Answers and vengeance.
The second level of the garage was still largely empty, and the area, true to form, was awakening slowly. Natalie did some deep breathing and stretching. Her operation and the fire had taken their toll on her stamina, but she was still limber, wiry, and as always, deceptively strong.
Calisthenics in a grimy parking garage.
It was pathetic that a life with so much promise had come down to this, but that was the way it was. Most of her plans and dreams to become a great physician and a champion of the down-and-outers of the world had been sliced from her chest or seared by fire. Now, all that remained for her was the powerful need to know what in the hell had happened and why, and the even more overwhelming passion to find and punish whoever was responsible.
Answers and vengeance.
A small coffee shop across the street provided her with breakfast and a washroom, as well as a copy of the Rio edition of O Globo. From what she could tell, the newspaper had nothing on Dora Cabral. Soon, though, she suspected, there would be a carefully crafted report, complete with the name of a chief suspect.
The wizened woman behind the counter looked as if she might not have taken a day off from working for decades. Natalie left an enormous tip under her empty cup, and headed back to the garage. At least, if she didn’t ever return from this trip into the rain forest, someone would have benefited.
She straightened up her gear and gave passing thought to calling her mother or Doug Berenger. Regardless of the story she concocted, either of them was intuitive enough to sense there was trouble. They had already once been through the nightmare of believing she had vanished, only to have her resurface. What would calling them now accomplish except to make them worry? Besides, it was not yet seven and Rio was two hours ahead of Boston.
Instead, she wrote a long letter to Hermina with instructions to share it with Doug. In it, she summarized the events since her return to Brazil, including every name she could remember. The waitress at the coffee shop first tried to return some of the tip Natalie had left, thinking it was a mistake. Then, finally convinced that her windfall was no accident, she provided an envelope for the letter and most gladly agreed to get postage and mail it.
It was time.
The Jeep’s fuel gauge was between three-quarters and full, and under the tarp in back were five-gallon stores of gasoline and purified water. Throughout her career as an international track star, she had always traveled well, and she could probably count the nights she had spent in a tent on the fingers of one hand. Now, she had survived her first night sleeping in the back of a car in many years. Whatever lay ahead for her, she knew, was almost certain to include many more firsts.
The morning was clear and pleasantly warm, promising yet another flawless day. Natalie swung onto the expressway north, trying to get into the rhythm of Carioca driving, which did not often involve the use of directional signals or mirrors when changing lanes, nor the use of brakes at almost any time. On the seat beside her was the rather crude map she had drawn to Dom Angelo. Questions about the place continued racing through her brain with the speed of the cars whizzing past her on both sides. Most vexing of those questions involved the possibility that Dora Cabral was simply mistaken in believing that the village had anything to do with Natalie’s ill-fated cab ride and the loss of her lung. It was too cruel even to consider that the poor woman had been killed in error. But if she really did know something, what could possibly be the connections between a med student from Boston, a nurse in Rio, and a tiny hamlet in the Brazilian rain forest?
Highway 44 west, located essentially where she had expected it to be, was a pleasant surprise—a recently paved two-lane road with painted center lines, soft shoulders, and not much traffic. If her estimates were right, there would be a cutoff fifteen miles up on her left, probably unpaved, that snaked through the mountains in the general direction of Belo Horizonte, the large capital of the state of Minas Gerais. A hundred miles this side of Belo Horizonte, what looked on the maps like a one-lane road would dive off to the left. And somewhere on that road was Dom Angelo. It was a long shot that she would make it without difficulty, but if determination mattered, she was going to find the place.
Five miles from where she suspected the road toward Dom Angelo might be, she slowed and began carefully inspecting and analyzing each turnoff. She was in the steep foothills of the easternmost rain forest. The two-lane road, no longer newly paved, and now pocked with potholes, rose almost continuously and turned sharply with little notice. Traffic was light, and it was often a minute or two before a car passed her in either direction.
