by Hugo Navikov
“Sir, that right there is—well, was—a Golden Poison Frog. It’s what, two inches long? That little sucker has enough poison in it to kill twenty full-size men. That damn snake never had a chance. That dude would also be dead without whatever those gloves are. I’m thinking Kevlar, like the gloves shark hunters wear. I want some of those now.”
It’s like daycare with Uzis, Lathrop thought, but said only, “When he gets out of there, bring him to me. Try not to talk too much. You’re not good at it.”
Crane nodded, not sentient enough to know he’d just been insulted, and marched over to where Russell was just emerging from the cage, having swum to the bottom, lifted the gate fencing enough to get through, and emerged like the Predator from the steaming brown water to stand in front of the visibly shaking promoter.
He looked back at Lathrop. “Maybe I should give him a minute.”
Lathrop nodded. The man wasn’t as dumb as he looked. (He couldn’t be.) But letting this play out before interrupting Russell did seem like a prudent idea.
Russell grabbed the promoter by the neck, his fingers reaching almost all the way across. This inspired a renewed frenzy of wagering among the still-engrossed farmers, and the promoter’s second seemed all too happy to cash in on this latest development and probable advancement opportunity.
The scene was taking place only about 150 feet from where Lathrop had been watching, and he could see plainly as Russell lifted the glove that was covered with the Golden Poison Frog’s entrails for the promoter’s careful consideration. Russell said, “Eu deveria fazer você comer isso,” which made the farmers laugh and made the promoter soil himself anew.
He didn’t bother to ask anyone what that meant. You didn’t hold up a hand full of incredibly deadly poison while holding a man by the neck in order to tell him the weather. Russell let go of the man’s neck, but it was extremely clear that he was not to move an inch.
Using the other gloved hand to very carefully remove the first glove, Russell then used the gloved hand and his booted foot to slowly turn the stiff first glove inside-out. Then he lifted it and shoved it against the promoter’s chest, saying, “Lave isso.” The farmers cracked up again, saying “Ooooh!” like they were in grade school.
Lathrop didn’t know Portuguese, but he did know enough Spanish to figure out, along with the men’s derisive laughter, that Russell had essentially just told the pants-crapping man: Clean that. It was more threatening than it sounded, because merely touching the skin of the Golden Poison Frog for an instant would mean paralysis. Anything more would bring a quick but very painful death. He put out his hand, palm up. Pay me.
The promoter pulled a wad of damp bills from his pocket and laid it in Russell’s gloveless hand. Russell looked at it, gave the promoter a smile, then punched him in the gut so hard that nobody watching felt like they’d be able to stand up straight for a week. The little bitch remained on the moist ground, unable or possibly unwilling to move. Russell spit on the promoter to make sure he was still alive, and when the man moaned, he said, “Novo cinturão, também.”
Lathrop turned with a quizzical look at the farmer standing next to him, who laughed. He must have known English, because he saw the look on Lathrop’s face and said with a smile in his heavy accent, “He want a new belt, too.”
~~~
The bulk of humanity trudged toward Lathrop and the paramilitary troops, passing them by without a single word or glance. Whatever had happened to Brett Russell in the two years since the Organization sent him to Congo, it had made him into … Lathrop didn’t know what. But it was scary as hell to him, and he thought he had seen everything there was to be scared of in the world. Still, he had a job to do: “Brett Russell?”
The man stopped immediately, then turned his muscled back and neck to fix Lathrop with a gaze so hateful that it made him want to run back to the helicopter, job be damned. “What,” was all Russell said, not turning the rest of the way but just standing there with the rest of his body in position to resume walking away.
“I’m Mister Lathrop with—”
“I know who you’re with. You’re with a troop of goons and wearing a $20,000 suit. You’re from the Organization.” The sneer in his voice was unmistakable. “What do you want? If they wanted to kill me, they would’ve already carpet-bombed this entire town. So what is it?”
