The Devil's Elixir (42 page)

M
y son is the reincarnation of the man I killed
.

At least, that’s what I thought Tess had just said. My head was still spinning from it, and I felt like I was the one having an out-of-body experience.

It was absurd, and all I could muster was, “What are you talking about?”

“The things Alex was remembering. Animals and scenes from rainforests.” She pulled out Alex’s drawings and showed them to me again. “These tribes, these settings. That’s right from McKinnon’s past. He spent his life in those places.” She was getting breathless, her words spilling out more intensely. “These plants. They’re medicinal plants. And this drawing here”—she pointed to the one of the man walking on orange, fiery ground—“that’s fire walking. McKinnon’s done it; I read it in a bio of his. Then there’s that other flower Alex drew, the one his teacher told me about. He told me it was supposed to cure heart problems, but that it turned out to be harmful. McKinnon was the one who found it. I looked it up. He was working for a big pharmaceutical company at the time. They were funding his research and footing his bills down there. And he found this plant that showed a lot of promise as a cholesterol inhibitor. But then the tests went bad and he fell out with his bosses ’cause they’d built it up into this medical marvel and they didn’t want their share options to implode. That’s why he bailed on the big pharmas and struck out on his own. Alex told me about this. Not in full detail, but he gave me enough to want to look into it. All the pieces fit.”

“Come on, Tess. Look at the drawings,” I countered. “It’s not like they’re photographic evidence. They’re pretty vague, maybe you’re reading stuff into them
because
it fits . . . and they could be things he saw on TV or in some issue of
National Geographic
. And that cholesterol story? Maybe he heard about it on the news or heard someone talking about it.”

“Maybe . . . but he remembers you, Sean. This drawing?” She handed me the one that showed Alex with someone facing him, and looked at me squarely as she tapped her finger against the dark figure. “He said this was you. He says you shot him.” She tapped the center of her forehead. “Right here. He told me the whole story. Just like you told me. In detail.”

She hesitated, and paused as I stared at the drawing again, giving it a proper look this time. And it was uncanny. Although it was a kid’s drawing, I saw something in it. A raw truth, an emotion that brought that night cannoning back into my mind’s eye. It was deeply unsettling to imagine that Alex had actually drawn me there, in the lab, but looking at it now with different eyes, it suddenly didn’t seem impossible.

And yet, it had to be.

“He knew, Sean,” she continued. “About the woman. About her kid. About the guy who was with you, how he shot them.”

And that hit me like a sledgehammer. “What?”

“He told me about it. How they died. How angry he got, how he ran . . . He told me about the laptop and the journal, about Father Eusebio. He knew about it. He knew everything.” Her eyes were glistening with moisture now. “How could he possibly know that, Sean? How could a four-year-old who wasn’t even born back then know any of these things?”

I didn’t have an answer for her.

I was having trouble coming to grips with the basic notion, let alone the details. I tried to step back, to go back to the beginning and track forward, to try to make sense of the sheer absurdity of what Tess had just hit me with. I racked my brain looking for another explanation, pulling her theory apart, but I kept butting up against one thing, one certainty that I couldn’t bat away. Alex didn’t get it from Michelle. I’d never told her how McKinnon had died, let alone what Munro had done. And it wasn’t written up in any report either. Corliss had made sure of that.

I looked at Tess, feeling my own soul going into a tailspin. “It can’t be . . .”

“How else could he know, Sean? How?”

And just like a moment earlier, I didn’t have an answer for her. But I now understood. I understood what this was all about.

“Navarro’s not after me,” I said, my voice hardening with anger. “He’s after Alex. Because he thinks Alex is the reincarnation of McKinnon. Because he wants the formula. Because he thinks Alex might remember it.”

“Exactly,” Tess concurred. “Alex is the target. Has been all along.”

It fit.

It goddamn fit.

And if this was true, then for some weird, sick, karmic mind-fuck of a reason, whoever chose how these things happen decided he’d drop-kick the soul of the man I executed into the body of my own son.

Forget intelligent design.

This was perverse, sadistic design.

I slid down to the ground and leaned back against the lone tree, feeling as isolated as it was. I still wasn’t sure I believed it. It was too insane, too surreal. It needed a major leap of faith, and I wasn’t there yet. But I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand either. Not with everything Tess had dug up. And if it were true . . . The thought of Alex seeing his murderer every time he looked at me, his own father, was too horrific to imagine. I went back to looking for ways to sink Tess’s conclusion, fast, to rip it apart and shred it into nanoparticles so it would never come up again.

I couldn’t.

I felt like my head was about to explode, like an astronaut in deep space whose helmet had cracked open. And I wish I was in space, where, if you believe the movie posters, no one can hear you scream. I’d have really belted one out. But I couldn’t. Not here. Not in front of Tess, not with Alex and Jules and the other agent close by. So I just slunk back, leaned my head back, and shut my eyes.