Natalie slowed even further and rolled down the windows. She might have been imagining things, but the oxygen-rich air felt different in her lung. Deep, fulfilling breaths came easier and more frequently. Her pulse actually seemed slower. The forest came close to the road on both sides, shielding her from the late-morning sun. At various points, a broad, rushing stream appeared and ran parallel to the pavement for some distance before darting off into the dense underbrush and trees.
The paved road had leveled when Natalie saw the cutoff. It was a well-worn dirt and gravel road, more than one lane wide, but probably less than two. A crudely painted sign that read CAMPO BELO had been nailed to a tree with an arrow painted beneath the words. By her estimate, Campo Belo was the nearest town of any size to Dom Angelo, but it was impossible to gauge the distance between them. Although she was almost certain she had found the road, Natalie checked the mileage and rechecked her map. At last convinced, she turned left and began a slow, roller-coaster climb through increasingly dense forest.
Excitedly, she began to allow herself to believe that she was going to make it to Dom Angelo without a major hitch. The going was slow, and six cylinders rather than the four the Jeep had would probably have made a big difference, but she was going to make it.
The first time she sensed trouble was when she pulled off to the side to stretch and have a brief meal of sliced meat, cold juice, and half a chocolate bar. She had been on this road for twenty or twenty-five minutes and had passed only one car coming in the other direction, but as she cut the ignition, just before the heavy silence of the forest enfolded her, she heard something. It seemed like the skidding of a car on gravel, along with the briefest noise of an engine. Then, in moments, there was nothing. Could it have been just an echo from her own car? Probably, she decided. Probably that was it.
She ate quickly, listening with a constant ear for any sound beyond the birds and insects of the midday rain forest. Then she pocketed her Swiss Army knife and shifted her hunting knife from her duffel bag to the front seat. Just an echo. That was all.
For the next mile or so, the road seemed to narrow as it went steeply uphill. To the left, rising from the edge of the road, was a nearly sheer, heavily forested hillside; to the right, an increasingly steep drop-off. If a car approached now, it would be impossible for them to pass, and someone would have to back up. Natalie drove with her attention equally divided between the challenging road ahead and the dusty emptiness behind. Her jaw was clenched, and her hands were white on the wheel, in part from the tension of negotiating the road, but also from the sound she had heard.
It was then that she was hit from behind.
She must have momentarily taken her gaze off the rearview mirror, because the jolt, a substantial one, was a total surprise. Reflexively, she jammed on the brakes, causing the Jeep to be pushed toward the drop-off at a forty-five-degree angle. She would have gone over right there had she not switched to the accelerator and floored it while at the same time spinning the wheel back to her left. The side of the Jeep tore against the hillside, uprooting bushes and gouging the trunk of a tree.
Natalie knew, even before getting a fix over her shoulder on the driver, that it was Rodrigo Vargas. In the moment their eyes met, he grinned and waved.
Then his car, a large black Mercedes, dropped back a few feet and charged again. This time there was absolutely no escape. T
he Jeep was airborne before Natalie could even react, careening through the trees and dense brush for what seemed like an eternity. It hit the ground, still upright, with jaw-snapping force. The windshield shattered, the doors flew open, and the one on her side was immediately torn away. The Jeep bounced high enough to clear some underbrush. Turning partway over, it just missed a tree. Belted in and holding the wheel with all her strength, there was little else Natalie could do.
Finally, the car took a vicious hit on the left front fender, then pitched forward in a graceless cartwheel before coming to rest, wheels spinning, on the passenger’s side, facing uphill.
The first thing Natalie knew with certainty was that she wasn’t dead. She was strapped to her seat at a hideously awkward angle, and was bleeding from someplace above her left eye. The car was filled with a chemical fog, apparently from having the airbag deploy, then deflate. Her right hip was throbbing, but her arms, hands, and feet all responded when she called on them to move. Whether it was from the tank or the five-gallon can, there was an increasingly strong odor of gasoline.
