by Jon Land
“Alive here.”
“Ever so true. The family bought out the Orlando Orfei chain, and I saw myself as the perfect person to manage it.”
“I understand.”
“Not until you’ve been here awhile, you won’t. Nobody asks any questions. They accept you for what you are and leave it at that. Your life can begin fresh the day you walk in. You’re not the first person to come to us the way you did, and you won’t be the last.”
“Except I’m not staying.”
“But you’re not about to find your friend McCracken without a hint of where to start looking, either.”
“I have to try.”
“And I understand that. What you gotta understand is you’ve got to be ready to move fast if things take a turn for the worst. That’s where we come in.” Patty rolled the beer bottle between her palms. “We? As in the people here who are going to help me?”
Lynnford rose and tapped his cane toward the window. “They’re all working now. We’ll get the ball rolling as soon as they break for lunch.”
“Are you happy now, Benjamin?” asked Pierce, standing in the doorway of the room that would be the tall man’s home for the foreseeable future.
Benjamin stared at him for a time. “I won’t be happy until we’re all together, until all this is finished.”
“Which will be very soon,” said Nathan, who had come up behind Pierce. “He wants to see us.”
“Now?” Benjamin asked fearfully.
“He called us here for a reason,” Nathan answered. “It’s time. Or damn close to it.”
“Let’s go,” Pierce suggested.
“Yes,” Nathan agreed. “Let’s.”
And they waited for Benjamin who, shrugging his shoulders, joined them in the corridor. The bunker was located some ten stories beneath ground level, constructed at a cost of nearly a billion dollars over the course of the past decade. All the work had been overseen by the man who had at last summoned them here. As far as they knew, this bunker was one of several scattered strategically across the United States, safe and insulated from anything that occurs on the surface above.
As a result, the air in the bunker had a sterile, antiseptic scent to it. Overdry, it played hell with the sinuses, but the slightly larger oxygen content kept the men from noticing. The worst feature of all, each would have probably said, was the lack of windows. With no world beyond to relate to, there was nothing to provide life with scale. Nothing, that is, other than the plan that had brought them all down here.
Nathan led Pierce and Benjamin to an elevator, which they rode to the very bottom floor of the complex. It was lit in a dull red haze and was colder than all the others. The lack of light, coupled with the absence of windows, was maddening. Stomachs clenched, they passed through an archway and into an even darker conference hall. The hall’s ceiling lights were encased by drop-off coverings that spread the light sideways instead of down. Everything else in the room was pure, pristine white. Untouched, virginal. Pierce thought it looked a little like snow.
Three places had been set at the huge conference table.
“Sit,” came a command spoken from the darkened slab that was the front of the room. “Please, my children, sit.”
The voice echoed through the hall’s sprawling limits, emerging in a slightly garbled, watery tone. Only the outline of its bearer was visible; a shadow hunched in a chair. What little life there was in his voice came from the echo. Pierce, Nathan, and Benjamin did as they were told.
“My children,” the voice started, “I am happy to report that all is proceeding on schedule.”
With that the hall’s light dimmed even more and a map of the entire continental United States was projected on the wall behind the shadow’s voice. The map’s glow cast his frame in an eerie translucence, outline bathed in a spill of light that might have come from the heavens themselves. Slivers of the light glowed red when the next instant brought twelve red splotches to the map, scattered irregularly over the United States and focused amid the nation’s largest centers of population. Accordingly, by far the heaviest concentration was along the Eastern seaboard. Six red lights dotted New York through Miami, while the West Coast and Midwest showed only three each.
“Everything is going as planned,” the voice explained emotionlessly. “No adjustments have had to be made in our timetable as a result of the complications.”
“Than the matter has been settled?” Pierce asked.
“Not quite,” answered the voice as the intensified glow from the red lights bathed the wall like blood. “I regret that it has now become necessary to alter our strategy to a very minor degree. One of the disciples must be replaced.”
“It was McCracken, wasn’t it?” Benjamin asked the question tentatively.
“Our efforts to eliminate him in Brazil failed, yes.”
“You’re saying you sent one of the disciples in and he failed?” Nathan asked incredulously.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Is McCracken that good?”
“We knew he was from the beginning. In reality, we have learned much from the encounter. The details are sketchy, but they provide a lesson, nonetheless. We won’t make the same mistake again.”
“But this mistake has cost us, hasn’t it?” challenged Pierce.
“Do not take that tone of voice with me, child.”
“Your precautions to deal with McCracken were inadequate. He’s faced similar battles before and won them all.”
“Not against the likes of our legion.”
“What happened to the disciple in Brazil?”
“Misjudgement, by all accounts.”
“No. As long as McCracken is still at large, our operation is in jeopardy.”
The shape took a deep breath. “We will watch him smolder in the ruins of his world. When we rise to claim the ruins, we will crush him like an ant. He represents everything you were conceived to destroy, the type of American who crushes everything in his path in the same way his nation once tried to destroy us by every means available. Your existences came about in response to this, and for nearly fifty years we have waited for the day that is soon to come. You three have helped chart everything. You three above all should know.”
