“Those are keffiyehs in the gibbets?”
Small smile. “Look closely next time, you will see what the new arrivals are shown before they are questioned.” He points at a Koran up on the shelf with the skulls. “Allah’s swordsmen and videotape for the infidel; gibbets and water for the jihadist.”
“Interrogation is a business? You gotta be kidding me.”
“Information is a business, like flesh and bone is a business. And always has been.”
I rub the grenade hand. My arm aches. “That was Barlow’s part; how you and him know each other?”
“Know? What man really knows another? Mr. Barlow was a pirate operating on the ‘civilized’ side of the sphere, as I often do. His brethren have lawbooks, briefcases, and robes, but then the good men of Spain wore robes for the Inquisition. As did the devout friars who buried countless slaves to put this elegant roof above our heads.”
I sip the rhum.
“Mr. Barlow was greedy and it bettered him, a man of hubris who did not travel sufficiently to know his own limitations.” Piccard exhales, then adds a thin-lipped frown. “And as a consequence of Barlow’s actions, you and I now have the problems Messieurs Barlow and Grossfeld created instead of opportunities.”
“Incinerate this place. That’s a fucking opportunity.”
Piccard leans back in his chair. “Not that I believe you are educated beyond the two years at Oxford, but why not Washington and her cherry-blossom ICBMs? Moscow and Tel Aviv? Do they not wreak sufficient havoc among the disenfranchised? Or the Vatican with her high hats and lowered pants? Or Mecca, for that matter, and her promises of virgins for defense of the faith? Select but one from my list and they produce far more suffering than the Gryphon.”
“You’re okay because you’re not as bad?”
Piccard smiles. “An educated man sees the world for what it is. The purest geography has no humans present whatsoever. Wherever humans breed, they stain the landscape. You would do what? Kill the evil Gryphon and the world falls back into balance. Nonsense.” Piccard shrugs. “But it has been this way since the Christ walked the earth. Kill the goat so the sheep of the same hoof might fatten in the sunlight.”
I glance at a row of gleaming surgical instruments arranged between us on our stone table, instruments meant for me if I ever give up the grenade. A little truth serum, a scalpel . . . “You beheaded a retarded kid on the dock. How the fuck do you justify that in your stained fucking landscape?”
“I do not.” Piccard sips the rhum. “Nor do I justify your murder of the emissaries we dispatched to Chicago. The strong eat the weak, though in the first world, eat is a figurative term.”
“I hope God’s real, I really fucking do. And I hope Susie and Anne smoke your pilots, buy a DC-3 full of napalm with my share of the gold, and light up this shithole while I’m still here to enjoy it.”
Piccard speaks Kreyol over his shoulder to the dark, then returns to me. “Dangerous women, I grant you, but not so potent that they nullify our advantages. If the gold is there, we will have it.”
A black woman enters and places papers on the table. She, like the first black woman, combines feminine movements, a man’s size, and . . . what? Bad surgery?
Piccard says, “Speaking of the gold, are you prepared to discuss the maps and their meanings?”
“Sure.”
“Let us begin with the Isle of Souls.”
“Sorry. The map from the well is the only map I can’t talk about.”
Piccard looks at me, then points at the instruments and speaks Kreyol.
The woman brings him the scalpel, then leaves.
“I asked her to bring us five of the special children. Like your ‘Flyers.’ I will remove their eyes instead of yours.”
“Touch one more. Just one. I kill us all. Better for them than here.”
Piccard squints, confused. “Have you seen Cité Simone-Cité Soleil? The sprawling ghettos of Haiti?” He spreads his arms. “Everyone in this camp is better off. No matter what their role.”
His cell phone rings. He answers in Kreyol, listens, then motions the black woman to him. “Ms. Devereux and Miss Bonny have deplaned in Pétion-Ville. And are now in La Boule at Castle Barbancourt, not the observatory and not Fort Jacques.” Piccard shows me a smile full of yellow teeth. “I must admit I do not have your eyes for Mr. O’Hare’s clues, but Jane Barbancourt’s castle is a perfect location for twenty-six thousand ounces of gold.”
