He’d make one last trip into the tunnel, to see for himself the pile of rock in front of McKenna’s tomb.
* * *
“You’re not going to pull free, Megan. Save your strength.”
Megan hadn’t stopped struggling against her bindings.
“Save my strength? For what?” Her voice cracked on the last word.
Luke stared into the pitch-blackness. He didn’t have an answer for her.
Calderon wouldn’t leave them alone long enough to cobble together any sort of escape plan. The blast that would seal them inside the cavern was coming at any moment.
Luke heard a footstep.
Then a match flared and the quivering reflection of a small flame painted the tunnel wall.
“Hey, boss, you in here?” a small voice said. Then, “Ouch.”
The flame disappeared.
“Who’s that?” Megan whispered.
“Frankie?” Luke said.
Another flame, this time closer. “Boss?”
“Frankie, we’re in here.”
“Who’s Frankie?” Megan asked.
The boy’s potbellied figure appeared at the tunnel’s opening holding a lighted matchstick. “Boss, what you doing here?”
“Come here, quick,” Luke said. “Use that match and burn the rope around my wrist.”
He knew it would be impossible for the boy to undo the expertly tied knots. But a match flame could melt the nylon ropes in seconds.
Moments later Luke felt the flame singing the hair on his hands, and then his right hand broke free. He grabbed the tape with his teeth and tore it away from his fingers.
The rope around his left wrist gave way and he went to work on his ankle ties.
* * *
The Río Dulce was unusually calm on that night, and Calderon’s boat was skimming across the water when he heard the beep in his jacket pocket.
He pulled out the detonation transmitter.
The light had changed to yellow.
He set the timer on his chronometer for three minutes and pressed START.
54
“Forget about it, Enrique. It was probably an animal,” Juan whispered in Spanish. “Let’s get out of here.”
They had armed the detonator and were trotting through a warren of small passages toward the main tunnel when Enrique spotted a movement in the peripheral wash of his miner’s lamp. The men had separated and crisscrossed through the intersecting paths, quickly backtracking to where they’d set the explosive charges.
But they hadn’t found anyone.
Juan pointed at his luminescent watch. “In two minutes this place is going to blow. We have to leave. Now.”
“I’m telling you,” Enrique said, “I saw something. It wasn’t an animal.”
Just then, a small shimmer of light shone on the tunnel wall, near the entrance to the cavern where Calderon had taken his captives.
Enrique flipped off his light, then reached over an overhead joist and turned off the arming switch on the detonator.
Juan was already moving into the tunnel with his M-16 raised.
* * *
As soon as Luke and Megan had lifted Father Joe to his feet, the priest said, “You three go ahead without me.” He took a long breath, his lips pursed. “I’ll follow behind.”
The priest could barely walk without their support, let alone sprint through darkened passageways.
“No.” Megan’s head was tucked under Father Joe’s armpit, her arm wrapped around his trunk. “We’re going out together.”
Her voice carried the tone of an appellate court judge.
Luke took the priest’s other arm and the three of them stutter-stepped to the mouth of the tunnel. Frankie led the way, holding a lighted match.
Their first step into the tunnel was greeted with a volley of gunfire that ripped the priest from Luke’s arm and sent both Joe and Megan to the ground.
Frankie dropped his match and the passage went black.
Footsteps — at least two sets — were moving toward them.
Luke dove to where Megan had fallen and rolled her away from the tunnel’s entrance.
The footfalls grew louder. A shaft of light suddenly pierced the darkness, painting an oblong circle of light at the far end of the cavern. The assailants were using assault tactics: storm the enemy’s position with overpowering force, give them no time to regroup.
Luke was crouched next to the tunnel entrance when the rifle barrel yawed around the corner to scan the perimeter of the room.
He shot up with the force of a catapult, slammed the rifle stock into the assailant’s head, then dropped to the ground with the slumping man, using him for cover while ripping the rifle from his grip. Luke spun the weapon in a 180-degree arc and put three rounds into the second attacker before the man could bring down his aim.
