They had an hour and a half to kill, and they spent it cruising the streets of the city’s west side, trying to find The Insurance Group on their own. They had no luck, however, and shortly before ten, Manuel drove to a long low modern-looking building that he said was home to the construction company where his colleague’s friend’s brother worked. He bade them wait in the truck, and they did so while he walked inside. He emerged several minutes later with another man in tow, a tall well-built man with neatly parted hair wearing a western-style suit.
“This is Guillermo,” Manuel said by way of introduction.
“Hola,” the man greeted them as he stepped up to the pickup’s window. He said something in Spanish.
“He’s asking if we have insurance problems, too,” Jorge translated.
“Sí,” Hunt told him.
More Spanish.
“He wants to know if we want to get rid of the company and put it out of business.”
“Sí,” Hunt said again.
“Bueno,” Guillermo said, and Hunt understood that. The man nodded emphatically, then spit on the ground and spoke rapidly to Manuel.
The guide nodded, replied, then got back in the truck. “It is two blocks away. He walks there and we follow. He shows us where to park and tells us when this insurance salesman walks by. Then he will walk back.”
“Should I pay him something?” Hunt asked as Manuel started the engine. “For helping us out?”
“No. That is an insult. He is avenging the death of his boss, his friend.”
They crept down the street and followed Guillermo to a relatively wide avenue, with vehicles parked on both sides of the road. He motioned for them to pull in behind a motorscooter, which allowed them to see the street in front of them clearly, and Manuel swerved into the spot, barely missing a scroungy dog who appeared to be munching on a piece of meat. He cut the engine, and Guillermo took out a cigarette and stood next to a fence near the passenger side of the car, smoking.
They waited a long time, and despite the open window, Hunt was starting to doze in the stifling heat of the pickup’s cab when a dig from Beth’s elbow jarred him awake. Guillermo was leaning in the passenger window next to them. “Aquí,” he said quietly and then spoke rapidly to Manuel in Spanish.
“The man carrying a valise,” Manuel translated as he looked in his rearview mirror and started the engine. “Here he comes.”
Guillermo left the side of the truck, apparently bidding them good-bye, and Manuel quickly and quietly said, “Gracias.”
The agent walked past the pickup.
He was dressed in the sort of old-fashioned gray suit favored by Mexican businessmen and politicians, he had dark skin, he carried a leather folder rather than a briefcase, but there was something instantly recognizable about him, and Hunt had to fight an urge to duck down behind the dashboard and hide until the man was gone. He did not seem as healthy or strong or powerful as their insurance agent—at least their agent as he looked now. Rather, he had the average build and ordinary features of their agent when they’d first met him, and Hunt thought that the man was on the prowl for suckers like themselves off whom he could feed, stable established individuals able to keep up with the graduated premiums.
The man rounded the corner at the end of the block, and Manuel put the pickup in gear and followed.
“Shouldn’t we walk?” Jorge asked. “I mean, aren’t we a little conspicuous? He’s going to notice a truck following along behind him at two miles an hour.”
“We will see what happens. We will see where he goes. I would rather be prepared to give chase should he get in a vehicle of his own than be caught off guard and miss the opportunity.”
Many other cars and trucks were crowding the street and quite a few pedestrians. Manuel gave nearly all of them the right of way, impeding his own progress in a non-suspicious manner but never letting the agent out of his sight.
Hunt had expected to be taken somewhere on the edge of the city. Not an inaccessible location out in the middle of nowhere like the witch’s house or the garden of evil to which she’d directed them, but someplace off the beaten path, in close proximity to the city but not right in the middle of it. Instead, the insurance salesman turned a corner, walked down another street, turned another corner—and they were there.
“I have never been to this place,” Manuel said incredulously. He looked around. “I did not know this was here.”
Amidst the maze of buildings and the teeming throngs of people in the center of Tuxtla Gutierrez was what looked like a dry reservoir the size of an American city block. It was in a hilly area of the city, and its placement seemed both natural and logical, but even before he saw the insurance agent stride briskly down the slope toward the bottom of the basin, Hunt had a bad feeling about the place. Manuel stopped the truck, and the three of them watched through the windshield as the agent reached the bottom and walked into a small stone structure in what appeared to be the exact center of the open space.
That structure looked familiar, Hunt thought.
It reminded him of The Jail.
He had not thought of that purposeless building since Edward and Jorge had taken him to see it, but now he recalled the dread he’d felt while inside, the claustrophobic sensation that both of his friends had experienced as well. He turned his head to look in the backseat.
“The Jail,” Jorge said, nodding. “Goddamn, I wish my cell phone worked here. I’d call Edward right now and have him check that place out.”
“But he wouldn’t be able to get there,” Hunt pointed out. “He still can’t walk by himself.”
Jorge shook his head. “Damn.”
They waited five minutes, ten, making sure that the insurance agent was remaining inside and not coming out. Just when they decided to get out of the pickup and hoof it down the side of the empty basin, the man emerged carrying his folder. Without pausing, he walked up the opposite slope, traversing the steep bank as though it were flat ground before disappearing down a narrow street between two old buildings.
