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“Move!” Mendez barked from behind them.
Adam was uncharacteristically quiet as they were marched across the sprawling camp. Ellie saw his hand flex irritably at the empty sheath for his machete. He was obviously feeling the blade’s absence.
Ellie felt a pang of sympathy for him. He was clearly very attached to that knife.
Most of the men that she saw were busy working—except for the ones with the guns, like Flowers and Mendez. Those fellows lingered at various points around the camp, quietly smoking or more loudly socializing.
Ellie’s mind whirled over the puzzle of what their presence meant. An unlicensed logging operation might employ some hired toughs to keep an eye on their perimeter. Perhaps she and Adam had stumbled onto a band of timber poachers.
Surely, they could talk their way past a few loggers. Adam would figure it out. Ellie would just follow his cues—and pick up as much information as she could on her own in the meantime.
She made a study of the workers as they passed. The men had a mix of Creole and Mestizo backgrounds. There was also a group of young South Asian fellows sitting around one of the campfires, chatting comfortably among themselves. Their Bhojpuri melded with the Kriol, English, and Spanish that clamored through the air.
The poaching operation—or whatever it was—carried far more equipment with it than Ellie and Adam had… though that bar was admittedly low. Most of the men appeared to be sleeping in hammocks with mosquito nets. A few tents were also scattered about. As they passed one, Ellie peeked inside to spot both a cot and a desk.
Burlap bags of dried maize and coffee were stacked in piles beside crates of tinned beef and lamp oil.
Her captors stopped outside of a larger tent on the far edge of the camp. Mendez tossed back the flap and strode inside. Ellie heard the sharp bark of his voice from within.
“We found a couple bakras up on the ridge,” he announced.
He had spoken English rather than Spanish or Kriol. That told her something about whoever the ‘boss’ must be.
Any reply was drowned out by a crash from behind them as the men felled one of the trees.
Mendez emerged.
“Inside,” he ordered with a jerk of his head.
Ellie glanced over at Adam for guidance. His eyes were on the tent. He stepped forward to enter it, leaving Ellie to follow.
“This the woman you were looking for, then?” Mendez demanded as he came in behind them.
The interior of the tent was dim compared to the bright afternoon of the sunlit riverbank. Ellie’s eyes took a moment to adjust—and so she heard what waited for her inside before she saw it.
“It is indeed,” Jacobs replied.
Ellie’s stomach dropped. Her vision finally settled, revealing Jacobs’ lean, dangerous figure standing at the far end of the canvas enclosure. His gaze shifted from her to Adam.
“And you have brought a friend,” he commented. “How surprising.”
Jacobs did not sound the least bit surprised.
“How are you here?” The words spilled from Ellie’s lips as her mind spun with a rising fear.
“In a rare example of foresight, the professor made several useful annotations about the map in his notebook before you took it,” Jacobs replied. “Enough, at least, to get us here once we corroborated them against the latest documentation from the colony survey office.” He gave Ellie a considering look. “I wondered whether you would recognize that the tributary might serve as a shortcut. I half expected we would run into you on our way here, especially if you had managed to convince him to come along with you.”
He waved a hand casually at where Adam stood beside her.
“So this is an ambush,” Ellie fumed.
“An expedience,” Jacobs calmly corrected her. “It made far more sense to simply continue with an expedition once we had caught you, rather than returning to the city to collect the requisite men and equipment.”
The tent flap was thrown back again, and Dawson entered.
“What’s she doing here?” the professor spluttered, pointing a nervous finger at Ellie.
“Miss Mallory was just about to return our map,” Jacobs smoothly replied.
