Chapter XXI

Medellin Police Headquarters,

Medellin, Colombia

"Where did they go afterwards?"

"She came back here, but left briefly afterwards. She said her son was ill. She had to leave. The other two went to the Intercontinental in El Poblado. I assume they're staying there."

"Who's tailing them?"

"Chavez is on Munoz and Torres on the others."

"Good," Juan Dominguez paused. "Keep me updated. I also want a tracking device on Munoz's car."

He hung up the phone without another word, frowning as he did.

It was bad enough that the one man he'd always idolized as the finest officer in the city had turned out to be a fraud, Valencia Munoz was another matter altogether.

He could excuse Sandoval's betrayal by reminding himself that Sandoval, with those clear blue eyes, strange accent and lack of a past, wasn't one of them. He never had been really. But Valencia was different. She was one of them. A Colombiana.

She was also his friend. Someone who'd always respected him, in spite of the fact that he would never command the kind of presence that Sandoval did. She respected his faith in the law. His inability to fall prey to corruption.

And now she had done just that.

There'd always been rumours that Munoz had a thing for Sandoval. Dominguez had never believed them. He didn't believe in petty work gossip. What he had believed was that she was better than this. Better than a cheap stereotype.

'Obviously, I was wrong.'

His phone rang, loud enough to jar him out of his fog of disillusion.

Dominguez cringed when he saw the extension on the other end.

Luis Rigato.

'Word travels fast, doesn't it?' he thought cynically. Rigato was no doubt calling to see what had happened after Munoz left the station with the two Americans.

Juan Dominguez hated working with Rigato. Rigato was a self-serving, chauvinist who chronically overcompensated for his lack of intelligence with brute force.

Getting shot by Sandoval was probably the best thing that had ever happened to his career.

He was the kind of police officer that almost made Dominguez ashamed to be one himself.

Except this time, Rigato was on the right side of the law.

And that was the side Dominguez would always play on, regardless of who was on the other side.

He tried to swallow the bitter taste in his mouth, and moved to pick up the receiver.

'Si…?'

Hotel Intercontinental, Medellin

"Hey…are you okay?" Mac asked her. "You haven't said a word the entire trip."

It was true. She hadn't. During the cab ride through Medellin and up into the hills of El Pobablo, back to their resort hotel, Robin couldn't think of much to say aloud, even though countless thoughts raced through her mind. Even now as they walked through the luxurious lobby she didn't know quite where to start.

"Robin…?"

"I'm fine," she answered before he could ask anything else. She stopped just short of rolling her eyes. Lately Mac always looked at her the way he did just now. Worried. Concerned. Apprehensive. As though she was still the helpless little girl who sat next to him at her parents' funeral.

And each time she felt the annoyance rise in her throat, guilt crept up right behind it. Never one without the other.

He worried about her because he loved her like a father. Why couldn't she just accept it and be grateful? God knows she loved him enough.

'Because…' she answered her own question. 'I never asked for a replacement after Dad died.'

Mac bit his tongue after her terse answer, knowing better than to press her further.

He held the elevator door open, motioning for her to step inside first. Her uncle the gentleman.

Robin sighed. Maybe Mac's concern wasn't so outlandish.

She wasn't. Fine. Not by a long shot.

Physically, she was drained. The flight and the time change had thrown off her carefully timed drug regimen. She wasn't sure whether that was the cause of her nausea and lack of an appetite. Or whether it was something simpler, like jet lag or the unbearably humid weather that made her feel like the air was moist enough to touch.

Or maybe it was because she was exhausted and, literally, worried sick about her parents.

Her parents.

The notion still took her breath away. That they weren't just looking for her mother but her father.

In Colombia, trailing her fugitive mother, in this crazy surreal world, she'd found her father. And now, before she'd seen him with her own two eyes, she was on the verge of losing him again.

"What do you think about Valencia?" she heard Mac ask her. She barely noticed that he had opened the door to his room and led her inside.

"What do you mean?"

"Do you think we can trust her?"

Robin smirked. "It's a bit too late for that now, isn't it?"

This time it was Mac who didn't say anything, and his grim expression tightened the knot in her stomach.

The truth was, she was terrified that by trusting in Valencia they might have blown her mother's cover. She was a cop after all. What if she had a change of heart and decided she didn't want to risk a prison sentence to help out an ex-boss?

"I don't have anything but a gut instinct to go on," Mac admitted. "But I feel like we can trust her."

"I hope so," Robin sighed, sitting down on her uncle's freshly made queen-size bed. Pausing only for a second before reclining backwards to lie down on it, staring at the ceiling when she did. What was it she fretted about last week at this time? A Chem exam? God, what she wouldn't give to worry about nothing more than lab exams right now.

