by Layton Green
It was a risky maneuver, because the Deputy Director had warned Lana not to tip their hand to the General. Not only were they dealing with a leak, but the CIA preached secrecy and the element of surprise. The less an enemy knew he or she was being targeted, the better.
After fabricating the USB drive, Lana had the DEA bring in a mid-level Alianza suspect for questioning, on the basis that he was someone who Ernesto Reinas claimed had knowledge of the shadow entity. She clued in the ranking DEA officer in Miami to the scheme, and no one else. The risk of blowback was minimal, and she kept her own name out of it, using the authority of the Deputy Director’s office to issue a memorandum to the DEA chief.
In the interview room, the unknowing DEA officer questioned the unknowing Alianza suspect, Ollie Fortuna, about a minor coke deal that had gone down the week before. Ollie left perplexed by the interrogation. He would no doubt relay everything to his superiors, claiming he had no idea why he was picked up. That information would reach the General or his people, who would have heard about the incriminating USB drive and would not believe a word of Ollie’s story.
Banking on this outcome, Lana was now parked in a surveillance vehicle a few blocks from Ollie Fortuna’s house in Kendall. This was her second night on stakeout, and a DEA surveillance team was with her, unaware of the true nature of the mission. She was surprised the General hadn’t already sent someone to eliminate Ollie.
Thoughts crowded her mind while she waited. As off the grid as the General liked to roam, he couldn’t escape the age of information. Everyone slipped up and sent the wrong email, or used the wrong phone, or, as most often happened, trusted the wrong person.
One way or another, Lana was going to find him.
She had already started her search for missing-in-action CIA officers connected to cults, especially someone who might have been exposed to Palo Mayombe along the way. A mole inside the Falun Gong movement in China had dropped off the radar five years ago, numerous undercover operatives in Muslim fundamentalist movements had disappeared without a trace, and in one case, a spy within the disgusting Children of God cult had taken his assignment too far, embracing the practices of the cult and relocating to Thailand.
Nothing promising enough to pursue, and none connected to Palo Mayombe. Maybe the cult angle was a red herring after all, a quirk of the Alianza. The thought depressed her.
Was there anything else the General cared about besides exposure? A lover, a prized possession, a relative—Colonel Ganso was right on that one. Everyone had a pressure point.
Ollie returned home at midnight. Two a.m. came and went, and then four a.m., with no activity. Statistically speaking, very few hits occurred between four a.m. and daylight. Lana sighed and left the stakeout, leaving two team members in place.
She flipped through the radio as she navigated the silent streets, taking a circuitous route through the leafy neighborhoods of South Miami to avoid detection.
Sure no one had followed, she entered her building’s garage through a secure gated entrance, then took the elevator to her apartment. On the way down the hallway she cranked the volume on her cell. She wanted to know the instant something went down.
Though physically exhausted, her mind was piqued, and she set her gun on the dining-room table and poured a glass of pinot noir. As was her custom, she walked through the apartment before entering her bedroom, checking all rooms and closets.
On the way through the living room she paused. Something didn’t look right. Setting her wine glass down, she backed towards the gun as her eyes swept the room.
She relaxed when she realized what was different: the night before she had moved the lamp beside the couch to the bedroom. Lana, she berated herself, take it easy.
After checking the balcony, she finally headed for the bedroom. When Lana had been raped, she had been house-sitting for a neighbor. She had walked into a bedroom and a man had shoved a chloroform-filled rag over her mouth. Since that night, she never entered a bedroom alone without putting her hands in front of her face, ready for defensive action. Unworried, but out of habit, she did the same as she opened the door of the safe house bedroom, holding her wine glass a foot in front of her.
Crack.
Her glass shattered, spraying her with wine and shards. Out of instincts honed over a lifetime of self-defense training, Lana didn’t stop to look or wipe her eyes, but rolled to her right on a diagonal, coming up with hands at the ready.
