“Who was?”
“Don’t know. No faces.”
I pondered.
“Military,” I said. “People in uniform. They tried to force me…” I shook my head. “I wanted someone dead. But not Brant. I don’t think.”
“So, you just thought of a nameless, faceless military authority dead. Right?”
“I just told you, Mike,” I said. “So how long do you suppose it’ll take for the luggage to get here? Maybe I should go get a rental car.”
“We’ll handle that for you.”
“So, you can put a tracking device in the car?”
“It makes life easier all around,” he said.
“Fair enough. Get me a big SUV, four-wheel drive. The terrain around Amanda’s cabin is too rough for a car, but I guess you know that,” I said.
He shot me a look that said enough.
“Sure. About this dream. You just thought a high-ranking military official dead?” Mike said.
“I don’t know what the rank was. I don’t know what branch of service. I don’t even know what country. Give it a rest, friend,” I said.
I tried to recall details. Nothing came.
“Did you make any motions or anything? Any ritual?”
“Mike, it was a dream. One of too many. Over and over. I spend my nights killing off faceless people. It’s been non-stop since the water episode.”
“That’s interesting, Sebastian, because the four-star admiral in charge of you, the project around you, also died yesterday. Early thinking is some kind of air bubble in the brain. His brain just sort of exploded. They’re doing an autopsy now,” Mike said.
“Well, I had my dream on the Singapore to Hawaii leg of the trip. You do the math. It’ll give you something to do.”
“You don’t care?” he asked.
“Didn’t know the guy. Didn’t even consider that such a person might exist,” I said. “And I think I’ve made myself clear on how much I like being thought of as a weapons system.”
“And the fact that two flag officers died at roughly the same time you were having disturbing dreams, that doesn’t bother you?”
“I told you. I don’t control it. I’m dreaming all the time. Someone dies every time.… Just not me.”
“Amanda wants to see you,” he said.
“You’re full of all kind of good news, aren’t you?”
“Are you going to see her?” he asked.
I watched one black bag after another go around the carousel.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll think about it. Right now, I have to go see an old Indian about a spider.”
Chapter 26
Surveillance
TOP SECRET
FROM: MAJ WALKER STURGEON, 348TH GENERAL SERVICES, CHIEF OF STAFF
TO: 348TH GENERAL SERVICES, ALL OPERATIONS TEAMS
RE: SURVEILLANCE ORDERS
LG MARKUS BRANT DIED OVERNIGHT THIS DATE IN WALTER REED NATIONAL MILITARY MEDICAL CENTER. CAUSE OF DEATH LIKELY STRANGULATION.
SUCCESSOR UNKNOWN AT THIS TIME.
IN ABSENCE OF COMMANDING OFFICER, CHIEF OF STAFF ASSUMES COMMAND PER REG. 14-37-B, REV 09/2015.
ACTION TEAM CHARLIE ACTIVATED IMMEDIATELY FOR SURVEILLANCE OPERATIONS IN HOMELAND AND ABROAD. NO RPT NO AUTHORIZATION LIMITS.
ALL SUPPORT AND OPERATIONS TEAMS TO PROVIDE ANY SUPPORT REQUESTED BY TEAM CHARLIE. NO EXCEPTIONS. HIGHEST PRIORITY.
SUBJECT TARGET: US CITIZEN SEBASTIAN ARNETT, PASSPORT 774872778, REF Y0071-12-14284-R CMS.
SUBJECT TARGET CURRENTLY UNDER SURVEILLANCE US ARMY SPECIAL WEAPONS COMMAND, USMC LTC MICHAEL OWENS, COMMANDING.
LTC OWENS UNDER ORDERS TO SUPPORT 348TH GENERAL SERVICES OPERATIONS.
NO RPT NO LIAISON ANY OTHER US GOVT DEPT, BRANCH OR AGENCY.
THIS IS A 348TH GENERAL SERVICES OPERATION ONLY. RPT 348TH GENERAL SERVICES OPERATION ONLY.
ORDER TO DISABLE CONTACT MAY BE GIVEN AT ANY TIME.
