DEVIL’S KEEP

by PHILLIP FINCH

  The cliff wasn’t high by his standards. He estimated 120 feet, not even a quarter the height of Lover’s Leap. But he knew a dozen routes on the Leap so intimately that he could close his eyes and imagine each move, every reach and traverse that he would string together to connect the bottom of the wall to the lip at the top.

  Now he had to do the same in darkness, on a wall he had never seen.

  He continued to stare up, and he waited.

  Again lightning flashed behind him, a heartbeat of brightness before the wall went black again.

  He stood through four bursts of lightning. Five. Six. Each time he added a few more details, links to the chain.

  Then he thought he had it. He waited for one more flash, a quick check to be sure that the reality matched his mental image.

  The lightning flared and died.

  Favor stepped up to the wall. He reached up into the darkness with both hands, and each hand fell on an invisible hold.

  He began to climb.

  Andropov thought that the patient should stay in the helicopter until the storm passed, and Lazovic agreed. They radioed this message to the chopper. Seconds later the reply came back: “No delays. Patient says that a little rain won’t hurt him.”

  Lazovic shrugged, and Andropov sent the two orderlies out with the Gator to bring him in. They rigged a plastic tarp over the canopy and drove off down the hill.

  At first Favor had the lightning to help him as he climbed. In its intermittent flashes he was able to glance at the stretch of rock wall immediately above him, checking that brief glimpse against the mental image that he had burned into memory. So far the route was holding up, the holds and cracks coming where he remembered them.

  And there were plenty. The fracture pattern had created small shelves and pockets with space to let him grip with his full hand or to plant nearly the entire sole of a foot. In daylight, in good weather, this would have been pure pleasure.

  In the dark and the rain, it took all his focus and strength and nerve.

  He was about halfway up when the rain slackened. Although the rock was still wet and slick, he was at least able to look up without getting raindrops in his eyes. But the lightning, too, was slackening. The squall was moving away and losing intensity. The pulses of light were weaker and further apart.

  Near the top, Favor found a nice ledge. Three or four feet wide, nearly a foot deep. Lovely. He estimated that he was fifteen feet from the top—one more set of moves. He breathed, rested, relaxed. And he kept looking up into the blackness above, waiting for a last beat of lightning that would confirm his memory of the rock above.

  He waited.

  He waited.

  Minutes passed, long enough that he knew there would be no more lightning.

  He tried to retrieve the image from the last flash of lightning, the rock face beyond the shelf where he now stood. A pull up to a knob, to a crack, to another knob, across to a long, narrow sill that angled upward, to a last shelf just two or three feet from the top.

  He ran through it once more in his mind. Then he moved, drawing himself upward, feet dangling. He hung with his left arm, reached upward to the knob there to the crack there to the second knob there to the angled sill there.

  The sill was no deeper than the length of his toes. He crabbed along it until he could go no farther.

  He was more than a hundred feet from the bottom, with his calves bearing nearly all his weight as he balanced on the narrow sill.

  He craned his neck and looked up. He could see where the wall ended. The edge of the rock face was absolute black against a sky that showed the pale glow of starlight against the clouds. The top was no more than five feet from his fingertips. One more hold was left—the last shelf.

  It should have been just overhead. Reach up, grab the shelf, pull up and scramble over the top.

  He slid his right hand up the face, as high as he could reach.

  No shelf.

  He strained upward, lifting on the tips of his toes, calves tensing. His fingertips found just smooth rock.

  No shelf.

  Once more he looked up, but he could see nothing beyond his up-stretched arm. His fingers dissolved into blackness.

  He told himself that the shelf had to be there, inches above his fingertips.

  He had to act. His calves were trembling. There was no alternate route, no going back. He had just the featureless black between his fingertips and the top of the cliff, and the memory of a shelf that had to be there.

  Or not.

  He relaxed the tension in his calves, then launched himself upward.