“Don’t you want to know how we found you?”
“It’s the Organization.” He raised his eyebrows. “So, I’m going to start walking again in three seconds. One. Two—”
“I’m on the run myself,” Lathrop said rapidly. “I want to talk to you about your revenge.”
Russell narrowed his eyes at the man, sizing up his claim. Finally, he shrugged and said, “Mister Fancy can buy me uma cerveja. The goons wait outside.”
~~~
Once they were ensconced in a corner of the steamy bar, Brett refusing to sit with his back to the door, Lathrop started in: “Let me show you something, Mister Russell. Actually, may I call you Brett?”
“Go ahead. Then I’ll rip your eyeballs out and drop them in your beer.”
“Mister Russell,” Lathrop said with a shaky smile, “I have a stack of stolen bearer bonds worth a total of eighty million American dollars in my satchel. I would offer them to you—”
“Save your breath,” Brett said, and moved to get up.
“—but I know that isn’t what interests you.”
He sat back. “You stole them? From the Organization? How are you still alive?”
“You saw my troops out there.” At Brett’s supremely unimpressed expression, he continued, “Which wouldn’t scare the big bosses, I know. But maybe it’s enough to keep freelance assassins from cashing in. But really, the Organization doesn’t realize yet that I’ve gone rogue.”
“I see.”
“You don’t see. You think I’m lying, but you’re sticking around for a moment to amuse yourself with why.”
Brett shrugged. “Maybe. Why don’t you tell me why, then? Why have you gone rogue from people who can have you killed like they’re brushing a beetle off their suit?” Lathrop visibly started at that, which made Brett smile. “For money? You have to know that you wouldn’t have two weeks to enjoy that money or what it could buy for you. Besides, I see that suit and those shoes. You had, or maybe still have, access to that kind of money, anyway. So not money. Why’d you go rogue? If you did go rogue, which I got to tell you, I really don’t believe.”
“Your family was murdered to keep you loyal, correct?”
Now it was Brett’s turn to recoil in surprise. He nodded warily.
“The same was done to me. First they threatened it, and then they did it. Which still makes no sense to me, as I was as loyal as they come. Perhaps it was a power trip; I don’t know, and what’s more, I don’t care. I want to exact revenge on them the same as you do.”
“Open your wallet.”
“What?”
Brett leaned forward and took a fistful of Lathrop’s $200 shirt and $100 silk necktie, clamping them so firmly that they would have to be thrown away, since they would never come uncreased. “If they took your family from you …” he said, and reached into his own shirt, pulling out military-style dog tags engraved with the faces of his wife and daughter. “… then you keep them close to you every second of every day.”
Lathrop very slowly reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out his billfold. Inside were pictures of himself with a woman and young boy, then photos of what must have been his wife and child together and individually. “Yes,” was all Lathrop said.
Brett let go of the man’s clothes and sat back in his chair. He said after a few seconds of thought, “Those could be fakes you carried on you just to convince me.”
“Of course they could,” Lathrop said. “Just as yours could be fake as well. But they’re not, and neither are mine. Now, may we speak about what I traveled all the way here to speak to you about?”
“Maybe. But first,
if you’re on the outs with the Organization, how did you find me? They must have told you where I was, and it wasn’t because they wanted to help you get revenge against them by contacting another target of their sick loyalty plan. And you couldn’t have found me on your own. I don’t even understand how they could, except that that’s what they do.” At Lathrop’s nod, he went on: “So? Why did they share my location with you? However they figured out or were told my location, they gave that information to you. Whether you are, or were, their employee or some kind of contracted intermediary, instead of sending just Thug Life out there to shoot me down? You got the information from them; more than that—they gave it to you. Amuse me: tell me why.”
