by Layton Green
Grey woke to the feeling of something cold pressed against his cheek. He opened his eyes to find Lana standing over him, both hands gripping the gun he had taken from the guard at the compound in La Candelaria.
“Where the hell are we?” she said. “Why don’t I remember a thing? Who are you, really? What did you do?”
“Put the gun down, Lana, and I’ll explain.”
“Like hell.”
Grey shifted his face to the side, out of line with the muzzle. At the same time, he grabbed and twisted her wrists. She kept her hold on the weapon, and he continued the movement, stripping the gun and flipping her on her back onto the bed.
“Damn you,” she said.
Grey walked across the room and laid the gun beside the television. He moved to sit beside her. She flinched but didn’t get up.
He told her everything that had happened in Salento and Medellín, and then told her about the night before, leaving out the tape and the notebook. Her eyes grew wider and wider, then flashed so brightly with anger that Grey leaned away from her.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked.
“At the bar with Carlos . . .” Her voice became very still and quiet. “I’ll kill him.”
“Who’s Carlos?”
“A bartender at a place I was . . .”
“Looking for Guiñol? The same place you were looking a year ago?” Grey asked.
“How do you know about that?”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
Lana turned to look out the window, at a morning sky the color of wet newspaper. When she turned back, her lips were pressed together and her shoulders had sagged.
“There’s something you should see,” he said.
He took the doctor’s notebook out of a drawer and handed it to her. As she looked at the notations on the first two pages, her fingers shook. When she listened to the tape, she looked as if she had just seen the Devil.
“Let me guess,” Grey said, “you thought you were getting close to him and the trail disappeared. Were you missing a day or two in there? Really bad hangover from Carlos’s bar?”
“Nearly a day,” she said dully. “The memory was so fuzzy . . . we were out all night partying . . . he said someone must have slipped me something, and that he took me home.” She gave a bitter laugh. “I guess someone slipped me something, all right.”
Her hands moved to her face, and she looked past him on the bed. “I can barely believe what you’re telling me about last night, but if I was really in that . . . place . . . last night and a year ago, then I have to assume they got it all. Details of the investigation, my user ID and password . . . my God, Grey. They had access to everything. So why did they let me—”
She swallowed and cut herself off. “Of course they let me go. My access ID was a gold mine. They sent the blue lady when I threatened them with exposure, and then I came here and walked back into their web. I went right back to Carlos.”
“My guess is this time they weren’t going to let you leave. Pump you dry and then kill you.”
She stood and slowly paced the room, shivering, face pale and hands crossed against her chest. “They could have done anything to me. Anything. I’ll kill them all or die trying, I swear. Every last one of them.” She stopped and turned to him. “I’m sorry about Fred. He was a good man.”
Grey didn’t answer. He was dealing with his own dark thoughts of revenge, flapping in his head like the beating wings of bats.
“We have a small advantage,” Lana said, “since we know where the leak was—or at least the major one—but the trail’s cold. Whatever was in that compound has already been moved or destroyed.”
Grey knew she was right. He had reported the incident, but he knew how slow the Colombian police moved, especially on an anonymous tip.
Lana lowered her head and pressed her fingers to her temples. “So I don’t know. I don’t know. If I tell the Director about the leak I’ll be crucified. All we’ve done is spook the General and driven him deeper underground.” She walked to the window and placed her hands on the sill. “I just don’t know what to do.”
“I might.”
She turned.
“I don’t think the General’s in Colombia—it’s too obvious. I think his base is somewhere remote. He’ll have protection, sure, but I think his main safeguard is his anonymity, his cults, his layers.” Grey eased to his feet and showed her the pictures they had found at the Ganador house. When he showed her the picture of the man Fred couldn’t identify, she grabbed it and stared at it.
“Do you know him?”
“No.”
“What about that plaza?” Grey asked.
She squinted. “It looks familiar, but I can’t place it.”