  His toes left the sill as he leaped. He lost all contact with the wall. For an instant, he hung in space, twelve stories above the rubble pile and the ocean, right hand reaching into the darkness as he arrived at the peak of his thrust.

  He slapped at the wall. His fingertips found the shelf.

  He grabbed. Held. His left hand shot up and grasped the shelf.

  Without a pause, Favor pulled hard against the shelf, rising up, going hand over hand as he rose above the lip and vaulted over the top.

  He landed silently, in a crouch, ready to react to sound or movement. But he saw nothing, and the only sound was the muted drone of the generator down toward his left.

  He knew from the aerial photos that he was at the top of a slope, in an area of sparse brush and grass and coconut trees and banana trees. Straight ahead, at the bottom of the slope, was the helicopter landing pad, and beyond that the edge of the island and the dock. To his right, downslope, was the main group of three buildings. A couple of bright specks showed through the trees, lights from windows.

  To his left, also somewhere below, he heard a low voice. Two voices. He guessed that they were thirty or forty yards away.

  He looked in that direction and saw only darkness.

  He rolled back the left sleeve of the wet suit, exposing the balisong. He pulled the tape away carefully, to keep from making a sound.

  He opened the knife, swinging out the split sides of the handle and fastening them.

  Holding it lightly in his right hand, he moved toward the sound of the voices.

  At first Yuri Malkin stayed at his post while he watched the storm roll in from the east. It was shaping up to be a spectacular show, the first excitement on the island since he popped the two brownies and sank their skinny little boat. Fortune hadn’t brought any more curious locals, and the prig Lazovic prohibited any diversions with the female guests in the blockhouse—as if it mattered! After midnight, on a shit pile of rock in the middle of the ocean, Yuri had to take his entertainment where he could find it.

  And he had the best seat in the house. He was under the thatched roof of the guard shelter that sat at the topmost point on the island, near the edge of the cliff. The spot had been chosen because it gave a clear view across miles of sea to the west. But the view to the east was nearly as good. He could stand in the shelter and see over the tops of the trees, across to where the bank of clouds was tumbling and roiling, lit up from behind by the lightning, booming and flashing like a distant cannonade.

  At first he divided his attention, looking away from the oncoming storm to briefly scan the sea with the night-vision binoculars in the shelter. But as the storm got closer, he gave that up—apart from the two fishermen, he had never seen a craft approach within five miles of the island—and turned his back on the dark expanse of water to fully take in the storm. The thunderhead was growing, and it seemed to be headed straight for the island. Hell, straight for his guard shelter. The wind was picking up, the palm tops shaking. A blue-white bolt sizzled down from the leaden cloud and danced for a second on the ocean.

  Great shit!

  Then Yuri realized what was happening. He had the best seat in the house because he was standing on the highest point for at least twenty miles around.

  He grabbed the Dragunov and started down the slope. To the left, down through the trees, was another shelter. Most times it was empty. But tonight, with
the reinforcements, it was occupied by his sometime pal Kostya Gorsky. Yuri tramped down the hill and found Kostya’s AK pointed at him as he came out of the trees.

  “Goddamn, it’s you,” Kostya said.

  “Who else would be coming down the hill?”

  “You shouldn’t be walking around,” Kostya said as he lowered the rifle. “The Manila boys have everybody nervous. You could get shot. What are you doing here?”

  “Fucking Andropov tried to turn me into a lightning rod,” Yuri said, and they both laughed.

  Rain began to fall, fat drops that smacked hard into the earth. Yuri and Kostya stood in the shelter and watched as the storm crashed in over the island. They smoked a couple of Kostya’s cigarettes. While the rain fell in sheets, they talked about the Manila assholes, and how shitty the food was these last few days before the monthly boat, and how they both wanted to rotate into the Manila crew so that they could live in luxury and diddle whores anytime they wanted.

  They turned to watch the helicopter as it hurtled over the brow of the hill from the west, plunging through the storm, descending. They watched as the Gator ground up the hill, carrying the client to his appointment.

