Humid air carried an almost inhuman scream to him, wavering insanely until it formed into words: “Morir, Huicho! Bajar infierno! Bajar infierno!” Back to hell! Back to hell!
Near. More important, the reproach came after the gunfire, meaning their prey had armed himself. The few guards left in the compound started to converge on the sound. Gregor whispered quickly into his headset and they backed off. He didn’t want to lose any more men.
Besides, these men respected a leader who exhibited the kind of bravery he demanded. Respect bred loyalty, so he always watched for ways to improve it.
Walking forward alone, he pulled his BlackBerry out of its holster and examined it. It monitored and controlled all of the compound’s outside security systems. At the touch of an icon on the screen, he could turn electric fences on and off, lock and unlock gates, arm and disarm surface weapons, and access the lighting system. Gregor had read in a security publication that small transmitters could be added to cameras to relay their images to handheld devices like his. He hoped to convince Litt of his need for the upgrade.
He cut through the forest’s shadows like a cat on the prowl. The BlackBerry confirmed that the compound’s Deadeye system was inactive. Only recently developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the device monitored an area for gunfire. When its infrared sensors detected a gunshot, its computer would calculate the projectile’s point of origin and instruct its own weaponry to return fire. Regardless of how well the assailant hidden himself, two seconds after pulling the trigger, he’d be dead.
Designed to protect high-ranking officials in motorcades and at public appearances, and to combat sniper activity, the Deadeye was a perfect addition to the compound’s perimeter security. Suspicious of the compound’s guards, covert activities, and the steady disappearance of people from surrounding towns, some local rebels had taken to ambushing vehicles coming into the compound and shooting at guards from the cover of the jungle. Such assaults had stopped after the Deadeye system mowed down three of the guerrillas.
Private organizations were not supposed to possess military-grade weapons. However, Gregor had discovered long ago that nothing was out of his reach as long as Litt’s band of merry scientists kept producing the germs dictators and terrorists desired. With its constant exchange of illegal merchandise, barter was the currency of choice on the black market. The Deadeyes had been a gift from the U.S. government to Israel to combat sniper activity on Route 1, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Several wound up in the possession of Hamas sympathizers, who preferred biological agents over anti-sniper weapons.
Gregor used his thumb to punch the button that activated the Deadeyes. The icon changed from “safe” green to “unsafe” red. Up ahead, he heard labored breathing and the crashing of a body breaking through heavy foliage.
He stepped behind a tree and yelled, “Jorge Prieto!”
The crashing sounds stopped.
“Jorge! There is no need for this! We want only to help you!” He spoke in the man’s native tongue.
“Go away! Huicho!”
He nodded to himself. To the Guarani Indians, Huicbo was an ugly little demon, a chummy companion of Death. He had long, dirty hair, skin the pallor of a corpse, and a fetid odor. The creature caused repugnance and terror. Gregor wondered if Prieto had ever laid eyes on Litt. He bent around the tree and caught a flash of khaki.
Prieto was staggering at the edge of a pillar of sunlight at the far side of a small clearing, looking for his pursuers. He was hugging himself with one arm; the hand of the other arm gripped a Beretta AR-70 assault rifle. Blood covered his face from the nose down, giving him the appearance of wearing a harlequin’s half mask. His eyes were wide and blinking continuously, whether from the sun or perspiration or troubled vision Gregor didn’t know.
He felt a pang of pity for the man. What must it be like to feel your insides turning to jelly? To have no clue why? He doubted Prieto would appreciate his own sacrifice. Could such a simple man grasp the grandeur of being the last experimental host of a virus that billions would come to fear? Or of being one of the first to experience a new generation of manipulable “designer” viruses? Ignorance is not always bliss, for here was a man who knew nothing but pain and fear, and none of the reasons that would make him proud to endure them.
Better to end it quickly.
Gregor stepped out from behind the tree and into the clearing.
