Burn (Story of CI #3) (14 page)

Lázaro rolled his eyes. "I've been watching. We're good. So yeah, I have that, and I also picked up my brother's ring this afternoon." Lázaro had told her that his brother was buying the wedding ring here in Bolivia, since it was a whole lot cheaper to buy a huge diamond here than in Puerto Rico. Apparently, Helda's replacement demanded a fair amount of bling.

"What I'm thinking," Lázaro said, "is that I can leave this stuff with you, because tomorrow on the way to the airport I really wanted to go to the market and get something for my mom. Some Bolivian tablecloth or somethin' cool like that. It would really suck to get robbed in the market."

"Oh. Ok." They were pulling up at the door to Wara's house, round-topped and wood with ancient black metal clasps. "Sure, I can keep that stuff for you. I'll bring it right to the airport in the morning."

But the night at Wara's apartment with the beer got a little crazy. And then a little crazier.

When Lázaro went to the airport for their flight to San Juan in the morning, Wara wasn't there.

LALO SPENT THE NIGHT PROPPED IN a folding chair just outside the Timbuktu hospital gate. Dawn spread over the sandy city in shades of butter and ruby red.

It had been a long night. Darkness in a mysterious African city where a feared bounty hunter roamed was not exactly conducive to peaceful meditation. Getting the call from Rupert yesterday about the attack on Alejo and Wara hadn’t really been good news, either. Lalo had spent the entire night shift staring dumbly at the hulking buildings around the hospital block, bathed in starlight. After about ten, nothing on the streets had moved. Caspian was inside the hospital, slumped in another chair outside the big communal room where the kids from the school stayed.

They’d both stayed here last night. It was Caspian’s turn for the night shift, but after the news about the Tuareg bounty hunter and how Lázaro Marquez nearly blew up Lalo’s friends, sleep had been the last thing on Lalo’s mind.

He hauled his bones out of the rickety chair and cracked his shoulders inside the body armor vest, inhaling the only hint of cool air Timbuktu ever got. The city already smelled like cooking fires.

This morning, Cail would set out for Timbuktu. She’d get to Bamako tonight, then hopefully catch a flight to Timbuktu sometime tomorrow.

He should have insisted more when he talked with her yesterday. It would have been better if she stayed away from him. It really would have.

But Lalo really wanted to see her.

Maybe all this tracking device crap would end up being nothing.

He clunked his head back against the scratchy mud building and exhaled loudly about six times. At that exact moment, the cell phone in his pocket started playing a wild techno beat.

It was Rupert, getting back to him. Lalo had called him yesterday afternoon after hearing the bounty hunter news at Amadou’s house.

The morning temperature suddenly heated up to suffocating. “Hello?” Lalo hated that his voice sounded a few shades on the pathetic side.

“Good morning,” Rupert said gruffly. Normally, imagining the balding ex-CIA employee sitting there at his computer desk in one of those fuzzy robes and plaid slippers was enough to cheer Lalo up.

Not today.

“Rupert. Hey.” Lalo felt a smile paste itself onto his face. He probably had the look of a guy a few crayons short of the whole box, if anyone was looking. “Thank you for…calling me. Did you happen to find anything out?”

“I did some checking,” Rupert said. Lalo heard him slurping coffee. “How are you?”

Lalo gritted his teeth against the loopy smile. “Not so well, actually. Thanks for asking.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Rupert seemed to frown. “I don’t think you’re in any real danger, but I know how this has to affect you. I’d like to reassign you. Alejo, Cail, and Wara will all be there tomorrow.”

That caught Lalo off guard. It was the perfect solution, wasn’t it? He could just hightail it out of Timbuktu and let them try to track him again. Maybe it would take them another twenty years to find him this time. Escape them once more at the age of fifty-six, and then twenty years after that, Lalo would probably be dead. Problem solved.

“Uh…” Lalo licked his lips and squeezed his eyes shut.

He was a wimp. He really wanted to go.

Lalo leaned back into the chair, felt the hinges scream against the weight of his tall frame. He felt heavy enough to crush the chair right down into the ground, all the way to hell.

“No,” he said, and freaked even himself out with how deep and scratchy his own voice sounded. Lalo cleared his throat and dug his fingers into the phone. “Don’t reassign me. I need to stay here. I can’t leave these kids.”

