“Working on it,” Grant told him.
Lexi tapped Gooney’s leg, and made a few signs.
He glanced away and back again, shaking his head, and signed back to her, a refusal, but of what? Lexi drew closer to Malcolm, and her hands tucked beneath her arms.
“Esta Loco! Are you drug runners or what?” The pilot angled toward the clearing Eleiua had fingered. “I don’t want to get arrested or shot.”
“No, no, they’re Americans,” Eleiua explained, as if that covered them for “crazy.”
“We’re stuntmen,” Grant put in. “Training for Hollywood. We’re scouting movie locations.”
“Really?” The man glanced back.
“You recognize her, right?” Grant pointed at Pam. “She’s very famous.”
The guy suddenly grinned and took his hand briefly off the yoke to wave.
Grant switched to English. “Wave to your fan, Pamela.”
“Oh, hello!” She put on a winning smile.
“Hey, Pam. Do you have any make-up in that thing?”
Startled, she rooted through her bag and pulled out a few compacts. Every eye in the passenger seats watched as he stuffed them into tactical pockets meant for ammo and first aid supplies. Gooney stretched out and smirked; no idea what Grant might have in mind, but still anticipating the op.
“So I’m in the movies?” the pilot asked.
“Not yet,” Grant told him, “But you’re doing a great job so far. Drop us off, then take her wherever she wants to go, okay?”
“Okay!” The copter descended. “How far you do you want to jump?”
“Not very, we’re just setting up for the next rehearsal. How close do you think you can get?”
Through the entire exchange, Eleiua watched and listened, fascinated. “Dios mio,” she muttered, “You are a movie star.”
The copter dropped with high precision, hovering just over the barren stony patch, and Grant flashed a smile and a big thumbs up as he pulled off his headset. “Ready, Gooney? Last chance to stay here. At least in Arizona your heart stopped first.”
“And let you be the hero? Not happening.” He flicked a glance toward Lexi, and his hand lifted, then lowered without saying a word to her. “On you, Chief.”
Taking the bag of goodies Eleiua prepared, Grant rolled to one knee, popped the door and jumped out to an easy landing. Gooney followed, slamming the door behind them and pushing his hands up to signal for lift. As the copter whirred away, taking Gooney’s family to safety, Grant re-settled his weapon then looked to the uneven surface underfoot. The White Way.
“Time on target?” Gooney asked, surveying the jungle with a practiced stare.
“Wish I knew.” Already, the helicopter’s noise faded to a distant mutter, and the vast jungle filled the silence.
Gooney blew out a breath. “Wherever the hell we’re going, guess we’re doing it together.” He stowed his rifle, massaging his injured shoulder.
“Hell it is then. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
* * *
Mom settled back in her seat and gave a long exhale, her eyes cast toward the lowering sky, then she redirected her gaze to Lexi and used her hands. “Thank God that’s over with.” A pause, then she added, “I hope.”
The headset pressed over Lexi’s ears, protecting her from nothing, providing her with a vibration in her jaw when the pilot or Eleiua spoke, as they were doing now. The figures of the two men dwindled on the ground below. She had asked him to stay, and he told her he couldn’t, he was sorry — then he was gone. Her father hadn’t said good-bye. He hadn’t signed his love, and she pressed a hand to her chest, containing her heart. Was that all — the last time she’d ever see him, when he moved from rescuing her to, stopping the spread of thousands of pounds of drugs, hoping to saved a town from a predatory gang? How many people would lose their hearts — would he be the first?
Malcolm squeezed her to his side, then he signed, “Do we just leave them? There’s really nothing we can do?”
Across from them, Mom said, “It’s better if we’re out of the way.” She paused between phrases, making Lexi miss her father’s eloquence. “Better for everyone.” Her breath fogged the window next to her, and she clutched the phone in her breast pocket. She had to be seeing the video again, too, but for her, it must be an image even more intimate. For an instant, Lexi imagined it was her mother who was cutting out her father’s heart.
She tapped her mother’s foot, drawing her gaze. “You made him go, didn’t you. Ray said he didn’t mean to leave us, that he always loved me. It was you, wasn’t it.”
