Bloodletting (41 page)

The same blood.

Carver fell to his knees on the ground and started to shove aside the branches. The dead leaves were wet and marred by splotches of black, the detritus torn up. Plants were bent and broken leading out the other side, where a trail of blood led down the grassy slope through the forest.

It disappeared when it reached the stream.

X

The corridor was now awash with light. Portable generators fueled the halogen fixtures mounted on tripods every dozen feet. They grumbled from outside on the rocky embankment. Special Agents passed him in a flurry of activity, hardly seeming to notice him any more than he noticed them. The tunnel looked dramatically different now that he could clearly see it, but that wasn't an improvement. Walls that appeared polished now displayed eggshell cracks and the wood of the doors looked like planks salvaged from a sunken ship. The cast-iron chandeliers were positively medieval. The concrete floors showed the cracks of an ever-shifting planet, and worse still, the crusted, rust-colored stains of suffering. He made sure not to step on any of these as he walked deeper into the mountain.

Carver didn't look into the first room to his right when he passed. He had seen more than enough blood for one lifetime. After following it from Colorado to Arizona, and then to Washington, he had finally found it. He just hadn't expected it to be the blood of a father he had never truly known mixed with that of a long lost love and a suspiciously hairy CIA agent. Some of his own was in here too. As was his brother's. And Lord only knew how much had come before that. He could still taste it in his mouth, and what frightened him the most was what it had done to him. What it had awakened inside of him.

He was no longer numb, but empty, incapable of feeling even the wound above his hip. His mind was still trying to rationalize what had transpired down here in the darkness. He wasn't sure that it ever would.

A group of windbreaker-clad FBI forensics specialists parted when he approached, revealing the body on the ground where he had left it. Lucky shot to the left thigh; even luckier shot to the throat. He hadn't been able to bring himself to look at the man until now, as to see him minimized by death might somehow humanize him and give a pitiable face to the beast behind everything.

Henrich Heidlmann, but no one would ever know. The man would prove to be a specter. His fingerprints and DNA wouldn't generate a match in any database. He would remain an enigma to the world at large, which thought a war most people hardly remembered had ended in a faraway land instead of under the very ground from which Starbucks and grunge music had sprung.

Carver committed every feature to memory. It was his responsibility. The man would never be held accountable for the countless deaths he had caused, any more than Carver would be held accountable for his. And this was his penance. To know the visage of true evil, to seek it in every set of eyes he passed on the street.

Heidlmann was so much smaller than seemed possible, especially for one who fancied himself a god. He was maybe five-foot nine. White hair, bald on top. Gunmetal-gray eyes. Teeth the color of weak tea. Blood covered his face, but there was hardly enough of it. There should have been more to at least intimate he had died slowly, badly, not merely the arterial spurts on the walls and the dried black amoeba around him.

One of the agents said something to him, but the words were an incomprehensible jumble.

Carver walked on and looked in the room where he had found Ellie. It looked like a stall in any barn. Only the gouges in the walls and the nearly imperceptible bloodstains on the straw remained to argue that it wasn't. That, and the Beretta and penlight he had cast aside, which he now returned to their homes beneath his jacket.

Faces and bodies passed, but he no longer even looked. There was nothing more for him to see here. He doubted a time would ever come when the memories weren't still fresh in his mind.

The rain had started to fall from the starless sky, beating down the foliage for keeping its secret for so long. From where he stood, he could see the dark stream, which mocked him with a continuous chuckle. Agents combed the woods, their barking dogs echoing throughout the valley. He already knew what they would find. There would be no body, only a trail of blood that would lead right back to him.

* * *

Wolfe looked like hell. Carver could see the dark hollows of his eyes even through the sunglasses. He was waiting outside the emergency room at the University of Washington Harborview Medical Center with a paper cup of coffee when Carver arrived. They acknowledged each other without words, in the way only people who live through a harrowing ordeal together could.

They entered the building side by side and passed through the hordes of the sick and injured. A freestanding sign advertising the flu clinic had already been changed to reflect the new dates, two weeks down the road. A boy in cleats and a green jersey held a visibly broken arm and sobbed into his mother's arms while the obese man beside her vomited into a plastic cup. Carver hoped they knew how lucky they were.

An elevator took them to the intensive care unit. Glass-enclosed rooms surrounded a central nurses station. Several agents hovered around the desk, making everyone look nervous. Wolfe led Carver to the second room on the left and past a guard who made no attempt to stop them. The off-white curtains were drawn over the large interior window. A sliding glass door opened into a room lorded over by beeping and humming machinery. Carver recognized the rapid infuser from beside the steel table in the room at the house in Arizona. Locke was under the covers nearly to his chin, only his left arm exposed to grant access to the port in his elbow. He was diminished, but the color was slowly returning to his face and lips.

Wolfe said something about the doctors offering no guarantees or timeframes, yet they were encouraged by the speed with which Locke was recovering and optimistic regarding his prognosis. He mentioned that badgers were notoriously feisty little devils, a comment for which Carver needed no clarification.

Carver gave Locke a squeeze on the shoulder and offered some reassuring words. The agent opened his eyes momentarily and bared a ferocious grin that left no doubt that the man would be on his feet again in no time and ready to settle the score. Carver pitied anyone who stood in Locke's way once he was strong enough to rip the IV out of his arm.

He left Wolfe and slipped back out into the main room. All of the nurses looked away. He imagined it might have something to do with the haunted look in his eyes, the smell of gunpowder that clung to him, or, quite possibly, the fact that he was still covered with dried blood.

Ellie was in the adjacent room. He slid back the door, sat in the chair beside the bed, and took her hand in his. It felt cold and fragile. IV fluids coursed into her arm, and the monitors above her head produced a steady electronic rhythm. When he looked at her face, he found her blue eyes staring right back.

