by Jon Land
Reston Ainsley had no answer.
Part Three
The Legion
New York:
Saturday, November 30, 1991; 3:00 A.M.
Chapter 17
THE WOMAN HAD DIED much too quickly. She gave up her life to him as easily as passing a quarter to a beggar, and he had packed it away in his pocket with a painful awareness of how little it weighed.
He sat on the edge of the bed, feeling that he owned the darkness. He liked the night, for it made him feel more superior than the day. When it was light he could be seen as well as see. But his eyes could pierce the darkness while his prey had no hope of seeing him. Since leaving Home Base, he had done most of his sleeping in the day.
Of course, he did not sleep much. Sleep meant hours lost to inactivity, and this he did not tolerate very well. Sleep also meant dreams, and these he hated most of all—because they were the one thing he could not control. From the first time he had ventured into the woods and killed the three Indians that night, his dreams had been twisted and difficult to comprehend. He wanted to comprehend; he had to. Control was something he relied on. He had learned anyone, anything, could be controlled. There were always ways.
The name they had given him at Home Base was Abraham. The others had been named after the twelve disciples of Christ. Of course, they were different from him.
He was alone.
Abraham could not have explained why he was different from the others. He could say only that he was better. He had seldom worked with them, and, even more seldom, interacted. Interaction was kept to a minimum, in any case, since it could actually prove counterproductive. Only alone can a man confront that part of himself that must be bettered and better it.
And Abraham was better.
He still had memories of the person he had been before coming to Home Base, but they mostly came only in his dreams. This was another reason to loathe the sleep that brought them. Thoughts themselves made for comparisons, and comparisons made him uneasy. He recalled the time he’d been part of a secret military action against a drug lord in Thailand. A shrapnel blast had torn up his face. Plastic surgeons had had plenty of sewing to do, and, for days after the bandages came off, Abraham had refused to look in the mirror. He was afraid of not recognizing the person he saw.
And now that person was gone. Today he was, simply, what he could do. A man must be defined in terms of his capabilities. More than anything else, it seemed, Home Base had changed his methods of looking at others. They had not had time to prepare him and the twelve disciples for life outside the jungle and it showed. Much of what had impressed him previously, impressed him no more. Money was nothing besides something to help make preparations for what he must do. People lived behind facades that must be meaningless even to themselves. Weakness, everywhere weakness. Could it be this was the same world he had left all those months ago?
How many months?
Abraham tried to pin the answer down, then gave up when it didn’t seem to matter. The hotel’s flickering neon light penetrated the torn slivers of the window curtain. It made the blood on the woman’s naked corpse look shiny. Abraham put his hand in the blood that had pooled on the sheet beneath her. He brought the hand to his nose, expecting it to smell of more than salty copper. Its scent was everywhere, but the scent was meaningless and insignificant.
Insignificant, and yet this was the scent of life itself, freed of its paltriness only in death. How ironic. So much Abraham saw now that had been denied him before Home Base. Once, long ago, in the memories forced upon him by his dreams, he had seen pleasure in life. Now there could be pleasure only in death. Vast pleasure beyond anything he thought possible. He wanted the pleasure as much as he needed it.
Abraham had hoped the woman would last longer. He had found her down on the crowded street. She had arranged for the room while he had hovered out of the desk clerk’s line of vision. If the man ever noticed him, Abraham would simply kill him. He might choose to kill him anyway.
He wiped his fingers on the soiled sheet. The woman continued to regard him with bulging glazed eyes. When Abraham had killed for the first time he thought that the death stare looked strangely familiar, but he couldn’t place it until he looked in the mirror. His own steel-blue eyes held the same emptiness, the same dark vacuum. He wondered what it felt like to be dead, then realized he knew already.
When you were dead, you couldn’t be hurt. The fears and pains of life were at last vanquished. Abraham had no fear. Abraham couldn’t be hurt.
He stared into the woman’s dead eyes. He tried to straighten her head to line up with his, but it wobbled on her neck. He had snapped it like a twig and then, with the woman spasming, had driven his hardened fingers straight into her stomach. Made them rigid and bent them slightly back. Felt the blood soak thick as he probed for a souvenir to take out with him. He locked on something sinewy that resisted at first, but then came free. Abraham had left it there, somewhere in the pool of gore beneath her.
Turning from the corpse, he rose from the bed and moved toward the bathroom. The single light did not work; Abraham regarded himself in the cracked mirror through the darkness. He had to stoop down to get any view at all, since the mirror was positioned for someone considerably shorter than his six foot six. As always, he did not recognize his face. It was not an altogether unpleasant face. It was rather soft, except for the scars that had outlived his several surgeries. A few dribbles of sweat slid down his forehead from his straw-colored hair. Abraham kept it cropped short, brushed straight back.
Only cold water came from the tap, and Abraham washed the blood from his hands as best he could. Even that slight exertion forced the muscles of his arms and shoulders to pulse and ripple. He looked up into the mirror from his bent-over stance and saw his face with the cracks in the mirror down the center of it. The result was a carnival-like impression that should have disturbed him, but didn’t. Abraham felt only then that he was gazing at his true self, and it was a picture he quite liked.
