He looked at her. “If we do stay overnight, I thought you’d want another gun in the room.”
“I do. But César doesn’t have to know that.”
“Okay… smart.”
“I’m thinking with my brain.”
“I resent the implication.”
“Scott—”
“Clark. We’re married.”
“César is waiting for us.”
“Right. We’ll take our bags to breakfast.”
She picked up her overnight bag. “Should we call John?”
“Oh, so it’s John now, is it?”
“Scott—please—should we call our pilot and give him the all clear?”
“He’s probably halfway to Caracas by now.”
“No he’s not.”
“The best place for him right now is in the Cessna. We’ll call him when we know it’s all clear.”
“All right. But we should call Dombroski. Maybe Worley.”
“We’ll call Dombroski as soon as we’re alone with open sky.”
She nodded but said, “I hope the sat phone works here.”
“Me too. Let’s have breakfast.”
They left the hut, and César glanced at the overnight bags in their hands. Taylor said something to him in Spanish, and he nodded and led the way.
Brodie did an eye-recon as he walked, and he noticed that Taylor was doing the same as she chatted in Spanish to César.
About fifty yards from their guesthouse, César motioned them into a large open-sided pavilion, draped in mosquito netting. Inside the pavilion were long wooden tables with benches, and César invited them to sit.
Brodie and Taylor sat across from each other, and César sat next to Brodie, apparently staying for breakfast.
Brodie asked him, “Do you recommend we order off the menu, or do the buffet?”
“My wife bring good breakfast.”
“Wonderful.”
César asked to see their passports, so this was a working breakfast.
Brodie and Taylor handed him their passports, and he looked through them, glancing at his guests to be sure their photos matched their faces. He then took a pen and very carefully wrote their names and passport numbers on his clipboard roster, under the names of people named Rolf, Fritz, Magda, and Gerda.
The Europeans, Brodie knew, were more adventurous travelers than Americans, which didn’t mean they were braver—they just had a higher tolerance for shitholes, or maybe they just expected to die and were happy when they didn’t.
César handed them their passports, then looked at Taylor’s T-shirt. “What say…?”