The knife came at her so fast, Lana had no time to think. She lurched to the side, narrowly avoiding the thrust, then snapped a front kick at her opponent. The kick was too weak to be anything but a distraction, but it connected and bought Lana the second she needed. Despite the terror of the attack, her training took over, and she cleared her mind to face the indigenous Indian woman weaving a dagger in front of her, a slingshot at her feet, her exposed skin painted blue, and her long black hair pleated in a braid.
She lunged for Lana with skill, her movements tight and precise, jabbing forward with the knife without overexposing. Lana managed to block the thrust and scramble away, looking for a weapon. A knife was exceedingly dangerous in tight quarters, able to cut from any angle.
Lana dove across the bed and went for the spare gun she kept in her bedside drawer. She managed to reach the gun, but not in time to use it. The Indian woman jumped across the bed and thrust the knife straight at Lana’s chest. If Lana had tried to raise the gun, she would have been gutted. Instead, she dropped the weapon and grabbed on to the wrist holding the knife.
As the Indian woman struggled to free her blade, Lana kneed her in the ribs, then stepped back and threw a side kick, her hands still holding on to her assailant’s wrist. She yanked on the wrist as she threw the kick, ripping the knife away. The Indian woman gasped from the blow but came back just as fast, striking Lana in the face and then lowering to trip her with an ankle grab.
Lana lost the knife when she struck the ground. Both women lunged for it, and it slid under the bed. Lana scrambled on top of the woman, jabbing at her eyes and then securing a chokehold. She dragged the intruder into the living room, trying to distract her while she leeched her air.
The Indian woman twisted and bucked, managing to insert a hand into the chokehold. Lana stepped back and threw another kick, this one powerful enough to send the woman crashing through the balcony door. Someone on the street below screamed at the sound of breaking glass.
With her back against the waist-high railing, the woman matched Lana blow for blow, using a stance and a fighting method similar to Lana’s. Both their faces streamed with blood from glass cuts.
Lana debated making a run for the gun on the dining-room table, but she couldn’t risk turning her back. The Indian woman let loose a barrage of open-palmed strikes to the face, which Lana parried. Then her opponent surprised Lana by closing the gap and clenching their bodies together. Before Lana could free herself, her opponent spun and backed Lana against the railing, leaning her backwards. Lana got in a few knees and elbows to the face, but the Indian woman shook them off and pushed on Lana’s chest, trying to flip her over the railing.
Bent over the metal bars, in danger of plummeting twenty stories, Lana wrapped her legs around her opponent’s waist and squeezed. Her opponent was no longer able to tip her over without falling herself, but a bolt popped loose and Lana felt the cheap railing start to give. She worked furiously to regain her feet, striking blow after blow into the face of the Indian woman, but nothing made her loosen her grip.
With a screech, the railing gave another few inches. Lana had to do something or they were both going over. Realizing what her legs were close to, she shifted her grip to wrap them around her opponent’s ribs, squeezing until the Indian woman screamed and stopped pushing on Lana’s chest.
The railing slipped farther, then gave way beneath Lana’s back. Lana squeezed even harder on the ribs as she twisted her body, reaching for the balcony floor with her hands and trying to catapult the Indian woman off the ledge. Whe
n Lana released her legs to grip the ledge, both women ended up hanging off the balcony by their hands.
While the Indian woman tried to pull herself to safety, Lana opted for a different tactic, lifting her body with her abdominals and throwing a devastating side kick into the cracked ribs of her opponent.
The woman screamed and dropped back down, hanging from her fingertips. Lana kicked again, utilizing every ounce of strength she possessed, every ounce of training, every ounce of rage at the attack. She felt the ribs buckle when she kicked, and the Indian woman screamed a final time, lost her grip, and plunged into the darkness.
A few hundred yards down the dirt road, after passing two footpaths leading into the jungle, Grey and Fred came to an iron gate set into a high chain-link fence topped by razor wire. The fence extended into the jungle on both sides.
The gate was padlocked and wide enough to accommodate a vehicle. A PROHIBIDO EL PASO sign warded off trespassers.
Grey turned back the way they had come, feeling as if someone were watching, but there was no sign of movement.
