Catacombs

by John Farris

  Belov had a second cup of coffee and read his horoscope in the Daily Mail, which promised him extravagant returns for diligent effort. Just what he wanted to hear. Five minutes before the cafeteria closed he strolled outside again.

  The Toyota hatchback was still parked by the fence. The guard on the gate had been changed, from a young man with a ewe neck to a pot-bellied old man enjoying a cigarillo. Belov heard recorded music from Landreth's bungalow which he identified as Brahms' B-flat piano concerto. The dazzling beauty of the allegro non troppo flowed through his mind. Obviously, given the grandeur of the technique, the pianist was Russian, but which Russian? Then he had it: who else but Gilels? He hoped Landreth and his mistress were having a relaxing evening together.

  To avoid the scrutiny and challenge of the new guard, whom he soon would have to kill, Belov circled around behind the massive inverted pyramid and dropped the sling he no longer needed in a dustbin. The path here was a mix of finely ground shell and dirt, which made for a more quiet approach to the compound fence at the point where he planned to break through.

  The cutters were in the big cargo pocket on the right side of his bush jacket. In the left-hand pocket he had his sunglasses and a familiar-looking, small plastic bottle with a label identifying it as a common type of nasal decongestant spray manufactured in Switzerland. But the bottle contained something altogether different, a spray that removed the fatty acids from the nerve endings of the face (or the genitalia, if one preferred), producing, for about the next thirty minutes, a condition of helpless agony. If the face was sprayed, then the victim also felt as if he were suffocating as the sinuses drained continually into the throat.

  As he'd anticipated, Michael Belov had no difficulty reaching the fence unobserved. He paused for a few moments, gently pushing aside the broad leaves of the croton plants that covered the outside of the fence.

  The virtuoso piano of Emil Gilels was louder. The bungalow was only about twenty feet away, at an angle. One story, overhanging roof, long front porch or verandah, with a smaller porch that might have been used for servants' quarters attached to the back of the bungalow. Belov heard a toilet flush. Inside a couple of lamps were lit, casting their light from the windows onto ground that was barren except for outbreaks of scrub palmetto, motley bougainvillea.

  There was just enough light filtering down from the pole overhead to assist him in cutting a good-sized opening in the fence. The only trouble was, somebody had been there before him.

  Belov suppressed his annoyance and dismay and stood perfectly still looking at the fence, ignoring the nighttime bugs whirling around his head. The wire had been cut to a height of six feet, bent inward, bent back again so that the intrusion wouldn't be readily noticeable. He let his own clippers fall back into the side pocket and took a longer look at the bungalow, at the possible places of concealment around it. There weren't many, so it didn't take him long to find his adversaries.

  Two men crouched side by side in a clump of palmetto not far from the steps of the sagging back porch. His first thought was of the Americans, of Matthew Jade, perhaps; They had somehow come across the trail of the enigmatic Englishman. Not that it really mattered who they were. He knew they were up to no good, and had to be prevented from getting their hands on Landreth.

  The piano concerto ended, and was too soon replaced by a shrill female vocalist who wanted to be taken to Funky Town. Nyshuri could be seen boogeying by a window. The bathroom light snapped on and Henry Landreth's spindly torso was visible in sections through the opaque glass louvers until he sat down. In the yard there was a tiny gleam of light as one of the waiting men exposed too much of the crystal face of his wristwatch.

  Amateurs, Belov, thought; even so he wasn't anxious to tangle with them. But it had to be done.

  One of the men, tall and lean, rose from the ground and moved swiftly to the back porch. He eased the screen door open and crept inside. But the rock music was loud and would have covered any incompetent moves on his part.

  Belov slowly bent the cut wire of the fence inward again until there was enough of an opening for him to pass through. He took his large sunglasses from his pocket and disassembled them. One earpiece became a sheathed steel blade about three and a half inches long, thin and sharp. He waited until he was sure the tall man was occupied within the house, then squeezed through the fence and approached the man waiting on the grounds.

  When he was just three feet behind the man, Belov cleared his throat softly.

