The whomp-whomp-whomp of a helicopter played in the distance. They couldn’t have vectored a helicopter in on him this quickly, he figured, but in another five minutes the sky overhead would be swarming with aircraft.
The jagged edges of half-buried rocks slashed at his bare feet. He lengthened his stride, ignored the pain. He couldn’t leave the trail until he had put more distance between himself and the hunters.
Speed and distance were all that mattered. Nothing else.
He held that thought until he came around a blind curve on the trail. A black Doberman was waiting for him, snarling, its teeth bared.
Luke dove off the trail and rolled down the slope, tumbling over sharp rock edges and scraggly dry vegetation until he finally came to a stop in tall grass on the lip of a small gully. He rolled into the depression and scanned the hill above him.
He mopped a painful spot on the back of his neck with his T-shirt. It came back dark red.
The dog stared down at him, growling and scraping at loose gravel on the edge of the trail. Small rivulets of sand streamed down the hill.
Ten feet to his right, a concrete culvert hung over the edge of a small knoll. He scurried over and tucked himself under the overhang. His chest heaved and he struggled to control his breathing.
A woman’s voice yelled, “Samson…Samson, get back here!”
More growling.
Then, the sound of loose gravel under hard-soled-boots. “Samson, what got into you? Calm down, boy.”
WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP…The thunderous roar of a heavy chopper came out of nowhere. A moment later, the air blast from its rotor wash wrapped him in a cloud of gritty sand.
“STOP RIGHT THERE!” a loudspeaker commanded.
Luke brought his hands up to shield his head from flying debris. He leaned into the side of the knoll, tucking himself under the two-foot concrete overhang. The direction of the windblast changed as the helicopter moved overhead in a tight circle.
If the police were using thermal sensors in their helicopters—and they probably were—his heat signature would look like a 500-watt bulb against the damp ground and cool morning air. The hunters had everything he didn’t have—air power, logistical support, communications—but as long as the chopper was directly overhead, its heat sensors wouldn’t find him under the thermal camouflage of a thick culvert. Until and unless they backed away far enough to inspect the hillside from an angle and look under the drain, he was invisible.
The percussion waves weakened. The helicopter was climbing.
The loudspeaker again: “We’re looking for a man…six feet, brown hair, light green or gray clothing…”
Luke tried to open his eyes. The sand stung his lids closed. The dog was yelping in the background, terrified.
“Ma’am, turn back and follow the path west. Instruct anyone you come across to do the same. If you see someone fitting this man’s description, do not—I repeat, do not—approach him.”
Luke sat there for several seconds after the helicopter flew east toward his property. He hadn’t come as far as he wanted, and the trail was out of the question now. Worse, the orange hues of daybreak were peeking over the top of the hill. Soon, he’d lose any ability to conceal himself in the dry brush.
He had to move now, before the sun came over the hilltop, but his exertion was generating enough heat to light up any thermal sensor within five hundred yards of his position.
He cupped his hands and splashed himself with the cold muck trickling from the end of the culvert. When his body began to shiver, he stopped.
A moment later he disappeared into the hillside.
• • •
“You Indians are killing me. You know that, don’t you?” The old man was leaning against a large boulder along the side of the trail, trying to catch his breath while staring at his dark-skinned companion.
The old man’s name was Father Joe, and he was a Catholic missionary priest. Megan had never kissed a priest before, but that was just what she felt like doing when he offered to take her back to Santa Lucina. The priest and his helper, Paco, had two more villages to visit. After that, he promised, the three of them would hike out of the jungle.
Father Joe put a hand on his companion’s shoulder. “What do you say we quit this job and take up golf?”
Paco nodded at the priest, as if he was accustomed to the old man saying things in a language as unfamiliar to him as the dark side of a distant planet.
The priest started to laugh, but it quickly turned into a wheeze. He grabbed a medication inhaler from his pocket and took three quick puffs. When his breathing settled, he turned to Megan and answered the question she hadn’t yet asked. “A touch of emphysema.”
The priest’s smile was framed by creases that looked like etched granite. His blue eyes had a piercing quality, as though they’d easily penetrate another’s thoughts.
A growing sense of guilt was nibbling at Megan, the feeling that she had abandoned Joe Whalen and Steve Dalton. It felt as if she had knocked over a hornet’s nest and left the aftermath for her colleagues, and the people of Ticar Norte.
That thought was still with her when they arrived at the first village two hours later. Xical—one of almost sixty aldeas that Father Joe traveled among with Paco. The priest visited each village no more than three or four times a year, and that fact probably explained the festive greeting that accompanied their arrival at the village.
An hour later Megan was sitting on a bench at the back of a makeshift church, watching Father Joe say Mass while a small rabble of dogs lay at her feet, licking themselves. Every time she moved, pieces of silty muck fell from her clothing as if she were a molting insect. Her wallet and passport made a soggy outline on her jeans.
She felt like a toad next to the women of Xical, who were dressed in brightly colored blouses with immaculate white trim and wraparound skirts that reached to their bare ankles. They appeared to move within some invisible pocket of air that was impenetrable to dust and grime. Only their bare feet, which looked like rusted iron, showed the wear and tear of their lives.
