The Pressure of Darkness

by Harry Shannon

  "You what?"

  Pal chuckles warmly. "Mr. Nandi and others of my people have already eliminated the majority of your guests and staff. Even your beautiful concubines. The medical personnel making the drugs have also been accounted for. Only the guards in the towers remain. We will see to them too, in good time."

  "I don't understand. We are partners." Buey humiliates himself by wetting his pants. This makes Gorman laugh out loud. Mr. Nandi clucks again.

  Pal mocks him with a sad, sighing sound. "You think so small, my friend. I was never interested in blackmailing anyone with the threat of a plague. I am only interested in unleashing one. What we have here is a disease which will change the world."

  Buey is shaking his head, mumbling something incoherent in Spanish that sounds like 'but you can't do that.'

  "Oh, I can and I will. And the only people inoculated against the plague will be my disciples. Jesus? Buddha? They will be as dust. I will have become Shiva himself, the destroyer—and savior—of worlds. I'm sorry to sadden you, Juan, but your usefulness and that of Los Gatos is done."

  Gorman pats his cheek. "And you see that ugly man who you think needs a bath? He will be dealing with you in just a moment."

  Buey's eyes are glassy. He is now struggling to stay awake. Mohandas Pal leans forward on the table and addresses him with some urgency. "Juan, my friend, have I ever spoken you of the Thuggee?"

  Juan Garcia Lopez shakes his head. He tries to speak, but can only grunt.

  Pal lectures: "Their history is fascinating. I shall be brief, considering the circumstances. The real origin of the religion is lost in antiquity, but the cult may have been initiated by Mahomedan vagrants who plundered India after the invasion of the Monghuls and Tartars. The Hindu belief is that the divine spark came from the goddess Bhowanee. The first written accounts were uncovered by the British occupiers around 1810, if my somewhat inebriated memory serves."

  Buey tries to speak again. What emerged was the babbling of an infant as Gorman, who stands behind Esteban and near Buey, begins to unwrap something from under his dinner jacket. Something he has kept hidden around his waist. Meanwhile, Mr. Nandi has removed the sash he used for a belt. He glides closer. His eyes are feral.

  "The Thuggee worshipped the Mother Goddess Kali, as do I," Pal continues. "A gentleman named Philip Meadows Taylor collected the accounts of one Ameer Ali into a classic tome called Confessions of a Thug. I have read it many times, as has my friend Gorman, who seldom reads."

  Buey finds words. "Wha-wha-what have you . . ."

  "Shhh, my friend. There is no point in becoming aroused or upset, certainly not at this juncture. To continue, the Thuggee believed in wining and dining their victims before offering them to Kali and, of course, relieving them of all their money and possessions. It seems that at a suitable point, well after dinner and a drugged drink, their leader would issue a command, and the slaughter would begin."

  Buey's dull eyes widen. His large heart is racing fast, but he cannot regain control of his limbs.

  Pal leans closer, smiles warmly. "Would you like to hear an example of that command, my friend?"

  "N-n-no."

  Pal chuckles. He looks deep into Buey's eyes, savoring the moment, and then raises his gaze to his two assistants. Gorman grunts in impatience, Mr. Nandi is more discreet.

  Finally Pal gives it voice: "Jey Kalee!"

  "No!"

  The cord drops around Buey's thick, muscular neck. He struggles to grab it with his hands. The ring finger of his left slides just under the cord as it tightens around him. He desperately fights to save his own life. His fat legs kick at the table. His eyes redden and bulge out; the tip of the captured finger turns purple with blood and becomes obscenely engorged. Gorman tilts away from him, at an angle, using all of his substantial upper body strength. Buey twists and bucks like an unbroken horse but he cannot break the hold. He grunts and moans; finally he wheezes into a red-faced stillness. Mohandas Pal leans in even closer, his eyes fixed on Buey's dying eyes.

  "Farewell, Juan. Prepare Hell for my arrival."

  Buey wheezes, voice high and squeaky, like air seeping out of a balloon. Watching him, Pal has a vapid, slightly bored expression on his face, like a man studying an event of minimal interest. Suddenly Buey's bowels open and a stench floods the room. Next, the delicate Mr. Nandi gracefully drops his scarf and strangles the sleeping Esteban, who dies as quietly as a helpless child.

