Age of Voodoo (25 page)

“Ho-kaaay,” said Tartaglione. “So who’s for calling it a day and heading back home?”

The quip didn’t raise so much as a chuckle.

“Anything we can do to fix it?” Buckler asked Albertine.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, could we just rub the
vévé
out? Would that maybe erase its influence?”

“We’ve seen it now. Rubbing it out won’t rub out our memories of it. We’re already intimidated by it, as we have every right to be. And whoever put the
vévé
there used blood—and most likely not chicken or goat blood either.”

“Human blood?” said Sampson, wrinkling his nose in disgust.

Albertine nodded. “Maybe their own, maybe someone else’s. There’s only one reason a
vodouisant
would do such a thing, and that’s to demonstrate unswerving loyalty to the loa of death. Down below us there’s a bokor who has given himself entirely over to the Baron. He has become an agent of death, an avatar of death. He has no fear of the Baron and therefore no fear of the consequences of any of his actions. That suggests he is a very dangerous man, and probably quite mad.”

“No shit,” said Tartaglione.

“That accepted, is it safe to just go past it and carry on?” said Buckler.

“It would be prudent to adopt some form of protection first,” said Albertine. “A
garde
. If only to bolster our mental defences. The
vévé
has spooked us, and fear increases one’s susceptibility to magical attack. A
garde
can reverse its malign influence, but I should warn you that it won’t be pleasant. You can’t ward off a blood
vévé
the way you can most ordinary
wanga
spells, with prayers and song and a dash of eucalyptus oil.”

“You saw us putting on an ointment of angelica root and caraway just now. A Wiccan I know brewed it up for us and incanted a charm over it. Won’t that be enough to do the trick?”

“Only
vodou
can resist
vodou
. Bring the other two in—Morgenstern and Pearce. And I’ll need to borrow your knife...”

T
HE SEVEN OF
them stood in a circle, their sleeves rolled up, left arms bared. Albertine had prepared a concoction in a small china bowl—a grey-brown paste made of rum, garlic powder, flakes of dried cinchona bark, ground-up mandrake root, and a pinch of dust from the floor.

“Brick dust is preferable,” she said, “but concrete dust will do.”

Using Buckler’s KA-BAR knife she made a small incision in her skin, just below the shoulder. She rubbed some of the paste into the wound, at the same time invoking the aid of the
garde
loa, the minor spirits whose role it was to watch over souls in peril.

“I bind you into me,” she said, tying a scrap of fabric round her arm. “I seal you inside where you will be able to look out for me.”

She went round the circle repeating the ritual for each of the Thirteeners, wiping the knife blade on a rum-soaked rag in between to sterilise it. The SEALs bore the discomfort of the cut with varying degrees of stoicism. Only Tartaglione made any noise, a comic “Ouch.” Buckler scowled at him.

Lex, last in line, grimaced as the knife was drawn across his arm but nothing more. Pain was in the mind. Pain was only ever in the mind.

And—it was very peculiar—the instant Albertine finished binding the wound, he felt a huge, overwhelming sense of relief. He looked at the
vévé
on the wall and he saw only a crude, scrawled picture. Not a forbidding emblem of doom but merely a design, something almost abstract, like a graffiti tag. Meaningless to the objective viewer. Even the nature of the substance used to draw it no longer bothered him.

The expressions on Team Thirteen’s faces matched what he was feeling. Where they had been tense before, now they were nonchalant. Where there had been concern, now there was indifference.

Tartaglione went up to the
vévé
and gave it the finger. “Superstitious fucking bullshit.” Then he crossed himself and spat on the floor.

Buckler tried pressing the call button next to the elevator. Nothing happened.

“Electricity’s out?” Lex suggested.

“Shouldn’t be,” Buckler replied. “When the installation was recommissioned, they sank a geothermal vent. There’s a binary cycle power plant feeding this place a constant five kilowatt-hours of free energy per day. Chances are the elevator’s been purposely put out of action.”

“Why?”

“Probably to keep people like us out.” Buckler shone a conventional flashlight down the shaft. “I can see the roof of the elevator car. It’s about thirty feet down. There’s a pile of what looks like rappelling gear there. And...” He directed the flashlight beam upwards. “Yep. Rope was secured at the top of the shaft. And cut by someone. Take a gander.”

Lex leaned in and peered up. There was an iron joist a few inches below the ceiling of the shaft. From it a short piece of rope dangled, the loose end neatly severed.

“Adds weight to the ‘intruders not welcome’ theory,” he said. “No cables or hoist mechanism, so I presume the elevator’s hydraulic.”

“You presume correctly,” said Buckler. “Keeps the profile of this building low. Also, better from a security standpoint. Makes the elevator easier to disable from downstairs, not so easy to sabotage from up here.”

“No chance of getting it going from up here, either. Is there any other way in? An external air vent of some kind?”

“None you can fit a body through.”

“No backdoor emergency exit?”

“Nothing. This elevator’s it, sole point of access and egress. So we’ve no alternative but to rappel, like the Marines did.”

Pearce tossed a rope over the joist and hitched it tight. He tested the knot with a tug, then let the remaining length drop to the elevator car roof. He wound the rope around one thigh and swung out into the shaft.

“Careful now, Whisper,” said Buckler.

Pearce just gave his CO a look and dropped out of sight.

