Body of Truth

by David L Lindsey

  When the street turned and grew suddenly steeper, Haydon realized they were on the bottom leg of the switchback. He threw the headlights on low, trying to see the edge of the road in the thickening fog, and slowed to a crawl again. He thought about the coffin and what would happen if the chain across the bed of the truck was not properly secured. He thought about that all the way up to the actual switchback itself, and then all the way up to Calvario proper, his mind playing out the entire drama of the consequences of such a macabre occurrence, until the nose of the truck leveled off into an immediate turn and they were instantly into the plazoleta.

  Everything looked different from behind the steering wheel than it had from underneath the tarpaulin in the back of the truck. But the place was small, the church where they had stopped was to their left, the main entrance and exit to the teardrop-shaped plazoleta was to their right. Haydon turned right into the narrowing top of the teardrop, realized they were on pavement, and within seconds they were leaving the town on a sloping paved road. In his headlights, Haydon could see the poor cinder-block houses on either side of the road. They seemed more scattered than he had remembered them from his seat behind the cab, and more isolated, and if there were barking dogs, the roar of the truck’s motor drowned out their strident voices. Again he looked at his watch and noted the time.

  As he pushed the truck down the long glistening ribbon of pavement, dropping meter by meter out of the cloud that hovered over Calvario, his headlights reached out farther and farther. It was clear for a while, the jungle and the road looking as if they had just been washed, but Haydon’s luck didn’t hold long. At first the fog came from the green wall on either side of the road in little tonguelike penetrations at the height of his headlights. He drove in and out of them until they became so numerous they pervaded, and then he had to slow the truck. Not only had the fog closed in, but the road changed too, leaving its straight descent from Calvario and beginning its serpentine course through the cloud forest.

  He didn’t know whether Janet slept or brooded, her head against the window, wrapped in silence. For his part, Haydon was almost weak with exhaustion. His mind fought the powerful urge of his body to quit. He rolled down his window and let the clammy fog whip across his face and into the cab. Constantly passing through alternating waves of dense and light fog was unnerving. He slowed when he could see only a few meters past his headlights, concentrating on the black margin of the road, and accelerated when he could see farther. It seemed that every kilometer or so he adjusted speed, corrected his distance from the cusp of the pavement, adjusted his eyes to a different depth of field, all of it drifting, wavering gray and silver.

  But even in his bleary exhaustion, Haydon was nervous about what lay ahead. He knew something was waiting for him, a resolution of one kind or another with Cage or Pittner or General Azcona’s death squads—or even some unimaginable amalgam of all three. The confrontation was inevitable, but the anxiety he felt at its approach was a peculiarly placed apprehension, perhaps not focused specifically on himself, despite the unbelievable experiences of the last twenty-four hours. Navigating the truck through the swirling veins of fog, he felt more like Charon, who, being only the boatman who ferried souls across the Hateful River of hell, had no fear himself of the torments on the other side. It was Lena they wanted. But they weren’t going to like what he was bringing them.

  The first stream caught him by surprise, and he plowed into it with a crashing roar that threw water up over the top of the cab. Horrified that he might have drowned the motor, he jammed his foot down on the clutch, hit the accelerator until the engine whined and smoked to life, and then he let out the clutch again and continued through the water and out the other side, more awake than he had been going in.

  As the truck emerged dripping from the water, he allowed himself to take his eyes away from the headlights and saw that Janet was awake, staring sleepy eyed, her elbows raised as she ran her fingers through her hair. Haydon didn’t bother to explain what had just happened. He assumed she had figured it out, and if she hadn’t and didn’t care enough to ask about it, he wasn’t going to waste his time. She rode awhile with her eyes open, peering out across the headlights just like Haydon, but then the constant rush of fog wore her down and once again she slumped against the door, her head leaning on the window.