There was a shuffling sound from the corridor, and he spun quickly and tensed. The sound evaporated as quickly as it came, and Abraham found himself facing the door of the dingy room. It was time to leave, anyway. His work for the night was finished. Soon his real work, the work he had been created for, would begin. Abraham looked forward to that with an excitement akin to what he knew in the days before Home Base.
Yes, he reckoned, closing the door behind him in the hallway. Very soon…
The cabin lay in the heart of the woods, blind and isolated. It was simple in design, a two-story structure built against a hillside at the edge of the Rocky Mountains.
A tall man turned from looking out a second-floor window that faced the driveway.
“I can’t see the guards,” he told the others.
“It’s all right,” replied a stout man who was seated on a couch covered in plaid fabric. “They would have called us on the walkie-talkie if there was trouble.”
“What if they didn’t have time?” the tall man demanded. “We could be alone in here, dammit. We could be in danger!” He turned to look out the window again.
“The trip wires would have sent us a signal,” replied the third man in the room, the only one of the three who wore his hair long.
“Trip wires wouldn’t mean anything to them if they got this far. You know that.”
Just then, one of the patrolling guards emerged from the woods and stopped to light a cigarette. The tall man turned away from the window, but did not breathe easier.
“See,” said the stout man on the couch.
“They won’t be able to find us, Benjamin,” said the longhaired man, joining the taller one by the window.
“And what if you’re wrong, what then, Pierce? And don’t try to tell me your security will keep them out if they discovered our location.”
“We’ll be gone from here before they get that chance.”
“Your reassurances no longer hold much weight with me, Pierce,” the fat man
said. “Your plan was enacted to guard precisely against this eventuality!”
“And the plan succeeded. To a point.”
“Not a great enough one in my mind. We should strike out at them while we have the opportunity.”
“In time, Benjamin.”
“If we have it, you mean.” The tall man swung toward the stout one seated on the couch. “What do you say to this, Nathan?”
“We have lost track of our pursuers, Benjamin. They could be anywhere now.”
“Stalking us? Searching for us?”
“They have no reason to. You know that as well as I do.”
“All I know is that this hasn’t gone as we expected it to. I refuse to accept anything at face value.”
“Stop whining,” roared Nathan. “You stand there worrying about our lives when there is so much more at stake.” He looked toward Pierce. “We must face the fact that we may have to rethink our entire strategy.”
“All is proceeding as planned, in spite of the setbacks we have suffered,” Pierce responded.
“No,” Benjamin said vehemently. “The final phase has been enacted without proper safeguards, without the very precautions that have dominated our lives.”
“And what choice did we have?” Pierce shot back at him. “I thought we had gotten them all.”
“We all did,” acknowledged Nathan. “But Benjamin is right on that point. The fact is, we didn’t.”
“Could we find him now?” Benjamin asked.
“Eliminating him would not keep the killers from finishing their work. Besides, we have used that very strategy to our own benefit.”
“And how long do you think it is before they realize the truth?”
“Long enough.”
“And in the meantime we stay here. Waiting.” Benjamin looked furtively out the window again.
“We move to our final destination tomorrow.”
“That is supposed to reassure me?”
“I don’t really care whether it does or not.”
Benjamin stormed back from the window. “And what about the door left open back down in Brazil? Are we to feel safe in spite of that, too?”
“On the contrary, we have enlisted the services of a most reliable ally to help us close it.”
“Really?”
“Blaine McCracken.”
Benjamin stood very still and waited for Pierce to explain.
Johnny Wareagle knelt barechested in the cold late autumn air. There may have been a time long past when the chill would have raised goose bumps on his flesh. He actually thought he remembered the last instance. It was a night in the hellfire, when the cold and rain were so bad that the team had to camp for the night. Wareagle took the first guard duty with his waterlogged poncho for company. The cold wetness had brought the gooseflesh.
Then the Black Hearts had come, and the gooseflesh had vanished.
He had never felt it again, he supposed, because his mind associated its rising with the coming of the ambush party that night. Johnny had killed them all himself, before the rest of the unit awoke. Whenever the gooseflesh should have come, his mind retreated into the heat of the battle, and the chill vanished.
The muscles of Wareagle’s massive upper body tensed and relaxed in the breeze. He sought comfort from the trees and brush, from nature, but nature refused him. This was his land, his home, where he came to ground, where the spirits could hold the demons of the past out so he could sample a peace he knew didn’t belong to him. Today, though, the spirits had deserted him, just as they had in Brazil.
Why? Johnny wondered.
The question did not frustrate or perturb him. Their absence implied a lesson he needed to learn. A host of birds landed at the edge of the clearing, and Johnny reached into his pouch for the feed he carried with him whenever he ventured into the woods. He filled his palm and extended it outward, waiting for them to approach and eat from his hand as they always did.
The birds waddled a bit nearer, testing the air, then stopped as if struck by an invisible barrier. They came no closer. Still Johnny held the feed out in his usual way, waiting patiently.
