Chapter 19

At daybreak it was still raining when she brought Anders and Emil Draga out of the farmhouse. Draga’s feet prodded the earth tentatively; he was still blindfolded and manacled. Anders rubbed his jaw and came to a stop when he reached the Bronco. “What now?”

“Get in. You drive. You know the way.”

“Up there?”

She pushed the Cuban into the back seat and wasn’t particularly gentle about it: Rage swirled in her and Emil Draga was the nearest available target.

Anders stumbled. He reached for the door handle for support. The bruise around his eye was big, dark and ugly. He looked half dead. It was more than just the physical injuries; probably he was suffering from some sort of shock not to mention exhaustion and fear and dejection. She didn’t know anything she could do about it except snap at him to keep him awake and functioning.

“Go on—get in. You can drive.”

“I can try,” he muttered, and hauled himself up onto the seat.

She went around and climbed in and sat sideways with her gun and half her attention on Draga. He sat twisted awkwardly because his hands were cuffed behind him. But he was a big brute and his feet were free now and she didn’t trust him to stay still.

The Bronco lurched uphill and she sat in a chilled fury with the revolver in her fist, thinking it out. They had Harry up there—hostage or dead. Very well. Now she had a hostage, too. They’d have to tread easy where Emil Draga was concerned: The power of his grandfather’s wealth would force them to take no chances with Emil’s life and as long as she had her gun to his throat she could go among them and stay alive long enough to get Harry out if Harry was alive. If Harry wasn’t alive she’d use Draga as her shield to get out of there and then, she thought, God help me I’ll kill him.

But it wasn’t going to come to that because she couldn’t really believe Harry wasn’t alive.

Because if he was dead it was her fault.

Emil Draga sat rigidly upright, his shoulders wedged in the corner between seat and window, and Anders wrestled drunkenly with the wheel, driving poorly, failing to anticipate rocks and potholes in the trail; Carole clung one-handed to the armrest.

They rolled onto a flat shelf of rock and Anders pointed vaguely to the right. “That trail’s a phony. We wasted two hours on it yesterday.” He swung left into the bed of a stream and the four-wheel-drive whined high. He was hunched forward, using the wheel for support; he was past the end of his endurance and she steeled herself against pity.

“How much farther?”

“Maybe an hour, hour and a half.”

“Describe the camp again for me.”

“What can you possibly accomplish except to get our stupid heads blown off?”

“Tell me about the camp. Do it now.”

The trail grew steeper and narrower. They had to use the winch. Somewhere in the run of the next hour the rain stopped but she didn’t notice, partly because her mind was elsewhere and partly because the trees kept dripping long after it quit raining. When the sun shot a ray through a hole overhead she said, “Where are we now?”

“Not too—” Then the truck ran into something and came to a dead stop, pitching her against the dash. The revolver clattered to the floor and she felt around for it while Anders stared at her stupidly. The engine had gone dead and he was twisting the key but nothing happened: The starter didn’t grind, nothing happened at all.

She found the revolver. “What is it?”

“How do I know? It’s gone dead.”

“Well get out and look under the hood!”

“I’m no mechanic, lady.” But he got out anyway and lifted the hood. He looked in from one side and then went around to the other side and looked there.

She got out of the car. “What is it?”

“Maybe a wire got knocked loose somewhere.”

“Find it. Fix it.”

“I’m looking, damn it.” He reached in tentatively, touched something and jerked back with a little cry.

“Did you find it?”

“No. It’s hot, that’s all.”

“Oh for God’s sake.” She peered in under the hood, as if that would do any good, and after a moment closed her eyes and forced herself to fend off this added frustration and get a grip on her composure. All right, the son of a bitch truck had broken down, it wasn’t that important, they weren’t far from their destination anyway—she went back to the door and reached in and wrenched the blindfold off Emil Draga’s head.

Draga winced and squinted in the unfamiliar light, cowering as if he expected a bullet.

Anders said, “What the hell are you doing now?”

