CHAPTER 16

 

 

AT LEAST SHE was surprised to see Mike again. In the hollow glaring light of the interrogation room she sat opposite him in her red jump suit, her black hair tied in a tight bun. She could not hide a sudden widening of her eyes and a crease in her brow as Mike walked in. Perhaps she expected yet another fruitless lawyer visit or a cop. Not the suited figure of Mike visiting as if from another world. She moved back in her chair slightly and the legs dragged a little on the floor sending a grating echo into the room.

Mike sat down and nodded a hello. But now she had no reaction. No response. Her eyes did not leave him as he settled himself opposite her.

“Hola, como estas?” he said.

She said nothing. Not that Mike expected her to. He knew this was his last chance to get anything out of her before he headed back to Guatemala. A simple greeting would not cut it. But now he had ammunition to fire at her.

“It’s been a long time since I last came to see you. The guards here say that you still have not spoken to anyone else. That’s your choice. But I bet it gets pretty lonely living without words, locked up in solitary with no news of the world outside. So let me tell you what’s been going on…”

Mike watched her face, but she looked up at the ceiling now with her hands placed flat on the table between them, not moving a muscle.

“Senator Hodges is doing well. The man you tried to kill is winning his party’s nomination race. What do you think of that?”

Nothing. That line had worked before, getting the only reaction he ever saw in her. It would not work a second time.

“But did you know the Senator’s wife is giving money to someone from your homeland, a General Rodrigo Estrada Carillo? Do you know him?”

He watched her intently. Nothing.

“I went to visit him. I met with him at his house,” Mike went on. He felt something now. Some presence entered the room, some ghostly thing seep through the walls. It was if the temperature rose to match a Caribbean heat and he caught a whiff of the General’s cigar smoke in the air, like a whisper of sulphur. He noticed a vein start to throb at the woman’s temple. Her top lip quivered slightly.

Bingo, Mike thought.

“He is an interesting man. He lives by the beach in a beautiful house.”

The woman looked back at him now; her eyes bored into his and he remembered the last time he was here. He edged back in his chair. He was suddenly aware that none of this was a game. Not here, alone in the room with the woman who tried to kill Hodges; someone who willingly pulled the trigger on another human being. But he pressed on.

“Yet I don’t think General Carillo is a good man. I have spoken to people about what he did during the war. He is a man who did some very bad things.”

One of the woman’s hands trembled, like a pressure kettle starting to boil.

“I’ve been talking to people about the war in your country,” Mike said. His voice was quiet, slow and deliberate. Static electricity prickled along his back as if Carillo himself stood behind him, looming over his shoulder at the woman in front of him.

“Someone told me about a massacre at Santa Teresa.”

The woman visibly flinched and a hissing sound escaped from her lips. Her head dropped as her eyes sought the floor and she brought a hand up to her forehead and kneaded her brow like bread. The knuckles scraped across her skull and bruised the skin underneath them. Mike winced and leaned forward in sudden shock.

“Were you there?” he asked, half in disbelief. “Were you a victim?”

Her head snapped back up.

“Who are you?” Mike asked.

She let out a snort of derision. “Get out of here,” she snapped. “Go back to your life and leave all this alone,” she said, her voice grating with lack of use, the vocal chords ringing like a guitar strummed out of tune.

“Why did you try to kill Senator Hodges?” he asked.

She held his gaze for a moment and then spoke in a dull monotone. “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked,” she said.

Mike shook his head. “Cut out that Biblical stuff. You know Carillo. You know about Santa Teresa. I will find out who you are. You know that,” he said.

The woman smiled thinly. “Si,” she said, switching to Spanish. “Es claro.”

Then she leapt at him.

The table jumped up into the air as she sprang like a cat across the short distance between them. Mike barely registered that she was not in handcuffs when he felt one of her hands strike him in the throat. The strength behind the blow was astonishing. She was like a coiled steel trap suddenly unsprung. He reeled backward and his chair toppled over. She was on top of him as he hit the floor, her face a mask of fury and both hands reached for his neck. Mike felt them squeeze, a vicious constriction around his throat that made him gasp as the breath was forced from him. He was helpless. He could not move. He could only look up into her eyes, aware at the dimming limits of his consciousness that somewhere his arms and legs flailed uselessly; flopping like a fish out of water. Now he could barely feel anything, just see those eyes bore down into him, filling his vision, even as the shadows at the edge crept in like a camera lens closing, narrowing the light down to a point, leaving just the brown eyes, burning with fury.

Then there was a sudden flash of light and a dreadful scream. The hold was suddenly released. Mike felt a huge gasp of air rush into his lungs and his chest expanded like an inflated balloon. At the same time a crippling wave of pain washed over him and burned his throat where her hands crushed in on his windpipe. He dry-heaved and felt like his lungs were on fire. He sat up and saw the woman writhe in pain on the floor as two wires protruded from her back. She screamed as the smell of burning hair filled the room. A guard stood over her, Taser in hand, and watched her squirm. Eventually he stopped and looked across at Mike.

“Jesus Christ,” the guard said. “Are you all right?”