  They were half an hour out of Calvario—Haydon had just checked his watch—when he thought he saw a faint rosy cast in the fog ahead. But it disappeared, or he thought it disappeared, if in fact he had seen it. And then it was there again. He was so tired his reaction was immediate confusion. Rose light? Was he hallucinating? Baffled, he took two deep breaths and reflexively lifted his foot off the accelerator. Suddenly he hit a pocket in the fog, and the light was brilliant ruby, and instantly the world was carmine, the color dancing off the particles of suspended fog until he felt as if he were entering the veins of a red planet.

  “Jesus Christ!” Janet screamed, suddenly sitting bolt upright, her hands out in front of her bracing against the dash. “Slow down…for God’s sake!”

  Haydon hit the brakes, and they started sliding, the bed of the truck drifting. He let up and fought the steering wheel to correct the fishtailing and they straightened out, and then he eased down on the brakes again to slow the hurtling truck, and up again as he felt the rear end drifting. It seemed to last a long time, this unchecked plunge toward the heart of the brightening ruby light.

  But the truck actually stopped in plenty of time, maybe twenty meters short of it, and Haydon, trembling and wide awake now, looked over the steering wheel at the roadblock, two cars nose to nose across the glistening pavement, each with ruby spotlights burning into the fog. Leaving the lights on, he cut the motor and sat there. For a moment no one showed himself, and Haydon heard nothing through his open window except cicadas and frogs.

  “God, what’s happening?” Janet wondered hoarsely. She was sitting forward in her seat, hands on the dash, her eyes so wide Haydon could see the red reflected in them when he looked at her.

  “Just sit tight,” he cautioned her softly. “Give it time.”

  He hardly had finished speaking when someone moved between the two cars, and the solitary, barrel-chested figure of Taylor Cage emerged through the mist and stopped squarely in the middle of the road, a red world at his back.

  And then a slow drizzle began to fall.

  CHAPTER 53

  “Haydon,” Cage shouted, ignoring the drizzle. “Is that Janet in there with you or Lena?”

  “Stay put,” Haydon said to Janet. He opened the door and stood on the running board, his arms on the top of the door of the cab, and looked out over the hood of the truck. “Both of them,” he said.

  “Bullshit. We only see one. Janet.”

  “Lena’s in the back.”

  “Yeah, well, the back’s the problem.” Cage wiped his face on the upper arm of his guayabera. “See, I’ve got people behind the truck there, in the woods, and they’re looking into the back of the truck with night scopes and things, and they tell me”—he held up a hand radio for Haydon to see—“that they don’t see anybody. Now, either nobody’s in there or there’s someone in there hiding, maybe with Uzi’s or something, waiting to blow the shit out of us.” He paused. “We can’t have that, Haydon.”

  “I’m the only one who’s got a gun,” Haydon said. “The same one you gave me.” Haydon reached down to his waist and pulled out the 10mm and held it up.

  “Throw that thing out here,” Cage said.

  “No, I won’t do that,” Haydon said.

  Silence.

  The drizzle was peppering down on the truck’s hood and cab and making deep, finger-drumming sounds on the tarpaulin stretched over the back of the truck.

  “Nobody’s in the back?” Cage said, lowering his voice some. It wasn’t necessary to yell. Theirs were the only human voices in the cloud forest.

  “Lena’s back there, I said.”

  “Why isn’t she in the cab with you two
?”

  “She’s dead.” Haydon did not care to put it any more kindly, and if he could have thought of a cruder way to tell him, he would have.

  Cage just stood there.

  “Bullshit,” he said tentatively.

  Haydon was tired. There was no reason for this drama. He stepped down off the running board and slammed the door, and immediately heard the collective clacking of automatic weapons cocking in the darkness. He stepped around in front of the truck.

  “Come on. Cage,” he said, motioning at him with the gun, deliberately not putting it away safely into his waistband. “No one’s going to shoot you, come on around to the back of the truck.”

  Cage barked something in an Indian dialect as Haydon turned his back on him and headed for the rear of the truck, and suddenly men poured out on either side of the road, high-powered flashlights snapping on, lighting up the back of the truck and Haydon with it. He knew he was in the sights of every gun behind the lights.