“It’s the Plaza de Armas in Cuzco, Peru. In Rolando’s house I found a picture of him and his son at Machu Picchu. I also found a tapestry that didn’t look Colombian. I Googled that, too, and it looks just like the type produced by the Quechuans around Cuzco.”
She looked up at him, her eyes intense.
“There’s something else. The one constant over the years has been the General’s use of the blue assassin. Our best guess is she’s some sort of Incan warrior priestess, though who knows why he chose that. I did a little research on Cuzco, and guess what? Coca country is nearby, it’s the gateway to Machu Picchu—and it was once the center of the Incan empire.”
Lana’s face was glowing, flushed as if heated in a forge. Grey was thinking of Fred trying to keep his insides from spilling out with a bloodied hand, and of Nya weeping in silence over the death of Sekai. His smile turned as cold as the tops of the peaks towering outside their window. “Want to take a trip to Peru?” he asked.
Before they left Usaquén, Grey and Lana found a Wi-Fi café so Lana could log into her work account via remote server. She sent an email stating she was returning to Miami to debrief, then changed her password.
Grey realized a day had passed—a very long twenty-four hours—since he had last heard from Nya. Perhaps not cause for panic, but he left another message and an email, then called one of his old colleagues at the American Embassy in Harare and asked him to check up on her.
Neither Grey nor Lana trusted the airport, but neither of them saw a choice. Lana knew a guy outside of Bogotá who flew for the CIA, but they didn’t want to place their lives in the hands of someone this deep in enemy territory, who might be on the General’s payroll.
They took a taxi to Chapinero to procure two fake passports each from a black market vendor Lana knew from her previous assignment. Making the trip downtown made Grey feel as if they were targets at a shooting range, but no one approached them.
So it was more fake IDs, thin disguises, and fear-laced waits in airports. Grey shaved his ten-day stubble into a goatee, swapped his Atlético Nacional hat for a Millonarios Fútbol Club cap, and picked up some sunglasses. Lana pulled her hair into a bun and tucked it into a head scarf, then applied heavy makeup and her own pair of oversize shades. Grey wished they had time to come up with something better, but speed was their principal ally.
At the airport, they bought round-trip flights to Lima to avoid a random check. They passed the wait before departure hunched in a secluded corner of an airport café, eyes searching every face that passed. Grey called Viktor again to update him.
When he relayed his suspicions about Cuzco and the reasoning behind it, Viktor murmured, “Very good, Grey. Very good.”
“The problem is, we’re still winging it,” Grey said. “I have no idea where to look when we get to Peru.”
Viktor was quiet for a moment, and Grey could almost see the hunch in the professor’s dark brow and the tension in his blacksmith’s shoulders. “I’ve thought for some time that the blue lady is the key, the link,” Viktor said.
“She’s dead.”
“Irrelevant. I suspect he was using her not just as an assassin, but as a way to terrify a local indigenous population into silence, perhaps even complicity.”
>
Grey’s eyes slipped to Lana. She was listening.
“You think he’s in the Andes somewhere outside of Cuzco?” Grey asked.
“Given what you’ve told me,” Viktor said, “I think it’s likely. I would focus my search on nearby villages where there is talk about the old ways, especially rumors of a sighting similar to our blue lady.”
“Will do.”
“I also believe this blue lady might represent something personal to the General.”
“Why?”
“She’s a random addition to his milieu,” Viktor said. “Too random, in my opinion. Something about her . . . invokes the familiar.”
“You think it might be a weak spot?”
“Perhaps she is something to exploit. Perhaps not. The General does not appear to have many weaknesses.”
“Thanks for pointing that out.”
After a pause, Viktor said, “Do you think it might be time to step aside, Grey? Leave the endgame to the government?”
“You mean leave Lana by herself? Look, if we don’t find this guy in the next few days, he’ll be gone forever.”
“Never underestimate the ego of a cult leader. He’ll trust in his carefully constructed defenses, and won’t believe the game is up until the bitter end.”
