“If a girl’s old enough to bleed, she’s old enough to butcher,” said Finisterre, and Leroy tittered.
“Not helping your case, dickwad,” growled Sampson.
“No, that’s true, Mr American. But my offer stands. What if I give you a time limit to decide? A deadline always helps focus the mind. Ten seconds, startin’”—he glanced at his watch, a Patek Philippe Nautilus—“now.”
“Go,” Lex urged Sampson. “Morgenstern bought us this opportunity, remember? You yourself said we mustn’t waste it. Finisterre’s even supplied the rope for you to climb.”
“And if he shoots me?”
“Five seconds,” said Finisterre.
“The crazy thing is, I don’t think he will. He’s not honest but he is honourable, in his way. And let’s face it, if he doesn’t shoot you when you go, he might well if you stay.”
“In other words, what have I got to lose?”
“Two,” said Finisterre. “One. Time’s up. Okay, what’ll it be?”
“All right,” said Sampson. “Dammit, all right. Topside it is.”
“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“But I swear, you try anything funny, asswipe, and you’re dog meat.”
“As God is my witness,” said Finisterre, and underlined his sincerity by crossing himself.
“And by the way, for the record, I ain’t fat. This is all muscle.”
“I apologise. The insult was uncalled for.”
Sampson turned and looked gravely at Lex. “You’ll find a way of clearing up this mess, right? Albertine, Wilberforce, they’re civilians. This isn’t their world, it’s ours, and they’ve no place in it. Promise me you’ll make sure they’re okay.”
“Absolutely. And in turn, you promise me you’ll get on the radio in Puddle Jumper and bring down a hundred tons of hell on Anger Reef.”
“Done.”
Finisterre waggled a hand impatiently. “Come on, let’s hurry it up. I’m itchin’ to get started on Dove. Not to get finished with you, though, Englishman. Oh no. It’s goin’ to be a long, bad death for you, an’ I’m goin’ to savour every second.”
Sampson steeled himself. Shoulders squared, he set off towards the elevator, keeping his gaze firmly fixed on Finisterre and specifically Finisterre’s gun. The least sign of the Garfish reneging, the merest twitch of a trigger finger, and Sampson would dive for cover. And if the bullet missed its mark, would come up fighting.
“No.”
This came from the far end of the passage, and it was as much a resigned sigh as an objection.
Papa Couleuvre appeared, flanked by zuvembies. More zuvembies filed up behind him.
“Who the fuck are—?” Finisterre began, but Couleuvre didn’t let him complete the sentence.
“Hmmm, another Baron’s man,” he said, giving him the once-over. “Quite the fellowship we have now.”
Finisterre swung the gun, training it on the bokor. “Don’t move.”
“Or what?” said Couleuvre serenely. “You will shoot?”
“Don’t make me.”
Couleuvre gestured. The zuvembies hastened forward.
“The escape is over,” he said, speaking now to Lex and the other fugitives. “A valiant effort, bought at a high price, but doomed to failure. I really have lost patience with all this resistance and disruption. It is using up precious time.”
“What are those things?” Finisterre demanded. As the zuvembies approached, he, Leroy and Wilberforce were getting a better look at the creatures, and what they saw filled them with bafflement and an instinctive dread.
“What you are going to be,” replied Couleuvre, “just a few minutes from now.”
The events that followed unfolded with wearying predictability. Finisterre fired. Leroy fired. The zuvembies strode on, wounded but unfazed. Within moments they had overpowered the two crooks. Finisterre and Leroy were in their custody; Wilberforce as well.
Lex surrendered, as did Albertine. Sampson, so close to the elevator, just yards from the route to freedom, could see no alternative but to do so too.
“D’accord,” said a satisfied Couleuvre. “There is a wisdom in recognising when you are outclassed and beaten. Don’t fight fate.”
Lex could scarcely believe their bad luck. Had the Garfish not arrived when he did, the escape party might even now be up on the surface, crossing the beach to the Zodiacs. Their goal had been tantalisingly within their grasp. And now...
Now there really did seem to be no hope.
