by Blake Banner
I felt sick. Things were about to get ugly.
Twenty
There were three dark blue Audis. They approached at a sedate pace, came off the road making small plumes of dust, and pulled up in front of the mission church. The doors opened almost simultaneously and ten men got out. They were all dressed in dark suits and they all had long, dark blue coats. It was like a scene from Men in Black.
Chetan said, “Come on,” and he and Red climbed out of the SUV. He leaned in the back window and stared at me and my two guards with his dark, expressionless face. “You stay till I tell you to get out.”
More car doors slammed behind us and I watched Red and Chetan with their boys approach the men in suits. There was a lot of smiling and hand-shaking. It might have been a regular business meeting in Manhattan, only we were in the most remote part of the Sonora Desert in Arizona, at night, and they were trading my life for a cocaine concession.
It wasn’t hard to identify Montilla. His manner was more reserved than the others. He smiled less, and when he spoke, everybody looked and listened. He was bald on top, but he’d let the band of hair at the back of his head grow long, and I noticed that his shoes, instead of high polish patent leather, were sneakers. An eccentric. Eccentrics are dangerous, because they are hard to predict.
He said something, made a gesture toward the church and he and his men in suits started moving that way, while Red and Chetan came back towards the trucks, gesturing for us to get out.
The baboon on my right gave me a shove. “OK, boy, git!” The guy on my left climbed out, grabbed hold of me with both hands and heaved. I was feeling pretty weak from the beating, but I put on a show of being all but finished and fell to the dirt. He gave me a couple of kicks that didn’t really hurt and dragged me to my feet. Then they were shoving me past the cars toward the church. I saw they had the doors open and a light had come on inside, casting a depressing, yellow glow on the dust. Behind me, I heard Cissy’s voice cry out, as though she’d been pushed or hit. I forced myself not to look, not to react. However hard it was, I had to convince them somehow I didn’t give a damn about her.
The church was of a simple design. The walls were white. The benches were crudely made from wood. There was a small altar at the end, dominated by a huge crucifix, a few painted plaster saints, and a virgin, who all looked real sad.
The lights came from plastic candles that had been screwed into a couple of wagon wheels suspended from the rafters above. There were real church candles around the altar, and the guy I assumed was Montilla walked toward them, with his rubber soles squeaking loudly on the terracotta floor. He pointed at the candles and said, “Enciendan las velas.” A couple of his boys went over and started lighting them. My feeling of sick apprehension grew deeper.
He turned and seemed to study me for a moment. I spoke first.
“Are you Rafael Montilla?”
The question seemed to amuse him. “You think I am Mexican?”
“I don’t give a damn whether you’re Mexican. I asked if you are Rafael Montilla.”
“I am not Mexican. I am Spanish.” He pronounced it like it had an ‘E’ in front, ‘Espanish.’
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
He creased up his eyes and kind of wheezed and giggled. He gestured with his hand and said, “Sujétenlo.”
A couple of his guys pushed Red’s men aside and grabbed my arms. He strolled over to me and looked up into my face. He had large, intelligent eyes, but all I could read in them was that he was obsessed with his own power and position.
“You have a choice here today, Lacklan.” He shrugged, talking with his body the way Mediterraneans do. “Is always the same choice in life. To suffer or not to suffer.”
“You’re going to torture and kill me, Montilla, don’t make me listen to your undergraduate philosophy as well.”
There was a flicker of irritation, but it was soon replaced again by the wheezing giggle. “Cooperate with me an’ I kill you quick an’ the girl goes free. Don’t cooperate an’ I torture you both an’ you both die.” He pulled up his shoulders and pulled down the corners of his mouth. “Is no complicated, I think.”
“It’s not complicated, Montilla. It’s simple. Every word out of your moth is worth shit. So give me one reason to believe you might be telling the truth, and I might cooperate.”
