MAX CONSIDERED TELLING Allain about the tape, but he held off. He’d gather his evidence first.
He copied the tape, packed the original up with the figurines, and drove to the FedEx office in Port-au-Prince.
He let Joe know what was coming. He also asked him to see what he could find on Boris Gaspésie.
He drove to Noah’s Ark. He parked up the road and fixed his mirror so he could see the gate.
He walked in and checked to make sure Eloise Krolak was there. He saw her addressing her pupils the same way she was talking to the zombie kids in the video. He thought back to the video, to the things he’d seen being done to those children. He felt suddenly sick.
He went back to his car and waited for her to come out.
In the afternoon it rained.
Max had never known rain like it. In Miami it poured—sometimes all day, all week, sometimes all goddamn month—but the rain fell and dribbled away into puddles or disappeared into the ground and back into the air.
In Haiti rain attacked.
The sky went near black as rain swarmed out of dense storm clouds and swooped down on Port-au-Prince, drenching the city to its foundations, turning bone-dry earth to running mud within seconds.
The sewers in the street quickly flooded and belched waste back up on the streets, which ran black and brown. In the houses around him rooftop reservoirs filled up to the brim and spilled over or broke clean off their rusted fittings and crashed to the ground; power went and came and went again; pipes burst, trees were stripped of leaves, fruit, and even bark; a roof caved in. Confused and panicked people ran into equally dazed and terrified pets, cattle, and strays, all of them collapsing into struggling, thrashing, conjoined heaps. Then came the rats, hundreds of them, flooded out of their holes, scuttling downhill toward the harbor in a great wave of rank, diseased fur, squealing in panic and fear. Great blasts of thunder blew holes in the atmosphere and sheets of lightning followed, quickly flashing up every detail of the damaged, drowning streets, awash with mud and shit and teeming with vermin, before snatching the vision back into darkness as if it had been an illusion.
The rain stopped. Max watched the storm move out to sea.
Eloise Krolak didn’t leave Noah’s Ark until after six-thirty, when she was picked up in a silver Mercedes SUV with tinted windows.
Max tailed the car out through the city and along the mountain road to Pétionville. It was dark now. Traffic was heavy.
They slowed to a crawl at the end of a long, thick, red-neon streak of stalled taillights. Max was four cars behind.
The opposite side of the road was mostly free. Barely anyone seemed to be heading into the capital at this hour.
Except for the UN.
A convoy passed the traffic jam—two jeeps followed by a truck, then, moving slower, another jeep, whose occupant was shining a flashlight into each of the stalled cars.
The beam passed Max. He looked straight ahead and kept his hands on the wheel.
He heard the jeep stop.
Someone knocked on his window.
Max didn’t have his passport on him, only his AmEx card in his wallet.
“Bonsoir monsieur,” the UN soldier said. Blue helmet, uniform, young white face.
“Do you speak English?” Max asked.
The soldier caught his breath.
“Name?” he asked Max.
Max told him. He’d hardly finished saying his last name before the soldier had pulled a pistol and was aiming it at his head.
He was made to get out of the car. When he did, he was immediately surrounded by half a dozen men aiming rifles at his head. He put his hands up. They frisked him, took his gun, and frog-marched him off the road to where the truck and three jeeps were parked. Max protested his innocence, yelled at them to call Allain Carver or the American Embassy.
He felt something prick his left forearm and saw the syringe sticking out of his arm, the plunger going down, clear fluid going in, someone counting down in his ear.
He should have been worried, but the dope took care of that. He had no fear. Whatever it was they’d given him was beautiful shit.