He wasn't really tired anymore.
It was a good thing when morning rolled around and Lalo could start his day.
Strangely enough, the air did not still burn.
Four days had passed since the Baptist Christian School had burned, and orange cinders no longer drifted on the breeze over the city. Timbuktu smelled again of coriander and donkey dung and dough frying in scarred metal pots of oil.
Lalo dressed in his favorite long-sleeve tee, an Angry Birds one with colorful patches over each bicep. This particular t-shirt was really starting to stink. He pulled on the body armor vest his team always wore outside the compound, settled the Glock 17 into his back holster.
Lalo left the missionary compound at seven, nodding at Johnny the security guard as he exited the mud-brick gate. Johnny perched on a big boulder just outside the gate, cradling his weapon, the very picture of an English boy with cornflower blue eyes, golden white hair, and skin so pasty he kept a bonus-size bottle of Banana Boat stuffed in the pocket of his cargo pants at all times.
Johnny was one of four private security guards employed by the Ancient Texts company, which worked to digitalize ancient manuscripts here in Timbuktu. The four guards had to protect the company scientists, who were working feverishly to get as many manuscripts scanned onto computers as they could before radical fighters or the elements destroyed the ancient manuscripts forever. When the manuscript guys were out of country, Ancient Texts had no problem with letting the guards help out at the missionary compound. Any foreigners in Mali needed all the security they could get these days.
Two of the Ancient Text security guards were out of country, but should be arriving any time with the manuscript guys after their week-long break. It was a rough trip getting out to Timbuktu, and Ancient Texts was kind enough to not let their scholars do the journey through Africa without security.
Ideally, Johnny would be accompanied at his post by the other Ancient Texts security guy in country, but there was a funny story about that because Hannibal had just plain disappeared. The consensus among Johnny and Lalo's team was that the Hungarian guard must have been taken by the AQIM fighters who had attacked the school. He’d been there the day of the explosion, and then, when the smoke cleared, poof. Hannibal vanished into thin air.
There hadn't been any ransom demands yet, but it was just as likely that the guard had been taken just for the fun of offing him. That was how things worked out here. Foreigners were just not that popular. Hannibal was probably tied up in the desert somewhere, waiting to star in a propaganda video for Al-Qaeda.
In other words, to lose his head.
Lalo left Johnny crisping red at the gate and loped down the dusty street towards the remains of the school. It was a bright day with a sapphire-colored sky, flecked with stringy white clouds. Breakfast had been good: milky tea and scrambled eggs with some blueberry muffins that Anne, the skinny missionary lady with butt-length red hair, had somehow made out here at the edge of the Sahara.
The missionaries were letting Lalo and his team stay at the compound, now that everything was burned at the school and there were no kids to protect there anyway. Caspian was over at the hospital in case the bastards who attacked the school decided to get near the kids again. It would be good when Alejo got back here, with Cail and Wara Cadogan as reinforcements.
It was gonna be hard for Alejo, though. No one would talk about it, say anything that would make him feel worse. But it was gonna be hard.
In the run-down hospital in the center of Timbuktu, seventeen kids were in agony from varying degrees of burns. There weren't enough beds in the place, so most of them were sleeping on blankets on the floor. Lalo passed by the blackened gate of the Christian school and lowered his eyes.
Four very hot blocks later, Lalo banged on the door of Amadou's family home. He and Amy had lived in the little room at the school when class was in session, helping out teaching and acting as dorm parents to the kids. The house that had belonged to Amadou's family for seven centuries was deep red adobe, set with three square windows with summer green wood frames.
No one was coming.
Lalo squinted into the white sun, checked out the empty street on either side of the house, and rapped on the metal door again. The heat of the metal nearly par-broiled the skin off his knuckles. Sweat was pouring down Lalo’s chest inside the vest.
Thank God, the door scraped open and Amadou's toffee-colored face appeared in the crack. A scraggly salt-and-pepper beard marred his chin, blanketing the barely-healed gash where Tsarnev had hit him when Amadou tried to defend his wife. Amadou's eyes shone against his skin, bright red.
