by Layton Green
PRAGUE OLD TOWN, CZECH REPUBLIC
Viktor unlocked the door to his study, then sat in a leather chair and basked in the familiar gaslit glow of the street outside his bay window.
He eyed the bottles of vintage absinthe filling the shelves along one of the walls. While desirous of a drink, he was pleased that he did not feel the same itch inside his skull, that all-consuming urge to imbibe. The thought of his emerald muse felt more like the remembrance of an old friend than a lover.
At least for now.
Speaking of old friends, Viktor was worried about his. He had not heard from Grey in a week, except for a one-line email sent two days after the rescue from the General’s stronghold.
Case closed. Nya’s dead.
Viktor had tried to call Grey dozens of times, with no response, and had to piece the story together. Jacques, Viktor’s Interpol contact, informed him that Viktor’s Interpol report and request on Klaus Hitzig had been flagged by the CIA, since Viktor was working with Grey and Lana. Running with the tip, CIA agents on the ground in Peru discovered that Klaus had taken a five a.m. flight out of Cuzco, and traced his movements backwards, all the way to a remote village named Kukukatari. It was a good thing, because the signal on Lana’s tracking device had moved out of range in the mountains, until helicopters flying above Kukukatari had picked it up again.
What happened after that was whitewashed, but Viktor gathered that a rescue mission had taken place, either led or financed by the CIA. The General had been killed, his hideout destroyed, and Grey and Lana Valenciano had survived.
Agent Federico Hernandez and Nya Mashumba had not.
Nya’s body had not been found, but her blood had spattered on the same rocks where the General’s crushed body had landed, one of his legs trapped by a log. The cliff off which they had fallen was a twelve-hundred-foot drop into a swift and shallow jungle river filled with boulders. That river flowed into another river, which merged into a tributary of the Amazon. Her body could be anywhere, and most likely had been eaten by crocodiles or piranhas. The search party, accompanied by a distraught American named Dominic Grey, had scoured the river for days.
The chance of her survival, he was told, was nil.
An uncomfortable thought emerged. Grey had told him about seeing Tata Menga in the jungle preparing two bilongos, one with the soapstone carving and one with Fred’s baseball. Viktor knew Nya had given Grey the carving; was she the true owner? Had the sea of dead souls allegedly commanded by Tata Menga claimed their second victim in the end?
Viktor, of course, thought not. But like so many of his cases, there was no way to be certain, and it riled him.
Restless, Viktor entered the adjoining library. The room was the size of a small apartment, stacked floor to ceiling with bookshelves. It was one of the largest collections of religious and occult literature in the world. Viktor had traveled far and wide to gather his material, from the homes of wealthy collectors to the archives of churches and secret societies around the world.
Viktor wondered what his next case would be. He knew he had another addiction, one that the absinthe helped soothe but could never tame. One that tugged at his every thought, lurked around every corner, lounged on the gravestones of every cemetery he passed.
That which Viktor craved was the inexplicable, the divine, the pieces of the cosmic puzzle. More than ever, he had grown weary of the evil that men do, and wished only to sink into the mysteries of the world.
Yet he knew the two went hand in hand. As he thought of Dominic Grey and of the unbearable pain with which he must be dealing, Viktor thought that without good and evil, without love and loss and the awareness of one’s desires, without humanity, then there was no great enigma. There was only a universe of dying stars and empty space.
The phone in the study rang. Viktor hurried back into the room. With mixed emotion he saw that the caller was Jacques Bertrand, his Interpol contact.
“Good evening, Jacques,” Viktor said.
“To you as well. I’m glad you answered. Something’s come up, and I need your help. We’ve never seen anything quite like this before. Are you available?”
Viktor glanced at the bookshelves in his study, then outside the window at a pair of tourists strolling through the fog. “I am.”
LIVE OAKS METHAMPHETAMINE CLINIC, CAMILLA, GEORGIA
ONE MONTH LATER
Danny Hernandez walked into the room with his head bowed, fiddling with the cuff of his sleeve. Though skinnier, and without the same spark in his eye, he was a snapshot of his father in his youth.
He walked through the visitors’ lounge and sat across from the man with the gaunt cheekbones and haunted eyes, the stranger who had requested to see him. “Who are you?” Danny asked, without making eye contact.
“Someone who made a promise to your father,” Grey said.
“Well he’s dead, so I guess you don’t need to keep it.”
“I know he’s dead. I was there.”
Danny blinked and raised his head a little higher.
“I was there, and I don’t have a son, and I wished it had been me that had died that day, instead of your dad. But it wasn’t. So here I am.”
Danny looked at Grey as if he was the one who needed to check himself into the clinic.
“The irony of your father’s life wasn’t lost on him, you know,” Grey said softly. He had already decided to take off the kid gloves with Danny. In his mind, his promise to Fred meant more than just saying the words.
“He spent his entire career fighting drug trafficking,” Grey continued, “and he had to watch his own family, his son, destroyed by the thing he hated most.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t around very much—”
“Shut up, kid,” Grey said. “He wasn’t around because he was putting food on the table and dodging bullets from the kind of people who sell meth to kids too young to know any better and who end up wasting their lives in rehab.”
Danny looked as if he were about to retort, then looked away and rose from the chair. Grey took him by the elbow and exerted pressure on his funny bone, too subtle for anyone else in the room to notice but enough to force Danny back to his seat.
“What the hell?” Danny said, jerking his arm away. “That hurts.”
“So you are alive. You’re your father’s son, you know. I can see it in your eyes, behind all the anger and hurt and self-righteousness. And if there’s one thing your father was, it was tough.”
