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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 themountains 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 hisownpocket. 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.

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