Shadow of the Jaguar

by Steven Savile

  Jenny’s head spun. Her hair kept falling across her eyes. The sweat made it cling to her scalp. She remembered something her mother used to say: “Women don’t sweat, dear, they glow.” Well, all things considered, she was glowing like a pig.

  Jenny counted off the numbers as the lift ascended until the doors opened and they stepped out.

  Chaplin did not run. Everything about his demeanour changed as he emerged into the hospital corridor. He walked slowly, looking left and right, hyper-alert. Jenny saw in him the same predatory qualities Stark and the others possessed. He leaned against the wall, more paint flaking beneath his touch. For a moment he didn’t move, he simply listened with his finger to his lips. Then he moved close enough that she could feel his breath against her ear as he whispered.

  “My men have gone.” The men he had ordered to watch over Cam were nowhere to be seen.

  She nodded, immediately understanding the ramifications of their absence.

  Jenny took a hair-tie out of her pocket and tied her hair up. She drew her fringe up out of her eyes.

  Chaplin nodded and they moved on, the echo of their footsteps the only sound in the otherwise silent corridor. The quiet was unnerving. She expected to hear the bleeps and blips of machines preserving life, and the wheeze of ventilators and all of those other hospital sounds. Yet it was as though they had stepped into the Kingdom of Silence.

  As they passed the crash-cart, Chaplin reached inside his linen jacket, behind his back and drew out a compact .45. He gripped it with both hands as he moved from door to door, checking each ward. A wheelchair was folded up against the wall beside the crash-cart.

  His sudden change spooked her, not least because it served as a reminder of just how unstable the world around them truly was. For all the talk of civility and burgeoning democracy, eco-reserves and boosted tourism, this was still the kind of place where a boy in a hospital bed could be made to disappear, if deemed necessary.

  Chaplin signalled her forward.

  She followed him into a small ward. There were eight beds in the room, three of which were hidden behind curtains. There was a grizzle-faced old man with a Captain Birdseye beard who lay on his back with his leg up in traction. In the bed beside him an emphysemic wreck of a man was rigged up with oxygen and tubes. She saw the ashtray on the bedside table beside the big juice bottle and the wilted flowers, and shook her head. Three other beds were empty, though one of them had been slept in.

  Chaplin pointed toward the furthest curtain.

  He tensed, drew it back, and visibly relaxed as he saw the young man in the bed. Chaplin holstered his gun, and became very much business-as-usual as the mask of violence slipped from his face. Jenny joined him at the bedside.

  Cameron Bairstow was asleep. His face must have been handsome once, but it was ruined now. Five deep scratches clawed from his left temple, down across his eye, cheek and nose to chin, each stitched with twenty or more sutures. The bruising around the eyes had left the entire left side of his face purple, though in places the flesh had already begun to heal, turning yellow. His throat and down across his bare chest bore the worst of the wounds. It was a miracle he hadn’t bled out. His body had been opened up with a savagery that was shocking. She counted a dozen deep cuts. On each, the flaps of skin had been sewn together to leave lips of flesh gaping across his chest and stomach. He looks like some abomination out of one of Connor’s horror movies, she thought, as she struggled to comprehend the severity of his wounds. Where he wasn’t cut he was lacerated. The darker bruises and crusted puncture marks could only have been made by teeth.

  No man had done this.

  The precision of the long slices couldn’t have been achieved by knife cuts. They mirrored the raking scratches of a hand — or paw — slashing down across Bairstow’s face, though instead of nails they had almost certainly been caused by claws.

  Tooth and claw.

  Cameron stirred, as though sensing their eyes upon him.

  “We’ve got to get him out of here,” Jenny whispered.

  “Are you sure? He’s hardly in a state to go trekking through the jungle.”

  “He’s not safe here. You know that.”

  “He won’t be safe if we try to move him, and kill him instead. I don’t see how we’ve got a lot of choice other than to leave him here.”

