by Condor
“To kill you. Because of the bus bomb.” Gabriel giggled as he said this, but Jardin wasn’t smiling.
“Who do you work for?” Jardin said, standing up and leaning towards Gabriel to stare into his eyes from a hand’s breadth away.
“Don Webster. Who do you work for?” Gabriel laughed again.
“Who is Don Webster?”
“He runs The Department. You know,” Gabriel put his finger to his lips and shushed loudly, “getting rid of bad people. Like you.”
Jardin stood back. “Thank you, Child Gabriel. You have been of great service. But that is nothing compared to the duties I have planned for you.”
Then he picked up the same statuette Gabriel had been hefting just a few minutes earlier, swung it back, and brought it round in an arc that ended at a point on the side of Gabriel’s head.
40
… and Alone
THE ROOM WAS A CUBE. Its walls were painted white. There were no windows, although there was a six-inch diameter circle of tiny holes drilled into a corner of the ceiling. No furniture, either. It smelled of disinfectant.
Gabriel fell asleep again on the hard mud floor.
He dreamt of Britta Falskog. Her red hair streamed behind her as she swam, naked, in the Amazon, among grinning crocodiles.
Wake up, Gabriel, she said.
He tried to sit up, but the explosion of agony in his left temple put him down onto the floor again, groaning and suppressing a wave of intense nausea. He fought to stay awake, but the heavy, sweaty blanket of confusion that surrounded him muffled his consciousness once again. He slept.
At some point he wet himself. The next time he surfaced, the stink, and the cold, clammy feeling of his thin cotton trousers, finally broke whatever spell he’d been under.
His throat was dry, and he was overtaken by a fit of hacking, dry coughs that made him retch as his empty stomach churned.
He sat up. Then he stood up. Taking slow, even paces, he measured the floor. Eight feet by eight.
There was a door, but it had no handle on the inside. He backed up and charged at the rectangular outline in the white wall. Apart from bruising his shoulder, he achieved nothing. Or not nothing, precisely. His awareness flickered back into life, fully active, and fully aware of the utter shit he’d got himself into.
A single, bright bulb burned in the centre of the ceiling, suspended from a short length of white, plastic-sheathed flex.
Gabriel ran his fingers along the edges of the floor, around the outline of the door and as high on the corners between the walls as he could manage. Nothing. A master carpenter couldn’t have made cleaner or smoother joints.
He slumped to the floor, his back wedged into a corner.
Fuck! I need a plan.
“Maybe I can help,” Smudge said, from the opposite corner. His customary, jawless smile was absent for once, though his face still looked unstable, as if a sudden movement might dislodge the flesh from the skull beneath.
“Any and all suggestions gratefully received,” Gabriel said, aware, as he spoke, that his former comrade was nothing more than a PTSD-induced phantasm.
“You’re not going to fight your way out of here, Boss. But you’re not dead, either. He could have killed you with another whack from that sculpture. So he wants you alive. That’s your Get Out of Jail Free card. Everything else, you have to play by ear.”
“Good enough, Trooper,” Gabriel said. “Now fuck off and leave me in peace, will you?”
He blinked, and the ghost of Smudge Smith was gone.
That was when the music started.
Gabriel’s tastes in music were wide-ranging. Jazz and old-time blues were his natural home, but he enjoyed classical music, rock, so-called ‘world music,’ anything that happened to move him. This did not extend to German ‘oom-pah’ music. As the tubas, trumpets, and bass drums began their assault, he hunkered down into a corner and shoved his fingers in his ears.
Three hours later, as the boisterous musicians began again on their waltz-time serenade, he curled into a foetal position and began to cry.
Three hours after that, he began to scream.
Two hours after that, he passed out, whether from hunger, dehydration, or fatigue no doctor would have been able to pronounce.
Britta stood before him, water running over her freckled breasts. She swept her long coppery hair behind her ears and squeezed the water out. Three parallel slits on each side of her neck gaped obscenely, their fringed red interiors pulsing as she drew oxygen into her lungs.