Again they waited, but not as long. They were anxious to get going. They were so close to entering The Insurance Group’s lair, to breaching the mysterious company’s inner sanctum, and they wanted to hurry up and get in there.
When it seemed clear to Hunt that the insurance agent was not going to return and that no one—
or no thing
—was going to come out, he reached across Beth’s midsection and opened the passenger door. “Let’s go.”
She got out, he got out, Manuel emerged from the driver’s side, and Joel and Jorge clambered out of the backseat. The five of them walked across the gravel, stood on the edge of the empty basin and looked down. This was the place. Hunt was sure of it. Whether that little building led to a maze of underground catacombs or was some sort of time/space anomaly housing a gigantic office building between those tiny walls in direct defiance of the laws of physics, this was where The Insurance Group had its headquarters. This was where it had started, all those centuries ago, and this was where it still resided.
It.
He’d been thinking of the insurance company as an entity, a sentient being, and he decided now that that was probably correct. This was not like a corporation in the modern sense, a business construct that employed people and provided services. It was more like an octopus, a living creature with multiple tentacles, and if one of those tentacles was hacked off, another would grow in its place.
Another would grow in its place.
He had avoided thinking about what they really had to do here, had concentrated on destroying their insurance agent’s immortal policy, but being here now and having seen that other salesman slip back into the city to cause more harm, he realized that he had to try and stop all of the agents, not just theirs—or else another would simply take his place and all their effort would have been for naught. He had no grand illusions, did not fool himself into thinking they could walk into that small building and put an end to centuries of
terror—he had no idea how they would even go about destroying the company itself. Explosives? Water? Fire?—but he knew that they needed to destroy all of the immortal policies they could find, cut off as many tentacles as they could.
“Any ideas on how we’ll get down there?” Beth asked.
“He just walked down.”
“It looks a little steep to me.”
It did look steep. But before they could talk about it any more, Manuel was squatting, crouching down, then pushing himself off and sliding down the dirt embankment on the soles of his feet. Hunt looked at Beth.
“Works for me,” she said, and followed suit.
Hunt felt like a kid. Sliding down, he glanced over at Joel and, despite the circumstances, he could not help smiling a little. When they were kids, the two of them used to take pieces of cardboard they’d cut from refrigerator boxes or television boxes or washing machine boxes and use them to surf down a grassy amphitheater in a park by the zoo, and that’s what this reminded him of. The embankment here was rockier though, the dirt not as smooth as grass and progress was slower. Which was fortunate. He almost fell over twice but was easily able to stop himself and then start down again. When traction slowed him to a crawl near the bottom, he stood and ran down the last few feet.
That was fun, he was about to say, but the sight that greeted his eyes at the bottom was that small outhouse-sized building, and he saw the somber expressions on the faces of the others and said nothing.
They walked cautiously forward, each looking up periodically at the rim of the empty reservoir to make sure that the insurance agent had not returned and was not striding quickly down the side toward them. They reached the small structure. Next to the building, not visible from above, was a hole in the ground, a square rimmed with concrete that looked like the entrance to a tomb. A foul odor wafted up from the hole, a stench of spoiled mushrooms and rotten potatoes that he recognized immediately.
Beth did, too. “This is it,” she said.
“I am not going in,” Manuel informed them. “I will wait here for you.”
Hunt nodded. He understood. Hell, for only twenty bucks a day, he doubted he would have come this far. He reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet and handed Manuel fifty dollars in bills and a hundred dollars’ worth of traveler’s cheques. It had only been three days and he was technically owed just sixty bucks, but the man had been much more than just a guide to them, and deserved at least this much. Hunt would have given him more if he’d had the money on him.
Manuel tried to protest. “No, no.”
Hunt forced the money into his hand. “Take it.”
“We are not through yet. I still work for you.”
Hunt looked at him meaningfully. “Just in case.”
Manuel glanced over at the hole in the ground and the structure next to it, and nodded. “I understand,” he said.
Hunt looked at the small stone building and took a deep breath. The entrance had to be on the other side, but he was not quite ready to walk around and peer into its doorway. He was afraid, and he suddenly realized that they’d brought no weapons with them. He’d been so obsessed with finding The Insurance Group’s office that he’d made no preparations really for what he’d do once they got there. He obviously wasn’t going to Jackie Chan his way through a host of sentries, but neither did he expect them to be able to waltz right in, tear up all of the agents’ immortal policies and then stride on out without encountering any resistance.
Tear up?
He’d been planning to burn them. But he’d forgotten to bring matches or a lighter.
God, how unprepared could he be?
He cleared his throat. “Listen,” he told Manuel. “Do you have a knife or something I could borrow? Some kind of weapon?”
“Like this?”
Hunt had expected, at best, a pocketknife, but the guide pulled from a hidden sheaf a scary-looking dagger with a six-inch blade.
“Yeah. That’ll do.”
Manuel was taking off the sheath. “Here. Tie this around your waist with your belt. It will leave your hands free.”
