by S. D. Perry
To either side of the plane Lara could see water, the endless shining Pacific to the right, the lighter blue of the Caribbean farther off to her left. Ahead of them were the Andes, rising from a dense green ocean of rivers, jungle, and hills. Shadows grouped and fled across the canopy of what seemed a billion trees, scattering like lizards.
“When this is over, my friend, I’ll make us the best empanadas you’ve ever eaten, and then we’ll talk,” Jonah said.
Miguel hesitated, then half smiled. “That’s a bold claim. You do flan?”
“My flan is the GOAT,” Jonah said, and then both of them were grinning.
Lara stared out at the darkening sea, remembering something her father had written in his notes from a trip to South America—that the beauty of the jungle there was matched only by its duplicity.
She had checked her pack three times already; the bow case and the shotgun were in a duffel, the Remington was clean, the climbing gear had been inspected. Not that there appeared to be a need for any real climbing, but she had to get to the site; Marin’s notes made clear that the Blue Labyrinth was completely underground, a meandering series of rooms built into the upper levels of a winding cave system. She planned to leave Jonah at the top of the fifty-meter drop—technically a cenote or sinkhole, as there was underground water present, but the shallow lakes were far beneath where she would need to go. She’d take her pictures and be back up in short order. Even padding her time, she didn’t see how it might take more than an hour to get to the most distant of the areas Marin had highlighted, and coming back would be even faster: she’d have her marks to follow.
Hurry. The urgency grew every time she stopped to think.
“How long did you say, until we land?” Lara asked.
Miguel glanced at the buzzing dashboard. “Unless it gets windy in the wrong direction, about forty minutes.”
Lara leaned back in her seat and pulled the phone with Marin’s maps out of her bag, opening the files again.
* * *
Luis Marin wasn’t hard to find. Only a few hours after Lara Croft flew off their radar in a single-engine prop, Ace called in. He and Sergei had found the traitor trying to sneak into a hotel where his mother had taken refuge. Marin gave up without a struggle. Harper put Mitchell on collateral immediately, and gave orders that Marin be taken to the outpost north of town, a solitary farm that Trinity had purchased for private meetings and visiting researchers. There’d been a lot of interest in Dominguez’s work.
Harper rode out to the farm with the rest of the Dozen, in a troop transport taken from the deserted Trinity compound; all of the local personnel had been pulled out before the tsunami. Koboshi drove, coaxing the shitty truck over dirt roads, while Harper considered his options. The men in the back kept quiet. Greaves had been a popular guy, and he was out of the game permanently, stuck in a clinic bed until an evac copter could take him to an actual hospital. Lara Croft had crippled him.
Technically, Harper should call his superiors immediately with the update—Marin was a loss, Croft was in the wind— but, also technically, his initial directive was still in play; in addition to assessing Marin, they were to monitor Croft’s movements. If he waited for an official order, up and back down the line of command, she could get away… Whereas if he and his team were to follow her to wherever Marin had sent her, and then call it in, there would be no chance of another escape. Keeping up their surveillance was likely to be the decision, anyway. Admin would huff about Harper overstepping his bounds, but there were those higher up who would want to know what Lara Croft found and wouldn’t care about such a minor break from regulation.
Koboshi turned into the drive for the farm, a long, low brick building set in the middle of three acres of beans and squash. Ace and Sergei had already arrived, a mud-spattered jeep parked by a leaning, dusty tool shed. They’d taken Marin inside.
Harper hopped out of the truck and into the sweltering heat, waiting until everyone was out before assigning tasks. Hux would get on the sat and order the transport back in, then download everything they had on their Maya-related sites. Koboshi would hack into the Civil Aviation Authority’s network—Byers and Alanis had followed Croft to the local airstrip and gotten the tail number off the plane she and her friend had taken—and start looking for her. The rest would sleep, eat—according to the files, the farmhouse had a pantry full of MREs—and run equipment checks. Harper wasn’t worried about the firearms—every member of his team was a fanatic about maintenance—but on their last assignment, taking out a troublesome bureaucrat and his personal guards in a banana republic, the helmet mics had been spotty. Lara Croft was a brat, but a tricky brat; she had managed to kill a number of trained soldiers all by herself. Only a fool would underestimate her. Harper wanted everything at a hundred percent if they were going to take their shot.