“You yourself said he’s different,” Grey said.
“In most respects, yes. When it comes to ego, I have my doubts. And I have to ask,” Viktor said softly, “whether this is about justice, or revenge?”
Grey gave a harsh laugh to cover up the images of Nya and Fred floating in his head. “Both. If this case involved buried secrets you’d be shoving me on the plane. Your weak spot is solving the mysteries of the universe, Viktor. Putting bastards like this in the ground is mine.”
Grey had barely slept an hour in two days. After they cleared Colombian airspace, Lana noticed his red eyes and drawn face and told him she needed him alert when they landed.
His leg was throbbing, so he took a few Tylenol and let his eyelids droop. Before he knew it, Lana’s face receded with the realm of the conscious, replaced by someone underneath him with mocha skin and dark knowing eyes, her athletic body pressed into his, hair spread in a halo of willful curls on the sheet.
Nya made little sounds of pleasure as they rocked together, her voice throaty and intelligent, sensuous and sure. Her thighs clamped against his waist and she pulled Grey’s head close, fingers pressing into his hair, caressing his stubbled face, tracing the tattoos and scars covering his back.
At the moment of release, he pressed his hands into her breasts and she arched, moaning his name and shuddering as the waves of pleasure ran their course. His grip on her softened, and they rolled to the side and faced one another. She ran her nails back and forth across the ridges in his abdomen.
“I have something for you,” Nya said, pushing away and then climbing out of bed. Grey was curious; she had never given him anything.
She returned holding something behind her back, an eager but nervous look on her face, as if unsure how he would react. Sliding in next to him, she handed him an impressionist soapstone carving of two intertwined lovers.
Stone carving was the predominant art form of the Shona culture, practiced to honor the otherworldly balancing rocks that defined the Zimbabwean landscape. Grey could tell that this piece, though only a few inches high, had been crafted with care.
He took it in his hands, staring at it for a long time without moving. He never thought he would find a woman who would want to give him a gift like this—and from whom he would want to accept. “Thank you,” he said softly.
She held him from behind in the hazy semi-darkness that came just before the dawn. “You’re welcome, my love.”
Even in the dream, he knew he was operating on hope for the future and knew what a perilous thing that was. Especially for him, who had no right to hope, to dream.
The scene shifted, to the time they had climbed Domboshowa at dusk with a bottle of wine, sitting cross-legged together on that moonscape perch just outside Harare, the grunts of the baboons keeping them company as they gazed on a red and gold sunset searing the peaks of the lower Rift Valley, the beginning of mankind at their feet, all red earth and stone and life.
Just as the sun went down and Grey leaned in to kiss her, the dream shifted again, to a torchlit cave through which Grey was walking, approaching an altar of skulls and candles.
No, Grey whispered, squirming inside the dream. Not there.
Past the altar and down more tunnels and up to the line of blood on the cavern floor, the embodiment of the sorcery of the N’anga, fear rippling through Grey like a hypothermic chill.
Wake me up, he told his subconscious, knowing he was stuck in a nightmare. I told you I never want to see that, not ever again.
Padding through the cavern towards the light at the end of the tunnel where Nya was tied to the slab of stone, torso wet with blood, the N’anga standing beside her with his knife. Grey arriving far too late, the damage done, he was going to lose her and she would never love him again, the N’anga watching as Grey ran forward in a rage and fell into the pit—
“Grey!” Someone was shaking him awake, calling his name in a low but urgent voice. “People are staring. Wake up.”
He opened his eyes, his breath coming in shallow gasps. Lana was beside him, eyes cloudy with worry. “You okay?”
He sat up and rubbed his eyes, jittery, still half-inside the dream. “Yeah. Sure.”
“Good, because we’re there.”
To throw off anyone watching the flight manifests, they switched airlines in Lima and bought two more round-trip tickets, this time to Cuzco using the other set of passports. After grabbing a bite to eat, Grey stepped outside the airport to stretch his legs.