He got that same smug expression on his face that Socrates must have had every time he led some bozo into seeing his own stupidity. “Certainty of suffering for you an’ the girl, versus, possibility of no suffering…” He spread his hands.
I nodded. “Oh, I see. So how can I cooperate?”
He paused, examining my expression, trying to work out if it was irony he was seeing in my face. “Who do you work for?”
“Myself.”
He was very fast. He was skilled in martial arts. His fist flashed from his hip and plunged deep into my floating ribs. The pain was deep and drained all the blood from my head, making me go dizzy. I felt nauseous and my legs gave under me. I heard him say, “Llévenlo al altar.” They dragged me down the central aisle and up the two stone steps onto the altar. There they dumped me on the floor and he stood over me. “Traigan a la chica.”
Bring the girl. They dragged her up in front of me. She was struggling and shouting at them to let her go. I refused to look at her. I looked at Montilla instead and tried to convince myself I would kill him that night.
“It’s the truth, you asshole. You want me to tell you a lie that you want to hear, or you want the truth?”
He shook his head. “Is not credible.”
“What do you want me to say? I work for the CIA? OK! I work for the CIA. Now what?”
He pointed at me and snapped, “Las muñecas!”
Now I saw that one of the guys had a coil of rope. They grabbed me between four of them and tied the rope around my left wrist. I shouted at him. “What the fuck do you want! I’m willing to cooperate!”
“Who do you work for?”
“Myself!”
The dragged me backward toward the crucifix and threw the rope over the left arm of the cross. Another guy started tying a second rope to my right wrist. They were going to crucify me, literally.
Montilla’s voice was dull and monotonous. “What are you doing in Tucson?”
My mind was racing. I needed to play for time and I needed to avoid getting strung up on the cross. Once I was up there, I knew I would be powerless.
“I was searching for somebody.”
He glanced at his boys and they paused. My right wrist was bound, but he hadn’t thrown the rope over the arm yet.
“Who were you searching for?”
My heart was pounding. I spoke carefully. “A woman. She has nothing to do with your operation. She is a girl I knew when I was young. We were in love.” He raised an eyebrow like he was losing patience. I rushed on, “Just listen to me, would you! I’m telling you the truth. “She wanted us to marry. I was in the SAS—the British special ops regiment. I figured it was no life for her and I told her no.”
“You were in the SAS?”
“Ten years.”
That made sense to him and he nodded. “Who is this woman?”
I sighed. “She was my childhood sweetheart. We grew up together. My dad died a couple of months ago. I inherited a lot of money. She didn’t want to see me anymore and she came out to Arizona. I followed her here and wanted to convince her we could try again. But she wouldn’t see me.”
He was shaking his head, but I could tell by his eyes he was half convinced. “This is bullshit.”
“No, it’s not. I’m telling you the truth. I lodged with Cissy. First night I was there this piece of shit…” I jerked my head at Red. “…beat her up. I felt sorry for her, but she told me what a great guy he was and begged me not to hurt him. I guess stupidity is a female condition.”
I put more feeling into the words than I had expected, and it must have sounded believable. I saw him hesitate and
glance at Cissy. Red looked confused, too. Montilla said, “So?”
“So I decided to have a private chat with Red. I was going to break his fingers and tell him to lay off Cissy. I like her. She’s a sweet kid. I’m not crazy about her, but she’s sweet and she doesn’t deserve to get beaten up by this chicken-shit redneck. While I was at his club, I saw he was trading coke and whores, and I decided, while I was looking for Sarah…”
He leapt on it like a snake. “Sarah?”
I hesitated, like I’d made a mistake. “My girl. While I looked for her, I’d do the world a favor and screw up his operation. One thing led to another and here I am… That is the story.”
He stared at me a long time. He was smart and he could sense there was truth in what I was saying, but he could also sense there was more to the story than I was telling him. Finally he said, “Maybe.”
“Maybe? What are you talking about, maybe?”
He jerked his head and snapped, “Álcenlo!”