"I came so we could walk over there together," Lalo told him. In the ten blocks since he'd left the mission compound, the sun had already begun to cook its way through Angry Birds’ long sleeves. It was tempting to step inside. Lalo could make out long patches of shadow in Amadou's tiled entryway, but he knew if he went in the house, Amadou might never leave. Lalo could see the man's eyes already round in alarm, bloodshot and tortured. Amadou would never be the same again.
"Come on," Lalo said. "The kids will want to see you."
Amadou squeezed his eyes shut, then finally nodded. He walked out into the street in red plastic flip-flops, Sponge Bob pajama pants and a stained white dress shirt. Lalo took the heavy ring of keys from Amadou's hand and locked the padlock on the ancient metal door of the house. Then he put an arm around Amadou's shoulder and they shuffled through pebbles and dust down the lonely street towards the hospital.
They made the rounds of the hospital, and Amadou held up admirably. Several little faces practically glowed when they saw their school director. Lalo felt peace when Amadou actually decided to stay longer, holding the hand of one rail-thin little girl lost inside a wool blanket on the tiles.
The sun was blazing overhead and the pebbles on the road outside the hospital fairly sizzled in the heat. It was probably about ten. Soon Lalo would send Caspian back to the compound to get some rest. But first, he just needed a second. Lalo cleared his throat to dislodge the lump and made it across the street to a boulder in an inviting patch of shade.
The shade was delicious. Lalo leaned back against the adobe wall and dialed Cail.
It would be awesome to hear her voice.
He enjoyed working with the guys on his team, Alejo and Caspian. But he and Cail understood each other.
"So Cail," he said when she answered her phone. "I haven't caught you knitting, have I?"
"Lalo." He could almost see her slow grin over the line, all the way from Morocco. They had talked after the school burning for just a few minutes. Obviously, Lalo hadn't been in a very good mood. "No, I am not knitting. Last night I did bake a couple loaves of honey oat bread though, after killing an exact hundred tin cans. The bread was really good at breakfast today."
Lalo stretched his legs out into the sunshine, felt them start to bake right away in the Sahara rays just like Cail's loaves of bread. Hearing her voice was warming him up inside just as quickly.
"The bread sounds good," Lalo told her. He and the guys had been subsisting on corn gruel and old tea. That's why the missionary-sponsored breakfast this morning had been so heavenly.
"Yeah, it was pretty darn good. Comes from making bread in the wood stove every day til I was seventeen. Hey." Cail's voice sobered. "What's the update on the kids?"
She already knew that twelve had died. "The ones in the hospital are all still alive. But we're gonna need some real medicine. And a lot of them will need plastic surgery." It sounded stupid and hopeless to say it. They were in Timbuktu, after all. Skin grafting for burns was extremely expensive and complicated. Who was going to fund all the surgeries for a bunch of kids from Mali? Travel and stay with them overseas during the recovery process?
Lalo felt himself blinking compulsively. He forced himself to stop.
"So I talked with my mom," Cail said after a long pause. "Didn't go very well."
"I'm sorry."
"Lalo, she
still thinks God's calling me to shoot the Antichrist!" Cail bit off her words. “I can't believe my parents can still talk like that. After everything that's happened. Can't they see?"
Cail was really upset.
"They can't see," he told her softly. "Look, I know the way you grew up was toxic to you. But you had family birthday parties with pretty cake and ate pizza that your mom made, all sitting around the table together. Your parents never hit you. It hurt you, but at least you grew up with love."
That was all there was to say. Of course Lalo never ate pizza around the table with his family, because he didn't even know which of the women in the cult compound was his mother.
They all knew how to beat you with a cane with equal passion, though. No prejudice there.
He could feel Cail's pain, the pain of having been manipulated by a belief system that took away who you were, forbid you to think for yourself. But Cail had known love in her family, and in that way she and he were very different. Cail must have taken the point and she decided to change the subject.
"Uh, Rupert said something really dumb yesterday."
Lalo felt a bicep flex and he folded his legs up against the boulder, out of the searing sun.
"He said he was going to ask you to help him find Marquez."