“Listen to me, Gabriel Wolfe,” she said. “I didn’t come all this way to watch you give up. So get off your arse and give me ten, soldier!”
He opened his eyes. The music had stopped. He flattened himself against the whitewashed floor and executed ten very poor press-ups. His arms almost buckled after five and he had to use his knees to finish the pathetic set. With his biceps and triceps quivering, and his breath heaving in his chest, he flopped to the floor and lay there, knowing that whatever was going to happen next, he was going to fight with every sinew and breath to regain control.
The door opened, banging back against the wall. A man stood there. He was tall, dressed all in white. He was heavily built, muscular arms hanging loosely by his sides. Maybe twenty, twenty-one. He looked like a college football player. He bent and grabbed Gabriel by the arms and hauled him to his feet.
“Come with me,” he said, in a flat, emotionless voice.
He dragged Gabriel out of the room, down a white-painted hallway, and pushed him through a door into another white room. This one was larger. A single, empty wooden chair faced a row of seven others, each occupied by a white-garbed acolyte of Père Christophe. Their faces were, variously, stern, bland or amused, smiles here and there, but no intensity of emotion that might yield a clue as to what was about to happen.
The young man forced Gabriel down onto the empty chair, then left, closing the door behind him with a soft click from the latch.
“Are you thirsty, Child Gabriel?” the young woman in the centre of the row of chairs facing him asked. She was tall, with an athletic build, her ropy arm muscles corded with thick veins under the skin. He noticed rows of punctures in both ears, all the way around the edge from the lobes upwards. There were matching dots in both nostrils and under her lower lip.
“Yes,” he croaked, breaking at once into a dry, heaving cough that lasted for almost a minute.
“Here,” she said, proffering a bottle of water that had been standing on the floor by one of the rear legs of her chair.
He leaned forward and grabbed it, breaking the seal on the lid and swigging half of the precious fluid in one go before pausing to gasp for air, then returning the neck of the bottle to his cracked lips and finishing it.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome. Now, let’s begin. Repeat after me, ‘I am a liar’.”
Gabriel looked into her eyes, a beautiful shade of brown, or maybe that green-brown they call hazel. Her eyelashes were thick and dark. He said nothing.
She glanced to her left, at a heavyset young man with black hair cut close to his scalp. He looked like the US Marines Gabriel had occasionally fought alongside, impassive but utterly confident of his abilities.
The man stood and closed the distance between his chair and Gabriel’s in two long strides. He whipped out his right hand and delivered a ringing slap to Gabriel’s left cheek that knocked him to the floor. A thick band of silver on his middle finger raised a white welt on Gabriel’s cheekbone.
“Child Thaddeus is an instrument of God,” the woman said. “Each blow he strikes causes him intense suffering. I will have to counsel him later. You would not want his suffering on your conscience, would you? Repeat after me, ‘I am a liar’.”
After the tenth, or the twentieth, time she instructed him to repeat her words, Gabriel’s face was running freely with blood. Thaddeus’s ring had opened several deep cuts on his cheek and the pain was the only thing keeping Gabrie
l from passing out with exhaustion.
Britta tapped him on the shoulder. “Yield, soldier,” she said. “This isn’t the battle to win.” Then she bent to kiss his mangled face, and disappeared.
“I am a liar,” he said.
They let him sleep after this, his first confession. Two whole hours. Then they brought him back to the room with the chairs. The Children facing him were different. The routine was the same. This time his reward for compliance was a meal. A bowl of rice and some small fatty pieces of meat.
Over the next month, Gabriel Wolfe was subjected to a regime of shouting, finger-pointing, chanting, a continuing restricted diet, long periods of solitary confinement in the white cube room, and sleep deprivation. In the early days, his SAS training and long years of instruction by Master Zhao helped him withstand the cult’s brainwashing. During the time they left him alone in the windowless cell, he practised his own meditation, repeating the mantra, “Alone on the landscape, always strong”. Smudge and Britta added their own messages of support from time to time, and he began to have long conversations with each of them during the rare moments when his tormentors let him be.