She imagined yelling at her mother for putting through this. Releasing the pent up anger she felt even now. What the hell was her mother thinking anyway when she decided to smuggle a stolen mask halfway across the globe? Not that her actions could've involved any sort of rational thought, period.

Yet, Robin knew that if her mother were to walk through the doors of this room right now, there wouldn't be any yelling. Who was she kidding? She'd hold on to her mother so tight that she wouldn't be able to breathe.

I can't lose you again, Mom. I can't.

"Do you think they're okay?" Robin mumbled.

Mac had taken off his jacket and opened the door of the bathroom, letting cold water run from the tap.

"What? Robbie and your Mom?" Mac asked. "Of course they're okay. If they have each other to look out for one another, they'll be fine. They're smart and tough."

Robin wanted to roll her eyes again. She could do without a phoney pep talk. One that neither of them believed. "Valencia said they were hurt."

"She also said Robbie was treated by a doctor," Mac countered.

Robin kept staring at the ceiling. "What do you think happened to Mom?"

She could see envision Mac's frown even without looking at him.

"I think…" he told her. "That there's no point imagining something that may or may not be."

"So we should just hope for the best?"

"Not just." Mac answered. He sat down, not on the bed where she was lying, but at the desk across from it. "Hoping alone won't bring them back to us. That's why we're meeting Valencia tonight and heading towards Panama with her. "

Robin closed her eyes tiredly, a smile forming at the corner of her lips. It was when he said things like that, that Mac often reminded her why she loved him. He always reminded her that actions spoke louder than words.

"Thanks," she whispered. "For coming here and helping me. I couldn't have done it alone. Or with Spencer. I realize that now."

"You don't have to thank me, sweetheart."

"I know that too."

"Good."

Mac went to pour the now ice-cold water into the coffee jug, as if knowing that's exactly what she needed right now. A good cup of freshly brewed coffee.

"Stop worrying about your parents, okay?" he told her while turning on the machine. "They're good at staying alive."

"If you promise to stop worrying about me."

Mac smiled. That same reassuring, warm smile that Robin now realized she'd taken for granted for far too long. "You drive a hard bargain."

Robin grinned, "My Dad taught me well."

Mac chuckled, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt and grabbing the coffee mugs to rinse them out. "Robbie would be proud to hear that."

Robin stretched her arms into a yawn. Maybe a nap wasn't such a bad idea.

"He wasn't the Dad I was thinking of…"

Munoz Residence

Medellin

The smell of Salvadorian cooking filled her nostrils before she entered the door of her home.

'Pupusas revueltas,' she thought. Hand-made corn tortillas filled with beans, cheese and pork. Served with rice and warm tomato sauce.

Her mother had learned to cook them as a child in her native El Salvador and now she made them at least once a week, and each time she did it reminded Valencia of the security and the happiness of her childhood. Of the hours spent helping her mother cook in the too-small kitchen of the house she grew up in.

"Hola Mama!" she called out from the hallway, loud enough to make sure her mother, whose hearing was starting to falter, could hear.

Instead of finding her in the kitchen, she saw both her mother and son on the sofa, watching a telenovela with the volume turned on loud enough to mask her steps.

Valencia sat down on the sofa next to her son, pulling him a hug, kissing him on the cheek. "Hola, mi amor."

He returned her hug, adjusting his glasses when they nearly fell off with her embrace. He didn't resist when she pulled him towards her, draping her arm over his shoulder.

Valencia planted another kiss on the top of his head, causing a mop of curly brown hair to swirl around her lips. "What are you watching?"

He shrugged his shoulders and gave her one his trademark smiles. The kind that made her fall in love with him anew each time she saw it. "No se. Pero me gusta."

Of course he liked it. Daniel wasn't hard to please. He liked almost everything. Everything interested him. Whether it was books or butterflies. Telenovelas or futbol, her son had the uncanny ability to find something fascinating in the most ordinary of things.

He had his father's mind. His brilliant, inquisitive mind.

His father was a professor of etymology at a university in Bogotá. Intellectual and eccentric, he was the polar opposite of the tough, machismo men Valencia spent her working days with. And she had loved him for it. He was a man who could spend endless hours discussing details of the lives of insects that Valencia couldn't even name, and make them sound like the most amazing things in the world.

It was the more arcane things, like Daniel's birthday, that he had trouble with.

Then there were other silly details that escaped him, like remembering that he was still married when, one day, he decided to romance a fellow etymologist. The thought still made Valencia cringe, even now almost half a decade later. That she lost her husband not to a woman who looked like the actresses on the telenovela she was now watching at, but to an achingly ordinary scientist who was ten years older than her. A woman who did the one thing neither she nor Daniel could do for her husband: She kept him interested.

Valencia kissed Daniel once more for good measure. 'I don't care that you have your father's mind…as long as you have my heart.' Valencia could forgive her ex-husband for a lot of things; she could even forgive him for falling out of love with her. It was his utter lack of interest in Daniel that she couldn't forgive.