Mike tried to speak but his throat hurt too much to even croak a reply. He nodded instead. Another guard burst into the room and whistled at the scene of carnage.

“That bitch,” he said. “You got her under control, Jake?”

The first guard looked down at the woman laid out on the floor. She was unmoving, save for her chest, which heaved up and down like an ocean wave. “She ain’t going to be any more trouble. I told you she was just a psycho,” the guard said.

“Yeah?” the second guard said and he too brought out a Taser. He aimed it at the fallen woman.

“Let’s see about that,” he said and he fired. The darts struck the woman on the leg and immediately she buckled off the floor, screaming and yelling. It was an awful sound, filling the rooms with words in a language that was not English nor Spanish. Loud, desperate, animal words that Mike did not comprehend. He staggered to his feet and grabbed the guard.

“Enough,” he managed to rasp. “Enough.”

The guard released his grip on the Taser’s trigger and the unholy noise subsided. The woman gibbered quietly on the floor, curled up into a fetal ball. She spoke her native tongue, keening softly as tears and phlegm poured down her face like a gruesome, sickly waterfall. Mike staggered outside. He slumped against a wall and held his head in his hands. Two words had changed it all. Just two words.

Santa Teresa.

He knew where he would be going next.

 

* * *

 

DEE COULD not help herself. It felt good to be back in the South. As the black limousine carried her and Hodges slowly though the streets of Columbia, South Carolina, she finally felt on home turf. She was at last out of the frozen battleground of New Hampshire and in a place where her accent would not be marked as unusual. She regarded the suburban homes rolling by, looking more and more faded as they approached downtown. Outside a dim sun shone from the sky. It was winter still, hardly warm, but there was no snow on the ground. She shed her thick woolen clothes like a snake casting off a skin. Finally, smoking outside on the streets would not involve almost freezing to death. She looked over at Hodges, sitting beside her in the car. He silently watched the buildings slip by. Did he know what he had done by winning New Hampshire? she wondered. He was on the cusp of beating Harriet Stanton and pulling off one of the greatest political upsets of all time to secure the party’s presidential nomination. Yet he was perfectly calm. Dee shook her head and instantly regretted it. She still had a hangover from all of the drinking the night before. She could barely remember getting on the plane. But Hodges was as fresh as a daisy. Must be that military constitution, she mused.

“This is where we end it, Jack,” Dee said, breaking the silence.

Hodges did not stop looking outside the window but he spoke, his voice level and measured. “You think we can?” he asked.

“We’re on a roll,” Dee said. “It doesn’t matter that New Hampshire was a squeaker. Americans don’t care about margins, they just care about winners. We’ve made Stanton a loser now. If we pull it off again, then she is dead in the water. She’ll never make it to Super Tuesday.”

Finally, Hodges pulled away from the view outside the car. He drew his jacket around him, though it wasn’t cold. He smiled thinly. “I know South Carolina’s got a bit of a reputation, Dee, and if Stanton’s desperate, how bad do you think it can get?”

Dee chuckled. They were in downtown now and they passed the State Capitol, in front of which stood a memorial to the war dead of the Confederacy, still proudly flying its battle flag. Memories were long here, the wounds of race never far from the surface, still crisscrossing the surface like a network of scars left by whips of a different age. Dee remembered those same monuments in the towns of her childhood, hearing conversations in bars and around barbecues of the War Between the States. It was a different world down here and it played by different rules. But, by God, she was going to enjoy trying to drag it into the 21^st Century.

“It will get bad,” she said. “Hell, if I were Howard Carver I would make this the worst experience of your life.”

“Don’t sugar coat it, Dee.”

“Never have, never will,” Dee said. “There are people down here who will try anything to rock your boat and most of them signed up with Stanton’s campaign months ago when she was sitting pretty. We have to be prepared for anything to come up. Because whatever they have, they will throw it at us.”

Hodges nodded and then looked puzzled as Dee held his gaze.

“So if there’s anything you need to tell me, Jack. Anything at all, now would be a good time. So we can prepare for any possible contingencies.”

Hodges laughed, at first a chuckle, and then longer and out loud. “Dee,” he said and he put a hand on her arm. “You know all there is.”

There was no hesitation in his voice. Dee smiled back at him as she marveled at his ability to lie like that. Or at least she thought he lied. He had never mentioned anything about his time in Guatemala to her except when she asked. What the fuck was going on here?

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing,” he repeated.

“That’s why you’re my guy,” Dee said as the car stopped outside the downtown Marriott hotel. Their latest home away from home.

Hodges opened the door of the car and stood aside to let her out. The air was gratifyingly warm and the sun’s rays caressed her skin. Her headache evaporated as adrenalin once more dripped into her bloodstream. They had barely a week here. Just six days to win this race. Six days to knock Stanton to the mat and count her out.

“Let’s get to work,” she said.

 

* * *

 

MIKE FELT her hands tighten around his throat again, throttling the life from him. She was so small, so light, how could her grip be so strong? Her fingers were like iron; cold and firm and unbreakable. He looked up, desperate to stop her and her face swam into view as, her fingers dug into his flesh, exploring deep into his body as she whispered in his ear.