Ignoring him she stood back and waggled the revolver at Draga. “Come on. Out.”

Draga backed out slowly, reaching for the earth with one tentative foot, presenting his big rump to the gun.

Anders said, “Put the blindfold back on him. He’s a dangerous son of a bitch.”

“He’ll break his neck up there if he can’t see where he’s going.”

“I figure to break his neck anyway,” Anders said with emotionless gravity. He seemed too drained to hold onto the trappings of hate; only the core remained.

“Maybe you’ll get a crack at him later. Right now I need him.”

“For what?”

“To get Harry out.”

“You’re out of your mind. They won’t go for that.”

“You know who this is? You know who his grandfather is? They need this big shit alive.” She had no energy for argument; she looked up into the dank jungle. “How do I get there? Follow these ruts?”

“There aren’t any more phony trails that I remember. Yeah, we just follow the ruts. A couple-three miles, I guess.”

“It’s not ‘we’—I want you to stay with the truck and get it fixed and wait for us.”

A residue of pride straightened Anders and he began to protest but she cut him off. “You’re in no condition to go anywhere, Glenn. You’d be of no help to me and you’d probably give us away too early.”

“You can’t go up there by yourself for Christ’s sake.”

“Well I’ve got El Creepo for company, haven’t I?”

“What is it, lady—some romantic urge to die with your lover? Is that what you want?”

Frogs chirruped and there was a racket of birds; water gurgled somewhere. She watched Anders lean forward, propped against both stiff arms, his palms on the fender of the Bronco, legs splayed, too weak to stand without support, tremors in his knees, head sagging, squeezing his eyes shut, shaking his head to clear it of dizziness. She wondered if the swollen eye was infected. She turned away from him and peered into the dense towering tangle. “If we’re not back by morning you may as well call in the police.”

He gave no sign he’d heard her. She said, “Glenn?”

“What?”

“Don’t pass out. We’ll need this thing running—we can’t get away without it.”

“I told you, I’m no mechanic. I’ll try. I can’t promise anything.”

She checked her pockets: penknife, half a box of cartridges for the revolver, handkerchief, the disposable butane cigarette lighter Harry had told her to carry. The coarse denim of the jeans scraped her thighs when she turned toward Emil Draga. His lofty eyes were narrowed to slits against the light and there was no fathoming his expression.

Anders said, “What’s the point of getting yourself killed? It won’t help Harry. He’s dead anyway. He’s seen their faces—there’s no way they can afford to turn him loose.”

“Is that how you’d have felt if it was Rosalia up there?”

“Rosalia.” His lips formed themselves clumsily around the word. He pushed himself upright and turned his head balefully toward Emil Draga.

“Glenn, I’m counting on you to have this running when we get back.” She wigwagged Emil Draga toward the trail and he began to trudge uphill. She didn’t miss the glint of cunning in his eyes as he went past her. She turned back once more. “Get this truck fixed—that’s all you need to think about.”

Anders’ bleak eye blinked at her; the other eye was swollen shut now. Too wilted to resist the force of her will, he only said, “Look out for tripwires and things. And they’ll have guards posted when you get up toward those high ridges. Stay out of the road when you get up there.”

She was already walking away.

The humid forest dragged at her feet, slowing her pace. It was all uphill and her legs wobbled from the strain. Emil Draga walked ahead of her in stony silence.

After half an hour she called a halt and sat down with her knees drawn up and the revolver propped on him. Emil slid down on his haunches, ever watchful.

“I expect your grandfather has some kind of affection for you,” Carole said. “I loved my son a great deal, you know, even though most of the time I had a strange way of showing it.”

“If it pleases you to talk,” Draga said, “talk.”

“Listen to me now. I want to save the life that still matters to me. You’re the only weapon I have.”

Draga watched her; he didn’t speak.

“Maybe I’m just tired,” she said, “but it’s come to me that it’s no good sacrificing the living to avenge the dead.”

He did not stir.