  Cage came stalking around the truck to where Haydon was already unlacing the rope from grommets in the tarpaulin. He got it open and threw back the flaps on either side. Finally stuffing the 10mm into his waistband to free his hands, he unchained the gate and took it off and tossed it on the pavement. When he turned, the lights were all around him, a couple of meters away, and Cage was standing next to him, looking at him, rain dripping off his nose, his guayabera soaked through to the skin. He held a radio and his own handgun and was staring at Haydon with an expression of cold skepticism.

  “She’s in a coffin under the coffee sacks,” Haydon said. He reached up and grabbed the side of the tarpaulin, put his foot on the flat bumper and pulled himself up into the back of the truck.

  Again Cage barked something in Indian, and the men moved up closer, and Haydon heard someone open Janet’s side of the cab. Then someone else was beside Cage.

  “Get up in there and look,” Cage said, and Haydon looked down into the round face of Lita.

  She was wearing quasimilitary garb, much like the woman who had brought them to Grajeda’s compound. She grabbed the side of the tarpaulin as Haydon had done and pulled herself up into the back with him. She avoided looking at him directly but unsnapped a flashlight from her belt and shined it around in the truck.

  “Hay nadie aquí,” she said.

  “¿Pero hay un ataúd?” Cage asked.

  “Sí, es una caja.”

  Cage grabbed the tarpaulin flaps and climbed into the back too. He looked at the coffin, the foot and head of which were showing from under the two coffee sacks that had been placed on top of it. He stared at the box a moment, and Haydon thought he could detect in Cage’s hesitation a true and threatening fear, the kind of fear that had nothing to do with an anticipation of danger.

  “Traéis las luces,” he yelled out the back of the truck, and quickly two men mounted the bed and held their lights down on the box as Cage, without asking for help, grabbed the first sack and wrestled it off before Haydon could even assist him, and then together they removed the second one. Cage felt around the edges of the lid. “Crowbar,” he said, looking around frantically as though there would be such a thing among coffee sacks.

  “There’s a tire tool,” Haydon said, remembering one under his feet in the makeshift seat behind the cab, and he crawled over and got it. Cage jerked it out of his hand and jabbed at the seam where the lid joined the sides until he gained some leverage and began prying, the nails groaning from the wood until Cage could get his fingers under the lid. With both hands in the crevice, he stood, pulling with his hands and wrenching the lid off in one ripping movement. The cloth that Janet had carefully folded over Lena’s face came flying off with the lid, snagged on a splinter of the rough lepa boards, and the beam from Lita’s flashlight fell squarely on Lena’s pallid face. Cage grunted as if he had been hit in the stomach and sat down hard on the coffee sacks beside the coffin.

  Lita snapped something in Indian to the men standing at the end of the coffin, and they quickly exited out of the back of the truck into the drizzle. Cage sat with his forearms resting on his knees, his hands dangling, staring at Lena’s face a few feet away. No one said anything, and as the rain tapped on the tarpaulin, Cage leaned forward and rested his head in his hands. He began shaking his head slowly and emitted a sound that seemed to issue from deep in his barrel chest, as though he were trying to swallow back a wrenching nausea. Lita was motionless, and when Haydon looked up at her he found her eyes were fixed squarely on him. He tried to read her thoughts, but her round Indian face was as indecipherable as if it had been carved of dark wood. Then something made him look at the rear window of the cab. Janet was watching Cage’s slumped figure with a loathing she could not have disguised if her life had depended on it.

  “Who killed her?” Cage did not look up.

  It was a question that summed up the cruelty that had become second nature in Cage’s life. He did not ask what happened, rather, who killed her? Whatever he was feeling now, it was an aberration. Taylor Cage was irredeemable.

  “She died in a car crash eight or ten hours ago,” Haydon said. “I think she was coming down off the switchback at Calvario. She was pushing it.”

  “A car crash,” Cage said, his head still in his hands.

  “That’s what they told me.”

  Cage said nothing at first, then, “Is that what you think happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re such a stupid fool, Haydon,” Cage said, swallowing. He ran his fingers through his short, brindled hair, let his hands drop to his legs, but kept his head down. “What about the documents?”

