Stark counted to five, then went for it. He stayed low, and moved fast, running from his hiding place beside an exquisite nineteenth-century Carrara marble statue of a voluptuous nymph. The piece was life-sized, which made it the perfect lure for what he had in mind. There was a small speaker wedged into the clamshell clutched by the stone maiden. He held the receiver in his hand.
Six more miniature speakers were placed strategically around the room at head height.
He waited, counting the seconds.
The patio door whispered back on its runners and the three men came in from the cold. Two were slim, average; the other was bulky, out of shape and breathing hard as the adrenalin pumped through his system. He would be the first to break, Stark reasoned. He was of a type, shot full of steroids to enhance the iron-pumping, overly bulky around the shoulders and neck, narrow around the waist, and small in one crucial area: the brain.
These guys strutted and acted the big man, taking risks that should never be taken. Couple their inferiority complex with a pea brain, and it was a recipe for disaster.
Each of the three had small Maglites and played the beams quickly across the surfaces.
The world outside had suffered a temperature inversion. The air on the ground had grown colder and colder, effectively trapping itself beneath the warm thermals above, meaning that without a wind to disperse it, and unable to rise, it was forming an almost marshmallow-like fog. With the torch beams and the trapped mists, they looked like something out of a bad science-fiction movie.
Stark waited until the big man was level with the marble statue. After four deep and slow inhalations and exhalations he whispered, “Fe Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of some rotten scum.”
His voice echoed in seven different parts of the room.
The big guy reacted with surprising alacrity, ratcheting off three shots into the stone nymph’s torso and one into her neck. The Carrara marble splintered and powdered. The clamshell fell and shattered on the floor.
“Missed,” Stark whispered, his voice coming from the floor by the steroid warrior’s feet. Incensed, the gunman fired off three more shots at the silhouette but still the stone maiden refused to fall.
“Not too smart are you?” Stark hissed, then he backed away, deeper into the shadows of the next room.
He counted off eleven silent beats in his head, then pressed down on a small metal plate. It would take nine seconds to rise again and break the contacts. Nine seconds.
“Over here,” he called, still on the move.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
He saw the bulk of the big guy loom darkly in the doorway.
Five.
Stark heard the soft click of the plate rising beyond the point of no return.
Four.
One of the others moved up behind the big guy, whispering something in his ear. Stark couldn’t have planned it better.
Three.
“Your move,” he said then, loudly.
Two. They turned to stare straight at him. The little guy hit the light switch.
Nothing happened.
One.
Stark launched himself to the left, behind the cover of a partition wall as the two wires within the metal plate came into contact, completing the circuit that blew the top off, and took away the lower half of the big guy’s legs in the detonation.
And then there was pandemonium in the small room, as smoke and flame and screams were met by crumbling walls and groans as the joists in the ceiling above buckled and caved, bringing a ton of plaster and timber down on their heads.
Stark stood, his ears ringing with the tinnitus of the explosion.
Flames licked around the ruined legs of the steroid warrior, but he was in no state to care. A second corpse lay on its back, arms and legs akimbo where the violence of the detonation had hurled him from his feet. With the fire rising, Stark could see that most of the dead man’s face had been burned away by the heat of the explosion.
He could not see a third body.
That didn’t mean it couldn’t have been buried under the rubble when the ceiling came down. Still, he wasn’t prepared to risk his life on it, and that was what it came down to. Best case, one more man inside the house and one left outside for him to deal with.
Worst case, well, he didn’t want to think about it.
Three dead, and he hadn’t fired his gun. That was the kind of return he liked.
He had stood stock-still for a full thirty seconds, listening to the snap and crackle of the smouldering fire as it ate away at the plaster and the timber beams of the ambassador’s ruined home. Stark had been careful when he’d planted the charge, judging the actual construction of the floor above so that the detonation would cause maximum structural damage without leaving Cam Bairstow stranded, or worse, consumed by the explosion.
The plaster wept from the raw wound in the ceiling like Solomon’s tears.
Stark felt the thrill of anticipation as he picked a path through the debris.
“Who sent you?” he called out, not really expecting an answer, and not knowing if they’d understand the question, anyway.
“You’re a dead man,” a thickly accented Germanic voice growled behind his left shoulder. Stark didn’t hesitate, and threw himself forward in a tightly controlled roll, then came up in a crouch, gun-hand braced on his knee. He fired off a single shot into the smoke. It was greeted by a grunt and the sound of a body stumbling back into the wall.
“You were saying?” Stark replied, a sudden calm settling over him. He had hit the third man; he had no way of knowing how badly. If the bloke didn’t answer, then the odds were he’d put him out of commission. He waited, listening for a second tell-tale sound to guide his gun. When it came, he squeezed off a second shot, the muzzle of his Browning flaring as he held back the recoil. There was no grunt this time, only the soft sound of meat offering the least line of resistance.
“Come on, who sent you?”
Why was there a German mixed up in this?