"Huh?"
"Yeah, well, I think I talked him out of it."
Lalo should have known this was going to happen. It was Timbuktu and he was already sweating, but another cold drop of perspiration shimmied down his cheek. "I can't. He'll find out. If I track anything, he'll find out."
"I know," she said.
"Ask me to help in any other way," Lalo said tightly. He wasn't really talking to her, but to Rupert. To the universe.
God, if he could actually help people, wouldn’t he do it? But if he did, it seemed pretty obvious to Lalo that bad stuff was gonna happen. Very, very bad things.
The eye. The pure evil and the fire.
It would find him.
Bread Crumbs
"I FOUND IT! THIS IS THE PAGE." Wara leaned back from the tablet on the glass table and into the sleek coffee shop upholstery. "I can apply for the visa right here, pay with my own credit card. Everything. Wara Cadogan is about to go to Mali."
Wara shifted her eyes over to the chair at her elbow, but Alejo barely glanced at her. He had brought one of his mud balls and was perched on the café chair with one ankle on his knee, polishing the rust-colored mud into a glassy sphere. Alejo's dark lashes were lowered as he squinted at the mud, rubbing it compulsively with a silky blue rag.
This was Alejo's new hobby. Rupert made them all pick something, since their job stress levels were pretty high. Rupert cooked, Cail baked bread, Lalo played computer games. Wara had her guitar.
When Wara met Alejo, he had exactly zero hobbies. Alejo had been a very, very serious guy.
Well now, Alejo had dorodango. The Japanese art of making shiny mud balls. Apparently you could use all different colors of mud. It took hours to polish the thing into a perfectly round, glossy sphere.
"Awesome," Alejo finally said. He frowned, leaning forward and honing in on some imaginary imperfection on his mud creation. Alejo wadded the rag in his palm and swiped it in miniscule circles across the coppery surface. "Rupert talked with the guy he knows at the Malian consulate, so everything should be ready for us to pick up tomorrow early."
“Nice. Looks like our flight’s at 3 pm tomorrow. Fez-Bamako.”
Wara started to reach towards the screen to enter her information for one Malian tourist visa, but her hands faltered, really not wanting to go there. She dragged her gaze in a wide circle around the Café Casablanca, where Cail had said goodbye to Wara minutes before and stalked off in a rotten mood to her lunch with old friend Jonah. The café was dingy with shamrock green vinyl upholstery. Dark wooden tables hosted Moroccan guys with fat cigars and fedora hats. The air swirled with espresso and aftershave and smoke that smelled like cloves.
They could have filmed Casablanca here.
"This is gonna work." Alejo peered at her from over the mud ball.
"Yeah, I know that." Wara winced, wishing she hadn't snapped. It's just that the idea of filling out the visa application was freaking her out. There was a reason she was sitting here with Alejo, pulling apart a flaky croissant while he chugged down black coffee. The internet at Rupert's house was totally secure, hard for anyone to hack in and discover Wara Cadogan's travel plans: a Malian tourist visa, then a flight to Bamako and on to Timbuktu. But here…anyone could find out what Wara Cadogan was up to.
And that was the idea.
She was supposed to be leaving a trail, little fresh bread crumbs so Lázaro Marquez could figure out she was still alive and follow her to Mali, then Timbuktu. Where Alejo, Cail, Caspian, and Lalo would be waiting.
Wara fought off a shiver, grimaced and grabbed Alejo's glass mug of coffee. The obsequious waiter had just been by with a refill from a steaming silver carafe. Yeah, it was sad, but she and Alejo were both pretty cheap. Why order two coffees when you could have free refills and just drink from the same mug? Wara threw back a large swallow of coffee, dark and deeply bitter.
"Eewww," she shuddered at Alejo, clinking his mug back in front of him. "Would it kill you to consume some sugar?"
Alejo kind of froze, then grinned at her, lopsided, eyes wary. “What can I say? I’m just not a sweet guy."
Wara grinned. "So true." She took a deep breath and pointed towards the dorodango ball with her chin. "Where did you get that mud from?"
