It was the Monday of a long weekend when I got the email. “this IS AN EMERGENCY,” it said. “Many lives are at risk… THIS IS NOT A JOKE.” It was a message from my younger brother. He wanted my phone number. I gave it to him.

The phone rang about half an hour later. My brother was in Colombia, in a small mountain town, and had gone to his Colombian girlfriend’s farm for a couple of days, an idyll interrupted when three men showed up claiming to be FARC and demanding fifty million pesos ($25,000) to let them leave town alive.

I had known my brother was travelling in South America and had intended to come to Colombia, but I didn’t know when he was going to arrive.

He was very insistent I tell no one, and that we find a way to convince my father to pay the ransom money. After we hung up my first call was to my girlfriend here in Cali. I told her I couldn’t talk over the phone — my brother was convinced all our phone calls were being tapped — so I asked her to get dressed and come over right away. It was already late.

What do I do, I asked her? Well, she said, there’s risks either way. Many times you pay the FARC a ransom and they kill the hostage anyway. Sometimes you pay the ransom and they sell the hostage to a different guerrilla group, who also demands a ransom. Simply giving them what they wanted was not necessarily the best solution to the problem.

What would you do if you were me, I asked her. I’d call GAULA, she said. GAULA, she explained, was the Colombia anti-kidnapping and extortion squad. There were more kidnappings in Colombia than anywhere else in the world, so GAULA, she argued, were some of the best people in the world to handle this sort of situation.

So we called GAULA. Unfortunately, we didn’t know where my brother was. He had called me from a land line, but I didn’t have caller ID, so it was impossible to know where he was calling from. I did have the IP address from his email but, as we were to discover later, that didn’t help much at all. Come into the office in Cali tomorrow between 7am and 7:30am, said the man on the phone.

I didn’t sleep too well that night. My brother and I are not exactly close — we’d seen each other in Buenos Aires last year for the first time in more than a dozen years — and I hadn’t had a single email from him since. Still, he was my younger brother, and I was responsible for him. My father didn’t know Colombia as I do nor does he speak Spanish, putting the onus squarely on me to get him out, alive.

The next morning my girlfriend and I rocked up to the police station and made it past several sentries to the GAULA office. The office itself, far from suggesting burly men with guns who rescue hostages, was replete with blue cubicles punctuated by the occasional meeting table. It could have been the head office of a grocery store in Boise.

Two men eventually greeted us and sat down. What was my brother’s financial situation, they wanted to know. What did he do for a living. Well, he was a poor backpacker who I thought had done some English teaching work in BA. They looked at each other significantly. Are you sure this isn’t a hoax? We deal with a lot of fake kidnappings, self-kidnappings, stuff like that. You say you don’t know your brother really well. Is it possible this is some sort of a joke?

I think about this. The thought had, in fact, crossed my mind. Was it simply a ruse to burn my dad for twenty-five grand? But then, the kid was definitely scared. No one can act that well. He was definitely afraid for his life.

No, I said. It is possible, yes, but I consider it highly unlikely. I gave them my USB key, which contained a downloaded copy of my brother’s email, with all the routing headers showing. This was passed off to a Colombian geek to process. Meanwhile, we stared at the opposite cubicle wall, and my girlfriend and I gossipped about the various boob jobs and outfits on the women in the office.

Finally the word comes back: the email was sent from an email cafe so remote that it was routed through a satellite link. Only one company offered that service in Colombia. They were a private company based in Bogota, and it would take eight days for them to process the government’s request.

My brother had been told he had only five days left to live.

We had to find out exactly where he was. Until we did that, there was nothing we could do. I signed a temporary wiretap authorization on the phone in my share house, and the two cops came by with a cassette tape recorder and a caller ID display. Set next to our modern desktop computer the tape recorder looked ridiculous.

The system is installed. All I have to do is press record when the phone rings, and turn it off if it’s not my brother. We sit around and wait. And wait. He doesn’t call.

At five thirty the cops decide to go back to the office. A card is given: call immediately if I hear from my brother.