Piccard hands the cell phone to the black woman on his left. She brings it to me—
I point her to stop five feet away and leave it on the table. I grab the phone, jump away, put it to my face, eyes on Piccard and the women. “Anne?”
Static, weak signal. “Aye. We’re at Castle Barbancourt, out front. Susie started a fight in the plane when I told her about Siri, came close to killin’ the copilot and us. She’s bein’ the mentaller, but we’ve overcome it.”
“Who went on the plane with you?”
“No one we could bribe. God bless ya for gettin’ us out.”
“Your turn now; sorority sisters with cannons. Make it happen.” The phone goes all static, then dead. I slide it down the stone table, scattering Piccard’s surgical instruments.
Piccard looks at the phone. “You did not tell them where to look.” He smiles and nods. “Because . . .”
“We gotta go back to the well.”
Piccard squints, thinks about it, then says: “The Gryphon awaits. Please relinquish the grenade as agreed.”
“Yeah, I’m gonna do that. Shove it right up his ass. And yours.”
“Mr. Owens, I don’t believe you understand the gravity of your situation.”
“Line up every kid here, do to them what you let Idamante do to me, and I’m not giving up the grenade. You fucking animals had me once; never happen again.”
Piccard calls over one of the black women. She bends; he whispers; she walks out into the courtyard.
I step farther back. “Whatever horror you’re gonna pull, you’re killing your people for nothing. And there’s a point where even these maniacs will know what you are.”
“They already know.” Piccard points out into the courtyard. “In a few moments five of the special children will be brought to this table. Each child will be brought by a woman, then secured to those hooks.” He points to the wall. “Each woman will have a boning knife. One child at a time, we will begin a vivisection until all five are open for your inspection.” Piccard smiles. “Or you may wish to be their executioner; use your grenade to save our little ones from the knives. I’m certain they will appreciate your humanity.”
No fucking way I’m killing five children. Not gonna watch ’em dissected like frogs either.
“Something further, Mr. Owens? Before the entertainment begins? A mixer perhaps, to go with the rhum?”
Somehow, I knew it would come to this; press every button until one works and I spill. Unfortunately, this piece of shit waited too long.
“Assuming I give a shit, what do you wanna know?”
“Everything.”
“Good. Fine. We’ll start at the beginning.”
“No, we’ll start at the end—explain the clue in the well; why we are at Castle Barbancourt?” Piccard dials his phone, waits until it answers, then lowers it. “And what, exactly, we can expect there.”
The stone table between Piccard and me is the size and shape of a craps table. I imagine the green baize layout, all my money—every goddamn thing I will ever own—on the pass line. I look at the surgical instruments, the hooks, the balloon faces outside in the trees. Deep breath, then: “All the clues have been in bottles of Barbancourt Reserve du Domaine. The last bottle produced a key. The key has an amber bowl for a head. As in ‘La Boule.’ O’Hare would’ve used Barbancourt Castle in La Boule to store the gold, not the Gardère’s building in Port-au-Princ
e. Someplace historic and safe from demolition but way out of the way.”
“And who has this key?” Piccard picks up his phone.
“Still in the well; in the bottle, behind a ballast brick with a turtle on it at twenty-three feet. Exactly.”
“You left the key where you found it.”
“Yup. Sure did. Planned to go back after I rescued Anne and Susie.”
“But you allowed the women to leave without the key?”
“I had to get them away from you, out of here before the storm hit. But I also had to be sure they didn’t run off with the gold. They’re pirates, remember? Sorority sisters, but with cannons.”
Piccard narrows his eyes at my second use of sorority sisters. He says, “But now you have told us . . .”
“Yeah, well, I went with plan C—dice players at the foot of the cross. I’d give you the hero speech, but what’s the fucking point.”
I grip the Flyers talisman around my neck. The M67’s lever releases in my other hand.