Prieto jumped at the movement. He squinted at Gregor, obviously unsure if he had spotted a man or a bush. Then he focused on Gregor’s face, which Gregor had not bothered to cover with camo. The Indian hunched lower and leveled the machine gun. Its barrel wavered wildly.
Gregor waited. When Prieto started backing slowly into the shadows, Gregor made a show of reaching for his holstered pistol. Startled by this, Prieto bared his teeth and fired. Dirt exploded fifteen feet in front of Gregor, who didn’t so much as flinch. The high-pitched whine of an electric motor sounded to Gregor’s right as the Deadeye rotated its weaponry. Prieto heard it, too, and shifted his gaze just as the Deadeye let loose with a five-second burst from its Ml34 minigun— five hundred rounds of 7.62mm ammunition spread over a six-foot radius. The effect was similar to an explosive charge: Jorge Prieto ceased to be.
The Deadeye’s Gatling-style barrels continued to whirl, filling the comparative silence with a metallic death rattle.
Gregor could make out the circular pattern cut through the jungle as if a rocket had passed, taking Prieto with it. Small trees fell to the ground, severed in two. Leaves floated down, having been torn from their branches and hurled skyward. The air was hazy as the slate-colored smoke of gunpowder drifted up from the Deadeye’s hiding place in the trees, and the green-hued mist of vaporized foliage floated down.
Booted feet stomped behind him. He punched the BlackBerry’s Deadeye icon again and watched it turn green. The last thing he needed was for some excited guard to shoot off a round and awaken the hideous Deadeye to their presence. He strode forward, searching the ground. He stopped when he spotted a pair of legs … just legs. The rest of Jorge Prieto fanned out from the knees in a glistening, lumpy mass. A guard entered the clearing, then stopped, wide eyes taking it all in. Two medical technicians arrived. They, too, stopped short, eyeing Gregor as if he’d perpetrated the destruction with his bare hands. He bent down to scoop up the dented and perforated AR-70. A piece of its polyurethane stock fell away. He saw that a fist still clenched the grip, and remembered that Guarani meant “warrior.” The man had died as his ancestors had lived—fighting. He tossed the rifle to the guard, who shied back before catching it with fumbling hands.
“Clean this up,” Gregor ordered and marched away.
fifty-five
Allen bolted up, a nightmare clinging to him like a bedsheet. He gulped for air even as the fear faded into his subconscious. For an instant he thought the warm moisture drenching his hair, streaking his chest, was blood, then he realized it was perspiration, lots of it.
The sound of another breath caused him to freeze.
He jerked around and recognized the van’s interior. Stephen was reposed in the driver’s chair, which was collapsed into a sort of narrow bed. Faint light coming in through the windshield caught the tips of his whiskers and hair, giving his head a fuzzy, surreal quality. But his soft, bass snore was real enough, and Allen found some comfort in that. He became aware of a rhythmic patter echoing through the van. It took him a moment to identify it as light rain falling on the roof. He shifted his gaze and made out Julia’s head between the passenger door and seat. He thought he could hear her shallow breathing. In all, he found the sounds soothing.
The army blanket that had covered the mattress when he crawled back to it was now bunched up in a corner. He shifted to slide the makeshift curtain away from one of the square back windows and smelled the stale odor of uric ammonia. The former owner had mentioned having small children, and Allen envisioned stains the ragged shape of countries on the bare, pinstriped mattress beneath
him. It gave him a token appreciation for the dark.
Stephen had parked at the far end of a shopping center’s parking lot. A twenty-four-hour grocery store in the middle of the strip dwarfed the peddlers of videos, liquor, stationery, coffee, electronic components, and other assorted luxuries of modern life. Allen spied a pickup truck and a dilapidated VW bug a few slots and one row over. Because the cars were too far from the grocery to belong to shoppers, he assumed their owners were store employees. A regular pattern of lampposts poured pools of rain-hazed light onto the vast asphalt. One such lamppost rose out of sight just to the right of the van’s rear window but returned no light. He scanned the pavement below for broken glass, saw none. He doubted Stephen would have thought to shatter the bulb, but Julia would not have hesitated.