“We want to be sure,” said Benjamin in conciliatory fashion. “That’s all.”
“McCracken has disappeared,” reported the shape. “But we have effectively isolated him. When he surfaces, we’ll know it. He is alone. No one in Rio would dare befriend him. He has become a pariah.”
“Why?”
The shape laughed a laugh that sounded more like the shrill wind ahead of a thunderstorm. “Apparently witnesses have placed him at the Bali Bar. He’s been blamed for the murder of Fernando Da Sa.”
“The news is bad, Kami-san.”
Tiguro Nagami had found Takahashi outside in the garden of the estate in Kyoto. The day had given itself up to twilight, the only time Takahashi’s pained eyes allowed him to drink in the rich sights, however much of their beauty might have been lost without the sun. “I felt as much,” he replied.
“The woman escaped us, and we are no closer to finding McCracken.”
“There is more. The tone of your voice speaks of it.”
“I have collated the reports of what occurred in the Botanical Garden. Twelve additional bodies were found, Kami-san…All savagely killed.”
Takahashi turned to face him. “Then it begins.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
“Why should I be?”
“Because up to now we could never be totally sure the enemy had succeeded.”
“Children of the Black Rain,” Takahashi muttered.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“Nothing. I trust we still have a chance of locating the woman and McCracken.”
“In any event, we have hope.”
“But it is dwindling, isn’t it, Tiguro?” Takahashi turned and gazed off into the garden for a long moment before shifting ba
ck toward Nagami. “Weetz will be in Philadelphia tomorrow. “
“His report confirms all is ready.”
“Then our battle continues. The death of the vice president will set them back, Tiguro. That is something, anyway.”
Johnny Wareagle stood in the center of the Delta Airlines terminal in Boston’s Logan Airport. He had parked his jeep close to the first terminal he came to and had spent the last several hours wandering about from one concourse to another. In his mind was the feeling that there was somewhere else he needed to be. A destination was calling out to him with a purpose all its own. The Delta terminal was no different in most respects from the others, but for some reason Johnny stopped in the center of its concourse.
In that moment the existence of the enemy was very real to him. In that moment, between breaths and heartbeats, he felt himself enter the mind of his greatest adversary. The concourse went black, and Johnny felt chaos and cool processed rage. He felt a soul cold enough to be frozen solid and a manitou that was formed of purpose and nothing more. Animals had more soul, more spirit than this. He felt he was glimpsing a machine, albeit one that gave off a foul odor of sulphur and rotten eggs.
Something lay dead in the blackness, and Johnny conjured memories of the jungle place he had walked through with Blainey. It was there that some part of his foe had been killed and replaced with another. The dead part might have reached out occasionally, but his foe never reached back. In the last instant before he slipped back, Johnny felt his adversary’s incredible power, an enjoyment of death equaled only by the capacity to bring it on.
Johnny opened his eyes, realized he was sweating. He had reached into a Wakinyan’s head for the first time, and a portion of his mind had come away scorched and seared. The night before, the spirits had brought his ancestors to him while he knelt by the fire. He could not see their faces, but their voices were clear. They told him the time for his Hanbelachia, his vision quest, had come at last. Everything he was, everything he had tried to be, was merely a prelude to the task before him. There would be only success or death, and nothing in the middle.
Johnny wanted to ask them about the hellfire, wanted to ask them about the obstacles he had overcome then, only to be faced with others. Was there no end? Would this test give way similarly to another? But his ancestors were gone, and there was only the breeze.
Johnny had smiled then. Life was a circle, after all, and a circle has no definable end or beginning. Strangely, McCracken seemed to have realized this ahead of him. He did not search for meanings or purpose; he merely acted. They shared the same circle, but seldom the same space in it.
Johnny started walking, his seven-foot, three-hundred-pound frame moving with the grace of a jungle cat even along the concourse. Many gawked, but few paid him a second glance. Or maybe by the time they tried to, he was gone. He gazed up at a screen listing departures, his eyes locking on the second one from the bottom: a Delta flight leaving in two hours.
For Philadelphia.
Chapter 23
MCCRACKEN CAME AWAKE slowly, clawing past his eyelids for the light he felt beyond him.
“He’s coming around, Reverend,” he heard a young voice call from above him.
“Let me have a look, then. Let me have a look.”
Blaine’s eyes opened to an eerie half-light and the sound of water dripping somewhere nearby. A rank odor filled his nostrils, a putrid stench mellowed enough by an anomalous cold breeze to be tolerable. Suddenly a face attached to a shock of raggedy, long hair was peering down at him, twisting to get a better view.
“How you be then, governor?” asked the man, with a shadow of a British accent.
“If I’m dead, this better not be heaven.”
“Hell be more like it—and even that might be giving it too much credit,” said the man, and Blaine saw a pair of medium blue eyes set in a face layered with month-old beard stubble. “You’re in Harocimha, largest favela of them all. Home for me and my boys.”