“Mmmmm.” Rupert drank more coffee and Lalo heard keys clicking in the background. “If you’re sure. Look, can’t you just find whoever’s after you? If we know where they are, you can avoid them. And if we knew Marquez’s exact location, we could go after him instead of waiting for him to take the bait and show up.”

Lalo felt himself blink compulsively. Yeah, when he’d heard that Marquez almost hurt Wara, it had broken his heart. But Rupert didn’t know what he was saying. “I thought…No, I can’t do that,” Lalo muttered, feeling extremely crappy.

Rupert sighed again. “I understand. Well, I checked into what you told me. It seems there’s a rumor going around in the underworld: a Russian tracking device. They say it can find anything, any human target or any physical location on the planet. But it’s just a rumor, Lalo. No one seems to know many details. This is obviously a high value item, however. A lot of bad guys think this is something worth looking for.”

“That’s all they’re saying?”

“There aren’t many details,” Rupert repeated. “No one seems to know anything beyond that. Russian. Tracking device. Millions of dollars.” There was a very long pause. “But Lalo, this is still a very valuable item. Being able to locate any person or thing on the planet? It’s priceless.”

Lalo felt about as white as a ghost.

“I don’t think it’s him who’s looking for you,” Rupert said over the phone. “If Markov or your father were the ones who’d put out the word, there would be more details. It’d be so much easier to find you with a physical description, for example. Things that Markov or your father would know.”

“They haven’t seen me since I was sixteen,” Lalo said through clenched teeth.

“It’s not them,” Rupert said. “At least that’s my bet. This is a rumor, and a whole bunch of random bad guys are trying to cash in.”

That was encouraging. Not his father, or Markov. Just the entire underworld of bad guys on the planet, all hoping to be the first to find the ultimate weapon.

“I can tell you for sure it’s not Markov, Lalo,” Rupert went on, “because intelligence says that he’s dead.”

Relief inflated Lalo’s lungs and he slumped down into the chair. He’d figured the Russian scientist must have kicked the bucket sometime in the past couple decades. Lalo never imagined having that fact confirmed would feel so wonderful.

“He worked with the Russian program to use psychic abilities for intelligence until 1995,” Rupert said. “The year he died. Might have been terminated to keep intelligence from leaking out.”

“Or because he failed,” Lalo croaked.

“Maybe.”

Lalo didn’t want to say it, but the question was crawling around inside his gut like a million hungry fire ants. “What about my father?”

Whatever the evil force was that Lalo sometimes saw in his dreams, it had to do with his father. But Lalo was convinced that his father didn’t need to still be alive to keep influencing the earth for evil, somehow.

“There’s been no information on your father for years,” Rupert said slowly. “Intelligence had their eye on him for a long time, thanks to that place he had down there in Colombia right in the middle of FARC territory.”

“It was a cult.”

“It sure was. And cults can do dangerous things. That’s why they were watching him. But years back the whole cult moved. No one knows where they went, if they disbanded.”

“Or maybe no one cares anymore.”

“That’s certainly an option.” The line fell silent and liquid tinkled. Lalo hoped it was Rupert getting a coffee refill. “Damn the MK Ultra program,” Rupert finally muttered.

Despite the growing heat in Timbuktu, Lalo shivered. For most of his life, he had no idea what had made his father turn into a guy who lived in a compound with sixty women in the jungle and worshipped Satan. Lalo just always assumed it was because his father was something like evil incarnate. But when Lalo came to work with Rupert, his new boss found out some things about Lalo’s father through his intelligence contacts.

Lalo’s father was Colombian, from an upper-class German background family. His name was Florian Band, and when he was a young man Florian won a scholarship to study in the United States. It seems there were recruiters at the university, working with a secret US government program called MK Ultra. Florian was taken for the program. They never asked his permission.

When Lalo found out MK Ultra had anything to do with his own life, he was thirty years old. Yeah, the secret files had been declassified and the information about the sick mind control experiments had been out there for years, but he never dreamed there was any reason for him to read about it. What did some American government project from long ago have to do with him?

The stuff he read had left him sick in bed for days.

