Angels of Vengeance: The Disappearance Novel 3 (14 page)

Think
, he told himself.
Think
.

‘I didn’t say September 11,’ she corrected him. ‘I said you would have received the prisoner after the intifada.’

‘But, of course,’ he said, desperately searching his memory and finally coming up with a face to put to the name she had given him.
Baumer
. It had been so long ago, and that had been a different life. He nodded vigorously, wanting her to know he could help. He was useful. ‘Yes, we had more after the intifada. I think I recall your German now. He was young, and very much assimilated into western culture. Not like most of the crazies we took in around then.’

‘Do you recall the circumstances of his release?’

Lupérico could not help himself. This could be dangerous ground. He averted his gaze, staring instead into the brush, as though his memories might lie in there.

‘Well, as I said, we had a number, a large number, of renditions pass through in those days. I am afraid I do not recall the details attending each of them. They were not really my responsibility. I was a processor, not an . . .
end user
– is that the term? And also, I’m afraid that part of my life . . . it was a long time ago. Much has happened, and I am no longer working in the service of the French state. As you can see, I have been abandoned.’

If he had hoped for a flicker of sympathy, he was disappointed. The woman’s eyes seemed as cold and fathomless as a frozen lake.

‘Think hard, Lupérico. You may not survive the wrong answer. Was Baumer’s release authorised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, or did you release him on your own authority?’

Lupérico had been thirsty before, but he now found that his mouth was unnaturally dry. There could be no doubt that he was in great peril. His tongue rasped against the back of his teeth, sticking there. His heartbeat, previously thready and uncertain, seemed to have slowed down considerably, as though every contraction was struggling hard to pump double the normal volume of blood.

‘Understand me,’ said the woman. ‘I do not care what scams or shakedown rackets you had going in Guadeloupe at the end. I know how things fell apart. They fell apart everywhere. I don’t need contrition or evasion from you, I need information. Why did you release Bilal Baumer?’

She did nothing as crude or obvious as turning her gun on him, but everything about the American and her lethal demeanour spoke to Lupérico of the gravest consequences if he didn’t tell her what she wanted to hear. He shook his head involuntarily, as if arguing with himself.

‘You are right, of course. Everything was falling apart. Once the intifada began, the
guerre civile
, the colonies were very quickly cut off. We had no –’

‘I’m not interested in a history lesson on the manifest inadequacies of the French state,’ she interrupted. ‘You are obviously getting to Baumer. Just take the direct route and save us some time.’

Lupérico couldn’t believe it. It was impossible that something so simple should rebound on him so many years later. My God, the terrible things he had done in the last days at Guadeloupe . . . He shook his head again. He had thought for a moment he may have had to answer for prostituting his female prisoners or, in the final extremes of
la colapso
, of organ harvesting some of his charges for a Chinese billionaire who flew into the facility on his own plane. But no.

The man sat on the brush floor, with moisture seeping in through the seat of his pants, marvelling at how a simple payoff could have brought him undone.

He slapped at a flying bloodsucker attempting to make a meal of his earlobe. The high-pitched buzz was distressing in and of itself. The sun still had enough power to make the terrible press of heat and humidity utterly unpleasant, but the small clearing in the forest remained heavily shaded by the thick, intersecting layers of overhead canopy. Lupérico reached for any recall of the smaller details of those days. For something that might just reduce the pitiless stare with which his liberator/captor regarded him.

He remembered that when it became obvious Paris had forgotten them, that the whole world was falling apart, he had moved quickly to secure his immediate future.

And yes, that did mean he released a few of the prisoners before their time. The young German, he remembered well now. The memories came rushing back, as if a dam wall had collapsed. This Baumer stood out for two reasons. When the man arrived in Guadeloupe, his file was sealed. Lupérico was given no idea of the prisoner’s background, nor of what had led him into expedient detention – a form of incarceration where the individual was held without acknowledgment, ‘
au plaisir du Président
’.

‘Baumer, yes, I did release him,’ he admitted finally. ‘But you must understand, our situation was quite desperate. We –’

‘Not interested. Why did you release him? It wasn’t from the kindness of your heart.’