Tess slid down and sat next to me.

After a moment, I asked her, “You really think it’s possible?”

She took a long second, then said, “I don’t know what to believe. And—honestly?—I’m torn. I’m torn between wanting it to be real and hoping it isn’t.” She reached out and put her hand on my arm and leaned in closer. “I don’t want it to be real for your sake. For Alex’s sake. It would be so . . . cruel. And unfair. And part of me is kicking myself for even having looked into it. But if it is real . . . we can’t run away from it. It’s better if we face it and deal with it and fix things so Alex and you can have the kind of father-and-son relationship you both so deserve.”

She stared up at the night sky. I followed her gaze upward. It seemed more vast and endless to me than ever.

“And if it is real . . . Jesus. It changes everything. If this life isn’t the end, if there’s a chance that we come back . . . That’s a whole other conversation and one I’m not sure we need to have right now.”

I nodded, more to myself than to her. All of that could wait. “I need to make sure Alex is safe,” I told her. “For good. If that’s what Navarro believes, then Alex isn’t going to be safe until that bastard is put away. That’s what I need to take care of first. After that . . . we’ll deal with the rest.”

I had to find Navarro. But once I did, I needed to shut him up, permanently. I didn’t want any of this to ever come to light—it would haunt, if you’ll forgive the pun, Alex for years to come and would make his life very difficult. I also didn’t want Navarro blabbing about this from some prison cell and inspiring a whole new wave of narcos to come chasing after my son like he was their golden goose.

I had to find El Brujo.

Little did I know that he’d find me first.

I
didn’t hear them come in.

It was late. Really late, or really early, depending on which way you look at it. I wasn’t sleeping, but I guess my senses were so numb I couldn’t say I was awake either. I was physically and mentally trashed, and sleep would have been very welcome. I did get some, initially. Maybe a couple of hours. Then somewhere around four thirty in the morning, my eyes flickered awake, and that was it.

Jules and Cal, the new guy, were alternating two-hour shifts on watch, but I’d offered to share the roster with them. My shift, though, wasn’t till six. And yet, here I was, staring at the ceiling. Maybe I couldn’t rest until I’d found a hole, some way of sinking Tess’s theory. Or maybe it was something inside me—acutely sensitive hearing or some kind of ESP, depending on whether we’re going for a strictly scientific explanation or, given where my head was at, a more esoteric one—that shook me awake because of the imminent danger. Either way, I was awake, just barely, lying there in bed with Tess next to me, trapped in that really irritating zone where you’re too tired to think but too wound up to sleep.

I thought I heard a faint creak, like from a plank of flooring or a door frame. Could be Jules getting herself a cup of coffee from the kitchen—or was it Cal’s shift? I wasn’t sure. Jules, I think. The house was silent again for a moment. Then I heard another creak, followed by a metallic snap.

That one slapped me awake, but by then it was too late. I was halfway out of bed and reaching for my gun when the door to our bedroom flew open and two dark silhouettes swarmed in. My fingers never made it to the Browning’s grip. I felt the hard, deep sting in my chest before I realized one of them had targeted me with his gun, but it didn’t sound like a normal gun and what hit me wasn’t a bullet. It came out with a whoosh, like you got from a compressed air cartridge, and what I had in my chest wasn’t a gaping bullet wound. It was a three-inch-long syringe dart with a black tip at its back end.

I kept going for the gun, but one of the intruders was already on me and kicked my arm away from the night table before throwing me against the wall. I glimpsed Tess barely sitting up in the bed before she yelped as she was hit with another dart. I pushed myself off the wall to hit back at the intruder, but in mid-stride, my muscles turned to jelly and I just crumpled down to the floor like a rag doll.

I couldn’t lift a finger.

I could only watch, a prisoner of my own body, as they walked around me like I wasn’t even there. From the corner of my eye, I could see them lifting Tess off the bed and carrying her out of the room, and a rage like I’d never felt flared through me. My thoughts rocketed to Alex, and I hoped they’d used something else to drug him, something that didn’t keep him conscious like I was, something that would spare him the horror of witnessing this. I thought of Jules and Cal, too, hoping they weren’t deemed expendable, hoping they’d been spared. Then a face loomed into my frame of vision, upside down, from behind me. A new face, one I’d never seen before, but I knew it was him.

Right there, inches away from me. And I couldn’t lay a finger on him or rip his damn heart out. Assuming he had one.

I just stared up at him, lost in my silent fury, screaming my lungs out in total silence, and I thought of spiders and lizards and what my tox report would look like when they did my postmortem.

“H
ey, come on, wake up. Please.”

The words woke me up with a start.

It took a few seconds for my eyes to focus, but I already knew I wasn’t going to like what they showed me. My head felt woolly, not quite like a hangover. More like my skull had been caught in a vise that was just loosened by half a turn.