  SIXTY-THREE

  "Go!"

  Father Benny praying soundlessly, rapidly, as the chopper bobbed and weaved in response to their hurried exit. Canvas, metal, and sweaty flesh; twin grunts as Bowden and Burke hit the ground bent over double. They rapidly beat feet away from the already departing craft. The equipment drop at the edge of the ridge had gone smoothly and from this point on they would communicate via hand signals or through the sparce use of high-tech headsets. They reached a gully, rolled sideways, dropped to their knees as the helicopter circled away.

  The warm night was silent, the desert floor crunched rock and pebble and sand.

  They ran forward in short bursts. Their gear already been taped down to limit noise. What struck Burke immediately was the incredible, overwhelming loneliness of the experience; this sliver of Mexico offered only the exhausted yawn of a graveyard, everything dead except for blood rushing through his ears and the soft, ragged caw of their breathing.

  It was a world of gray slate, like the pocked surface of the moon, nothing moving but the black silhouettes of two men, running breakneck through the hard-packed sand, carrying automatic weapons and a grudge.

  Having dropped the sniper gear on the first pass allowed them to make better time, but also upped the possibility of being discovered. Hopefully the guards would buy that the chopper was on a drug run for a rival cartel. If the bad guys got to the weapons stash before they did, Burke and Bowden were dead men walking. They moved, dodging the occasional succulent that tried to stab at their heavy boots. Jack Burke felt a nasty stitch in his side, knew it was happening sooner than it would have in his wayward twenties. I'm getting old.

  Nearby, Scotty dug deeper and caught a second wind. His big arms and knees pumped slowly and steadily, like parts of an oil rig. He started to leave Burke behind. His face seemed ecstatic; he was grinning like a pumpkin. Burke could remember the last time Scotty had seemed this alive. An odd feeling of buoyancy overtook him and, like a young boy, Burke challenged Scotty with a fresh burst of speed. When the two men arrived at the rubber craft containing their gear, they were both in pain and out of breath but laughing silently, running on adrenaline and endorphins. Bowden stabbed the raft with his knife and rapidly unpacked the canvas cases containing their sniper gear. He tossed a scope to Burke, who scurried up the slope on elbows and knees to have a look at the drug lord's compound.

  Peering through the greenish filter, Burke scanned the entire area. He quickly located the first guard tower. The dimensions they had been given were slightly off and the compound was bigger than they had estimated, but that wasn't surprising. Burke panned down the top of the wall and found the second guard. The man, face a white oval in the green smog, was smoking a cigarette between cupped palms, confident he had nothing to fear. Good, good.

  Burke slid noiselessly back down the sandy slope. He held up two fingers. Bowden had already assembled one of the rifles. He tossed it to Burke, who climbed back up and sighted on guard number two. Moments later, Bowden was a few yards to the left and locating number one. Burke checked his watch. Three minutes to go. He slowed his breathing, took a reading on the mild wind and marked the exact distance to the target. Bowden did the same. Burke held up one hand, five fingers. He kept his eye on the mark.

  As the man finished speaking into his hand-held microphone and returned to smoking, Burke counted down five-four-three-two . . . and fired on one. Two soft thumps, like fists against a pillow broke the eerie silence; the sounds quickly faded away without creating an echo.

  Burke scored a perfect
head shot. The guard dropped like a felled steer without making a sound. He swung his scope down to Scotty's tower and ascertained that the second guard lay slumped over the edge of the station, arms dangling.

  Burke looked up. Scotty pointed to his own temple and grinned with obvious pride. They nodded at one another and simultaneously let the rifles slide back down the slope behind them. Up and over. They started down the rock face, climbing by hand rather than rappelling. And this was the most terrifying part, climbing with your cheek plastered against the sharp edges of the rock face, splayed out like a starfish with your back to an armed enemy. Say one stray guard wandered outside to take a piss, well then boom, they were both ground hamburger. Hell, a kid with a pellet gun could have knocked them off when they were this vulnerable. Fingers growing numb, nose full of dust and dirt, feet slipping and sliding . . . then, at last, the ground.