MK Ultra’s goal was to study the behavioral engineering of humans. Like Lalo’s father who later went bonkers, the subjects weren’t asked for their consent. The experiments involved drugs like LSD, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and torture.

They turned his father into a soulless psychopath, and then released him into the world.

“Lalo? You still there?” Rupert sounded patient. Lalo usually freaked at any discussion of his father. Embarrassing, but understandable.

His father could never find him. It was Lalo’s ultimate nightmare.

Lalo actually felt tears stinging the backs of his eyes.

“Yeah. I’m, uh, still here. Thanks Rupert.”

Thank God, Markov would never find him. The man was dead.

Was he crying out of relief that the Russian was dead?

Or because Markov might have been the only one who knew what happened to Romina, and that knowledge would have died with him?

Bamako, Mali

IT WAS NINE O CLOCK AT NIGHT AND the breeze that battered through the taxi was scratchy and heated. She had just gotten to Bamako, and already Cail was feeling suffocated. There were a couple paved streets in this teeming city, but the rest were pillowy dust that shone white in the moonlight. She couldn't even see the stars thanks to the clouds of pollution swirling over the city. The taxi that had picked them up at their hotel was a rattling metal deathtrap that literally had a spring sticking out of the sad gray upholstery. The passenger side door up front was latched together with string.

Cail, Wara, and Alejo were stuffed into the back, smooshed together in the African heat, trying to avoid the rusty spring that bounced in time to rowdy hip hop music. This taxi was supposed to be taking them to a restaurant. The three of them had arrived tonight from Fez, dumped their stuff in the hotel where they would sleep until the flight to Timbuktu in the morning. A very tall concierge in a pressed burgundy uniform flashed them a smile in the lobby and promised he would send them in a taxi to the tastiest restaurant in Bamako.

"Have you been to this place?" Cail squinted at Alejo. The dry wind whacked at her spiked hair, swirling it around like Medusa’s snakes. Outside the taxi, a living cavalcade of motorcycles swarmed by, outdoing the larger vehicles' speed by an impressive margin. Dust clouded the taxi's windows.

Alejo raised an eyebrow at the mayhem outside and calmly turned back to Cail. The guy could get dropped in any part of the world and feel like he was in his backyard. It kinda wasn’t fair.

Alejo crossed his arms in front of his chest. He looked much too awake for having just traveled internationally. "Nope," he said. "Never been there. We're going to some place called the Appaloosa. I've heard other foreigners talking about it but I never went."

Not surprising. If it was some sleek bar expats liked to frequent for a good time, it wasn't likely Alejo would show up there. The guy needed to learn the meaning of having fun in your time off.

Suddenly they were arriving. The taxi pulled to a halt in a haze of yellow dust. Alejo grabbed the door handle gingerly. Cail hoped the entire door wasn't about to fall off.

"We're here," the cheery taxi driver grinned from the front. Alejo passed him some cash and the driver beamed at them, all flashing white teeth and rainbow colored shirt. "This is the Appaloosa. All foreigners love this place."

They thanked him and climbed out into the sauna. The taxi sped off and Cail stood there gaping at what sat in front of her when the dust cleared.

There were doors, round saloon-shaped ones with slick metal cut-outs of bucking broncos with a lasso. Overhead, a giant sign in Old West letters proclaimed "Appaloosa. Tex-Mex Grill." From somewhere inside the building, the familiar strains of country music wafted, something that slammed Cail right back to childhood in Nebraska. It sounded like "Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox If I Die."

"Whoa," Cail said. Her jaw was drooping a little bit. "It's like a…saloon. In Africa."

Alejo was grinning. Wara was squinting at the bucking broncos.

Inside, the place just got better.

It
was
"Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox," blasting from a real jukebox with neon lights, nestled in the corner by the bar. The bar was smoky, wreathed with slender blond girls in denim skirts and red bandana print blouses that gaped open in all the right places.

There were a bunch of booths along one side, coral orange Southwest material with wagon wheel spokes under the wooden tables. Above each booth, a black and white Indian face kept watch, solemn and grave under a headdress of feathers.

"Please, sir, madam, if I may show you to a seat?" Cail ripped her eyes away from the scene as a Malian guy materialized at her elbow. She blinked at him to make sure this was real. Here in the middle of West Africa, this guy was wearing black velour pants with fringed leather chaps. Tooled boots with spurs. A red and white checked shirt with a crisp bandana around the neck. And of course, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat.

