Pandora's Temple (8 page)

McCracken had found Wareagle hard at work with hammer and chisel in hand amid the harsh winds and biting temperatures of late winter in South Dakota. He worked without a safety harness or belay on a narrow ledge barely wide enough to accommodate his feet, making McCracken feel almost guilty for hammering a restraining bolt into the face alongside his oldest friend and tying himself down.

“Nice work, Indian.”

“It’s good to see you too, Blainey.”

McCracken felt the cold breeze blow some of Wareagle’s etchings into his face. “This your version of retirement?”

“Anything but,” Wareagle said, barely looking up from his labor. “Honoring the greatest Sioux of all time reminds me of a legacy I can never totally live up to.” He met McCracken’s gaze and held it this time. “Crazy Horse was a warrior until his very last day on Earth and I will be too.”

“That’s good, because we’ve got a job.”

Wareagle glanced at him, but only briefly. “As I figured.”

“’Cause why else would I be here.”

“It was only a matter of time, Blainey, but this job will still have to wait until I’m finished.”

McCracken looked up and around to regard their place amid the massive carving. “I don’t think the college students held hostage by a drug cartel in Mexico can wait that long.”

Wareagle tensed visibly, then did his best to reposition the chisel before lowering it to face McCracken again. “So you came here to rescue me first.”

“An assault rifle or an MK-2 knife would look a lot better in your hand than a hammer.”

“Different weapons, different tasks.”

“Statues don’t bleed, Indian, and granite is plenty harder than flesh and bone.”

“You know why I came here?”

“Not really, no.”

“To find out if I could stay, to find out how long I could live without that part of me birthed by the Hellfire.”

“End result?”

“I knew you’d be coming and in my mind’s eye did not welcome your presence. I saw myself turning you away, refusing a return to the world we have so long known.”

McCracken shifted on the thin ledge slightly to better face Wareagle. “So here I am.”

“And when I got your message, the vision from my mind’s eye proved wrong. I felt something stir in the pit of my stomach, a familiar feeling I could not ignore or deny, confronting my true nature.”

McCracken again regarded the product of Johnny’s labor. “As a warrior instead of an artist, you mean.”

“Like the tale of the scorpion and the frog.”

“I figured I owed you, Indian.”

“Blainey?”

“How many times have you lifted me from a funk with words I didn’t fully understand but somehow made things feel right? How many times have you made sense of what we were facing, put it in perspective? So that’s what I’m doing, returning the favor.”

“Because you feel I’ve strayed from the path.”

“Not in so many words, but that’s the general idea. You and I were bred for one thing, Indian—wet work, not art work. Here you are turning the legend of your people into the face of a memorial when the real memorial is how many lives we’ve saved over the years.”

Wareagle smiled thinly. “How many lives this time, Blainey?”

“Four.”

“And how many captors?”

“A hundred, maybe more.”

And then, undramatically, Wareagle returned the hammer and chisel to his work belt. “The Hellfire all over again.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way, would you?”

“Baz?” McCracken asked now. “Is he still working the Gulf? I thought he retired.”

“Twice,” Johnny Wareagle told him. “But he can’t manage the task any more than we can.”

“Except he’s got the good sense to stay away from guns, drug dealers, hostage rescues, rocket-propelled grenades, Hellfire missiles—should I go on?”

Wareagle seemed unmoved. “It’s worked for us for forty years, Blainey.”

“Minus the last two.” McCracken shook his head. “Why the hell are we still alive? I mean, we’ve both known soldiers, operatives, operators—whatever you want to call them—who didn’t make it through their first field op. We’ve survived what feels like a thousand of them.”