"I don't know what I would have done if..." he said, his voice cracking.

"It wouldn't have made my day either." Her voice was a dry whisper, subtly slurred by the painkillers. She managed a weak smile.

"How are you feeling?"

"I've been better."

The exertion took its toll as he watched. Her eyes drooped closed of their own accord. The smile lingered a moment longer. He thought for sure she had fallen asleep until she whispered something so softly he couldn't quite hear. Leaning across the bed, he kissed her gently on the forehead. Her eyes twitched under her closed lids. He was about to leave her to her rest when she whispered again.

Ellie's words replayed inside his head when he left the room. At first he thought she had said "Take her," but with repetition came clarity.

She had actually said "Tapir."

* * *

Carver swung through the emergency room and talked with the physicians who had received Hawthorne and Jack from the Flight for Life chopper. The doctors had managed to stabilize them and appeared genuinely pleased with themselves, but wouldn't offer better than even odds. Both had been rushed to surgery, where they were still under the knife. Hawthorne had taken a slug to the upper left side of his chest and another to the right side of his pelvis. His left clavicle was shattered, his lung collapsed, and his pleural cavity filled with blood. Add to that a compound fracture of the iliac crest, and even if he made it through surgery, rehabilitation was going to be a daunting task.

Jack had taken the worst of it. Eight stab wounds from a scalpel to the abdomen. Had the blade been larger or any less sharp, Jack's viscera would have been unsalvageable. As it was, he had bruising and lacerations to his spleen, liver, right kidney, and his bowels had been cut to ribbons. The surgeons were going to have to resect feet of his intestines, sew up the liver, and quite possibly excise both the spleen and kidney. It would be touch-and-go for a while.

Both doctors had been quick to point out that had either man lost any more blood in the field, they wouldn't have stood a chance. Carver thanked them, but didn't feel reassured in the slightest.

He went back up to Ellie's room and again held her hand. This time she didn't open her eyes. The surgeons had been instructed to page him the moment either Hawthorne or Jack was out of surgery. So now he played the waiting game. He closed his eyes, listened to the reassuring sounds of Ellie's soft breathing, and pondered bats and tapirs. In no time at all, he was asleep.

Chapter Eight

What we call Man's power over Nature turns

out to be a power exercised by some men

over other men with Nature as an instrument.

--C.S. Lewis

I

El Mirador Ruins

North of El Petén, Guatemala

Four Days Later

Carver crouched beneath a ceiba tree. Waiting. The tourists had all left for the day, leaving the ruins no better off for the assault of flashbulbs and trash littering the paths and underbrush. Thirty years ago this site had been on the brink of renovation, which now only meant cordoned trails to funnel the curious from one temple to the next in a parody of the lives led here more than a thousand years prior. He was soaked to the bone and uncertain of exactly what he hoped to find.

None of the others knew he was here. After all, like the other agents before him, this was his battle, his responsibility.

Ellie was resting comfortably in a regular inpatient room, awaiting the final clearance from her doctor and biding her time watching television. The moment Locke had been able to stand on his own power, he had simply vanished, leaving behind a finger-pointing night staff and a neatly folded hospital gown. Wolfe remained to field the questions for which there were no answers, and to take the debriefing from the half-dozen different government organizations that needed to cover their asses. Worse still, he was in charge of keeping Hawthorne bedridden, at least until they were able to pull his chest tube. Once the doctors decided his lung was in no danger of collapsing again and that the Erector Set they had used to rebuild his hip would bear his weight, they'd allow Hawthorne to sign himself out against medical advice. They were tired of arguing and Hawthorne was a man accustomed to getting his way. He was also a man who wouldn't be particularly missed by the staff. Jack had come through surgery as well as anyone could have hoped. He was lighter for the four feet of jejunum, the spleen, and the kidney of which they had absolved him, but at least he was nearly out of the woods. The morning Jack had awakened, Carver had been almost crippled by relief. By lunchtime he had been on a plane to Los Angeles, the first of seemingly thousands of transfers that brought him to where he was now: drenched, exhausted, and praying he would get the opportunity to use the semi-automatic pistol in his fist. Just like his father three decades earlier.

His brother had a four-day head start, but a pair of gunshot wounds might have slowed him down just enough for Carver to catch up with him.

Ellie might have been delusional from the painkillers, but she had been right. The bat and the tapir. The clues had been right in front of him the whole time. Bats invariably returned to the darkness after a long night's hunt. They weren't migratory. They always came back to their home. In this case, the place of their birth. The El Mirador ruins, specifically the La Danta temple. La Danta, of course, had he but taken the time to learn, was Spanish for tapir.

Their lives had now come full circle.

At the stroke of midnight, he emerged from the protective foliage and met the true wrath of the storm. A startled spider monkey screeched above his head and hurled itself through the upper canopy. He heard the rapid clap of the wings of birds startled to flight, the slap of his feet through the ankle deep mud. Yellow ropes had been strung around the pyramid to keep people from climbing all over it like ants, but they only slowed him down for a moment. The side of La Danta that had been swallowed by the hillside had been nearly completely excavated, the dirt hauled away from a slanted path leading to the dark maw at the bottom. He had learned earlier on the tour that they were preparing to open the tunnels beneath to the public once they were retrofitted for safety. His guide had made no mention of any strange discoveries they might have found inside. If he knew Jack, every last piece of equipment had been unearthed and studied right down to the atomic level anyway.

He reached the chain-link gate blocking his way into the temple and stopped. The picks were already in his hand. A minute later, the padlock was in the mud. He had been watching the pyramid for the better part of the night and had only seen construction workers pass through the gate.