“And do you have any matches—”
“I brought a lighter,” Jorge said. He smiled. “I thought you might forget.”
“Thanks.” He finished fastening the sheath, then slid in the knife. “I guess we’re ready to go.” Now that the time had come, he could sense in himself more than a little reluctance.
Fear.
“I wait for you here,” Manuel promised. “If you’re not back by nightfall, I will go for help.”
“Gracias,” Beth told him.
“Yes, gracias. You’ve been our savior. We never would have made it here without you.”
Jorge slapped the guide’s back, gave him a hug. Joel shook his hand. “You’ve been a big help. Thanks.”
“It has been my pleasure.”
Hunt looked around at the faces of their small intrepid band. He saw anger, determination, fear pushed aside by bravery. They were unprepared, probably outnumbered, definitely at a distinct disadvantage, but they refused to let that stop them, and right now he was prouder of his wife and friends than he had ever been of anything before in his life.
They were doing the right thing. And whatever happened from here on in, they would always have that.
He nodded good-bye to Manuel and they walked around the corner of the building.
TWENTY-ONE
1
Hunt had no idea what he’d expected to find, but it was not this.
The entrance to the small structure was open and doorless, and guarding it was a blind dwarf, a freakish little man with wide staring eyes and a nose that looked like a beak. The mouth, muscles pulled into a permanent smile, was toothless, gums blackened with disease.
The dwarf did not say anything, and neither did they. Hunt had no idea what to do. He looked over at Beth, back at his friends, but they were all equally blank. On impulse, he stepped forward and walked past the little man into the structure. The guard made no effort to stop him, did not move at all, in fact. He might as well have been a statue.
Like The Jail, there was water on the floor, as though the small building capped a spring, but unlike The Jail there was also another doorway. Well, not exactly a doorway, more like a trapdoor, a circular hatch awkwardly placed in the rightmost corner.
That was how they would gain entrance to The Insurance Group.
“Come on in!” he called, and though the room was small, his voice echoed. He waved his hand, beckoning the others.
Beth started to follow him inside, but when she drew close, the dwarf leaped in front of the entryway. She screamed, jumped back, and Jorge appeared from the right to support her before she fell. The dwarf was making a sound like a rabid bat, an angry high-pitched squeaking noise that no human larynx should have been able to reproduce.
Instinctively, Hunt moved forward to help—
—and the dwarf stepped aside to let him pass.
There was no way the little man could have seen him from behind, and Hunt did not know by what mechanism the guard could have known the exact moment to move over and let him through, but he suddenly realized why he was able to enter the building while Beth could not.
Life insurance.
Deluxe life.
Only immortals were allowed inside.
Beth had figured out the same thing. “I didn’t buy life insurance,” she told him. “I can’t get in.”
“Let me try it,” Joel said. He started toward the entrance, and the dwarf jumped in front of him, making that angry squeaking sound. “Jesus!” He backed up so fast he almost tripped over his own feet.
“I have an idea.” Hunt moved in front of Joel, and the dwarf stepped aside. “Hold on to my shoulders and stay behind me. I’ll shield you.” Joel grabbed his shoulders, and Hunt walked forward, keeping himself between the dwarf and his friend.
They made it safely inside.
“It worked!” Hunt shouted jubilantly. Leaving Joel in
the building, he walked back out and attempted to do the same thing with Beth.
The small sentry blocked his way, not squeaking this time but growling, a wild threatening sound that made him think of a cornered boar. Hunt stopped, waited for a few seconds, then took a tentative step toward the entrance. The dwarf crouched as if ready to spring, clawed hands opening and closing rhythmically. With his milky-eyed stare and grinning black-gummed mouth, he appeared dangerously crazy.
Hunt backed off.
The dwarf resumed his normal stance, and Hunt tried it again with Jorge. Like Joel, Jorge had no problem getting in as long as Hunt remained between him and the sentry.
Hunt walked out unimpeded, had Beth climb onto his shoulders for a piggyback ride, but before they had taken even a single step, the dwarf was in a crouch and growling.
Women could not get in.
It was the only conclusion possible. He was about to suggest another try, but Beth was already shaking her head. “Go,” she prodded him. “Who knows what kind of alarm that set off. You need to get in and out fast, under the radar, before anyone finds out about you.”
She was right, he knew.
He nodded, gave her a quick kiss, a quick squeeze, then walked past the dwarf and back inside.
“I watch her,” Manuel announced from around the side of the building. “I guarantee her safety.”
“What am I, a china doll?” Hunt recognized her humorous tone of voice, but Manuel began apologizing, afraid he had offended her.
Everything would be all right out there. It was in here that he had to worry about. He turned his attention toward the circular hatch on the floor, which Joel and Jorge were already examining. It had no visible knob or lock or handle, and he was not sure how to open it. He crouched down next to the closed trapdoor, thinking he might be able to just lift it, but it appeared to be flush with the floor. In fact, now that he looked carefully, it did not look like a real door at all but a painted one.
THE POLICY Page 34