"O-kay," she muttered under her breath as the African cowboy led them towards one of the Southwestern booths. The booths didn't seem nearly far enough away from that bar. The girls lurking there were definitely giving Alejo the eye.

"If they were real cowgirls, they would do up about six more of those top buttons," Cail muttered to Wara under her breath. Wara grinned at her.

The booth ended up being quite comfy. Cail raised an eyebrow in approval at the menu, which was in English and had quite a few things she actually recognized on it.

"Chicken fingers, pizza, calzones…" Cail slid a finger down the list, clucking her tongue in satisfaction. "The food at this place totally meets my approval, anyway."

"Excuse me, partner."

Alejo, who was sitting next to Wara, started and turned to the voice at his ear. One of the sexy cowgirls was standing there smiling. She definitely had an Eastern European accent going on.

And she didn't have a lot else on.

"Buy me a drink at the bar?" the girl pursed cherry red lips at Alejo. Cail flipped her eyes over to Wara and saw she was scowling. The intruder leaned over and platinum blond braids trailed across her boobs. She was all smiles, that’s for sure.

Alejo smiled back at her, but it looked kind of fake. Like the kind of smile you might put on for your mother-in-law if she asked you if you liked her world famous lutefisk.

"I'm, uh, here with friends," he managed, and thankfully did not add
maybe another time.
"Busy. Thanks."

He tried to turn back to Wara and Cail, but before anyone could react, Svetlana or whatever her name was had a grip on Alejo's jaw and was totally lip-locked. How a simple bargirl could maintain such a hold on a guy trained in martial arts and field operative interrogation was beyond Cail. The kiss was over before Cail could even think of a swear word and Svetlana the cowgirl sauntered away, winking at Alejo over one bare shoulder.

"Oh my gosh." Cail cringed, appetite totally gone. Wara finally jerked her gaze away from the bargirl and back to Alejo, who looked like a drawing in the old Windows Paint program. Someone had chosen bright red, clicked on his entire body, and pushed the little paint can fill icon.

They all stared after Svetlana until Wara was the first to snort out a laugh. Somehow, that morphed into full-fledged giggling. Alejo was shaking his head, trying to act all cool, but his cheeks were smoldering.

"That was so disturbing!" Wara giggled at him. Cail might have been tempted to slap the guy for not extracting himself from Svetlana’s lips a millisecond sooner, but apparently Wara was more forgiving. She was grabbing Alejo’s hand from under the table and wrapping her fingers up in his.

"You know, that looked kind of fun,” Wara said, totally breathless from too much laughing. “I'm kind of in the mood to kiss you myself, Alejo."

Cail rolled her eyes, because Alejo Martir actually looked rather cute sitting there, kinda shell-shocked, cheeks stained all rosy.

"I just can't right now, though,” Wara continued, “cause I feel like before I kiss you, you should buy and guzzle a whole bottle of mouthwash."

Wara lost it and snorted again.

"Extra-strength!" Cail laughed from across the table. "Super mint flavor or something."

Alejo glanced once more towards the bar, then squeezed Wara's hand back and turned to grin at her. The red was starting to fade. "I hope that doesn't mean I have to leave a really big tip," he said.

"You won't leave a really big tip!" Wara ordered him. "Because the menu here says they have cheesecake. You are gonna buy me desert with that money instead, amigo."

By the time their pizza arrived, everyone had finally settled down. Before they could take the first bite, Alejo’s cell rang and he got up to take the call outside. Cail watched him go out the swinging saloon doors with one eyebrow raised. Wara was forking up a trail of cheese splattered across her plate.

"Don't worry," Cail told her. "No one’s following him out the front door."

"Oh my gosh. Good," Wara rolled her eyes and shoveled in the cheese. "This place is so crazy."

"It was good to laugh, though," Cail said. She’d actually confessed to Wara on the plane today about the setback in her emotional state and the little white pills she’d had to start taking again. It was gonna take at least a week for her to start noticing the effects.

It had not been fun telling Wara about it. Being crazy was not as exciting as it was cracked up to be.