  Instead of diving forward out of the palmetto and rolling away in an immediate evasive move, the heavyset man looked up and around, rising instinctively on the balls of his feet and showing the whites of his startled eyes. He also exposed his throat. Belov could have cut it for him, but it might have taken the man thirty seconds or more to lose consciousness. He had already grunted once, in alarm. Belov thrust the blade through the outside corner of the man's left eye and rammed it into the brain while restraining with a fierce grip the pocketed hand that held an automatic. He let go of the knife and caught the man by the necktie with his free hand, lowered the dead weight silently to the ground. Then he retrieved his knife and went after the other one.

  He was halfway to the back porch of the bungalow when a loud bang sounded on the hospital grounds, and the lights went out. The generator had been blown.

  They are doing absolutely everything wrong, Belov thought with a mixture of fury and impotence. Which meant they weren't Americans, who could be trusted to show some professional competence in these affairs. For an instant he considered retreating before he was swept up in the inevitable chaos that would follow the act of sabotage.

  But he'd come too far to quit now, and he couldn't afford to lose Henry Landreth.

  Belov entered the house, hearing screams, shouts, the sound of a struggle. He knew what was happening; the man he was after had kicked open the bathroom door and dragged Landreth out.

  "Nyshuri! Help!"

  The black girl wasn't capable of lending much help. Apparently she was still in the living room of the bungalow, frozen in fear, crying out in Swahili. Belov pictured the guard at the gate fumbling with his keys in the dark, trying to get the padlock open. He heard the solid thunk of a blunt instrument against thinly padded bone and the aspirated groan of Henry Landreth lapsing into unconsciousness.

  It sounded like too hard a blow. He turned a corner into a hallway and saw a pencil-thin beam of light shining on Landreth's pallid face. There was blood oozing from one nostril. He was slumped against a wall, his trousers down around his knees. His assailant, hunkered beside him, couldn't decide whether to pull them up or yank them all the way off before carrying Landreth down the back steps.

  Belov made a neutral sound, neither word nor grunt. The other man turned his blond head and spoke sharply to Belov in Afrikaans, a language he recognized but didn't speak.

  "You've got the right string, baby, but the wrong Yo-Yo," Belov said, sounding a lot like John Wayne.

  He was unsure of the strength of his blade in a close struggle, so he jetted the man with spray from the bottle he was holding in his other hand. But this one was better trained, or a better athlete, than the man he'd killed outside. The spray missed his face as he threw himself over the partially supine body of Henry Landreth and somersaulted through a doorway at the end of the short hall.

  Belov was afraid he'd come up out of his tuck-and-roll with a gun in his hand, which would complicate matters. But apparently as he rolled to his feet in the living room he became entangled with Nyshuri, knocking her flat, provoking fresh screams of terror.

  To add to the confusion there was a burst of machine-gun fire outside, as if the guard had decided to shoot his way through the gate. Belov glanced once at the dim form of Henry Landreth slumped in the hall. Was he breathing? Nyshuri was still screaming, but he heard the slap of a screen door as the interfering South African escaped from the bungalow.

  Belov cursed him and made his own, reluctant decision. His chances of gettin
g Landreth away from there now were nil, even if the blackout continued. The police or soldiers would soon be on hand, shooting or arresting anyone who looked the least suspicious, sealing off the grounds. He couldn't afford to be picked up. Time to call it a night. He was confident that the Catacombs were close, very close. He had only to exercise patience and care. Tomorrow, or the next day, he would have the information he needed and be on his way.

  Chapter 19

  WARSHIELD RANCH

  Silverpeak, Colorado

  May 17

  The instructors brought in to teach Raun Hardie and Lem Meztizo the Third the rudiments of parachute jumping had set up a practice area in the largest of the two barns on Jade's ranch, and for two days, when she wasn't hiking and doing calisthenics and wind sprints to build her endurance, Raun learned how to survive leaping out of an airplane from a mile or so in the air.