One, one thousand; two, one thousand—
I tell Piccard, “There’s six ways to roll seven,” then roll the fragmentation grenade down the stone table. “You and I just bet it all.”
Castle Barbancourt
Chapter 28
Susie Devereux
The battered versions of Anne and I approach the castle, herded up the road by two heavily armed Tontons who stink of the Gryphon’s paradise. I spit blood downwind and shield my eyes from wind debris. The wind didn’t kill us flying in here, but it had built sufficiently to kill the Gryphon’s pilot when he tried to leave.
Anne glances me. Most of me still vibrates. I mantra what kept me alive since Chicago, what will kill these motherfuckers behind us.
At the castle’s entrance, fourteen frightened locals crowd the archway, unable to break through the massive Moorish doors to safety. One Tonton fires a burst from his AK, raking the doors. The locals scatter.
Anne and I stop at the iron-and-wood doors, turn and face the Tontons.
One curses his dead phone. The other gunpoints Anne away from me, eyeing me for more violence they know is coming. It’s clear they got no new intel from Piccard on where the gold is. Bill died without giving it up.
Hurricane Lana is 80 percent of the sky behind the Tontons, and she will be on us all before long. The scarier of the two says, “Next time you make trouble, I shoot you; fuck you while you die.”
I eye him back, the blood dry on his forehead and nose from my headbutt and teeth. Maybe he shoots me; but without the info Bill promised to provide Piccard, this miscreant can talk rape and murder, but if he kills me, their “treasure map” chances drop by 50 percent; kill Anne too, and they have zero.
All they can really do is to escort us to the castle, torture us into producing the gold—if we can—then execute whatever orders Piccard and the Gryphon gave for our limited future.
Anne touches my arm.
I recoil; both Tontons jump back, fingers tight on their triggers.
Anne keeps her eyes me. “Easy, girl, our day’s comin’.”
The Tontons motion us away from the doors, then fire twenty AK rounds into the lock panel. The metal and wood splinters. They kick the doors, but they don’t open. One Tonton tries the shredded lockset on the left-hand door. It opens; Anne and I are motioned through. Both Tontons follow. The doors shut behind us.
The one who thinks he’s going to fuck me says, “The gold. Now.”
I step toward an open area with descending stone stairways on either side. “Then what? I let you shoot me? Fuck you.”
This time Anne doesn’t feed me calm.
The Tonton says, “Which one of you wishes to live? I shoot the other.”
Anne and I both say: “Fuck you.”
He levels the AK at me. Anne shouts, “Wait! The gold’s down there.” She points down the stairs to the right.
The Tonton cranes down the stairs. At the bottom of the first turn, built into the wall, is the life-size painting of Pauline Bonaparte and General Leclerc that Bill said would be there. I pretend to start for the stairs. The Tonton rifle-butts me in the kidney. I block part of the blow; pain buckles my knees; I land on the stone floor, ball fetal.
One Tonton steps over me. He descends the stone stairs, past the painting, and disappears into the curve. I push up to my knees, glance at Anne, and say, “Dumbass missed the painting.”
The Tonton still with us levels his AK at me and shouts Kreyol down the stairs. The other Tonton reappears, leans his AK against the wall, pulls a fixed-blade knife, then pries at the painting. He pries until he can wedge in the knife’s blade to the hilt, then pounds the hilt with his hand. The wall explodes. Stone fragments and razor dust blow up and out of the stairwell. I land on my back. So do Anne and the Tonton.
Smoke, dust, echoes.
I roll, cough smoke, try to focus; Anne leaps on top of the Tonton. She pounds his face with one hand, her other arm limp and bloody. He wrestles her off and braces to stand.
Anne lunges again, clawing at his eyes. I land on his legs, rip his pistol out of his belt, ram it into his chest, fire twice, scream “Die, motherfucker!” and fire the pistol empty into the stairwell smoke.
Anne staggers off the Tonton. I grab his AK, butt-stroke his blinking eyes, pound his face again, jerk the AK to my shoulder, 360 the room—
Anne’s arm is a mangled mess.