“I want you to know,” she said, “that I’m not going to shoot you with this unless you force me to do it. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“You’re a fool.” He showed his contempt by tipping his head back against the tree and shutting his eyes.

“I got Harry Crobey into this,” she said doggedly, “and now I want to get him out of it. That’s what I want—it’s all I want. I don’t give a shit about you and your misbegotten counterrevolution. Do you understand me?”

No reply. Carole lifted herself on watery knees. “Get up.”

There was a tripwire and she told him to walk around through the forest to avoid it. She walked directly behind him with the gun near Draga’s spine because she didn’t want anyone taking her by surprise from the shadows. The sodden ground sucked at her boots. A gust of wind came along like a breath from an oven. She felt the overpowering burden of her guilt and forced herself to disregard it; she imposed calm upon herself and narrowed her thinking down to a slit through which only the most immediate practical concerns could pass.

She felt a tendon go, in her heel, and kept moving; she fastened her lips against the twinges.

Allegro and pianissimo now. Forget the pain in the goddamned foot. It can’t be far now.

The trees were heavy, vines thickly entwined. Orchids and lush verdure; insects about her face. A dank smell of primeval rot.

She remembered bits of Harry’s dicta. Never talk to the enemy until you’ve licked him. Well there was a time to break every rule. She worked out what had to happen and rehearsed her lines until the repetition assumed the tiresome ritual predictability of a flamenco or kabuki episode:

Send Harry out here. Send him out or I kill your precious Draga. Don’t follow us. We’ll turn Draga loose when we know we’re safe.

It was all she’d need to say to them. All the decisions that were hers to make had been made now. The final decision would be up to Rodriguez. She had nothing more to do but play it out to the end.

It probably would go against her; most likely she’d end up killed, dead in the festering jungle and no one to mourn. But she would go through with this because it was Harry. And because she had got the poor son of a bitch into this mess. And because I have got, you should pardon the expression, integrity.

She moved with extreme caution now, the revolver cocked and leveled upon Draga’s spine from inches away.

It was, she thought, suicidally and hysterically pointless. But she had to do it for Harry. And for herself.

Another tripwire; they went around its anchor; she said, “Stay in the trees now. Don’t go in the road.”

This was high ground. The primitive track skirted a jutting rock and bent out of sight, tipping down to disappear. From within, the edge of the trees she surveyed it and saw no way to cross that point without stepping into the roadway. She chewed her lip. “Well go over that rock—over the back side of it.”

“I can’t climb that rock with my hands behind my back.”

It was true. But she wasn’t going to take the handcuffs off him. Gun or no gun. He could throw a rock at her, run for it, anyway. She couldn’t afford to lose him now.

“All right. Then we’ll use the road. My gun in your back all the way—if anything happens you’re the first to die. This thing is cocked. Keep it in mind.”

She had no idea at all what might be in his head; he gave nothing away. His facade of indifference troubled her because it might mean that with Latin soldierlike machismo he was prepared to die for the sake of his comrades. She rather doubted it because he was too much the child of privilege for that sort of down-in-flames gesture, but it was a possibility and if it came true then she’d have lost.

She said, “Move.”

“Be careful with that thing, woman. You could trip and set it off.”

“That would be a crying shame,” she snapped. “Move.”

He stepped out into the road and she followed. Draga moved forward a pace at a time, head lifted, apparently scanning the treetops and rocks above them. She crowded close behind him with the revolver all but touching his back. She found herself waiting for the bullet that would kill her: She wondered what it would sound like.

Without warning Draga wheeled. His elbow whacked the revolver aside. Instinctively she clenched her hand—the revolver slammed her palm in recoil; the noise was earsplitting; the bullet went harmlessly off the road somewhere; and Draga was swinging his heavy boot against her—a clumsy kick, off-balance, but it pummeled her off her feet and she sprawled. She didn’t lose her grip on the gun but she was still trying to roll over and face him when something—it must have been his boot—thundered against her kidney and propelled her over the edge of the road’s shelf and then she was tumbling, rolling, falling down the slick mud of a nearly perpendicular mountainside—brush whipped at her, clawed her face; rocks rattled under her; she was falling in space, then sliding in muck—the world spinning.