Daniel, the gentle nine-year old boy, who gladly kept his grandmother company while she cried her eyes out watching telenovelas. Valencia knew that her son didn't harbour a single unpleasant thought towards his father. That if her errant ex-husband were to show up the front door right now to play twenty minutes of soccer with him, Daniel would love his father for it. That he wouldn't even ask why his father hadn't bothered to call him once in the last three months.

'You don't deserve your son,' she thought angrily each time the subject entered her thoughts.

"Es mentiroso. No le ama," Daniel explained, when he caught her staring blankly at the TV screen.

"Is that right?" Valencia mumbled in English.

"Que dices?" Daniel's head swirled around with lightning speed at hearing the foreign words come from her mouth.

Valencia smiled. "Nada."

She got up and walked to her mother, sitting on the other end of the sofa. "Mama…I need to talk to you."

The look of obvious apprehension on her mother's face made Valencia cringe. She also felt like she was 12 years old again. Even now that Valencia was in her mid-thirties, her mother could still spot trouble with a single glance.

Valencia explained that she had to leave Medellin for a couple of days, maybe longer.

'As long as it takes to find Roberto,' she wanted to add.

The news disturbed her mother and sent a dozen questions flying in her direction.

"It's dangerous isn't it? They are sending my little girl on a dangerous assignment because she's too foolish and brave and they know it!

"You would tell me the truth if it wasn't that! I know you would!"

"I can't believe you still take these risks now, even now after Eduardo left you all alone to raise that little boy!"

Valencia cringed and begged her mother to lower her voice.

"Mama, it's not work. Please don't scare, Daniel. I promise you. It's personal."

The less her mother knew the better. Especially if the police were to find her absence suspicious and began to question it. The last thing Valencia wanted was to put her staunchly honest mother in a position that would require any sort of lying.

Of course her own lie unleashed another barrage of question.

"Personal? Personal? What is so personal that you can't tell you mother?"

"Is it a man? Is this about a man?"

"Is something wrong with you, mi nina? Are you ill?"

Valencia bit her tongue. All this was hard enough without the guilt that was slowly building up in the pit of her stomach.

"No…Mama. I'm not sick. Please, trust me. I can't give you the details now but believe me when I say that I'll come back in a few days and when I do everything will be back to normal."

Her mother's black eyes tried to hook onto her gaze, as if by trapping it she could catch the truth as well. "You are not going for surgery are you, Valencia? You're beautiful, my girl. You're so beautiful. I don't want to see you skinny and perfect. It's not natural."

Valencia couldn't help laugh. "No, Mama. It's not that either." She bent her head downwards and cupped her mother's cheeks, kissing her on the forehead. "Please, Mama. No more questions. Promise me you'll look after Daniel?"

Her mother pretended to be hurt. "As if you have to ask me, if I will look after Daniel! As if! As if you could stop me from it!"

"Right, Mama…" Valencia sighed, relieved that the indignation marked the end of her questions. "Let's go eat. I'm starving. Since I'm going for plastic surgery let's make sure I get my money's worth."

"Valencia!"

Valencia laughed, as she put her arms around her mother and walked back into the living room with her.

Near the Panama border

"Are you sure you know how to use that?" Anna asked him for the second time since they got up in the morning, raising her eyebrows towards the compass Robert was holding.

"No, of course not. I lied to make you feel better."

Roberto caught her glare and had to make an effort not to grin. It felt strange to banter with her the way he did. Strange and new. Comfortable and familiar all at once.

'Sometimes talking with you,' he thought. 'Feels like talking to my wife.' Except he didn't know what a marriage felt like. Didn't know what it meant to love someone. At least not the way a husband loved a wife.

The way Robert might have loved Anna.

'Correction,' a voice told him. 'Not 'might have'. The way he did love her. Anna wouldn't look at you the way she does if Robert hadn't loved her. Not Robert…stop thinking of him as some stranger. Me. If I hadn't loved her…' another voice corrected him, mounting the endless confusion of thoughts that ran through his mind. Relentless thoughts that somehow helped him overlook the physical pain and fatigue that threatened to overwhelm him with every step he took.

"This is an actual path," Anna pointed out, stopping dead in her tracks so suddenly that he almost bumped into her, interrupting his thoughts. She turned around to meet his gaze. Wet streaks of hair hung over Anna's forehead, clinging to the perspiration that covered her skin, as if mimicking the moisture that was covering the lush, green plants that surrounded them.

Roberto nodded. He had noticed it earlier but hadn't bothered to mention it to her.

"Other people have walked over these mountains, we're bound to stumble on a path every now and then." Personally, he was grateful. The worn route on the ground meant there were less branches to trip over and less to slap him in the face as they rebounded off of Anna in front of him. It made for an easier trek.

