“What?”
“Their office,” he said. “Where is it?”
“Río Dulce. It’s a port city—”
“Pack your things. We’re leaving now.”
46
Calderon stared at the young man standing on the other side of his desk. Despite his anger over the bungled mission — McKenna would flee the forest lab long before he and his men could get there — he took no pleasure in what he was about to do.
The truth was, he had underestimated McKenna. He wouldn’t do that again.
Hector was standing at attention, trembling like a frightened child. He wasn’t much older than a child, Calderon realized for the first time. The young man had been one of his better students at the training center for the Guatemala Special Forces in Poptún. Most of the security force at the CHEGAN site had come from there. They were men disillusioned with their military careers, and easily enticed by the kind of money that he offered them.
Developing a talent pool to draw from was the only reason that Calderon had spent two miserable years in Poptún as a civilian trainer, working alongside corrupt officers who pocketed the money that was supposed to pay for the state-of-the-art equipment his trainees lacked.
“So, Hector,” he began in Spanish, “tell me again why you fired your weapon when you were instructed not to?” Calderon didn’t wait for the answer. “Didn’t Mr. Kong tell you to hold your fire?”
Calderon glanced at the Asian who was standing in the corner of the room with his arms folded across his chest, his eyes indifferent and unblinking.
The young man choked out a response. “I–I thought the sentry was firing at Raoul.”
“I see. So you had a good reason to ignore orders.”
“No, no, I did not mean—”
“You see, I wanted you to wait for me to get there. But instead, McKenna has escaped, and Raoul and Jorge are dead. What am I going to say to their families, Hector?”
“I am sorry, sir. It will never—”
Calderon’s eyes went to the Asian. “And what am I going to say to Hector’s family, Mr. Kong?”
When he looked back at the young man, Calderon’s hands were face up in the manner of a question. Resting in his right palm was a serrated steel blade.
But only for an instant.
Hector’s eyes grew wide when the blade pierced his throat. He stumbled backward, grabbed at the metal haft and pulled the knife from his neck.
But that wasn’t going to help him. His windpipe was already severed. Pulling the knife out only meant that blood would flood into his lungs — he was going to drown rather than suffocate to death.
Calderon watched the young man slump into Mr. Kong’s waiting arms, but his mind was busy replaying his phone conversation earlier that evening with Sammy Wilkes.
* * *
It was now or never, Megan realized. If she was going to have any chance of escaping, she had to make her move now. Kaczynski was improving rapidly, his temperature curve receding, his delirium clearing. He had responded after only thirty hours of penicillin, more quickly than she had anticipated.
Once his recovery took hold, the value of her life to her captors would evaporate.
As she had hoped, word of her mosquito scare had spread among the guards, and a screen door had replaced the open doorway to their room. Their guard was sitting in a chair on the other side of the screen, his head propped against the opposite wall of the corridor.
She had rehearsed the movements in her mind a hundred times: climbing onto the window ledge that was outside of the guard’s field of vision; leaping to the tree branch that was as far away as any vault she’d ever done; swinging up and onto the huge limb and crossing to the other side of the compound wall; and finally, climbing the steep mountainside to a road she’d seen only once while walking across the compound two days earlier.
The screened window was on the wall to the left of the entry door. Both she and Father Joe had feigned catnaps near that window to condition the guard to their disappearing from view for long periods. At random intervals the guard would put his face against the screen door and survey the room. She and Father Joe had worked out a system of signals and taken turns working on the window’s wire mesh when the guard was in his seat. They had separated the edge of the screen from its frame an inch at a time, then put it back in place. Working all night, they had freed most of three sides.
She needed the cover of darkness. They had taken her watch, and she didn’t know the exact time, but based on the flow rate of the IVs and the lab technician’s habit of changing the IV bag at midnight, Megan guessed it was about 4:00 A.M. The sun would be rising in a few hours.
They had come up with the plan together, communicating in gestures and coded whispers when standing together over the patient. The priest had worked excitedly, at times causing him to lose his breath. She could see the fervor in his eyes. He wanted her to escape, probably more than she wanted it.
Even though it was his idea that she should attempt an escape, her sense of guilt swelled as the moment approached. Both of them knew what their fate would be once Dr. Kaczynski emerged from his stupor and took over his own care. And both knew that Father Joe did not have the physical agility or stamina to accompany her.
The priest would pay for her escape with his life unless she could quickly get to the police and return with help.
Megan was standing over Kaczynski when the guard rose from his seat. He walked up to the screen door, studied the room, then sat down again.
Father Joe came up from behind and whispered, “It’s time.”
Megan nodded without turning. She was fighting back tears.
The priest stepped beside her, took a damp cloth from her hand and patted Kaczynski’s forehead.
“I’m coming back for you,” she said.
He smiled while dabbing a rivulet of sweat from the patient’s neck. “Godspeed, Megan Callahan.”
She stepped away from the table, opened her mouth while spreading her arms in a yawn, and shuffled over to the window. She listened for any telltale sounds from the guard as she eased back the screen.