The unconscious assailant was lying in the entry. Luke used the tip of his rifle barrel to point the man’s helmet light into the tunnel and jinked his head into the passageway, searching for targets.
The tunnel was empty.
He shouldered the weapon and quickly examined Megan, who was already rising onto her elbows with Frankie’s help.
She was shaking, but there were no gunshot wounds.
When Luke turned to Father Joe, his eyes went immediately to a spreading circle of red on the priest’s left side. He tore open Joe’s shirt. There were two entry wounds in his chest.
Megan kneel-crawled around Luke and took a position on the other side of the priest.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered when she saw the wounds.
Father Joe had a rapid pulse.
In a few minutes the priest’s pulse would become thready, and then fade completely.
And there was nothing they could do for him.
Megan placed his head in her lap. “Hang on, Father,” she said through welling tears. “Stay with us.”
The priest coughed violently and leaned to the side. His breaths came in gasps, but his face was strangely calm. He looked first at Luke and then at Megan. When his eyes reached her, he lifted his right arm and made the sign of the cross.
Then he collapsed and was still.
After a long moment, Megan began stroking the priest’s forehead. She wiped away bits of dirt and combed back his hair with her hand.
“He’s gone, Megan. We have to go.”
She let out a wailing cry, brought Father Joe’s head to her breast, and rocked back and forth.
* * *
Calderon was nearing the freighter when he glanced at his chronometer — thirty-seven seconds until detonation.
He pulled the transmitter from his pocket.
The light was green. Someone had disarmed it!
“Turn the boat around,” he shouted at Kong. “Take us back to the dock.”
Calderon keyed in his radio. Two sentries standing guard on the barge checked in. Neither had heard from Enrique or Juan.
Calderon grabbed a spotting scope from a compartment under the helm and aimed it at the cove. Laborers were scurrying over the barge like a horde of worker ants, securing cargo, doing their final checks. Two men using a winch tightened cables around the mosquito container.
The tunnel entrance was empty, and dark.
He rechecked the arming indicator on the detonator. It was still green.
What had happened?
McKenna couldn’t have broken free. It wasn’t possible. He had checked the bindings himself.
When the boat entered the lagoon, Calderon switched his scope to infrared mode and searched for heat signatures near the tunnel entrance and in the water along the perimeter of the barge.
Nothing.
He pulled the detonation transmitter from his pocket. The light had changed back to yellow.
What the hell is going on?
He blew out a heavy breath, reset his chronometer and pressed START. He hoped his men were sprinting, because he was only giving them one minute to clear the blast area. After screwing up his timetabl
e and delaying the detonation, they’d know better than to loiter. At worst, the percussion wave would knock the wind out of them, cover them in a cloud of silt. Or maybe their ears would ring for the next few days.
They knew the rules, and the risks.
Thirty-one seconds. Calderon ran a thumb across the ignition switch.
He still wondered what had caused Enrique and Juan to disarm the detonator for those few minutes. They knew their trade, and rule one when handling explosives was never to arm the detonator until everything — explosive charges, detonation cord, and blasting caps — had been checked twice, then cross-checked by a fellow team member.
Fourteen seconds.
“Ah, what the hell.” Calderon flipped the toggle switch.
His last conscious thought was the sensation of intense heat from an orange fireball.
* * *
Luke was underwater and dolphin-kicking away from the barge when the C-4 exploded. The blast wave slammed into him like a tsunami.
The world went from dark to black and the murky water suddenly felt like a viscous soup. He was disoriented, unable to differentiate up from down.
This was supposed to be his element. Nighttime water operations were what SEALs knew best, but his mind went hazy and his eyes lost focus as the last of his oxygen burned away.
He brought his legs together and dolphin-kicked, following the small air bubbles he released from his mouth every few seconds, chasing them upward. When his head broke the surface, he pointed his mouth at the sky and gulped in the night air until his speckled vision cleared.