"People that live here?" Anna asked him with disbelief.

"Yes and no," Roberto explained. "There are rebel camps in these mountains as well as drug smuggling operations. There are two main factions, the FARC and the ELN. They're both left wing. They oppose the government, American influence in Colombia, multi-national corporations, the widening gap between the rich and the poor…you name it. Oh, and over the years they've grown to hate each other as well. They supposedly represent the poor and powerless, and they control large parts of land here, funding themselves and their arsenal of weapons with drug money, extortion, kidnapping…you get the idea."

Anna face was serious now. "So is it a good idea that we're on this path? Where we could run into them?"

Roberto shrugged. The path looked ragged and in parts overgrown. It could have been weeks or months even since any organized group of individuals had walked along it. "We could run into them anywhere. Following a path won't make it any more or less likely."

Anna cringed. "You're not reassuring me. What happens if we do…run into them, that is. "

It would mean the end of them, Roberto knew. The rebels would likely kidnap them, and once they found out about the bounty on their heads, they would kill them both and claim their reward, oblivious of the irony that, for a change, their violence would be an act of public service.

"I don't know about you, but I don't plan on running into them."

"But if we do…" Anna pressed.

"If we do, the police will be the least of our worries."

"That's great. So if you don't die of exhaustion or infection, chances are you'll end up kidnapped and held for ransom by guerrilla fighters."

Roberto chuckled. "Are you always this optimistic?"

"I want us to get out of here alive," she said defensively. "I want to know what our odds are."

"I don't have mathematical odds for you, Anna," he replied. "But I can tell you I didn't come this far without planning on making it all the way."

"Good," Anna's face softened.

"If your aim is as good with guerrilla fighters as it was with overzealous cops like Rigato, I think I stand a fair chance."

This time he caught a reluctant smirk on her face, "You always trusted me to help you out of a jam. I see that hasn't changed, even if you don't know it."

The remark caught him off guard, like all her other references to a common past.

"Don't worry, it's a mutual feeling," she added as if sensing his unease. "You had a knack for getting me out of hot spots too. Tell me something else…you seem to know this area well. Have you been here before?"

Roberto nodded. Anna's keen powers of observation were something he was only beginning to appreciate. 'Note to self,' he thought wryly. 'Watch what you say and do because she notices everything.' "I have," he admitted, egging her on to keep walking as they spoke. "A couple of years ago I brought a team of officers up here to track the movement of cocaine from mountain plantations into urban ghettos. It was part of a collective initiative to nip things in the bud."

"Was Valencia part of your team?" Anna asked, speaking without turning back, her attention focused on the path ahead of them.

Where did that question come from?

"Yeah…she was."

"You're friends?"

"I suppose you could say we are. Were."

"Just friends?"

The hike was strenuous and he could appreciate the monosyllables, if not the questions themselves. As much as he needed conversation to keep his mind off his shoulder, there was something about Anna's questions that never failed to get under his skin.

Did you always drive me nuts?

"Yes. Just friends," he mumbled.

"She likes you."

That came out of left field and Roberto stopped just short of wincing. "She's never said as much."

"Do you think a woman would risk her entire career if she didn't feel something for you?"

Good point.

Had he really been oblivious to that fact for years, only because he valued her friendship too much to imagine ruining it with something more complicated? "I was her boss," Roberto pointed out. "I don't make it a habit to sleep with my officers."

"Did you mean what you said in the Barrio?"

"What I said?"

Anna stopped walking, turning around to face him. "You said that after you met your daughter, you would come back to face charges here."

"Look, Anna," Roberto swallowed. Every time they stopped the weight of their backpacks seemed to compound, as if someone threw in a couple of bricks. Although his pack was considerably lighter than Anna's, he could still feel the broad strap digging into his shoulder wound, like a knife. "Maybe I've never known who I was, but I always knew who I wasn't. I was never someone who didn't own up to what I did. It's not an option for me to spend the rest of my life a fugitive. I owe it to myself…I owe it to the officers I've worked with for the last decade." 'I owe it to Val' he wanted to add.

"What about what you owe your daughter?" Accusation lined Anna's face. "If you go to jail after all this, you're going to break your daughter's heart all over again."

"Can we worry about that when we get out of here?" he shot back. "Which we'll never do if you keep stopping."

"She lost you for over ten years," Anna continued, ignoring him. "What are you going to do? Say 'Hi, Robin. Nice to see you again. I'm off to jail now' ?"

She definitely had a way of getting under his skin. "It's my daughter, Anna, therefore it's my problem to…"

He didn't have a chance to finish his sentence.

A loud shriek interrupted him and before he could react, he saw Anna dump her pack, reach for the gun and push him into the ground.