The Trade Mission

by Andrew Pyper

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Horror

Synopsis

On the heels of his acclaimed bestselling debut Lost Girls, Andrew Pyper brings his darkly musical language, chilling suspense, and psychological complexity to a story of survival in the Amazon jungle.

On the delirious eve of the new millennium, Marcus Wallace and Jonathon Bates, two twenty-four-year-old overnight dot-com millionaires, are on a trade mission in Brazil. Their product is Hypothesys, a virtual "morality machine" that promises to help people "make the best decisions of their lives." But when the decision is made to take an ecotour up the Río Negro deep into the Amazon jungle, the Hypothesys team members are forced to make choices for themselves -- choices that carry fatal consequences.
In the dead of night, their boat is boarded by paramilitaries who kill the Brazilian crew and kidnap Wallace and Bates, their two older colleagues, and their enigmatic interpreter, Crossman. Blindfolded and thrown into a pit for a prison, they must fight to find the will to survive. But when the increasingly unstable Wallace engineers a violent escape, their own natures emerge as a threat potentially more dangerous than the boundless jungle that surrounds them, or the gunmen who relentlessly pursue them.
A rare combination of literary skill, contemporary insight, and outstanding storytelling, The Trade Mission is an electrifying read that confirms Andrew Pyper's mastery of psychological suspense.

 

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Release date: February 18, 2003

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 352

Sample

BEFORE

THEY are only boys.

Tall enough to be men but something gives them away, even with parka hoods pulled tight over their heads. From a distance they might appear as two swaying drunks debating over which of the paths ahead will lead them home. But look at their faces: freckles standing out against bloodless cheeks, chapped lips held tight against the wind. Their fear is neither a child’s nor a man’s. Nothing is real enough to be entirely believed by boys like these, although they’d like to believe in something if it might make them look a year or two older. But for now they’re too in-between, afloat in the not-quite-thereness of their boyhoods. Look at their faces: sometimes their eyes show a hurt they haven’t even lived through yet. It’s like a vision the two of them have shared, a premonition of the life ahead as an ongoing trade of damages. It’s why boys sleep as much as

they do. And in their dreams they are caped crusaders. Human but with impossible talents like x-ray vision or freezing breath or flight. Dreams that often end badly nevertheless, with an assassin’s blade slicing their throats or tumbling out of the sky to gasp awake before they hit the ground.

“What’s it say?”

“That way, I think.”

“Which way?”

“Through there. North.”

The slightly taller one returns the compass to the inside pocket of his parka and points a trembling finger into the trees that surround them. It’s officially winter, but up until a couple hours ago the snow had been cagey, dusting and melting and looping around but refusing to settle in for good. Now it’s coming down straight as marbles.

“It’s getting dark,” the shorter one says, and it is, the sky a purple sheet lowering over the cedar branches. It’s also getting cold. A drop of several degrees within a minute of the sun’s retreat.

They’re lost, but neither has said so yet. It’s their Outdoor Orientation exam—blindfolded then dropped off three miles in by sniggering prefects who kept calling them “lover boys”—and now it’s clear that they’ve failed. Why did the parents of one and the guardians of the other send them to this school in the middle of the Canadian woods anyway? It’s obscene, as the shorter one has taken to saying about all things that bore him. And to make matters worse, it’s one of those schools without girls. Its unspoken specialty is keeping the young gentlemen of the wealthy out of trouble. But what kind of trouble could you get into up here even if you tried? Nothing to do but drink smuggled booze and look out classroom windows at the wall of trees and prickly

creeks that lead to farther nowheres. It’s as if the people that sent them here want them to get lost.

“You better get rid of that,” the shorter boy says, eyes on the mickey of rum pulled out of the same pocket as the compass.