He was almost fifty feet from the dock when he surveyed the results of his work. A large chunk of the barge’s midsection was missing, as was the Plexiglas mosquito container that had sat over the section of hull where he placed the C-4 charge and detonator. The huge iron flatbed was already listing heavily, and water was flowing into the starboard side.
At the far end of the lagoon, Calderon’s boat was turning in a tight circle. A man on the vessel’s bow was using a hook pole to snag something in the water. When he finally caught it, it took three men to pull the limp body from the water. As they were lifting the large figure onto the boat’s deck, he erupted in a coughing fit and started thrashing. The men jumped away as if from a wild animal.
Calderon.
A man in the dimly lit wheelhouse shoved the throttle arm forward, made a violent turn, and powered the boat into the river’s channel.
Luke turned to a blackened cul-de-sac at the farthest edge of the cove and stared into a shallow hollow until his eyes detected the movements. Megan and Frankie were treading water behind a curtain of hanging vines.
55
“You’re being stubborn,” Luke said to Megan. “You have to go to Guatemala City, to the U.S. Embassy. You’ll be safe there.”
“I’m not going there without you.” She poked his chest on the last word.
He looked across the bus aisle at Frankie. The boy was lying lengthwise on a bench seat with his head propped against the window and his hands coupled behind his neck, his glance bouncing between Megan and Luke as if taking in a ping-pong match.
“I can’t go to the embassy,” Luke said. “There’s still a murder warrant out on me and I came here on a forged passport. The first thing they’d do is lock me up.”
“Fine, then we’re not going to the embassy. But we’re staying together, and that’s final.”
Their nearly empty bus slowed for a sweat-drenched man yanking his mule across the road. Luke felt a certain kinship with the man.
Ahead, beyond a mile-long swath of grasslands, a dome of brown haze hung over the city of Santa Elena.
Returning Frankie to his mother was the only thing they had agreed on since their escape. Minutes after the explosion on the barge, four surviving crew members and one of Calderon’s sentries had escaped in a small skiff they threw over the side of the sinking vessel. Calderon’s boat had disappeared and the freighter was already steaming away when the river finished swallowing the barge and its cargo.
A fishing trawler had come across the carnage at first light, making two figure-eight loops outside the cove before swooping in and unloading its crew to pick over the shoreline for loose salvage. For one hundred U.S. dollars, the skipper had ferried them back to Río Dulce, where they’d boarded a bus to Santa Elena.
“Calderon’s going to come after me,” Luke said, “and I’m going to let him find me because this thing won’t end until one of us is dead. Until it’s over, I want you as far away as possible.”
“And where am I supposed to hide, Luke? Tell me, where will I be safe? I’ve seen what these people are capable of. They slaughtered an entire village.” She grabbed his hand. “Don’t leave me here by myself.”
He felt the tremor in her fingers, and wrapped his hand around hers.
There was no way to remove her from this nightmare, he realized. Calderon and his men had probably already regrouped and begun hunting for them. If Megan remained with him, he was exposing her to the violent fury that would inevitably converge on him. If they separated, Megan might have to run a gauntlet of Calderon’s men to reach the embassy, after which some State Department bureaucrat might or might not adequately protect her while investigating her improbable story.
“Okay. Maybe you’re right,” he said finally. “We’ll stay together, at least until we get out of the country.”
The bus lurched when it started moving again, and Megan’s head pitched back as if a thought had just shaken free.
“The first thing we need to do is warn your father.”
She was reading his thoughts. Wounding CHEGAN had served only to arouse his enemy. Kaczynski and his knowledge were safely secured in the bowels of the Chinese freighter. Though Luke may have destroyed Kaczynski’s lone colony of egg- and sperm-killing mosquitoes, CHEGAN needed only to acquire a fresh batch of his father’s mosquitoes to salvage its genocidal plan.
