Something else, too. His head felt heavy. Heavy, and—slow. Like his reflexes were dulled.
He heard footsteps at the door, and twisted his neck to see who it was. The door to the gym opened, and a man stepped in. He was smartly dressed in a black open-necked shirt and some expensive-looking gray slacks. He wore dark leather loafers without socks, and his slick black hair was gelled back.
He had a fat, short, curved knife in his hand.
And as he positioned himself in front of Villaverde, the agent met the man’s eyes and felt an odd shiver. They were studying him with an inscrutable intensity, the kind of eyes that were laser-focused but aware of everything around them, the kind of eyes that could casually dismiss anything they surveyed without the hint of emotion.
And in that glance, he spotted the tiniest of acknowledgements, as if to say, “Yes, it is me.” And Villaverde knew, for certain, that it was Navarro.
“Don’t think you’re going to—”
“Ssshh,” the man stilled him with two rigid fingers in front of his mouth. Then he raised his knife and, slowly, slid it across the surface of Villaverde’s bare chest without pushing it in too deeply and opened up a vivid, red, circular gash across his entire torso.
Villaverde refused to scream. He wouldn’t give the pinche madre the satisfaction. Navarro studied him dispassionately, then he slashed his chest again, and again, making horizontal and vertical slits that criss-crossed the circle in a symmetrical pattern. Then the man finally stepped back, admired his handiwork, took out a cloth from his pocket and began to wipe clean his blade.
Villaverde felt like he was going to black out from the pain. He was trying not to look at his lacerated chest, but couldn’t help himself. His torso was a bloody, fleshy mess of cuts. He was bleeding profusely, his blood drenching his pants and dripping off his toes and onto the polished wood floor of the gym. None of the cuts, however, appeared to have hit an artery or an organ.
He didn’t understand why he was being tortured before Navarro had even bothered to ask him what he wanted to know. He had always wondered how he’d react in a situation like this. He knew he wouldn’t tell them anything, no matter how much pain he felt. He was going to die anyway, there was no way around that. But he had several choices regarding how he spent his last moments alive. He was in too much pain to get angry, and he felt it was pointless to vent by screaming abuse. But he still had to say something. Honor demanded it.
“Whatever you’re after, you do know you’re going to end up like all the others, right? Sooner or later, if we don’t get you, one of your fellow narcos will and you’ll be dog food like everyone else.”
Navarro tilted his head to one side and gave Villaverde a thin smile. Then he removed a small leather pouch from his pocket and loosened the lace that held it closed. He held the pouch aloft, almost reverently, and whispered a few words in a language that Villaverde didn’t understand. Then Navarro’s eyes gazed directly into his own.
“Clear your mind, and enjoy.”
He dipped a hand into the pouch, then pulled it out. His cupped palm was now full of a fine gray dust that looked something like human ash. He took a step forward, so he was up close to his prisoner, reached out, and—with his eyes locked on Villaverde’s—he massaged the dust into the open wounds on Villaverde’s chest. The powder burned—badly—but Navarro didn’t flinch, even though Villaverde was screaming so loudly it felt like he was going to burst his own eardrums.
Then, just as suddenly as he’d started, he stopped. He turned and stepped away, grabbing a towel from a stand on the way and wiping his hands as he stood by the glass wall and stared out at the sea.
Villaverde felt the pain subside, then, very quickly, his pulse started to race. He thought of Torres and realized that in a few minutes he wouldn’t be in control of his own mind.
After a few minutes, Navarro returned to face him and stood absolutely still, staring at him while muttering some more incomprehensible words.
And then he felt it. Much sooner than he had expected.
His temperature rose. Sweat broke out across his face. Stomach acid boiled in his abdomen and shot up into his mouth, making him retch and almost choke. He shut his eyes, only to see strange, primordial shapes glide across his vision. He opened his eyes again, but the weird forms were still there, swimming across his vision of Navarro and the gym behind him.
