The car bumps and shudders over broken pavement and rutted dirt. It makes a lot of turns. I try for a while to track our route, but I lose count after only a few minutes. I have no idea how long I was unconscious.
As I’m trying to piece together some kind of pattern in the few available clues, we make a turn uphill and onto a smoother road. The car picks up speed. Unless I was out for more than an hour, it seems likely that we’re on the Via Nacional, which means that we’ve left the city and we’re headed north parallel to the coast.
I return to the question: What would anyone want with me? My family doesn’t have money, and I think it’s common knowledge that the network is on the verge of financial collapse. The union that represents my camera crew agreed two weeks ago to a 10-percent cut in pay in exchange for a promise from the network execs to keep layoffs to minimum.
The State Department under the present administration isn’t keen on lifting a finger to help journalists who stray outside the “safe zones” and get themselves in trouble. And that’s assuming you consider what I do journalism. Some of my critics call it “infotainment.” Others aren’t so generous.
If my captors have kidnapped me for ransom, they’re in for a big surprise when they discover what a worthless hostage they’ve taken.
Still searching for clues, I think back to lunchtime in the Libertador Hotel dining room. I sat at my usual table, ate my typical meal. I’m billed as a culinary adventurer, but the truth is that off camera, I like predictability in my foodstuffs as much as the next guy. Maybe more than the next guy. I like the Libertador because two or three of the waiters speak passable English. Also, the dining room features an “American menu”—tough steaks cut as thin as the tongue of one of my shoes, but still identifiable as beef, and served with French fries made from the little purple potatoes they grow in the mountains around here. They also serve bottles of Budweiser chilled to something less than 98.6 degrees, which passes for cool in this climate.
No, I’ve been overlooking something important. Before lunch. Something that happened this morning.
Note: Okay, this one is a lonnnnng stretch from the assignment, which was to write about someone or something “indispensable.” From that prompt, I somehow got back to my story about the kidnapped field reporter, who is most decidedly NOT indispensable—not to his network, not to his family, not to the partner cheating on him back home, and probably not to the gang of thugs who’ve just kidnapped him. Unless he can convince them otherwise.
This is the sequel to Exercise #35 and precedes, by some indeterminate amount of time, Exercise #34. (I know, the numbers don’t make much sense, do they?)
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
Loooooooong stretch indeed. Do you ever stick to the assignment? Sheesh!
Who cares if it is a stretch! You wrote something that furthered a story idea, so mission accomplished. I wonder where this is going to end up? It is an intriguing story idea. I wait with baited breath the completed project.