His father was standing directly in their path and didn’t even know it.
“My dad’s office and home phones are probably wired. These people are thorough,” he said. “Maybe I can reach him on the wards this afternoon. They can’t tap every phone in the hospital.”
The muscles in Luke’s neck tightened as he considered his quandary. He was half a continent from his enemy’s objective, and a fugitive hiding from both his would-be killers and the police.
Time was on CHEGAN’s side. To stop them, he had to pull his father into this vortex of madness.
He knew it, and so did his enemy.
Luke closed his eyes and rubbed his lids.
Megan’s palm landed on his forehead.
“You’re burning up,” she said.
He already knew the infection in his shoulder was worsening. “I’ll get something in Santa Elena. There’re some things I need to get at a pharmacy before we drop Frankie at his mother’s.”
When Luke finally blinked his eyes back into focus, he saw that Megan’s gaze had turned inward.
“If I hadn’t asked Father Joe for help, he’d still be alive,” she said. “I should’ve let Kaczynski die.” Her voice broke on the last word.
“If he’d died, they would’ve killed both you and the priest,” Luke said. “Wherever Joe is, I’m sure he’s glad it turned out this way instead.”
“Glad? How can you say that? I gave CHEGAN back their leader.”
“Kaczynski’s a scientist, not a leader. He may have come up with the idea, and he probably thinks of himself as the linchpin, but he never could’ve organized something as big as CHEGAN. There’s someone above him.”
“You think some out-of-control government put this scheme together?”
Luke shook his head. “This isn’t the type of thing that government types would’ve dreamed up. It’s too outrageous, too farfetched. This idea was sold to them by someone who was involved in creating it, someone who understood the science and could sell the idea.”
“Who?”
“Caleb Fagan.
”
“What?”
“It all fits,” Luke said. “From the beginning, he’s been on the periphery of the malaria project, helping my father. He was probably the one that fed my father whatever Kaczynski learned about Zenavax’s malaria antigen. Fagan was the perfect conduit, and he could’ve easily diverted those shipments of my father’s mosquitoes to Kaczynski.”
Megan showed him a face full of uncertainty.
“Caleb’s the one who figured out how my father’s flu vaccine killed a batch of mice. Now that same reaction shows up in Kaczynski’s genetic vaccine. That’s no coincidence. Remember what Kaczynski said about needing to modify the antigen for mosquitoes? It was Caleb who tinkered with the antigen to boost the immune response. He understands Killer T-cells and apoptosis — that’s his field — and he’d know how to harness that knowledge for a vaccine. But he underestimated the effect, and the reaction got away from him.”
The bus’s brakes hissed as they turned into a curve.
Megan’s eyes were roaming in a thought. “He started the clinic down here.”
“The clinic gave Caleb an excuse to travel here without raising any questions,” Luke said. “His sudden midlife interest in international healthcare was all part of the plan. It gave him an entrée to the people he needed to sell the idea to, the people who later formed CHEGAN.”
“The patrons.”
Luke nodded. “The night that Josue Chaca arrived in the E.R., Caleb walked into the Trauma Unit when we were in the thick of it. He was right there from the beginning, watching us.”
* * *
“Do you think Caleb knows that you’re on to him?” Elmer asked after listening to Luke’s story and recounting the recent events at University Children’s.
“I doubt it,” Luke said. “Kaczynski painted himself as the kingpin of their operation. He never mentioned Fagan. I’m sure they’ve talked since my escape, and Kaczynski would’ve reassured Caleb, told him that his secret was still safe.”
Luke was in an Internet café a half block from the Santa Elena bus station, speaking into an incongruously modern pay phone. After dialing Sammy’s number and getting a busy signal, he’d had Megan call University Children’s at exactly 3:00 P.M., L.A. time, the usual starting time for his father’s afternoon ward rounds. Using a phony name, she had convinced the fifth-floor clerk to put Elmer on a back-room phone extension.
Stigma Page 34
