Catacombs

by John Farris

  "'Chapman?" Henry said, too eagerly. "Is he dead?"

  "Not yet. But it's only a matter of time for all of them. It was certainly worth the great risk I took to introduce the virus; we've learned a great deal about it, and we may well develop an antivirus that will save countless black lives in future. So your friends will have been sacrificed in the service of two causes–oh, Henry, now look what you've done! All of your expensive cigarettes are in the dirt."

  Kumenyere, rifle in the crook of one arm, bent gracefully to help the Englishman replace the unsoiled Dunhills in his gold case. He observed Henry's trembling hands. "Do you know what it is they say in the States? 'You're climbing the walls, man.' Ha!" Henry straightened, and screwed a gritty cigarette into his ebony holder.

  "Does Jumbe know about the epidemic?"

  "I've kept it from him. He would bear the responsibility for all those lives much too heavily."

  "Yet he'd willingly blast half a million white South Africans into radioactive moonbeams, given the chance." Henry shook his head, dismissing the incongruity."It doesn't help us if all the fever victims die. Not if Erika Weller is roaming around free."

  "I rather doubt that she is. She took off in a crippled aircraft in the middle of the night, and nothing has been heard from her since."

  "Sheer incompetence, letting her get away like that!"

  "An unfortunate combination of circumstances. We had no idea she could fly an airplane. Obviously she couldn't fly very well."

  They broke through a living curtain of small dotted butterflies dancing in their path; the track took them downhill, past groundwater forest thick with tamarind and wild orange trees. A big green monitor lizard, bulbous with jowls, squinted at them from atop a termite-infested log. Henry stumbled over a root in the track, and Kumenyere put out a hand to keep him from falling.

  "I think, Henry, that you should return to seclusion in Dar and let Nyshuri amuse you during these long days. The waiting is difficult. Even for me, and I have a great deal of preparation to do before I assume the presidency. Let the Russians and the Americans conduct their frantic investigations. They'll waste their energies looking six hundred miles in the wrong direction for the Catacombs. It's safe to presume that Erika Weller is dead. At your insistence, I passed on instructions concerning Raun Hardie to some capable friends of mine in America."

  "There's only a possibility," Henry brooded, "that she knows where the Catacombs are. Hardie doesn't mention her in his account of the discovery. But it's common knowledge that she was raised and educated by her father; she accompanied him nearly everywhere until the day he was killed. I have this feeling in my bones–it's better to do away with the girl, before the Americans have a chance to interrogate her."

  "So there are no more 'flies in the ointment.' Who else can find the Catacombs? Just you and I."

  As they rounded a bend near the lakeshore, Kumenyere paused in a patch of shade and suddenly shouldered his high-powered rifle, throwing back the bolt, seating a cartridge designed to blow the heads off most game animals. Henry looked around in astonishment, then fear.

  Kumenyere grimaced and waved him aside. "Get behind me. But move slowly and then keep still."

  Henry Landreth looked back over his shoulder, seeing for the first time the old female elephant blocking the track ahead of them. She was chocolate colored from mudbaths, with a pitted raspy forehead and huge tusks turning gunmetal gray. She stood in a shifting pattern of light and shadow in a threat display, her trunk raised, one foot swinging. In Africa elephants are sized according to their estimated tusk weight: The matriarch might have been carrying a hundred and eighty pounds in matching ivories.

  "Hnyu mbaya sana," Kumenyere murmured. "That one is very bad.

  "Why don't we just go back now?" Henry said timidly, unnerved by the size of the elephant, knowing how fast she could charge if provoked.

  "No. She's in my path. And I don't stand aside for elephants."

  Kumenyere took aim with his .470 rifle. "They tramped my brother, and they nearly ruined my father's farm. They can be hunted to extinction, and I wouldn't care."

  He fired. Henry cringed.

  The old elephant roared and turned away, a foot and a half of her left tusk shot off, the pulp and nerve exposed. In her agony she reared up on her back legs, to a height of fifteen feet, and lost sight of them. She went crashing off into the swampy brush beside the track, sending flocks of rails and black-winged stilts into the air.