Wareagle settled back in his chair at the K-Paul’s table, suddenly pensive. “There is a legend among my people called the Rabbit and the Elk. The rabbit lived with his old grandmother, who needed a new dress. ‘I will go out and trap a deer or an elk for you,’ he said. ‘Then you shall have a new dress.’ When he went out hunting, he laid down his bow in the path while he looked at his snares. An elk coming by saw the bow. ‘I will play a joke on the rabbit,’ said the elk to himself. ‘I will make him think I have been caught in his bow string.’ He then put one foot on the string and lay down as if dead. By and by the rabbit returned. When he saw the elk, he was filled with joy and ran home crying: ‘Grandmother, I have trapped a fine elk. You shall have a new dress from his skin. Throw the old one in the fire!’ This the old grandmother did. But when he returned to the snare, the elk sprang to his feet laughing. ‘Ho, friend rabbit,’ he called, ‘You thought to trap me; now I have mocked you.’ And he ran away into the thicket. The rabbit who had come back to skin the elk now ran home again. ‘Grandmother, don’t throw your dress in the fire,’ he cried. But it was too late. The old dress was burned.”

“Okay,” McCracken said, after Wareagle had finished, “I’m waiting.”

“For what?”

“The point.”

“Among young Sioux, the point of the legend has always been the folly of assumption, of fooling oneself into believing something is what it isn’t. We—you, me, Bas—have never suffered from that. We live today because we see the world for what it is and accept our place in it.”

McCracken looked at Wareagle across the table, grinning. “Good. Because I was having trouble picturing you in a dress.”

Wareagle looked down at the hand that had just set the water glass down on the table. “You’re not wearing your ring, Blainey.”

“Neither are you.”

“The difference being I never do.”

“Maybe I don’t feel especially worthy of it right now.”

Wareagle turned his gaze toward the soft case lying across the extra chair. “How old is the sword?”

“Five hundred years, give or take a decade.”

“How old was it yesterday?”

“About the same.”

Wareagle leaned back just enough to make his chair creak. “My point exactly.”

“What about last week? Believe I was considerably younger before Juárez.”

“Why us after so long, Blainey?”

“Suit who came calling said he came to us because we were the only ones who could get it done.”

“But you don’t believe him.”

“I think he came to us because no one else would take the job. Suicide mission.”

“Anything but, as it turned out.”

“I don’t know what’s worse, Indian. The feeling we were done or the feeling maybe we should be.”

Wareagle leaned forward, so fluidly that his chair didn’t make a sound this time. “There’s another story my people tell of a Sioux warrior who once defended his tribe single-handedly against a Cherokee raiding party. It was winter and the Cherokees were foraging for food when they came upon the village. But in snow and cold, the Sioux warrior struck them all down. The legend says he covered himself in ice and snow so the Cherokee looked past him into the air. And when it was over, instead of celebrating, he wept. Not out of guilt or remorse, but because there was no one left to kill.”

“Did he live to fight another day?”

“The legend doesn’t say, Blainey.”

“Neither does ours.”

Katie DeMarco moved quickly down the sidewalk, cell phone glued to her ear, willing the connection to come through. She knew they’d found her again; spotting jacket-clad men on this blistering hot New Orleans day baking the asphalt beneath a sun-drenched sky was a dead giveaway there, even before she glimpsed them talking into their wrist-mounted microphones when she passed by.

She’d ridden the eighteen-wheeler all the way to the Dupuy Storage and Forwarding facility, climbing down once the cargo door was raised open to the shocked stares of the workers. Katie paid them no heed, just hurried off before they could gather their thoughts.

“Hey! . . .
Hey!
”

She never acknowledged the calls shouted her way, walking until she found a bus stop and climbed onto a bus bound for the nearby downtown district. She stank of coffee, the pungent aroma so imbedded in her nostrils that she couldn’t shake it.

Upon reaching the French Quarter, Katie had purchased a throwaway cell phone in a drugstore, stepping outside to find more jacketed figures seemingly talking into their hands directly across the street from her. There was no choice now; she had to risk making the call while she still had the chance, convinced those at the other end were in at least as much danger as she.

Katie dialed Todd Lipton’s satellite number, her pace kicked up to a fast walk just short of a jog. She heard a click, followed by a harsh buzzing sound that indicated his phone was ringing in Greenland.

“Hello,” Lipton answered finally, through the static bursts clogging the line.

“Todd, it’s me.”

“Is that you—”

“Don’t use my name. It’s not safe. None of us are safe.”

“You’re breaking up. I can hardly hear you. Could you say that again?”