The guy on my right threw the rope over the cross and they both started to pull. I have experienced a lot of pain in my life. I have never experienced anything comparable to those few seconds as I was being dragged up that cross. It was a pain that cannot be described. To say that it was like having long shards of glass driven through my lungs does not begin to describe it. My lungs contracted and all the muscles in my back and my chest, trying to hold the weight of my body, went into spasm, so I could not breathe or shout or cry out to release the agony in my chest. After four or five heaves on the rope, when my own body was covering that of Jesus behind me, I managed to find a foothold on his feet, and the nail that was driven through them. And so I found some small relief for my arms and lungs.
I was aware of a voice screaming and crying, and slowly realized it was Cissy, begging them to let me down. Montilla was smiling up at me.
“It looks as if the girl has stronger feelings for you than you for her, Lacklan.”
I rasped, “Don’t be stupid, you fucking psychopath. That is a normal, decent, human reaction to torture, you stupid motherfucker! Let her go, she has no part in this.”
He cocked his head on one side and shrugged. “Maybe so and maybe not, and in the end, the most likely thing is, who knows?”
He turned and swept everything off the altar. There was a clattering of gold and brass and silver on the stone steps. His voice rang out, like he was giving a sermon. “Are you a Christian, Lacklan?” He waited for an answer, but every word was agony, and I knew that whatever I said would make no difference. He went on, “I am an atheist. Gods, temples, religions—mind control for powerful men to take possession of the brains and emotions of the sheep.”
I moaned, “More fucking undergraduate philosophy.”
He gestured with his chin at the altar. “Pónganla en el altar. Átenla.”
Four of them grabbed Cissy and dragged her kicking and screaming to the altar. They lifted her onto it and pinned her down while a fifth guy tied her ankles and her wrists so that she was splayed helpless across the top.
Montilla pointed at her and looked up at me. “This, this is the ritual that counts. This is the ritual that has meaning. When one man sacrifices the lives of another man and a woman to increase his own power. Now I am sending a strong message to everybody in this room, that I have no limitations in what I will do to get, and hold onto, temporal power.”
I curled my lip and snarled, “You have no power over me, Montilla.”
He looked genuinely surprised and laughed out loud. “Are you serious?”
“Even if I gave a damn at this stage about the woman, I know that whatever I do and whatever I say, the outcome will be the same. You are going to kill us both. Once you made that clear, you lost your power over me. You set me free, pal. Stick that in your philosophical pipe and smoke it, asshole.”
He nodded, smiling. “Maybe.” Still smiling at me, he said, “Traigan la navaja.”
Bring the knife.
Twenty One
Cissy had gone a horrible, pasty white color and was trembling uncontrollably. Her eyes, wide with terror, were fixed on my face, like she was expecting me to do something. There was a bustle of movement among Montilla’s suits and one of them produced a long, slim-bladed dagger. He handed it to Montilla, who went over and stood looking down at Cissy’s face.
The pain in my chest was spreading to my back and had become unendurable. But I kept asking myself, once it became unendurable, what then? I still had to go through it. But I could feel my mind slipping, like I was beginning to hallucinate. I fought to keep control, but when I spoke, my voice came out like a raw rasp.
“What do I need to do to convince you that she is no part of this? What do I need to do to convince you I am telling you the truth?”
He shrugged. “I am not sure. I am not sure you actually can convince me. For now I am planning on removing her fingers one by one, at the joint. We see how you react, if you change your story, if you offer me some proof…” He frowned. “What is this Sarah’s full name?”
“Sarah Connors…”
He laughed out loud. “Seriously? Like the Terminator? Seriously?”
I snarled at him and shouted, “No! Not like the damn Terminator! Connors! Not Connor, Connors!”
He raised an eyebrow. “Address?”
A dim light arose in my mind. I couldn’t see it clearly yet, but it was there, glimmering. Maybe, just maybe…
“I hadn’t got that far yet. But I know she was seeing a guy at the university.”