“You’re hit.”
Anne clamps her arm to her hip and staggers against a wall. “Never . . . better.” She sucks smoky air, coughs, wipes her eyes, and says, “Dial her back, Susie. Need you thinkin’ clear.”
I uncurl my finger off the AK’s trigger; feel my lips cover my teeth, hear my mouth panting.
Anne says, “Our man William, God bless ’im, saved us a second time. We run his clue now and fast. Only way Piccard and the Gryphon will trade for him.”
The Tonton’s phone is by my foot. I grab it and hit redial to ransom Bill. “No signal.”
Anne staggers.
I wrap my arm around her bloody waist. “We gotta doctor you.”
“A sat phone, Susie.” Anne sags against me. “With a signal. Has to be one in this castle somewhere. Doctor me, then call the Gryphon, say we’re already holdin’ the gold—”
I finish her sentence: “Then, gold or no, we bait that fucking monster to his last red-market dinner.”
Chapter 29
Bill Owens
Run. Mangrove branches slap my face; both hands block what I can. Muck sucks at my shoes and swallows one leg to the knee.
Wind howls above the trees. Behind me is smoke and flames. Fifteen feet of thick stone table saved me. If I’m hurt, I don’t know how bad.
Voices yell; flashlight beams sweep high and low.
I trip, fall onto odd, dry ground. Lights fan the trees. I jump up, run, smash into a ragged ridgeline, leap up and grab a crag I think I can see, claw higher on rock.
Lighting cracks above the trees. Lights splash me and the rock. Voices shout. Hands claw me off the ridge. I spin, smash a face, kick another, bite. Rifle butts club me to the ground. Boots stomp my chest.
I roll blind, make a knee, and—
***
My eyes blink open. It’s dark but not black. The sound of torrential rain pounds everywhere, but I don’t get wet. Wind screams through the cracks of stone walls. The massive structure that surrounds me seems to shake. I’m seated, naked, skin on stone, shivering.
They have me.
The Gryphon
Chapter 30
Bill Owens
They have me.
Wall chains and rusted manacles cuff both wrists. Adrenaline widens my eyes, pounds my chest. This will be medieval bad.
A shape approaches me from the deep shadows. He checks me, then the wall chains, then grabs my hair to bend my neck. Eyes c
heck my eyes. Animal stink and vomit breath coat my face. Behind the eyes, a door creaks.
Light spills but doesn’t reach us at the back wall. A misshapen shadow steps into the low doorway, killing most of the light. The hand holding my hair releases. The eyes and body disappear. No words are spoken. The door closes. A lone ray of light remains.
A cane clicks on the stone, followed by hard-soled shoes. An old-world French-aristocrat accent speaks from the dark above me: “Our time, and yours in particular, is limited.” The voice seems to sit. “May I suggest we use it wisely.”
My eyes water from a strong sour and antiseptic odor. I cough at the taste.
Two hands appear in the narrow light.
I startle backward into the wall.
The hands are the sour smell. The fingers are curled atop a cane. Atop the hands, a light-brown face settles into the light. Boils and cysts cover the skin. Tinted glasses hide the eyes. The nose is piggish; the mouth opens and the tongue touches left, then right, then recedes. “My proposition.” The voice is steady, practiced, false in its calm: “Deliver my gold; I will deliver one hundred innocents from their blood-farm confinements. The UN hospitals will suffer a loss in supply, but they will make do. The innocents are suitable for your rescue; we keep them soft, in living crates, much like your veal merchants keep their calves. After the hurricane passes, they will be put aboard a boat with a qualified captain and sailed to the destination you name. You may make hockey players of them all.”
The cell door opens wide. Dim light spills across me, but not him. Ten children are led in. All appear . . . awestruck or confused, retarded. None speaks.
“Or. After we have told you each of their names, histories, and hopes for a life outside their crates, you will watch them die in this room, one at a time. Their bodies will share this room with you until no space remains. The door will be sealed. We will leave you to your thoughts and the rats’ appetites.”
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