Lupérico had difficulty maintaining eye contact with her. Her gaze, although almost inhumanly cold, still seemed to weigh him in judgment. Was it his imagination or did the forest seem unnaturally quiet now?

‘Well, I was paid, of course. A bribe, if you must. We are both adults, señorita . . .’

He waited, hoping she might give him something, but the woman’s demeanour did not change. She didn’t speak. She simply stared at him, waiting for him to continue.

‘Look,’ he went on, gesturing helplessly, ‘it was obvious to me he was one of the bearded crazies. Even though he was clean-shaven. I have dealt with enough of them to recognise the type. Fanatics, all of them . . . But you would know that, after 9/11,’ he added, hoping to create some common link. ‘This German was no different. A fanatic with more sense than most, but still a death-obsessed medieval god botherer, no? But what did it matter? Their great Satan was gone. There could be no return to France for him. Not when Sarkozy prevailed in the war. So what did it matter, letting one more savage out into the wild?’

The log on which he sat was rotten, and it crumbled underneath him as he shifted his weight. Lupérico’s backside cracked the thin husk of the hollow, fallen tree trunk with a loud crunch and he dropped a couple of inches before emitting a little shriek when he realised he was covered in stinging red ants. He leapt to his feet and tried to brush them from his pants. The woman was on him before his heart could beat again. He had no idea what she did to him, but he felt his legs suddenly swept out from under him as his shoulders were driven down into the ground. Into the giant ants’ nest he had just disturbed. He would’ve shrieked aloud, and for much longer, but the fierceness of the expression on her face, now less than a foot from his, unmanned him. She looked predatory, carnivorous.

‘Tell me exactly how he was released.’

He tried to speak but she was choking him. He could feel his eyes bulging and his face turning red as he spluttered and slapped ineffectually at her stranglehold. She regained control of herself just as he felt himself about to pass out, but he remained unable to answer her with any alacrity. Instead he rolled away from the ants, coughing and gagging for air.

‘It was another Turk,’ he said with great difficulty, fighting the urge to vomit. ‘A businessman. He described himself as Baumer’s uncle, but that was almost . . . almost certainly a lie. But he was a businessman. He was in shipping. One of his ships was in port and he offered to take Baumer away. What did I care? It was one less prisoner to feed, one less crazy to worry about. The world was at an end. It did not matter.’

His tone was almost pleading. The woman had withdrawn to the other side of the clearing and gave a very strong impression of having to restrain herself. Why did she care about all this? What was it to her? Like him, she was just a functionary.

‘The name of the Turk,’ she demanded. ‘The one who came and took your prisoner, the one who bribed you. What was his name?’

Lupérico noticed the tips of her fingers moving rhythmically, tapping the black holster in which she wore her sidearm. Panic sluiced through the former jailer. If she intended to frighten the information out of him, she was doing herself no favours. How was he supposed to think with the prospect of execution hanging over him?

‘I-I do not remember.’

‘You need to remember, believe me.’

He felt ants crawling around under his clothes, biting him and tearing small pieces of flesh from the open wounds inflicted by his torturers. He was terrified and in agony.

‘It is too hard . . .’ he protested. ‘Those days, they were the end of days. The end of the world. How can you expect me to remember the name of one fat Turk?’

She seemed to understand that she was distressing him. The woman folded her arms and made an obvious effort to collect whatever feelings were threatening to run away with her.

‘So, you were bribed by a Turk. A businessman with shipping interests. Do you remember the name of the ship you said was in port?’

‘
Sweet mother of God, why would I remember that?
I don’t remember his name. I never saw his ship. I had no reason to! Do you know what sort of traffic we had through in those days?’

The woman took in a deep breath, composing herself again. He watched her, wary of what she might do next.

She seemed to resolve a debate within herself. He flinched as she reached inside her combat vest, but rather than producing a weapon she pulled out a resealable plastic bag. She unfastened the Ziploc and removed five or six pieces of paper. Photographs.

She dropped them on the ground in front of him before stepping back, paying him the compliment, he supposed, of at least pretending he was a threat to her. Lupérico didn’t need to be told to pick them up. Brushing ants off himself, resisting the urge to shake his legs like a wet dog to throw more off, he bent down to retrieve the images.