  "She'll remember me," Kumenyere said with satisfaction, ejecting the brass cartridge from his smoking rifle. "She'll have that toothache until she dies." He smiled. "Well, Henry. What else is on your mind?"

  "I did hope to spend a few minutes with Jumbe."

  "Yes, you should." Kumenyere put an arm around the Englishman. "Try to be cheerful and reassuring. Convince him, again, of the rightness of the course we've chosen for him."

  Henry Landreth turned his head toward the fabulous mountain, a look of yearning, of obsession in his eyes. He said passionately, "We should use the excuse of possible eruptions and landslides to evacuate everyone from the base of the mountain. It's a one-in-a-million chance that thrill seekers or amateur volcanologists might stumble on the Catacombs. But we can't afford even those odds. No one must be allowed to go near Kilimanjaro until we're done,"

  "Jumbe will certainly approve of that." Kumenyere tightened his grip on him, knowing how distasteful Landreth found it to be embraced by a black man. "Don't worry, Henry. Nothing will happen to Kilimanjaro. The Lords of the Storm knew that it will endure as long as the continent. Kilimanjaro stands for everything that once was great, and will be great again, about Africa."

  "I have a feeling in my bones," Henry said, still gazing into the distance. "I think I should go back. I know I should go back, and wait for whatever comes."

  Suddenly his eyes opened wider; he gasped in Kumenyere's fierce, bone-grating embrace.

  "You should do," the doctor said softly in his ear, "only what I tell you, and when I tell you. Make no mistake about that."

  Chapter 9

  FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL

  FACILITY

  Talon Mountain, Colorado

  May 7

  A spring snowstorm, powered by tricky winds gusting to fifty miles an hour, swept down out of Wyoming just before dawn and created nearly impossible conditions for the takeoff of a helicopter. The storm was predicted to clear the area by noon, leaving four inches of wet snow on the ground. Jade figured they could drive the hundred miles from his ranch in two hours, and he was impatient to find out what Raun Hardie might have to tell him about the Catacombs.

  John Guy Gibson reluctantly agreed not to wait for flying weather; he and the security officer assigned to him, a man named Parcher, piled into Jade's big black-and-chrome, four-wheel-drive Custom Bronco, which was equipped to plow through drifts that would smother most automobiles.

  Jade handed over to the CIA deputy a microfilm file he'd studied for two hours the night before.

  "Do you feel you know any more about Raun Hardie than you knew before?" Gibby asked Jade as they headed west. Three pairs of quartz-halogen headlights blazed through a flying mush of snow.

  "Only that prison life doesn't agree with her. That could be something."

  Jade mumbled his reply. He wasn't in a talking mood. He'd had a disturbed, sleepless night. About four he'd finally gone into Nell's room, needing solace, a sympathetic hearing. But she'd been missing more often of late. The window that had remained cracked on a view of eternity was shut, despite his proficiency, his techniques of recall: He found that he was as blind as if he were gazing into a mirror at his own grieving face. There was a stillness he hadn't noticed before. Nell's room seemed abandoned for good, despite his determined efforts: the daily hothouse flowers, her personal effects scrupulously kept. Jade was shocked.

  It was as if Nell no longer existed–or rather, desired to exist for him. He sensed, somewhere, her faint and poignant smile. He was left to himself to solv
e the enigma of Raun Hardie.

  After the death of her father, when she was fifteen, Raun had settled in the states, in suburban Washington, D.C., with guardians, including a motherly, sensible woman who smoothed the rough edges. Despite a lack of formal schooling during the years she globe-trotted with her father, Raun had little difficulty settling in with her peer group and adjusting to the academic routine at a good private school. She was summa cum laude at George Washington University, then an editor of the law review at the University of Virginia.

  In her college yearbook photo, taken eleven years ago, she seemed to be thinking, not posing, her face turned a little away from the camera, the fingers of one long hand pressed against her temple. She was about to smile, or laugh; she was, rather than conventionally beautiful, fresh, engaging, original. And her face, with its heavy cheekbones and wealth of lashes, coronet of braids and dark husky hair, did appeal to the camera. It was a face that invited contemplation, and might easily inspire devotion.