First things first. “Let me know when Mitchell gets here,” Harper said, and the guards nodded.
He walked through the wavering mirage of the dirt yard, stepping into the cooler dark of the building’s front room. Hux had set up his laptop on a table there and was already tapping away. Hux Lane was one of the top players in the Dozen, along with Mitchell, Ace, Sergei, and Reddy. Pure sociopaths, every one of them, and devoted to Harper. The others were hard and well-trained, but not necessarily the brightest. Harper didn’t mind. All of them followed orders.
Marin was in one of the back bedrooms; the two at the home’s east end were soundproofed, allegedly. Harper moved through the hall, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, sneering at the cheap utilitarian furnishings. Trinity had no interest in aesthetics.
Sergei was strapping Marin to a high-backed wooden chair in the last room on the left; Ace had his Ruger trained at Marin’s feet. Both nodded at Harper when he came into the room but didn’t speak. The engineer’s face was covered by a burlap hood. He groaned, rolling his head. A spot of blood had leaked through a bandage on his left shoulder.
Sergei used most of a roll of electrical tape to secure the prisoner—ankles, arms, hips and chest. He taped Marin’s hands to the heavy wooden arms of the chair; Marin’s fingers twitched and trembled, useless. Sergei finally looked up at Harper and gave a nod.
“I’ll have a moment alone,” Harper said, and both men filed out, closing the door behind them. The room was small and bare. Dusty flowered curtains hung in the tiny window, a number of dead flies scattered on the floor beneath.
He watched the hooded man, waiting. Marin gave in first.
“You should kill me now,” Marin said. “I don’t have anything to tell you.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Harper said. “For example… what was your daughter’s name?”
Marin shook his head, the burlap swaying.
They would need to establish a few ground rules. The transport plane would have got the Dozen to wherever Croft had gone—one of the sites Marin had set traps for, surely—in half the time it would take her to fly the distance, but after it had dropped them here, the pilot had taken it back to Mexico City for maintenance. Even if it was flight-ready—unlikely—they were stuck waiting for it. Harper had some time to kill.
He pulled his sidearm, a Glock 19, checked it, then flipped it around so he was holding the barrel as he stepped to the prisoner. He slammed the butt of the gun down on the top of Marin’s right hand. Bone crunched beneath the heavy metal.
Marin howled in agony, writhing, his hand immediately turning purple, swelling. Harper waited until the throes had passed before speaking again.
“When I ask a question, you’ll answer it,” Harper said. “If you don’t, there’s going to be pain. Your daughter’s name.”
Marin’s voice shook. “What does it matter?”
Harper tapped Marin’s uninjured hand lightly with the gun butt. A promise.
“Natalia,” Marin said.
Harper nodded to himself, satisfied. He reached out and pulled the bag off of the man’s head. Marin squinted up at him, gasping, his long face streaked with tears and dirt. He looked p
urely miserable, and unwell—the soul sickness of utter devastation radiated from him like a smell.
“Loss is never easy,” Harper said, “but when faced with this reminder of your own mortality, you betrayed the faith.”
Marin looked like he wanted to respond, but his gaze darted to the weapon.
“Speak up,” Harper said, dropping the Glock into its holster.
“What is the faith, to you?” Marin asked.
“As it ever was,” Harper said. “To serve in God’s army. To expose the false gods that mock his existence. To secure evidence of his supremacy, for all to see.”
“Of course,” Marin said. “Because God cannot do these things for himself. It’s up to Trinity to call forth miracles, to convince the world.”
“It is our covenant,” Harper said patiently. “We pledge our arms as prayer. You took the Oath.”
“Yes, and that’s what I told myself,” Marin said. “Pledging my life to a glorious purpose, to show man proof of God. A cause to die for, to kill for. But it’s a concept that denies the lives of those lost, that denies the meaning of those lives.”