There were six of them, all men, two of whom were white, while the remainder were Arabs, or maybe Persians. For one brief, shining instant, his spirits actually lifted – he recognised one of them.

‘This is him! He’s the Turk who offered me the bribe, without a doubt.’

The woman nodded as though she had known all along. Satisfied at last.

For the first time since he’d been picked up by the Oficina Seguridad, perhaps for the first time since he had fled Guadeloupe on one of the last flights out of the airport, Ramón Lupérico felt as though circumstances had finally broken his way. For close to five years he had grifted and scavenged a path through the anarchy of
la colapso
and the brutal consolidation of Roberto’s Federation until his luck had run out.

But perhaps this might be his chance to escape. He had helped this woman with something that was obviously very important to her and the people who had sent her. And it was such a small thing. So many of the jihadists passed through that Baumer would surely not have been his responsibility for much longer anyway. He had done a small wrong in this instance, no more. The woman had said she was not at all interested in those instances. And she was American, which was good. The Americans were looking to rebuild the empty land. A man of his talents, they would surely . . .

A loud metallic click interrupted his happy thoughts of redemption. He looked up from his reveries. Confused. The woman was pointing something at him. He was looking right at it.

He did not finish the thought.

‘You can’t do this to us, Mister. We ain’t done nothin’ worth a hangin’.’

In her dream, the three men, the three surviving road agents from the gunfight at Crockett, were already dead. And yet they lived. They sat astride their horses on legs broken so badly that the feet of the youngest one were turned completely around in the stirrups. His accomplices, the old one and the fat one, were no better. Shattered femurs poked through torn jeans, and flies crawled in the old
gringo
’s gnarled and mangled mess of bloody kneecaps, destroyed by a shotgun blast, from the look of them. The unholy dead paid it no heed.

Instead they complained of the injustice of being hung for raping whores and driving off
banditos
. The ‘whores’ stood in front of them, a clutch of pale-faced, trembling Mormon women. One of the so-called bandits, her father, slipped a noose over the ruined skull of the morbidly obese road agent sitting on the horse in the centre.

In her dream, even the horses looked as though they had ridden from the gates of hell. Their eyes were burning coals, and when they snorted and threw their heads back in protest at the burdens they were forced to carry, they spat long fiery tendrils of magma that burst into dirty blossoms of oily black and orange flame upon hitting the ground.

Sofia was angry. Not with the road agents. Not these ones anyway. They would soon be on their way to punishment. Her anger was directed at her father, and she was angry in the way that only a teenager could be with an adult. She had saved his life last night, at considerable risk to her own, and for this she was rewarded with a whipping the likes of which she could not recall from her childhood.

Didn’t he understand that she was capable of protecting herself? What if she’d had her Remington with her the day the family had been attacked? She could’ve picked off the agents from the hilltop. Maybe she could have shot down the men who assaulted Mama. She just wanted to be somewhere safe, with all of her family still alive and untouched by the evils of the road agents. Not standing under a tree in the middle of a wasteland, surrounded by wailing women who had not been strong enough to defend themselves. She wanted everything back as it had been.

Part of her hoped that this retribution might draw a line under it all.

Of the three dead men they had captured and strung up for execution, for some reason she took a particular dislike to the fat one in the middle. There was just something gross and upsetting about even looking at him; something deeper than the surface detail of the maggots seething in his wounds, of a giant worm nosing blindly around in the bloody crater on the side of his head. It was something deeper and more elemental than that: a sense of his complete evil. Maybe it had something to do with knowing what he had done to the captured women. They had not spoken about it in detail, of course, but in her dream – a very distant and rational, but disconnected part of her understood this was a dream – Sofia had a very good idea of the indignities visited on the Mormon women.

While none of the ghouls her father prepared for execution had been at their homestead, they were of the same type – they were monsters. And according to Papa, they all worked for the same end and the same man anyway. This devil in Fort Hood called Blackstone. It was he who should’ve been bound and trussed up on one of those Satanic mounts with a noose of rusted razor wire around his neck, but she kept those thoughts to herself. She knew the Mormon women were uncomfortable around her, finding her hunger for vengeance unseemly and disturbing. But Sofia did not care. She put it down to their being Mormons. She was a Catholic, and in its heart the one true church believed in the redemptive value of blood sacrifice. Also, it quietly regarded all outsiders as marked for purgatory at the very best.