ENDIT
TOP SECRET NODIS
Chapter 27
Sweat Dream
Chief William-Walks-with-Something-or-Other—why can’t I remember anyone’s name?—insisted.
“There is no old man at the Campion place,” he said. “There is no such old man.”
“How can you be so sure? Maybe he’s from another tribe? Maybe he’s a squatter,” I said. “I know I spent a night boozing with him.”
“Maybe you drank too much and imagined him,” Chief William said, frowning. “You whites did more to destroy my people and our culture with your liquor than your guns.”
Mention of the old medicine man — whose name, of course, I didn’t know — really set Chief William off. I could half understand. I thought the old Indian was a major pain in the butt, but I was pretty sure I didn’t invent him.
“I don’t mean to argue,” I said. “I just want to find him. Can you put the word out that I’m here and I’ll be at the cabin for a while?”
“No. No such person exists. If you drink out there, I can’t stop you. Just don’t give alcohol to my people, including that old trouble maker.”
“I thought you said … Never mind. I get it. I’m sorry,” I said.
For the second time in two months, I overpaid for supplies at the reservation store. Then I drove out into the gray-brown desert to Amanda’s ancestral cabin.
I half expected to find the old Indian sitting on the porch step. He wasn’t there, but he’d been around. The cabin door was unlocked, and the interior was clean. Out in this wind-blown desert, nothing stays clear of dust for more than a few days.
I unloaded the SUV, unrolled my sleeping bag and fixed a tall Tanqueray and tonic, and sat out on the porch to await the Indian’s arrival. I did not wait long. He shambled around the corner of the cabin from the outhouse.
“Old man, they say you don’t exist. That I am imagining things,” I said.
“What do you say?”
“I say you drink a lot of gin for someone who doesn’t exist.”
“You bring Hendricks or Number 10?”
“Hendricks.”
“You sweat this time?” he said.
“That’s why I’m here.”
“We will have one drink, then sweat.”
We drank out of red plastic cups with chunks of ice chopped from a large block I’d bought at the reservation store. And lime. Lots of lime. One drink bled into two, then three. The sun sank in a blaze of orange over the horizon.
In the morning, the old man threw water on my face. I rolled off the cot, kicking at my sleeping bag, gasping for breath.
“Dammit. Don’t do that!”
Memories of drowning flashed through me.
He turned and walked out the door.
I stripped off my wet T-shirt and trudged after him.
In the pale pink light of early morning, I saw a small mound off to the right of the cabin, well away from my parked truck. The Indian had constructed a sweat lodge using the frame from my one-man tent, a blue tarp I’d picked up, and some Indian blankets he had scrounged from who knows where. It looked large enough for two small people to fit into.
“You expect me to get into that thing?” I said.
“We don’t dance. We sweat.”
I crawled in behind him. We sat cross-legged, his skinny knees resting on my knee caps, the heated stones between us singeing hairs on my legs. My head bent down so far, my chin touched my chest.
The old man sprinkled water and dried herbs onto the rocks. Atoms of steam filled every crack and crevice in our bodies. My water-damaged lungs stretched with every breath, but in a good way. The steam brought tears to my eyes. Wild colors flashed before me like the light show from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
At first, I thought it was the steam making my head swim. Then I felt the Indian’s old fingers around my throat. Less and less air was reaching my lungs. I choked out a dry cough, then another. Every breath I took produced a wheeze, every short exhalation a whistle. It must be the smoke, I thought. The old man put too many her
bs on the hot rocks.
I gasped. I was getting no air. My throat was blocked. What was he trying to do? Colors turned to black on the back of my eyelids; my eyes bulged and my ears roared. My tongue swelled and filled my mouth. Water came at me from all sides. I was drowning again. I exhaled, emptying my lungs one last time.
I flailed my arms and legs, battering the flimsy sweat lodge into pieces and scorching my legs on the heated rocks.
The cold desert air made me shiver as I panted for breath. I lay on my back, chest heaving.
“Old man!”
I sucked in a mouthful of air.
“Help me. Where are you?” I croaked.