The taller one lifts the bottle in salute and throws back a gulp. Passes it to the shorter boy, who drains the spittled backwash. At first the alcohol had made being stuck in the woods kind of funny, then it had offered temporary blooms of warmth. Now it does little but root them to their places, as though all the stuffing above their waists had poured down their legs and into the frozen earth. The shorter one chucks the bottle away and it takes its time in midair. A half dozen tumbles before burrowing under the white blanket on the forest floor.

They go on. Put a few more miles behind them, or around them, for there’s always

a river or sudden cliff that pushes their path into spirals. And with the hours come new surprises of exhaustion. It takes all the talk out of them. There is little to be said anyway except the obvious, which, if stated aloud, would only make them more afraid.

Neither wears a watch, but the air is solid in the way the middle of the night is. Hardly moving at all now except for their arms, rubbering about them for balance.The cracked skin of their hands skimming in and out of view. They come to a stop in a small clearing encircled by a solid web of brush. How’d they get through it in the first place? For a time each of them believes they are speaking, although it’s impossible to tell. When they lift their heads to face each other the snow fills the air between them as falling bits of shadow.

“Which way now?” the shorter one asks, his lungs stinging from the air it costs him.

“It doesn’t matter. We keep ending up in the same place.”

“Or what looks like the same place.”

“Same difference.”

“But we have to keep going.”

“Why?”

“To get out of here.”

“We’re not getting out of here.”

“Yes, we are.”

“And you’re going to save us?”

“That’s right. I’m going to save us.”

“Here then.”

The taller one pulls the compass out of his pocket and hands it over. But it’s too dark to get a fix on the gyrating arrow,

anxiously skipping between each of its four options.

“The compass is lost too,” the shorter boy says.

“I’m really tired, man.”

“We’re both tired. But we have to move.”

“I don’t think so.”

“C’mon. Another half a mile.”

“Where?”

“Might as well be straight ahead.”

“I don’t—”

But the taller boy doesn’t finish. Instead there is only the whoof his body makes as it collapses forward into a creamy drift.

“Get up!” the shorter boy thinks he shouts, but immediately begins to doubt

it. Frightens himself with an oddly hollow laugh.

For a minute nothing moves. The night muffled as though brushing against a closed window. At his feet the snow already collecting over the body, sculpting its outline into another shape of the wind.

“You have to get up now.” The shorter boy has fallen to his knees. Certain of his voice this time, at once fierce and cracked. “You have to.”

“No, I don’t.”

“I’m asking nicely.”

“You go. I’ll wait here.”

The shorter boy considers this. Calculates the possibility of lucking out and finding a road or cabin. Getting help

Considers the particular darkness of the night, the particular hardness of the cold.

Even if he made it, the fallen boy wouldn’t. The shorter boy tries to make the questions in his head as complicated as he can in order to buy a little time, but instead the answers come simply and terribly. He might leave and live, or stay and probably die.

He rolls the taller boy onto his back to show a startling mask of sealed eyes and lips. Drags him the few feet it takes to lean him up against a tree out of the worst of the wind.

“Hey, are you with me?” he asks, catching sips of breath.

The taller boy can only clench his jaw in reply. He’s about to fall away into sleep, or someplace deeper, once and for all. The shorter boy knows this because he isn’t far from falling away himself.

He lets himself lie down next to the taller boy and unzips their parkas. Slips his arms around the other’s chest, brings him close in a wriggling hug. Stretches the layers of their parkas as tight as he can around their necks and knees.

“A sleeping bag,” the shorter boy says.

“This is weird, man.”

“Just pretend I’m a girl.”

“But you’re not.”

“Pretend.”

Their bodies find a hundred new ways around each other so that soon they are neatly joined as two lumps of clay. Under their coats their breath mixes in puffs of white steam.

Do they speak of things that matter? The odds they’ll be alive to see the morning?

Of their love for their mothers? For each other?

Serious words are not their talent. Instead the one who stayed behind whispers to the other practical jokes they have both planned and already performed. Lullabies the cruel nicknames of teachers into his ear. Then even he runs out of things to say along with the strength to say them. The snow drumming on their shoulders.