It seemed as if the entire village was crammed into the large wooden structure: about eighty men, women, and children; half as many dogs; a dozen free-range chickens and two roosters; and, in front of the altar, two mice sitting in a makeshift cage made of twigs and twine.
A man standing next to the altar poured incense into a hollowed-out rock filled with hot coals. Mushroom-shaped plumes of smoke rose and wrapped Father Joe in a thick white cloud. He choked out a prayer, then exploded in a fit of coughing and waved his hands in search of air. The incense handler seemed not to notice or concern himself with the priest’s violent reaction, and Father Joe did nothing to stop the smoky ritual.
Over the past half hour, the same scene had played out every five minutes or so. Every time the cloud of incense ebbed, another scoop of incense landed in the bowl and the priest broke into a paroxysm of coughing.
Megan didn’t understand a single word of the Mass. Father Joe was performing the entire service in a Mayan dialect.
The churchgoers suddenly broke out in song, accompanied by an enormous marimba that was manned by five young boys with rounded mallets. They stood along its length, reaching across one another and tapping parallel rows of wooden bars with the speed and precision of knife jugglers.
Father Joe came around to the front of the altar and lifted the captive mice above his head. He appeared to talk to the rodents as the room chanted verses in a singsong tempo. Next, he carried the cage down the center aisle of the church. As he passed the rows of wooden benches, men standing along the aisle spoke to the mice. Megan had stopped attending Mass after her mother died, but she was raised Catholic and knew its liturgy. It seemed that Father Joe was bending the Church’s rituals into the shape of a liturgical pretzel.
When the priest reached the back of the church, he started around the back wall. As he passed Megan, he said, “The field mice are ruining their crops. We’re asking the mice to
move someplace else.” He lifted the cage an inch. “After Mass, the elders will take the mice out to the fields and let ’em go so they can tell the other mice about the deal we struck here.” He looked at her and shrugged.
Despite the sweltering midday heat, the Mass continued for another hour. She couldn’t think of anything but food as she followed Father Joe and a throng of villagers out the back of the church.
Just as she lifted her face to the sunlight, the ground shook violently. On the horizon, a huge flock of yellow birds lifted skyward with a loud clatter.
A low-pitched rumble followed seconds later.
The shaking lasted almost a minute, during which the residents of Xical wore expressions of terror.
Then it was gone.
For the next several seconds the only sound came from chickens pecking at the ground.
Megan moved next to Father Joe. “Was that an earthquake?”
The priest was looking into the distance, slowly shaking his head. “I don’t think so.”
Moments later she heard the rushing water. At first it sounded like a river carrying runoff from a storm, but the flow quickly took on an unnatural quality, surging into a wet pulsating din.
A loud crack reverberated in the jungle.
“Father?” she asked.
“I hear it. It sounds like a tree just snapped in half.”
A small group of Indians collected on the far side of the village and pointed east toward a deep gorge that was covered with tropical growth. Trees were going down like bowling pins.
Megan, Father Joe, and Paco gathered their things and followed a dozen men along a twisting mile-long trail toward the ravine.
They wended their way through the jungle, eventually coming to a precipice overlooking a furious torrent of water. The raging river—it was over thirty yards wide—engulfed the slopes of the deep canyon as it raced by them. Loud popping sounds ricocheted off the canyon walls as brushwood broke free at the water’s edge. The hulking carcass of a tree, roots and all, hurtled past them. Eddies of red turbid water swirled like demon whorls rising from the underworld.
Megan watched Father Joe make the sign of the cross. His lips moved, as if in prayer, but his voice was lost in the fury of the watery rampage.
For the next several minutes she stood there dumbfounded, watching the deluge gallop past her. A hypnotic state took hold of her.
Then, just as quickly as it rose, the floodwaters receded. In the span of just five minutes, the river shriveled to a languid stream.
She turned to the priest. His skin was pallid, and his eyes were in another realm.
“Father Joe?”
When he didn’t respond, Megan followed his line of sight.
There, on the shoreline, half submerged in a knotted mess of vines and branches, was the glistening flesh of a naked corpse.
32
Luke clung to the outside edge of a concrete wall and peered at the manicured lawns in front of Griffith Park Observatory. Jets of water angled back and forth over the section of turf closest to him, sending ghost-like swirls of mist skyward.
The Observatory sat on a flat three-acre oval of ground created seventy years ago by shaving off the top of one of the park’s taller peaks. The bank of phones he needed stood on the other side of the grassy expanse, on the western side of the property.
Skirting a maze of crisscrossing hiking trails, it took almost ten minutes to work his way around the steep slope out of which the concrete art-deco structure rose. The Observatory was not yet open, and he expected foot traffic to be nil, but a small army of municipal groundskeepers were milling around the property. They moved at a lethargic pace, appearing to have no more interest in their work than the city had in their lives. They would be easily distracted, drawn to anything that might break up the monotony of their usual routine.
Word of an escaped murder suspect would be more than enough to grab their interest.
Luke studied the men. None showed any sign of heightened awareness.
Five women on the far corner of the grass promenade were stretched out on blankets, lost in the ritual of their yoga exercises.