Her mother straightened in her seat, fingers knitting together, then parting. “You have seen him as he really is. How could I raise children around that —” a pause while she searched for a phrase — “kind of anger.”
“How much of that was him, and how much what he needed to be? Him being here, the bullet he took, him being down there, walking into his —” she couldn’t make the sign, her hands pulling back from naming his death. “You call it danger. You call it anger, or violence — what if it’s love?” Helping her practice lipreading, teaching her to shoot, taking her to the fireworks he hated, flying to the jungle where he wasn’t meant to be — what if it were — “love” she formed again. “Love, love, love, love.”
“Funny way to show it.” Mom had some kind of treatments that made her expressions sometimes harder to read, adding shading to what she said, or maybe taking it away. “Exploding like a walking bomb. That wasn’t me. He came home from war like that.” Her disavowal looked too emphatic, dramatic, and not entirely convincing.
“And you never loved him enough to see it. You never loved him enough to help him instead of hurting him more.”
At that, Mom scowled, then told her, “I had to protect myself, and you. I had no choice.” The sign resembled finger counting, or someone plucking off a glove, one finger at at time.
Lexi pulled the coin from her pocket and dropped it into her mother’s palm. “There is always a choice.”
Her mother laughed, and it wasn’t the nice kind. Malcolm flinched.
Mom rolled the coin between her fingers, then put it down to compose her hands. “A coin isn’t a choice, especially this one. It’s chance, random. Do you know the story about that stupid coin?” Mom leaned forward, her face intent. “He wanted you to think it meant you could do anything, no matter how bad the situation, that you could find another way.” She thought again, her lips moving, before she signed, working her way through the vocabulary she knew. “He and another man had been captured. Made to kneel, and the Taliban soldier was holding a sword over them. Which one of them should he kill? He was taunting them, like a cat with a mouse. He took out that —” she resorted to pointing — “and offered to flip it. Choose, he told your father. Will you be heads or tails. He didn’t tell them if the choice meant you’d live or you’d die.” She gave that cackle again, and composed herself before she resumed.
Finally, Mom said, “What did he choose? You want to know. Was he heads, and that’s why he lived, or tails? He chose tails.” She fixed Lexi with a hard stare, and tapped the coin. “Then when the coin was in the air —”
“When the coin’s in the air, you’ll know what you’re hoping,” an echo of her father’s hands underlying her mother’s words.
“— he rushed the Taliban.” She acted out a little play in her seat, and Lexi envisioned what she was trying to say. Headbutted the guy in the chest? knocked him into the sand. “He killed that man with his hands tied behind his back. I think he broke the man’s neck.” Her hands hesitated, as if disturbed by her own words. “That is the kind of choice your father makes. You think he was fit to raise children? When he was away, at least I didn’t have to worry. Then he came home.” She shook her head, and the coin disappeared in her clenched fist. “No,” she said aloud. She blinked several times, and repeated, “No.”
That was exactly the kind of choice her father made: forget the ru
les somebody else imposed. Forget naming his companion to die. He jumped straight into the face of danger, took on the man with the sword and won.
Her mother’s lips moved again, and Lexi tapped for her attention, asking for her to sign what she’d said. At her side, Malcolm gave her a nudge, and spelled out, “Action hero.”
Lexi nodded. “We’re not leaving.”
“Of course we are! I traveled down here, I hired that man —” She started out well, then her hands shook, and she switched to speech, her words became so anguished that Lexi couldn’t understand.
You’re not the boss of me, she thought, but she didn’t say it. “There must be a way to help them. We don’t have to fly into danger.” She circled her hand, indicating the helicopter should turn around.
“Thank God. We’re not the action heroes. No matter that the pilot thinks we’re from Hollywood.”
“What if we were?” Malcolm signed. “We would fly to the rescue. Whatever happens down there, they got no way out.” His hands showed the trap.
“That is flying into danger,” Lexi pointed out. “Besides, we don’t know where they are.”
Mom’s hands shook, but she forced them to sign, slowly and carefully. “I thought I’d lost you, Lexi. I don’t want to ever feel that way again.”