THIRTY-SIX
IN LAB 1 AND LAB 2
THEY WERE TAKEN down to the laboratories. Lab 1 and Lab 2 were, it transpired, a single large room divided unequally into two chambers, with a half-glassed partition between. Lab 1 was stuffed with biotech equipment—centrifuge, electron microscope, incubator, modular liquid handler, PCR protective chamber—while 2, the smaller space, contained a half-dozen steel gurneys lined up in a row.
One of the partition’s windowpanes was starred with a bullet hole. Much of the equipment lay strewn, broken. Dried black bloodstains crisscrossed the floor and scabbed the walls.
Here was where V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T. had first been used and where Couleuvre’s slaughter of the installation’s personnel had begun.
The group of captives was separated up. Albertine, Wilberforce, Finisterre and Leroy were consigned to Lab 1. Couleuvre had the zuvembies tie their wrists and ankles with electrical flex and then attach these restraints with more electrical flex to various immoveable fixtures around the room. Albertine was deprived of her shoulder bag.
“Not making that mistake twice,” said Couleuvre, placing the bag on a high shelf—contraband. “No more sneaky little mambo tricks from you, lady.”
Lex and Sampson were shoved through the connecting doorway into Lab 2. Four of the gurneys were already occupied. Buckler and Tartaglione had two. The unconscious Pearce lay on another. The fourth was a bier for the body of Morgenstern, whose face was so mutilated as to be all but unrecognisable. The three still-living Thirteeners had been bound tightly by leather cuffs and straps connected to the gurneys’ frames.
“And this is where we put the dangerous ones,” Couleuvre said.
The zuvembies forced Lex and Sampson down onto the spare gurneys. Both men resisted but, against the superior preternatural strength of zuvembies, it was futile. In no time they had been buckled in. Lex strained against the cuffs and straps but there was no slack, no leverage, not an inch of give. He was held fast.
The sense of helplessness was agonising. He felt vulnerable, emasculated. He fought down a growing panic, ordering himself to stay calm, keep a clear head, be in control. It wasn’t over yet. The outlook was bleak, but while he lived, while his mind still functioned, there was always a chance of turning the situation around.
“Now stay there and be good,” Couleuvre instructed Lex and the Thirteeners. “It will not be long. I will deal with the others first, then come round to you.”
“No!” Lex yelled. “Leave them alone!” His concern, of course, was for Albertine and Wilberforce. Finisterre and Leroy he couldn’t have cared less about.
Couleuvre, anyway, ignored him, exiting Lab 2 with a dismissive wave. Back in Lab 1, the bokor fetched phial trays out of a refrigerator and began unpacking sterilised hypodermics from their wrappers.
By craning his neck Lex could just see through the partition windows. The fear etched on the faces of Albertine and Wilberforce sent a surge of adrenaline through him. He writhed wildly and blindly against his bonds, every sinew stretched, every muscle straining. The blood roared in his ears. He was aware of an animalistic wail coming from his own throat, a wordless ululation of rage that didn’t sound human even to him. Soon enough he was exhausted. He sank back against the gurney’s cold, unyielding metal, panting like a dog. All he had to show for his efforts was a sore wrist, which he had chafed until it bled.
“It’s no use, sport,” said Buckler from the gurney adjacent. “We’re going nowhere.”
; In Lab 1, Finisterre was attempting to ingratiate himself with Couleuvre. His low voice resonated through the windows.
“Listen, man, I can make you rich. Super rich. Name your price. I’ll give you anything you want. Girls? I can get you girls. Car? I’ll buy you a fuckin’ Ferrari. Just—just don’t do this, okay? Whatever you’ve got in mind, you don’t have to do it to me. I can be your friend, the best friend you ever had.” Around his sunglasses his bald pate glistened with sweat.
“I do not need any of that stuff,” Couleuvre replied. “I have a higher calling, brother.”
Finisterre switched to threats. “For God’s sake, I’m the Garfish. You do not fuck with the Garfish.”
“But I am not fucking with you,” said an unperturbed Couleuvre. “I am just making you into more than you could ever dream of being.”
Finisterre’s bravado collapsed. “Don’t kill me,” he said, his voice clogged by a sob.