“You’re quite right, of course,” Lathrop said, then took a sip of his beer now that things seemed to have relaxed slightly. “I did work for them, the same as you used to, working in a front corporation until they needed more for a particular assignment. In this case, they wanted me to find you because of your experienced hunting and killing cryptids of all kinds, including at least one actual dinosaur, that Spinosaurus in Africa.”
“I never killed anything unless it was about to kill me, and even then I tried not to. I laid Bras out back there because he forced me to kill that beautiful green anaconda to save my own life. And the Spinosaurus, by the way, is still alive with its young in the Congolese rainforest. But all right, they wanted someone with my skills.”
“Yes. They want you to go somewhere that man has never been, so deep into the jungle that it has never been mapped, in order to bring back an Organization scientist and the … well, the superweapon he created.”
Brett’s eyes narrowed again. “Wait. There’s a scientist there, but no man has ever been to this place in the jungle.”
“Right, sorry—before him, I mean.”
“Uh huh. And I assume he was being paid by the Organization to develop this ‘superweapon’? What is it, a nuclear bomb?”
“No,” Lathrop said with a chuckle, “they have access to nuclear bombs if they want them. But using nuclear weapons would be bad for the global economy, to say the least, and the Organization is the global economy, in many ways.”
“All right, so what is it?”
Lathrop cleared his throat awkwardly. “There I have to demur, Mister Russell. I don’t actually know. I believe they didn’t consider me to have a ‘need to know.’ They just needed me to know enough to hire you to find this scientist and, if possible, his superweapon, and bring your quarry back to the opening of the secret world.”
“Secret world,” Brett repeated.
“Don’t concern yourself with that at the moment, if you please. What I’m trying to tell you is that they want that man and his weapon desperately, enough to hire you instead of killing you so that you may retrieve them for the Organization. When I realized how mad they were to get this done, I saw it as my opportunity to exact revenge upon them for what they did to me, to my wife and son.”
Brett nodded slowly. “All right, then. Your revenge would be, what, selling their superweapon or whatever to the highest bidder that wasn’t also somehow them?”
“That is my business, Mister Russell. Maybe I want to drop it on their heads. That’s no concern of yours. Your concern is only what I ask of you and what I am willing to pay you.”
“You say you know money doesn’t interest me, although I will take those bonds in addition to whatever your real payment is, give the money to the people of Ipixuna so they don’t have to slash and burn their own rainforest to survive. But what are you really trying to pay me with?”
Lathrop cleared his throat again, but this time it was anything but awkwardly. He sat straighter in his chair and arranged his suit just so, then said, “When I left Geneva for New York to get your dossier and the bonds with which to bribe you—the Organization is unable to see that money cannot buy anything worth possessing—I was already planning to betray them. With the information and the bonds, I was able to steal documents showing exactly who it was who ordered the execution of your family. It is with those documents that I shall pay you for retrieving the scientist and his creation.”
Brett leaped across the table, breaking it as he dove into Lathrop and they crashed through Lathrop’s chair onto the floor. He bared his teeth like a mad animal and snarled into the Organization man’s face, “WHO IS IT? Tell me right now or I’ll crush your skull.”
Weirdly, other than the natural alarm from being attacked and driven to the dirty floor, Lathrop remained calm. “I never looked at the papers, Brett. Do you think I wasn’t aware that you would torture me until I told you what I knew? Now get off of me before I whistle for my dogs to shoot you dead.”
After a moment, Brett relented and helped Lathrop to his feet. He unfolded some of the reals and gave them to the barkeep for the damage, then sat at the next table over with Lathrop. “Where are these documents?”
“They will be waiting for you when you emerge from the secret world. If I am lying and I don’t have them, then I imagine you would kill me right then and there, or later if I somehow were able to get away. But, as you can see, I’m not concerned, because I really do have them in a very safe place. As a goodwill gesture, however, I’ll give you the $80 million in bearer bonds right now.” He pushed the inordinately expensive attaché across the table, and Brett took it and placed it next to him on the floor. Lathrop laughed and said, “Aren’t you going to check them?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Brett said. “What’s this ‘secret world’? How do I find this scientist? Give me the details, and we just might have a deal.”