Lexi met her eye. “Then you know how I feel about losing my father. Again. Did you make him go? Did you force him to sign that paper?”
Her mother swallowed hard, and wouldn’t look at her, as if not listening let her off the hook for a question Lexi should’ve asked a long time ago.
“What next?” Malcolm asked.
“We can talk to Aabo,” Lexi told him. “He knows more, I’m sure of it, but nobody tried to understand him. He likes me, likes knowing other people who sign. If Eleiua came with me, maybe he would tell us.”
Malcolm held up his finger, and triggered his headset mic, the hum of his voice moving through her skull. “Eleiua agrees.”
Mom sat up as if preparing for an interview. “So we’re doing this?” Her sign of inclusion looked doubtful. “You really intend to do this?” Mom didn’t look as panicked as she had a moment ago. “Maybe you —” indicating Lexi and Eleiua — “can talk to this man and we can relay the information to Casey.”
“Yes, maybe. I hope that’s enough.” She regarded her mother as one adult to another. “Mom. I’m not leaving here until I know, one way or the other. You made him leave me. Don’t make me leave him, too.”
Mom’s eyelashes fluttered, her eyes gone a little glossy, then she touched the phone in her pocket, holding it lightly, rather than with the deathgrip she’d had earlier. “If not … The tracker.” She fingerspelled the word. “The one we put — he put — in the vessel.” She sighed, and briefly displayed the phone. “He made me download it, too. Given how much I’ve paid, I practically own this helicopter. It’s absolutely a last resort, but if we had to, maybe, possibly, we could fly to the rescue.”
Lexi caught her mother’s hand in a rush of something she hadn’t felt for a long time, something that seemed out of place in a conversation about rushing headlong into danger. Hope. Hope that she’d see him again. Hope that, this time, she would know how to interpret his love.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
* * *
Grant took point, carrying a map from Eleiua’s go-bag, his cellphone held on top of it, with the tracker app showing the blue dot converging on their location. “Unless she ditched the vessel with somebody else, looks like Raxha didn’t go to the hacienda with the raid. If Dante stuck with her, that makes better odds they don’t know we’re together. Everyone else who could ID me is dead.”
Overhead, the day should be growing brighter. Instead, the clouds grew denser, a thick gray that swelled and rumbled. Rainforest. Gotta expect to get wet. As long as it didn’t spoil their supplies.
“You never did let me down, y’know. Even at your worst. Even at mine.” Gooney snorted. “Crazy, knowing you can count on your worst enemy more than on the woman you married.”
“If you and me in the last fifteen years are what passes for a good relationship, you need to elevate your standards.”
Gooney hooted with laughter, the giddy kind that bubbles up before battle. “What’s the plan?”
Grant was not the guy Gooney would have chosen to follow to the ends of the earth — ever — but there he was doing it again, slogging through the jungle, sweating like a perp under the lights. Humidity clung over their faces and arms, warm and damp as blood, sticking Grant’s clothes and turning Gooney’s hair into a wiry mass that looks as impenetrable as the trees and vines around them. Not so long ago, he would’ve said the man’s head was that impenetrable.
“Right now, we’re ahead. The copter gave us a boost.” He aimed his hand along the rugged trail of stones. “The White Way goes through the jungle for miles, sometimes it’ll be harder to follow than others. Eleiua said it points to the stash, but it doesn’t go all the way. For that, we need the bat, the jaguar or the snake. Raxha’s intel has to be at least as good as ours, and she probably knew the White Way was in this area, she’ll just come at it from another direction. So long as the paths converge, we’re heading the right direction. We know it’s not far from the hacienda. because Hernan could do a round trip in a few hours.”
“Dropping in on his lady-friend on the way home.”
“You got it.”
“So then we get inside this tomb, and the stash is in there?”
Grant shrugged. “Seems like it.” He wet his lips. “Here’s the thing, Gooney. They get there first and get inside, and we’re screwed.”
“We’d be assaulting a fortified location, just the two of us.”