“You are losing weight, Child Gabriel,” one of the young women said to him, as he sat facing her one, what? Morning? Evening? “Here.” She held out a bar of chocolate.
He grabbed it from her and crammed half of it into his mouth at once. At the intense hit of sweet, creamy flavour, tears formed in the corners of his eyes and rolled down his cheeks to mingle with the smears of melted chocolate around his mouth.
“Thank you, Child Britta,” he mumbled.
She frowned. “I am Child Yasmin. But it is Père Christophe you must thank. Look.” She pointed to the door.
It was him. Père Christophe was standing there, smiling down at Gabriel. He walked over and laid a soft hand on Gabriel’s shoulder as he finished the rest of the chocolate.
“I love you, Child Gabriel,” he said, looking down into Gabriel’s upturned face.
“I love you, too, Père Christophe.”
The Children applauded at these words.
The next session began with a bottle of water, without Gabriel’s having to earn it. As the water entered his stomach, the purified extract of what the Brazilian Indians called caapi, and their cousins across the Peruvian border called ayahuasca, delivered its harmala alkaloid molecules into his bloodstream. Propelled like bullets by Gabriel’s elevated pulse, they crossed his blood-brain barrier about forty-five seconds later. He retched and fell to his knees, vomiting up a thin stream of water and half-digested rice. The Children sat, unmoving, watching his spasms. When he finally stopped and slumped unconscious to the floor, they left.
Père Christophe was talking. A beautiful, deep voice that seemed to come from inside Gabriel’s mind.
“See how the condor flies, Child Gabriel. See how she soars.”
“I see her, Père Christophe.”
“She is coming for you.”
The huge bird landed between them, spread its wings and enveloped Gabriel in the soft black silk of its feathers.
“She will protect you, Child Gabriel, when you carry out my Second Order. When you give your life for me.”
“She will protect me, Père Christophe.”
The bird smiled down at Gabriel. She had soft, slanted eyes. Like his mother’s. Dark brown.
Then she spoke.
“Père Christophe is good. Père Christophe is love. He loves you more than I ever could, Gabriel. Do you love Père Christophe?”
“Yes, Mum. I do. I love Père Christophe.”
“Good boy. Now, come, I want to show you something.”
She held him tightly as she spread her great wings and took to the blazing blue vault of the heavens, sweeping her wings in huge, whispering beats that seemed to echo the sound of Père Christophe’s voice.
He smiled, eyes closed, as he rested against her, taking in the vast tract of rainforest below, with its golden threads of rivers.
“You love Père Christophe,” she said.
“I love Père Christophe.”
“You love Père Christophe.”
“I love Père Christophe.”
A hundred times the condor said it.
A hundred times he repeated it.
A thousand.
A million.
Until the end of time and the edge of space, the beautiful bird flew with him safe in her embrace.
“I love Père Christophe,” he said.
It was true.
Then the condor began speaking her name to him. Over and over again. And with it a command.
41
A Test of Faith
HIS BRAINWASHING COMPLETE, GABRIEL was led to a small hut in the centre of the village by one of the female Children. She tucked him up in a narrow single bed, beneath a blanket woven from coarse, thick wool in a pattern of red, brown, and cream stripes.
Every four hours, one of the Children would look in on him and report back to their Aunt or Uncle.
On the eighth visit, Gabriel stirred as the young woman was about to leave. She turned and went to sit beside him on the edge of the bed. Wincing with pain, he levered himself up onto his elbows.
“Child Gabriel,” she said, softly. “How are you feeling?”
He looked up into her pale blue eyes.
“Who are you? Am I dead?”
She smiled. “No, you are alive. You are in Eden. I am Child Rebecca. We are all Père Christophe’s Children.”