He trailed the blade across Cissy’s belly, slowly moving down. She shuddered and made a horrible, guttural noise.
“I think you are bullshitting me, Lacklan. That is a very dangerous thing to do.”
“You’re wrong. His name is Engels. You can Google him. He’s a professor at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment…”
He had frozen long before I reached the end of the sentence. He stood for a long moment staring at nothing. Finally, he said, “What is your surname, Lacklan?”
“Walker.”
He turned to look up at me, like the name was vaguely familiar. “Lacklan Walker…”
I gave my voice no particular inflection. “That name familiar to you?”
“Who is your father?”
“Cut her loose. I keep telling you she is no part of this.”
Red was scowling at Montilla. “What the hell is going on now?”
“What is the name of your father?” His voice had an edge to it.
I half-shouted, “It is who you think it is, Montilla! Robert Walker! Gamma! That mean anything to you? I know about your investment in the Biosphere, in Project Apollo and the Social Environmentalism Project! Now, you want to talk, let’s talk, but let the girl go, for fuck’s sake! She is not a part of this!”
Red had gone puce and his eyes were shining with growing anger. “What the hell is going on here?”
Chetan was shaking his head and pulling at Red’s arm. “We don’t want to be a part of this…”
Montilla drew breath, paused, then closed his mouth and held out his hand. “Teléfono!”
A suit handed him a cell and he walked down the central aisle punching in a number. Now the game had shifted. As I had hoped, he had lost interest in Cissy. Instead, I had probably signed my own death warrant. But there was a chance, a slim chance, I could talk my way out. It was a slim chance, but it was also the only chance I had.
I looked down at Cissy. She looked as though she’d gone into shock, her eyes locked on mine, wide and staring. My head was foggy and I felt I was losing consciousness. I forced myself to focus on Red and Chetan. They were speaking urgently to each other in muted voices. Their guys looked uncomfortable and scared. The suits looked impassive. They knew somebody was going to die tonight, but they didn’t care who. I spoke up, and my voice sounded half-dead in my own ears.
“Things are getting away from you, Chetan.” I gave an ugly laugh. “You can feel it, can’t you? This is one of tho
se situations where nobody gets out alive.” They all frowned at me. I shifted my eyes to his boys. “If I were you, I’d be making for the cars before it’s too late.”
The suits were glancing at each other and smiling. They knew what I was doing and they thought it was funny. They thought they were in control. They didn’t understand that I was teasing that control out of their fingers.
My feet were beginning to slip off the nail in Jesus’ foot. Exhaustion was taking a hold of me, and I knew that I had to do something fast or it would be too late. I said, “You know what we have here, don’t you, Chetan?” I tried to study his face, though my eyes were losing focus with the pain and the lack of air. “What we have here is unwelcome witnesses. You and Red and the boys, are all becoming witnesses to something you were not supposed to be privy to…”
Montilla’s suits had stopped smiling and had that ‘uh-oh’ look on their faces. One of them spoke for the first time and said, “Calla la boca ya, gringo!”
I gave a small, humorless laugh. It hurt.
“You speak Spanish, don’t you, Chetan? Why do you think he’s telling me to shut up?” I gave another, weary laugh, even though it still hurt from last time. “Why do you think they were so interested in getting a hold of me? You are so out of your depths here, boys. There is going to be a lot of killing tonight…”
“Que te calles ya! Cojones!”
Which basically meant ‘shut the fuck up’.
I heard Montilla’s rubber soles squeaking back along the central aisle. He stopped and stood looking up at me, like a man questioning his own faith.
“I don’t know what you hoped to achieve, Lacklan. I guess it was a desperate, last ditch attempt, huh? Now I know who you are, I don’ need you no more. Time to die.”
“What about the girl?”
He smiled. “Seriously?”
“You can’t leave witnesses, right?”