He eased down on the mattress and gazed through the window at the clouds. Beyond, stars twinkled as raindrops passed over them. He wondered how long until the sun came up and the others woke. Then he drifted off again. When his eyes fluttered open, it was daylight and the van was moving. Stephen and Julia talked quietly in the front seats. To orient himself, he turned back to the rear window. The sun stung his eyes.
“Good morning.” It was Julia, looking much more refreshed than he felt. She had spun her chair around and was ducking under the table that held her computer equipment. She positioned herself in the bucket behind Stephen.
“Is it?”
“We’re alive,” Stephen called back. “I’d say that makes it a good morning.”
“I suppose.” Allen groaned and swung his legs off the mattress. He tugged at his shirt to align the buttons with the center of his chest and asked, “Where we going?”
“McDonald’s,” Stephen chimed. “Hungry?”
“I don’t know yet, but I sure could use a mug of Java.” His mouth tasted like something had died in it; probably smelled like it too. Julia was massaging her neck, and he remembered the awkward position she had slept in. He felt a little guilty that he’d hogged the only bed, but only a little. He lined up the toe seam of a sock and pulled it up. He looked up to find her smiling at him.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head slightly.
That smile. She really could break hearts without any trouble.
“It’s just that I’ve never seen your hair mussed up before.”
His hands flew to his head as if she’d said his hair was on fire, and he began combing it with his fingers. Her smile broadened, and as much as he could have bathed in her charms all day, he was irked to realize that he was the cause of her amusement. He noticed the laptop lid was closed. When he’d decided to check out the mattress, it had been open and still receiving the decrypted data from Julia’s friend.
“Did you get the data?”
She grinned and nodded. “It took even longer than the program had calculated. It was still downloading when we parked and fell asleep. When I checked this morning, it said file transfer complete. I almost opened the directory, but I figured you two would want to be part of it.” She was almost giddy.
“Doesn’t matter to me who checks it out.” Allen shrugged. “As long as it’s something we can turn over to someone else and get back to our lives.”
The van stopped, and Stephen killed the engine. Through the windshield, a pair of men in paint-stained coveralls pushed through a glass door marked with golden arches.
Stephen turned to face them. “So what’s say we stoke up on some greasy fast food and do some good today?”
The three collected their toiletries, invaded the restaurant’s washrooms, ordered breakfasts, and met back at the van, bags of food in hand. The men climbed into the front seats while Julia took her position facing the laptop. Immediately she began clicking away, taking bites out of a biscuit whenever the computer paused to perform a command. The aroma of Egg McMuffins, hash browns, and coffee quickly usurped the odor of old cigars as the van’s dominant smell.
“Okay,” she said after a few minutes.
Allen tossed her a quick glance, then turned his full attention to her when he noticed that she was sawing her top incisors over her bottom lip. He wondered if she’d have much of a lip left when this thing was over.
“Ready to see what’s on that memory chip Vero left?”
Allen thought she was trying to sound optimistic. Truth was, they were all hoping for something that probably didn’t exist: an easy answer to their dilemma—any answer to their dilemma.
Stephen choked on his coffee. It spewed from his mouth and into the forest of his beard as he snatched at a pile of napkins and slammed them over his mouth. He turned his watery eyes toward her.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, popping the cables from the back of the laptop and positioning it on the chair behind Allen so all of them could see. She collapsed the van’s pseudo-table as though she’d been doing it a long time, put it on the floor at her feet, then turned back to the laptop. The fifteen-inch screen was black except for a palette of five colorful buttons hovering in the lower right corner.
Allen recognized the symbols on the buttons from audio-cassette players: a triangle with the acute angle facing right for PLAY; a triangle pointing left for rewind; two vertical lines for PAUSE; and a square for STOP. The fifth symbol he didn’t recognize; it looked like the circle and crosshairs of a rifle scope.
Julia moved a cursor over the palette of buttons.
Something struck the van.