They’re afraid of me.
The realization struck him like a burst from a jackhammer. He was no longer the person the birds knew and trusted. The essence of his manitou had changed.
First the spirits had stopped speaking to him. And now this.
The connection was inarguable. Yet the spirits had not deserted him. Their silence was counsel in itself. They had helped him reconcile himself to the past. But the future they would leave to him. Johnny could see it in all its obscurity, had seen it since first setting foot in Brazil.
Somewhere there was an enemy he had to face, an enemy who would test the very foundations on which he had built his life. All else, from the hellfire on, had been merely the proving ground leading up to this final rite of passage. The guidance of the spirits had taken him this far, but now he must face his Hanbelachia, his vision quest, alone.
He was changing and evolving. Soon he would face an enemy who would determine whether the rest of his days would be spent as a true warrior or with his ancestors. The enemy was vast and powerful, as black as the heart of a moonless night with an ice storm for a soul.
Out there now waiting.
Waiting for him.
Sal Belamo got Patty set up in her own personal office. She had always loved computers. She had never set out to sea without a portable along. This computer was simple enough to use, but it was powerful enough to analyze data coming in from an incredible number of government sources. Sal knew all the right access codes and passed them along.
Patty had started by calling up every bit of information available on the list of victims she already had. There were fifteen now with the names McCracken had added. She read everything on them she could find, much of the information classified.
The first part of the answer came to her quite by surprise. She was simply staring dreamily at the frozen screen when an item caught her eye. A simple fact and nothing more that made her think of her father. But it reminded her of something else, and she scanned fast to another entry.
A chill moved up her spine.
She spent the next hour rechecking seven more of the victims. Here was a connection.
Incredible. But what did it mean?
She resisted the urge to call Sal right now. She was on a roll and she knew it. This clue would lead her to others. The truth was within her grasp.
Chapter 18
“YOU ASK ME, chief, be a good idea if you let me ride shotgun with you back to the jungle,” Sal Belamo offered stubbornly. They had stopped outside Dulles Airport in the predawn hours of Saturday, where a government jet was waiting to fly Blaine McCracken to Rio de Janeiro.
“I don’t want Patty left alone, Sal. It’s as simple as that.”
“You don’t trust Maxie’s people to do the job?”
“I don’t trust anyone right now besides you and Johnny. Something about this whole business smells wrong to me, but I can’t pin down where it’s coming from. You and I go to Rio together, there’s no one up here to pick up the pieces.”
“How ’bout the Indian?”
“Johnny’s got his own stake in this.”
“You guys seem to read each other clear as the morning paper.”
“I carried him through a mine field once, and he’s been carrying me ever since.”
When Sal frowned, his twisted nose pointed to the right. He reached into his pocket and came out with a pair of clips for Blaine’s Heckler and Koch 9-mm pistol.
“Well, if you don’t want me tagging along, how about I give you a little going away present?”
“I’ve got plenty of bullets.”
“Not like these, you don’t. Got a friend who makes ’em up special. Puts a glass capsule inside each with a mixture of ground glass and picric acid.”
“Potent stuff.”
“Extremely shock sensitive, he would say. Anyway, mixing it with the ground glass
makes it less sensitive and allows it to be fired from a gun. Once it goes bang, the bullet distorts, which breaks the glass capsule and allows the acid to mix with lead.”
“Forming lead picric,” Blaine concluded.
“Big boom when it hits its target. I call ’em Splats, since that’s what happens to whatever they hit.”
McCracken accepted the clips, noticing they were stored in clear plastic, which was carefully molded over their contours.
“Oh, yeah,” Sal added. “Thing is, you don’t want to get them wet. My friend says it undermines the explosives’ stability. Point is, you don’t load Splats until you’re near sure you’re gonna need them.”
Blaine ran his fingers over the plastic. “What kind of firepower we talking about?”
Belamo winked. “Fire one of these into a watermelon and you won’t even have any seeds left to plant.”
“I’m not hunting fruit, Sal.”
“Splats don’t discriminate, chief. They’ll turn anything into paste.”
They parted right after that, and Blaine’s thoughts turned to tracking down the only man he knew of who could shed light on what had gone on at the installation in the Amazon: Jonas Parker. For some reason, Parker had been absent during the time of the massacre. After it, he would have known he was a marked man in grave need of protection. Assuming he had been successful in that quest, he would still be in hiding now. The trick would be finding him.
Toward that end, McCracken called Carlos Salomao, the man who had drawn both him and Johnny Wareagle to Brazil in the first place.
“If you were in Brazil and needed to disappear fast, who would you go to, Carlos?”
“That is simple, amigo. Fernando Da Sa. Ever hear of him?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
Fernando Da Sa, Carlos explained, was the most powerful crime lord in Rio—and thus the entire country. As head of the Commando Vermelho, or Red Command, he controlled narcotics, weapons, gambling, prostitution, even the lotteries in the Rio mountainside slums. The Brazilian police were far more corruptible than their American counterparts and, as a result, Da Sa operated virtually untouched.