Nodding, Grant said, “That’s why I need to infiltrate, make it at least partially an inside job.”
“Wish we could’ve grabbed some C4, just blow the whole thing.”
“Pyramid, temple, and tomb.” The idea of destroying an otherwise undisturbed cultural center jabbed at his conscience. “I can’t say you’re wrong.”
“But you hate the idea.”
Grant looked back. “I didn’t found the Bone Guard to blow up somebody else’s heritage. That’s not in my mission statement.”
“Guess that’s why I can’t take that job you offered.” Gooney pushed a little harder and came up beside him. “Your way and my way don’t work so well together.”
“Still on offer,” he said. “I think they could.”
Something moved in the upper branches of a towering tree fern. With a flash of brilliant red, a quetzal swept overhead, its long tail feathers tracing like emerald calligraphy through the sky.
“Jesus. I keep expecting to see dinosaurs, y’know?”
“It’s not Jurassic Park, Gooney.” Except inasmuch as it might kill them both.
“So, we’re not blowing it up. We just go in, guns blazing?”
“You do realize this was your mission, your idea. Now you’re looking to me for the plan.”
Scowling, Gooney said, “I’ve been busy.”
The slopes around them climbed steadily, the stone pathway disintegrating under mounds of leaf litter. Grant scanned ahead, beneath the gloom of the trees, where the ground pitched more steeply, and spotted the first stairs. He suppressed his smile. Couldn’t wait to see what Gooney thought about this.
“If they get there first, it needs to be an inside job, an infiltration.”
“You’re just determined to get back in with these people. What are you, nuts? Chief, if they make you, you really will be a movie star — and it’ll be a snuff film,” then he added, sotto voce, “that’s their niche.”
“They wrapped layers of defense on that monastery.”
“Didn’t help ’em. We still got it done.”
“For two reasons. One: You and I were able to communicate, to time the attack for when you got on scene, and coordinate our movements. And two. I was already in. I cut their defenses in half before you showed.”
“If you w
ant the credit, man, I am totally happy to share.” Gooney flashed his grin. “Assuming you’re sharing the profits.”
“Assuming your ex doesn’t claw back everything she’s already paid.” They mounted the first of the stairs, and the lower trees fell back around them.
Gooney’s head swiveled, looking down, then up and up and up. “What is this, the stairway to Heaven?”
“Half-way, anyhow. Double-time, soldier!” Grant started up more vigorously, getting his blood pumping, working over the plan. He had one. He knew it would work. And he hated the thought of it. How long before Gooney arrived at the same idea?
“Screw that,” Gooney growled.
Under the trees, climbing, the temperature lowered. Every tree became a colony, a vertical ecosystem with epiphytes clustering in the branches and so many mosses clinging to every surface the whole place grew shaggy.
“I don’t like you going in alone,” Gooney called after him.
Grant pounded the narrow steps a little harder, taking several with each stride.
“Besides, if you’re underground or in a pyramid, your cell won’t work, if you could even communicate with me while you’re making nice with the bad guys.”
Heart thundering, Grant took a pause for breath, looking down a few hundred stairs, maybe another three hundred to go. Climbing the endless track of puny steps felt like stumbling rather than walking, every one of them sheathed in moss and crumbling underneath. They’d been here for hundreds of years, pounded down by hundreds of people trying to survive to reach another day.
“Jesus, Casey — it’s not even your mission. Like, I know you’re a decent guy, you want to stop this as much as I do. Maybe.” Gooney caught his breath, and plodded onward, drawing closer to Grant with every step. Growing closer to reaching the same, deeply unwelcome conclusion.
To one side of the steps, the hillside crumbled into wounds of gravel and broken branches, grey-green with the jungle’s sweat. Curls of bark peeled back like mummified skin and old sticks protrude into skeletal shadows. Couldn’t help the double-take every time. They were looking for a tomb, and this whole place eroded into buried remains. Birds screamed at them from the canopy, swooping from one towering glossy-leaved tree to the next, flashes of parrots, and once, the great sweep of silent wings as a harpy eagle sought for quieter hunting.
The Maya Bust Page 19