“It is not killing. Do not look at it like that. It is granting you new life. You are a Baron’s man, so you should appreciate what is coming. The death that you have brought to so many others is not going to stake a claim on you. You are going to surpass death. Not everyone gets the chance to die and still live.”
“Take him.” Finisterre nodded strenuously at Leroy. “Him instead of me.”
Leroy mouthed off indignantly in response. His allegiance to his employer had just found its limits.
“Why, when I can have you both?” Couleuvre summoned the nearest zuvembie, then paused over Finisterre and Leroy. An index finger hopped from side to side. He appeared to be performing an eenie-meenie-minie-mo method of elimination.
His finger alighted on Leroy. He gave the zuvembie the go-ahead, and the undead creature clamped a hand over the henchman’s face, covering his mouth and pinching his nostrils shut.
Leroy took a minute and a half to suffocate. His eyes bulged. His whole face seemed to swell up. His heels rattled a tattoo on the floor. Finally his eyes rolled upwards, the irises disappearing from view, leaving just the capillary-crazed whites showing. His head lolled.
Couleuvre administered a dose of V.I.V.E.M.O.R.T. into Leroy’s arm and carried out a perfunctory vodou ritual over the corpse—incense and chanting.
“Soon be ready,” he said, and moved on to Finisterre.
The drug lord was hyperventilating with alarm and terror. He moaned, swaying his head to and fro. Lex could not help feeling a small twinge of satisfaction. The Garfish was getting no more than he deserved. He was also, in extremis, showing his true colours. He wasn’t facing death bravely. Like any bully, he was, when the tables were turned, nothing but a coward. He babbled, begged, cajoled, prayed, wept.
Couleuvre remained unmoved. A quiet instruction to the zuvembie, and Finisterre was subjected to the same treatment as his henchman. He took longer to die. He was taller, with a greater lung capacity. Two minutes passed, three, before asphyxiation was complete. He slumped sideways, and the sunglasses slipped from his head onto the floor.
Again, Couleuvre injected and incanted.
Leroy was beginning to revive. A groan of horror escaped Wilberforce’s lips. The dead henchman’s neck and shoulders spasmed, as though little jolts of electricity were being shot through him. His jaw started to work round and round in a cud-chewing motion. His eyeballs rolled back down, revealing his irises again, which now bore a pale yellow tinge like all the other zuvembies’. He tried to rise but was prevented by the lengths of flex securing him. Couleuvre took a scalpel and sliced through the bonds. Leroy tottered to his feet and stood, stoop-shouldered and obedient, ready to serve his new master.
Finisterre was soon upright too. The great gangly drug lord cut a humbled figure. His expensive clothing and accoutrements hung limply off him, now just so much gaudy, hollow finery. No longer did he seem arrogant and untouchable. He had become merely another member of Couleuvre’s zuvembie horde, an undead underling. A man who had ruled Manzanilla through fear and brute force had become a creature with no needs or desires of his own and no will save Couleuvre’s.
The bokor, by this time, was all set to create a third new zuvembie. He gaze turned on Wilberforce, who himself couldn’t tear his eyes from Finisterre and Leroy. The dark miracle that had just occurred was beyond Wilberforce’s comprehension. Lex could see an edge of madness in his eyes. Death might actually come as a blessing, sparing Wilberforce a plummet into out-and-out insanity.
Couleuvre was poised to give his zuvembie assassin the kill command. Abruptly, he raised his head. He turned this way and that, questing, quizzical. Something had caught his attention. Some sound?
A broad smile buttered its way across his features.
“They have found it,” he exclaimed. “They have breached through. Bondye stands revealed. Bondye in all his glory.”
Without another word he hurried out of the laboratory, leaving several stationary zuvembies, including the two recent additions to their ranks, along with a perplexed Wilberforce and a relieved Albertine.
The two cousins had been granted a reprieve.
But for how long?
LEX LAY BACK on the gurney, numb with despair. Events in Lab 1 had cast a pall over the people in Lab 2. The atmosphere, already grim, now verged on desolate. Nobody met anyone else’s eye. Nobody seemed to want to speak.
“Man’s got his bomb,” Sampson finally said. “I guess it really is game over.”