  Raun Hardie was spirited, inquisitive, and quickly impatient with the evolutionary pace of good works in bureaucratic Washington. She lasted two years in a promising job at HEW, then quit to form a consumer advocate group called Gray Cells, which published a monthly newsletter to inform the average American about the greed and incompetence of big business and big government. Despite the contrary opinions of disgruntled bureaucrats and post-trial autopsies in the press, there was never a taint of subversive intent or unlawful militancy about Gray Cells. The organization had numerous well-connected supporters, but it survived largely through the efforts of volunteers, and kept its accounts in good order. Raun became an accomplished public speaker and debater, skillful at prying open closed minds without making enemies; not surprisingly, by the time she met Andrew Harkness she was one of the best-known women in America.

  Harkness, at the age of thirty-seven, had distinguished himself as a young man with exceptional promise in government. He was a foreign-policy specialist, already the number two man on the National Security Council staff: brainy, aggressive, and a favorite in high places, which allowed him to exercise a considerable talent for head knocking, imposing his will and viewpoint in matters of strategic policy. He first encountered Raun Hardie on an otherwise social occasion; before the evening was an hour old they were locked in a bitter debate that provided a fund of gossip in the capital for days afterward.

  Apparently neither relished the opinion that the debate had been a draw; they resumed a few days later, privately, and after that, despite her anti-Establishment bias and his primary role as a champion of official White House policy, it was evident that they had commenced an unlikely but passionate affair.

  In his public life Harkness seemed little changed by Raun's influence, if she tried to influence him at all; his prospects were untarnished by the liaison. So it came as a shock, a little more than a year later, when Harkness resigned his post, citing insoluble conflicts with his superiors, including the president. Thus he ended a career he had begun as a graduate student in foreign affairs at Princeton.

  At the time of his press conference he was prematurely gray, subdued, grim, and thoughtful, in contrast to the abrasive ebullience he had demonstrated during his quick rise with the administration. Immediately after his resignation he went into seclusion. Three months later an edition of Gray Cells was entirely devoted to an article written by Harkness, setting forth in convincing detail secret plans of a cooperative effort by the Department of Defense and the CIA to sponsor armed revolution in Warsaw Pact countries. His information was distilled from nearly twelve hundred pages of reports removed from top-secret government files unavailable under the Freedom of Information Act.

  When he was arrested, in a mountain hacienda in New Mexico, Harkness freely admitted he had taken the material, because "At no time in our history has the shadow business of government so unconscionably jeopardized the future of its people." He exonerated Raun Hardie of complicity in the theft, and stood trial in the Federal District Court in Albuquerque. The trial was long, and complex, and most of the citizens Harkness had sought to protect paid little or no attention. But no verdict was reached. Several weeks after the trial began, Raun Hardie joined forces with an underground militant group called the '66 Strike Command. They invaded the courtroom and removed Andrew Harkness at gunpoint, touching off an explosive drama that was still flickering on the pages of the world's press four and a half years later.

  All of the eight young men and women who collaborated on Harkness' escape were heavily armed, with automatic weapons, including Raun herself. In the courtroom the elderly jurist hearing the case suffered a stroke from which he never recovered. Outside the courthouse the militants and their hostages split into three teams and went in different directions. In the van with Raun and Harkness was a girl named Bonnie McBride, daughter of a Wall Street lawyer, and an ex Marine and car thief from Louisiana, Bobaloo Blanchard. They had one hostage, a court reporter, who was released unharmed within minutes.

  Subsequently Raun's team split again, and took advantage of a great deal of confusion involving an identical van and two couples who closely resembled the fugitives to get far away from Albuquerque. The authorities could never prove that this coincidence was part of a master escape plan.

  Other members of '66SC weren't so lucky. Two of them, and a policeman, died in a shootout at a roadblock on the interstate near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

  Raun and the rest of the group disappeared. Bonnie McBride later was identified as a lay missionary working in a Central American republic with which the U.S. had no extradition agreements. The FBI immediately put Raun Hardie and Andrew Harkness at the top of their most-wanted list.