  Bowden landed first, took a knee and raised his laser-modified, silenced Heckler & Koch 9mm MP-5. He swept the area and waited for his partner to hit the dirt. Burke was only a few seconds behind. He carried a black CAR-15 with a pump shotgun attached to the bayonet fixture. The two men paused long enough to feel confident they had not been discovered.

  Burke adjusted his flak jacket and raised the small microphone around his neck to mouth level. "Read me?"

  "Yeah, you okay old man? You look wasted."

  Burke flipped him off. The two old friends rose, ran bent over and then split into a widening V as they crossed the open ground, heading for the gates to the compound. Bowden slipped on some rocks and tumbled for a long and worrying moment but then he was back on his feet and in stride. Burke reached the wall first and flattened against it. Bowden, now twenty yards north, did the same a few seconds later.

  One thing the spook predator drone had not been able to tell them was the precise location of the doors. Bowden worked his way south, feeling for clues, while Burke held his position at the southern-most gate. Scotty was almost upon him when he raised one hand and pointed up. It was some kind of doorway that rose up from inside. Bowden gauged the height of the obstacle. He signaled for Burke to climb up onto his shoulders.

  Burke flipped the rifle behind his back, loosened a thin but remarkably strong nylon cord and a supple plastic hook designed for silent entry. He ran up onto Bowden's body, stepped in his clasped hands and climbed up onto the broad shoulders. He tossed the hook over the wall. On the third attempt he hooked something that held his weight.

  Burke shimmied up to the top of the wall, swiveled his head, checked left and right. To his relief, the entire courtyard seemed empty. He could see lights burning in the long hacienda building, and someone moved behind closed drapes. Burke dropped over the ledge, let the rope down and helped Bowden come over the wall. So far, so good.

  The two men trotted down the unguarded stairs, footsteps echoing now, and then split up again. Bowden took the left side of the next entry point and Burke eased down to right. Another pause to catch a little breath, a check of the time, a wan smile exchanged because they were ninety seconds ahead of schedule. Then Burke reached for the doorknob, locked down cold when he heard voices, one man and one woman with American accents. The couple was arguing in fairly loud bursts, moving down the barracks hallway, coming closer to the exit. Burke made a hand sign to signal they would each take the target nearest when the door opened. They moved back out of the way.

  The door opened. A gray-haired old woman in pearls stalked through it and turned toward Scotty Bowden, lipstick-coated mouth running a mile a minute, saying, "I'll be damned if I do the shit work again, Mr. Farnsworth, I just won't have it, I'm telling you!" She registered the presence of death, face blackened and eyes wide, poised there in the darkness. She searched for a way to scream . . .

  . . . And meanwhile, the elderly man she'd called Mr. Farnsworth was only two steps behind her, clutching at her clothing, swearing in a gravelly voice that she was 'a shrew and a bitch.' Burke took the male's left hand and wrist, twisted hard and leveraged the man to his knees. Burke clapped a hand over the mouth to buy a few seconds, hesitated because they both seem so old that somehow killing them didn't seem right, but when he glanced over at Bowden, the woman's throat had already been cut and blood was arcing out into the dirt like a small, dark fountain. Burke released the old man's arm, grabbed his skull in both hands and SNAP broke his neck. In less than five seconds, two bodies lay sprawled in the dirt under indifferent stars. Bowden shot Burke a puzzled look and a shrug, as if to say: that was a shame, but what the hell are these two little old people doing in a place like this, working for an asshole like Buey?

  Burke and Bowden trotted through the door and further into the compound, knowing they had to keep moving, stay on the clock or be left behind.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Mohandas Hasari Pal is very, very pleased with the cognac, a VSOP rarity that the ever resourceful Buey somehow procured. He sips. "I will miss you, Juan, you fat pervert, particularly for your bottomless greed and prurient interest in all things intoxicating." The corpse does not respond. Its eyes are red-streaked golf balls and milky drool runs from the mouth. After a moment a small amount of gas escapes, creating a ripping sound which causes Pal to giggle.

  "Well said, my friend. Your sad demise is indeed lacking in dignity. But since I knew you were planning to betray me as well, and keep both shares of what you believed to be blackmail money, I simply moved more efficiently than you to bring things to a close."