  “Can you have someone watch him?”

  Chaplin grunted something approximating a laugh. “Who? The police? The military? Who, exactly, do you propose we should trust?”

  “I hate this.”

  “I can’t say I am particularly fond of it either.”

  “So we have to proceed as we planned, and get him to the safe house. If we get him out of here, at least we can have one of Stark’s men babysit him until he’s in a position to be flown home.”

  “All right, then we’ll move him to the ambassadorial summer residence,” Chaplin said. “That’s the only place I could arrange where we could actually protect him, and it’s on our soil, so to speak. I would have done so sooner, but after the attack he was in no condition to be moved. The doctors would not countenance it.”

  “Please don’t talk about me as though I’m not here.”

  Jenny jumped with surprise. The young man on the bed spoke, his voice hoarse with disuse. He shifted, opening his eyes to look up at them. Despite the cocktail of drugs pumping into his body to ward off the pain, his eyes were bright, feverish even, with intelligence.

  “And don’t for a minute think I’m going home without my brother.”

  “Cameron,” Jenny said, “My name is Jenny Lewis, I work for the British government. Your father sent me to help you. Jaime is dead, Cameron.” Despite the tension of their situation, Jenny tried to keep her voice soft and sympathetic.

  “I know that better than anyone else. I saw him die, after all.” Then his voice became surprisingly firm. “I am not leaving his bones out there to rot. The animals might have got his flesh, but something of him has to go home. It has to. I am taking him home.”

  “I understand,” Jenny said. Every word that came out of her mouth sounded like some soulless platitude. But this wasn’t a fight worth having, not here and now. All she wanted to do was get him out of there, to somewhere safe.

  They could argue about bones later.

  “Cameron, I need to ask you something,” Jenny continued. “Did you talk to anyone about what happened? About the attack, and the village? Anyone other than me, that is?”

  “No, I didn’t. Why?”

  “Where are the guards, Cam?” Chaplin asked, looking over his shoulder, peering nervously toward the empty corridor.

  It occurred to Jenny then that they had seen very few nurses or other medical staff since they had come onto the fifth floor. She picked up Cameron Bairstow’s chart, skimming quickly over the scrawled Spanish. The only thing she was able to glean from it was the doctor’s name: Mendoza. She asked Cameron if he had been visited by anyone.

  “I haven’t seen them since early this morning,” he said, struggling to sit up in bed. The exertion brought beads of perspiration to his face, lending his already waxy complexion an almost ethereal quality. She thought he looked like death struggling to rise.

  “I don’t like this at all,” Jenny said to Chaplin. It looked as if he was no happier about the situation. “We’ve got to get him out of here.”

  “I’ll make some calls.”

  That struck Jenny as odd, since she thought it had all been arranged.

  “Good,” she replied. “I’ll get him ready, and locate a hospital administrator.”

  Then Cam spoke up. “You’re doing it again,” he objected, but there was less strength to his protest now. “Talking over my head, like I’m not here. What’s happening?”

  “Can you walk, Cam?” Jenny asked him.

  “I haven’t walked in over a week. So I have no idea. I’m not paralysed, if that’s what you mean.”

  “We’re going to need to move you.”

  “I gathere
d that much, but why?”

  Jenny looked back over her shoulder toward the empty corridor, not sure what she expected to see there. It was just a vague sensation, and the skin at the nape of her neck prickled, as though someone had walked over her grave.

  “We think you are in danger here. There has already been one attempt on your life, and the threat is simply too great for you to stay here, when anyone can walk in from the street.”

  Cameron’s eyes darted left and right. For a moment his fear looked furtive. He reached up to touch his face, but couldn’t bring himself to let his fingers settle on the ruined flesh. He looked up helplessly at Jenny and Chaplin.

  “I want this to be over.”