  Almost three years to the day she spectacularly changed her stripes, Raun Hardie walked into a police station in Waterloo, Iowa, and gave herself up.

  She'd been working at a farm cooperative in the next county, but she seemed to have suffered from her lonely life as a fugitive. Her hair was shorter and lighter. Otherwise she'd made no attempt to disguise herself. She claimed full responsibility for plotting Harkness' escape. She knew where he was, but would not tell. She wanted only to have a speedy trial, receive her sentence, and be left alone.

  The heat of pretrial publicity was enough to fry the brains of everyone involved. Raun chose as chief counsel of her defense team a man whose sober dignity was no substitute for his lack of experience in court, and she stranded him without a viable way to defend her. She had done it, she said, because Andrew Harkness was a courageous man who had chosen to serve only his conscience, and she could not idly watch him subjected to the prolonged injustice of a government inquisition. Only the young and incurably idealistic found this a persuasive argument; the liberal community was inclined to dismiss Raun Hardie as an embarrassment because of her involvement with a muddled, murderous group of self-styled revolutionaries.

  When she commented, infrequently, on her predicament, Raun seemed to be involved in a kind of mental torture that passed for philosophical insight. Her affair with Harkness was analyzed at length, to her detriment, embellished with speculation and gossip. Because she wouldn't speak to reporters and was indifferent to the public's appetite for the notorious and lubricious, the press did not treat her kindly. She also refused to cop a plea.

  The government prosecutors, all of them highly ambitious, took this refusal as an invitation to turn the courtroom into an arena, with the tacit approval of the presiding judge, the honorable Harry Stokes Wanda. They pressed their open-and-shut case vigorously, condemning Raun as a gangster, a symbol of everything evil that could be expected to evolve from open dissent and civil disobedience. She was found guilty on all counts.

  Judge Wanda, before sentencing, delivered a lengthy citation, including her culpability in the deaths of a fellow jurist and a young policeman, and her failure to cooperate with the law by revealing the whereabouts of Harkness; above all, he took her to task for her unwillingness to repent. He then gave her fourteen years.<
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  There was, as she began serving her time, a backlash of sympathy, a "Free Raun Hardie" movement, but it came too late to be of much use. In prison she frequently had been ill or depressed, and very bitter about the length of her sentence. A book analyzing her character and exploits had been the top nonfiction best-seller in the country for several weeks, but some serious questions about her motives remained unanswered.

  It was commonly believed, in the Justice Department, that despite the vital issues in contention at Andrew Harkness' trial, he would have served, at most, two years in a minimum-security prison. Why then had Raun Hardie taken such desperate risks, thrown so much of her life away, to spare him a mildly punitive sentence? And why, with both of them at large, had she abruptly decided to give herself up? Had she still been living with him at the time she walked into the Iowa police station? If not, where was Andrew Harkness today, and what had happened to their relationship? Harkness must have known that by surrendering himself as well she would have benefited from a greatly reduced sentence.

  Instead Raun was stoically paying for them all. And the mysteries persisted.

  Fifty miles from Talon Mountain, John Guy Gibson was jolted from a doze and looked fuzzily around. The sky had lightened, the snow was turning to rain. They were on the ragged western edge of the storm.

  "Where are we now?" he asked, peering at the steep, white-capped evergreen forests above them.

  "Black Alder Canyon."

  Gibby blinked, and tried to recall why that sounded familiar. The heavy tires whined on a tight wet curve. "Isn't this where your wife died?"

  "That's right," Jade said, with no change of expression; but he seemed to be in a hurry to leave the canyon behind. In front of them, on the road, a heavily hung aspen dropped part of its load of snow. Gibby tried to envision hurtling tons of it, piling deeply from wall to wall, enough snow to bury Nell Jade, in her car for more than two days of subzero temperatures. Jade had been traveling only a few minutes behind her, in the Custom Bronco. And he had been here, waiting at three in the morning, when the plow blade scraped down to metal and broke open the glass. Gibby had seen snowbound soldiers in Korea, pale blue, welded to their weapons. Nell Jade, he imagined, had been a piece of ice sculpture in a brittle parka, in an eerie white cocoon spun from her freezing breath.