  “I don’t have them,” Haydon said. “They wouldn’t let go of them. They knew you’d be waiting for me, or Pittner would be, or the G-2. You screwed it up when you tipped your hand in Cobán.”

  “Did you see the documents?”

  “No.”

  Cage nodded. “Do you know what’s going to happen to Grajeda?”

  “Happen to him?”

  “Grajeda has a problem…” Cage wiped his brow on the shoulder of his guayabera and looked up at Haydon. “Their compound back there is a kind of way station for the guerrillas traveling in and out of the Petén jungles. There’s a small permanent population that runs the compound, but most of the people there are transient, passing through on one mission or another. A group went in there yesterday, on their way through. One of them is an infiltrator, a Kaibile who joined one of the guerrilla groups six months ago, a sleeper, just waiting for the opportunity to cross trails with Grajeda. Tonight is the first time that’s happened. Pretty good timing.”

  “He’s going to kill him.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t see the relationship between the documents and the ‘problem.’”

  “Grajeda’s heard rumors about his impending assassination. They’ve beefed up their protection, of course, but…he knows the odds. He knows he’s on short time. He considered Lena his last good chance of getting the stuff out of Guatemala.” Cage looked around the truck. “So, why don’t I believe you when you tell me you don’t have the documents?”

  Haydon looked at Cage. Like Grajeda, even sitting beside her coffin, close enough to breathe on her, he didn’t have time to grieve for Lena Muller.

  “They didn’t give them to me,” Haydon said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  “I want those documents real bad,” Cage said. He was breathing heavily, almost as if he were doing control-breathing, trying to keep from hyperventilating, trying to keep his emotions on an even keel. “You know why those documents are so hot? Azcona’s kidnapping crap, sure. That’s enough right there, isn’t it. State will be pissed if that gets around town. But there’s more. Real embarrassing stuff that’s been happening on Pittner’s watch…they’ve known about Azcona’s kiddie trade for a long time, just looked the other way because, you know, well, he’s such a valuable asset. I mean, he has his bad points, but…If the great American public gave a shit about Gua
temala—which they don’t—that could be a scandal that would make some heads roll…nobody here wants to take any chances…”

  Cage stopped. He was through explaining. He stood up and shouted something out to his Indians. He stepped over to the rear of the truck and climbed down.

  “Lita, Haydon, come on out.” Haydon got the lid to Lena’s coffin and laid it back onto the box, lining up the nail holes as best he could aided by the beam of Lita’s flashlight, and tried to bang a few nails back in with the tire tool. “Hurry the hell up,” Cage yelled.

  Haydon gave one quick look at Janet through the rear window and then followed Lita out the back and onto the pavement. As soon as they were out, four of Cage’s men grabbed the canvas flaps and swung up into the truck bed and started throwing out the burlap bags of coffee beans. Two men on the ground began ripping them open with knives, scattering the beans all over the wet pavement.

  “I’m going to empty the truck,” Cage said.

  Haydon stood in the drizzle and watched Cage’s men scatter the coffee beans from an even dozen sacks, dumping the beans onto the roadside, down the pavement, wherever they happened to fly as the sacks were ripped open. They were throwing out the thirteenth sack when they heard cars coming from the Cobán direction on the road, and they all stopped and grabbed their Uzi’s. Furious, Cage stalked around to the front fender of the truck and stopped. The fog lightened and grew bright as the cars approached and pulled up behind the roadblock. They, too, left their lights on so that this small point in the narrow Calvario road was lighted like a film set.

  Car doors opened and closed, whump, whump, whump, whump, whump, muffled in the dense fog, and the long shadows of men in street clothes and carrying the ubiquitous automatic weapons stretched out toward the truck and played weirdly on the moving screen of mizzle. Lita moved up to the front fender, in Cage’s shadow.

  “Cage, this’s Pitt.” Pittner’s voice was somewhere back among the headlights and the silhouettes moving across the rank of lights. “Let’s talk.”