  “We know you do, Cam,” Chaplin reassured him. “So do we. Believe me. So do we. You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, as the old saying goes. Don’t worry, though, we won’t let anything happen to you,” he promised. It was one of those rash promises that was almost impossible to keep in the cold light of day, like a lover’s promise never to leave or an adulterer’s pledge of fidelity. The words themselves meant nothing, but they somehow lent strength to the person to whom the promise was made.

  “I’m going down to the car to get it ready, and make a couple of calls,” Chaplin continued. “Jenny will help you get dressed.” He reached behind his back and drew the gun once more. He handed it to Jenny. “Just in case. I’ll see you back at the car.”

  She didn’t argue. She took the gun and slipped into it her pocket. It was heavier than she expected, but not as heavy as it truly ought to have been. It was a gun, it ended lives. It should have been every bit as heavy as the lives it ended, not just a few pounds of metal. Through the thin material, it felt cold against her skin.

  “Trust no one,” she said unnecessarily.

  Chaplin nodded and left them to get ready.

  That nagging doubt refused to go with him. He might not have been the mastermind behind the robbery, but he was most certainly wrapped up in this somehow.

  What remained of Cameron’s clothes were neatly folded and stowed in the cupboard beneath the bedside table: socks and shoes. There was nothing else. The bloody tatters he had arrived in had obviously been incinerated.

  “Wait there,” she said. As though he could go anywhere he chose, should the whim take him. Moving from bedside table to bedside table, she scavenged a pair of baggy shorts that looked like they would fit. Captain Birdseye watched her, then said something in Spanish, gesticulating toward his own cupboard. She took it to mean there was something in there he wanted her to see. Opening the door, Jenny found a bright yellow Hawaiian palm-print shirt.

  “Thank you,” she said, when he didn’t start screaming Thief!

  The entire time, she saw no sign of anyone who resembled a hospital official. Returning to Cam’s bed, she helped him sit up, then dressed him one leg at a time.

  The needle from the drip was still in his left arm.

  “This might hurt a bit,” she apologised. Before he could answer, Jenny withdrew the needle. Cam winced, but he did not cry out. A little blood bubbled out of the puncture; it was so little that it would scab over quickly, so she wasn’t worried about it.

  “I saw a wheelchair in the corridor. Finish getting dressed. I’ll go and fetch it.”

  She stopped at the door, and peered around the corner, not knowing whether she was panicking unnecessarily — and uncharacteristically. It was difficult not to allow the feeling of isolation get to her, that sensation that came from being a stranger in a strange land. She needed to talk to Cutter, and for that matter, Lester, but without a working phone, she couldn’t. It was one of the many things she took for granted back home. Out here, the lack of communication only served to add to the feeling of helplessness that had swollen all around her since they landed.

  There was so much going on that she couldn’t see. But things seldom remained hidden.

  Jenny found the wheelchair, and pushed it back in the direction of the ward. As she did so, she passed a window, and her blood ran cold.

  An SUV had pulled into a car park behind the hospital, and several men were getting out. They all wore dark glasses — nothing unusual about that. But she caught a glimpse of one of them examining a pistol. He put it away, then they moved calmly toward a back entrance, carefully avoiding anything that would attract attention.

  I have to get Cam out of here. There’d be no time to sort it out with the authorities — that would have to wait until later.

  As she entered the room, Cam was struggling with the buttons on the ugly yellow shirt, his fingers trembling as he tried to force them through the buttonholes. Jenny knelt at his feet and moved his hands aside so that she could button the shirt for him. In other circumstances it might have been a tender gesture, but everything about it now screamed necessity.

  That done, she then helped him move from the bed to the chair. She tried not to look at his face as it contorted with pain.

  When he sank into the wheelchair, Cam bit down on a scream. Still, a whimper escaped between his lips.

  “Is there anything here you need?” Jenny asked, doing her best to stay calm and practical.

  He shook his head.

  “They deal the meds out three times a day. There’s nothing else here worth having.”

  “Then let’s get out of here before someone comes.”