At six fifteen the phone rings. It’s him. He’s calling from a cell phone in the street. What’s going on?

The family doctor, also the only doctor in town, seems to know the FARC commandantes. He has been asked to negotiate, to find out first if this is an official FARC action, or just a bunch of extortionist thugs hoping to make a quick buck, and if it is an official FARC action, to negotiate a more reasonable ransom.

Where are you, I asked him? What’s the name of the town? What altitude? How do you get there? How far from Medellin? When I see you I’ll tell you everything, he says. Better not to risk it.

I call GAULA again as soon as this conversation ends. They come over. Oh, no, no, that’s bad says the senior cop. Suppose it isn’t a FARC action and FARC finds out about it. Then maybe they really do kidnap everyone!

They take away the tape for translation and analysis — the cops don’t speak English — and promise to get the location of the cell phone processed.

That night my girlfriend has a brainstorm. Well why can’t you just call back that cell phone and say you had a missed call? I couldn’t, because my accent would immediately arouse suspicion, but next morning when four cops come by for a chat I suggest it.

Now we had a name: Nariño, outside Sonson. In the boonies five or six hours north of Medellin. What are we waiting for? says the cop. Ya vamonos.

They leave one cop sitting in a chair next to the phone, and the rest head back to the office to make calls to their Medellin office.

Hours pass. My father calls. What’s going on? I’ll let you know when I know something, Dad. In the afternoon I can’t take it anymore, and I go out to get some exercise for a couple of hours. I hadn’t been out of the house for several days.

After working up a big appetite and after a nice cold shower (it’s far too sticky in Cali to ever want a hot one), I’m sitting down to eat my dinner when the cops come by again. I scarf a handful of peanuts, put the dinner in the fridge, change my shirt, and off we go back to the police station.

They took the tape recorder with them from the house, and they hook it up to a fax machine in the office. We want you to call your brother on this number.

Fill me in already, I said. What’s going on? Is he alright? What’s happening?

We asked the local police to keep an eye open for him, they explain. My brother has bright blond hair and speaks Spanish with an Argentinian accent, making him easy to spot. The local police saw him walking to the internet cafe with his girlfriend.

Obviously he wasn’t kidnapped, at least not technically, so the local police followed and knocked on their door. They — my brother, his American backpacking friend, his girlfriend and her extended family — are very afraid.

So I call my brother. They tell me: you didn’t call us. We just want to know he’s alright. This strikes me as strange. They are the police. How can they not know already what their counterparts in Medellin are doing?

I call. Everything’s fucked, he tells me. The place is swarming with cops. Going to be flown out by helicopter tomorrow, he says. His girlfriend’s family won’t be able to return to that village for years, maybe never for fear of their lives. They’ll have to sell their home. Add another family to the three million displaced people in Colombia.

And how did they find out? He wants to know. No one else knew besides me, he swears. Absolutely no one. Did I call the cops? I see them watching me out of the corner of my eye. No, I didn’t call anyone, I tell him. Must have been the NSA, you know they tap all the phones and read everyone’s email.

The cops drive me home. Gentlemen, thank you, I tell them. Thanks very much. They smile. No worries. It would be very bad politically if an American got kidnapped. We were glad we could help.

The rest of the story remains undiscovered. My brother never contacted me after that. Maybe the cops told him I put them onto the case. I don’t know. I pestered the police with phone calls until I was told he was in Medellin, he was fine, and he was out of their hands. It wasn’t a police matter if my brother didn’t want to talk to me.

Would it have been better to have negotiated with the extortionists? Would it have been better to have tried to handle this myself?

I don’t believe so. My brother blames me for his friend’s family having to leave their home. But the moment those extortionists walked onto that property, their future in that town was over. Even if we had paid them, then what? Extortion, like blackmail, like a protection racket, never ends. If you can squeeze the victim once, you can come back and squeeze again, and again, and again.

The grapevine tells me my brother and his friend are being put on a plane back to the States. I gather they are not being given the option to stay. Which is a shame.