Fred gripped the tire iron he had taken out of the trunk. “I wish I had my wire cutters. And my piece.”
Grey sat and twisted the sole of his left boot, then slid his slender ceramic lock-picking tools—designed to avoid airport security—out of their hiding place. A minute later he had the padlock dangling from his fingertips while Fred pushed the gate open. “Nifty skill,” Fred said. “We shoot the locks and kick ’em in.”
On the other side, Grey shut the gate and replaced the padlock. The bulk of the forest stretched into the darkness, broken only by the dirt road. The jungle was dry and low and dense, nearly impenetrable, tough and stunted like the Mayans.
Grey thought of Palo Mayombe and how its practitioners believed that spirits thrived in places such as these, roaming the night, the empty dark between the trees echoing their soundless cries.
Fred swore and spun in a circle, slapping at his back and arms. He shone his penlight on the road as a stick insect as long as Grey’s hand scuttled into the brush.
“Let’s hope we don’t have to go in there,” Fred muttered.
Grey eyed the disappearing insect with revulsion. “Let’s.”
As close as it was beside them, the jungle was still a distant thing, its vine-covered depths daring them to step off the road. There was enough moonlight to see twenty feet ahead on the road, and like most predators, Grey felt comfortable in the near-darkness, knowing it worked to his advantage.
Nothing about their present situation, however, made Grey feel comfortable. The dirt road ended a quarter mile later at a grassy clearing filled with a handful of cars and SUVs—including a yellow Jeep Wrangler. Beyond the car park was a wooden fence, waist high and stretching in a wide perimeter. Inside the fence loomed the outline of a haphazard group of structures, low and long like farmhouses.
They approached on the balls of their feet, Grey crouched with his hands loose at his sides, Fred gripping the tire iron. As they neared the fence, Grey could hear the murmur of a low voice, a ritualistic tone somewhere between singing and chanting. The language sounded the same as the one used by Hector Fortuna and the woman at the cemetery.
Another locked gate. When Fred put his hand on the fence post, ready to step over, Grey grabbed the back of his shirt. Fred looked back at him. Grey flicked his eyes downward.
Fred yanked his hand away, seeing what Grey had noticed: the “fence posts” were fleshless spinal columns, straightened and braced with wooden slats. Each column was spaced six feet apart, and each rested on a sacrum with a sheared base.
“Tell me this fence is not made of human spines,” Fred whispered, then looked to his left and right, where the fence disappeared into the darkness surrounding the compound. “Holy Mother of Christ, how many are there?”
Grey took a step back and hopped the fence without touching it, landing catlike on the other side. After eying the fence, Fred grimaced and put his hand on top of the nearest spine, using it for balance as he stepped over.
The nearest building was a single-story rectangular house with a screen door on the front. They approached and found the door unlocked.
Instead of going inside, Grey risked a glance between the buildings. Torchlight revealed the backs of a line of men standing in a circle. The singing continued unabated, now joined by the steady thump of a conga drum.
Grey could see movement inside the circle. He pulled back.
“What is it?” Fred asked.
“My guess is a Palo ceremony.”
“Any idea how long it might last?”
“All night, five minutes, who knows?”
The buildings were wooden, aged, all with doors and windows unlocked. Grey and Fred darted across the gaps, and when they were opposite the car park, they risked taking a look inside one of the houses.
After letting their eyes adjust to the dark interior, they hurried through the simple house, finding nothing of interest. Pausing by the kitchen window, Grey decided to steal a glimpse of the ceremony. Fred crept up behind him.
In an open space between the compound’s buildings, nineteen people stood in a rough oblong circle. Torches in iron stands lined the perimeter, dirt and scraggly grass covered the ground. Spaced between the torches were tall stakes topped by hollowed-out coconuts, each carved and painted into a different grotesque face.
Two more people, a man and a woman, stood in the center of the circle, next to a gigantic terra cotta cauldron, easily four feet across at the lip, filled to bursting with sticks and dirt and bones. The thin and shirtless man in the center, an older man with wrinkled cinnamon skin and wild and uneven dreadlocks, had two live black snakes wrapped around each arm. He was barefoot and pushing a long pole around the pot, chanting as he stirred.