  She was determined that she was not going to make an actual jump. No power on earth– But at the same time it was imperative to give the impression that she was cooperating, and the techniques which the experts taught were not difficult to learn. Rolling backward and forward on a tumbling mat, keeping feet and knees together and her chin tucked in. Launching herself from a small trampoline and rolling forward over one shoulder. Jumping from a six, then a ten-foot-high platform. Learning, after coming up with a chipped tooth and a bloody lip the first time because she was too loose and casual, how the shock of impact is taken up by the strength of the legs and then distributed along one side of the body by rolling through thigh and hip to the shoulder.

  Raun was fitted for a red-and-yellow jump suit, boots, and helmet. She learned the theory of canopy control by hanging from an actual harness and pulling on the lift webs. She practiced jumping from the platform with a second chute, which, they solemnly told her, was useful in case the first one opened improperly. Admittedly a rare occurrence, but . . . A Roman candle, it was called. From any distance above a thousand feet the body would meet the earth at a speed of one hundred sixty miles an hour.

  Uh-huh, Raun said. Her mind was far away. It was a meaningless consequence for thumbing your nose at Fate. She'd already reached her absolute limit, ten feet above the tanbark in the barn. Wild horses wouldn't drag– They taught her how to get rid of that first tangled chute in case she needed to open the second. At the end of fifteen hours of instruction and practice she felt quite competent. But it was all for nothing. She was just biding her time.

  On the evening of the sixteenth she went for a hike and jog before dinner and was surprised to find that she had been looking forward to this time; Lem Meztizo, claiming that he was feeling the results of months of physical neglect, went with her.

  Their course took them down by the Picket Wire, where the three trout fishermen were wading upstream and about thirty yards apart, serenely looking for that last catch of the day. One of them, the portly Bill Sawyer, turned and noticed them and waved. He and Raun had never spoken, but in a sense they were friends: It was one curious effect which the beauty and isolation of the ranch had on people. Raun waved back. From Red Cloud Mesa came the wind-borne tang of cook fires, voices of children playing. The sky was streaked with yellow cloud. They came to a tree with horizontal low branches ideal for chinning.

  Raun managed three and a half. Lem astonished her by pumping his heavy body up and down fifteen times before dropping lightly to his feet and sucking wind.

  She almost wished Jade were with them. A stray thought, from nowhere, but it nearly knocked her over. Of all people. Raun smiled involuntarily, the smile twisting into a grimace. When he was around she always felt a prickle of animosity. He was too quiet for her, a spooky kind of quiet, she liked people who talked, who let you know what they were all about. He could be a boor. His mystical bent dismayed her. Jade had power over her, and although in the end it was she who would win, Raun felt, in the meantime, uncomfortable and resentful. He used his loneliness like a shield–well, she'd been guilty of that a time or two in her life, strike the objection. But why did he keep his dead wife's room untouched, except for a change of greenhouse flowers daily, as if it were a shrine?

  Last night he'd spent three hours–and six minutes, to be exact–in there. She could understand what a shock it must have been to lose Nell, to stand helplessly by knowing where she was but unable to reach her as she slowly asphyxiated. When you expected the one you loved to die, knowing for months there was no hope, it was tough enough, but somehow easier to endure. With Andrew . . . But she couldn't think about Andrew Harkness, not now. She had to deal with Matthew Jade. Getting him to open up a little, talk about something personal and human and not about his obsession with the Catacombs, might be a help.

  They jogged the last two hundred yards up to the house, accompanied by a couple of the wild-looking collies who lived on the ranch. Raun was puffing hard but determined to make it. Looking over at Lem, she saw that his face had turned the shade of a ripe tomato. But he was keeping pace, his belly moving ponderously with each short stride: He ran like a man trying to avoid breaking eggs.

  Lem sneaked a look at Raun and his mouth turned up in a grin. Raun began to laugh and then, totally winded, she tripped on a clump of grass and sprawled. The dogs jumped over and circled around her, and one stuck his long nose into her ear. Raun lay back, nuzzling the collie, looking at the dots of stars that swam in the darkening sky. She felt an emotion she'd been without for so long it seemed foreign to her nature: a flash of happiness and contentment.