“Here. Over here. You help me,” the old man said. He sounded feeble, unlike his familiar taunting self.
“Why’d you do that?” I said. “Was that part of the sweat?”
“Do what? I don’t do anything. You try to strangle me,” the old Indian said.
Minutes passed. My breathing slowed, each cycle of inhale and exhale beyond my control. I felt like I’d fallen from a tree and crashed onto my back, knocking the wind out of me.
I inventoried my body parts. My neck moved. Legs. Arms. My back hurt from landing on the hard desert ground. I rolled onto one side, and pebbles dug into my arm and leg.
“Old man,” I said.
“You come help me,” he said.
I struggled to my knees, light-headed and disoriented.
“Say something so I can find you. I want to wring your scrawny neck.”
“Here. Over here.”
“What happened? You choked me. I almost died in there.”
“Not me. You. That spirit. You two do this. You hit me, kick me, wreck the sweat lodge.”
What was he talking about?
“You were strangling me,” I said.
“You talk to spirit?”
“No. Nobody said anything. You just started choking me. I couldn’t breathe.”
“That spirit” the old man said. “I see him. Angry. Angry. He chokes us both. That is him talking.”
He coughed and wheezed.
We lay on the ground, trying to catch our breath and get our bearings.
“So that was talking huh?” I said, staring at the last fading stars overhead. “What did it look like?”
“Mad. Crazy mad. Angry mad. Eyes. Big. Many. Legs reach like hands, claws. Don’t want to see again.”
I heard the old man move somewhere behind me.
“Horse flies. You got no horse, but you got horse flies,” he said. “Everything about you crazy.”
“None on me.”
“All on me.”
“Good. You deserve them.”
“We sleep.”
He tossed a blanket my way.
“Good idea. Sweet dreams, old man.”
“Not around you, I don’t think.”
*
He was gone when I awoke in bright sunshine. I didn’t know how long I slept. I’d added dozens of fresh cuts and scrapes to the collection still healing on my body. Using the side mirror of my SUV, I gazed at the spider web on my cheek. It looked the same, but I noticed red spots on my throat.
If I had been puzzled before, I was totally bewildered now. I looked around. The sweat lodge was gone, but round desert rocks lay scattered in a rough circle where I thought the lodge should be. I found my tent frame and tarp folded neatly in the back of the SUV.
I staggered to the porch step and plopped down. My head throbbed, either from being choked or from a night of drinking gin—maybe both.
Chief William might not think the old Indian exists, but I was confronted with too much evidence that he does. Whether he had some extraordinary ESP powers or something, I didn’t know, but I would no longer deny that something of the kind was possible.
Given that, what reason would he have to lie to me about the sweat lodge. If he hadn’t attacked me—and it was an attack—something else had. And I had a ready candidate at hand.
Here is where it got really weird. The spider spirit marks me, then lets me—forces me?—to go off killing people who annoy me. Now it’s trying to kill me?
It all sounded so far-fetched. Thinking about it made me doubt my sanity. I’d certainly suffered a trauma in Borneo. Maybe it was PTSD. Maybe I should see a shrink.
And say what?
I tried to destroy the demon spirit inside me, and now it wants to kill me.
Chapter 28
Replacement
I paced the cabin porch waiting for Jimmy Beam to pick up my call.
“Sebastian, you survived your water adventure.”
“I did, Jimmy,” I said, thinking that adventure was hardly an accurate description of my suicide attempt. “Listen, something has come up.”
“Of course, it has. That’s you all over. You make things happen.”
“I didn’t do it this time.… Well, I may have… it’s complicated.”
I watched the sun spread a yellow glow over the western reaches before me. Twelve hours away in Sydney, if that’s where the peripatetic Jimmy Beam was, the sun would be setting about now.
“I’m listening, mate,” he said.
“Well, first, have your people heard about the death of some really high-ranking American military officers in the last week?”
“Admiral. High up in your special, special ops,” he said. “We’ve dealt with him. We heard it was a brain aneurysm.”
“Mike thinks it was me.”