Alejo lifted his eyes to her in surprise. As if this was unprecedented that she was interested in his mud hobby. "The banks of the Niger River," he said. "I got it close to Timbuktu."
"Ok. Cool." She flashed a smile at him, liking the spark in Alejo's eyes. Wara unhooked her turquoise hippy purse from the back of the chair. "Here. Can you read me my passport number? Let's get this over with."
Much too quickly, Wara found herself confirming the credit card transactions for the visa fee, then an airline ticket.
The email from Air France was already sitting in her inbox. Thanks to Rupert's guy who knew a guy, the visa was supposed to be ready tomorrow.
All of Alejo's team in Timbuktu were in Mali on tourist visas. CI was officially an educational NGO, and the guys were supposedly there as teachers at the school. It wasn't abnormal to see people carrying weapons in that part of Africa, especially with the political situation.
Wara inhaled sharply and grabbed her tablet, stuffed it deep into the recesses of her purse. There was no way she could take it back now.
Somewhere in cyberspace, Lázaro Marquez could be tracking her right now. He was probably already scrolling through her email account. Buying a flight to Mali and packing up his hiking boots and sunscreen.
"Don't you think we should leave now?" Wara heard her voice much too high. "Get out of this café?"
"Marquez couldn’t get to us right now unless he was already waiting right outside the door," Alejo frowned. "You told your family not to give any info away to anybody who called looking for you."
"Yeah, they had no problem with that, after the fiasco in Iran."
"You came to Morocco on the other passport." From Bozeman to Morocco, Wara had used another passport Rupert made up for her, so Lázaro couldn’t track her. “And besides,” Alejo frowned, “he thinks you’re dead. He’s probably halfway around the world, on another job by now.”
"True." Wara realized she was biting her lip and forced herself to stop. Alejo gave his mud ball a final polish and stuffed the silky rag into the pocket of his jeans. She had to admit, Alejo's fashion sense had grown a bit since she first met him. He used to live in khaki cargo pants and faded t-shirts, but now seemed to be more used to nice jeans, flannels, and trendy-looking hoodies.
Trying to distract herself by checking out Alejo was not working. Wara's heart was still doing a five K sprint inside her chest.
What if Lázaro was waiting right outside the door?
; "Well, I think we should go now," she finally announced. "Unless you're hungry. You didn't really eat much today." Wara had thought Alejo would be thrilled at the tasty food choices back in Morocco, after months of eating corn gruel and no coffee. But he had just picked at the butterscotch pancakes Rupert made for breakfast, listless and as pale as a Bolivian guy could get.
Alejo didn't take his eyes off the mud ball. "Not hungry."
Wara's cell phone started to vibrate inside her purse, buzzing against the chair leg. Wara dug around in the bag until she felt the phone under a mini bottle of raspberry martini lotion and a tie-dyed headband. She shivered as her hand brushed the black metal of the tablet.
Mali. The day after tomorrow.
"Hello?" she croaked into the phone. The call said it came from Skype.
"Wara? Hey honey!"
It was her mom. Wara felt herself begin to grin as she scooped up the last bit of decimated croissant from her plate and stuffed it in her mouth. "Hey mom! You're up early." It was really good to hear a voice from home. "What have you been up to?" Wara tried to sound cheerful.
She could almost see her mom, stout with skin the color of milky coffee, bustling around the kitchen to make some awesome egg casserole for a hearty breakfast. With cheddar cheese. And lots and lots of bacon. Wara's mouth started to water.
She saw the kitchen where she had grown up, airy and open with tiny little red checked curtains. The walls of her family's house were all of wood. Her dad was probably already in his office near the entryway, wearing his trendy black glass and gulping Starbucks made in that expensive machine on the kitchen counter while he clacked away at the computer.
Oh my gosh, she was homesick.
Wara didn't often get homesick.
It was good her mom usually talked a mile a minute, because Wara's throat suddenly felt tight. Lara Cadogan banged something that sounded like a wooden spoon against the counter, then Wara heard running water. In the background, the microwave beeped.
Burn (Story of CI #3) Page 7