  Her euphoria, in a milder form, lasted until 5:06 A.M. the next morning, when she was awakened by the sound of a helicopter landing at the ranch only about thirty yards from her bedroom window.

  Raun turned her head on the pillow and there was Matthew Jade, in profile, his face turned toward the silver-gray windows in the dark room. The running lights of the helicopter flashed on the window glass. Raun thought she had locked her door the night before, but apparently that didn't mean anything to him.

  "MORNING," he said, as if he knew without having to look that she was awake.

  "What are you–" Jade cupped a hand to his ear and leaned toward her.

  "I SAID, WHAT ARE YOU–"

  "TODAY'S THE–" The helicopter pilot cut his engine then, and Jade lowered his voice. "Today's the day."

  She sat straight up in bed, tingling from shock.

  "It is not. You said Saturday!"

  "I lied. You're as ready now as you'll be then, and it's better if you don't have time to think about it too much. Trust me on that, Raun."

  "I'm not leaving this room!"

  Jade didn't argue. He walked over, stripped the comforter and blanket from her, and left her shivering on the mattress in her snug yellow flannel pajamas.

  Too snug. She put her knees down and her hands in her lap.

  "You can put your jump suit on, or I'll carry you out of here in your pj's."

  "You s-son of a b-bitch!"

  "My mother," Jade said, "would grieve to hear you say that. Either you go up in the wild blue yonder today, or I'll bury you back at Talon Mountain."

  "No you won't," Raun said, glaring at him.

  "Be ready in ten minutes. We have to go all the way to Denver to catch our flight."

  He had the courtesy to leave her alone then; Raun frantically studied her options. Today or tomorrow she had planned to twist an ankle or knee just badly enough so that she'd have to stay off it for a few days. Other than deliberately scalding herself in the shower or cutting her wrist with a safety razor, which made her feel even more squeamish than the prospect of leaping from a giant transport plane, there seemed to be no way to avoid climbing aboard the helicopter Jade had ordered for this ungodly hour.

  In the end she got off the bed, used the john, brushed her teeth, and zipped up her jump suit over thermal underwear. She packed some clothes and carried her boots outside into the dawn.

  The helicopter was a late-model twin-engine Huey with room for sixteen passengers. The parachute instructors were loading
the copter. Ken was on hand with fresh doughnuts and coffee.

  "I put champagne on ice for tonight," Ken said, grinning at Raun.

  "Lovely," she said, and smiled bravely for him.

  "You be just fine. Mist' Jade take good care of you. That man is a prince."

  Then she was inside the helicopter strapping herself into a bucket seat opposite Lem Meztizo, whose face in the morning light was like wet cardboard. This wasn't so much fun for him either, Raun thought. He offered her a stick of chewing gum in a shaking hand. "Must have been some bad ice at the Purple Pussy last night," he said.

  "We should take a strike vote. Right now."

  Jade heard her and turned his head, made a thumbs up gesture as he went forward to join the pilot. They took off, circling slowly above the ranch yard before heading northeast. The interior of the copter filled with blinding sun. Lem put his head down and chewed, his jaw bulging, his face slick with sweat. Raun closed her eyes, heart thumping.

  Down among the aspen and flowering cherry on the Picket Wire River, Bill Sawyer put his binoculars in their case and went back inside his camper to pour pancake batter on the hot griddle. Steve Roper and Ted Clemons joined him. Their clothes smelled of fish. Probably his did too.

  "Where do you think they're going?" Roper said to Sawyer.

  "Not far. They don't have any gear. Just parachutes. Probably scheduled for some practice jumps on one of the airbases hereabout."

  "Should be getting some word back today on the girl," Clemons said.

  "Let's hope," Roper said. "But maybe we shouldn't wait too long."

  "I've got the same feeling," Clemons admitted. "Could be we ought to let her speak for herself."

  Sawyer glanced at Roper but didn't ask what he had in mind. He was not cut from the same cloth as the Cobra Dance men, and was glad of it. When they finished with Raun Hardie she would be nearly unrecognizable as a human being. A few hanks of hair, misshapen flesh over the many broken bones. But before she died they would know everything about her life that was worth knowing.