“Sacrifice is part of the whole,” Harper said. “People die every day. If their deaths serve to advance the greater purpose, to finally unite mankind in belief… no sacrifice is too great for that.”
“Trinity would stand righteously at the grave of the world,” Marin said. “I looked into the face of my daughter and saw God. I felt his love, in my love for her, and for my beautiful wife. Precious moments of connection that can only exist in their own time. After what happened yesterday, I… I believe now that those moments are God’s true gift to us. Trinity chases only the future; it denies God’s gift to his children. We are foolish, prideful men, trying to create meaning for ourselves. It’s wrong. I was wrong.”
Harper shook his head. The rhetoric of emotion, weak and selfish. Harper was no fanatic, but Trinity’s goal was altruistic, and he believed in it. A world under one God, the way it was supposed to be. Eden reborn. He might not see it in his lifetime, but Trinity would endure, its soldiers would keep fighting to guide humanity to such a place. If Dr. Dominguez was even partly successful, they would be that much closer.
There was a soft rap at the door. Mitchell had arrived.
“You know, I was going to torture you for the information I want, but honestly, I’ve lost my appetite for it,” Harper said. “You’re weak, Marin. You took a loss and crumbled. Tell me where Lara Croft is going, and I’ll send you to your wife and child.”
Marin stared back at him. He looked scared but resolute. “I won’t.”
“Oh, you will,” Harper said. “That’s absolutely what’s going to happen. You can tell me now or later, but later you’re going to be hurting.”
“Then I’ll be hurting,” Marin said, lifting his chin. “And she’ll have time to find what she needs.”
Harper walked to the door, cracking it open. “Mitchell, step in here, please.”
Mitchell nodded and followed him into the room, bouncing the gurgling, dark-eyed collateral on her hip. A little boy, about a year old, his mouth and chin speckled with chips of the candy skull he was slobbering to mush in one chubby fist. Marin’s youngest nephew, and namesake. The boy goggled at the room, his brow drawing up.
“Any problems?” Harper asked.
“Playpen in the yard, they never saw me,” Mitchell said, in a cooing, girlish voice as she nuzzled the worried boy’s neck. “Isn’t that right, baby? They never saw me, did they?”
The baby giggled, ducking his head. Harper was slightly unnerved by how maternal she was acting to keep the child calm; if he asked her to, she’d put a finger through its eye.
He looked at Marin, who had frozen in shock. He’d seen fear in the man’s face before, but this was true terror.
“No,” he whispered, through trembling lips.
“I guess little Luis’s father—your only brother, I believe— died when the big wave hit. Fisherman, right?”
Marin didn’t respond, his desperate, helpless gaze glued to the baby. Mitchell continued to bounce the little cherub, producing another candy from her shirt pocket.
“Little Luis can be dropped off in the market in an hour, none the worse for wear,” Harper said. “Someone will find him, take him to his mama. She’s probably losing her mind right now. My god, can you imagine? Her husband dies, her son disappears… Think of how happy she’ll be when he gets home. How relieved.”
Harper took his Glock back out of the holster and chambered a round. “Or. She’ll never see him again, and he will die, here, now, in this moment—God’s gift, as you say. Now, I’m breaking my own rule here, but there’s no need to upset the baby with further incentivizing, is there? Really, haven’t you suffered enough? So, I will ask one more time. And only one.”
“You’ll kill him anyway,” Marin breathed.
“No, sir, I won’t,” Harper said. “No reason. He’s too young to tell anyone what happened. I’ll let him go, if you’ll answer me. On my Oath.”
He already had Marin, he’d had him the second Mitchell had come in, but the scenario had to play out—the prisoner seeking reassurance. As if a man who would threaten a baby could be trusted. It wasn’t logical, but it was human nature to play certain roles, Harper had found. And he actually wasn’t lying. Even in the aftermath of a disaster, there’d be an outcry about a missing baby, and someone might remember the strangers running around with guns. And Trinity had burned its bridges by getting out before the waves hit; their usual agreements with the local law weren’t stable. Harper doubted he’d ever set foot in the crappy little town again, but there was always a chance. He’d never thought he would end up in a lot of places.