Katie DeMarco moved the phone closer to her mouth, continuing to weave through pedestrian traffic on the sidewalk. “I said you’re not
safe
. I think Ocean Bore is on to us.”

“I heard ‘on to us.’ Did you say on to us?”

“Yes, Todd. You need to take—”

“I can’t hear you . . .”

“—precautions.”

“Precautions? What precautions?”

“I stepped in a load of shit here in the Gulf. I don’t know what Ocean Bore is after, but it’s big and it’s not oil. Repeat, not oil.”

“What about oil?”

“Did you hear what I just said? Can you hear me now?”

No response amid the static.

Katie swallowed hard, as she composed her next words. “Listen to me, Todd. They’re after me. They know I was on board the
Venture
.” Katie waited for him to respond. “Todd, are you there? Can you hear me?”

Silence followed, interminable and empty, that left Katie’s mind racing.

“Todd?” she posed, hoping he was still there, the connection intact.

“I heard you say they were after you,” his voice returned finally.

“I’ve got to move. Don’t try calling me. I’ll call you again as soon as I’m safe.”

“Did you say
safe
? Are you in danger? What’s going on?”

“Todd, please, there’s no time. Just listen!”

“You need to contact Twist,” he said instead.

“Todd—”

“He’s your backup in New Orleans. He’ll help you, he’ll . . .”

“Todd, you’ve got to listen to—”

“. . . get you out of this.”

Katie squeezed the phone tighter. “Todd, can you hear me?”

“I can hear you.”

“Hide if you can. Flee the village. You’re in danger.”

Silence again.

“Todd? . . . Todd?”

“Call Twist, call—”

Click.

That was it; the line had gone dead. And the men were closing from both sides and across the street, the phone call having branded her an easy target. She couldn’t go back, couldn’t continue forward. All she could do was veer suddenly toward a restaurant called K-Paul’s on Chartres Street.

McCracken and Wareagle both ordered the blackened Louisiana drum, fish caught just miles away.

“I feel better already,” McCracken said, taking a bite of his.

“Have you spoken with the family of the student who died?”

“Now why would I do something like that?”

“Because you’d want them to hear what happened from you, Blainey. You’d want to put a face to the grief to better deal with your own.”

“Not yet, no,” McCracken said, almost shyly. “But I’ve got their contact info. Not sure if just showing up on their doorstep is in anyone’s best interest. Folsom said he’d handle it, which means it won’t happen or be a waste of time. . . . What?” McCracken asked, when Wareagle continue to stare at him in silence.

“It’s refreshing.”

“What?”

“How you’ve always valued one life as much as a hundred. In the Hellfire and after.”

“Well, Indian, I’m too old to change now.” The entry door being thrust open ahead of a young woman bursting through drew his attention immediately that way. “Like I was saying.”

She had wavy black hair and eyes that seemed to shine in the restaurant’s light. She swung toward the door again as she backed away, as if expecting someone to barge in after her. Keeping her eyes peeled in that direction, she angled for the bar while scanning the room, in search perhaps of an alternative exit.

Just like McCracken would have done if he were being chased.

“You thinking what I’m thinking, Indian?” he asked, aware Wareagle’s gaze had been drawn to her as well.

In that moment, a pair of big-shouldered men burst through the restaurant entrance.

“Not our problem, Blainey.”

But then pistols flashed in the big-shouldered men’s hands.

“It is now,” McCracken told him, reaching for the chair across which he’d laid his samurai sword.

Katie DeMarco veered away from the bar when she saw the men coming, steering toward an exit sign posted near the south side of K-Paul’s rear just past a similar sign for the restrooms. Coming that way straight toward her, though, were another pair of men who might have been twins of the first pair. Dressed almost identically, their hands were starting to emerge from beneath their jackets.

Katie thought of crying out, screaming, anything to draw attention to herself and stop the coming attack. But the resolve she glimpsed in the men’s eyes told her no response that feeble could forestall their intentions. So she turned again, intending to cut through the center of the restaurant, when a man at a table just past the bar whipped out a sword from inside a wooden scabbard, its mirrorlike steel glinting in the naked light of the restaurant.