He closed his eyes again, trying to block out the confusion. Blinding colors took over, then suddenly, they disappeared, like someone had hit a switch in the back of his eyes. The blackness was intense, complete—a darkness he’d never encountered. He opened his eyes, suddenly terrified that he’d gone blind, and the creatures appeared. Horrible, hissing reptiles and snakes. Deformed, human-like shapes, snarling through fanged teeth, strafing him from all corners. And behind them, black walls, closing in, tightening against him like a giant vise.
He started to scream and shut his eyes, trying to block out the horror. He forced himself to think of something else, something calming, and thought of the last time he’d gone surfing at Black’s Beach. He tried to focus on the waves rolling in from the submarine trench half a mile off the coast. On the raw ocean swells marching toward the shore, one after the other, before releasing their energy in big hollow peaks. He tried to remember the smell of the sea, the sound of the seagulls shrieking overhead, the feeling of the sheer power of the waves as he paddled out to join the lineup.
For a brief moment, it worked. He felt a blissful calmness as his turn came up. He jumped up onto his board. Bent his knees. Centered his weight. But something was rushing toward him. Not the beach. Not the ocean. Something else. Something from deep inside of him. He felt it slam into him with a force greater than the biggest wave he’d ever ridden. It knocked all the air from him. He couldn’t breathe and was gasping for air. It seemed as though all his organs were jammed up against his heart—and then it burst out of the cuts on his chest.
A three-headed snake, thick as a boa and black and slimy, emerging from a field of flames, curling out, coming out of him and spinning on itself before it drew level with his face and snarled at him, its wide jaws filled with rows of fangs.
Villaverde could see flames jutting out of the cuts on his chest, he could smell his own skin burning and feel it sizzling and melting from the scorching heat. He knew he would be incinerated completely within seconds, and as he screamed and tried to turn away from the monster facing him, it followed his head around and moved right in so it was breathing into his sweat-drenched face and asked him, with an echoey hiss, “Where are they?”
60
M y son is the reincarnation of the man I killed.
At least, that’s what I thought Tess had just said. My head was still spinning from it, and I felt like I was the one having an out-of-body experience.
It was absurd, and all I could muster was, “What are you talking about?”
“The things Alex was remembering. Animals and scenes from rainforests.” She pulled out Alex’s drawings and showed them to me again. “These tribes, these settings. That’s right from McKinnon’s past. He spent his life in those places.” She was getting breathless, her words spilling out more intensely. “These plants. They’re medicinal plants. And this drawing here”—she pointed to the one of the man walking on orange, fiery ground—“that’s fire walking. McKinnon’s done it; I read it in a bio of his. Then there’s that other flower Alex drew, the one his teacher told me about. He told me it was supposed to cure heart problems, but that it turned out to be harmful. McKinnon was the one who found it. I looked it up. He was working for a big pharmaceutical company at the time. They were funding his research and footing his bills down there. And he found this plant that showed a lot of promise as a cholesterol inhibitor. But then the tests went bad and he fell out with his bosses ’cause they’d built it up into this medical marvel and they didn’t want their share options to implode. That’s why he bailed on the big pharmas and struck out on his own. Alex told me about
this. Not in full detail, but he gave me enough to want to look into it. All the pieces fit.”
“Come on, Tess. Look at the drawings,” I countered. “It’s not like they’re photographic evidence. They’re pretty vague, maybe you’re reading stuff into them because it fits . . . and they could be things he saw on TV or in some issue of National Geographic. And that cholesterol story? Maybe he heard about it on the news or heard someone talking about it.”
“Maybe . . . but he remembers you, Sean. This drawing?” She handed me the one that showed Alex with someone facing him, and looked at me squarely as she tapped her finger against the dark figure. “He said this was you. He says you shot him.” She tapped the center of her forehead. “Right here. He told me the whole story. Just like you told me. In detail.”
She hesitated, and paused as I stared at the drawing again, giving it a proper look this time. And it was uncanny. Although it was a kid’s drawing, I saw something in it. A raw truth, an emotion that brought that night cannoning back into my mind’s eye. It was deeply unsettling to imagine that Alex had actually drawn me there, in the lab, but looking at it now with different eyes, it suddenly didn’t seem impossible.