Marin nodded. “Okay. Yes. On your Oath.”
“Where did you send Lara Croft?”
“Sabre-Dominguez 3, the Blue Labyrinth in Colombia, the one with the tunnels,” Marin said. “Please, please don’t hurt him.”
Harper nodded, looking at Mitchell. “Drop him off somewhere and report back. Tell Hux on your way out where we’re headed; I want detailed layouts. ETA on the transport is unconfirmed, but it’s less than four hours. We’ll be flying out well before dark.” They might not beat Croft, but she was in a puddle-jumper; it would be close.
“Copy that.” She reached out and took hold of the baby’s hand, waving it at Marin.
“Wave goodbye to your uncle,” she said cheerily. “Say bye-bye!”
She walked out, her smile disappearing before she’d reached the door. Mitchell was the only woman on Harper’s team, and possessed a kind of darkness that sometimes transcended brutality. Nobody even joked about fucking with Mitchell.
Marin had started weeping again, his body limp against the rubbery tape that held him to the chair. His hand had swollen considerably. Harper considered making it fast, but in the end took a few moments to express his rage at Marin’s betrayal of Trinity. To Lara Croft, a privileged child with the luck of the devil.
He worked until he got tired of the screams, then put the hood back on Marin and placed a round through his skull. The burlap kept Harper from getting splattered. He called into the kitchen for someone to clean up the mess, then went to see if there was any word on that ETA. He was eager to move. If everything continued to go so smoothly, by the time the sun rose tomorrow, Croft would be dead.
* * *
It was true what they said, the sun set fast in the tropics. One minute there were trees and mountains and wide empty spaces crawling with muddy, winding snakes of water, then it was dark, bam. They’d gone from flying over the jungle to floating in infinite darkness. Kind of creepy. Jonah concentrated on his counting; he was setting aside cash from their funds, in case they needed to smooth anyone’s feathers. It wouldn’t be wise to let anyone see how much he was actually carrying. Lara always traveled prepared.
Miguel started up on the radio a few minutes later, calling in on a channel choked with static. He repeated his ID number in a steady voice, asking
for copy. After long minutes, a low voice crackled back.
“Copy.”
Miguel cleared his throat. “Tell Papa I owe him a drink.”
There was a long pause. “This Spicy?”
“Yes, yes,” Miguel said. “Just need to fuel up, friend. Drinks are on me all around. I’m five minutes out but can head on, if you’re busy.”
Another pause, longer. Jonah glanced at Lara, a seat away, but she was checking her kit for about the hundredth time. If she was alarmed that they were about to fly into a den of armed killers, it didn’t show. Jonah shifted in his seat. He had no worries about her ability to handle herself, but if somebody got out of line and Lara had to break an arm, there might be trouble.
Finally, the low voice came back. “Yeah, okay.”
The channel snapped off, and Miguel tapped at the mix valve, studying the gauges. “Now we watch for the lights.”
“They’ll guide us in?” Lara asked.
“They’ll turn on some lamps. We set down with the lights on the port side and hope we don’t overshoot.”
“That sounds totally safe,” Jonah said.
“Yeah, well. It’s a risky business. You’re lucky you’ve got an experienced pilot.” Miguel had forced some humor into his voice but his shoulders were up.
“Yeah, but I didn’t realize you were spicy,” Jonah said.
The pilot chuckled, relaxing a little. “Hush now, help me look.”
Jonah looked. Shades of black, and too early for the stars to kick in. He could feel the world beneath them, the heavy pull of life and green, but he was staring at a blank screen. All he could see was vague reflections of their searching faces, ghosts low-lit by the dashboard lights.
Lara spotted it the same time as Miguel, pointing. “There!”
Jonah squinted. A thin crack in the dark at the bottom of the windshield, a sliver of yellow-white, low and slightly east.
“That’s the spot,” Miguel said.
The scratch of light got closer, and Jonah could see faint smudges of light close by, fires or perhaps windows in the Santo Almeda compound. Miguel tilted the yoke and pushed at a lever, and then they were dropping, the engine cranking up.
