting to do that for a while.”

She smiled playfully. “Good night, Duncan.”

“Good night, Dr. Bower.”

She went inside and took off her boots. Duncan was still standing outside but had turned around
,
looking like a sentry at a post. He was genuinely concerned about her, probably because she was the only white woman in the entire village and they didn’t know
whether
that was prized or not. She smiled again to herself as she lay down, falling asleep to the drunken chatter that was taking place outside.

CHAPTER 45

The morning came with nothing but heat and the stink of moisture soaking into the hut.
It was perfectly quiet outside
except for the
chirp of crickets though the sun was already up. Sam rose and brushed her teeth
,
using a little water out of her bottle
,
and pulled her hair back with a rubber
band
.

The village was empty; a smoldering fire and empty bowls that had contained their potent beer the only evidence that people lived here.

She walked over to the adjacent hut and peeked in. Duncan slept next to Benjamin.
There was a third sleeping bag
and she was unsure who it belonged to. She heard some banging nearby, like someone
was
knocking on a metal door, and she walked in that direction to see Agent Donner bent over a pan that was slowly heating up over a fire.

“Eggs?” he said.

“Sure.” She sat down against a tree, the shade covering her entire body as she stretched out her legs in the soft dirt. “Hav
e you had any contact with the b
ureau?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“I thought you guys always had to be checking in.”

“No, they trust us. More or less.”

They were silent a long time and he looked over to her, a grin on his face.

“You look like you have something to ask me, Dr. Bower. So just ask.”

“You’re not FBI. I’ve dealt with dozens of agents. You don’t walk like them, you don’t talk like them and you certainly don’t act like them. I’ve never heard of a federal agent abandoning an assignment and chasing some crazed hippie into the jungle.”

“Maybe I’m after the crazed hippie? Maybe my assignment is
to follow him wherever he goes?
”

“Bull. You have no jurisdiction here. You couldn’t effectuate an arrest if you wanted to. He would call the police and you might be the one arrested. You wouldn’t have let him out of the country if
he’s
what you were after.”

He chuckled softly to himself as he flipped some sunny-side
up
eggs upside down in the pan. “You are clever, aren’t you
,
Samantha? You must get that from your mother. She was an artist, wasn’t she? And your father was brilliant too if I recall. It must be really difficult to watch one die and the other’s brain get eaten away a little bit every day.”

She star
ed at him a few seconds and
said, “How do you know about my mother?”

“Leslie? I know a lot about Leslie. I even saw some of her paintings. She had talent. If she’d have been some drug addict freak instead of a normal housewife the art community might’ve taken her in as one of their own.”

“Who are you?”

“I, Dr. Bower, am a man who maintains balance in all the things.” He took out some olive oil from a small container and poured a little more in the pan before taking out the eggs and placing them on a paper plate. He took a slice of bread out of some tin foil, put it on the plate, and placed it in front of Samantha before cracking another two eggs and putting them in the pan.

“What do
you mean balance?”

“Well, Duncan there is a Mormon. Have you ever read the Book of Mormon?”

“No.”

“Fascinating read. I’m not Mormon, mind you. But it was fascinating nonetheless. Many see it as a spiritual guidebook, but that’s not what I saw. I saw a chronicle of war. It’s filled with cannibalism,
rape, murder, genocide
…
it
s essence is that without faith in God, that is our natural state. In Honolulu
,
for example, the strong are devouring the weak right now. That is what happens without balance. Civilization needs people that can bring balance. That can keep us from the destruction predicted in the Book of Mormon.”

“Are you CIA?”

He laughed. “CIA? No, I am definitely not CIA. They devoted decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to fighting the Soviets and they didn’t know the Berlin Wall was coming down until the bricks were hitting them on the head. The CIA has failed at every mission they have ever had and you know what their cover is? That we don’t hear about their successes, only their failures. Can you believe that nonsense? If their failures can leak, surely their successes would to
o
. But we haven’t heard of them because there haven’t been any.

“The KGB
won their war. They had covert operatives in every branch of government, especially the CIA. They
beat
the CIA
in the spy game
, but then
lost
the politics game
. Balance, you see. The Communists pushed to
o
hard and it swung the other way. It’s people like me that cause that swing to begin.”

Sam watched as he finished cooking his eggs and then threw dirt on the fire. He sat down, pulled out some bread, and dug into his
breakfast
. “I really wish I had some Tabasco
sauce,” he said.

“I think you should leave,” Samantha said. “Leave now and I won’t tell everyone what you just said.”

“Oh? And what did I just say? A lecture on balance? And perhaps I should remind you that
there are no police within a
hundred miles of where we are and you are the only white woman
in probably triple that distance. Without me he
re, these Indians would
keep you as their sex slave until they drunkenly raped you to death one night. Then, I don’t know, they’d probably cannibalize you I guess. I’ve heard that was their custom for intruders for centuries before the Peruvian government outlawed it. But then when has
the law
ever stopped anything?”

“Why are you here, Agent Donn—” Before she finished her sentence she saw the look of amusement on his fac
e. “Of course, your
name’s not Billy Donner. What are you doing here?”

Duncan walked up from behind
them. “Hey,” he said to her
.
“
You
guys got eggs? Got any left?”

“Of course.”

Sam watched as he took out the pan and began to make more eggs. She stood up and walked away, Duncan asking her what was wrong and she just brushing past him without a word.