Things went nearly black but she heard the bellowing of Emil Draga’s voice somewhere far above her and she peered through the haze of her vision—brush and trees loomed at crazy angles. She heard the rush of water.

She’d lost the revolver, of course. A kind of equilibrium returned to her, she got her bearings and distinguished up from down. Above her was the track of her own sliding fall—she was incredulous at the length of the scar her body had sluiced in the mud: She must have fallen nearly a hundred feet and she wondered how many of her bones were shattered. It was a clinical thought, detached. She lay motionless, blinking. Pain gradually flooded through her system; everything ached.

At the top she didn’t see anything move at the rim of the road. It occurred to her that Emil’s voice was fading. He was still yelling but it was farther away. He must be running toward the camp, yelling for help.

In a little while, she thought, they’d come back and finish her.

She wondered if she could move.

She lifted her head away from whatever had cushioned it. Well at least the head and neck worked. She looked down the length of her body.

The jeans were ripped, a long slice along the left calf. There was no open cut but the skin was abraded and dappled with angry red dots.

She lifted her left hand experimentally and winced at the sudden pain in it, but she closed it into a fist and opened it and continued to stare whimsically at it. There was a nasty raw blot across the back of it where she must have flailed against something. But the fingers functioned.

Now the right hand. It was pinned half under her and she had to roll her torso back to free it. Every movement inflicted a new throbbing ache.

But nothing refused to articulate.

She had fallen into a scrub of some kind: more bush than tree. She’d crushed half of it but the rest of it supported her, a sort of latticed mattress of twig and leaves. The pitch of the slope began to level off here. It tilted down more gently—another twenty or thirty yards perhaps; trees at the bottom and she couldn’t see beyond them.

If she’d come off the rim twenty feet to either side she’d have dropped into boulders. If it hadn’t been raining incessantly the slope wouldn’t have eased her fall. If.… By blind luck she was alive.

Silence now, only the rattle of flowing water below in the trees. She didn’t hear Emil Draga any longer. Raindrops began to drip on her.

With a rough uncaring need to know, she curled her feet under her and attempted to stand up.

The bush collapsed under her. Clinging to it she fell another ten feet and slid to a painful halt, both hands splayed to ward off obstacles. Her palms, now, began to bleed.

She trembled with a pounding violence that she found almost comical: She grunted with effort and stubbornly climbed to her feet and lurched downhill until she blundered up against the slimy trunk of a big tree; she stood against it numbly, waggling her toes inside her boots, moving her arms about, sucking a great breath into her chest.

Everything hurt, everything throbbed, but unaccountably the organism appeared to be in rudimentary working order.

She rubbed both abraded palms against the cloth of her blouse, smearing blood and mud together. Christ. Somehow she was alive.

Then she heard them—a faint clanking; voices. Coming along the high shelf of the road above her. She recognized Emil Draga’s bellowing anger.

It wasn’t thought; it was primitive impulse that drove her back into the protective darkness of the jungle.

Her breasts felt as if they’d been squashed under a tractor and her hands stung so badly she could hardly stir them, and one knee had gone wonky—a ligament or something; it hurt every time she put her weight on it at a certain angle. There was a frightful bruise along her right hip, her left calf was sharp agony where it had been scraped raw and both shoulder blades felt as if they’d had chips axed out of them. She had welts on cheek and forehead; her scalp hurt frightfully where a lock of hair had caught in something and been ripped away; she had a thin bleeding line in her lower lip, like a paper cut—she kept licking it—and her teeth felt as if they’d been jarred loose. Both elbows gave her trouble and she found a new pain in her shoulder when she tried to lift her right arm to ward off a branch she ducked under.

She went slowly downhill through the stinking growth; steam eddied about her. The tattered rags of her outfit clung to her like shreds of flesh on a rotting corpse. She found the water almost immediately—the source of the sound she’d heard: a stream, birling off rocks and swirling through a big pond and disappearing through a narrow gap beyond. The noise she’d heard was a small waterfall beyond that gap.