The agents, however, they were going straight to hell. And as awful as she expected it to be, she wanted to watch them go. How annoying then that she should miss the drop of the gross one in the middle because she had rushed – or floated, really, this being a dream – to the side of the girl called Sally Grey, who had fainted under the taunts of the youngest of the condemned.

‘
You even told me you liked it, you said you wanted it that way
,’ he called out from the back of his horse, causing a blush to discolour her wan features before her eyes fluttered and she dropped to the ground with a small, barely perceptible groan.

Sofia did not pause for a moment’s thought. She hurried over to Sally to see if she might help. Indeed, in the dream, she flew quite literally to her side, as an angel might. But no sooner had she taken her eyes off the road agents than she heard a few harsh words and a horse whinnying, just before a sharp, collective gasp from the small gathering and the sudden snap and thrumming of the hanging chain being jerked tight. She was aware, somehow, that the razor wire her father had wrapped around their necks had morphed into thick, rusted chains, each link cruelly barbed with fangs of sharpened bones taken from the bodies of the innocents these men had killed. She turned her head quickly to see the giant troll’s body swinging dramatically and his legs kicking and jerking while her father looked on.

The eldest of the road agents appeared as a desiccated husk, a puppet of dry bones and wolf hide. He laughed at Papa, a sound like thousands of rats scurrying through a darkened basement. And the more he laughed, the stronger he seemed to grow, and the weaker and more translucent became her father. Fading away, fading away until a terror took her by the throat, a fear that he might be laughed out of existence altogether.

It was all too much to understand, and Sofia didn’t know why they hadn’t simply shot these men down like rabid dogs when they first had the chance. She had even offered to do the work herself if the others didn’t have the stomach for it. What was the problem?

If they had just shot them down; if they had just shown these agents the same lack of mercy they had shown the victims. If only she had been stronger. Her father would not be fading away. Papa would not be . . .

In the dream she screamed, but no sound came from her throat. All she could hear was the laughter of the dead man.

In her hospital bed, she screamed, and a nurse came running.

*

Her second awakening, late on Friday night, came easier. She emerged from a dreamless darkness into a soft, drugged consciousness. She remembered, in great detail, but with no feeling, having awoken earlier. Screaming, howling and clawing at her bedclothes, swinging her damaged fist at a male nurse who tried to calm her down. She remembered the sting of a hypodermic, and a sense of panic as darkness rushed up to meet her. But she was not panicking now.

She knew Papa was dead. The police officers who had come to the loft had told her that. She knew it, and yet between her and that knowing stretched a great gulf over which she could only barely glimpse the oceans of sadness that waited to claim her. But she could no sooner swim over to that grief, through the thick numbness of whatever drug they had given her, than she could have her father back. Sorrow enclosed her, but it was a loose fit. Like a dark heavy coat, a man’s coat, worn by a child playing dress-ups.

Her room was empty aside from herself. The North Kansas City Federal Medical Center had a surplus of rooms to go around. She could smell steamed vegetables and chicken, a thin almost metallic aroma. Like iron filings at the back of her throat. A television suspended from the ceiling was tuned to one of the three channels provided by the Armed Forces Heartland Network. It appeared to be the music video hour. She thought she recognised the band, some Wave Punk thing from Germany. Apart from the hall light, the flickering images on the TV screen provided the only illumination in the room. Full dark had fallen outside, and a high wind moaned as it rushed around the hospital buildings, rattling her window in its frame.

Papa was dead, and Maive gone with him.

The only people she had left in the world, or at least in this part of it. She thought of Trudi Jessup, who had been so kind to her on the trail, and Adam, whom she liked very much. But they were both gone now. Trudi back in Seattle, and Adam living somewhere in Canada with relatives.