She unsnapped the seat belt and pulled herself up and out of where the door had been, stifling a cry whenever she moved her right hip. A contusion or muscle tear, she decided, but not a fracture. It would slow her down, but it wouldn’t stop her. She noticed her hunting knife caught beneath the handle of the passenger door. Painfully, she leaned across, retrieved it, and slipped it into the elastic waistband of her pants. The Jeep had come to rest so far down the embankment that she could not see the road through the thick foliage, but she knew that somewhere up there, Vargas was preparing a descent to check on his handiwork and, if necessary, to finish the job.
She hobbled away from the Jeep and then knelt, head down, and listened. From not too far below she could hear rushing water; from above, nothing. Then the mosquitoes began—lone fighters and squadrons, attracted by her sweat, her breathing, and her blood, buzzing into her ears and nose.
No movement! she warned herself, staying in a crouch as the first wave began biting.
No movement, no sound!
“Natalie!” Vargas’s call pierced the forest. “Natalie, are you all right? It was stupid of me to have done that. If you’re hurt, I want to help.”
Natalie peered back up the steep, densely forested embankment, but could detect no movement. Six inches at a time, operating on all fours, forcing the intense ache in her hip from her mind, she worked her way parallel to the hillside, farther and farther from the wreck. That Vargas had a gun, she had no doubt. She had the knife, but her mobility was limited, and her speed nonexistent. Every movement of hers along the sodden ground left crushed ferns and broken branches. Soon, Vargas would be following that trail. Her only chance, and that a small one, was an ambush from above. Of course, at the moment of truth, there had to be an unencumbered willingness to use her seven-inch blade.
“Natalie. I am sure you are hurt and in need of help! I can help you. I can explain everything. I can tell you about Dom Angelo.”
He was slightly breathless, suggesting that he was working his way down toward the Jeep. Snorting some bugs out of her nostrils, Natalie pushed on, searching for just the right spot. From below, the sound of the stream or river grew louder. Suddenly, on her right, the forest broke away. The twenty-five- or thirty-foot drop to the swirling water—a broad stream—was not exactly sheer, but it was damn steep.
“Natalie, I see where you are going. If you want help, just stay where you are. I saw the blood in your car. I know you are hurt.”
There wasn’t much time. Still on all fours, Natalie pushed ahead another twenty feet, then cut uphill for ten feet, and finally back toward the Jeep. If Vargas was following her trail, as he said, he would pass right beneath her. When he did, she would have one, and only one, chance.
She braced herself against the thick, squat trunk of a palm. There was no position she could shift to that didn’t put strain on her hip, so she resolved to ignore any pain that didn’t completely disable her. Somewhere she had read that there were more than 2.5 million species of insects in the rain forest. At that moment, she had no trouble believing that statistic.
To her right, she could see bushes moving. She pulled the hunting knife from her waistband and unsheathed it. The blade, unused except for slicing a piece of paper in the store, was frightening and intimidating. She hefted it in her hand, and decided to thrust it overhand, aiming for a target in Vargas’s neck or chest. The image she had was of the attack by Norman Bates’s mother on the detective in Psycho. As the rustling of the policeman’s approach drew closer, she reflected on Dora Cabral, slumped on the table in her modest kitchen. Rodrigo Vargas, despite his charm and good looks, was a remorseless killer. She had to be strong and willing, she told herself. Strong and willing.
In seconds, she saw the top of the man’s head above the undergrowth. He was moving slowly, aware of everything around him. There could be no hesitating. She crouched low and planted her right foot, clutching the huge knife, and working to ignore the electric pain in her hip. Vargas was coming into view. In three or four steps he would be directly between her and the drop to the river. The sound of the churning water was her ally, masking her last-second movement. He was holding a gun loosely and professionally in front of him. Two more steps.
Don’t look up. Don’t…
Natalie pushed off awkwardly and threw herself down at the man, flailing more than stabbing with the knife. She struck home just behind Vargas’s right shoulder and thought she might have hit bone. The man screamed. His gun discharged ineffectually. Then her momentum took them both over the edge of the steep embankment, tumbling helplessly toward the river—two rag dolls slamming off trees and over bushes.