  A discreet knock. Mr. Nandi opens the door and glides into the room. "We have accounted for all of his men. I went to attend to the guards in the tower but found that one of the others must have already dispatched them."

  "People need to learn to follow orders."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Well and truly done, Mr. Nandi. We are quite pleased with you. Now, as Gorman has gone to fetch my unfaithful bitch of a wife, would you take the young one away with you?"

  "Yes, sir." Mr. Nandi grabs the body of Esteban by the shoulders, drags it out. The chair falls to the carpet. Mr. Nandi pauses to right it before resuming his task. He leaves as soundlessly as he arrived.

  As Pal stands and walks the length of the table, glass of VSOP in one hand and the other down, his delicate, manicured fingernails trail along the surface of the wood. "You thought my purpose was mere blackmail. How short-sighted of you, my friend. If you had any imagination, you too could have been inoculated with the sacred cure, but that was not to be. You were too much of a hedonistic dullard to become a believer and follow me. Once my biochemical demon has been unleashed, the whole world will be ripe for the taking. The prize I seek is civilization itself, not just a measly billion U.S. dollars."

  Pal begins to cough, and for a few seconds the severity of his illness is apparent. Then the weakness fades. "Those who we have already inoculated, the loyal few who will survive, revere me as a living embodiment of the sacred. This is what you could not understand, Juan. My body may die, but my legend will survive. It will outlive not only me, but most of the human race. Thus I shall be worshipped for all time."

  Mohandas Hasari Pal leans down over the body of Juan Garcia Lopez, which now reeks of excrement, vomit and urine. Pal inhales deeply. "Sweetness. The left-hand path teaches us to savor all things." Another taste of brandy, another deep inhalation. "So I savor even the stench of your death." Another sip. "Forgive me my theatricality, old friend. But this is the most significant moment of my life and I am determined to enjoy it."

  Pal sits next to the slovenly corpse. He puts one arm around the shoulders and kisses Buey on the cheek. "Thank you for being such a simpleton, Buey. I shall be eternally grateful for your single-minded stupidity."

  Another knock, more forceful than the first. Pal, who is now slightly inebriated, looks up. He forces himself to focus. "Come."

  The door opens and Indira, still wearing the backless paper gown, enters the room. She falls inward, pushed from behind. Indira struggles to keep her body covered. She is furious, sobbing from anger a
nd humiliation.

  Gorman appears and looks down upon her with a horrid blankness. He awaits instructions.

  "Darling, won't you join me for a drink?"

  Indira recognizes the voice of her husband. Her gaze follows the rug, the chairs, the table, and finally comes to Pal. She sees Buey's corpse, the arm casually flung around his neck, the sneer on her husband's face. But rather than scream she is determined to at least appear unfazed.

  Indira must keep him talking. She knows it is her only hope.

  "Slumming again, my husband?"

  Pal bellows laughter. "I have always enjoyed your feistiness, Indira. You are seldom boring, even when being a slut." He sweeps one hand across the table, sending glasses and dishes to the floor. "Come, sit down and join us."

  Indira stays huddled on the floor for one moment too long. Gorman moves, rapidly as a cobra. He seizes her ear and her hair and yanks her to her feet, then propels her forward. She slams into the table with an expulsion of air, her bare buttocks exposed. Humiliated, she covers herself and sits down across from Pal, who sips from his glass and winks.

  "That's better. Tonight would not be complete without you here to share in my triumph."

  She does not respond at first, but cannot keep from trembling. Finally: "So now you are a murderer as well as a hypocrite."

  Pal throws back his head and laughs again. "Such venom from my little princess." He kisses the cheek of the corpse. "You call that hypocrisy? I am doing exactly what I said I would do, my dear. I am embracing death and shit and becoming one with the Mother. And very soon I shall join her."

  "It could not be soon enough for me."

  Her continued defiance irritates him. He leers, somewhat comically. "I hope you enjoyed your hot little tryst with the soldier, Indira. It won't be the last fucking you get, but it will surely be the more pleasurable of the two. Would you like to know what I have in store for us this evening? Are you the least bit curious?"