And yet, it had to be.
“He knew, Sean,” she continued. “About the woman. About her kid. About the guy who was with you, how he shot them.”
And that hit me like a sledgehammer. “What?”
“He told me about it. How they died. How angry he got, how he ran . . . He told me about the laptop and the journal, about Father Eusebio. He knew about it. He knew everything.” Her eyes were glistening with moisture now. “How could he possibly know that, Sean? How could a four-year-old who wasn’t even born back then know any of these things?”
I didn’t have an answer for her.
I was having trouble coming to grips with the basic notion, let alone the details. I tried to step back, to go back to the beginning and track forward, to try to make sense of the sheer absurdity of what Tess had just hit me with. I racked my brain looking for another explanation, pulling her theory apart, but I kept butting up against one thing, one certainty that I couldn’t bat away. Alex didn’t get it from Michelle. I’d never told her how McKinnon had died, let alone what Munro had done. And it wasn’t written up in any report either. Corliss had made sure of that.
I looked at Tess, feeling my own soul going into a tailspin. “It can’t be . . .”
“How else could he know, Sean? How?”
And just like a moment earlier, I didn’t have an answer for her. But I now understood. I understood what this was all about.
“Navarro’s not after me,” I said, my voice hardening with anger. “He’s after Alex. Because he thinks Alex is the reincarnation of McKinnon. Because he wants the formula. Because he thinks Alex might remember it.”
“Exactly,” Tess concurred. “Alex is the target. Has been all along.”
It fit.
It goddamn fit.
And if this was true, then for some weird, sick, karmic mind-fuck of a reason, whoever chose how these things happen decided he’d drop-kick the soul of the man I executed into the body of my own son.
Forget intelligent design.
This was perverse, sadistic design.
I slid down to the ground and leaned back against the lone tree, feeling as isolated as it was. I still wasn’t sure I believed it. It was too insane, too surreal. It needed a major leap of faith, and I wasn’t there yet. But I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand either. Not with everything Tess had dug up. And if it were true . . . The thought of Alex seeing his murderer every time he looked at me, his own father, was too horrific to imagine. I went back to looking for ways to sink Tess’s conclusion, fast, to rip it apart and shred it into nanoparticles so it would never come up again.
I couldn’t.
I felt like my head was about to explode, like an astronaut in deep space whose helmet had cracked open. And I wish I was in space, where, if you believe the movie posters, no one can hear you scream. I’d have really belted one out. But I couldn’t. Not here. Not in front of Tess, not with Alex and Jules and the other agent close by. So I just slunk back, leaned my head back, and shut my eyes.
Tess slid down and sat next to me.
After a moment, I asked her, “You really think it’s possible?”
She took a long second, then said, “I don’t know what to believe. And—honestly?—I’m torn. I’m torn between wanting it to be real and hoping it isn’t.” She reached out and put her hand on my arm and leaned in closer. “I don’t want it to be real for your sake. For Alex’s sake. It would be so . . . cruel. And unfair. And part of me is kicking myself for even having looked into it. But if it is real . . . we can’t run away from it. It’s better if we face it and deal with it and fix things so Alex and you can have the kind of father-and-son relationship you both so deserve.”
She stared up at the night sky. I followed her gaze upward. It seemed more vast and endless to me than ever.
“And if it is real . . . Jesus. It changes everything. If this life isn’t the end, if there’s a chance that we come back . . . That’s a whole other conversation and one I’m not sure we need to have right now.”
I nodded, more to myself than to her. All of that could wait. “I need to make sure Alex is safe,” I told her. “For good. If that’s what Navarro believes, then Alex isn’t going to be safe until that bastard is put away. That’s what I need to take care of first. After that . . . we’ll deal with the rest.”
I had to find Navarro. But once I did, I needed to shut him up, permanently. I didn’t want any of this to ever come to light—it would haunt, if you’ll forgive the pun, Alex for years to come and would make his life very difficult. I also didn’t want Navarro blabbing about this from some prison cell and inspiring a whole new wave of narcos to come chasing after my son like he was their golden goose.
