Where Are My Children? The True Story of a Mother Who Risked Her Life to Rescue Her Kidnapped Children by Cassie Kimbrough

Author:Cassie Kimbrough [Kimbrough, Cassie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zebra Books
Published: 2011-11-06T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Thursday, April 21, 1988

I got up early and had showered and dressed by 8 A.M. It would be my second day to wear the wig. To pass the time, I did crosswords and wrote in my journal. By ten o'clock no one had shown up and I was starving. I dialed room service and in rusty Spanish ordered breakfast. It couldn't hurt, I reasoned—in a hotel this big, the waiter wouldn't know that a woman was occupying the room that a man named Bob had registered for.

I felt lightheaded, both from hunger and from the effects of the high altitude. The waiter arrived and laid out quite a spread: a basket of rolls and breads, jams and butter, juice, and café con leche, thick Bolivian coffee made with steamed milk. Shortly after I laid down my napkin, Lloyd showed up. He glanced at the untidy table and reprimanded me for ordering the food. Embarrassed, I apologized. Maybe I wasn't taking this cloak-and-dagger stuff seriously enough. He told me it was foolish to take a chance, to assume people wouldn't notice things.

"How did you pay for it? You don't have any Bolivian money yet," he asked.

"Uh, I charged it to the room." I felt like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

"Did you sign anything?" he demanded.

"Well, I signed the tab. I just scribbled down some initials, as illegibly as I could." After all, I didn't know Bob's last name. But I figured the hotel people would think nothing of the scrawled initials. Bolivians seemed to take great pains to create individualized and totally unreadable signatures.

"Don't do it again," Lloyd scolded. "Don't ever do anything unless we tell you to. We'll take care of the food and whatever else you need."

He went on briskly, "We're moving you out of this room today anyway. There's a suite on the other side of the hotel, with a sitting room adjoining it. That way we'll be closer to you and we'll have space to make plans. If a maid comes to clean the room, you can switch to the other room. That way nobody has to know you were ever here."

For the second time since my arrival in La Paz, I was moved to another room.

As soon as I entered my new quarters I went to the window, which faced south. From there I had a clear view of the apartment building where Federico and the children were living with Nila, some three or four blocks down the street from the hotel. I counted up from the ground to the fifteenth floor, where her three-bedroom apartment occupied half the floor. I knew her living room was on the other side of the building, overlooking the circular Isabel la Catolica Plaza. I remembered the room clearly, having eaten many meals there and sat many times on her formal velvet sofa. The room was furnished with a mixture of handmade Bolivian furniture and quite a few artifacts that Nila and her husband

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