Once she had the screen peeled back, she looked in both directions at the dimly lit compound below, grabbed the window frame and lifted herself onto the sill.
Her throat tightened. She bounced lightly a few times, shaking away the fear.
Then she sprang at the tree limb.
Father Joe coughed to cover the sound.
Megan caught the thick branch with one hand, missed with the other. She hung there, swinging by one arm, her body suddenly announcing its fatigue.
Her free arm caught hold of the bough, then slipped away.
She had almost no strength left. She knew her body; her reserves were gone. Soon, her single handhold would give way.
Panic swiped at her like a tiger’s claw.
She looked back into the room.
Father Joe was watching her. There was a smile in his eyes. They were strangely calm, like those of a parent watching his child learn a new skill.
Without a word, he turned both thumbs skyward.
Megan hadn’t seen that gesture since she was a young girl. At gymnastics meets, before each event, she’d turn to her father and he’d lift his thumbs.
It was their private little ritual, an unspoken message to her. You can do it, Megan.
And do it, she did, speaking to her father in silent thoughts as she curled up and onto the tree limb.
She raced over the top of the stone wall.
47
“This woman, Megan, I sense that she is more than just a friend,” the microbiologist said.
Luke downshifted without replying to the woman’s comment. The truck’s gears ground loudly.
He had just told her about Megan’s abduction by men whose description matched the killers at Zenavax’s lab. He had described the tan truck with a red caduceus that her kidnappers used, and the explosive charges that destroyed Mayakital.
They had left
the Zenavax lab two hours ago and were winding through a narrow mountain road. The transmission groaned every time the speedometer needle passed the fifteen-kilometer bar, and the bullet-riddled truck creaked loudly whenever they hit a pothole, which was often. It wouldn’t be long before the mechanical beast died.
He was breaking every rule of evasion and countersurveillance he had ever learned. Their truck was as conspicuous as a zebra with pink stripes, and his passengers included a woman about whom he knew little, three men about whom he knew nothing, and a nine-year-old boy over whom he seemed to have no control.
The only precaution he’d taken was to bar any communications. Earlier, the woman had asked to call Zenavax’s U.S. headquarters, to tell her company about the melee at the lab, but Luke had not allowed her to make the call. There were still too many unknown risks — his enemy had already demonstrated that they could tap a phone line — and he didn’t want to risk giving his adversaries any more information than they already had.
His only concession to the woman had been delaying their departure from the lab for the few minutes it took to release her monkeys from their cages.
“Our guards, Miguel and Eduardo, you did not kill them, did you?” she said. It sounded more like a statement than a question.
“Does it matter?”
“To me, it does.”
“I shot one of them in the shoulder.”
“That would not have killed him.”
“I was aiming for his chest.”
The edge of the dirt road floated in and out of Luke’s view. One of the truck’s headlights was broken and the other lolled to the side like an eye hanging from its socket. His only view was through a gaping hole in the shattered windshield. Insects streamed in through the opening and ricocheted off his face.
“My name is Rosalinda,” she said.
“Luke.” He offered his hand.
She took it. “Luke, I know the executives who run our company. They are aggressive business people, and sometimes unpleasant, but they are not killers.”
It had already occurred to him that Zenavax might be a pawn in this drama. The men guarding the forest facility had displayed total surprise, and the killers had shown no regard for anyone at the laboratory, gunning down two of Rosalinda’s workers in cold blood. If the company was trying to conceal something, why bring attention to itself by staging an attack on its own site?
But if Zenavax wasn’t at the center of this maelstrom, the CHEGAN FOUNDATION seemed even more implausible. A healthcare organization doing relief work in remote Indian villages was hardly the profile of a violent cabal.
“What are you going to do when we get to Río Dulce?” she asked.
He’d been mulling that question for the past hour and still hadn’t come up with anything resembling a plan.
“Follow the only lead I have.” He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket on which Rosalinda had written the Río Dulce address for CHEGAN.
“I have no idea what is there. It is simply the address I had in my records.”
“I need to see what’s there.” He glanced over at her. “And I’ll need your help, at least to drive by and scout the place. You blend in better than me.”
Frankie stuck his head through the porthole between the cab and the truck bed. “Boss, where we going?”
“Stop calling me ‘boss.’ ” Luke reached into the footwell on Rosalinda’s side of the cab, grabbed his pack, and fished out Sammy’s phone.
He had missed that evening’s call from Sammy, but they were passing over the crest of a mountain and Luke thought he’d try for a satellite connection while he could. He punched in Sammy’s number.
A voice filled with sleep answered on the other end. “Do you know what time it is?”
Luke looked at his watch. “Three-seventeen A.M.”
“Where the hell have you been, Flash?” Sammy’s voice was suddenly awake.
“I need information about something called the CHEGAN FOUNDATION.” He spelled it for Sammy.
“Hang on. Let me get something to write with.”