Ten feet from the bank, Natalie caught a woody shrub and stopped herself, the branches tearing skin from her arms. Vargas continued his near–free fall, finally coming to rest facedown and motionless on the muddy bank, with his lower half in the water. Blood was soaking through his khaki shirt from a stab wound just behind and below his right armpit. Neither his gun nor her knife was anywhere in sight.
Natalie lay where she was, badly shaken, gasping for breath, and hurting in more places than she could catalogue. Below her, Vargas remained still, his legs dancing obscenely in the swirling stream. Had he broken his neck in the fall? Or accidently shot himself? Or had the wound she inflicted been mortal? Of the three possibilities, only the third seemed unlikely. The knife hadn’t felt like it went that deep, but the thrust was wild, and almost anything could have happened.
Groaning from the discomfort, she rolled over and sat, bracing herself with arms that felt as if they had been assaulted with a bat. Below her, Vargas’s legs continued their macabre dance of death. He was a bad man, she said to herself, and deserved his fate. In her heart, though, she still felt sick at having killed.
Painfully, she used a tree to push herself upright, then again stared down at the policeman, trying to focus in on what her next move should be. Rodrigo Vargas and the rental Jeep were probably where they would forever be. Her job was to get to Dom Angelo, and the most likely way to accomplish that was the man’s Mercedes.
Where would the keys be?
The climb up the embankment was not going to be easy, and it would certainly not be worth doing if the keys were, as seemed likely, in Vargas’s pocket. The notion of retrieving them from there made her queasy, but climbing up the difficult slope to check for them, then back down if they weren’t in the car, then back up again made no sense.
Gingerly working her way down to the body, Natalie looked for a heavy rock to use as a weapon in case she was wrong about Vargas. What she found instead was something much better—his gun. It was resting in some mud against the base of a huge fern, about twenty feet from the water. It was a heavy, long-barreled revolver with a dark wood handle—something close to what Jesse James might have worn. No surprise there.
She wiped off the barrel on her pants and carefully approached Vargas’s body. His chee
k was pressed into the mud, his face turned away from her, his arms outstretched. Cautiously, she knelt beside him, then hesitated before reaching into his pocket. Instead, she set her fingers on the skin over the radial artery at his wrist. His pulse was bounding!
Before Natalie could fully react to the discovery, a guttural scream issued from Vargas’s throat. Snarling, he twisted over like a viper, latching on to the wrist of her gun hand. The once urbane policeman was an apparition. His upper lip was gashed through, and was bleeding briskly into the muddy mask that covered his face. His eyes were glazed by an insane fury, and his teeth, covered with mud and blood, were bared.
Natalie pounded frantically at his face with her free hand, and kicked him again and again with all her strength, hoping somehow to catch him in the groin. He outweighed her by fifty pounds at least, and despite all of her efforts, he steadily forced himself on top of her. His free hand got purchase around her throat, and his grip closed tightly.
Just as she felt she might be losing consciousness, one of her kicks connected, and for the briefest instant the grip on her wrist relaxed. Without a conscious thought, Natalie yanked her hand free, pointed the pistol in the general direction of her attacker, and fired.
In a spray of blood and gore, Vargas’s form went instantly slack. The top of his skull, shot downward from no more than two feet, was gone, exposing what remained of his brain.
In near shock, crying out with every breath, her ears ringing from the ferocious blast of the revolver, Natalie wiped tissue and blood off her eyelids with the back of her hand. Then she whirled and plunged her face into the cool, silty stream.
Twenty-Seven
In respect of temperance, courage, magnificence, and every other virtue, should we not carefully distinguish between the true son and the bastard?
—PLATO, The Republic, Book VII
Dr. Sanjay Khanduri, swarthy, handsome, and very intense, weaved through the teeming streets of the metropolis of Amritsar, proudly extolling its virtues to Anson, who sat in the seat next to him, and also to Elizabeth St. Pierre, in back.
The Fifth Vial Page 25