Blaine was aware of feet shuffling toward him, the sound like rats lunging for a meal. It made him bolt upright, and a thunderclap erupted in his head.
“Easy does it, governor,” the man said, easing him back down to what Blaine realized was a straw mattress placed on top of a rickety set of bedsprings. In the next instant, the two of them were engulfed by a sea of young faces and eyes, smaller ones pushing their way forward to have a look and being shoved backward for their efforts. Gazing about, Blaine saw he was in some sort of shanty. Poorly layered brick and clapboard formed the interior of the structure, cutouts for windows, but no windows present, allowing the only light in. The interior was multileveled and steep. Only the remnants of a floor were visible, the rest being hard-packed dirt and rock. McCracken turned toward the sound of dripping water and saw a deep ravine running from outside the shanty down through it, carrying what could only be raw sewage based on the scent.
“Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” was all Blaine could think to say.
This time he succeeded in propping himself up a little. The young eyes and soiled faces backed off a bit. Blaine smelled unwashed hair and bodies mixing with the other scents sifting through the cavernous mustiness. He recalled now a similar scent as he was dragged down into a tunnel from the alley behind the Bali Bar. It was all coming back to him, and little of it was pleasant. Splotches of memory were missing, but he did recall an agonizing walk up a labyrinth of stone steps, his arms propped upon young shoulders and the pain everywhere. The steps had undoubtedly led here to the Harocimha favela, Rio’s most infamous slum.
“Be glad it ain’t anywhere but here, governor,” the raggedy-haired adult told him. “Here no one can find you no matter how hard they try. Here nobody can find anyone. Great thing about the favela.”
McCracken was finally clear on where he was, but not on how he had gotten there. He knew more than a million natives called the favelas of Rio their home. Little more than shacks hammered out of wood, stone, and abandoned brick, many of the structures would be washed down the mountain come the rainy season. Others were more sturdily built and even boasted running water and electricity. But the sewage system was no more than a series of channels like the one running through his hideout, draining down the mountain and into the sea.
“How long have I been here?” he asked.
“You been in and out for damn near a day and a half now.”
“That makes today…”
“Monday, governor,” the man said, and extended a boney hand covered to the lower knuckles by what had once been a glove. “Name’s Reverend Jim Hope. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
Blaine took it reluctantly. At the same time his eyes swept through the boys gathered about him. He counted twenty, ranging in age from seven to maybe sixteen. Their skin colors seemed as disparate as their ages. There were blacks, mulattos, well-tanned Portuguese who could have passed for Americans, and various levels in-between. “For a man of God, you been awful busy procreating.”
The comment took a while to sink in. “This flock’s mine in the spiritual sense, not the biblical.” He slapped his arms around two of the boys’ shoulders. “They ain’t the product of my loins much as the product of my conscience. Homeless till I gathered them here. I educates them, too, in the ways of man and machine.”
McCracken noticed the bed cots and straw mattresses laid about in no discernible pattern over the crusty floor. Propped up on and against the wall were a number of battery-powered lanterns. There were tables and chairs, an ancient refrigerator with a whining motor, and a working gas stove rimmed with squat steel cannisters containing fuel. He saw cupboards and chests, along with a sink overflowing with dirty dishes that might have been there forever. McCracken turned his attention to himself and checked the tightly wrapped tape enclosing his ribs, then touched the sutures and bandages dotting his face.
“Teach one of them to be a doctor, Reverend?”
“No, governor. But the favela meets all needs. For a pric
e, of course.”
“And just how did you pay it?”
Jim Hope removed his gaunt arms from the shoulders of the two boys and stuck his hands inside his great coat. They emerged fingering a host of wallets, billfolds, and jewelry.
“In cash, governor,” he said, smirking.
“I see what you mean by educating them,” said Blaine.
“Lucky for you it was, too. If my boys ain’t’ve been in the Bali Bar when they was, you’d be a dead man now, I reckon.”
“To pick a pocket or two, right?”
“No, we stick to the tourists to earn our keep. Don’t we, Edson?”
A boy who could have passed for American tossed an arm upon Reverend Jim’s shoulder.
“Please, sir. I haven’t eaten in three days,” Edson said mournfully.
“Well, then,” said Reverend Jim, mocking the motion of extracting a bill from one of his many wallets. In the next instant a second boy had snatched the wallet from his hand and mocked escape.
“This was the streets, governor, he’d be two blocks away by now.” Reverend Jim accepted the wallet back. “Good job, Marcello. You, too, Edson.”
Both were smiling triumphantly.
McCracken sat all the way upright, and this time Reverend Hope’s young charges didn’t shrink away.
“They like you, governor. Said you handled yourself pretty damn well. Man like you’d fit in just fine with this bunch.”
“Sure, and we can tell prison stories by the firelight.”
“You’d be better off not making fun, governor.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The truth is, I’ve really got to be on my way.”
“No easy task in itself, I’m afraid,” Reverend Hope said. He pointed to the ceiling. “Men back in the city seem pretty intent on finding ya since two nights back.”