The net hadn’t extended this far yet, but the police would arrive soon.
To the east, two police helicopters buzzed the hillside behind his property like angry insects. Above them, four TV news copters maintained fixed positions. He was probably on every TV set in southern California.
Luke stripped off his T-shirt and rolled the bottom of his scrub pants into a cuff. He continued this until the pants had become knee-length shorts. It would look ridiculous to anyone who gave him more than a passing glance, but he had to do something; the green scrubs marked him like a bull’s-eye.
The pay phones were twenty feet away, next to a closed food concession. Luke jumped out from his hiding spot and casually jogged to the bank of phones. While dialing the number, he shook his arms loosely and twisted his torso from side to side—as though stretching after a long run—while he waited for an electronic operator to process the collect call.
If the man he needed wasn’t there, or wouldn’t take his call, Luke had no backup plan. He had one shot, and even that was a dim hope.
One of the groundskeepers turned in his direction, gave an indifferent glance, and went back to raking the ground.
When Sammy Wilkes answered the phone, Luke emptied a lungful of air he didn’t remember taking in. “Sammy, I need a favor.”
A minute later they were still talking when a convoy of police cars exploded over the crest of the hill at a full gallop and splayed across The Observatory’s promenade.
Luke plunged over the concrete wall, grabbing furiously at branches and sprigs to slow his fall down the steep hillside.
• • •
Megan climbed over uprooted trees and slogged through mounds of leafy rubble, following the flood’s path. Paco led the way, forging a trail along what was left of the river’s embankment. Father Joe brought up the rear, fingering a rosary as he went. The priest’s brooding mood seemed to pull the rain out of every storm cloud that passed overhead.
The priest had merely shaken his head, glassy-eyed, when she asked if he had any idea what had caused this.
Her mind was a jumble of conflicting thoughts. The last thing she wanted to do was follow a swath of destruction along an unfamiliar river into unknown territory. But then, neither did she want to stay behind in Xical, just her and a village full of strangers speaking Q’eqchi. Those had seemed to be her choices because Father Joe started upriver the moment the floodwaters subsided, as if pushed toward the source of the destruction by some unseen force.
The memory of her waking nightmare in Ticar Norte, knowing that her assailants were still out there, had tilted the scales in favor of Father Joe’s company. And their trio was traveling southeast, Megan reminded herself, not northeast toward Ticar Norte.
She pictured people lying injured from the flood, clinging to life in some remote corner of this wilderness. Knowing that she might be able to help them aroused in her a sense of purpose.
But her moments of resolve were fleeting. The young man’s corpse that had washed onto the riverbank near Xical was a harbinger of death. She could feel it.
Father Joe’s countenance told her that he felt it too.
Megan slowed her pace until the priest was alongside her. “Father, you need to rest.”
The priest pulled the inhaler from his breast pocket and took a puff. “There’ll be time for that later,” he said with a tight throat.
Five minutes passed before they came across the second body. It was an older man, and his body lay cockeyed at the water’s edge. His wide-open eyes held the gray fog of death. There was a crescent-moon-shaped tattoo on his chest.
Paco remained at a distance as Megan and the priest approached the body. Father Joe knelt by the corpse and looked skyward in prayer. His face suddenly relaxed, his expression trance-like as he whispered an indecipherable prayer.
When he was done, the pries
t gently folded the dead man’s arms across his chest and said, “I knew this man. He’s from a village about three miles upriver.”
She glanced at the tattoo again. “Mayakital?”
The priest nodded without looking away from the corpse.
“When was the last time you visited Mayakital?”
“Ten, maybe eleven months ago. They’re an independent sort of people. And they’re not Catholics, so I wait for them to invite me. That happens maybe once a year.”
“The tattoo. What does it mean?”
The priest turned to her, the question slowly congealing in his eyes. “It’s part of a fertility rite. It’s unique to their tribe.” The priest started to raise himself. “The people of Mayakital tattoo their infants on the night of the first full moon after their birth. Boys get a crescent moon on their chest. Girls are marked with three small circles, down here on their stomachs.” He pointed at his lower abdomen.
“I’ve seen that tattoo before, on a boy that came to our hospital. He traveled all the way to the U.S., only to die in our emergency room.”
He looked back at the corpse and nodded through a distracted gaze. “The Mayans have a hard life. And their children—well, they die in greater numbers than you’re probably used to in your work. I’ve heard that infant mortality is as high as twenty percent in some of these villages, and from what I’ve seen, that figure sounds about right. It’s a fact of life for these people.” He waved Paco forward. “These people don’t ask a lot from life, and they don’t get much.”
The priest opened his palm and let his rosary unfurl as they walked through a thin cloud of mosquitoes.
She slapped at a prick on her neck. “What do you do when the prayers don’t work?”
He glanced at her. “I’ll let you know if that happens.”
It wasn’t long before they came to another body. It was a small girl with a broken bone sticking out of her left lower leg. Her body was wasted and shriveled. Something had been at work, stealing her life, long before she drowned in the flood.
With each grisly discovery—the next hour brought three more—Father Joe picked up his pace. His legs churned through the mud like pistons.
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