The woman in the middle, the gravedigger Grey and Fred had seen at the cemetery, had stripped to jeans and a bra, and was singing and gyrating around the pot, her limbs flailing as if dancing to ten different tunes. Her eyes were rolled back, her hair loose and spinning in her face.
Except for the man thumping the heel of his hand on the conga drum, the people on the perimeter looked divided into two groups: three well-dressed men with hulking bodyguard types on either side of them, and a collection of emaciated men and women dressed in tattered clothing. Grey guessed the people in rags were acolytes of the palero with live snakes on his arms, who could only be Tata Menga.
“Holy shit,” Fred said, in a voice so low and hoarse Grey could barely hear him. “The man in the sport coat? That’s the Alianza’s number two guy. The jackal with the goatee is Ricky Orizaga, he runs the South Florida arm from Cancun. The other guy, I forget his name, he’s a big deal too.”
Tata Menga stopped stirring the pot and sat cross-legged on the ground in front of a low table. Grey took a closer look and saw two open bilongos sitting side by side, the black wax paper spread open like the wings of some foul carrion bird.
Grey clenched his hands when he saw what was inside the first bilongo, ready to be stuffed into the bundle of black magic. Nestled among the blood and dirt and dried lizards, Grey could see the soapstone carving Nya had given him, missing since the night the blue lady had tried to kill him. When Grey had failed to find it the next morning, he assumed he had knocked it off the balcony.
Which meant someone was in his hotel room when he chased after the blue lady.
Tata Menga opened his hands. Grey noticed his fingernails were incredibly long, curving in a limp sickle away from his palms. The palero bared his teeth, then moved his hands back and forth, as if showcasing the contents of the bilongo. He wriggled his fingers, the six-inch fingernails bending under their own weight, and started to close the first package. The long fingernails and waxy black bundle made Grey think of a spider wrapping its prey.
“What the—that’s my lucky blue and red baseball,” Fred said, “inside that second whatever it is. I had it in Miami, they must have broken into my place.”
“The soapst
one carving’s mine,” Grey said quietly.
As Tata Menga wrapped the bilongos, one of his disciples stepped forward, took a swig from a plastic bottle, and spewed liquid over the cauldron. He then inverted the cigar he was smoking, ashed, put the glowing tip in his mouth, and blew a cloud of smoke.
“What the hell is this?” Fred said.
“You don’t want to know. C’mon, we’ve seen enough.”
“This night, this ritual, it’s about us, isn’t it?”
Grey didn’t answer, and Fred crossed himself as they backed out of the house.
When they had almost circled back to the car park, Grey noticed a footpath branching away from the compound. They followed it to a shed a hundred yards from the buildings, backed against the spine fence.
The metal shed had no windows and was padlocked. Leaning against the door was a stick with a doll’s head stuck on top, eyes missing and blond tresses in tatters, as if a willful child had plucked out chunks of hair.
“We’re pushing our luck,” Fred said.
“This could be the prize.”
“Just hurry,” Fred muttered.
The noise of the ritual had faded, leaving only the din of insects. Grey moved the stick and went to work on the lock. He had the intense feeling of sand pouring out of a broken hourglass.
The padlock was an enormous seven-pin lock, rare and hard to conquer. Lock picking had been one of Grey’s specialties in Recon, however, and a few minutes later he heard the final pin click as the lock popped open.
They stepped inside and shut the door behind them. Both men turned on their penlights. Small as it was, the shed was climate controlled with a dehumidifier, the air cool and dry.
Expecting the worst, piles of dead bodies or more cauldrons overflowing with vile materials, Grey was surprised to find an orderly room, half-filled with locked bronze chests. Grey opened three of them. All were filled with American dollars arranged in neat stacks of twenties, fifties, and hundreds.
Fred whistled. “Must be a few million in here. I’ll get this in for analysis.” He pocketed a stack, then surveyed the shed with crossed arms.