  She checked the corridor again before wheeling him down to the elevator. Every step of the way she expected someone to challenge her. Mercifully, no one did. A nurse had returned to the station, but she didn’t even look up from what she was doing. No time to stop now.

  Jenny jabbed the call button and the lift doors opened. She pushed the chair in, and the doors closed behind her. She felt every revolution of the winch as they descended.

  “There was a newspaper report, Cam. It claimed that you found a village on the outskirts of the rainforest, where everyone had been murdered. Is it true?”

  He nodded.

  “If you didn’t talk to the press, then someone else did. It may be the same person or persons who want you dead.”

  “So who does?” Cam asked through his pain. “What would that accomplish?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to work out,” Jenny said, honestly.

  The lift doors opened, grinding on something that was stuck in the mechanism. She pushed the chair out, glanced left and right, and headed directly toward the glass-plated doors, moving quickly but in a way that wouldn’t cause anyone to notice. Her footsteps sounded erratic, like an arrhythmic heart tripping over itself.

  “There’s a lot of money in this eco-reserve and the tourism it’ll bring in. And the smuggling trade is worth millions of pounds. But I can’t figure out what they stand to gain from your death, yet someone wants to keep you quiet.”

  The sensors above the entrance picked up their approach and the glass doors parted for them. The heat rushed in.

  “We need to make you safe, then as soon as you’re able to travel, we need to get you out of this country.”

  Jenny moved quickly across the car park, and saw Chaplin leaning against the SUV, his mobile phone pressed up against his ear. He had turned his back on them and was bent over slightly. She couldn’t quite make out what he was saying, but it was clear that he was agitated.

  Stark was nearby, sitting with his back against a tree, watching the hospital doors. As soon as he saw her, he was up on his feet and moving quickly in their direction.

  Chaplin hung up, and was all smiles.

  “Any trouble?” he asked.

  “We’ve got to move quickly,” Jenny said. “I saw some men entering the back of the hospital, and at least one of them was carrying a gun.”

  “Good God,” he said. Then he turned. “Come on then, Cam. Let’s get you somewhere safe.” Chaplin popped the lock on the rear door. “You can call your old man later, and let him know you’re all right.”

  As quickly as they could without injuring him further, they helped the young man int
o the car. Jenny watched the hospital the entire time, but to her relief, the men she had seen didn’t reappear.

  As they drove away, she knew she should have been relieved, yet she couldn’t help but think that she was swimming with a shark. Chaplin said all the right things, did all the right things, but there was something about him that had every nerve in her body jangling.

  Still, she had got into the car with him — but only because Stark was there, she realised.

  She also realised that she had no idea where they were going. She was driving into the unknown, with one man who might betray her at a moment’s notice, and another who had a death warrant on his head.

  Stark would have to play her knight in shining armour.

  TEN

  She was late.

  It was almost four in the afternoon. The others had returned at one.

  It wasn’t like Jenny to be late. She had that innate Civil Service punctuality gene. Cutter couldn’t remember the last time it had happened. Something must have forced her to change her plans.

  She had Stark with her, but that didn’t make him feel much better, truth be told. The others were sitting around the hotel lobby, waiting for their local guide and translator to arrive before they set off for the eco-reserve. Connor played with a monkey on a stick, making it do summersault after summersault.

  “This is so cool,” he said, earning himself a withering glare from Abby. “Well it is,” he said, defensively. “Can’t I enjoy the local handicrafts?”

  “It was made in China,” Abby said, shaking her head. “You’re such an idiot sometimes.”

  “I’m sure she’s okay,” Stephen said, coming over to stand beside Cutter.

  “Of course she is,” Cutter agreed, though his matter-of-fact reassurance wasn’t particularly convincing.

  Piped Muzak lulled around them. For once it wasn’t some watered-down version of an Italian opera. It had a distinct South American flavour of pipes and the rhythmic slap of drum skins.