It made no sense. Then, as he thought about it, it didmake sense, in a peculiar sort of way. Cutter had said it himself: Peru was big money for the wrong kind of people. If it wasn’t drugs it was animals that was the toxicology of this once proud nation. Pizarro’s legacy of exploitation and death lingered on. Who stood to gain the most by preventing the truth from coming out? At first he had thought it was the government itself, but then he’d forced himself to think beyond what he was being shown, and to ask no, who reallystood to gain?
Private money.
It was always about private money. And often foreign ‘investors’.
So a German lying on the floor, bleeding out, wasn’t so improbable after all. With its central location and the wall down, it made perfect sense for business to pass through from the East to West, and vice versa, and from North and South. Germany was a nexus. A pivot in world trade — at least of the illegal variety.
Drugs or animals?
He knew where he’d bet his money.
Animals; they were a multi-billion-dollar business after all.
He shook his head. The heat from the dwindling flames warmed his face. And because of its crackle, he didn’t hear the soft crunch of footsteps behind him.
“Say goodnight,” the German whispered into his ear.
Stark didn’t so much as flinch. As the German’s knife arm wrapped around his throat looking to slice into the carotid artery, he caught it and yanked down on it, hard, slammed his head back at the same time as he pulled the German forward. Stark’s vision blurred as the back of his skull ruptured the German’s nose.
He yanked on his attacker’s arm again, twisting it savagely, then breaking it across his knee. The German reeled, but Stark wouldn’t let him fall. Not yet. He turned to look the man in the eye. The face he found there was a mess of blood and cartilage. The red stuff pooled thickly around his eyes, making it almost impossible for the man to see.
Stark didn’t feel sorry for him
.
“You talk too much,” he said, driving his fist into the man’s throat. The single punch caved in his hyoid bone and left the German choking slowly to death on the floor.
And still, Stark did not feel sorry for him.
The man had come here intending to kill him; where was it written that he should feel pity just because the assassin had failed?
He stepped over the soon-to-be-dead man and went in search of the last of them. It would be over in a minute or so — of that he was certain.
And then he would go looking for Chaplin. This place had never been a safe house. It had been an invitation to come finish whatever sordid business he had got himself mixed up in, nicely isolated with plenty of backyard to bury a couple of bodies. The whole thing reeked of a set-up.
He needed to get this done. And as much as he wanted to get out there to the reserve, to find them, he knew he couldn’t. He needed to make certain Cam was safe, and to do that, he had to stay here. He had to find someone he could trust.
Right now, though, it was Cutter who was in the greatest danger, out there in the darkness, trusting the snake as it coiled slowly through the long grass and, unseen, around his legs.
The last man died an inglorious death.
Stark crawled forward on elbows and knees, his belly pressed low against the dirt. The stench of burning flesh had begun to waft out into the foggy darkness. The shallow low-lying layer of white mist was almost perfectly inert. There wasn’t so much as the slightest sigh of a breeze in the cold night.
He kept his shoulders and head beneath the white. It allowed him to creep slowly across the lawn and into the trees. Only then did he stand, amid the remains of his handiwork. A dozen trunks stood lopsidedly, their bark shredded with shrapnel, the pulp exposed to the night. He had been right.
The first man lay with his back pressed up against one of the ruined trees, his hands clutching his guts. His face was as colourless as the mist, utterly drained of blood. Killing him would have been a mercy, but keeping him alive was more expedient. He couldn’t just go blundering off into the Amazon looking for Cutter and his crew — he needed to use his head; numbers, co-ordinates, anything and everything that might tilt the balance in his favour as he waged a one-man war against the poachers and their mercenary army.
Beyond the dying man he found the last of them, panicking, walking in circles, muttering desperately to himself and casting fretful glances up at the dark windows of the house.
“Boo,” he whispered, enjoying it as the man’s bones tried to lurch out of his skin.
“Stay back! Get away! Don’t come any closer!” The man shrieked, spinning around frantically, slashing the air with his torch as though it were a knife. The light cut across Stark’s throat, but he did not bleed. He stepped forward, his grin slow and malicious and all the more haunting for the roving torch light.
“Who are you?”
“Banquo,” he said, naming the uninvited guest. Recognising that he was cornered, the man launched himself.
A moment later, a shot rang out across the Cuzco night sky, and it was over.
Stark went back to get what he needed from the dying man.
SEVENTEEN
Alex Chaplin hadn’t run into the forest with the others.
Instead, he sank down against the well. His back was so thoroughly soaked with sweat that he had to check twice to be sure he hadn’t leaned against stones still slick with the dead woman’s blood.
He put his head in his hands. He wanted to weep.
All he could think — over and over — was, What have I done?
For a full minute he couldn’t move. Every muscle in his body tightened, constricting and conspiring to undo him. If it had been possible, he was sure his lungs would have seized up, clogged with the humid air, and his heart would have tripped a final beat, such was the grief that wracked his mind.
The mist thickened around him, conjuring wraiths that danced around the empty square.
It had been an angle, nothing more than twisting a story to meet a need. He’d taken the money from Eberhardt without a second thought, and sold the kid’s words to the first journalist who’d bite. He tried to tell himself that he hadn’t had a choice. Eberhardt was that kind of bastard. You did what he said, or you ended up floating in the muddy waters of the Amazon.