  They started talking about football, soccer, the Russian Cup tournament. Football was the one topic that divided them. Yuri was from Moscow and had been a Dynamo fan all his life. Kostya, from St. Petersburg, was disgustingly loyal to his hometown Zenit club. As usual, the jibes were good-natured at first and then turned edgy. They were arguing when Yuri realized that the storm had passed and the rain had ended.

  Kostya stood and announced that he had to take a crap. “Create a steaming likeness of Moscow Dynamo” was how he put it. He walked off into the darkness. Yuri knew that he should return to his post, but he wanted a couple of cigarettes for later, and he decided to wait so that he could bum them when Kostya returned.

  A sudden noise in his earpiece startled Yuri. It was Andropov, taking roll of the security detail.

  “Karlamov?” he said.

  “Karlamov here,” a voice answered.

  “Surin?”

  “Surin here.”

  “Gorsky?”

  Yuri heard the answer simultaneously in his earpiece and nearby in the undergrowth: “Kostya Ivanovich Gorsky present!”

  “Malkin?”

  “Here,” Yuri said.

  “Any unusual activity at your position, Malkin?”

  “Ah, no, sir, everything is normal,” Yuri said.

  Yuri heard a rustling in the brush in Kostya’s direction. Then the rustling stopped.

  In his earpiece, Andropov finished calling roll. He said, “Stay alert,” and he was gone.

  Where Kostya had disappeared, there was silence.

  After about a minute, Yuri said, ”Hey numb nuts, come give me a couple of smokes. You can whack off later.”

  There was no answer.

  Yuri said, “Kostya?”

  And a few seconds later: “Kostya? You all right, buddy?”

  No answer.

  Yuri could see nothing in the direction that Kostya had gone. He lifted the Dragunov and brought the telescopic sight to his right eye.

  The scope was night-vision, thermal-infrared. It detected variations in heat. The scope worked in darkness, even through fog, with hot spots shown as light against dark: the hotter, the brighter. Even on a tropical night, the human body would show clearly against the cooler background.

  Yuri pointed the scope in the area Kostya had gone. He scanned at about shoulder height and saw nothing.

  He lowered the barrel of the gun a few degrees, pointing the scope down where a standing man’s feet might be. That was how he found Kostya: about ten yards away, on his back, legs splayed.

  Heart attack was the first thought that came to Yuri. But in the same instant, he took in the odd angle of Kostya’s head, twisted at an unnatural angle.

  A hand clamped over Yuri’s face, an arm reaching in from behind. Yuri’s training took over. He reacted instinctively, shoving the butt of the rifle behind him, trying for a blow to his attacker’s abdomen to make him release his grip.

  But the attacker was waiting for the move. He shifted, and the rifle butt found just air.

  Uh-oh, he’s good, Yuri thought.

  The hand was still firmly on his mouth. It was the left hand, Yuri thought. And the right…

  Well, Yuri knew what the right hand was about to do.

  So he wasn’t surprised to feel the pressure at the top of his spine, the sudden roaring pain as the tip of the knife blade pierced the hollow behind his neck, angling upward toward the brain.

  Real good, Yuri thought, and the blade slid in to the hilt.

  Cockeye Teddy lay sedated on a bed in a presurgical prep room. The OR actually had two of these rooms, reached by separate doors from outside: one on the south side of the building that was used to prepare the unwilling donors, the other on the north side, for the patients. The arrangement was designed so that the client was kept separate at all times from the source of the transplanted organ.

  Lazovic entered the room, checked the handwritten notations on the medical chart that hung from the foot of the bed. He pulled back the sheet that covered the patient up to his neck, revealing the bare chest, shaved smooth within the past few minutes. He touched a black marking pen to the skin and traced a single line, about a foot high, in the middle of the chest.

  In a corner of the room, Ilya Andropov was checking his security detail, calling them individually on the radio net.