Thankfully, Wara and Alejo would never know exactly how messed up she’d been on the fountain yesterday afternoon. Cail had totally missed the meeting time back by the car, but Cail’s two friends had been a little “tied up” with Lázaro Marquez, anyway. They hadn’t exactly made it back to the car on time either.

If Cail wanted to feel sorry for herself because of the pills and looming craziness, she just needed to remember how Wara and Alejo had spent their afternoon.

They needed to catch Marquez, and they needed to catch him now.

If Cail cared a little less about Lalo, she would have to admit that Rupert was right. Lalo could find Lázaro for them. None of them would have to wait out there in Timbuktu for the psychopath to show up and try to take out Wara.

They could go after Marquez right away, take him down.

It took a second for Cail to realize Wara was trying to talk to her. The panic had been growing as Cail stared at the tasty-looking slice of Six Meat Pizza on her plate and contemplated Lalo and crazy assassins.

“So I never got to ask you,” Wara was saying. “About lunch yesterday. The day kind of ended badly for me. How did it go with Jonah?”

Cail felt her fingers strangling the life out of the red and white checked tablecloth. Wara had already munched through a third of her generous slice of pizza. It smelled amazing, but Cail couldn’t touch it. The pizza just sat there, all cheesy and glistening with sausage and waxy canned mushrooms, mocking her.

"I kind of get the feeling that Jonah is someone you didn’t get along with growing up?” Wara smirked.

"Uh…" Cail cringed, rolling her eyes up to the black and white Indian sentry over their heads. "We did. Actually. Get along very well." She might as well tell her. A little bit of it, anyway. This was gonna be quite the trip, and the secrecy level among those involved was gonna have to drop a little.

Jonah was gonna be waiting for Cail in Timbuktu, for heaven’s sake.

"I was in love,” Cail confessed. Her cynical alter-ego was screaming, banging on the walls of her head very loudly, demanding that she shut up. “With Jonah.” Wara slowed down chewing on the pizza. "When we were teenagers," Cail went on. “You cannot repeat this to a single soul.”

Ooooo," Wara grimaced. "No wonder it was so awkward to have lunch with the fiancée, too."

"Mmmmm," Cail grunted.

"Bad breakup?"

“You have no idea.”

Wara stuffed crust into her mouth and washed it down with Fanta. “You broke up when you went off to join the army?”

“Uh…” The panic grew. Cail suddenly regretted mentioning Jonah’s name.

The flicker of a smile curved Wara’s mouth. “To train to kill the Antichrist,” she added.

Cail would much rather talk about the Antichrist than Jonah. She harrumphed. Wara knew the story.

The scene flashed across Cail’s brain, the little church in Nebraska with the faded slate blue carpet and sloped ceiling with rough wood beams. Her parents, the pastors, were praying over Cail, who was kneeling in front of the big Christian flag by the altar. She was wearing a pink nylon skirt with cheery daisies and a white chenille turtleneck. Her butt-length hair was tamed into a severe bun on the top of her head.

All the members of the church crowded around, praying in tongues and asking God to bless this eighteen-year-old girl as she went off to the army to learn to shoot.

Revelations specified that the enemy of God’s people, the man called the Antichrist, was gonna get a fatal head wound. It was prophecy, and God’s word always came to pass.

And lucky Cail Lamontagne, timid homeschooled girl from Nebraska, was the chosen one. God had picked her to be the one who was gonna fulfill the prophecy.

Cail felt something in the pit of her stomach begin to burn at the window into the past. “Yeah, I was supposed to kill the Antichrist,” Cail croaked, surprising herself when she cracked a smile. “Some people’s parents want them to be doctors. Others, lawyers. I just had a very special career path.”

Wara rolled her eyes and stabbed at her pizza. “I can’t believe your church did that to you,” she said. “I look around, and I see so much crap that church has done to people. And it makes me wonder if it’s all worth it.” Wara glanced towards the door. A long peacock feather earring brushed across the braided strap of her black tank top. She was looking for Alejo.

“He’d better hurry up or you’re not gonna leave him any pizza,” Cail said. She saw Wara turn back to the table grinning, then notice Cail’s untouched plate.

“You can’t eat?”

Cail swallowed hard. "No." Her voice came out creaky. "There's just this screaming in my head. I didn't bow my head and pray the right thing, so I can’t eat."