He licked his lips.
How was he supposed to have known?
That was the great defence? Ignorance?
He was a businessman. It had been a simple proposition. Eberhardt’s man had turned up on his doorstep the day after Cameron Bairstow stumbled out of the jungle, and offered him the proverbial thirty pieces of silver to take advantage of this unique opportunity. All he had to do was kick up some dust to keep the locals in line, and scare the tourists away from the jungle for another year or two. Keep them limited to the beaten tracks of Titicaca and Machu Picchu, Lima and Trujillo.
That way Eberhardt’s crew could continue to farm the ripest assets of the rainforest.
The man was vile, but that didn’t make him any less powerful. He was more than just a smuggler. That was such an outmoded term. He didn’t row some tiny skiff into a cove in the dead of night. To the outside world, Eberhardt was legitimate. He dined with the ambassador, played polo with big wigs, and ran one of the most successful import-export companies in all of the Americas, North or South. He owned people; such was his power in this backwater world Chaplin had found himself in.
It was like something out of a Fitzgerald novel, full of the underclass bowing and scraping to the rich white man.
And God help him, Chaplin had enjoyed it.
Playing both sides against the middle was hardly new, and his thirty pieces of silver had been a very bankable half a million dollars for himself, and one hundred thousand apiece for the men he had brought in to do the job.
But this... this wasn’t his doing.
This was real.
And wrong.
And frightening.
It was as though by conjuring up the illusion of their precious El Chupacabra, he’d given life to the demon. It was one thing to lay out your needs in some detached, almost academic manner, but it was quite another to see the evidence of your lies brought to life like some bloody curse.
At first he had thought that it would be simple. One boy was already dead, and the other already had one foot in the grave.
Then Sir Charles had called, said he was sending people to bring his son home, and it had all become so very, very complicated.
And it appeared as if the fates had a wicked sense of humour, he thought now, huddled up against the side of the stone well, shivering, his hands stained with more than merely metaphorical blood.
Could lies conjure demons?
Alone with the dead, surrounded by the criss-cross of animal tracks and empty huts that once had been homes, no matter how primitive, it seemed all too believable that the gods could damn him so completely.
Chaplin shivered, and not because of the creeping chill.
He wept for himself and for the dead — but mostly for himself.
And because he hadn’t run, he saw the shadow-shape move across the tree line.
It most certainly was not a jaguar or panther.
It was El Chupacabra, brought to life.
“Oh, God,” he breathed, fingers clawing down into the blood-stained earth.
Of all things, he smelled the sickly sweet aroma of burnt cookies.
And then the creature came bounding out of the undergrowth.
He struggled to his feet and turned to run, managing perhaps a dozen terrified paces before the sudden shocking weight knocked him down. He screamed, but the sound was strangled as the beast pinned him down and tore into him with its teeth. Blood bubbled in his throat, spilling out across the dirt to mingle with the blood of the tribesmen.
He struggled to lift his head, the weight of the animal crushing down on his spine. The world around him reeked of burnt biscuits, and something else. Vanilla? T
he smells made no sense to the dying man. He clawed at the dirt, trying to drag himself another inch away from the teeth that tore at his hide. The grass stained his teeth and his face as the weight drove him down, forcing him to eat it as he gasped for air.
After the first bite, there was no pain.
His body was protecting itself, shutting down one organ at a time in a rapid flood of endorphins. He was delirious, smelling things that weren’t there. The biscuits and the vanilla were blood and faeces, they had to be. His body was playing tricks on his mind, to protect him.
That had to be what was happening: one last sensory deception from the body of a liar and a cheat, just to make his own passing less traumatic.
He managed to bring his head up, and he gazed upon the hook-beaked face of Pacha Kamaq, the Earth-Maker of Inca mythology. It had to be a statue, yet it looked so alive.
And it moved.
He knew then that he had lost his mind to the pain. The gods did not walk the earth. They never had, and they never would.
A heartbeat later, he lost what was left of his life.
EIGHTEEN
Nick Cutter crouched down beside the dead pouch-blade.
The creature’s wounds went beyond severe. He had expected to see a deep cut from one of the tribesmen’s blades, but what he found instead was a ripped and torn carcass. The marsupial was almost as long as Cutter was tall, though so thickly muscled it was twice as wide. One of its two great teeth had broken off, leaving a jagged edge.
“Isn’t she amazing,” he breathed, almost reverentially as he reached out to touch the broken tooth. The damage was recent enough that the tooth was still incredibly sharp. It had most likely broken off during whatever life-and-death struggle had killed it, Cutter reasoned. Even in death, the creature retained much of its almost mythic prowess. The definition of the musculature was incredible, and the claws huge. It was easy to see how one crushing blow could cave in a victim’s skull.
“‘Amazing’ isn’t the word I would have chosen,” Lucas said. The SAS man crouched down beside him, more interested in the mess of tracks around the dead Thylacosmilus than in the beast itself. They evidenced a ferocious struggle, the earth churned up by claws scuffing at it. Long gouges in the dirt suggested that the pouch-blade hadn’t gone down without a fight.
Shadow of the Jaguar Page 19