“Is that what he wanted you to tell me? To man up and beat this? Thanks for the advice.”
“No, that’s what I wanted to tell you. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and get out of this dump. Take care of your mom and sisters. Don’t let your father’s life be in vain. He’d have traded every bust he ever made to see his son clean.”
“Seriously, man? You have no idea what it’s like. You don’t just wave a magic wand and make this go away.”
“Then don’t rely on magic.”
“Whatever.”
Grey stood. “Good luck, kid.”
“Where’re you going?”
“Does it matter?”
After Grey took a few steps, Danny called out, “So what’d he want you to tell me? Get back in school? Stay away from drugs? I inherited our broken-down camper van?”
Grey stopped, turned, and looked Danny in the eye. “When he died, we were helping a woman kidnapped by drug dealers. Your father was shot twice with hollow point bullets by some very bad men. Once in the leg and once in the stomach. You ever seen anyone shot in the stomach? If the wound’s bad enough, and your father’s was, you have to hold your intestines inside so they don’t spill out. I wanted to stay with your dad, even though I knew he was dying, but the next to last thing your father did was point his gun at my head and tell me that if I didn’t get the woman with us out of there, he’d shoot me himself. Then he covered us while we ran away. It was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. I can still hear his final scream, and only hope he died quickly when the
y tortured him.”
Danny stopped fiddling with his sleeve. His face had paled.
Grey walked back to Danny and stood over him. “And do you want to know the last thing your father did before I left him in that room alone, with his lifeblood pumping between his fingers and a group of cold-blooded killers rushing through the door?”
Danny’s voice was just above a whisper. “Sure.”
“He made me promise to tell his son he loves him.”
Grey found a diner a few streets from the clinic. Steam rose off the pavement from a morning rain. Houses with vinyl siding lined the streets, but he didn’t bother lifting his head to observe the crowd. People without faces, streets without names.
He slid into a booth in the rear, facing the wall. A waitress with bright red hair and a gap in her front teeth laid a menu in front of him.
“Just coffee,” he said.
“You sure, hon? You look like you ain’t eaten in weeks. Some grits, pancakes?”
“I’m sure.”
When she left, Grey reached into the pocket of his cargo pants and took out the soapstone carving of two intertwined lovers, the only thing he had found after weeks of searching the river. He had spotted it stuck in a pile of driftwood a mile from the bottom of the cliff. A piece of black wax paper had been flapping in the current, still attached to the statuette. Grey had made a fire and burned it.
As he placed the little carving on the table, he caught a glimpse of himself in the grime-streaked window. Dirty and unshaven, but otherwise intact. The minor knife wound and the road burns from the motorcycle crash had already healed.
All of that horror, all of that suffering, and he wasn’t even injured. He stared at his reflection and barked a laugh. Dominic Grey: martial arts expert, taker of lives, warrior supreme.
Murderer of friends and lovers.
The General’s words pounded in his head, as they had since the day of her death. No one’s as self-centered as a man in love.
“Hon?” the waitress said, returning with his coffee. “You okay?”
One of the best things about Nya was that she had rarely asked him questions, and never about the future or the past. They had lived fully in the present, two souls in a canoe working in tandem against the rapids, drifting in silence when the river grew calm.
A river churned brown and creamy like peanut butter, hidden deep in the jungle, a highway of memories disappearing into the mist.
“No,” Grey murmured, his eyes never leaving the statuette. “I don’t think I am.”
Acknowledgments
As always, there are too many to list, but here are the highlights: to the team at Thomas & Mercer, Kjersti and Jacque and Tiffany and Gracie and Diane and all the rest—I can’t praise your energy and brilliance enough. And especially to Alan, for taking a chance, sharing a vision, and placing your faith in my work. Andrea, thanks for a great edit. Ayesha, your high standards are always in the back of my mind as I write, improving my work. Rusty, what can I say, I owe you a debt that can probably never be repaid, so all I can say is thank you. C-Money, I can’t imagine a better travel companion, and I’m glad that man with the scars let you out of the back of his SKV in Bogotá, as that might have ruined our Colombia trip. Mom and John, thanks a million for the early reads and fantastic comments. Dear Suzanne and Aidan, thanks for housing a hand-wringing author during the completion of this work. Mike Burke, physician to Dominic Grey, thanks for interesting conversations over good beer. Miami peeps, especially Jimmy and Stephanie but also Frank, Sal, Curtis, Jair and their families: I love your city, thanks for your amazing hospitality, and I miss too many things to list. Special thanks to Frank Mena for his help with translations. Jamie and Jennifer, thanks for the sage legal counsel—and everything else. And as always, to my wife, for your enthusiasm, incisive comments, and for picking up my slack during the research trips that brought this book to life. That debt will be repaid.
About the Author
Photo © Robin Shetler Photography
LAYTON GREEN is a mystery/suspense/thriller writer and the author of the bestselling Dominic Grey series, as well as other works of fiction. His novels have reached #1 on numerous genre lists, and have cracked the Amazon Top 50 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
Layton lives with his wife and children in the Atlanta area. Please visit him on Facebook, Goodreads, Library Thing, or on his website at www.laytongreen.com.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
CONTENTS
START READING
PEOPLES TEMPLE AGRICULTURAL PROJECT, NORTHWEST GUYANA
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
PEOPLES TEMPLE AGRICULTURAL PROJECT, NORTHWEST GUYANA
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
MEXICO CITY
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
COLONIA DIGNIDAD, CHILE
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
SOUTH AMERICA
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
Acknowledgments
About the Author