The rush of the waterfall made it impossible for her to hear anything from above. She didn’t know if they were following her track down the cliff. Most likely they’d have to use ropes to get down there—or go around, if they knew another path. Were they coming after her?

I would, she reasoned. They couldn’t take anything for granted. They’d need to see for themselves that she was dead. They’d come down here and look for the body.

They’d follow her tracks.

The sudden realization shot hopelessness through her. She couldn’t get away. It was only a matter of time—a few minutes at best.

No way to outrun them. The shape she was in, she could barely hobble.

She sat down gingerly.

“I’m sorry, Harry. I gave it my best shot.”

She whispered the words and her eyes rolled shut.

Harry.…

The thought stunned her awake.

“God damn it—I am not dead yet!”

Cunning, now. She needed every whit of cleverness. She knelt by the pond and scooped water in her hands, rubbed her palms together gently in the water to wash off the clots of mud and blood, cupped handfuls of water and splashed it in her face. It was shockingly cold.

They can’t follow tracks in water.

The pond was mostly bordered by the exposed roots of trees where the soil had been washed away. She gripped the roots and lowered herself slowly into the water, at first stunned by the icy chill, then welcoming it because it began to anesthetize her throbbing aches.

Take your time now. It wouldn’t do to get swept out into the current and carried over the waterfall. She moved along with slow deliberation, clinging to out-jutting roots, moving from one handhold to the next.

They’d expect her to go downstream—downhill—toward the bottom of the mountains and escape.

She went uphill instead. Pulling herself against the current. Up to the head of the pond where the water foamed over rocks in the shallow streambed. Then she trudged carefully upstream, cautiously placing one foot at a time and testing for solidity.

The stream came burbling down out of a narrow chasm. She climbed doggedly into it, moving from stone to stone, bracing herself with one hand against the wall of the chasm. The water was only a foot deep most places; sometimes she was able to walk on the tops of stepping-stones.

One of them rocked and gave way, overturning. She windmilled her arms crazily and went in up to the knees, thinking in panic that she’d twisted her ankle.

That would be the last sonofabitching straw. She put her weight on it angrily and it was all right and she realized then that there weren’t any last straws—she had come too far for that; nothing was going to stop her short of death.

It started to rain again. Pelting down. Drops so big they hurt when they struck her exposed bruises. You can’t get any wetter than wet, she told herself dismally, and continued stubbornly up the chasm, the water rising to her thighs once and almost pitching her over.

Exhaustion dragged her to a stop and she stood with both palms against the rock face, panting. She looked back down toward the pond but there wasn’t anything to see in the sheeting rain.

Soon, she knew, they would begin searching up this way. She had to get out of the chasm. They are the ones who killed Robert and they’ll damn sure kill me, too, if I let them.

She wasn’t going to let them. Because she still had Harry to think about and she didn’t intend to let him down. Cool dispassion now: This was the time to move fast, get out into the jungle and lose herself in it, because the battering rain would cover her tracks and this squall wasn’t likely to last much longer.

The walls of the chasm fell away above her. She saw a narrow waterfall at the top but it looked as if there might be a way to climb out to one side of it, if the rain hadn’t made the rock too slick. Trees loomed up there; vines and roots dangled thick. There was a rainbow at the top. She grinned at it: It was too Hollywood to be true. She climbed toward it but the sun moved, or the clouds did, and the rainbow disappeared.

As she approached the top she moved through tendrils of mist and realized she was actually inside the cloud. She groped for handholds, tested her weight on corkscrew roots, drew herself up six inches at a time, tearing her sodden clothes on things, planting new bruises on top of the old ones, ignoring all of it.

When she looked over her shoulder she couldn’t see the pond anymore; it was screened by the trees and the curve of the chasm and the rain. She faced upward again. Not far now. They’ll expect me to run for it. They won’t expect me to come for Harry.