  “Surin? … Gorsky? … Malkin? … Any unusual activity at your position, Malkin?”

  Lazovic waited until Andropov was finished, then said, “Is there any reason we shouldn’t proceed?”

  “Apparently not,” Andropov said.

  “Then let’s proceed.”

  Favor dragged the second body out of the shed, back into the undergrowth, and laid it beside the first.

  He picked up the Dragunov, examined the scope. He brought it to his eye and made a slow 360-degree scan to be sure that he was alone.

  Infrared thermal imaging, he saw. Generation 4—the Russians weren’t scrimping on the goodies. He wondered how many more like this were on the island.

  The two dead men wore almost identical clothing, dark T-shirts over dark fatigue-style pants. He went through their pockets. A key ring, two keys. Cigarette lighter. Spare ammo magazines.

  Favor’s wet suit had no pockets. And it was hot. He was sweating under the neoprene shell.

  He peeled it off quickly and stripped the clothing from the first body. He pulled on the pants, then the T-shirt. He put the lighter and the keys in one of the pants pockets.

  He picked up the Dragunov. It was a potent tool, with a killing range that extended from one end of the island to the other. He didn’t need it yet, but it was too good to leave behind. He dropped the spare magazine into another pocket.

  He moved out of the undergrowth, to a spot where he could see more clearly. He lifted the rifle and looked through the scope, making another long, thorough sweep across the dark mass of the island before him.

  He picked up four ghostly white figures.

  One, on the far left in his field of view, was a man standing alone in one of the thatched-roof shelters. Favor knew that this man must be near the northern tip of the island.

  About ninety degrees to the right was another lone man, this one seated near the dock, facing out to sea.

  Farther to the right, and nearly out of his vision, was the helipad, where two men were refueling the chopper. Favor knew that the main group of buildings—his ultimate target—was still farther to the right, to the south of the helipad. But it was out of sight, through the trees and on the other side of a hump of land, and he wasn’t ready to go there yet.

  Operating alone, Favor knew that he had to keep his back secure. That meant clearing the area north of the helipad before he advanced on the structures to the south.

  Favor slung the Dragunov over his shoulder. Wearing a dead
man’s clothes, with the knife held ready in his right hand, he stepped out into the darkness to the north.

  Like all the others on the perimeter, the guard at the north end of the island had the use of night-vision binoculars that would easily have detected the approach of a man from one hundred yards or more. And, like the others, he had orders to watch the sea.

  When the rain stopped, he left the small shelter and stood at the edge of the rocky shore with the binoculars around his neck. Looking constantly through the glasses was tedious and—he thought—completely unnecessary. But he did raise the binoculars every few minutes and scan the sea from left to right and sometimes back again.

  He was doing that when he heard someone walking behind him, legs brushing against the high grass that fringed the shore. The surf was loud, so he knew that whoever was coming up must be close already. But this didn’t alarm him. He was sure that the interior was secure. The danger, if there was any, would come from the sea.

  He put down the glasses and turned. He saw the outline of a man dressed exactly as all the guards were dressed, with a Dragunov slung over his shoulder.

  Who had been issued a Dragunov?

  He said, “Yuri?”

  The approaching figure was three strides away, and he closed the distance quickly but without rushing.

  “No,” said the figure, and the knife sliced through the darkness.

  When they finished refueling the chopper, the pilot and the medic sat together in the open cabin door, legs dangling, looking out toward the shoreline and the dock. The pilot held an AK-47, cradling it self-consciously. A second AK lay beside the medic on the cabin floor.

  The orderlies had brought the rifles when they drove down to get the client in the middle of the storm. One of the orderlies had passed the rifles up while the other helped the client into the front seat of the Gator.

  “What’s this?” the medic had said.

  “Your weapons. Also, refuel as usual, but don’t depart until you receive permission from Andropov. You are to assist the security detail if necessary.”

  “I’m a medic, he’s a flier. We aren’t responsible for security.”