He had passed through Lima once before, and the view of the city outskirts was just as he remembered: half-finished buildings that looked like a broken jigsaw puzzle beneath dusty slopes pockmarked by the remains of adobe ruins. Lima’s weird milky sky, caused by layers of fog and pollution, made Grey feel as if he were in a waking dream, visiting a dystopian city hovering on the edge of reality.
As Grey rolled his neck to work out a crick, his thoughts turned to Nya, memories of his dream infusing his mind like a teabag spreading through hot water.
He had to hear her voice. It shouldn’t be too late in Zimbabwe, so he found a pay phone and tried a collect call, avoiding his cell just to be safe.
Still no answer.
He called his DSO colleague, who said he couldn’t reach her either. He had driven by her house and while no one had answered, nothing seemed amiss.
“What about the dogs?” Grey had asked. “Did you hear barking?”
His contact had not.
Grey held his cell in his hand, staring at it, pushing away the idea that had scuttled into his head like a hungry beetle. Surely Nya had gone to the Eastern Highlands, somewhere out of cell range, and taken her dogs with her? Heeding the advice in Grey’s message?
Perhaps, but wouldn’t she have called him first? Let him know she was disappearing?
Or was she thinking a step ahead, in case someone was tapping her phone? Leaving no trace of her whereabouts?
Please, he whispered to himself. Please let that be the case.
Lana signaled with a raised finger from the terminal. He went inside, and they boarded the plane to Cuzco.
CUZCO, PERU
Do you suffer from altitude sickness?” Lana asked as they walked onto the tarmac in Cuzco. The dry, windswept peaks surrounding them gave Grey the impression of stepping into an unfinished bowl of pottery.
“Never have,” Grey said.
“Good, because we’re over eleven thousand feet.”
Grey whistled and stuffed his hands in his pockets. It was even chillier than Bogotá, though the sun peeking in and out of the clouds made the weather seem bipolar.
The taxi ride in was an easy journey. First through patchwork construction as crumbly as stale bread on th
e outskirts of town, into the congested modern center rife with the earthy smells of the street markets, and then bumping along the cobblestone streets of the old town.
They had the taxi drop them at the Plaza de Armas, and Grey felt a tingle as they stood in the same spot depicted in Rolando Ganador’s photo. Graceful lampposts and wooden balconies surrounded the plaza, and the two hulking baroque cathedrals looked more like citadels than churches. Behind the plaza, the ruins of Sacsayhuamán fortress loomed high on the sierra, underneath chunks of cloud drifting through the endless Andean sky. Truly a regal setting for the Incan emperors, the conquistadores who followed—and for the two criminal masterminds caught by the flash of a lens.
“It’ll be risky asking around,” Lana said.
“We’ll play it as low-key as possible. Two tourists looking for lost Incan legends.”
Lana had bought an alpaca shawl off a street vendor, and she wrapped herself tightly in the cool mountain air. “Yes,” she murmured.
Grey had the idea to start with the numerous tour operators lining the Plaza de Armas. One by one, they inquired about tours to the surrounding area, Lana explaining that they were visiting scholars researching Quechuan mythology and the present-day remnants of belief, keen on visiting villages with legends of blue spirits of vengeance haunting the cordillera.
They were told there were plenty of villagers who still worshipped in the old ways, and that religion in the highlands was a syncretism of ancient beliefs and Catholicism. But no one, they were told with a smirk, had heard of anyone claiming to see an incarnation of Mama Huaco.
After the fifteenth tour guide muttered locos gringos under his breath, Grey decided to expand their witness pool. They started talking to the community of Quechuans in the old city, most of them selling indigenous wares on blankets spread out on the street. They even talked to the little old ladies in brightly colored shawls, their faces wrinkled and brown as crushed paper bags, who led baby llamas through the streets on a rope leash and posed for pictures without changing their expressions.