Thunk!
Her pistol appeared in her hand so quickly, Allen wondered if it had always been there. As for himself, he might not have even noticed the sound, had Julia not moved so urgently. Before he realized it, his head was between his knees. He steeled himself for the windshield’s inevitable shattering under the impact of the next round. His mind filled with things he wanted to yell out: Start the van! Step on it! Let’s go!
But he heard Stephen’s words first: “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” He was leaning almost out of the chair to stop Julia’s movement toward the sliding door. “The door lock, Julia!” he said. “I just locked the doors.” He reached his hand back and toggled the switch twice: Thunk! Thunk!
She stared at him in disbelief, whether at Stephen’s actions or her own, Allen couldn’t tell.
“It is loud,” Stephen said apologetically, with a sideways tilt of his head.
She settled back in her chair, calmly slipping the weapon under her blazer. “It’s okay,” she said, closing her eyes. “Bit jumpy.”
I’m just glad she’s on our side, Allen thought.
Her lips stretched into a fat grin; then her eyes snapped open. “Told you I was raring to go.” She reached out to the computer and clicked play.
fifty-six
The black man emerged from a doorway set in a whitewashed wall. With a perfectly round head and pencil-thin body, he resembled an upside-down exclamation point. He wore blue jeans, which were mostly white and hung loosely on his narrow hips, and a threadbare flannel shirt, buttoned tight at the neck. Dangling from the tips of three fingers was a beat-up metal lunch box, the kind kids toted to school in the sixties. Whatever had decorated it—images of the Brady Bunch, Speed Racer, or King Kong—had long since faded and chipped away. After appraising the sky, he started up the unpaved street, his heavy boots kicking up little plumes of dust. He glanced over his shoulder and stopped. A big smile broke like a crescent moon on a starless night. He raised his unencumbered hand and yelled, “Moyo Wanji!”
“What’s that? What’d he say?” Allen didn’t take his eyes off the screen.
Julia shook her head. Stephen said, “Shhh.” All three had rotated their captain’s chairs to face the laptop. By now, each was leaning forward—even Allen, whose nonchalant posture had succumbed to intense curiosity around the time the man on the screen had assessed the sky for rain. If the McDonald’s restaurant suddenly exploded, it was doubtful the three people in the blue conversion van would have noticed—except maybe to turn up the volume on the computer they encircled.
From the left side of the monitor, another man came into view, dressed in equally depreciated clothes, carrying a stained paper sack. He said something unintelligible and clapped the first man on his back. As the two continued on, the camera jerked and followed, wobbling with the camera operator’s hurried gait.
A column of numbers lay to the right of the video image. The first appeared to be a date, European style with the day first— 5 April of last year. Below that, presumably, the time the video was shot—06:08:21 when the action started and now just changing to 06:11:00.
Julia thought the next number, 00:01:49:15, was a tape counter in National Television System Commission protocol: hours, minutes, seconds, then frames, which were ticking off at a pace of thirty per second. This was no amateur shoot; whoever had filmed, edited, and compiled this demonstration was professional.
As the camera followed the two men through the grungy streets of a small village, Stephen stretched across to tap at the number below the counter.
“See that?” he asked.
“Some kind of countdown,” Julia observed. “Seven hours and four minutes—to something.” She suppressed the urge to look at her watch, almost forgetting that the events playing out on her computer screen were now thirteen months old. Still, that backward-moving timer gave her the chills.
The men on the screen walked into a square where an old military-type truck idled loudly, belching clouds of oily exhaust from a rattling tailpipe. The truck was a sick shade of greenish-yellow, except for spots of pea green on the cab doors where insignias had been stripped away. Other men, all black, converged on the truck from different directions. In turn, each man climbed aboard, disappearing within the
truck’s canvas-covered bed. When the “star” of the video—that’s the way Julia had come to think of the round-headed man—disappeared into the shadows, the image flickered once and went black.
Julia realized she’d been holding her breath. She let it out and pulled in another.
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