Lathrop ordered them another round, and within half an hour, he had told Brett Russell absolutely everything he knew about what he called the secret world, the rogue scientist, and how enraged the Organization would be when they didn’t get what they wanted. He finished with, “They might kill you, but they will definitely kill me. But that won’t matter; then I’ll just be with my family.”
For a minute, Brett just stared at Lathrop and considered everything he’d been told and been offered. Then he nodded and said, “All right. But I’m gonna need my team.”
~~~
In the eleven months since she had left her husband in the rainforests of South American, television journalist Ellie White (formerly Ellie White-Russell) had worked every spare moment to get her life and career back to where it was before she had met Brett Russell while covering the story of an alleged Kasai Rex in the jungles of Congo for the program Cryptids Alive! But everywhere she turned, everything she tried, her efforts to get in front of the camera and start reporting once again were thwarted as if by some mysterious hand.
She knew what this “hand” was: it was the Organization, that shadowy global cabal that was after Brett. She had hidden out with him in the rainforests of South America for a year, married him in some 400-person village called Pijuayal, but finally she could take living half a life no longer and had to leave. In the end, Brett had seemed relieved; looking over his shoulder for both of them was exacting a terrible toll on him, and he would be better able to survive in peace without her.
Men—always men—approached her almost weekly for months thereafter in Iquito, where she had been stranded, unable to command the fare for passage home. They offered her money or threatened her life, sometimes both, in pursuit of information about where he was now. Early on, she told them about Pijuayal, since she was certain he would have left there probably within days of her departure. They paid her well for the information, some $4,000, which allowed her to get back to the United States and begin her life again.
Or so she had thought. The bastards must have thought she was holding out on them even when she was back in Atlanta: she noticed suit-wearing men tailing her on city streets, watching her from across the street when she was home, even going through her mail and her garbage, she was sure. If they didn’t have her phone tapped, she would have been very surprised.
But it was all for nothing, because she hadn’t spoken to or h
eard one word from Brett in over a year. The Organization must have been trying to squeeze her, because every job opportunity mysteriously closed even after they had agreed to hire her. She wasn’t yet thirty and was still, if she could say so herself, extremely hot in a Kim Possible action grrl kind of way. Anybody should have wanted her talking into a microphone on their TVs or computers.
But then came The Mysterious Investigators. The offer to be the face of the paranormal investigation show came out of nowhere, just when she was about to apply for a job at a Starbucks in Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, which was where she was going to have to move and live with her sister. She thought doing this would make death not seem like much of a change when it finally happened, hopefully sooner than later.
Not that TMI was a huge step up financially, but at least it allowed her to do what she loved, which was paranormal documentary filmmaking. The two guys running the show, Stefan and Ravi, wanted a female investigator to help expand their YouTube subscriber demographic, as well as come up with some new ideas. The weird thing was that they found her. She had her LinkedIn profile and her own (non-remunerative) YouTube channel, so it wasn’t all that weird, but still, it worked out.
Now, a couple of months in, she and Stefan were working on the “Biloxi Leprechaun” episode at the industrial park studio TMI rented when Ravi came in with an opened letter in his hand and a dazed look on his face. Stefan, who was as tall and Nordic as Ravi was petite and Indian (although both were second-generation Americans), sat back from the editing monitor and looked at their partner. “Oh, God. What?”
Ellie was sure the letter was some kind of eviction notice for the studio or maybe a crackpot death threat from something claiming TMI was “too close to the truth” on some garbage conspiracy idea or another. But Ravi smiled dreamily, and she knew this was something else entirely.
“We got a grant,” Ravi said, his white teeth gleaming. “I don’t even remember applying for it, but The Mysterious Investigators just got a grant from …” He read from the page: “from the Skeptic Skeptic Society.”