“It may not work,” said Buckler. “Jeez, how long’s the damn thing been sitting there? Thirty years? Wires and contacts could be corroded. The trigger mechanism could have seized up. The plutonium core’s probably decayed beyond viability. Odds are it’ll go off with a fizzle and a fart instead of an almighty bang.”
“You think, LT?” said Tartaglione.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to look on the bright side. It’s what I do.”
“Yeah, chief,” said Sampson, “you’re always a regular ray of sunshine. Famous for it. All the bars we hang out at, the guys all say, ‘You know that Tom Buckler? He’s just one big bottle of happy juice, he is.’”
“Damn straight,” said Buckler. “But I’ve got to tell you, all of you...”
“Hell no, please don’t get schmaltzy on us.”
“Not intending to, Tartag. All’s I was going to say was, don’t be afraid.”
“Kind of late for that, don’t you reckon? I think I already peed myself a little tiny bit.”
“I mean of dying. Because I believe—no, I know—there’s something on the other side. There’s more.”
“You know?” said Lex.
“Sure I do. I’ve been there.”
Lex recalled a conversation he had had earlier in the day. “Sarajevo.”
“Who told you?”
It wasn’t betraying a confidence. She was dead, after all. “Morgenstern. She said something happened to you a few years back, in Sarajevo.”
“Something did,” said Buckler.
“But you prefer not to talk about it.”
“I do. But I guess, in the situation we’re in, it might be, I don’t know, instructive?”
“Go on, then. If it’ll help.”
“You really want to hear it?”
Lex did his best to shrug. “Why not? Isn’t as if I’ve got much else to do at present—apart from wait to die.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
SARAJEVO
TEAM THIRTEEN FLEW into Butmir International Airport on a freezing, fogbound winter morning. This was about five years ago, maybe nearer six. Heading up the squad was Master Chief Eugene Exton, an ROTC graduate who had racked up hundreds of hours of mission time in some of the hairiest combat zones on the planet. A stand-up guy who took shit from no one and gave you shit only if you deserved it.
Buckler was the junior member of the team, the FNG—Fucking New Guy—having been a Thirteener for just three months. The very first operation he’d gone on had involved a nest of vampires, and that had been a goddamn eye-opener all right. Baptism by fire. He was still f
inding his feet in the crazy, fucked-up, Stephen-King-meets-James-Bond world of Team Thirteen.
Their objective was an industrial park in Sarajevo’s Novi Grad municipality, specifically a warehouse unit that had been turned into a nightclub. A decade after peace had come to post-Yugoslavia, the kids were dancing again, deafening themselves with dubstep or techno or some other such moron music while necking down the kind of pharmaceuticals that made that type of racket bearable.
Only, at this particular venue the happy vibes had turned to screams one night. The warehouse had become a slaughterhouse.
Casualties had topped a hundred and fifty. The survivors, few that they were, claimed to have seen ghosts whisking through the crowd of ravers, slitting throats, gutting bellies, ripping out hearts and spines.
The Bosnia-Herzegovina authorities publicly dismissed these accounts as nonsense. A bunch of kids off their faces, tripping balls on ketamine and ecstasy? Amid lasers and flashing lights and clouds of dry ice? Of course they hadn’t seen ghosts. The official line was that gangsters, Russian mafia most likely, had rampaged through the place with machetes and samurai swords, settling some grudge or debt they had with the nightclub’s owners.
The unofficial line was somewhat different. Somebody somewhere in the national government knew there was more to the incident than met the eye and knew, too, about Team Thirteen. Calls were made, and while, on the face of it, it wasn’t an American problem, there had been American boots on the ground during the Balkan crisis, so the US had some sort of moral obligation in the region. It was, it seemed, a kind of legacy issue.
Because, see, in that selfsame warehouse, back in 1995, there was a massacre of Bosniaks—Bosnian Muslims. On the orders of General Ratko Mladić a couple of hundred of them had been rounded up by the Serbian paramilitary unit known as the Scorpions, marched into the warehouse, and scythed down by machinegun fire. UN peacekeepers had found the bodies the next morning, led to them by an informant.
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