“Does he now?” Jimmy said. “Did you know the man?”
“I didn’t know he existed.”
“Where were you when he died?”
“Probably somewhere over the Pacific, between Singapore and Hawaii. Mike wasn’t real specific about the timing.”
Back and forth across the porch, my bare feet played a squeaky tune on the sunbaked, loose floor boards.
“Very interesting,” Jimmy said. I could imagine him rubbing his chin in a thoughtful way he had. “So, you’re a long-distance threat. We wondered if you might be.”
“Not funny,” I said.
“I wasn’t joking. Ever since you showed up with that spider web tattoo, we’ve wondered about the parameters of that little trick of yours. Our American allies have wondered, too, and somehow word of you has reached our Chinese friends as well. Everybody’s interested.”
“Just what I need. More people following me,” I said, peeking around the corner of the cabin toward the outhouse. “Look, Jimmy, I think it’s got way more control over me than I have over it. Do you know anything about an American general named Markus Brant?”
“The one you choked in Abu Dhabi? Yes, indeed. He was special ops, too. The kind you Yanks don’t share with allies. Reputation as a nasty bloke. Unforgiving. Dirty. You stay away from him. He’s not your friend. In fact, I’m not sure he has any friends. Impressively bad bloke.”
“All right, I get it. A mean dude,” I said.
“Way beyond mean, Sebastian. My people aren’t sure he’s 100 percent under control. He’ll remember what you did to him. There could be payback,” Jimmy said.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“He’s dead, too.”
I leaned on one of the posts holding up the porch roof, squinting into the brightening light, imagining the curves Cecilia Brant would make under a bedsheet.
“Really?” Jimmy said. “Hmm. We hadn’t heard that. Did you do that one, too?”
“I don’t know that I did either one,” I said, “but I feel strongly that I didn’t do that one.”
“Why so sure, if you feel you don’t control things?”
“It’s more a feeling. I remember dreaming on the plane. I was angry about the nameless, faceless people who keep Mike Owens on my tail. I dreamed them dead. I’ve met Brant and his wife. I liked his wife a lot. I just feel that if I directed some negative energy his way, I would have known it.”
On the horizon of my mind, the bedsheet was slipping off Cecilia Brant’s curves.
“So that�
�s what you’re calling your new ability? Negative energy? How New Age of you.”
I rolled my eyes at Jimmy halfway around the world.
“So, why are you calling?”
“The demon spirit tried to kill me,” I said.
“How did it happen?”
I told him about the old Indian, the sweat lodge, and the horrible feeling of fingers around my throat.
“Maybe the demon is trying to send you a message not to mess with him again. You did, after all, try to kill him.”
“You think it’s mad at me?” I said.
“Well, it would certainly have good reason,” Jimmy said.
“Because I tried to destroy it, even though that meant killing myself?”
“No, mate, because you’re an even bigger failure than your predecessor.”
“The machete man? How so?”
“The forest, mate. The forest is gone.”
“But I had nothing to do with that. The sheikh did that.”
“Yes, he ripped a path to the village. But I think it’s what happened next that may have your demon visitor up in arms.”
“What happened?”
“The people in the village, the one where you picked up the black orchid, they took sick. Many died. The rest scattered. That community no longer exists.”
“How is that possible? How do you know?”
“It’s my business to know,” Jimmy said. “The Chinese crew that the sheikh’s organization hired brought in some kind of disease. We can’t say for sure what, because there are no bodies to test. The Dyak had no immunity. Most of them died while you were in hospital.”
“The old woman, too?”
I stopped my pacing and plopped down on the porch step.
“Don’t know. No one has seen her since you tried to drown yourself. Besides, I’m not sure she can die just like that.”
“You think she’s the demon?”
“No. More like a witch. Someone who can communicate with the spirit world. I think you’ve got the demon all to yourself.
“My theory,” Jimmy continued, “really, it’s more like an educated guess—is this demon is guardian of a particular part of the forest. It picks a human surrogate to do its work and gives them the spider tattoo.”
The Mark of the Spider: A Black Orchid Chronicle Page 16