At the mention of Père Christophe, Gabriel relaxed and slumped back onto his pillow. “I love Père Christophe. He sent me with the condor.”
“I love him, too,” she said. “Come, he wants to see you.”
“I will serve God through Père Christophe’s will. It’s the First Order.”
“Yes, it is,” she said, then laughed, a light sound that made Gabriel think of someone he once knew. He couldn’t remember her name. It didn’t matter. Only Père Christophe mattered.
Ten minutes later, he was sitting in Père Christophe’s living room, sipping tea from a white china mug and eating a bowl of fruit salad. His saviour spoke.
“Gabriel, I am so glad you joined our family. I have such plans for you. The angels will smile when they meet you, for you have a divine purpose here at Eden.”
Gabriel finished the mouthful of sweetly scented papaya and guava, spiked with fresh lime juice, and put his spoon down.
“How can I serve God? Please tell me.”
Père Christophe smiled and stroked his beard, then stood. “All in good time, my Child. But first, God wants to be sure of your faith. Have you finished your breakfast?”
Gabriel slurped up the last of the juice in the bowl, gulped down his tea, and got to his feet. “Where are we going?”
“To meet someone. Someone who will test your faith. Come, walk with me.”
Together, they left the house and crossed the village square, leaving between a pair of adobe huts painted in bright shades of turquoise and rose pink.
“It’s a beautiful day, is it not?” Père Christophe said. “You can smell a change in the air.” He sniffed loudly. “A change in the seasons and in man’s fortunes.”
Gabriel followed his example and inhaled deeply. “I can smell wood smoke, Père Christophe. What are we burning?”
“Oh, I have some friends visiting. They are building a workshop for us. Where we can pursue God’s work.”
“That is good. You have many friends, Père Christophe.”
They walked on, along a grassy path cut through the forest, until they emerged into a small clearing. In its centre were two older men and a young woman. They all smiled as Père Christophe and Gabriel approached. The young woman’s eyes were heavy-lidded, and her smile was a little lopsided. The men were holding her by her arms. She swayed between them.
“Child Gabriel, these are your Uncles Joseph and Samuel. And this is Child Elinor. She is your test of faith.”
“What should I do? Are we go
ing to pray together?”
“No. Not pray. I have given Child Elinor the Second Order, and I wish you to carry it out for me. You know how to take a life, I think?”
“I do.”
“Then place your hands around her throat and take hers. For me.”
The young woman looked at Gabriel and spoke.
“I have been chosen for my glorification. I am grateful to Père Christophe. Thank you, Child Gabriel.”
Then she shook herself free of the two older men and closed the gap between them in two unsteady paces.
Gabriel smiled back at her and encircled her slender neck with his hands.
Above them, a howler monkey boomed out a call and was answered by shrieks and hoots from its rivals.
Gabriel began to squeeze, digging his thumbs into the soft flesh just above the notch in Child Elinor’s throat.
He looked down into her eyes, which were beginning to bulge from their sockets. Tiny carmine flares erupted in the whites as their oxygen supply was choked off.
Her mouth opened and her tongue, a darkish purple, poked out. She was on her knees now. And he leaned over her, maintaining the pressure around her neck, observing the whiteness around his knuckles.
Death was close now, but he knew better than to let go.
A minute more.
Just to be safe.
42
Blessed Are the Bomb Makers
CHILD ELINOR WAS ALMOST DEAD. Faint gurglings were the only sounds to escape her stretched lips. Gabriel stood over her, staring down into her bloodshot eyes as he choked the life out of her to please Père Christophe.
“Enough!” It was Père Christophe who shouted this command. “Release her, Child Gabriel.”
Gabriel relaxed his grip around the young woman’s throat, and she collapsed onto her side, gasping and weeping as she filled her lungs. Her throat was marred by an ugly circlet of dark purple bruises, and the imprints of Gabriel’s thumbs stood out in stark relief on the pale skin at the base of her throat. He stood back from her and turned to Père Christophe.