Luke kept going: “Last time we talked, you said you might have something to tell me tonight. What did you mean?”
“I’m still working on it. Sammy’ll let you know if—”
“Tell me now.”
After a long stretch of static, Sammy said, “Okay, but don’t say anything until Sammy’s done talking.” Another pause, then, “I’m coming up dry on your lady friend’s kidnapping. Now, I know you said no-way no-how you were gonna talk to Calderon, but I got to thinkin’ that maybe I should call him.”
Sammy seemed to wait for a reaction that Luke didn’t give him, so he continued, “I didn’t tell him about you. I told him your hospital had hired me to look for her. He’s got connections in places where polite folks usually don’t go. I figured it’s worth a try. But I haven’t heard back, so maybe he’s got zip.”
Luke looked down at the gun tucked under his belt. It was a Colt 1911A1 semiautomatic that he’d lifted from one of the would-be killers — the same make and model that Calderon had used while a member of Proteus.
Rather than the standard .45 caliber model, Calderon had used a modified version that shot 10mm rounds — just like the one tucked under Luke’s belt.
“Stay by your phone,” Luke said. “I have a feeling that Calderon will be calling you.”
“A feeling?”
“When you hear from him, let me know.” Luke thumbed the END CALL button.
* * *
Megan looked back at the valley below her. She’d been climbing the mountainside for over twenty minutes and wondered why she hadn’t reached the road she’d seen from inside the walled compound.
The complex was strangely quiet. There were no men rushing under the wash of floodlights, no flashlights on the hillside below her — none of the angry sounds she had expected to hear.
Nothing to distract her from the guilt that hung over her like a guillotine blade. Earlier, she had rationalized that they wouldn’t risk killing Father Joe as long as she was on the loose. After all, they had to know that she would bring the police back with her. But there was something about the nature of these men that tugged at the logic of her argument.
Especially their leader, Calderon. There was a zeal and obsession to his cruelty. She couldn’t expect him to think and act as other men might.
Megan climbed over the rotting trunk of a deadfall. Her foot came down on a dry branch. A loud crack split open the forest’s calm.
She froze, winced. The buzz of insects filled her ears.
A moment later a grinding sound pierced the white noise of the forest.
Metal against metal. Gears scraping against one another. She looked up toward the sound. A headlight strobed on the hillside above her, about twenty yards up the hill, its beam darting between breaks in the trees.
Her legs started churning like a jackhammer. She thrashed up the hill.
The single headlight swept over her, then a truck drove past on the road that was just ten feet up the hillside.
She screamed but it came out as a hoarse whisper. Her breath was gone.
Megan clawed at the undergrowth and finally, on all fours, dragged herself onto the edge of the road.
She was spent.
The truck downshifted — more grinding — and turned into a curve about thirty feet ahead of her. The only brake light that worked glowed red.
She guzzled air, her lungs heaving, trying to catch her breath and raise a scream.
She rose onto her knees and yelled.
As she did, an arm came from behind and wrapped her neck in a chokehold. The last thing she heard was the unearthly sound of her own smothered scream.
48
“What was that?” Luke pumped the brakes and slowed the truck as they rounded a curve on the narrow mountain road.
“Probably a predator finding its next meal,” Rosalinda replied.
“It sounded human,” he said. “Like someone screaming.”
“In a forest full of primates, sounds like that are common.”
Luke pinched the bridge of his nose and blinked his eyes into focus. Ahead of them a faint blush of moonlight dusted the timbered peaks. Outside the driver-side window, a single cluster of amber lights burned in the valley below them. The sound was too close to have come from there.
He looked into the back of the truck. Rosalinda’s workers were staring at the trailer bed, avoiding his gaze. Frankie was curled up, asleep.
Luke eased off the brakes and the truck started to roll again.
They rode in silence for the next hour while he replayed the past week’s events. He thought back to something that had gnawed at him for days. The person who had framed him for the football player’s murder had to know that Luke was proficient with a sniper’s rifle, or the frame wouldn’t have worked. Only a handful of close friends knew of his training as a SEAL, and no one but fellow Proteus members knew about his brief career in black ops.
Luke fingered the Colt 1911A1 semiautomatic under his belt. Proteus had given its elite fighters a great deal of freedom in selecting sidearms and other personalized weapons. Two of its members had used the modified 10mm Colt. Both had come to Proteus from the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment, formerly known as Delta Force.
But only one, Calderon, held a grudge against him.
The men who had attacked him at the forest lab were highly trained soldiers who used military tactics. He thought back to what Sammy had told him about Calderon training Guatemala’s Special Forces before forming his own security company, a company he would likely staff with men he had trained, and men he equipped to his own standards.
The pieces of the puzzle fell into place like pins in a lock tumbler. Calderon knew him in a way that few did, well enough to reel him in, using Megan as bait, knowing that he would press the fight rather than run.
Calderon would have seen through Sammy’s charade and known that Luke, not University Children’s, was behind Sammy’s search for information about Megan.
Stigma Page 30