Her head felt as though it had been packed in cotton wool soaked in sleeping gas or anaesthetic, or something. She was not groggy so much as numb. She stared out the window overlooking darkened hospital grounds. Through the blowing snow she could just make out the lights of the Cerner Corporation Campus, where the Heartland Territorial Government had set up. After their initial arrival in KC, they had spent a week on the former office campus going through a series of health checks, interviews and screenings not all that different from the ones they went through for the homestead program in Texas. They stayed in a hotel room at the casino down the road, a musty, depressing room still marked by the stains of the departed.

She was transfixed for a moment by the reflection of the TV screen, which seemed to hang in the air outside her room. It floated in the darkness, seemingly as disconnected from consequence and meaning as she was.

Given the view, not to mention her familiarity with the hospital, she realised she was probably five or six floors up, facing towards the east. On a good day you could see the restored power plant from up here.

Sofia tested her freedom of movement. She wasn’t hooked up to any drips or restrained in any way. A chunky plastic remote sitting on the bedside table looked like something she could use to call the nurse’s station. But she didn’t. Without being sure why, she carefully swung her legs out over the side of the bed and tried to balance her weight as she stood up. She was a little faint, and dizzy with it, but a few deep breaths saw her regain her equilibrium.

Her thoughts moved slowly. Her father’s death seemed like a great, dark mountain, with her standing at the foot of it, looking up and wondering how she could ever scale such a thing, or even move around it. As slow and stupid as the drugs made her feel, she was glad of them.

Papa.

He was gone, and she knew his loss would soon hurt much worse. Worse than the loss of an arm or even a leg. Her heart had been ripped from her chest. But for now she remained deadened to the pain. That was good. She knew it gave her the chance to get moving, to act before she was paralysed by the weight of it all. That was one of the things she had learned as they crept and sometimes fought their way free in Blackstone’s Texas. Sometimes, no matter how grave the injury or outrage, you just had to move. To stand still was to die. You’d be overwhelmed, ploughed under. Like everyone who had died in that flood on the Johnson Grasslands. They hadn’t moved, or they hadn’t moved quickly enough.

Sofia moved. She quickly stripped off her loose cotton hospital gown and began changing back into the clothes she had been wearing. They were folded neatly in an armchair in the corner of the room, a pair of relatively new Levi’s, a long-sleeved tee-shirt and a black hoodie. She was almost undone by the thought that Papa should’ve been sitting there waiting for her when she woke up. That’s what fathers did. They watched over you. They were there for you when you woke up.

But that way lay madness, she knew. Even with the numbing cushion of the drugs to protect her, Sofia knew not to poke at that wound. It would pain her soon enough. As she climbed into her jeans and boots, listening for any sound of movement outside the room, she began to gather her wits. The fog was clearing from her thoughts, if not her feelings.

Maive.

Sofia had thought her dead. But no, she was not – not yet, anyway. She had survived the attack, the two police officers had said. As muzzy and clouded as the teenager’s thoughts might’ve been, she was clear-headed on that issue. Her father and Maive had been attacked, not simply run down in some random accident. And Maive had survived.

She would be here somewhere. Sofia remembered that now: Maive was still alive, but very badly injured. Was she in a coma? Was she undergoing surgery? Sofia was sure she’d known the answer to that once, but like a poor student, she had forgotten. It would be frustrating were she not inoculated against feeling anything.

She tucked the white tee-shirt into her jeans and put on the thick, fleecy hoodie. As she concentrated on dressing herself, she remembered. Maive was in intensive care. The nurses had told her that when the paramedics brought her in, after she’d collapsed back at the apartment. Maive was alive, but she was in intensive care. That’s why Sofia couldn’t see her. She recalled asking them if Mrs Aronson would be all right, but couldn’t remember what they told her. Perhaps the nurses had avoided the question. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Sofia would not be able to see her. Not if she hoped to get away from here.

And for now that’s all she wanted to do. To get away from this hospital, away from this city and back to Texas, where her family had been murdered. And where she could find the man her father blamed for the deaths.

The tyrant Blackstone.

Sofia Pieraro would return to Texas, as her father had promised to, and there she would settle with the man who had taken everything from her. She was done playing stupid games with the
federales
. They had done nothing in all the time she and Papa had been here in KC. Nothing but talk. She was the last Pieraro. She had no choice – she would act.