I had to find El Brujo.
Little did I know that he’d find me first.
61
I didn’t hear them come in.
It was late. Really late, or really early, depending on which way you look at it. I wasn’t sleeping, but I guess my senses were so numb I couldn’t say I was awake either. I was physically and mentally trashed, and sleep would have been very welcome. I did get some, initially. Maybe a couple of hours. Then somewhere around four thirty in the morning, my eyes flickered awake, and that was it.
Jules and Cal, the new guy, were alternating two-hour shifts on watch, but I’d offered to share the roster with them. My shift, though, wasn’t till six. And yet, here I was, staring at the ceiling. Maybe I couldn’t rest until I’d found a hole, some way of sinking Tess’s theory. Or maybe it was something inside me—acutely sensitive hearing or some kind of ESP, depending on whether we’re going for a strictly scientific explanation or, given where my head was at, a more esoteric one—that shook me awake because of the imminent danger. Either way, I was awake, just barely, lying there in bed with Tess next to me, trapped in that really irritating zone where you’re too tired to think but too wound up to sleep.
I thought I heard a faint creak, like from a plank of flooring or a door frame. Could be Jules getting herself a cup of coffee from the kitchen—or was it Cal’s shift? I wasn’t sure. Jules, I think. The house was silent again for a moment. Then I heard another creak, followed by a metallic snap.
That one slapped me awake, but by then it was too late. I was halfway out of bed and reaching for my gun when the door to our bedroom flew open and two dark silhouettes swarmed in. My fingers never made it to the Browning’s grip. I felt the hard, deep sting in my chest before I realized one of them had targeted me with his gun, but it didn’t sound like a normal gun and what hit me wasn’t a bullet. It came out with a whoosh, like you got from a compressed air cartridge, and what I had in my chest wasn’t a gaping bullet wound. It was a three-inch-long syringe dart with a black tip at its back end.
I kept going for the gun, but one of the intruders was already on me and
kicked my arm away from the night table before throwing me against the wall. I glimpsed Tess barely sitting up in the bed before she yelped as she was hit with another dart. I pushed myself off the wall to hit back at the intruder, but in mid-stride, my muscles turned to jelly and I just crumpled down to the floor like a rag doll.
I couldn’t lift a finger.
I could only watch, a prisoner of my own body, as they walked around me like I wasn’t even there. From the corner of my eye, I could see them lifting Tess off the bed and carrying her out of the room, and a rage like I’d never felt flared through me. My thoughts rocketed to Alex, and I hoped they’d used something else to drug him, something that didn’t keep him conscious like I was, something that would spare him the horror of witnessing this. I thought of Jules and Cal, too, hoping they weren’t deemed expendable, hoping they’d been spared. Then a face loomed into my frame of vision, upside down, from behind me. A new face, one I’d never seen before, but I knew it was him.
Right there, inches away from me. And I couldn’t lay a finger on him or rip his damn heart out. Assuming he had one.
I just stared up at him, lost in my silent fury, screaming my lungs out in total silence, and I thought of spiders and lizards and what my tox report would look like when they did my postmortem.
THURSDAY
62
“Hey, come on, wake up. Please.”
The words woke me up with a start.
It took a few seconds for my eyes to focus, but I already knew I wasn’t going to like what they showed me. My head felt woolly, not quite like a hangover. More like my skull had been caught in a vise that was just loosened by half a turn.
I was lying on a thin cot and the first thing I noticed was that my hands weren’t bound. The cot squeaked as I bent up, and I saw that my legs weren’t tied either. I glanced around. My surroundings were spartan to a fault. I was in a windowless room, about fifteen-foot square. Its walls were old and made of stone that rose up into a low barrel vault. There was literally nothing else in the room apart from me and the cot and a guy who was just standing there, staring across at me like I was a stranded alien. Which, in a sense, I realized I probably was.
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