“I love you, Mike. I love you, Mike.”

Now Jaynie’s face swam in front of him. She was strangling him, dragging the life out of him. If only he could tell her to stop. He opened his mouth and finally began to scream…

He woke with a start, alone in his hotel room. Sweat covered him and the only sound was the whirring hum of the air conditioner. He breathed heavily as he waited for his eyes to focus in the darkness. Then he flung off the sheets and padded over to the window and drew back the curtains. Outside it was still dark and the lights of Guatemala City twinkled below him, spread out like a rolling carpet of fireflies fleeing to a broken and jagged horizon of dark mountains. He was back.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered to himself.

He put a hand to his throat and felt the swelling where a ring of purple circled his throat in a mottled necklace of bruises. He winced and remembered the eyes that looked down on him as her hands tried to kill him. He felt a twinge of emasculating shame that a woman older and so much smaller than himself was able to take him down. But her sudden attack was so brutal he barely knew what was going on even while it was happening. She would have killed him too; he did not doubt it.

He shivered and turned down the air conditioning. Immediately the heat and humidity of the tropical night invaded the room. There was no going back to sleep so he brewed a cup of coffee and sipped it in front of the window while a slow dawn crept across the mountain horizon to begin a new day. He was jittery and it had nothing to do with the caffeine. He had looked up Santa Teresa on the map and planned to head straight there, armed with little more than a police photograph of the shooter and a long list of questions.

The tiny village was about five hours drive away, along winding roads through the volcanic Mayan heart of the country. It was up in the Highlands that formed the central spine of Guatemala, far from the hot and sweaty Garifuna coast where Carillo now lived. It would be yet another different world. Mike sighed. It felt like an insane expedition and far removed from the campaign he joined. He made a second cup of coffee and watched the dawn break. It was time to go.

 

* * *

 

AS HE checked out Mike failed to notice the pretty woman standing beside him until he turned around to head for the door. Even then, as he stared into the familiar face, it was so unexpected, it took a full two seconds of gawping before his brain comprehended with startled recognition.

“Hi Mike!” the woman said with a grin full of triumph and satisfaction.

Lauren.

Mike’s mouth opened and closed like a gasping goldfish. He dropped his bag and searched for words but managed to stutter out only a stunned response. “What… what are you doing here?”

 

Lauren kept on grinning. “Now that’s really my question to you, Mike,” she said and she stood in front of him, hands on her hips with her head cocked quizzically to one side.

Mike said nothing. He struggled to gather his thoughts. She caught him again. Just like outside the prison in Iowa, she tracked him down. He was flabbergasted.

“Come on, Mike,” Lauren said. “I didn’t follow you again just to have you clam up on me.”

He could barely speak. “How…?” he stammered.

“You think you’re my only source? You guys have downplayed that Guatemalan money transfer, but then I heard a whisper among some of the student volunteers in Manchester that you visited down here on a trip. Didn’t take long to figure out there must be a link. Then I start digging around with the folks who arrange travel for you guys. Seems you’ve not been spending much time on the campaign trail at all recently. You’re on your own mission, Mike, and I’d like to know what it is. So when I heard you were heading down here again, I figured I needed to know why. So I took another risk. I followed you. Here I am.”

Mike was floored. But also impressed. He had no idea she was on his tail.

“What’s going on Mike?” she repeated. “What’s the link with Guatemala? What’s to stop me putting a blog post out in the next hour saying you’re down here?”

The threat was clear. Mike put up a hand and took out his phone.

“Okay,” he said. “You got me. But wait a moment. Let me make a phone call. See if we can make a deal.”

Lauren shrugged. “Sure. But don’t leave my sight,” she said.

Mike walked a few yards and punched in Dee’s numbers. He blurted out the news in a frenzied whisper while covering his phone with his hand and glancing at Lauren who watched him like a hawk eyeing up a rabbit. There was silence on the other end of the phone. Then Dee spoke.

“What the fuck?” she screamed.

Mike shut his eyes. He had never heard Dee lose her cool like that. Not at any point of the campaign. But she lost it now. She shouted a long list of expletives and Mike heard a distant smash as something crashed to the ground in whatever room she was in. Mike weathered the storm and prayed for it to end. He needed Dee to tell him what to do. Eventually there was quiet on the other end and he heard Dee struggle to regain composure.

“We are in a heap of shit here,” she said. “We’ve got six days until polling starts in South Carolina and we don’t need any mistakes. You must keep her quiet until the voting is done and dusted. After that we can deal with any shit that’s going to come out. But not before. You got that?”

“Fine,” Mike said. “But what the hell do I do?”

Dee thought for a moment. “Keep her close. We want time and she wants information. So we trade that. Take her with you. Work with her. But tell her that what you discover is embargoed until after South Carolina votes. She can’t run anything about what you find out down there until the last vote is counted. Got that?”

Mike nodded and Dee hung up without a further word. He walked back to Lauren who looked at him expectantly.

“Let’s grab a coffee,” he said. ‘I’ve got a proposal for you.”