Moments later, he supplied a sitrep. “Peachy.”

Tartaglione descended next, followed by Buckler, then Sampson.

“Your turn,” Morganstern said to Albertine. “Ever done anything like this before?”

Albertine shook her head.

“Then don’t copy those guys, sliding down like that. That’s just showing off. Loop the slack once around your waist, like so, then walk yourself down backwards, feet against the side, paying out the rope as you go. Don’t worry about falling. You won’t, and even if you do, it’s not far and someone’s bound to catch you. Are you listening, team?”

“Roger that,” said Buckler. “I’ll be keeping the rope steady at this end, Guardian Angel. You can do this. Walk in the park.”

Albertine eased herself down the elevator shaft, heeding Morgenstern’s advice to the letter. It was slow and painstaking, and Lex was on tenterhooks throughout, until he heard confirmation from Buckler that she’d made it safe and sound to the bottom.

He indicated to Morgenstern that she should go next. “Lady SEALs first.”

“Honorary SEAL,” she corrected. “It’s still the only branch of the US Armed Services that doesn’t accept women. I used to be in the Navy’s Hospital Corps, a medic, but I’ve been with Thirteen long enough that the others hardly remember that any more. They treat me like just another shooter, just one of the guys.”

“Bet there’s an interesting story attached to how you came to join.”

“You bet right. There is for all of us. But we don’t have time for that right now.”

“Not even the abridged version?”

“Okay then. The Cliffs Notes guide to Team Thirteen. For one reason or another, we’ve all got a reputation for bad luck. You know how it is with people in the military. Things go south for you on a few missions in a row, rightly or wrongly you get singled out, earn a rep as a Jonah, and it sticks.”

“So they bundle you all together in the same unit...”

“Figuring, ‘What the hell, least they can do is screw things up for each other and not for the rest of us.’”

“Nice.”

“Isn’t it just?”

With that, Morgenstern leapt into the shaft and slithered down.

Lex took a last look around the cinderblock building. The raw masonry of the walls, the defunct museum-piece generator with its bulky dials and gauges, the bars of dusty sunshine slanting in through the windows. He had a hunch he wasn’t going to be above ground again for a good long while. He savoured this final glimpse of daylight, this final breath of fresh air.

“White Feather, something keeping you?” Buckler demanded over the comms.

“Coming.”

Lex grabbed the rope and scissored his legs around it like a firefighter descending a pole. He began to lower himself hand over hand. Simply sliding would have shredded his palms to pieces. He didn’t have gloves on like the Thirteeners did.

Above him he heard a faint but distinct
creak
. The rope gave a sudden sharp lurch. He froze. There was a pattering sound, granules of something crumbling and falling.

“Hey. What was that?” Buckler said. “What’s going on up there?”

A flashlight beam probed upwards. Lex shut his eyes as it passed over his face, and opened them again as it continued above his head.

He heard a second
creak
, this one louder, and in the beam of light he saw the joist shift downwards a fraction. The rope lurched again.

“It’s coming loose,” he said. “It’s going to—”

And it did.

And so did Lex.

TWENTY-FOUR

COLONEL GONZALEZ

P
LUNGING THROUGH BLACKNESS
.

He didn’t have far to drop. Ten, maybe twelve feet.

But he had no means of gauging exactly where the elevator car roof lay. He let himself go limp, but the impact, when it came, was still a bludgeoning, painful shock.

The joist was plummeting after him. He rolled blindly out of its path, and it pounded, end first, into the elevator car. A tremendous, thunderous
clang
. The car shuddered. Someone screamed.

Lex had felt the joist whistle past his foot, missing by millimetres.

There was a second
clang
, duller than the first, as the joist keeled over, fetching up at an angle, its upper end coming to rest against the side of the shaft.

Dust and debris rained down in its wake. People choked and spluttered.

Buckler: “Are we all okay? Who’s hurt? Anybody hurt?”

His flashlight swept a hazy glow over everyone’s faces. He got nods, grim grins. Lex’s shouted warning had at least given Team Thirteen and Albertine time to leap to the edges of the elevator car, so that neither he nor the joist crash-landed on any of them.

The flashlight beam finally found Lex, crouched in a corner.

“What the hell did you just do?” Buckler demanded.

“I’m fine, thanks for asking.” Lex picked himself up, dusted himself off. His back and shoulders ached. “No bones broken. Haven’t got a bloody great piece of iron sticking out of me.”

“You pulled half the building down on top of us.”

“Don’t exaggerate. The joist must have been loosened from its setting, what with the weight of all of you hanging off it one after another. I was the final straw. That or...” He snatched the flashlight from Buckler and trained it upwards. “Those look like chisel marks to anyone?” Two rectangular slots could be made out where the ends of the joist had been lodged. The concrete around each bore signs of having been chipped away at, especially underneath. “Booby-trapped. Rigged to give way if anybody tried to do what we did. They knew a second team might be coming in after the Marines. They were prepared for us.”

“How do we know it’s not just natural erosion?” said Buckler. “That hunk of metal’s been stuck up there for decades. Sea air eats concrete and cement for breakfast, and maintenance and upkeep hasn’t been a high priority around here.”

“Scared to admit you might have screwed up? Face facts, great and mighty Lieutenant Buckler. You should have inspected the joist more carefully before Pearce attached the rope.”